House Of Horrors

Chapter 7: Horror Unfolds

Chapter 7:

Collin's POV:

As soon as I got that chilling, frantic call from my brother's friends, I was rushing out of the door of my apartment. Maybe I was only twenty-two and still in the training academy, but I still had the whole police force in my back pocket. There was no way I was just going to let the cops handle this without me, that was my little brother in there.

Bursting into the wide double doors of the station, I immediately went into the back offices where my childhood best friend worked; he graduated two months before I did but so far had spent more time behind a desk than patrolling.

"Quil!" I yelled out with panic laced in my voice, while sprinting around searching for him. Quil's head of dark brown hair popped up from behind his small cubical and shot me a strange look, that said 'calm down'.

"Whoa, chill Collin! What's going on, what's the matter?"

I sucked in a deep breath before speaking, "I just got a call from Nick... he and a couple of his friends are stuck in a creepy haunted house, apparently two people are dead and everybody else's life is in danger," I stated. Quil's eyebrows furrowed in concern and he plopped back down in his gray office chair. We were silent for a moment, as I impatiently let him think over the sticky situation.

Quil picked up the bulky plastic phone sitting on his desk and mumbled something into the receiver that I didn't quite catch, but I assumed he was calling for some back up.

"Where is this haunted house exactly?" he asked, not even looking up at me. I picked my brain, trying to remember what was said about the location when I had been in a half-asleep state.

"The corner of Sibley," I announced finally, and Quil visibly stiffened, grasping the phone in his right hand while the dial tone beeped annoyingly.

"That one?"

"Umm, yeah," I stuttered, feeling anxious at my best friend's strange reaction, "What's wrong with that one?"

Quil pushed himself to the other end of his cluttered desk and pulled open a deep drawer. His slender fingers brushed past several files until he found the right one, a thick brown folder full of various documents.

Peeling the file open, he started to flip through the multiple papers until he got to a list of names.

"See all these names?" Quil asked me, holding the piece of paper up to my face closely, "These are all people that went missing. They were last seen going to this haunted house, that's the only thing they all had in common; that and we never found any of their bodies. We closed this piece of shit down though, two years ago. So, I don't really understand..."

"Wait," I whispered, closing my tired eyes to think long and hard. Quil stopped talking and set his brown eyes on me, waiting for me to speak. A memory flashed into my head, Nick talking about going to the house, "Nick.... said.... he was going to a haunted house.... a closed one... so he already knew it was shut down"

"This doesn't make sense, the owner was arrested last week, Andrew Roy. So, who is running this thing? Who is still letting kids inside?" He questioned, frantically shuffling through all the papers in the thick file. A bead of sweat rolled down his face, and I observed my best friend's familiar features, realizing he looked aged from exhaustion.

"Hey Collin, can you name all the people he's with?"

I knew all Nick's friends, but I didn't know which ones he was currently with, only the ones I spoke with on the phone.

"Well, I know he's with Emily Valentine and Hayley Lawson for sure, but that's all I know."

"How do you know this?" Quil asked, staring intensely right into my green eyes and making me sweat a bit.