The House That Death Built

by Michaelbrent Collings

  "Thanks," he breathed.

  Then she let go. And pushed him.

  37

  Rob moved so fast it was less a run and more a controlled fall. Aaron watched him stumble/run forward, toward Sadface. She had a knife out, clutched in her hand as though she had been waiting for something just like this –

  (what if she has what if she was waiting and this is what she wants)

  – and the knife slashed out as Rob ran for her. He sidestepped it. Knocked it away. It flew under one of the theater seats with a light, almost jaunty clatter.

  Rob plowed into Sadface. They both hit the huge TV, but the glass screen was strong and just bounced them back into the room with not a crack marring its surface. Rob and Sadface went down in a heap, Rob managing to twist so he ended up on top.

  "Son of a bitch!" he roared, somehow managing to emphasize the last word so it left no doubt who the "bitch" was.

  Sadface wasn't done. Another knife appeared in her hand. She swiped with it, and Rob lunged back; barely missed having his throat cut.

  He bounced back against the TV again, and by the time he managed to find his balance, Sadface was on her feet. Knife held out. Mask bright in the reflected light of the TV, a glowing menace.

  Rob growled, and took a step toward Sadface.

  Aaron jumped into the fray.

  He hit Sadface from behind, plowing into her hips and sending her knees buckling forward. Rob kicked at the same time, his big foot landing square in Sadface's chest. She didn't make any sound of pain, no indicator other than a single, sharp exhalation as the air exploded from her lungs.

  But no cry. No whimper.

  Just silence.

  Sadface's arms wheeled as she tried to keep her balance. Aaron was still moving forward, inertia driving him a few more inches into and through the line of her legs. Her knees buckled further. Rob kicked again, and this time she went down.

  Rob launched himself at her, catching her knife hand as it continued to make huge circles in the air. He jumped on her as she pitched back, falling over Aaron's form, which was still clenched around her upper thighs.

  They hit the floor in a heap, Rob on top and Aaron on the bottom with Sadface struggling between them –

  (sadface sandwich!)

  – and then Rob pitched himself sideways and the weight disappeared from Aaron's body as Rob dragged Sadface off him and onto the floor.

  Sadface struggled for a moment under Rob's bulk. But he had her knife now, and jammed it under the line of her mask, slamming the edge against her throat hard enough to draw blood.

  "Kayla!" he shouted. "Kayla, get in here."

  A moment. Silence.

  Aaron looked back toward the hall, hoping to see what was stopping her from coming. Hoping to see her running toward them.

  He didn't see her. He didn't see the hall either.

  "What –" Rob began.

  The door swung closed. No view of the hall. No view of anything outside this room.

  Didn't Rob break the door?

  And it was true. He could see where Rob had hit the door, where he had splintered the frame.

  But the door still swung shut. And when it hit the side of the frame there was a loud click and it stopped moving and Aaron knew that, even if Rob had knocked the entire latch mechanism out of the door, something else was now holding it closed.

  Once again, they were trapped.

  38

  TJ's mind sped up. In the instant after he fell –

  (no not fell Susan pushed me Sue pushed me)

  – he experienced a single instant that somehow captured an eternity. He wondered if his mother would miss him. If she would cry.

  In the next instant he wondered what death would feel like. When he hit the stone floor below, either to die instantly or to merely shatter his body and then be consumed by the huge dogs waiting there. He hoped he felt nothing. Prayed for oblivion.

  And then the pain came.

  It wasn't the speedy, silent nothing that he had hoped for. Instead it was lines of agony, crisscrossing his back, the backs of his thighs and his outstretched arms. Wetness spread across his neck –

  Wetness?

  He was staring at the chandelier. But there was something wrong. Something….

  It's too close.

  The stone floor had been a good thirty feet below the chandelier. But it looked like it was only twenty or so feet above him. Maybe even a little less.

  Where are the dogs?

  The wet feeling spread across the backside of his body, then the pain – already so bad it was an effort to keep from crying out – increased tenfold as he turned his head.

  No dogs.

  No nothing.

  The pain came again. Worse than before. White-red lines of fire across his back, legs, arms.

  He screamed, and as he screamed he saw that he was, indeed, too close to the chandelier. Saw that the dogs were, indeed, nowhere near.

  He saw the glint.

  For a moment – another forever-time that lasted no longer than a panicked heartbeat – he couldn't understand. Then sight turned to thought, and thought turned to comprehension.

  The glint was a wire. It streaked across from the wall at the far end of the foyer, then to him.

  He turned his head. The pain worsened, there was a sudden surge of wetness that he now understood was blood… but he had to know. The wire went under him, then continued to the wall that formed the bottom of the curving stairs. Disappeared into it through a hole that was almost too small to see.

  He was on a wire, suspended in space midway between the top of the stairs and the foyer floor.

  No, many wires. Not just a single, nearly invisible thread, but a spider web of filaments, spun by some enormous creature intent not on capturing insects, but much larger prey.

  He had fallen into the web. It caught him, the wire cutting deep into his body under the driving force of his own weight.

