Guests in the Attic by JG Faherty
Guests in the Attic by JG Faherty
Annabeth Temple heard the sounds for the first time about a week before Halloween. Scratch-scratch-scratch. Barely audible over the gurgling of the rainwater coursing through the drain spout outside the bedroom window.
Scratch-scratch-scratch.
There it was again. She lifted her head, more awake now, listening.
Scratch-scratch-scratch.
Was it in the walls? No, over her head.
She waited, ears straining in the darkness, cataloging every sound. The tick of the kitchen clock, the refrigerator’s hum, the occasional burble of the water cooler in the kitchen.
Again. The sound of claws scratching at wood and plaster.
Mice? It wouldn’t be the first time. The chill October nights often attracted furry creatures from the nearby woods.
Thump!
Annabeth sat up straighter. Mice didn’t make noises like that. Something big was up there.
Squirrels? Oh, God, rats?
“Steve? Steve, wake up.” She pushed against her husband’s shoulder.
“Huh? What’s the matter?” His voice, fuzzy with sleep, cleared as she kept shaking him.
“There’s something in the attic. Rats.” The idea had become a certainty in her mind.
She tried to keep calm. This wasn’t the city, where whole buildings got infested and vermin could spread like wild fire. In the suburbs, you laid a few traps, sealed a hole, and that was it. They’d had to do it more than once since moving here ten years ago.
So why was her stomach churning?
Scratch-scratch-thump.
“Did you hear them?”
Steve sat up, his just-starting-to-thin brown hair poking up at odd angles. He gave them a little groan as he swung his feet out of bed.
“Yeah, I heard them.” He banged on the wall with the flat of his hand, as high as he could reach. “Nothing I can do tonight. Tomorrow I’ll put traps in the basement and the attic, maybe a couple under the kitchen sink.”
He listened for a moment and then crawled back under the covers. His muscular arms felt good as he pulled her close. She turned, spooning herself against him, enjoying the feel of his warm flesh against hers. She started drifting back into sleep, lulled by the deepening sounds of his breathing.
Until a sudden thought brought her awake again.
“Steve? What about the boys? What if the rats bite them?”
“Not gonna happen.” The words were muffled by his pillow, but she heard them. “These aren’t city rats, honey. Go to sleep.”
She tried, but the idea had taken root in her brain and wouldn’t die.
For the rest of the night, the walls were silent. Annabeth knew because she never fell back to sleep.
***
Steve Temple frowned as he got up from the couch. The damned trick-or-treaters were endless this year. And it never failed; just as he got comfortable again, that’s when the next batch of little vermin would knock.
He opened the door, his basket of miniature candy bars in hand, and found the porch empty.
A flashback to his own childhood made him look down. No brown paper bag of dog crap occupied the welcome mat. No voices giggled from the bushes.
The knocking sound again, and Steve realized it came from inside the house. In the ceiling.
The damn rats again.
They’d been appearing intermittently since last week. He’d put out the usual glue and snap traps, but so far no luck. The damn things were smarter than he’d given them credit for.
So far it was rats one, Temple family zero.
But that was about to change.
Annabeth had taken the kids to her sister’s house for the evening to trick-or-treat with their cousins. They wouldn’t be back for at least three more hours.
Plenty of time to hunt some rats.
He ducked into Bobby’s room and grabbed the pellet pistol from the closet. Annabeth was too much of a softie when it came to hurting animals, even if they happened to be eating holes in their walls and making nests in the attic.
Steve had no such qualms. Gun in one hand and flashlight in the other, he made his way as quietly as possible up the stairs to the attic. There was no sound as he turned the knob and slowly pushed the door open.
The attic was a full size room. Eventually they planned to finish it with walls and carpet, but for now it was just a plank floor over the insulation, and the rafters showing overhead.
The unofficial storage area of the house, over the years it had become a maze of boxes, cartons, and assorted junk.
Steve picked his way carefully through the obstacles. He was counting on the general fearlessness of rats more than his own stalking skills to get close to them.
