He held the ladder while she went up, then he climbed up behind her. From here the spiral pattern in the floor tiles was more obvious. So was the black stain at its center. He inspected a shelf on the far left, thinking he recognized the spine of one of the books. "Hey. This book doesn't belong here."
Lilian approached him. "Which one?"
He pointed it out. One of the Garrote hardcovers had been misplaced among several scientific books, titles like The Age of Spiritual Machines, Computational Intelligence and The Brain Makers, along with a well-worn paperback of The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton. Ben grabbed the copy of The House Feeds but it wouldn't pull down from the shelf, it only tilted slightly, and a hidden mechanism made a sharp click.
"Careful, dammit!"
Garrote's voice came from behind them. They wheeled around and peered over the railing. Garrote stood over a disheveled man in a wooden chair. Ben gripped the railing, frightened for a moment, until he realized that this was not the Garrote they had seen elsewhere in the park.
"They're holograms," Lilian said. "You must have triggered a cutscene when you pulled on that book."
"Don't splash it on him," Garrote said to the woman standing beside him. She was dressed in a white suit jacket and skirt, with her back to them so they couldn't see her face. "It needs to appear as though I've poured it over myself."
The woman wore leather gloves and poured gasoline over the head of the unconscious man on the chair from a red plastic gas can. It soaked the man's straggly hair and spilled over his shoulders and chest, splashing on the floor around him. The unconscious man wore one of Garrote's cardigans but otherwise appeared filthy, as if the two of them had recently picked him up off the street.
"Care to do the honors?" Garrote said, holding up a single wooden match. It was the same blue-patterned matchbox as the one in the pocket of Ben's cargo shorts, the same brand the police had found tossed up against a bookshelf at the scene. If he'd been able to inspect it closer, he would have seen the bearded Chinese man on its face above the name Kitchen God Strike Anywhere Matches.
The woman refused Garrote's request with a brusque shake of her head and the writer began to smile. "Very well." He struck the match and let the flame flicker for a moment. It made his eyes twinkle. Then he tossed it onto the unconscious man.
Immediately the man burst into flames. Garrote laughed, the firelight giving his features a demonic look while the man in the chair screamed, his entire body engulfed by the blaze. Garrote's cardigan burned off the man's torso and the flesh began to peel off his bones. Forensics had found he hadn't been tied to the chair, yet he remained seated as if he was unable to get free, his back arching, melting fingers clawing at his thighs.
The woman had turned away. She was facing Ben and Lilian now but the flames at her back obscured her features. Behind her the dying man's stomach burst open and viscera spooled out over his lap, cooking between his legs. The woman's shoulders bunched as if she might be wincing or even retching.
"Oh, don't act so squeamish," Garrote scolded her. "You've done worse for your pound of flesh. Here, give me the gasoline."
He snatched the gas can from her and tossed it aside, where it landed near the matchbox. The police would later find both covered in Garrote's prints and conclude that Rex Garrote had burned himself alive—all but Detective Beadle, who thought something else entirely. Judging by what they'd just witnessed, the detective had been right.
Ben turned back to the science books, thinking they might be a clue. He'd read The Terminal Man on a Crichton binge one summer along with the Jurassic Park books and a handful of others. It was about a man who receives a surgical implant meant to counteract seizures by direct intervention in his brain. Before the implant the man believes machines will one day take over the world and after, he starts thinking he's becoming a computer himself. And in Rex Garrote's The House Feeds, a man's body and soul are slowly absorbed by the demonic Victorian home he lives in, Deaver House, which was based on this house.
It all made sense. But was it possible?
"Garrote is still alive," Ben said.
Before Lilian had a moment to process this information, the holograms flickered and twitched like a bad signal on an antique TV. The chair legs snapped under the man and his charred corpse dropped in slow motion. Suddenly the woman stepped briskly out of silhouette, out of sync with Garrote and the burning man, whose movements had drastically slowed. Ben recognized the woman's face, although the last time he had seen this person it hadn't been a woman.
