It Has Spread

I used to pride myself in being honest. I was always big for my age, and sometimes got into accidents, but overall, I liked to think I was a pretty good kid. I got up early, went to school on-time, never skipped Sunday school.

But it’s funny what money can force even the best of us to do.

When the divorce ripped my family in half, and the cash ran out fast, my brother and I got into some pretty messed-up stuff just to start it flowing again. Though we dabbled in mugging and a little gambling, our strong suit was always robbery. We started on poorer, easier blocks, but after a year or so of practice, we graduated to a couple middle class neighborhoods. After we mastered them, we started hitting the higher-ups. Big houses, big dough, big security systems.

I guess my honesty got lost somewhere along the way.

However, now that I’m old and more than a little grey, all those forced entries are far behind me. I’ve found my honest again. Or, rather, it has found me.

I have tried to shed it once more, to shrug it off like I used to do so easily, but it appears that this time, my honesty is here to stay. So it follows by simple reason that, as a narrator, I am to be trusted. The story I am about to tell you concerns our last robbery—the one job that finally did us in—and as much as I’d like to sugarcoat it, I find myself unable to: these events of which I will speak are one-hundred percent true.

It all began on a day like any other in early spring. The sun was peeking out through a carpet of fluffy clouds, dappling the manicured lawns with jigsaw patterns of luminance. Pablo and I were crawling down the street in my pickup, doing what he called “the sweep.” We’d frequent the road a few times—surveying a few houses each way—until our eyes finally came to rest on something workable. An empty driveway, an overstuffed mail box—these were both signs of an easy entry.

“Hey, check this out,” Pablo called after our third length. He indicated with his finger a large, disheveled property littered with tree trash and thriving weeds. We usually made a point not to fool ourselves with long-abandoned houses, as they were usually void of anything useful, but… something about the place seemed to intrigue him.

After a closer look, I reasoned it must’ve been the 60” flat screen just visible through the front windows. I stopped the truck in the vacant car park, and popped open the driver’s side door as Pablo fished around in the glove box for his tool kit. “Hey, Zach,” he called without taking his eyes off the bright red box he’d liberated from its depths, “I can’t find the flashlight.” I rolled my eyes. “The sun’s gonna be out for a while.”

After a long silence, I suggested we just use our phones as a light source, to which he agreed. You know, just in case the sun happened to go out while we were inside.

When we reached the door, Pablo opened the toolbox, and retrieved his lock gun. However, after a few tries, he realized such gizmos wouldn’t be necessary this time.

The door had been left unlocked.

Pablo turned to me. Unlocked doors were risky. They either meant that the owner of the place was inside and his car just wasn’t there, or the genius had forgotten to lock up after leaving. The predicament was visible in my brother’s eyes, and I stepped back to give him some thinking room. It’d be great if the house was empty, but hitting a place with a guy inside was never fun. If he wasn’t sleeping or deaf, you either had to kill him—which I’d never been able to do—or head for the hills before he called the cops.

Pablo reached for the knob. “Let’s just take a peak.”

I nodded. That flat screen was pretty attractive.

The living room was expansive, encompassing the majority of the house’s first floor. Just beyond the television setup lay a pleasant kitchen and dining area, and a staircase which wound up a wall and out of sight. Pablo rushed to the TV, but I remember holding back for some reason. Some part of me found the kitchen more alluring. Leaving my brother to his typical dismounting routine, I strolled around the barstools flanking the island countertop, and headed for the stove. Running my hands along the smooth granite, a thought popped into my head.

You loved this feeling.

A memory accompanied the message. A fleeting image of myself as an infant, crawling along the countertops in our old family home, evading my father who would inevitably round me up and wrestle me into the sink for a bath.

I blinked away the recollections, and found tears in my eyes. Quickly clearing them, I turned to venture in search of my brother. Unfortunately, before I got far, my watery vision came to rest on the first in a string of uncertainties that now define the entire experience. You see, where the refrigerator should have been, there lay a hole. A void of dusty sockets and old wallpaper. Had someone hit the place first? But, looking back at my brother, I had to ask: Why was the television still there? Surely, the thieves would’ve made off with that if given the chance. My eyes swiveled downward, and came to rest upon the floor. Scratches rent the hard linoleum, a pale trail of marks that winded all the way from the fridge socket into a room beside the stair. A closed door barred my eyes from its interior.

To the sound of Pablo’s creaking wrench, I crept forward. The knob felt cold in my hand. Incredibly cold, as though someone had just lifted it out of a tank of liquid nitrogen.

Like a medical shot, I figured the whole ordeal was best to just run through, and get over with, before the anticipation forced me to reconsider. I couldn’t even really remember why, but I was experiencing a dramatic pull towards the room’s contents. A feeling somehow associated with the memory flash from before.

I yanked the door open before any more connections could gather.

The first thing I noticed about the room beyond was the smell. My eyes stung as rotting fruits, vegetables, and dairy products all battled for control of my olfactory glands. After I’d weathered the burns to my nostrils, my eyes followed up with a second beating.

