The light began to dim to a yellow glow, weaker, weaker. I strained to see the painting—
Before my eyes, like black mold growing in time lapse, tiny specks percolated through the wall, widened into patches that widened into areas, surrounded then covered the picture, thickening, ever thickening—toward me.
I suppose it was logic, pragmatism, and yes, my own vanity that kept me in the chair, none of which deterred the phenomenon. It boiled out of the wall, an inky eruption. In the faint orange light from my phone I searched for the picture on the wall—it was inundated, gone. The bed disappeared next, then the nightstand. The presence obscured the top of the door, then the top half, filling the room, expanding downward. The closet was nowhere to be seen. As if with a diabolical mind, it saved my little corner for last, swallowing up the space on my right, on my left . . . above me.
The light from my phone went dead.
CHAPTER
9
Four Messages
I had no thoughts, no theories, nothing left but instinct. I dropped to the floor because it was the only place to go. I rolled, groping about for bearings, trying to find the door.
I felt a weight on my left shoulder, and then a painful compression as if something had taken hold of me. It was not by my choice that I ended up flat on my back, sightless in the dark, fighting, grappling, contacting nothing, while something directly above bore down with a weight that expelled the air from my chest. My very next breath . . . would not come.
I pounded the floor, kicked, screamed without sound. As consciousness, as life itself, broke away in pieces with the passing seconds, I was lost to panic.
I cannot say, for I do not recall, that I prayed. I cannot say what transaction, if any, may have occurred in the blackening remnants of my consciousness. I can only guess that for whatever reason, the House was satisfied, its message delivered. The weight lifted. Air rushed into my lungs. My reawakened limbs got me to the door, out of that room, and into the hall.
The moon had risen, casting precious light through a window at the end of the hall. I thought only of breathing as I labored to my feet, leaning against the wall to support myself. My mind returned with the question of calling for the others—
The very next door burst open and Andi, a dripping, spewing silhouette, tumbled into the hall, rebounded from the opposite wall, and collided with me, coughing, flailing as if drowning. I wrapped my arms around her to bear her up. She spewed water from her mouth and nose, splattering me, the wall, the floor, and I recognized the briny scent, even caught the taste once again, of seawater. She gagged, coughed, gasped for air.
“Easy now,” I said, not wanting an explanation, only wanting to calm her, to save her. “Breathe, girl, just breathe.”
She calmed, quit flailing as I held her, and with admirable intention drew several wheezing breaths.
“That’s it, that’s it.”
She was dripping wet as if plucked from the sea. Shivering. Her nose was running. Blood from a head wound streaked her face.
She was my employee, but in that moment she could have been my daughter. I bolted into the room that had nearly smothered me. Defiant, not caring what the House might do, I tore the comforter from the bed and returned, throwing it over Andi’s shoulders. She wrapped it around herself, calming, breathing steadily.
“All right?” I asked.
She nodded, willing each breath. “I was in the ocean . . . the whole room was filled with water . . .”
By now I was oxygenated and thinking again. “We’d better check on the others.”
We knocked on Brenda’s door but didn’t wait for the answer we didn’t get. We found her flopped on the bed as if lifeless. We shook her, called her name, with no response. I felt the artery in her neck. She was alive but barely breathing. “Let’s get her up.”
Taking her arms over our shoulders, we bore her from the room. She was limp, nodding off, muttering as if drugged.
“Come on, walk,” Andi coached her. “Walk!”
A few feet into the hall, Brenda jerked as if startled. Her legs went to work, bearing her up as her eyes opened and rolled about. “Whaz ’appenin’?” We propped her against the wall. “Whaddaya guys doin’?”
Andi checked her arms. “Look!”
Both arms bore the needle tracks of an addict. The vein in the crook of her left arm bore a needle mark that was recent, red, and swollen.
For an instant I wanted to confront her, rebuke her for such wanton, self-serving, irresponsible—
But then I noticed that Andi’s hair, silhouetted in the patch of light at the end of the hall, was wild again. “Excuse me.” I reached and felt it. It was dry.
She felt it, then felt her clothing under the comforter, which prompted her to look once again at Brenda’s arms.
The needle tracks were fading.
And so was Brenda’s stupor. Her eyes focused. She stroked her arms. “Where’d the guy go?”
“What guy?” asked Andi, her eyes inches from Brenda’s.
Brenda recovered further and shook her head. “I was dreaming. Some guy shooting me up . . .” A wave of emotion. She covered her face.
I checked for the wound on Andi’s head. It was gone, along with the blood that had streaked her face.
And it was in that moment that I saw beyond her frizzy hair, stark in the moonlight at the end of the hall . . .
A child.
I froze. Brenda and Andi followed my gaze and were as stupefied as I was.
He was a lad of ten years or so, dressed in jeans, untucked shirt, and tennis shoes. His backlit hair glowed like an aura around his head. Despite all our clamor, he didn’t seem frightened, but fascinated, studying each of us.
“Please tell me you see that,” I whispered. I caught Andi’s, then Brenda’s eyes. Yes, their faces told me, they saw it too. We looked again—
In that instant of inattention, the lad had vanished. Nothing remained at the end of the hall but an empty patch of moonlight.
