House of Fallen Trees (15 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Karen’s head snapped back on her neck, hard enough to cause pain as the muscles were pulled.
   A vile smell assaulted her nostrils and her eyes opened, watering furiously. She shook her head, trying to get away from the bitter scent.
   “I think she’s back,” a voice said.
   She knew that voice. It belonged to a handsome dark man with kind eyes and bright straight teeth he flashed whenever he smiled, which was often.
   Getting her eyes to focus was a challenge but as she blinked the tears away, the foul stench retreated and the handsome man’s face was inches from her own. She was not particularly surprised to see him smiling.
   “Welcome back,” Saul said. “We thought we’d lost you for a minute there.”
   Karen tried to speak, found her mouth was filled with what could only be moon dust, so dry it had never known moisture in all the time of its existence.
   Looking around, she saw she was no longer in the office on the third floor of the house, but back in her own room, on the second floor, lying on the bed. Rory stood at the foot of the bed, watching her with tired eyes.
   Saul sat beside her. He held a tiny object up to her face so she could see it. “Smelling salts,” he said. “We didn’t know what to do so we went through your stuff, figuring since you had the Benadryl you’d probably have something for fainting too. You are one prepared lady.”
   She wanted to tell him she hadn’t fainted, that she’d only backed away from the world and had done it intentionally and didn’t appreciate being pulled forward again.
   “Here, drink some water.” He held a bottle to her lips and tipped it until her mouth filled with the cool sweet liquid and washed away the desert dryness coating her tongue.
   “You’ll probably want a shower soon,” Saul said, taking the bottle away and setting it on the night table. She remembered peeing herself and felt her face burn.
   “What happened in there?” Rory asked.
   Karen’s eyes darted to him and away again. She didn’t want to remember and talking about it would bring it all back to the surface. Instead of answering him, she asked, “How long have I been out?”
   “About an hour,” Saul said.
   “Why did you lock yourself in my office, Karen?” Rory wanted to know. “Were you looking for something?”
   She glared at him. “I didn’t lock myself in your goddamn office.”
   “Oh, you didn’t? Then why was it locked when Saul tried to get in?” Looking away, she made no response. “If I didn’t have the key,” he went on, “we would have had to break the door down.”
   For the first time, she noticed the lights were on. “The electricity came back.”
   “Yeah,” Saul said. “Not sure for how long though. The wind is really kicking up out there.”
   Karen cocked her head, becoming aware of the loud gusts shaking the trees around the house. “I want to go home,” she said suddenly. The revelation irritated her. She had come to find out what happened to her brother and was just now discovering the price of the truth was too steep. She was a coward.
   “I want to go home too,” Saul said.
   “Yes.” Rory began pacing at the foot of the bed. “We all want to go home. It turns out we came here for fucking nothing.”
   Karen didn’t want to deal with him any more, and the only way she could think to get rid of him was to announce that she wanted to bathe, which wasn’t a lie, but it would also mean being alone, which she definitely didn’t want.
   “You want to tell us what happened in there?” Saul asked, also ignoring Rory’s outburst.
   “No,” she said. “But I will anyway.” She closed her eyes, searching for a single grain of courage. A minute ticked by, the wind howling with rage and she said, “I saw Sean.”
   Rory stopped his pacing and stared at her.
   Quickly, she added, “Not the real Sean, but some…I don’t know...apparition of him I guess.”
   “You’re saying you saw his ghost?” Rory asked, unable to keep the skepticism out of his voice.
   “I guess. I don’t know. Maybe I saw what the house wanted me to see.”
   Rolling his eyes, Rory tossed his hands into the air. “Here we go again.”
   Saul said, “You’re not helping anything, Rory.”
   “No? Well, that’s probably because I’m not
trying
to help anything. She’s basically accusing me of killing my partner of five years!”
   “She is not!”
   “Are you blind? That’s been her purpose all along! She came here already thinking I’d done something to Sean! Why can’t you see that?”
   “That’s not true,” Karen said. “But you can believe whatever you want to believe.”
   “Oh, you think I
want
to believe my partner’s sister thinks I’m a fucking murderer? Are you fucking kidding me?”
   “She didn’t say that,” Saul said, standing up.
   “She may as well have.”
   “What the fuck is your problem, man?” Saul asked, stepping closer to Rory, fists clenched.
   Karen saw where this was going and spoke up quickly. “I think I want that bath now,” she said. “Saul, would you mind staying in here while I take it?”
   It took him a few seconds to stop staring down Rory, but when he did, he said, “Yeah, no problem. I won’t go anywhere.”
   Karen got up and went to the bathroom, closing the door and praying those two didn’t start beating the crap out of each other. She ran the tub and stripped out of her damp, urine-smelling clothes, much more comfortable being alone now the lights were back on. But, judging by the sound of the wind, they wouldn’t remain on for much longer, so she had to make her bath a quick one.
   With the water running, she couldn’t tell what the guys were saying in the bedroom, but she could hear them talking, which meant they weren’t shouting. That, at least, was a good sign.
