August huffed on the lens of his handicam and switched it on, shrugging. “Sure, why not? Maybe she moved into that big, dark house with those children and decided to take up Satanic ritual abuse to pass the time. Everyone needs a hobby, you know?”
Sadie ignored him and continued. “It's just that... in life, there were reports of her hurting the children under her care, right? What for? Was she just crazy and abusive or did she have another reason for doing it? For that matter, why did the staff at the asylum get involved with... whatever it was they got up to?” She frowned. “However it is that Margot has managed to remain in this world, the one thing that hasn't changed is her interest in hurting people. Margot possessed Ophelia, and she was the one who made her slash her wrists and later reopen the wounds. I could be missing something, but I think Margot is stuck in this world because of unfinished business. The business, though, is the continued abuse of innocents—she's still trying to finish her dark work, the work that began in the asylum.” She sighed. “I'm just spitballing, but that makes sense, doesn't it? Did you ever find out what exactly happened in the asylum? Why the staff had taken to abusing the patients—what their goal had been?”
“I couldn't tell you,” he replied, scanning the kitchen through the handicam's viewfinder. “I'm afraid I didn't have time to look into that. Whatever it was they were hurting patients for, it was serious enough to get two of the guys—doctors—hanged, though.” He gave the camera a shake and then shut it down. “It's got a half-charge. Should be enough.”
“The asylum was shut down in 1927, right?” Sadie eased herself into one of the kitchen chairs. “That means her spirit has been walking those halls for almost a century. If there's a link between Margot and the scandal at Rainier, then it's just possible that her spirit has been trying to fulfill some dark goal all this time. We have to stop her tonight, no matter what. We need to find that mirror, bury it, and if that doesn't work we need to try something else. Whatever happened at the asylum, she's the last remaining link—the last root of the tree. We need to dig it up for good, lest it keep growing for another hundred years.”
“To that end,” interrupted August, pulling up his chinos, “this is what we've got.” He singled out two flashlights of hardy steel construction. “Lights. These will fare much better in the house. We'll each carry one.” He pointed to a small plastic camping lantern. “We can set this down in a room as a beacon—something that'll help us get back to, say, the main entrance.” One by one he dropped the lights into a backpack.
“What're these for?” asked Sadie, picking up a crumpled plastic bag filled with what looked like glow sticks.
August reached into the bag and grabbed a handful, activating them with a snap. When he'd shaken them furiously and put out the lights to test their brightness, he handed her a fistful and dropped the remainder into the backpack. “Unlike a flashlight, these don't run out of batteries and no electrical interference will hamper them. We drop 'em like breadcrumbs throughout the house so that we can establish a trail, get it?” He paused, grinning, and singled out one in the shape of a fairy wand. “I'm calling dibs on this one, by the way.”
They were better prepared this time, but the prospect of visiting the house at night still irked her. “Do you think this will be enough?” she asked. “She might be stronger right now that it's nighttime; she's more at home in the dark than we are. We may not even see her coming. I can usually see ghosts just fine but she managed to sneak up on me nonetheless.”
August held up the camera and then gingerly set it in his bag. “That's what this baby is for. If she shows up, the recording is going to wig out. Remember the hospital footage? Same deal. She can't help but give herself away.”
She had to give him credit; he'd put a lot of thought into covering the bases. Still, there was one potentially time-consuming problem he hadn't addressed yet. “I'm still not sure how we're going to find the mirror, though. The longer we wander through that house, the more time we're going to give Margot to prey on us. It could take us hours to find a mirror in that giant place...”
“Nah,” countered August. “I've been thinking about it. It's like this. Remember that blueprint of the house I showed you?” He extended a finger and traced lines in the air as he explained. “Margot's corpse was found on the first floor; that limits our search to the ground level. Also, if you look at the layout, you'll notice that there are two long halls that cut through the lower story. The first one, which goes straight ahead from the entry hall, leads past the stairwell and into a bunch of larger rooms. That was the hall we explored during our previous visit. The downstairs bedrooms however—there are five on the first floor and five on the second—are located down the right-hand hallway, which we passed but didn't explore. Based on the facts, we know that Margot must have died in one of those five ground-floor bedrooms, and it follows that one of them is bound to contain the mirror. In reality, we only have to search five small rooms in that house to find our target.”
“Damn,” she replied, “I'm impressed.”
“There's one last thing,” he added, standing up and throwing open one of his cupboards. From it he drew out a large box of kosher salt. “We'll be needing this and a shovel. I've got one in the garage. So, this is the battle plan: We find the mirror, drop it into a hole two feet deep and coat it in salt and—voila—no more Mother Maggot.”
“Hopefully,” she was quick to insert.
He retrieved his keys and slung the backpack over one shoulder. “You ready to roll?”
She wasn't, but if she hesitated any longer it was possible she'd lose her faith in the plan and all her nerve besides, so she nodded and made her way to the door. August locked up and tossed the supplies into the backseat. When he'd jogged round to the garage and found his shovel, he set it in the trunk and then fired up the engine.
The night had deepened substantially by the time they began rolling out toward Beacon Hill.
