Within These Walls

by Ania Ahlborn

  Open your eyes.

  She couldn’t tell if she was urging herself on, or if the suggestion had slithered from the inky gloom.

  Open your eyes.

  She clenched her teeth, squeezed her sheets between her fingers for strength.

  Downstairs, a subtle twang of music cut through the silence of the evening. The bass, although quiet, crept up the walls and pulsed, as if mimicking the house’s heartbeat. Vee peeked open an eye. The gentle patter of rain tapped against the window as her gaze adjusted to the dark. The room was as she left it. Boxes were stacked against one of the walls, her secondhand furniture still needing to be put together. The bed frame was disassembled. A stack of books sat on the floor next to her bed.

  What was her dad doing?

  The music was quiet, but when she peered at her phone it was nearly four a.m. Though she was thankful for the distraction. Between the heat, the thickness of the air, and that weird feeling of not being alone, she felt just about ready to crawl out of her own skin. Knowing that her dad was downstairs was a comfort. She’d get up, tell him to stop with the music, and maybe get some sleep.

  Stalling, she texted Heidi despite knowing her best friend was fast asleep.

  My dad is such an idiot.

  Knowing a response wouldn’t come for at least a few hours, Vee finally forced herself to her feet. Tugging open her door, she looked out into the upstairs hallway and shot a glance toward her father’s room. The door was open. The room was dark. She furrowed her eyebrows at the music coming from beneath her. It wasn’t typical of her dad’s taste. He was into electropop and old eighties stuff. Lately he’d been listening to nothing but Morrissey on a loop—standard woe-is-me stuff. But this music was more dated, like the kind of songs played during movies about the Vietnam War or documentaries about San Francisco in the sixties. That, and there was a distinct scratchiness to it, a slight carnival warble that made the hair on the back of Vee’s neck bristle with apprehension.

  Forcing her feet to move, she stepped up to the banister and peered down onto the living room below. The light in her father’s study was off. So were the lights in the kitchen. Save for the small shred of moonlight that managed to cut through the cover of rain clouds, there wasn’t a speck of illumination.

  “Dad?” She hated the uncertainty in her voice. Of course he was down there. How else was the stereo on? She ignored the voice inside her head that was so fond of whispering terrifying alternatives. It’s on because they’re here. Or maybe it’s not really on at all. Maybe this isn’t your house. Maybe all the furniture will be gone. Your father is dead, and you’ll be trapped here forever, just like them. Just like the people that died here so long ago.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she whispered to herself, then raised her voice. “Dad?” He had to be down there somewhere. Maybe he was standing outside the kitchen door, staring into the orchard the way he had been when she found him earlier. He had been looking into the shadows, as though he had seen something there. For a split second, she had been tempted to tell him what she had seen—the boy from the photographs; what she had heard: a haunting scream she still didn’t understand. The girl in the mirror. The house, re­arranged. But the surprise on his face when he had turned and saw her there had been disturbing. It was as though he hardly recognized her, like he hadn’t been altogether sure whether she was his daughter anymore. And so, she had let him have it. No mercy. Just what Mom would have done. You’re turning into her. Vee grimaced at the thought.

  “Are you down here?” She began to descend the stairs, her hand gripping the rail. One step down the staircase. Then another. Then a third. Her pulse thudding with every subsided inch. The air was soupy, viscous. She picked up a hint of sweet, earthy smoke.

  That was when Vee saw her—the shadow of a long-skirted figure standing to the side of the base of the stairs. She seemed to be looming, as though waiting for Vee to come within arm’s reach. It’s her it’s her it’s her again.

  Vee’s breath caught in her throat. She opened her mouth to scream, but a shift in the darkness had her attention reeling toward the living room instead. Here a tall, lanky figure vibrated beside the stereo that continued to play music despite being turned off. The dark silhouette seemed to shimmer, as if trying to keep still despite its urgent need to move. The arms and legs were long, awkward, spiderlike. Vee imagined his face covered by multiple arachnid eyes.

  She had enough nerve to bound back up the stairs with a tremulous moan.

