Jess screamed as the blackened form stepped over the safe. We scrambled to our feet and ran, searching for an escape from the maze-like room. Shrill laughter echoed as the thing closed the gap between us. What little light came in from the streetlights outside illuminated the narrow path forward through decades of hoarded junk. Cardboard boxes crumpled underfoot, things jutting over the edges of tables crashed to the floor as we bumped them. The walkway was too narrow to run side by side, and neither of us wanted to run in the back.
We came to a Tee in the path. Neither of us knew which way to go. Everything looked different in the darkness. I turned to ask Jess which way to go and only saw the dim outline of her face before she screamed as the thing grabbed her.
The handcuff cut into my wrist. I fell to the floor as it dragged us back toward the safe. My boots skidded over the floor. I kicked the piles of old inventory, clawed with my free hand at anything sticking out from under a table, and thrashed against the thing’s grip. I couldn’t stop it from dragging us toward the glowing red portal now swallowing the safe and the trampled remains of the Ouija board.
At the last second before we were plunged into an unknown fate I felt one of the wrought iron legs of the bedframe. I rolled underneath it and gritted my teeth as the short handcuff chain caught. I was deafened by Leyland’s chilling laugh, Jess’s cries of pain, and the howling red portal.
The ghoul grabbed Jess’s wrist with both hands and jerked violently. It shrieked and thrashed against the bed’s resistance. I realized with horror the legs were beginning to slip. I kicked against the movement with my boots, racking my brain for a way out of this when I felt a familiar metallic cylinder roll into my chest.
“The Maglite!” I thought.
Maybe there was another way out of this room. If we could just get free of its grip. Maybe rush past it… we’d figure the rest out later. Right now, this was my last hope of escape. I grabbed the flashlight and clicked it on. Light flooded the ghoul’s face.
Wrinkled fingers shielded sunken yellow eyes. It shrieked in pain from exposure to the bright light. In that brief moment, it lost its grip.
This was our only chance. I scrambled out from under the bed and pulled Jess to her feet. We ran back down the labyrinthine path through the massive room. Wood splintered as loud footfalls thundered behind us. It was too close to risk glancing over my shoulder. Jess screamed again. Wind filled the room, howling with unabated fury. The floor shook. Scythes hanging from the rafters swung back and forth. We were near the stairs. As we reached the end of the aisle, a claw hammer flew past us within inches of our heads. We were mere feet away from the front windows. I glanced at the missing section of floorboards and knew what I had to do.
“Jump!”I shouted.
Jess yelled something in response. She either didn’t hear me or misunderstood because she tried following the path, back the way we came. I had no time to explain. I grabbed her by the waist and hurled us both through the hole.
A cloud of dust and plaster erupted as we crashed through the ceiling and onto the shelves next to the paint mixer. The merchandise buckled under our weight and collapsed to the floor. We coughed dust from our lungs. Ruptured cans of paint gurgled as they spilled out over the floor. The unmistakable smell of paint thinner and varnish assaulted my nose.
Before I could check my body for injury, booming footsteps echoed from the stairwell on the other side of the building.
“Jess! Get up! We gotta get out of here!” She whimpered at my touch as I helped her to her feet, but seemed to understand the urgency of our situation. Limping, flashlight still in hand we made our way past one aisle after another. We were almost at the front door, one more aisle stood between us and the foyer, when the wraith emerged, blocking our path. Jess cowered behind me. We backed away from the slowly advancing form. I pushed the flashlight button, hoping for the same blinding light to deliver us once again from the entity.
Nothing happened. It let out a sinister laugh. Jess buried her face into my arm and sobbed. The thing closed the short distance between us, reaching toward us. With white-knuckled fear, I swung the flashlight as
hard as I could, clubbing the display window facing the street. A spiderweb of fractures consumed the glass as it shattered into the sidewalk. I closed my eyes and jumped through the cascade of falling glass, pulling Jess along behind me.
We landed on our backs on the broken shards of glass. The entity in the hardware store screeched. I opened my eyes, to see it franticly clawing at us, snarling through broken teeth. For whatever reason, it never crossed the threshold of the broken window.
“The Brooks family will pay!”
It let loose ear-splitting howl and rammed the brick column near the window in rage. The ground shook beneath us. Loose bricks toppled from above. One of the mortar-filled cracks on the front of the building split open. More cracks ruptured across the historic storefront, stretching wider as the wraith thrashed against the old building’s supports. The groan of old timbers drowned out the thing’s wild screams as they gave way to the collapsing second floor. Shattered glass and ice melt salt ground against the back of my coat as we kicked away from Old Man Brooks’ collapsing livelihood and into the street. Broken bricks cascaded down from above and the wrought iron façade crumpled onto the sidewalk. The wail of the ghoul we awakened died away and the only sound left on Main Street was the cold autumn breeze.
By some miracle, neither of us suffered any major injuries that night, apart from some bruises and matching, minor lacerations from the handcuffs. It wasn’t the solution we had in mind, but things did eventually work themselves out for Old Man Brooks. The insurance policy on the building was more than enough for Mr. Brooks to retire. While the insurance company did their investigation, Mr. Brooks insisted on renting shop space in one of the other derelict downtown storefronts. I think he did it more out of a desire to keep busy than anything else. Most of the ‘customers’ were actually the Old Man’s friends, the same crowd that used to gather around the kerosene heater in the old store and ‘chew the fat’. He was never busy enough to turn a profit and his wares consisted of what remained in the corrugated steel lean-to behind the ruins of the old hardware store, although I once heard about him rushing into the north side of the store, the one side not completely collapsed to get a .79 cent PVC pipe fitting for a customer.
It also turned out, my time spent working in the run-down store, listening to Mr. Brooks’ oral history hadn’t been in vain either. An essay I wrote, dramatizing the literal and figurative collapse of once great business was impressive enough my English teacher submitted it to the editor of the Henderson County Gazette. One day after class I even got a call from Harold Walters, the editor of the Gazette, offering me an internship the next summer.
I didn’t keep in touch with Jess after the dust settled. The last time I talked to her, she said something about Kathy Connors being pissed off we lost her vintage Ouija board. We both remained with our respective circles of friends, although from then on, I didn’t hang my head when I passed the group of jocks and cheerleaders in the hallway.
A grass lot occupies the block where the store used to be. There are probably still those who whisper around town about insurance fraud and the old man not being upset enough at the destruction of his business. But every once in a while, when I get stopped by the red light next to the vacant lot, I remember something far more sinister was really behind the old building’s collapse.