The Unseen (40 page)

“It was in there,” Katrina said, looking through the door at the room.

The knocking started again. This time it was downstairs, muffled … curiously the sound seemed the exact same distance away. Slow, steady thumps.

Listening to it, all of Laurel’s suspicions about a human source fled her. She could feel in her marrow—this was
other.
It was mind-shattering, soul-shattering. Her whole body was in revolt against the essential wrongness of it, the irrationality, the impossibility. She could feel the same reaction in the other three; they all stood still and poised in disbelief, in outrage, in awe.

Brendan was the first to break the paralysis. He and Tyler strode down the hall, in the direction of the main stairs, Katrina right behind. By the time they reached the doorway to the next hall, they were running.

Laurel stood and looked through the doorway of Brendan’s room at the white walls, the narrow, monastic bed. The knocks continued steadily downstairs. She felt the hair on the back of her neck rise, and she turned and ran for the hall.

As she reached the bottom of the main stairs, she realized that the knocking had stopped. Voices came from the dining room, a few sharp sentences, then silence. Laurel darted across the entry hall toward the great room.

She passed through the archway and again felt a shock of static electricity that made her gasp aloud.
What is that?
She halted on the threshold … but the tingling was gone. She forced herself forward, walked across the wide expanse of the great room.

The other three stood around the long central table of the dining room, heads lifted toward the ceiling, not moving … just listening in the stillness.

Katrina started, “I don’t—”

Brendan lifted a warning hand and she fell silent.

The thumping started again—this time in the library, upstairs and on the other side of the house. Again, Laurel noticed that it sounded exactly the same distance away, not any closer or farther than any of the other knocks had been.

No one ran this time. Tyler’s face tightened, and Brendan looked resolute. They all walked back slowly, even deliberately, out the doorway of the dining room, across the floor of the great room toward the stairs. Brendan held the EMF reader up as they walked.

Laurel braced herself as she stepped back through the arch, but there was no sting of static this time. She saw Katrina glance at her speculatively and wondered if Katrina had felt the shock, too—but Laurel was too keyed up to speak. The EMF reader began beeping steadily as they all headed up the main stairs.

Brendan, in the lead, paused on the landing and they all stopped behind him, listening. The knocks continued, the slow, heavy raps. “Is this recording?” Brendan asked Tyler.

Tyler glanced back toward the first floor. “I don’t know. I mean, the cameras are on, but I don’t know if we’re picking up audio.”

“Go back down and check—,” Brendan started.

“No,”
said Laurel violently. “No one goes off on their own.” She didn’t know why but it was imperative that they stay together.

After a moment Brendan nodded curtly and they all continued moving upstairs toward the slow, steady knocking, Tyler taking two stairs at a time. “Slow down,” Brendan snapped at him.

Tyler instantly flared up. “What are we doing, sneaking up on it?”

Brendan grabbed Tyler’s arm, halting all of them. “Just slow down. I want to see when it stops—”

At that moment, it did.

All four of them were still, heads raised, holding their breath …

“It heard us,” Katrina whispered, and no one laughed. They followed Brendan up the remaining stairs and across the hall to the library.

The heavy wood door was closed.
And that’s weird,
Laurel thought.
Who would have closed it?

Brendan reached for the knob—then rattled it. He pushed on the door. “Locked,” he muttered.

“Is there a key?” Tyler asked.

“Maybe. There were some extras on the ring.”

On impulse, Laurel reached to the knob and turned it herself. The door swung open. Brendan looked at her and she shook her head, mystified. Then they all moved into the room.

It took a moment to grasp—then Katrina gasped. The framed photographic portraits along the whole back wall were askew, as if someone had brushed by the entire length of the wall, or an earthquake had jarred the house and deranged them.

The electromagnetic frequency reader in Brendan’s hand started beeping louder and faster. “It’s reading twelve,” he said, excitement crackling in his voice. “That’s extremely high.” Tyler had the camcorder up to his shoulder and was shooting footage of the pictures on the wall.

