Jack is back...

Chapter 4

Howard Lucas stood at the base of a dimly lit staircase, his gaze fixed downward onto the first of fourteen blue-carpeted steps. His hand, wrinkled and cracking from too many hours of exposure to the elements, found the wooden handrail and he stepped up, keeping his eyes locked on the next step upwards, unable to move them away. Upon reaching the eighth step, he stopped, unable to continue any further, held by some invisible force.

His soul screamed for him to stop, but Harold’s body forced his head to look up to the top of the staircase. There, standing on a narrow landing, stood Jennifer Dickenson, her body soaked in blood.

Harold gasped. He tried to turn away from the horrible sight but was paralyzed. He couldn’t even force his eyes to slam shut. As he continued to stare at the vision of the nine-year-old girl, two long-fingered, shadowy hands appeared behind her.

Harold tried to shout a warning but no words came forth. It was as if his vocal cords had been severed. As Harold looked on helplessly, the shadowy hands latched onto the girl’s blood-drenched shoulders, yanking her violently backwards, pulling her through the wall and out of sight.

As Harold stood and stared, silently horrified beyond his wildest dreams, the black hands shot forward from the wall, hitting him firmly in his shoulders, sending him toppling down the stairs.

Harold jumped from the couch as his mind brought him from his nightmare, back to the sanctity of his living room. He wiped away a cold sweat and looked at the clock.

Seven-thirty?

Still woozy from the strange dream, and a little hung-over from the heavy boozing, Harold looked around the living room for Kimberly. She was gone. Wiping away the rest of the sweat from his forehead, Harold stood and headed into the kitchen with lumbering motions similar to that of a bear running downhill. He pulled open the refrigerator door and stuck his hand in, reaching for a tall can of Labatt’s. What he found attached to the can was something that he had been expecting for a while now.

Kimberly had stuck a post-it note to the side of the can. It read simply: I’m leaving you. Good luck sobering up.

Howard crumbled the note up in his hand and tossed it into the garbage.

She didn’t even bother signing it, he realized as he cracked open his cure-all and took a sip. As the contents soothed some of the dull throbbing of his head, Howard realized something he had not known before. Kimberly was gone, but he didn’t care. Not that he was a cold-hearted prick, he cared slightly, but to him it felt more like breaking your favorite DVD. It didn’t even feel close to the day that his life slipped into its current, downward spiral. The day that Jennifer Dickenson died.

It had been a typical, run-of-the-mill, haunting. A few noises in the attic, a few objects placed in one area, only to be found somewhere bizarre. The Dickenson’s had called him in to investigate and he made the short trip from Toledo to Tiffin with expectations of a simple case. He couldn’t have been further from the truth.

As soon as Howard arrived at the quaint little country home, the entity started to show more intense indications of its presence. To Howard, it seemed as though it was waiting for him to arrive, almost as if it had been waiting for an audience.

Jennifer became the focus of this particular ghost’s insurgence. Harold had his own thoughts on this matter. He believed that children were more vulnerable to contact with the dead. He had seen it on several occasions and could prove it to almost anyone, given half the chance. He had watched several infants and toddlers that would just start staring off, usually into the upper corners of a room. They would start to laugh, then turn to look at the nearest adult with a wide grin, almost as if to say, "Do you see my new friend." Then they would look right back up to the same spot and repeat this odd behavior. Harold had witnessed these events hundreds of times.

Whatever spirit had made its way into the Dickenson household, it harbored no intentions of making friends with Jennifer or anyone else for that matter. It was malicious, wicked, and there for one reason, to instill fear into the minds of any human it came across.

Harold believed that there were several types of ghosts, the most common of these being souls of the deceased that were not yet ready to pass on to the next level of their existence. They were generally harmless, nothing more than an unseen visitor with nothing to do with their time.

Then there were the one’s who were a little more devious.

Harold believed that just like humans, spirits gained wisdom with age. He was certain that the longer they had been dead, the more powerful they would grow. This was a solid hypothesis. Spirits used energy, just like the body of a human, as you continue to harness that energy by repetition of certain actions, the easier it would become. Harold believed that while the recently deceased might only be able to move a pen across a table, a hundred-year-old spirit might be able to move a table across an entire house. The implications were limitless.

What haunted the Dickenson residence was one of the latter types, something that for whatever reason, did not want them there.

On the third day of Harold’s investigation, Jennifer Dickenson walked up the stairs, the same set that Harold had just dreamed of. When she reached the top, Harold turned around and looked at her, offering a pleasant smile. As the grin formed across his face, something terrible happened. Jennifer, without any visible action, was thrown down the stairs. The force that pushed her did so with such ferocity that Harold heard her neck snap before she hit the staircase.

Harold slammed back the can of beer, trying to shake loose this torturous image from his mind as he sat at the empty table in front of him. This was going to be a long day.

