Kill Creek

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2017 Scott Thomas

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Inkshares, Inc., San Francisco, California

  www.inkshares.com

  Edited by: Philip Sciranka, Matt Harry & Adam Gomolin

  Cover design by: M. S. Corley

  Interior Design by: Kevin G. Summers

  ISBN: 9781942645825

  e-ISBN: 9781942645832

  LCCN: 2017955309

  First edition

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Kim, Aubrey, and Cleo.

  For my parents.

  And for Old Parker,

  because the tallest tales

  cast the longest shadows.

  Gossip is mischievous, light and easy to raise, but grievous to bear and hard to get rid of. No gossip ever dies away entirely, if many people voice it; it too is a kind of divinity.

  —Hesiod

  Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days. . . . Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.

  —H. P. Lovecraft

  PROLOGUE

  NO HOUSE IS born bad. Most are thought of fondly, even lovingly. In the beginning, the house on Kill Creek was no exception.

  The house was made from nothing more fantastic than wood and nails, mortar and stone. It was not built on unholy ground. It was not home to a witch or a warlock. In 1859, a solitary man constructed it with his own two hands and the occasional help from friends in the nearby settlement of Lawrence, Kansas. For a few good years, the many rooms within the grand house were filled with a passionate love, albeit one shared in secret, a whisper between two hearts.

  But as with most places rumored to be haunted, a tragedy befell the house on Kill Creek. The man who built it was murdered, mere feet from the woman he loved. His outstretched hands attempted to span that mockingly short distance between them, to touch her dark skin, to caress her hair; his mind insisting that if he could just hold her, they would both be saved, that if he could just wish hard enough, they could still be together.

  They were not saved. His love’s body was taken from beside his own and hung from the only tree in the front yard, a gnarled beech. She was already dead, and yet they strung her up in one final insult. The bodies became as cool as the steamy August night would allow, the silence of the house and grounds lying over them like a death shroud. They would remain undisturbed for several weeks, forgotten as the town of Lawrence endured its own tragedy. As dusk fell, the horizon to the southwest flickered with the orange glow of flame. Lawrence was burning.

  A house stained by spilled blood cannot escape the harsh sentence passed by rumor. The townspeople, traveling the quiet dirt path to Kansas City, began to speak of the house as if it were alive. How badly they felt for the poor, sad place, orphaned as so many children had been during the bloody border battles preceding the Civil War. It was impossible to say what happened within that empty house on long, dark winter nights, when the wind cut through the barren forest to rattle its windowpanes. There was just something about the place that inspired travelers to quicken their pace as they passed Kill Creek Road.

  Because of its size and grand architecture, the house did not remain empty forever. A few tried to call it home. Yet no one felt completely welcome in the house, and most moved out within a year. They could not explain why they were compelled to abandon it. It was as if the walls refused to absorb their warmth. Even in the middle of summer, the temperature dropped a good ten degrees as one passed over the threshold.

  It had become a bad place. A thing to be feared.

  In the late 1920s, Kansas Highway 10 was built, linking Kansas City and Lawrence. By the 1970s, the modest paved road had been expanded to a four-lane highway. To someone speeding by at fifty-five miles per hour, the exit to Kill Creek Road was easy to miss, as was the sign that marked the creek itself. As life raced forward and simple times grew ever more hectic, the house on Kill Creek became just another empty farmhouse, left for the prairie to reclaim. Even the creek that had once fed so greedily from the Kansas River began to dry up, the sun baking its bed until it cracked like old flesh.

  The closest neighbors still shared stories about the strange things they’d witnessed over time—lights passing in the windows, pounding on the doors, whispers in the darkness—but the house and its bloody history had been reduced to nothing more than a tall tale that parents told their children as they tucked them into bed. Most did not believe the stories; they were told simply to keep the children safe, to warn them of the dangers of exploring the dilapidated structure. The house must have been lonely then, the passion that had built it lost, pulled down into the earth like morning fog.

  In 1975, the Finch sisters, Rachel and Rebecca, bought the estate from the county, which had owned it since the last occupant abandoned it in the spring of 1961. The Finch sisters were not concerned about the house’s dark history. They were sixty-eight-year-old identical twins, and they had seen and endured much worse than a few bumps in the night, especially Rebecca, who was confined to a wheelchair, the victim of a tragic accident of which neither woman spoke.

  When the Finches hired local hands to help them refurbish the once-grand mansion, many welcomed their arrival, thinking the sisters would finally give the house the care and attention its original owner had intended. The Lawrence Journal-World and the Kansas City Star both ran articles about the Finch sisters’ arrival. KILL CREEK MANSION FINALLY A HOME announced one paper. TWIN SISTERS RESURRECT “HAUNTED HOUSE” proclaimed the other.

