Holy Hell

The police ringed the house in the dark. They had already come from the woods, where they found her raped and cut apart under the trees. Guns drawn, they crept toward the front porch.

The house sagged, and by every account on that street it always had. Nobody could remember it any other way. Its skin was grey and filthy, blistered paint hanging in long scabs, and the window frames had gone soft with rot, black and wet as old bone. Gutters drooled a thick green slime. The yard was a wet tangle of weeds and trash, and flies rose in a cloud when the officers stepped off the street, the same fat flies that had been on her in the woods.

As they drew closer, a stench leaked through the walls—thick as sewage, sweet and wrong, like meat left in a closed room. It clung to the tongue. Pike, who was twenty-four and eleven months on the job, clutched his stomach and heaved into the weeds. He had smelled this on her skin already, out there under the leaves, and the house had the same breath. A slick of something dark had seeped under the door and dried in a crust on the stoop.

When they stepped onto the porch, the boards gave under their boots, soft and swollen, sticky with old rain and whatever had leaked from inside. They saw the door. Someone had taken a knife to it and carved occult sigils from top to bottom, the cuts still dark, as if the wood had never stopped bleeding. Doyle went still. The same marks had been cut into the trees around her.

The officers looked at each other with faces full of dread. Pike shook his head no. The chief said, “Okay. Open it up.”

Pike pulled the screen door. Doyle came in with a boot to the doorknob.

BLAM. The door swung open, and they moved into the living room.

The house and everything in it fell silent. No clock. No fridge hum. Just their breath and the tick of cooling metal from the broken lock.

Their lights crawled over the room.

Blood was smeared across the walls, mixed with black spray paint, still tacky in places where a hand had dragged through it. The paint ran in long drips. It looked as though someone had performed rituals here, marking the room with occult sigils, graffiti-style, over the windows, over the pictures, over a pale outline on the floor where a body might have lain.

The place was a wreck. Cushions were gutted. Drawers hung open like broken mouths. Broken glass gritted the carpet, and the carpet was wet, dark, and sour. It looked as if someone had torn the room apart looking for something, or looking to ruin everything she had touched. The stench was overwhelming. It rose off the floor in a warm wave and got behind their teeth.

“Good God almighty,” Pike cried. Doyle made the sign of the cross and clutched the rosary under his uniform.

“What the hell have we walked into?” Doyle said, looking at the chief leading the investigation.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Brace yourselves. I think this is about to get a lot more disturbing.”

As they moved from the living room to the kitchen, they heard rustling. Soft. Wet. Something shifting in a space too small.

“Sir, I think there might be an animal in the kitchen,” Pike said.

“I know. I can hear it,” said the chief.

They walked into the room. Animal parts lay chopped into chunks, fur still attached, on the table, the counter, and the sink. Paws. A tail. A head turned toward the doorway as if it had been set there to watch. Blood had run to the floor and gone tacky around their boots.

“Dear God!” Doyle exclaimed.

In the corner was a cage, half-covered with a filthy towel. Two small dogs.

The one at the back had been dead a while. Long enough to go flat. Its eyes were open and clouded and its coat had collapsed down onto the ribs, and the shape of it had settled into the newspaper underneath.

The other one was alive.

It was pressed into the front corner of the cage with its spine against the wire, as far from the dead one as thirty inches of cage would allow, which was not far. It had been there the whole time. Days of it. Its nails scraped the tray when it shifted its weight, and that was the rustling they had heard from the living room, and it was the only sound it made. It did not bark. It watched them come without lifting its head off its paws.

When Pike crouched down in front of the cage, it tried to back up.

“Get animal control in here now,” the chief said.

Pike grabbed the walkie-talkie off his hip. His voice broke when he called it in.

“Sir, I think you should look at this,” Doyle urged.

When the chief turned around, he saw a small door at the back of the hallway that led past the laundry room. The hall itself was narrow and bowed, wallpaper peeling in long damp strips, the floor sloped toward that door like the house wanted them there.

It was cracked open. Witch bells hung from the doorknob, black and dull, and they gave a thin sound when the air moved, as if the house had already announced them. Cold leaked up through the gap. It smelled of wet stone and old soap from the laundry, and under that, something buried.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Doyle slowly opened the door that led to the basement while Pike shined a light down the staircase. The steps were raw wood, stained, and they sank in the middle. The walls closed in, close enough to scrape a shoulder, and the light died before it found the bottom.

“I don’t see a light switch. There is probably a light in the basement.”

One by one they started down. The house pressed in behind them. Each step took the kitchen farther away, and the bells went still.

“I found the light,” Pike said. He grabbed a string hanging from the bulb and pulled it.

When the lights flashed on, they saw the altar.

Staring them in the eye was the head of a slaughtered goat that had been mounted on an old end table. The wall behind it was graffitied and stained with blood. Same sigils as the rest. They were spirals of varying sizes, with blood-soaked crosses and pentagrams over them.

The heads of twenty or thirty animals lined the altar.

There was white chalk on the floor. A large circle with a triangle and an elven star inside. There were countless seven-day glass candles lining the room, all emptied of wax, with black soot staining the glasses.

The officers stood in front of the altar. The air in that corner of the basement was colder than the rest of the room, and none of them stepped into it.

An officer came running down the stairs and announced, “Animal control is here, and so is a cleanup team.”

The chief turned around and stared down his crew. “Start writing your reports. Be as detailed as possible. Go to church tomorrow, take communion, and don’t speak of the evil you saw here today.”