He glided over the snow. What would he find at the Blue Boy?
What he knew for a fact was that human blood had been found in the chimney. Chad reported that he’d heard animals eating something at the base of the chimney. But the space had been nearly cleaned out when Richard inspected it. Neville had reported that he’d been locked in his room shortly before that inspection, suggesting that someone in the house didn’t want him to witness the cleaning of the chimney. And the only two people in the house, as far as Richard knew, were Jack Devlin and the caretaker, Zeke.
Devlin, of course, had been desperate to prevent a search of the house. The scenario had all the hallmarks of Devlin being guilty, of at least covering up a crime.
But he was very possibly guilty of much, much more.
He could be using this storm to finish what he started, Richard reasoned. He thinks we can’t get to him, so he’s free to continue killing the rest of the people in the house.
He prayed that Annabel would still be alive when he got there.
Richard turned the handlebars, steering the snowmobile up the narrow, wooded road that led to the Blue Boy Inn. He thought he was safely in the middle of the road. But apparently he had strayed off the path.
He felt the machine suddenly shudder beneath him. The snowmobile stopped, churning up a geyser of snow and throwing Richard clear over the handlebars.
Plop! The chief found himself head-and-shoulders deep in cold, fluffy snow.
Moving his arms as if swimming, he managed to pull himself upright. He stood, with some difficulty, as the snow was not packed all that hard. In this case, that was a good thing. The snow had cushioned his fall. If it had been hardened with ice, Richard might have cracked his head open. His goggles had stayed in place, but he’d lost a glove as he’d flown through the air, and his scarf was askew, allowing a cold draft to slip down his sweater.
Breathing heavily, Richard assessed the situation. The Ski-Doo was about four feet away, no longer spitting snow. Caught on some bush below the snow, it appeared to have stalled out. Richard said a silent prayer that he could get it started again.
Just getting back over to it was a chore. Every step he took, he sunk to his knees, and sometimes up to his hips. The wind was blowing so fast and furiously that even his goggles couldn’t keep his eyes from welling up. His exposed left hand was freezing. There was no way he’d ever be able to walk the rest of the way to the Blue Boy. He had to get that snowmobile moving again!
Finally, he reached the machine. The first thing he needed to do was push it away from the spot, so it wouldn’t get stuck on the branches of the bush again. It took some muscle, but finally Richard shoved the snowmobile farther out into the clearing, where he was certain that the only thing beneath him, some five or six feet, was the dirt road. Hopping onboard, Richard started the ignition as Danny had showed him. But the Ski-Doo was unresponsive. No matter how many times Richard tried, the motor remained silent.
“Goddamn it!” he shouted into the wind.
Had it been damaged in the accident? Had Richard damaged it pushing it off the bush? What could he do to fix it? He had his cell phone, carefully stowed in an inner pocket of his coat. But what was he going to do? Ask Danny to trudge on out here? Even if he made it, it would take hours. And hours Richard did not have.
His mind was racing, trying to calculate the risks and the possibilities of heading up to the Blue Boy on foot. He’d have to try. He couldn’t just give up. He’d have to walk. If there was danger up there, however, he wasn’t sure how he and Annabel or anyone else might escape it without the snowmobile.
Richard was ready to slide his leg back over the machine and start on his trek when he decided to try the ignition one more time.
Below him, the Ski-Doo hummed back to life.
“Hallelujah!” Richard shouted into the blowing wind.
In moments, he was back to gliding over the snow, heading up into the hills toward the Blue Boy Inn.
98
“Please don’t make me go under there!” Annabel cried, as the little eyes under the bed blinked at her in the dark.
“Get up off your knees, Miz Wish.”
Annabel’s head snapped up. The woman with the long gray hair was gone. Standing in her place was Zeke, looking very weary and sad.
“Zeke!” Annabel jumped to her feet. “Please let me go! Please don’t keep me here!”
