Among You (13 page)

His last, tragic mistake.

The tendrils forced their way under the skin of the soldier who cried out, not in pain but desire. He begged the entity to take him, feed upon him, make him its plaything. The once powerful man was reduced to little more than a sniveling pet to a horror-fueled nightmare. The tendrils wormed their way under the flesh and meat and then, made the skin sack its puppet. Arms flailed awkwardly, legs buckled and dropped the body to the ground. The man’s right hand grasped the left pinky finger and jerked it back until it snapped. One by one, the fingers on the left hand were ruined as tears of pain poured down the man’s cheeks.

The puppeteer forced the thin man’s right thumb deep into the heart of his right eye socket. The jelly of the eyeball slopped to the ground below. When the man attempted to cry out, the right hand grasped his jaw and yanked downward, to no avail. With his one good eye, the man scanned the area and then locked onto a nearby tree. Unsteady legs carried the body to the old maple. Around three feet from the ground, a notch had formed in the tree. The man bent down, hooked his lower jaw in the notch, and then, with a single, upward motion, ripped his jaw from its hinges.

A wet moan escaped the man’s throat just before he dropped, motionless to the ground. The wisps of smoke rose from the lifeless body and coalesced into the form of a woman.

Tall and rail-thin, bulging eyes, and patchy, straight hair – the woman was a hollowed-out shell of whatever she once was. Though her skin was a familiar shade of gray-green, her eyes were oily black orbs.

The specter raised a bony finger toward me and hissed.

“
You are he.” A cloud of mist poured from between the woman’s lips. “‘Twas a tell of prophecy forsworn a young man would cross the boundary between man and ‘Kind. Know this, human, once you’ve stepped foot into our world, you cannot return.”

Gunshots rang out. The woman craned her head toward the house and then jerked back to me, her lips spread wide in a horrific, silent howl. Grief and suffering lined her face to draw my heart to breaking.

As she vanished, so too did the solidity of the world around me. An ear-piercing screech threatened to pull me from the dreamscape. Starting at the sky, the world dissolved to ash and dust. I turned to run, hoping to out race the change.

Just as I felt the tug of ash at my feet, the sound of my alarm yanked me from the dream. I sat up, chilled from lying in my own lake of sweat, and sucked in a great breath of relief.

eleven | not meant to know

Sally expertly turned her car into her parking spot, put the car in park (with a bit more gusto than usual), and turned off the engine. When our eyes met, there was clearly something driving her cold stare forward – straight into and through me – and then, she grabbed her bags, got out of the car, slammed the door shut, and marched toward the school entrance.

I followed suit and caught up with Sally. She turned and spoke with a cold undertone.

“
What is going on with you, Scott? You’re going to get yourself into serious trouble if you’re not careful.”

Sally knew all. How? I had no idea.

“
Sal, listen to me; you know my dad is cool. There is no way he’s going to tell anyone. It’s all good.”

“
No, Scott, it’s not.” Sally uncharacteristically slammed the palm of her hand against the door and then pulled it open and stepped into the disinfectant-laced air of the high school breezeway. “Why did you go back? What is so important to you there?”

Instead of replying, I swung my backpack around, fished out the book from last night’s haul, and handed it over to Sally.

“
The Concise History of the Gaultier Family
?” said Sally. “A book? That’s it? Scott, please – ”

“
Sally, this isn’t just
any
book. I need you to help me check this thing out and see if it’s real. If so, then we have one hell of a mystery on our hands.”

Sally crossed her arms and bit her lip before she spoke. “How so?”

I swallowed, unsure if I wanted to open this doorway now or let her pull the curtain aside and peer in herself. I went for it; I couldn’t help myself.

“
If this book is legit, those girls we saw at the haunted house – like the one in the hanging room – are over one hundred years old.”

A burst of laughter shot out of Sally’s mouth. “I love you, Scott, but you’re crazy.”

I was just about to drop to one knee and beg Sally, when Cody Sloan decided it was time to soil my soul yet again.

“
Well, well, what do we have here? Dr. Who the Hell Cares and his faithful sidekick Doze Tyler.”

Before I could turn to face Cody, he snatched the book from my hand and slid out of my reach.

“
And just what might this be, Mrs. Maskey? A book! Gosh, golly Beav…do people still read?
The Concise History of the Gaultier House
. Interesting. Can I get this for my Kindle? Oh wait, I don’t have a Kindle! Why? Because I’m not a freakin’ nerd!”

My cheeks were burning with rage. I wanted nothing more than to smash the back of Cody’s skull against a locker until the peas and marbles that made up his brain dropped to the floor.

Cody opened the book and read out loud. As soon as he finished reading the first page, he tore it from the book, crumpled it up, and tossed it at my feet.

The rage in my cheeks spread to my clenched fists and I unleashed every ounce of frustration out on Cody Sloan. When our bodies met, the forward force of my attack sent us to the floor with me straddling my arch nemesis.

Like a man possessed, I rained down blows on any part of Cody Sloan I could find. Face, neck, shoulders, chest…so long as it was in my line of sight, my fist would find it. No matter how much pain I inflicted, no matter how exhausted my arms grew, I continued dropping the hammer.

“
Help!” shouted Sloan. No one answered his call. It didn’t help Cody’s case that no one liked him…so, no one rushed to his aid.

Finally, Cody tossed the book to the side and shouted, “There’s your stupid book, Maskey, now leave me the hell alone.”

