by Ninie Hammon
Her eyes welled with tears so suddenly they almost squirted down her cheeks.
"I guess you know all about that if you traced me here." Her voice was thick and tear-clotted. "Darren loved the color of my hair, said it reminded him of a chestnut mare. I'd have made it any color he wanted …" She looked right into Bailey's eyes then, like she figured to find empathy there, and she did. "I'd have done anything for him. He was the love of my life."
Bailey's eyes filled with tears, too! It was an extreme response. Shoot, he'd figured out months ago she'd been married, had a child — that she didn't want to talk about, and he respected that. She was usually so guarded about letting that part of her show, but now she looked ready to cry.
Melody took a deep breath, got hold of herself. Bailey finished off the tea in her cup.
"I had to get away … Darren’s family didn't … so I reinvented myself."
There was that phrase again. She had to "become new" and "reinvent herself." Well, what she had invented was just about perfect in every way, or that's what the Bartleys had said. The perfect little girl.
"I got a teaching certificate and came back home to West Virginia, settled here. Life was good, and then … then little Riley was taken. Was gone." The word was almost a sob. "I should have walked him and the other boys all the way out to the playground. I shouldn't have just sent …"
She couldn't continue, put her head in her hands. She didn't cry out loud, but her shoulders shook. He looked helplessly at Bailey. She gave him a blank look in response.
"Wasn't your fault, you gotta know that." Lame, but the best he could do.
She took her hands away, wiped the tears off her cheeks, took a deep breath and forced a tremulous smile. "I know it wasn't my fault." She tried to pull the smile the rest of the way across her face but couldn't manage. "The way you know the recipe for bean dip. Knowing it and believing it are two entirely different things."
Then they sat in silence. T.J. didn't know what to say. Bailey looked kinda dreamy, probably still shook up by what she seen when she connected with that locket. The moment was drawing out toward awkward. And some irrational part of T.J.'s psyche was telling him, no yelling at him, that he ought to get up right then, tell this lady it was sure nice to meet her, have a nice day, take Bailey by the hand and get out of this house.
"Would you …" Melody began, firmed her voice. "Would you like to see the ballroom upstairs? It's positively amazing. I feel selfish keeping it all to myself."
"I'd love to see it," Bailey said and stood. In her excitement, she stumbled, must have caught her foot on the edge of the coffee table. T.J. rose and took her arm and steadied her.
"Oops," she said, and burped a little giggle.
Melody rose, crossed to the parlor door and led them out into the hallway toward a right-out-of-a-fairytale grand staircase that wound up to the floor above. It ended in front of big double doors that looked like they was as tall as the front doors on the house.
As they started up the stairs, T.J. became aware of the strange smell again. The stench got stronger the higher up the stairs they went.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Bailey climbed the elegant staircase behind Melody, with T.J. bringing up the rear. The house seemed to have acquired a golden glow, with warmth emanating from the hundreds of twinkling lights in the chandelier dangling from the foyer ceiling. What a lovely place! Almost magical. She could hear, or thought she could hear, a buzzing sound, too, no — softer than sound. A vibration in the air that seemed to come from behind the huge doors on the second floor that led to the gigantic ballroom T.J. had described as they were approaching the house.
It was all lovely … except for the smell. Nothing lovely about that. She'd smelled it the moment she stepped into the house. It had gone away while they were in the parlor, or maybe she had just grown accustomed to it, but as they climbed to the second floor, it grew stronger. She tried to identify the smell, but it eluded her. She couldn't seem to focus on it, or on the origin of the buzzing sound, either, which now seemed somehow to come from inside her head.
The source of the aroma, though, became more clear with every step. It was coming from beyond the big doors that now loomed above her at the top of the stairs. They were so tall she wobbled a little looking up at them.
They stopped in front of the doors and Melody asked, "Have you ever been to Pittsburgh?"
Bailey bleated a giggle at the non sequitur and T.J. gave her an odd look.
