Wow, it's October already! I was hoping to be on my way to Portland Oregon by this time but it looks like it'll be a little longer yet before I move,lol.
In the meantime, to celebrate the season, here's a horror story I wrote last year. Hope you enjoy it!
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The Night Life
The new people moved into the old Bilkins house on Monday. Thursday night they threw their first party.
Adrian Draly noticed the noises coming from down the street at around eight o’clock that night. While working on his client’s file on his laptop, he became aware of a deep, thudding drumbeat. He was sitting at his kitchen table and got up to see where it was coming from. From his window, he could see that most of the houses on his street were either dark or calm, but the Bilkins house, older and taller than the other houses on the block, was ablaze with light. He could see dark shapes moving around inside. The drumbeat was definitely coming from there and from time to time he could hear a woman’s high pitched squeal or laughter.
Must be a housewarming party, thought Adrian. As long as it doesn’t last too late, I don’t care. And with that he went back to his work.
He finished a few minutes before nine and decided to spend the next hour before bed watching a DVD of a recent British comedy a friend at work had given him. While he was watching it, he was dimly aware of the pulsing drumbeat in the background. At one point, the loud squeal of the woman he had heard earlier came through the open window of his bedroom and startled him. At twelve minutes after ten, he turned off the DVD and got ready for bed, hoping the party would wind up soon.
Three sleepless hours later, it still hadn’t.
Not knowing what else to do, Adrian called the Nashua police. He recognized the voice of the officer that answered as Hugo Timmons. Adrian was relived; Hugo was a friend and would get to the bottom of this.
“Hey Hugo, this Adrian Draly out on Cody Road. I hate to bother you tonight but there’s a loud party going on a few houses down, some people moved into the Bilkins house and I guess it’s a housewarming party or something, I don’t know. Could you please swing by there and get them to tone things down? I can’t get any sleep.”
“Sure, I’ll go talk to them. The old Bilkins place, huh? All us kids in town were scared shitless of that place growing up.”
“Yeah well, I didn’t grow up around here, I moved here twelve years ago, still a newbie to a lot of people around here.”
Officer Timmons laughed. “Yeah, that’s pretty true. You get yourself some sleep Adrian, I’ll go calm them down.”
Adrian hung up the phone. Forty minutes later, the party had still not abated. He finally fell into an angry, restless sleep.
There was another party the next night.
It was a Friday night and Adrian didn’t have to work the next day but the endless drumbeat and loud cheerful shrieks of the woman (or was there more than one voice? He couldn’t be sure.) kept him awake. He considered calling Timmons again but decided not to. He didn’t want to be the cranky neighbor who couldn’t stand to see others having fun. He’d encountered his share of those during his college days in Atlanta twenty years ago. Let them have their parties, they couldn’t keep this up forever.
At one thirty, the party was still going on. Adrian sighed and went downstairs to sleep on the living room couch. The sound was slightly less intrusive there and once again he fell into a fitful sleep.
Saturday night came and with it another party.
“Oh come on! You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”, Adrian yelled to himself after the now hated drumbeat started up shortly after eight. He spent the next few hours stomping around the house. Once, he heard the now familiar gleeful squeal of that damn woman.
“Fuck you, you whore,” he muttered under his breath.
At midnight, he couldn’t take it anymore. He called officer Timmons.
“Hugo, it’s Adrian again. Look, it’s been three goddamn nights in a row, every night a damn party. I’ve tried to be a good sport about this but enough is enough. I don’t know what you told them the other night but it didn’t work. You’re going to have to go back and be stricter this time.”
Timmons was quiet for a few moments. “Uh, yeah…about that. I never made it out there.”
“Why the hell not?”
“You heard about the 7-11 that got held up that night? I was on my way out there when the call came in. All officers on duty had to respond. By the time everything was wrapped up it was almost four AM. I figured by then the party had burned itself out.”
“Well could you please make it out there tonight and make them cut out the shit?”
“Adrian, give ‘em one more night. I’ve been a cop for fifteen years, trust me on this. You don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with new neighbors. Give ‘em just one more night. If they’re at it again tomorrow night, give me or the cop on duty a call and I promise we’ll take care of it.”
Adrian gave a deep, suffering sigh. Suddenly a thought occurred to him.
“Hugo…I can’t have been the only person on this street to have complained about the noise.”
“Well, let me check…” There came the sound of rustling papers. This lasted for nearly a minute and a half. “No, there have been no other complaints from anyone on Cody Road.”
“That can’t be!”
“Can’t but is buddy. So what’cha gonna do?”
Adrian sighed again. “One more night…’Buddy!’ But if I hear so much as a peep from that house tomorrow night…you are gonna hear about it.”
“Good man! Now try to get some sleep.”
Timmons hung up, leaving Adrian alone in the dark. Alone with the drumbeat and a woman’s piercing voice.
Sunday night was blissfully quiet, as were the next three nights.
By the middle of the week, Adrian was certain that the problem of the rowdy neighbors was a thing of the past. When he came home from work on Thursday afternoon he was in such high spirits he decided to walk the few blocks to a nearby convenience store to buy a few groceries. There was a lightness in his step as he made his way down the street. He passed by the Bilkins house. The house still looked very run down, it didn’t seem as if the new owners had done any work at all on the building.
Well, if the assholes hadn’t wasted their time on those parties they would have a lot more accomplished by now Adrian thought smugly.
At the store, he bought a quart of milk, some orange American cheese and a package of hot dogs. Still feeling happy, he began the walk home. As he passed by the Bilkins house again, he saw there was a woman standing on the porch.
