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Ice cubes rattle in a glass as you sip the whiskey. Your host, a man known only as Mr. Negative, takes a seat opposite you and pours a drink for himself. The furnishings that surround you are as ancient as the house in which they reside, yet they look unused. Your host sighs and begins to speak.
You're sure you want to hear this?
You nod, praying that he doesn't change his mind. You've put a week of effort into getting him to talk. You'd heard the whispers of the old men, but never the whole story. Only one man knew the entire tale.
So be it.
You take another sip of your drink. He sighs again and begins his tale.
It was Halloween when it happened. I was in New Orleans, moving some liquor for Marietta Rossi. She wasn't Godmother then, but she did have a crew, and we're friends. She needed a favor and I was happy to oblige.
New Orleans is an old city. The French got there in the late 1600's and the Indians were there for God knows how long before that. That's a lot of time for shit to happen.
He takes a drink and pauses, carefully weighing his next words.
Evil is like a sickness. It starts small and out of sight, then festers and spreads until it's either treated or the effected die off. Except that evil can infect anything. Buildings, people, animals, it doesn't matter. Some call it possession, others call it haunting, but it's the same. Once you're exposed to it, it stays with you. Do you understand?
You nod and take a drink.
Marietta sent me and three of her people to pick up this liquor shipment and smuggle it back to Detroit. We'd have to drive the truck, under cover, from Louisiana to Michigan. It wasn't going to be easy, but I was certain we'd pull it off. We were supposed to pick up the crates at an abandoned house in the French Quarter. We didn't know it, but the house had a history.
There had been more than thirty deaths associated with the house, which was about a hundred years old. An old lady had tortured her servants there, until a house fire exposed her insanity. When the firemen entered, they found servants chained to the walls in the attic, each tortured through various horrifying methods. There were men whose eyes had been gouged out, their lips sewed shut, dismembered limbs stitched to their abdomens. The firemen found buckets of hands and feet and a stack of rotting heads. When the smoke cleared, there were at least twenty dead servants and the old lady had escaped. She was never heard from again.
There have been three suicides and at least seven murders in the house. All gruesome. A man buried an axe in his wife's forehead. A wife poisoned her family; a child strangled his mother and father while they slept. You get the idea.
But still, even if we had known, we might have gone. We were there to pick up booze, nothing else. And who believes in that bullshit anyway?
We found the house and went inside. It had been empty for years and it showed. There was no electricity in the house, so our flashlights were all we had. I called out "hello" but no one answered. Then we saw her.
She was in her mid twenties, I'd say, and dressed to kill. She looked like she had been poured into her dress. She stood at the top of the staircase and she gestured that we should come upstairs.
Assuming that she was our contact, we followed her. All four of us. We went upstairs and then followed her into a room at the end of the hall. She turned around to face us and when she did, one of the guys shone his flashlight in her face, so we could see her.
She didn't have eyes. Where her eyes should have been, there were these black squiggles, like a kid's scribbling. Random black scribbles moved over a white background. She opened her mouth and a sound like metal scraping glass came out.
"What did you do?"You ask, excitedly. Your host takes a drink and continues.
I was closest to the door. I took a step back and I was in the hallway. The two guys in front of me did the same. When they did, the door slammed shut, trapping the first guy, the one closest to her, inside the room. We couldn't get the door open. We rammed it and kicked it, but we couldn't get it open. Then the noise stopped. The door swung open, by itself, but the room was empty. We called to the guy, but he was gone. So was the woman.
It was then that we decided to get the hell out. The thing was, and I know this sounds strange, we couldn't find the stairs. We retraced our steps, but there was only floor where the stairs should have been. We started looking for a way out, but there was nothing. We began to search the rooms.
They were all bedrooms, save one large parlor at the end and one small bathroom. Each had a different décor, a fact which was evident despite the years of neglect. The furnishings remained, as if the prior owners had just walked away, leaving everything behind. And there were no windows.
In the first room, I found a pile of random objects on the floor. There was a pair of glasses, a gun, a belt buckle, some cufflinks, and some odd gold nuggets.
"Gold nuggets?" Your curiosity gets the better of you.
They were teeth. Gold teeth. We were looking at a pile of everything that was metal in or on our associate. I'm pretty sure that we were looking at what was left of him.
Then there was the scratching noise again. We left the room and went back into the main hallway. The woman was there again, mouth open, scratching sound coming out. Except this time, her jaw continued to drop and her mouth grew wider and wider. When her jaw reached her knees, she reached inside her own mouth and pulled out our associate. She closed her mouth he stood beside her, the black scribbles now covering his eyes.
One of the men panicked. He drew his gun and began firing at the figures at the opposite end on the large hall. The bullets, of course, passed through the figures at the other end of the hall. But, when the gun was emptied, they disappeared.
Then she was right there, in front of the man who shot at her. She opened her mouth and the scraping sound came out again. But this time, her black tongue shot out and into his eye socket, through his eye, and into his skull. The other man and I backed away, in a state of shock, and watched as he began to shrivel, like a tire going being deflated. He continued to get smaller until he was gone. She closed her mouth, and then opened it again. His gun and belt buckle fell out of her mouth onto the floor.
We heard a scream from the parlor at the other end of the hall. We ran to the sound and we entered a chamber of horrors.
Severed heads littered the bloody floor. A large cauldron was beginning to boil and we could see children struggling to get out. A chain ran through the abdomen of another man, binding him to the wall. A dismembered hand crawled across the floor and up the wall, like an insect. The woman appeared and began to walk toward us, across the bloody floor. I could see her footprints in the blood. They weren't human. There were three toes and other smaller toe facing the other direction, like a lizard. She stopped in front of us and this time, she spoke, without moving her mouth.
"What did she say?" You ask excitedly.
She said, "Only one." I understood immediately. I pulled out my gun and shot the other man in the head. The woman looked at me and winked one of her black scribbled eyes. I looked behind me and the stairs had reappeared. So, I ran. I made it to the front door and, for some reason; I turned and looked over my shoulder. The place was packed with them. People, or what used to be people, with those black scribbles over their eyes. They spoke in unison, without moving their mouths.
"What did they say?" Your host pours another whiskey and consumes it in one gulp.
They said, "Join us." I turned and ran. I drove back to Detroit. I was still shaking when I saw Marietta. She didn't ask questions.
"And now? Have you been back? Are you still afraid?"
I amstill afraid, but I've never been back. Mostly because they followed me here...
"What?!?" You stand and turn around to face a beautiful woman with black scribbles over her white eyes.
I'm sorry. I truly am. But I have to keep itat bay until I can figure out how to get rid of them.
The last thing you see is the black abyss of the woman's gaping mouth as you join the legion of the damned.
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