“If it was really a dead body, then it would be stiff or mummified or a skeleton by now,” Seth said. “There’s no way it would still feel like a living person.” After a moment, he added, “If it were put here recently, it would have started to decompose. You guys would have smelled it.”
“Don’t you think we thought of all that?” Chloe said, half irritated, half amused.
Martin spoke again, this time in a voice that was barely audible. “Maybe the guy’s not really dead,” he said.
Seth gave a sharp bark of a laugh. “Are you crazy? You mean to tell me there’s some invisible guy sitting there and letting you grope all over him without saying anything? Did you feel him breathe, by any chance?”
“No.”
“Well then. It’s probably just a mannequin or something.”
“Seth, you haven’t been here the whole time,” Olivia said. “You don’t know about how weird everything is, and the dreams, and…”
“That’s fair enough,” Seth interrupted. “Just let me touch it. That’ll help me get a better handle on things.” He sounded brave, but Olivia could see his hands shaking, just a little.
“All right. It’s just here.” Chloe took his arm and guided his fingers to a spot in the darkness that looked like every other. His palms flattened slightly, as though pressed against an unseen glass globe. After a moment, his skin went pale, and he yanked his hand away with a strangled cry.
“See what we mean?” Martin asked. There was no satisfaction in his tone, only weariness.
“What is that thing?” Seth had backed away and now stood beside Olivia, his hands hanging uncomfortably at his sides as though he feared they might be contaminated.
“I have a couple of theories,” Martin said. “I think it’s either the man who used to live here—Crandall, the magician—or a friend of Crandall’s that he might have murdered over a year ago.” He briefly related the sad fate of James Morley that he had read that morning.
Olivia crossed her arms. “Crandall disappeared years ago, when he was already an old man. He couldn’t still be alive now, either to be sitting here or to kill anybody.” Shivers traveled up and down her spine as she realized the import of what she was saying. “Assuming you call that alive,” she finished.
“Well, Martin and I have been talking about it down here,” Chloe said. “We think maybe it’s some kind of suspended animation.”
“And our dreams,” Martin added. “I thought that maybe—whoever this is—we’ve been sort of catching his dreams. Either that or he’s sending them to us deliberately, maybe as a warning.”
“You guys are nuts,” Seth said, although he didn’t sound as if he really meant it.
“A warning for what?” Olivia asked, as though Seth had not spoken.
As if on cue, there came a strange rift on the air, not so much a sound as a gut-level vibration, a warp in the fabric of space-time. Olivia’s heart jumped into her throat, and as she glanced at the flashlighted faces of the others, she saw her own sudden, overpowering dread reflected back at her threefold. She wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but she knew it was major. She knew it was very, very bad.
Then, very faint, came the sound of hundreds of racing footsteps echoing above their heads.
“They’re in,” Martin said simply.
* * * *
From the moment Martin spoke, time sped up and slowed down simultaneously; everything happened at once, yet seemed to take forever.
The footsteps and shouts were like thunder crashing over their heads. Martin looked up toward the ceiling, even though there was nothing to see. Their fortress had finally been breached. He realized he should be afraid, but instead he felt strangely calm, inhabiting a pocket of silence amid the sounds of destruction from upstairs.
He was only startled out of his complacence by Chloe, who began shaking his arm so vigorously that he nearly dropped the boxes he’d forgotten he still held. “We have to do something!” She said, and her voice was so loud in the empty space that Martin thought he went deaf for a brief second.
“What can we do?” Seth said, peering back over his shoulder even though there was nothing to see.
Chloe snatched the boxes from under Martin’s arm. “It’s got to have something to do with these.”
Martin looked at her panicked, sweating face. “How do you know that?”
“I don’t! What other option have we got?” Flashlight beams spun wildly as Chloe pawed at the box lids, prying them up with trembling fingers. The first box contained the lump of wax, which when light was shone upon it proved to conceal a wick at one end. “Anyone got a lighter?” she asked.
Seth retrieved a cheap Bic from his pocket and handed it to her without a word.
“Wait!” said Olivia as Chloe closed her hand around the crude candle. “Do we have to do something in some particular order?”
Martin’s strangely dislocated brain managed to cough up a memory through the haze of noise and fear. “The dreams,” he said, his own voice sounding sluggish to his ears. “Right before waking up. A paper smell, then a wax smell, like a candle burning. Then a bell ringing.”
Olivia was nodding. Chloe extinguished the lighter flame. “Okay, okay, you guys are right. Where’s the book?” She pried open the second box, which contained the bell, then hurriedly opened the third and pulled the book from its crushed velvet bed. She looked up at her three companions. “What, am I supposed to read the whole thing?”
There was a resounding crash from upstairs, and all four of them flinched in unison. “Just hurry!” Olivia said.
“Here, you start reading,” Martin said, taking the box with the candle in it and upending it so the candle rolled out. “I’ll light the candle, and Olivia, you ring the bell.”
“When?” she cried.
“Whenever!” Martin snatched the lighter from Chloe’s grasp. “Okay, babe, just open that thing and start reading.”
