The Sliding: A Clifton Heights Tale Read online

  The Sliding – A Clifton Heights Tale

  By Kevin Lucia

  Copyright 2010 – © Kevin Lucia

  Originally Published, 2010 – Morpheus Tales Magazine, Issue #1

  2011 - Republished as “Old Bassler House” in Northern Haunts

  2013 - Released in Things Slip Through

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Welcome to Clifton Heights, New York. Just another average Adirondack town, and nice enough in its own right.

  Except after dark, or under the pale light of the moon. Or in a very private doctor's office at Clifton Heights General Hospital, where no one can hear you scream. Or on a road out of town that never ends, or in an old house sitting on the edge of town with a mind - and will - of its own.

  Maybe you shouldn't have left the interstate, my friend. Maybe you should've driven on to the next town.

  But you didn't. You saw our sign, turned down our road, figuring on just a short stay. And maybe it will be.

  Or maybe you'll never leave.

  Anyway, pay a visit to The Skylark Diner. I'll be there. Pull up a chair and let me tell you about our town. It's nice enough, it really is.

  Except after dark. Or on cold winter days when no one is around, and you're all alone…

  ****

  The Sliding

  I’ve been remembering things, lately. Things I don’t want to remember, terrible things that happened long ago. I don’t know why. Actually, I don’t know much about anything, anymore. My writing career is over, I’m on the fourth year of a teaching career I hate, I’ve been drinking way too much, I’m remembering things I’d rather not and I don’t know why.

  I’ve tried to talk with Fitzy and Father Ward about it. They were there, of course. But the conversation always fizzles to a dead end and a change of subject. All they want to remember is the day three high school kids trespassed into the old spook house on the

  edge of town, and no matter how cleverly I’ve brought it up over the past few years I can’t get their shuttered minds past a certain point.

  They think – or NEED to think – nothing happened.

  But something did happen. We glimpsed a dark truth: that a shadowed world exists next to ours, one defying explanation. And I’m remembering it.

  All of it…

  #

  August, 1985

  I hesitated on the old porch outside the closed window, hand resting on cracked siding. Through the dirty glass the room beyond appeared empty, littered with the usual debris you’d expect in an abandoned house: crumpled wads of paper, old books and magazines, tin cans, beer bottles, broken toys and plates.

  “This is stupid,” I muttered. “You seriously want to do this?”

  “C’mon. You’re the biggest guy here. You can’t possibly be this much of a wimp, can you?”

  I glared at Mike Fitzgerald over my shoulder. We’d been friends since my family and I moved here two years ago, but sometimes he pissed me off, royally. “Listen. Your parents may not care what you do. I cut my hand messing around with this window and Mom’ll have a conniption, then Dad’ll ground me for giving Mom a conniption.”

  “Honestly, Fitzy,” Bill Ward said, leaning against the siding, “Gav’s right. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea. I mean… that window wasn’t boarded up the last time we came here, and that was almost three years ago. Maybe we should just…”

  “Baaaaalls.” Fitzy folded his arms and hung his head, as if mortified at our apparent cowardice. “What made your wangs shrivel up and fall off? C’mon, Bill. We’ve been in there tons of times. There’s nothing even a little creepy about it.”

  He smirked at me. “Unless, of course, you’re from out of town like Nancy-Boy, here.”

  And that tore it.

  Which, of course, Fitzy had planned on.

  I shrugged. “Fine. Someone give me a hand, though. Looks pretty stuck to me.” I grasped one corner of the window, and nodded at the other. “Bill… ?” He nodded and joined me.

  As we carefully tried to pry open the window, I asked, “So what’s the deal?”

  The story was typical, probably the same in small towns everywhere. Bassler House was an old, three story Victorian farmhouse that had been abandoned for years, and eventually all the kids in town embarked on a pilgrimage here to test their mettle.

  However, according to Bill, its walls and floors were adorned with nothing more than hastily scrawled Satan-worshiping scripts like pentagrams, 666 and such predictable slogans as “Satan Rulz.”

  “It’s kinda lame,” Bill said as the window finally screeched open. “It was fun to poke around here when we were little kids, but there’s not much to see, really.”

  “That’s only because no one’s ever gone into the basement,” Fitzy remarked. “Bet there’s some seriously cool shit down there. No one’s ever had the stones to check it out, though.”

  I glanced at the crumbling foundation and remarked, “That’s probably smart. Doesn’t look all that safe, honestly.”

  Fitzy snorted but I ignored him, figuring that the only way he’d ever venture into the basement would be if I went first.

  And thank God we didn’t go into the basement that day.

  Because I’m not confident we would’ve made it out.

  Several minutes later, after Fitzy had swiped a broken branch off the porch and wedged the window open, I crawled through and stood in a musty room on the first floor.

