The Diablo Horror (The River Book 7) Read online

  “And do we know where in Diablo it is?” Roy asked.

  “No,” Steven said. “We don’t. We’re going to have to do some detective work.”

  “Well, that shouldn’t be too hard,” Roy said. “It’s not very big.”

  “I’d been to Diablo Lake with friends,” Jason said. “I didn’t realize there was a town called Diablo.”

  “It’s hard to call it a town,” Roy replied. “It’s strictly a company town, not more than a couple dozen houses, tucked at the bottom of Diablo dam. Only employees of the utility that built the dam live there.”

  “You-know-who said that because it was recharging, the owner of it would be active,” Steven said. “Whatever that means. And he said to use caution.”

  “Could mean anything,” Roy said. “I guess we’ll see. And when we find it, what then?”

  “He said to bring it back to my house in Seattle,” Steven answered. “I presume that meant he’d take it from there. And that should complete the deal.”

  “Hmm,” Roy said, leaning back in his seat and looking out the passenger window. Tall evergreens lined the freeway as they sped toward Everett, but Roy didn’t seem to be seeing them. Steven knew he was kicking around what he’d told him. He probably thinks it’s a trap, Steven thought.

  “And Eliza?” Roy asked, turning back.

  “Still in the hospital,” Steven said. “I called just before we left. Too weak to speak, so I talked to Joe. I’m guessing you-know-who realizes I need help on this, or I expect you’d be in the hospital right along with her.”

  “Christ,” Roy said. “Really?”

  “That’s been his M.O. from the beginning. Threaten you two until I agree.”

  “What a pig’s ear,” Roy said, turning again to look out the window. Thomas’ words to him from the night before returned to his mind: He’ll keep coming back. It’ll never be over.

  “So Eliza’s in the hospital because of this deal you have, that you won’t tell me about?” Jason asked.

  “Basically, yes,” Steven answered. “We need to locate this Agimat as quickly as we can and get back to Seattle with it. By tomorrow, if possible.”

  “How are we going to do that?” Jason asked.

  “I don’t know,” Steven said. He turned to look at Roy. Roy was back to staring out the window, watching the evergreens go by.

  ◊

  Steven pulled his car off the main road where a large wooden brown sign read “Diablo” with an arrow pointing to the left. The sign didn’t look like a normal highway or forest service sign.

  He slowly progressed down Diablo Street, Gorge Lake on their right, and a steep cliff lined with evergreens on their left. The small two-lane road twisted and turned along the edge of the lake. After a mile it emerged into a clearing that looked like a small collection of houses placed simply along two small roads. Steven chose one of the roads and slowly drove along it, observing the houses. They were all the same; same size, shape, design. Little houses made of ticky-tacky, he thought. They were painted different colors, but the colors were in a limited palette – nothing interesting or eye-catching. Each home sat back from a one-lane asphalt road, with a cement driveway connecting the house to the street. Lawns filled the space between the house and the road. There were no fences, and the lawn of one house ran into the lawn of the next. After passing nine or ten houses on both sides of the street, he turned and drove down the other lane running through the clearing. It was similarly lined with the same houses. The only real difference between any of the houses was which children’s toys were lying in front of or behind each house.

  One house seemed different than the others, standing out for odd reasons. Whereas all the other houses had closed windows, this house’s windows were open, and drapes were blowing out of it. There were clothes on the ground near the front door, strewn across the lawn toward the driveway. “That one looks promising,” Roy said. Steven stopped the car in front of the house. It had the feel of being empty, but honestly, so did all the other houses. There were no people to be seen anywhere, as though the rapture had hit or an evacuation had been called.

  “Do you want to drop into the River and check it out?” Steven asked Roy.

  “Not if there’s people living in there!” Roy said.

  “It looks vacant,” Steven said, cocking his head. “I think the front door is actually open a bit.”

  “People obviously live there,” Roy said. “Look at all the stuff outside.”

