Unsure of my actions, I put the car back into drive and pulled off to the soaked side of the road—only a few feet lest I sink into the surrounding swamp. I thought for a second, then shifted the car into park. I just couldn’t make a decision to drive forward or backward. I couldn’t.

  The approaching headlights got bigger and brighter, making me think it was a truck. My heart leaped into overdrive as it came right up behind us, veered a little to make room, came up alongside, started to pass us…

  The truck’s tires screeched with pressed brakes as it swerved, its back end fish-tailing away from us, its front end stopping directly in our path. I immediately shifted into reverse, my foot moving toward the gas pedal, my head turned toward the back to scout our escape route, when Andrea shouted at me.

  “Wait! Don’t go!”

  I paused, panic searing through me, looked at her. “What?” I shouted. “What?”

  “They’re holding up a sign!”

  I faced forward again, focused on the passenger-side window that sat right in the beam of my headlights. Like she’d said, someone held a sign against the glass, a large piece of white paper that seemed to shine of its own accord. A message had been scrawled across it, hastily but neatly, with a black magic marker:

  House of Tongues

  NOW

  Or Wesley dies

  Get in, alone

  I stared at the words, completely unable to look away or act. I felt nothing inside, as if someone had shocked my system with a human malware that erased my hard drive. At least the part that had feelings, emotions. Everyone in the car was silent, even my kids. The numbness that consumed me at seeing the message was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.

  Memories were coming back. Like hearing a song or smelling a scent that takes you to another time and place, I was being swept away, swept to that night long ago when I’d been taken to the House of Tongues.

  “David?” Andrea whispered, seeming to sense that I’d fallen into a semi-trance.

  “Yeah?” I replied weakly.

  “You can’t go back there.”

  I couldn’t answer, couldn’t say anything. If I had a soul, it had fallen into an abyss.

  “Protect my kids,” I said. “Protect my mom. Take this van and drive. Drive until you hit the Georgia state line. You have a shotgun. Use it if you need it.”

  “David,” she said sternly. My mom said my name in the same way at the same time.

  I opened the door.

  “David!” Andrea reached out and grabbed my arm but I gently shook it off.

  Then I looked at her, all the fierceness of the evil world in my gaze. “Protect my family.”

  “David, no! No!”

  My mom screamed at me from the back. “Close that door and drive away, David. Right now!”

  The truck waited in front of us, idling, a stream of exhaust rising in the eerie light.

  “Daddy?” Hazel said in a trembling voice.

  “Dad?” Mason.

  “Daddy?” Logan.

  With the open-door alarm dinging, I turned around and faced my children. Hazel, her sweet face wet with tears, her eyes full of questions. Mason, pale and afraid, wilted. Logan in the far back, as confused a kid as ever was. I loved them to bursting, but we weren’t complete. Not without Wesley. Not without their eldest brother.

  “Do you guys trust me? Have you always trusted me?”

  I waited for their nods and got them, one by one.

  “Do you know I love you, more than any dad has ever loved his kids?”

  More nods, a few more tears.

  “I swear to you, I’ll be okay. I’m going to save Wesley and Grandpa, then we’ll all be back together. I swear it. Okay? I need you to be brave and go with Grandma and Andrea. You can pray for me if you’d like. And for your brother.”

  More nods, more tears. Their bravery humbled me to a level I didn’t know possible, and solidified the oath I’d just made to them. One way or another; somehow, someway; if I had to reach down the gullet of hell itself and pull Satan’s heart out with my bare hands, I’d do it. When dawn came, my family would be alive and safe. All of them.

  I looked at Andrea and she looked back at me.

  “There’s no choice,” I said.

  She waited. Nodded. Blinked, squeezing out a couple of tears.

  “David, you can’t do this,” my mom pleaded. “You can’t do this.”

  “Mom, I love you. I love you more than life itself.”

