A Place So Wicked by Patrick Reuman (life books to read txt) 📕

when they were little. He figured it was some older brother thing, a sixth sense.

“You wanna run downstairs with me?” Richard asked, startling Robbie from his thoughts.

“Ummm, yeah. Sure. Why?”

Richard nodded at his phone. “I’m looking here at how to take a door off its hinges.

Robbie almost laughed. The guy achieved all the academic honors in school but had to look up how to take a door off its hinges.

“If the realtor can’t find the key and that smell doesn’t go away,” Richard continued, “we may have to just take the door down.”

Robbie thought his brother just looked bored. There was nothing they were going to accomplish by going and looking at the door. If they were going to go down and take the door off its hinges, they may as well just go do that now and get it out of the way. But he wasn’t about to debate something as silly as that right before having to ask his brother for a huge favor.

Robbie jumped to his feet. “All right, let’s go.”

Robbie followed Richard into the hall. Lisa caught sight of them as they passed and asked what they were doing.

“Just running down into the basement,” Richard said as he reached the basement door and grabbed the handle.

An unholy wave of putrid disgust flooded up from the basement the moment Richard cracked the door. So fast, even, that his mind didn’t have the time to register what was happening. He opened the door fully, allowing the tsunami of filth to crash through the house for just a second before slamming it shut again, gagging as he did so.

Lisa shrieked from the kitchen. Robbie bent over and dry heaved. He was absolutely thankful as he came back up that he hadn’t eaten much of anything all that day otherwise he may be splattering the floor with it right then.

But Lisa wasn’t so lucky. They heard a gag and a splashing sound in the distance. Richard took off for the kitchen, stumbling with disorientation as he tried to regain his senses after the smelly onslaught. Robbie simply stepped back, putting distance between himself and the door as if it would pounce again.

He had remembered the basement smelling terrible that morning but nothing like this. It was undoubtedly the worst thing he had ever had the misfortune of smelling in his entire life, and Robbie had spent a fair share of nights in some pretty disgusting places during his couch-surfing early twenties. Whatever was causing this, it had to be dead—like really, really dead. Or worse. But what was worse than dead?

Richard held back his wife’s hair as she heaved up her lunch into the kitchen sink. After a few loads of half-digested food coated the metallic surface, she released one final painful heave as her stomach tried to push up contents that weren’t there anymore. The acid burned her from the throat up, tinging her taste buds with the flavor of stomach juice and bile.

Thuds echoed from the stairs as the three kids came rushing down led not only by the horrible smell that they had all noticed immediately, even from different rooms, but by the sounds of commission that accompanied it. The smell intensified as they reached the first floor.

“Gross!” Paisley said as she threw her arm over her nose.

Trevor stopped altogether. Without a word, he turned back around and headed up the stairs, his hand covering his mouth. Toby didn’t stop him to ask why he was going. The kid had been half sick all day, and a whiff of this mess probably only made it worse.

Toby joined his sister, covering his nose with his hand. He saw his dad in the kitchen handing his mother a glass of water. Then he turned on the faucet and used the sprayer to hose down the interior of the sink. At the end of the hall, Robbie stood there, his entire expression a deranged mix of disgust and something else.

“What’s going on?” Toby asked.

His dad rubbed his mother’s back and whispered something in her ear.

“I’m fine,” he heard his mother say softly.

His dad nodded and then headed toward Robbie.

“We have to do something about this.”

Robbie agreed.

His dad turned around and looked at Toby and Paisley as if surprised to see them.

“All right, you three head outside and get some fresh air while me and Robbie try to figure out what’s going on. Where’s Trevor?”

“He’s upstairs,” Toby said. “Probably in bed.”

His dad nodded. “Okay, you three go outside.”

“What are you going to do?” his mom asked, concern etched in the contours of her face.

“We’re going to have to take that door down and figure out what the hell is back there that smells so damned terrible.”

His mother didn’t argue. She rounded up the two of them like there was a fire somewhere in the house that only she knew about and led them to the door. Toby wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, but it sounded like whatever the problem in the basement was, it wasn’t the first time they had encountered it.

A nice, cool breeze greeted them as they exited the house. Their mom closed the door behind them, and Paisley took a seat on the steps. Toby noticed the branch still on the ground. By the way his mother was staring at it, his dad had already filled her in on what happened.

In the disappearing sunlight of dusk, he could still see the brown of the grass. He almost thought he could smell the putrid scent coming from the lawn as well but knew it was just his mind playing tricks on him.

He took a step toward the tree, wanting to get a better look at the plant corpse, mostly because there was little else to do while they waited. He noticed movement in