Christmas Eve on Haunted Hill by Bryan Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

More pictures adorned the walls there.  The kitchen
was somewhere in that direction, maybe also a laundry room or office.  Upstairs
were the bedrooms where so many of them had died.
              Simone raised the phone
and aimed the light up the staircase.
              Terry stood at her side
and stared up there, too.
              They could see the stairs
up to about the halfway point.  The light from the phone was too weak to penetrate
much farther.  As they stood there in silence another few moments, Simone was
struck by the utter absence of sound emanating from anywhere else in the
house.  Until now she’d been too fascinated by her exploration of the living
room for this to register.
              Spence and the others
should be banging around somewhere in here, whooping it up as they chugged
beers and made a wreck of the place.  Her boyfriend was too much of an
obnoxious fuck to stay this quiet for this long.  She felt her first real
prickling of fear as this notion solidified in her head.  Any lingering
resentment she still felt toward Spence for his rude behavior dissipated at the
thought that something bad might have happened.  Okay, maybe there were no
ghosts here, but that didn’t mean there weren’t other dangers.  This was an old
house.  Nothing had been done to maintain it for a long time.  Maybe some
rotting floorboards had given way and they’d fallen into…something.
              Fuck, she didn’t know
what might have happened.
              But some kind of accident
was definitely possible.
              She switched the phone to
her left hand, braced her right on the bannister, and started up the stairs.
              Terry gripped her wrist,
stopping her on the first step.  “Hold on, we don’t know if it’s safe up
there.”
              “I’ve got to look for
Spence.  Isn’t this total fucking silence freaking you out even a little?”
              “Just hold on a second. 
Let’s try calling out for them first.”
              Recognizing this as a
sensible suggestion, Simone cupped a hand around her mouth and raised her voice
to shout:  “ Spence!  Where the fuck are you!? ”
              Terry added his own, even
louder contribution.  “ Karen!  Bradley!  Stop playing around, you assholes! 
We know you’re fucking with us! ”
              They stood there and
waited a while.
              No response came from
upstairs or anywhere else in the house.
              Simone let out a breath. 
“Fuck this.”
              She twisted free of
Terry’s grip and started up the stairs again.
              Terry hesitated a moment
and then followed her up the creaking stairs and into the deeper gloom of the
second floor.
     
     
     

6.
     
    Luke learned some interesting
things over the course of the next hour or so as he continued to drink and talk
with Greg Lancaster and the regulars at Sal’s Place.  As so often happens with
conversations fueled by copious amounts of alcohol, the rambling,
multi-participant discourse occasionally veered off into some far-ranging
tangents.  However, it always returned to the subject of the tragedy that had
befallen Luke and his family ten years ago.  At first this made Luke as
uncomfortable as it usually did, but his reluctance to discuss the matter soon
evaporated in the face of Greg’s unrelenting ebullience.
              Among other things, he
learned that the Herzinger house on Crandall Hill became a focal point of local
lore in the years following the tragedy.  It hadn’t been long before everyone in
Rayford was referring to the location as Haunted Hill rather than by its proper
name.  Stories of a haunting first began to circulate widely about two years
after the murders.  It was said that at night screams and other disturbing
noises could be heard emanating from the supposedly empty house.  Some