"When you go up Interstate 79 from the south, you can't see the city." Melody sounded as excited as a little kid. "Then you enter the Fort Pitt Tunnel and when you pop out the other side, there it is — bam! — the skyline right in front of you. The skyscrapers and the rivers — the Monongahela and the Allegheny, the fountain at The Point where the rivers merge to form the Ohio — the golden bridges. The surprise is breathtaking."
Her face wreathed in a beatific smile, she was almost bouncing in place in childlike delight.
"I want the ballroom to take your breath away like that — so close your eyes! Don't open them until I say 'now.'"
Bailey obediently closed her eyes. The world swayed when she did.
She heard a gentle rumble as one of the big doors swung inward.
And the stink of — Bailey had no idea what —punched her like a fist, staggered her, did indeed take her breath away.
"Now!" Melody cried, her voice no longer soft and soothing but ragged, grating and unnatural.
Bailey felt small hands on her back, propelling her violently forward as she opened her eyes, her vision a blur of reddish light. She stumbled, felt T.J. grab her arm, but she was too off-balance and fell to the floor, dragging him halfway down with her.
"What the—?" T.J.'s words seemed to come from a long way off.
Jumbled images tried to connect in her head but thoughts skittered away as quickly as they formed. She heard a thump as the big door slammed shut, felt T.J. lifting her to her feet, but her legs had become bags of water and she couldn't seem to keep them under her.
"Oh my … dear God!"
That wasn't awe in T.J.'s voice. It was fear.
The horrific stink, the reek was suffocating. Though her eyes were open, the world swam in front of them. T.J.'s image passed by in a red haze. Then he took her face in his hands, held her head steady, but even then the tumbling and turning continued, the whole world lurched and swayed.
"She drugged you. Musta been in them sugar cubes."
"Drugged?" the word was hard to form, difficult to push out past her lips.
When he let go of her, she crumpled in a heap. T.J. was … seemed to be dancing around. She watched him brush something off his pants leg and then he cried, "Get up! Get off that floor."
She concentrated, tried to see clearly the floor beneath her.
It came into focus then. They came into focus. Bugs.
All over the floor. Crawling things. Beetles. Roaches. Something that jumped — a grasshopper, maybe? A cricket? Creatures with tiny whirring wings. Buzzy things — buzzing all around, the air was full of it — cicadas, June bugs — flies!
And spiders.
Spiders everywhere!
Shrieking, she lurched to her feet with T.J. steadying her, keeping her upright as he swatted off the creatures crawling up his pants legs and brushed frantically at her jeans.
She swayed and he commanded, "Stand up!" She tried, struggled to orient herself, but the whole world pitched and yawed like a ship in a rolling sea.
Ship.
She noticed it at the same time she thought the word. There were ropes above her head that looked like the rigging on a ship, dangling everywhere, hanging down from the balcony boxes on the walls and from the ceiling. There was one piece so large it was secured at both ends and stretched across the whole width of the gigantic round room, from a balcony box on one side to a balcony box on the other.
Then the pieces of what she was seeing coalesced in her head.
The ship's rigging was like a spider
's web. A giant spider's web the color of blood.
She heard someone screaming, a horrible sound, warbling and terrified, a sound of horror and revulsion. It went on and on, until the pain in her throat forced her to own the sound, her throat so raw she could only mewl like some small animal caught in a trap.
T.J. held her up and dragged her with him to the door behind them. He banged on it, tried the knob, yanked it.
"Locked."
Then he turned with her back toward the room and she swayed, almost fell, stayed on her feet only by concentrating hard, trying to figure out the nightmare horror around her.
This was no fairytale ballroom with a hardwood dance floor shined mirror bright. The floor wasn't wood at all, at least Bailey couldn't see any — just dirt and mulch and straw and vegetation she couldn't identify. The crystalline chandelier did not cast glittering light in a kaleidoscope of colored flames to sparkle on every surface it touched, either.
