Kill Creek Read online

He ran the towel across the mirror to wipe the smudge away.

  There he was, his image clear. His eyes were tired, heavy bags hanging below them. Deep lines cut through his weathered skin. His hair looked thinner than he remembered. It had started to reveal empty patches of liver-spotted scalp.

  “When did I get so damn old?” It was a rhetorical question.

  The drip from the faucet turned to a stream as Sebastian gave the knob another twist. Water swirled around the bowl, washing away the thick brown spatters, gurgling as it was swallowed by the drain. The odd amplification remained but was now accompanied by a more subtle sound, just under the splash. Sebastian listened. It was a familiar sound.

  In that moment, if he had allowed his imagination to run wild, he would have said it was the sound of voices whispering.

  TWELVE

  3:45 p.m.

  DANIEL SLIPPED OUT the back door, making sure it did not slam behind him. The overcast day had burned off to reveal a blue sky just beneath, the way a skinned knee will reveal the redness of fresh flesh. Every few minutes, the wind would pick up and blow from the north, pushing its way like a bully through the woods to the clearing, rocking the bushy bodies of trees gently to and fro.

  With one hand, Daniel powered up his cell phone, checking to make sure he had ample reception. Two bars. Good enough. The display read “Home” as the number automatically dialed.

  After two rings, a young girl answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Claire?”

  “Who else would it be?” his daughter replied with her perfect blend of childish playfulness and teenage smartass. “Mom told me about your ‘interview.’ I can’t believe you’re doing that. It’s, like, a little crazy, you know?”

  “Yeah, I’m kinda surprised I’m here myself.”

  “So? See anything scary yet?”

  Daniel smiled to himself. He always smiled when he talked to Claire. “Not yet, sweetheart. But the day is young.” He followed the trail of chipped pale stones away from the house, closer to where the trees parted like a mouth yawning.

  Or screaming.

  “You go to church yesterday?”

  “Yeah, with Mom.”

  “How was it?”

  “Intense. Heavy on the fire and brimstone. You know, cause of Halloween.”

  Daniel knew. His church didn’t actively discourage the holiday, but the lesson was always the same. Horror is the result of sin. Sin gives way to temptation. Temptation is the number-one weapon of the Devil.

  The formula was so simple. When you played it in reverse, you had a guaranteed best-selling book.

  “Speaking of, you have any big Halloween plans?”

  Claire gave a soft chuckle, obviously meant to go over her father’s head. It didn’t. Daniel knew what it meant. She assumed he still thought she was interested in trick-or-treating. He may be a lame, middle-aged, churchgoing dad, but he wasn’t stupid. Claire had plans with her friends, plans that would undoubtedly expose her to the temptations of underage drinking and premarital sex. But Daniel had a secret, a lame, middle-aged, churchgoing dad secret: he trusted his daughter.

  “Jessica’s sorta having a little get-together tonight,” Claire said offhandedly. The understatement was a bit too obvious.

  “A party?”

  She was quick to protest. “Not a party. Just, you know, a few friends.”

  A few friends. Age-old code for party.

  “Nothing big. Probably just watch horror movies, that kinda thing.”

  “What’s his name?”

  A pause. The question had caught her off guard.

  “Clint.”

  Daniel gave a dramatic sigh. “Clint. No, no, no, Claire, not a boy named Clint.”

  “What’s wrong with Clint?”

  “Everything.”

  And Claire laughed. It was the same laugh she’d had as a child, five years old in a frilly pink dress her grandmother had given her, spinning circles until her giggling forced her down. It was the laugh that melted Daniel’s heart. The laugh that, if it ever went away, would tear him to pieces.

  “I’ll put Mom on,” she said.

  “You do that,” Daniel told her. “Have fun tonight.” He groaned. “With Clint.”

  Another laugh, then silence as Claire left her room and wandered down the hallway. Suddenly there was a burst of static, a shrill squelch in Daniel’s ear. He jerked the phone from his ear just as a voice broke through it:

  “Hello?”

  “Hello? Sabrina?”