He placed his finger to his lips, a sign for her to keep quiet. Looking over his shoulder, he said, “Keep your voice down. I’ll take care of things.”
“That woman,” Annabel whispered. “She killed Chad.”
The old man nodded with great sadness. He looked as if he might cry.
“Where did she go?” Annabel asked, terrified she’d come back with her knife.
“I sent her away,” Zeke told her. “For now, you’re safe. I’ll see to that.”
Annabel pulled back from him. “How do I know I can trust you?”
“You don’t. But you don’t have any other choice.” Zeke looked at her coat and boots. “If you were thinking of going out there, forget it. You’d get swallowed up alive by this nor’easter. I’ve seen many of these storms in my day, and this is by the far the worst.”
“But I can’t stay here,” Annabel said, wrapping her arms around herself. “Where is Jack?”
“Walking through the house, muttering to himself.” Zeke shuddered. “The house has gotten to him. Just as it did his father and his grandfather.”
“What do you mean?”
“His grandfather fed the house for years in exchange for great success. Cordelia finally made him stop, but then young Mrs. Devlin showed up—Jack’s mother—and like you, she had grand visions for the house. Even her death wasn’t enough to keep Jack’s father from falling under the spell of the house. But when they came for Miz Cindy . . .”
“Who came for her?”
Zeke looked at her. “The house. And when Mr. Devlin saw what happened to his precious little girl, he finally woke up, and sealed over the fireplace once again. It stayed that way for many, many years.” The caretaker’s ancient yellowed eyes found Annabel’s. “Until you arrived, Miz Wish.”
“The . . . fireplace?”
Zeke suddenly held up his hand, as if he’d just heard a sound. “I will be back,” he told Annabel. “Stay here. I will lock the door so no one can get in.”
“No, please, don’t lock me in again. I can’t bear it! Not with that thing under the bed.”
Zeke looked at her uneasily. With great difficulty, he bent down. “There’s nothing under there now,” he reported as he stood back up, breathing heavily.
“I don’t believe you,” Annabel said.
“Then don’t. I don’t really care if you do. But if you want to be safe, stay in this room. If you go out the window, that’s your choice. But you’ll never make it off the hill.”
Zeke hobbled out of the room. Annabel heard him turn the key in the lock.
She hurried over to the window. She could see the way the snow was blowing. Ten-foot drifts were forming right before her eyes. Zeke was right. She’d never make it down the hill to the road, let alone all the way to Millie’s. The snow was too soft, too unsettled. It would swallow her up alive, as Zeke had said.
But stay here? Out in the storm, she risked death from cold and exposure. Here in this house, she risked death from an insane woman roaming the halls with a knife.
Or worse—she risked death from her worst childhood nightmare.
She would be eaten alive by Tommy Tricky.
99
The soles of his shoes making sticking sounds as he walked through the blood on the floor, Zeke draped a sheet over Chad’s dead body.
The poor man. But he was a fool, too, Zeke thought. He should have accepted the offer Zeke and Cordelia had made him. They might not have been able to make good on the offer, but Chad would be alive today, sitting at home with a mug of coffee, riding out this storm.
Zeke stood lo
oking down at the body. He’d draped many sheets in his years in this house. The first had been over the headless corpse of Andrew McGurk. Zeke had been just a teenager then. He and old Mr. Devlin had managed to pull McGurk back out of the fireplace, but the house had already gotten his head.
It was that episode that had finally convinced old man Devlin to brick over the fireplace. But eventually his son, Cordelia’s husband, had unbricked it. The pattern repeated itself every generation.
The worst had been the baby. That poor woman, hiding out here from her rich father’s goons, had thought she was safe. From her father, yes. From the house, no.
Zeke had found the baby’s arm in the ash dump. That was all that was left of her.
All his adult life he’d been covering up corpses, wiping up blood. Ever since he’d taken this infernal job, he’d been enslaved to this house, a prisoner of its terrible secrets. No more. He wanted an end to this before he died.