It was the programmer standing there in a white jacket and pencil skirt. Harrison's face was unmistakable, with his shiny, balding head and those dark little rat eyes behind a pair of narrow, dandruff-flecked glasses, despite resting on the slim, hourglass figure of Rex Garrote's accomplice.
"Kids! Thank God—I found you!" the programmer cried. His voice had the same pre-echo quality as the ghost they'd helped leave its body outside the farmhouse. His voice stabilized as he approached the balcony below them. "If you want to get out of here you need to d-do exactly as I say, you g-g-got it?"
Lilian spoke. "You're still alive?"
"Just barely. I've inserted a digital avatar of myself into the program."
Ben said, "The reboot."
"Exactly," the programmer said. "But Garrote knows I'm in the system and he knows you're here, too. He'll get to us all soon, so we have to act quickly."
"How do we get out of here?" Lilian asked.
"You were on the right track with the books. I'll see if I can open the door for you the easy way."
The programmer squeezed his eyes shut, frowning in concentration. Behind him, Garrote's eyes began to slowly rise from the sight of the burning corpse, practically glowing with firelight, turning toward the man wearing his agent's body. The gleeful menace twisted into unadulterated rage, and Ben knew—he knew—Garrote wasn't a hologram, not any longer. The writer was here, in the room with them. And if Harrison didn't hurry, they would all be dead.
"He's here!" Ben cried.
"I'm doing the b-best I can. There's a lot of tech in this park, I just have to find the right algorithm to—there!"
At the far end of the balcony, the shelf popped out from the others with a click and groaned open, revealing a darkened hallway beyond.
"Quickly, get into the tunnel! You have to get to the servers. That's his only link with the system. I'll reach out to you as soon as I can but you have to—"
Garrote's eyes burned red and the woman's clothes burst into flames. The programmer screamed as the fabric peeled off his flesh. Ben looked away. He saw Lilian had already started across the balcony, heading for the secret door, and he chased after her.
They had to get to the servers. Garrote's consciousness was contained within it, exactly as he'd begun to suspect while looking at the books on the shelf. Somehow, Garrote had merged his consciousness with the computers, and those computers now controlled everything in Ghostland.
Pull the plug, sever Garrote's link to the park, to the ghosts, to his army.
Ben just hoped they could find the servers before Garrote caught them. Because this time, just like in his novels, the writer would leave no survivors.
Lilian burst forward with a surge of adrenaline as the passageway already began to rumble shut. Ben was steps behind her. In a blink of an eye Garrote was standing on the balcony above the ladder. Lilian hurried behind the bookcase. If Ben didn't reach her soon, he would miss the opportunity—the passage was almost shut. She held out a hand, fingers splayed, calling out for him to hurry. His breathing was heavy from the brief sprint along the balcony. She feared he wasn't going to make it.
Another blink and Garrote stood in the space Ben had just dashed away from, his eyes bright with malice, a dark smile frozen on his face.
Lilian backed into the dimly lit tunnel as Ben reached her and began squeezing his way through the narrow gap. He gasped, the back of the shelf pressing against his ribs, groaning as it tried to close with him inside the gap. S
he grabbed his hand and pulled, coaching him. "You can do it! Just a little bit more!"
Garrote was so close now. "You… are… MINE!" he roared. He snatched out and grabbed at Ben's T-shirt sleeve but his fingers slipped through the fabric and Ben managed to squeeze his head and shoulder through as the shelf drew closed with a click.
"Is he gone?" Ben said in the dark, gasping for breath. "Did we lose him?"
His exhaustion, his despair was palpable. She felt for his hands and squeezed them, hoping to pass some of her remaining strength on to him. "Let's just keep moving," she said. "I got a look down the tunnel before it closed. There's a lever at the far end. I bet it controls the door."
"Okay," Ben said. He took a deep breath and repeated himself. "Okay." He swallowed with difficulty.
She pumped his hands one last time for courage and let them go, then reached out into the darkness for the walls. The brick was cool, almost damp to the touch, the tunnel barely wider than her shoulders were broad. She moved forward, holding the walls, hoping she wouldn't trip, hoping Garrote wouldn't find them in the dark and drag them down into the blood-red water Allison had spoken of when she died.