And then came the laughter. As if we had become the brunt of a cruel joke, from somewhere came a riotous, mocking laughter, the very stuff of ghost stories and horror movies. We all jumped, quivered. The ladies cowered against the wall, arms protective. I found myself in the center of the hallway, vulnerable on every side and spinning to look for . . . what? Surely not a ghost.
But where was that laughter coming from?
We looked about, narrowed it down . . .
The last door, at the end of the hall. Tank’s room.
This was not appropriate, not in keeping with anything we’d experienced. He’d scared years off our lives. What the devil could that big oaf be laughing about at a time like this?
We hurried—I stormed—down the hall to the bedroom door. I rapped on the door so hard I hurt my knuckles.
He was still laughing, whooping, hollering.
I flung the door open and there he stood, enraptured, grinning, wagging his head in wonder as he looked all around the room at—
We saw nothing but a dark bedroom.
“This is so incredible!” he whooped. “Wow! Can you believe this?”
“Believe what?” I asked.
He wagged his head in spellbound wonder. “It is just so beautiful, so perfect!”
His joy made Brenda feel no better. “He’s on acid or something.”
“Look at that sky!” said Tank. “It just keeps going and going . . . and . . . you hear that music?”
Of course, we didn’t.
“Man, can they sing!” Then he sank to his knees in . . . well, a religious moment. “I can see Him! I can see Him standing right there!”
“We need to get him out of here,” said Brenda.
“We all need to get out of here,” said Andi.
I’d had all the scientific inquiry I could bear for one night. “I heartily agree.”
“You can’t see this?” Tank was desperate for us to share his experience.
No. We couldn’t see it.
“It’s heaven! It’s gotta be!”
Of course there would be no tearing Tank away from his visions by physical force. We had to talk him back to earth, tell him we were concerned about safety, tired . . .
Scared to the point of a complete emptying of our bowels, Brenda said—I’m paraphrasing.
Tank was elated, satisfied, bolstered in every inch of his being, and that was a lot of inches. He came with us, talking about the flowers, the smells, the music, the joy of the place, the love he saw in “His” face. We got him through the front door and across the street to the woods.
Even in the dark, Van Epps could tell we were out of kilter. “What happened? What did you see?”
“Data we should only discuss by daylight and under calmer circumstances,” I insisted.
“I didn’t see anything from out here,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve wasted drive space on—” He went blank, eyes peering across the street.
We turned.
The House was gone.
CHAPTER
10
A Heated Debriefing
We gathered in the supposed safety of Van Epps’ home for the few remaining hours before daylight. We needed sleep, but of course we couldn’t get it.
When morning came, our eyes were burning and our nerves were raw. We were in no condition to butt heads over findings and procedures. Tank, wiser than I’d given him credit for, went for a morning jog to depressurize. The rest of us entered into battle, our pointing fingers our swords and coffee cups our shields.
“It’s gone,” said Van Epps. “And so is the opportunity! The House was yours and you let it get away.”
Brenda’s crazed eyes and dreadlocks made her a veritable Medusa. “Now listen here, you—” She described him from a library of expletives. “You weren’t there! You didn’t see it, you didn’t feel it, you didn’t almost get killed!”
“So where’s the data? How do we control this thing? Tell me!”
“Whatcha got on your video besides three hours of static?” She turned to me and Andi. “Guy can’t even run a camera!”
Van Epps came back at me, finger waving. “I did not desert my post!”
Fearing Brenda might round the kitchen table to scratch his eyes out, I intervened. “The data can only be understood by calm and objective minds in the light of day—”
“Oh, shut up!” She was just as angry with me. “Don’t give me that super scientist crap! You were about to piss in your pants.”
“Yes! Yes, I admit being terrified, but that’s my point. On a human level—”
She mimicked me, “ . . . on a human level . . .”
Disrespect always sets me off. “On a human level we can’t trust our impressions because they are skewed by emotion.”
Andi—my employee!—jumped in. “But emotions are part of it—they’re part of the message. We were supposed to be scared!”
“We are not dealing with a message. We’re dealing with an explainable phenomenon, with observations, data, that’s all.”
“The House was trying to get our attention!”
“Well, see, now you’ve assigned it some kind of personality.”
Brenda’s long fingernail pointed like a weapon. “She didn’t assign nothin’! She’s right, that thing’s talking and, baby, I’m hearing it and you’d better listen too if you want to save your sorry ass!”
Van Epps had a mini-fit in his corner of the room. “So this is the team you brought?”
How dare he? “I didn’t bring them!”
He shot a glance at Andi.
I pointed to Brenda. “Well, I didn’t bring her!”
Brenda slammed down her coffee cup. “That’s it, man! I’m outta here!” She addressed Andi on her way to the hall. “This guy ain’t human and that’s why he’s missing the whole point!” She glared at me. “You got as much sense as a refrigerator!”
She was looking for the closet to get her coat. The door she tried was locked. She struck it with her fist.
“Other door,” I said.
Andi perked up and went into the hall.
“You’re not leaving as well?” I asked.
She ignored me, preoccupied by that locked door.