   She lowered herself into the tub and washed quickly, not wanting to be naked when the electricity failed again. She was in and out in five minutes, not bothering to wash her hair.
   Breathing a sigh of relief once she’d toweled off and stepped into her robe, she opened the door just as a tremendous cracking sound came from outside.
   Saul, alone in the room now, leapt from the bed, hand held up to her in a stop gesture.
   “Tree falling,” he said, head cocked, listening.
   What seemed like a long time later, a loud thud shook the house as Karen’s eyes widened in alarm. “Yep,” he said, as if she’d spoken. “Close by too.”
   “Fuck,” she said.
   He looked at her, vaguely amused. “It happens. We’re in the woods.”
   “But why does it have to happen now?”
   Saul went to the porthole, looked out. “It’ll be dawn soon. We can try hiking down out of here, but I don’t know.”
   “You don’t know what?”
   “If it’ll be too dangerous. These winds must be at least sixty miles an hour, which is a pretty serious thing around here. Not to mention, it’s the first wind storm of the season.”
   “So?”
   “So, that means that a lot of branches will be coming down and, as you just heard, some trees too.”
   “I don’t care about that,” she said impatiently. “I just want to get the hell out of here.”
   Saul ran a hand over his stubbled cheeks. “You don’t get it. A tree falls on you, you’re dead.”
   She scoffed. “I think I can get out of the way of a falling tree, Saul. You think I’d just stand there? Hell, I’ll run the entire way back to the truck if I have to.”
   “It’s just not a good idea,” he said.
   “And staying here is?”
   Evidently thinking this conversation was just going in circles, he changed the subject. “Why don’t you tell me what you saw in Rory’s office?”
   She shook her head. “I told you. I saw Sean.”
   “You saw Sean?”
   “Yes.”
   “And what was he doing? Did he speak to you?”
   She crossed the room and sat on the bed, pulling her robe tighter around her body. “No, he didn’t say anything.”
   “Well, what was happening? What was he doing?”
   She wanted to shout at him for badgering her, for forcing her to say things she didn’t want to say, but found she didn’t have the strength for yelling anymore. “I think…I think he was being raped.”
   “Raped? By who?”
   “By…himself.”
   Saul raised his eyebrows. “How does that work?”
   “Look, it’s what I saw, okay? Don’t ask me to explain it!”
   “Okay, okay. Calm down.” He sat on the bed beside her. “It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, that’s all.”
   “Does any of this make sense? Saul, in case you haven’t noticed, this is one fucked up house we’re in and I’m starting to wonder if we’re gonna make it out of here alive.”
   Taken aback, Saul draped an arm around her shoulders. “Don’t say that. Of course we’re gonna make it out alive.”
   Karen made a face, clearly not believing him.
   “Unless a tree falls on us, of course,” he joked.
   She didn’t laugh. “I want to get out of here.”
   “We will. As soon as the sun comes up.”
   “You said it would be up soon. Let’s just leave now. We can travel a little ways in the dark and then the sun will be up and we’ll already be halfway there.” The longer she spoke, the more this plan sounded logical to her. “We can take flashlights. We’ll be fine!”
   “I think it would probably be better if we just wait. Maybe get a little shuteye first. I know I could use it.”
   She felt her heart sink. “For fuck’s sake, Saul. You can sleep when you get home!”
   He sighed and it had to be the weariest sound she’d ever heard in her life. “It’s too dangerous,” he said firmly.
   She scowled, crossed her arms like a petulant child. “Maybe I’ll just go by myself then.”
   “You know I can’t let you do that.”
   “You can’t
let
me do that? I’m sorry—did I miss the part where you’re in charge of what I do and don’t do?”
   “I’m not going to keep arguing with you about this, Karen.” As if in agreement with him, a huge gust of wind slammed the house and what could only be a branch—a big one—crashed down on the roof. Karen flinched. Sympathetically, Saul said, “Keep in mind that we’re on the second floor and it sounded that loud. Imagine if we were upstairs.”
   “Seems to me we might be safer outside,” she said dryly.
   “Sure, until one of those things clocks you in the head. Then you won’t be able to fight with me any more.”
   “Wouldn’t that be a shame.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Karen emerged from the hot shower feeling refreshed and awake. She wrapped a fresh towel around herself and began to wipe condensation off the mirror above the sink with her hand.
   The moment her hand came into contact with the glass, it cracked beneath her fingers.
   She gasped in surprise and yanked her hand away. Her first thought was that she’d put too much pressure on the old mirror—a thought which she quickly dismissed as being absurd. It wasn’t as if she’d punched the damn thing…
   Studying the crack, which ran from the upper left corner of the small mirror to lower right, she raised her hand to touch it again, but even before she made physical contact with it another crack appeared, crisscrossing the first.
   “Holy shit.”
   She took a step back, confusion creasing her forehead.
   The mirror cracked again…and then again and as she stared, the fear just beginning to tingle in her veins, the cracks began to ooze a dark red fluid.
   Blood, she realized as it dribbled down the mirror and dripped—
tap, tap, tap
—onto the back of the sink.
   
