"The Horrors That Hide" a novel by Julianna Rowe

 I will be posting a new chapter of my latest novel .....daily 

                                                The Horrors that Hide by Julianna Rowe

Intro: There he is again, lying in his recliner, hiding from something, or maybe just the world. He might act like the most approachable and sensitive person you could meet, all the while learning how to manipulate emotions and actions to serve his purposes that would seem to have been led by someone in the hereafter world.

 

                                             The Horrors That Hide     by Julianna Rowe

 

                                                     Chapter One:  Law and Order

 

During an intense episode of Law and Order, Adam and I heard a strange noise coming from one of the bedrooms in the West Wing of 532 S. Monroe. It wasn’t unusual to hear strange sounds on occasion from that area. Everyone knew about the kid, well I guessed he was nearly a man, considering he had graduated high school. Anyway, he committed suicide in that wing of the house, thus the strange noises, not to mention lights flashing on and off by themselves, especially during a full moon. He made it obvious he had something he needed to finish saying on this plane, yet there was no means to do it except by using electricity and sound waves. Made sense to me, considering I believed the world would come and go, slash revolve around simple and complex physics.

Ordinarily, Adam and I would ignore most anything that occurred in that wing of the house. It had been all but closed off since Auntie Rose died, except for Adam’s men’s night. Drinking and gambling. Despite the fact there hadn’t been any activity in such a long time, I decided to check it out anyway. I wanted my husband to do it, but we all knew men didn’t see and think about things differently. He would just disregard, and continue watching the television as usual.

I was flipping on lights as I went along the corridors. Well, it was only a cross between a corridor and a hallway, but sure as heck felt like a passageway to another world when the light decided to blow out. The walls were painted a dark green with mahogany trim, making it darker. I squealed like I had a reason to be afraid. It was more like a scream, but no one rose from their big brown leather chair to see if I were alright. He loved seeing the damsel in distress in his old cowboy movies, but when it came to his wife checking on strange sounds in the night by herself in the old mansion, she was on her own! Little did I know how much on my own I would be. 

Oddly, the flashlight had been put back in its proper placement in the kitchen pantry. I didn’t think much about the corridor light burning out until I noticed the guest bedroom lights were also out. I guessed it was a breaker that needed flipping, but what was the noise we heard? I was wandering toward the breaker box in the back closet, thinking it was strange how the floor was creaking. My mind reassigned itself to months past where we had all the old wiring and fuses electrically updated to breakers. As I came back from my trance regarding our expensive overhaul of wiring, I realized I had never noticed such weakness in those floorboards in the past, but then it had been some time. Actually, never had I had to rescue a lighting issue in our home. I mean, come on, it was a brand-new system. I opened the door to the metal breaker box and stepped inside. That is when my world went into a forever reverser.

As I stepped in, the floor gave way, and opened the death-lingering container rabbit hole it would become. I shot straight down nine feet, landing on a soft clay surface of an unknown substance. To think terrified was an understatement. Immediate recall went to the Florida man who fell into the sinkhole from his bed in the middle of the night while screaming for his brother to help him as he sank thirty feet never to be seen again, suffocating as his muddy breaths sucked dirt into his nasal cavity down to his thrashing throat and gasping lungs. I was in shock as I slowly regained a few brain cells, allowing me to think it was purely an accident. The floor simply gave way in an old house, and Adam would soon come and find me. This time he would have his own personal damsel in distress, as in the episode of Law and Order I had just walked away from in our peaceful living room. His favorite fantasy was right before him. The only thing lacking was the railroad tracks, and me tied to them with the train coming. Little did I know it was much worse.

Finally, able to stand up and survey the damage, I noticed no caving hole in the ceiling from where I had crashed through the closet floor. My breathing was becoming faster out of fear, and then the gasping began. I was suffocating. I realized there wasn’t enough oxygen for me to survive in that hole of death. I cupped my hands over my mouth, trying to stop the hyperventilating, yet wishing for death to come soon, so the suffering would cease, but death did not come. I was having a panic attack. When I finally overcame the injustice of the situation on my body and mind, I saw a door showing me a dimly lit path. I suddenly felt as though I were in a movie scene where Lois Lane or Nicole Kidman were in dire need of saving, but Superman and or Tom Cruise never showed up. I was not short of oxygen, rather I was gasping for air due to fear. But, I was underground, or was I? I must have had a concussion, and I was delirious was the only logical explanation.