This room was dark, gloomy and dank, and a squalid stink filled every breath, like she had crawled into a hole in the earth filled with foul creatures dwelling in filthy darkness. It was as full of crawling life as a jungle, wriggling vermin scuttling across the huge expanse of floor, a twitching sea of multi-legged horror, alive with the whirr and twitter of small wings and rasping legs. Her blurred vision refused to isolate any single thing into clarity out of the living, writhing mass that blanketed every surface. Mounds of something, like a raked-up pile of leaves, dotted the floor and lay heaped up against the walls like … garbage. Was it rotted-food garbage?
She tilted her head back to get a look upward, though, and the motion made her more dizzy and she staggered. The iron clasp of T.J.'s grip on her arm was all that supported her.
"Stand! You fall and they'll cover you up."
She spread her feet apart, steadied herself against T.J. and peered into the gloom that faded into darkness toward the ceiling. The chandelier was covered in … in filth. In bugs and she didn't know what else, but the hundreds of thousands of crystals no longer sparkled. They were dull, dirty, the light that shone through them defuse — and no longer multicolored. It was red, only red, like the spiderwebs were slathered in old blood. The chandelier provided less illumination in the huge room than a dim bulb darkened with the phlegm of dusty time in an old attic.
Bailey could see dark openings in the walls around them, the Hobbit-doorway stairwell openings T.J. had described that led to the spiral staircases and up into the concert boxes on the walls. But there was no light in any of them. They glared out into the gloom, black orbs of blind eyes.
T.J. gasped.
"No … oh, oh no." He shook his head in denial, staggered like something had hit him. But he managed to stay upright and keep her upright, too.
"What is it?"
"There." He pointed up.
Her vision was fuzzy. She tried to clear away the blur by squinting, tried to stand still to relieve the sensation that the room was moving, swaying. There was a thing the size and shape of a golf bag, but wrapped up in something, dangling by a single rope below the web of ceiling ropes. Though it reflected the red light, she thought it was white or silver.
She'd seen something like that before, but she didn't know where.
"What is it?"
"I … I'm not sure."
But he was sure. He knew what it was. She could tell he did. She tried to figure it out on her own, stared at it.
He groaned then, sucked air through his teeth and made a moaning sound in his throat. She looked where he appeared to be looking. Higher up, in a darker corner of the webbing was another one of the silver things, maybe a little bigger than the first.
"T.J., what …?"
He was looking all around, in the webs above and along the walls, searching for …
She felt something climb up her ankle and tried to wipe it away, but the motion got her so off balance she almost fell over.
"I'll do it," he snapped, dusted the thing off and kept looking around, searching.
T.J. suddenly began to drag her along the rounded wall to a door. Not huge and imposing like the double entry doors, but larger than a normal door. Either it, too, was made of rough-hewn wood with metal straps or it had been crafted to look like it was. The door wasn't just closed. Some kind of caulking — was that mortar? — fastened the door into the door frame, sealed it, leaving not the tiniest crack. Even if the door had been unlocked, it would have taken a sledgehammer to open it. Make that a jackhammer. T.J. spotted a couple of other doors on the round wall like it, but he didn't even bother to try the knob.
He continued along the wall until he came to the first of the Hobbit doors on that side. Lying on the floor beside the protruding doorway opening was a silver sack like the two hanging from the webbing above.
"Can you stand?"
"Uh huh."
He leaned her against the wall and she began to slide sideways as soon as he let go.
"Stand up!"
She concentrated as hard as she could, pushed the swirling, swaying away from her consciousness, gritted her teeth.
"I got this. But not for long."
He stepped toward the shiny silver thing — a gigantic turkey leg covered in Saran Wrap after Thanksgiving dinner.
She remembered then where she'd seen the silver thing. In the hallucination after she tried to connect to Caitlyn's portrait. She'd been carrying something silvery white … got a flash of a second one.
T.J. tore at the wrapping, ripped at it frantically, then stopped suddenly, stepped away and made a sound she couldn't define. She looked at the thing where he'd ripped away the wrapping, got a look at what he had seen. And she shrieked.
