Lucy gaped stupidly at her hands. She must’ve lost her grip on the chopper when she was submerged.
“All of you,” Bryan muttered. “You’re all so damned inscrutable. It’s like you have meetings after I go to bed. You plan ways to keep me outside the group.”
She looked wildly about. Nowhere to go. “We don’t do that, Bryan. We—”
“—want to win the contest, just like I do.” Ten feet away. Closing. “You figured you’d eliminate the toughest candidate.” Five feet. “But I’m still here.”
His hands shot out.
Lucy spun away, but he snagged the back of her shirt. She splashed forward onto her chest. She pushed to her knees, but Bryan smashed down on her. She fought against him, but he weighed so much. God, like a stone column crushing her.
She surged ahead, the rocks underwater goring her knees, but Bryan came with her. Lucy shot an elbow at him, caught him in the shoulder, but he only laughed at her. Lucy strained forward, half spun, and only when he was seizing her by the shoulders did she realize her error. Her face went under.
A cold shroud enveloped her. Bryan was leering down at her, great hands gripping her arms, but between them there were two feet of creek water, and Lucy was choking. But this time there was a massive body on top of her and no way to escape.
She grasped his forearms, her nails harrowing his flesh. Through the muffling barrier of water she heard him cry out. He scuttled over her. A moment too late she realized what he had planned, and then his knees were pinning her shoulders to the rocky creek bottom, his crotch in her face, no chance at all for her to buck free. She was going to die here.
Panic set in. Water rushed into her mouth. She clawed at his hips, but he seemed impervious.
She closed her eyes, a coldness seeping into her limbs. Her fingers scrabbled on Bryan’s granite-hard calves, his ankles.
The Bowie knife in its case.
Her eyes shuttered wide. She pushed the snap open.
Fight! a voice in her head screamed.
She’d slid the knife most of the way out before Bryan’s hand slapped down at her.
Kill or be killed!
With the last of her strength she whipped the knife up.
Then Bryan’s weight was gone, and she rolled onto her knees, thrust her head up. She attempted to inhale, but her system rebelled, the water exploding out of her in a flood. While she knew she was badly exposed, her back to Bryan, she could no more prevent the expulsion of water from her body than she could go back to her childhood and make a different decision on that frozen creek.
Lucy wiped her mouth, stood with the Bowie knife clutched at her side. End him, she told herself. Put him down.
“…fucking bitch,” Bryan was snarling. “I need a doctor.…”
Lucy saw he indeed needed a doctor. The knife wound spanned the length of his forearm, beginning at the elbow and terminating just shy of his palm. She remembered hearing somewhere that slitting your wrists was only effective if you went north–south, like this incision. Though Bryan had peeled off his t-shirt and was attempting to tie a tourniquet at his elbow, blood was absolutely gushing out of his wound.
Bryan fumbled with the makeshift tourniquet. “Stupid…cunt…” he muttered. “I can’t believe.…”
Lucy rose, faced Bryan.
She strode over to him, raised the Bowie knife.
Take him down!
Bryan glanced at her, comprehension dawning, but Lucy didn’t give him time to react. She swung the knife in a looping stroke, the blade parting the skin of his throat. A necklace of crimson rills streamed down his chest. He opened his mouth, issued a gargling cough. He pawed at his throat, his eyes opening and shutting.
Finish it!
She gripped the Bowie knife with both hands and plunged the blade into his chest.
His blood-slimed fingers fell on her wrists. She jerked the knife from his chest, heard a lung whistling. Just as she was about to stab him again, he sank to his knees, coughed out a splat of blood, which hit the water and separated in snot-like streamers.
His face was very pale, the wound in his throat deep. It yawned open, reminding her of fish gills, purple and raw. Unmoved, Lucy gripped the knife and waited for him to spring one last surprise. She’d been conditioned by movie villains to expect it.
Instead, he rolled sideways and went under, surfacing only when the current had taken him several yards down. She walked after him for a time, but his face remained under. Dead for sure.
Lucy turned. She had to check on Will.
And on the heels of that, she thought of Rick. Had he really left the competition without telling her?
No, she thought, wading toward the shore. He wouldn’t have left without saying goodbye, especially not after last night.
She had to find him. If he was still alive.
Wiping the bloody knife on the hip of her shorts, Lucy emerged from the creek.
Chapter Seven
Will thought, Bates was a monster.
The cold, implacable voice of truth: That’s not why you left him there.
Will: He killed his kids.
Truth: Leaving Bates in that hole was the act of a mean little bastard. You’d been bullied by your brother and your father and damned near every kid in elementary school, and you seized your chance to spew that meanness back out.
Will: Did he deserve it?
Truth: Deserving or not, you took a life.
Will: Okay, yes! I took a life! I was young and stupid and full of anger. I should have called the police. I should have done it all differently, and I’m sorry.
Truth: (silence)
Will: But I don’t deserve to die now, do I? Or is God or fate or nature or chaos or whatever is in control just as cruel as I was? Or does mercy play a role somewhere?
“Will?”