  Grit crunched underfoot as I turned in a circle, warily eyeing dark corners, walls shedding wallpaper in curled, shriveled strips…

  And the open door in the far corner.

  “So all the cool stuff’s in the other room?”

  “Yeah,” Fitzy sneered, “check it out… if you’re not pussy.”

  Bill sighed as he climbed in after me. “You’re an idiot.”

  As usual, Fizty’s reply was brilliant in its eloquence. “Bite me, cock-knocker.”

  I ignored them and approached the door. A slight chill rippled across my skin, but I told myself it came from a draft blowing through the window, that’s all. When I stepped through that door, however, I couldn’t so easily dismiss the sensation.

  Because in the next room was a pentagram, but it wasn’t hastily scrawled on the wall, nor did it appear the work of drunken teenagers. Laid with meticulous care, a brick pentagram covered the whole floor in a near-perfect circle.

  Bill reached my shoulder, saw what I did and whispered. “Holy…”

  “What’s up?” called Fitzy from outside. Getting no answer, he crawled through the window and when he joined Bill and I, he muttered, “Damn.”

  Of course we did the most logical thing: we entered the room.

  Almost instantly I smelled something rotten. A high-pitched buzzing - which I hadn’t noticed before now – filled the air. I squinted and saw flies massing above each of the pentagram’s points. As I passed them, that rotten-meat smell wafted upward, making my stomach churn. I couldn’t really see very well what was rotting there but quite frankly, I didn’t want to.

  Eventually we found ourselves clustered by a winding stairway leading to the floors above. Bill nodded at the pentagram and whispered, “That’s new.”

  I believed Bill’s sincerity but remained skeptical of Fitzy. “You didn’t set this up?”

  The bald shock on his face unnerved me. “No way,” he said, his mouth drawn tight.

  We looked around. Unlike the other room, the wall
s had been painted a stark, blinding white, which maybe you wouldn’t expect. A big pentagram laid out in the middle of a room, you’d expect the walls to be painted blood-red or midnight black, scrawled with the requisite 666 or upside-down crosses or weird words written in a strange foreign language. But the blankness of the walls seemed more serious, somehow, more real and very wrong, in a way I don’t think any of us then could’ve put a finger on,

  but after all these years, the best I can come up with?

  Alien.

  Not human.

  But, we were teens and supremely convinced of our immortality, so when no black-robed Satanists burst from hidden crevices to offer us up as virgin sacrifices to strange, unknown gods we relaxed, figuring the pentagram was probably the creation of some lonely and bored Goth kids with no lives and nothing better to do (who were probably virgins too). We couldn’t explain the whiteness of the room, so, as teens tend to, we dismissed it, and after several minutes, Fitzy grinned and said, “We should trash it.”

  I glanced at Bill and frowned. “You mean…”

  “Sure. Toss the bricks out the window. Screw up their little Goth party.” He raised his eyebrows. “Think how pissed they’ll be.”

  I shook my head. “That’s exactly what I’m thinking.”

  However, this was Clifton Heights. The real world. Nothing much ever happened here. How likely was it that a bunch of Satanist/Goths would hunt us down and drag us from our homes kicking and screaming for messing up their brick pentagram?

  This time, however, I wasn’t content to lead. “Fine,” I nodded at the bricks, “be my guest.”

  Fitzy’s eyes narrowed. For a moment, I thought he’d pass.

  But in a flash he grinned, vaulted to the pentagram, grabbed a brick and flung it with rare enthusiasm at the room’s only window.

  The brick crashed through.

  Glass tinkled to the floor.

  And when hordes of Satanists didn’t stream forth to devour us, we descended upon the pentagram, grabbing and chucking bricks through the window.

  I don’t remember much about what happened next. We grabbed and threw; grabbed and threw, manic and machine-like. I hate to think that in our fervor we scooped up the rotten matter on the floor but we must’ve, because minutes later, when we stood in the

  room’s center, panting, the floor lay bare as we absentmindedly wiped our hands off on our jeans.

  Our adrenaline burst fading, we eyed each other with dreadful fascination. We’d lost ourselves in our brick-throwing frenzy and it was a bit alarming, to say the least.

  And we stood there in the tired weirdness, waiting.

  But nothing happened.

  Fitzy broke the silence by clapping his hands and saying, “Well, that’s that. Let’s see if there’s anything cool upstairs.”

  Abruptly, Bassler House became nothing more than an old house in need of exploring. Our momentary fugue dismissed, we tramped up the winding stairs in search of more oddities.

  But about fifteen minutes later we descended, mildly disheartened. We hadn’t found much. Most of the rooms had been empty save scraps of litter, offering little amusement. Perhaps the most interesting things we’d found was a dented, pitted whisky flask in one room and in a second room, a hole in the middle of its floor, looking as if something had plunged through recently.

