Hudson House

For my wife--love ‘ums
And special thanks to LeeAnn Doherty, Karla Herrera and Scott Nicholson

“Down there, the house keeps its secrets.”

PART ONE—1984
CHAPTER 1

The boys stood together at the end of the gravel driveway with their jackets flapping in the October breeze and the sun setting behind them.  Tommy Pomeroy snorted and spat a clump of yellow phlegm onto a patch of crab grass.  Eric Hunter and Ed Forlure turned from the looming house, glanced at the spit.  They didn’t say anything—the spit summed it all up.
Eric stepped forward, actually onto the driveway.  Tommy snorted behind him and spat again.  Eric knew what that meant:  Hurry up.
Brushstrokes of sunlight painted the front of the house in orange and red; a crimson blade streaked across the second floor windows like a bleeding gash.  Those windows were the house’s dead eyes and the porch its rancid mouth, the four pillars its rotting teeth.  To go up the front steps onto the porch was to walk onto its tongue and smell its moldy wood breath, to enter the front door . . .
“Are you fagging out?”  Tommy asked.
Eric’s mother said Tommy was a smooth-talker, but sometimes Tommy’s voice made Eric cringe; it was like when his brother Steve called him “a little shit.”  Eric shook his head.
“Then go,” Tommy said.
His feet did not want to.  If the house were a monster then the two third-floor windows that protruded from the roof were extra eyes that grew from the house’s forehead like tumors.  Sometimes things moved in those windows. Sometimes things swayed back and forth.
A girl had hanged herself up there.  She used a few of her father’s neckties twirled together, wrapped one end around a roof support beam and the other around her neck.  Her father didn’t even know it happened until late that night when the knot broke and her body dropped to the floor.  People said she did it because the house made her do it.
Eric took another step toward the house and Tommy applauded.  “This is really exciting, Eric,” he said.  “Great show, buddy.”
Eric bit his lip and continued walking.  He heard his mother’s warning:  Stay away from Hudson House, Eric.  Don’t go near it.  It isn’t safe.
A sheet of wood covered the first-floor window as did sheets for the second-floor windows and, presumably, the ones on the side and in back—but not the windows on the third floor, the ones that stretched out of the roof like frog’s eyes.  The gravel driveway petered out into the overgrown lawn.  From the driveway, a slate walkway led out into the yard and then turned at a right angle toward the porch steps.  The other houses in the neighborhood were not like this; most houses had garages behind them or attached, and if there was a walkway to the porch, it started at the sidewalk.
Eric paused at the edge of the slate path.  Evergreen trees lined both sides of the property continuing behind the house, completely blocking the neighbors. A maple tree towered in the front yard like a giant sentry.  Its gnarly arms swayed and orange leaves wafted down.
A serial killer had lived here.  Hox Grent.  Years ago, he terrorized the neighborhood, stealing kids, dragging them back here and slaughtering them.  Most of the bodies were never found, only occasional pieces.
Eric stepped onto the slate walkway.  Blades of grass stuck out of jagged cracks like the fingers of people buried alive who had managed to break the surface before choking to death on dirt.  Somewhere a dog barked; it sounded like a warning.
“Wait.”
Eric had been holding his breath and now released it.  Ed ran up the driveway and stopped next to him.  He held out a flashlight.  “Here.”
“I don’t want to do this,” Eric said.
For a moment it seemed that Ed might respond, perhaps offer some encouraging words or even tell him not to go through with it.  Instead, Ed nudged him with the flashlight until Eric took it and then Ed ran back to the sidewalk.  Eric hadn’t brought his own flashlight because part of him hadn’t accepted he’d be in this position; the other part of him knew that a flashlight wouldn’t protect him anyhow.  Despite that, the weight of the two D-batteries inside the plastic casing reassured him.  He turned it on.
“Any day,” Tommy said.
The front steps sagged in the middle like they were made out of cardboard and the color ranged from white on the edges of the steps to dry, peeling tan in the middle where thousands of footfalls had fallen before him.  And of those people, how many had stepped here for the last time?  How many times had Hox Grent’s feet scuffed these steps?
