Текст книги "Within These Walls"

Автор книги: Ania Ahlborn

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

Another came after the first.

He can’t wait to meet you.

A third.

See you soon.

She dropped the phone onto the desk as it continued to chime, text after text blinking onto the screen. It was broken. It had to be. It was why her dad had left it downstairs, having abandoned it instead of taking it with him when he had gone to bed. Because he had to be in bed now, right? He was upstairs, sleeping. Where else could he be?

Suddenly, the idea of her father not being in the house at all turned her nerves electric with panic. What if he had finally seen the ghosts for himself? What if he had gotten so scared he had run out of the house without realizing he had left her behind?

“No, he would never do that,” she whispered. Except that he had left her mom, so why couldn’t he leave her, too? Was there really that big of a difference?

It’s not you, it’s him.

Her bottom lip quivered at the possibility. Her fingers tightened around the cross in her right hand. Maybe her dad really didn’t love her anymore. If he could stop loving Vivi’s mom, it meant he could stop loving anyone. And wasn’t that why she had been drawn to Jeff in the first place?

Why was she suddenly so scared?

Because it’s real, she thought. Because they’re here and they shouldn’t be. Because they’re dead and I’m alive and none of this should be possible.

And yet there she was, some strange woman waiting on the opposite side of the door, Jeff promising to come to Vivi the way she had hoped he would.

You’re getting what you want. So stop running away.

She turned and made her way to the door, scared to see the room that lay beyond it, terrified to see that woman standing there, smiling. Because maybe her eyes would roll into the back of her head. She’d open her mouth as if to scream and her mouth would only grow wider, so wide that she could hardly see her face at all. Or she’d start bleeding like the girl in the mirror had. That woman couldn’t be alive. She was one of them.

But she had to swallow her fear. She had to have faith.

With her hand on the doorknob, she sucked in air and turned her head away, as if looking in the opposite direction would somehow give her strength.

Vivi stepped into the living room that shouldn’t have existed, then bolted for the stairs. She took them two at a time, and yanked open her bedroom door, never looking back at who might have been right on her heels. But she stopped short of bolting inside, staring into the room that was supposed to be hers. The space she had come to know as her own was gone. Her red-and-black striped comforter and thumb-tacked band posters were replaced by a bed covered in an ugly brown blanket. A multicolored woven rug lay in the center of the room. A vase full of pine branches decorated the bedside table. The sweet scent of smoke filled her lungs.

But one item had been spared in the shift. The black paper rectangle of Vivi’s homemade Ouija board rested at the foot of the bed, waiting for her to continue what she had started before going downstairs.

She swallowed, tamping the butterflies that beat their wings against her insides. Everything about the room felt wrong. Reason told her to stay out, but she took two steps forward.

It was time to finish this.

It was time to meet Jeffrey Halcomb.

52

Saturday, November 20, 1982

Three Months, Twenty-Four Days Before the Sacrament

AUDRA’S BEST CHANCE was to convince Jeff that what he believed about her wasn’t true.

She hadn’t lost faith.

She still loved him.

She wanted to be with him forever.

“I dreamed about you last night.”

Jeffrey sat next to her, his eyes diverted, both of his hands holding hers as the rain pattered against the windows of his room. He didn’t look up when she spoke. He hardly looked at her at all anymore, as though seeing her swelling belly disgusted him, but she could tell he was listening. The muscles in his hands twitched just slightly, as though something about her statement had flipped a switch that had been off for far too long.

“I dreamed that I was walking through a field of wheat in the sunset, and there was a man in the distance silhouetted in gold. The closer I got, the more I knew I was in the presence of God, and even though I was scared, I kept moving forward because I wanted to see his face.”

Jeff finally looked up. His expression was thoughtful, hopeful.

“Imagine my surprise when I saw it was you.”

He said nothing. He only smiled. But something about his appearance made it hollow.

He didn’t believe her. He didn’t want her back. She was too far gone.

She was nothing but a vessel now.

She could see the rejection in his eyes.

53

IN THE LIVING room, Audra Snow’s things were gone. So was the dark figure that had stood in the corner. But Lucas knew Jeffrey Halcomb was still there.