Something thumped at the far end of the room, and Steve tip-toed his way towards the sound. The flashlight’s narrow beam highlighted sudden movement between some boxes, and he fired the pellet pistol.
A high-pitched squeal answered the gun’s soft pop.
“Gotcha, you bastard!” He ran forward and pushed the stacked boxes aside.
Clawed hands reached out and grabbed his wrists, sinking needle-sharp nails into his flesh. He screamed in surprise and pain. He pulled back, dropping the gun and flashlight in the process, crying out again as lines of fire blossomed across his hands.
Freed from the creature’s grasp, he fell backwards on the rough wood and scurried away, pushing himself with his feet and hands like a giant crab.
In front of him, hissing and screeching accompanied a flurry of movement. Boxes tumbled over. There was a sound of glass breaking, and then something hard hit him in the chest. Looking down, he saw it was the flashlight.
The rubber handle was slippering in his hand as he fumbled for the button. When the light finally came on, he let out a gasp.
Four red lines furrowed across the back of each hand, from just above the wrist to the knuckles. Blood seeped from the wounds like flood waters rising over a riverbank. Crimson drops trickled down staining his faded jeans.
“Sonuvabitch.” Thoughts of catching rats disappeared, replaced by the realization that he needed a trip to the emergency room.
Worse, he’d have to tell Annabeth what he’d been doing.
As he escaped down the stairs, he did his best to ignore the triumphant screeches and crashing boxes following his exit.
***
Steve put on his best ‘I’m a dope’ smile as he met Annabeth at the door. Kyle and Jamie had already rushed into the kitchen to sort through their Halloween bags.
“Don’t worry, honey. I’m okay,” he said, attempting to forestall her certain anxiety.
“Oh my God! Look at you!”
Annabeth’s normally cream-colored complexion grew paler as she took in the extent of his injuries.
“It looks a lot worse than it really is,” he said, nodding his head at the two maroon-splotched dish towels wrapped around his forearms and hands.
“What the hell happened?”
He shrugged. “I went up into the attic to kill those friggin’ rats. I shot one with Bobby’s pellet gun. Then–”
“You what?” Irritation was quickly supplanting worry on her face.
“Let me finish. I had one cornered behind some boxes, but when I reached for it, it grabbed at me and clawed my arms. So I came downstairs, washed up, and waited for you.”
“A rat did all this?” Hands on her hips, mouth pursed, one eyebrow raised. A poster child for disbelief.
“Obviously it wasn’t a rat. I think we’ve got a raccoon nest up there.”
“I can’t believe you’d do something like this without me home.”
Steve frowned. “Think how I feel. I’m the one who’s gonna have the stitches.”
“You deserve them.” Annabeth looked at him. Her round, dark eyes glistened, making them seem ever larger.
“Hey, honey. It’s all right.” He kissed her nose, one of their little signs of affection. “I’ll be fine.”
She finally gave him a smile. “And?”
He didn’t have to ask what she meant. “And…I’ll call an exterminator first thing in the morning.”
“Damn straight. Now I guess we have to get you to the hospital.” She shook her head. “I’ll have Cassie Henderson come watch the boys.”
***
“Musta been some big-ass raccoon.” Tom Clausen, owner of Pest-Be-Gone, raised an eyebrow at Steve’s gauze-wrapped hands.
“Eight stitches in one, six in the other,” Steve said.
“He thinks it’s something to be proud of.” Annabeth’s tone carried her own opinion like a neon sign.
“Raccoon’s are pretty tought,” Tom allowed. “A thirty-pound ‘coon can make mince meat out of a grown man.”
“If I’d known it was a raccoon, I wouldn’t have tried to catch it. I figured we had rats.”
“More likely to get ‘coons than rats. They love attics, ’specially with winter coming.” Tom pulled a large flashlight from one coverall pocket. He’d already put on work gloves and plastic goggles. “Now me, I don’t take no chances. You wait down here while I go look around.”
The stocky, bald-headed exterminator clumped his way up the steps. His eldest son, Jake, was busy examining the outside of the house, looking for possible entry points.
Annabeth leaned against the railing. “He won’t kill them, will he?”
