The Spook House (The Spook Series Book 1) (12 page)

Jones nodded, as if he understood. I tried to speak, but only garbled sounds came out. I decided not to try to talk any more, but I did look intently into each man’s eyes, pleading, “I see you! I hear you! I’m here!”

Jones, started to say, “I don’t know …”

“Don’t think too much about it,” Smith reassured him. “Sometimes he has his moments of lucidity where I believe he’s really here, in the real world. I can even talk to him. But in the end, he reverts back into the fantasy.”

“He seems to be looking at us now,” Jones said doubtfully.

“Trust me,” Smith said, “He’s not all there. Still, this might be a good time to let his father in. He’s been waiting.”

The two men left my sight. Some time later, Owl-Eyes returned. My dad was standing next to him. He looked like he had aged horribly. It started when he went to jail on the stupid gun possession charge, and now this. I stared into his sad eyes as he peered down at me.

Dad and the doctor looked at each other. Smith nodded and walked away, giving us privacy. Dad put his hand near my face. He hesitated, as if afraid to touch me, and then laid his hand on my forehead. He held it there, like a parent checking the temperature of a sick child, and stroked my hair a few times before removing his hand. I felt something die inside me, as if I knew the separation was permanent. There were tears in my eyes, and in his.

“Oh Jake, I am so sorry,” he said. “I am so sorry.”

Sorry for what? Whatever had happened, it wasn’t his fault. It was mine. I tried to speak. Dad winced. I must have been making unintelligible noises.

Owl-Eyes returned. He touched my dad on the shoulder. It was time to go. Dad slowly moved away from me and said, “I love you, son.”

Then they both walked out of sight. A door opened and closed. Then I heard a loud buzzer outside the door. This must be a high security facility, I thought. Then the lights went off, leaving me alone in the darkness.

So that was it, I thought. I’m insane. I’m in a prison hospital or a psych ward or something. I’ve lost everything: my dog, my dad, my freedom, and my mind.

There was nothing left – nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing left to look forward to. There was only pain, and I wanted it to end. I wanted to die.

We’ve all heard stories about how the “will to live” can keep people alive, enabling them to survive against the odds when they should be dead. I wondered, If the will to live can keep you alive, can having no will to live actually kill you?

I tried to will myself dead. It wasn’t working. I lay there in the darkness, with my eyes open, staring at nothing. I said, “I want to die,” as if God would hear me and come get me. I closed my eyes and cried, “It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault.” 

19

I woke up (What was this? The fourth time?) wondering where the hell I was. I was lying flat on my back, and I was being held down. This time, a wet towel was held over my face. Water seeped into my mouth!

“No!” my brain screamed. “I’m being waterboarded!”

When the towel was removed, I confessed, “It’s all my fault! I want to die!”

Strong hands held me down. I heard a voice say, “Relax, Holmes! Relax!”

“Who are you?”

“Can you see me? It’s Paco.”

“P-Paco?”

“That’s right! Stay with me, Holmes!”

The towel wiped my face. I looked up and saw two men staring at me intently.

“You back, Bro?” the larger black man said.

“D-Dubois?”

The smaller Hispanic guy looked elated.

“It’s all my fault,” I told him.

He looked at me and said, “You took a bad trip, esse.”

I looked at the men. They helped me sit up. We were in a dark room lit only by two lanterns on the floor. They offered me water from a canteen. It tasted good, but I drank too quickly. I coughed and wiped my mouth. I looked at the men and said, “You’re not real. None of this is real.”

“Easy, Holmes. You’re still tripping,” Paco said. “They dosed you. They’re testing drugs and shit on us. I can tell.”

“D-Drugs? No. I’m not here. I’m crazy.”

“Damn straight you are,” said Dubois, “but that’s because of the drugs! Paco’s right. The shit’s in the air! I can taste it!”

“How … how do you know that?”

Paco said, “Esse, when you’ve done as much shit as I have, you can tell.”

Paco looked at Dubois, who nodded in agreement.

“He’s right,” Dubois said. “I’ve done my share of shit too. Not, as much as Paco, but fuck. Who has?”

We all let out a small laugh. Then Paco said, “In this house, we’re all trippin’.”

I couldn’t tell what was real anymore and what wasn’t.