Strong wind beat around the house and made it groan in a million places like the joints in an old man’s body.  Perhaps the house was waking up.  Maybe the girl was upstairs, too, swinging.  Maybe she’d come down and say hello.
Eric’s skin prickled with freezing gooseflesh.  He stopped at the foot of the steps.  The house had probably been white or tan but it now radiated in splashes of red, yellow, and orange.  The colors swirled across the wood like drops of paint in a bowl of water.  Heavy gashes in the screen door made it sag like a limp body about to fall over dead.  Someone had spray painted an upside-down star on the storm door behind the screen.  Why were the windows boarded and not the door?
It won’t be open.  There’s no way it’ll be open.  And then we can all go home.  He’d sleep with his Ghostbusters nightlight on—he would not tell that to Tommy.
“If you don’t get in the house before dark, it doesn’t count,” Tommy yelled.
He was making this up as they went along.  In any trio of friends, there’s always a leader and theirs was Tommy.  He was probably hoping for a really good laugh, one that would make him fall down with cramps in his sides and tears bursting from his eyes.  For that to happen, someone usually had to get hurt.  Eric would have to play his part for Tommy’s amusement and then they could get back to playing with action figures.
“This isn’t so bad,” Eric whispered.
The first step squeaked beneath his foot.  Shadows from the fractured spindles in the porch railing stretched up the house like mangled fangs.
The moan of the next step screamed for Eric to run back to the sidewalk and beg Tommy not to do this to him.  Tommy would only send him back to the house and up the steps again.
Eric took the next two steps rapidly and stood on the porch with the backs of his sneakers hanging off.  If he fell backwards, he’d descend into endless darkness.  He would fall forever or maybe into hell.
He shivered, rubbed the sleeves of his jacket.  He immediately felt stupid.  It wasn’t the middle of January.  He was being a baby about this.  He just had to enter the house, grab something, and leave.  Yes, it was stupid, pointless even, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t have the guts to do it.
He stepped toward the door.  A fist-sized hole lay between him and the door like someone had dropped a heavy rock through the wood.  Or something had tried to break free from beneath.  Inside the hole, light glinted off the cat-shaped eye of a troll.
He stumbled back a few steps to the edge of the porch again—fall off into the darkness—and stopped.  There hadn’t been a troll or anything else demonic.  He had caught the reflection of a beer can left by a teenager; that was all.
The flashlight beam focused on the curved metal handle of the screen door and Eric went to it.  He was mindful to spread his legs wide over the hole without looking at it.  Then he was at the door and all out of space.
The screen door handle froze his fingers.  The door opened with a squeal.  Eric’s heart thudded into his throat and his hands numbed; undigested hotdog from lunch roiled in his stomach.  He wanted to vomit and cry and run away and never look at this house again but he knew he couldn’t do that—running away would label him a coward forever and, even worse, he’d have to admit it was true.
The screen door bounced off his shoulder when he reached for the knob of the storm door.  The spray-painted star (a “pentagram,” it was called) grew larger, stretching across the door in all directions to become a mammoth star, the upside-down legs now gnarled horns.  A face emerged inside the star.  Eyes blinked open.  Eric closed his own.  Just my imagination.  He opened his eyes—the image was a spray-painted star once more.
He grabbed the doorknob and turned—be locked, please be locked—and the bolt slipped easily back into the door.  He instructed his arm to push forward but it refused.  He had gone this far and yet his body wouldn’t allow him to go the next few steps needed to prove his bravery.
“Sun’s almost gone,” Tommy yelled.
The quicker he did this, the quicker he could be back in his room, away from this house.  He willed his arm forward again and this time the muscles cooperated to nudge the door open a sliver with a sucking ooofff sound—the sound of a sealed coffin breaking wide.  Stale air teased his nostrils; it reminded Eric of the way the boxes of Christmas supplies smelled every year when his father brought them down from the attic.
When the door opened all the way with a faint rusted squeak, red sunlight broke through the opening and turned the floating motes of dust into levitating drops of blood.
Eric gripped the flashlight with both hands and scanned for something to grab; anything would do, anything to appease Tommy.  To his right, just past a boarded window, a staircase ascended half a dozen steps to a landing and more stairs continued upward at a right angle.  He would never go upstairs.  No matter what Tommy might call him or how he might threaten him, Eric wasn’t going to search the second floor—that was one floor closer to the dead girl.
