House (36 page)

Barsidious White stared at the girl through the holes in his mask, feeling the hatred boiling in his gut, knowing he couldn't stop himself now.

Until just a few minutes ago, the game had proceeded perfectly, as it always did, even with this interesting new twist presented by the girl. He'd lost track of how many houses he'd played this game in. He'd enter the house, invoke the powers of darkness to fill the house to personify the evil of all who entered. The house, like himself, obediently became a crucible of power.

To each house he invited enough demons to make life hell for the victims. Stewarts and Bettys and Petes and other inbreds. But more important, there were these hosts of Jacks and Stephanies who mirrored their own natures.

Jack and Stephanie were guilty, and so in the end they would die.

But what about Susan?

His earlier suspicions that she might not be guilty at all were now screaming to the surface. She was less and more than anything he'd ever confronted.

His urgency to see Jack kill her forced him into betraying his desperation. Jack had said no, and he'd nearly killed the man then. He would have if Susan hadn't stepped in the way.

And why didn't he just kill her? An hour ago he would have said it was because she was for the others to kill.

Now something deep in his psyche suggested her death might not be such a good thing. But he couldn't connect any reasoning to it.

Stephanie's face was distorted, terrified. This much he relished. But the still, small voice of Susan shredded any delight he could milk out of the unfolding scene. She was too confident, too aware of the reality between dark and light.

But who was she? And where had she come from?

Then Susan turned her back on him and spoke clear, soft words, and the Tin Man knew who she was. Or at the very least, what part she was playing in this contest between light and darkness, life and death.

He began to panic.

“Kill her!” he roared.

The girl spun to face him. “He said no!”

Tin Man pulled the trigger in uncontrollable rage.

The shotgun spewed fire with a tremendous boom. Jack couldn't see the impact of the shot because Susan was between him and the Tin Man. But he felt the impact a moment later when her body flew backward and crashed into his chest.

He instinctively grabbed her.

Felt the wetness on her belly.

Saw the room tilt as his mind began to shut down.

Susan groaned once, then slumped forward, dead in his arms.

42
6:16 am

JACK DROPPED SUSAN IN HORROR AND LET the body fall facedown. Blood snaked out from under her body.

Stephanie began to sob. They'd been in some harrowing situations, but this was the first such innocent death, and Jack was surprised by the sudden pain in his gut. Her frail, dead body there on the ground screamed foul.

He felt his heart begin to break in stages, like a tall building being brought down by demolition charges. But there didn't seem to be any foundation to catch all the rubble. It caved in on itself and fell into a deep void of emptiness.

The Jacks had all broken eye contact with him for the first time and now looked at the girl, mesmerized. The Tin Man chambered another round slowly, as if needing time to contemplate what he'd just done.

Jack heard a faint crackling sound. His eyes went to Susan's blood on the floor. But it wasn't the kind of red blood he expected to see. Red, yes, but laced with a crackling white light, as if it carried a charge.

Look to the light.

The Jacks had seen it too. Several directly in front of Jack stepped back. They began to bob anxiously. A murmur swelled. Clicking and banging gradually filled the room.

White stared at the girl.

In frantic style, the hundreds of Jacks crowded into the room began to bounce in a strange, ritualistic dance.

Like the banging door earlier.
Now, now, now, now . . .

What now?

Or was it some kind of celebration?

Stephanie rushed past Jack and dropped to her knees beside Susan's prone body. She reached a hand out and began to whisper urgently past streaming tears.

“She's the light! She's the light!”

She was the light? Of course, he'd seen the light, but was she actually the light?

White shifted his eyes to Stephanie. Then up to Jack.

Resigned to whatever fate now awaited them, Jack lowered himself to his knees. His throat knotted with pain, but he saw no remedy, no way to survive, no reason to live, no reason to die. He only felt pain.

Look to the light.

Had he seen the light?

The Jacks' bouncing cries rose to a loud roar. For the first time, Jack could actually hear words in their chant. “Kill.” They gripped their axes and knives, chanting, and with each chant their voices came closer to unison.

“Kill, kill, kill, kill.”

They seemed to be waiting for permission before tearing in. White stood flat-footed, head tilted down to show the lower whites of his eyes.

Stephanie's whispering rose to a shout; he barely heard it above the din. “You are the light!”

Jack's heart quickened. He said it silently with her the first time, staring at her mouth as his mind reached back to make sense. “You are the light.”

Is that what Susan had meant? That he should look to a source of light outside himself? The light came into the darkness.

Stephanie's cry changed again, sobbing and wailing at once. And now her words cut through the din so that they were clear.

“Son of Man, have mercy on me, a sinner!” She drew a long, loud, gasping breath and wailed again. “Son of Man, have mercy on me, a sinner!”

Son of Man.

The truth struck Jack full in the face. Susan had taken their death as the guiltless one. She was the light in the darkness, but the wages of sin really was death. The guilty really had to die, just as White insisted. That was the game.

