Inheritance

My grandfather, Albert Helzinberg, died last month.
I hadn't really known the man. My parents had died in a bizarre accident when I was six. I was raised by my Aunt Tilly, my mother's sister. Because of this I didn't have much to do with my fathers side of the family. Aunt Tilly actually refused to talk about the old man, she seemed almost afraid of him when I would ask her about about my family. I can't say when I had last seen my Gandad. Yet a few days after his death I got called to see his lawyer.
Apparently he had left me a small inheritance. Very small actually. It consisted mostly of his library. He had been quite the book collector, and since most of his money had been taken up by funeral payments and other expenses, all that was left of his belonging for me to get were his collection.
I was surprised by all of this. I told my Aunt, and she said to just refuse to accept anything that was his. This struck me as odd, and wasteful. It wasn't like my Aunt to throw away something that might be worth money. But she was adamant that nothing good would come from having anything to do with my Grandfather.
It was on a Friday when the books finally arrived at my apartment in Brooklyn. The UPS man had me sign, then started to bring in box after box of books. There must have been hundreds. They filled my spare bedroom and most of my living room area.
I figured I could maybe go through them and see if any were worth any money. Perhaps put them up on E-bay and see what I could get for them. After all I could use the cash much more than the clutter. Not that I'm drowning in debt or anything, but there's a difference between treading water and swimming. I hoped that if a few of these were rare old books maybe I could manage a nice vacation out of them.
I took a weekend off to unpack the books, piling them up as best I could in different piles based on if I knew the titles, if they looked old, or if they seemed like trash. It was going pretty good when I came upon the locked box. It was inside one of the UPS boxes they had used, but it was leather and very old looking. It was heavy and had an old rusted lock on it with a key still in it. This got my attention. Clearing up a space I began to see if I could get the box open. Unfortunately it resisted my efforts, the lock was rusted just too much, and since I didn't want to damage it there was only so much force I was willing to use.
I went to the store later that day and got myself a can of WD-40. I ended up using almost the whole can on the old lock, but after a while I was able to turn the key. The box opened with a high pitched grinding noise and a release of rather noxious fumes. Inside the box were 5 books. They looked odd, each very old and with a binding that almost looked like leather, but if so it was no leather I had ever seen before. Almost a pinkish color. Each book was written in some foreign language that I couldn't read. The first was entitled De Vermis Mysteriis, the second was Unaussprechlichen Kultan, the third Deamonalatreia, and lastly Al Azif. The fifth book was newer looking than the rest, it was a collection of artistic drawing by someone named Richard Upton Pickman. These I put aside, because after flipping through the drawings I figured that anything so abhorrent as these pictures were must be worth something to someone. They were of the most horrible subjects, yet done with such a realistic style that one felt like you could reach into them.
I decided that I should try looking up the titles of the other 4 books, as well as the artist who did the drawings. Perhaps these might be worth some real dough. I flipped through the books a bit, there were some disturbing pictures in them, and the one called Al Azif had some almost mathematical equations in it as well. I wondered why the book seemed to feel almost greasy, in fact touching it kind of made my skin crawl. I stared at the words in it. It almost looked like they weren't even real words in it, just squiggly lines racing across the pages. As I blinked I fancied that the words almost seemed to move around, an interesting optical illusion probably caused by the weird foreign writing. I stopped looking at after a while because trying to make sense of it was giving me a headache.
The next day I went on the internet and started to search. At first I had little luck. Amazon had some of the books, but they were obviously either much later versions or more likely different books with the same names. None of them looked remotely like the volumes I had.