  His legs suddenly went numb from the thighs down. At first it was a relief, the sudden disappearance of all sensation bringing with it a corresponding absence of pain in that area. He had fallen into the wires so hard, they had bitten so deep, that at least one of them had severed his spine.

  A new wetness spread, this time on top of him. Warmth cascaded across his groin as he lost control of his body. Perhaps it was fear, maybe it was just a side effect of the paralysis.

  He cried out again – pain, terror, helplessness.

  He looked up.

  Sue was still there. Staring down at him. The terror that had blanketed her expression since he first saw her hanging from the ceiling lamp in the hall was gone. Now she looked out at the world – at him – with a strangely blank expression. Watching everything through eyes that had somehow lost the brightness he had seen in them every day since that day in the garage. Sloughed it off like a snakeskin grown too small.

  "Help," he croaked.

  He knew she wouldn't. She hadn't just let go, hadn't lost him to a fall. She had pushed him into it.

  But his lips moved again. He couldn't help it. "Help."

  She watched him for another microscopic eternity.

  Then moved away, disappearing from view.

  A new wetness joined his urine, his blood.

  TJ wept.

  And waited for death to claim him in a web spun by a black widow that wore his lover's face.

  39

  Rob vaguely understood that they were trapped. That Aaron was screaming as he rammed into the closed door to the hall. That each time he hit, he bounced back. Several times he fell.

  But it was all far away. The only thing up close – the only thing real – was Sadface. His knife against her throat.

  The downturned crescent frown on the mask mocked him. Her silence under his knife – no whimpering, no pleading, no nothing – enraged him.

  She did this.

  She caught us here. Her and Happyface.

  They killed Tommy and Kayla.

  They brought TJ. />
  That last thought bit the deepest. Full of complication, mired in a history half-lived.

  Aaron's shouting suddenly changed. The sound managed to yank Rob's attention from Sadface to the other man.

  Aaron was looking through a window that had suddenly appeared in the door. A face hung there. The Crawford girl, looking in on what was happening, like a visitor staring into an animal cage at the world's strangest zoo.

  "Hey!" Aaron screamed. "Can you –" Then his tone changed again. No longer hope at seeing someone outside this room, but raw terror. "Look out! Look out!"

  Happyface had appeared in the window. Right behind Susan.

  At Aaron's words, Susan turned to the other masked freak. She didn't shrink away, didn't scream in terror.

  She turned away from him.

  Her face was calm, not a trace of fear – or anything else. It was a blank mask that betrayed nothing.

  She moved below the level of the window. Brought something into view. Put it on.

  It was another mask –

  (Oh dear God, oh Jesus, oh mommy please save me)

  – another Greek theater mask. This one, though, was different. Not just the expression, but the mask itself didn't seem… right. There were no crescent eyes, no frown or smile. Instead, the eyes were uneven, mismatched circles. The mouth was open in an asymmetrical oval.

  Not happiness.

  Not sadness.

  Insanity.

  Happyface, Sadface, and now Madface.

  Why is this happening to me?

  It's not fair.

  He turned away from the sight of the two masks in the window, and told himself it was because staring at them wouldn't help anything, he had his ticket to freedom right below him, right under his blade.

  But those were lies. He just couldn't look at the two masks out there. They were too much, and to look at them too long would be to join Madface in her insanity.

  Rob leaned on Sadface. Pressed a knee into her breastbone so it would be nearly impossible to breathe, even as he increased pressure on the knife at her throat.

  "Where's Kayla?" he screamed. "Where's TJ? Where's TJ?"

  The TV beside him flickered. The crisscrossing views of multiple cameras in the rooms of the mansion disappeared. Now there was only one picture, enormous on the hundred-inch screen.

  TJ.

  The kid's form was splayed out, arms and legs and head the spokes of his body's wheel.

  And he was floating.

  Floating?

  No. Not floating. He was hanging on something. Rob could barely make it out, but something flashed in the dim space over the foyer. As soon as it did, he remembered the wire that had cut so deeply into Tommy's body. And, knowing what to look for, he could make out a near-invisible net made of the same wires.

  Blood dripped from TJ's form to the floor of the foyer. The huge dogs were there, lapping it up. Waiting for more.

  Rob thought the kid must be dead, and a sharp coldness spread through him. Then TJ's head turned. He looked up and screamed. Rob heard it both on the television and filtering through the closed hall door. High-fidelity sound that doubled the pain it communicated.

  Rob's jaw dropped. He looked back at the window.

  The Crawford girl –

  (no no never again she never was she's Madface and that's all)

  – spoke. Like Happyface and Sadface, her voice was altered, mechanical. A mockery of humanity. "None of you even thought to ask: If I knew about the trapdoor and the passage, how could I possibly not know about what was happening here?" She held something up to the window. It looked like a complicated remote control of some kind, bigger than a television remote and covered in different-colored buttons whose functions were mysteries to Rob. "Everything I did was so you would let me in. Let me be with you." She nodded toward Happyface. "It was enough for them to see from far away. But I wanted to be close." She paused then added, "So I could see your faces," and in the same instant pressed one of the buttons on the remote.

