Kevin O'Brien - One Last Scream

Now, she was awake again, listening to the toilet tank refilling. The master bedroom door let out a yawn as Mark closed it. He would be asleep soon, and she’d be the only one awake in the house-this creepy little house in the middle of nowhere.

Ina heard a rustling noise outside, and told herself to ignore it. They were practically surrounded by a forest, and it was full of creatures making noises. Or was it that thing Mark had chased halfway up the trail? Maybe it had come back. Maybe it had been watching the house, waiting for him to go to bed.

Ina, quit doing this to yourself.

There it was again, the rustling sound.

Ina tossed back the covers and climbed out of bed. Padding over to the dormer window, she peered outside. She didn’t see anything. But she heard those strange rustling sounds again. Was it coming from inside the house? Downstairs?

Standing very still, Ina listened. Floorboards creaked, more rustling. It wasn’t Mark; she would have heard the master bedroom door squeak open again. Way down the hall and farther from the stairs than her, Mark couldn’t hear what she was hearing, not even if he was still awake. She was the only one who heard it, the only one who knew something was terribly wrong.

You’re blowing this out of proportion. You got spooked earlier by that bear or whatever it was, and now you’re imagining the worst.

That much was true. She was thinking about the type of killer who might lurk within these woods, someone resourceful and clever, and yet savagely brutal. Someone deranged.

Stop it! She’d grown up listening to too many urban legends: the killer with the hook for a hand; the babysitter menaced by a maniac in an upstairs bedroom; and now, her own wild imaginings about this woodland killer.

She heard the noise again, and realized how silly she was. It was just the sound of logs in the fireplace popping and settling. That was all.

Ina crawled back into bed, and pulled the covers up to her neck. As much as she tried to convince herself everything was fine, she lay there tense and rigid, listening for the next sound.

She didn’t have to wait long. It came from downstairs again, in the living room, and she could tell exactly what it was: the legs of a chair scraping across the floor. Someone must have bumped into it.

The noise was loud enough that Mark must have heard it, too, because the master bedroom door creaked open again. Then there were footsteps in the upstairs hallway.

Ina climbed out of bed and started toward the door. Her heart was racing. At least she wasn’t the only one hearing the noises. And Mark was investigating it. She could hear him on the stairs. “Oh, thank God it’s you,” he murmured. “Jesus, what are you doing here? You scared the hell out of me….”

A hand on the doorknob, Ina pressed her ear to the door. She could hear undecipherable whispering. But one thing she could make out was Mark saying. “Okay, okay, I’m sitting down….” Obviously, he knew the person who was downstairs. There was more murmuring, and then Mark raised his voice. “Hey, no! Wait a minute, no-”

A loud gunshot went off.

Ina reeled back from the door.

She heard her sister’s footsteps along the hallway. Someone else was charging up the stairs. “Oh, God, no, no!” Jenna screamed.

Ina’s stomach lurched at the sound of a second blast. She heard someone collapse right outside her bedroom door.

God, please. This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening.

Ducking into her closet, she closed the door and curled up on the floor. She was shaking uncontrollably. She heard footsteps. She couldn’t tell if they were coming toward her bedroom or moving away from it. She felt dizzy, and couldn’t breathe. The dark closet seemed to be shrinking in around her. Ina’s whole body started to shut down.

She wasn’t sure what had happened, if she’d fainted or gone into a kind of shock, but Ina suddenly realized some time had elapsed. The house was still, and a very faint light sliced through the crack under the closet door. Dawn was breaking.

Was it all a nightmare? As she tried to move, every joint inside her ached. She felt as if she’d been beaten up. Her body was reacting to the trauma. This was no nightmare. It was real.

Ina managed to get to her feet and open the closet door. But she was shaking. The bedroom was still dark with only a murky, early dawn light seeping through the dormer windows. Nothing had been disturbed in the room. The door was still closed.

Ina swallowed hard, and then reached for the doorknob. As she opened the door, she saw the blood and bits of brain on the hallway wall. Only a few feet in front of her, Jenna lay dead on the floor facing that blood-splattered wall.

Ina let out a gasp. Tears stung her eyes, but she didn’t stare at her dead sister for too long. She staggered back toward the stairs. She shook so violently she could barely make it down the steps. She clutched the banister to keep from falling-or fainting.

In the dim light she could see only certain areas of the living room. Other spots were still shrouded in darkness. She glimpsed Mark in his robe, sitting in the rocker by the fireplace. But his face was swallowed up in the shadows, and he wasn’t moving at all. As Ina warily approached him, she saw that his wavy brown hair was matted down with blood on one side. He stared back at her with open dead eyes and a bewildered expression. The top left side of his head had been blown off.

“Oh, no,” Ina whispered, a hand over her mouth. “No, no, no…”

Someone emerged from the darkness beyond the kitchen door.

Ina gasped again. She saw Mark’s hunting rifle-aimed at her.

Tears streamed down Ina’s face as she gazed at the person who was about to kill her. “Oh, my God, honey,” she whispered, shaking her head. “What have you done?”

The shotgun went off.

Her aunt was staring at her, and asking, “What have you done?” And that was when Amelia shot her in the chest.

All at once, she bolted up and accidentally banged her knee against the steering wheel of Shane’s Volkswagen Golf. Amelia barely noticed the pain. She was just glad to be awake-and out of that nightmare. It seemed so horribly real. She’d even felt the blood splattering on her face as she’d shot her parents and Aunt Ina at close range.

Now Amelia anxiously checked her reflection in the rearview mirror. She touched her hair. Not a drop of blood anywhere. If she’d washed it off, she certainly would remember. It was a dream-vivid and frightening, but still just a dream.

Shivering from the cold, Amelia looked around. It took her a moment to realize she’d fallen asleep in the front seat of the VW. She’d parked in the small, desolate lot of a boarded-up hot dog stand. The unlit, cracked sign had a cartoon of a smiling dachshund. It read: WIENER WORLD! HOT DOG EMPORIUM-WIENERS, FRIES, and COLD DRINKS!

Amelia wasn’t sure where she was, but she could hear cars zooming along on the other side of some evergreen trees across the street from Wiener World. She had to be somewhere close to a highway. She squinted at her wristwatch: 11:15 A.M.

Her head was throbbing and she felt so thirsty she could hardly swallow. She hadn’t had a hangover in several weeks, and this was a painful reminder of what it had been like during her drinking days. Now Amelia remembered the party last night, and how she’d treated Shane so shabbily. She remembered grabbing that bottle of tequila and driving off toward Wenatchee. She’d had this sudden urge to get to the family cabin, and make certain her parents and her Aunt Ina were all right. She’d been convinced some harm would come to them.

Amelia felt around under the car seat for that bottle of tequila. There was still some left, and she took a swig from the bottle. But even the jolt of alcohol didn’t erase the violent images lingering from that nightmare. Something had happened at the Lake Wenatchee house; she was sure of it.