Just find something and grab it.
Straight ahead, a narrow hallway ended at a shut door that led, presumably, into a room, maybe the kitchen.  To his left lay a large empty room which Eric could only partially see because of the jutting wall.  The stale smell floated all around him like invisible mold.
Somewhere something creaked like a really large finger cracking its knuckle.  Nowhere did Eric see anything he could grab as proof of his visit to Hudson House.


CHAPTER 2
The floor moaned beneath Eric’s next step and he paused.  He glanced at the stairs and then up, to the ceiling.  Was she swinging up there now or lying on the floor?  The hair on the back of his neck stood up as a cold chill coursed over his body.
Eric turned his back on the stairs and entered the large room.  He immediately knew something was behind him; it had jumped toward him the moment he moved.  Right now it stood in the crimson sunlight, hulking over him with blood-soaked arms from wrists that never stopped bleeding, a makeshift noose of ties slung around its neck.
Eric swung the flashlight behind him.  The thing had moved back into the shadows where his light could not reach.
A pair of boarded windows divided the far wall of the room.  Flakes of paint had peeled off of the wall in large strips like claw marks.  Eric imagined the girl in a panic ripping at the wall, tearing at it until her fingertips bled, desperate to scrape her way out of the house that had become her eternal residence.  Those same mutilated fingers could seize his neck and break his spine the way the noose of ties had broken hers.
Another boarded window—the front window—was to Eric’s left and a large opening into another boxy room was to the right.  Three more windows sectioned the walls in that room in a mirror image of this one.  Eric had expected old, moldy furniture with decades of spider webs sagging across them.  He had at least imagined there would be beer cans and fast food wrappers from teenagers strewn across the place, but he found three completely empty rooms.  The musty smell faded and intensified in waves.
The floor moaned with each step and Eric paused after every cry.  He kept the flashlight steady while squeezing his other hand into a painfully tight fist that started to numb.
He stopped in the middle of the room and carefully scanned the floor as far into the next room as he could.  Bare floors in bare rooms in a bare house.  Should he keep searching?  He faced the next room.  The sunlight was fading rapidly from the front door like a retreating dream.
He could leave the house now, run out slamming the door before the thing leaped onto his back and dragged him even deeper inside.  He’d tell Tommy that he searched and scoured but couldn’t find anything to grab but that didn’t matter since he and Ed had seen him enter the house.  Tommy would smile that stupid, proud grin and call Eric a fag.
He passed through the archway between the rooms to the back of the house.  The sunlight did not reach this far—maybe it had vanished for the night.  To escape, he would have to run back through the last room, turn into the foyer, go out the front door and down the porch steps.  And do it with a plastic flashlight.
The floor in this room groaned more loudly and the wood felt softer, weaker.  His feet told his brain that the floor had thinned out here like ice and that he needed to tread lightly or he might fall through into the basement.  The monster waited down there.  The thing of hair and teeth.
That’s where Hox took his victims.  He tortured them in the basement and then fed them to some hideous beast.  Some kids said there was no beast, just some starved dogs, but it amounted to the same:  whomever Hox took was never seen again.
With the next step, the floor dipped.  He stopped, waited for the wood to splinter and break.  Every second he remained in place increased the odds that the floor wouldn’t hold but the fear of taking another step, onto an even thinner patch, kept him still.
A closed door stood to his right.  He turned toward it, started to take a step, paused.  The floor whined.  He would walk to the door, push it and see what happened.  If something did happen, he’d bolt out of the house as quickly as he could.  If the opening of the door showed him merely another barren room, Eric would examine it.  Then he’d find his way out.  He would not look upstairs—homo coward forever or not, he was not going to climb those steps.
He reached toward the door and did not like how his hand shook and blurred in the light.  The wood was moist.  He pushed on it and his fingers sank into the door like they would into dough or soggy cardboard.  His fingers sank deeper.  It’s got me.  The door would suck him in, absorb him, and keep him forever.
