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Details are sketchy at this late hour about the bodies recovered from the cabin upstate in what has been described as a brutal triple homicide. The bodies of Grant Forge, Shannon Radson and Kyle Rollins were found, the victims badly mutilated by party or parties unknown. Local officials are reluctant to provide too much information at this late hour as investigations are ongoing in an effort to contain—

Sheriff Dodgeston turned the radio off and sat back in his desk. The photos he had taken at the scene were scattered across his desk and were the only grim reminder he needed of what had happened at that cabin. The bottle of bourbon from his desk drawer was already half gone. It was rare for him to indulge at work but it was definitely called for in th. He had stopped looking at his hands after several times when he looked down to discover them trembling. And it wasn’t because of the bodies. Even in a relatively secluded part of the country, he had seen his fair share of violence.

It was the house itself.

Walking in, he had never had a stronger feeling of being unwanted. It was like the house had hissed when he walked through the doors. Every step around the place, he kept expecting something to jump out at him. In the kitchen, he glared at the tiny door leading into the cellar that he had no intention of exploring. He knew enough of the history of this house that he wasn’t going down there. Most of the killings had happened before he had been born but just knowing how many children had been killed down there made his skin crawl. Add these poor bastards to that list. There had never been a place as tainted as this, as far as he was concerned.

Dodgeston hadn’t wasted much time exploring the house. There wasn’t much to be found, apart from the victims themselves. And he had no interest in taking a minute more than was required to get the job done. He cleared out and let the coroner’s office finish up. Whoever had been responsible left behind no sign, no clue as to their identity and as far as Dodgeston was concerned, they were probably three states away by now.

In the inner recesses of his unconscious, Dodgeston wasn’t sure if he was avoiding looking too much into this because he knew it was probably wasted effort or if there was something else. He would have never admitted it out loud but a small part of him had to admit that the lack of any kind of physical evidence made him wonder if the person responsible for this was even human. It was crazy to consider, what else could it be? All he knew was that from the moment he walked into that house, he felt like he had stepped out onto an alien landscape where literally anything was possible, where nothing was absurd or crazy.

He was terrified of that place.

And it was only then, in the breadth of that moment that he realized exactly what he needed to do. It had nothing to do with paperwork, or making notifications to families of the deceased or with putting out an alert for perpetrators unknown. The cabin out there lay at the heart of everything.

He had tried to track down the owner of the property and had spent an hour on the phone, going around in circles, trying to find any records.

On paper, it was like the cabin didn’t even exist.

What he had to do was see to it that reality matched up with that paperwork.

He took no one with him. In truth, there was no one he could trust to not have him committed for what he was thinking about doing. He needed to get out there and get this thing done before he lost his momentum and his nerve. This had to be done. He didn’t know how many people had been killed within the walls of this house but he would see to it that it wouldn’t happen again.

The sky overhead was clear and black as he stepped out of the jeep, moving towards the silent cabin. The gasoline sloshed around in the can as he walked, already fingering the lighter in his pocket. There was no indication of any kind of life inside, in fact the building seemed to stand as a repellent to the very life force he felt surging inside of him. It felt like an ending for anyone and anything that veered too close to its presence.

But Dodgeston would put a stop to all of it.

He moved around the house slowly, taking his time to make sure the gasoline was soaking into the wood. Once he had made a full orbit around the foundation, he pulled out the lighter, rolling his hand across the top to produce a strong flame. He saw the names of the victims, images from file folders strewn across his desk.

Kyle.

Grant.

Shannon.

No one had been here to help them. He would do the best he could. The only thing he could think to do.

Dodgeston tossed the lighter.

Within minutes, the house was engulfed in flames, raging up to lick at the night sky. He followed the tracks of the inferno and embers, up past the second floor windows and as he watched silently, his heart began to skip a beat.

Someone had just walked up to the window.

He could see the outline of someone, tall and reedy, an oversized hat on its head that reminded him of old timey clothing that men might have worn over a century ago.

“Christ,” he muttered.

Dodgeston ran up onto the porch and winced as he stepped into the cabin, picking up on the smell over the smoke. wasn’t from the bodies they had found earlier. A smell like this took decades to seep into the pores of every surface. He couldn’t fathom how those kids had endured staying here. His father had been a mortician and Dodgeston had allowed himself to be taken to work with him on only one occasion.

This smell was even worse.

The house itself smelled like it was made from the dead.

The ceiling above him groaned, as if from a footstep. He looked up and tried to see through the splitting boards.

“Hey!” He shouted but there was no indication of movement or response. No call back from anyone who might have heard him.

Dodgeston sprinted up the stairs, knowing that time was short. He was willing to be on the hook for the destruction of this decrepit property. But if someone ended up dead, his life was over. The hallway upstairs stretched away from him as he ran, looking into each room as he tried to find whoever he had seen.

It wasn’t until the last bedroom when he found the woman, strung up from the ceiling. The noose dug deeply into the flesh of her neck. Her eyes were vacant mirrors, reflecting the room around her as there was no longer any presence inside of her to see anything.

Dodgeston didn’t know who she was or where she could have come from. The sight did serve to further solidify what he already knew, that this house was clearly something that had to be destroyed. He heard the sound of wood cracking, felt the heat coming from below and turned to leave.

The man now standing in the doorway stopped him short.

Dodgeston couldn’t see any facial features as they were obscured behind the brim of the hat he wore. His clothes were simple white cloth that hung off of him loosely as he leaned against the door frame, seemingly uncaring about the fire or anything else going on around him.

“Who the hell are—” Dodgeston began to ask but in the span of a heartbeat, he was pinned against the wall, the man holding him tightly as he shifted his gaze up towards him. As Dodgeston got his first look at the thing’s face, he screamed.

The face was gone, replaced by a solid mass of burned, congealed flesh. The skin flexed and molded, as if somehow conveying the anger that seemed inherent in this thing. It lifted Dodgeston up even higher, until his head brushed up against the ceiling. The arm that held him stretched out, elongated as it continued to push him up higher. The side of his face was now pressed flat against the ceiling, his neck screaming out in pain as it bent back. He waved his one free around in an attempt to swing at the thing but all he found was empty air, the heat from the fire below now just caressing his flesh. He felt something start to snap and in an instant everything blinked away.

He woke up on a dirt floor. Standing, he looked out the one smudged, dirty window at the flickering light from outside. Somehow he had ended up in the basement while the fire raged overhead. The creature that had evidently sent him here was nowhere to be seen.

Dodgeston had to get out of here before it was too late. But as he turned to the stairs, he heard the high pitched sound of glass breaking. He turned to look and saw the flames coming in through the window, like water. The house seemed unaffected, uncaring as the fire sought him out, quickly engulfing him and in the end, the one blessing he found was that the final moments he spent within agony were also brief.

In the coolness of the night outside, the house remained as a beacon against the expansive night sky. The muffled screams from within were nothing new and extinguished quickly. The cry from a lone bird flying high overhead could be heard as the wind began to pick up over the open valley. Silence returned, the fire gone and all that remained was a house.

A house, patiently waiting for whoever might be next to cross over the threshold and into what waited for them within.

****author’s note – if you are intrigued by the events in this story and would like to see more, keep an eye out for my upcoming novella, Yesterday, When We Died.

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