Smoke and Mirrors (16 page)

The door was still jammed shut. “Yeah, get over it.”

“Stay back; none of you can help!” Peter's voice stopped the rush. “Tony, is he dead?”

“No,” Cassie answered before Tony could.

He turned and gave a little shriek to see her three quarters of a profile also peering through the door about four inches from his shoulder.

“Tony?” Zev. And he sounded concerned.

Face flushed with embarrassment—it had been a distinctly girly shriek—Tony kept his eyes locked on the makeup artist and waved a hand in the general direction of the people behind him. “He's unconscious, but he's not dead.”

“How can you tell?”

“I can see him breathing.”

“His lips are kind of blue.” Brianna flicked the flashlight beam down the length of Everett's prone body. “I like his sandals.”

Tony was just beginning to consider stepping away and trying to call the door to him when Mouse's large hand closed over his shoulder and pulled him back. “Move. You too, kid.”

She shone the flashlight at the cameraman. The beam gleamed along the length of the light stand he was holding. “Are you gonna break the glass?”

“Yes.”

“Cool.”

“I wouldn't,” Stephen muttered.

Great. With no time to be subtle, Tony grabbed Mouse's wrist. The big man glared down at him. “What about broken glass? You know, shards of it sticking into Everett?”

“Risk,” Mouse acknowledged. “But he needs help.” He shook off Tony's grip and swung the stand, the heavy base slamming down toward the inner window.

From where he was standing, Tony wasn't even sure it hit the glass although the sound of an impact echoed through the hall. There was a flash of red and another impact as Mouse landed on his ass six feet from the door, the stand bouncing across the hardwood to clang up against the far wall.

“The house won't let you damage it,” Stephen told him under the rising babble of voices.

“You couldn't have said that?”

“Would they have believed you?”

Point to the dead guy.

“All right, all right! Just calm down.” With everyone used to following Peter's direction, the noise level dropped. “I'm sure we'll be able to get to Everett in a couple of minutes. The guys outside at the trucks are probably working on getting the doors open right now.”

The silence that fell was so complete the soft
pad pad
of Ashley shifting her weight from one bare foot to the other was the only sound in the hall.

Then Tina took her flashlight back and snapped it off. “Shouldn't we be able to hear them?” she asked.

“All right; on three.”

Chris and Ujjal, the genny op, shifted their grips on four-foot lengths of steel scaffolding pipe.

“One.” Karen wiped rain off her face and moved a little to the right where she had a better line of sight on the kitchen door. “Two. Three.”

Impact. A flare of red light and both men were flung away from the house. Karen ducked as a pipe cartwheeled over her head to crash against the side of the truck.

“Told you it wouldn't work.” Graham Brummel's voice sounded over the fading reverberation of steel on steel. “House is closed up tight. Won't be opening till dawn and there's nothing you can do from out here to change that. You might as well just do what I said and head home like the rest of the crew.”

“Fuck you,” Chris snarled as he got to his feet. “I'm not listening to you; you're in on this. I'm calling the cops.”

“And why would you need to call the police, Mr. Robinson?”

Chris, Karen, and Ujjal turned. Graham Brummel stepped back into the shadows as Chester Bane moved out into the spill of light falling from the spotlight mounted on the side of the truck. He stood, dry under the circle of his umbrella, and listened impassively as his three employees, growing wetter and wetter, attempted to explain. Finally, he raised a massive hand. “You can't get into the house.”

It wasn't a question, but Chris answered it anyway. “No, sir.”

“You can't even touch the house.”

“No, sir.”

“You can't contact the people inside the house, but you believe that they are unable to leave.”

“No, sir.” He frowned as Karen drove her elbow into his side. “Yes, sir?”

“My daughters are still in there.”

Propelled by a hindbrain response to danger, all three of them took an involuntary step back. Karen elbowed Chris again, and he coughed out another, “Yes, sir.”

“And the caretaker knows what's going on.”

“Yes, sir.” In unison this time, powered by relief.

“Where is he?”

“He's . . .” Chris turned, realized Graham Brummel was no longer standing by the front of the truck and frowned. Before he could continue, the sound of a door slamming over by the garage answered the question.

CB made a sound, half speculation, half growl. His employees parted as he strode forward, walked around the truck, and crossed the small courtyard to the garage, the wet gravel grinding under each deliberate step. At the door leading to the caretaker's apartment, he furled his umbrella and handed it back, fully confident there'd be someone there to take it. The door was locked.

He rattled the brass knob for a moment, noting the amount of play in the movement of the door. Then he took four long steps back into the courtyard. Ujjal scrambled to get out of his way.

“Should I call the police?” Karen asked him as he stood, staring at the door.

