So how come the fat man’s picture is there? Riddle me that.
She was about to close the book and put it aside, thinking it merely another thing that was of no use in her current predicament, when a single page slid partially out from near the back. It was a thicker piece of card, spotted and faded with age but the writing, beautiful calligraphy in black ink, stood out proud and clear.
There are houses like this all over the world. Most people only know of them from whispered stories over campfires; tall tales told to scare the unwary. But some, those who suffer, some know better. They are drawn to the places where what ails them can be eased. If you have the will, the fortitude, you can peer into another life, where the dead are not gone, where you can see that they thrive and go on, in the dreams that stuff is made of.
Unlike the scrapbook itself, Janis had a sense that this was something important. At the moment, she could imagine how, but it had got her attention, and it felt like a clue, or even a message. She knew from long experience to trust her gut in these situations, so she kept the piece of card, stowing it in the inside pocket of her jacket when she put the scrapbook back under the pillows.
She immediately put both the book and the card out of her thoughts. It was something else to think about later. For now her first priority was to get her head clear and to find a way out of what she had to presume was still a drug-fueled labyrinth.
Anything else is just too weird to consider.
The bed was definitely too comfortable. Combined with the feeling of relative safety here in the quiet, doll-free room, she had little inclination to move. In fact, she felt the urge to sleep again, to just lie down and close her eyes, in the hope that she’d wake up, clear of drugs, and somewhere else, somewhere that tiny dolls from her past were not lurking in every shadow. It was only the thought of John Green, and what kind of predicament he might be in that kept her upright and awake, and finally got her moving off the bed.
First, she went to investigate the gramophone. There was a seventy-eight on the turntable, He Sleeps in the Depths by King Rat and the Burdens. Neither the title or the name meant anything to her. The cranking handle hung loose on the side of the box but she already knew that it could start up at any minute without intervention, and if it did, she might have to change her job description to include a degree of breakage. She lifted the thick disk out of the box and put it on the dresser, then put the thick needle back in its cradle.
And if the bloody thing starts playing now, I’ll know I’m in la-la land for sure.
She looked up at the swirling fog in the window. There was still no chance of seeing anything else outside, but unlike out in the hallway, it had stayed light in here, at least enough for her to see clearly as she made a quick survey of the room.
There wasn’t much to find, a perfume bottle and lipstick, some lacy underwear that made her blush to touch it, a make up brush and a compact, all of which told that the occupant was probably a woman. The drawers of the dressers were full of clothes, satins, silks and velvets, long draped dresses in high contrast colors, and more lacy underwear, with stockings and garter belts, and, in the bottom of the dresser, handcuffs, chains and several small flails with sharp tipped ends.
A tart’s boudoir right enough.
There was also a myriad of small china ornaments, the kind of thing that tourists buy to give away as presents or as small reminders of holidays. As she’d noted earlier, these were mostly religious in nature, cherub, angels, virgin Mary and small nativity scenes and churches, all too gaudy, too cheap in look to have any value beyond sentimentality. She picked up a particularly ugly cherub to see it was stamped on the bottom end, a present from Niagara Falls. She turned away so that she didn’t have to look at all the cheerful little faces, it reminded her again of the dolls, and that she still had them to deal with.
She did a quick tour of the rest of the room and, much to her surprise, found another door, in the far corner, she hadn’t spotted before as it lay in deep, almost black, shadow. It looked more like a closet door than any way out of the room, and was probably full of more clothes. Or more dolls. She ignored it. She wasn’t ready to try any door at all just yet, not after the high weirdness that had brought her to the room in the first place. But she had to leave sometime, she’d need to eat, drink, pee, although she had no need for any of the three at the moment.
I’m still high, there’s no other explanation.
That was something that was giving her pause. It must be an hour now at least since she’d come into the house, she was having trouble gauging the passage of time though, and couldn’t be sure, but surely she should be coming down from any effects by now? Or even noticing some bleed back in of the real life she knew to lie just out of reach? None of that was happening. This place, this room, seemed solid, and resolutely refused to diminish or fade.
Janis was just as resolute in her convictions.
I will not, I cannot, yield to it.
She considered her options. She could stay here, wait it out, and hope that the drug faded and all became right. But that still left the possibility that the boss, and maybe the forensic team, was in trouble in here somewhere, lost behind a door she hadn’t tried yet, lost with their own bad dreams, whatever they might be.
Her own nightmares were out there, but so were her friends.
She headed, not for the main door, she knew what was out there already, but for the closet door in the dark corner. She put her hand on her pistol, said a silent prayer, and pulled the door open.