Steve glanced at his wife. In her artfully torn jeans and oversized football jersey, she could easily pass for ten years younger than he thirty-six.
My wife’s a MILF. The thought brought a smile.
“What’s so funny?” She tilted her head, eyebrows furrowed.
“Nothing. He won’t kill them. He traps them and then lets them go somewhere far from here.”
Annabeth exhaled. “Good. I’m going to get dinner started.”
Something crashed in the attick and was followed by a loud scream.
“What the hell?” Steve raced up the stairs, Annabeth close behind him.
The clamor from the attic grew worse as Steve threw open the door. Shrieks of pain mixed with the sounds of breaking glass and falling objects, creating a deafening pandemonium in the confined space.
“Tom! Are you all right?” Steve tried to make his voice heard over the general din.
“Help!”
The commotion came from the far end, near where Steve had encountered the raccoon the previous day. Strobing flashes of yellow indicated where Tom’s flashlight was moving around in what seemed to be random motions.
Now that he was in the attic proper, Steve noticed the other sound: a high pitched screeching.
Same as he’d heard when he’d been attacked.
Motioning for Annabeth to stay back, Steve hurried across the dim room.
A stack of boxes exploded outward in front of him, casing him to stumble backwards and fall to the floor.
He barely noticed Annabeth’s cry of terror as Tom’s bloody, twitching form staggered towards them, hands outstretched and waving. Empty eye sockets stared out of a face shredded almost beyond recognition.
Tom’s mouth hung open and an unending wail forced its way past teeth and gums exposed by missing lips.
Steve shouted out his own fear and disgust as the ravaged body fell on him. Something moved in the deep shadows between the boxes. No, several somethings.
Points of light appeared in the near-darkness.
Eyes.
Each luminescent yellow-green orb held an elliptical pupil in its center, fiery red instead of black. Unlike a cat’s eyes, the pupils extended horizontally, creating an unsettling look that would have made a Hollywood special effects designer proud. The twin circles marking each animal’s presence were low to the ground and not much larger than dimes, but no less terrifying for their small size.
Hot piss filled Steve’s underwear as he realized it wasn’t raccoons living in his attic.
One of the creatures hissed, loud and long. Steve held his breath, his heart triple-timing a painful rhythm in his chest as he waited for the thing to attack.
Instead, it spoke to him.
“You’re all going to die.” The voice was high and alien sounding, as if Satan had sucked helium before speaking.
A short, hairy arm stretched forward out of the shadows. Long, black claws, dripping Tom’s blood, dropped something onto the floor.
A human eye.
Only then did it screech out its hatred and anger. Behind it, more of the pygmy monsters cackled and wailed.
Steve’s field of vision narrowed until all he could see was Tom’s blue eye staring at him.
Then everything disappeared into a black fog.
***
“Steven!”
The sound of his name cut through the darkness. Steve thrust out his hands to ward off the beasts’ attack.
When the expected pain of teeth and claws gouging flesh didn’t materialize, he lowered his arms and opened his eyes.
Bright lights, soft cushions. Annabeth’s small, oval face staring at him.
He was in the living room.
“How did I get here?” His throat felt scraped and raw.
“You don’t remember? You grabbed me and practically dragged me down the stairs. Then you collapsed here.”
She knelt down next to him. “You left Tom up there. What happened? What were those things? Rapid fire questions, too fast.
Up there. The attick. Clausen’s dying body on the floor.
Steve sat up. He remembered everything.
“Where are the kids?” They had to leave, right now.
Before they came downstairs.
“Outside, playing in the front yard.”
“You’re all going to die,” it had said.
He believed it.
“Steve!” She shook him. “I tried calling 911. The phone’s dead. And my cell’s in the car.”
“That’s fine. C’mon, we’re getting the hell out of here.” He grabbed her hand and started towards the front door.
“What were those things?” Annabeth asked again.
“I don’t know.” But deep down, he did know.
Evil, hateful creatures. Whether they came from Hell, another planet, or some laboratory didn’t matter. They were deadly and he was getting his family as far away from them as possible. Let the police handle it, or the national guard.
