His smile widened a touch as he said the word cozy, and Drew caught the not-so-subtle sexual innuendo. He chose to ignore it, though.
“Trevor wanted to stop by the Historical Society, and Amber decided to go with him. I figured I’d catch up with them later.” For some reason, he was reluctant to tell Greg that they’d gone there to brush up on the history of the Lowry House. He didn’t want him to know that the three of them were hoping to unlock their repressed memories this weekend. With sociopaths, the less information you told them, the better. They’d just use it as ammunition against you.
This is ridiculous, he told himself. You’re treating Greg like he’s some kind of enemy who’s out to get you. Since when did you decide to buy a ticket for the paranoia train?
Maybe he was overreacting, but he’d learned over the years to trust his instincts, and he wasn’t about to start ignoring them now.
“I suppose Trevor wanted to do research for one of his books,” Greg said. “I’ve read a couple and found them amusing enough, I suppose, though a little hard to take seriously.” He smiled. “Dry retellings of old, tired ghost stories, for the most part. Stairs that creak in the dead of night, strange shadows glimpsed through windows, voices whispering words one can’t quite make out, an unseen hand trailing cold fingers along one’s flesh . . . kid stuff. Parlor tricks that in the end don’t amount to much.”
“Oh? You don’t think they could be an attempt on the part of the dead to communicate, to bridge the gap between our two worlds?”
Greg let out a derisive sniff. “That’s what people would like to think, but the reality is so much more . . .” He trailed off with a look of surprise, as if he’d been about to say more than he’d wanted. He covered his discomfort with another smile, this one feigning warmth. “As much as I’m enjoying talking to you, Drew, I should get going. All the major preparations for tonight have been taken care of, but you know how it is, always a million little last-minute details to attend to.” He stood. “Good talking with you. I hope we’ll get a chance to do it again before the reunion’s over.”
Still sporting his fake smile, Greg offered his hand for Drew to shake.
Drew hesitated. The thought of touching Greg made his skin crawl, but he didn’t know why. Not wishing to appear rude, he ignored his instincts, reached out, and clasped Greg’s hand.
A wave of vertigo engulfed him, his vision grayed and went black, and when the world became clear and steady once more, he found himself standing in someone’s living room. His first impression of the place was that it was old: the wooden floorboards were warped, the walls needed painting, and the plaster was cracked and chipped in spots. The furniture wasn’t much better. Threadbare couch and easy chair, fabric worn and colors faded. Curtains that might have once been white but were now pus-yellow. The smell of stale cigarette smoke and mold hung thick on the air, adding to the overall atmosphere of despair and slow dissolution.
Sitting on the couch, bathed in the harsh light of an old floor lamp, was a middle-aged man. Thin, almost cadaverously so, with sunken cheeks and dark hollows around his eyes, as if he hadn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep in weeks, maybe months. The lower half of his care-lined face was covered by an unkempt white beard, and he wore his white hair long and bound in a ponytail. He wore a stained T-shirt that sported a faded Corona logo, black jeans, and brown work boots.
The man sat hunched forward, elbows on knees, head hanging down. He looked tired, as tired as anyone Drew had ever seen. A large hunting knife rested on the couch next to him, and held loosely in his right hand—so loose it looked as if it might slip out of his fingers any second and fall to the floor with a heavy metallic thud—was a pistol. Drew didn’t know much about guns, but he still recognized the weapon as a nine-millimeter. He knew this because that was the gun John Lowry had used to kill his family, and that’s who the tired, rail-thin figure sitting on the couch was: the infamous murderer who’d given the Lowry House its name.
Drew understood that he was experiencing a hallucination of some kind, but rather than being disturbed by this fact, he was fascinated. It was astoundingly realistic, and not just the sights and sounds. He could feel his own body—the solid heft of it, the way the floorboards gave beneath his weight—feel the air passing in and out of his lungs, the increasing tempo of his heart as adrenaline ramped up his system. Like anyone else, he’d had dreams that he believed were real while they were taking place, but no matter how realistic those dreams might have seemed at the time, they were nothing compared with this. Those dreams might have seemed real, but this hallucination was indistinguishable from reality. That meant one of two things: either he had gone insane, or what he was experiencing was the result of some kind of paranormal phenomenon. He didn’t feel crazy, but then, in his professional experience, the craziest people believed they were sane.