Then a break of sorts when I stumbled across a reference to a writer, a Lovecraft. Yet the article I read suggested that the man, some horror writer from way back, invented the books. That of course had to be false, these books at my table were much older looking than to be just under a century and were certainly not imaginary. The books he used in his fiction were of the same name, and also dealt with evil things. I wondered if maybe he had based his stories around the information he had found in the books then pretended they were fiction in order to hide the fact that he'd read them at all. I followed link after link about the books, yet no matter how much I delved I couldn't find any reference to anything that looked remotely like my inheritance.
stymied in my efforts I instead decided to try and translate some of the books. If I could manage to pick out a few phrases then maybe I could get results from googol. So I went looking for for sites that would help me read the strange words inside the books. This took much longer than anticipated, but after a few hours I had managed to copy out some phrases in the Kultan book, which it turns out was in German. Yet the phrases that I managed to switch into English didn't make much sense to me. Just gibberish about people worshiping corpses, or something like that. One of the words came back as meaning dead gods, which I guess meant either zombies or Jesus. It kind of made me think of some of the pictures in that Pickman guys book. Some of the words didn't even seem to have a translation, I couldn't decide if they were meant to be names of people and places or maybe written in some sort of code.
Frustrated with everything I was glad when my Aunt called me on the phone, interrupting my work and giving me an excuse for a break. She seemed uneasy as we talked, and I realized that in her own special way she was edging around questions about the books I had gotten. I finally got her to the point of the call, which was she was uneasy about me reading some of my Grandfathers stuff. She told me, hesitantly, that she always wondered if the old man had had something to do with the night my parents died. It was one of the reasons why she had kept me away. To her my Grandfather was into unholy stuff, and she didn't like to think that it might have now been passed on to me.
I have to admit that all this made me laugh. Who knows, maybe the old man had been some weird satanist, but it was all just headtrips for idiots as far as I was concerned. I told my Aunt that I had no intention on keeping any of the books, that even now I was in the midst of trying to find a little out about them so I could put them up on E-Bay to help finance my vacation. This seemed to relieve her a lot. I also told her that who knows, maybe it was meant for some dark rites, but that it meant nothing to me. In the end I convinced her that what I had read was all just the babbling of some sick little people who didn't know better. Nothing to worry the heart of a good woman like her, or to trouble my sleep at all. To prove it to her I read her the passages that I had been able to translate over the phone.
I was not alarmed at the time when the phone went dead. The fact that it happened right after I finished the passage I was reading didn't even register on me. I figured that either the connection got broken, or that my poor Aunt had accidentally hung up on me. I also didn't get too concerned when my attempt to call her back was met with failure. I began to think that maybe she was a little upset that I had read to her from a book that she considered evil. So I left it at that and went back to trying to translate the books I had.
It was about a half an hour later that the phone rang again. I assumed it was my Aunt, meaning to either apologize for the hang up or to chastise me for the reading. What I wasn't expecting was the police.
The next few days were such a blur that I didn't have much time to think. There was the funeral to arrange, which took up much of my time and even more of my mind. It had to be closed casket. There was no choice due to the shape the body was in. The police seemed to want to talk to me constantly, updates on how the search for my Aunts killer was going, about how outraged the people in the community were over her violent death, the charity fund they raised in her memory. I was amazed at the amount of people at her funeral. I knew that my Aunt was a good women, after all she had raised my poor orphan self, but the fact that this many people knew how good a women she was was stunning in a way. Sometimes we don't realize the impact that the people in our lives can have on others.
After she was laid to rest the whirlwind didn't slow down right away. It turned out that she had left me quite a bit of money. As well as her home. As one of her few family I got the majority of her estate. Even after the bills were paid off I was going to be able to live quite a comfortable life. Aunt Tilly had spent years storing away money just in case, now it had become my just in case money. But none of this could touch the fact that my Aunt was gone, murdered in a horrible fashion. The last real touch of family I had. I was alone now.
It must have been almost a month before I got to look at the books again. I had had everything of mine moved into my Aunts house, a nice little place out in the country. It was perfect. Quiet and just off the direct path. It also had a sturdy basement. That was critical. After all, I need a place away from the light if I'm to deal with the dark.
See, I figure that whatever I read in that book caused my Aunt's death. The way she was killed, well it's the same as pictures drawn by Pickman. The horrible things done to her body, no man could have achieved that. Let the police stumble about and look for a maniac, only I know the truth. The fact that it was something called up by my Grandfathers books that tore my Aunt to shreds. I also figure that my Aunt may have been correct about his having a hand in my parents death. Their strange accident could be tied into something in these books. See, I have translated even more of the book, I know some of their horrible secrets now. They talk of evil and secrets. They tell of things that weren't meant to ever exist, and how to make these things do your bidding.
