Horror House

By Jery Tillotson

'Twas the night of the blizzard
And into the great house,
Crept a crazy old madman
Who Wielded an Axe
He butchered twelve people
before the tenth bell
And After he ate them
He returned to black hell
***

Andrea D'Allasandra shocked readers around the world in 2000 when she introduced the terrifying mountain madman, Benji, who butchered a weekend house party, in the best-selling Death House.

Now, in her stunning new sequel, Horror House, Benji returns to slaughter again in the newly refurbished mountain chalet. He believes that old adage: "Once you check in, you can never check out!"

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 24, 2003
• ISBN: 9781462095162

Jery Tillotson

Jery Tillotson, writing as ?Andrea D'Allasandra?, shocked readers everywhere with his terrifying debut suspense thriller, Death House. His stunning sequel, Horror House, continues the pulse-pounding saga of the monstrous mountain psycho, Benji, who wields his axe with renewed frenzy among the unsuspecting tenants of Horror House during a ferocious blizzard. Lock your doors!

Book preview

Contents

PART I

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

PART II

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

About the author…

To Wilson and Theodore of Fargo, N.D.

During the blizzard of l969

I’ll say it again. The Old Saunders Place is a charnel house. It should have been destroyed after nearly a dozen people vanished from there three years ago. No one knows what happened to them during that blizzard. But we found enough evidence to prove it was something horrible. And now three years later, we’ve got these money-grubbing New York real estate nuts who want to turn this death house into a friggin’ apartment complex! When we have another big blizzard like we did the last time, this crazy psycho is going to strike again. The blood will be on the hands of Grimaldi Properties in New York.

—Interview with Sheriff Bobby Lott

Fox News, January 2003

We are not greedy vultures. Sheriff Bobby Lott is a fat-mouth. We’re not trying to cover up the tragedy that occurred at the Old Saunders Place in 2000. Let’s move on. I’m proud of our new enterprise. We’ve completely renovated and refurbished the whole mansion. You wouldn’t recognize it. We’ve created the most luxurious apartment complex in America. We’re one hundred per cent booked. Thousands of people are waiting to make Mountain Manor their home. You’ve got the safest security system in America. That shows you how scared people are of living there.

—Al Grimaldi, CEO

Grimaldi Properties, New York, NY

Inside Edition television interview, December 2003

Twas the night of the blizzard

When into the house

Crept a crazy old mad man

Who wielded an Axe

He butchered twelve people

Before the tenth bell

And after he ate them

He returned to dark hell…

—Graffiti found on bathroom stall of Sunoco Gas Station,

Snowflake, N.C., February 2004

PART I 

CHAPTER 1 

Click-clack.

Click, click.

Karen Harper looked up from her People Magazine.

And listened.

Who in the world was up there?

For an hour or more, it was like someone in the apartment above her was dancing or cleaning up a storm. Doors opened and shut. Silence followed and then it started up again. Click, click, clack, clack.

High heel shoes clattering over the wooden floors.

It couldn’t be the maids.

They wore tennis shoes. When they cleaned up her place, they were so quiet she didn’t even hear them.

Should I investigate? Should I call Joy in the office downstairs?

No one was supposed to be up there. The Pettiways were gone until spring. Here it was December. She knew the couple and they cherished their privacy—like everyone else who lived here at Mountain Manor.

Karen wasn’t buddy-buddy with the loud, pushy Betty Pettiway. But before she left, Betty had said several times she didn’t want anyone—not maids nor building staff—to enter their home.

She kept her prized collection of Ivory elephants there, along with jewelry and oil paintings that she and her retired executive hubby had picked up around the world.

Betty had bragged how she had put the fear of God in sweet, pretty Joy, the building manager, about obeying her wishes.

When we get back from Russian, Betty boasted, we’d better not find one glass used or one towel messed up.

That couldn’t be Betty up there and it certainly wasn’t her husband. Maybe the couple had cancelled their Russian trip. Still, Karen had never seen the heavy, messy looking Betty in a pair of heels. She went in for flats and slippers.

I’ll just go up there and tap on the door, Karen thought. If it’s Betty, then I’ll just prove what a good neighbor I am by worrying about the footsteps.

She stood up but sat back down.

Don’t think about it. Her husband, Pete, had yelled at her when they first got married that he didn’t want her sticking her nose in anything outside their marriage.

That’s all you have to worry about now, Miss Cotton Ball, he had snarled. You worry about me, nobody else and we’ll have a good marriage.

