Except worry filters through the holes in my resolve. It’s not completely over.
“Joel,” I say, gearing myself to cross the room. I will my gaze to look only where it needs to.
“Joel?” I call out louder, peering back into the connecting space where Todd had landed after falling through my floor. I steel myself and run full circle around the piles of garbage bags. No sign of him.
“Where else could he be?” I say, feeling the panic rise like bile in my throat. This doesn’t make sense. Ada said he was down here. Even Garrett implied he was in here.
I wheel around, waiting for a flash of inspiration, for some kind of answer to magically appear. I could look through my entire house, but I already did that. I’m sure nothing has changed. Joel, where is Joel?
I wish I could ask Ada. But it’s better this way. The dead should be dead. Leave the living alone.
A person can’t just disappear like this. I don’t know where else he could be.
Or don’t I?
He wouldn’t run off. And leave his cell phone, his clothes, everything? Joel wouldn’t just abandon me, or his internship. He wouldn’t run away from his life, no matter what my dad was trying to get him to do.
No, there’s one more place I haven’t checked.
twenty
seven
Todd taps his fingers on the grand piano in the Warren’s posh home. The fixtures and furniture are all squared off in a very modern style that makes Todd get the same feeling he always does here, like he’s not allowed to touch anything.
Jordan kneels over Sierra on the tile, tilting her chin up to feel for a pulse. Sierra’s brown hair is frazzled; her body lies as if wilted, though Todd catches movement in her fingertips and a slight rise and fall of her chest. At least she’s not dead.
He’s been pacing, skimming through Garrett’s journal, hoping for elaboration—maybe something on relativity or the madman’s ideas on laws of nature, perhaps. He sees a section of Garrett’s notes that touches on conservation of energy, but none of it holds Todd’s interest for long. He can’t keep his glance away from Piper’s, or get Sierra’s words out of his head. She’d mentioned other stuff. Had something more than skin-switching happened?
And what happened there to create such a volt of electricity? He’s not sure if the house did it just to ward off Sierra’s presence, or if something else—or someone else—caused it. It can’t have all been to keep Sierra out. He’s seen people come and go there for years and the house has never done a thing.
Then again, he didn’t know it could.
His brain tries to flick back to its factory-setting of denial. But after having Piper’s room turn upside down on him one minute and then ripping the floor right out from under his feet the next—no, it isn’t too much to expect the house to go to these measures just to keep one girl away.
Still, Piper is in there. And he’s wasting time.
“Is she okay?” Todd asks, trying not to sound impatient. All impatience fades, though, when he lowers the journal and notices Jordan pumping against Sierra’s chest, stopping to breathe air into her mouth. “Dude, what are you doing?”
Jordan stops long enough to pump against her chest again in a poor imitation of movie-scene rescues. “CPR. What does it look like?” He bends to place his mouth over hers again.
Can he not tell she’s alive? Todd had only said as much when he told Jord not to call 911.
“Looks like you’re trying to make out with her Lloyd Christmas style. Oh come on, Dumb and Dumber? Don’t tell me you’ve never seen it.”
“I’ll kill you,” Jordan mutters in reply, pumping her chest once more. “If she dies, I swear I’ll kill you.”
Here we go again, Todd thinks, remembering the last few conversations he’s had with Jordan, laced with threats and declarations of betrayal. Jordan knew how Todd felt about Piper, and he still had the nerve to do what he did. Some friend he was, to go and vandalize her house. Most of all Todd remembers the confrontation afterward where he’d sounded off with a fist in Jordan’s eye after finding an axe in his hand and Piper bleeding on the ground.
“I told you,” Todd says, annoyed. He closes the journal. “I didn’t do anything. In fact, she landed on me—I probably saved her life.” He nurses his shoulder, still feeling the car’s metal against his back. “Besides, she’s breathing, man.”
Jordan pauses and looks right at Todd. A bruise leers below Jordan’s left eye, purpled and black. “Then what the hell happened?”