  This isn’t happening not happening no.

  She nearly tripped over one of the risers, caught herself with the palms of her hands, and continued to scramble up.

  Not happening not happening no No NO!

  Vee raced toward her father’s door, desperate to find him sleeping in his bed. But she stopped short, her right hand clutching the banister. Because there, at the end of the hall, in the threshold of her father’s open door, was a third figure. Unmoving. Frozen in place.

  Vee’s heart hitched in her throat. She gasped for air, her lungs refusing to work. The man lifted his arm as if to press a finger to his lips. Shhh. Something winked at her from the darkness, like shiny buttons catching a glimmer of moonlight.

  She twisted away, ran to her room, and slammed the door so hard it vibrated in the frame. Her right hand beat at the wall like a moth trapped beneath a lampshade. She flipped on the light to reveal an ordinary, unpacked space.

  She couldn’t handle this.

  She was crazy to think she could.

  The panic inched up her throat, a cry trying to bubble up past her lips.

  She couldn’t handle this.

  It was too much.

  There were too many of them.

  No matter how grown-up she tried to act, she was nothing but a dumb, scared kid.

  She’d tell her dad everything. About the boy in the orchard. The scream. The girl in the mirror. The stereo. The people downstairs and the man in front of her father’s bedroom door. She’d tell him about the house. The way the furniture had changed. The way she was sure she had been standing in another time and place despite knowing she was where she was supposed to be. If her dad decided to lock her up in the loony bin, so be it. At least she’d be able to sleep.

  Shhh.

  She replayed the way that figure had lifted his finger to his lips.

  Don’t say a word. Don’t tell him anything.

  With her back against the door, she took deep, steadying breaths. Maybe she’d just imagined it. Sure, yeah. She’d spent all night looking at those stupid pictures, reading articles about how they had all died, how Jeffrey Halcomb had convinced them to take their lives. I just imagined it, she told herself despite knowing it was impossible. Because how could she imagine so much so frequently? I just imagined it! She yelled the conviction inside her head, trying to convince herself, but it was no use. Believing that it was all in her head was just as crazy as believing she was seeing ghosts.

  “Just . . . just give me a sign,” she whispered. “Just tell me you won’t hurt me and I won’t say anything.” She’d read about people being attacked by spirits. She knew all about demonic possession, about losing yourself to a world most refused to believe in. She had fantasized about knowing what was on the other side a countless number of times, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t afraid.

  But if they promised her . . . if they swore she was safe . . .

  Vee swallowed against the lump that had built up in her throat as her gaze shifted toward her bed. There, on the floor beside her mattress, her laptop glowed. The image of Jeffrey Halcomb smiled up at her. And as if by magic, the panic that had been clawing at her insides began to subside.

  It was his eyes. They promised to dissolve Vee’s fears. All that anxiety about her parents, about fitting in, about what was lurking in the dark . . . he’d make it go away, if only she believed.

  If only she
believed in herself.

  If only she believed in him.

  22

  * * *

  MORNING. LUCAS DROPPED a cardboard box onto his desk chair. For such a small container, the thing weighed a ton, packed full of papers and manila envelopes and computer printouts of articles he’d found online or in the library.

  Despite the media circus that surrounded the eighties Halcomb impasse, the information that was readily available was a lot like listening to the same song on a loop. Raised by a pair of fanatical Protestants back in Veldt, Kansas, Jeff Halcomb had been seen as a prophet. When he got too bold and started messing with the young minds in town, he got the boot, courtesy of his own father. That’s when Jeff started collecting his own congregation up and down the Pacific coast. But when it came to his true motivation, nobody knew. Lucas had read the few crappy, dated biographies that existed on Jeff more than a handful of times, but they only raised more questions. The reason as to why Jeffrey Halcomb killed Audra Snow while his hard-earned adherents lay dying around him remained little more than a question mark.