  “Daniel?” There was worry in his wife’s voice. “How’s it going?”

  He felt a warmth in his chest, the hidden flame that meant home.

  Daniel reached the last of the stones and stepped through the trees, into the dense forest. He hadn’t noticed it before, but the drone of cicadas now enveloped him, as if that one simple step had transported him to another world.

  “Daniel?” Her voice quavered, breaking the fluidity of her normally steady tone.

  “I’m here,” he assured her.

  “I don’t like this.”

  The barren branches high overhead seemed to reach for one another, straining to clasp fingers bare of leafy flesh, pointed fingertips desperate to span the distance as the light wind knocked them gently about.

  “Like what?”

  “This. You. There. You should have just come home.”

  “I’m here for the same reasons the others are here, baby. It’s publicity. I’ve got the new book series coming out soon. This could help make sure it sells.”

  “Your books will sell. They always do.”

  “The Christian bookstores are saying they won’t carry this one. It’s the beginning of a backlash, Sabrina. They’re saying . . . they say my books glorify evil.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  Daniel closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I know that. You know that. This is the chance to explain myself. And if the church is going to abandon me, then I’ll need the mainstream readers more than ever.”

  “No one’s going to abandon you,” she assured him.

  For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

  “I’ve heard about that house,” Sabrina said finally. “I know the stories people tell.”

  “And that’s just what they are. Stories.”

  A sigh, not so much for her as for him. “I just . . . I don’t like the idea of you flirting with the occult.”

  Daniel gave a sharp laugh. He knew he shouldn’t go out of his way to show his irritation, but after seventeen years of marriage, she should know him better. “Sabrina, I’m here at a very ordinary, very un-haunted house to promote my books. Tomorrow, I’ll be on a plane and back in Chicago by dinnertime.”

  “Do you promise? I mean, that the house is . . . only a house?”

  Something creaked under Daniel’s feet. He looked down to find that his shoes were completely obscured by fallen leaves.

  He scratched at the ground with his fraying leather shoe.

  “Daniel? Is . . . thing okay?” The reception was cutting out.

  “It’s the signal, sweetie. I’m going to lose you.”

  His foot did not scrape dirt but a harder substance. Cement, perhaps. But cement did not creak. He shoved the toe of his shoe down harder and there came a sharp crack.

  Wood. It was wood.

  Daniel was fat. He knew he was fat. But in that moment he found himself to be amazingly agile, hopping into the air just as the wood plank snapped clean through beneath him. As he did, the phone slipped from his sweaty fingers.

  He landed a couple feet away, on the safety of solid ground, just in time to watch the phone drop straight down toward the split plank. One moment the cell phone was there, and the next it was swallowed by the jagged black slit in the cracked board.

  He heard the tinny, faraway voice of his wife call out, “Daniel?” And then the phone was gone.

  “Shoot!” He lunged toward the crack in the board but stopped short, remembering that it was
his weight that had snapped the plank in the first place.

  “Goddamn it!” he cried out. Immediately he looked around, his cheeks flushed with shame at taking the Lord’s name in vain. Luckily, there was no one there to hear him.

  Over the tops of the trees, the Finch House silently watched.

  The wood that had snapped under his feet covered a well, the same well about which Wainwright had gone out of his way to warn them. Using his foot, Daniel brushed away the cover of brittle leaves and vines to reveal warped, weathered boards placed haphazardly over the well’s stone mouth. Years of erosion from rain, snow, and ravenous termites had taken its toll on the boards. Great splintering cracks gouged deeply into the wooden flesh, the sides crumbling at the touch. The planks probably wouldn’t have supported the lithe Kate, let alone the largest person in the group. The handyman Wainwright sent out to prepare the house must have missed this, or surely he would have replaced the boards. At the very least, he would have ringed the area in barrier tape.

