The Diablo Horror (The River Book 7) (4 page)

“It looks like they left in a hurry,” Steven said. “There’s
clothes and stuff all over the driveway.”

“He was quite upset,” Liz said. “I told him he couldn’t just
do that, leave like that. It has to be run through HR. But he said he didn’t
care, they weren’t spending another night in the house.”

“Did he say why?” Roy asked.

“He wouldn’t tell me,” Liz said. “I told him if it was the
plumbing or something like that, we’d get it fixed – we’ve had some problems
with the pipes in the houses, some of them are old – but he wouldn’t give me a
reason. Just said we could reach him in Burlington and that he’d be driving up
for his shift. There’s nothing I can do about it today, since it’s a Saturday.
They’ll have to deal with it on Monday, when there’ll be someone in HR in
Seattle to talk to about it.”

“My god,” Roy said. “That’s a surprise. I wonder what could
have happened?” He turned to Steven. “I guess we need to go down to Burlington
and see what’s going on, right, Bartholomew?”

Bartholomew?
“Sure,” Steven replied, trying not to smile.

Roy turned back to Liz. “Did they tell you where they were
staying? How we might reach them?”

Liz looked down at her desk, searching for a sticky note that
she found near her phone. “He said they were staying at the Holiday Inn in
Burlington, Room 209.”

“Well, thank you for your help,” Roy said. “We’ll just zip on
down there and try to find out what’s going on!”

“Oh, sure, no problem,” Liz said. Steven caught her looking
at Jason. He turned to look at Jason, and caught him staring back. He elbowed
Jason. “Come on junior, time to go.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jason said, breaking his stare with Liz and
following Steven and Roy out the door. He gave Liz a friendly wave as they
left, which she returned.

“Family bolts from the house suddenly?” Roy said, walking
back to the car. “The same night your object supposedly reverts to someone up
here? Not a coincidence.”

“You want to go explore the house?” Steven asked. “I think it
was open.”

“No, let’s try to catch them at the motel,” Roy said. “Figure
out what we’re dealing with before we storm in.”

Steven had to drive back through the housing complex to get
out to the main road. They passed by number seventeen once again. Steven slowed
the car so they could get a good look.

“Yeah, left in a hurry,” Roy said. “Obviously dropped a few
things on the way out.”

“Didn’t even care to close the front door,” Jason added.

“You don’t want to jump into the River, or anything? While
we’re here?” Steven asked Roy.

“Since we don’t know what we’re dealing with yet,” Roy said,
“and there’s another way of getting information first, I’d like to maintain the
element of surprise in case we might need it. We can be down and back from
Burlington quick enough.”

 “Alright,” Steven said, pulling the car forward and back to
the road that would take them out of Diablo. Soon they were back on Highway 20,
heading west.

◊

The man standing in the open doorway eyed the three of them warily.
Steven could see children in the background, playing on the motel beds.

“We know something strange happened,” Roy repeated. “We think
we might know how to resolve it, but I need to hear from you what happened.”

“Are you from City Light?” the man asked.

“No,” Roy said. “City Light probably wouldn’t understand what
happened to you, would they? In fact, it was probably so bizarre you’re not
even sure you should tell me about it. But we need to know, regardless of how
strange it might have been. Can you tell us?”

“Hold on,” the man said, stepping inside and closing the
door. Steven, Roy, and Jason stood in the hallway at the Holiday Inn, waiting
for him to return. In a moment he reemerged from the room, holding a plastic
card key.

“Let’s walk down to the lobby,” he said, leading the way. “I
don’t want my wife or kids to hear this.”

They followed him as he turned down a stairwell. “My name is
Brett,” he said, descending the stairs rapidly. “Brett Kinsley.”

Roy had already introduced the group when they met the man at
the door of his room. “What happened last night?”

Brett reached the base of the stairs and walked to a set of
sofa and chairs in a corner of the lobby. He sat in one of them.

“I’ll warn you, it probably sounds like I’m crazy,” he said,
“but you said you wanted to know, so here goes. I woke up around two a.m.,
thought I heard a sound.”

That was about the time we were driving away from Eximere
, Steven thought.

