Within These Walls

by Ania Ahlborn

  Staring down at the counter, the receptionist discreetly slid a slip of paper Audra’s way.

  Do you need help?

  I don’t know, she wanted to scream. I don’t think so, but I’m scared. I hope not, but I’m terrified.

  “I have to go,” she mumbled. “I’ll be back.”

  “O-okay.” The counter girl looked worried as Audra turned away. Jeffrey stood from his seat, followed by Gypsy and Clover in kind. Jeff pushed the door open with the soft ding of a bell while Clover and Gypsy rushed her out of the building and back into the car.

  “What the hell happened?” Jeff demanded after Gypsy pulled the hatchback onto the road. “Where are the pills?”

  “The prescription is expired.” Audra spoke toward her hands. Perhaps, had they not locked her up for so long, she would have realized it was up for renewal. And yet, for some reason, she couldn’t help but blame herself for the mistake. Maybe now they’d really abandon her, except they’d take the baby with them and Audra would be left empty and alone.

  Part of her believed it would be better that way. Just give them the baby and forget this life. You were never meant to be part of this family. And you were never meant to have a family of your own. Maybe her dark fantasy of her mother finding her hanged in the summer home would come true after all. Except that a year and a half ago, her suicide would have been a way to spite her parents for their neglect. Now, killing herself would be nothing more than a cowardly way out of her own hopelessly lonely life. Because if a man like Jeffrey couldn’t love her—a man who loved so many unconditionally—if her own mother couldn’t have been bothered to care, it meant that there was something truly wrong with Audra Snow.

  If they do let you keep the baby, she thought, it’ll be a wonder if it’ll be able to love you, either. And then what? Would she grow to resent her own child? Is that what happened to her own mom?

  Jeffrey sat motionless in the passenger seat for a long while, then slammed his hands against the dashboard in a rage, snapping Audra back to the present. It would be a matter of days, perhaps a week, before her father would know about the expired prescription. Even if Audra managed to get an emergency appointment with her physician, the medication would change. The red flag would fly. The family’s time in Pier Pointe was up. It was time to pack, time to move on. She only wondered if they’d take her with them. It was one thing to find a place for nine grown adults, but to find a new home not for ten people but for ten, a dog, and a newborn child? Impossible. No, it was too tall an order. They’d leave her. They had to. There was no other way.

  “Fuck!” The profanity startled her as it came barreling out of Jeffrey’s throat. She’d never heard him curse like that before, had never seen him lose his cool so completely.

  “It’s fine,” Gypsy said after a moment. “We’re close enough.”

  “It couldn’t have been long now,” Clover added, her gaze drifting to Audra’s belly. “Maybe a week or two away.”

  Audra furrowed her eyebrows at that. She shook her head, not understanding. “A week or two away from what?”

  “From the birth,” Clover said.

  “We have to deliver it now.” Gypsy’s voice was steady. “Today.”

  “What?” Audra’s heart leaped up into her throat. “What are you talking about? Deliver it . . .”

  “Don’t be afraid,” Clover said, reaching across the backseat to place her hand on Audra’s stomach. Audra slapped it away, as though Clover’s touch had stung. Clover’s expression went hard. She faced forward, glaring through the windshield.

  “I want to go to the hospital.” The request seemed a simple one. Logical. Of course she was going to deliver in a hospital. How else was her baby going to come into the world? But Gypsy shook her head from behind the wheel.

  “Hospitals are full of demons,” she said. “Men and women who want to inoculate unborn children into a system of unhappiness and pain.”

  “It’s where the pain starts,” Clover murmured, though she kept her eyes straight ahead. “It’s where the downfall begins. Doctors. Drugs. The system.”

  “School,” Gypsy cut in. “Work. Taxes. Death.”

  “Lack of enlightenment,” Jeffrey said, calmer now, more to himself than to any of the girls. “A life, wasted. But this life won’t be wasted. This life will be spared of pain and suffering the minute it comes into the world. It will spare us the same pain and suffering.”

