So many things that she’d forgotten.
How could I have forgotten?
The man set the Thermos on the bedside table next to the wooden box that had been empty of coke and pot for so long now. He used an edge of the wool blanket to wipe her mouth, then let her rest a moment. He smiled at her and she smiled stiffly back at him.
“It’s okay,” he said. He wasn’t wearing the balaclava and, yes, his hair was long, pulled back into a ponytail.
While he was retrieving the robe with the large peony flowers from its nail, she felt beneath her pillow for the little scissors. Finding them, she made a fist around them.
When he brought the robe to her, she was standing shakily by the bed. He helped her into the robe and tied the belt around her so it wouldn’t gape open. The sleeves were so long that they hid her hands.
“You don’t have any shoes, do you?” he asked.
She looked at him blankly.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said.
When she reached to scoop the thing up in its blanket nest, he stopped her.
“It’s too big,” he said. “Too much blanket.” He looked around the room and found one of the towels she had washed in the sink and hung up to dry. After he laid it across the bed beside the blue blanket, he gently pushed the folds of the blanket aside and carefully picked up the thing, cradling its head in his hands. It looked up at him, away from the light, but it didn’t make a sound.
“It looks healthy, Allison. You did a good job.”
Allison didn’t know why he was saying that, but it made her feel less worried.
He wrapped the baby tightly in the towel so that its arms and legs were bundled inside, but left a small flap of towel to rest over its head. Then he lifted it again and gave it to Allison.
Taking the flashlight in one hand, he took one of her hands in the other.
As he opened the door wide, a small amount of light and a strong draft of air rushed into the room.
Startled, she tried to pull away.
“You can do it,” he said, pulling her close to his side. “We have to go, Allison.”
She shook her head vehemently.
“It’s okay. Just a few more steps, and I can carry you if I need to.”
A wave of fatigue washed over her, and again she felt as though she might fall. When the man moved, she willed herself to follow, letting him be the force that kept her going forward.
They were in the hallway that she’d glimpsed for just those few seconds so long ago, when Michael had crushed her shoulder. Ahead, a door as thick as a wall stood open. Beyond it was only darkness. But she sensed that it wasn’t a small darkness, like her room. This darkness was vast, possibly endless.
“It’s just there,” he whispered. “Not too far.”
The word “there” held no specific meaning for her. “There” was everywhere that wasn’t her room. Her legs weakened, and she stumbled. He held her up.
Before they’d gone more than a few feet, they heard a noise ahead. A door opening, shutting. She saw a second light.
“Shit!” the man whispered. He blinked off their flashlight.
The distant light bobbed through the darkness, coming toward them.
The man almost fell over her as he tried to maneuver her backwards in the dark. She cried out when he stepped on her foot.
At the other end of the tunnel the response was immediate, as though she’d called it forth:
“Allison!”
Michael’s voice. She knew it like the sound of her own heartbeat.
The man switched his flashlight on again. He was pulling her away from Michael without explanation or apology. She kept her eyes cast down, looking at the rough floor, which wasn’t nearly so worn as the floor in her room. The thing in the towel began to whimper.
I’m sorry!
Now the man was dragging her up a staircase that climbed up, up into a different darkness. The walls pressed in, barely far enough apart to let them pass. She hadn’t made it up ten of the steep, irregular steps before she flagged and almost fell backwards.
Down in the tunnel, Michael kept after them.
The flashlight’s beam danced on the walls as the man bent to help her up. Her head scraped against the bricks more than once as they climbed, and she closed her eyes, trying to ignore the pain.
“Allison!”
Michael was closer. The thing cried out to him. But as weak as Allison was, she knew already that she couldn’t ever go back to that dark, dark place, even if the light seared them both.
When there were no more stairs, they emerged into a room with electric lights like the one in the room she’d just left. But there were many, all glowing, casting a rich amber light. The walls were covered with women in antique Japanese dress, surrounded by blossoms.
Panicked, she cast around for a door and saw two wide, wooden panels that might have served as doors, but she wasn’t certain. The only opening she saw was behind her, a narrow gap that seemed to be part of the fireplace. But she could hear what was coming behind them. Was she meant to stay in this place?
No! Not another prison!
The man with the long hair took her hand again and they ran across the room. The wooden panels did make up the door. He slid one of the panels aside, and she found herself in an enormous, sunny hall which seemed, oddly, open to a sky filled with stars.
Chapter 70
“We told the police that Ariel wasn’t sure what she saw that night,” Rainey said. “And that was true.” She and Gerard had left the woods and come into the kitchen to get some water.
Gerard was sitting on one of the kitchen stools, while Rainey paced, restless.
“The woman she saw go over the railing didn’t look like Karin. She was dressed differently and looked younger. To tell you the truth, it all kind of sounded like a dream, the way she explained it.”
“She woke up in the middle of the night, right?” Gerard said. “Maybe she was dreaming.”