“We always leave our bedroom door ajar, so the girls can come
in in the middle of the night if they need to,” Brett continued, “and there’s a
nightlight in the hallway for them in case they’re scared. Well, I kept seeing
a figure move past the doorway, blocking the light from the nightlight. Saw it
several times. It couldn’t have been the girls, it was twice their size. Scared
the shit out of me. So naturally, I slipped out of bed and went for the
shotgun.”

“Naturally,” Roy inserted.

“I loaded it and walked into the hallway. I’m thinking, this
is weird, Diablo is a little company town, way up by the dam in the middle of
nowhere, there’s never any crime here – who would try to break in? But I keep
seeing movement in the corner of my eye. Nothing I could see directly, but if I
just stopped and stared straight forward, I could tell something was moving in
my peripheral vision.

“I pushed the door open to the girls’ room and saw that a
corner of the room was dark. The nightlights in their room didn’t illuminate it
very well. Someone was there, in the corner that I could barely see, shrunk
down in the dark. Damn, goosebumps go up my spine just thinking about it. I was
terrified. I raised the gun, but then I felt frozen, like I was moving in a
dream.

“The man rose up out of the corner. He looked all wispy,
indistinct, like he was coming apart. But I could see in his hand, he held an
ax. He moved over to Julie’s bed. I say moved because he didn’t really walk, it
was more like drifting.”

“Did you think he was a ghost?” Jason asked.

“Not at the time,” Brett said. “I was just scared out of my
mind. I was trying to move my arms, to point my shotgun at him, but everything was
so slow, like I was moving through syrup. It made me think I was dreaming. He
stood over Julie, looking down at her. I saw him raise the ax. Then he…”

Brett turned away from them, clearly upset by the story he
was telling. There were other people in the lobby, and he lowered his voice.

“…he brought the ax down on her leg. It cut her leg off, but
it didn’t…I don’t know how to explain this...I could see the blood, but I also
knew her leg was whole, that it was an illusion of some kind.

“When the ax passed through her, Julie woke up. She was
staring right at me. I realized I was pointing the shotgun at her. I was trying
to move it to point at the man with the ax, but it wouldn’t budge, it kept
pointing at her, right at the bed.

“The man with the ax brought the blade up again and swung
down on her, hitting her in the chest. She screamed, but I knew she wasn’t
screaming because of the ax, but because of me, because she could see me
pointing the shotgun at her.

“There was something in my mind, something clouding me, like
the thickness in the air making it hard to move. It kept telling me that it was
OK, that I could kill her and she’d be fine. He pulled the ax from her chest
and brought it down again, right into her skull. I tried to look away, but I
couldn’t. I was being forced to watch. It was like he was teaching me, wanting
me to learn how he’d done it. I could feel my finger tightening on the trigger
even though I didn’t want to do it. Julie could see something was wrong with
me. She slowly slid off the bed. Thank god she did. A second latter, bam! –
buckshot everywhere. Julie ran down the hallway to her mother.

“The bang from the shotgun woke everyone up, and it freed me
from whatever trance I was in. I turned on the light, saw what was left of
Julie’s mattress. My other daughter was cowering in her bed. I walked over to
her and she pulled away, terrified of me.

“I dropped the shotgun and left the room. I told my wife to
pack a bag, we were leaving, that there was something in the house and we had
to get out. She didn’t know it was me holding the gun that shot up Julie’s
bed.”

“Had anything like this ever happened before?” Roy asked.
“Had you ever seen the man with the ax previously?”

“No, never,” Brett said. “We’d been in that house for six
months, and nothing like this had ever happened. It was just a normal, quiet,
boring little house.”

“Do you remember anything else about the ax man?” Steven
asked. “Anything he was wearing?”

“He was so indistinct,” Brett said. “It was like he was going
in and out of focus. He…” Brett stopped, thinking. “There was something on his
chest. Metal I think, it reflected the nightlights. Couldn’t tell you what it
was.”

“What are you going to do?” Steven asked.

“Well, I know we’re not going back in that house,” Brett
said. “We’ll stay here until I can find an apartment or something. I’ll send a
truck to get the furniture. We didn’t pack much more than a few clothes and we
were out the door. I can drive to work, I don’t have to live there. I don’t
want
to live there.”