  “Looks to me like they left in a hurry,” Jason said.

  Steven observed the number seventeen on the side of the house in small reflective decals. He looked over to the house across the street, and saw eighteen.

  “Come on,” Roy said. “Let’s see if there’s anything else here.”

  Steven continued on. The similarity of the houses and the lack of any living people, any movement inside any of the houses, was disconcerting. There were vehicles parked in front of some of them, and an occasional barbeque or croquet set stored in the driveway, but no people anywhere.

  “This place is creepy,” Jason said. “It feels like something out of a Stephen King novel. Every house exactly the same, and no one around. Kinda fucked up.”

  When Steven reached the end of the road, he was facing a steep rise of rock cliffs and was forced to turn around.

  “The whole complex is boxed in by the mountain,” Roy said. “Seems that first road is the only way in or out.”

  As Steven backtracked through the houses, he noticed a road that lead further to the east, out of the housing complex, and around a corner of the mountain.

  “Wonder where that goes?” Steven asked.

  “To the dam,” Roy said, “which is the only other place these people need to go. To work.”

  Steven drove up the eastern road, watching the houses retreat in his rear-view mirror. After a sharp turn he found himself at a large parking lot and an old brick building that almost looked as though it was built into the side of the mountain. Rising behind it in the distance was Diablo Dam. They were sitting at its base. Steven suddenly realized how much water was in front of him just beyond the dam, and it made him a little nervous. He saw incline tracks that ran from the base where the brick building was located up to the top of the dam.

  There was a chain link fence surrounding the parking lot, but the gate was open.

  “Why not start here?” Steven asked. “Someone must be in there.”

  “Might as well,” Roy agreed. “I’d prefer that to just driving around, trancing as we go, surprising people.”

  Steven parked the car in the lot and the three of them walked up to the administration building. As they approached the doors, Roy said, “I’ll handle this.”

  Steven knew that meant he was about to give one of his performances, and although he was familiar with what Roy was about to do, he doubted Jason was. He turned to Jason and whispered, “Just go along with whatever he says!”

  They walked in. Roy noticed a woman sitting behind a counter.

  “No, you’re wrong,” Roy said to Steven in a loud voice. “You can’t! They’re not for sale, you don’t understand!”

  “Can I help you?” the woman asked, rising from her chair behind the counter and walking out to meet them. She was young and slim, and had a name badge with her picture on it, pinned just above her left breast. Steven found himself trying to read her name from the badge, and he worried that he might be looking too hard at her chest.

  “My son here seems to think you can buy these houses,” Roy said, pretending to be exasperated. “I keep telling him you can’t. They’re company owned, isn’t that true?”

  “That’s true,” the woman said, smiling back at Roy and the others. “They’re all owned by the utility, and they’re just for employees of the dam.”

  “See?” Roy said, turning on Steven as though he’d won some kind of victory. “I told you that, but you wouldn’t listen!”

  He turned back to the woman. “He never listens,
never did as a boy, either! Hi, I’m Roger.” He extended his hand.

  The young woman took his hand. “Liz,” she replied, smiling back at him.

  “I suppose I could have proved it to him by asking Bernie, he’s my brother, staying with the people in number seventeen, but they don’t appear to be home. There’s a mess in front of the house, too. We came all this way to visit them, and I’m surprised they’re not here. We’re worried about them!”

  Liz’s face began to pout. “Well, there was an incident there or something,” she said, walking back around behind the counter. “Mr. Kinsley came up here this morning and said they were moving out to a motel in Burlington.”

  “Really?” Roy asked. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Liz replied. “I’m just temping today, because of the holiday weekend. I got here at seven, and he was at the door, waiting for me to open up. He said he was moving out, that he’d already taken his wife and kids to a motel in Burlington, and would send a van to remove their stuff from the house before the end of the month.”

  “It looks like they left in a hurry,” Steven said. “There’s clothes and stuff all over the driveway.”