"It's cold in here," she said. It was probably cold enough to see her own breath, if she could have seen anything at all. "Are we going down?"
"Huh?" Ben said behind her, still breathless.
"It feels like the tunnel's going down."
"I dunno." He paused, the only sound in the tunnel their footfalls, and the light swish of their hands against the cold stone walls. "Yeah, I think so."
The tunnel seemed to go on much longer than it had looked before the light shut out, leading down and down on a low decline. She wondered if it might take them right down to the basement. Her Converse scuffed on the floorboards. Her fingertips gently whispered against the walls. Her heart thrummed in her ears.
Suddenly she realized she could no longer hear Ben's labored breathing.
"Ben?"
"I'm here." He was only a step or two behind her.
Finally, she felt the cold metal lever and closed her fingers around it. Ben bumped into her from behind.
"S-sorry," he said.
"It's okay." She pulled the lever down. A sliver of light appeared in front of them, blindingly bright, in the shape of a door. Brick ground against brick as the passage opened on a walk-in freezer, the walls lined with shelves stacked with boxes of all sizes.
That explains the cold. "I guess we're not in the basement," she said.
"N-no. Probably not."
Goosebumps sprung up on her arms and her breath plumed out before her. The passage hissed closed behind them, a neat rectangle of insulated metal no one would suspect was a passage from inside the fridge. She reached the exit and slammed a shoulder into the door, jerking down on the handle. It wouldn't open. "We're stuck!" she said, hugging herself as she shivered.
"There's a pin," Ben said. He reached past her and pulled the metal pin out of the handle.
She tried the door again and it opened easily. Warmth bloomed on her cheeks and arms as she stepped into the kitchen. Her first breath formed a cloud of vapor as she slammed the fridge door behind her. Her next breath less so. The third wasn't visible at all. The light hairs on her forearms settled and the flesh on her forearms smoothed out, the goosebumps disappearing.
They stood in a large kitchen of pale tile and shimmering steel. She turned to Ben. He was breathing deeply, slowly, in through the nose, out through the mouth.
"You okay?"
"Uh-huh," he said eagerly.
A shrill scream sounded nearby, startling them both. Lilian traced the sound to the kitchen door, where a pretty young black woman with her hair in a tight bun burst through, dressed in a vintage maid's uniform with a white ruffled collar and apron. As the maid glanced over her shoulder she tripped, falling to her knees against the foot of the counter island. She knelt beside it, cowering, watching the door as she blindly felt the countertop for something to defend herself with.
A shotgun blast punched a ragged hole through the door, thrusting it inward.
The maid let out an involuntary scream, stifling it with the hand not roaming the countertop. Her employer stepped in: a fat, sweaty, rosy-cheeked man with a neat little waxed mustache, dressed in a cinched tuxedo with the buttons at his waist ready to burst. He expelled an empty shell from the shotgun in his hands and took aim.
"Mista Hedgewood," the maid said. Her slender fingers touched the serrated edge of a bread knife and her eyes widened. "This ol' house got its claws in you."
"Hedgewood," Ben said in a revelatory tone, as if the name meant something to him.
For a moment Lilian worried the ghosts would react to his voice, but they seemed either disinterested or unable to hear him. The man in the tuxedo—Mr. Hedgewood—considered the maid's proclamation for a moment, but he pulled the trigger anyhow. The maid winced against the impending pain… but the shotgun didn't fire, the trigger only clicked dryly.
"Blast it!" he cried.
He turned the barrel up to his eye and peered down into it. In the instant his attention left her, the maid closed her fingers tightly around the shaft of the knife and jabbed it into the man's stomach. His mouth opened in a cherry-red O and the shotgun went off in his hands. The upper half of his head exploded in a wet, chunky mess and the large man fell forward, toppling over her.
Drenched in his blood, she dropped the knife, which clattered on the tiles as she hurled the body from herself in horror and disgust. Hedgewood slumped to the floor, the ragged territory of flesh and gristle and bone above his neck pouring blood onto the white tile.
