That wall on the stair landing—would it really hurt anything to see what was going on back there? He knew he was probably just distilling all his problems down to a single one that would ostensibly be solved by the smashing of the wall and the discovery of what, if anything, was behind it. He couldn’t help it—here was some definitive action he could take, and its allure stoked his curiosity to the point where he could no longer resist it.
Giving his painting up for now as a bad job, Martin wiped his hands on his jeans and made his way out to the hall and down the stairs, stopping on the landing and trying to ignore the way the little hairs stood up on the back of his neck.
The wall stared back at him, innocent, even indifferent, its mahogany finish glowing flatly in the dimness. He reached out and brushed his fingers against the wood, almost expecting to feel nothing but air, then chuckling nervously to himself for his silliness. Growing braver, he stepped forward and pressed his ear to the wall. The house was quiet all around him, except for the inevitable pops and creaks that marred the silence of all old houses. He strained to hear, pushing his ear so hard against the wall that it started to ache, but he still heard nothing. Really, what had he been anticipating? A ghostly voice whispering to him through the wood? The sound of a faraway machine rumbling in the bowels of the house?
Scowling, he backed away and stared at the spot haunting his dreams for more than two months now. He cocked his head to one side, as though doing so would sharpen his focus. He knew that everyone in the house—himself included—had more or less agreed to leave the wall alone for now, for fear of releasing whatever was behind it. What if whatever was back there really was good, just like the dream suggested? What if it really was trying to help them, or protect them from something? What if their inaction was putting them in some kind of danger? Martin had to admit he didn’t really like the idea of the dreams being a trick by some evil entity wanting release. He very much wanted to take the dreams at face value. In Martin’s dreams, this little patch of floor and wall had been a safe zone, safe from an evil coming from outside, not in.
He looked down at his watch. Ivan was at work; Chloe and Olivia had gone off to do some research into the house’s history. He didn’t know how long they would be, and he knew he should really wait until they got back, see what they found out. If they found out anything earth-shattering, surely they would have called him. Martin didn’t like going against the rest of the household, but the dreams became more frequent, more urgent, and he wanted to get to the bottom of them. Besides, he told himself, he was really doing the others a favor, doing all the dirty work and perhaps taking the brunt of the consequences. This sounded like a lame justification, but he stuck to it nonetheless.
Martin tapped his finger against his chin. He knew there was some wood filler left out in the garage, but that wouldn’t be enough to hide a hole big enough for him to see into. He couldn’t really do anything but hope that it wouldn’t do any harm, and that the others would forgive him when they saw there was nothing to worry about. There would be nothing to worry about, he had to convince himself of that.
His heart thumping even as he pretended coolness, Martin trotted out to the back porch and rooted around in the toolbox until he came up with a good-sized hammer. “Sorry about this, Chloe,” he muttered under his breath, hefting the hammer’s weight in his paint-spattered hand.
The wall on the landing shone dully under its coat of wood polish, and Martin felt a twinge of uncertainty as he raised the hammer, feeling as though he were taking a knife to a Rembrandt. A second later, he forced the twinge away, and he brought the tool down, squinting his eyes tight at the impact.
As the echo of the blasphemous noise died in his ears, he cautiously opened one eye. He’d swung the hammer only three or four times, but already the wood had splintered, and a hole gaped there, black and toothy. Martin remembered the painting he’d done that morning, the one with the wall opened out into an indescribably black tunnel, and he shuddered.
For a moment, he almost thought he could feel a gust of cold wind from the hole, the breath of some spirit, perhaps, released in a sigh at its long imprisonment. As soon as he perceived it, though, it was gone, and he couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t imagined it. A musty smell—dust and damp and maybe mouse droppings—was all that remained.
Martin leaned in, careful of the splinters, and peered into the hole he’d made. The floating dust made his nose itch, and he sneezed several times; the sound made a strange tinny echo from inside the gap in the wall. Rubbing his eyes, he looked in again.