She was at once the most beautiful and most repellant woman he had ever seen. She seemed to be in her mid twenties but somehow Adrian knew that wasn’t true. She had long reddish brown hair and huge eyes that seemed to be all colors at once. Her mouth was small and crooked into a sly, secretive smile. From what he could see of her teeth, they seemed sharp and pointed. She was wearing a short green dress. Her skin was the most disturbing thing about her. It looked amazingly smooth, like the skin of a shark or maybe a life sized doll. Adrian wanted to touch that skin…and he wanted to run away from it, forget he had ever seen it.
Without realizing it, he began to walk towards the porch, towards her. She moved towards him as well and as she moved out into the bright sunlight, he noticed just how sheer the fabric of her dress was. He could see the dark aureole of her breasts and his eyes strayed down her body…yes, he could faintly see the dark triangle of her loins.
They stood like this for several moments. Then Adrian found his voice.
“Uh..hello there! I’m Adrian; I live a few houses up the street. What’s your name?”
She didn’t answer. Just looked at him with those huge eyes, her smile becoming ever more sinister.
“You sure had a lot of parties here last week! Hope you all had fun! How many of you moved in here? I never saw a moving truck, just one day the ‘For Sale’ sign was, poof! Gone!”
She still didn’t answer. Instead, she began to slowly open her mouth…then she snapped it shut. She did it again. And again. And again.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Adrian asked. He nearly winced at the panic he heard rising in his voice.
Her mouth opened. Snapped shut. Opened. Snapped shut.
Adrian turned and walked quickly up the street. Before he turned into his driveway, he looked back down the street. She was still there, watching him. Suddenly, she threw back her head and let out that squealing shriek that had nearly driven him mad the week before. Then she turned and ran into the house, the front door slamming behind her.
That night around eight, the drumming began again.
“That fucking crazy bitch!” Adrian roared. He threw the shot glass of vodka he had poured to calm his nerves across the room. It hit the window and knocked out a huge shard of glass, causing him to scream even louder. He began to stomp towards the phone to call Timmons but midway across the room, he stopped. Fuck Timmons! He hadn’t done shit to help him with this problem. He was probably sitting on his ass down at the station, laughing about the whole situation. No…he was going to have to take care of this himself.
I’m going to go down there and make them stop! he thought in a red haze. If I have to wipe that disgusting smile off that little whores face and slap around any other freaks there, so be it!
He marched down the street, each step seeming to make the drumming louder. The old Bilkins house was once again all lit up. Every single window had a shade drawn down. Adrian thought he saw a large shadow slide quickly behind one on the second floor. He ran up the porch steps and across to the large front door. He began to pound on it.
“Hey assholes! Is this a private party or can anyone come on in? You love to share the fucking noise though, don’t you?”
He gave the door another savage punch. It swung open. It was also at that moment the drumming stopped. Having taken things this far, he decided to go on in. Before he crossed the threshold, he turned and looked back up his street. Every other house besides his and the Bilkins place was dark. He then realized he hadn’t seen or heard any of his other neighbors in several days. Possibly longer. A shiver passed through him and he stepped inside.
The inside was a mess. Absolutely no work had done been on the inside either. The floor was rotted in several spots. There was no furniture anywhere. The smell of mildew was the strongest he had ever encountered in his life; he had to concentrate to keep from coughing. The new silence was very unnerving.
Adrian heard heavy bumps like running steps coming from the floor above him. They must all be hiding upstairs, he thought. He began to look around for stairs so he could go up there and confront them.
He passed by an open door. Something made him stop and look.
It had been a large, walk-in closet. It was totally empty, no old clothes, no hangers, not even the rods for the hangers. A single bulb hung bare on a cord that swung on a faint breeze. He noticed there was an extension cord running into the closet. He walked inside.
There was a large hole in the floor of the small room. Here, the floorboards had not rotted away but violently smashed to expose the ground beneath the house.
There was another hole, in the ground.
As if in a dream, Adrian drifted over to the hole. The extension cord ran into the hole in the ground. He looked down into it. There were many work lights, like the ones mechanics use, strung down along the side walls of the hole, going very far down. But the hole continued far down below the last light.
There was something inside Adrian, some race memory or psychic whisper that told him that hole went all the way down into Hell itself.
He stood, perhaps for many minutes, maybe for several hours, gazing down into that pit. At some point, he became aware that someone was behind him. He turned.
She stood there before him, totally nude. His eyes drank in the beautiful white and brown of her perfect breasts, the lovely dark tangle of her crotch. Again, he noticed that nearly impossible smoothness of her skin that spoke of sharks gliding in the moonlight reefs, of the artificial crying out to be human.
On silent feet, she walked up to him. She gazed into his eyes and he knew he had been born to love this succubus, that she had crawled up the side of that pit behind them only for him. She reached up and took his face in her hands. She pulled him down and kissed him with all the passion of Hell. After several long moments, she broke off the kiss, looked at him with that smile that was full of dark hints.
Suddenly, her embrace became a shove.
Adrian stumbled backwards. His feet flew over the rim of the hole and he began to fall. He reached out wildly to grab onto to something but the walls of the pit were too hard to gain any purchase. His hand lashed out again and closed on one of the white hot bulbs of one of the work lights, causing it to shatter. He shrieked in pain.
As Adrian fell he thought he heard the drumbeat begin again, but whether it was the final poundings of his heart or the music of the demons that awaited him below, he would never know.
5/31/09-6/01/09 Brian Moreau