“Is it still here?” Katrina whispered. Laurel knew exactly what she meant. It felt exactly as if they were chasing a presence from room to room, as if a child were playing hide-and-seek with them.

“Let’s see.” Tyler lunged for the heavy round table with the lazy Susan built in, and knocked his knuckles sharply on the wood surface. The sound was very loud in the room.

There was a pregnant silence … then the knocking started again, on the far side of the house.

“Goddamn it,” Tyler swore. He turned to the library door and took off running.

“No!” Laurel called behind him, but he was out the door, footsteps pounding in the hall.

Brendan and Katrina followed, and again Laurel found herself a beat behind, trailing, as they ran into the upper hall of the main house.

Running down the hall she was very aware of the pitches and tilts of the floor. It rolled, a feeling like a wave, like seasickness. One moment she was running down it and suddenly she was tripping, flying, and sprawled on the floor—right in front of Brendan’s room.

The door was closed again, though she knew it had been open when they left it. She stared up at it, and felt chills start from the base of her spine, a feeling of pure, black terror. She scrambled away from the door, and up to her feet, and bolted after the others.

They all arrived in the servants’ kitchen, breathless, to find Tyler standing in the middle of the floor. The knocking had stopped.

Tyler kicked the table.

A skillet jumped off the hook where it hung on the wall and crashed to the floor behind him. Katrina gasped; they all spun, staring … and waiting …

The knocking began again in the dining room, below.

Tyler tore out of the kitchen like a madman and pounded down the back stairs. The others hurried behind … down the stairs, through the house office. They had just bolted into the downstairs kitchen when the knocking stopped, followed immediately by a cry of rage from Tyler in the next room.

Laurel and Brendan dashed for the doorway. Tyler was in the dining room, shouting at the walls, at the ceiling. “Show yourself! Come on! Come out!”

There was silence … and then knocking began from all the places they had heard it before, except the one they were standing in.

“You made it mad,” Katrina said to Tyler breathlessly. The knocking grew louder, waves of it, pounding around them.

“It’s trying to get in,” Katrina said, and the blankness in her sweet, light voice was chilling.

“It
is
in. Isn’t that the point?” Tyler said roughly.

Brendan spoke, and his voice was very distant. “No—it’s trying to get
over
. Over, or through.”

He had his clipboard out and was writing down the numbers from the EMF meter, which had gone off again, beeping frantically. Now he strode to the doorway to the great room. “I’m checking the audio …”

He stopped just inside the door.

Laurel came up behind him to look, and felt her stomach drop, a vertiginous jolt.

The paintings hung on the walls in the great room were not crooked, but upside down.

“Whoa,” Tyler said behind them.

Laurel felt a sudden pressure in the air. She gasped for breath. Katrina cried out beside her, a strangled sound. “Oh my God!” The girl raised a trembling hand. And then Laurel and Brendan saw what she was pointing to. The screens of the monitors were shattered. Glass glittered on the table and floor around the table.

Brendan ran to the monitors.

“Did it record?” Tyler demanded.

At the monitors, Brendan’s back stiffened. He checked the power cords, jiggled switches. “
Damn
it. The equipment’s off. Completely off.”

Tyler strode to the monitors and checked.

“Look.” Katrina pointed again. The lamps on the mantel of the fireplace were shattered—the glass bowls lying in heaps of glass on the marble.

Laurel felt a wave of disorientation.
But they weren’t broken when we walked in. I know they weren’t. And I didn’t hear any crashing, either… .

Brendan started forward, holding up the EMF—but something had changed. The device was silent. Brendan stared down at it, flicked at the switch. “It’s gone dead.”

Tyler hefted the camcorder, checked it, and paled. “Camera’s dead, too.”

“But—that’s not electrical,” Laurel heard herself saying.

“It fried the equipment?” Tyler muttered, and Laurel thought in that moment that he looked more confused and vulnerable than she had ever seen him.

