The House That Death Built (15 page)

"What's happening?"

TJ kept hitting the door,
refusing to slow down no matter how much his flesh bruised, no matter how much
he screamed inside that it was useless and this was the necessary end of
something too good to be true.

He left a red smear on the door
after one of the hits and the farthest part of his mind told him that it was
blood; that he had smashed his skin to pieces and was now bleeding all over the
perfect paint job.

He didn't stop. Pain coursed
through him, but he didn't stop didn't stop just kept going and didn't –

Click.

He had reared back, moving as far
as he could with the bed in the way, then took a running start at the door when
the sound made it through his fevered mind.

The door swung open before him.

He had a single instant to
realize that there was no one in the doorway; that no hand had unlocked or
opened the door. Then he was through, falling to his knees when the obstacle he
had expected simply disappeared.

He would have fallen farther –
would have dropped right to his belly – but something else stopped him.
Strange-feeling. Not hard like the door had been. Loose. But still solid.

Whatever it was
moved
.

He wheeled back and finally saw
what he had fallen into.

"Sue!"

She was dangling from a rope
around her neck, a thick cord that continued up above a ceiling lamp above her
head.

She had managed to get the
fingers of one hand between the noose and her neck. The other hung listlessly
at her side as she devoted what little strength she had left to a feeble kick
that would never help.

TJ launched himself to his feet,
wrapped both arms around her waist, and lifted with all his strength. She
weighed nothing at all in his arms. He hoisted her as high as he could, and was
relieved when he heard her take in a deep, ragged gasp of air.

He hoisted her up higher, until
his arms were around her hips. Then he let go of her with one arm - still so
easy to hold her, even one-handed, like the air she had lost had stolen
everything else she had as well – and reached up with the other. He fumbled at
her neck, and she cried out as he rubbed his fingers across her abraded skin.
He didn't stop, though, not until he had gotten the noose loosened, then lifted
it over her head.

She dropped into his arms. Fell
against his embrace. Sobbed.

"Sue," he said.
"Sue, you all right?"

She kept crying for a moment, and
he looked up at the noose that still hung overhead, wondering how it had gotten
there and what was going on.

"Sue?" he repeated. He
tried to make his voice soft, but adrenaline turned the word into a shout.
"Sue, you okay?"

Sue finally looked at him. Her
eyes were aglow with tears, and the neck of her tank top was stained by blood
that had flowed from her neck where the rope tore into it.

"They did it," she
said. "They're doing it. Oh, God, they're doing it."

Tommy had felt pain before. A lot
of it. When he was a kid he was small and he got knocked around by everyone he
knew. When he got older, he got bigger, and learned to take pleasure in others'
pain. But pain still came for him there, too: bruised knuckles, broken fingers,
the occasional tooth knocked out of his jaw when someone fought back harder
than expected.

He liked it. Liked the pain. Not
because he enjoyed pain in and of itself – he wasn't some head case – but
because of what it inevitably represented.

Someone who fought, but lost.

Someone who resisted, but
surrendered.

Someone who was once whole, but
whom Tommy had finally broken.

Pain was a companion, a thing
that he led from place to place and visited on others, so it was natural that
he would feel it himself as well.

But it never bothered him. Not like
it did now.

But it's not the pain that hurts,
it's the
nothing
.

That was it. The pain around the
cut to his lower leg was actually minimal. But there was a distressing cold
that had gathered there and was now reaching icy fingers up into his thigh, arcing
toward his groin. The cold wasn't painful, either, it was just numb. The numb
scared him, because what would happen when it got to his heart?

He was pretty sure he had severed
an artery when he ran into that wire. He had twisted slightly as he fell, and
the wire had cut not just into his shin, but wrapped partly around the back of
his leg, hacking into the calf muscle.

Are there even arteries back
there?

Think so. Yeah. Remember that guy
you cut a few years ago? How fast he bled out?

"What's going on?" His
sister's voice was ghostly, lost in the darkness of the landing. She sounded
like she was already half-dead.

Tommy looked at Rob. Aaron's red
flashlight was still on, and Rob's masked face was a black, bloody skull in the
light.

