We stood in a tight triangle in the finely furnished room.
“Is this the boy you saw last night?” Tank asked.
“He’s the one,” said Brenda as I nodded.
“I was out jogging, you know, and here he comes running out from between those houses just down the hill, and he’s looking scared like somebody’s chasing him, and I hollered, ‘Hey, bud, you okay?’ He acted like he knew who I was because he just came running to me with his arms out, and I picked him up and he put his arms around me and just hung on.
“But—” Tank paused for effect and then wagged his finger to make a point. “I saw two people right on Daniel’s tail, and you know what? They were there last night, standing there with the other folks watching the House and watching us.”
“A man and a woman?” I asked. “She had short black hair, and he was young, six feet tall, close-cropped hair?”
“Wearing black. Last night and today. They must like black.”
“Go on.”
“I asked ’em, ‘Hey, you want something?’ but they just got out of there, didn’t say a word.” Tank made sure to meet our eyes. “I think they were up to no good. Daniel was scared of ’em, but now they had to deal with me so they took off. Good thing.”
“Did Daniel know who they were?”
Tank shrugged. “He didn’t say anything . . . but he doesn’t usually.” He hushed his voice and leaned in. “But here’s something for you: I was gonna bring him back to Van Epps’ place, and he wasn’t about to go there, either. Looks like he knows that place and he’s really scared of it.”
“But this place doesn’t scare him at all?” Brenda wondered.
“Hey, I tell you what, I was just trying to figure out what to do with him when, bammo, man, here’s the House, right here. He dragged me through the front door like he wanted to hide in here, so here we are.”
I suggested, “So he’s the one who likes peanut butter and jam sandwiches?”
“There’s food in the House, stuff that’s easy to fix. I guess he’s been living here, or hiding here.”
“So . . . who is he? Where’d he come from?”
Tank could only shrug. “Guess we could ask him.”
We went back into the kitchen. Brenda had the heart, the gentleness to try the direct approach. “Hey, sweetie, we’re kind of wondering, just what are you doing here? Do you know why you’re here?”
Daniel looked at his invisible friend as if for an answer. Then he directed a long, studying gaze at me and said, “Not yet.”
Perhaps it was an answer to Brenda’s question. Strangely, I felt it was a message to me.
CHAPTER
12
One Final Message
Hello?” came a call from the street.
It was Andi, planted timidly on the pavement. I beckoned from the front door. “Come on in, the coast is clear.”
She kept eyeing the House, every step cautious as she came up the front steps and through the doorway. Meeting Daniel helped dispel her fears, though it left her as puzzled as the rest of us.
“What did you find out?” I asked as we four clustered in the living room.
Andi kept her voice low for the child’s sake. “I got a report from the assisted living facility. Clyde Morris must have been quite a crumb; they didn’t have anything good to say about him. But it’s kind of pitiful: They say he died from suffocation. Apparently he rolled over into his pillow and couldn’t right himself.”
“And Gustav Svensson?”
Andi nodded. “He was a real person, an old fisherman who lived on his boat in the harbor. People say he was a nasty old coot, but he died four days ago.” She took a breath, maybe to be sure she still could. “He drowned. But he had a blow to his head. Folks figure he slipped, hit his head, and fell off his boat.”
We all met each other’s eyes as the pieces came together.
“So,” said Brenda, “Mister objective, scientific, poo-poo-the-supernatural-stuff, what do you say now?”
I knew she wanted to corner me. That wasn’t about to happen. “Whatever this is . . . it is what it is.”
“Oh, that’s good, that’s real good.”
“This is a scientific inquiry. Consequently, even though the means by which we acquire the data is open to question, the data itself could be true. Whatever this is, and however it works, we can’t rule out what the House seems . . . to be telling us.”
Tank nodded toward the kitchen and young Daniel. “And still is. By the way, his last name is Petrovski. It’s written on his shirt collar, and there was a phone number under his name.” He handed me a torn corner of paper napkin with the number scrawled on it. I handed it to Andi.
