Smoke and Mirrors (17 page)

“Not our fault,” Stephen muttered. “We were minding our own business and she saw us in the bathroom mirror.”

“So she tried to contact us and got grabbed by something else.”

“The evil thing?”

“You saw what she did to Karl, what do you think?”

“I think . . .” Which was when Tony realized that the hall had gone quiet. And everyone was staring at him. “I . . . um . . . I think a séance is a bad idea. I mean, if we are being held by restless spirits, by the kind of spirits who'd trap us in the house and keep us away from Everett, do we even want to talk to them?”

Amy rolled her eyes. “Well, duh, Tony. They can tell us why we're here and what we have to do in order to get out!”

“Survive until morning?” Stephen suggested. “And we're not restless, we're just bored.”

Karl's crying had gotten louder.

“We're not having a séance.” There was a definitive tone in Tina's voice that said this was the final word on the subject. “This is not the time to start playing about with things no one truly understands. Not when we're in the middle of a situation
we
don't understand. And we are most certainly not involving the children in that sort of potentially dangerous nonsense.”

“They wouldn't be involved,” Amy protested.

“You couldn't get the little one far enough away,” Cassie said quietly.

A little too quietly.

Tony turned. He could barely see her.

Stephen glanced down at his nearly transparent hands and grimaced. “Showtime.”

The sound lingered a moment after he vanished. It was the only sound. Karl had stopped crying.

A door slammed upstairs.

“I know what you're doing!” A man. Not so much shouting as shrieking in rage. He sounded . . .

Like he's gone totally bugfuck.
Tony jumped at the hollow
thunk
of something heavy and sharp impacting with one of the second-floor doors.

Heavy and sharp.

Showtime.

“Oh, no . . .” He was halfway up the stairs before he realized he'd started moving. A hand grabbed at his leg, but he shook it off. Voices called his name, he ignored them.

The man—Mr. Mills—yanked the blade of the ax out of the door to Mason's dressing room. Except it wasn't the door to Mason's dressing room; the hall had reverted to pre-seventies renovation carpeting and wallpaper. The small part of Tony's mind not anticipating terror took a moment to note it was an improvement.
And I guess that explains why the lights are back on.

Mr. Mills staggered sideways as the ax came free and screamed, “You can't hide from me!”

White showed all around his eyes. The skin of his face was nearly gray except for a dark spot of color high on each cheek. Blood oozed out of the cut where he'd driven his teeth through his lip, mixed with saliva, and dribbled down his chin.

Bugfuck seemed a fairly accurate diagnosis.

The door opened across the hall and Cassie stepped out, pulling it nearly closed behind her. Her face was flushed, her hair messy, but her head was intact. “Daddy, what are you . . . ?”

Mr. Mills roared and charged toward her swinging wildly.

Cassie stared at him in astonishment, lips slightly parted, frozen in place.

At the last possible instant, the door behind her opened and Stephen dove out into the hall, one arm around his sister's waist, taking them both out from under the blade of the ax.

Which came out of the plaster and lath a lot faster than it had out of the wood.

Holding hands, Cassie and Stephen ran down the hall and into the bathroom, slamming the door.

“No!” Tony stepped out into the hall. “You'll be trapped!”

Mr. Mills seemed to realize the same thing because he started to laugh maniacally.

“Hey! Crazy guy!”

No response. The ax chopped into the bathroom door.

“Goddamn it, you can't do this! They're your kids!”

Another chop and a kick and the door was open.

Cassie screamed.

He couldn't let this happen. It didn't matter that they were already dead. That this had happened almost forty freaking years ago. He couldn't stand by and do nothing. He raced down the hall and threw his arms around Mr. Mills, hoping to pin the ax to his side.

Mr. Mills walked into the bathroom, swinging the ax, like he wasn't even there.

“Filth!”

