Every House Is Haunted

by Ian Rogers

  Her overall impression of the artefact was of a shoddily constructed scrapbook. Something a disturbed kindergarten student might have made.

  And there was something else. An indefinable sensation she got just by holding the book in her hands. A dark feeling she didn’t much care for.

  Wendy returned it to the cradle, replaced the glass lid, and rejoined Vanners in the hallway.

  “What is it?” she asked in a voice that trembled slightly.

  “We call it Black Book,” Vanners replied. His voice had also lost some of its joie de vivre.

  “Yes, but what is it?”

  Vanners grinned, but there was no warmth in it. “Think of it as the other book that’s going to change your life.”

  7

  “Did you feel it?” Vanners asked as they walked back to the elevator.

  “I felt . . . something,” Wendy said in a low voice.

  “We’ve pointed every damn instrument we have at the thing and all we know is that it was written in ink made from some kind of charcoal and vegetable gum, and it’s in incredibly good shape for a book that’s over six thousand years old.”

  “Six thou . . .”

  “We’ve carbon-dated the pages and binding and it checks out.”

  “That would make it early Sumerian.”

  Vanners nodded. “That’s what we think.”

  “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how something like this could have existed, let alone survived in that condition. . . . You don’t have any idea what the symbols mean?”

  Vanners gave her a look as if the answer was obvious.

  “That’s why you’re here, kid.”

  8

  After they returned topside, Vanners took Wendy out to Coyote Hills, a housing development for employees of Project Wellspring.

  She followed Vanners’ silver pickup along another nameless desert trail that suddenly and inexplicably turned into flawless, black asphalt.

  She was so absorbed by this unexpected change that it took her a moment to notice the houses passing by on either side of the road. Large, picturesque bungalows and quaint little cottages, each with its own luxurious green lawn, and on each lawn a sprinkler system spraying out twirling fans of water.

  Vanners turned into the driveway of a quaint little Cape Cod with lots of gingerbread trim, and a flower garden that seemed to be thriving in spite of the harsh desert conditions.

  Wendy parked behind him and got out of her car.

  “Welcome to Coyote Hills,” Vanners said proudly. “Population: 16. But we’re a town on the grow!” He sounded absurdly official, as if he were the mayor of this tiny town. “If you decide to stick around, you’ll be number seventeen.”

  “This is your place?” Wendy asked.

  “Nope, this one’s yours. I live over on Maple Lane.” He pointed further down the street.

  “I get to live here?” she asked skeptically. “This is my house?”

  “One of the perks of the job. If you choose to take it.”

  The chance to study the oldest book in the world and a considerable trade-up from the one-bedroom dormitory she’d expected? Suffice it to say she took the job.

  9

  On Tuesday, Wendy was introduced to her supervisor, Professor Horowitz. A tall, skinny man in his early sixties with pale skin and a prominent bone structure that gave him the appearance of a skeleton in a lab coat.

  He didn’t seem to like Wendy very much, and he didn’t seem overly concerned about hiding the fact, either. Vanners told her it was because Horowitz saw her as an affront to the quality of his research to date on Project Wellspring.

  “What exactly is the purpose of the project?” Wendy asked as they entered the office area.

  “For now it’s a straight decipherment deal,” Vanners explained. “Put another way, in R&D we’re currently doing a lot more R than D. We’ve got plenty of ideas for application, but we can’t work on implementing any of them until we unlock the damn book.”

  “Unlock the book?”

  “There’s a general feeling among the experts who have had a chance to examine Black Book that it’s not only written in a language we don’t understand, but also some form of code. What kind of code, we don’t know exactly. The thing doesn’t match up with any comparable linguistic data we’ve managed to get our hands on. Horowitz doesn’t know what it means, and neither did the three guys who worked here before him.”

  A metallic thumping sound caused Wendy to jump. She looked over at a young man with shaggy red hair bending down to get a can of Sprite from one of the vending machines.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “Sounds like someone racking a shotgun, doesn’t it?”

  Wendy smiled politely.

  “Thumper, this is Wendy Harris. Wendy, Thumper.”

  “Charmed,” he said, tipping her a little salute with his can of soda. “Welcome to the cave. Your eyesight will adjust in a few weeks. ’Course by then you won’t be able to go back out into the sunlight.”

  “It might be for the best in your case, huh, Thumper?”

  “Touché,” Thumper said. “If my mother could only see me now. A lab technician who spends his days feeding hundred-year-old manuscripts into a computer that is, alas, my only friend.”

  “What about Tara?” Vanners asked, nodding at a narrow-faced woman sitting in a cubicle on the far side of the room.

  “Tara doesn’t talk. I might as well have a conversation with Godzilla.”

  Wendy recalled the model she had seen perched on the computer monitor the other day.

  Vanners clapped his hands together like a teacher calling his class to attention. “I’ll let the two of you get acquainted. If you need me, I’ll be in the cafeteria with Horowitz.”

