The House That Death Built (16 page)

TJ didn't see anything but Susan.
Didn't hear anything but her raspy breathing as she tried to pull air in and
out of her damaged throat.

Hurt. But alive.

He hugged her. Held her so tight
he thought he might hurt her. She held him back, though, just as tight.

Then stiffened.

He looked at her, fearful that
the hanging might have caused some other pain.

Can you get nerve damage like
that?

He didn't know. He was good with
cars, but people were a mystery.

He looked at Sue, terrified he
would see her eyes open and unseeing; that the clenching of her muscles would
turn out to be a final spasm before death.

Her eyes were open, but they were
definitely seeing something. They looked over his shoulder. Wide, shocked,
terrified.

He turned. Slowly. Afraid he was
going to see whoever had strung her up from the lamp, come back to see the job
done right this time – and come to make him watch.

No one was there. No person who
could have done this.

No person.

Instead, he found himself staring
eye-to-eye at the largest pit bull he had ever seen. The thing had to be three
feet tall at the shoulders, and long enough that if he went up on hind legs,
he'd be able to lick TJ's face with ease.

Or bite my face off.

He twisted, facing the dog while
keeping Susan behind him. The dog was staring straight at him. Just staring.
And for some reason that was more terrifying than any growl.

There were more pit bulls behind
that one, too. They were all milling around a closed door, taking turns
scratching at it. Occasionally one would take a flying leap at the door,
smashing into it with a shoulder or just bulling into it headfirst.

Sue's gasps had changed. No
longer the sound of pained breathing, this was terror flooding in and out of
her. He knew, because that's what he was feeling himself.

The pit bull that was staring at
them didn't move. It was a statue. But TJ knew that the instant he got bored,
they'd be dead meat. He thought about turning and running with Sue back to her
bedroom, but rejected the idea. The dog would bring them down before they got
halfway there.

So all that was left was for
her
to run to the room. He'd stay behind. There was no hope of standing up to a
monster like that – let alone four of them – but maybe he could buy her a bit
of time. Enough.

"Get ready to –" he
began, then stopped.

The air was dirty.

He squinted, not sure how he
could be seeing what he was seeing – but there it was. Some kind of smudge just
hung there in midair between him and the dog. It was even… was it
dripping
?

It was. And even though it was
dark, the absence of light turning everything to varying shades of gray, even
so he could tell what color the smudge would have been in the daylight: bright
red. Blood.

The dog seemed to notice the
impossibly-located spot at the same time. It went back on hind legs and placed
its forepaws –

(
He's taller than
I
am!
)

– on two spots of nothing to
either side of the smudge, then leaned forward and began to lap the blood up.

The sight of it – the
impossibility of it – drove TJ forward. He took several steps. The dog kept
licking the smudge, taking no notice of him.

No, it notices me. It just
doesn't care, because it knows who's in charge here.

TJ reached out a shaking hand.
Touched the spot beside the thing's left paw. It was cold. Hard.

Glass.

Why's this here? How'd it get
here?

Then, suddenly, the dog stopped
lapping at the blood spattered on the other side of the glass. It perked its
head to the side, and TJ took an involuntary step back. The thing glanced at
him, but its attention was somewhere else. The others had gone still, too. No
more scratching at that one door, no more tossing themselves at it like NFL linemen.
They just stood. Waited.

Then, as one, they ran to the end
of the hall and disappeared down the stairs. The one that had been leaning on
the glass didn't spare a backward glance, just dropped to the floor and
disappeared with the others.

The blood was gone. There was
just smeared glass in a hallway that clearly was anything
but
just a
hallway.

"What…." He couldn't
even complete the thought. He didn't have words to express the depth of his
confusion. The night had been perfect. And now this – whatever it was.

Susan had stayed behind when he
crept up to the glass that bisected the hall. Her whisper slid through the air
and made the hairs on his neck rise.

"They're doing it," she
said.

He turned. "What are –"

She was already gone. He caught a
glimpse of her rear leg as she ran back into her room. TJ looked back at the
glass – he couldn't help it, it drew his gaze as the near-invisible focal point
of whatever insanity had enveloped him – and then followed her.

He ran into her room.

Stopped.

Susan was nowhere to be seen.

Gone.

Rob looked at the thin sliver of
metal he had just pulled from his cheek. It glinted dully – a dark nail painted
with bright blood.

He dropped the nail. It plinked
on the bare wood floor of the attic, and he began pulling more nails from his
cheek, his hand. The hand ones made him happy in a way – he'd gotten his hand
over the left side of his face when the sound hit him, and the placement of
some of the nails and ball bearings embedded in his palm convinced him he would
have lost an eye if he'd moved any slower.

The lights had been rigged. Some
kind of explosive charge rigged to the contact wires, and when he flipped the
switch it didn't turn on the bulbs, it blew them up and sent the bits of
shrapnel – ball bearings and nails and shards of metal – that had been packed
inside the glass shells flinging outward.

Bombs. They made
bombs
.

He heard a groan: Kayla, kneeling
on the floor and digging ball bearings and jagged bits of metal out of her side
with a tiny screwdriver.

Tommy was silent. Laying on the
floor, motionless. Rob could see that he'd been hit, too – his shirt and pants
were shredded in numerous places, and his mask was a mess. But he wasn't making
any noise. Maybe the blood loss from his leg was too much.

Gone. Too bad, man.