Best assume for the moment that he was sane and that what he was experiencing was more than a complex and realistic delusion. But that assumption was a mixed bag, emotionally. On the one hand, not being insane would come as a huge relief. But finding himself trapped in some kind of psychic time warp and transported back to the night Lowry shot his family to death before planting a bullet in his own brain wasn’t exactly a comfort.
Was this what Amber, Trevor, and he had seen on that long-ago night when the Lowry House burned to the ground? A vision of Lowry himself, sitting alone and despondent in his living room, holding on to his gun while who knew what dark thoughts slid black and silent through his diseased mind?
“I don’t want to. I won’t.”
Lowry didn’t raise his head as he spoke, and his words came out so soft they were more breathed than spoken.
Without thinking about it, Drew took a step closer so he could hear better. A floorboard creaked beneath his foot, the sound loud in the silence of the room, but Lowry didn’t react. He wondered if the man heard the sound or if he was too lost in the twisting corridors of his own mind.
Or maybe I’m not here—not completely, anyway, Drew thought. Maybe he and Lowry were somehow out of phase with each other, and while Drew could see and hear him, he was invisible to Lowry.
He decided to test his theory.
“What don’t you want to do?” he asked, speaking loudly enough to be heard but keeping his tone calm and gentle, as he’d done hundreds of times when talking to patients.
Lowry sat there for a time, quiet and still. But then he spoke, his words still below the level of a whisper, and Drew had to strain to hear him. “Hurt them.”
A chill fingered down the length of Drew’s spine. He didn’t have to ask whom Lowry referred to. “You don’t have to,” Drew said.
He started to take another step forward, but as the floorboard creaked a second time, Lowry’s head snapped up, and he glared at him with eyes that blazed with equal parts madness and fury. Lowry raised the gun and aimed it at Drew’s chest. Drew felt a cold, sick feeling deep in his gut, as if he’d been punched by a fist of ice.
“What the fuck do you know about it?” Lowry raised the volume now, his whispering giving way to a gravelly roughness.
An instant ago, the man had appeared drained of energy, but now he was alert, muscles wire-taut, and he held the gun in a rock-steady grip.
Drew couldn’t tell if the gun’s safety was off, but he intended to proceed as if it was. If this was a hallucination, then he wouldn’t be hurt if Lowry fired. An imaginary bullet wouldn’t cause him any harm. But if this was something other than a hallucination, then maybe a bullet could hurt him. No point in taking any chances.
He raised his hands and showed Lowry his empty palms. “You’re right. I don’t know anything about it.”
“Damn straight,” Lowry said, sounding only partially mollified. He kept the gun trained on Drew, but his trigger finger relaxed a little.
Drew waited to see if the man was going to add anything else, but after several moments passed without another word from Lowry, he said, “How long have you been sitting the
re?”
Lowry opened his mouth to answer, then paused and frowned. “I don’t know.” No anger in his voice now, only confusion. “A long time, I think. Hours, probably. Not days, though.” He frowned once more, as if trying to recall. Then he looked at Drew with an almost pleading expression. “Do you know?”
Drew shook his head, making sure to keep his hands raised and motionless. “No. I just got here.”
Lowry nodded as if this was the answer he’d expected, but if it disappointed him, he gave no sign. “You’re not one of them, are you? The voices, I mean. I’ve never seen any of them before, only heard them. But you don’t sound like them.”
“What do the voices sound like?” Drew asked.
Lowry’s eyes narrowed. “You pulling my leg? You’ve got to be able to hear them—they’ve been talking the whole time you’ve been here. Hell, they’re talking right now. Goddamned things are so loud I can barely hear myself think. Some of them tell me to use the gun, others say I should use the knife. But they all want the same thing in the end. They want me to hurt my family. Hurt them bad.”