My surroundings were hectic: a jumbled mess of papers and folders. I could tell the room had once been a sort of study, but now served as a bedroom as well. A rumpled cot hugged the grimy south wall, and an old blue notepad lay atop an adjacent nightstand. I also identified the source of the smell.

All around me lay bits of soiled food. Greenish sandwiches sat near bottles of curdled milk, wreathed in leaves of black lettuce. A large hunk of moldy cheese lay defeated within the left of a pair of loafers.

Each of these articles originated, no doubt, from the fridge… which rested on its side in the center of the room. A closer examination revealed a message, hastily scrawled upon the polished steel door. It read: “PLEASE GO BACK UPSTAIRS.”

As the cyclone continues to move west, I thought, all residents in the Ravenwood area are urged to stay within their homes until further notice. But had I thought it? I panned my vision away from the fridge, and honed in on the source of the feint report. Eventually I located a radio near the foot of the cot, and grinned as I realized it had only been the weather channel.

I had squatted to examine the radio, and in standing up, my eyes were again introduced to the blue notebook. Its pages beckoned from behind the rumpled cover, and I found myself unable to resist their pull. Acting on instinct, I snatched the book off the table and turned to page one. Only one word could be found there, written over and over again until its duplicates covered the paper. “It has spread to the lungs.” As I flipped through more and more pages, it became obvious that all were identical to the first. That same sentence scrawled again and again—a thousand times at least—was all the notebook held.

I thrust the thing back onto the nightstand and turned to leave. The former tenant of this house—whoever they were—obviously had more than a few issues.

“Zach!” I heard my brother call from back in the living room, “come here!”

I quickly complied, eager to leave the study.

Pablo had removed the TV from the wall, and it now rested face-down on the coffee table. But Pablo wasn’t anywhere near his work. I instead found him standing before the window, staring out at the unfolding rainstorm.

My mouth hung open. Where before a cloud-dotted sky had smiled down, now roiled a mass of thick black thunderheads. Thunder shattered the silence as I approached my brother. “Hey, we should go,” I yelled over the noise, “there’s a—”

“—Tropical storm coming through, I know,” Pablo replied, “I heard on the TV.”

“You turned it on?”

Another monstrous clap derailed the conversation, and left us standing in the dim natural light, staring at each other.

“Should I get the TV?”

I shook my head. “Let’s just get home before it gets any worse.”

Treading carefully over the soggy yard, Pablo and I made our way to the driveway. Once we’d reached the truck, Pablo climbed in, and I soon joined him. I fished for the keys in my pocket while he buckled in. Rain poured heavy on the windshield. Upon meeting with the key, the engine turned over a few times, then blew smoke and died. Thick blue fog curled from under the hood as it sputtered through its final moments. I pounded the wheel in frustration, but Pablo only scowled. “I’ll call a guy.” He reached for his phone, then thought twice. My eyes followed his to the road, which shone under a streetlight through a sheen of rainfall. Hailstones had joined the droplets, and I could feel the old truck popping and groaning with each hit. “Actually… Maybe its best we stay put,” he advised, “the roads’re like ice.” I thought for a moment. After seeing the room with the fridge, that house was the LAST place I wanted to go. However, the storm was going to town on the windshield, and it wouldn’t be long before the glass gave way to the ice. I eventually complied. As soon as we’d trudged back inside, I went around with my phone-light, and found some switches. Soon, I’d given luminance to the living room and the kitchen. I made a point to keep the study in darkness. That done, I met my brother by the door, and we set up camp on the living room couch. He told me to wait here until the roads cleared up, and I agreed that that was probably the best plan at this point. The far-off cracking sound of the windshield finally sighing its last punctuated our decision.

Sitting there on the sofa, I got my first good look at the ceiling. An air conditioner vent had been removed, leaving a fair-sized rectangular hole. This had been hastily covered by a white sheet, which billowed outward as new air was pumped in, and drew back as stale air was sucked out. The process produced a sound one could only notice upon looking right at the source. I remember it sounding just like breathing. Pablo sank into the cushions, and sleep took him within seconds. It reminded me of how he’d always conk out right after touching the mattress as a kid, while I tossed and turned, fighting to shut my eyes.

My dad used to get the biggest kick out of it.

To this day, I have no recollection of falling asleep, but as I did wake up some time later, I can only assume that to be true. I saw only blackness, and at first thought a lightning bolt had knocked out the power.

But rising to my feet, I found that hypothesis to be false. Through the window I could see that old street light from before, still shedding its sickly glow upon the wet asphalt. If the street hadn’t lost power, why were the lights off?

“Pablo?” I called into the dark, “what happened?”

My words earned no reply.

I felt for where he’d been before, but found only empty couch.

On an impulse, I decided to call him. The harsh backlit screen burned my eyes, though I eventually managed to key in his digits nonetheless. I lifted the phone to my ear as it began to ring.

At first, silence. And then… A feint chime from somewhere above me. Upstairs? The chime came again, and this time I was sure. My brother had gone upstairs. But why isn’t he picking up? I tried him again after it went to voicemail, but got the same result.

Two more fruitless tries drove me to stand. If he wasn’t picking up, maybe he’d hurt himself somehow. I had to locate him to see if he was okay. I marched valiantly toward the stairs, phone-flashlight in hand, yet the second my foot touched the first step, I felt my courage begin to recede. What had the fridge said?