I also know exactly what I must do. What I have to do, in memory of my poor dead Aunt.
There are so many people in the world who deserved to die instead of her.
The only question left is, who should I call and read to next?

The Horrible House in the Woods

I first saw the broken down old house while hiking through the woods behind my friends property. We were both 13 and just going into high school. His name was Jacob Torrington and we had planned on building a dam across the old river that snaked it's way in the woods behind where he lived. It was while we had ranged a bit away from the river, looking for some good solid fallen wood to use as a base for our dam, that I spied the building much further through the trees. If it hadn't been late fall, with most of the trees bare, I would never have spotted the decrepit old structure.
I asked Jacob about it, and he said that his father had told him to stay away from it. He said it was an old hunting cabin, and also private property. His dad has warned him that he'd get in big trouble if he went near it, both possible from the law and definitely by his dad. It had stood back there for as long as Jacob could remember and yet he had never seen anyone ever use it.
Well, as a teenager that got my imagination going. I talked Jacob into going to take a look. He wasn't sure about it, but I convinced him that we were old enough. At 13 you have a weird sense of invulnerability, and neither the law nor Jacobs dad held much terror for me. So we gave up on the dam and headed back deeper into the woods to see about this hunting shack.
It was old, and seemed like it should be falling down. Yet it stood tall, almost brooding. The front door was closed tight, and the light was wrong for peeking in past the dirty windows. It was two stories high, made of wood that looked grey and brittle with age. It was obvious that no one had used the structure for many a long year. Yet despite being curious neither of us quite had the courage to try the door to see if it was open. Looking was one thing, trespassing was another. Yet now that Jacob had gotten this close he seemed loath to just leave. Perhaps it was just a part of him that was excited about going against his fathers wishes for the first time, that first taste of rebelling against authority. We stayed near the house, trying desperately to see inside, until the sun started to go down and we realized that we needed to get home for dinner.
That started a trend for me and Jacob. Every day that we could we made our way back to that house. After a while we became brave enough to try the door, but it was locked tight. I even brought some Windex and paper towels one time to try and wash the windows, but the dirt must have been on the inside because we still couldn't see through them. Sometimes we would talk about breaking one of the windows so that we could get in, but talk was all it was. The thought that someone might one day come back to use the place and find what we'd done was just too terrible to follow through with. So instead we'd hang out in front of it. Acting like it was our house, our place. While we both had other friends we never brought any of them back there, somehow we both felt that it was our little secret.
Of course after we got our licenses we stopped going back there. With a car at our disposal there were much better places to go than to sit in front of an old empty building in the woods. We had discovered girls and cars and arcades. The world seemed full of possibilities. Yet ever once and a while Jacob would still mention the old house back in the woods. I got the impression that maybe he still walked out there sometimes. The thought of my friend standing at the door to the place alone gave me the willies, but I never said anything about it to him. I figured that it was his buisness and no one else's.
We were 18, having just graduated, when he brought the place up again. I was heading to collage, and Jacob had decided to join the navy. In fact he was going to be leaving in about a month from that night. We were having dinner at McDonald's, and he told me that he had thought about it and was going to break the lock to the place. At first I didn't know what he was talking about. Once I caught on I told him he shouldn't do it. I talked about the law, about getting in trouble, but Jacob would have none of it. He said that if no one had gone to the place in all these years then it must be abandoned. I hadn't realized how much the thought of the place had prayed on his mind all these years. He told me that some nights he would tell his parents he was going to a friends, and instead take a sleeping bag and camp out by the houses door. That sometimes he would knock on the front door and wait for hours to see if anything answered. He said that he felt that he couldn't leave the town peacefully until he had seen the inside of the house.
Well, all this kind of freaked me out. I told him that it was going beyond curiosity and sounded dangerously like an obsession. To my surprise he agreed with me. However he said that the only way he felt he could get free of the obsession was to walk inside of the place. I told him that it could be dangerous, the wood was probably rotted and termite eaten, in fact the whole thing could come down on his head just by opening the door. It had looked like it wanted to fall apart when we first found it, and I was sure it hadn't gotten better over the years. Yet still he persisted that he needed to go in, to walk the halls and look upstairs. He said that some nights he would dream about walking out there and finding the door open. He always woke up covered in sweat before he entered the place.