The door pushed into the next room and his fingers slipped on the surface with a wet squeak.  Streaks of blood stretched back from his fingers across the door.  The tips had been torn open, the nails ripped out.  Blood poured over his hand and splattered on the floor between his feet.
He started to scream but silenced it after only a brief yelp; his fingers had returned to normal.  His mind playing tricks on him.  Or something else playing tricks.
Eric swallowed; his throat felt incredibly dry like he had swallowed a handful of dirt.  A slight push swung the door a few inches forward before it swung back just past the door frame and then settled in place.  If he kicked the door hard, it would swing wide into the other room and then swing back just as wide into this room.  At least that promised easy escape.
He pushed the door open slowly until the hinge stopped yawning and the door could go no further.
Two boarded windows hung above a sink set in the middle of the kitchen counter.  In front of the sink stood a woman with long, brown hair, her back to Eric.


CHAPTER 3
Eric’s stomach knotted.
The woman’s white dress clung to her narrow frame and fluttered around her knees from an invisible wind.  It radiated like a white light bulb.  She was standing straight, rigid, like something had startled her.  Her hands were in front of her, perhaps in the sink; her elbows jutted out from her sides like knotty branches.
Eric froze.  The sound of his swallowing echoed throughout the kitchen like a monstrous belch.  The woman did not flinch.
If he tried to back out of the kitchen the door would squeak as it had on its opening and that would alert the woman to his presence.  Then, as his father said, all bets were off.  He couldn’t stand in place forever, though.  Eventually one of them would move.  Once he started, he’d have to run.  Could he outrun her?  Ghosts could fly—Eric could only pump his legs and hope he didn’t trip.
Maybe she wasn’t a ghost, just a woman who had gotten lost.  Teenagers invaded this place on a daily basis; maybe she was a mother searching for her son.  Why was her dress glowing?
Metal scraped against metal, long and slow, high and piercing.  Eric’s brother had once threatened to make Eric a eunuch, whatever that was, and dragged the blade of a carving knife along a sharpening rod, producing the same sound now vibrating around the room.
He wanted to cry.  What was he supposed to do?  He squeezed the flashlight, his only weapon.  If not a ghost, the woman was some crazed lunatic hoping to continue the slaughter of kids in the memory of Hox Grent.
The scraping metal sound slashed at his ears again and again, louder and louder.  Soon the blade would rise over the woman’s head and then she would turn, and with a huge grin of spiky fangs she’d bring the giant knife down on him, slicing through his entire body.  She’d peel his flesh from his bones and eat it in bloody slurps.
The sound continued relentlessly, a screeching table saw rapidly severing plywood.
The woman turned.  Her face appeared behind a curtain of brown hair that hung straight past her chin.  She could have been pretty (did he know her?) if not for the blood splotches splashed across her dress.  Her arms hung at her sides, palms open.  Thick rivers of blood coursed down her arms from deep canyons of mutilated flesh.
Her dead, black eyes rolled backward.  She dipped her head back.  Her mouth dropped open, and then her hair liquefied and splashed onto the floor in thick, crimson fluid.  From her hollow mouth ushered an equally hollow cry.
Eric’s own scream burned his throat.  He tried to shut his eyes and couldn’t.  His vision blurred with tears that couldn’t hide the thing before him.
The woman stepped toward him.  No, floated toward him the length of a step.  Her feet grazed the ground but did not move.  Her arms reached for him.  Blood poured from her forearms and splattered on the kitchen floor in blobs that exploded on the tile.
Please, dear God I’ll be good so good dear God please.
The woman lunged at him.
Eric’s legs collapsed, his knees snapped forward, and he hit the tiled floor first with his knees and then with his face.
The hollow cry morphed into a much more familiar laugh that rose and fell in cackles.  It was how his brother laughed after twisting Eric’s arm hard enough to make him beg for mercy.  Not his brother; this time it was Tommy.
“Get off,” Eric cried.
He couldn’t budge Tommy.  His friend’s laughter peaked even higher and he rocked back and forth, riding Eric like a horse.
“Yeeehaa!”
Was the woman still in the room?  Did her blood now stain his face? 
“She’ll get us!”  Eric yelled.
“Oh, no!”  Tommy erupted into a violent fit of laughter.  “The dead girl’s going to get us.”
