"The Bat House" - Horror Hill

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

He turned away from the group and went quickly down the road and on into the woods. A voice called, Bradley, behind him, but he paid it no heed. He began to move faster and faster until he was almost running full tilt through the trees, the dark bowls clocking by on either side, malign and injurious shapes among which he floundered in full flight. Gradually, he began to slow. He could feel something cold seeping through him, like water through a rockery, and was suddenly aware that what he could see of his surroundings he did not recognize. The trees loomed enormously and closed him in. The spaces between them grown thick with tangled shrubs and thorn bushes, murricut coils of bramble against which dead leaves and other refuse had been blown by the winds and there impaled. He slowed to a walk and then sat down on the trunk of a rather deformed tree that had fallen like some colossal android whose circuitry has shorted. His hands trembled and every breath raked white hot coals through his lungs. He sat there for a minute or three, alert for any sounds of voices on the cold autumn air, footsteps, laughter, old dry sticks crunching underfoot.

Nothing, no noise at all save his own breath and his pounding blood and a bird calling from some dim and bowered solitude, thin and fading, forever lost. At length and with his breath still roaring like a furnace in his chest, he stood and looked around, cradled as he was in a grail of quietude and gathering dusk. Bare branches, bitter trees, damp and spongy earth, lacquered with mulchy leaves and snaked with knobby, slug-white roots reared out of the miry black ground like alien tendrils testing for life. To the west lay a slope where his own harried passage had crashed through brush and bracken, and beyond this, he could see sourceless and spectral the faint toe-colored light of the sun. And here he blinked, squinted hard into the wan unraveling of light with a feeling nigh to unease. Through the tangled latticework of tree branches engraved upon the sky, he could make out the dark angle of a steep roof line intersecting the horizon. As he looked, some small bird that was to his eye somehow ill-shapen tumbled over the roof, fluttered, returned. Then another. Then more. Hundreds of them, darting and checking across the watered sky.

The rising apprehension in the pit of his stomach tightened like someone doing a knot. Without really knowing why, he set off towards the building. It just seemed to draw him, the way a magnet draws iron.

He began a careful ascent of the gently rising slope, picking his way among hornbeam and ewe with the straw-colored light of sunset burning its way towards him. As he drew nearer to the building, his brain finally caught up with the noise he'd been hearing but had not entirely registered. A constant, greedy, squeaking, incessant, pervasive, as of the numberless cries of some tremendous nest of mice. He paused uncertainly against the vine-encrusted trunk of a black and mournful cedar and glanced once over his shoulder, as if, perhaps, he might turn back. The clearing from which he'd climbed lay silent and still. A barren gallery told him blue-black shades of lengthening shadow that he couldn't help but feel had been just quit by another. Some medieval ghost with eyes to the ground, hobbling with hymnal and cowl. He pushed the thought aside and turned and walked on. When he came over the crest of the slope, he understood. Not birds, after all. A few meters in front of him stood a new-looking metal sign that read, Bat House, in black letters on a yellow field. Below this, in slightly smaller letters, it said, Do not enter without a bat license. All bats and their roosts are protected by law.

Bradley lifted his eyes from the words on the sign to the house where it stood before him. It was a laurel-colored weatherboard with a sharply gabled bitumen roof fitted tightly to the fascia boards. A dark monolith elevated by a quartet of stilts, so that it resembled some strange angular bug raised up on tiptoe. A constant stream of bats darted to and fro from the bottom of the building and out of the tops of the trees, like rough shapes of ash scattered by the luminous wind of sunset. He walked slowly towards the bat house, as if all the years of his young life had been honed down to this single moment, to the cries of bats washing over him from out of the darkling trees, primal and myth-laden, urging him on into the deepening shadows taking hold of the land, those red-eyed basilisks cast in miniature, scions of kamazats, or the doomed princess liatogi, their shrill corral seeping through the cracks of a darker world, where light itself is at a premium, and those who dwell there have neither love nor affinity for it. There was a ladder beneath the building, rising dizzily to where a small hatch was set into the floor for access. He drifted to a halt just at the edge of the cool blue penumbra of the building's shadow proper. He stood, watching up at the ladder, and the dark leathery shapes of bats dropping plum and sheer from a sunless slatted under region of seething wings and blackness. A blackness studded with brightly-pupiled rubies, myriad blood-red eyes that glowed like coals in a grate. A panoply of otherworldly creatures to this sad corporeal medium forever bound. Beasts with no other origin save for the dark itself, to which they are clan and kin.