When my breathing came back from death to life, I walked toward the open door, passed through it almost afraid I might never get back to the place I dropped from the closet a million miles ago in our West Wing. My screaming for hours went unnoticed. Why wasn’t Adam coming for me? Surely, he had checked on me, or had he fallen asleep in the huge leather chair that had taken my place long ago. Oh, how I had missed holding him, caressing him, touching his skin after he was clean-shaven. How I would let him rest his head on my shoulder while I gently played with his auburn hair, moving my fingers down across his forehead, then over his closed relaxed eyes onto his nose, then across his soft lips. Sometimes he would retrieve one of my fingers into his mouth, gently caressing it and then releasing it back to me. 

I screamed his name. “ADAM, help me! HELP ADAM PLEASE!”

But, there was no answer. Adam did not come. After a while, I stopped screaming, and figured he would wake up and find me eventually. Trying to calm myself, I meandered onto the odd surroundings I had fallen into. I thought how Adam would be shocked at these underground quarters someone from the past had designed very well, for what reason we would surely discover. 

Yet the décor was not old-fashioned. If this had been a hiding area during the Civil War or for slaves. No, this was more a state-of-the-art modern-day décor. It was fully furnished, and that was when my gut sensed something amiss, and I became frightened.

Was this the work of some diabolical genius who previously owned the home? No, I had owned the home for many years, but how was whoever getting in and out of this underground prison? Was there food here? I continued walking around, attempting to assess the situation, all the time trying to pretend this was not happening to me. I had fallen into a deep hole in the direction of Hell on Earth. Like those sinkholes in Florida, we would see on TV, but my sinkhole came furnished. This just wasn’t normal. Of course, it wasn’t normal for God’s sake. I had just fallen through the floor of my home into what I didn’t know what.

What was Adam doing? Was he looking for me? Did he fall asleep, and wouldn’t even miss me until morning? And then what would he do? Would he think I got up early and went somewhere? I started screaming, until my throat gave me definite signals to stop, or I would end up with throat polyps and talk like a heavy smoker the rest of my life. At the rate I was going, there wouldn’t even be surgery to fix the polyps, because I was never going to get out of this place. Anxiety riddled my body like buckshot on a bear’s behind. What if Adam thought I simply decided to leave him for a better life somewhere—to disappear. 

Wait, stop, think! 

There had to be an exit for whoever constructed this fortress. They—whoever they were—had to get food, and at that thought, I headed for the refrigerator. EMPTY! I stood staring, knowing this meant because I didn’t die from the fall, I would surely die of starvation. No food. I loved to eat. That was when the tears began falling, and as they fell, I also realized that would deplete my body of any extra fluids as well, so I had better stop the bawling, or as my dad used to say, “Oh stop your bellowing.” As in a cow bellows. A terrible thing for a dad to say to a little girl, but he was an old farmer, so it went.

I needed to stop my brain from wandering and begin thinking about how to escape. Escape what? I simply fell into an old passageway for slaves from the civil war, but in my heart, I knew that was not true. The décor was too updated. I started dragging and piling the furniture one on top of another at the area I fell through the closet floor. I climbed my makeshift ladder of instability, and was almost to the top when we, as in chairs and more chairs all crashed to the floor. The floor was made of old barn boards, yet was unusually clean. Who had kept this hidden area of confinement clean for his or her satanic purposes? Damn, I was scared. Where was Adam? Why wasn’t he banging on the floor? Of course, he wasn’t banging on the floor, why would he? But where did he think I went? And what time was it? I had no cell phone with me. Nothing. And now I had to pee. I began searching for a commode or something usable as such. There were dark narrow hallways leading to more barn board walls, each of which I pushed and pulled, attempting to find a secret exit. There had to be one, and there had to be a toilet of some sort for people that hid here at one time. I eventually came upon a tiny room closed off with a metal door. How in the name of Sam hell did anyone get a metal door down here? I carefully opened it to find a man-made shit hole, a five-gallon bucket, as in my parents’ house on the farm, and written on the wall was a very personal sign that read:

“Dear Jayne, I decided this was much easier and less costly than getting a divorce. My life with you has been like what this room represents. I hope you enjoy your short stay. Love Adam.