Eric’s flashlight had rolled into the far corner, light facing them.  The room was empty.  The woman had vanished, but that didn’t mean she was gone.
“I’m serious,” Eric said more calmly.
Tommy was still laughing when he stood.  Eric jumped to his feet so quickly he nearly lost his balance.  He hesitated about retrieving the flashlight.  He didn’t want to pass through where the woman had been.  He might feel something.
“I saw her,” Eric said.
Tommy shined a flashlight directly into his eyes and Eric squinted back.  “She didn’t die in the kitchen, stupid.  She’s hanging two floors above us.”  He gestured but Eric didn’t dignify his statement.  Tommy knew urban legends; Eric knew truth.
“She was in this kitchen, at the sink.”
“Washing dishes?”
Tommy’s smirk almost trapped Eric’s words in his mouth.  “I think she was . . .  sharpening a knife.”
“Getting ready to cut the Thanksgiving turkey?”
“No.”
“And you’re the turkey.”  This fit of laughter stirred a repressed ball of rage in Eric’s gut.  He swatted the flashlight out of his face, but not out of Tommy’s hand. 
“Shut up.”
“Ooo,” Tommy said.  “Someone doesn’t like being called a turkey.”
“I know what I saw.”
Something about how Eric said those five words weakened Tommy’s laugh and his smile waned.  They stood in silence for several seconds.  Ed stood behind Tommy, eyes wide.  Would Ed interfere if Eric and Tommy started fighting, really fighting?  He’d probably watch and greet the victor as his leader.
“You find anything to take?”  Tommy asked.  “Or were you too scared of the woman making dinner?”
Eric wanted to tell him to shove that flashlight up his ass and walk all the way home with light shining out of his butt like a giant lightning bug.
“No.  The house is empty.”
“What’s that?”
Tommy’s light found a small piece of metal a few feet away on the kitchen floor that glinted like a jewel.  It lay almost directly in the middle of the room where the woman had walked only moments ago.
“Go get it,” Tommy said.
Eric shook his head.
“Homo.”
Tommy pushed past Eric and retrieved the thing on the floor.  Eric expected Tommy to start screaming when he picked it up, expected it burn his hand or turn him crazy.
Tommy examined the thing in his open palm with the flashlight beam shining off it.  After only a few seconds of inspection, Tommy tossed the thing in the air where it hovered for what felt a little too long, and then caught it in his hand again.
“Your girlfriend left you something,” he said.
He tossed the thing underhanded to Eric, who caught it without really seeing it fly through the air.  It nestled in his hand like a small, cold insect.
Without his flashlight, Eric recognized the shape and weight of what Tommy had found:  a ring.  He balled his hand into a fist and fingered the contours of it.  Cold spread out from the ring to numb his palm and fingertips.  He opened his hand and touched the ring with the thumb and middle finger of his other hand.  His fingertips chilled like he had touched a frozen soda can.  The cold stung but not bad enough for him to let go.  He twirled the ring in a circle between two fingers.  The band was thin, almost frail, and something sharp sat on top of the ring, a diamond.  Eric had probably seen hundreds of rings on men’s and women’s fingers in his life but he couldn’t picture any of them.  He knew his father and mother wore wedding rings, but those were just gold bands.  This felt like a real ring, one a woman might adore.  One worth something.
Who could have left it?
A gift.  From the ghost.
“Hand me my flashlight,” Eric said.
“Get it yourself.  There’s got to be something better in here than some gay ring.” 
The flashlight was a mile away across a land chartered by paranormal powers.  If he walked across that land, would he come back the same?  Little late for that.  He started across the kitchen.
“Perhaps your girl is back here,” Tommy said.  He was running his flashlight over a closed door at the far end of the wall.  Maybe it led outside.  He reached for the doorknob.
“Don’t,” Eric said, without realizing he was thinking it.
Tommy laughed.  “Afraid your girl will like me more?”
The flashlight waited a few feet away.  The ring was numbing his hand.
“We should leave,” Eric said.
“Fag,” Tommy said.  He grabbed the doorknob.  His body tensed.  A shiver wiggled through him and he cried out.  Eric flinched backward several feet from Tommy and the flashlight.
