LITMIR.BIZ

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that they were all being attacked by...a creature, by someone or something. They had fallen back and were struggling to rise from the dining table, where there were...

      Oh, God, corpses, real corpses. Dead people, all around the table. Suzie and Hannah were yelling and screaming, and Tyler was reaching out, but the carving knife was coming down and it was going to sink into Tyler’s chest at any minute!

      She heard a terrible scream—high-pitched and full of fear and horror. And she realized it was coming from her...

      And she had drawn the attention of the...

      Man. It was a real man.

      An actor gone insane? What the hell?

      No, no, no, no. It was impossible. It was Halloween. It had to be a prank, an elaborate show...

      The man was real.

      Absolutely real.

      He was tall and big and had long scraggly white hair and he might have played a maniacal killer in a slasher movie.

      Except this wasn’t a movie.

      And he was coming at her.

      He opened his mouth and smiled, and she saw his fangs. Long fangs that seemed to drip with something red...stage blood...

      Real blood.

      She screamed again.

      It sounded as if it was coming from someone else, but it was not. It was coming from her.

      Tyler struggled up from the table. He slipped.

      He was slipping in blood.

      “No, no, no!” Sarah screamed.

      And then Davey stepped up. He thrust her back with his arm and stepped before her, his cheap little plastic sword at the ready.

      “Leave her!” Davey shouted, his voice filled with command.

      The man laughed...

      And Davey struck him. Struck him hard, with all his strength.

      The man went flying back. He slammed into the wall, and the impact sent him flying forward once again.

      He tripped on a dead girl’s leg...

      And crashed down on the table.

      Right on top of Tyler and Sean and Hannah, who had already been slammed down there. It was too much weight. The table broke with an awful groaning and splintering sound.

      Shards and pieces flew everywhere as what remained of the table totally upended.

      Tyler let out a cry of fear and fury and gripped the man’s shoulders, shoving him off with all the force of a high school quarterback.

      To Sarah’s astonishment, the man, balanced for a matter of seconds, staring furiously at Davey—and then he fell hard. And didn’t move again. She saw that he’d fallen on a broken and jagged leg of the table.

      The splintered shaft was sticking straight through his chest.

      Tyler got up and hunkered down by the man carefully, using one of the plates off the table as a shield.

      “Dead,” he said incredulously. He looked up at the others. “He’s dead... He fell on the broken table leg there and...oh, God, it’s bad.”

      “Out of here! It’s evil!” Davey commanded. “It’s still evil.”

      They were all shaking so badly no one seemed able to move. Davey reached for Hannah’s arm and pulled her up. “Out!” he commanded.

      And she ran. Suzie followed her, and then Sean, and then Tyler met Sarah’s eyes and took her hand, and they raced out, as well, followed by Davey—who was still carefully wielding his plastic sword.

      They heard sirens; police and security and EMTs were spilling onto the grounds.

      The medics were struggling, trying to find the injured people among the props and corpses and demons and clowns.

      When the group of friends reached a grassy spot, Sarah fell to the ground, shaking. She looked up at Davey, still not beginning to comprehend how he had known...

      Or even what it was he had known.

      “I told you—that house is evil,” he said. “I told you—my dad. He taught me to watch. He stays with me and tells me to watch.”

      * * *

      IT HAD BEEN the unthinkable—or easily thinkable, really, in the midst of all that went on at a horror-themed attraction at Halloween.

      Archibald Lemming and another inmate had escaped from state prison two weeks earlier. They had gotten out through the infirmary—even though he had been in maximum security. News of the breakout had been harried and spotty, and most people assumed the embarrassment suffered by those who had let them escape had mandated that the information about it be kept secret.

      Archibald Lemming had been incarcerated at the Clinton Correction Facility for killing four people—with a carving knife. The man had been incredibly sick. He’d somehow managed to consume some of the blood in their bodies—as if he’d been a damned vampire. He’d escaped with a fellow inmate, another killer who was adept with a knife and liked to play in blood—Perry Knowlton. Apparently, however, Lemming had turned on the man. Knowlton’s body had been found burned to little more than cinders in the crematorium at an abandoned veterinary hospital just outside the massive walls of the prison.

      Sarah knew all that, of course, because it was on the news. And because, after the attack at Cemetery Mansion, the cops came to talk to her and Davey several times. One of them was a very old detective named Mark Holiday. He was gentle. His partner, Bob Green, was younger and persistent, but when his questions threatened to upset Davey, Sarah learned she could be very fierce herself. The police photographer, Alex Morrison—a nice guy, with the forensic unit—came with the detectives. He showed them pictures that caused them to relive the event—and remember it bit by bit. The photographer was young, like Bob Green. He tried to make things easier, too, by explaining all that he could.

      “Archibald Lemming! They found his stash in prison. Idiot kept ‘history’ books. Right—they were on the Countess Bathory, the Hungarian broad who killed young women to bathe in their blood. The man was beyond depraved,” one of the cops had said that night when he’d met with the kids. He’d been shaking, just as they had been.

      People were stunned and angry—furious. If there had been better information on the escape, lives might have been saved. Before the confrontation with Davey and his friends, the man had killed ten people and seriously injured many more. He’d managed to escape at a time when it was perfect to practice his horror upon others—Halloween. He had dressed up and slipped into the park as one of the actors.

      But many survived who might have died that night. They had lived because of Davey.

      It did something to them all. Maybe they were in shock. Maybe denial. Guilt over being the ones who made it out. And confusion over what it meant, now that the normal lives ahead of them seemed all the more precious.

      Sarah was with her cousin and her aunt when Tyler came to say goodbye.

      He was leaving the school, going into a military academy and joining the navy as soon as he could.

      Sarah was stunned. But in an odd way, she understood. She knew she had closed in on herself. Maybe they all had, and needed to do so in order to process that they were alive—and it was all right for them to go on.

      She, Tyler and their friends had survived. And it was too hard to be together. Too hard to be reminded what the haunted house had looked like with all the dead bodies and the blood and things so horrible they almost couldn’t be believed.

      So she merely nodded when he told her he was leaving. She barely even kissed him goodbye, although there was a long moment when they looked at each other, and even this—losing one another—was something they both accepted, and shared, and understood.

      Sarah

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