The first blow took Stephen in the side of the neck, the force of it driving him to his knees. Cassie screamed again and tried to drag her brother with her into the bathtub. Her father reached past his dying son, grabbed the strap of her dress and yanked her forward. She stumbled and slipped on Stephen's blood. The strap tore. As the pressure released, she spun around just as the ax came down, chopping the chunk out of her head.

Tony really hoped that she wasn't the one moaning as she crumpled to lie beside her brother. He really hoped it was him.

Splattered with the blood of his children, Mr. Mills turned and walked out of the bathroom, Tony backing hurriedly out of his way. Once in the hall, he looked down at the bloody ax as though he'd never seen it before, as though he had no idea whose brains and hair were stuck along its length, then he adjusted his grip and slammed the blade down between his own eyes.

Tony skipped back as the body fell and realized the light was disappearing. “No . . .” He wasn't going to be stuck up here with . . . with . . .

“Tony!”

A light in the growing darkness.

A circle of light.

A hand grabbed his arm and a familiar voice said, “Are you okay?”

“Lee?”

“Yeah, it's me. Come on. Let's get you back to the others, okay?”

He was talking slowly, calmingly. Like he expected Tony to go off the deep end at any moment. As the last of the light disappeared and there was nothing in the upstairs hall but him and Lee and Tina's flashlight, as Karl started crying again, Tony had to admit that the deep end had its attractions.

Lee took his arm as he stumbled and got him to the stairs where other hands helped steady him as he descended. Once in the hall, he swayed and sank slowly to his knees.

“Amy, get the wastebasket out of the drawing room.” Tina's voice.

“But . . .”

“Quickly.”

Just quickly enough.

Tony puked until his stomach emptied, then took a swallow of water and puked again. Finally, when even the dry heaves stopped, he wiped his mouth and sat back on his heels.

Wordlessly, Zev handed him a tissue.

He wiped his mouth and dropped it in the bucket. “Thanks.”

The music director shrugged. “Hey, not the first time I've seen you toss your cookies.”

“Man, you two had a seriously twisted relationship!”

“He had the flu,” Zev explained shortly, accepting a water bottle from Amy and passing it over. “You okay now?”

“I think so.” Physically anyway.

“What happened?”

Polite “let's pretend Tony's not puking” conversations stopped. Tony glanced around the hall and found all attention directed at him. Not surprising, really—they must've thought he'd gone insane. He sighed. He'd been afraid he was going to have to say this at some point; he'd just hoped to put it off as long as possible.

Except that he'd figured out what the house—the malevolent thing was up to—and if he couldn't save Cassie and Stephen, there were another eighteen people in danger. Coworkers. Friends. Kids. Lying wouldn't help them.

Another deep breath.

“I see dead people.”

Someone snickered. Kate found her voice first. “Bullshit.”

“No.” Lee came slowly down the stairs, eyes locked on Tony's face. “I believe him.”

“SO, ALL THE TIME
I'm growing up,I heard about my mum's cousin who married a rich guy, had two kids, a big house, and the perfect life except that her husband went nuts and killed the kids and himself. End of perfect life. She dies in the loony bin fifteen years later.” Graham took another pull on his beer. “You sure you don't want one?”

“I'm sure.” CB leaned forward, the chair creaking under his weight. “Get on with it.”

“Yeah, okay. Maybe that story's why it's always been about dead people for me. Maybe not. Who knows? Point is, I never forgot it and a few years back, when I was at loose ends, I decided to go looking for the house. You know; the house where the perfect life ended.” He jerked his head toward the window. “That house. I showed up right about the time the last caretaker took a walk out to the highway and stepped in front of an eighteen wheeler. It seemed like a sign—the timing and all—and, next thing I know, I'm employed. A month later, I'm in that second-floor bathroom—the bathroom where it happened, where my mum's cousin's kids got whacked—and I look in the mirror and there's these two dead kids standing behind me. I turn around and there's nothing there. I keep going back to the bathroom and I keep seeing them and I work at it . . .”