  Daniel reached under the middle plank, and his bare fingers sunk slightly into the deteriorated wood. Thoughts of spiders filled his mind—thin, needlelike legs scuttling in the dark; fangs dripping with teardrops of golden venom; sleek black bodies born of shadows; webs in the nooks and crevices where only they could climb, like a trail of silken nightmares. Daniel could smell the dank odor of the well’s mossy walls, of the stagnant water somewhere far below, of the absolute darkness. Glancing around, he located a stone, jagged like the tooth of some long-extinct beast, and, holding it directly above the slit of blackness, he dropped it down into the well. Its fall seemed impossibly long, the splash as it hit bottom far too faint.

  It can’t be that deep, he thought. It was impossible. No well should go down that far unless the digging of it exposed an immense chasm, a black pit long buried beneath the shifting earth.

  The ancient odor emanating from the well hit Daniel, as many lost scents do, with a misplaced memory from mental oblivion. When Daniel was just a boy, he and his family—his parents; his brother, Peter; and his sister, Mary Kay—lived in a ramshackle three-bedroom house forty miles south of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It wasn’t their first house, nor was it their favorite. His father had lost his job as a maintenance man for the city and, with an alarming shortage of jobs in the area, had no choice but to uproot his family and retreat to the only place that didn’t demand a mortgage payment: his own father’s hunting lodge.

  Daniel hated what Peter referred to as “Grandpa’s Whack Shack,” a nickname Daniel knew was hilarious without entirely understanding its perverse meaning. The Whack Shack was small, drafty, and home to just about every type of insect in the Tar Heel State. Crickets, grass-hoppers, cicadas, mosquitoes, hover flies, deer flies, horseflies, silver-fish, cockroaches, fire ants, carpenter ants, yellow jackets, honey bees, centipedes, millipedes, ticks. You name it, they had it. Crawling up the bathtub drain. Burrowed under stacks of bath towels in the closet. Nesting in the spaces where the sagging floors and warped ceilings had begun to separate from the dingy walls. The Whack Shack was never intended to house a family; it was Grandpa’s escape from the city, where he and his hunting buddies would go for some peace and quiet, miles away from their nagging wives.

  Yet what Daniel despised most of all were the eight-legged monstrosities, the arachnids, the spiders. Daniel’s father assured him there were only two kinds of spiders that could do any real damage: the brown recluse and the black widow. But to young Daniel—a sensitive teenager with every one of his childhood fears intact—spiders were the most horrifying creatures on the planet.

  “I read that at least once in their life, ever’body will have a spider crawl into their mouth while they’re sleepin’,” Peter said to Daniel one day, knowing good and well what kind of damage this tidbit of information could do to his younger brother. The very thought of it—a spider with its prickly legs and deadly fangs, creeping between his lips, welcomed in by the slow draw of his slumbering breath—it was enough to keep Daniel awake for nights on end.

  And then, one steamy summer afternoon, Daniel came face-to-face with the very thing he feared. It was Peter’s friend, Kenny, who made him go in. A skinny, red-haired creep who lived next door (next door being a mile and a half as the crow flies), Kenny Milburn must have had a million freckles, and where there weren’t freckles, there were pimples, so many that his face looked like a rotting apple, discolored and lumpy.

  That afternoon, after much begging and pleading, their mother ordered Peter to let Daniel tag along. It really wasn’t much of a demand; Peter and Kenny had plans to go no farther than the front yard for a game of catch, but it annoyed Daniel’s older brother and his no-good friend all the same. So when Kenny overthrew Daniel’s prized Official Mickey Mantle baseball (complete with faux signature), sending it racing into the crawl space under the house, it was Kenny who insisted Daniel go after it.

  Daniel looked from the darkened crawl space entrance to his older brother, not wanting to whine like a baby, hoping that Peter might see the fear in his eyes and offer to go himself.

  Instead, Peter stood silently as Kenny’s taunts grew louder and louder. Before Daniel knew what was happening, he found himself down on all fours, inching his way across the line of shadow that marked an end to sunlight’s safety and the beginning of the underworld, the realm of the crawl space.