  Rob looked back at the television beside him. At the huge screen that made its single image so much larger than life, so much more painful.

  The chandelier hanging above TJ let go of the ceiling. It fell.

  "No!" screamed Rob.

  TJ had time for a single, sharp gasp. Then the heavy corona of crystal and metal and wire fell directly on top of him. The chandelier stopped exactly like TJ had. Halted by the net of wires.

  The chandelier stopped.

  TJ didn't.

  The heavy weight of the chandelier drove into his flesh, slammed it back into the wires. The wires separated TJ into pieces that fell to the foyer floor with splats and thumps.

  The pit bulls went mad. Dinner.

  Rob screamed. His mind separated into two parts: the part that was rage, the scream the only way it could express what it was feeling; and the part that realized his scream sounded somehow familiar. The sound of pure agony. The sound of loss.

  A sound he had heard on others' lips as he stole not only what they had, but what they were. Money and riches lost, husbands and wives stolen away.

  Children killed.

  He turned away from the television, turned away from that part of him that wondered if this wasn't right, if it wasn't just.

  He turned to Sadface. Began smashing her face with his free hand. He didn't bother taking off the mask, just slammed down right through it. Smash, smash, smash, and every time his fist fell he knew that the world hated him, that all this was wrong, that nothing would ever be right again. The world hated him. And it just wasn't fair.

  "No!" he screamed. "No, no, no, how could you do that how could you do that to my son?"

  In his peripheral vision he saw Aaron stumble, just go from standing to a near-fall as he heard Rob's words. Rob looked at him, blinking away a curtain of tears. "He never knew," he said. "Never… never…."

  The words drained him. Halted the fist that had rained down on Sadface.

  "You have a son?" said Aaron. A strange comment, given where they were, what was happening around them. A jarring pause in the terror of the night. But at the same time it seemed right. Words spoken in eulogy over his boy.

  "A long time ago," whispered Rob. "Before Donna. He never knew. And I thought…." The hand that had pounded Sadface now lifted. He rubbed his palm against his forehead. "I thought that keeping it that way – keeping myself away from him – would be the best thing I could do for him." He chuckled. The sound held no mirth. "It was probably the only good thing I've ever done."

  He turned back to Sadface. Smashed his fist into her face again. Again.

  On the third hit, the mask split and fell away from her face.

  Rob reeled.

  (The man showed Robert something inside his wallet. A picture of a smiling woman and a teenager, both with dark shoulder-length hair and deep brown eyes. Both striking – beautiful.

  "My wife and daughter," said the man.)

  The woman looked nothing like the woman in the folder. Her hair wasn't blond, it was so dark as to be nearly black. The hair was missing in a long patch from her temple to the back of the head, and when he saw it he recognized her.

  The woman. The woman from five years ago. The job where it all started to go wrong.

  "You're dead," he whispered. "Tommy killed you."

  But obviously he hadn't. The bullet must have ricocheted off her skull – rare, but it did happen – and left her bleeding, dead-looking, but still very much alive.

  He heard Aaron gasp in shock, and knew the other man had recognized her as well. Rob nearly fell off her, surprise driving him back as hard as any punch to the gut. Then he pressed himself forward again, forced himself through the anguish and the pain and surprise. He pressed down with the knife. Looked to the window in the door – Happyface –

  (it must be him, it must be the guy from that night)

  – and Sadface –

  (and the daughter – Christ did anyone actually die that night did that night even happ
en at all or was it just a dream?)

  – stared back at him through the glass and through their unmoving masks.

  "I'm done!" Rob shouted. "Done playing! You let us out or…."

  He tapered off. The threat didn't need to be stated. And sometimes the unstated ones carried more power.

  A moment stretched into a minute. Now Rob doubted: what could he do if they didn't back down? He couldn't just kill Sadface –

  (What was her name what was the name of the family?

  Oh, yeah, it was Schaffer.

  But that's not who they are anymore.)

  – because killing her would negate his only leverage.

  What do I do? How do I –

  Happyface and Madface disappeared from the window. Madface moved away last, throwing a long look over her shoulder before disappearing from view.

  Rob exchanged a look with Aaron. What was going to happen now?

  The door clicked. It swung open a few inches.

  The sound should have been encouraging: Rob had won the facedown. He had leverage that they cared about.

  So why did the open door scare him?

  He looked at Aaron again. The other man was experiencing the same confused emotions.

  Rob moved. He hauled Sadface to her feet.

  "Come on, bitch."

  Aaron looked sick. Looked like he wasn't sure whether he should follow or not. Like maybe the shmuck thought they somehow deserved all this.

  Then he followed Rob out of the room. Followed him the way he always did. He might gripe and moan about being forced into things, but in the end he always had a choice.

  And he chose to follow Rob.

  Rob grinned a tight smile as he forced Sadface into the hall before him.

  It's all gonna be okay.

  My luck changes here. I'll make it change.

  40

  Rob moved out of the room. Aaron didn't want to follow him. But he did, because where else could he go?

  Rob led them out of the media room and into the hall. His eyes darted everywhere, looking for anything that might leap out of the darkness. Anything that might maim or kill them.