And bricking up the fireplace was no longer enough.
He sighed and turned to leave the room.
And walked directly into Jack, who had been standing there in the doorway, unknown to Zeke, watching him.
“What are you doing in here?” Jack asked him.
“Giving the dead a little respect,” Zeke replied, his voice surly.
Jack grabbed the old man by the front of his shirt. “Don’t interfere, Zeke. You must give the house what it needs.”
Zeke struggled, but couldn’t break free of Jack’s grip. “Oh, Mr. Jack, please try to see things as they are! We can’t do it anymore! The house will take us all. Don’t you care?”
“The house will make us successful,” Jack told him, tightening his hold on Zeke’s shirt. “That’s what they’ve promised. My father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather—they all understood that!”
“Until they died broken men, the ones they loved destroyed around them!”
Jack’s hand loosened its grip, and Zeke took the opportunity to move away from him.
“Your mother, Jack! Don’t you remember?”
Jack’s eyes clouded over.
“The house took your mother! She didn’t die of cancer. She didn’t die in a hospital. Your father lied to you, Jack. She died here—horribly—”
Jack’s arm suddenly swung out. The back of his hand connected with Zeke’s face, and the frail old man went flying across the room, hitting his head against the wall. He slid down into a clump on the floor.
“Think of your wife,” Zeke managed to whimper, as his head throbbed and the room around him began to spin. “Think of Annabel.”
But Jack just stalked out of the room.
Zeke put his face in his hands and cried. Eventually, everything went dark.
100
Annabel thought she heard shouting from another room. She steadied herself, bracing for the worst. Then she heard footsteps clomping down the hall. Jack’s footsteps, she thought. Hard, heavy, angry. Was he coming in here? Was he going to kill her? Annabel began to tremble violently. But the footsteps went right past the door and up the steps to the attic. Annabel heard the door to the attic open and close.
For the moment, she let out a sigh of relief.
But she was not out of danger. Far from it. Zeke had told her to wait for him, but she was no longer willing to wait. For all she knew, the shouting she heard from the other room had been an altercation between Jack and the old man, and Zeke was never going to emerge the winner from a fight like that. He might even be dead.
Annabel had to get out of the house. She’d take her chances outside. Better to freeze to death than get hacked up like Chad.
Or worse.
She flew to the window. But when she tried to lift it, the stubborn thing wouldn’t budge.
She tried again. Still it didn’t move.
It hadn’t been opened in years, Annabel figured. It was painted shut decades ago. Cordelia had never brought fresh air into this room. Suddenly, Annabel panicked. Her palms got sweaty again. She was trapped.
“No!” she screamed.
She looked around for something with which to smash the window. The iron doorstop would have worked, but the cops had claimed it as evidence after Cordelia’s death. There wasn’t anything in the room that looked strong enough. Finally, Annabel ran over to the bed, hoping the little man would not leap out from under it and grab her ankle. She snatched the pillows off the bed and removed their cases. Then she opened Cordelia’s drawer and yanked out one of the dead woman’s lacy old slips. Annabel proceeded to wrap the slip around her right hand, and then pulled both pillowcases over that. Balling her hand into a fist, she walked back to the window.
She whacked the pane of glass as hard as she could.
“Oww!” she yelled.
But still it didn’t break.
She tried once more. The glass in the old window didn’t shatter, but it did pop out of the pane, tumbling down into the snow as a gust of cold air rushed into the room. But that wasn’t good enough. The window had twelve panes, each separated by wooden frames. Annabel couldn’t fit through the one pane that she’d removed. She’d have to pop out at least four of them, and she’d have to also break the wooden frames.
And try as she might, that old wood was impervious to her blows.
“Owwww!” Annabel cried out on her fifth attempt to break the wood. Even a second pane remained resistant to her assaults. She was making a great deal of noise. Jack would hear her. Or he’d be attracted by the sound of the wind gusting through the open space in the window. Snow was swirling into the room, encrusting the wall and the floor.