14
Todd sat at his desk typing up the woman’s, Samantha’s, witness statement from the transcript on the tape from the interview room. The interview had affected him deeper than he had expected. He could normally tell when someone was being deliberately evasive or trying to conceal something important to the case. But the blonde had seemed all too eager to get it out of her, as if the telling of it would force it away somewhere she didn’t have to think about it. It had the ring of truth to it, but that didn’t make it any the less outlandish.
He listened to it all the way through before starting to type, and again he felt a cold shiver up his spine.
I believe her, I don’t know why. But I do.
He wasn’t in any hurry to get typing. He wasn’t about to file the report any time soon if he could get away with it. The chief was in a bad enough mood already without having anyone bring him a fairy story where there should have been a confession.
The expected media circus had started, in as much as you could count one local television and two radio station crews from just around the corner as a circus. But given the nature of the crime and the body count, it was only a matter of time before the mainland news got hold of it and sent people over, they were probably on their way already. Likewise, the phones hadn’t stopped ringing, questions from the media, and concern from higher up the ranks, even into political spheres of influence. The chief had enough on his plate and Todd was going to do his best not to annoy him.
Not any more than I have to anyway.
There was still no news from the sarge or the inspector, and Todd was starting to get a bad feeling about that. Yes, the blonde’s story was outlandish, in the extreme, but there was that one fact, that one thing that lent it verisimilitude. She’d mentioned the lavatory flushing on its own accord. It was only a small thing, but it had Todd worried, worried for the sarge, and worried for his own sanity.
After the interview Samantha had pleaded to be allowed home, even apologizing for lying about her mother waiting for her. But much as Todd might believe her, and might even consider letting her walk if it was his decision to make, the chief needed someone he could point the top brass and the media at to say they were getting somewhere, and like it or not, Samantha was that someone.
Todd took her down to the cells for the night. Constable Williamson came with them, but Samantha talked only to him. There was definitely a bond growing there, and it seemed that Todd wasn’t the only one to feel it.
<
br /> “Please?” she said, as he showed her inside. “Don’t leave me alone too long?”
She wasn’t so sassy now, the brash persona from earlier had almost all gone, now she just looked frightened, and somehow smaller. He promised to look in on her, a promise he intended to keep, and let her keep the smokes. The last time he’d seen her she was sitting in the corner of the cell with her knees tucked up to her chin, staring into space and sucking smoke as if it was the most important thing in the world.
Constable Williamson had put a hand on Todd’s shoulder as they went back up stairs.
“Is this shit for real?” she whispered. “Drugs, murder, black magic and killer demons? The media are going to be all over it when they find out.”
“Not if we don’t tell them,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow at that, but didn’t reply. They both knew how naïve it had sounded. Reporters got stories from cops all the time, and paid good money for them. There would be plenty of people in the station, plenty that knew just enough of the details already and could spin them out as far as the media’s wallets would last.
That was when he’d come up to his desk to type up the report. He still didn’t know what he was supposed to do with it when he was finished. He had just got to the part where she’d stopped talking to listen for something Todd hadn’t heard.
“We’d tried seances, Tarot readings and just sitting around and thinking hard in the past, none of it had got us anything but bored and sober, and that’s no fun at all.”
There was a strange noise on the tape over the end of the sentence, a buzzing that sounded almost like a voice, at least in rhythm and intonation. Todd downloaded the section of digitized file to his PC and played around with the mix, turning up the volume in his headphones to try to isolate the anomaly.
He managed to drop Samantha’s voice out completely, so that only the buzzing vibration remained. It still sounded like a person, but now he spotted it wasn’t talking, it was more like music, although played at the wrong speed entirely. It was when he slowed it down he heard it properly.
Some old guy singing the blues.
That’s what she’d said, and that’s what Todd heard. And not just singing, there was what sounded like a slide guitar part accompanying it, pretty slick playing too, better than Todd could have managed even on his best day.
He sleeps in the depths with the fish far below,
He sleeps in the deep in the dark.
Now that he knew that the buzzing was music, he listened to the rest of the tape, and found it again, just at the point where she’d stopped and rummaged in her other ear. Another buzzing, and another piece that yielded more of the song when he slowed it down.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies,
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies
He listened to each snippet twice, going backward and forward between the original version and the slowed down version. There didn’t seem to have been any manipulation of the tape, couldn’t have been as it had come straight from the interview room to his computer across the secure internal network, but he was at a loss as to how the music had gotten in there.
He played it one last time, as loud as he could get it through his headphones.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies,
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
And right on cue, just as the snippet of song came to an end, the sound of a woman’s screams rose up from below, coming from the cells.
Todd was second on the scene, just behind the duty sergeant. They found the blonde, Sam, cowered in the corner, batting at the air with her hands and screaming loudly.
She stopped screaming when she looked up and saw Todd, but she kept swiping the air, as if being bothered by a swarm of wasps.
Or one damnable big one.