  “He was quite upset,” Liz said. “I told him he couldn’t just do that, leave like that. It has to be run through HR. But he said he didn’t care, they weren’t spending another night in the house.”

  “Did he say why?” Roy asked.

  “He wouldn’t tell me,” Liz said. “I told him if it was the plumbing or something like that, we’d get it fixed – we’ve had some problems with the pipes in the houses, some of them are old – but he wouldn’t give me a reason. Just said we could reach him in Burlington and that he’d be driving up for his shift. There’s nothing I can do about it today, since it’s a Saturday. They’ll have to deal with it on Monday, when there’ll be someone in HR in Seattle to talk to about it.”

  “My god,” Roy said. “That’s a surprise. I wonder what could have happened?” He turned to Steven. “I guess we need to go down to Burlington and see what’s going on, right, Bartholomew?”

  Bartholomew? “Sure,” Steven replied, trying not to smile.

  Roy turned back to Liz. “Did they tell you where they were staying? How we might reach them?”

  Liz looked down at her desk, searching for a sticky note that she found near her phone. “He said they were staying at the Holiday Inn in Burlington, Room 209.”

  “Well, thank you for your help,” Roy said. “We’ll just zip on down there and try to find out what’s going on!”

  “Oh, sure, no problem,” Liz said. Steven caught her looking at Jason. He turned to look at Jason, and caught him staring back. He elbowed Jason. “Come on junior, time to go.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jason said, breaking his stare with Liz and following Steven and Roy out the door. He gave Liz a friendly wave as they left, which she returned.

  “Family bolts from the house suddenly?” Roy said, walking back to the car. “The same night your object supposedly reverts to someone up here? Not a coincidence.”

  “You want to go explore the house?” Steven asked. “I think it was open.”

  “No, let’s try to catch them at the motel,” Roy said. “Figure out what we’re dealing with before we storm in.”

  Steven had to drive back through the housing complex to get out to the main road. They passed by number seventeen once again. Steven slowed the car so they could get a good look.

  “Yeah, left in a hurry,” Roy said. “Obviously dropped a few things on the way out.”

  “Didn’t even care to close the front door,” Jason added.

  “You don’t want to jump into the River, or anything? While we’re here?” Steven asked Roy.

  “Since we don’t know what we’re dealing with yet,” Roy said, “and there’s another way of getting information first, I’d like to maintain the element of surprise in case we might need it. We can be down and back from Burlington quick enough.”

  “Alright,” Steven said, pulling the car forward and back to the road that would take them out of Diablo. Soon they were back on Highway 20, heading west.

  ◊

  The man standing in the open doorway eyed the three of them warily. Steven could see children in the background, playing on the motel beds.

  “We know something strange happened,” Roy repeated. “We think we might know how to resolve it, but I need to hear from you what happened.”

  “Are you from City Light?” the man asked.

  “No,” Roy said. “City Light probably wouldn’t understand what happened to you, would they? In fact, it was probably so bizarre you’re not even sure you should tell me about it. But we need to know, regardless of how strange it might have been. Can you tell us?”

  “Hold on,” the man said, stepping inside and closing the door. Steven, Roy, and Jason stood in the hallway at the Holiday Inn, waiting for him to return. In a moment he reemerged from the room, holding a plastic card key.

  “Let’s walk down to the lobby,” he said, leading the way. “I don’t want my wife or kids to hear this.”

  They followed him as he turned down a stairwell. “My name is Brett,” he said, descending the stairs rapidly. “Brett Kinsley.”

  Roy had already introduced the group when they met the man at the door of his room. “What happened last night?”

  Brett reached the base of the stairs and walked to a set of sofa and chairs in a corner of the lobby. He sat in one of them.

  “I’ll warn you, it probably sounds like I’m crazy,” he said, “but you said you wanted to know, so here goes. I woke up around two a.m., thought I heard a sound.”