“Help!”  Tommy yelled.
Eric could not move.  Electricity, supernatural electricity, was passing through his friend’s body, frying his brain and melting his skin, but Eric couldn’t do anything. 
“Help me!”  Tommy shook violently, hand stuck to the knob.  He was a caught fish on the poisoned hook of the house.
The urge to run came from the depths of his mind that knew, somehow, that if he touched Tommy he would be stuck to him and thus stuck to the house, too.  The place would get them both.  The only answer was to run, get help, and let an adult come here to risk his life.  Kids weren’t supposed to die.  That was one of the duties parents were assigned when they agreed to be parents.  Parenthood meant eventual death.
Ed moved from the darkness of the dining room to Tommy’s side like he had been ejected from a catapult.  He grabbed Tommy’s arm and pulled back.  Tommy’s hand slipped off the knob and the two boys stumbled backward several steps and collapsed onto the floor.  Tommy landed on Ed, who cried out.  Eric still didn’t move when Tommy’s laughter returned and he began verbally ripping into Ed for thinking the house had really been electrocuting him.
Ed backed out of the kitchen into the doorway again, almost hidden in the shadows.
“You guys are stupid,” Tommy said.  “There’s nothing to be scared of.”
“But you said . . .”  Eric let the rest of his thought dry up.  He was only falling deeper into Tommy’s trap.
“Babies.”  He shook his head.  He walked back toward the door, dodged to the right, snatched up Eric’s flashlight, and tossed it behind him with a rapid, “Heads up.”
Eric dodged the flashlight, which smashed against the wall.  He jumped at the sound.  Tommy sighed.  That sigh was worse than the obnoxious laughter, like a disappointed parent instead of a mocking brother.  He had made fun of them for being cowards in hope of making them tough and he had discovered that his friends really were wimps.
“I just want to look back here,” Tommy said.  “Don’t go anywhere.”
The door was open in a rush and Tommy vanished into another dark corner of this very dark house.  The floor creaked with his footsteps until he was gone and then the house went silent.
Behind him, the flashlight had died.  Without it, Eric and Ed were stranded in the dark.
“Tommy?”  Eric’s voice sounded weak and pathetic.
Tommy, of course, did not respond.  He was tricking them again.  Jokes for kids like Tommy were like drugs for addicts:  the more they did them, the more they wanted to do them.  And, much like the addicts that they had learned about in school, jokers left a wake of injured people in their path.  Hurting people might have been part of the thrill for Tommy.  Usually, he hurt others, outsiders and weirdoes, but if ever in need, he’d go after Eric and Ed.
Eric started for the door, but Ed’s words stopped him.
“We should go.”
The calm tone and solid conviction of his words startled Eric.  “We can’t.”
“Soon we won’t be able to.”
“What do you mean?”  Eric asked, but he knew what Ed meant.  If they didn’t get out of Hudson House right now, they might be doomed to wander its dark passageways.  Ed sensed the house’s hunger as Eric had, but Ed either lacked the bravery to face the house or possessed the courage to know when it was time to flee.
“We can’t leave Tommy,” Eric said.  He continued toward the door.
“He’s already gone,” Ed said.
“What?”
The kitchen door swung back and forth gently on its squeaky hinges.  Eric didn’t blame Ed.  A moment later, the front door banged in its frame.  Had Ed shut them inside the house or had the door shutting been an accident?  Maybe the house did that itself.
“Tommy,” Eric said.  “Ed just left, and I’m going, too.  Come out.”
Eric couldn’t abandon Tommy.  Tommy was a prick sometimes but they were still friends.  You didn’t abandon your friends, not unless you were a coward.
He crossed the kitchen and paused outside the open door.  The light from Tommy’s flashlight was so faint that it appeared Tommy had taken a candle in there with him.  A dry, lifeless stench oozed out of the dark.  It was the smell of his grandma’s extra bathroom, the one she always kept closed and never cleaned.
Set just off to the right across from the open door a sheet of plywood blocked another window.  No escape.
Eric stepped past the door.  Tommy stood several feet to the right in a narrow room, flashlight poised on the far wall.  The beam was so dim and the splash of light on the wall so faint that the flashlight batteries must be rapidly dying.