“I’m on it,” she said.
“Okay,” said Brenda. “So, believing what the House is saying . . . who died from a drug overdose?”
“Or still might?” I said. “And the files in Van Epps’ camera?”
“Three folders, one hour each, nothing but static.”
Brenda reiterated, “Guy can’t run a camera.”
“And there is still . . .” I looked toward the door in the hallway that was locked the night before and, I guessed, still was. “One final message, wouldn’t you say?”
Andi and Brenda exchanged a look. They were sisters on this one.
Andi led the way to the door. “Have you seen this before, seen it elsewhere?”
Clearly, we all had.
“Looks just like the same stupid closet door that wasn’t the closet door back in Van Epps’ place,” said Brenda.
I nodded. We were together on this. “You and I both mistook that door for the closet, and both times, it was locked.”
“But here it is,” said Andi, “a direct copy, and locked just like the other one.”
“Hold on,” said Tank. He spoke quietly again. “Daniel won’t use this hallway. He always goes the long way around, through the dining room, to get to the kitchen.”
“We have our next step,” I suggested. I was just about to wonder how we might accomplish it when, to our surprise, a lawn mower started up in the front yard.
“What the devil—” I started to say, but was interrupted by the clatter of a chair in the kitchen.
Tank looked, then hurried. “Hey, bud! What’s wrong?”
I caught only a glimpse of Daniel before he disappeared, terrified, inside a cupboard and closed the door after him. Tank looked at us, then toward the front door, nonplussed.
Neither I, nor Brenda, nor Andi, had felt comfortable closing the front door behind us, so it remained open, providing a framed view of the front yard. The mower’s operator passed across that view, eyes locked ahead of him, a death grip on the mower’s handlebar, pushing the mower for all he was worth.
It was A.J. Van Epps.
CHAPTER
13
The Prison
Data? Van Epps had become an unnerving source of data by his very behavior. He would not stop mowing the lawn even as I chased alongside him, trying to engage him over the roar of the mower.
“Behavioral Analysis!” he shouted to me, turning about and heading back across the lawn again. “We apply an input, such as doing the House a favor, such as mowing the lawn, and see if it triggers a response we can analyze, a change in behavior.”
“A change in what behavior?”
He wouldn’t answer me. I hurried beside him, almost tripping over the walkway, until I was tired of the game, the indirectness. “What are you afraid of?”
He stopped, but left the mower running, I suppose, to ensure our privacy.
“You can’t see it? That thing’s a predator, a—a vindicator! It has something against me, against all of us.”
I refrained from saying You’re mad! but I certainly thought it, and I suppose he read it in my face.
“Think what you will, but we—you and I—have become part of the experiment. It intends to take us like the others, and that means practical solutions, direct action.”
He continued mow
ing, leaving me behind. I ran once again to catch up with him and called over the mower. “Do you have any gardening tools? We could help. We could weed the beds, edge the lawn.”
That seemed to mollify him, at least for a moment. “In my garage. Help yourself. Please.”
I signaled Brenda and Andi to come with me. We agreed with Tank that he should remain with the boy.
In Van Epps’ garage we found the tools we needed: a large hammer and a crow bar. Within minutes the obstinate door in Van Epps’ hallway splintered away from its lock and creaked open.
It was the doorway to the basement. Steep wooden stairs descended into a musty chamber of web-laced concrete, a netherworld of stacks, shelves, and piles of things unneeded and unused.
Directly opposite the base of the stairs was another door, yawning open, hanging crookedly from its hinges. It had been barred shut, but the two-by-four bar had been broken like a toothpick; the door had been locked, but the lock now lay in bent and broken pieces on the concrete, leaving a hole in the door like a shark bite. Strangest of all, the door had been broken out, not in, as if a formidable beast had been captive but was now at large.