There was a bang in the kitchen, like a pot hitting the countertop. Lucas vacillated in his open study door when something rushed past him, rushed right through him. He staggered back. The air left him in a gasp, squeezing out every last bit of oxygen from his lungs when the door slammed shut in his face, trapping him inside.

He stumbled away, the backs of his legs bumping into his desk. All at once, the drawers flew open. One fell to the floor, spilling its contents across the dull brown rug. What the hell was this, a poltergeist? Was stuff like that actually for real? He clamped his teeth together and shot a look at the door.

Jeanie, he thought. I’ve got to get Jeanie.

He shoved himself away from his desk, grabbed the doorknob, and twisted, but it didn’t budge. He tried again. The knob didn’t give, not even a little. He veered around, his eyes fixed on his chair. If he couldn’t go through the door, he’d smash the window, then work his way back inside to get his daughter. But his approach toward the chair was cut short. The door flew open again, rattling against the adjacent wall.

Lucas spun around. He hesitated at the now familiar sight of Audra Snow’s old furniture. It was as though the mere motion of the door opening and closing had transported him. The place was the same, but time had reversed itself by over thirty years.

He rushed past Audra’s old living room without giving himself a chance to think. Because if he did think, he’d have to consider how any of what was happening was possible. The people in the orchard. The laughter. The voices. The table. The furniture that had been stacked even after the house alarm had been installed.

Every conclusion seemed insurmountable. Every answer was nothing short of unreal.

That was when it dawned on him, a realization so unbalanced it stopped him short of Jeanie’s bedroom door. Jeffrey Halcomb had asked Lucas to move into this house knowing full well what was inside, what would happen. Halcomb had never intended to grant Lucas the interview he had promised, and Echo’s motives had never been to help Lucas with his book. She’d given him the photographs to keep him where he was, to root him to Pier Pointe.

Because there was something here.

Something no logic-minded person would ever consider real.

Something he himself had cast aside as weird fiction while, perhaps, Jeanie had taken the notion far more seriously.

I don’t want to go to Uncle Mark’s.

I want to stay here.

He tore open Jeanie’s door, and at first he didn’t see her. For a flash of a moment, he was sure his life was over, certain that his body was going to give in beneath the sheer weight of his fear.

“Jeanie?!” He bolted into the room. That was when he saw her, his little girl kneeling inside her closet as if in prayer. A square of black paper rested beside her knees. She didn’t turn to look at him. Jeanie, who was always quick to snap her head around and give him a disapproving glare, didn’t seem to even know he was there.

“Jeanie,” he said, choking on her name. Jeanie’s failure to respond only heightened his anxiety. He stumbled toward the closet, caught himself on the jamb, his mouth going dry at what he saw. There, covering the wall, were pictures of Jeffrey Halcomb and his family. Jeff, outlined in yellow highlighter to give him an angelic, ethereal glow. Jeff’s photo framed with squiggles of black Sharpie and silver paint pen—swirls and curls and hearts and childish sentimentality. Jeff winked at him from a small wallet-sized portrait Lucas hadn’t seen before.

You’re too late, it said. I can love your kid better than you ever could.

Something inside him shifted. His apprehension began to dwindle beneath the smolder of anger—the same impatient ire that had consumed him not more than a few hours before.

“Jeanie.” Lucas took a single step forward. He extended his arm, grabbed her shoulder. It woke her from her daze. She turned her head, and for a brief moment, her eyes were far away.

“Jeanie . . .” The uttering of her name lifted a veil from her face. That distant, almost glazed-over stare melted away, leaving his daughter alert, startled. “What are you doing?” he demanded. “What is this?” His gaze settled on what he could only imagine to be a makeshift Halcomb shrine.

He could read her expression. She had seen something. While he was downstairs, hearing the laughter of dozens of people, seeing the shadow of Jeffrey Halcomb standing in the corner of the living room, something had happened to Jeanie as well. But rather than figuring out what that was, he caught her by the arm and pulled her up. The sheet of paper crumpled beneath one of her feet, the silver pen too light to read.

Suddenly, she tore her arm away from him as if revolted by his touch. “No!” she screamed. “Leave me alone! I have to finish this, I have to do what I said!”

“What are you talking about?” He reached for her again, but Jeanie shoved him away. “Stop.” He nearly barked the word. “We’re getting out of this house. Now.”