  The Finch sisters did not live up to those expectations. They were, as people in the region were wont to call them, “odd birds.” The Finches rarely spoke to the carpenters working on the house, and, once moved in, they almost never stepped foot outside. If one of them could be regarded as friendly, it was Rachel, with her long, flowing black hair, who always paid the workers promptly and fairly. Rebecca, hair pulled painfully tight in a bun, was almost never seen, choosing to stay behind the closed door of the third floor’s only bedroom. An elevator was one of the first additions, allowing wheelchair-bound Rebecca to roam freely throughout the spacious house. Yet she was never about for long, always returning to that one room, a single two-foot-wide window providing her only view of the outside world.

  Once, a plumber inspecting the pipes asked Rachel why her sister did not come downstairs more often. “It must get awfully lonely up there,” he said. Without missing a beat, Rachel turned to the man, gave the closest approximation of a smile she could muster, and replied, “She has all the company she needs.”

  Two years later, Rebecca Finch was dead. According to the coroner, her heart had simply given out. Rachel continued to live in the house on Kill Creek, refusing visitors, even those who came to express their condolences for her sister’s passing. No one except Rachel Finch walked the halls of that house for nearly five years. No living being, that is.

  So it came as a surprise when, in 1982, Rachel granted an interview to world-renowned parapsychologist and author Dr. Malcolm Adudel. Although most of the scientific community regarded him as a fraud, Dr. Adudel’s books based on his adventures into the paranormal were devoured by a public desperate to believe.

  Only Rachel Finch and Dr. Adudel witnessed the occurrences during his weekend visit to that house.
The resulting book, Phantoms of the Prairie: A True Story of Supernatural Terror, brought the house on Kill Creek to national attention. While critics and skeptics discounted the book as pure fiction, eager readers kept Phantoms of the Prairie on the bestseller list for an astounding thirty-six weeks. The story Dr. Adudel wove was short on details and long on atmosphere, but for those seeking proof of the existence of ghosts, the book was all they needed. The house on Kill Creek was officially crowned a doorway to the other side. It was a house of nightmares. More importantly, it was once again known by name.

  Rachel Finch died in 1998. She was ninety-one years old. Just like the man who’d built her beloved mansion, Rachel’s body was not discovered until several weeks after her death. Teenagers from suburban Kansas City had, on a dare, crossed the weathered bridge spanning the dry, dusty ravine that once was Kill Creek. They made it one hundred feet from the front porch before coming to a sudden stop. There, swinging slowly in the beech tree, from the very branch that had once supported the dead, slack weight of the original owner’s forbidden love, was Rachel Finch. An amateurish knot dug into the stretched, rotting flesh below her chin. Her thin black hair fluttered softly in the breeze and then settled upon her shoulders. As the onlookers tried to make sense of this sight, the rope creaked, and Rachel’s body spun around to face them. A beetle crawled happily in one of the empty sockets that had housed her gray eyes.

  Many speculated as to what drove the old woman to hang herself. Some assumed it was sheer loneliness; the loss of her sister had become too much to bear. Others suggested that it was the house—the house had driven her to do it—although no one could say exactly why. And then there were the few, those who took morbid glee in tales of tragedy, who whispered in slow, deliberate voices that Rachel had not killed herself at all. She was dragged out of the house and hung from that branch against her will. Someone—or something—had done that to her. It was a reminder that the house was best left alone.

  After Rachel’s death, all of the Finch sisters’ belongings were left in the house, as stipulated in Rachel’s will, including, one would presume, the furniture in the third-floor bedroom. No one knew for sure what that room held. Its entrance had been sealed shut, the staircase now ending in a wall of brick as if no third floor had ever existed.

  Word spread once more that something was very, very wrong with the house on Kill Creek. Rachel Finch’s death was just another chapter in its dark legacy. Eventually the house and lot became the property of Douglas County. And, despite being on the market once more, no one dared move into the infamous structure. It still attracted its fair share of curiosity seekers, a constant source of busywork for the sheriff’s department, who routinely patrolled the area. In 2008, a chain-link fence was erected around the grounds to keep out trespassers. The owners of the local business that donated the time and equipment for the job simply said they slept easier knowing that they had helped discourage others from approaching that house. They even threw in a coil of razor wire at the top of the fence for good measure.

  So the house fell silent once more, the yard overgrown with knee-high tallgrass and clinging ivy.

  The house on Kill Creek still stands. Empty. Quiet. But not forgotten. Not entirely. Rumors are its life, stories its breath.

  PART ONE

  INVITATION

  Last October

  I took another step into the abyss. “What’s down here?” I called to her. I could sense her presence at the top of the stairs.

  “Don’t worry,” Rachel replied. “It’s more scared of you than you are of it.”

  I heard her chuckle, a laugh that stuck in her throat, never quite reaching her lips.

  As usual, I would have to see for myself.

  —Dr. Malcolm Adudel

  Phantoms of the Prairie

  ONE

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7

  THE AIR WAS on fire.

  Set into the stone wall was a towering Gothic window, the beveled panes of its enormous, narrow body glowing in the afternoon sun. Dust motes swirled in the shaft of light blasting through the glass.

  Just beyond the light, in the shadows, things shifted restlessly.

