Within These Walls

by Ania Ahlborn

  “Lou?”

  Logic told him he should have been as worried as Mark was. If he really had lost all that time, he needed to get himself to a doctor. Because how could it have been possible? Maybe something in his head had snapped. And yet, that date kept nagging at him. So I lost a week, so what? I’ve been busy. Working. That’s what I came up here for.

  “Lucas.” Mark was growing impatient, but it was Lucas who was pushed over the edge by Mark’s agitation.

  “Hey, man, why don’t you mind your own business?”

  A long, drawn-out pause, then: “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me,” Lucas said, gripping the phone tighter to his ear. “Why don’t you let me do what I came here to do?”

  “Lou . . .”

  “You know that every time you call me, you’re screwing up my rhythm?” he asked. “You know that every goddamn time you make this phone ring, I’m pulled out of my groove?”

  Nothing.

  “So, thanks for calling, Mark. Really, thanks. But maybe next time realize that if I’m not returning your voice mails or calling you back it’s because I’ve got more pressing shit to do than sit around and explain myself to you. Maybe that would be a good idea.”

  Lucas ended the call before he could register what he’d just done. He’d never spoken to Mark that way in his life, never. There was a distant, nagging voice at the back of his mind that assured him that what had just happened wasn’t right, that there was something very off about the conversation that had just taken place. And perhaps he would have dwelled on that fact for longer than he did had it not been for that glowing, seemingly leering date on his phone.

  What the hell am I forgetting?

  He had never been good with keeping track of time. Even as a college student, the hardest question on the test was the month, day, and year. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to remember the significance of a day that was nearly over. Unless it could wait until tomorrow.

  That was when it hit him.

  He fumbled through the small mountain of paperwork that had accumulated on his desk, searching for a photocopy of Halcomb’s letter he knew was hidden there. He eventually found it, a date circled in red Sharpie. He had two days.

  It was Jeff’s deadline.

  Forty-eight hours left. That was it.

  Holy shit.

  His incessant calls to the prison for his interview had blurred together.

  Jesus, what’s going on? Is everything all right?

  Endless hours sitting in front of the computer had stealthily peeled the calendar pages away.

  . . . for like over a week.

  He couldn’t look away from the photocopy in his hand. He stared at the numbers circled in red, checked it against his phone, double-checked it against the date on the bottom right-hand corner of his laptop screen. But the date refused to change. Mark was right. It had been long, too damn long.

  That tiny, fading voice of logic managed to whisper: How can you simply lose over a week of your life, Lou?

  But the louder, more incessant voice of obsession drowned it out. Because somehow, inexplicably, Lucas only had a couple of days left to see the man who had compelled him to move to Pier Pointe; otherwise, Jeff would no longer be willing to talk, if he was ever willing at all.

  Halcomb had shut him out. Betrayed him. Threatened Lucas’s project by refusing to see him. He had backed out on a deal that Lucas upheld without so much as a bat of an eye. The knowledge that he had somehow run out of time made him feel sick. But it was more than losing time—it was an assurance that, despite all his efforts, his career might now be over. His marriage sure as hell seemed to be. He was going to lose his kid, the girl that meant everything to him, and yet he still managed to see her for no more than what seemed like a few minutes a day. When was the last time I saw her, anyway? He had been too busy scrambling for a solution. This was Jeff Halcomb’s fault. He had put Lucas out.

  His fingertips tingled. His entire body buzzed with nauseous anxiety. Mad butterflies smashed into his organs, desperate to beat their way through muscle and skin.

  His attention wavered to one of Echo’s loaned photographs. In it, Jeffrey Halcomb was alone. He sat cross-legged on what appeared to be a bed of pine needles. There were trees at Jeff’s back. He was cupping something in his hands, too out of focus to make out; possibly a baby bird or squirrel. But it made no difference; his smile was too disarming to focus on the contents of his palms. Jeffrey Halcomb had, in his heyday, been what any woman would have considered beautiful. Dark waves of hair stopped just beyond his shoulders. His face was long and angular, strikingly attractive—a face that drew in runaways, eyes that promised a better future filled with acceptance and understanding. But goddamn, it was that smile that won them over. Something about it radiated peace and love and all the stuff an angry kid leaving their home life behind would want. Jeffrey Halcomb looked positively radiant, a hippie transplant stuck in the early eighties.