He liked referring to her as one of those beauty titles she had won so easily as a popular, Dixie beauty back in Alabama. Miss Cotton Ball, Miss Barbecue, Miss Watermelon, Miss Yam, Miss Cattle Queen, Miss Jimmy Dean Sausage.

She had been proud of those titles but Pete had a way of turning them into insults.

Well, he’d be home in three hours and she’d better make certain everything was perfectly in place. Her table absolutely had to be set with the best china and crystal, the food perfectly prepared or he’d throw it against the wall.

He had done that a few times here and laughed at her shock.

That’s what I think of this slop! he guffawed. If I don’t like something, I get rid of it! So, if I’ve got a wife who can’t cook a fucking decent meal then…

The painters had already come up here three times this month to spray back the peach tint into the walls of the dining room.

They didn’t ask any questions but they certainly wondered why her walls were stained with food grease and big splotches of tomato sauce. Pete smirked at her concern.

They’ll probably think you’re one hell of a messy cook, Miss Barbecue.

A quick retort nearly escaped her tight mouth: No, you Tom Cat sonofabitch! It’s because you’re worse than an ape and lousy fuck in bed.

But—she knew her whole existence was based on pleasing this jerk off. She had women relatives who had made bad choices with husbands. None had learned any skills except the art of pleasing a man.

One cousin who used to be the Home Coming Queen in high school now lived on welfare in a tiny little house in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Her husband said he got tired of her mush-mouthed way of talking and the fact she preferred eating Spam sandwiches to preparing gourmet dishes.

An aunt worked as a clerk at Walgreen’s Department Store in Greer, South Carolina. She had also once been the chief majorette in the high school band. Her husband got her hooked on booze and pills and then dumped her.

Karen had visited the poor woman in her miserable little room over the town’s poolroom and found the plastic curtains on the one window and the empty cabinets just too depressing.

Pete threatened that Karen would end up like them if she didn’t watch it. He called them butterflies and she was one of them. They were nice to look at for a few years but after that….

I’ll not end up like them, she vowed. I’ll divorce Pete this summer and I’ll get my alimony settled and then I’ll start life anew. I’ll take courses at one of the colleges. Everybody tells me I’d be a fantastic airline stewardess or a restaurant hostess or a TV weather girl.

I’m only thirty-nine. Life doesn’t end there. It did in the old days. But times are different now if you’ve got guts and spunk.

Until then, be a zombie, a gutless little butterfly. Smile and laugh and suffer in silence.

The footsteps above had stopped. A board creaked. Right above her.

It was like—like somebody was up there that was listening to her.

She dropped her magazine and went to the bar. Too early for a cocktail but just living here in this place made her nervous and edgy. She wished like hell their new mansion in Asheville would be ready to move into soon.

As her first glass of champagne vanished into her stomach and then a second one, she felt that old shadow of depression creeping into her.

Maybe her husband was right when he makes fun of her beauty titles. At the time, she was thrilled and she wallowed in the attention and the spotlight. She turned down so many dates every night with the towns cutest guys that it became as routine as brushing her teeth.

So many men, so little time. She thought it’d last forever. She could just wrinkle up her pug nose and smile at the best-looking jock on the football team, the hottest looking bachelor in Mobile.

They all came running. They begged her to marry them. Many threatened suicide. They fought over her at dances, at bars, at parties. While her girl friends were terrified of the violence that trailed around her, she feigned indifference.

Then the handsome, hot-eyed, very rich Pete Billingham came up to her one day on the campus of Ole Miss and drawled: I’m gonna marry you. Get your wedding gown ready. Because you’re getting hitched to one rich sum-bitch.

He was rich all right. He was heir to his father’s billion-dollar computer parts empire.

He had also told the truth about being a sumbitch.

What good did having twenty beauty titles mean now? It meant nothing. I’ve got to find a way of being independent! If he cuts me off without a dime, I can’t let him see that it’d bother me.

I’ll show my pride. If need be, I’ll walk away, my head high and start a brand new life.

A computer sat untouched in the corner of the room. She knew she should use it and surf the web, as Pete described it, and find out more about becoming an airline stewardess or a restaurant hostess or a TV weathergirl.

I’ll do it tomorrow. We’ll be snowed in. But I’ll have to be careful. Pete mustn’t find out I’m planning to escape.

Above her, the footsteps continued to move over the floor. They’d pause, take a step, and then hurry to another part of the unit.

If it wasn’t Betty up there and if it wasn’t any of the maids, then maybe—

Karen Harper felt that horrible churning of her stomach. She had checked the doors and the windows of her fourth floor apartment. No one could enter here but that’s what all those people slaughtered here three years ago probably thought, too.