  “Faith will prevail,” Gypsy and Clover echoed back in unison.

  “Now is our time,” Jeff said.

  “Patience will prevail,” the girls called back.

  “What are you talking about?” Audra felt ready to choke, somehow unable to pull in air despite the cold wind drifting in through the partially rolled-down window. “I want to go to the hospital,” she repeated. “I’m having my baby at a hospital.”

  “You’re having my baby,” Jeffrey said, his tone eerily composed. “That’s all that’s important. The where of it is of my choosing, of my making. You are the vessel. I am the father.”

  She wanted to scream.

  What’s happening?

  Had the hatchback had rear doors, she would have yanked on the handle, tried to get out, thrown herself onto the unspooling road.

  “We sacrifice ourselves for each other,” Jeff told her, not bothering to twist in his seat to look her way. Reassurance was gone. Comfort was but a shadow of a memory. “Our lives mean nothing separately. Together, we are eternal.”

  Those words reverberated in her head. She’d heard them before, moments before Jeff had guided the blade of a knife involuntarily clasped in her own hand across Claire Stephenson’s throat.

  A strained cry squeaked out of Audra’s throat.

  “Who are you?” she whispered, her words all but obliterated by her own strangled sobs.

  “Fear is to be expected,” Jeff said. “You’re weak. The weak are afraid of everything.”

  56

  * * *

  LUCAS COULDN’T BRING himself to believe what he was seeing. A young Jeffrey Halcomb stood at the top of the stairs. And despite Lucas thinking through all the possibilities, the crazy fucking possibilities, seeing Halcomb on the second-floor landing undid every scrap of remaining logic in Lucas’s head. He wanted to accept it, but, staring twelve feet up at a rejuvenated dead man, his brain rebelled. A stubborn denial.

  But his refusal to acknowledge the warped reality that had somehow taken over his life was rebutted by Echo twisting to look at him from where she stood. She craned her neck and gave Halcomb a wide, delirious smile.

  She can see him, too.

  It meant Lucas wasn’t imagining things. Except that when he looked away from Echo and back to where Halcomb was ­standing—directly in front of Jeanie’s door—Jeff was gone and Jeanie had replaced him. She stood motionless at the upstairs banister, her face blank, her eyes empty.

  Something about her stasis kept Lucas cemented in place. There was something different about his daughter, something he couldn’t put his finger on. Like when Caroline had dyed her hair a half shade lighter and expected him to notice, waiting for him to pick up on the minuscule change.

  “Vivi,” Echo murmured from the couch.

  “My Vivi,” Jeffery Halcomb said, nearly making Lucas jump out of his skin.

  His gaze darted from his daughter to the dead man now on his left. Halcomb looked like he’d stepped out of the thirty-year-old photographs tucked into Lucas’s desk drawer.

  “As in, ‘long live,’ ” Jeffrey mused. “A perfect moniker to reflect her true purpose, don’t you think?”

  Lucas opened his mouth to speak but he couldn’t find his breath. If he had breath, there would have been no words. Halcomb looked so real. So alive. So young.

  “You look surprised, Lou,” Halcomb said, a wry half grin tugging at one corner of his mouth. “I’d think that you
, a true-crime writer with such an imagination, would have expected this. You, Lucas ­Graham, the man who knows so much about me and my little family.” The ghost of a smile faded. Halcomb frowned, as if disappointed. “It always surprises me. For what if some were without faith? Will their lack of faith nullify the faithfulness of God?”

  Faith.

  The word rolled around in his head.

  Faith.

  His eyes darted back to the stairs.

  Jeanie was descending the staircase with a weird sort of slowness, like a VHS tape running at half speed. Halcomb’s cross was in her hand. How the hell had she gotten ahold of it? He’d stuck it in his desk drawer, had seen it just hours before.