Halfway to the front door the lights went out.
“Shit!” Steve stopped, holding on to Annabeth as she stumbled into him.
“What–”
“Quiet!” He kept his voice to a sharp whisper. The hairs on the back of his neck crackled as they stood up. Annabeth’s harsh breathing sounded loud in his ears. He turned away from her, straining to hear anything out of the ordinary. A clock ticked nearby and there were the usual creaks and groans any house makes.
As he listened, his eyes grew accustomed to the near darkness. The sun was almost set and Annabeth had shut the living room blinds earlier.
“C’mon,” he said in a quiet voice. “Let’s keep going for the door.” Steve stepped carefully and slowly trying his best not to bump into anything while at the same time avoiding those places where he knew the floor squeaked.
They reached the door without incident. Steve turned the knob, then paused. “As soon as I open it, run like hell for the car. Got it?”
Annabeth put her hand on his arm. “Wait. How come nobody heard the screams?”
“What?”
“All that noise. How come Kule and Jamie didn’t come to see what was going on? Or Tom’s son, Jake? He was right outside.”
Outside.
What if there were more demons than just the ones in the attic?
“The boys were probably making so much noise of their own, they didn’t even notice. We’ll grab them and head for the car.”
He didn’t mention Jake. There was only one way he could have missed his father’s death cries.
Don’t think about that now.
“On three. One…two…three!” Steve pulled the door open then leaped back with a scream.
“Oh, Jesus! No!” Annabeth pushed past him and fell to her knees on the front steps.
Steve turned his head. The remains of the sandwich and tomato soup he’d had for lunch erupted from his stomach and spilled onto the entryway carpet.
When he looked up again, Annabeth had the lifeless bodies of Kyle and Jamie cradled against her. Her body jerked with the force of her sobbing, causing Kule’s eyeless head to roll bonelessly back and forth. His blood-matted brown hair, the only thing he’d inherited from his father, smeared Annabeth’s shirt.
On her other shoulder, Jamie’s mutilated face stared at him with blame, the missing eyes and nose created a flesh-covered skull that asked him:
How could you let this happen to me?
Steve grabbed Annabeth’s arms and pulled her back inside, dragging the remains of their children along at the same time. When he had her all the way in he slammed the door shut. No point in being quiet now.
“No, no, no.”
Something cold gnawed at Steve’s stomach as he listened to his wife keening over Kyle and Jamie’s bodies. Hatred, blind and endless, forced its way past the fear that had been overwhelming him.
Those creatures had taken away his children. Without Kyle and Jamie his life meant nothing.
He was going to make them pay.
“Annabeth. Annabeth!” He slapped her face. Her eyes went from confused to angry.
He didn’t care.
“Go out the back door. Run. As fast as you can. Head for the Peterson’s house. When you get there, call the police. Tell them the boys were attacked by some kind of animal. Then wait there for me.”
“I can’t leave them!” No tears now. Like Jaime, she was blaming him.
“I’ll bring them. But there’s something I have to do first.”
“I’m not leaving!” She wasn’t hearing him.
“I’m going to burn down the house, Annabeth. When I do, I don’t want you here.” He picked her up, set her on her feet.
Started pushing her towards the kitchen.
She fought him and he let her. As long as she kept moving.
“You bastard! Don’t make me go!” When she tried to claw his face, he grabbed her hands and pushed harder.
In the kitchen, he pinned her against the wall while he opened the door.
Jake’s body fell inside, the headless stump of the neck spilling thick, dark fluids onto the linoleum.
This time when Annabeth screamed, she clutched at Steve, burying her head against his chest.
“I can’t go out there alone!”
There was no time for compassion. “You have to. I need you to call the cops.”
She tried to punch him but he held her too tightly. Instead, he leaned in and kissed her.
Her gaze cleared as reason returned. In the last moments of dusk, her pale face was a moon, her eyes black craters underlined in shadow.
“Steve, no. Please don’t…” He saw that she knew.
“Go.” One last push and she was out the door. “Run!” He slammed the door shut and locked it. Annabeth stood on the porch for a moment.