  Audra Snow, Laura Morgan, even dead-eyed girls like Chloe Sears—they all wanted to be whatever it was Jeff had tucked away in his hands. They wanted to be that baby bird, that tiny woodland creature. They wanted Jeff Halcomb to be their everything, and in the end, that’s exactly what he had become.

  Lucas pushed the photograph beneath his stack of papers, not wanting to look at it anymore. Why did I speak to Mark that way? He had to call him back to apologize. He grabbed his phone, but rather than calling Mark back, he found himself speed-dialing Lambert Correctional Facility long after visiting hours were over. When Lumpy Annie answered the line, Lucas nearly sighed with relief at the sound of her voice. At least she was familiar. Maybe, finally, he’d stumble into a bit of luck—by some miracle, on his last attempt, Lumpy Annie would say, Wow, gee, Mr. Graham, I sure am glad you called, because inmate number 881978 suddenly changed his mind about that visitation thing. You should come on down first thing in the morning and do that interview you’ve been harassing us about.

  But from the tone of her recognition, he doubted that was the case.

  “Oh, hi, Mr. Graham,” she said, no longer needing an introduction.

  “Hi,” he said, embarrassed by the fact that this prison receptionist had become somewhat of a long-distance acquaintance. “Sorry, I just had to check one more time. You understand . . .”

  Lumpy Annie remained quiet for a long moment, then exhaled a breath into the receiver. “Mr. Graham, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

  “He’s still not taking visitors,” Lucas said. “I guess that isn’t much of a surprise.”

  “Not quite,” she said. “It’s a bit more serious than that.”

  “How so?”

  “Mr. Graham, the inmate . . .” She paused, backtracked. “Jeffrey Halcomb, he’s no longer with us.”

  “He was transferred?” That didn’t make any sense. Halcomb had been at Lambert since his conviction. If there had been any plans of transferring him from one facility to another, Lucas would have known about it.

  “I guess you can say that,” she said. “He’s dead, Mr. Graham.”

  Lucas lost his breath.

  “He killed himself in his cell earlier today. His body is with the medical examiner. So I guess you can stop calling here.”

  A strange feeling roiled around in his guts, one that suggested far more empathy than he cared to feel for a brainwasher, a conspirator, a murderer. Halcomb was dead? How could that be? A man like him didn’t just simply end himself like . . . like Hillstone. Like Schwartz. Like January Moore. Like the lost and lonely of Pier Pointe, 1983.

  “I don’t—” Understand. The final word was lost among the dimness of his study, cut off as his gaze shifted to the cross on his desk, the artifact he’d been fiddling with during his research, tapping against his blotter to an unheard tune. Schwartz. Lucas leaned back in his seat, repelled by the cross’s very presence, sud
denly sure that Jeff had gone the same way his inmate neighbor had. Someone had left that cross for Lucas with Lumpy Annie. Someone had also smuggled one in just like it and passed it on to Schwartz. How did a man kill himself in a maximum-security cell? Someone had provided Jeff with a weapon . . . someone from the outside.

  “. . . the cross,” he murmured into the phone.

  “Mr. Graham?”

  “He stabbed himself, didn’t he?” The words trickled out of him in a slow, wheezing leak, so quiet that, had the connection been bad, Lumpy Annie wouldn’t have had a chance to catch his question. But she had. He could tell she had by the momentary pause, as if she was considering whether telling him to check with the coroner for that information, or to finally throw a bone to the desperate bastard who kept calling the prison.

  “No,” she finally said. “He poisoned himself. Arsenic, they think.”