“You
work
at it?”

“Yeah, you know, I open up to it. I reach out to the other realm,” he added when CB clearly didn't understand. “Never mind, it's not important. Soon I can see them even outside the mirror and soon after that we start talking. They're a little vague at first, after all they've been trapped at the moment of their deaths for years, but the longer we talk the more they remember who they were.”

“What does this have to do with my daughters?”

“I'm getting there; you're not going to get what's happening without the background stuff. So while I'm talking to the family—that's the two dead kids in case you lost track—I'm scoping out the rest of the house and spiritually, that's one crowded piece of real estate.” A long drink, then he set the bottle down on the table and leaned forward, mirroring CB's position. “Bad stuff leaves its mark, okay? I'm guessing with all the weird crap Creighton Caulfield brought into the house, he got his hands on a piece that wasn't just weird—it was out-and-out evil. Just to be on the safe side, though, I checked to make sure they didn't build the house on some kind of off-limits Indian burial site and they didn't. The First Nations out here, they're on top of that stuff.”

“Get. On. With. It.” CB growled. Had one of his writers pitched him a plot so heavily weighted with cliché, that writer would be back working the Tim Horton's drive-through before he got to the second act. Cliché applied to his daughters, however, that made a compelling story.

“Right. Now, Creighton Caulfield, he was a piece of work. Nobody liked him and the stuff he liked, well, you don't want to know a guy who likes that kind of stuff, see? And, fed by Caulfield, the bit of bad keeps getting bigger. After a while, it's no longer a mark left by bad stuff, it's reached a critical mass and it's now a bad thing all on its own. By the time Caulfield dies, it's a full-sized malevolence.”

He paused, waiting for comment, but CB only nodded, so he went on. “Trouble is nothing's feeding it anymore. Caulfield's gone and nothing's making it any bigger. So it starts working on the new people in the house and a lot more proactively than just lying around and waiting for them to slip on it like some kind of evil banana peel. It finds the weakest link.” Snickering, he sat back. “You are . . .”

“I wouldn't.” Not a suggestion.

Graham's mouth snapped shut and he sighed. “You know, you should really keep a sense of humor about this or it's going to be a long night.”

“A short night for you if you don't
finish
the story.”

“What?” Then he found the threat. “Uh, right. So the malevolence finds the person most open to it and kicks him round the bend, but this person doesn't get to go bye-bye until he's offed someone else. The whole damned place, and I use the word damned in its literal sense, is full of murders and suicides and every death feeds the malevolence and makes it stronger, more realized.”

“Again, and for the last time—what does this have to do with my daughters?”

“I'm getting there. In the mid-seventies, a woman named Eva Kranby tossed her baby in a lit fireplace and then killed herself. Her husband—another seriously rich guy . . .”

“The Kranby of Kranby Groceries?”

“No idea. Wherever this guy got his money, losing his wife and baby just crushed him, but he wouldn't sell the house. He's living in New Zealand now, but he still won't sell. The house has been empty ever since except for the caretakers. The first guy, he's a total stoner and when the house makes a move he thinks he's having a bad acid trip and takes off. No food for the house. Next guy, he's a religious nut who spends a lot of time praying and finally snaps, goes babbling to his minister about exorcisms and the like and he's gone. Still no food for the house. Next guy, the guy I replace, actually does kill himself, but he does it away from the property. So there's been nothing new coming in for a number of years and hardly anyone to work on, so by the time I get here, in order to keep from just bleeding away energy, the house goes dormant and as long as you're careful not to wake it up, it's perfectly safe. Okay, some parts of it, like the ballroom, can be freak shows in their own right—we're talking a lot of trapped dead in there and you spend any time in with them, next thing you know, you're going to be joining the dance. There was this electrician, back during the first caretaker, got brought in to fix some wiring or something and they found him dead in the ballroom. They called it a heart attack, but it was exhaustion.”