John Manning - The Killing Room

“Uncle Howard has spent millions in the last ten years. He’s met with all sorts of people. And this time he’s very encouraged. There’s someone up there with him now…”

“How do you know?”

“I phoned him a few days ago, and he told me he was expecting someone.” Dean sighed. “He seemed optimistic.”

Paula shook her head. “He was optimistic about all the others as well.”

“If only we could all just move far away,” Linda mused out loud, her eyes on her children. “Sever all ties to the rest of the family. Start over. New names…”

Her husband was quick to dismiss the idea. “It was tried. You know that, Linda. Uncle Ernie tried that, and we all know what happened to him.”

They were quiet. Yes, indeed, they all knew what had happened to Ernest Young. After attending two successive family reunions, Uncle Ernie decided he no longer wanted to press his luck. He didn’t want to end up in that room himself. So he bundled up his wife and two young daughters and disappeared to parts unknown. None of the rest of the family had known where he was or how to contact him. But something knew how to find him. When Ernie failed to show for the family reunion, Uncle Howard feared the worst for him. But it wasn’t for a couple of weeks that the family learned that his fears were valid. Dental records confirmed that the identities of a family slaughtered by an unknown assailant in their home in the town of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, were not Jim and Julie Baker and their daughters Kathy and Stephanie, as their neighbors had thought for the past seven years. Rather, they were Ernie, Molly, Ann Marie, and Susie Young. Each had been decapitated, and on the walls of their house, written in their blood, were the words: ABANDON HOPE.

There was no running away. That was the lesson Uncle Ernie had taught them. Instead of just one death that year, there were five. The family did, indeed, abandon hope.

At least until Dr. Kip Hobart, a parapsychologist, had come along. There had been séances. There had been exorcisms. There had been Catholic priests and Wiccan shamans. There had been ghost hunters who vowed the house was “clean.” There had been hope. Paula remembered that hope-so painful now that it seemed to burn in her gut. Because the hope had ended the morning they found poor cousin Douglas dead on the floor of that room, his hands tied behind his back and a plastic bag secured over his head.

Poor Douglas. Paula’s mind flashed back to the last family reunion ten years earlier. Douglas had had a teenaged son and namesake whom he sent upstairs to bed before they all gathered in the parlor for the lottery. Little Douglas was sound asleep upstairs, unaware of the terror his father faced in the basement. Paula remembered the way the boy’s face had crumpled in the morning when he learned the news of his father’s death. Little Douglas was now old enough this year to be told the family secret. Uncle Howard surely had plans to sit down with him and break it to him, as gently as possible.

And what happened after Uncle Howard was gone? He was ninety-eight years old. Surely this was his last reunion. Who would take over from him? Paula just wanted to burn the house down-or at least move out. But that had been tried, too. A couple of generations ago, the whole family had tried running away, all except Uncle Howard, who feared such avoidance of the lottery would only bring about more slaughter. He was right. On the designated night, no one entered the basement room-but on the next morning, Francis Young, one of the far-flung nephews, died of a massive heart attack. The morning after, Francis’s infant son Michael was found dead in his crib. And on the morning after that, one hundred miles away, twelve-year-old Andrew Young dropped dead face-first into his oatmeal. The remaining members of the clan got the message. Terrified, they all rushed to Uncle Howard’s house. The lottery was held as it should have been, and David Young, Francis’s younger brother, was chosen to enter the room. The next morning, David was dead of a stab wound to the heart, but the parade of deaths ended after that.

At least for another decade.

What always amazed Paula was how the local Youngsport authorities never seemed to get wise to the odd mortality schedule of the family. Much of it had to do, of course, with Uncle Howard’s wealth: if the richest man in the state, indeed one of the richest men in the country, decided that the strange deaths that occurred regularly every ten years in his house were suicides or accidents, then the authorities simply went along. Even this latest sheriff, George Patterson, known to be a hard nut to crack, had been fooled by the death of cousin Douglas. At first he was skeptical that Douglas had accidentally suffocated himself while trying to play a trick, casting suspicious eyes around at all of them. But the family’s abject grief had finally absolved them of any blame in the sheriff’s mind. They didn’t seem like murderers; they seemed like a family decimated by tragedy-which they were.

Dean was calling the kids to come up and eat. Their hamburgers and hot dogs were ready. Paula stood, feeling no better than she had when she left the city to come out here. She had hoped that Dean might be able to say something to her-anything-that could have alleviated some of her anguish. But hope was no longer a commodity in her life. She understood that finally. Karen would leave her. She’d be alone. That was her fate. It was, no doubt, better that way.

She watched as Zac and Callie dried themselves off on the banks of the lake with big white terrycloth towels. She loved the twins with all her heart. There had to be a way to protect them from that room-a way to free their futures, so they would not spend their lives as trapped as she and the others had always felt.

A flash of movement in the woods just beyond the lake drew Paula’s eye.

Was it-a deer?

No.

Paula’s blood went cold.

It was a man. In the woods.

He had been watching them.

In that instant a thousand thoughts and emotions flooded her mind. A man. Watching them. A threat.

But no. Why would he be a threat? A neighbor perhaps. A hiker.

Her heart began to race.

She knew that was wrong. The man was no neighbor, no innocent hiker.

He was likely not even a man at all.

Even as the figure faded once more into the shadows of the woods, Paula knew what it was. In the weeks leading up to a reunion, there were often sightings. Apparitions from another time. The forces that had brought upon the curse that ruled over their lives.

Sometimes there were sightings of a woman. Paula had seen the woman with the long dark hair and white dress several days before the last reunion. She had been standing across busy Commonwealth Avenue just watching her. Paula had known right away what it was.

Other times the sightings were of a man. This was the first time Paula had ever seen him, though others had reported seeing him in the past.

A man-holding something in his hands.

Staring into the woods now, discerning the shadow that was surely him, Paula made out the terrible thing that he gripped in his undead hands.

A pitchfork.

Her heart leapt in her chest.

“Zac! Callie!” she called suddenly, bolting down the hill toward them. The children lifted their faces to her, their hair wet and slicked back. “Come along, darlings!” Paula reached them and swept them into her arms.

She didn’t think they were in any particular danger from the figure in the woods-at least, not for the moment. But she was letting the man know that she had seen him, and that she would do everything in her power to save those she loved from his grip.

And that included the children she would never have herself.

She ushered Zac and Callie back up the hill, where they settled themselves down at the picnic table and happily devoured the burgers and dogs their father had prepared for them. Paula stood a few feet away, watching them, glancing every so often toward the woods. She could no longer make out the man. But she knew he was there.