  It was damp underneath. The ground outside had been baked dry by the sun, but in the crawl space, the earth retained the wetness of recent rains. Daniel could feel it soaking through the knees of his blue jeans. He knew his mom would not be happy to find the soiled pants in the laundry hamper. The dank odor left by standing water filled his nose, the thick scent of mildew and mold. Daniel held his breath until little black spots would creep from the corners of his vision; only then would he take in another quick, desperate gasp. His back scraped the underside of the house and Daniel winced, sure that it would leave a blood-speckled spot in the middle of his shirt. He thought of his mom again, how she would totally flip out when she saw what he had done to his clothes.

  And then, there it was, a white orb glowing like a pearl in the damp belly of an oyster. Only a few more yards and the baseball would be in his hands.

  The black spots were not going away. Daniel took a deeper breath, tasting the years of sediment, the dirt and dust and decomposed leaves, but the black spots continued to close in. He was sure he would pass out. But strangely he didn’t feel the least bit light-headed.

  One of the black spots spun down on a line of silk no thicker than a human hair, its body twisting to reveal the bright red hourglass on its belly, like the dab of blood Daniel was sure he had on his back. The black spots were not warnings of impending unconsciousness. They were alive. And they were everywhere.

  Terror swept through his round body in a million icy pinpricks. Daniel was sure for an awful moment that every deadly spider had decided to bite him at once. Without thinking, he reached out and snatched up the baseball, giving a helpless whimper as he tried to turn around. The crawl space was too tight. No matter how he twisted his body, he could not maneuver around to face the opening, that painfully distant square of light that meant the end to his hell.

  He began to panic. His eyes darted from the ground before him to the rough wood above to the cement pillars supporting the house, stopping on a wisp of white just to the right of his shoulder. It was a peculiar substance, like cotton candy, but white instead of pink. From its center, a black body scampered out, tested the air with its two front legs, and reared back like a startled horse. It seemed to sense that Daniel was close, so close, reaching out as if it longed to touch the young boy’s skin, to skitter across his rolls of flesh and under his clothes where he wouldn’t be able to brush it off, where it could do what it lived to do, to bite, to kill.

  With a quick glance down to make sure the area was free of spiders, Daniel smacked his palms to the ground, the baseball still clutched in his right hand, and pushed off with all his st
rength, simultaneously lifting his knees and propelling himself straight backward. He knew he didn’t have a chance of getting out without being bitten. He had never really thought he would see a black widow in the real world. Here was not one but tens, perhaps hundreds of the monsters. His father’s warning echoed in his mind: it would only take one bite.

  He felt a tickle on his bare skin. One of the spiders had fallen onto his arm and was skittering quickly higher. In another second, it would disappear into his sleeve.

  Daniel heard a horrible whimper escape his lips, and then he drew in a deep breath and puffed it out toward the spider. The spider was slipping its long black legs beneath his sleeve, and then the sharp breath whisked it away. But another black widow was on him in seconds. And another. And another.

  He was going to die in the crawl space.

  So young Daniel Slatterson did the only thing he knew to do in situations like that one—he prayed. He prayed hard, eyes closed tightly, the words spilling from his quivering lips so quickly, they became one solitary thing. “GodifyougetmeoutofthisIpromisetolivemylifeforyou.”

  The faster Daniel recited his prayer, the faster he pushed himself backward. His knee came down on the pointy edge of a stone and Daniel winced, feeling the warm wetness of blood begin to saturate his muddy jeans, but still he did not stop praying.

  “GodifyougetmeoutofthisIpromisetolivemylifeforyou.”

  In his mind he could picture his body swarming with the terrible arachnids. He could imagine their fiery bites, the poison hot as it coursed through his veins. His left palm and the baseball in his right hand dug ravines in the dirt, leaving odd mismatched waves of earth in his wake.

  And then an amazing thing happened, the very last thing Daniel ever expected. Daylight warmed him. With one final thrust, he launched himself out of the crawl space and into the open air. A gust of wind blew the spiders free. He rolled across the grass, hoping to crush whatever deadly creatures remained beneath his thin cotton shirt.

  “What the hell’s the matter with him?” Kenny asked dumbly.

  Daniel opened his eyes, squinting in the summer sun. Peter and Kenny were standing over him—black, featureless shapes against the cloud-speckled sky.