“But it was so real!” I said. “I was there! Why am I the only one who freaked out?”

“I’ve built up a tolerance,” Paco said. “I mean, fuck. They can’t give me anything I haven’t done before. I know when I’m trippin’. I’m seeing weird shit in here too, but here’s what they didn’t know when they signed me on.”

He took off his helmet, faced the camera and microphone mounted on it and yelled, “I’ve seen it all before!”

“Dude,” Dubois said to me, “You almost killed us. We had to wrestle your gun away from you.”

I couldn’t say I was sorry. The only words that came out of my mouth were, “It was so real.”

“Yeah, well, we’ve got your gun,” Dubois said. “We’re not giving it back until we’re out of here. Here. You can take this.”

Dubois handed me one of the lanterns. I held it like a frightened child clutching a doll, drawing some sense of security from it.

“Do you know where you are now? Do you remember what we’re doing here?”

A blur of memories flashed through my mind, but I summed up our purpose with one word: “Kaz.”

“That’s right, Holmes.”

Paco looked at Dubois and said, “He’s back. He’s ready to go.”

Then he looked at me and said, “Back to work, Holmes.”

“How … How long was I out?”

“About 10 minutes, Holmes, though it felt a hell of a lot longer than that.” That was the understatement of the year.

Dubois said, “Alright. So. Are you cool? We need to go.”

Like a person trying to recall a fleeting dream, I struggled to remember where I was and what I’d been doing. And just like a dream that seemed so real moments before, the memory was already melting away into nothingness.

I got to my feet. I was starting to buy into this reality, just as I had the others. This one felt the most real. This situation had a complete history leading up to it, where as the other episodes seemed like scenes of my past that had been edited and spliced into the docudrama of my life. Bizarre as this situation was, this was the only one that made sense.

Dubois said, “We thought about splitting up. Paco was going to stay right here and watch you, and I was going to go get Kaz. He was my search partner. He’s my responsibility.”

Paco said, “That’s right. But I talked him out of it. I said, ‘That’s what they want: for us to split up.’ But now that you’re back, there are three of us. We need to find Kaz now and get out of here.”

I agreed. I didn’t want to be responsible for any more delays. “I’m good now,” I said. “Really. Let’s go get him.”

–––––

Dubois led the way down the other hallway opposite from the one with the room that had tried to trap him. I followed behind him, holding the lantern. Paco took up the rear. Despite not having a gun, I felt OK, knowing I was in the safest position. If a patrol line is going to be attacked, the man in the middle is usually the safest. In a surprise attack, the person in the front or the back is usually going to get hit first.

We came to a corner and Dubois shot a glance down the hall and declared it clear. He advanced. Paco and I followed. The hall was dark, and at the far end was a door with a blade of light underneath it.

“Shit! You see that?” Dubois said.

Paco and I grunted in agreement.

“Fuck! That must be where he is! Let’s go!”

We hurried down the hall. We took positions outside of the door.

“We have to warn him,” Paco reminded Dubois.

“Yeah, I know,” Dubois said, irritated. In a routine mission, we wouldn’t announce to occupants or terrorists inside that we were there. The whole idea was to catch them off guard. But there was a chance that Kaz was in there. We didn’t want him to freak out and have him start shooting when we burst in.

“Kaz!” Dubois said. “You in there?”

There was no answer.

“It’s us, Kaz. Be cool. We’re coming in!”

Dubois tried the door. It was locked.

“Fuck,” he said. He looked at us. There was a wordless question on his face, and a silent agreement: We had to break down the door.

“Door’s locked, Kaz. We’re coming in. Don’t shoot us.”

Dubois kicked in the door with a powerful blow. We spilled inside and swept the room with our eyes and gunpoints.

“What the fuck?” babbled Dubois.

“Dios mío,” gasped Paco.

“Oh God,” I said, confirming that we were all looking at the same thing.

We were in a large room in the corner of the house. It was eerily lit by about a dozen candles spread around the room. There was a large queen size bed in the middle of the room. Passed out on top of it, nearly naked, was Kaz.

“Kaz?” Dubois said, nervously.

I had a bad feeling about this. This room seemed cleaner, somehow, like somebody lived there. It didn’t smell musty at all. There was a slight breeze coming from somewhere. I could smell the candle wax, and something else. I think it was a faint trace of perfume.