Already dead. We're already dead.
All of us.

Rob looked unsure. Tommy had
never seen him like this. Completely lost, nearly unhinged.

"I… I don't," he began.
Then his mouth slammed shut and some of the steel returned to his eyes. He
turned toward the stairs.

"What are you doing?"
said Aaron.

"Going up, dumbass,"
said Rob.

One of the dogs slammed into the hall
door again. Another thing that Tommy had never seen – he knew about pit bulls,
but how were these so big? How was all this even possible?

Rob looked pointedly at Aaron,
then back at the door. "Unless you'd rather try your luck that way."

The cold reached a bit higher.
"Oh, damn," Tommy whispered. His skin stretched tight and clammy over
his bones. "I think I'm in real trouble here."

Kayla looked like she was going
to say something – not to tell him it would all be all right or anything so
simple. She wasn't the type. Whatever she said, he had a feeling it would be a
slap to the face of whatever hope any of them still had.

Whatever it was, she didn't say
it. In the next moment, a sound cut her off. It was a strange, ratcheting noise
- a sound like an old movie projector might make, deepened to a low roar and
amplified a hundred times.

Click… click… click-click-click
–

The noise was coming from the
floor right in front of the door to the hall. Everyone instinctively crowded
backward, none of them quite willing to get on the attic stairs, but no one
wanting to be too close to the noise, either. Whatever it was, it wasn't a
good
sound, Tommy knew that in his bones.

Click-click-click-cli –

Then the sound of shattering wood
and the screech of metal rang through the space. A line of ten-inch nails
slammed up through the floor of the landing right in front of the attic door.
They stretched from one wall to the other, and were about six inches deep, each
nail placed an inch or so from its closest neighbors.

Anyone standing there when it
happened would have been skewered up to the shins.

Click-click-click-cli –

Another set of nails slammed
through the floorboards. Another six-inch-deep section of the landing
disappeared, replaced by a bed of sharp points.

Click-click-cli –

"Up! Get up the
stairs!" Rob shouted.

No one had to be told twice.

They ran as fast as they could.
Kayla moved with him onto the steps, and together they blocked the way past.
Good thing, since this way Rob was pushing them, helping them move faster.

He was pretty sure, if Rob could
have, he would have left them behind to die.

Can't blame him. I'd do the same
.

The nails shattered the
floorboards, chewing up the remainder of the landing. Then they began following
Tommy and the others right up the stairs.

Click-click-cli – SLAM.
And the first step dissolved.

Click-click-cli – SLAM.
The next step. Faster.

The next one.

Tommy pushed Kayla and Tommy as
hard as he could, but heard the nails coming faster and faster behind them.
Aaron was following them all at the end, and Tommy was pretty sure he wasn't
going to make it.

Kayla suddenly abandoned her spot
below his arm.

Bitch
.

She threw herself up the last
step, rolling as far away from the stairs as she could. Rob shoved Tommy with
panicked strength, and Tommy tripped the rest of the way up the stairs, rolling
himself – though not as gracefully as his sister had done.

Rob was out of the stairwell a
moment later, tossing himself away from the stairs and the spikes that were
devastating them. He rolled over to look at the mouth of the stairwell.

At Aaron.

The last man on the stairs –

(
Click-click-cli – SLAM. And
the step right behind Aaron's feet was impaled to oblivion.
)

– looked ahead. But Tommy could
see it in his eyes. He wasn't going to make it, and he knew he wasn't.

Click-click-cli
–

At the last moment, the last
instant
,
Aaron jumped. Not forward – he was too far away from the end of the stairwell
to make it – but
up
.

SLAM
. The steel spikes went up in
perfect sync with him, spearing into the air as he jumped, drawing his knees
toward his chest for more height.

Then he began to fall again.

The spikes did not.

Tommy, hurt as he was, couldn't
help but stare. He liked to watch things die.

And Aaron was definitely going to
die.

A flurry of thoughts went through
Aaron's mind during the few mad seconds of running.

The house he'd grown up in.

His mom and dad, both dead.