  10

  Thumper’s situation turned out to be almost identical to Wendy’s. After graduating from UCLA with an advanced degree in computer science, he had come here after hearing about the job from one of his professors. He had been on Project Wellspring for eight months and still didn’t have any clear idea as to the nature of the work he was doing.

  “It’s research,” he said, offering the same reply (and the same shrug) that Vanners had given her. “I run ancient texts through an optical scanner. But it’s a living.”

  Thumper also told her about Tara, the narrow-faced girl who didn’t talk.

  “Well, she talks, but not very often. I say ‘good morning’ to her every day, and I get a response maybe ten percent of the time. It could be worse. My father’s typical attitude in the morning was to whip bottles of Jack Daniels at my head.”

  Wendy stared at him.

  “It wasn’t so bad,” he said, giving her hand a reassuring pat. “It was only the full bottles that really hurt.”

  11

  Over the next two weeks, Wendy fell into that depthless chasm of the working class—the daily routine.

  Monday to Friday she woke up at six, showered, dressed, and stuffed a piece of toast or an apple in her mouth before driving the twenty-five miles to the glove factory. She spent the morning struggling with the perplexing symbols of Black Book, jotting notes on possible leads, then hashing them out with Thumper and Tara in the afternoon. By the time four o’clock rolled around, the three of them were wandering the halls like undead ghouls in a George Romero movie.

  A month went by, and Wendy was still no closer to understanding the book’s strange language. The work was going very slowly—something Horowitz pointed out every chance he got. He likened Wendy’s progress to the speed at which the polar icecaps were melting. For your sake, Ms. Harris, and for the sake of all humanity, I sure hope the solution to global warming isn’t in that damnable book, because we’ll all be living on rafts and backstroking to work by the time you find it.

  “You should feel sorry for him,” Thumper told her one day.

  “Feel sorry for him? The guy’s a total jerk.”

  “H
e’s a Skeletor,” Thumper said, as if this explained everything. “His skin’s two sizes too small for him. He walks around like he’s wearing jeans that just came out of the wash. Rides up in the crotch. Bound to make anyone miserable.”

  “Thanks, Thumper.”

  It would have been easier to take Horowitz’s comments in stride if they were only off-the-cuff jabs made by an angry, old man. But the truth was, she was no closer to figuring out Black Book, and however mean and pejorative Horowitz’s criticisms might be, inaccurate they were not.

  The only thing she had come up with, the only theory that Thumper and Tara had yet to shoot down, was that Black Book might be a primitive arithmetic primer. Some of the symbols bore at least a passing resemblance to basic syntactical structures she had seen in other ancient texts of the same period, but it always felt as if there were something missing, some basic layer of information she hadn’t figured out how to interpret.

  There was something else, too. It was a minor thing, but she couldn’t help feeling it might be significant.

  The first time she had handled Black Book, she had done so with her bare hands, and the book had left charcoal stains on her hands. Every time after, she had been wearing latex gloves, and it had left no marks.

  Maybe it was because the gloves just didn’t pick up the charcoal, but she wondered. She wondered a lot.

  12

  She was still wondering about it as she was getting into her car at the end of another fruitless day. Thumper and Tara had taken the afternoon off to go to the movies in Bartonville. Wendy had been invited, but she didn’t feel right about leaving early on yet another day when she had failed to produce any results.

  She rummaged in her purse for her car keys and felt something wet and sticky touch the back of her hand. She pulled it out and saw the old napkin she had used to write down the directions to the job interview. The eyeliner she used had caused the napkin stick to her hand.

  She recalled how angry she had been that day when she saw the directions had been smudged. The writing was totally illegible now. She could no more understand the words on the napkin than she could the symbols in Black Book.

  She stared at the eyeliner stain on the back of her hand for a long time. Then a smile slowly spread across her face.

  She hopped out of the car and ran back to the glove factory. She took the elevator down and searched all of the rooms on Sub-Level One. Horowitz wasn’t in any of them, which meant he was probably in the lab on Sub-Level Two. Wendy’s key-card didn’t give her access to that floor, and Horowitz never answered his phone.

  She went to her desk, booted up her computer, and fired off an e-mail to the good professor, telling him of her discovery.

  His laconic reply came a moment later: I’ll check your notes in the morning.

  Wendy stuck her tongue out at the screen and dropped her finger ceremoniously on the delete key. “Take that, Skeletor.”

  What she proposed was impossible, of course. Completely impossible. But the Black Book itself was impossible on so many levels she had given up trying to document them. When you bent the rules of physics once, why couldn’t you do it again?

  She shut off her computer and went back down the hall. She stood outside the elevator, tapping her foot and looking back the way she had come. She could go to the library and test her theory herself, but something told her that might not be a good idea.

  In fact, it might be a bad idea.

  Black Book was a dark book. Dark as in threatening. Dark as in sinister. And she didn’t want to be alone in a room with anything that transmitted such malefic signals.

  If Horowitz wanted to wait until morning, that was fine by her.

  She would go home and sleep the sleep of the just.

  Or try to.

  13

  It was still dark out when she woke up to the sound of someone banging on her front door. She slipped into a robe and went downstairs.