Not possible,
her mind cried while her body backed up even further, until she was against the opposite wall, eyes widening with fear.
Losing it. No other explanation. I’m just losing it…
   
She wanted to shout for Rory…for Saul…but the fear of them running and finding she’d been screaming and hysterical for no reason whatsoever prevented her from doing so.
   She could be crazy, but if that was the case, she wanted to be quietly so. Not a blabbering idiot, not some lunatic schizophrenic yelling at hallucinations and drooling down the front of her shirt.
   
Please
, she begged herself.
Just stop.
   
She forced herself to not hear the cracking sounds, the blood drip-drip-dripping, covering her ears with her hands. She made herself close her eyes and count until she reached twenty. Then it would be gone. The mirror would be normal once more and she could think. She needed to
think,
goddammit.
   Beginning her count, she tried to get her breathing back to normal, to relax and put all thoughts of insanity out of her head. She was simply overtired…jetlagged…
   At twenty, she opened her eyes to find that even more cracks had formed, more blood had spilled onto the sink, flowing over the side of the pristine porcelain now, dripping onto the gray and white tiled floor and puddling there, collecting in the spaces between the tiles and slowly traveling towards her bare feet.
   She sucked air into her lungs and began to step forward, hand reaching out to the mirror and her cracked red reflection.
   “It’s not real,” she whispered. “It
cannot
be real.”
   The moment her foot came down and touched the pooling blood, she grimaced and then the entire bathroom floor gave way, plummeting her downwards into nothingness. She didn’t have time to scream, no time to react in any way at all. She was simply falling through darkest space, the sound of the splintering floorboards ringing in her ears even as they fell with her.
   Arms pin-wheeling, she was dimly aware of the urge to vomit and in the next millisecond, she hit bottom, landing squarely on her tailbone.
   Face pinched in pain, she immediately attempted to stand up and found she couldn’t. Instead, she looked around to discover she’d fallen into the Captain’s office, having missed falling on top of his desk by mere inches.
   She groaned and put a hand to her lower back, hoping she wasn’t seriously hurt. How had this happened? On the floor around her, she expected to see broken floorboards and other evidence of a collapsed floor, but there was nothing. Just the immaculate Persian rug. Tilting her head, she saw the ceiling above her was intact.
   A dream then?
   But she knew better. This was no dream. The pain in her backside told her that.
   And furthermore…
   How had she fallen from the bathroom on the
second floor
to end up in the office on the
third floor
?
   The question nearly stopped her heart.
   
What the fuck was going on?
   Pain or no pain, she climbed to her feet with the intention of getting the hell out of there but froze when she saw the notebooks scattered across the top of the desk. They hadn’t been there on her previous visit to this room, and she doubted Rory or Saul had even been in here since then. And even if they had, why would they have left half a dozen notebooks out in the open this way?
   She stepped closer to the desk and saw they were journal-type notebooks, some of them more battered than others. Older, with creases and doodles scarring their covers.
   She could not deny her curiosity and when she flipped open one of the covers, her breath caught in her throat. Despite the many years since she’d last seen it, the handwriting of her brother was unmistakable.
   Her eyes quickly scanned the first lines and without even realizing it, she sank into the ornate desk chair, now oblivious to the pain in her lower spine.
   The entries were undated and it took her a while to put the notebooks in what she guessed was some kind of order but when she’d done so, she had to blink back tears. The things Sean had written about were disturbing to say the least.
   Turning another page in the last book, she read:
   “
Now that they’re both dead, I have nothing to keep me here and yet I feel I cannot escape. To leave here would be to leave my last memories of my beloved family and I simply cannot bring myself to do that. They both loved this house as much as I did and it would be a betrayal to them, and to myself, to flee in the face of heartbreak. That is not something Melinda would have wanted. ‘The Forest Sea’ is what she used to call our beloved home, always with that small smile and her eyes glowing as emerald as the pines surrounding us.
   No, I must stay here and somehow battle on through the heartache. For them. For myself. They died here and so shall I…”
   