Sierra gasps for breath, her eyes popping open wide. She grapples, scraping her fingers along the tile. Jordan cradles her in his arms.
“Sierra, baby, you okay?”
As realization strikes, she loses her composure. Her full lips mush up like prunes. Tears streak down her face. Jordan pulls her into his arms, matting down her hair. Todd notices where Jordan used to stroke her face before, he avoids touching her pimpled skin now.
The crying had been one thing that surprised Todd the most about Sierra. Like the day of Piper’s audition. She’d cried to him after Piper had stood up for herself, even after Sierra had antagonized Pipes about her mom. Yeah, the phrase, “being able to dish it out but unable to take it,” applies like a stamp to Sierra Thompson.
Sierra pulls away, eyes on her lap as she coughs and gasps a few more times. “I want my skin back!” she cries. “I want my own memories, my head, my body, my LIFE. And I know she can make it stop!”
“Uhhh—” Todd grunts, not knowing what to say. Then again, who knows when it comes to Sierra. Jordan looks dumbstruck and keeps rubbing her back like that will make it all better, although the movement isn’t so much soothing as it is like he’s trying to sand down a table.
“And what’s with these memories?” she goes on, ranting to the floor. “I’ve never moved. I’ve gone to Cedarvale my whole life, so why should I care when someone is scared to come to a new school? I don’t care—I don’t, I don’t!”
“Doesn’t sound that way to me,” Todd wants to say, but instead kneels beside her as she trembles on Jordan’s lap. No, Sierra would never be scared of going to a new school. But he knows someone who would be.
“You’re seeing Piper, aren’t you?” he asks softly.
She snorts a long sniff while her burnished brown eyes trudge their way up to meet his. She doesn’t say a word, but that’s confirmation enough for him.
Todd sinks to the floor and runs a hand through his curls. “Holy crap,” he mumbles. Then, a different thought occurs. He shakes Sierra like an Etch-a-Sketch. “Are you seeing Piper? Are you seeing her right now?”
Her head bobbles. Jordan shoves Todd off. “Dude, back off. Sierra? What’s going on this time?”
This time?
Sierra keeps her gaze on Todd. “What—is with Piper Crenshaw’s house?”
Todd shakes his head. This cannot be happening.
“I told you I was sorry,” Jordan says, still cradling Sierra, who is becoming more composed by the second. “I was pissed about what you said when I helped Si with that profile, and about how secretive Piper is about her house when I was there and something happened, something she tried to cover up. And I lost it. I only meant to, you know, taunt her a bit, not hurt her. Come on, man,” he exchanges a glance with Sierra, “we know something is up.”
Todd glances across the street again. He’s running out of time. He doesn’t know what’s going on in there, only that it’s got to be bad. And who knows if he’ll see Piper alive again, not with some egotistical Jack the Ripper scientist haunting her basement.
But if he does see her again, he knows he won’t want to try and justify why he’d confided in the two people she hates more than anyone else in their whole school.
Besides, look at what it took for him to finally believe Piper’s house-body aberration. There’s no way he can provide proof like she did. Except
that they don’t seem to need it, not with Sierra being suddenly clairvoyant.
Still…
“No way,” Todd says. “Everyone knows Sierra’s a loose cannon. Especially when it’s dirt on someone else. Look what you did about Piper’s mom.”
Sierra purses her lip, shaking her head as another tear trickles out. Something about her expression tells him this time is different. A gleam in her eyes, a seriousness in her countenance. Likewise, Jordan stares at him with a mixture of guilt and assurance.
“I can’t,” Todd goes on, though this time it’s half-hearted. It’s asinine. Piper would kill him.
But who else can he turn to? One thing Piper could never understand—one thing he himself had forgotten—is that up until a few days ago, these guys had been his friends.
Sierra adjusts her clothes, then looks back up again. “You can trust us,” she says. “Remember the F Shack?”