  I jumped out of the car, slammed the door closed before anyone could say another word. I expected a door to open, someone to chase me, but no one did. Andrea knew what had to be done, and she’d taken charge of the loved ones I was leaving behind. I walked toward the truck. The sign in the passenger window had been taken down, but a hand appeared in the dim light of the interior. It made a hitchhiking fist, thumb extended, pointing to the back of the truck, its meaning clear.

  I grabbed the lip of the truck bed with both hands, placed a foot on the bumper, then vaulted myself into the back. I sat down, legs crossed, my back against the side. The truck peeled out, spraying mud onto the front of my van, then sped away. I watched the van recede, but the lights were too bright for me to see inside. To see the faces of my family.

  I raised my right hand against the rushing wind resistance.

  I waved.

  It’s my turn this time, Andrea, I thought as I lowered my arm.

  This time it’s my turn.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  June 1989

  We walked through the woods, Pee Wee right in front of us. He had a flashlight, illuminating a narrow path through the brush and weeds and undergrowth. Another man was behind us, a bag on his head, a thing that now seemed almost normal to me. He, too, had a flashlight, directed at us in case we made any sudden moves. Andrea and I held hands, our fingers slick with sweat. We’d probably been hiking for 20 minutes since we left the gigantic Cadillac, where a dead man lay next to it, his skull bashed in by a crowbar.

  I’d killed a man, and so far I felt no remorse.

  I did feel sick inside, queasy, unclean. But not remorseful. These people had put me through hell, and they all deserved a similar death. Worse. And if they thought Andrea and I were just gonna be nice little lambs going to the slaughter, they had another thing coming. Not that some monumental, heroic bravery had taken over me—the honest truth is that I was scared shitless. But I’d also had enough of their antics, feeling as if we’d reached a point where we had nothing to lose anymore, a point with only two options: beg for mercy or go down fighting. I hoped in my heart I’d choose the latter when all things came to a head.

  On and on we walked, through the gloomily lit tunnel of the trees.

  “Where’re you taking us?” Andrea asked. No one had spoken for a few minutes and her voice just about wiped out the courage I’d been building up—I almost jumped out of my pants.

  Pee Wee stopped. We stopped, too, or we would’ve run right into him. Without turning around, he answered in a tone full of annoyance.

  “I already told you where we’re going. The House of Tongues.”

  “Well what the hell is the House of Tongues?”

  I almost cheered at the defiance in her words.

  This time, Pee Wee did turn around, shining his flashlight up under his chin to create the classic ghoul face. When he spoke, his face twisted with creepy shadows. “It’s exactly what it sounds like. I ain’t no poet.”

  He spun around and started walking again. The Baghead behind us gave a nudge in our backs with his flashlight, and we stumbled forward, trying to keep up. A few minutes later, we exited the trees and entered a small clearing, maybe 30 feet wide, where not only the trees but even weeds, bushes, scrub—everything—had been cleared. Pee Wee and the Baghead both were shining their lights around, either looking for something or trying to impress us with our location. I wasn’t, in the least.

  Only one thing broke up the bare ground of the clearing, and I had no idea what it was. Some kind of shaft, almost like a chimney, made of old stones and mortar, rising 20 feet from the ground. It was cylindrical, about as wide as one of the huge pecan trees in our front yard, and tapered off a little toward the top, ending in a jagged circle of broken rock, reminding me of a beer bottle that some brawler broke against the bar to ward off a drunken foe. The surface of the shaft looked ancient, covered in mildew and moss, a sickly greenish hue mixed with gray.

  “That there’s been around since the Revolution, kids,” Pee Wee said, sounding more than a little fanatical, like a deranged docent in a museum. “The House of Tongues is right under it. Come on, now.”

  He walked forward, his light making the tall structure’s shadow sway back and forth against the trees like a drunkard. We followed him around to the other side, where there was a square hole built into the bottom of the shaft, no more than three feet high, sealed by an iron-banded wooden door. The whole thing seemed like a tower in a castle—maybe Rapunzel had been imprisoned up top, though I saw no sign of her hair.