“I think there’s a reason the man with the ax appeared,”
Steven said. “You were seeing a ghost from the past. He was reenacting
something, and you saw it. Somehow he wrapped you up in it, which is a little
odd, but I’ve seen it happen before.”

“We’d like to go back to your house,” Roy said to Brett. “See
what we can find out. Can we have your permission to do that?”

“I don’t care,” Brett said, “so long as I don’t have to set
foot in it again.” He pulled his key ring from his pocket and began removing a
key. “Here,” he said, handing it to Steven. “I don’t suppose I could get you to
bring back a few things for us?”

Steven looked at Roy, who just shrugged his shoulders.
“Sure,” he said. “Make me a list, we’ll bring you what I can fit in my trunk.”

“Will the neighbors notice that we’re there?” Roy asked
Brett.

“Of course,” Brett said, “they notice everything. They may
not say anything to you, but they will notice. If one of them stops you, just
tell them I asked you to bring some things for me.”

“Maybe you should write something up,” Roy said, “when you
make your list of what you want us to bring. Write a note giving us permission
to stay in your house, in case someone gets nosy and calls the cops.”

“Sure, I’ll do that,” Brett said. “Are you sure you want to
go in there? I’ve never been more scared in my life than when I pulled that
trigger. It’s like I had no control.”

“We’ve got some experience with it,” Steven said. “We’ll be
fine.”

   “How do you want to approach this?” Steven asked Roy as
they walked up to the house. Jason began picking up the clothes that were still
lying on the ground in the front yard.

“Based on Brett’s descriptions,” Roy said, “I think it’s a
ghost following a pattern, like most ghosts. He may have been here the whole
time, ever since the events that he’s reenacting originally occurred, but
undetectable to the residents. If it’s true that the Agimat he was wearing
recharges during this time of year, it likely intensified him in a way that
made him detectable by Brett.”

“So we don’t know how long ago he was in the house?” Jason
asked.

“Could have been any time since the house was built,” Roy
replied.

“That’s not important now,” Steven said. “Our goal here is to
recover the Agimat and get back to Seattle. We don’t have to figure out who he
was, or what happened.”

Roy walked into the house, Steven following closely. The
first room was a combination living and dining area, with a kitchen in the
back. A hallway ran down the rest of the house, with bedrooms coming off either
side. Roy walked down the hallway, poking his head into each room as they
passed. First on the right was a bedroom. Across from it was a utility closet,
holding laundry machines and a hot water heater. Next on the left was a
bathroom. Across from it on the right, another bedroom. Finally, on the left, a
master bedroom, with separate access to the bathroom. The house was small,
compact, and a little dreary, with windows set high in each room, allowing in a
limited amount of light.

Jason finished picking up the front yard and brought the
clothes into the living room. One of the sliding windows was open, and a drape
was fluttering out of it. He pulled in the drape and shut the window.

Roy and Steven joined Jason in the living room. “You can tell
they raced out of here,” Roy said. “Each room is a little trashed.”

“Are we staying here tonight?” Jason asked.

“We’re staying only as long as we have to,” Steven said. “You
want to trance, Roy?”

“Might as well, now that we know what we’re dealing with,”
Roy said, pulling a chair from under the dining table and sitting on it. He
removed his blindfold and handed it to Steven. “You want to join me, Jason?”

Jason lit up. “Sure!” he said, grabbing his own chair.

“Don’t form your own trance,” Roy said. “Once mine is ready,
I’ll open it to you and you can join me.”

“Alright,” Jason said, sitting on the chair and closing his
eyes.

“Guess I’ll just stay here,” Steven said. He knew Roy
expected at least one of them to stand guard over their bodies while the trance
was occurring. He guessed Jason might be a little too young for Roy to trust
with the task.

Steven walked to a sofa in the living room, not more than ten
feet away from his father and son. He sat and watched them. He checked his phone
– it was two-thirty.

Soon it was three, and then three-thirty. Steven began to
become concerned. It was a long trance, longer than he’d remembered Roy ever
being gone in one. That Jason was with him in the trance made him a little
nervous.

At four p.m. he decided to drop into the River and see what
was going on, make sure things were OK.
I’ll only jump in for a second,
he thought.
Just to see if there’s trouble.

