True Fear
by Eric Cline
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 by Eric Cline
Cover copyright 2012 by Eric Cline
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Scare them! Mike Prinzik thought. Scare 'em! Then he began typing:
The cellar beckoned. Dorian and Eliza knew they must confront what lay down there if they were to solve the mystery of Elvermere House. The cellar door had three jagged claw marks now, bulging out toward them. Whatever lay beyond that door could do that with a single swipe of its unholy paw.
The brother and sister looked at each other; she holding the baseball bat she'd used to become the first female varsity champion in her high school; he, wielding the pickaxe their great-grandfather had used the day he had struck gold in the Transvaal. They knew, without even saying so, that these makeshift weapons were no use against the beast or beasts--
An ice cube poked Mike's elbow. He smiled.
Mopsy's nose.
Mopsy was Mike's dog, and his living link to his teenage years. Mopsy had come into the Prinzik home when Mike was 15. She had been given the name by Mike's sister because of her thick, stringy, white fur, which did indeed resemble a mop. Now, the 30-year-old Michael Prinzik had taken custody of the family treasure.
He had leased a ground floor apartment, even though he would have preferred a higher floor for privacy, for ease in taking her out for walks.
“Dinnertime?” he said. “Yeah, you and me both.” He rubbed her head. She looked up at him with milky, cataracted eyes. She was getting blind now, as old dogs did, but Mike kept the floors clear of dirty clothes, pizza boxes, and other things that a bachelor otherwise thinks are perfectly good decorations for his carpets. That way she wouldn't stumble. Too much.
Mopsy had trained him well in that regard, by stumbling into, and then nesting in, his windbreaker; he'd tossed it casually when he came home from work one day. In nesting, she had scratched holes in the thin plastic, and Mike had a new attitude (and a new windbreaker) almost immediately.
“And she did it all with a smile on her face,” Mike told his sister over the phone. It was true. Mopsy smiled. A lot. Some foolish people thought a dog's smile was an illusion of jawline and facial muscle, but true parents of furry children, including single dad Michael Prinzik, knew the truth.
She wasn't just his doggy kid. She was also his writing partner. Mike had ambitions, and he spent his weekends trying to fulfill them. He loved horror in the Lovecraft / Bradbury / King / Gaiman manner. He would sit in front of his computer, Microsoft Word booted up, and treat the white “page” as Nostradamus was fabled to have treated a dish of water; he stared into it. Unlike the alleged seer, who claimed visions of the future came to him, Mike would have settled for a spooky story or two. And on occasion, he would break from his own trance and write a sentence, a paragraph, a page, and then trance it up again until the next set of words came. And this was where Mopsy performed her indispensable work. She made it her duty to touch her ice-cold nose to his bare elbow whenever she wanted to go out or eat dinner.
He had hidden the clock on his computer screen, and no others were allowed in the room. Mopsy allowed him to concentrate without glancing at the time to see if he should grab a snack, go to the bathroom, or do anything in the world except write in the free time that he had.
Obeying orders, he poured her food in the kitchen. He had to take extra time for the supplement powders, pain pills, and anti-inflammatories she needed. Friends asked why he didn't just leave some food down in a bowl all of the time; friends did not have big dogs.
Mopsy was 80 pounds (and had once tipped 85), a mixture of several interesting breeds to be sure, none of which the Prinzik family had any clue about when Father brought home a puppy from a litter someone at work's dog had had.
No, you did not leave food down for big dogs. Constitutionally, it wasn't good for them. They'd eat it all and be hungry for more (at least if Mopsy was any judge!).
He put leftovers for himself in the microwave. Waiting for his own grub, he noticed Mopsy wasn't eating hers. She just stood there looking at her bowl on the floor. Then she looked up at him. She tried to walk away, but he called her back.
“Mopsy, honey! Eat your food.”
She looked at him, went back to the bowl, sniffed it, sighed, and walked away, this time in peace.
#
Dorian turned to his sister.
“Have you gone mad?” he said. “CALL them?”
“Yes, call the demons up here!” said Eliza. “Ring the dinner bell. Better to confront them up here, where we know our ground, than to go down there into that hell pit that we thought was the cellar.”
“As long as they're trapped in the basement, we're safe.”
“No, Dorian! We are not. The evil influence of them permeates the whole town, not just the whole house. Remember those eggs at the supermarket bursting out of their cartons? Remember that pack of feral dogs that cornered us at the old elementary school? It is all the demons' doing!”
Dorian gestured with the pickaxe up to the horseshoe hanging above the cellar door.
“That horseshoe is the only thing that stands between us and the soul swallowers. It must not be allowed to fall or we are defenseless!”
“No, Dorian! That horseshoe has been a sword of Damocles hanging over our heads. It has allowed the demons to grow stronger and my writing to grow weaker and more cliched. Let us knock it down in a completely revised scene on Saturday afternoon after I take Mopsy to the vets. Just erase the last three or four paragraphs which have been particularly shitty.
#
Saturday at 10 a.m., Mike took Mopsy to the veterinarian. Being an 80-pound mutt, she got the back seat all to herself. After Mike gave her a boost.
