Every House Is Haunted by Ian Rogers Read Free Book Online Page B

existence. Hobos and transients in search of shelter from Tennessee’s brutal thunderstorms sometimes came upon the lone cabin in the woods. Most of them were struck dead before they could get within ten feet of the front door. A few made it inside, but as the saying goes at the roach motel,
They check in, but they don’t check out
.
    Despite the lofty theories of pundits like Dale Mundy, Cabin D was not hungry for blood, or souls, or Hostess Twinkies. It simply didn’t like visitors. It had stood in the woods beyond the Crescent Moon Motel for over eighty years, and, like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, it might stand for eighty more.
    But some people—those who had not forgotten about Cabin D—decided they couldn’t take that chance.
V
    When he reached the edge of the parking lot, Henry kicked off his shoes and continued on barefoot. The grass was cool and damp under his feet. It was incredibly refreshing, and it took his mind off the gargantuan meal he had just eaten . . . and the cancer that was eating
him
.
    It also took his mind off the thing that was waiting for him in the woods. The thing that had been masquerading as a dilapidated cabin for the last eighty years.
    Cabin D hadn’t killed anyone in seven years—not since a seventeen-year-old runaway named Justin Dugby came upon the cabin one rainy night—but the group Henry worked for decided enough was enough. It was time to take Cabin D out of the game.
    Except we can’t do that without taking one of ourselves out of the game.
    Henry recalled something one of his science teachers had said, about how energy could neither be created nor destroyed. The poisonous cloud that Cabin D had existed within all these years operated under a similar principle. It could not be destroyed, as such, but the malefic energy that thrummed through its walls could be negated.
    Travis had given him the means to do that very thing. A small post-hypnotic trigger that—if it worked—would snuff out both the cabin’s influence and Henry’s life. A fair trade, he thought. The authorities would find his body, eventually, and he’d be written off as just another dead vagrant. He wasn’t carrying any identification, not that it would have mattered anyway. He had been legally dead since he joined the group eleven years earlier.
    Passing through the grass and into the dense woods, Henry could feel the pressure building up around him. His ears felt stuffed with invisible cotton. The sound of his footsteps seemed distant, not his own. As he pressed on, the pressure continued to build until he thought his head might explode. Cabin D didn’t like visitors. Travis had shown him a satellite photograph of the woods behind the Crescent Diner, pointing out a number of black dots in the clearing where Cabin D stood.
    Birds
, Travis had said with a dark grin.
Makes you kind of glad there are no commercial flight routes that cross over it, huh?
    That was part of the reason Henry had volunteered to take out Cabin D. Yes, the cabin was mostly cut off from the world, and yes, more people died each year from lightning strikes and shark attacks, but those were natural occurrences. There was nothing natural about Cabin D. And things could change very quickly. Cabin D wasn’t sitting on prime real estate now, but who could say what would happen ten, fifteen, or fifty years from now? The possibilities were as endless as they were disturbing.
    The last few weeks leading up to his departure, Travis had started calling Henry “The Amazing Psychic Suicide Bomber.” Henry didn’t mind. At least Travis was still talking to him. By that time, most of the others in the group were ignoring him completely. In their minds he was already dead. He was like a ghost walking among them. They knew what he was planning to do and they were afraid for him.
    And now here it was.
    Henry stepped out between two hoary oaks and into a sea of tall grass that wavered gently in the night wind. Cabin D stood about forty feet