The House on Mayberry Road Read online

Becky sensed all the tiny oddities the most—the house, the bats, the clearing. Everything within tens of yards didn't feel right to her. Something inside that place wasn't normal, and whatever it was had spread into the surrounding area. She calmed her anxiety by telling herself that she was way too high and a wimp, but her gut hadn't failed her at the stroke of midnight on September 11, 2001, only hours before America had been attacked. She commenced to throw up continuously until morning when the news finally informed the world about the tragic event.

  Only five minutes...just to prove Scott wrong.

  Evan took a last drag, tossed the joint aside, and entered the house, giggling. Becky breathed a sigh of relief. If anything was going to happen, it would have happened by now.

  Doug watched, blinking, waiting for that fool to run back outside, pretending to be possessed or just plain stupid. He don't have to pretend to do that.

  They all stared up at the towering structure like children gazing up at the moon during a lunar eclipse. Becky was almost certain those two upper windows were looking back at her. Scott could hear Evan's footfalls from inside going from room to room, then from ground level to second-story. He did not hear what he expected or wanted to, such as rattling chains or the unearthly groans of disembodied spirits...or the screams from a young quarterback who thought he was the toughest boy in town.

  Then, the footfalls halted—ceased—as if Evan had fallen down into a bottomless hole. The silence that followed was worse than before. Not even a cricket could be heard, nor the screech of a distant locus.

  They all waited, their hearts pounding, the tension rising. Time seemed to stand still.

  Finally, a sound came: Errrrrr...

  The front door creaked open. Doug started. Becky gasped. Scott burst out laughing.

  "Oh, man. Come on out of there already! You know Charlie Steera. All the stories he makes up are total bullshit anyway—" But before Scott could finish and before Becky could exhale, something else happened.

  The door slammed shut. The leaves stopped blowing. An upstairs window exploded. Becky was the first one to see what, or who, had fallen out of the second story window...

  Or had been thrown out of it...

  Evan.

  Becky let loose a scream so loud it rattled Doug's eardrums. He barely had enough time to hear the broken glass trickling down toward him. Some small shards fell into Scott's eyes, momentarily blinding him. A deep, hallow thump sounded quickly as Evan's remaining body slammed against the soil.

  His three friends looked down at him, their six eyes widened to full capacity. Nobody could believe what they were seeing, whom was lying there about to die. The boy wasn't even in one piece anymore but only half a piece. His body had been ripped in half at the waist. His intestines were strewn about and torn open, their insides revealing what he'd eaten earlier: pizza. The smell of it, mixed with his fecal matter, swam up Scott's nostrils. He turned and vomited. Becky continued to shrill the clearing with an air-raid scream. Her face was almost as red as the blood pouring from the huge open cavity where Evan's legs had once been attached. Doug stared at him, blinking his eyes, his mouth ajar, unable to move or look away. What made it worse was that Evan was still alive.

  He reached up for his friends, as if one of them could actually help him stand. But everyone was too traumatized to do anything that required conscious action. His eyes were the narrowest among the four, and his pupils were yellow instead of black. He coughed up watery blood persistently. His whole torso quivered. He continuously felt for his legs with his left hand, and every time he couldn't touch them, he looked confused. They were somewhere upstairs, in the house that was more than haunted.

  As soon as he tried to speak, Becky stopped screaming. She wanted desperately to hold his hand, but could not make herself do so. Doug's mind spun with small phrases that made no real sense: he's not a quarterback or tough guy anymore...can't degrade him for smoking pot again...won't miss his raunchy sense of humor. Scott, his eyes cut and bleeding from the fallen glass, knelt down and spoke first. "Jesus, Evan, what the hell—how did—"

  "I'm going to die, ain't I?" Blood spurted from Evan's mouth. "It hurts so bad, man. So fucking bad. Ahhhh—Cahhh!"

  Becky covered her mouth with her hands. Tears flowed down her cheeks.

  Scott spun around, searching. For help, an answer, support, he didn't know. "What do we do?! What do we do?!"