Rob saw Aaron. He must have
dropped on the far side of Tommy when the explosion happened. As far as Rob
could see, his least-favorite safecracker hadn't been hit at all. Just looking
around from behind Tommy like some alternate-universe groundhog checking to see
if it was safe to come out or if there'd be another six weeks of Apocalyptic
metal rain.

Figures. Figures
he'd
be the one to avoid
getting hit.

Rob pulled the last of the nails
from his face. They'd stapled his mask to him, but as soon as they were gone he
yanked the tattered fabric away. Kayla did the same, and Aaron followed suit a
moment later.

Masks were for staying quiet,
staying unknown. That ship had definitely sailed.

Tommy suddenly moaned –

(
Not dead after all.
)

– and sat upright with a jerk.
"What's happening?" he said. He looked around the group, one eye moving
in rapid circles as he tried to take in everything at once.

The other eye was gone. Just a
mangled mass of mask and skin in a clotted knot where an eye should have been.
Tommy didn't even seem to notice.

"What's happening?" he
asked again, then followed it up with a shriek: "
WHAT'S HAPPENING?
"

He pulled his gun and pointed it
at Rob. Rob's guts coiled in a cold mass. He wondered if it wasn't their
surroundings that would kill him, but one of his own team.

Then the gun flitted over to
point at Kayla. At Aaron, who pushed away from the spot near Tommy and slammed
against the back wall of the attic.

"What's happening? I said
what's happening? Answer me!"

Rob didn't know if Tommy would
have heard anyone if they did answer. Looked like the guy had blown a serious
gasket.

The gun retrained on him. Rob's
hands went up as he saw how it trembled, how close Tommy was to killing someone
just as a way of reasserting his grip on the universe. "Easy, man,"
he said. "Easy, Tommy. We're all in the dark here."

Tommy's lowered his gun. Still,
he kept it in his trembling grasp as he looked around with an eye that tried to
see everything at once and managed to see nothing at all.

Aaron brought up his light – that
blood-red light that he used when working on safes –

(
How'd he manage to keep
holding onto that thing?
)

– and swung it around. Unlike the
Maglites the rest of the team held, his light didn't slash its way through the
shadows. It was a paintbrush, shading pitch black into a lighter shade of
crimson. It illuminated, but brought no real brightness, and no safety.

A moment later, a more normal
light joined the glow of Aaron's flashlight: Kayla brought out her Maglite and
turned it on. Rob leaned down – slowly, he didn't want to do anything that
might set Tommy off – and picked up his own light from where it had fallen when
he tossed himself away from the deathstairs.

They swung the lights around. Just
walls and empty space. The attic was huge, but other than the bare rafters
above and the wooden walls on all sides, there was –

Rob stopped moving. The icy
feeling that had clenched his center when Tommy pointed his gun at him was
replaced by a warm, oily sensation that made him feel like throwing up.

Nothing in the attic. Not until
the farthest wall. And there….

A small, closed window.

Below the window… a card table.

On the card table… a single piece
of paper, folded in half so it stood like a tent on the center of the table.

Kayla muttered a curse.

Tommy made a sound that could
have been a sob of pain or rage or terror.

Aaron was silent.

Rob waited. When no one else
moved, he began walking toward the table. Because, really, what else was there
to do?

TJ couldn't believe what he saw.
Not at first. Susan had to be in here – there was nowhere else she could have
gotten to.

The window was shut tightly – no
way she could have opened it, gone through, closed it again, then disappeared
from view so fast he couldn't see any of it happen.

Closet?

No real possibility of her
getting in the closet and shutting
that
door, either. But he checked
anyway. Her closet was bigger than his bedroom at home, but there was nowhere
she could have been hiding. It was just the usual clothes and shoes.

He moved to the bathroom next.
The door was already hanging open, and the angle of the mirror allowed him to see
most of what was inside – and what wasn't – before he even got there. Still, he
had to check.

Before he got there, he heard
something behind him. Just a whisper, but it was so loud in the preternatural
stillness of the room it felt like someone had sucker-punched him. He spun as
the door to the hall began to close. He ran back to it, reached the door just
as it fell flush with the jamb and clicked shut.

He grabbed the doorknob. Jiggled
it.

Locked.

"Susan?" he shouted,
pounding on the door. No way she could have done this – no way she could have
slipped past him and then closed him in without his seeing it – but who else
was there to call? "Sue!"

"Under here."

Again, the sound was so
surprising it acted as an assault. He jerked in place, then spun quickly toward
the source of the sound. Again, nothing but an empty room.

"Under here."

This time he was ready enough for
a voice that he managed not to jump. He just knelt and looked for the source of
the words.

Under the bed. Sue was there, and
when he saw her TJ almost screamed because it wasn't Sue after all it wasn't
all of her it was just
half
of her there, half of her under the bed like
she'd been cut in half and left for him to find.

"Come on," she said.
With those words, understanding penetrated. She hadn't been cut in half; it
just looked like that because she was leaning out of a trapdoor under her bed.

A trapdoor?

"Sue, what's going on?"
he managed.

"No time. Come on." She
wiggled back on her elbows, scooching further into the darkness until she
disappeared.

TJ stood still for a moment.
Everything about this was wrong. Not least of which that he didn't even
understand what "this" was.

"Come on. Hurry." Her
voice floated out of the black square beneath her bed like the voice of a ghost
from the grave.

Tommy looked at the door to the
hall. Locked. He could go out the window, but then what would happen to Sue?

He followed her into the
darkness.