We approached Kaz on the bed. He was wearing nothing but his underwear. He was bulging under it, showing the most obvious sign of sexual arousal.

There were other things wrong. In fact, these were worse. There were double-puncture marks on his neck, chest, and arms. There were reddish smears on him – some I knew were blood. Others I guessed were lipstick.

My first thought was, It was her!

I thought of the female “ghost” I had seen downstairs. I told myself that I hadn’t really seen her, but that lie came back to haunt me. I thought, I’m responsible for this. There’s somebody in here and I didn’t tell anybody. This is my fault.

“Is he … Is he …?”

I couldn’t even bring myself to say it.

Dubois put a finger alongside Kaz’s neck. He looked pleasantly surprised and said, “No! My boy’s got a pulse!”

“We’ve got to get him out of here now,” I said.

“This is my fault,” Dubois said. “We were a team.”

“No,” Paco said, “If it’s anybody’s, it’s mine. I should have let you go after him. We didn’t need two people to watch Abrams.”

“Yes, you did,” I said truthfully. Then I said words I didn’t expect to come out of my mouth. “It’s nobody’s fault. Or at least it’s not ours. It’s the house’s fault. Or Command’s, for sending us in here. Let’s just pick him up and go.”

Everyone agreed. We were all tense while Dubious lifted Kaz out of the bed. Sometimes, terrorists booby-trap the bodies of fallen American soldiers, knowing that Americans will move them and not leave them lying there. Thankfully, Kaz’s body did not set off a bomb.

We left the room in a new order. Paco left first, holding his weapon. Dubois followed, carrying Kaz in his arms. I was last, carrying the light. I felt very vulnerable. Paco, now the only man left holding a gun, seemed far away in the front of our line.

I was the last one in the room when a gust a wind came from nowhere and blew out all of the candles at once. Although I was only a few steps away from the door, I vaulted out of the room. I was in midair, barely out, when the door slammed behind me like a trap snapping shut.

“What the hell was that?” Dubois shouted.

“It … It was the wind,” I said, trying to catch my breath, and realizing I had just used a cliché found in almost every horror movie.

We all keeping moving and didn’t look back.

We continued back the way we came down the dark hallway. It seemed longer to me than when we had first come down it to the room. That was probably just my imagination.

I remember feeling a sense of relief when we had made it to the balcony area at the top of the stairs. I was practically ecstatic when we reached the bottom of the stairs and the foyer in front of the front door. I was strangely giddy, as if surprised we had actually made it that far.

Paco tried the front door. He tugged at the handle and started swearing is Spanish. We were locked in.

“Oh, no,” Dubois groaned.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t surprised. The house wasn’t going to let us go that easily.

“Holmes, we didn’t come this far to get stopped here. I’m tired of this shit. Stand back.”

We all backed away. Paco aimed his weapon at the windows. He popped off a few shots. The windows sparked, but didn’t shatter.

Visibly frustrated, Paco fired at them, holding down trigger. He sprayed the windows, the door, and the walls with gunfire.

Dubois and I ducked, fearing for our lives. We yelled at Paco to stop before we all got killed by ricocheting bullets.

Eventually, he stopped firing and lowered his weapon. I don’t know whether he heard us or not, or whether he just finally gave up.

“What the fuck?” he stammered. “Bulletproof glass? What is this shit? We’re trapped!”

“No,” I said. “There has to be another way.” I think Paco and Dubois were reassured by my strong conviction. I could see it in their faces. I meant what I said. I was going to find a way out. Kaz’s life depended on it. Probably all of ours did.

I knew what I wanted to do, just not how to do it. I had to come up with a plan to maintain the confidence of the troops and to achieve my goal.

I didn’t have a plan. I knew I had to come up with one fast, but that could wait. We had a new problem. There were noises down the hall near us. Something was coming up from the cellar.

20

We heard the wood creaking as something came up the stairs. Two shadowy figures emerged from the darkness.

At first I was excited. These were our guys. One of them still had his rifle with the flashlight. I expected a third to join them, but that didn’t happen. Three men – Boudreaux, Barnes, and Stillman – had gone down to the basement. Who was missing?