Dee, waking him up with a kiss
nearly every day of their marriage.

The days she hadn't kissed him,
because she was in the hospital or just too weak to move.

He remembered, suddenly and
strangely, the look Rob gave him earlier in the night, the veiled hints that he
would kill Dee.

For some reason, that look no
longer struck him as terrifying. He wondered if he might have been able to do
something if he'd just stood up to Rob. Told him to go to hell and walked out.

And then the thoughts dissolved
the way the stairs were dissolving, flitted madly away like the remnants of
balloons popped not by a pin but by ten-inch spears.

Click-click-cli – SLAM.

It sounded like gears shifting
each time, some mechanism he couldn't see rolling into place below his feet. It
gave him a second to know the next nails were coming, an instant to wonder if
this was the one that would finally outrun him.

Click-click-cli – SLAM.

Kayla and Tommy disappeared from
his sight as they launched themselves forward and upward, off the stairs.

Click-click-cli – SLAM.

Rob was gone.

Click-click-cli – SLAM.

Aaron jumped. There was no way to
make it off the stairs, so he didn't try. He jumped straight up, and below him the
air itself was shoved aside to make way for something coming through it
bullet-fast.

He hung there in midair. An
impossible minute. More thoughts –

(
dee's smile the way she looks
at me when she's mad the way she looks at me when we make love rob's face and
why oh why didn't i just tell him to go to hell
)

– tumbled and jumbled their way
through his mind.

He fell.

The spikes were below. Below and
–

(
Click-click-cli – SLAM.
)

– ahead and nowhere to land but
death. Falling on the nails with his body weight, falling forward and impaling
legs and chest and neck and face with the others and then dying stuck to them
like a bug on a display board.

(
dee's smile
)

He jerked in midair. His legs
splayed out, the soles of both feet finding their way to either side of the
stairwell. They hit the walls and he shifted his ankles so the soles were
pressed as flat against the walls as he could get them. His hands mirrored the
motion, each hand going out as far as it could, each palm finding an opposite
wall.

He pressed with hands and feet as
hard as he could. The wall slid under his gloves, his feet kept slipping down.
Too fast, too far.

Gonna die.

The death would be worse this
way, too. No sudden pain, no quick shearing of flesh. He was going to hit the
nails slowly, they were going to drive through him by the slow force of his
body weight alone.

The wall still slid.

The nails pushed through the side
of his right shoe. Blood began to trickle.

And he stopped falling.

He looked down. His left foot was
planted hard against the stairwell wall on that side, and had slowed to a stop
only an inch or so above the line of nails below. His right foot had stopped
at
the line – the feeling he had of the nails ripping through his skin was real.
He had sunk down to the nails on that side, and they had pierced the downturned
side of his shoe, pricking his flesh. Not badly, though. Just enough to hurt.

Just enough to make it hard to
stay where he was.

His arms began to shake. He
couldn't stay like this long.

He looked forward. Rob was
looking at him, jaw open like he'd just witnessed a miracle: not Jesus walking
on water, but a thief walking on air and steel.

Tommy was looking at him, too, pain
and interest warring in the big man's eyes.

He wants me to die. He'll enjoy
it.

The thought drove away the sudden
fatigue in his arms and legs. He leaned his body weight forward, jerked his
hands away from the walls, then repositioned them against the wall about a foot
ahead and a foot above where they had been.

The hard part: he did the same
thing with his feet. It wasn't just that his hands were bearing his bodyweight
with nothing more than his upper body strength and friction on their side, it
was the fire that lit in his right foot when he pulled it away from the nails
on that side. He would have sworn he heard a sucking, tearing sound.

Then he was loose. Everything
fell on his hands. He jerked his feet forward. Up. A horrible moment when they
scrabbled against the walls, failed to gain purchase.

Dee. She's waiting for me.

His feet jerked into place. He
repeated the motion, traversing the area above the last five steps – all of
which had disappeared before the onslaught of the nails. The sounds had stopped:
whatever had happened, it only happened to the stairs. The attic was safe.

For now.

The small voice in his head was
clear on this. There was no way this was over. No way the nails were all there
was.