Nothing. It was too dark to see anything in there at all.
He turned and hopped down the three steps to the kitchen, where he rummaged through drawers and cabinets for nearly fifteen minutes before finding a flashlight. Back on the landing, he trained the powerful beam into the hole, his curiosity now seeming to eat at his insides with voracious abandon.
For a second, he thought he caught a glimpse of something—a figure, maybe?—but it was gone too quickly for him to be sure. It could have been a shadow, or the flicker of light on a supporting beam. He blinked more dust out of his eyes, and let his gaze follow the flashlight’s path into the darkness.
Still nothing. The glow from the flashlight was adequate, but there was literally nothing for it to illuminate. Martin stared harder. He couldn’t even make out a floor, or a wall, or a ceiling where the underside of the upper hallway must be. There was nothing at all. It was like looking into a featureless black void.
Martin drew back, his skin clammy. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see, but this… He shook his head. It was somehow worse than if he’d seen a stack of rotting corpses. He wasn’t sure why, but it was. There was literally nothing back there. He couldn’t wrap his mind around it. How big could the space behind that wall possibly be? He tried to conjure up the floor plan of the house in his mind. The living room lay directly on the other side of this gap, with one of the larger bedrooms directly above it. Below was the long, low space of the basement. In short, the walls and ceiling of the gap should have been no more than a few yards away. The entire space couldn’t be much bigger than a closet, surely.
Martin realized that he was shaking all over. A part of him wanted to look again, in the hopes that he’d been mistaken—a second glance would reveal nothing but a mundane gap behind a wall, perhaps with wooden studs and exposed wiring, maybe even a couple of long-dead rodents, their fragile skeletons emerging from tufts of fur like old milkweed pods. A second look would make everything better.
He couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. With one trembling hand, he turned off the flashlight, then stood frozen in the ensuing dimness, his breath heaving as though he’d just run a mile, his tongue coated with a coppery slime. He wondered how much worse the dreams would get now. He wondered if something came out of that nothing behind the wall, something waiting for the right person to come along and free it.
Finally, snapping out of his trance, he realized he wanted nothing more than to seal up that hole forever, and forget he had ever looked inside it. Walking backwards down the steps—not wanting to turn his back on anything that might be in there—he put away the flashlight where he’d found it, and then went out to the garage to get the wood filler and an old piece of screen. He would seal the hole and slap some stain over it before anyone got home. He wouldn’t mention what he had done to anyone. If any of the others noticed his handiwork, which they surely would, as it would have to be a quick and sloppy job, he would just laugh it off and tell them he’d banged a hole in the wall but he saw absolutely nothing back there, nothing at all.
Technically, that was the truth.
Chapter Seventeen
Ivan hadn’t stopped thinking about that girl, even though the dreams had gotten—well, not worse, but more hectic, frantic. They came often now, sometimes several times a night, and even when he just dozed off in the afternoons. It had
gotten to the point where he dreaded sleep.
Still, though, seeing the tiny dark figure of that strange little person standing in the threshold of his bedroom with her palms raised as if to ward him off—that image was completely indelible.
Weirder than the fact that she’d turned up at his house was the fact that he hadn’t seen her at all since then. He’d been working at the music store just like always, and when he arrived in the morning or left in the evening, or walked out for lunch or a smoke, he never failed to glance over at the papered glass door of the ersatz little church with its pitifully hand-lettered (and now crooked and fading) sign. He saw a few others going in and out—mostly older, desperate-looking men, and once he was pretty sure he recognized Sammy from the coffee shop where Olivia worked—but of the deformed blonde dwarf in her girlish pink dress, he saw nothing.
After a while, it got to the point where he had nearly put it out of his mind. He became more and more preoccupied with work, with his band, with helping to run Crandall’s when he could, and with worrying about the dreams and what he and his friends were going to do about them, and what they might imply. In fact, when he left the shop at a little past six, locking up and adjusting the guitar across his back, he nearly forgot to glance over at the shabby little storefront that dubbed itself Bellwether. Then something caught his eye.