But she had to try. It was her only chance.
Annabel pulled her hand back to swing it once more against the window. But just as she did so, she spotted a sight she could not believe—something she hadn’t dared let herself hope for.
A man was barreling up through the trees on a snowmobile.
It was Richard Carlson!
101
In the other room, Zeke was struggling to regain consciousness.
He dreamt. He was fifteen years old again, standing on the front porch, asking old Mr. Devlin for a job.
It was 1949. Back in those days, the Devlins maintained a farm out in back of the inn. A brood of hens clucked all around the place, and a rooster crowed from somewhere out in back. Old Mr. Devlin told Zeke he’d hire him to feed the chickens and cut the corn.
The young man ended up doing a lot more than that.
“Where is my baby?” the woman was screaming at him.
In his hands Zeke held the bloody pink arm. It looked as if it had come from a doll. The woman fainted dead away.
“Help me! Help me!” McGurk shrieked, as he was carried toward the fireplace.
Zeke grabbed hold of one leg, Mr. Devlin the other, but they were too late.
The sound of those creatures munching on McGurk’s head haunted Zeke’s dreams for the rest of his life.
But the worst, for him, was the attic.
In his dream, he walked those stairs, just as he had every day for the past twenty-three years. Everything that had come before had been terrible enough. But the attic these last two decades had been even more wicked.
She had been beautiful once.
Until the house had gotten to her.
The craziest thing of all, she loved the house. She would do anything for the house. The house that had tried to kill her.
In his dream, Zeke saw her as she once was. So beautiful. So innocent.
And then he saw her as she was today.
The knife—slashing Chad over and over, the way she had slashed others.
All for the house.
Zeke opened his eyes.
“No more,” he said to himself.
He would end this. He would do what successive generations of Devlins had failed to do. He would destroy the Blue Boy Inn.
102
“Richard! Oh, thank, God, Richard!”
He heard Annabel’s voice as soon as he switched off the
engine of the Ski-Doo. He lifted his goggles and looked up at the inn. There she was, shouting from a second-floor window over the front door. She had popped out a pane of glass, and was waving what looked like a pillowcase to get his attention.
“Annabel!” he shouted through the wind in response.
The snow had covered nearly the entire first floor of the house. From the second-floor window, it was only a matter of a few feet to jump to the little roof over the front porch, and then another couple of feet to the surface of the snow.
But given the wind, the cold, the softness of the snow, and the instability of the snowdrifts, Richard knew it was still going to be very difficult to get up there to Annabel and then get her back here to the Ski-Doo.
He started off across the snow.
“Annabel!” he called again.
Her face appeared at the open pane in the window. She placed her finger to her mouth, telling Richard to be quiet. He figured she was in danger. She didn’t want someone else in the house to know that he was coming. He nodded and kept on approaching.
The snow, thankfully, was somewhat harder here. Richard sunk only to just below his knee with each step. He made it to the front porch, mostly buried in snow. By grabbing on to the trellis that was attached to the side of the porch, he was able to haul himself up onto the little roof, dislodging a couple of feet of snow as he went. His gloveless hand was freezing. He was pretty certain he’d end up with frostbite.
He was just grateful that it was his left hand. He’d need his right for shooting his gun, if necessary.
Standing on top of the porch roof, Richard could see Annabel’s face much more clearly. She looked terrified. Her hair was disheveled, and Richard believed he could discern blood on her hands and clothes. She was wearing a coat. Apparently, she’d been thinking of going out the window herself.
He grabbed hold of the ledge that ran above the porch and out under the windows of the second floor. It was only about six inches wide, but once he’d knocked the snow off it, Richard figured the ledge would be sufficient to get him over to Annabel’s window. He hoisted himself up. For a second, his bare hand slipped, and he dangled precariously over the snow. But he steadied himself, and scrambled up onto the ledge. He took a deep breath, and then began inching his way toward Annabel.
The Inn Page 26