Cody finally managed to push me off and duck from my grasp. He stood on the other side of the room, tears streaked his cheeks and blood stained his lips and eyes. Before either of us could launch a second attack, the familiar clip of high heels greeted our ears. We both turned to see the school counselor, Melissa Middleton, rushing toward us. The second we laid eyes on her, no one moved. She had that effect on us – the ability to bring every male in the school to silence – even if she just stood, alone, doing nothing. A strange mystery surrounded the woman.

“
What’s going on here?” Melissa barked. She came to a stop, planted her heels, and crossed her arms at her chest. The hardest part about dealing with Mrs. Middleton was that she was as gorgeous as she was stern. From her short, straight, blue-black bob (complete with bangs), to her librarian glasses, she was a geek’s wet dream in heels and professional skirt suit. She was equal parts mother and dominatrix. You wanted to obey her out of fear and love simultaneously.

Her eyes landed on the book. She snatched it from the ground and yanked Cody to his feet.

“
So this is all about a book. Fancy that. Sloan, I had no idea you could even read. Well, good for you. I guess you earned your grow’d up pants today.”

I snickered at Mrs. Middleton mocking Sloan’s atomic-level hick drawl.

Big mistake.

“
And Maskey, I want you in my office immediately.”

“
But…class…”

Middleton turned on her heels as she said, “I’ll give you a note. Now.”

I watched as Middleton marched down the hall, my book in her hand.

Sally grabbed my arm. When I turned to her, tears were running down her cheeks.

“
I’m so sorry, Scott. I didn’t mean to…”

I pulled her into a hug.

“
Sally, that was all me.”

“
No,” Sally spoke through sobs. “I shouldn’t have argued with you.”

“
Everything’s okay,” I whispered into her ear. “It’s
not a big deal…promise. We’ll talk about this after school. I have to get to Middleton’s office before she has her whip and ball gag out.”

That brought a laugh to Sally’s lips. Now I could walk away from her without a guilt monkey backpack crushing my shoulders.

Mrs. Middleton saw me coming and immediately gestured to the chair across from her desk. “Please, shut the door behind you. Sit down, Scott.”

I complied, without hesitation, wondering if this was where the whip and gag would come out. Middleton allowed a smile to grace her face. I hadn’t noticed before, but her lips had a certain Liv Tyler-ness to them; for a brief moment, I was lost in their lushness.

My Middleton-macking daydream was interrupted when she slid the book across her desk.

“
Where did you find this book, Scott?”

The question took me by surprise. Why did she care about a book that was most likely nothing more than marketing material?

I hesitated
.
Why, I wasn’t sure.

Mrs. Middleton slowly nodded her head to prompt me.

“
I found it at the Gaultier Haunted House in Tyler’s End.”

Middleton sat up straight in her chair, her lips pursed together into a pseudo duck-face. All that remained was for her to whip out her phone and dance into her best selfie pose.

“
Found it, or stole it?”

My head dropped and a sigh escaped my mouth. “
Stole it,” was all I could say.

The room filled
with a discomfiting silence. When I looked back up, Middleton stared at me. The look on the woman’s face was impossible to read. One moment, it seemed
as if she was concerned, the next she was angry, yet again next she was amused.

“
You shouldn’t have this book, Scott. There are some things you aren’t meant to know.”

Her statement took me by surprise. Every fiber of my being wanted to know what I shouldn’t know. Instead, I launched into what would probably have Middleton shipping me off to Central State in a straitjacket.

“
Mrs. M-Middle-ton,” I stumbled out of the starting gate. “This is going to sound crazy, but I believe the Gaultier House is really…” I hesitated, unsure if the next word out of my mouth was really the wisest choice for someone already looked at as a bit of an oddity. “…haunted.”

Middleton’s eyes widened and her lips parted and hung, just slightly apart, for a moment before she spoke. “What makes you say that?”

My cue to dive, head first, into my theory.

“
The other night, Sally and I went to take the tour of the house. What I saw, nearly everything, was unexplainable. You have to understand, I’ve walked through the best haunts in the country and nothing comes close to what Gaultier had to offer. Everything was too real to not question.”

Middleton laughed. “Scott, it was a haunted house…a standard Halloween attraction that happens to be held in a real house and funded by a very wealthy family. With that kind of financial backing, the effects are going to be convincing.”

I interrupted. “The following night, I returned. The house was closed, so I slipped in through an unlocked basement door. My goal was nothing more than to understand how they did it. But within a twenty-four hour period, they had the house completely free of any effects. No wires, no tripping mechanisms, no fog residue…nothing. The house was perfectly normal. But honestly, it wasn’t so much the house that was mind-blowing. If you could have seen how the characters switched from monstrous to human and back…it was a thing of artistic beauty.”

Middleton shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“
She was right in front of me, Babette Gaultier…inches away. My eyes were glued to her angelic face the entire time. Without smoke or mirrors, she pulled a mask of horror away to reveal her true self and then, as if by magic, the mask returned and she was monstrous. There was no way to explain how, within the blink of an eye, those people went from monster to human so easily.”

Melissa sat back in her chair and steepled her fingers so the tips touched her lips.

“
We all do that, every day. Moods can change…”

I slammed my hand down on her desk, harder than I intended.

“
I’m not talking in metaphor, Mrs. Middleton. I saw this with my own eyes.”
She reached her hand out, across the expanse of her desk, and grabbed mine.

“
It’s okay, Scott. Calm down. I’m very sorry if I’ve insulted you.”

I pulled my hand from hers. She tensed. “What if I told you I believe you?”

“
I’d say you’re patronizing me.”

“
What if I told you two people were murdered in that house?”