He froze. The voice had not been in his head. It had been.…
“If you can hear me, speak up.”
Lucy, he thought.
He opened his lips to answer, but soil seeped into the corners of his mouth. Will spluttered, made to push it away, but his hands were buried.
At once he remembered where he was. The slow landslide had dragged him down, and at some point he’d lost consciousness. He had no idea how far underground he’d ended up, but it couldn’t have been too far because he was still able to make out Lucy’s words. She called to him.
With a grunt, he thrust his shoulders against the dirt. Buried alive, he thought, then tried to unthink the words, but as the dirt sifted over his cheeks, tiny clods of it pattering on his knuckles, they repeated an unholy refrain: buried alive, buried alive, buried alive—
“NO!” he bellowed.
Lucy cried out. She’d heard him! But it didn’t mean a thing if she didn’t see him too. He thrashed in the dirt, refusing to die this way. His chin upthrust, he worked his shoulders around, loosened the soil. He’d sinned badly in allowing Bates to starve, but dammit, this wasn’t poetic justice, it wasn’t karma, it was fucking overkill, and he refused to succumb to it. His injured back howled, yet the will to live was greater, the need to breathe.…
His face emerged from the soil and he sucked in a great heave of air.
Lucy gasped, “Will! Oh my God!”
It scarcely registered. All he could think about was the rain peppering his face, the delicious oxygen, and as he wriggled his way out of the soil, he drank in all the fragrances of the forest. The spruce trees and the fecund soil and the rain, and with a groan he jerked one arm free and then the other.
“Oh God, Will,” Lucy said, hands linking under his arms and hauling him up, “what happened to you? How did you.…”
She never finished, or if she did Will didn’t hear it. All he could hear was the full-throated chorus of raindrops showering the forest. He grimaced at the intense spinal pain but managed to extricate his
shoes from the hole and flop onto his back. He was alive. Broken, maybe, but alive.
Then, a terrible thought intruded.
“Where’s Bryan?”
Her face went hard. “Floating.”
He took in her bedraggled appearance. Blood streaks on her face and throat. “You killed him?”
She smiled wanly. “He messed with the wrong failure.”
“We’re all failures.” He sat up, hissed in pain. “Hell.”
“You can wait here.”
“And what?” he said, making it to his knees with an effort. “Sit here until the next horror arrives? Miss Lafitte or Rick’s lunatic police chief—”
“Or Wells.”
He glanced up at her.
“Wells is the key,” she said. “It starts and ends with him.”
Will planted his palms on the soil, got slowly to his feet. Even with Lucy supporting him, it took an effort. “It’s a good thing I never played football. One hit and I’m like a decrepit old man.”
“He was a freight train. We didn’t see him coming.”
Will massaged his lower back. “What’s your plan?”
“Fight them. Try not to get killed.”
He took in her tangled wet hair, her torn, bloodstained clothing. She’d never looked smaller to him. Or tougher.
They began to move. In Will’s weakened state they made bad time, but after a while the forest began to thin, and the emerald of the meadow grass started to peek through.
“I think I have a way to beat Wells,” he said, and as he spoke the words, he realized they were true. He glanced at her. “You gonna look for Rick?”
She nodded.
“What about Miss Lafitte?” he asked.
Lucy held up the Bowie knife. “Bryan kept this sharp.”
“It is a wicked-looking thing.”
Lucy grinned. “Am I wicked-looking?”
“You look like a drowned muskrat.”
He joined her in laughter, though it hurt like hell.
They reached the edge of the forest, gazed up at the rainswept mansion.
“I’m going inside,” Will said.
“To your room?”
“Uh-uh,” he said, beginning the slow, painful climb. “To Sherilyn’s.”
Chapter Eight
They climbed the hill in silence. Drawing nearer, Lucy noted how different the exterior of the mansion now appeared. No missing slate shingles, no water stains on the stone and brick façade. The broken windows had been replaced, the shutters no longer aslant. Despite its age, the house looked like it could have been built this spring.
Restored, she thought. Just like Wells.
They reached the porch.
Will said, “I’ll go in first.”
Lucy just gave him a look.
He sighed. “Okay, you go. But what’ll you do if—”
“This knife took care of Bryan.”
“Yeah, but Bryan was—”
“—human? Barely.” She drew in a shuddering breath. “We have to kill them before they kill us.”
Will nodded at the immense doors. “Miss Lafitte could be on the other side right now. Or Wilson.”
Or Wells, she thought.
“Hey, Lucy…” Will started, but she was already reaching for the door. “What are you doing?”
She opened the door.
Nothing attacked them.
She went in. “If I find Rick, we’ll come get you.”
“Then what?”
“We leave together. Winning the contest doesn’t mean a damn thing now. We’re good enough writers to make it without him.”
He gave her a smile that made her wish they were anywhere but here, just sitting together and having a drink. She imagined him at a Cubs game, joking with his buddies.
“We can do this,” she said. “We can beat them.”
He nodded. “Be safe.”
“Don’t die,” she said, and moved toward the back hallway.