My cell phone—our phones were the only thing among us recharged—played Beethoven’s Fifth. “Yeah?”
“Hey, howdy!”
I was so emphatically, even dangerously not in the mood. “What is it?”
He told me but I had to ask him to repeat it. He did.
My world changed.
Brenda was coming out of the hall, headed for the front door. I waved at her to stop. She flipped me off. “It’s Tank!” I tried again. “Please. Please wait.”
Invoking Tank’s name worked. She rolled her eyes at the ceiling, but she stopped. Andi was all eyes and ears.
I got a quick report from Tank, found out where he was, and ended the call.
We had to come back from the brink. Hand raised and voice quiet, I said, “All right. We have more data. Now. Calmly, in the daylight, let’s agree, please, that we will hear all sides on this.” I made eye contact with Brenda. “And that includes me. I will listen to you.”
Brenda sniffed in disgust and looked away, but she stayed where she was.
“Andi . . . a word.”
I led Andi into the living room, cautioned her to silence, and spoke into her ear. “Have you found any precedents for this, any case of a House . . . carrying messages, as you put it?”
She seemed to be confessing. “No, but—”
“I have some research I need you to do . . .”
Andi went into the kitchen and asked Van Epps for his camera. Van Epps was about to protest, as I expected, but I deftly changed to a more pressing subject. “The House is back. It’s right down the street.”
That worked. As if everything up to this point, especially our quarrels, was forgotten, we all poured into the street.
I hardly had to direct everyone’s attention. I merely looked down the hill and so did they, and we saw the two-story Victorian sitting there as if it had been part of the neighborhood for years.
I expected Van Epps would fly into a seething, four-letter rage, and so he did. So much for logical and practical. This was not the man I once knew, and that seemed to carry a message as much as anything else we were dealing with.
“If you can grant us another chance,” I told him, “we’d like to go down there and complete what we couldn’t complete last night.”
He eased just enough to scold me: “Well, make sure you do!” He waved us on and stormed back into his house. For a moment I saw him pulling back the front blinds to watch.
“Andi, please get that information and join us when you have it.” I could see a protest forming and averted it. “It’s vital.”
She went inside to fire up her computer.
“So where’s Tank?” Brenda asked.
“He’s in the House, even as we speak.”
CHAPTER
11
Daniel
It was a short walk, during which Brenda and I said not a word to each other. I felt it would be a long time before we did.
Remarkable. The House appeared just as it had the night before: same yard, walkway, planting beds, everything.
Except this time, Tank was standing in the front door, smiling and waving.
I looked at Brenda and she afforded me a cold, wordless return. Even so, by her tentative gait up the walkway I could tell she felt the same familiar fear I did. We did not like this place.
As for Tank . . . his comfort, his joy with the House was so incongruous as to suggest a meaning of its own.
“Hey, y’all, come on in! I got someone I wantcha to meet!”
Tank turned and went in as if we would follow him.
“Well,” I said, “it scared us, but it didn’t kill us.”
“First time for everything,” she responded.
She’d said something to me. Bolstered, I ventured inside. She followed, giving a closet d
oor a side glance as we passed through the hallway into the kitchen.
Tank had taken a seat at the breakfast table, and there beside him, having a bowl of cereal, was the child. He was dressed in the same untucked shirt and jeans, and now that he was sitting with one foot boyishly askew, I noticed he was missing a sock.
“Everybody, this is Daniel.”
The boy looked up at us, munching on his breakfast, expression neutral. I smiled, stumbling over myself to be nonthreatening.
Brenda seemed to have her own issues where a child was concerned. Her cold exterior gave way to an abrupt and inexplicable sorrow that she fought back. At length, she took some deep breaths, then stooped to the boy’s level with a smile I’d never seen before. “Daniel, it’s great to meet you, baby.”
Tank gestured toward an empty chair next to Daniel. “And this is . . . well, I called him Harvey but Daniel didn’t like that. So we don’t know his name.”
Daniel looked up at an invisible someone sitting in that chair, a sizable person, judging from his eye line. I looked at the empty chair, at a loss. Nothing was ever going to be normal again, was it?
Tank must have read my face. He laughed, and it was a kind laugh; I took it that way. “Oh, you’re all right. I don’t see him either. But Daniel does.”
Daniel exchanged a smile with the friend who wasn’t there.
Brenda asked, “Well . . . is Daniel . . . ?”
Tank reached over and tousled the boy’s hair. “Oh yeah. He’s real.”
Brenda pointed at Tank’s tattoo, the one featuring our motley four and this small boy.
Tank shook his head in wonder. “Ain’t that wild?” Then he stood. “Hey buddy, we’re gonna go into the next room and talk a bit. You just finish up your breakfast, okay?”
The boy gave Tank a smile of complete trust.
Brenda and I went with Tank into the living room, and I noticed how much better I felt. Brenda seemed much more at ease as well. It could have been Tank’s carefree and comfortable manner, plus the fact that the living room—indeed, the whole House—was lovely in the daylight, not threatening or mysterious. In any case, I was thinking clearly, and that was indispensable.
Invitation: The Call, The Haunted, The Sentinels, The Girl Page 9