Chapter 4 - The House on Blackwood Lane
Darkness swallowed the kitchen like a heavy, suffocating blanket. The only illumination came from the pale, sickly silver light of the cold November rain filtering through the high bay windows.
"Ryan!" Sarah screamed in the pitch black, her voice echoing with pure panic.
"I'm here! I'm right here!" Ryan yelled, feeling around blindly in the dark until his hand caught the sleeve of her crimson sweater. He pulled her and Toby close to his side. "Move slowly. The front door is ten feet straight ahead."
They shuffled through the dark, their shoes crunching over shattered lightbulb glass and coffee ceramic. Ryan held the iron fire poker raised in his right hand, his heart hammering against his ribs like a sledgehammer.
They reached the grand front foyer. The massive, solid oak front door stood before them, its brass deadbolt glinting faintly in the moonlight. Ryan reached out, grabbed the thumb-turn lock, and twisted it.
It clicked open.
He grabbed the heavy brass handle and yanked.
The door didn't move.
Ryan swore, planting his boot against the doorframe and pulling with all his strength, his biceps straining against his dark blue shirt. The door remained completely solid, sealed shut as if it had been welded into the stone structure of the house itself.
"It's jammed," Ryan gasped, sweat pouring down his forehead despite the freezing cold air sweeping through the house.
"It's not jammed, Ryan," Sarah whispered, her voice dropping into an icy, hollow register. She pointed a shaking finger at the threshold beneath the door.
Creeping out from the narrow crack between the bottom of the front door and the wooden floorboards was a thick, black, viscous fluid. It bubbled up slowly, filling the foyer with the suffocating stench of stagnant marsh water and old soil.
Thump.
Something heavy fell inside the front coat closet just three feet to their left.
Ryan swung the fire poker toward the closet door, his muscles coiled, every nerve ending in his body screaming in terror.
The louvered wooden doors of the closet slowly creaked open on their own.
Inside, hanging from the brass coat hooks alongside Ryan’s winter jackets and Sarah’s raincoats, was a tiny, soil-soaked yellow raincoat. It was the coat Lily had been wearing the afternoon she wandered away from their backyard campsite two years ago—the coat she had been wearing when the search party found her body three days later in the swollen waters of Blackwood Creek.
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Water was dripping from the hem of the yellow raincoat, forming a dark puddle on the closet floor.
"Daddy..." a voice whispered from inside the dark folds of the yellow coat. "Why did you leave me by the river?"