Chapter Nine
As he hobbled up the stairs, Will thought of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. So many of his favorite books featured writers and their tales, fictional characters that came alive and tried to harm their creators.
Somehow, Roderick Wells had tapped into that potential in a way no other writer had, in a way no sane person would believe.
Will didn’t know if it was Wells or his land, but the power here was real. More importantly, it was transferable.
Corrina Bowen had created the murderous maid.
Rick Forrester had coaxed Police Chief John Anderson to life.
The sensual abomination Will had glimpsed on the shore…yes, even Will had begun to create something.
But it was none of these he was interested in now.
Will started down the second-floor hallway.
The estate was vast. Maybe it was growing. Maybe it fed on their words, expanding and changing and forming new worlds.
Maybe none of them would escape.
Will reached his room, kept moving.
Maybe the others had created villains as well, but he could only focus on the ones he knew. What did they have in common?
Malice. Unpredictability.
Violence.
But what if one of their stories was coming to pass in a different way? What if one tale was playing out without any of them realizing it?
He reached Sherilyn’s door.
Unlocked. Thank God. He entered the room, locked the door.
He performed a slow scan of the bedroom, thinking, Is this the moment? Will this decide all our fates? It sounded melodramatic, but he suspected it was near the truth.
Wells had been growing younger. And the mansion had been, what? Healing? Rejuvenating?
Insane.
But true.
He made his way to the writing table, bent to slide out the drawers.
The key, Will believed, was the stained-glass mosaic in the chapel. He thought of Wells garbed in armor, his golden sword aloft, the keen blade flashing as it commanded the serpents. Like the eyes of the fanged vipers bearing down on the villagers, Wells’s eyes had shone with a perverse light, a ruthless joy that reveled in the massacre.
Had Sherilyn captured the true Roderick Wells in her fairy tale?
If so, he had to find her story. The Magic King was the key to everything.
The desk drawers were empty, the only items within a few pencils and a tube of magenta lipstick.
The rain tapped the windowpanes, the ticking of the grandfather clock the only other sound in the bedroom.
He swiveled his head, stared at the clock.
As he approached, he remembered something his father had once said about this type of clock. Some had full bonnets, some didn’t. Some simply had faces and were flat in back, and Sherilyn was tall.…
Will reached up and probed the top of the grandfather clock. His fingers rasped against the edge of a notebook. He seized it and hobbled over to the desk. Reached into the middle drawer and found a pencil. He opened to the middle of the notebook, skimmed until he got the sense of the story. He remembered the scene in which the main character met the peasant boy. The girl in the story, she could have been Sherilyn or Lucy or neither of them.
But the peasant boy…the one who would challenge the Magic King…Will had believed all along that the boy was Rick, and judging from the way Sherilyn had looked at Rick on the night of her reading, she’d felt the same way.
Will tried to control his galloping heart. He didn’t think he could match Sherilyn’s talent.
But he could remain true to her vision. Yes, he thought that was something he could do. Sherilyn had written a fantastic opening, but she hadn’t been given time to finish it. Will didn’t have much time either. He suspected Wells and his emissaries were preparing th
eir onslaught. There was no way Will could withstand the ferocious entities Wells would unleash.
He could, however, try to vanquish Wells in The Magic King. It was a small chance, but in his weakened state, it was all he could do.
He finished reading the last chapter Sherilyn had written. Richard, the peasant boy, was locked in the dungeon. Will had to find a way to save the boy, to overthrow the king, to bring his reign of terror to an end.
Will sat in the dimness of the dead woman’s room, let his mind drift to a magical realm where a vicious tyrant held sway.
The same way Roderick Wells ruled this estate. Could Will defeat him in these pages?
He raised his pencil, took a breath, and began to write.
Chapter Ten
Every molecule cried out to slow down, to exercise caution, but an even deeper layer of her psyche understood that time was short, that if Rick was in the basement, and if he was still alive, he’d be in terrible danger.
Creeping along the back hallway, her thoughts shifted to Wells. What upset her most was how childlike her fear of him was, how superstitious. After all, she hadn’t seen him hurt anyone. Or, for that matter, perform any nefarious deed.
Yet there were reasons to fear him.
Not the least of which was the way he’d grown younger.
Yes, she thought. Wells was a psychic parasite, a demon of flesh and blood. Most of all.…
He’s a vampire.
Lucy froze six feet from the basement door. It was the first time the word had popped into her head, but now that it was there it would not be displaced. She couldn’t think of Wells as a fanged bloodsucker with a garlic allergy. But the sort of creature who feeds on others, who through canniness and willpower can survive epochs…yes, she could imagine Wells as that sort of being.
Yet what flickered through her head as she compelled herself forward was a scene from Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot, which featured one of the scariest scenes she’d ever read. The protagonist – A writer! What a lovely coincidence! – venturing into the basement of a creepy old house to kill the king vampire.
Lucy clamped down on the thought. Granted, she had every reason to be afraid; in the past hour, she’d witnessed things that weren’t possible, been hunted and nearly murdered by a psychopath.
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