  Doug pointed to Evan's head in one fast, jerking motion. "Holy Christ, look!"

  Slowly, Evan's three inches of spiked hair inexplicably changed from natural blonde, to brown, to black, and then to powdery white within seconds. Nobody said a word, but everyone groaned and grunted—especially the victim. Three puddles of blood were accumulating exponentially: two beside his ears and one on his clavicle cavity. Some even found its way up his nostrils.

  "What happened, Evan? Tell us what happened," Scott managed to say. He had finally calmed down a little.

  But the victim did not respond. His quivering hands felt the ground beneath his twitching form, trying to grab onto grass to stay alive.

  "E—I—Gaaah!" Evan groaned, gurgling on his own blood, which now poured from his mouth.

  His face quickly started turning pale blue. The life was draining out of him. He now resembled a zombie fresh from the morgue.

  "Tell us, buddy. You're going to be okay, okay? Everything is gonna be all right." Scott was trying to make himself believe this very thing. But when he looked down at the carnage and at the glass blades embedded into Evan's bleeding spleen, he almost fainted.

  "It—I saw what—there's something that—inside!" It wasn't his massive injury that made it hard for him to talk; it was something he had witnessed.

  Becky felt like her chest was going to rupture. She was crying so hard it hurt every muscle in her body. Doug was almost choking on the dinner he was trying to keep down.

  "Tell us what we can do to help you, Evan! What is it you're trying to say?"

  More blood shot from the boy's mouth, some spilling into Scott's face. Then, Evan's twitching body suddenly tensed, eased, and his hand finally let go of the grass.

  He was dead.

  The three breathing teenagers went utterly quiet. The sound of crickets, locusts, and a running stream filled the clearing. A moment later, Doug opened his mouth.

  "What do we do? What do we do, huh? I don't need this, guys."

  "Is he really...dead?" Becky's voice was so uneven, it took Scott a while to process her choppy cluster of words.

  He felt Evan's neck for a pulse. But there wasn't one. He looked back at Becky and shook his head.

  "Don't feel a thing. He's ice cold."

  Becky suddenly screamed, Scott suddenly stumbled backward, and Doug suddenly vomited.

  Evan's lifeless corpse came back to life. His eyes popped open, his arm lifted up, and his finger pointed at the house.

  But was it really Evan?

  "Do not look beyond the veil of the physical eyes! It was not meant for the bodily race to venture beyond its five senses! There, lies something not ought to be seen, smelt, tasted, touched, or heard! Nothing you touch is real. Everything you see is ultimately fabricated! Don't look! Doooon't seeee!"

  That's when something even stranger happened. Evan's yellow eyes began to bleed profusely, and a wicked smile took up both edges of his lips. Becky fainted, her face plopping into a puddle of blood. Doug turned and ran away, vomiting all over himself. Scott couldn't move.

  "You wanna see what I see, Scott? Ha-ha-ha-ha!"

  Evan's—or whoever’s eyes they were—exploded. Chunks of meat went everywhere. One small piece found its way into Scott's mouth. Another landed on Becky's back. The shriveled blue body of Chester County's most elite quarterback again went lifeless. His raised hand collapsed to the ground, and his laughing face went quiet and disheartened.

  Scott stepped back, slipped in a puddle of blood, and fell to the ground, knocking the back of his head against a rock. Before unconsciousness set in, he lo
oked back up at that house one last time.

  Impossible, he thought to himself as he stared up at the second story window Evan had flown out of.

  It was no longer broken; the glass was again in one solid piece.

  Chapter 2

  John Rollings was sound asleep in bed at two A.M. when his cell phone on the nearby stand began ringing and vibrating, filling his peaceful apartment with unneeded clatter. The phone shrilled several times without successfully waking this dead-looking man. After the initial call, it rang again, finally jarring him from his deep slumber.