  Speculation had shifted from the why of the crime to that of Halcomb’s silence through the years. Some thought his refusal to speak was a simple case of him not having a compelling enough answer to such a loaded question. People expected the explanation to be mind-bending, infused with satanic worship, weird rituals, and terrifying beliefs. Except that, perhaps, Jeffrey Halcomb had been a lunatic who ended up killing those who had come to trust him most. No spooky motivation. No nightmare reasoning. Just mental illness. Maybe that was why Halcomb had never said a word about what had happened that March afternoon. It wasn’t exciting enough, and Halcomb’s narcissism wouldn’t allow for dissolving the mystery that surrounded him with an answer that didn’t live up to the hype.

  Others thought that Halcomb’s silence was because of exactly that: the devil worship, the strange rituals. Halcomb refused to talk because his inspiration was somehow sacred. If he dared to speak of the event, he would give away a secret that demanded being upheld.

  A lot of Lucas’s accumulated research material claimed that Halcomb’s Faithful were his only true followers. Other articles insisted no, that couldn’t possibly be the case, but it wasn’t an angle readers wanted to entertain. Back in 1983, the majority of folks cared for nothing more than to know that the crazy ones had killed themselves off and their insane leader was behind bars.

  But a handful of Halcomb’s estranged believers slowly bubbled to the surface after everything had died down . . . willing to come forward after they were sure they wouldn’t be implicated in any of Halcomb’s crimes.

  January Moore had been close with the deceased Georgia “Gypsy” Jansen and Chloe “Clover” Sears, and she was still out there somewhere. From hours of tracking her down on the web, Lucas had narrowed his search to either Tacoma, Washington, or Salem, Oregon. Last he could find, January was the co-owner of a novelty boutique specializing in handmade soaps and candles.

  Then there was Sandra “Sandy” Gleason, whom Jeff called Sunrise. She had been as young as Shelly “Sunnie” Riordan—only fifteen—when she met Halcomb for the first time. In the only interview she ever gave, Sandy confessed that Jeff had tried to impregnate her on multiple occasions. When Sandy came to realize that Halcomb was courting her for a baby and not her charming personality, she made a break for it. She hadn’t been followed because Halcomb had since deemed her a waste of time. Lucas narrowed Sandy’s location down to somewhere in Vallejo, California, but she proved to be even more elusive than January Moore.

  Back in New York, he had tried to reach out to the citizens of Veldt, Kansas, but none of them wanted to talk. Even Mira Ellison, who’d given a vivid account of what Jeffrey Halcomb had been like while still living in their hometown, refused an interview. Lucas had managed to get her on the phone, only to have the woman insist he never call her again. I don’t know any Halcomb, she’d said, then immediately hung up.

  He couldn’t find anything on the Gate of Heaven, not a number or a location in Veldt. The only speck he managed to glean off his endless Google searches was that Veldt had suffered a bad fire in the spring of 1984. There was no tracking down Pastor Gregory Halcomb or his glossolalia-gifted wife, Helen. It was as though the Halcomb clan and the church they founded had simply vanished . . . and, for whatever reason, the folks of Veldt seemed too terrified to speak about where their church and its parishioners had gone.

  Lucas tried to reach Trevor Donovan and Susanna Clausen-King, two other characters who had breezed in and out of Jeff Halcomb’s life after his exile from Kansas. He had circled their names in red marker on a long list of potential interviewees, but all searches resulted in dead ends. Janessa Morgan—Laura Morgan’s mother—had been an option, until her name ended up as a hit on an obituary site. Washington State congressman Terrance Snow and his wife, Susana Clairmont Snow, would have been an ideal source, but the couple had passed away in a fatal US 101 crash in 1986, just north of Olympia’s Schneider Creek.

  When it came to the ghosts of Halcomb’s past, January Moore and Sandra Gleason were Lucas’s only leads.

  And then there was the neon-blue sticky note he’d slapped onto his legal pad full of unanswered questions. The names “JOSH MORALES” and “EPERSON” were scribbled across it with the number for Lambert Correctional printed below. Josh—despite being a little starstruck—had made a good point: Lucas had written a book about the Black Dahlia, and he hadn’t had a killer or witnesses to interview then. A book was a book. If he had been able to pull it off a few years ago, he had a decent chance of a repeat performance.

