Christmas Eve on Haunted Hill (4 page)

          He immediately called for
another.

Simone peeked through the open door
into the shadow-cloaked foyer of the long-abandoned Herzinger place, feeling a
little nervous as she stood on the threshold of entering the site of the most
notorious crime in the town’s history.

          Not that it had much
competition in that area.  Rayford was a quiet town for the most part, with a
population several hundred souls below 10,000.  There had been other murders,
sure, even a few other explosions of violence resulting in multiple victims. 
But not one of those incidents approached the sheer horror of what had happened
here ten years ago.

          Most locals knew the
story by heart.

          The scope of it was
almost incomprehensible.  An extended family gathered for a Christmas
celebration.  Fifteen men, women, and children, not including Silas Herzinger,
the patriarch of the family and architect of its demise.  All but one of the
Herzingers died that night, many of them butchered in their sleep, chopped to
pieces with an axe.  Others were awake, but only barely, thanks to the high
level of Rohypnol circulating in their systems.  Their holiday meals had been
laced with the drug, ensuring they would be easy prey.  Defensive wounds on
their bodies suggested a few were just conscious enough to attempt fighting
Silas off, but their efforts were doomed to failure.  Only Luke Herzinger, then
a young man in his middle twenties, escaped being dosed with the drug.

          But even his survival had
been a narrow thing.  Asleep at the time of the massacre, the slaughter was
nearly over by the time the screams of a female cousin from the room next to
his stirred him to wakefulness.  The cousin died and Silas came to his son’s
room.  Unbeknownst to Luke at the time, his mother and three siblings were
already dead, as were numerous other relatives.  He was wide awake when his
father came into the room.  The old man had donned the Santa suit he normally
wore on Christmas Day for passing out presents to the young ones.  It was
covered in blood, as was his face.

          Silas tried hard to kill
his last surviving son, but Luke dodged the swinging blade of the axe several
times before he was able to grab a table lamp and smash the heavy base of it
over his father’s head.  He then went off in search of help only to be struck
dumb with horror at the carnage that greeted him in every room.  It was so
overwhelming he fled the house without calling 911.  Instead he got in his car
and drove at high speed all the way to the police station.  He was a babbling,
almost incoherent wreck, but at last the lawmen were able to get the gist of
the situation.  By the time they made it out to the house at the top of remote
Crandall Hill, Silas was already dead by his own hands.  He’d blown his head
off with a shotgun.  No one ever discovered why he’d done this horrible thing. 
He left no note.  His finances were in good order.  There was no evidence
anyone had done him wrong in any way.

          He just…snapped.

          Somehow.

          For unknown reasons.

          “We going in or not?”

          Simone jumped at the
sound of Terry’s voice.  She turned away from the door and saw him standing at
the edge of the porch.  Beyond the porch, the wind was still gusting hard and
blowing the heavy snow about so fiercely it was impossible to see more than
about ten feet in any direction.  She again cursed Spence’s bullheaded
stupidity.  The possibility of being stranded here for the night was feeling
more real all the time.

          She folded her arms tight
beneath her breasts and shivered.  “Guess we’ve got no choice.  It’s too
fucking cold to stay out here.  But I wish we had another flashlight.  It’s
creepy dark in there and I don’t see Spence or anyone else.  They must be
deeper in the house or upstairs.”

          Terry still held the
handles of the plastic grocery bag containing his beer in the fingers of his
right hand.  Smiling, he shifted the bag to his other hand and dug his phone
out of his right hip pocket.  He swiped at the screen a couple times and an instant
later a beam of light projected from the back of the phone.

          Simone frowned.  She’d
forgotten many smart phones were equipped with a flashlight function.  The
light the bulb at the back of the phone emitted wasn’t quite as powerful as the
real thing, but it was a hell of a lot better than nothing.  Her phone was in
her purse, which she’d left in the SUV.  She thought about going back for it,
but another glance out at the near-whiteout conditions changed her mind.  She’d
just stay close to Terry.

          She stepped aside and
waved a hand at the open door.  “Lead the way.  Let me carry that beer for
you.”

          Terry handed the bag over
and watched as Simone extracted a green bottle from the six-pack carton.

          She smiled.  “You don’t
mind sharing, do you?”

          Terry returned the
smile.  “Not with you.”

         
Of course not
,
Simone thought.

          She knew full well Terry
would never refuse her anything.  The feeling of power this gave her might have
made her feel bad, at least a little, under other circumstances, but right now
she didn’t care.

          Her hopelessly devoted
nerd friend dug his keys out of another pocket and offered them to Simone. 
“Those aren’t twist-offs.  You’ll need an opener.”

          A cheap opener—the kind
available from impulse-buy racks at virtually every convenience store across
the nation—was attached to the key ring.  She popped the cap off the bottle and
let it fall to the snow-covered porch.

          She passed the bottle to
Terry.  “That one’s yours.”

          She opened another bottle
for herself and shoved Terry’s keys in a pocket of her jacket.  “For
safekeeping.”

          Still smiling, Terry took
a slug of beer—a big one, to show how manly he was, no doubt—and entered the
Herzinger house.  He held his phone at shoulder-level as he moved deeper into
the foyer.  Simone took a slug from her own bottle and followed him into the
house.

          The taste of the beer
made her grimace.  It was sharply bitter, the flavor too strong for a palate accustomed
to the blander, gentler taste of cheap beer.  She figured she would switch to
Budweiser when they caught up to her asshole boyfriend and the others.  Terry
could keep his fancy suds.

