Twelve Nights at Rotter House

J.W. Ocker

Description

Felix Allsey is a travel writer with a keen eye for the paranormal, and he’s carved out a unique, if only slightly lucrative, niche for himself in nonfiction; he writes travelogues of the country’s most haunted places, after haunting them himself.

When he convinces the owner of the infamous Rotterdam Mansion to let him stay on the premises for 13 nights, he believes he’s finally found the location that will bring him a bestseller. As with his other gigs, he sets rules for himself: no leaving the house for any reason, refrain from outside contact, and sleep during the day.

When Thomas Ruth, Felix's oldest friend and fellow horror film obsessive, joins him on the project, the two dance around a recent and unspeakably painful rough-patch in their friendship, but eventually fall into their old rhythms of dark humor and movie trivia. That’s when things start going wrong: screams from upstairs, figures in the thresholds, and more than what should be in any basement. Felix realizes the book he’s writing, and his very state of mind, is tilting from nonfiction into all out horror, and the shocking climax answers a question that’s been staring these men in the face all along: In Rotter House, who’s haunting who?

Sujets

• Policier & Thriller
• Thriller
• Horror
• Joe Hill
• Dean Koontz
• Fiction
• Stephen King

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 29 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781684423705
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Twelve Nights at Rotter House
Twelve Nights at Rotter House
J.W. Ocker
TURNER PUBLISHING COMPANY
Turner Publishing Company
Nashville, Tennessee
www.turnerpublishing.com
Twelve Nights at Rotter House
Copyright 2019 J.W. Ocker. All rights reserved.
This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design: M.S. Corley
Book design: Tim Holtz
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Upon Request
9781684423682 Paperback
9781684423699 Hardcover
9781684423705 eBook
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Dad
Contents
Night One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Night Two
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Night Three
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Night Four
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Night Five
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Night Six
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Night Seven
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Night Eight
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Night Nine
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Night Ten
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Night Eleven
Chapter 27
Night Twelve
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Night One
Chapter 1
I had to get into the house.
It was towering and dark, asymmetrical and multistoried. It was so dark that it made the starless void behind it look bright, like a flaw in the dark firmament, a ragged black piece excised from the perforated navy of the night sky.
I ran up its concrete steps without pausing to take the edifice in. I knew what it looked like-like a haunted house.
At some point, its exterior had been painted a bright, sunny, annoy-the-neighbors shade of yellow, but over the centuries, where it hadn t completely peeled off in toxic shards of lead, the color that remained had aged to a pale, diseased hue. The green and maroon of its trim had darkened to a dingy black. The exterior of the house was lavishly ornamented with lacy overhangs and pointed dormers in painfully acute angles. The tall, grimy windows of its three floors were stacked atop each other in three columns, crowding the fa ade like links of bad costume jewelry. It was gaudy even for a Victorian. Of course, it was a Victorian. In its current condition, with plywood filling half of the windows and the lace and siding broken and covered in streaks of mold, it looked like a rotting tier cake. A godawful thing, probably even when brand new and occupied. A large picture window gaped near the top of its single, central tower, the dark square like an eye or a mouth. Atop the flat roof of the tower was the spiky metal crown of a widow s walk, an ornament for decaying royalty.
I had to get in.
Four shiny deadbolts marred the edge of the tall door like healed scar tissue from an old break-in. The sweat soaking my hair and the back of my shirt flashed cold as I saw the locks, and I almost dropped the large, sagging cardboard box in my hands. The porch light was off, so I scuffed my boots quickly on the concrete deck to see if there was a mat that could hide a key. Nothing. It made sense. This wasn t the kind of house that would have a welcome mat. I dropped the box onto the porch and raised my fist to knock on the door before realizing how stupid that was, knocking on the door of an abandoned house. I cupped my hands to my eyes as I smudged my nose against the window beside the door. Shreds of yellowing curtain dangled inside-dead jelly fish tentacles in a dark, silty ocean. I couldn t make out anything in there, as if the house stopped at the fa ade.
I dashed down the steps to the lawn, my bags flapping around me like clunky ostrich wings. I quickly slunk around to the side of the house, knowing that I had just transformed from visitor to trespasser. I sprinted to the side door, which was less ostentatious than the front one but shared with it the existential and physical qualities of being locked firm. The house towered above me-a dark sphinx, oblivious to my plight as I traced my way in a burgeoning panic around its irregular flanks. By the time I completed the entire circuit of the house and jangled three locked doors, I was huffing like an idiot who should ve left his bags on the porch.