  I’m not sure how we didn’t see it as we descended the steps, but the smell hit us the instant our feet touched the floor.

  “What the hell…” Fitzy breathed.

  There in the middle of the room was the pentagram, untouched, whole. The flies buzzed as before and when we looked to the window we’d thrown the bricks through…

  “The window,” I said, “it’s not broken.”

  Bill pointed a shaking finger to the window we came in, rasping, “It...it’s closed. We left it open. Fitzy propped it open!”

  What happened next is still… fuzzy.

  We ran out of the room…but seconds later found ourselves standing around the pentagram facing each other, hordes of flies buzzing at our feet. We couldn’t move or speak, our muscles clenched in fear. Sweat glistened on Fitzy’s face; tendons strained in

  Bill’s neck as my fingernails dug into my palms.

  And there was something there, moving down the hallway. A heavy body sliding toward us, and though it seemed to last forever, it never got any closer.

  Between his teeth, Fitzy grated, “Wreck it. Gotta… wreck it.”

  Those words broke the spell holding us there. We again descended upon the pentagram, but all I remember are strange, twisted faces, howling mouths, burning eyes. We grabbed and hurled bricks through the window again.

  And when we finished, Fitzy clapped his hands and said, “Well, that’s that. Let’s go see if there’s anything cool upstairs.”

  Again we ascended, saw very little except for the dented whiskey flask and the room with no floor, then descended, a little disappointed. When we hit the bottom of the stairs, we smelled the rot again.

  “What the hell?”

  “The window’s not broken.”

  “Where we came in – it’s closed. Fitzy propped it open! I know he did!”

  We tried once more to run but again found ourselves rooted around the pentagram as a heavy thing slowly slid down the hallway, much closer, this time.

  We struggled and ground our teeth until finally Fitzy managed, “Wreck it. Gotta… wreck it.”

  And again we did.

  Only to find ourselves quickly returned to our spots, the sliding even closer, now.

  After the same interminable fight, Fitzy choked, “Wreck it. Gotta…”

  But I found my voice. “No! Leave it!”

  Fitzy and Bill’s wide eyes showed their disbelief. “We have to,” Fitzy hissed, “it’s making this happen!”

  And a force seized me, an incredible pressure swelling inside my head. My ears rang and eyes watered, and, in my heart, I wanted to destroy that pentagram so bad my hands itched with the desire.

  And that’s when I suspected. Hell, I knew.

  The house didn’t want me to talk. It wanted us to keep wrecking the pentagram, over and over, forever… until the sliding reached us. I didn’t know how I knew that, how it was possible, but somehow I knew it was true, all the same.

  I managed to shake my head. “No… it wants us to keep wrecking it… to stay stuck. It’s holding us here… for IT.”

  Shocked realization lit in their eyes. “The sound in the hallway,” Bill rasped, “it’s getting closer.”

  My mind whirled and I felt sick but I pressed on, following my intuition. “We leave it,” I gasped. “We’ll leave it alone, go away, and never come back.”

  The pressure disappeared.

  Our bodies leapt free.

  But the sounds in the hallway, however, slid closer.

  “Go!”

  We pounded away from the pentagram into the adjoining room, arms and legs pistoning. With the loop broken, the window was propped open as Fitzy had originally left it, but as we fled the sliding filled the room, and to this day I’m sure that I felt the

  mist of hot breath on my neck.

  Fitzy, quicker than Bill and I, scrambled through the window first, knocking away the branch and bracing it open with his arm. I’ve always wondered if he saw It, because I remember his white face and dinner-plate eyes as he screamed, “Hurry!”

  Bill made it through the window easily. Tall and lanky, I’d always been a little clumsy, so I slid to a stop, put my hands and one foot on the windowsill to pull myself through…

  … and stopped.

  Because I wanted to turn around, wanted to see It for what it was, needed to see It, for real.

  But Bill and Fitzy grabbed my shoulders and pulled me through the window. We crashed together onto the old porch in a dusty heap, rotten boards shuddering. The window slammed shut.

  And the air fell still.

  We glanced at each other for several quiet minutes.

  “We o
ughta get going,” Bill finally offered, “Dad’ll have the grill hot by now.”

  “Yeah,” Fitzy added, “and I wanted to go into town before dinner.”

  I nodded silently. We got up, brushed the dust off our clothes and walked away from Bassler House, ignoring the much lower sun, ignoring also the muted sliding, as if something was still chasing us from far away.

  #

  So here I sit in my office, thinking about what it is I’ve just written and what I’ve been writing these past few months. As a professional, my writing career is over. I’ve come to accept this. And to be honest… I’ve changed so much in the past few years that my life as a published author seems a dim fantasy, a memory of a life that happened to someone else.