“Make him stop. Please, make him stop that fucking singing.”
“Calm down, Miss,” the duty sergeant said. “Or we’ll have to sedate you.”
“Sedate me? Yes, please, as much as you can give me. I can’t take much more of this bloody song.”
“There is no song, Miss,” the duty sergeant said, and was about to walk into the cell when Todd held him back.
“Let me, sarge. She knows me.”
He went inside and hunkered down to be at her level.
“Do you still hear it?” he said.
She looked him in the eye, and nodded.
“Sometimes it’s loud, other times, like now, it’s just soft and quiet like. But the fucker has followed me here. How could he follow me here?”
She started to bat at the air again, shouting and yelling.
“Fuck off, just fuck the fuck off.”
It proved impossible to get her to calm down in the cell. The duty sergeant still wanted to call the on-call doctor to administer a sedative, but Todd talked him into letting her out, into his custody as long as she remained in the interview room. She came quietly with him up the stairs, clutching his arm all the way.
He fetched her a strong mug of coffee, and let her smoke until she seemed calmer, if not quite settled.
“Can you hear him now?” he asked.
“No. The old bastard has gone back to sleep. Thank fuck.”
“Do you know who he is?”
She looked up at that.
“You believe me? You believe I can hear him?”
“Let’s just say I’m starting to come around to your way of thinking.”
Todd nearly told her about the song on the tape, but decided that might only set her off again. He tried a different tack to get her away from thinking about the song.
“Now that we’re here and talking, tell me what you know, what Peter Hines knew, about the history of the house. Did he ever talk about it?”
She laughed at that, and seemed to relax, slightly, but it was a start at least.
“Ever talk about it? He never fucking stopped, all the time since I met him. John introduced us, about this time last year, and that was about two weeks before him and Don broke in and took to sleeping up there, sleeping and trying to commune with the heart of the house, that’s what he said he was doing. Old hippie moose crap was what I said then, but I guess he was right and I was wrong.”
“He was obsessed then?”
“Day and night, it was all he talked about, even down at the bars when the rest of us just wanted to get wasted. He went on the history tour every night for a week until the guides told him to fuck off, and he had the poor librarians run ragged all over town looking for newspapers, reports and books about the fucking place. To be fair to him, he seemed to know his stuff, but once he started I usually tuned him out, it got a bit dull after a while, you know, all that old shit.”
“Moose crap,” Todd said, and got a smile in return before his next question. “Do you remember anything at all, anything that might help us here?”
“Only that I’ve heard stories about that house since I was back in junior school. It’s been a fucking weird place for a long time. But that doesn’t help you much, does it?”
It was Todd’s turn to laugh, he couldn’t help it, the situation was just too far outside his normal terms of reference. He was still laughing when the woman opposite cocked her head, and started batting at the air again.
And now Todd heard it too, as if it was coming from some invisible speaker in the top left-hand corner of the room, the same bass voice, the same silky-smooth guitar accompaniment, cutting through like razor wire.
Where he lies, where he lies, where he lies, where he lies,
The Dreaming God is singing where he lies.
15
Deeper in the depths of the tower, and almost full dark now.
The chill felt intense. He had a feeling that if he stopped moving at all, he’d be frozen solid within minutes, the cold as biting as any Newfoundland winter’s night, and the blackness thick, almost palpable, like moving through heavy velvet curtains.
But
the weapon was seemingly more than just a defense against the dark forces. It glowed, giving off a faint light, but enough to help him at least avoid walking into walls or off any precipices. It also sent a continual flow of heat that spread from his palm to his whole body. It continued to sing, the bass choir humming in a constant drone that echoed the rhythm and flow of the old blues tune he’d been hearing and made John feel, somehow, less alone, there in the dark.
It might be cold, but apart from that he felt fine, better than fine, given the circumstances, the wound in his belly throbbed, but he could deal with it, and he wasn’t hungry or tired. More than that, he felt alive, more alive than he had been since the morning of the stabbing. Wherever he was, it seemed to be good for him.
A change is as good as a rest.
His old mum used to say that often, and John finally understood it.
Maybe shouldn’t have had to come quite so far to reach that understanding.
The Burdens, his Burdens, were still at his back, emboldened by the lack of light although none had yet come close enough for him to be able to take a good shot at it. He could smell their stench though, hear their breath and the rustling of leathery wings, the scrape of talons on stone, and their chittering, high and shrill as if in counterpoint to the hum of the choir in his head. In his childhood drawings, they had always been active, flying alongside futuristic cars or spaceships, attacking pirate ships, or fighting among themselves over a scantily clad girl, that one was a personal favorite. He wondered whether they felt as he did, whether they were invigorated by this place. If they did, then it might not be too long before it was him they were fighting over.
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