“Okay.” She opened the cover forcefully and was immediately rebuked by a cloud of thick dust puffing up into her face. She coughed, the sound echoing weirdly off the unseen walls. At last, she squinted down at the book as Seth shone a flashlight on the page. “Shit, what the hell language is this?”
“Never mind, just do the best you can!” Martin could hear the invading horde upstairs, stomping across the floorboards toward their hiding place. He wondered if Ivan was in the lead.
Chloe began reading from the beginning of the book, struggling over strange syllables that sounded like no language Martin had ever heard. As she read, her voice took on a bizarre droning quality, like the recitation of a dark prayer, or a funeral mass. The smell of the old paper and binding was filling Martin’s nostrils, just like in the dream. Are we doing the right thing? he wondered as he summoned the flame on the lighter. Or are we just making things worse?
Chloe’s reading had become much smoother, more fluent, and the words wove a tapestry around them as they stood, four puny humans in a sea of nothingness, with only their flashlights between them and oblivion. Martin couldn’t help but think of a small band of ancestral beings, huddled around a pitiful campfire, surrounded by peril on all sides, trying to keep the darkness at bay. He shivered.
The lump of wax—or whatever it was—felt warm and throbbed in his hand as he applied the flame to the wick. There was a bluish spark, and the candle burst merrily to life, its intense red flame dancing against the pale flesh of their faces. The four of them looked at each other in the candle’s flickering illumination, and though he couldn’t speak for the others, Martin noticed their features warping and changing, becoming simultaneously monstrous and angelic. He felt a pang again, a sudden certainty that they were doing the wrong thing, but then he noticed something else.
The sounds from upstairs had died down. They hadn’t stopped completely; Martin could still hear the cre
aking of the floorboards, the susurrus of many people breathing at once. It seemed to him the invaders upstairs stopped their plunder. Perhaps, like Martin and the others, they waited to see what would happen. Keep reading, Chloe, he encouraged silently. Olivia and Seth stared at him, their eyes huge and grave.
At last, Chloe turned the final page of the small book, intoning its message in the weird, echoing voice that was so unlike her own. As soon as she had finished and closed the book reverently, Olivia raised the crystal bell before her eyes and rung it, three times. Its diamond tones enveloped them all, completing the protective barrier that Chloe had begun with her reading. Martin felt suddenly safe and warm, as though enclosed in the loving arms of a mother and father unlike the horrid counterfeit parents of the followers upstairs. Without realizing it, Martin had drawn closer to his friends, and the four of them comprised a tight knot of shared humanity, a shell of safety in the midst of disaster. Martin closed his eyes, the mingling scents of paper and wax lulling him into a kind of hypnotic state.
In fact, he was so overwhelmed by this odd fugue that he barely even felt what was going on in the dark around him, at least until Chloe punched him hard on the arm. “Hey, Martin, are you in there?” she said, her voice sounding like a warped record slowly coming up to speed. “Fucking look.”
Martin opened his eyes and looked.
The room around them seemed to be—lighting up was the first phrase that popped into his head, but that wasn’t exactly right. It didn’t seem as though objects in the dark were gradually being illuminated as much as they were being brought into existence from a void. Martin thought of a Polaroid picture developing, and that wasn’t quite right either, but it was closer.
“Holy shit.” That was Olivia, and if Martin were capable of speech, he would have echoed the sentiment. Seth simply stared around at the emerging surroundings, his mouth agape.
The stairs were the first thing to come into sharp focus, which made Martin wonder if the chamber upstairs had already undergone the transformation. As the rest of the room wove its reality around him, he turned his head this way and that, trying to take it all in.
The space was nearly empty of furniture, but still seemed pleasant, almost lush. Martin caught glimpses of gilt-framed paintings hung high on the walls and intricate rugs that slowly revealed the whole of their splendor. Most of the paintings had the supernatural as their subjects—exquisitely rendered witches flew on skirling broomsticks across midnight blue skies of pigment and linseed oil; demons capered gleefully in the red glow of painted flames. Scattered among the artwork were a few framed posters advertising Crandall’s magic shows, and in all of these Crandall was pictured in a long, black Victorian-style cape that reminded Martin of something Jack the Ripper might have worn. The magician was staring out at the viewer with large black eyes that clearly harbored secrets in their twinkling depths.
The sight of the posters jarred Martin from his stupefied silence, and made him remember what else would be illuminated in the room. “Crandall,” he said, then looked down.
It was undeniably the same face, the same crest of graying hair sweeping back from the high forehead. Crandall’s body was still, waxen, but as he looked, Martin could swear he could see the man’s lips tremble, just slightly, as though in preparation for a single, life-restoring breath.
“He’s alive, isn’t he?” Chloe’s voice was no more than a whisper. “What we did, the book—it must have woken him up.”
No one else spoke. Everyone stood frozen before the unmoving magician, unable to tear their eyes away from him even as the sounds from upstairs confirmed that the followers had begun moving again, and that some of them were at that moment climbing through the hole in the landing wall.
Finally, Seth’s wavering voice asked, “What do we do now?”