“I believe you . . .” Drew searched his memory for the man’s first name. “John. I hope you’ll believe me when I say I can’t hear them. At least, not clearly enough to make out what they’re saying.”
Drew rarely lied to patients, but over the years, he’d learned that sometimes you had to play along with their delusions in order to keep them talking. Lowry might not be his patient, but the principle was the same.
Lowry’s upper lip curled into a sneer. “Well, then, you must be pretty damned hard of hearing.” He paused, and his sneer melted away. “Or maybe I’ve lived with them for so long now that I can hear what nobody else can.” His face brightened then. “But I think I can help you.”
The man jumped up from the couch so swiftly that Drew had no time to react, let alone think about defending himself as Lowry rushed toward him. But Lowry didn’t fire his gun, and neither did he use it as a bludgeon. Instead, he thrust it into Drew’s hand, then stepped back and regarded him, head cocked to the side, as if he were an artist examining his work with a critical eye. He smiled and nodded, pleased.
Drew had never held a gun before, and he was surprised by how heavy it felt. Damned cold, too. Far colder than metal should feel, more like ice. So cold it burned his hand. He tried to let go of the gun, but his fingers refused to pull away from the metal. They felt stuck, almost fused to it, like sticking your tongue to a metal lamppost in the dead of winter. He gave his hand a shake in an attempt to dislodge the gun, and when that didn’t work, he tried prying his fingers loose with his left hand. Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t separate his fingers from the metal, and he wondered if he would be forced to sacrifice a layer or two of skin in order to divest himself of the weapon.
He felt panic begin to rise, and he forced himself to remain calm. Not only would losing control of his emotions be counterproductive, but he also suspected that in this place—whatever its precise nature—his fear would be used against him.
He looked at Lowry, surprised to feel an urge to raise the nine-millimeter and aim it at the man. He had never held a weapon before, and he’d never contemplated using one against a fellow human being, had never even fantasized about it. But here he was, fighting the urge to train the gun on Lowry, just as Lowry had held the gun on him only a moment ago. What the hell was wrong with him?
Lowry’s smile widened. “See? You can hear them now!”
“What are you talking about? I don’t . . .” Drew trailed off. Maybe he did hear something. A kind of buzz deep within his ears, almost as if tiny insects had infested his aural canal and were crawling around inside. But whatever the sound was—assuming it was real and not a product of his imagination—there were no words to it, nothing even close to an approximation of sense and order. And yet . . . the more he listened, the more the noise seemed to convey a sort of meaning. Not concepts or images but something far more primal. It was the buzz that had caused him to aim the gun at Lowry, he was certain of it. And it was telling him to do more than just point the weapon at the man. Much more.
“Go ahead,” Lowry said. “I want you to. I’ve listened to the voices for so long, it’ll be such a relief when they’re gone. You know how some people picture heaven as a place filled with beautiful warm light? Not me. I think of heaven as a place of complete and total silence.” He drew in a long breath and let it out. “So, please. Do it.”
The buzz in Drew’s ears got louder, and he felt his finger tighten on the trigger. “No,” he whispered.
“It’s OK. I want you to.” Lowry stepped toward Drew and stopped when his chest touched the muzzle of the gun.
The buzzing grew even louder and rose in pitch, as if the insects were becoming excited. The pounding of Drew’s heart formed a desperate backbeat to the insect voices, and he felt a bead of sweat roll down the back of his neck. He focused his will on making his arm lower the gun, but his body refused to obey him. He tried instead to turn to the side so the gun would no longer be pointing at Lowry, but his body didn’t respond to this command, either. It seemed there was nothing he could do but stand there, gun barrel jammed against Lowry’s chest, his finger tightening on the trigger.
