Hell Within -- Chapter Four: The Children -- Scenes 1-5

-Part Two: The Becoming-

-Chapter Four: The Children-

-1-

"Oh, my god!" Amy said as Ben pulled his RX-7 into the cul-de-sac before the Lancaster mansion.

She opened the door and got out of the car before it stopped moving and looked straight up at the five stories of black stone and arched windows.

Ben’s car door slammed shut behind her, and she heard him say, "So what do you think?"

"It’s beautiful," she said, but her response was only reactionary.

In fact, Amy didn’t know what to think of it. She had no frame of reference for something such as this. She’d spent the first twelve years of her life living in a single-wide trailer.

She’d thought her father had made it big when he bought the three-bedroom, one bath house across from Ben’s grandparents.

The biggest house she’d ever lived in was the one she and Ben had spent eight years in when Ben owned the restaurants. It was a four bedroom, two and a half bath two story.

The largest house she’d ever been inside was Graceland. She and Ben had taken her father there on vacation the last year of his life. She was pretty sure two or three Gracelands would fit inside this one.

It was the biggest house she’d ever seen in her life.

Looking up at it gave her a creepy feeling not unlike the feeling she’d had when she and Ben had visited a Gothic Cathedral in France.

"Your parents lived here?" she said.

"I didn’t believe it either until I saw the photo album."

She looked back at Ben and then up to the house.

Ben would get on just fine here. He liked dark and dreary, but she didn’t think she’d like it.

She’d always fancied herself a creative homemaker, but this was way out of her league. She was a brass and glass girl. This was the Sistine Chapel.

She hadn’t even wanted to come here.

But Ben seemed adamant about patching things up.

"Just take a ride with me and see the house and everything will be different," he’d said.

"How the hell are we going to pay upkeep in a place like this?" she said, still unable to peel her eyes away.

"With the money that I inherited."

She looked at him again. "How much?"

Ben shook his head. "We’ll never have to work again."

She looked back at the mansion.

"Our furniture is going to look like shit in there."

"We don’t need our old stuff. The house is entirely furnished. What we don’t have, we can buy."

Amy laughed in spite of herself.

Ben stepped around beside her, looked up to the house, and nodded.

"Well, no sense in standing out here all day. Let’s go in, and I’ll show you around."

-2-

By the time they reached the Master’s Quarters, her tour of the house confirmed it. The house was unlike anything she’d ever seen.

And the master’s quarters was especially daunting. It looked like a place someone with the last name Rockefeller or Vanderbilt should sleep. The master’s bedroom alone was larger than their two-bedroom apartment, and it was laden with eye-candy.

The bed was curtained and up on a pedestal. The walls were of a parchment color paneled halfway up with ornately carved cherry. And the back wall consisted of a long panel of windows.

"Check this out," Ben said walking over to the windowed wall and opening one of the windows. He stepped outside, and Amy followed.

What she found was an enormous balcony that stretched the length of the back of the house complete with lawn furniture and old-fashioned iron grills.

And the view was spectacular.

She could see over the treetops in the patch of woods behind the house, that there was a small pond beyond. An old gazebo with white paint flaking off of it stood on the bank.

Beyond the pond, more woods and the skeleton of an old church steeple rising just above the trees.

"Make yourself at home," Ben said.

She turned and looked at him, and found him gaping at his wristwatch.

"We have a little more than an hour before the Bekins truck gets here. I want to scout around and find a place to store the stuff we’re not going to use."

"You’ve already moved our stuff?"

Ben nodded.

"Does this place have a phone?"

Ben huffed. "Funny you should ask that. It only has one phone and it is unusable. The phone company is supposed to be coming out, but it might be a while. Use your cell phone."

She turned and looked back out at the view. She sensed Ben standing behind her and watching for a moment, before he turned off to mind his business.

-3-

Ben began to discover the folly of his moving into the Lancaster mansion immediately.

