Within These Walls

by Ania Ahlborn

  Up.

  Up into a wide, nefarious grin.

  Lucas stumbled backward, nearly falling into his study before slamming the door.

  It’s him.

  His pulse vibrated the plates of his skull.

  It’s fucking him.

  Every second that passed was one closer to the insane realization he already knew.

  “How?” he whispered, but he knew that, too. It hadn’t been a trick or a ploy or a schizophrenic delusion.

  One hundred and fifty miles away, Jeffrey Halcomb’s corpse was cooling on a gurney. But here in Pier Pointe, despite the impossibility, he was alive and well. He had found his way back to the coast. He had returned to the house he had been pulled from, had returned to the house where . . .

  Lucas’s gaze jumped back to the corkboard, all those faces staring out at him, smiling wider than he remembered, grinning at him, as though they’d been waiting for this very moment of epiphany.

  His guts seemed to shift, rearranging themselves so that it was harder to breathe, to think, to stand up straight. Lucas couldn’t decide whether to jump out the window or rush out of his study armed with his empty coffeepot, swinging it like a wild man as he bolted for the stairs to get his kid.

  Lucas shot his arm out across the varnished top of his desk, reached for his phone, missed. The device bounced off the side of his hand and skittered along the desk, landing among the pile of photographs and newspaper clippings with a soft thump. He crawled across the floor in a rush, his palms and knees hitting the ground hard as he shimmied to the opposite end of his desk. The phone was there, close to the wall outlet and the electrical cord that kept his laptop and coffeemaker powered up. He snatched the phone off the floor and pressed his back against the wall, thumbed the lock screen, and tapped the phone icon.

  Josh’s text glowed bright against the home screen.

  See you soon? J.

  Lucas remembered having cleared it before placing another call to the police.

  See you soon?

  But there it was, taunting him.

  . . . soon?

  J for Josh. For January. For Jeffrey. For . . .

  Jeanie.

  The phone tumbled from Lucas’s hand. He wiped his palm against the fabric of his pants, as if touching the phone would permanently infect him with the terrified madness he was already feeling. He had to get upstairs. Had to get to his daughter. Had to make sure she was okay. It didn’t matter how scared he was.

  He made to scramble to his feet, but again, his movements hitched in sudden pause. His lips parted in a quiet intake of air as a new photo winked up at him from among the pile he’d studied so closely. In it, Jeffrey Halcomb stood in the front yard with Congressman Snow’s house to his back. One arm was looped around a brunette’s shoulders, her long hair hanging around her face like silken drapes. His other arm was around Audra. Lucas narrowed his eyes and plucked the photo off the floor, bringing it in closer to his face to study the dark-haired woman. At first it had looked like Georgia, but something about her face was wrong.

  That was when he saw it, that large ornate cross given to Lucas at the prison. The cross he’d shoved into one of his desk drawers, too frustrated with a lack of answers to keep it in sight. The artifact was half-hidden behind the lapel of the woman’s shirt. Lucas brought the photo in even closer, squinting at the decoration that looked hand-painted and too big to wear.

  He flipped the photo over.

  Eloise, Jeff, and Jeanie.

  His entire body went numb.

  Lucas dropped the photo as quickly as he’d have dropped a lit match lapping at his fingers. It landed faceup. Jeff’s grin was now wider than before, beaming in malicious triumph. Echo smiled out at him, the cross around her neck winking in the sun. But he hardly noticed the change in Echo and Jeff, his eyes currently fixed on Audra’s face, her stick-straight hair now a halo of loose blond curls, her plain-Jane looks replaced by his daughter’s face. His girl. His Virginia.

  “Oh my God . . .” The words came in a gasping rush.

  He forced himself to his feet, pushed across the room, and without allowing himself the time to hesitate, pulled open the door.

  In the living room, Audra Snow’s things were gone. So was the dark figure that had stood in the corner. But Lucas knew Jeffrey Halcomb was still there.

