by Ian Rogers
The real question was why did Haney do it?
The Group was still trying to figure that part out, but Charles knew they weren’t really interested in the answer. What was done was done. They had learned a few facts. That a listing for 17 Ashley Avenue had appeared on three real estate websites over the past two weeks. That the name attached to the listing was one Dustin Haney. And that Haney stopped coming to work five days ago, which also happened to be the day the Westons closed escrow on their new home.
Charles wished he could have told Ted and Dawn the truth. He took no pride or pleasure in lying to people, though he acknowledged it as a necessary part of his duties. But the truth wouldn’t give them closure; it would probably have the opposite effect. It would have acted like a battering ram to the fragile doors of perception, and once those doors were open, it was impossible to close them again. Charles knew this from personal experience.
On the other hand, he felt not even an inkling of sympathy for Haney. It was hard to feel for a man who had taken advantage of a retired couple who had wanted nothing more than a home in which to spend their twilight years—twilight years which had turned out to be twilight days. The Group’s think-tank were still scratching their heads over Haney’s motive, but Charles figured it was because they were looking too deeply. He was willing to bet Haney had been motivated by nothing more than simple greed. Why he thought he could outrun and outwit the snoops was the real question.
As these thoughts raced through Charles’s mind, he discovered his feet had carried him around to the back of the house. From here he could see down into the Don Valley and the dark sprawling expanse of the old Brick Works. With its sooty brick and spire-like smokestacks, it would have made a better haunted house than the house on Ashley Avenue.
But looks are deceiving, aren’t they, Charles, m’boy?
Oh yes. In fact, that was the first thing they taught you at the Mereville Group. It could have been their slogan.
He bounced the T.R.T. baseball in his hand and stared down into the valley of dark twining shapes and rustling leaves. He had meant to give the ball to Sally before he left the house, but Ted Weston had picked that moment to show up on the porch and then Sally was already up the stairs.
And here you are still outside while she’s inside.
Charles clutched the ball in a death grip. The voice in his head had managed to do what half an hour in the house had been unable to accomplish.
It had scared him.
Here he was promenading around the yard while Sally was inside—inside—the house.
He started back at a quick trot.
By the time he reached the front yard, he was running.
4
Sally was twenty years old when she was recruited by the Mereville Group. On that particular day she had been standing outside the Red and White General Store in Antigonish, drinking an Orange Crush. She looked up when the car with the Hertz sticker in the corner of windshield pulled into the gravel parking lot and the man in the expensive suit stepped out. Not Charles. She didn’t meet him until a month later, when she began the Group’s year-long training program in Toronto. This man, who moved not toward the store but directly over to where Sally was standing, introduced himself as Edward Reed and then proceeded to ask if she had given any thought to her career.
Sally had stared at Edward Reed for a long moment. Next he’s going to ask if I ever thought of being a model. She had heard stories about strange men who approached girls and offered them work as models. Unfortunately, most of those men turned out to be El Pervos who were interested only in girls willing to take off their clothes. Of course, they didn’t tell you that up front. Oh no. First they had to butter you up, tell you how beautiful you are, and how much money you could make—and so easily!
That thought was going through Sally’s mind as she reached out to shake Edward Reed’s hand. The moment they touched it was jerked out of her mind (she jerked her hand back, too), and was replaced with a sudden and inexplicable amount of knowledge about the man standing before her.
His name isn’t Edward Reed; it’s Winter. Dan Winter. Daniel Clarence Winter. He’s thirty-eight years old, he lives in Barrie, Ontario, and he’s left-handed. Once, in his senior year of high school, he cheated on a trig final.
Sally dropped her Orange Crush and stared agog at Dan Winter, a.k.a. Edward Reed.
“It was a calculus final, actually,” Dan Winter said. “But you were close.”
Sally continued to stare. She’d had episodes like this before, but never one so strong, so intense.
Mr. Winter told Sally what was by then clearly evident: she was a telepath. Then he asked her again if she had given any thought to her career. Sally had replied in her mind: My career as a telepath?
Dan Winter grinned at her: Yes.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
A year later, Sally had finished the psychic’s equivalent of preparatory school and was given her first assignment—bloodhound work at Pearson International Airport. Using her “wild talent,” she picked out potential recruits from the crowds of people departing and arriving. She had been there only a week before the Group pulled her out. They were concerned that in the wake of 9/11, airport security would be on high alert, and that it was only a matter of time before someone noticed that Sally was never meeting anyone or taking any flights herself.
So they sent her to the mall. Five of them, to be precise, on a rotating monthly schedule. Same assignment, sniff out potential psychics for the Mereville Group. Sally did that for six months, spending her days pretending to window-shop, eating her meals in greasy food courts (she put on fifteen pounds), and staying under the radar of mall security (who were not nearly as astute as their brethren at the airport). The Group called this sort of work “trawling.” Sally called it boring.