He was scoping the house looking for a place to store the bulk of their furniture when he happened on an area outside of the main body of the mansion that he found most unusual.

Instead of the stone or hardwood floors that lined most of the hallways, this area was covered in the kind of pebble-flecked white tile that one might find in a schoolhouse or government building. And there was a faint antiseptic smell lingering in the hall.

Each door he opened seemed to lead to the same kind of room -- a small bedroom-like set-up with a white radiator beneath each window. These rooms each contained WW2 style beds with simple iron frames designed for not more than one person -- their mattresses stripped of linen.

Each room held identical tables -- circular and small like a card table with a stained wooden top, and sometimes a wooden chair before it.

Each had a bathroom -- old-fashioned water closets with bath tubs that looked as though they were designed for people with difficulty moving around. The wall by the commodes had iron hand rails on each side as did the tubs.

At length, he came to a room with a green door that was different than the others. It was a heavy metal door with a steel-reinforced glass window at its top, and a sign on the door read "NO ADMITTANCE."

Ben squinted, scratched his head, and then opened the door.
He recoiled at the sight inside.

A man wearing a white lab coat stood over a gurney just inside with his back turned to Ben. And the only hint of the nature of his work was the two bare feet pointing up at the end of the gurney.

"Excuse me?" Ben said.

The man held up a bloody gloved finger without turning to face him.

"I get to you just as soon as I’ve finished fixing your mother."

Ben frowned and stepped inside the room and looked to his right.

His mouth fell open.

Another gurney sat against the wall with a little girl, who couldn’t have been a day over nine strapped, down like a mental patient to its iron rails. A white strip of cloth had been tied over her mouth in an effort to gag her. Her wide brown eyes darted fearfully around the room as she struggled against the leather straps that bound her hands and feet.

The shape of her face, the tone of her skin, and her auburn hair reminded Ben of his mother’s self portrait in the sitting room of the master’s quarters.

He cast a fearful eye at the man hovering over the gurney in the center of the room.

The man in the lab coat discarded a bloody mass of tissue on a metal tray beside his instruments.

Ben stepped up behind the man in the lab coat and around him and gasped at the sight.

The woman on the gurney, an attractive lady with curly locks of red hair lay with her brown eyes open and locked in a dead-man’s stare up at the bright lights above. Her lips were blue and parted slightly revealing her front teeth, and there was a smudge of blood on her right cheek.

Her naked torso had been split in two with her skin clamped back like a frog someone was dissecting. It appeared that the good doctor was in the process of removing all of her organs.

Ben turned away and clamped his eyes shut, and felt the Big Mac he’d had for lunch boiling back up his esophagus. When he opened his eyes, the room was completely different.

The gurneys were gone, and the dome of lights over the area where the man in the lab coat had been dissecting a woman was dark.

Ben shuddered.

-4-

An hour later, Ben found himself lugging a heavy Bekins box into the Main Downstairs Den. His mouth fell open when he stepped into the enormous room of hardwood floors and oaken walls. He carted the box across the room and sat it down on the hardwood floor before the six-foot hearth and stood up straight.

That’s when he found himself face to face with the portrait of his pale ancestor.

* * * *
A pale hand drooping over the edge of a lime bathtub.

Blood spinning counter clockwise down the chrome drain.

A little boy standing in the doorway staring wide-eyed at the spectacle.

The figure in the painting hovering in the shadows above his bed. He wore all black medieval clothing with white ruffles, and his skin was electric blue like that of a cadaver. His eyes blazed green almost glowing in the dark. His black beard undulated as if he were submerged in water. And there was an electric smell to the room like ozone.

Ben was petrified, but the spirit seemed not to notice. He stretched out his bony hand.

"We’ve come to protect you."

* * * *
It was the same man he’d seen in all his dreams. The same figure he’d encountered at his apartment last week.

He had no concept of how long he stood before the hearth staring at it, and he also didn’t realize it when Tom stepped up beside him, folded his arms and trained his eyes on the portrait.