He grabbed her, wrenched her toward the door, but somehow she stayed in place. Eighty-five pounds of little girl, and he couldn’t budge her from where she stood. Her feet were cemented to the floor.

“Jeanie, stop screwing around! We need to go!” He pulled her forward again, but she was rooted in place. She was made of stone, and he had suddenly lost all his strength. “I’m serious, Virginia.”

Jeanie shook her head at him. There was something wrong with his kid. He watched her narrow her eyes and slowly cant her head to the side. She didn’t have to say the words for him to read her questioning expression.

Virginia . . . ? Who’s Virginia?

“This is crazy . . .” he said. “Don’t be weak.” He didn’t reach out again. But he couldn’t just leave her there, no matter how inexplicably angry he suddenly felt. The girl who was standing in front of him looked like his child, but it wasn’t Jeanie—not anymore. And he wasn’t sure he even cared. Fuck it, he thought. Let her mother deal with her. But he couldn’t just leave her.

“Jeanie,” he said, trying to reel in his agitation. “I don’t care what you promised to whom, you understand? Let’s go.”

She didn’t move.

Goddammit!

He reached toward her again, but he didn’t make contact. Just before his fingers grabbed hold of her arm, a rush of air hit him square in the chest. It was like a bottled hurricane, uncorked, pointed directly at him. He was nearly knocked off his feet as he stumbled backward, away from the closet and out of Jeanie’s room. The small of his back cracked hard against the upstairs railing. It was the only thing that kept him from flying head over feet to the red bricks of the ground floor. The wooden banister shuddered against the sudden impact. His legs folded beneath him like broken twigs.

The anger was gone, leaving nothing but panic.

But despite his rapid-fire pulse, his attention never wavered from his daughter. He was zeroed in on her as he sank to the floor. Her expression was a tense mélange of anger and despair. She opened her mouth to say something, but only the first few words managed to escape her throat.

“You’re a liar. You don’t love—”

Before she could finish, the bedroom door swung inward, slamming hard enough to rattle its frame.

Lucas leaped up. He threw himself at the door, fully expecting it to stay shut, fused to the jamb like his study door had been. But it fell open and he fell with it, back into Jeanie’s room.

Except it was no longer Jeanie’s room, but a place Lucas had never seen before. Ugly. Plain. A bouquet of pine branches sat atop a bedside table. A simple bed was covered in a brown blanket.

“Jeanie?!” He spun around where he stood, searching, as though she could hide from him in a room so small. But she was gone.

Her stuff. Her room. His daughter.

Vanished.

A scream clambered up his throat.

Echo. Where was she? Where the fuck was she?

He staggered down the hall to where Echo should have been, shoved open the door in search of his temporary babysitter, but all he found was a vacant air mattress among stacks of boxes he had yet to unpack. He stepped inside, Caroline’s careful handwriting printed across brown cardboard: LOU’S BOOKS. Suddenly, he ached for her. All he wanted was to hear his wife’s voice, to cement himself in some sort of reality, any sort of reality that reminded him of how the world worked. His yearning was felt in little more than a blink of a second, nothing but a quick flash of nostalgia devoid of the facts. The fights. The affair. The imminent divorce. Too short to give him any shred of relief from the disappearance of his only child.

Lucas turned, ready to throw himself back into the hall, to check Jeanie’s room again, to scream for Echo’s help despite suspecting the worst of her. I can’t do this alone. But the guest bedroom door swung shut just as it had in Jeanie’s room, barricading him in the same way he’d been locked in his study not a few minutes before.

He grabbed the doorknob. Déjà vu. It didn’t turn, not even a wiggle. He gritted his teeth, tried to shake it free, but instead of the door opening, the walls began to vibrate again. Lucas let go of the knob and took a few backward steps, staring at the walls that now looked as wavy as a midsummer highway throwing off heat. He swallowed as the door and wall before him warped yet stayed the same.

“What the fuck,” he exhaled, barely audible even to himself. The air went thick with electricity, heavy and cumbersome. He stood motionless, afraid to set off a static spark, imagining the entire house going up in flames if he made a wrong move.

But he couldn’t just stand there. He had to find his girl. Reaching out, he dared to brush his fingers across the plane of the wall that flexed like thin plastic, undulating like bad reception on an old TV. It licked at his fingertips with a soft hiss. He pulled his hand back, unsure whether the sensation was cold or hot. When the room seemed to settle into a state of stability, Lucas sucked in air, knowing exactly what he was going to see.