Rainey shook her head. “She definitely saw Karin.” Her voice got quiet. “After.” It pained her to have to talk about Karin being dead. The way her body was exposed when she found her had shocked her, and she hated to think how much it had hurt Gerard. He looked exhausted. Miserable. His jaw was still swollen from the fight with Jefferson, and the cut beside his lip would take a while to heal.
“That just doesn’t make sense,” he said.
“But there was something else,” Rainey said. “The part that really freaks me out.”
Gerard waited.
“She said she saw my late husband Will standing outside my bedroom door, watching it all. She said he’s appeared to her before. That he’s been here all along. With us.”
Now Rainey watched him, nervous. He took a moment before answering.
“I’ve never believed in ghosts. I think people get themselves overexcited and make stuff up.”
When Rainey started to protest, he raised a hand to stop her.
“I didn’t say that’s what I think about what is going on here,” he told her. “Maybe in some other place. But not here.”
“You mean, you believe her?”
“Karin never thought there was anything supernatural going on here, and nothing happened to me while I was working on the house. But there is something wrong here, Rainey.”
“That’s why you think she’s in the house.”
This time, seeing the pain on her face, Gerard got up to put his arms around her.
They stood like that for a few moments until Rainey could breathe again. Around them, the kitchen was silent. The house was silent. She couldn’t even hear the clock in the hallway. Had it stopped? It was as though the house were waiting for them to move. To make some sound. It shocked her how much she wanted to stay right there with his arms around her and her head against his chest, not moving, until Ariel appeared. She wouldn’t ask any questions. She’d forgive Ariel anything.
She knew she was embarrassing herself, letting Gerard hold her this way. But t
here didn’t seem to be anything in his embrace except compassion. And she was grateful.
Finally he pulled away, looking a little abashed.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “We’ll find her.”
Rainey nodded, trying not to cry. Crying was not allowed. She had to keep her shit together. The house always had its shit together, and she had to wrest Ariel from it.
“She didn’t run away,” Gerard said.
“No. She never wants to leave. She doesn’t even like to be outside,” Rainey said.
“Because of her scars?”
“Maybe. Do you think she looks any different from the first time you saw her?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I just thought she looked less afraid. She was pretty shaken up that day she fell upstairs.”
Rainey leaned against the counter, her hair almost completely loosened from its tie. She looked spent. “She’s got this idea that the house is healing her in a really dramatic way. I’ve seen her looking in the mirror when she didn’t know I was watching. She touches her face like she’s really happy with it. When we first got here, she wouldn’t even have a mirror in her room. And you saw that big one we put in the ballroom. She’s trying to start dancing again.”
The ballroom. It creeped him out far more than any other space in the house. Even the strange, empty sheds up on the roof.
“But nothing’s actually different?”
“Of course not,” Rainey said. “She’s not using her cane as much, and she’s stopped wearing those hats. Sometimes she tries to use her right hand. But those are all things that the doctor encouraged her to do.” She paused, watching his reaction. “What is it?”
“We need to call the police, Rainey. It’s the only way. They need to do a wider search. You can have them comb through the house, too. Get some volunteers.”
Rainy looked away, but she knew he was right.
Chapter 71
Demons, darkness, spiderwebs . . . these were all things Ariel might have expected to find after turning the ice-cold doorknob on the next room down the hallway. But she could see nothing at all for a moment because she was suddenly engulfed in blinding light and could barely open her eyes.
Sunshine streamed with a surreal intensity through the windows around the dome: pure, yellow, brilliant light as though the sun itself had exploded. She’d never seen so much light in the well of Bliss House. Heavy motes of dust hung suspended in its rays like shapeless snowflakes, and everything around her was bathed in shades of gold. She was standing on the third floor, outside the theater room. But there were pieces of furniture she didn’t recognize: tables and chairs and lamps, a large cabinet, and paintings of landscapes that looked a lot like the Virginia countryside.
It wasn’t the Bliss House she knew. Even she was not the Ariel she knew. She felt weightless, as though she might rise at any moment into a shaft of sunlight. It was all so impossible! Though her mind was telling her differently, she knew her real self was still in that unexplored room, far beyond the lowest floor of Bliss House.
She heard angry voices coming from the ballroom. The door flew open.
At first Ariel thought it was two women frozen in the doorway by the sun’s brilliant assault, but she realized that one of them was a man with lank blond hair that hung to his shoulders. They didn’t hesitate long. The man pulled the woman behind him onto the mezzanine. She was carrying something wrapped in a towel. Neither noticed Ariel standing opposite.
The girl hardly looked human. Her skin was white, bloodless, and she blinked against the light. Her stained robe billowed around her, but her arms and legs were so thin that Ariel wondered she could move at all without breaking. Her feet were bare. The man dragged her purposefully, as though she were a reluctant child. Ariel knew her, recognized the robe, the blazing red hair. It was the girl she’d seen fall the night that Karin Powell had died.
A second man emerged from the room, screaming after them.
“Allison, stop!”
It was Jefferson. And yet it was not. This man was like him, but taller, much less stocky, and his wavy hair brushed the collar of his button-down shirt. His voice was deeper, too. Commanding, where the Jefferson she knew was less confident. Less frightening. She’d seen this man before, too.