  A shudder shook him from the inside out.

  I don’t even know where she’d have gotten such a pill, Maury said of January’s death.

  Someone had given it to her.

  Just like someone had done the same for Jeff.

  Just like someone had passed on the cross, first to Schwartz, then to Lucas.

  “Holy shit,” Lucas whispered. “The visitor . . .”

  “Mr. Graham?”

  “The visitor,” he repeated. “Check the visitor. The woman. It was her. It had to be.”

  Lumpy Annie went silent on the other end of the line.

  What have I gotten into?

  Laughter sounded from beyond Lucas’s study door.

  He blinked, his heart tripping over itself.

  It was a pair of girls. They were laughing on the other side of the wall. Laughing at him.

  Lucas dropped his phone onto his desk blotter, launched himself up and out of his chair, and rushed across the length of his study to yank open the door.

  But rather than hearing more laughter, his mouth fell open at what he saw instead. Despite the darkness, he could make out the outlines of the living room furniture in the moonlight. An armchair was stacked on top of the couch. The coffee table was somehow balanced on top of the chair. Couch cushions were piled high on top of the table. It was an impossible Jenga puzzle defying gravity.

  Something in his chest loosened. An involuntary gasp escaped his throat. Suddenly, he was remembering the upside-down family photograph in the living room, recalling Chloe Sears’s dead-eyed stare and doped-up smile flipped onto its head. There had been the girl in the orchard. Somehow, despite the security system, they had found their way inside and moved things around. The washed-up writer and his little girl were, in someone’s messed-up opinion, getting exactly what they deserved. Because who the hell moved into a house like this? Who chose to live in a place tainted with blood and death? Someone was fucking with him.

  “Jeanie?!” His daughter’s name slid past his lips, and while he was trying to subdue his panic, his voice sounded startled, strained. He was unsure why he was calling for her. He didn’t want her to see what was going on in the living room, certain that if she set eyes on that physics-defying stack of furniture, she’d freak out.

  He forced himself out of the study. Darted across the living room. Diverted his eyes from the furniture tower, as though looking at it for too long would reveal some sort of voodoo curse. Why did I speak to Mark that way? Scanning every dark corner as he bolted to the far wall of the room, he slapped his hand over the light switch.

  The overhead lights refused to come on.

  That was when Lucas began to genuinely panic.

  Oh God, they’re still inside.

  Somewhere close, they were watching his temperature rise. Holding their hands over their mouths. Grinning behind their palms. Statuesque in their stillness.

  He took the stairs three at a time, nearly launching himself into Jeanie’s room. The door flew open. He struggled to catch it by the knob before it slammed against the opposite wall. He missed. Jeanie jumped with a start. In the cold laptop glow of her room, she shoved a piece of paper underneath her bed and leaped up.

  44

  * * *

  VIVI HAD GOTTEN used to spending time by herself and she was starting to enjoy the solitude. If she wasn’t in front of her computer or on her phone, she was sitting in the shadows of her closet, staring at the printed-out photographs of her newfound idol. The small photo Echo had given her of Jeffrey Halcomb remained constantly at hand. Even his handwriting was compelling—sharp and dangerous, alluring. She imagined rock stars writing the way he did. The difference was that Jeff was better than any rock star. Those guys were nothing but an illusion. Jeff Halcomb, though . . . he knew Vivi existed. The proof was right there, scribbled onto the back of a snapshot. Somehow he knew, and for some reason, he cared.

  If anyone was going to be able to communicate with Jeff’s fallen family still present in this house, it would be her. It was almost as though, rather than her father bringing her to Pier Pointe, it had been Vivi who had drawn him across the country instead. It was a crazy theory, an impossible thought, but she felt connected, in touch with her potential to reach into the netherworld more than she had ever been before. The shadows that lurked in that house were making her intuition stronger. They were silently, invisibly encouraging her to continue her search for answers. To not give up. To help them even if she didn’t know how.