  After all, Jeff had come home.

  50

  * * *

  Monday, October 11, 1982

  Five Months, Three Days Before the Sacrament

  THERE ARE FEW times in life when a person genuinely doesn’t know how they arrived at their destination, when the journey has become so snared and twisted with lies that an individual can’t tell left from right. Audra had thought about leaving, had seriously considered grabbing Shadow, getting in her car, and driving to the hospital, where she’d tell them everything. The family. The pregnancy. The way she’d been made to slit Claire’s throat, only to leave Claire and her dead husband behind in their picturesque beach home. But they were watching her. Her screams at the scene of the crime had awakened their sleeping suspicion.

  She was no longer Avis. Now she was nothing more than a threat.

  Kenzie kept a constant vigil when it came to the news, watching for any information about Richard and Claire Stephenson’s murders. Pier Pointe police were stumped. The locals were in an uproar. This sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen in their town. Audra hoped her father would catch wind of the crime and drive down, or at least call. But of course he didn’t. And so she remained trapped within her own home.

  She had cried for the enemy, for people who had threatened her life and the freedom of her most cherished comrades. She was too weak to receive the blissful euphoria that Deacon had described eight months earlier. She understood now that to achieve that bliss, she had to lose herself. To gain that happiness, she had to give herself to Jeff beyond any sort of trust she knew.

  They called it faith, but they really meant surrender.

  But she couldn’t surrender, not with a baby on the way. She couldn’t shake what she’d seen, what she’d done. Claire Stephenson’s screams continued to reverberate within her skull. The way the blood spurted from Richard’s throat played itself over and over again inside her head. Even if Audra somehow made it to the police, her confession would implicate her in a double homicide. If she got to the hospital, they’d pull her records, see the suicide attempts. The mania. The endless list of medications. The fact that she was living in Pier Pointe despite her primary-care physician’s suggestion to stay close to family. Stay in Seattle, he had said. I know you and your folks have differences, but in case of an emergency . . . in case you need them on short notice. Family is always good to have.

  Family.

  Yes, family was always good.

  Except it was pointless to think about escape. Her car was gone. She didn’t know what they had done with it. Maybe it was parked down the road, just out of view. Or it could have been all the way at Maggie’s house—Maggie, no longer her friend. Now Maggie was nothing more than another one of her captors. They could think that Audra had betrayed them with her sympathy for Claire and Richard, but it was they who had betrayed her. Maggie was supposed to be her best friend. Audra had trusted Deacon to protect her, had believed that Jeffrey would love her. But now, rather than peace and laughter and unconditional love, there was a sentry watching her every move. Whoever Jeff assigned to the job was told to act like nothing was wrong, like they were only there to help. They wanted to make sure the shock of what had happened at the beach house hadn’t hurt the baby.

  But Audra knew better.

  They were waiting for her to run.

  Or to hang herself from the shower rod.

  Or to leap from the window to the stone-dappled flower bed below.

  If they cared about the baby, they would have let her go see a
doctor to make sure everything was on track. They would have allowed her to take the prenatal vitamins she knew she needed, ones that—when she had brought it to Jeffrey’s attention—he had said were poison, manufactured by the enemy. His child would not be made impure by those toxins. He would not allow his baby to be infected by “the man” even before it left its mother’s womb.

  Even if Audra did somehow make it to the hospital, Jeff would claim her. He would lie. He’d tell the nurses that she was unstable, that she’d stopped taking her medication because she was pregnant, terrified of birth defects. And now she was going out of her ever-­loving mind. She was a loose cannon. A crazy person. If he could only take her home and get some food in her, she could sleep off the temporary hysteria. It would be fine. This sort of thing had happened before.

  And the nurses would believe him. Charmed by his beautiful smile and his chocolate-brown eyes, they’d swoon as he batted his eyelashes.

  My God, isn’t he gorgeous?