Karen gasped at the last sentence, her heart sinking, the strange event that had brought her to this room and to these notebooks completely forgotten. She stared at her brother’s handwriting for a long time before turning to the last page of the notebook.
   There, scrawled in black ink as though written by a drunkard, the words screamed up at her and somehow she wasn’t particularly surprised.
   
“TWO MEN HAVE THE CARCASS!!! TWO MEN HAVE THE CARCASS! TWOMENTWOMENTWOMENTWOMENTWO-”
   
She slapped the book closed and gathered them all up in her arms, racing from the room as if chased by demons.
   
“Rory!”
she shouted.
“Rory!”
   By the time she’d reached the bottom of the stairs, both Rory and Saul were there, expressions of alarm on their faces.
   “Jesus, Karen!” Rory asked. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
   Panting, she held the notebooks out for him to see. “Why didn’t you tell me about these?”
   He frowned, looking more confused than ever. “What? What are they?”
   “Sean’s notebooks!” she barked. “Why would you keep this from me?”
   “I have no idea what you’re talking about!”
   Saul came forward, reaching for the notebooks, but she pulled them away and burst into tears. “He was fucking insane! How could you have let that happen? Why didn’t you tell me?”
   “No,” Rory insisted. “He was fine! Why would you even think that?”

“It’s all here!” She held the notebooks up once more. “Right fucking here! He thought he was your precious fucking Captain! Does that sound like a sane mind to you?”
   “Let me see them, Karen,” Saul prodded gently, extending his hand once more.
   Her eyes found his and she snarled. “Did you know about this too? You did, didn’t you? How could you not have?
It’s right here
!”
   “I didn’t know anything,” Saul said in the same soothing tone. “Please. Just show us what you found.”
   A moment passed, her cheeks flushed with anger and grief and then she shoved the notebooks at Saul’s chest before sinking to the bottom riser and sobbing freely. “He killed himself. He’s dead. He killed himself.”
   “No!” Rory suddenly shouted. “Sean is alive! He never would have hurt himself! He loved me! He loved this house!”
   “The
Captain
loved this house!” she yelled back.
   Rory stalked to the other side of the room, breathing hard, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides.
   With one of the notebooks open in his hands, Saul asked Karen where she’d found them.
   “In the Captain’s office. They were on the desk.”
   “I’ve never even seen those before,” Rory said, still clearly infuriated.
   Saul rapidly began turning pages, his face darkening as he did. “Maybe you should, Rory.”
   “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Rory rushed over to his side and snatched the top notebook away from him. He couldn’t have read more than a few lines when he threw the notebook across the room. “This is bullshit! Those aren’t Sean’s.”
   “It’s
his
writing,” Karen insisted.
   Rory’s jaw worked up and down. He wanted to argue but she suspected he was out of words. Finally, when he spoke, it was barely above a whisper. “Sean did not kill himself.”
   That said, he stormed through the living room and out of sight.
   Saul carried the notebooks over to the sofa and sat with them on his lap, reading. Karen watched his face very carefully, looking for signs of…she wasn’t sure what. When she couldn’t stand his lack of expression for another second, she said, “He was crazy, wasn’t he?”
   He looked up at her sadly. “I don’t think you should bring this up to Rory again. At least, not for a while. Let him read these when he’s ready, once he’s calmed down.”
   “You didn’t answer my question.”
   Sitting back on the sofa, Saul released a long sigh. He thought about his answer for a long time before replying. “My grandmother used to say that we’re all surrounded by spirits, all the time. She believed that they can affect our moods because we breathe them in and out, absorb them through our skin. That sometimes they can overcome us.”
   She frowned at him, confused. “I don’t get it.”
   “Well,” he said, and set the notebooks on the cushion beside him. “It basically boils down to this. Either Sean
was
crazy. Or…”
   “Or what?”
   “Remember I said don’t mention this to Rory.”

“
Or what?”
   “Or he was…I guess, for lack of a better term…he was possessed.”
   Karen stared at him. “Possessed.”
   He shrugged. “I’m just saying what my grandmother believed and it seems like those are our only two choices. Which do you prefer?”
   But she didn’t know which she preferred. And, she supposed, she never would.