Hudson House [Now available for the Kindle]

Chapter 2

-CHAPTER 2-

The floor moaned beneath Eric's next step and he paused. He glanced at the stairs and then up, to the ceiling. Was she swinging up there now or lying on the floor? The hair on the back of his neck stood up as a cold chill coursed over his body.

Eric turned his back on the stairs and entered the large room. He immediately knew something was behind him; it had jumped toward him the moment he moved. Right now it stood in the crimson sunlight, hulking over him with blood-soaked arms from wrists that never stopped bleeding, a makeshift noose of ties slung around its neck.

Eric swung the flashlight behind him. The thing had moved back into the shadows where his light could not reach.

A pair of boarded windows divided the far wall of the room. Flakes of paint had peeled off of the wall in large strips like claw marks. Eric imagined the girl in a panic ripping at the wall, tearing at it until her fingertips bled, desperate to scrape her way out of the house that had become her eternal residence. Those same mutilated fingers could seize his neck and break his spine the way the noose of ties had broken hers.

Another boarded window-the front window-was to Eric's left and a large opening into another boxy room was to the right. Three more windows sectioned the walls in that room in a mirror image of this one. Eric had expected old, moldy furniture with decades of spider webs sagging across them. He had at least imagined there would be beer cans and fast food wrappers from teenagers strewn across the place, but he found three completely empty rooms. The musty smell faded and intensified in waves.

The floor moaned with each step and Eric paused after every cry. He kept the flashlight steady while squeezing his other hand into a painfully tight fist that started to numb.

He stopped in the middle of the room and carefully scanned the floor as far into the next room as he could. Bare floors in bare rooms in a bare house. Should he keep searching? He faced the next room. The sunlight was fading rapidly from the front door like a retreating dream.

He could leave the house now, run out slamming the door before the thing leaped onto his back and dragged him even deeper inside. He'd tell Tommy that he searched and scoured but couldn't find anything to grab but that didn't matter since he and Ed had seen him enter the house. Tommy would smile that stupid, proud grin and call Eric a fag.

He passed through the archway between the rooms to the back of the house. The sunlight did not reach this far-maybe it had vanished for the night. To escape, he would have to run back through the last room, turn into the foyer, go out the front door and down the porch steps. And do it with a plastic flashlight.

The floor in this room groaned more loudly and the wood felt softer, weaker. His feet told his brain that the floor had thinned out here like ice and that he needed to tread lightly or he might fall through into the basement. The monster waited down there. The thing of hair and teeth.

That's where Hox took his victims. He tortured them in the basement and then fed them to some hideous beast. Some kids said there was no beast, just some starved dogs, but it amounted to the same: whomever Hox took was never seen again.

With the next step, the floor dipped. He stopped, waited for the wood to splinter and break. Every second he remained in place increased the odds that the floor wouldn't hold but the fear of taking another step, onto an even thinner patch, kept him still.

A closed door stood to his right. He turned toward it, started to take a step, paused. The floor whined. He would walk to the door, push it and see what happened. If something did happen, he'd bolt out of the house as quickly as he could. If the opening of the door showed him merely another barren room, Eric would examine it. Then he'd find his way out. He would not look upstairs-homo coward forever or not, he was not going to climb those steps.

He reached toward the door and did not like how his hand shook and blurred in the light. The wood was moist. He pushed on it and his fingers sank into the door like they would into dough or soggy cardboard. His fingers sank deeper. It's got me. The door would suck him in, absorb him, and keep him forever.

The door pushed into the next room and his fingers slipped on the surface with a wet squeak. Streaks of blood stretched back from his fingers across the door. The tips had been torn open, the nails ripped out. Blood poured over his hand and splattered on the floor between his feet.

He started to scream but silenced it after only a brief yelp; his fingers had returned to normal. His mind playing tricks on him. Or something else playing tricks.

Eric swallowed; his throat felt incredibly dry like he had swallowed a handful of dirt. A slight push swung the door a few inches forward before it swung back just past the door frame and then settled in place. If he kicked the door hard, it would swing wide into the other room and then swing back just as wide into this room. At least that promised easy escape.

He pushed the door open slowly until the hinge stopped yawning and the door could go no further.

Two boarded windows hung above a sink set in the middle of the kitchen counter. In front of the sink stood a woman with long, brown hair, her back to Eric.