  That was when the memory of being locked in his study hit him; the way he hadn’t been able to open the door. The way it had burst open and shut on its own only moments later, as though some unseen force had run inside and locked their self in with him. He remembered the drawers of his desk flying open, the top one with the broken rails crashing to the floor. It was the drawer he’d dumped Halcomb’s cross into among a myriad of paperwork and Post-it Notes. Lucas swallowed against the possibility.

  It had been Jeanie all along.

  Somehow, in some impossible way, she had been in his study at the very same moment he’d been scrambling to get out.

  Lucas squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head, refusing to believe it. “No,” he murmured. None of it made sense. None of it was fucking right. But nothing had ever been right here. His kid had grown distant, more defiant, the moment they had moved in. He had become more indifferent than ever, hardly able to think about anything but Halcomb, the book, the research—obsessed with the case. He’d pushed aside all his doubts and allowed a stranger into their lives, had snapped at his daughter and hissed through the phone at his best friend to leave him alone. Doors opened onto rooms that shouldn’t have existed. Dead people ran through the yard like a group of gallivanting kids. A man who had killed himself earlier that day was standing not ten feet away, looking three decades younger, twice as dashing as he did in photographs.

  Faith.

  Sometimes faith didn’t make sense. It simply was what it was. And yet Lucas couldn’t accept it.

  “No,” he said again. “It isn’t possible.”

  Halcomb gave him a thoughtful glance, that chilling smile crossing his lips again. “With men this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible.”

  The shadows in the corners of the room began to shift. They stepped out of various parts of the room and into the dim light; Georgia Jansen with her long dark hair and her hardened features. Derrick Fink with his cowboy boots and mother-of-pearl snaps. Dead-eyed Chloe Sears. And the rest of them.

  All save for the victim.

  Audra Snow was missing.

  And here was Jeanie at the foot of the stairs among Halcomb’s believers, as if to take Audra’s place.

  Lucas seemed to be the only one disturbed by this unnatural reunion. He clawed at the front of his T-shirt, his fingernails scratching at well-worn cotton, trapped inside his own skin. When the Doors’ “Break on Through (To the Other Side)” came blasting out of the living room speakers, every nerve in his body buzzed with the electricity of a pent-up scream. He reeled around to see Echo having just put a vinyl record down on a player that didn’t belong to him. Because nothing in this house truly did—everything belonged to them. They were in their rightful place. It was Lucas who, somehow, was the intruder.

  Echo began to sway back and forth, her mug of whatever it was she’d been drinking discarded. It was gentle at first, as she waited for the music to build. Then there was something terrible about her movement, unnatural, like a puppet with its strings yanked tight. She flailed her arms, her hair whipping right and left. Her eyes met his as she danced, flashing with an alarming eagerness.

  Lucas couldn’t look. He turned away from her, his gaze tumbling across the room until it stopped on his daughter. Jeanie was swaying to the music on the opposite side of the room, her mouth turned up in a dreamy smile. Her eyes were closed, and her hair was longer than it should have been. Straighter, having grown a good six inches in the last ten seconds. Just as Jeff Halcomb appeared younger, there was something about Jeanie’s movements that promised Lucas his little girl wasn’t his anymore.

  And when she looked up at him and gave him a coy smile, the air in his lungs vaporized to nothing. Jeanie’s eyes were no longer green. They were blue.

  Blue like Audra Snow’s.

  “Oh my God.” He twisted where he stood, grabbed Halcomb by the arms, only to shove him away, as though having grasped fire.

  How can I touch him? How is he really here?

  The culmination of three decades of Jeffrey’s intricate planning, of unwavering faith, had been set in motion. He was about to repeat the ritual, set what had been interrupted right after all this time. He needed another Audra, a vulnerable girl who was full of contradictory emotions. Love and hate and hurt and confusion. All the shit Lucas and Caroline had shoved into their now broken daughter with their fighting, their refusal to let either party win.