Crandall’s eyes opened.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Mother and Father came marching triumphantly up the dirt road less than an hour after Ivan and the disciples had hidden among the trees. The electricity in the crowd was palpable, like a crackle on the air. No words were exchanged; Ivan and the others had simply fallen in line behind their leaders, and the dozens of new recruits that marched at their backs. They were the breakers of the threshold.
Ivan spotted Lily in the crowd and made his way over to her. She smiled up at him, warily, and he returned the smile, hoping it looked as genuine as it felt. He felt a little impatient with the girl, he had to admit that to himself. Everything would be different now. He took her hand and squeezed it companionably. On the other side of him, Rose appeared and slipped her butterfly hand into his as well.
As they approached the house, it felt less like a siege than a homecoming. The doors were locked, of course, but Ivan had his key. The others parted to let him pass, staring at him solemnly. Even before he had slid the key in the lock, he knew that the spell was broken. There was no longer the sense of an invisible shield hovering over the house, keeping them out. There was nothing now.
The front door swung inward on the cool, darkened living room, a large space in which glints of metal chairs, tables, and musical equipment shone in the dimness. Ivan peered in and felt a familiarity with these things, with the look and feel and the vaguely coffee-like smell of these rooms he had once lived in, but there was no longer any emotional attachment. He might as well have been in a hotel suite.
The only thing unfamiliar was the sight of a small, splintered hole in the wall beside the sofa. Ivan glanced at it, briefly, half-remembering the dreams he’d had before he’d seen the light, then dismissed it as unimportant.
He felt the presence of Mother and Father at his back, and with utmost humility he moved aside so that they might be the first ones to cross the forbidden threshold. The occasion warranted some solemnity, formality, but clearly Mother and Father were too eager for the trappings of ritual to mean anything to them; without ceremony, Mother pulled her shawls tight around herself and stepped quickly inside, Father close at her back. Once they breached the doorway, the followers hesitated only a second, glancing at each other with hungry eyes, before plunging through the living room at a pace just short of a sprint.
Ivan was a little taken aback by their behavior, but as it was not his place to question, he kept his thoughts to himself. The other disciples were arrayed on the porch behind him like a ragged army, their moon faces slack except for the slightest hint of confusion peppering their features. They had known or sensed their leaders’ goal in getting into the house, but now it seemed as though they were all waiting for someone to tell them what to do next.
Ivan wasn’t sure what was expected of them either, but after a few moments, he decided the best course of action would be to follow Mother and Father into the house and play the situation by ear. Tentatively, Ivan stepped over the threshold, relieved that there was no longer that invisible and rather unpleasant barrier to block his way. He glanced back over his shoulder at the others, encouraging them with a look. They understood, and in their numbers began moving toward the house in a great undulating mass.
Mother and Father had gone toward the kitchen, so Ivan led the disciples in that direction. When he rounded the corner from the dining room, at first he saw no one, but then realized they must have climbed the three steps to the landing. He smiled. The information he had given them must have been important, then.
The disciples were still streaming into the house behind him, and he could hear the inevitable knocking about of furniture, and the occasional tinkle of broken glass as hundreds of pairs of feet and arms crammed into the limited space. Over the racket, he heard Mother’s strange inhuman voice muttering something to Father. Ivan couldn’t make out what she said but when he turned the corner and spotted her, the sound stopped immediately. Father turned toward him with an unreadable expression on his face.
“What we want is in here,” Father said, loudly enough so that the o
ther followers in the kitchen could hear him. “We’ll need some of you to come with us to fetch it. The rest of you stay up here and don’t move until we tell you to.”
There was some general milling as the disciples looked at each other, wanting to volunteer for duty, but perhaps unsure of what the duty would entail. Ivan felt no such uncertainty, and stepped forward immediately. Lily had stepped in sync with him, and stood proudly at his side. Of course, Rose was next, and after a moment, a few others volunteered also; then Mother and Father nodded their approval, then turned toward the hole.
Just as they did so, there was another warp in the air around them, much like the feeling Ivan had gotten when more disciples were converted, but different somehow, and much stronger. He froze, his heartbeat very loud in his ears. Mother and Father froze, too, their heads tilted as if listening. Father’s brow furrowed, and Mother tugged hard at her robes. Something was wrong; Ivan could feel it.
Then the sensation passed, gradually ebbing away, though not disappearing entirely. Some of the disciples began to move again, looking at each other uncomfortably. Father visibly relaxed, though he glanced at Mother, clearly uncertain and seeking direction. The shrouded woman straightened, the fabric around her face tightening so that Ivan could almost see her monstrous features, her oddly glowing eyes. Then one clawed hand emerged from her swaths of fabric, and she gestured at Father to climb into the hole.
As Father stepped forward to obey, Ivan decided the space inside the hole was becoming lighter; he was sure he spotted a hint of varnished wood, the darker rectangle of an open doorway.
A scream suddenly issued from the fading blackness, and a sound like a great engine coming to life.
* * * *
Olivia had never been a girly type of girl, and it took quite a bit to make her scream, but a dead body suddenly opening its eyes accomplished the task handily.
No sooner had the sound of her lone shriek died away than everyone in the cellar became aware of another sound, one which emanated from the ground beneath them, and reverberated through their bones.
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