Frozen was putting it mildly. I was frozen with more pain-filled anger than I had ever known in my entire lifetime. Hate was operating as a skilled surgeon through every vein in my body. To Hell, if I would let him get away with this horrific crime. Starving me to death, after all I have done for him, and with him,  and just because we believed differently politically, or so I thought. I didn’t plan his death, because he didn’t vote for who I thought he should vote for. I always remained silent when he talked incessantly about his conspiracy theories, and how the government was listening to our phones and spying on us in our homes, and how the last election was this and that, and so off the charts unrealistically unbelievable. How the past President drank the blood of I couldn’t remember who or what.

The tears were starting to come again. The anger subsided, and the pain came in rushes like storm clouds over an already beaten down cornfield. The fruits of the land were laying down dried up and nearly dead. Like I felt. And with that, I sobbed myself to sleep on the soft purple sofa that sat on the barn flooring in my large casket of death. When the anger in my blood woke me, I wondered if Adam felt less guilty buying such a soft purple sofa for his wife to lie on while she starved to death, and what was he going to do when my body started to stink from rotting under the beautiful mansion we had built together for years. Wasn’t he afraid I might haunt him? I will! I will! No, he didn’t, because he didn’t think that far ahead.

I began to dream, or was I in that state of in-between, thinking about how Adam had walked into my life uninvited. Was that passive-aggressive? All these years was he planning to kill me? Suddenly, my mind was reeling in a thick distasteful memory mixed with many good years. My thoughts came in pictures of lovely flowerbeds with sudden mudslides smothering and snuffing the life out of them in a fraction of a second, and then my mind went back to the beginning again, that first day I met Adam.

He had walked over to the booth I was dining at and slid himself smoothly onto the soft leather seat opposite me. I looked up from the trance I had been in while eating the meal I had been momentarily alone with. I turned my head slightly to the left, looking over the top of my newly purchased pink leopard glasses, waiting for the intrusive stranger to speak. Obviously, he was waiting for my reaction to his rude entrance into my world, but I didn’t speak as he had expected, rather I took another bite of my salmon marinade with asparagus, and as I slowly chewed, I met his eyes again and waited.

He was a handsome fellow who was used to intimidating women. What he didn’t know was he had briefly stunned me, and that I had learned from experience how to play that poker game. While he sat stupidly trying to figure out what to do next, my mind took me to a different place. I asked myself what would happen if I had slipped into a booth on the opposite side of this man while he was quietly eating his meal? What if I sat there looking all beautiful waiting for him to respond to my uninvited gorgeous presence? That made me instantly want to save him from his self-made conceited grave site, considering that was what I had done for others most of my life. But I didn’t. I restrained my deep-rooted compulsion to be the savior of any and every one in need of saving. He was the one that slithered into my space and hadn’t slithered back out yet, so I just kept eating and watching him squirm uneasily.

Finally considering his looks hadn’t saved him, nor did I, he spoke, “May I join you; my name is Adam.”

I finished chewing before releasing him from his mental confinement, by responding, “Why, of course, Adam, and did you bring your evil apple for me to partake of as well?”

It was then I realized I might have gone too far and had become the intimidating one. I then broke the ice with casual laughter, and the words, “It is nice to meet you, Adam, at least I think so.”

His neck jolted in a slightly backward motion and his eyes changed their intention to a more query state, as he responded, “I guess I deserved that. Please, forgive my intrusion, but it was the only way I could think of to meet you.”

I smiled and exchanged a more reasonable chatter.

We had so many good years to have them end like this in murder?

Max seven days and I would be dead. I never had a reason to google what a person would go through while dying without food or water. I had seen children from other countries with their bones sticking out dehydrated with flies all over their bodies. The one good thing was there are no flies down here. What was I thinking? My mind had gone into mass confusion, unable to bring forth one solid thought, and then it happened out of the darkness of the situation, I saw ‘it.’

I remembered years ago when we were viewing ‘it’ before purchasing. Adam and I had walked around to the backyard area, and noticed the neighbor kitty-corner to the left bulldozing a large area from the mid-center of our view toward their property. At the end of the dozing was a double garage door. They had decided since the previous owner had passed away, and no one seemed to care for the property, they would on their own create a new entrance to their garage, a much nicer entrance that held a place for their boat. I was amazed at the gall of some people, but the pieces were coming together right inside my hungry scared mind. I had left town to visit a friend in North Carolina a while back. I noticed some dark lines in our backyard, and asked Adam what caused them. He blew me off with some story about how he spilled weedkiller, and had to buy some new carpet grass to repair what he had ruined. Of course, I bought his explanation. Why wouldn’t I?

Adam had been planning this for a long time. My manipulative husband had planned my murder for months or maybe years.