PLEASE GO BACK UPSTAIRS.

What was that supposed to mean? Couple that with the message from the book, and you had genuine nightmare fuel. I’d long exiled my childhood fears of the dark, but as I followed my pool of weak light up those shadowed stairs… It seemed to gain back some of its old territory. I tried my brother again after I’d reached the summit, and entered a narrow corridor. His chime was closer now, a few doors away, in fact. I trailed the jubilant notes through the darkness, playing them again and again until I finally located the door. After giving the knob a good pull, I ventured into the room beyond, and poked at the ensuing blackness with my phone light. I found Pablo’s phone quickly, as its screen was still lit, displaying my calls. The device had been left face-up on the left of two nightstands flanking a queen-sized bed set against the northernmost wall. Unlike the grimy cot from before, this one was well-made, the sheets crisply folded to perfection.

Next to Pablo’s phone was another blue notebook, identical to the one downstairs, save for the writing on the cover. Where the other had displayed only wrinkled cardboard, “Dream journal” was carefully printed in sharpie. On another impulse, I picked this up, and flipped through it. This time, my eyes were met not with repetitive scribbles, but with concise, organized paragraphs. I didn’t take the time to read all of them, but there was one by the back that caught my interest. It, unlike the others, was accompanied by a picture.

The artist wasn’t a very experienced one, to be sure. The figure the picture depicted was wildly out of proportion, and the face was a mere two dots and a line.

This bizarre humanoid sat by a crudely-sketched bedside, in which lay a sleeping man whose head was entirely in shadow. Below this were written the words: “He always says the same thing.” I closed the book, and started towards the door, but a creaking sound from the hallway stopped me cold. More thumps and creaks followed the first, forming a slow chain of approaching sounds.

“Pablo?” I called into the dark.

No reply.

The thumps drew steadily closer. I backed away, only to trip over the foot of the bead and flop backwards onto the mattress. The thumps quickened as I fought to regain balance, then stopped altogether.

I breathed a sigh of relief, but chocked on it halfway through when the noises started up again. They were now dominated by a loud scrabble, one that traced the path of the thing from the doorway to the wall, where it transmuted into the scrape of ripping drywall. When this final set of noises at last ground to a halt, I knew where it was. The thing had crawled onto the ceiling. I took out my phone, and shone its backlight up into where I suspected its eyes to be. My blood froze. The hairs on my back shot up like syringe needles.

Could you even call them eyes? And the mouth…

I fought the urge to vomit, and instead channeled the energy into a mad dash for the exit. Just before I cleared the door, I heard the humanoid whisper in a voice like a crackling fire: “It has spread to the lungs.”

I knew at once were I needed to go. The one place where it couldn’t find me. The one place where it would leave me alone.

I tore down the staircase, and ripped through the kitchen, all the while aware of a second set of footsteps close behind. I wrenched open the door to the study, and flew inside, quickly shutting it behind me. I knew the lock wouldn’t hold him for long. He’s forced his way past it before. My phone light eventually fell upon the fridge, which had been moved slightly since I’d last laid eyes on it. I also noticed that another rotting thing had joined the mounds of spotty fruit and blackened vegetables. My light had found the corpse of a middle-aged man, one so old, it was now little more than wafer-thin skin and bone. But if he’d been in the fridge, and now wasn’t…

I pulled the fridge door open, and shined my light into the sterile expanse within. There Pablo lay, huddled in a shivering heap. Without saying anything, I joined him inside, and shut the door behind me.

“Zach,” he whimpered, “I didn’t turn on the TV, and you didn’t turn on the radio.” A blunt pounding vibrated through the door to the study, and I pictured the humanoid outside, banging its fists against the wood, clawing at the knob. “I know,” I replied, “and the storm didn’t turn off the power.”

With a final rip, the battered door gave in, and swung open on its hinges. Footsteps announced the humanoid’s approach, then stopped abruptly. I pictured the thing standing over us, smiling through its twisted mouth.

“It has spread to the lungs.”

Again, I have no memory of falling asleep, but the next thing I knew, I was being jolted awake by Pablo’s jarring ringtone. It was still dark within the fridge, but the backlight provided some luminance, and more crept in through a gap near the base of the door. My internal clock told me it was morning. I quickly silenced the phone, and cautiously pushed the door open. Blinking the sleep out of his eyes, Pablo was slow to follow. Eventually, however, we did manage to right ourselves, and stand up. Sunlight was slanting in through the study’s sweeping windows, and the corpse from before was nowhere to be found.

Dragged upstairs, some part of me thought.

The phone continued to vibrate in my hand, and I impulsively fingered the “answer” slider.

“Pablo?” It was my mom’s voice.

“No, no,” I groggily replied, “It’s me, Zach.” I braced myself for the classic “where have you been?” conversation, and prepared my explanation. “Boys, you have to come quickly,” she whimpered, “it’s your father.”

I couldn’t remember the last time she’d talked about him with that much emotion.

“He’s gotten worse. They say… It has spread to the lungs.”