“She’s a whore, Michael,” the man who looked like Jefferson said. “Look at her child!”
It was when his mouth was closed, though, that Ariel recognized him. Or recognized the man he was to eventually become: Randolph Bliss, Jefferson’s father.
The man who was pulling the girl stopped. So this was Michael, the man with the ponytail, the brother who everyone said had run away. The brother they assumed was dead.
The girl stopped as well and looked up at the man who had hold of her. She clutched the bundle closer. Was that a baby she was carrying in the towel? Her voice was so weak that Ariel could barely hear her.
“What did he call you?” she asked. “Who are you?”
Run, Ariel whispered. Just run.
“You did this to her!” the man called Michael said. “You’re an animal, Randolph. You’ve almost killed her.” He looked down at the girl. “He wanted you to think he was me. But he’s my brother, and his name is Randolph.”
Already bone-pale, the girl seemed to fade in the sunlight. The only darkness about her was her eyes, and their seriousness aged her decades. She stared up at the man called Michael as though seeing him for the first time.
Whatever else the rooms beneath the house were, they had been hell on earth for the girl. How long had she been down there?
Run!
Ariel felt no danger for herself. And as fearful as she was for the girl, she understood that what she was seeing had happened long ago, and might happen again and again. Time didn’t move, here, and nothing she did could change it.
“You fucked her, too, Michael,” the young Randolph said. “Why didn’t you take her away before now? She was good, wasn’t she?”
He addressed the girl, Allison. “Ask him why he didn’t rescue you. What was he getting out of it?”
Allison jerked her hand from Michael’s. She took several steps back.
Her voice was hoarse, and broke with her words. “Why didn’t you just kill me? Please, God, just kill me!”
“You know we can’t let her go,” Randolph said, a wheedling tone in his voice. “And she doesn’t want to leave with you. She’s our responsibility.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Michael said, reaching out to her. “I’ll help you.”
But the girl shrank away.
“Michael wore a mask because he’s a coward,” Randolph said. “Where do you think he was for so long? He was getting laid by somebody else.”
“Allison, I’m sorry! He’s right. I was a coward. I shouldn’t have gone away. Let me help you now.”
Ariel understood. The place she’d been so curious to get into had been—and still was—a prison.
The sunlight flickered, momentarily throwing the scene into a blackness deeper than night, deeper than the blackness in the staircase leading down to the tunnel. But the three other people on the gallery didn’t seem to notice.
“But you’re Michael,” the girl said, her voice barely a whisper. She pointed to the young Randolph.
“I was teasing you,” Randolph said. “Like we were playing a game. I know you don’t want to leave, Allison. You told me you want to stay here. You can stay here, and the baby can stay here if you want. Or you can let me take the baby. My mother will make sure it goes somewhere very, very safe.”
Michael lunged, but Randolph was faster in retreat, and Michael was only able to tear the front of his shirt.
Randolph laughed. “You’re such a pussy, Michael. Be a man for once.”
Michael went after him again. The girl stared—not screaming, not reacting at all.
Someone was going to die in this shining place, and Ariel didn’t want to watch. She told herself that all she had to do was to look away and it would all disa
ppear.
In the second it had taken her to turn her head toward the sound of an explosion, their house was gone and so was her father. There had been nothing to see but a gray, nameless chaos of debris flying toward her, rising into the sky. But, no. There had been one thing . . . a single, bright blue bird of cast concrete. She’d bought it at a school tag sale for her mother, who had tucked it beneath a boxwood near the front door, as though it were resting. That bird had sped by her, launched into the same oblivion that had absorbed her father.
Randolph and Michael grappled on the landing. Ariel had seen fights between brothers before, in school, and they were always more intense than fights between strangers. Beyond the anger, there was the history. Favoritism, jealousy. Pain. But there was insanity here.
Michael aimed his head at Randolph’s stomach like a battering ram, and knocked him into a table. Now they were on the floor, rolling in a violent embrace. Michael screamed as Randolph grabbed his hair, jerking his head back until Ariel thought his neck would break. She felt her stomach jump as a handful of Michael’s hair and scalp came away.
Still the girl stared, holding the bundle to her with one hand and tugging nervously at her own hair with the other.
Run!
This time, Ariel screamed at her. Not getting any reaction, she ran across the gallery, pressing herself against the wall—a wall that was solid, real—to avoid the brothers crashing one another into the furniture. The men’s faces were bloody.
But Randolph’s face was changing rapidly. Ariel saw a hundred other faces flash across it, as though he were a hundred different people, some hideously ugly, some terrified, some vicious and insane. Women, children, men. Michael froze in his brother’s embrace. His face contorted, and Ariel knew that the sight of it was killing him. It had hold of his mind, of his heart, and was squeezing the life out of him. She could feel it reaching for her, too, digging deep, deep inside her.
It was the house. This house. It was holding all those faces—all those souls—captive. Innocent souls. Guilty souls. Not just men, but women, too. Children.
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