“You've always been good when going to the vet's, haven't you Mops?” Mike said. Whenever he chauffeured her to an appointment, life became strangely multi-dimensional. A 30-year-old adult man would be alone driving a 15-year-old dog; but overlaid on that would be a 16-year-old boy in the passenger's seat, reaching into the back and trying to calm down an excited, squirming bundle of fur. And his mother, driving, yelling: “Don't give her any more attention! It just makes her wilder, Michael. I don't need the distraction. Michael Prinzik!”
But Mopsy wasn't a puppy anymore. She was nice and quiet in the back seat now. And the transparent film of the past, though stubbornly overlaying the live feed of the present, eventually faded. When they got to the vet's, Mike briefly dabbed his eyes with his sleeve. Then he helped Mopsy as she gingerly stepped down to the asphalt.
On the vet's scale, it turned out that she was a 69-pound dog, not an 80-pounder. He knew he should have figured that, given how thin she had gotten recently. The vet was a short woman only a few years older than himself. And why not? He wasn't exactly a kid; there were veterinarians younger than 30 in this office.
She'd been fantastic with Mopsy, the last few years. She stroked the dog's head while she talked to Mike. He appreciated her giving Mopsy continued attention; a surprising number of veterinarians were brusque with both animals and people. But he didn't appreciate some of the things she said. He shook his head in the negative, trying to remain calm and polite.
“Have you heard about the dog that just got certified as the oldest dog in the world?” he said. “Somewhere in England, I think. Twenty-seven years old. Mopsy's only 15. Well, she's going to make it to,” he stopped for a moment to touch his hand to his face, “at least 27. She's going to be the,” he stopped, “the one in the record books.”
The doctor nodded. “Yes, yes. The can always surprise you. I've seen some real fighters here. But when they stop eating? Well, they just have a way of letting you know. If she doesn't eat in the next few days? She's already underweight. She doesn't really have stores of fat to draw on. She-- if she doesn't eat in, I'd say, by Monday-- well, she-- they, they just have this way of letting you know.”
“Mm-hm, yes, thankyoudoctor.”
He went through a drive-thru on the way home. Junior hamburger, junior bacon burger, chicken nuggets. All for Mopsy. Again, a transparent film overlaid the live feed of life. Mom, scolding. “She doesn't need people food!” And he, a giggling, rebellious teen, breaking off bits of burger and bun and thrusting them into the back seat. Spongy lips holding drool and wide, dull teeth nipping at his hand, and a warm, slimy tongue insistently probing the webbing between his fingers, making sure the boy had not held anything back.
But then the film was gone again. The burger and chicken bits, torn up by hand, went into a Tupperware container and into the fridge. He had lain on the floor with her for 10 minutes, trying to get her to eat some.
“Tonight,” he said. “Supper. I'll heat it up in the microwave for you. Real nice.”
#
Eliza held the baseball bat up in front of her like an ancient knight with a jousting lance. She could not allow this hellish creature to get any closer. This skeleton, held together at the joints by some hideous, glowing green mucous, paced back and forth in front of her. Its red, fiery eyes, mere candle flames coming from deep within the sockets of that skull, seemed to stare right through her.
That hideous, grinning jaw moved, and what came from within that rib cage were words . . . . but words spoken in the voice of a flooding, muddy river.
“My - progeny! My - lovely - female - progeny! You - have - fulfilled - the - prophecy!”
Dorian, his back to hers, making sweeps with the pickaxe to hold back the lesser demons which roamed in the drawing room, dared to tilt his head back to glance at the grisly skeleton.
“What are you talking about, you damned creature?”
Eliza looked at the skeletal, animated remains of their great-grandfather, Elias Elvermere, builder of the Elvermere mansion and founder of the Elvermere fortune.
The demonic creature responded, “I - swore - my - soul - to - the - Devil - in - exchange - for - my - Earthly - fortune. - I - promised - that - my - firstborn - female - descendant - would - be - Satan's - bride. - But - I - had - only - a - son - and - he - had - only - sons. - Now, - my - only - great-granddaughter, - you - shall - be - wed - to - Satan!”
“No!” she shrieked.
“You'll never take my sister!” Dorian said, shaking the pickaxe. Then he realized he was holding the same implement that the creature before him had held in life; he almost wanted to toss it away from himself. But reluctantly, he did not disarm.
The skeleton of Elias Elvermere emitted a sharp shriek that apparently passed for a laugh among denizens of the bowels of the Earth.
“That - very - pickaxe - you - hold - in - your - hands - is - a - token - of - my - evil, - great-grandson! - I - used - it - to - kill - a - family - of - Boers - when - Satan - revealed - to - me - that - their - farm - had - gold - under - its - soil! - Then - I - rode - to google city in colonial S. Africa and staked my claim! And how could I kill a farm family with a pickaxe when they would have had shotguns at least? So rewrite this scene.
#
Mike called his sister that evening. The time difference meant the sun was still shining in California. He had not seen Dora in person in three years. They both worked, and neither had the price of a fairly good used car for plane fare. They had tried webcam chats a couple of times, but it was a pain for both of them; she had to sit at her computer and hook up the camera (which she usually kept physically unplugged due to security concerns -- those cameras really could be hacked by Peeping Toms); and he had to use his laptop, which had a built-in webcam. She much preferred walking the wild hills near her northern California home with a Bluetooth while talking, and he for his part preferred lying on his sofa with the speaker phone on.