"Amazing isn’t it," Tom said suddenly causing Ben to jump.

Ben looked at the man standing beside him who didn’t remove his eyes from the portrait.

"Who was he?"

Tom nodded. "He was Henry Lancaster, the builder of this house."

"What do you know of him?"

Tom’s eyes gleamed and a shrewd smile curved his thin lips. "He was severe. He built this house in the late 1500s as a kind of fort to protect himself and the remaining survivors of his colony."

Ben frowned. "That doesn’t agree with history. I’m pretty sure that there was no colony in Georgia until the 1600s."

Tom shrugged. "I’m just reciting what I’ve read from the journals in your library."

"Journals?"

Tom nodded. "It’s all there, including the journal of the man himself."

Ben looked back at the portrait. "I’ve seen him in my dreams."

Tom gave him a Mona Lisa smile.

"What?"

Tom looked up at the painting. "There’s an old wives tale; they say he protects the children."

We’ve come to protect you.

Ben turned his head and looked back on the face of the man with wonder. Tom had called him severe, but the man in the portrait had a meekness about him.

He looked weak.

And he stared at the rendering for an indeterminate amount of time pondering all the new information.

"What was wrong with him?" he said after a time.

When Tom didn’t answer immediately, Ben turned to look at him and found nothing where he’d been, but empty space.

-5-

Amy Eaton looked in the foggy antique mirror over the walnut dresser in the oval bedroom, took in a deep breath, and released it slowly. This was the part that she’d been dreading, but she’d postponed it as long as she could.

She lifted her cell phone and dialed the number, and then she hit the send button and pressed it to her ear hoping she’d get the answering machine, but the phone rang twice before he picked it up.

"Hello?" Dick said.

"It’s me," she sighed.

"Amy? -- I’ve been worried sick about you. I’ve called your phone, but it only rings. I even called Ben on the pretense that I wanted him to come into work, and when he didn’t answer, I thought that son-of-a-bitch did something to you."

"No, every thing's fine."

"Where’ve you been?"

She bit her lower lip. "Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about."

"This doesn’t sound good."

Amy sighed. "I’ve decided to give Ben another chance."

"You can’t be serious!"

"I can’t just throw away our marriage, and Ben is not a bad man."

"Not a bad man? You said it yourself; the man has always been off his block."

Amy shook her head and sat down on the side of the bed.

"He goes on drinking binges for weeks at a time. Doesn’t call, doesn’t write, doesn’t draw you a picture. You find him in a hospital half-dead."

"That was one time, and that was after he lost the restaurants and the house."

Dick huffed. "He wakes up in the middle of the night screaming and won’t tell you why."

"Dick."

"What?"

She sighed again. "We’ve fallen on hard times, and he’s drawn up into himself. But all of that’s over now."

"What’s this all about? A week ago you were dead set on leaving him."

She shook her head. "This is just way too complicated."

"Do you not care about me anymore?"

"It’s not that simple."

"Well, I think I deserve an explanation."

Amy lay back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. "Look, I’ve done something very wrong here. He’s got problems, but he’s a good man."

"Whatever."

"I have to break it off."

"Fuck you."

And he hung up.

Amy hit the end button on the phone and sat up and looked in the mirror, and a pang of terror shot through her chest. Ben stood in the doorway of the bedroom staring at her.

She spun around.

"How long have you been standing there?"

Ben shrugged.

"I’m sorry," she said.

Ben gave her an interrogative look. "About what?"

Amy studied him and started to respond, but before she could get a word out of her mouth he was speaking again.

"Have you been in the downstairs den?"

She shook her head.

"There’s a painting there. . . ."

He shuddered.

"What?"

He shook his head. "We’ve got a lot to do. Can you help me arrange some of this?"

"Sure."

Ben stared at her a moment longer as if he wanted to tell her something that he couldn’t find the words to say, and then he turned out of the room. Amy watched him go thanking her lucky stars.

(Continue to Chapter 4 -- Scenes 6-7)