“Tommy?”
“I found something,” Tommy said in a complete monotone.
“Found what?”
“Something special.”
Eric wanted to grab him and drag him out of the house, but the sound of his voice, the lack of any life in that voice, kept Eric in place.
Empty shelves surrounded them, sticking out from the walls like spikes.  The darkness wrapped around Eric.  He couldn’t fill his lungs with air.  The room started shrinking.
“This house is really special,” Tommy said in that same flat voice.  It was an awful voice, a dead one.
“We have to leave,” Eric said.  “Now.”
“We can’t.  Not yet.  Maybe never.”
“Stop joking around, Tommy.  This is serious.”
“I know.”
Was Tommy breathing heavily or was that Eric?
“We can leave.  Ed did.”
“No,” Tommy said.  “He didn’t.”
“Tommy—”  He stepped toward him and stopped.  He didn’t want to move any closer.  Whatever was wrong with Tommy was unnatural and dangerous.  Maybe contagious.
“Try to leave,” Tommy said.  “You’ll see what I mean.”
“I can’t leave you here.”
“Sure you can.  I’d leave you.”  Faint emotion floated in those last three words.
Eric paused.  Tommy really would leave Eric if their roles were reversed.  Part of Tommy probably hoped that something was going to happen to Eric in Hudson House and when, after waiting a few minutes outside with Ed, he hadn’t heard any screams, he decided to enter the house and scare Eric with an old-fashioned surprise tackle.  But Eric had already been screaming at the bleeding woman.  Perhaps Tommy hadn’t heard that.  Perhaps the house hadn’t wanted him to.
Now the house was doing something else.  Something to Tommy.  He wasn’t faking:  that brief trickle of emotion in his voice hadn’t been mischief but fear.  Genuine fear.
Eric turned his back on Tommy.  His breathing improved.
“Run for your life,” Tommy said.  “Not that it’ll do any good.”
The flashlight beam faded, faded, died.  Tommy started moaning, low groans at first and then loud cries.
“Don’t you see it, Eric?  Can’t you feel it?  It’s beautiful,” he yelled.  “So beautiful!”
Eric ran.
He smacked the kitchen door and sent it swinging behind him, and then he skidded across the dining room floor, shot into the living room, tripped into the foyer, and crashed against the front door, falling to the floor.  He leapt up and pawed at the door until he found the knob, and then he was yanking back on the knob, turning and yanking, pulling back with all his might and finding that he couldn’t get it open, that the house wasn’t going to let him out and that Tommy was right, that there was no escape.  He kept turning and pulling back and crying for the damn thing to open and feeling the tears pour down his face and feeling so helpless, so stupidly helpless.
When the door opened, Eric spilled out onto the porch and tripped all the way down the steps and tumbled onto the walkway.  Ed was gone.  Behind Eric, Tommy’s moaning cry echoed within the house.
Eric ran and didn’t slow down until he was on the front lawn of his own house.
He grabbed the railing on the porch that led to the back door and into the kitchen—where his mother would be waiting for him to get home so she would know if she had to whip up some dinner because Dad wasn’t going to be home until late, like usual, and Eric’s brother had already gone out with friends, promising, as usual, not to drink or do anything “stupid.”
He ran up the steps and sprang inside the house.
“Mom, you have to—,” he started to say but the rest of his sentence, call the police and send them to Hudson House because Tommy’s in trouble and maybe Ed, too, never came out.
His mother lay on the floor in the middle of the kitchen, arms outstretched, legs splayed, blood gushing from a wound in her head.

# # #

This concludes the sample chapters of Hudson House.

J.T. Warren  was born on Halloween, a few months after his mother saw Jaws at the movies.  His affinity for horror can be traced to an early age when he built a coffin out of cardboard and pretended to be a corpse, much to the concern of his parents.  He can still be found in a coffin on Halloween when he gets into the spirit of the season.  He is a public school teacher and has successfully lured thousands of students into literary waters through works of horror.  He hopes his writing will further encourage young adults to discover the wonder (and dread) found in the written word.

Connect with J.T. Warren on Facebook to learn more about him and find out when Hudson House will be available.
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