I asked him when he was going to do it, having decided that there was no way for me to change his mind. I suggested that I would like to go in with him, since I had been with him the first time he had gone to it. He said he hadn't decided yet, but sometime in the next week before he left for service. He also promised that he would call me before he did it, so I could come with him.
It was three days later when I was getting out of work when I got the call. I worked at the local Scrubby Bubbles Car Wash, and was just heading out when my dad called my cell phone. He said that there were some police cars and an ambulance over at the Torrington place. I raced over, but by the time I got there it was all over. His mom was sitting outside, just crying to herself. I hugged her and asked what had happened.
Apparently Jacob had gone out somewhere that afternoon for about an hour and when he got back he had walked up to his room, pulled out a gun that his father had gotten him for his 18th birthday, and blown his brains out. No explanation, no warning, just gone. No one could understand what had happened, he had seemed fine until that day. He had been looking forward to the navy, he'd always loved the thought of being in a uniform. Now he was gone. I stayed with his mom till his dad got home, then I went home myself.
Somewhere in me a horrible suspicion was forming. He gone out somewhere on foot for about an hour. Which meant that it had to be somewhere close. I wasn't surprised to see that there was a message on my phone at the house when I got back. At first I didn't want to listen to it. I was afraid of what it might say. But after about an hour of staring at the little blinking light I gave in and pushed the play button.
At first there was nothing. Just white noise that you get when someone is not talking. Then came a sob. A sad little noise that broke my already broken heart further. Then my dead friends voice came out of the machine. It sounded strained and full of bleak depression. All he said were five words.
"Inside....Inside that damn house."
A last message from my friend. Jacobs only explanation as to what he did and why he did it. His suicide note, 5 words recorded on my machine forever. I had to go. Had to see for myself. I ran all the way. Past the house of sorrow, where his parents were undoubtedly sitting and wondering why had their baby boy done this terrible thing. I ran past the river, where we should have just built a dam that day and been done with it. I ran until I reached the house. Then I stopped.
The door was open. It was getting dark, so I couldn't see inside very well, but the door was open. Also the ground floor window next to the door was broken. Some of the other windows were broken too. I wasn't sure if these had been broken at some point in time, or if it had happened when he had gone in. How much had age changed the place, how much had been him? He'd done it. Just as he'd said he would. Gone inside, and whatever was in there had killed him. Maybe not in body, but in mind and spirit and ever other way that mattered. I realized standing there looking at the place that in a small way I had killed him too. It was me, all those years ago who had convinced him to come back here. It was me who had introduced him to this awful place, that had gotten him hooked on it, fascinated by it. Whatever was inside belonged to me as much as it did to him, and maybe it would mean my death too but I had to see. See what had broken my friend. See what had been hidden in these woods for so many years, what had been right next to us all those times we'd hung out here. I knew I had to see.
I walked up to the door. I realized that I was holding my breath, that my heart was just about bursting through my chest, that I was crying. Crying in fear and loss and pain. I couldn't make out anything through my tear blurred vision, and it was getting dark, but I was going in anyways. Then I saw movement from inside, something coming forward in the dark of that place. Coming down the hallway towards me.
I fainted when I heard the voice. Just passed right out. How long I lied there I don't know. When I awoke it was late, the moon shining high over head. The first thing I noticed was that the door, the door to that horrible house, was shut again. I didn't need to try it to know that it was locked. I got up slowly and walked home.
I have never been back to that house in the woods. I think about it a lot, but I have never gone back. I'm glad that I never got to see inside, that I never got to see why my friend died. I'm also glad that I never got to see what was moving inside of there. Whatever shut that door, as I lied there on the ground before it, did me the greatest favor of my life. I'm grateful for that.
But that voice haunts me. I can still hear it while I sleep at night. All it said was one word.
Simple, direct, to the point.
Just the word NO.
But it said it in Jacob Torringtons voice.
That voice, the voice from inside that house.
That horrible house in the woods.