A grin spreads over her face as she says it, adding a glow to her skin and reminding Todd how smoking hot she is. It had been the second week of summer practice when Todd had heard Jordan, Sierra, Kody, and Tabitha, thoroughly intoxicated after what they called a “drinking raid” that ended with them being chased across town by the cops. They’d been knocking the side of the hot tub in his backyard and asking it if they could hide. Todd peered out at the sound and snuck them inside his house just as a cop car rolled down the street. For whatever reason, the hot tub had been dubbed the “F Shack” that night. Todd chuckles too. It’d been the first time of many nights they’d hung out last summer.
“Dude,” Jordan says, jumping to his feet and out the front door. The house across the street is visibly shuddering; the siding boards shake so much the gaps between them are visible. Images of bleeding wallpaper, of faucets turning on of their own volition, of bodies stripped of their organs sledgehammer into Todd’s brain, making thinking impossible.
All at once Sierra screams, a raging, ear-stabbing scream so tangible it goes straight through him. She rears back like something invisible is on the prowl, ready to spring. Jordan clings to her like he doesn’t know what to do. Todd doesn’t blame him—he wouldn’t either.
“Ugh!” she wails, looking at the ceiling, at something that isn’t there. “He’s like—hacking somebody. The blood. Oh man, the screams…Make it stop, make it stop!”
Jordan gives Todd a helpless glance as Sierra quavers and shoves away from him. She rises to her feet, grasping her head in a strange dance like she’s trying to extract something from her skull.
“Dammit,” Todd curses. He’s got to get back in there. Jordan coaxes his girlfriend to sit on the uncomfortably square red couch. She breathes a few times, settling back down again. He can’t imagine what she’s seeing. What Piper’s going through.
“Okay—” Todd relents. He has no other choice. “But if you do anything, or tell anyone…”
“We’ll sign a contract!” Sierra bursts, then startles when she sees the look of incredulity Todd and Jordan both give her, because she’s suddenly back to normal. She realizes it too and cowers back, folding her arms. “What, my mom has to do it sometimes.”
“Don’t mess with the Bates Motel, got it,” Jordan says, overriding her. His attention is plastered to the window and the view across the street.
Todd swallows, gripping the journal in his hand. He can’t believe he’s going to do this. Then again, maybe it won’t be as hard to explain as he’d thought.
twenty
eight
I glance uneasily up at the ceiling the stairs lead into. The thick sight of wood everywhere—stairs, walls, ceiling—wigs out my mind, the way a room that’s been painted all black makes you look for some sign of dissonance, for something to stand out. The solidness of everything gives an air of finality to the closet-sized room.
Jordan’s boots sank into me when he’d climbed these stairs. I wonder if I’ll feel that this time. And the image I’d seen of Ada being trapped alive under them. This is where it all started for me. Opening this door opened my view into the past.
I’m glad about it, in some small way. Glad I was able to stop Garrett, to keep Joel from sharing my father’s fate. Glad this is all over. I’ll find Joel and we’ll burn down the house. Move far away. Take Todd with us and just leave this town.
Though I can’t tell from here, there’s got to be a trap door at the top. A hatch of some kind, some way to get into wherever the floating door leads.
I’m nervous to see my father—will he really be in here too? Will he be angry at me? Of course, he always seemed to be angry about something. No wonder, though, seeing as how he was just as much a murderer as my mother.
“I hope you’re up here, Joel,” I say, taking the first step.
I get the impression that I’m growing as the space between myself and the ceiling shrinks. But instead of having to duck the way Jordan did, I squint and straighten, hoping somehow this will work. Sure enough, my head goes through the ceiling like it’s not even there.
I emerge into an unfinished room. It’s what I imagine the attic looks like: small, about the same size as mine, and completely devoid of furniture or windows. Bare lath boards—what they used to build houses with—are exposed, the plaster sealing them oozing out through the cracks.
And though I expected to see them, the sight of men loitering aimlessly through stirs cold into the air, making me take a step back. Some sit on the naked floorboards, some stare out through a door-sized opening at the far wall.