  Echo’s dancing transformed into an erratic spasm. Lucas winced as she convulsed yet somehow stayed on her feet. Foam collected in the corners of her mouth. The eight ghosts that had stood throughout the room had shifted, and were now lying in the center of the room, convulsing in the form of a human star. Red plastic cups littered the ground next to them. Echo shook in the center of the formation, then crashed to her knees with a choking gasp, seizing in the center of the dead.

  Lucas lunged for his daughter. Grabbing her by the arm, he yanked her toward him, ready to run, sure that if he was only able to make it out of the house Jeanie would come back to him. She would, by some miracle, be herself again. But rather than stumbling toward him, Jeanie stood still, stuck in place just as she had been upstairs in her room. She stared at him with blank, disbelieving eyes, unable to comprehend why he would deny her happiness. Why would he insist she continue living with his misery.

  Don’t you want me to be happy?

  All that came of Lucas’s seizure of her arms was Halcomb’s cross coming loose from her hand. She let go of it, and it transferred into his own grip. He stared at it—a token of the past brought into the present. Or was the present now the past? It was a beacon, the thing that had led Halcomb back to the house. Just as Lucas had agreed to live in Pier Pointe without so much as a second thought, he’d brought that cross into the house once more. Just as Jeff had expected him to. Just the way he wanted.

  That was when Jeff darted forward so quickly that Lucas didn’t have time to react. Halcomb snarled as he squeezed his hands around Lucas’s throat. A violent forward pull sent both men crashing into each other, leaving Lucas to gasp for air as if nearly drowned. He tumbled onto the living room floor, the cross still in his grasp. Giant swallows refilled his deflated lungs. The air was redolent of sweet smoke. Red fruit. It was like tasting a scent, like walking into an overly perfumed room and smacking your tongue against the roof of your mouth.

  The room became brighter. More real, like a yellowed photograph coming clear.

  The room was brighter and Jeff was gone.

  57

  * * *

  March 14, 1983

  Twenty Minutes Before the Sacrament

  AUDRA TRIED TO run. She caught a break and made for the trees behind the house, but she could hear them behind her, whooping and laughing as though it was all just a game. They cornered her, grabbed her by her arms and legs, and carried her back to the house while she wept for mercy. But she knew no clemency would be given, because this wasn’t about her. This was about the baby. She was little more than a host, and could mercilessly be disposed of.

  They dropped her onto the floor in the center of the living room, and through her frantic, hysterical tears, Audra saw Maggie emerge from the kitchen. She was carrying
what looked like party cups. “Drink,” she said, distributing the cups among the group. Kenzie and Nolan took turns holding Audra down as they gulped whatever it was Maggie had concocted.

  Maggie paused next to Jeffrey. She placed a hand on his forearm in a thoughtful way. “Hard to believe we’re finally here,” she said.

  “It is,” Jeffrey agreed. “But here we are.”

  “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” Maggie said with a chuckle. “Just think of how far we’ve come since meeting in Veldt.”

  Audra couldn’t put it together, didn’t understand what they were talking about, but she remembered then—Jeff had mentioned that they needed Maggie to take care of things. What things?

  That’s when it hit her: they were really going to do it, they were going to kill her.

  And what would become of the baby? What would become of her mother? Her father? How long would it be before her parents knew she was dead? Please, she thought, I take it back. I take it all back. I don’t want them to find me like this. Let it be the mailman, the meter reader, the police—anything but them.

  Deacon approached her, and for a split second, Audra’s soul was ignited by hope. Maybe he was remembering the connection they had made on the beach, or felt pity for her and would somehow talk the group out of doing whatever it was they had planned. This isn’t the girl we want. We’ve made a mistake. Let’s move on, forget the whole thing.

  Deacon knelt next to her, and for a moment she was sure he was her salvation. But his words brought promise of something else. “I always knew you were the one,” he said. “You’re scared now, but death is only temporary. Trust in this, Avis. Have faith.”