          Terry turned left a few
feet deeper into the house, moving through a wide archway into what appeared to
have been the living room.  Simone saw a long couch and multiple recliners. 
The couch faced a TV stand, but the electronic equipment it had once housed was
no longer present, probably removed long ago by either Luke Herzinger or
thieves.  She was amazed so much furniture was still present.  She’d expected
to find the place stripped bare, its contents either put in storage or hauled
away to the dump.  That would have made sense.  No one had lived here for a
decade  And yet with just a few exceptions—like the missing TV and accompanying
components—the inside of the house still looked much as it must have all those
years ago.

          Recognizing this was a
bit unnerving.  A series of empty rooms would have been far less creepy.  The
preserved state of the place heightened a growing sense of having entered a
long-sealed mausoleum.

          Standing in the
approximate center of the living room, Terry turned in a slow circle and played
the beam of light over the walls.  Simone’s amazement grew as she saw several
family pictures and a few art prints still hanging in their frames.  Terry
accompanied her as she approached the section of wall adorned with the most
pictures.  Her mouth fell open in astonishment as she stared at faded images of
people that were familiar.  She’d encountered many of these faces in the course
of researching the Herzinger Family Massacre.

          She reached out to
lightly touch the face of one little girl.  In the picture, the girl was
standing with her father in an outdoor setting.  The photo had been snapped on
a bright day in a park somewhere.  The little girl was wearing a yellow dress
and had her arms wrapped tight around one of her father’s stout legs.  The
father was smiling and holding an even younger child in his arms.

          The man in the photo was
John Herzinger, younger brother of Silas.  The girl in the yellow dress was
Marlee, John’s daughter.  The child in his arms was Dalton Herzinger, his only
son.  There’d been another daughter, Laura, several years older than Marlee. 
She wasn’t in the picture.

          They were dead now, all
of them.

          Simone let out a breath
and took her hand away from the picture.  “This is so freaky,” she said,
glancing at Terry, who was watching her with a strangely rapt expression.  “I
can’t believe all this stuff is still here.”

          He indicated the pictures
with a tilt of his chin.  “Maybe you should take one.  You know…as a souvenir.”

          Simone frowned.  “I don’t
know,” she said slowly, her gaze going back to the old pictures.  “I’m not sure
I’d feel right about it.”

          Terry grunted.  “What’s
to feel bad about?  They’ve been here all this time.  Nobody wants them.  Hell,
there’s no one left alive to care.”

          Simone thought of Luke
Herzinger, who’d decamped to the hinterlands many years ago and had never been
heard from again.  She’d stalked Facebook pages of some of his old friends and
classmates.  Sometimes they asked each other about Luke, but no one ever knew
anything, it seemed.  It was as if he’d disappeared from the face of the
earth.  He might even be dead now.  Terry was right.  It might be okay to take
some of these pictures.  Maybe at least one of them.

          Terry turned away from
the pictures and resumed his exploration of the living room.  Simone followed
him, her fascination continuing unabated as she examined bookshelves partly
filled with books, DVDs, and VHS tapes.  The shelves looked somewhat depleted,
with a meager assortment of books and video cases present.  A few more were
scattered on the floor nearby.  Here, then, was an example of something clearly
more interesting to previous trespassers and scavengers than pictures and moldy
old pieces of furniture—the Herzinger family’s media collection.

          Some of the remaining
items were standard things any home with kids would have. 
Shrek
,
The
Lion King
,
Toy Story
.  The usual.  Of the relatively more
adult-oriented fare that remained, there was nothing much that piqued Simone’s
interest. 
Meet the Parents
,
Titanic
,
Field of Dreams
, a
few others.  She had a feeling the really intriguing stuff had been pilfered by
others long ago.  For some reason, she’d imagined Silas Herzinger’s taste in
films tending more toward things like
A Clockwork Orange
or
Henry:
Portrait of a Serial Killer
.

          Or, hell, maybe his
favorite movie really had been motherfucking
Meet the Parents
.  A phrase
she’d encountered often in her reading about killers came to her, the one about
the “banality of evil”.  It was overused, really.  But maybe that was because
it was so apt.  The weirdest thing of all about the Herzinger story was how
shocked everyone had been that Silas had done such a thing.  He was frequently
described as “sweet”, “gentle”, and “caring”.  And yet he’d done something
undeniably Evil with a capital E.  It couldn’t have come from nowhere.  There’d
been a deep sickness of the soul inside him, something rotten he’d hidden very
well for a long time, until it finally had to come out.  Simone thought that
was the most disturbing thing of all.  Because if that level of evil could
reside in a man that beloved, it could live in anyone at all.

          In her own father, for
instance.

          Or in Spence.  Or Terry.

          Even in herself,
possibly.

          Terry looked at her
again.  “You want any of this crap?”

          Simone laughed.  “My
family already has all this shit, I think.  Like just about everybody else on
the planet.”

          She chugged down the rest
of her beer and tossed the bottle over her shoulder, grinning at the way Terry
winced when it shattered on the floor somewhere behind her.  “Relax,” she said,
still smiling.  “The owners won’t mind.  I promise.  Here, you carry the beer
for a while.”

          She proffered the bag
with one hand and snatched the phone from Terry with the other.

          Terry made a sound of
dismayed surprise.  “Hey.”

          Simone was still holding
out the bag.  “Take the beer, Terry.”

          He hesitated a moment
before slipping the bag’s handles from her fingers.  “You didn’t even ask if
you could use the phone.”

          She laughed.  “That’s
something you still haven’t figured out about life.  Sometimes you just gotta
take
what you want.”

          A moment of pregnant
silence elapsed as they stared at each other in the semi-darkness.  Terry’s
eyes were narrowed to slits because Simone had aimed the light at his face. 
Then he let out a breath and took a step toward her.