  Faces.

  Staring. Silent. Hungry.

  Their eyes were focused on a man in his late thirties, his brown hair buzzed to the scalp. He was handsome, just over six feet tall, dressed in old black Levi’s and a henley that showed off a thin, slightly muscular build. The shirt’s long sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, revealing a collision of tattoos covering his left forearm. There was a strange, pitted texture to the skin into which the ink had been set, his entire left arm and the back of his hand wrapped in scar tissue. Dark lines snaked seemingly random courses across the flesh, but within the abstract arrangement, images emerged. Trees. A wildflower. The hollow eye of a skull. And flames, so many flames, devouring all.

  The man looked out at the three hundred students stacked upon each other in the stadium seating of Budig Hall’s Hoch Auditorium. No matter where he turned, he met someone’s rapt gaze. Technically they were here to attend a freshman-level class called Introduction to Horror in Popular Culture. But he knew why every seat in the lecture hall was currently filled. He was not only a Lawrence resident and a KU alumnus, but a best-selling author, an “expert” on the subject of horror.

  Sam felt the bristles of hair rub against his palm as he ran a hand over his shorn head.

  Don’t blow it—you’re supposed to be a master of the macabre.

  He walked the length of the floor of the lecture hall, feeling every set of eyes tracking him like prey.

  “What don’t we know?” he asked rhetorically, his voice echoing from the highest, darkest corners of the cavernous room. “What is hidden—purposely hidden—from us? The Gothic tradition is about secrets, dark secrets, awful secrets, hidden just behind the façade of normality. Modern horror is still heavily influenced by this tradition. But it’s not creepy old castles that hold these secrets anymore. The Gothic has invaded our everyday lives. The old farmhouse in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The suburban Japanese home in The Grudge. Even a videotape in The Ring. The infectious evil that used to be confined to crumbling ruins in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, like Lewis’s The Monk, Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer has spread to our cities, our small towns, our homes. And that makes it even scarier, doesn’t it?”

  There was a murmur of agreement, a few heads nodding within the many-eyed mass before him.

  Sam began to pace more quickly, his own excitement on the subject growing. “So what makes some stories innately Gothic? A Nightmare on Elm Street hinges on the secret that the Elm Street parents are keeping from their children, that they took the law into their own hands and killed Freddy Krueger. Saw keeps us guessing about Jigsaw’s true identity and motive. So why don’t these feel as entrenched in the Gothic tradition as other horror movies?”

  The students glanced uneasily at each other, no one wanting to be the first to give a wrong answer.

  “Okay,” Sam said finally. “I believe there are several key reasons.”

  The chemical smell of a dry-erase marker drifted into the air as Sam uncapped it. He turned to a massive whiteboard mounted on the back wall and quickly jotted down the first entry on his list.

  “One: Emanation from a Single Location,” he said aloud as he wrote.

  He turned to lean over a heavy wooden lectern as he spoke directly to the class. “Yes, we’re told in the very title that the nightmare is happening on Elm Street, but in the movie itself, we never get a sense that the evil truly emanates from this place. It does very little to give us a sense of the geography of Elm Street, the close proximity of the targeted kids, or even if Freddy’s horrible acts, both past and present, are confined strictly to this part of Springwood. In the end, the antiseptic safety of ‘Elm Street’ just juxtaposes nicely with the all-consuming threat of ‘Nightmare.’

  “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, on the ot
her hand, is confined mostly to an old house in the Texas countryside. If those fatally curious kids never wandered over to Leatherface’s house, they would have remained in one piece. The evil is behind that door. Don’t open the door, and you got nothing to worry about.”

  The dry-erase marker squeaked its chipmunk voice as it sped once again over the board.

  “Two: a Sense of Forbidden History. The location must have some dark history associated with it, whether it’s the illicit affair of Quint and the former governess in The Turn of the Screw or the suburban wet dream of the brand-new housing development in Poltergeist, a neighborhood that just happens to have been built on top of the bodies of a relocated cemetery. Even in these examples, which are firmly rooted in the supernatural, the secret history is purposely kept from our protagonists.

  “Three: an Atmosphere of Decay and Ruin. This could be the physical decay of classic Gothic literature—the aforementioned crumbling castles and shadowy manors that continue to show up in films like The Others and The Woman in Black and Crimson Peak. But it could also be mental decay, like the main character in Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, who moves into a seemingly innocuous apartment and proceeds to lose his mind. More often than not, it’s a combination of the two—the ruin and decay of the physical structure leads to the ruin and decay of the mind of the protagonist. We see it again and again in books like The Haunting of Hill House and movies such as Session 9, in which the cleaning of an abandoned mental institution coincides with the mental degradation of the homicidal leader of the cleanup crew. And finally—”

  Sam wrote the last item on the board.

  “Four: Corruption of the Innocent. That’s you guys.”

  This drew a laugh.

  He replaced the cap on the marker, set it on the ledge that ran along the bottom of the board, and returned to the lectern.