Brendan strode toward the archway. The rest followed. “Watch out!” he cautioned. There was more broken glass on the floor, and on the butler’s table under the lamp. Laurel could see bits of broken glass under the sconces on the stairs, and gleaming shattered pieces in the hallway.
When did this happen?
she thought wildly.
Why didn’t we hear it?

And then all around them they heard the sounds—like lightbulbs popping and bottles shattering and glass cracking—all at once, a prolonged destruction … and completely aural. There was no movement, no sign of anything stirring or breaking, just a reverberation of sound. Katrina pressed her hands to her ears and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block it out.

And then silence.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

They chased it for hours, on and off all day, until they were exhausted and shaking. It seemed like an hour … it seemed like three days. But wherever they were in the house, the knocking was somewhere else. They never saw anything move; whatever it was they were chasing was always a step ahead of them, as if deliberately taunting them.

They were being played with, completely. Several times they tried waiting in a room,
not
following the knocking. And the knocking would start in one room, then move to another, then back to the room it had just left. Slow, leisurely, taunting, until at one point Katrina screamed at the ceiling, “What do you want?”

There was a silence … then the knocking started in another room.

It was like being under siege. But by what?

There was a force of personality there, undeniably.

It’s the randomness that feels so insane,
Laurel thought.
It does seem to be communicating, trying to communicate, but what? Or at least—it seems to have intention.

There was no further assault of sound after the glass breaking; in fact, the knocking slowed down considerably after that auditory blowout.

When finally it stopped, Katrina had curled up and fallen asleep on the couch in the great room, like a fatigued child. Brendan found the digital camera was working, and they had no idea if it had been working all along, as they had not thought to use it. He went around the house clicking off photos of the damage, which was really nothing more than some upside-down paintings, broken lightbulbs and lamp fixtures, a few shattered bowls. Whatever
It
was,
it
seemed not to like glass; or perhaps it only wanted to leave them in the dark

And no one thought of leaving.

While there had been pockets of terror throughout the day, there had been nothing at all like an assault, or physical threat. They were all spacey from the adrenaline rushes and crashes but they were also raw with impatience for something else to happen.

They all drifted in the house: Brendan prowled relentlessly with the digital camera and the EMF reader, checking and rechecking levels. Tyler disappeared into his bedroom, and when Laurel went to get a broom from the narrow closet by the servants’ kitchen, she could hear soft snoring from his room. There was glass everywhere and she wanted to get it up before dark, or at least pushed into corners.

She started in the servants’ kitchen and the back part of the hall, and when she stepped through the lounge into the central part of the hall, the door to Brendan’s room was still closed. She hurried by it, putting as much distance between herself and the room as she could before she resumed her sweeping.

It took more than an hour to make her way all the way around the house. Twilight was descending and she could see the white nymph at the tip of the circle of lawn through the windows as she walked across the front hall, toward the great room in the fading light. Katrina sat on the couch, curled up in blankets; she was awake, staring out through the windows. She did not look up when Laurel stepped in. Tyler stood in front of one of the upside-down paintings, looking absurdly like a quizzical patron in a modern art gallery.

Brendan was at the desk, writing by candlelight, which startled Laurel, until she realized that they had no electric light anymore. Every bulb had been shattered.

Was that intentional?
she wondered.
Will we do something about that?
But she was too tired to think clearly about it.

She stood in the middle of the room, feeling like a ghost, but also feeling no desire to speak, to make her presence known. Finally, Brendan glanced up and noticed her. “No manifestations for two hours,” he said.

“No,” she answered. “What do we do?” she asked, like a child herself.

“We wait,” Brendan said, and returned to writing.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Everything was moving. The wind played hide-and-seek through the trees outside, a constant rushing swirl of motion; bushes scraped their branches across the windows, screeching and scratching, nails on the glass. The draft breathed through the chimneys, and curtains stirred in front of the windows.