The Pits (Part 6)

Max rushed through the woods, feeling his heart beating so hard his eardrums echoed in response. He had left the path a while back, thinking he was going the wrong way. Hopefully deviating from the posted trail would ironically provide a better route to safety. But for now, he would just keep running. The last time he stopped to breathe he heard the rustling of leaves and branches behind him. Not sure if it was the wind or the cultists, he went back to running.

            It wasn’t the parking lot, much less his car, but Max finally came upon a place where he might find help. He ran into a clearing that surrounded a two-story house that had a large pile of chopped wood along its right side. Max looked around as he walked toward the house. There were holes in the ground that he didn’t bother looking in. Areas of the land that had been recently covered, and a backhoe left next to one of the large holes.

            This place didn’t make him feel wanted. In Max’s opinion, this was the house of someone who didn’t want to be found. Old, and rickety, as if someone had abandoned it. It looked like someone had built the house themselves one hundred years ago. The windows upstairs were dirty, and boarded up, but surprisingly nothing was actually falling apart. Someone had been maintaining the house. Someone had to live here.

            Max reached the front door, but before knocking on the door he turned back towards the woods. The cultists that had followed him were standing at the edge of the clearing, staring at him. ‘Take a step closer and I’ll knock and unleash whatever hell this has instore on all of us,’ Max thought, hoping they wouldn’t call his silent bluff. He took a step backwards, closer to the door. The cultists ran.

            This solidified Max’s fear about being at that house. There was something wrong here if they wouldn’t come near it. ‘Maybe the people that live here belong to a different cult, and they have problems with each other.’ But even he believed such an idea was stupid.

            Knocking on the door was the scariest thing Max had done until that point of his life. He felt like running. But there was no way he’d make it anywhere safe if he had to run through the woods. Worse still was the thought that he might come across Gio in a worse condition than when he had saw the other boy last. No one answered the door, so Max knocked again, a little bit harder, but hopefully, not hard enough to piss of anyone that lived inside.

            The door opened.

            He was raised to be polite—or, at least, he was when he turned ten years old and moved in with his father. Max was not about to just walk into someone else’s house. However, he did open it a little more with another knock.

            “Hello?” He called. “Is…anyone home?”

            Max’s voice lowered to a whimper at the end of the sentence. As much as he, and his friends, needed help, he prayed that he never had to find out. Though, he decided to weigh his options.

            Go inside, and probably be murdered for trespassing.

            Close the door, wait on the porch, and hope the owner came back soon.

            Or, take his chances in the woods, again.

            “What if they didn’t know I was in there?” He wasn’t really considering it at the time but hearing himself say it out lout made him think that might not be a bad idea. But the did try to talk himself out of it. “If this were a horror movie, I’d be yelling at me for thinking this was a good idea.”

            Max looked around the property again, then back at the cultists who were hiding behind foliage at the tree line, watching. He sighed, “I don’t think I have a choice.” He took a few steps into the house, once again looked at his stalkers, then closed the door. Max turned around, looking at the back door, which was visible from the front door, and had to clap his hands over his mouth to keep from screaming. One of the cultists was standing at the back door, his face only an inch or two away from the glass, not moving. This wouldn’t be a great time to wet himself, not that there was a good time that he could think of. Max forced tried to force himself to calm down but was having trouble doing so.

            He saw something move in the corner of his left eye, and slowly turned his head to face the wall in the next room. There were four cultists standing closely to the two windows, looking in just as the first one was. For once, Max noticed that they were all wearing different masks. They were definitely similar; however, each had different shapes and symbols stitched into them. They looked like transmutation circles that Max had seen in a book about alchemy, once.

            They all stood still for a few minutes; their constant staring making Max tear up, knowing what they wanted of him. Then, suddenly, they just left. And quickly. The darted off into the trees again. And Max didn’t have a good feeling about that.

            It was time to move.