Her face painted in the dead man's blood, the maid's wide-eyed gaze settled on Lilian and Ben as if she could see them, more than a hundred years into the future. "He's coming," she said. But it was Harrison's voice that came from her lips. "I'll unlock the door under the stairs but I can't hold him off much longer. You have to move, kids."
Hedgewood's blood-slicked palms slapped down on the tiles beside the woman and he began to push himself to his feet. The corpse staggered blindly, his exposed throat gurgling as gore slopped out of the lower half of his head like an overfilled soup bowl. The tongue flopped with a horrible glottal sound as his fingers reached blindly for the knife in his stomach.
"Mista Hedgewood," the maid said, fear in her voice as she backed away from the living corpse on her hands and feet. "You cain't be alive. You ain't got a head…"
Suddenly all the pots and pans on the hanging rack started swinging, clanging hollowly against each other, and the stove burners all turned on at once, burning with large blue flames, and the cupboards and drawers slammed open and shut, open and shut, their contents clattering.
"Let's go!" Lilian shouted over the noise. She grabbed Ben's hand. His fingers were still so cold, as cold as the grave.
They ran for the door as utensils flung out from the drawers, hurtling toward them. Lilian ducked from a large shiny knife which sunk into the wall ahead of them with a doorstop twang, knocking an antique brass clock off the wall. Cutlery and condiments struck the walls and clattered on the tiles at their feet, clouds of flour, scattered cereals, cracked eggs. As they hurried past the headless corpse, he swung at them with the knife, the swish of the blade audible over the racket.
Ben shouldered through the door into the next room. Lilian hurried in behind him, pushing it shut and twisting the key in the lock. Her heart pounding, she turned to look at the room they had entered. She gasped at the sight of yet another horror.
The dining table was set for a fancy dinner. The remains of a large turkey and various side dishes moldered, buzzing with flies and the Rice Krispies crackle of a thousand crawling maggots. Around the table sat a young family in Victorian dress: a mother, a father and three children of varying ages, their corpses purplish and bloated, a foamy pinkish crust on their chins and dribbling on their napkins and bibs.
The father's head rose, lolling drunkenly. "He that eateth, eateth to the Lord
," he gurgled, blood and foam pouring from his lips. "For he giveth God thanks."
"Amen," his family gurgled in unison, then they began shoveling rotten morsels crawling with insects into their mouths.
As this macabre scene played out a deep, rumbling horn bleated from beyond the French doors to the foyer, so loud it rattled the glass in its frames.
"What was that?" Ben whispered, terror in his voice.
The sound had frightened Lilian too, rattling her heart and setting her nerves on edge. Behind them, something pounded against the kitchen door, a metallic scrape tracing its way down the wood.
Hedgewood, the headless man, had found them. They would have to risk running into whatever had made that terrible sound out in the foyer to get to the basement stairs.
"Come on," she said.
They sidled past the ravenous ghosts busily devouring their squirming, larvae-infested last meal and stopped in front of the French doors, attempting to peer through the etched glass. The foyer looked deserted. Whatever had made the strange trumpeting sound was gone.
Behind them the kitchen door splintered around the handle and the headless man shambled in, swinging the knife. Lilian and Ben both grabbed a handle. Ben gave her a worrisome look—obviously as wary of the sound they'd heard as she was—and together they drew the French doors open. Once through, they slammed them shut. They'd ended up at the far end of the foyer, near the front door.
"Look!" Ben shouted, pointing toward the basement door. The light on the lock mechanism was green. Harrison had opened it, as promised.
As they hurried across the foyer the loud, rumbling trumpeting came again. In the instant she realized where it was coming from, the basement door swung open violently, crashing against the base of the stairs.
For a long, silent moment nothing happened. They stared into the darkened opening, exhausted and afraid, awaiting the inevitable. Finally, a massive, impossible creature emerged from the darkness, so tall it had to duck to get through the doorway.
"Oh no," Ben gasped. "It's him."
Lilian didn't know who he was and she didn't want to find out.
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