It was a girl, but it was definitely not the dwarf. This girl looked about the same age, but she was angelic where Lily was pitiful, secure in her beauty where Lily was desperate for affection. Yet she was also somehow innocent, with round, blue eyes opened wide, as if in constant surprise, and a tiny pink rosebud mouth that demonstrated just the right combination of knowingness and naïveté. She was clad in a clingy red dress that flattered her young, lean body, its plunging neckline stopping just short of revealing the modest, but perfectly formed, swell of her breasts. She was leaning against the glass front window of Bellwether, looking at him with open curiosity and perhaps bemusement.
Ivan realized that his mouth was hanging open, and he snapped it shut, feeling his cheeks burning. It wasn’t just that the girl was beautiful (she was) or that Ivan hadn’t gotten any from Olivia lately (he hadn’t, but they’d both been tired and stressed). It was a sort of indefinable, mystical quality about her, an impression that she had to do nothing more than flash a grin or raise an eyebrow, and easily convince the most virtuous of men to kill for her.
She stepped away from the glass and slithered toward him, the red fabric of her dress whispering off the surrounding concrete. When she walked through the slats of sunlight painting the sidewalk, Ivan could almost see through the dress; the outline of her legs was clearly delineated, and, for a moment, he even fancied he could see a darker patch of shadow where her thighs met. His blush deepened.
“So, you’re Ivan,” she said when she was still a few feet from him. Her voice was as resonant as struck crystal, achingly feminine. “Lily has told me so much about you that I thought I’d come out and have a look at you myself.”
Ivan swallowed. The gist of her words came to him only slowly, as though they rode on a wave of molasses. Even after internalizing their meaning, all he could manage in reply was a breathless, “Oh?”
“Yes.” She was very near to him now, and he could see a vein in her neck pattering out her heartbeat. The smell of her was exotic and dangerous, like cloves and sawdust and bitter almonds. “Lily wanted me to tell you how sorry she is about coming to your house that night,” the girl continued. She sounded conspiratorial, leaning closer to impart great secrets. “She watched you every day, as you came and went, and I think she developed a tiny little…obsession.” She drew the word out to odd hissing lengths even as she held her fingers less than an inch apart to demonstrate exactly how little Lily’s obsession was.
Ivan cleared his throat. “Well…um…tell her not to worry about it. No harm done, right?”
The girl touched his arm, and his skin jumped with electricity. “Well, why don’t you tell her yourself?” The pupils of her eyes were very dark, and spiraled down into nothingness. “She’s only sitting just inside the door there, probably watching us. I know she’d love it if you came in and talked to her.” She paused. “I’d love it, too, of course.” The girl smiled, and her teeth were supernaturally white in the deepening shadow. Then her pink lips pursed outward in a pretty pout. “Poor Lily, she doesn’t have much luck with men, as you can imagine. I suppose it’s not surprising that she develops these silly crushes of hers.” She shook her head, clicking her tongue in pity even as she smiled.
“Is Lily your…sister?” Ivan didn’t know what made him ask it, or what difference the answer could possibly make, but he felt he had to say something, to try to penetrate the sluggishness engulfing his mind and body.
The girl laughed, her honeyed hair dancing on her shoulders. “In the church, we are all brothers and sisters. I’ve known Lily for a very long time.” She held out her hand. “Come. You can talk to her yourself. Then you can ask her whatever you wish to know. Then we can talk some more, if you like.” The emphasis she placed on the word we was laden with promise. She was very close to him now, the heat of her body radiating like a tiny furnace.
Ivan half-lifted his hand to take hers, but then he shook his head, silently cursing his muddled brain. “No…I really should be going home…” He tried to bring up Olivia’s face in his mind—she was right across the strip mall, making cappuccinos, for fuck’s sake—but nothing would come.