His stuff would be gone. The house would be different yet, somehow, mind-bendingly the same. Perhaps, this time, it would stay different, permanently. Maybe this time he’d be stuck on the other side.

He pulled open the door with a mix of determined reluctance—hesitant, scared. Just as expected, the house had transformed. But now it wasn’t just the superficial things within it being replaced by those that had existed long ago. Along with the wallpaper and carpet and furniture and framed pictures, the night beyond the windows was replaced by the bright glare of day. Up until now, certain rooms had been reimagined and misplaced, but he always found himself on the side of familiarity. That was all gone now. He could sense it the way a parent anticipated catastrophe. The air smelled different, felt thicker.

Oh God, this isn’t the present, he thought with certainty. This is 1983.

He stepped into the upstairs hall with bated breath, an intruder in his own rental home. He waited for the voices—the same ones he’d heard earlier—but the house was silent. So quiet that he could hear the trees gently creaking outside. There was the lightest jingle of a wind chime somewhere, dancing in the breeze.

He crept past the door that should have led into Jeanie’s room. It stood wide open and inviting. The window was open, the curtain pulled back, filling the room with bright afternoon light. A pine-scented breeze pushed the drapes to and fro. He was drawn to the view, if only to see what the outside world looked like. Staring across an endless expanse of trees, he realized that he could have been a thousand miles from Pier Pointe without ever knowing. The landscape was a perfect repetition of green. The only suggestion that he may have been in the wrong place was the vibrant blue sky, not a rain cloud in sight. But he could still hear the ocean, wave after repetitive wave crashing onto the gray and rocky shore.

Just as he was about to turn away from the window, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. A swatch of goldenrod ducked into the trees—wavy blond catching the light like a fleck of gold.

Jeanie.

Ready to yell, he stopped short. If someone was inside the house, it would be better to not alert them to his presence. Instead, he turned and ran with light feet, trying not to make a sound as he descended the stairs in the least possible amount of steps. When he reached the foyer, he shot a look over his shoulder at the living room, half expecting to see Jeff Halcomb standing there, staring at him with a perplexed smile across his face. The dead Jeff Halcomb—except that death didn’t seem to matter anymore. Lucas saw the top of someone’s dark-haired head as they sat on the couch. A woman. Her back was to him as she stared at a blank TV screen. Lucas crept to the door, winced as he opened it, and left it ajar before darting to the side of the house.

He rushed for the trees, his daughter’s name on the tip of his tongue, his feet crunching twigs and wild grass. Stepping wrong, his foot rolled over a pinecone. Pain flared deep in his ankle, but he didn’t stop. By the time he reached the tree line, he was limping badly and panting for air.

The interior of the forest was quiet. There was no snapping of branches, no talking, no sign of the girl he thought he had seen. Not until he glanced back to the house and saw Jeanie standing in the upstairs window, now closed, staring out at him just as he had looked out at her only moments ago.

“Jeanie!” But before he could tell if she heard him or saw him at all, his eyes went wide. Three, four, eight people rushed out from around the corner of the house in a full-on sprint. The group stampeded toward him. He lifted his hands and held them palm out to fend them off.

No. Stop. I’m not even supposed to be here.

But they kept on coming.

The boys were faster than the girls. The front-runner wore cowboy boots and a shirt that would have made John Wayne proud. Lucas searched for the right words to stop the group in their tracks, but he came up empty. Because the guy leading the charge was unmistakable with his tight blue jeans. Lucas had stared at the man’s picture long enough to have known Derrick Fink anywhere.

Mid-run, Derrick’s mouth turned up into a dogged sneer. In three seconds’ time Lucas would be knocked flat onto his back by a man thirty years dead. And the people that followed him shouldn’t have existed either. Kenneth, with his goofy face and his gangly arms, was hot on Derrick’s heels, grinning and whooping, as though this sprint was the most fun he’d ever had. Nolan trailed a few steps behind, his huge eyes impossibly wide as he struggled to keep up.