But Susan was the Christ, who had died instead. And Tin Man seemed to know his mistake.

Jack screamed the words with Stephanie, “Son of Man, have mercy on me, a sinner!”

He gripped Stephanie's hand as if it were his last lifeline, and together they cried out at the top of their lungs. Their words stumbled over one another in a jumble.

For long seconds he yelled, until it occurred to him that the hissing had stopped. And so had Stephanie.

He opened his eyes and lowered his head. The room had come to an absolute standstill. The crowding Jacks had stopped two strides back, axes raised but frozen.

Why?

He heard the crackle of electricity again. The light? He glanced down.

The blood from Susan's body was brimming with light again, arcing with white-hot fingers of power. The electricity gathered and blasted into his face. Into his mouth. Into his eyes.

A thick shaft of mind-numbing energy rushed into his body.

He trembled under its power. Too much; it was too much! He jerked his head up and screamed.

And then the power flowed again, as strong as before, only this time
from
his mouth. From his eyes.

Jack could see through the light as it blasted from him, white-hot. He saw it all at what had to be one-tenth of the actual speed, a surreal display of searing power.

The Jack closest to him went rigid at the approaching shaft of light, then screamed and evaporated into a black fog before the light even touched him.

The blaze cut through the Jacks behind him, twenty-deep, as if they were nothing more than ash. The light spread out on all sides, joined by as much light from Stephanie, who was screaming beside him.

The terrible shrieks of the undead filled the room, crumbling to ash before the low, crackling hum of power that came from him and Stephanie.

The light came into the darkness, and the darkness did not understand it, but that no longer mattered because the light was now obliterating the darkness.

Still they screamed. Still the light flowed.

White's body jerked with the full impact of light streaming from both Jack and Stephanie. He came off the ground, folded forward, screaming with pain.

For a few moments he hung in the air as if gut-punched, shaking under the raw power that ran through his body. His screaming was swallowed by a roar of light. He was unceremoniously released and dumped to the floor where he lay in a pile, unmoving.

Still they screamed. Still the light flowed.

And then Jack collapsed.

From outside the house, no one would know the horrors that had ravaged Jack and Stephanie deep in the basement as the dawn showed its face.

A faraway scream now and then, the faint sound of milling insects . . . all sounds plausibly from the nearby forest rather than from inside the large, long-ago- abandoned house.

All the windows were barred and dark, all the doors sealed tight. Any soul on a casual stroll through the woods might see the old brown pickup truck wedged up on the front porch and think a youthful joyride had gone bad, but otherwise the house looked like many other similarly abandoned homes in the backwoods.

But all of that changed at precisely 6:17 in the morning.

It started with a barely visible flash of light that momentarily lit the house and then was gone, as if a flash grenade had been set off in the basement.

Then the light was back, only now brimming from the space below the doors and through the cracks in closed shutters and in some cases glowing bright from uncovered windows.

The light grew brighter, blinding white. Rays of light broke past thin cracks and streamed into the air.

Windows rattled as if attempting to contain the surge of energy that pressed them to the breaking point. The front door creaked, and for a moment the whole house began to tremble.

The shutters and windows throughout the house loosed from their latches with loud bangs and blew open. Light shot into the sky in thick shafts, riding a hum that lasted seven or eight seconds.

Then, as if someone had pulled the plug, the light disappeared, and the house was once again shrouded in grayness. The windows swung lazily on their hinges for a moment.

Then the house was still.

43
7:00 am

JACK STOOD BEHIND THE STONE WALL A hundred feet from the door, holding Stephanie close to him, staring at the silent house.

To their right, two police cruisers sat with lights flashing red and blue. Three officers were approaching the house, one still on the radio.

“It looks that way. We found Officer Lawdale's cruiser a half mile up the road, abandoned with the other two cars. We have reports of two survivors here who believe the killer impersonated him.”

The radio crackled. “You're saying three dead, two survivors?”

“That's unconfirmed, but we're going in now.”

“Copy that.”

The cop shut the door to his cruiser and turned toward Jack. “You sure you're okay?”

He nodded. “Fine.”

“Stay put. We're going in. You're sure no one's alive inside?”

“I'm sure.”

The cop nodded and headed toward the house.

An old rusted washing machine sat to the left of the flagstone path. Tall grass rose to their calves. The house itself stood stoically before them, an old abandoned house now showing its true colors.

They could see the concrete stairwell that descended to the basement on the right side of the house. The door at the bottom was still open as they'd left it, and one of the cops had just disappeared through it.

Birds chirped. Insects sang.

They'd woken inside and found only three dead bodies in the basement. Randy, Leslie, and White. No Stewarts, no Bettys, no Petes, no Jacks.

No Susan.

The first police cruiser arrived as they crawled out of the basement. They'd found Officer Morton Lawdale dead in his house an hour earlier; he'd failed to report for his midnight shift. The abandoned cruiser had led them here, to the only structure within three miles, an abandoned house set back off the road.

Jack took Stephanie's hand in his.