“I love you,” he heard her say.
Then she ran.
He turned away wishing they could have had a better goodbye. They deserved better.
A quick search of the junk drawer and the liquor cabinet turned up the items he needed. In less than two minutes he was ready.
Time to make some noise, make sure they were all waiting for him. He kicked over the kitchen table sending dishes everywhere.
“All right, you fuckers! Come and get it!”
***
Steve stomped his feet as he walked up the steps. He banged on the walls. He kept up a litany of obscenities shouting as loudly as he could.
In the attic, he paused at the entrance. The demons had been busy. Most of the flesh had been eaten from Tom’s body and bloody stains were visible everywhere in the dim glow of the flashlight still lying on the floor.
“C’mon, I know you’re here. What’s the matter, afraid of a lousy human?”
A demon shrieked from behind some boxes. Another answered across the attic.
Steve’s heart thumped in his chest. “Show yourselves, goddamnit!”
Boxes fell over.
Something stepped forward.
The creature stood on two legs, its squat gopher-shaped body hunched over so that its hands nearly touched the ground as it walked. Dirty, matted brown fur, coarse and straight, covered it from head to foot. The thing was about the size of a housecat, without the tail.
But it was the face that made Steve want to run for the nearest church.
The skull was dented and misshapen. A pointy, rat-like snout poked out from under the large, yellow-green eyes. Those eyes stared at Steve and he felt the malevolent intelligence lurking behind them.
More of them, fifteen, maybe twenty, shuffled into view.
The nearest monstrosity opened its jaws. Instead of a tongue dozens of pink, worm-like tentacles roiled and twined and waved, each one moving independently of its neighbors. Row after row of jagged teeth jutted out at all angles.
“Hu-man,” the diminutive horror stretched the word out into two long, rasping syllables. As shrill and alien as the voice was, it still managed to convey disgust and hatred. “Time to die.”
Steve reached his hand into his pocket and grasped the cigarette lighter he’d taken from the kitchen. He tried to estimate how long it had been since he’d turned the gas on for the stove and oven.
“Come and get me.” He closed his eyes, braced himself for the pain.
Chittering laughter accompanied the click-click of hundreds of claws on bare wood.
He said a silent goodbye to Annabeth and a prayer for her safety.
“This is for Jaime and Kyle,” he whispered.
As the first sets of teeth found his flesh, he lit the lighter, the flame spreading quickly across his vodka-soaked pocket.
The sound of agonized screaming filled the night air for almost five minutes before the house exploded and temporarily turned night back into day.
***
A quarter mile away, Annabeth paused as orange and yellow blossomed in the dark twilight. A moment later, the booming roar of the explosion shattered the early evening stillness.
Annabeth watched the thick black smoke mushroom up over the trees, signalling the end of her life as she knew it. From the moment Steve had closed the door on her there’d been no doubt as to his intentions. She’d seen the dead look in his hazel eyes. He planned on sacrificing his life to destroy the creatures that had invaded their home and murdered their children.
Sacrificing it to save her.
“Goodbye,” she said to the funeral pyre he’d ignited. Then she turned her back, unable to look any longer.
Another fifty yards brought her to Cassie and Joe Peterson’s house. A line of solar-powered garden lights outlined the driveway and front walk. The lamp over the door was on but no lights shone through the windows.
She ran up the driveway and knocked. No answer. Just her damn luck for them not to be home when she needed their help.
The key.
They always left a key under one of the flower pots on the porch. The first one she turned over showed nothing but cement. She kicked at the others, sending them flying into the yard. She’d pay Cassie back later.
The key was under a large geranium. It took several tries for her to control her shaking hand and get the key into its slot and turn it.
She threw open the door and felt around until she found the light switch. Nothing happened.
Something hissed in the darkness. Annabeth froze.
Around her tiny spotlights blazed into existence. Luminescent eyes with red pupils.
High-pitched laughter mixed with ear-piercing wails.
Annabeth’s legs collapsed under her and she fell forward.
Into the warm, wet remains of Cassie Henderson.
Like those of her neighbors, Annabeth’s screams went unheard.