At either side of the front porch steps were large rhododendron bushes, the kind that grow everywhere but whose thick, waxy leaves and bright blossoms look tropical. These particular specimens looked mostly dead, their leaves shriveled into stiff, brown tubes. I stuck my head and shoulders through the dry, scratchy foliage of each, their sharp, twiggy branches grabbing at my bags as I dug in the dirt looking for large rocks. I found only one, about the size of my fist, so I hefted it. No key beneath, just the dark, soggy wrigglings of a pair of worms.
I stood up too fast and felt woozy, the monster silhouette against the night sky swimming quickly above me before settling back onto its foundation. I shook off the feeling and sprung up the porch steps to the door with new resolve. Everything depended on me getting into this haunted house. I raised up on my toes and stuck my fingers behind the high, ornate lintel of the door. I slid my hand across the top edge in search of a hidden key-and screamed.
I instinctually pulled my hand back in a fist, fixating on the dark gash in the meaty part of my thumb. I shoved it in my mouth, tasting blood and feeling it drip down my chin. I didn t need a porch light to know what had happened. I d just ripped my hand open on a protruding nail or shard of wood. It hurt bad.
The haunted house got first blood.
I pulled my hand out of my mouth and wiped my chin on my shoulder. As I squeezed my injury in my other hand, I leaned against the door. It felt loose in the jamb.
I reached down and turned the textured surface of the knob with my cradled hand. It stuck firm at first, but after a few moments of slippery grappling, rotated easily. I slowly opened the unlocked door with an ominous, satisfying creak that no Foley artist could have faked.
Forgetting my lacerated hand for a minute, I picked up my box and entered the foyer, stepping from the darkness of the night into the darkness of the house.
It felt like more than a transition from out to in. My ears popped and a sense of vertigo tingled around the base of my skull. It was hard to breathe, like the air was bad. When I did finally draw a deep breath, I detected the mothy scent of dust, old wood, and rotting fabric. A few labored breaths later, I was able to muster enough air to speak through the miasma.
Hello Rotter House. Silence and darkness in response. Both thick. The kind of silence that hurts your ears. The kind of darkness that strains your eyes.
I closed the door behind me with my hip, throwing my weight against it like it was a heavy airlock hatch. At the ominous sound of the metal latch catching the jamb, I realized that I didn t feel any better now that I was inside the haunted house. And I suddenly regretted what got me here.
Chapter 2
It had taken half a glass of tawny port for me to call Emilia Garza. Not because I was afraid of the woman. She was a stranger to me. But I was calling this stranger to ask a favor-an important one.
I had envisioned myself making this call while leaning back casually in my chair and staring at the ceiling, the way rich people make deals over the phone. Instead, I was hunched over the laptop in my study like I was having trouble ordering a pizza online.
It wasn t really a study. The name it deserved was probably home office. Sure, I was surrounded by books. But they weren t elegant leather tomes displayed in solid cherry built-ins. They were cheap paper wrapped in gaudy covers designed by a marketing department to attack the eye, and they were sitting on shelves made of Walmart pressboard. And my desk wasn t a solid, dark, polished block of important-work-happens-here. It was a cheap, beige monstrosity with popped screws that I picked up secondhand off Craigslist. I had stolen the desk chair, the one I wasn t casually leaning back in, from the kitchen table downstairs.
The first time I called Garza, I got this weird buzzing sound. It didn t even sound digital. I double-checked my notes to make sure it was the correct number. I d pulled it off one of those generic-looking people-search websites for $9.99, so there was a good chance it was wrong and that my credit card information had been stolen. But I hadn t mistaken the digits. That left my options as either spending more eye-searing hours online looking for her actual number or trying the number again and hoping that the universe would resolve everything in my favor. Since in an infinite universe everything that could happen does happen, I chose the easy route.
Somebody picked up this time, and the first two words of the conversation went extremely well.
Hello? the voice said.
Hello, I replied. Is this Emilia Garcia? I had practiced this conversation about twenty-five times, so naturally I flubbed it right away, misstating her last name, even though I d written it in four-inch-high black Sharpie letters on a sheet of paper that leaned against my laptop screen in front of me like a cue card.
This is Emilia Garza . Is this a goddamn telemarketer? You having trouble reading your screen?
No, I m not a telemarketer. I paused. I had worse news for her than that.
Then who are you? Why are you calling me?
I m calling you because you own you re the owner of Rotter House, correct? Silence on the other end of the line.
Finally: I own Rotterdam Mansion, yes. Shit, that was a big tell, and she had caught it right away. Is this a goddamn ghost hunter?
No,