  Pee Wee took out an old-school key and slid it into a keyhole, turned it; a click sounded and the door opened slightly. The noise reminded me of the Cadillac’s trunk, and that made an ominous situation even more ominous. Pee Wee crouched down and placed his palm against the wood, pushed it all the way in with a creak. Darkness waited on the inside, complete.

  “Follow me,” he said, then he leaned forward onto his hands and crawled through the opening.

  I looked at Andrea but she was too busy staring at the square of blackness where Pee Wee’s feet had just disappeared. The Baghead nudged me with the point of his finger.

  “Get in there,” the man said with that gravelly voice I hadn’t heard since the Honeyhole. I was massively confused as to who’d been who whenever I met these psychos.

  Andrea went ahead of me, dropping to her hands and knees and crawling forward. I did the same, right behind her, and as soon as she crossed the threshold, faint light appeared on the inside. I entered next, into a tiny rounded chamber that looked much like it did on the outside, rough stone blocks mortared together in haphazard fashion, the circumference of the chimney narrowing the higher it went. A few tubular fluorescent bulbs hung like Christmas ornaments from rusty nails, their wires zigzagging up the curved face of the flat rocks. The glow was unnatural and uneasy on the eyes.

  A metallic staircase spiraled its way downward from a small landing at the door, and Pee Wee had already descended a few steps, so that his eyes were almost even with mine while I still knelt. Andrea stood on a step to the right and above him, looking up the shaft of the chimney. I joined her, glad to stand back up to my full height. The place smelled dank and rotten, the air surprisingly cool. The lights buzzed over our heads, an unpleasant sound that matched everything else about the place. Baghead was the last to enter, shutting the door behind him. I felt as if I’d been sealed in a tomb, and hoped it wasn’t true.

  Without saying anything, Pee Wee started clomping his way down. We followed.

  The steps clanged and the entire metal structure of the spiral staircase trembled, rattled as we descended into the depths below. There were also metallic groans and squeals that echoed off the walls, the sounds ricocheting up the stone shaft until they hit the top and bounced back toward us. Soon it was an eerie cacophony of reverberations and perpetual squeaks that made my head hurt. The slight swaying of the steps made me dizzy.

  The stench seemed to worsen every time I put a foot down. Rot. Decay. Moldy wetness. We’d gone 20 steps. Then 40. I couldn’t fathom what the purpose of this place had been in those long-ago years when it had been built, dug into the earth. But I feared finding out the source of those foul smells. The fluorescent bulbs above us had lost their effectiveness, the air darkening, but I could sense a reddish glow coming from below. Magma, was the word that came to mind, a river of lava, just like Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings. But the temperature was plummeting, not the other way around.

  We reached the bottom.

  I heard the scruff of Pee Wee’s shoes when they left the metal mesh of the steps and scraped across a dusty stone floor. Andrea and I exited the staircase right after him, entering a long, narrow tunnel constructed from the same blocks of stone as the shaft we’d just descended. A red lightbulb hung from the ceiling, the only source of light, creepy as hell, as if someone’s blood had evaporated into the air. At the end of the corridor, another iron-banded door stood closed.

  No one said anything. I was holding Andrea’s hand and couldn’t remember how long we’d been doing so. Pee Wee walked ahead, all the way to the door. We followed him, the gun-toting Baghead right on our heels. This routine was getting old, but that didn’t mean I was anxious for it to end. A visceral fear, something deeper and more sickening than I’d felt before, crept into my nerves and bones. The stark realization that my death awaited me on the other side of the door… I didn’t know how to bear it, shaking from the panic.

  Andrea squeezed my hand harder, brought it to her lips, kissed my knuckles.

  “It’ll be okay,” she whispered. Her words bungeed me back to sanity, at least for the moment. We all stood in front of the menacing door, its cracked wood and rusted iron bands looking as old as England.

  “This is the House of Tongues,” Pee Wee said in a scratchy whisper, something demonic about it. “I expect reverence when we enter. Do you understand?”