23
The entire car ride was tense. Sadie braced herself the whole way, as if in preparation of a sucker punch that never came. Though, in a sense, the blow did land, for at seeing the stony titan atop Beacon Hill from the roadside she felt the breath knocked out of her.
The Honda slowed and August coasted into the gravel lot across the road. He wasted no time in parking, in stepping out and gathering the supplies. He tasked Sadie with the shovel and box of salt and took the backpack for himself. A curious change had come over him in the previous twenty minutes since they'd left his place. He wasn't making his usual wisecracks; his ordinarily bubbly nature had been replaced by something more subdued, almost melancholic. She was glad to see him take this seriously, and yet the change in his demeanor—and the knowledge that, like her, he was almost certainly terrified—only fed her apprehensions.
She clutched at the wooden handle of the shovel and started across the quiet road behind him. The moon was bright tonight; brighter than in recent memory, and in the hopes of softening the mood she pointed it out to him. “Moon's nice and bright tonight. I wonder what phase it's in.”
He looked up into the sky for an instant before leveling his gaze back on the house in the distance, and replied, “It's a waxing gibbous.”
She chuckled, unsure of what to do with that information, and then slid back into silence.
Aside from its brightness, this night was also singularly quiet. There was almost no breeze to speak of, leaving the tall, usually rustling grasses ahead of them to stand like spikes of green glass. Some smallish mammal—a squirrel, raccoon or rabbit—descended the hill some thirty feet off, chittering as it went, and for awhile that was the only noise to be heard. Small sections of the field were home to clouds of gnats; they clustered above muddier pockets in the grass that the earlier showers had left behind, and from elsewhere their shriller relatives made occasional bleats.
She used the shovel as a support when the gradient increased, and when she dared look up at the house again she was stunned at its closeness. The pair was a
scending at a reasonable clip, but the structure now loomed inordinately near, as if it were itself sliding down the muddy hillside to meet them. Sweat dotted her brow, made her blouse stick uncomfortably to her skin. August paused just long enough to roll up his sleeves and undo a few of the buttons on his dress shirt. The bowtie he'd worn up to that point was stuffed almost hatefully into his pocket and the collar of his shirt was left damp with perspiration where it had sat.
The house on Beacon Hill greeted them with its usual stony silence, and the shadows cast by its impressive footprint were as distinct as lines on a map demarcating the borders of hostile territories. They were a few dozen yards from the busted retaining wall now, and as they advanced Sadie thought better of scanning the black windows as she'd done during their first visit. She kept her eyes locked onto the tangled path ahead, on her companion—on anything but the weathered grey facade.
“All right,” said August, adjusting the shoulder strap of his bag. “Here we are.” He picked up his pace for a few moments and then drew to a halt at the borders of that crumbling wall. “Here, take this,” he said, handing over one of the flashlights. He claimed the other for himself and also juggled the handicam. The device whirred and clicked as it powered up. The viewfinder flashed several times before it was ready to record, and he spent awhile adjusting the zoom and taking in their surroundings. “It's working,” he said.
This, she took it, was his way of saying it was time to go inside.
He tucked his flashlight under one arm and dug out a claw-full of glow sticks, some of them giving off warm neon colors. “Leave the shovel and salt out here and stick these in your pockets so that you can drop them as we go. You might want to activate a few more so that you don't have to do it inside.”
Sadie wedged her flashlight into the back pocket of her capris and then took to snapping the chunky things until they glowed. With a dozen or so successfully activated now and their combined brightness showing dimly though the fabric of her pockets, she sized up that wide entry arch and took a deep breath. “I can't believe we're going in again,” she muttered.
“Stick to the plan,” he advised. “It's going to be quick—painless, remember? We know just where we need to go and we've come prepared.” This paternal tone of his was quite different from his usual manner; she found she rather appreciated the change. Listening to him talk that way, she could almost bring herself to believe that everything would be OK.
Almost.
They began toward the entrance, and when both had hesitated sufficiently at the threshold, they stepped wordlessly inside. The now-familiar squeal of the tired floors was there to greet them as they entered, as if it were the house's way of saying, “Welcome back!”
Flashlights activated, the pair cut through the velvety darkness with wild swings, the whitish beams serving to break fist-sized holes in what was otherwise a wall of perfect black. These flashlights were certainly an upgrade compared to the tiny thing August had used the last time, but even with two of them in action, Sadie was dismayed at how little a difference they made.
August interrupted her thoughts before she lost ground to despair. “Let's set the lantern up in here,” he suggested, lowering the bag and handing her the camera. “Hold onto that for me.” Unearthing the lantern, he clicked it on and then walked it several paces into the room. Once set, it cast a feeble glow across the floor. “Hopefully we'll be able to see that from a distance.” He reclaimed the camera, giving the room a quick study through the viewfinder. “It's early yet, but I don't see anything happening here. No glitches, no static. What about you, Sadie. See anything? Hear anything?”
