Hudson House [Now available for the Kindle]

Chapter 3

-CHAPTER 3-

Eric's stomach knotted.

The woman's white dress clung to her narrow frame and fluttered around her knees from an invisible wind. It radiated like a white light bulb. She was standing straight, rigid, like something had startled her. Her hands were in front of her, perhaps in the sink; her elbows jutted out from her sides like knotty branches.

Eric froze. The sound of his swallowing echoed throughout the kitchen like a monstrous belch. The woman did not flinch.

If he tried to back out of the kitchen the door would squeak as it had on its opening and that would alert the woman to his presence. Then, as his father said, all bets were off. He couldn't stand in place forever, though. Eventually one of them would move. Once he started, he'd have to run. Could he outrun her? Ghosts could fly-Eric could only pump his legs and hope he didn't trip.

Maybe she wasn't a ghost, just a woman who had gotten lost. Teenagers invaded this place on a daily basis; maybe she was a mother searching for her son. Why was her dress glowing?

Metal scraped against metal, long and slow, high and piercing. Eric's brother had once threatened to make Eric a eunuch, whatever that was, and dragged the blade of a carving knife along a sharpening rod, producing the same sound now vibrating around the room.

He wanted to cry. What was he supposed to do? He squeezed the flashlight, his only weapon. If not a ghost, the woman was some crazed lunatic hoping to continue the slaughter of kids in the memory of Hox Grent.

The scraping metal sound slashed at his ears again and again, louder and louder. Soon the blade would rise over the woman's head and then she would turn, and with a huge grin of spiky fangs she'd bring the giant knife down on him, slicing through his entire body. She'd peel his flesh from his bones and eat it in bloody slurps.

The sound continued relentlessly, a screeching table saw rapidly severing plywood.

The woman turned. Her face appeared behind a curtain of brown hair that hung straight past her chin. She could have been pretty (did he know her?) if not for the blood splotches splashed across her dress. Her arms hung at her sides, palms open. Thick rivers of blood coursed down her arms from deep canyons of mutilated flesh.

Her dead, black eyes rolled backward. She dipped her head back. Her mouth dropped open, and then her hair liquefied and splashed onto the floor in thick, crimson fluid. From her hollow mouth ushered an equally hollow cry.

Eric's own scream burned his throat. He tried to shut his eyes and couldn't. His vision blurred with tears that couldn't hide the thing before him.

The woman stepped toward him. No, floated toward him the length of a step. Her feet grazed the ground but did not move. Her arms reached for him. Blood poured from her forearms and splattered on the kitchen floor in blobs that exploded on the tile.

Please, dear God I'll be good so good dear God please.

The woman lunged at him.

Eric's legs collapsed, his knees snapped forward, and he hit the tiled floor first with his knees and then with his face.

The hollow cry morphed into a much more familiar laugh that rose and fell in cackles. It was how his brother laughed after twisting Eric's arm hard enough to make him beg for mercy. Not his brother; this time it was Tommy.

"Get off," Eric cried.

He couldn't budge Tommy. His friend's laughter peaked even higher and he rocked back and forth, riding Eric like a horse.

"Yeeehaa!"

Was the woman still in the room? Did her blood now stain his face?

"She'll get us!" Eric yelled.