  But that was all over now. He could have worked around Halcomb, but Jeanie was altogether a different matter. She’d found him out. He couldn’t, with any semblance of a clear conscience, stay in that house any longer, even if it meant breaking his end of Halcomb’s already defunct deal.

  Lucas stared at his box of papers, then allowed his gaze to travel across the expanse of his study. He’d pushed a folding table against the far wall, the wood paneling above it blocked by a corkboard. Computer printout pictures of nine dead people were pinned to it in three neat rows. He had hoped to get to know those people more intimately than he could through newspaper articles. He wanted to know how a group of kids—who, as far as he knew, weren’t much different from his twelve-year-old daughter—had been duped by one man. How could they have simply given up their lives because they were asked to do so? What had Jeffrey Halcomb promised them? Or had it been more like the Jonestown Massacre—had he made them poison themselves? And where had they gotten the poison? Had it been something as standard as rat poison or a pesticide from a gardening store?

  He shook his head, looked away from the photos of the nine that had died far too young. It doesn’t matter, he thought. It’s done. Over. He didn’t know where he and Jeanie would go or how he’d afford it, but they couldn’t stay on Montlake Road. Lucas wanted his life back, wanted to recapture the success of his career—it was why he had omitted the details of the house in the first place. What Caroline didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. Stupidly, he hadn’t stopped to consider that Jeanie was the one who would be most affected if the truth came out. He had sorely underestimated his kid’s intelligence.

  He scooped up the papers on his desk, straightened them with a quick tap against the varnished top, and dropped them into the box that sat on his chair. You’re living in the past, he told himself. Maybe it’s time to move on, find something new. Maybe taking a job as a reporter for a news site wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe, rather than being stuck in one place, he could find a gig as a travel writer for a big-time blog and traipse the world, become the interesting person he hoped his daughter would see him as. Maybe, someday, instead of Jeanie seeing photographs of her mother in front of the Colosseum, she’d be looking at photos of her dad in Tibet, in front of the Taj Mahal, on the beaches of Fiji, on top of a snow-covered mountain in the Austrian Alps. May
be it would be better. Defeat was a bitter pill, but perhaps it was the very medicine he needed to fix his broken life. Sloughing off his old self would give him a new start. He could only hope that Jeanie would see his moving on as strength rather than weakness.

  “Okay,” he murmured into the quiet of his study. “I surrender.” Except that, even after saying it aloud, he didn’t believe it. Not for a second. A part of him wanted to give in, to forget the fight. But the other half of him knew that this was what he was born to do. You’re a writer, Lou. Not a journalist and not a goddamn travel writer—a true-crime writer, chasing the darkness.

  But Jeanie.

  He couldn’t.

  Not like this.

  The doorbell chimed.

  Lucas blinked away from his box of research and stepped around his desk to the window. Parting the slats of the blinds, he spotted an old VW Microbus parked behind Mark’s Honda. Which reminded him: he had to get up to Seattle soon, return Mark’s car, and pick up the Maxima.

  Jeanie’s steps thumped down the stairs. The moment that had passed between them the following night had been strange. Jeanie had left him standing in the dark, the girl in the orchard forgotten, his gaze fixed on the empty doorway. He wondered if it would have brought them closer had he told his daughter the truth, and so he’d tried to talk to her. He had knocked on her door for what felt like an hour before giving up. Having gone to bed shortly after, he hadn’t seen her since. Give her space, Caroline had once suggested. You don’t have to fix every fight before it’s done being fought. This fight promised to be a long one. He only hoped they could resolve it in the end.

  Lucas stepped out of his study to catch sight of Jeanie at the door. Had he seen the woman his daughter was greeting standing outside his house in New York, he would have taken her for a vagrant. She had long brown hair that reached for her waist, her clothes a patchwork of hippie fabrics topped off with cowboy boots and a mismatched scarf. She was grinning at Jeanie. When Lucas stepped to the front door and cleared his throat, she turned her attention to him and gave him a Peace, man kind of smile.