He entered the flow, feeling the room shift around him, some
things becoming brighter while other things became darker. Roy and Jason
weren’t there. He drifted into the first bedroom, afraid that Roy or Jason
might have been attacked, but he remembered Brett’s story, and assumed the
blood he saw splattered on the beds and walls was from someone else.
Roy or
Jason wouldn’t have bled like this in the River, anyway,
he thought.
This
is from the past.

The house was quiet and still. Each room he checked showed
signs of a brutal attack, with blood-soaked bed sheets and pillows. Steven
expected a ghost to emerge from the shadows, like Brett’s story, but there was
nothing. He felt more and more creeped out as he went from room to room, the
silence accentuating the brutality of what he imagined had happened.

Where are they?
He wondered. Then he noticed blood streaks on the floor.
The
bodies were removed. He took them somewhere. Maybe that’s where Roy and Jason
are now.

Steven left the River and opened his eyes. Jason and Roy were
still seated in front of him, calm.
Let’s just be patient,
Steven
thought.

After another half an hour, he was relieved when Jason opened
his eyes, and then Roy did the same, reaching up to take off the blindfold. He
took a deep breath as though he’d been holding it, waiting for them to come
back.

“You guys were gone a long time,” Steven said.

Jason rubbed his eyes. Roy stood up.

“He took his time,” Roy said. “Brutal.”

 “So tell me what happened,” Steven said.

Roy sighed. “It’s what I thought. Ghost with a pattern. But
he’s a lot more powerful because of the Agimat.”

“What’s with all the blood?”

“His handiwork,” Roy began. “So, here’s how it goes. He’s up
pacing. He’s got the Agimat; it’s hanging around his neck. He’s talking to
himself, walking around in circles in the living room. I can only understand
what he’s saying half the time.”

“The other half is Filipino,” Jason said. “I recognize it
from the girl I dated.”

“So he’s going on and on about his faith,” Roy continued,
“about his faith being strong, that his faith will overcome anything, on and
on. It’s like he’s working himself up to do something he knows he has to do.”

“My girlfriend told me,” Jason said, “that some Filipinos
believe so strongly in the power of the Agimat, they sometimes test it.”

“Test it?” Steven asked.

“Yes, harm themselves,” Jason answered, “believing the Agimat
will cure them. It’s a demonstration of faith.”

“So, right now the Agimat is at its most powerful,” Roy said,
“because it’s recharging. He decides to test it. It’s a big demonstration of
his faith, some kind of proof. He goes out to the garage and comes back with an
ax. He walks into the first bedroom on the right. There are children sleeping
in there, his kids, three girls. He raises the ax over one of them, then he
seems to have second thoughts, and cowers back into a corner of the room,
muttering.”

“He was saying he had to believe strong enough,” Jason said,
“for the Agimat to work, to heal them. And that if he didn’t go through with
it, god would know his faith was weak.”

“So he rises up out of the corner,” Roy said, “and walks back
over to the bed. He swings the ax, severing the girl’s leg. The girl wakes up,
but before she can scream he brings the ax back down in her chest.”

“Exactly where Brett saw the ax hit his girl,” Steven said.

“He pulls the ax from her chest, and brings it down once
again, into her skull,” Roy said. “Then he lifts it, looks at the body for a
moment, and moves to the next bed. This time he goes straight for the chest. He
doesn’t want them to wake up during the attack and rouse the others. He
slaughters the two other girls in this room, then he leaves and walks to the
next bedroom.”

“Can I lay down for a minute?” Jason asked. “I’m having a hard
time keeping my eyes open.”

“Sure,” Steven said. “Take one of the beds down the hallway.
You feel OK?”

“He’s just wiped out,” Roy said. “That was a long time in the
River for a novice.”

Jason walked away from them, down the hallway and into one of
the bedrooms. They heard him flop onto a bed.

“And you’re fine, old man?” Steven asked.

“Never felt better!” Roy said back, smiling. “He’ll be OK.”

“So he kills his family?”

“The next bedroom is the boys’ room. Two brothers. Kills them
the same way; massive blow to the chest with the ax. Then he leaves that room
and goes to the master bedroom, where he does the same to his wife. She puts up
a fight, but he keeps swinging, screaming that god will save her, telling her
to stop fighting.”

