Тим Леббон - New Fears 2 - Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

He quickly packed his duffle bag and made for the door. He wouldn’t come back, he told himself. He was, after all, just passing through. He’d never stayed in the same place more than a day or two, not since his father’s death.

He searched the house, found nothing of value. The dead batteries still weren’t anywhere.

It was late afternoon by the time he walked the half-mile into town. The town was smaller than he’d hoped, the business district little more than one main street, with a diner, a general store with a lunch counter in back, a drugstore, a feed and grain supply and a hardware store. He spent some time in the hardware store, but there weren’t enough other customers and the clerk was paying too much attention to him for him to lift anything. So he left and went down to the general store.

He walked down the aisles, considering. One clerk here too, seemingly the identical twin of the fellow in the hardware store, but less attentive. In the candy aisle he slipped a pair of energy bars into his coat pocket as he bent down to pretend to examine something on the bottom shelf. Batteries were on an endcap and a little trickier to pocket unobserved, but when he stood just right he got his body between the display and the clerk and managed to slip a set down his pants.

He wandered a little more, just to throw off the scent. By the time he was turning again toward the front of the store, prepared to leave without buying anything, it was beginning to grow dark outside, snow just beginning to fall. The clerk seemed to have doubled, having been joined by his brother or cousin or whatever the fuck he was from the hardware store next door. Unless there was a third one floating around. They were whispering back and forth, watching him.

He considered briefly putting everything back. But he needed the food—it had been well over a day since he had had anything to eat—and he needed the batteries too, particularly if he was going to spend the night outdoors. He needed to be certain his flashlight wouldn’t go out. Matches, too , he thought, otherwise no fire. He found a box of them, slipped them into his duffle bag.

The clerk from the hardware store was heading toward him, his lips in a tight line. The other clerk, the one who actually worked there, had moved to block the front door.

Lars headed quickly up the aisle and toward the back of the store. Behind him, the man closest to him gave a shout, and Lars burst into a run, darting through the door marked Employees Only . He swerved around boxes and metal shelves until he reached the back wall. He chose a direction and ran along it until he hit the door, a metal bar slung about waist-level. He pushed on the bar and the door opened to a blast of cold and an alarm went off. And then he was out in an alley, the light fading, snow drifting slowly down. He ran, his feet slipping on the ice, hearing the sounds of the two clerks in pursuit behind him.

He ran until he no longer heard them, then stopped, listened. It was all but dark out now. He walked for a while, catching his breath. Where was he? He wasn’t sure exactly—one of the roads leading out of town, fields on all sides. And then he heard something, a cry from behind him. He began to run again.

And then in the darkness he heard voices even closer, as if he had not run away from the two men but toward them. He cut quickly off the road and into the field beside it—only it wasn’t a field but a house and its grounds. Almost a mansion from what he could see of it, he found himself idly thinking. And then he realized exactly what house it was.

But he hadn’t been anywhere near it. How could that house be here?

The voices drew closer. Would they see him if he just stood still in the yard? It was already dark, but was it dark enough? Would they see his face shining like a buoy in the darkness?

It’s just a house , he tried to tell himself. Just an ordinary house. Nothing to worry about. Before the voices came any closer, he forced himself to walk toward it, find the loose boards over the window, and squirm in.

Later he wondered if he’d heard voices after all. Or, rather, wondered if the voices he’d heard had been connected to the two clerks, if they were still chasing him. That was, he told himself as he waited in the house, the heart of the matter. Either the voices were the clerks’ or they weren’t. But if they weren’t, what were they?

I’ll just wait a little , he told himself once inside, just until I’m sure they’re gone. But each time he thought he was safe and made for the window, he’d hear them again. Or hear something like them anyway.

How much time passed? He wasn’t sure. Had he slept? He didn’t think so, but it was much darker in the house now, so dark he couldn’t see at all save for the pale lines of light marking the joins between the window boards.

He got out his flashlight. It wasn’t wise, not if the two men were still outside looking for him, but he couldn’t help himself—he couldn’t stand the dark, not in here. He turned it on, pointed it at the ground.

The room, he saw, looked just as it had the night before: clean, immaculately so, the floor itself freshly polished. As if it were not a deserted house after all. Having the flashlight on made him feel better, but seeing this made him feel worse.

He listened. The voices came and went for a while and then dissolved into wind, a lonely sound with nothing human to it at all. He pulled on the boards to look out and see if they were still there—or tried to anyway: the boards wouldn’t give. It was as if they had been nailed back in place since he had entered. He pulled at them, hammered on them with his flashlight. Disoriented, he looked around, tried the boards on the other windows, but they were all tightly nailed in place.

He went to the front door, unlocked it, rattled the handle, but something held the door shut from the other side. He hit it with his shoulder, then stopped. It had been padlocked, he remembered. Of course it wouldn’t open.

All he needed was something to pry the boards away from the window. It didn’t matter how they had gotten stuck—it was not worth thinking about. All that mattered was to get them off and get out.

But there was nothing in the room—the room was empty: he knew that already. He hit one of the boards with the butt of his flashlight, but when its beam began to flicker, he stopped. He couldn’t bear to be without a light. Not here. He needed to find something he could pry with. He would have to find something else.

He found himself going back and forth between the entrance hall and the hallway, but stopping shy of opening the door at the end of the hallway. He looked in the kitchen, found nothing but empty cabinets. The dining room was empty too. He tried the doors to either side at the end of the passage, discovered them both still locked. He kept searching the same empty rooms and finding nothing. I won’t go , he was telling himself, not in there.

But in the end he did go. He could see the poker in his mind, leaning in its stand just beside the fireplace. He would, he told himself, rush in, take the poker, leave. He would look at nothing, no one. He would think about nothing, no one. He would just come and go. He wouldn’t stay.

But when he finally opened the door, a fire was already lit, roaring in the fireplace. He couldn’t help but see that. And he couldn’t help but see that the spray of blood was there again on the wall above the mantel, looking even larger than before. Just as he couldn’t help but see the creature in the chair, struggling into, or perhaps out of, its skin. The skin was still on the bottom half of its body, but not the top half.