The girl’s hand still hung there between them, undaunted. “It will only take a moment, Ivan. You don’t want to hurt her feelings, do you? The poor darling.” Beneath the wheedling, Ivan thought he could hear the icy core of a command, the voice of a girl who was used to getting everything she wanted, and getting it immediately and without resistance. “Come on, for me?” Her eyes widened, and she blinked prettily.
Ivan was torn. On the one hand, he knew he should be getting back; dinner would probably be waiting, and the girls might have found something out about the house. On the other, what harm could it do to just pop his head in and clear the air with Lily about the whole attempted break-in scenario? At least one load would be off his mind. He tried to tell himself he wasn’t interested at all in this beautiful girl before him, who clearly wanted him to come inside, who might be persuaded to… No, he wasn’t thinking that. This was all for Lily’s benefit; he was just being a good guy. Almost before he had decided what he was going to do, he took the girl’s hand.
“I can only stay for a minute,” he said as he let himself be led to the glass door of the unassuming little church.
The girl’s sunny smile broadened. “A minute is all it should take,” she said.
Chapter Eighteen
“What the hell did you do to that wall?”
Martin winced. He knew his patch-up job had been amateurish at best, but he hadn’t expected Chloe to notice it less than two seconds after stepping into the house. “Don’t be mad,” he said.
Chloe stood near the refrigerator, her hands on her hips. Her jaw was set, her lips pressed into a flat line, but Martin fancied he could see a hint of amusement twinkling in her eyes. He hoped it was amusement, anyway. “I thought we’d agreed,” Chloe said. Olivia, standing beside her, crossed her arms and frowned.
“Yeah,” Martin said, praying he looked appropriately contrite. He motioned for the girls to sit at the kitchen table, then placed a cup of coffee in front of each of them before sitting down opposite. “I know we agreed, and I’m sorry. I really don’t have an excuse, other than the dreams getting worse. You guys can probably understand that. I just couldn’t take the curiosity anymore.”
“You might have put us all at risk,” Olivia said.
“I know.” He looked at her, then looked back to Chloe, whose expression didn’t seem quite so stern. “If I really thought anything would happen, I wouldn’t have done it. I hope you ca
n forgive me.”
Chloe took a sip from her cup, her dark eyes watching him over the rim. “It’s not just me who has to forgive you,” she said.
Martin nodded again, looking down into his own cup. He could feel Olivia’s gaze burning through the top of his head. Without looking up, he said, “What did you guys find out?”
“Oh, no. You first,” said Olivia.
He peered up at her. “What?”
Chloe reached across the table and punched him lightly on the arm. As she did, the pissed off expression she’d been trying so hard to maintain finally cracked, and she smiled. “You’re an asshole, Martin.”
He smiled too, rubbing his arm, even though the punch hadn’t hurt that much. “Hey, I’ve been called worse.”
“Yeah, and I’ll hurt you a lot worse if you don’t tell us what was back there.”
“Tell you about the five hundred spectral virgins I spent a pleasant afternoon with? Not on your life.”
“Martin!” She was trying hard to keep from cracking up, and now Olivia was beginning to lose it, too.
“All right, all right.” Sitting with them now, joking about it as if everything was normal, made him feel immensely better, although a lingering dread still tainted his thoughts. “To be perfectly honest with you,” he said, almost cringing as he said the words, “what was behind there was…nothing.”
Chloe stared at him for a long moment, the ghost of a grin still wreathing her face. “Nothing?”
“That’s right,” he said firmly. “I mean, there were a few dead mice, and probably some old cockroach turds, but other than that, nada.” He stopped there, fearing that further explanation might make him inadvertently reveal the extent of the nothingness he described, the total void he’d glimpsed behind that wall. No walls, no ceiling, no floor. No end.
“Are you sure about that, Martin?” Her previous mirth was forgotten, and her brows now knitted in concern.
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