“Christ!” Steven said, shaking his head. “These deluded
people!”

“Worst of all, there’s a baby in their room, in a crib. It’s
woken up by the mother’s screaming and the father’s yelling. Once he finished
with his wife, he went over to the infant and placed the blade up against its neck,
then he pressed it down slowly with both hands until he’d decapitated it.”

“Jesus Christ!” Steven said. “What a sick fuck!”

“So then, he sits there on his bed. He’s covered in blood,
his dead wife right next to him. He closes his eyes and waits, as though
something is going to come along and fix everything. He’s grasping the Agimat
around his neck, praying. Nothing ever happens. He gets up and wanders into the
other bedrooms, seeing his butchered children. He starts to become upset, angry
that something isn’t happening. He isn’t getting the miracle he’s expecting. He
starts crying, walking from room to room, praying. You can tell that he’s
slowly starting to realize that they aren’t coming back. And that he’s the
reason they’re gone.

“It takes him a while to figure out what he’s done, but once
he does, he starts hauling the bodies out. The girls he carries out to his
truck; the boys and his wife he drags out. Then he gets in his truck and
leaves.”

“That must have been when I jumped in,” Steven said. “I saw
the blood everywhere, but no one was here. Did you follow him?”

“You bet we did!” Roy said. “He drives back down Highway 20
about a mile, then turns off onto a side road for a ways. Eventually he stops,
pulling his truck off the road. He carries each of the bodies to a pit, and
throws them in. Then he leaves his ax there and drives the truck back to the
house. Then – get this – he walks back to the pit! He’s walking along the side
of the highway, crying. No cars came along; it was dead quiet the entire time.
When he reached the pit, he picked up the ax and threw himself in. You could
faintly hear him crying if you stood at the top.”

“Unbelievable!” Steven said, trying to take in the whole
story. Its brutality was horrifying. “So, people find the house empty, and the
blood, and assume something happened.”

“Yeah, I don’t know about all of that,” Roy said. “Wasn’t
part of the trance of course. But I can tell you they didn’t find the bodies.
They’re still down that pit.”

“Then the Agimat is down there, too?”

“I’m not sure of that. I was observing it, while he was
killing his family. It’s a strange object, with unusual powers. Obviously not
the powers he thought it had. But I couldn’t detect it in the pit, standing
above it.”

“Someone must have scavenged it from the pit,” Steven said. “It
wound up at Eximere somehow. When I removed it last night, it reverted to this
man who killed his family, thinking he was the owner. It’s a physical object,
so it must have returned to the ax man’s body down in that pit.”

“But it’s more than a physical object,” Roy said. “The reason
that ghost suddenly became so active, scaring Brett and his family, might have
been because the object reverted to the ghost in the house, not the body in the
pit. Brett said he saw the ghost wearing it. So did I.”

“I just assumed that was because he was wearing it when he
committed the murders,” Steven said.

“I’m telling you, there’s something different about this
object. I don’t think it’s down in the pit at all. He’s wearing it as he
reenacts things, and we’ve got to find a way to get it off him.”

“OK. Let’s say you’re right. What do we do?”

“The cycle will start again. You come with me this time, into
the trance. Let’s concentrate on the Agimat, see if there’s some way we can take
it from him.”

“What about Jason?”

“Let him sleep. We won’t be long, we’ll only stay in the
River during the house part. We don’t need to follow him to the pit again.”

“Alright,” Steven said. “Let me check on him first.”

Steven walked down the hallway to the last room on the right,
and pushed the door open as silently as he could. Jason was sleeping on a bed
in the corner. He walked over to him, listened for his breathing. He was out,
sound asleep. Steven turned and left the room.

Roy resumed his seat on the dining room chair, and Steven
walked around him to tie the blindfold. Then Steven sat next to Roy in the
chair Jason had used.

Steven waited in the River for Roy’s trance to materialize.
After a few minutes, it had completely formed, and Roy opened it to Steven, who
joined him.

Follow me,
Roy said, leading Steven to the master bedroom.

There was the man, pacing by the side of his bed. He was
holding the Agimat in his right hand, tugging on the leather strap that held it
around his neck.

How are we supposed to take it from him?
Steven thought.