It’s not just any opening. While I know the exterior looks like a gray and purple door with no handle, from this side it reveals the grass and linden tree standing in my yard, but as if I’m looking at it through a shimmering portal. A hidden window to the outside. I peel my gaze for a second, wondering if there’s any traces of Jordan’s axe. Probably not.
The men aren’t ghosts, exactly. Not pearly and vacant-looking the way Thomas’s ghost had been, but their bodies aren’t defined either. None of them really notice my entrance. They must be used to girls rising through their floor out of nowhere.
I can’t help my skepticism. This was their promised eternity? To spend their immortality stuck here? Still, I’m shocked to see them looking so hopeless. So miserable. I wonder which of them had been the one to buy the house from Garrett so long ago. Which of them had been the first to agree to this.
I skim faces, looking for Joel, hoping he’s not like the rest of them. But it’s not Joel I see.
My hands fly to my mouth, and I get the urge to break for it, to pour salt water over my eyes in attempt to erase the sight of Mr. Garrett. Though he’d been relatively young during our last conversation in the basement, now his hair is white, his skin loose and leathery. I catch patches of bone where skin sags away from his eyes and mouth, like he’s wearing a mask and it’s slipping off. The only reason I recognize him is the bloodstained apron over his old-fashioned clothes.
And in the corner near him stands the only woman in the room. Her form is blurred like the others’, and what looks like a cage hovers around her head.
“Mom!”
She won’t look at me. Just stares at Garrett’s lifeless body on the floor beside her. It’s here completely, not half ghostly the way the rest of them are.
“It won’t work,” Dad says softly. I don’t see him join me. One second he’s just there. “She’s not fully here.”
“Why is she here?” I ask in horror. And I take the time to goggle at my father’s immortal state, wondering how he’s here if his body is gone. He looks the same. Thin nose, glasses, droopy, forlorn expression. I wonder why he ever thought this would be a good idea. Why he ever believed this counted as immortality. Because they look pretty dead to me.
“She killed someone Garrett had been prepping. It tied her to this house as well, but not in the way it should have because she wasn’t sworn to him to carry out the responsibility. So Garre
tt’s protection wasn’t on her. Now her mind is warped. Trapped here while her body—”
“—rots in jail,” I finish. “Dad, what are any of you still doing here? I stopped it. You should be free.”
“You shouldn’t have come here,” he says.
His concentrated expression gives me the wiggins, the way he analyzes me. He never paid this much attention to me in life. No reason he should start acting like I’m his pride and joy now.
“Why did you do it?” Pledge your life to this. Kill those people. Guilt trip Joel into it.
“This is what Crenshaws do. I didn’t have any other choice.”
“Yes you did.”
Dad continues watching me like I’m an interesting specimen from one of his books. “Whatever,” I say, growing angrier. “Where’s Joel?”
“Not here,” says another figure. Could be a long-lost grandfather. At this point, I don’t care. All these men took the lives of others, just so they could keep living. I don’t know of anything more selfish.
“Why would you want this?” I ask the room. The figures ignore me, but one joins Dad’s intense staring match at me. “Any of you?”
“We were told our souls would be lost after we die,” the man says. “We didn’t want to be lost.”
“Death is just a part of being human,” I argue. “You shouldn’t try to control something that’s uncontrollable. No one can stop death. Look what happened to Garrett, what he did to people. That’s seriously wrong. And you’re all sick.”
I look again to my mother, wait for the bitterness to rise, remembering how hurt I’ve felt all these years and especially the night after I saw her in prison. Knowing the truth now, and seeing her here, I feel nothing but pity.
Time to go. I don’t know where Joel is if he’s not in here, but I can’t stand around chatting. The floor above the stairs is solid. I stomp on it a few times, unsure how I got through before. I hurry to the floating door, remembering what Ada said about it not having a handle.
The Forbidden Doors Box Set Page 23