  We’ll show you how.

  If she just kept pushing forward, they would lead her in the right direction. Pushing forward meant more research. The more she learned, the clearer her direction would become, and over the past week, Vivi had learned a lot.

  Breaking out her new black stationery from its plastic wrap as soon as she and her dad had come home from the mall, she had written “BLOODY MARY” across the top of the page in silver ink, then powered up her laptop and began to surf.

  There were a bunch of stories about Bloody Mary, but none of them could pinpoint exactly where the urban legend had come from. There was Mary Tudor, daughter of King Henry VIII—a woman who grew up watching beheadings, burned people at the stake, and was pregnant with a ghost baby that was never born. There were rumors that she bathed in blood to stay young, and that if you wanted to summon her, you had to whisper I stole your baby while staring into a dark mirror.

  There were tales of Bloody Mary being an evil witch who drowned children for fun. Some said she was a sad mother who had lost her only child in a flood. Sometimes you had to lock the bathroom door for anything to happen. Other times, you needed a lit candle so you could see your own reflection. Or you were advised to spin around in a circle three times. But a few elements always remained constant: the bathroom, the darkness, the mirror, and the chanting of her name.

  Vivi had shown those articles to Echo when she had come to visit, and Echo had smiled and nodded and suggested that, perhaps, a ritual was just what Vivi needed, that maybe the tales of conjuring Bloody Mary could lend inspiration on how to reach out to the spirits that lingered in the rooms of the Montlake house.

  “But I haven’t seen anything in the past few days,” Vivi had confessed. “It’s like they’re gone. Except they can’t be, right? They can’t just disappear?”

  Echo had shaken her head, agreeing that the ghosts that lived within that house couldn’t simply up and leave. “Maybe they’re waiting for something,” she’d remarked. “Perhaps they’re just being patient. It’ll be a lot easier to help them if you can ask them how. Open the door. Have faith and don’t be afraid.”

  Don’t be afraid: that was easier said than done. It was true that over the past few days, the house had felt different, almost safe. And yet Vivi still avoided the blue room at all costs, not yet able to shake the image of the girl in the mirror, her eyes rolled back in her head, her mouth gaping wide and her ratty old sweater dripping with blood.

  But she took Echo’s advice anyway and, over the next few
days, came across a multitude of stuff she already knew. There was a bunch of stuff about channeling and being a medium. She read about trigger objects: an item that a spirit may be drawn to because they knew it in life, and consequently encourage them to communicate. But she didn’t have anything that could possibly lure Jeff’s family out of the shadows—at least not that she knew of. Maybe there was something somewhere in the house. Perhaps they wanted her to go on a treasure hunt, but that would be difficult to do without her dad raising his eyebrows. Would he even notice? She wasn’t sure. Her father had done exactly what her mom had predicted—he had locked himself away. Vivi had spent the last handful of days eating pizza and takeout. At first she had to ask her dad to order that stuff, but now his credit card was a permanent kitchen fixture, ready and waiting on the ugly orange counter.

  Vivi had nearly skipped over the Ouija board stuff. She didn’t own one and it seemed like a waste of time reading about it. But tonight, one article stopped her in her tracks. The blue Google link read: MAKE YOUR OWN OUIJA BOARD—TALK TO SPIRITS, RAISE THE DEAD.

  She looked up, allowed her gaze to drift, slow and deliberate, across the walls of her room. Was that the way they wanted her to reach out?

  Ghosts don’t care whether your Ouija board is officially licensed by Hasbro, the article explained. If you have a spirit who wants to communicate, it’ll be satisfied with a homemade spirit board.

  It was perfect. A ritual, just like Echo had suggested.

  She chewed on a fingernail, then tore out the pages of notes she’d taken from her pad of black stationery paper. Turning the pad lengthwise, she stared at a picture of a homemade board glowing on her computer screen. She took a deep breath and began to copy it, her odd sense of anxiety growing with each letter carefully penned onto the page.