  That was about the time we were driving away from Eximere, Steven thought.

  “We always leave our bedroom door ajar, so the girls can come in in the middle of the night if they need to,” Brett continued, “and there’s a nightlight in the hallway for them in case they’re scared. Well, I kept seeing a figure move past the doorway, blocking the light from the nightlight. Saw it several times. It couldn’t have been the girls, it was twice their size. Scared the shit out of me. So naturally, I slipped out of bed and went for the shotgun.”

  “Naturally,” Roy inserted.

  “I loaded it and walked into the hallway. I’m thinking, this is weird, Diablo is a little company town, way up by the dam in the middle of nowhere, there’s never any crime here – who would try to break in? But I keep seeing movement in the corner of my eye. Nothing I could see directly, but if I just stopped and stared straight forward, I could tell something was moving in my peripheral vision.

  “I pushed the door open to the girls’ room and saw that a corner of the room was dark. The nightlights in their room didn’t illuminate it very well. Someone was there, in the corner that I could barely see, shrunk down in the dark. Damn, goosebumps go up my spine just thinking about it. I was terrified. I raised the gun, but then I felt frozen, like I was moving in a dream.

  “The man rose up out of the corner. He looked all wispy, indistinct, like he was coming apart. But I could see in his hand, he held an ax. He moved over to Julie’s bed. I say moved because he didn’t really walk, it was more like drifting.”

  “Did you think he was a ghost?” Jason asked.

  “Not at the time,” Brett said. “I was just scared out of my mind. I was trying to move my arms, to point my shotgun at him, but everything was so slow, like I was moving through syrup. It made me think I was dreaming. He stood over Julie, looking down at her. I saw him raise the ax. Then he…”

  Brett turned away from them, clearly upset by the story he was telling. There were other people in the lobby, and he lowered his voice.

  “…he brought the ax down on her leg. It cut her leg off, but it didn’t…I don’t know how to explain this...I could see the blood, but I also knew her leg was whole, that it was an illusion of some kind.

  “When the ax passed through her, Julie woke up. She was staring right at me. I realized I was pointing the shotgun a
t her. I was trying to move it to point at the man with the ax, but it wouldn’t budge, it kept pointing at her, right at the bed.

  “The man with the ax brought the blade up again and swung down on her, hitting her in the chest. She screamed, but I knew she wasn’t screaming because of the ax, but because of me, because she could see me pointing the shotgun at her.

  “There was something in my mind, something clouding me, like the thickness in the air making it hard to move. It kept telling me that it was OK, that I could kill her and she’d be fine. He pulled the ax from her chest and brought it down again, right into her skull. I tried to look away, but I couldn’t. I was being forced to watch. It was like he was teaching me, wanting me to learn how he’d done it. I could feel my finger tightening on the trigger even though I didn’t want to do it. Julie could see something was wrong with me. She slowly slid off the bed. Thank god she did. A second latter, bam! – buckshot everywhere. Julie ran down the hallway to her mother.

  “The bang from the shotgun woke everyone up, and it freed me from whatever trance I was in. I turned on the light, saw what was left of Julie’s mattress. My other daughter was cowering in her bed. I walked over to her and she pulled away, terrified of me.

  “I dropped the shotgun and left the room. I told my wife to pack a bag, we were leaving, that there was something in the house and we had to get out. She didn’t know it was me holding the gun that shot up Julie’s bed.”

  “Had anything like this ever happened before?” Roy asked. “Had you ever seen the man with the ax previously?”

  “No, never,” Brett said. “We’d been in that house for six months, and nothing like this had ever happened. It was just a normal, quiet, boring little house.”

  “Do you remember anything else about the ax man?” Steven asked. “Anything he was wearing?”

  “He was so indistinct,” Brett said. “It was like he was going in and out of focus. He…” Brett stopped, thinking. “There was something on his chest. Metal I think, it reflected the nightlights. Couldn’t tell you what it was.”