  John looked over at the trembling Motorola and caught it right before it tumbled over the edge of the stand. He flipped it open and put it to his ear. His eyes were barely open when he spoke: "John Rollings, paranormal investigator, no haunt too small—"

  Before he could finish, a tense male voice on the other end interrupted him: "Well, Mr. Rollings, this is Sheriff Charlie Steera, from Bellsville. We've got a serious problem and we absolutely need your assistance, ASAP."

  John rubbed his eyes and yawned. "Name the place and the problem. I'll be there immediately."

  There was a pause, then the empty sound of people shouting hysterically in the background. Somewhere outside, obviously. Pandemonium happening in real time.

  "Just come to Mayberry Road out on Robin's Pike. You'll know it when you see it."

  "Okay, sir, may I ask what this is regarding? Strange noises, things moving by themselves, any—"

  —A sudden click, and the hum of an open line...

  "Hmm...must be a Poltergeist." John snapped his phone shut and sat up.

  John Rollings was a twenty-three-year-old low-rent psychic and expert of the supernatural. Since the age of nine, he had been able to occasionally read other people's thoughts, to sometimes predict future events, and to quite often communicate with ghosts. Despite many failed attempts at tapping into the realm of the unknown during his early years, John eventually matured into a man of knowledge and wisdom on the subject. He knew he didn't have the far-seeing eye of Edgar Casey, or even the gifted insight of James Van Praagh, but he knew that humans were made of more than flesh and blood and bone and tissue, and that there were further reasons to being alive other than being born, working, growing old, and dying. Not only did he find comfort in this theory, but he would have probably lost his mind somewhere along the way if he hadn't.

  Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it's not there, was his favorite motto regarding his practice, his life. Going into haunted houses proved this for him. Having seen through the forms of many deceased specters validated his belief in the extraordinary. No skeptic could debunk his experiences or his faith. And though he was still light years away from psychic Nirvana, he'd advanced light years from where he'd first started.

  There were tricks to opening the third-eye, of course.

  John Rollings knew a few of those tricks.

  Nearly every religion had them, they just used different techniques.

  Wearing ugly yellow boxers and a skin-tight Tee, John slipped lazily out of bed and went straight for the bathroom. After pissing and washing his hands, he looked at his reflection in the mirror. His jet-black hair was so shaggy it looked supernatural in itself. A little stubble coated his cheeks, chin, and neck, but not his upper lip, where it seemed extremely reluctant to grow. His eyes were dark brown, half open, their corners stuffed with slivers of crust. He gazed deeply into his dark spheres and whispered unevenly, "It's not your fault. It's not your fault."

  His voice, however, was saturated with doubt.

  Five minutes elapsed, but he didn't move or look away. The same burdening thoughts he'd been facing for the last seven years still ran through his mind, trying to upset his faltering sanity. They ate away at the lining of his conscience like termites at wood. He could not forgive himself for what he'd done to that poor girl in back Oregon, and how he had inadvertently caused her death by offering her the advice he intended to help her with.

  Mr. Rollings, what is wrong with me? Why can I do this and nobody else can?

  Because you're special, I had said.

  But I want to be normal. I don't want to be able to move things without touching them. I just want to be like everybody else.

  Why, Sarah? Why would you give up such a great gift God gave you for a life so mediocre?

  It's a curse from the devil. Besides, it's too hard being special. All this attention, the way people look at me and treat me for being this way...I want to just belong.

  Trust me, it may be difficult now, but in a few years, you'll understand—

  A few years never came for Sarah Pouster...not even a few days. She'd hung herself one day later in her room, with a note attached to her Hannah Montana shirt, which read:

  I'm a freak

  The image of a pale-faced twelve-year-old girl hanging from a rope resurfaced in John's mind. She was the most gifted telekinetic he'd ever come across, too. Now she was a haunting mistake stamped onto his soul.

  He looked down toward the sink and touched the walls beside the mirror with both his fists. When he looked up again, tears gleamed heavily in his eyes.

  "Please, God, don't let today be another day like then."

  No comfort yet, even after seven long, excruciating years.