  The banging resumed, accompanied by a voice: “Wendy! Wendy, wake up! It’s Vanners!”

  Wendy opened the door and let him in. A pair of security officers in black combat fatigues followed closely behind him. They wore ski-masks and goggles that she assumed were of the night-vision variety. They were carrying assault rifles, which, for the moment anyway, were pointed down at the Turkish rug that covered the foyer.

  “What is this?” Wendy demanded.

  “It’s Horowitz,” Vanners said in a strident voice that didn’t sound like his own. “He’s dead.”

  14

  Wendy had never been in Horowitz’s study before—she didn’t even know where he lived (on Maple Lane, it turned out, two doors down from Vanners). But even if she had, she didn’t think she would have recognized the place now.

  It looked as if a tornado had ripped through the mahogany-panelled room. The heavy oak desk had been reduced to splinters, the lamps lay shattered on the floor, and all of the books had been pulled off the shelves and thrown every which way.

  Horowitz, or rather what was left of him, was sitting in his executive swivel chair. If the room looked like a tornado had hit it, then the professor looked like someone who had swallowed a hand grenade. His arms and legs, clad in striped flannel pajamas, were held together by a bloody, pulpy mess that was no longer recognizable as a human body. His head, miraculously still attached to his neck, lolled to the side, as if he couldn’t bear the sight of his own horribly mangled body. Not that he could have seen much, anyway. Whatever had caused his body to rupture in such a gruesome manner had done the same to his eyes. They lay across his cheeks like white jelly.

  “What the hell happened to him?” Wendy asked.

  “I don’t have the slightest clue,” Vanners replied. His voice seemed unable to decide whether it wanted to be scared or angry.

  A couple of security officers were taking surface swabs and photographs. Another was crawling on the study floor, picking up the fallen books and stacking them in neat piles.

  Vanners looked over at Wendy. “When was the last time you saw Horowitz?”

  Wendy stammered. “I . . . I e-mailed him just before I left the glove factory. I didn’t actually see him, but he sent me a reply.”

  “What did you e-mail him about?”

  Before Wendy could answer, the security officer on the floor flipped over a hunk of wood and uncovered a familiar, dark-covered book.

  “Found it!”

  “Oh, thank Christ,” Vanners let out a deep breath. “That was too close. Too damn close.”

  The security officer handed him the book. Vanners clutched it to his chest. Watching him, Wendy was once again reminded of the first time she had held the book. She remembered that feeling of power—dark power.

  “Vanners,” she said, “you might not want to hold it so close.”

  15

  “So explain this to me again.”

  Wendy folded her arms and looked over her shoulder at the drawings she had made on the white board. Thumper and Tara had remained silent throughout her presentation, but Vanners and Summerhill, the chief of security, had asked questions throughout.

  Vanners’ queries chiefly consisted of clarifying certain details and points throughout her narrative. Summerhill’s, on the other hand, bordered on accusations of murder—or at least accessory to murder.

  “Which part do you need explained, Mr. Summerhill?” Wendy asked crisply.

  The security chief sat up in his chair (he had been slouching further and further into his seat as Wendy attempted to explain her theory of what may have happened to Professor Horowitz). “The hocus-pocus bit,” he said. “The part where the professor’s little black book goes boom.”

  Wendy gave Vanners a look that said How much longer am I supposed to humour this fool?

  Vanners nodded sympathetically and motioned for her to be patient for just a little bit longer.

  “First of all, it wasn’t anyone’s little black book that did this.” Wendy pointed to a glossy
black-and-white photograph on the wall that showed the scene in Horowitz’s study. “That is Black Book, and that is a deadly artefact.”

  “What is this ‘deadly artefact’ bullshit?” Summerhill quipped. He looked at the others for support, but didn’t find any. “I mean, it’s a book, for Christ’s sake. Books don’t kill people.”

  “I don’t think this one meant to. Not exactly.”

  “We’re going around in circles, Ms. Harris, and I’m sorry, but this isn’t making any sense to me.”

  “This is a bomb,” Wendy said, and picked up the plastic evidence bag that contained Black Book. “And this is the trigger.” She picked up another evidence bag, this one containing a sheet of paper from Black Book. It had been found on the floor of the study near the professor’s body. “I believe the professor used his key-card to remove Black Book from this facility and took it home with the intent of using the information I supplied him to carry out an experiment that ultimately cost him his life.”

  Summerville pointed a finger at her. “So that means you might have had some complicity in Professor Horowitz’s death.”

  “I told him what I thought it was,” Wendy said in a low voice. “I told him what we had been missing. What was needed to activate the book. But I had no idea what it would do . . . the kind of power it had.”

  “But how did it happen?” Vanners snapped. “It’s all so . . . backwards. It feels like we just invented nuclear power and now we’re trying to figure out how to split the atom.”

  Thumper visibly trembled and Tara let out a deep sigh. They were both looking at Wendy. For what? Comfort? Reassurance? She didn’t think either one was on the menu today.

  “I think Professor Horowitz tapped into some kind of energy source contained within Black Book, and I think he did so by physical contact.”