When Charles had come to her with the Ashley Avenue assignment, Sally had done more than jump at it—she had pole-vaulted over it. Anything to get her away from the mind-numbing Muzak and the El Pervos in the food court who seemed to come not so much to eat as to ogle the teenage girls.
Looking up at the house on Ashley Avenue for the first time, Sally had wondered if she hadn’t bitten off more than she could chew. But now, as she walked aimlessly through the rooms on the second floor, she found herself feeling strangely relaxed, almost at peace. It was not the sort of feeling she would have expected to feel in a place with the reputation that 17 Ashley Avenue had. Instead she was experiencing the same kaleidoscopic mix of emotions she had felt on her first few days in the Group’s training facility: a heady cocktail of curiosity, excitement, and nervousness.
She wanted to do a good job here—because she took pride in her work, but more because she didn’t want to go back to the mall. It was trite, but it was true. She’d had her fill of malls and was ready for something new, something marginally more exciting than “trawling.” And she hoped after today, the Group would feel the same way, too.
She considered opening her mind, just a little bit, to see if she could pick anything up from the house. But that probably wasn’t a good idea. In fact, it might even be a bad idea. To do such a thing in a place like this was like raising your chin to Mike Tyson and saying Come on, big boy, gimme your best shot. 17 Ashley Avenue was not the heavyweight champeen of haunted houses, but it probably still packed a wallop.
Sally wandered into the bathroom where, according to the police report, Mr. Weston had had his “accident.” The mirror over the sink was gone, and she could see the contents of the medicine cabinet. This struck her as an invasion of privacy, and she averted her eyes, turning instead to the old-fashioned clawfooted tub.
It was here that Mrs. Weston had found her husband, covered in broken glass, his throat slit. The report suggested that Mrs. Weston had panicked at the sight, went to call 911, and fell down the stairs, breaking her neck.
It was a good story, but Sally had a couple of problems with it.
F
or starters, the report said Mr. Weston had been standing on the edge of the bathtub to hang a shower curtain and lost his balance. As he fell he reached out blindly and grabbed the mirror over the sink, pulling it off its hinges. When he landed in the tub, the mirror shattered, and a piece of it slit his throat.
Sally supposed such a thing was possible, but not very likely.
The part about Mrs. Weston going downstairs to call 911 didn’t make sense, either. If that’s what she was really doing, why didn’t she use the phone in the master bedroom? It was closer.
She was scared. She panicked.
Yes, and in her agitated state she tripped over her own feet and fell down the stairs.
Again, it wasn’t an impossible scenario, but an extremely unlikely one.
Sally went into the master bedroom. All of the furniture was draped with white sheets. Sally went over to a tall, slender piece, pulled off the sheet, and let out a frightened gasp when she saw her reflection in a gilt-framed mirror. The sheet caught on the bottom corner and rocked the mirror back on its feet. Sally reached out and caught it before it fell backwards. She didn’t need seven years of bad luck, thank you very much.
As she was replacing the sheet, she heard Charles in her head admonishing her: Don’t touch anything. She stuck her tongue out at her reflection, which responded in kind. She flung the sheet onto the bed and went over to the window that looked out on the overgrown lot next to the house. From this vantage point the diamond shape of the old baseball diamond was even more apparent.
She turned to her left and took the sheet off the piece of furniture standing next to the window. It was an old vanity bench. It was beautiful. She didn’t know anything about antiques, but it looked expensive. The wood was cherry and polished to a high gloss.
Sally sat down on the bench and looked into the mirror. Another mirror. Mirrors all over the place. Two mirrors in the bedroom, a broken mirror in the bathroom.
An idea came to her then, in much the same way as the one about opening her mind to the house had come earlier. Closing her eyes, she reached out and placed her hands on the surface of the mirror. Sometimes she could pick up impressions from inanimate objects. It was called psychometry, and the Group held it in very high regard.
The glass was cool under her hands. There was an abrupt cracking sound that Sally heard not with her ears but with her mind. A psychic sound. The crack of a bat. A baseball bat.
Her eyes flew open. A whitish blur came flying in through the open window and struck the vanity mirror. There was another sound—the unmistaken crash of breaking glass—and Sally felt a sharp pain in her left eye. Her vision in that eye immediately turned red, as if a filter had been placed over it. She clamped her hand over it and felt something jagged and sharp cut into her palm. There was a piece of glass sticking out of her eye! She opened her mouth to scream but all that came out was a dry squeak. She stood up, her hand still clamped over her eye, and tripped over the bench in her rush to escape the room and find help.
She tried to keep her balance and probably would have succeeded if her foot hadn’t come down on the baseball that had broken the mirror. Her foot went backward while the ball shot forward. Her legs were swept out from under her—prompting a sudden strange association: her airplane ride to Toronto, her first airplane ride anywhere, and the mechanical vibration as the landing gear was pulled into the main body of the plane—and then she was falling . . . falling face-first onto the hardwood floor. The shard of glass sliding directly into her brain, killing her instantly.