Her grip tightened instinctively around the barrel of the flashlight and she thrust it out before her in a joust. “N-No,” she stuttered. She stood in place awhile, the light peeling back only the most superficial layers of darkness, and combed the space for that white face. It didn't emerge, but that was no guarantee that it didn't lurk deeper in.
August turned, outstretched his light to the left. “This is the way we went last time. The hallways are down here, remember? If memory serves, there's nothing to the right. This is just a big entry hall.”
Sadie stuffed a hand into her pocket and withdrew a neon blue glow stick. She followed closely behind August who now sought out the entrance to the hall, flashlight and camera held out tautly before him. When her own eyes turned up no phantoms in the dark, she would look to the viewfinder as if to reassure herself there was really nothing there.
The hallway appeared before them, its gloom completely untouched by the sickly shine of the lantern to their backs. With a wind-up, Sadie tossed the blue glow stick into the passage and watched it roll awhile across the dusty floors. When it came to a stop, the pair proceeded and she yanked another one—neon orange this time—from her collection.
They pushed into the hallway, the narrowness of the passage giving the beams of their flashlights a bit more currency. Something skittered past their feet as they started in, but after a shared gasp they shook off the scare and kept on. Tainted wrinkles in the plaster seemed to writhe like diseased veins as they swept past, almost fooling one into the belief that the house was a living thing. Streaks of mold, of spider's silk, traced the slumping walls like vessels leading to some black organ that stirred within the uncharted depths.
Sadie cast another glow stick down the hall. It rolled over the uneven floors, and she tensed as it stopped, half-expecting it to cease its rolling against the specter's waiting foot. So far, the way was clear of phantoms, however. They continued with a threadbare confidence, marking their way and keeping a lookout for the fork in the hall that would transfer them to the wing they sought. Their previous trip down this very passage, coupled with their earlier study of the blueprint, told them they were getting close.
“It can't be too far now,” whispered Sadie, dropping a red glow stick at her feet.
“Wait—” blurted August.
Both of them halted when the viewfinder screen gave an unexpected blink, as if the visuals had cut out for a fraction of a second. “Hold up,” whispered August. “It might just be the battery or something. I haven't used this thing in awhile.”
While he adjusted the angle of the viewfinder and waited to see whether the display would flicker again, Sadie looked back the way they'd come and was alarmed to find that she couldn't see the lantern anymore. A feeble glow radiated in that nest of dense shadow to their backs, but it had been beaten down by the effusive darkness till only traces of it polluted the space.
Another possibility occurred to her as she stared back, however—one that was quickly borne out by a shift in said glow.
The light hadn't been subdued by the shadows; rather, it had been obscured by something standing in her line of sight. Her heart jumped in her chest and she nudged August in the side with her flashlight. “It's... It's...”
The handicam display gave a violent flicker, which led him to finish her sentence. “It's coming, isn't it?”
From the tired floors they'd walked only moments prior, there sounded a slow, noxious squeal.
At this noise, August whipped around, thrusting both light and camera toward the hall entrance, and in doing so witnessed a sudden jumbling of the display. The screen of the viewfinder pulsed on and off, and when it powered back up after a seconds-long lapse, clusters of pixels jittered in the center as though unable to process what the lens was taking in. “Oh, shit.” He fell a few steps back and only kept from tripping thanks to Sadie's grip on his arm.
She didn't need the camera to know what was standing behind them. Through the cone-shaped divot her light managed to carve into the darkness, she could see the vague, slumping outline of that night-bodied thing, could catch the barest edge of its eggshell of a face.
And it was getting closer.
Stumpy black legs pistoned disjointedly against the floors, and the fearsome whole lurched forward, head rolling to one side. The tar-colored membranous body quaked for the effort, and it shook harder s
till as that grating, bone-dry laugh began to dribble from its insect-encrusted lips. “AH-AH-AH-AH...” The vile laugh built into a hacking shriek as the figure groped through the darkness. Its quickness was spent in the smaller movements—the wiggling of its gnarled digits, the frenzied turns of its head—but as a whole it moved with an almost impossible slowness, as though stumbling through waist-high water. This gradual gain down the hall, made in fits and starts through profoundly unnatural movements, was in some sense more disturbing than a full-on run. There was an otherworldliness, a strange menace superadded to its pursuit.
The duo bumped into each other and then charged deeper into the hall. Sadie managed to continue dropping glow sticks, though her shaking hands grabbed up too many at a time and cast them about at random. Clusters of red and blue and green lights littered the hall, making for a zigzagging trail.
“Here!” shouted August, suddenly bracing himself against the wall and hitching to the right. “It's the other hall!” With nary a pause, he switched tracks, breaking into a jog down this new passage. He lowered the light, the camera, and pointed out shafts of the bright moonlight penetrating into the passage from the open doorways down the way. “It's in one of these rooms,” he said. “It's gotta be.”
From the rear, the sounds of Mother Maggot's advance waxed dominant. Whenever there was a pause in the uneven footfalls, a brief break in the noise, peals of sputtering laughter would ring out. August couldn't hear the laughter, but his continued study of the scrambled viewfinder told him that the specter was on their heels.
The Haunting of Beacon Hill Page 19