  Isn’t she lucky?

  What a beautiful baby that’s going to be.

  Shame that she’s such a crackpot.

  Yeah, a shame that she’s so crazy.

  If I had a chance with a hunk like him, I’d do just about anything.

  Anything at all.

  And they would have. Just like Audra.

  51

  * * *

  VIVI JUMPED WHEN a door slammed down the hall, her fingers drifting off the coin she was using as a makeshift Ouija board planchette. Her dad had asked for both her and Echo to keep their doors open and the upstairs lights on—and while Echo had snuck into Vivi’s room for a few minutes to get the scoop on what had happened with the house, she quickly retired to the guest bedroom, giving Vivi the solitude to do what needed to be done. Vivi knew the Maxima had never been taken. It was as though the world had suffered a computer glitch. The car had gone momentarily invisible. She’d seen The Matrix and read enough books on the paranormal to know that some people believed ghosts were exactly that: a hiccup in the system. Which meant there had to be a system. Perhaps that was the problem with this house—maybe it was sitting in some dead zone. But instead of a cell phone signal, all the regular energy that made reality what it was had gotten scrambled up somehow.

  Another slam. Is that Echo? It had been the door to either her dad’s room or the guest bedroom Echo was using—nothing but an air mattress and a bunch of unpacked boxes, most of them full of her dad’s old books. Vivi had shut her own door despite her dad’s request. She needed silence, had to give this her undivided attention. With Jeff gone, she was determined to make contact, and it seemed to her that Echo agreed tonight was the night. Tonight, she’d finally meet him. It was time to start her new life.

  Dearest Vivi . . .

  Perhaps the slamming of doors was the very sign she’d been waiting for.

  See you soon.

  If it wasn’t Echo rattling them in their frames, it was the people who had gone quiet, the ones that were waiting for her to break down that last remaining barrier between the living and the dead. They may have been patient this past week, but they certainly didn’t sound that way now.

  Vivi’s fingers curled into the comforter that was pooled around her legs before she swung them over the side of her mattress. But she faltered before getting up. Maybe those loud noises were trying to get her out of her room, trying to tell her to go downstairs. Maybe Jeff was down there, waiting for her. Or perhaps the house had shifted the way it had before and their furniture was replaced by old stuff that must have been in the house when Jeff had lived here so long ago.

  Exhaling an impatient breath at her own hesitation—it was too late to be scared now—she shoved the covers aside and slunk barefoot across the room.

  It sounded quiet out there, no voices, no noise. She carefully pulled her door open and stuck an eye between it and the jamb. The hallway light was still on.

  She pulled the door open wider and stepped out of her room, quietly padded down the stairs, and silently cracked open her dad’s study door. It was dark in there save for the glow of his laptop screen. Her throat went tight at not seeing him in his usual spot. He was always in there, especially at night. He worked best when everyone was sleeping—at least that’s what he said.

  Turning to face the living room, she knew that her Ouija session hadn’t caused a shift. The flat screen was still there. The couch wasn’t the brown-and-orange plaid she had expected.

  There was a clang that sounded like someone placing a pot on a kitchen countertop. “Dad?”

  She stepped across the darkened room and ducked her head into the kitchen. The light above the sink burned weak and yellow. A woman stood in its anemic glow, her back turned to the rest of the room. Echo? It had to be her, but her once long, glossy hair was now short, chopped clean off, as though Echo had taken the kitchen shears and cut it while Vivi remained closed up in her room.

  But it had to be her. Cherries littered the kitchen island. She and Echo never did get around to making that cider. Jeffrey’s favorite, Echo had claimed, though Vivi wasn’t sure how Echo could have known that. Echo had only been a child when Jeff had been arrested. Those scattered cherries surrounded an old-looking mortar with a pestle jutting out of its stone bowl. Cherry pits littered the bottom of the bowl. She hadn’t seen the tool before, and maybe that’s why Echo hadn’t peeked her head in to check on her during the night. Perhaps she’d left the house altogether, returned to her own home, and fetched the things she needed to make the cider she’d promised Vivi a few weeks before. Maybe Echo had chopped her hair off as a way to usher in her own new beginning. If meeting Jeff was the start of Vivi’s new life, why shouldn’t it have been the same for Echo, too?

