It was the house that they called “Solstice.” He wasn’t sure who named the house or why, but he speculated that it was the most menacing name some drunken buffoon could come up with on short notice, the only word he knew having to do with witchcraft. The house was said to be filled with evil. Rumors had it a family was hacked to pieces in there, and tunnels ran from the basement all the way to Manitou Springs. Devil worshippers supposedly used those tunnels to drag their sacrifices to and from the convent, which served as their base of operations for the evil they wrought.
All of those stories amused Matt, as the convent had been purchased by private investors and remodeled. It was now a nursing home, and the furthest thing from evil that he had ever seen. Granted, death was surely no stranger to the old castle, but more in a housekeeper-type role than as the sickle-wielding stalker of darkness.
Matt bounded down the hill, hitting the meadow at a dead sprint.
The muscles in his legs ached from dragging his heavy feet through the thick snow. He hadn’t slept at all since the night before last. He was growing increasingly weary, physically, with each passing second, yet his flesh tingled with anticipation. His heart pounded and his mind raced, already beginning to plan the night that he had waited his entire life for, the night where he would fulfill what he hoped was his destiny.
Standing in front of the house, he stared at the cracking paint on the exposed wood. One of the windows on the front of the house had been broken and boarded up, but all of the others were still in working order. There was a brand new lock box on the front door, making it impossible to turn the knob, but that really didn’t matter, as he and all of his friends knew how to get in anyway.
There was something about the house, almost a life energy, drawing its pulse from the land around it. It resonated darkness. The air about it always seemed a few degrees cooler, the wind not daring to touch its crumbling exterior. There was something inside of it, something that made his hands tremble and his heart begin to pound every time he got near to it.
He was filled with a brimming sense of longing. All he wanted to do was get in there and set things up the way he wanted them... and then bring on the night. There was someone, something behind the walls, waiting for him, watching him, or perhaps it was the house itself. Either way, he knew that there was something else around him, wishing for the darkness to fall.
The whole house emanated evil. It was a coppery taste on the tongue, a stagnant smell in the senses, a cold, yet fiery sensation that raised the hackles on the arms and caused the head to ache.
He was home.
Wandering around the left side of the house, he kicked at the snow drifted up against the bowing wood, clearing a path to find the small cellar window. Kneeling, he scraped at the ice surrounding the framed glass until he was able to pry up the window. Lowering himself to his belly, he slipped beneath the glass and into the pitch-black basement. He grabbed onto the sill of the window and lowered himself to the dirt floor.
Thin lines of water ran down the cement walls onto the dampened earth floor. Drops of water echoed through the empty room as they fell from the cracked floorboards into the puddles eroded into the ground. It smelled like a combination of wet moss and mildew, the dust lingering only long enough to form the cobwebs that swayed gently overhead from the ceiling.
There was an ancient furnace next to a small hot water heater at the base of the stairs ahead. Neither had seen a spark of electricity in more than two decades the way he saw it, and somehow were coated with the dirt from the floor around them. A small circle of black beckoned to him from behind the furnace. It was a small tunnel, rumored to be the one that led straight across town beneath the city. Once, he had crawled inside and shimmied his way about five feet before being overwhelmed by the nearly paralyzing swell of claustrophobia and had been forced to hastily retreat. He always meant to bring a flashlight along, but until today, none of the stops here had really ever been planned.
Over the course of the last year he had spent a lot of time here, making it almost like a home away from home. No one ever bothered him here, leaving him to sit on the floor and read as much as he wanted, but his favorite past time was just studying the house. Every nook and cranny told a different story, every faded bit of graffiti dating itself. He often tried to picture exactly what was going on at the time of the writings, but every time he did, it was something different.
Feeling along the wall with his right hand, Matt eased toward the stairs leading up to the floor above. His footfalls echoed hollowly in the dingy room, the steps creaking, threatening to crack into splinters beneath his weight.
A thin ray of light blinded him from beneath the door to the kitchen as he ascended. Shoving open the door, he stood in the empty room. Piles of plaster lined the baseboards from where they had fallen in chunks from the walls. The wooden joists inside the walls peeked through every few feet, the frayed wiring visible within the recesses of the aging walls. Something moved within tattered gaps, something alive, scurrying through the piles of dust and debris. No one had ever seen them, anything living at all within this house, but they were always there, scraping at the inside of the drywall, powdering its chalky surface.
Most of the linoleum had been peeled back and scattered throughout the house in small flaps, the plywood floor dusty and dirt-crusted where it had once been. Every footstep banged loudly, echoing back at him from the cellar below. The door to the refrigerator lay on its side, leaned up against the wall, but the rest of the unit was nowhere in sight. The cabinets had all been ripped off of the walls and nothing but a long u-shaped, rusted pipe protruding from the wall betrayed the fact that there had ever been running water. Spray-painted words covered the walls, and Matt was sure that by now he knew what all of them said by heart, so he no longer needed to read them.
Stepping through the kitchen, he stood at the entranceway to the bedroom to the left. Everyone called this the “bee room,” as every inch of floor was covered with a half-inch thick layer of dead bees. He preferred the term “dead room.” It amused him, at least.
Without raising his feet, he shuffled into the room, moving the bees in growing piles in front of his wet shoes, careful not to crunch even a single body. Whatever had caused them to die, and in that fashion, the last thing that he wanted to do was to ruin the perfection of it. He cleared a small circle in the center of the room and sat down, Indian style, right in the center. Pulling his backpack from over his shoulder, he set it in his lap and unzipped it. Carefully, he excised each item from the bag, one by one, lining them up side by side as he inspected them, preparing to set everything up just the way that he imagined it for the night.
Producing a large, sharp, black-handled kitchen knife, he watched the light shine from the finely-honed blade. He brought it in front of his face, his own reflection staring back at him. He laid it on the floor, perfectly perpendicular to his lap, and reached back into the bag. Pulling out a bundle of steak knives bound together with rubber bands, he separated them and set them side by side with the first knife. There was a large wooden mallet, a meat tenderizer, its hitting surfaces covered with jagged metal caps.
There was a pair of handheld garden shears, the blackened cutting surface practiced and razor sharp. And finally, at the right end of the display, he laid his father’s hunting knife. The handle was crafted out of bone. There was a small picture of an elk whittled into the core, the long blade slightly arched, the back edge serrated with a jagged, ripping edge. It had been handed down through his family for generations, rumored to have been crafted by his great, great grandfather who had been a trapper and skin trader while the country had expanded west. He held it in his hand, turning it over and over, balancing its weight in the center of his palm. A crooked smile raced across his chapped lips.
Nodding to himself, Matt climbed onto his knees and slid the line of steak knives beneath the bees right in front of him, burying the blades beneath a thin layer of exoskeletons. Even though the bees had been dead for quite some time, as evidenced by the complete lack of innards within their hollow, crunchy corpses, their stingers were still fully intact and functional. They broke off painfully in the backs of his hands while he covered the knives.
Pulling the rows of stingers from the reddening flesh on his hands, he dropped them to the floor and clambered back to his feet. He bundled up the rest of his tools and cradled them beneath his arm. Turning, he traced his footsteps back out of the room and into the kitchen.
On the far wall, there was a large hole in the drywall, exposing the wooden support beams halfway up from the floor. Reaching inside, he deposited the shears within, steadying them in place with the frayed electrical wiring. Smacking the wall to make sure the shears stayed where he had placed them, he whirled and descended into the basement once again.
The wooden tenderizing mallet wedged perfectly between the handrail on the stairs and the wall, pinning there so that it wouldn’t fall, but at the same time it would be relatively easy to just grab it and begin hammering.