We found a small room within. There was a bed with its covers askew, and a portable RV toilet. Some toys lay on the floor, some children’s books and a box of crayons on the bed. Andi found a single sock, clearly the mate to the one the boy was wearing.
We regarded once again the door that had sealed this room, the concrete walls with no window, the cold, the silence, the prison cell size, and a silence fell over us.
“Friend of yours?” Brenda said at last.
Only to my horror and dismay. It took effort to find my voice. “I . . . cannot defend him.”
“Defend him? What for? This is all . . .” She mimicked my voice, my manner. “Entirely pragmatic! A logical step! A practical means to an end!”
“Enough—”
“We’ll lock the kid up like a lab rat, purely for the sake of gathering useful data because after all, what are right and wrong but mere social abstractions?”
“You’re not being fair—”
“Fair? What do you know about fair?” She waved her hand over the whole mess before us. “I’ll tell you fair. If I was the House I’d be after him too, and I hope the House gets him!”
She had me on the ropes, but Andi, like the proverbial bell, saved me. “Excuse me? Have you seen this?”
She was referring to strange symbols the boy had scrawled on the wall of the room with a black crayon. It could have been a code, a language, I couldn’t tell. I looked to Andi, but she seemed perplexed.
Until I remembered a phrase Van Epps had used: the handwriting on the wall . . .
That triggered something in Andi. She gasped, looked at the strange squiggles again, then grabbed a crayon from the bed and began to copy them on the same wall, but in mirror reverse, from left to right. “Oh no . . .” she said. “Wow. Unreal. It’s in script, and he wrote it left to right. . . .”
“Keep going, baby,” said Brenda.
Andi finished copying, then pointed at the symbols as she read: “May-nay, may-nay, Tay-kel, oo-far-seen.”
I now recognized it. “Hebrew.”
Andi nodded. “Every Jewish girl learns her Hebrew. This is a quote from—” Then she laughed and wagged her head in wonder. “From the book of Dani’el!”
Brenda was impatient. “So what does it say?”
“Mene,” I began. “To count. Tekel: To weigh. Pharsin: to divide.”
“The prophet Dani’el’s warning to the wicked king Belshazzar,” said Andi, her voice hushed with wonder.
“Written by the hand of God on the wall of the king’s palace.” To Brenda’s questioning look I responded, “I was a priest.”
Andi explained it. “God was telling Belshazzar, ‘Your days are numbered and they’ve come to an end; You’ve been weighed in the balance and found wanting; your kingdom is divided among your enemies.’”
“So the boy Daniel has a gift,” I mused.
“And one tough dude for a friend,” said Brenda, eyeing the broken door and then pointing to a high basement window still hanging open.
“Harvey?” Andi asked.
Brenda shuddered. “Man, I ain’t calling him Harvey.”
“So as Earthsong told us, he escaped.” I recounted the “reading” of the fortune-teller. “A child thought to have a gift . . . he was consulted . . . he was a prisoner, but he broke his bonds and is free and people are looking for him.”
Andi eyed the writing on the wall. “God spoke in different ways in the Bible. You know the stories: the burning bush, the donkey that talked to Balaam, Gideon’s fleece . . . the handwriting on the wall. I couldn’t find a precedent for a ‘house holding people accountable,’ but maybe the House is another way for God to speak.”
“In which case, I’d say Daniel delivered. He spoke for the House, only Van Epps didn’t like what he had to say.”
“And Daniel isn’t the first prophet to be locked up by somebody who didn’t like his message,” said Andi.
“And Earthsong . . .” Brenda ventured.
I was having the same thoughts. “She knew all about it—and she was careless enough to tell us.”
Brenda muttered—maybe a curse—as her hand went to her head.
“What?”
“You okay?” Andi asked.
“You wanted me to tell you if I got any more pictures. . . .” Brenda’s eyes closed as if viewing something in her mind. “I see . . . blood on the floor.”
“Where?” said Andi, looking around.
“In my head!”
“The fortune-teller,” I said, my guts twisting.