  But something wasn’t right . . . something Vivi couldn’t immediately place.

  She shot a look down at her feet, her toes curling into the carpeting that didn’t belong. Her heart bounced in the hollow of her chest like a paddleball on an elastic string, up and down from her feet to her throat, threatening to bound right out of her mouth and onto the rug.

  How can the carpet be wrong if the room is right?

  She twisted where she stood, her gaze tumbling over the living room furniture for a second time. And just like that, she was in the house that wasn’t, the same room stuck in a different time.

  She blinked back at the kitchen. Echo was humming something beneath her breath.

  How can the kitchen be the same if the living room is different?

  Except that there was a blender on the counter that Vivi didn’t recognize. A brushed-silver toaster she’d never seen before sat next to it.

  “Echo?” The name squeaked out of her throat as little more than a whisper. Suddenly, she wasn’t sure about the woman facing the sink. A skin-crawly feeling crept across her arms when the woman’s humming stopped.

  Echo went silent.

  Motionless.

  Like the dead standing upright.

  Vivi’s brain told her to run, but she refused to give in to her fear. She forced her thoughts back to the pictures she’d studied so intently online, the names of Jeff’s family members—the people that could relate to her own plight. Shelly. Roxanna. To the neglect. Laura. Chloe. The want for something better than what she had.

  “Georgia?” Vivi asked.

  As if recognizing the name, the woman at the sink began to turn. Slow as a second hand on a dying clock. Tick by tick.

  Vivi swallowed the wad of spit that had collected at the back of her throat, her eyes fixed on the woman who wasn’t Echo. Except it wasn’t Georgia, either.

  The woman lowered her chin. She looked down her nose at the twelve-year-old before her. Her pale skin seemed almost translucent. A silver cross glinted from around her neck in the dim kitchen light. As if noticing Vivi’s attention shifting to her necklace, her mouth pulled up at the corners. The dark-haired woman gave Vivi a
smile as Echo’s words spiraled through her head.

  He’s looking forward to meeting you.

  Something in her brain clicked.

  This isn’t right.

  This isn’t supposed to happen.

  They’re going to pull you under.

  You’re going to die, just like them.

  Despite her intention to stay put, no amount of willpower could keep her from nearly tripping over the brick steps as she bolted toward the closest safe place. Mindlessly, she ran for her dad’s study, slammed the door shut, and pressed her back against it as she tried to catch her breath.

  She stared at her dad’s desk through the darkness as her mind reeled, wondering if anything on it could be used as a weapon. He had to have a letter opener in one of his desk drawers. Or maybe a pair of scissors. Something, anything.

  How are you going to use that against people who don’t exist?

  Except maybe the lady out there did exist. She didn’t recognize her from any of the photos she’d seen online. That woman wasn’t one of the people who had died here that day.

  With her survival instinct on full blast, she was determined to protect herself. As soon as she located a weapon, she’d go find her dad.

  Shoving herself away from the door, Vivi imagined that strange, short-haired woman kicking it open and following her inside. She pictured her being followed by Derrick, Kenneth, Nolan, all the people who were supposed to be deceased yet somehow still existed within this house.

  Throwing open her father’s drawers one after the other, Vivi pulled one so hard that it flew off its rails and spilled onto the floor. She dropped to her knees, frantically sifting through papers, pushing around envelopes and pens and loose note cards. She spotted the edge of something silver peeking out from beneath a yellow legal pad. The letter opener.

  But when she shoved the pad away, she was left staring at the same cross she’d just seen hanging from around that stranger’s neck.