He hadn’t expected Landon to be so adamant. But then he hadn’t expected his and Nauls’ nearly blasé reaction to the things he’d told them either. Something had changed since they’d driven out here. The moment he’d agreed to go with them they no longer seemed quite as upset as they’d been initially. He dropped his cigarette and pushed away from the car. “You’re sure?”
“Rooster, I…we’ve…been there since.”
“You’ve been back there since that night?”
“You don’t understand,” Landon said. “We never left.”
Running… screams… confusion…
Panic explodes through the darkness…
The flashlight bounces, throwing strobe-like splashes of light along the corridor, floors, walls and ceiling before finally settling on Nauls. His face protrudes from the darkness, eyes closed but with a look of horrific pain. Blood slowly trickles from his nostrils into his beard.
The others scramble about trying to cover the corridor. Landon frantically knocks Snow out of the way and climbs the stairs back to the house.
Nauls opens his eyes. “He’s here,” he says in a loud whisper.
His body begins to shake. Slowly at first but gradually building in intensity, he begins to buck, wracked with increasingly violent spasms. His thin frame twists as he flails about, and his weapon falls to the floor. He brings his shaking hands to his face, screams and stabs his fingers directly into his eyes.
Rooster reaches out in an effort to stop him, but it’s too late.
Nauls tears his eyes from their sockets with a spray of blood and fluid, his screams replaced with laughter as his spasms grow worse and he begins to spin like a top.
“Jesus God!” Snow shrieks, falling away in horror.
“Go!” Starker grabs Snow and throws him toward the stairs. “Go!”
Rooster stands paralyzed, holding the flashlight on Nauls, who comes to rest, laughing through the blood and pain, holding an eyeball in each hand as if in offering, hideous moist strings dangling from them and dripping blood. “We’re going where there are no eyes,” he says, his voice little more than a garbled growl now. “Where everyone is blind… yet everyone sees.”
Blood suddenly spews from his mouth, eye sockets, nose and ears. Like something has exploded deep inside him, the blood sprays free as his screams return, this time as raspy, animal-like squeals. “He’s here,” he gurgles, choking on the blood as it pours out over his bottom lip. “He’s—”
Nauls flies backwards, crashes into the far wall like he’s been thrown by something savage and powerful. His body slides to the floor, swallowed by the shadows there.
Rooster feels Starker’s enormous hand clamp onto his arm and yank him back just before he fires a burst from the AK-47 into the darkness. Together, they run for the stairs. “Don’t look back!” Starker yells out.
But it no longer matters.
The darkness, and all that dwells within it, follows.
In the room upstairs, Snow lurches about, lost in the dark, his guns at his side and his mouth open, soundlessly forming words—perhaps prayers—while something speaks to him from the surrounding shadows only he can hear. The voice of a woman, a young woman asking him why, her voice oddly hollow as she shuffles about nearby, hidden in darkness, her breath cold and rapid on the back of his neck. But when Snow turns there is only night, moonlight and fog beyond the blown-out windows. The scarecrows watch a field of weeds, a dead forest and a path to nowhere, an empty road no one will ever cross again.
The voice, different now—neither male nor female and no longer entirely human—whispers his name.
Snow wants to run for the door but can’t move. He knows, understands for the first time, what is coming, and still cannot move. He trembles and begins to urinate. As the .45s drop from his hands the fire appears from nowhere, sweeping over the ceiling then down the wall and across him, engulfing his body in seconds. Oddly, Snow feels no burning sensation, no pain, only sorrow and hopelessness the depths of which he never believed possible. He stumbles, flaming arms and hands held out in front of him as if to embrace some invisible presence. He sinks to his knees. Eyes wide, he stares at something through the growing inferno and laughs maniacally.
The last thing Snow sees is Starker and Rooster rushing up the stairs.
Outside, Landon runs with all his might, the tall grass and overgrown weeds slowing him as he wades toward the road. The van, he thinks, just have to make it to the van and I’m free. He ignores the scarecrows’ dead stares and does not look back, even when he’s certain there is something right behind him, closing in with impossible speed and ready to swoop down and pluck him from the field like a hawk closing in on a mouse. He bolts through the last bit of field and jumps the final embankment down to the road. Pitching forward on landing, he catches himself, and now on pavement, takes a quick look back. No one coming, nothing behind him. He pulls the revolver from his belt just in case, sees the farmhouse in the distance. It’s on fire, the flames creeping up through the roof, lapping night. He turns and runs for the van but pulls up short after only a few strides. It’s gone. He looks around frantically. This isn’t possible. He parked it there himself, out of the way, just as Rooster instructed.
“Yeah, I need this shit.” He heads off down the road, running right down the center lane through the darkness; the fog-shrouded moon his only guide. Every now and then he looks back. The farmhouse, the scarecrows and the fire grow fainter and fainter until the night swallows them whole and he is alone in the darkness.
He slows his pace a few minutes later, finally opting for a fast walk. His chest heaves as he tries to catch his breath and a sharp pain digs at his side. Landon keeps moving, knowing eventually he’s bound to run into something—a car, a house—anything. He notices a slight incline to the road. He pushes on, trying to forget the things he saw back there. All he needs is a car. He can hotwire anything and be long gone from this place for good. He kicks it back up a notch, jogging up and over the sloped portion of road. In the distance, he sees an outline of a building. Set back quite a distance from the road, it is merely a silhouette, but a hulking one. Must be a house, he reasons, then increases speed and veers off pavement onto grass.
Running across the field, he watches it become more and more defined the closer he gets. Within minutes Landon realizes it’s a barn.
Beyond it is a farmhouse.
A farmhouse guarded by scarecrows…a farmhouse in flames.
“No fucking way.” He comes to a stop between the barn and the house. He’s gone in a circle, but how is that possible? He ran straight and in the opposite direction the entire time.
Shadows drift through the weeds before him. Landon steps back and raises the revolver. He can hear screams and smells a suspicious burning odor. Beyond that of burned wood, it is sickeningly sweet and similar to the stench of charred meat.
A baby cries somewhere nearby. Landon whirls in the direction to find only darkness. Blind with terror, he runs but trips over something and pitches forward into the grass and dirt. He scrambles to his feet, sees what he fell over. A wooden stake…a cross of wood…