“Not yet.” A sledgehammer wrapped in an eight-hundred-and-fifty-dollar London Fog trench coat would have made much the same sound as his shoulder did hitting the painted wood.

Wood cracked.

“A lock,” he said, forcing the brass tongue through the splintered casing and opening the door, “is only as good as the wood around it. Find someplace dry to wait where you can see the house. Come and get me if anything changes.”

“Shouldn't we . . .” Chris began and stopped as CB paused, one foot over the threshold. “Never mind. We'll find someplace dry to wait and watch the house.”

Two more steps inside, and CB paused again. “Is Tony Foster trapped inside?” he asked without turning.

“Uh . . . yeah.”

“Good.”

There was a black cat sitting at the top of the stairs. He ignored it. The door behind the cat was also locked.

“You have to the count of three, Mr. Brummel.”

The door opened on two. Mr. Brummel didn't look happy, but he was smart enough to move well back out of the way.

“Tell me,” CB commanded as he stepped into the apartment.

Graham Brummel snorted. “Or you'll what? Call the cops?”

“No.”

The single word carried threat disproportionate to its size.

“You guys know what's going on?”

Brother and sister exchanged a look as identical as injuries allowed.

“Sort of,” Cassie allowed at last.

Tony sighed and slid a few steps farther into the dining room. There were about half a dozen arguments going on in the front hall, and so far he hadn't been missed. “ ‘Sort of ' isn't good enough.”

“It's mostly Graham's theory.”

“Graham?”

“Graham Brummel, the caretaker. He's kind of a distant cousin,” Cassie explained. “When he got the job as caretaker about six years ago, he began using the blood tie to pull us more into the world. That's why we're aware and the rest aren't.”

The rest. Oh, yeah, that sounded good. Tony sank down on one of the folding chairs the caterers had provided and resisted the urge to beat his head against the table. “Start at the beginning.”

“The beginning?” She took a deep breath—or seemed to take a deep breath since she wasn't actually breathing. “All right. The house is . . .”

“Or holds,” Stephen interrupted.

“Right; it is or holds a malevolence.”

“A malevolent
what?
” Tony demanded impatiently.

Cassie frowned. “There's no need to be rude. You know, we don't have to help you.”

“You're right.” Not that they'd been a lot of help so far—a little late with the warning. “I apologize.”

Mollified, she gave the folds of her skirt a bit of a fluff before continuing. “Graham says it's just a malevolence.”

“A piece of bad stuff?”

“Very bad,” Cassie agreed. “And it collects tormented spirits. Graham thinks it got the idea from Creighton Caulfield who collected some very weird stuff. He thinks Mr. Caulfield was the template for its personality.”

Tony held up a hand. “So, cutting to the chase—the malevolence, the evil thing in the house wants to collect us?”

“Probably. It hasn't added anything since Karl and his mother and that was almost thirty years ago.”

“I didn't see his mother.”

Stephen snorted. “Of course, you didn't. Karl's like a night-light, he's on all the time.”

That seemed to jibe with Amy's theory of the youngest being the strongest. “And
Mr.
Brummel knew this when CB rented the house?”

“Yes and no. He knew the background of the house, but he also believed that because the house had been empty for so long, the malevolence was dormant.”

“Sleeping,” Stephen offered as Tony frowned.

“Yeah, I know what dormant means. Looks like he was wrong.”

“No, he was right. We can feel it now, like we could before, but the feeling only just started up again.”

Great. Somehow, they'd screwed themselves. “So shooting here woke it?”

Stephen shrugged and adjusted his head. “Graham says only blood can wake it.”

“Yeah, but all the blood we used is fake!”

“Oh, crap.”

“Tony?” Holding one of the candles carefully out in front of him, Zev peered into the dining room. “What are you doing sitting all alone in the dark?”

He wasn't alone and the two ghosts shed enough light for conversation. Probably not a good idea to mention that though. “I'm . . . uh, just thinking.”

“Well, think in the foyer. Peter wants us all to stay together.”

“In the foyer?”

“He doesn't think we should leave Everett.”

As they left the dining room together, Amy's voice rose to meet them. “Look, what we're involved in here is clearly beyond the usual and a séance is a perfectly valid way to contact the restless spirits holding us in this house.”

“Restless spirits,” Mason scoffed from the stairs. “That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.”

But he almost sounded as though he was trying to convince himself.

“Do you have a better explanation, then?” Amy asked him. “Does anyone?”

No one did.

“So why
not
hold a séance?”

Tony turned just enough to raise an eyebrow at Cassie.

The ghost shrugged. “Well, the one with the purple hair would be perfectly safe, but make sure the younger girl isn't involved. If she can hear Karl, she could easily get possessed. That's what happened to Karl's mother.”