Chapter 5

Chandler Crowe sat in his black leather recliner as the last few flames licked around the final piece of wood in the fireplace. The entire family had slept together on the living room floor. Each of them, Chandler included, could not calm their fears enough to sleep upstairs. Chandler thought that Bobby could have, he seemed to be completely disinterested in the freakish events that had unfolded in his sister’s room a few hours prior.

Chandler looked down at his son who was sprawled out on a blue sleeping bag. Bobby had fallen asleep at midnight and hadn’t shown any signs of a bad sleep. Not even the slightest twitch. Abigail was laying on her pink sleeping bag, two pink pillows propping her head up. Chandler knew she had not slept much at all, she had spent hours on end changing her positioning on the floor. For the brief periods she had slept, she kept mumbling in her sleep, calling out the phrase "Jack is back." It was enough to send chills down his back.

Patricia was on the couch a few feet away. Although she had probably been disturbed more than the other three by the strange event, she had quietly fallen asleep shortly after Bobby did, thanks mostly to the Valium she had ingested.

"Daddy?" Abigail asked, bringing Chandler’s attentions back to his daughter. She had rolled over now and looked up at him with her hazel eyes full of worry. It had been a long time since he had seen his daughter this frightened. "What is it, Abby?"

"Do you think that thing will come back?"

Chandler had never believed in lying to his children, not up until now. "No, baby," he assured. "Why would it?"

Abigail rolled over and closed her eyes, comforted by Chandler’s lie. It wasn’t exactly a lie, he really had no idea what was going to happen next, but he had to say something, and that was all he could think of. As he sat there contemplating whether or not he believed it himself, his mind drifted away, and he finally found sleep.

On the floor, lost in the deep recesses of his mind, Bobby watched on from somewhere unknown to him as the dark, ghostly form drifted through the darkness. Trees lined both sides of the narrow street as Jack made his may through them with the slickness of a serial killer. Gazing downward, Bobby noticed that the figure now had visible feet, he had fully formed, and Bobby could hear the quick, soft crunching of his boot heels on the snowy sidewalk. Aware but yet unaware, awake but somehow knowing in his subconscious that he really was not, Bobby recognized the house that the ghost crept toward. It was Jenny Johnson’s home, the only house on the block not coated in one of the many hues of colors available to the modern world. It was a simple, two-story house, built near the turn of the last century, a fresh coat of white paint overlapping the previous ones. Bobby had always found the house creepy, in fact, at Jenny’s ninth-birthday party, Bobby remembered thinking that if any house could look like it was haunted, this was the one.

Jack, now attired with a black top-hat, matching trench-coat, and spinning a cane in his right hand, passed through the solid door as if walking through a small hail of rain. He ignored it entirely. Bobby followed, how he did not know, he only was aware of the man he pursued. The "hows and whys" of it were as yet a mystery to him. Bobby, now mesmerized by this strange dream, continued to follow at Jack’s heels as he pressed through the door that he knew was physically impossible to breach. As Bobby entered, the feeling of utter despair and rage entered his soul. In front of him on the couch, no more than five-feet away, Benjamin Johnson, the city council member of more than fifteen-years, lay dead in a hideous pool of blood and entrails. Beside him, Bobby witnessed the grisly vision of his Bejamin’s wife Betsy, her face shredded beyond mortal comprehension and her throat slit wide and deep. As Bobby gazed at the nightmarish scene before him, a sorrowful cry filled the air around him, and his gaze was broken. He pushed forward through the room, fixing his eyes upon the narrow hallway that led him toward the scream, carefully avoiding the sight of the dead couple that lay only a few feet away. Bobby passed through the hallway quickly, stopping at the plain white door that led to Jenny’s room. A bloody hand-print ran the length of the door, as if it were meant as a warning to keep anyone from entering.

Inside the room, Bobby found Jack. He held the auburn haired Jenny Johnson with one hand around her mouth, the other holding his bloody knife beside her carotid artery. He smiled a wicked, rotten-toothed smile and winked at Bobby as he entered.

"I shant stop ripping them, Bobby, not until I’m buckled!"

Bobby looked from Jack-who had now begun wiping the bloody blade along Jenny’s cheek, leaving behind thin wisps of blood as it passed back and forth-to Jenny. Something in her terrified, pale-green eyes shook Bobby. They looked too real to be a dream.

As Bobby stood helplessly by, Jack raised the knife high into the air. Paralyzed with uncertainty, Bobby watched as Jenny wriggled and screamed a muffled plea for help, her eyes locking with his own. Jack brought the blade down in a blur, depositing it into Jenny’s abdomen. With one quick, vicious pull across, Jenny’s insides splashed out onto the wooden floor below with a massive gush of blood. As Jack let go of Jenny’s limp body, he licked the blade of his knife and winked at Bobby as the lifeless corpse landed awkwardly on the bed.

As quickly as Bobby’s nightmare began, it ended, and his dreams took him someplace more pleasant, a place where he played professional football, and his team never lost.