Sally took her hands off the mirror and opened her eyes. She wasn’t blind or dead, but she was crying. Suddenly she didn’t want to sit here anymore. She didn’t want to be in this house anymore.
She stood up abruptly, knocking the bench over. She held her arms out for balance, then walked around it, give it a wide berth, and made a beeline for the hallway.
Her attention was so focused on the bench that she didn’t notice the gilt-framed mirror had inexplicably moved across the room—right into her path of travel. She saw it at the last moment, tried to dodge around it, but her foot clipped the bottom corner and sent it crashing to the floor.
Sally swore and crouched down to pick it up. The frame was empty. All the glass was on the floor. As she stared at it, something strange happened.
The pieces started to move. Not very much at first, but they were moving. As if the floor was vibrating and causing them to dance ever so slightly.
Then one piece flew into the air and hung there. Another piece leaped up and joined it. Then another. And another. Soon glass was flying into the air like grease on a hot plate, joining the growing mass which hung there.
The floor was bare in a matter of seconds, and a vaguely humanoid shape constructed of broken glass stood before her. It was a flat, dwarfish form, with stumpy arms and stumpy legs. But there hadn’t been that much glass to work with.
Staring at the thing which had been a mirror until a few seconds ago, Sally was reminded of another wayward girl who had wandered into a place she probably should have left well enough alone. But she didn’t think Alice had ever encountered a looking-glass creature like this one in her travels through Wonderland.
It took a step toward her. Its foot made a crunching, tinkling sound on the hardwood floor. The overhead fixture sent wild flashes of light along the walls as it took another step toward her. Sally thought of Mrs. Weston and her trip down the stairs.
She hadn’t gone running for the telephone, Sally realized.
She had been chased.
5
Charles ran around the side of the house and up the porch steps. He experienced a brief nightmare moment when he thought the front door was locked, but then he pushed instead of pulled, and ran into the main foyer. He saw Sally lying on the floor at the top of the stairs. Her eyes and mouth were open wide in what was almost a burlesque of fright. It was an expression Charles has seen on a hundred horror movie posters: the terrified starlet cowering before the monster. Sally was no Julie Adams, but that was okay, because the thing standing over her was no Creature from the Black Lagoon, either. It had a short, squat body that seemed to be composed entirely of broken glass.
As he watched, the creature swung one of its jagged hands in a glittering arc that opened a long red line on the palm of one of Sally’s upraised hands.
Charles’s heart seemed to freeze solid in his chest. He clutched at his chest, and realized he was still holding the T.R.T. baseball. Then, without realizing what he was doing or why, he turned to his side, dropping his arm as he did so, and leaned into a position he had seen a thousand times on ESPN. He adjusted his hold on the baseball, made sure he had a firm grip, and turned his head to the left (looking for the catcher’s sign, he guessed). A half-second later the rest of his body started to turn; his arm came around last, snapping through the air in a whip-like motion that ended with the release of the ball.
It shot through the air like a bullet fired from a gun, striking the glass creature dead centre and exploding its strangely fragmented body into a thousand pieces. Shrapnel flew everywhere. Sally still had her hands raised and was able to protect herself from the worst of it. Charles raced up the stairs and looked her over. Three fingers on her left hand were sliced open and would require stitches; on her right hand, a piece of glass was embedded in the webbing between the thumb and index finger. Another piece was sticking out of her thigh.
“Can you walk?”
Sally nodded and took Charles’s hand. He started to lead her down the stairs, but she stopped him and turned back around. She crouched down, teetering on her injured leg, and picked up the T.R.T. baseball sitting amongst the broken glass.
As her fingers made contact with the old rawhide, she saw a flash of images. The vanity. The open window. The scratch baseball game taking place outside. Kids hollering and laughing. “Eddie’s OUT, Eddie’s OUT!” The crack of a bat, followed by the crash of broken glass. Then everything turns red.
The images faded away.
Sally clutched the baseball to her chest and for a moment Charles thought she was going to start reciting the Pledge of Allegiance . . . or maybe a couple of verses of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” He took her arm again and led her down the stairs and out of the house.
He put her in the car and fastened her seatbelt.
“She was trying to make herself pretty,” Sally said in a low, dreamy voice. She gripped the baseball close to her chest and looked up at Charles. “But she was never pretty again. She was never pretty again, Charles.”
Charles closed her door and went around to the driver’s side. As he slipped behind the wheel, he realized he forgot to lock the door of the house. He took the key out of his pocket and ran with it outstretched in his hand to the porch. He locked the door and ran back to the car.
As they pulled away from the house, Sally looked over at the overgrown lot. She clenched the baseball tighter. Her blood dripped across the old, cracked rawhide. The baseball didn’t mind. It was like coming home.