  ***

  John knew the roads of Bellsville very well; this was his hometown. His particular practice, however, required moving around a lot. He'd lived in eleven of the fifty states at one time or another, but none compared to here. Being a paranormal investigator wasn't as lucrative a business as running a construction company...or even being an ice cream salesman, for that matter. Jobs came at the strangest times and in either the most ordinary or extraordinary of places. Money was almost as elusive as the ghosts he tried to clean from houses. Sometimes he even worked in nightclubs, performing on-stage illusions for twenty or thirty extra bucks. Definitely not his preference, but it's what made ends meet.

  What John wanted more than anything was to find the one special job that would boost his career into high gear … something bound to make headlines in newspapers, radio, television and movies for years to come. Perhaps an account as well-known and as frightening as the Amityville Horror, or as strange and as incomparable as the Winchester Plantation—a story unable to be ignored by the general public and to be renowned forever in his particular field.

  But investigations like that only came once or twice every century. Hitting the Powerball happened more frequently.

  Still, he moved forward, his head in the clouds, just hoping life had something better in store for him.

  ***

  A beat-up, brown Lincoln Town car cruised along a windy, wooded country hill in the dead of night. John was driving, trying to see through the stark darkness. His brights were just cutting it. He got some help when the flashing beacons of a police car filled his eyes suddenly and made him swerve off to the shoulder of a narrow, two-lane roadway. The sirens that followed screamed through the night like whistling fireworks. A cruiser flew urgently past him, going back toward town. And it had pulled out of Mayberry Road, his intended destination.

  It was not so dark there.

  John soon flicked on his turn signal and pulled onto Mayberry Road. Gravel popped beneath the weight of his vehicle. In the distance he could see a variety of high-powered lights burning within the immediate woods only a hundred feet away. They lit the surroundings like a dim sunrise. Rescue trucks and fire trucks were faintly visible from where he was; there must have been half a dozen of them either parked in the middle of the road or off to the side, their own lights flashing. John didn't know what he was in for tonight, but he had a feeling that this was bigger than he had imagined. The question was...what?

  Anything but another Oregon incident.

  A long trail of red-burning flares lined the middle of the road, stretching to the point of infinity. A soft wind twirled the accumulating smoke. As John progressed, his foot barely touching the gas, he could see a team
of rescue personnel walking back and forth up ahead, near the woods by Runner's Stream. Some were carrying equipment boxes, some tools, some just flashlights, but they all, from what John could tell, looked rather tense.

  He sped up, curious to know why half the valley's police force had been summoned to one specific and far-out location. What were they doing? Where were they taking off to in the woods? And how did this pertain to him?

  Was it possible that a nearby neighbor—a frightened elder, or a teenage prankster—called him by mistake? For the purpose to lure him out here on a wild goose chase?

  Jesus, I hope not.

  John slammed on his brakes. An obese police officer stepped out into the road and held out his chubby STOP hand. His mouth was hanging open, either because he was out of shape or afraid. He looked at John like he wanted to take out his gun and shoot him for being here where he did not belong. Instead, he hurried over to his window, pretty fast for a fat guy.

  John rolled it down.

  "Go back NOW!" The officer huffed.

  "But I was called to come out—"

  Before he could finish, the cop pointed back up the road. "Go back, or I'll throw your ass in jail. There's nothing for you to see here."

  "Somebody called me to come out here. Sheriff Charlie Steera?"

  The man said nothing. He simply gazed into John's eyes, making him uncomfortable. John had seen that exact same fear in Darlene Wilkins back in '97, when she moved into a house possessed by Balaam, a three-headed demon.

  "Sir, I'm going to ask you one last time. Turn your vehicle around and go home." His warm, wheezing breaths brushed against John’s face.

  "Sir—"

  "Burt, it's okay. Let him through." Another cop stepped out of the darkness. This man was a little leaner, a little shorter, with a prominent handlebar mustache and a mushed, upturned nose. He had serious-looking eyes but gentle-looking cheeks, much like Winston Churchill. "I'll take it from here."

  The nervous officer walked away and the new one approached.

  "John Rollings?"

  "That's me."