Their eyes asked for an explanation.
“Your comments, Brenda, about Van Epps being unable to run a camera. We can say for sure he was minding that camera long enough to record three hours of static.”
“But—” said Andi, eyes widening.
“Exactly,” I said. “We were in the House for five.”
CHAPTER
14
The Third Death
I assigned Andi to a safe and neutral position behind a tree on a small bluff overlooking the House and, just up the street, Van Epps’ home. She was not to approach either one—which was fine with her—but to let us know if anything developed. In the meantime, she could follow up on the phone number Tank found on Daniel’s shirt collar.
Brenda and I returned by back roads to Earthsong’s Psychic Readings to find a CLOSED sign hanging in the window. We knocked, we called out, we got no response. Brenda drew upon her street wisdom, gained admittance through a side window, and let me in through the front door.
Upstairs, a sound system was playing psychedelic rock from the sixties. We ventured up the stairs to the living quarters, a dimly lit, cultural throwback with tie-dyed tapestries, black-light posters of Morrison, Hendrix, and Joplin, walls randomly splattered in pop-art colors.
We found Earthsong on her bed, two fresh needle marks in her arm, the syringe on the nightstand. She had nodded off and fallen into a deeper and deeper sleep until she was dead.
“Don’t touch anything,” I cautioned.
“So here’s death number three,” said Brenda.
“Murder number three, I’m afraid.” I used a pen from my pocket to press the sound system’s off button and immediately confirmed the stirrings I thought I’d heard downstairs.
I went to the top of the stairs and called out, “Lady and Gentleman, she’s dead and we are witnesses; we have the child in our custody, and Van Epps will be convicted of murder. Now you can kill us and draw all the more attention, or you can abandon Van Epps right here, right now, and slink back under your secretive rock to fight another day.”
Brenda, beside me, was clearly surprised to hear footfalls move through the building. We caught only the back of the man and woman going out the front door.
“Our error, leaving that door unlocked,” I said. “They’ve been following us from the
beginning. We’ve seen them before: scum from that Institute, damage controllers, trying to find Daniel and letting Van Epps know our every move—beginning with our visit to this very place. Earthsong thought you and I were them. That’s why she showed off so much—and said things she shouldn’t have.”
“And Van Epps killed her?”
I felt condemned by my own concession. “As you reminded me, it was the pragmatic, logical, practical thing to do. It stands to reason that perhaps she was his mistress, which explains how she knew about Daniel, his gift, how Van Epps held him prisoner, and how he escaped. And being Van Epps’ mistress, of course she’d be jealous when Van Epps brought in Daniel to consult instead of her. So she was jealous of Daniel and high on heroin, which made her blabby—a liability. If she mouthed off so freely to you and me, who else might she talk to?
“You noticed there were two needle marks? The first dose was administered by Earthsong to satisfy her addiction; the second fatal dose was administered by her lover, who knew where she kept her heroin—who no doubt supplied it in the first place, maybe in exchange for sexual favors. He was only minding his camera outside the House for three of the five hours we were inside. The other two afforded him the opportunity to come here, eliminate the risk of discovery, and return to meet us outside the House, his jacket freshly imbued with more of Earthsong’s incense, by the way.
“As for Clyde Morris and Gustav Svensson, if we believe the pattern set by the House—which logic, not belief, compels me to do—it follows that the same person who engineered Earthsong’s death is also responsible for the other two.” I reached for my cell phone. “I would say it’s time to call the police.”
In my hand, my cell phone played Beethoven’s Fifth. The screen told me it was Andi. “Yes?”
She was so frantic I could barely understand her.
“Van Epps! He’s trying to burn the House down, and Tank and Daniel are still inside!”
CHAPTER
15
A House Afire
At perilous speed we drove back to where the House . . . used to be. At that location we found a field overtaken by blackberries.
Invitation: The Call, The Haunted, The Sentinels, The Girl Page 10