What about the note?

The card from the safe was still
in his pocket, along with the bit of – what was it, a photo? – that it had held
inside.

those who have nothing cannot be
robbed

He actually frowned as he
crawl-climbed his way up the stairwell. Wondering what it meant. Wondering what
was happening.

Wondering what would be next.

The last step of the way was
hardest. Almost to the top of the stairs – at the top, really – but the wall on
one side of the stairwell ended and there were still spikes below him and now
no real way to get forward and over them. Rob or Kayla could have given him a
hand and he could have made it that last little bit with ease. But neither of
them showed any inclination to move closer to the steps.

"Help," he managed
through gritted teeth. No one moved.

Tommy actually smiled. Aaron
could see the blood still pooling under his leg, could see the man's lips growing
paler and paler, but still Tommy found some sick pleasure in what was
happening.

Forget it. Just go.

Get home to Dee.

He braced his hands, then pulled
his feet up an extra few inches. After they were firmly against the walls, he
let go with his hands and lunged forward as hard as he could.

It was almost too hard. Instead
of an awkward jump, the force of his push tore his feet loose from where they
were pressed and he did a clumsy layout, his body going more or less parallel
to the stairs, his lower half still hanging over the spikes even though his
upper half was beyond them.

I'll only be maimed and crippled.
Not killed.

Hooray for me!

He fell.

And a hand grabbed him. Yanked
him forward and away from the stairs.

He landed with his rear toe
touching the final line of nails. His whole body ached worse than it ever had –
not just the actual exertion of what he'd done, but the palpable reality of how
close he was to death.

He shuddered. The hand that had
pulled him forward disentangled itself from his own. He looked at Kayla as she
wiped her gloved hand on her chest, as though his own hand had been covered in
grease.

"Thank you," he said.

"Don't," she answered.
"Just help get us out of here."

That made sense. She didn't care
about him, any more than Tommy did. But she was perhaps the most pragmatic of
the group. She'd help him stay alive as long as that seemed to improve her
chances of getting through… whatever this was.

I can live with that.

You just
did
live with that.

"Thank you," he said
again.

She rolled her eyes. Then turned
her flashlight beam on Rob. "Where did you bring us, Rob?"

Aaron nodded. "How did you
find this guy?"

Rob's eyes flashed. Angry the way
only a guilty man can be. "Same way I found all of them. Waited for the
idiot to tell me about himself, give me his address, show that he's a good
mark."

Rob stared them down for a
moment. Aaron looked away first, staring down at Tommy. The big man had slumped
backward and was now flat on his back on the floor. Aaron knelt beside him. Fumbled
for the wound on his leg, not sure what he could do or even if anything could
be done at all, but Tommy knocked his hand away hard enough that it bruised
him.

"Don't you goddam touch me!"
he shouted hoarsely. The words themselves seemed to exhaust him, and he slumped
again.

Aaron looked back at Rob and
Kayla, who were still engaged in a staring contest, standing a foot away with
nothing but air and threat between them.

Rob was the first to blink. He
swung his light around, and Aaron caught sight of two naked lightbulbs hanging
from the ceiling rafters: one at each end of the huge and (as far as he could
see) empty attic.

Rob saw them, too, and turned his
light to the side. Near the stairwell was a light switch. Rob flicked it.

The bulbs didn't turn on.

Instead, there was a sharp
double-pop – not as loud as a gunshot, but certainly loud enough to make
Aaron's ears ring in the closed space of the attic. He reacted instinctively,
throwing himself to the floor beside Aaron.

He heard the
swish
of
something small moving past his head. Heard sounds similar to – though smaller
than – the noises the nails had made when they came up through the wood steps.

Kayla screamed. A moment later,
so did Rob. Tommy shrieked as well.

Over faster than it began. One
moment there was a bright light followed by something that happened so quickly
Aaron couldn't understand it. He sat up and looked around. Rob's light had spun
across the floor, and now sat at the top of the once-stairs, illuminating the
area enough for Aaron to see what had just happened.

Enough for Aaron to see that the
stairs were just the beginning.