Even though she and Pete had lived here for two months, she had never experienced the constant fear like she felt here. When she tried talking to her husband, he listened, raised his brows, and ignored her.

This is the safest place in America, he said. They’ve got security guards. You’ve got a main office where there’s somebody all day. The doors are reinforced with steel. That nut who killed the others won’t be coming back here.

She asked him let her get a gun. Pete had cackled: You? With a gun? You’d probably blow my brains out by mistake.

And we wouldn’t want that to happen would we?

She had blurted out the words in a joking matter but he gave her a weird look.

That’s not so funny, Miss Cottontail Barbecue Spam Sandwich.

Oh, you know I was joking, Pete.

His answer was to throw the special chicken basted in lemon sauce against the wall that night at supper. He smashed the rest of the gourmet meal she had catered in from Pierre’s in Snowflake onto the floor.

She kept picking at her food as if nothing happened.

That infuriated him more. He threw her to the hardwood floor and mashed her face into the mushy peas and onions and custard pie.

An hour later, he was laughing his head at the TV show, Jackass.

That’s what you are, he gasped. A jackass.

She had cleaned up herself and the mess on the floor and grabbed a butcher knife. She moved quietly up to him as he lay sprawled naked on the couch. The knife was hidden the sleeve of her robe.

But then he grabbed her and brought her against him and began loving her up like only Pete could do. Her knife slid unseen to the floor where she pushed it with her hand beneath the sofa.

She hated herself for being such a slut. His hot body, his manly equipment was like a drug to her. It was one primary reason she had taken all that shit from him.

I’m a slut. I act like a gutless little bird because my husband is so great in the sack.

The footsteps had paused again—directly over her. Whoever was up there seemed to sense where she stood.

She stepped over to the roaring fireplace. A few moments later, the high heels click-clicked over to where she was.

Somebody is up there listening to me. But how? She wore velvet-lined slippers. No one could hear her.

No one can get in. Pete will be home soon.

There were people living above her, beneath, on either side of her.

That didn’t make her feel better.

Since she was here alone nearly every day and sometimes at night, she heard weird noises, like someone singing softly, in a nasal, deep tone. Shadows danced on her walls where there shouldn’t be any.

When she looked out the window at night, it was even worse. All those thousands of trees that surrounded the building and stretched away for miles.

Sometimes it looked like a very tall, hunched shouldered man stood behind one of the pine trees. To her poor vision, it appeared this figure was staring straight up at her.

She wished she could wear glasses. Pete didn’t like her in glasses. She couldn’t wear contacts because they killed her eyes.

Was there really someone down there every night, staring up at her window?

And was she going nuts or was someone slipping into her place here and watching her here, too?

She could look through her closet and sense somebody had been handling her clothes.

She was a neatness freak. Karen enjoyed seeing her garments hanging precisely and neatly on the hangars in her closet. Her drawers were stuffed with expensive, lacey panties and negligees and bras.

It gave her a sensual thrill to feel the smooth, cool silk and satin between her fingers as she arranged them neatly.

Yet, she often found them mussed, folded awkwardly, the clothes in her closet rearranged.

No, it couldn’t be Pete. He never glanced at her stuff since she had put all of his male things—socks, undies, and handkerchiefs—in a separate cabinet.

It couldn’t be the maids. She never left the apartment when they came in three times a week to dust and vacuum and polish and changed the sheets of her big bed.

Worst of all, the invisible intruder was using her beautiful, sunken tub.

She had always considered herself a little psychic. She prided herself on this intimate secret—the ability to sense and actually feel the spirit world around her.

Just yesterday, she had filled up her glorious marble tub of eggshell blue and stepped into it. She loved the scented waves of moist heat drifting upwards. Citrus and vanilla perfumed the air.

But as soon as she let herself into the misty waters, she jumped out. Someone had been there—yet, there was no trace of the invisible intruder.

Images of a bear-like thing, a filthy, hairy ape, a shapeless monster covered in fur splintered her tranquility.

A nauseating whiff of old piss, of unwashed skin, of old, decaying garbage came to her mind.

It couldn’t be the tub itself. She had heard that marble could give off a strong scent of mineral when the water was extremely hot. This aroma was hideously different.

An animal had soaked itself in her beautiful tub.

I’m losing it, she worried. No one can get in here.

It’s the ghosts of those who were killed here, she decided. That’s it. Ten people were butchered right here