  I felt so helpless, knowing we should fight, attack these two monsters before we were opened up to even more on the other side of the door. But I couldn’t. I had no capacity to act.

  So I nodded instead.

  “Are you gonna kill us?” Andrea asked, holding onto her dignity. “You really think you’ll get away with all of this?”

  “No.” He answered with absolutely no doubt in his voice, as if he’d accepted the consequences of his many murders, felt that it would all be worth it. “Now, are you going to be reverent?”

  Andrea was fuming, but she seemed to sense that the time to fight back had not yet presented itself. She nodded as meekly as she could.

  “Good.” Pee Wee unlocked the door and pushed it open.

  A rancid breeze blew outwards, as if the chamber within had exhaled after holding its breath for millennia. I gagged, held my nose, coughed at the same smells we’d already been accosted with, but magnified tenfold. Pee Wee reached around the frame of the door and flicked a switch; lights flickered to life beyond the opening—lights with the same buzzy glow of the fluorescents in the stairwell. He paused at the threshold to look back at us, then made a gesture with his head for us to follow him in. Then he stepped inside, and so did we, entering a room with a low ceiling, bordered with wooden shelves on all sides, about 20 feet square. Several lightbulbs hung from the ceiling.

  The shelves were mostly spare, but one wall of them had been filled with sealed mason jars, lined up end to end, the glass of each touching its neighbors on both sides. An amber-colored liquid filled each one, a large, pale chunk of something floating within every single jar. The bottles were labeled with white stickers yellowed from age, messy handwriting scrawled across the faded surfaces.

  In my life, I’ve felt the presence of true darkness, of evil, of things that have haunted and will continue to haunt me until I take my very last breath. But at the top of the list, far ahead of whatever may come in second place, was the feeling I got in that room, in that moment, looking at those shelves, stocked with sealed, dusty mason jars.

  Pee Wee swept an arm slowly through the air, in the direction of the jars, as if revealing a brand new car to a winner on a game show.

  “Behold,” he said in a reverential voice. “The tongues of our ancestors.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  July 2017

  The warm air rushed against my skin, blew my hair into a tangled mess, as the truck drove through the night. I sensed the turns before they came, shifted my body in anticipation, though I’d only been to this place once in my entire life. The memories were coming back hard and fast, some of it masked as intuition, and not in any type of order that made sense.

  But I remembered the castle-like tower, with its broken-tooth crown. I remembered the iron-bound doors. I remembered the spiral staircase of metal and rust. Worst of all, I remembered the wall of mason jars, each one filled with an amber liquid, keeping its precious cargo safe, floating, and preserved.

  Tongues.

  I shuddered at the thought, at the memory. The purpose of the tongues still eluded me, however. Why did Pee Wee have them all? What had he said on that horrific night so long ago? I couldn’t quite recall. Not yet. But the memory waited, patiently, eager, on the other side of some veil that I didn’t understand.

  The truck slowed and turned onto a barely-there dirt track that vanished quickly into a heavily wooded area. The canopy of branches and leaves looked like a cave rimmed by the headlights of the vehicle, its destination dark and foreboding. Although impossible, it all seemed familiar to me—that tree, that bush, the rocks along the trail, the way the path curved slowly to the right. In my countless visits back home since I’d graduated from high school, I hadn’t been back to this spot or this general area, even. The growth of the forest would be completely different from when I was a teenager. But still. I was coming back to the place where my horrors culminated, climaxed, marinated into the meat of my being.

  I was scared, like the child I had been.

  The truck stopped.

  A cloud of dust washed over us, shining in the headlights like fog, then dissipated. The truck doors opened, and two men got out, both of them wearing the uniform of old, the most ridiculous uniform I could possibly imagine for people of such evil. Grocery bags on their heads, the handles tied around their necks, cut slits through which they could breathe.

  Having been through all this before, I found a seed of bravery mushed within me.

  “Seriously?” I asked, throwing all the scorn I possibly could into the word. “Still with the stupid bags on your heads? What are we, in kindergarten? Show your faces, cowards.”