She'd thought her voice was gone, that it was too hoarse to make this loud, shrill wail. T.J. stepped back to her, took her into his arms, turned her body away. But she stared in horror over his shoulder at the plastic-wrapped form. At the small hand and arm sticking out now where T.J. had torn the Saran Wrap off the child's body.
Bailey couldn't stop screaming.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
T.J. Hamilton had seen a lot of awful things in his almost-seven decades of living. Much of it natural horror. Dead bodies, charred unrecognizable in the wreckage of a downed helicopter. That kid from Oklahoma, begging T.J. to help him put his insides back in his belly where it'd been ripped open all the way across.
Some of it'd been supernatural horror that wouldn't nobody but Dobbs have ever believed was real. He'd watched his mama paint one hideous portrait after another all them nightmare years in After.
But even the supernatural horror had made sense! It was beyond human understanding, forces out there he couldn't explain that did things beyond human capacity. But it had made sense. Nothing about this made any sense at all.
And it was his fault, too. Him and Bailey stuck here like this, it was all on him.
His "cop's gut" alarm had been clanging ding, ding, ding from the moment he stepped inside this big old house, but he'd ignored it. How many times had he warned recruits against ignoring their intuition, that when they listened to it, the intuition got louder, got clearer as they got older. That if they'd pay attention, it'd tell 'em things wouldn't nothing else tell 'em, warn 'em of stuff couldn't nobody really know was comin’. How many times had he said that and then he went deaf to his own words and pretended he didn't hear that thing clangin' away in his head? Like that stupid robot with the Slinky arms with pinchers from Lost in Space.
Danger, Danger, Danger, Will Robinson.
He'd knowed they was something wrong, something off about Melody McCallum the instant he laid eyes on her. He couldn't have told you what it was, but the hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention like a class of West Point cadets. He shoulda been on guard. Watchful. Ready to act. A warning like that should have …
But it didn't. He went stupid 'cause she was so little and delicate and 'cause what she'd gone through had been so terrible everybody'd ought to cut the poor little thing slack for the rest
of her life because of it.
He hadn't let that stink tell him something wasn't right here. Had even closed his eyes when she said to. Only for an instant, but that'd been long enough. And who could have known something like this was comin'? Intuition or not, cop's gut or not, wasn't nothing in this life or the next that'd prepare a man for something like this.
What was this?
Why was this?
Well, duh, they had all danced 'round and 'round the issue since they first found out what happened to that little girl whose portrait Bailey had painted. The child had gone insane. She'd willed herself into catatonia and re-emerged somebody else, had reinvented herself as the perfect child. Who grew up to be the perfect first-grade teacher … who thought God had sent a spider to protect her.
No, Katydid thought that. Melody didn't remember her childhood, didn't remember Katydid.
They all should have acknowledged it a long time ago, soon's Bailey started having them "hallucinations." She was connecting to a mind gone completely mad and wasn't no telling what she was gonna find there. Bailey'd been right — Melody and Katydid were two entirely different people.
And one of them was a murderer, a serial killer, a cold-blooded monster.
Which one?
But a way more important question right now was: What came next?
What'd she drug Bailey for, would have drugged him, too, if he hadn't faked drinking that sugar tea.
She'd kidnapped them kids. All three of them. Riley Campbell. Christi Strickland. And that little girl today from the mall whose name T.J. didn't even know. She'd kidnapped them and then she'd killed them.
And when he and Bailey showed up unannounced at her door, she musta figured him and Bailey was onto her.
Which meant she had to kill them, too. Meant she was up there in the shadows somewhere, armed with God knows what kind of weapon, primed to pick them off at her leisure. Or let the creatures she'd stocked this nightmare lair with kill 'em for her. He had no doubt there were poisonous spiders here — of course there were! If both he and Bailey had "drunk their Kool-Aid" like good little victims, they wouldn't have made it two hours.