“Stop!” Lucas yelled, and tucked his head beneath his pretzeled arms, protecting himself from the impact. Derrick hit him head-on. Then came Kenneth and Nolan, followed by five girls decked out in their kaleidoscope dresses. The riot of color swallowed him whole. But rather than being knocked down, Lucas simply stumbled. His feet skidded across the grass as the group continued past him as though he wasn’t there at all. And yet, he could smell the perfume of patchouli and weed waft up behind them as they tore across the backyard. He could feel the brush of their polyester shirts and soft denim. The flap of airy skirts assured him that this was no hallucination.

He twisted around, watched them bolt for the trees he himself had been advancing toward only seconds before. This time the pine shadows weren’t as empty as they had been. Just beyond the bank of gently swaying conifers was the flash of a girl who, from behind, looked just like Virginia Graham.

Lucas couldn’t help it. He ran after them.

Maybe he had seen wrong.

Maybe Jeanie hadn’t been upstairs.

Maybe she was in both places at once.

Nothing made sense, so why should this?

He ran after them, listening to Kenneth carry on like a delinquent in search of trouble. A couple of the girls laughed while a third catcalled, “Come out, Avis!” Lucas’s steps slowed when a few of the group broke out of formation, the name rattling inside his head. Who the hell is Avis?

They reminded him of Serengeti predators, a group of hungry animals expertly breaking apart to box in their prey. The girl Lucas had thought was Jeanie made a panicked dash for the cherry grove, but they all cornered her in no time flat. She was slow, weighed down by a swollen belly, her arms wrapped around it as if to keep it from tearing away from her body.

Audra Snow.

She looked left, right, then directly at Lucas, as if to implore him for help. Making a final attempt to escape the group, she made a dash for a break in their ranks, stumbled, and crashed onto the forest floor with a muffled cry. Halcomb’s diviners jumped in to stop her. They surrounded her like hyenas falling onto fresh meat.

Audra began to sob as Derrick and Kenneth grabbed her by the arms. She screamed garbled pleas as Georgia and Chloe seized her ankles and helped lift her off the ground. Lucas stared wide-eyed as angel-faced Shelly reeled back and punched Audra square in the mouth. Audra shrieked, and Shelly—the little girl Lucas had only imagined as innocent—hit her again to shut her up.

Audra’s protests were quick to deteriorate. Like a wounded animal, she used up all her fight, then resolved to weeping as she was carried back to the house. Lucas stepped to the side as the group marched past him. Roxanna and Laura looked positively euphoric as they trailed behind the rest of the group. None of them seemed to notice Lucas standing there, as though he had somehow been transported into a moving snapshot of things that had occurred.

Halcomb’s group was nearly out of view when Lucas forced himself to move. When he stepped around the corner of the house, he caught sight of the hem of Roxanna’s skirt just before the front door closed. Lucas picked up the pace, his thoughts tripping over what would happen next.

Somewhere in the span of the next few hours, Audra Snow would lie semiconscious in a circle of eight, their heads pointing toward the center, their legs splayed out like the points of a star. That’s the way the police would find them. Death by arsenic, though the authorities would fail to pin down the poison’s source and Halcomb would refuse to give details.

Lucas pushed the front door open and braced himself for what was to come, but the group was gone. All but one remained.

Echo stood in the center of the room. A mug was cupped in her hands.

“Hello, Lou,” she said. “Welcome.”

Lucas shook his head at her. “What the—where’s Jeanie?” he asked. “Where’s my daughter?”

“She’s fine,” Echo said, her tone dreamy. “She’s so close.”

“Close . . .” He didn’t know what that meant. “Close to what? To where?”

“Close to here, to forever. Close to what you try to create with your books, Lou. In some ways, writing books is like giving yourself eternal life, isn’t it? We all want it—we just go about it in different ways.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” He spit the words at her, not in the mood for stupid riddles. “Where’s my kid? What is this?” And for a split second, he honestly believed that she could explain it all away—the house, the furniture, the fact that he’d stepped out of night and into day. The entire world had shifted and it had taken him and Jeanie, and now Echo, with it.

Echo gave him a thoughtful smile. She approached the couch in her bare feet, then took a seat and faced the blank TV.

Upstairs, a door swung open and hit the wall behind it.

Lucas’s gaze darted back to Jeanie’s room just in time to see a young Jeffrey Halcomb step into the hall.