When the explosion came, the impact jolted up Drew’s arm and into his shoulder, but his hand remained steady, held frozen in place by the buzzing in his ears. Blood sprayed out of the exit wound in Lowry’s back, and the man flew backward as if punched. His eyes rolled white in their sockets, but a beatific smile was fixed on his face as he fell. He landed in a wet red pool of his own blood with a sickening squelch and lay still.
Drew couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. He stared down at Lowry’s dead body, unable to believe what he’d done.
Not you—the voices! They did it! They made you hold the gun, made you pull the trigger . . . That’s what he told himself, but even if it was true, it didn’t do anything to blunt the terrible, crushing guilt he felt at having ended another man’s life.
The voices had a different reaction to Lowry’s death. The excited buzz quieted, became relaxed, almost drowsy, as if its hunger had been sated and it was content.
The silence in the living room was cut by a frantic voice calling down from upstairs.
“John! Are you all right? What happened?”
It was a woman’s voice—Lowry’s wife, Drew guessed—and she sounded terrified. He didn’t blame her. Hearing an unexpected gunshot in your home in the middle of the night was bound to shatter anyone’s composure.
Another voice. “Mommy! What’s happening? I’m scared!” A little girl, maybe five or so. It was accompanied by a third voice, this one of an even younger child crying. The sound was high-pitched and loud, and Drew couldn’t guess the child’s gender, but he remembered that Lowry had two children, a girl and a boy. This, then, was presumably the boy crying.
Drew wanted to call out and reassure them, but what could he say? It’s OK. I shot your husband and your daddy, but he’s dead now, and there’s nothing more to worry about.
The buzzing once more increased in volume and intensity, and while it still didn’t form any words, he had no trouble understanding what it was trying to communicate.
Nothing to worry about? I wouldn’t say that.
His right foot slid forward of its own volition, followed by his left. His right slid forward again, and once more his left followed suit. He tried to reassert control over his legs, but he had no more success than when he’d tried to stop himself from shooting Lowry. His feet continued moving him forward, and with a cold, sinking feeling, he realized where they were taking him.
The stairs.
By killing Lowry, he’d prevented the man from harming his wife and children, but it seemed that the voices were determined to make sure that history repeated itself, one way or another. And since Lowry could no longer carry the gun upstairs, the voices had chosen someone else to do it.
Drew mounted the first step. Then the second. The bu
zzing was loud again, excited and insistent, urging him onward, urging him to climb faster.
The woman’s voice came again, uncertain and afraid. “John? Honey, is that you?”
The third step creaked, and the small boy’s cries became more strident, as if he sensed what was coming up the stairs for him. The girl called for her mommy once more.
With his left hand, Drew grabbed hold of the wooden railing and tightened his grip. His foot tried to mount the next step, but his hold on the railing prevented it.
The buzzing became angry then, increasing in volume until it felt as if a pair of razor-sharp daggers had been plunged into his ears. His face scrunched up in pain, but he refused to release his grip on the railing. The buzzing grew even louder, and the pain intensified to the point where it felt as if his skull might burst like a rotten melon.
He gritted his teeth against the pain, and tears streamed down his cheeks. The agony inside his head became his entire world, drove out all other thoughts. He could no longer remember his name, was no longer even aware of himself as an entity separate from the pain. He knew two things: that the pain would go away if he let go of the railing and that he would rather die than allow that to happen.
He sensed the shrug in the voice as it said, If that’s the way you want it . . .
His hand raised the gun to his face, inserted the muzzle into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
TWELVE
“I’ll see you at the banquet.”
Drew looked at Greg, struggling to comprehend what the man had said.
Greg gave his hand a last pump before releasing it and starting to walk away. He got a few feet before he stopped and turned back around to face Drew.
“You know, I used to consider you something of a rival,” Greg said. “You weren’t as smart as I was, but Trevor and Amber looked up to you and followed your lead.” His smile verged on a leer. “Especially Amber. I was jealous. I didn’t want to just be a member of your group; I wanted to be its leader. I suppose in a way, I wanted to be you.” He paused and looked thoughtful. “Seems silly now, doesn’t it?”
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