Between sobs, she said, “Get away from me. Just leave me alone. Leave me alone.”
“We didn’t mean—I didn’t mean it like it sounded.”
‘That’s a lie. You did. Just leave me alone,” she wept. “Just leave me alone.”
“Just come inside. It’s freezing out here,” Chet said, and took his jacket off, wrapping it across her shoulders. “Please. Just come inside.”
“I will,” she said, her heaves subsiding a bit. “Just go away. Leave me alone. I’ll go in. But after you leave.”
16
When Mira was alone, a light snow began to fall. It was early in the year for snow, and the flakes were small and fine. It’s almost November first, she thought. Halloween. All the parties back in the city. I’m missing everything. Just because 7 have to be here with Dad. Just because of Dad I’m stuck in this hellhole, and then he has to be here, the one that I know should want me, but that witch is after him, and I’m so ugly. I’m ugly and disgusting and no one will ever love me. No one will ever love me. I will die a virgin. She reached down and hugged her dog to her, raising him up on the bench, like a large child in her arms. She buried her face against the thick ruff of fur along Conan’s neck. In her left hand, a pair of night goggles.
“You love me, don’t you, Conan? At least you love me, at least somebody does,” she wept as she cuddled her pet. He pressed his icy nose against her throat and made noises that sounded like sweet comfort. “Let’s not go back to that house again. I don’t want to see any of them ever again. I hate all of them. I wish I hadn’t come. I wish we could just go someplace safe. Just you and me. Just somewhere small and safe where no one can find us.”
17
It was four o’clock in the morning when Frost awoke and saw the girl standing by his window in the dark. He glanced up at the camera in the doorway. Would the camera capture this?
All he could make out was her small form. He reached beside his bed for the night goggles. He slipped them on, and then could see her more clearly.
Yes, it was her, the little one. the pretty girl from the cellar. She was a teenager, from the look of her torn clothes, from the look of wildness and innocence on her face; and it excited him that she was there. With the night goggles on he saw her clearly, saw her half-smile, her long blond hair, and as she moved closer to him, he could see the markings on her skin, the symbols that had been etched upon her, all glowing in the greenness of the goggles.
He knew that she was Quincy Allen, the teen who had died the previous year. It was her spirit, lingering like residue here. Within his mind, her voice spoke to him.
She would become one of his voices, he was sure.
She would come into him, inside his flesh, and dwell there, and make the voices speak again.
And he knew that he was the most important one in the world to her.
He wanted to love the dead girl very, very badly.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1
Frost spent the early morning hours feeling the Voices come back inside him. It was like an earth-shattering orgasm to feel them go through him again. It was Snapping Jaws coming back! It was a tickling in his throat, a fiddling within his mind, and he felt stiff and firm and erect and whole as he heard them speak within him.
“She’s going to die, you have to know that, she needs to—”
“Look, in a few more minutes you’re going to want to stop all of them, because they’re out to destroy you. You know that, don’t you? Frost? Can you hear me?’
“Of course he can hear you, look at him, he’s excited again. It’s been a long time since he’s been this aroused.”
“Do you want to see true beauty, Frost? We can show you our treasures, we can show you the other side of everything, you know.”
‘The inside out of it.”
“The turnabout of flesh.”
“Yes,” one of them whispered softly, a sweet woman’s voice within him. ‘The other side of things. The infinite.”
“It has great beauty.”
“Great beauty is no accident,” said another. “Frost, do you understand? We will give you power, if you like. We have made you potent. You are more than you’ve ever been. Here, here with us, in Harrow.”
Frost closed his eyes. He asked them: “What are you? Are you the dead? Can you show yourselves to me?”
“Would you like to see us?” one of them asked.
“Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, please, yes,” Frost said, feeling something in his mouth that was like licorice and a memory.
“Open your eyes. We are here with you,” the sweet-voiced woman said.
Frost went from darkness to light and saw, for the briefest moment, what seemed like a brilliant star going out into an absolute darkness.
And yet, in the dark, his goggles on, he saw them as they crawled toward him. Some of them moved as if they had no legs, crawling with their arms; others came on all fours like animals, their stringy hair hanging down.
They’re an army. A fucking army. An army of night crawlers. Coming to me, coming to me. The thoughts spun through him a mile a minute. Soon their arms writhed around him, and he saw the green glow of their faces, and there were children with teeth like knives, and there was a man with a spike in his hand, and there were even soldiers in dented armor, and the stories that Ivy Martin had told in the cellar came to him again: Gilles de Rais and the children he killed, the Knights Templar, and all of them wanted him, and there she was, the most beautiful woman of all, an angel in human flesh, Isis Claviger, with her mouth open for him, her lips drawn back across her teeth.
They covered him and held him and pressed themselves deep into his body, and he trembled and shook and wept and rejoiced until morning’s light. He drew the curtains back on the dawn, letting the sunlight flood his room. Then he went to look at his new, shining self in the mirror. He saw them, all of them, within his own eyes; he felt a delicate shiver run through his being. They were no longer voices alone. They were actual creatures within him. They shared his thoughts and tasted his love, and it was as if everything Frost Crane had ever wished for had come true.
It was only after he’d come down from the incredible high of this that he went over to his battered suitcase and opened it. There, in his shaving kit: fingernail clippers.
Frost Crane sat on the edge of his bed and began carving the symbols into his skin. He had watched them the previous night as they’d come alive before his eyes, just for him, showing him the words and the phrases and the pictures that were necessary. They had it all wrong! Ivy and Jack and their crude companions! Words on a wall were meaningless! It was the flesh of humans that needed the words and the images to open the door wide and let in the divinity of Harrow. His skin felt ripe and tingly, his fingers moving the sharp edge of the clipper over his belly and thighs with an artist’s precision but a factory worker’s speed. The holes of his body expanded so as to allow more of them to enter him, to be within his flesh.
And as he drew the ritual symbols that they showed him, he felt something like a door within him open up; not a metaphorical door that opened his mind or heart but a literal door, creaking open, a door of bones and organ meat and pumping blood, opening, and his skin began turning outward, but he did not scream.
He did not scream.
There was great pleasure to be had as his flesh became the doorway of Snapping Jaws. He began seeing how the light changed, and how what had seemed painful was in fact like an exquisite tickling, a kind of loving, a meeting of the inner with the outer, of the spiritual with the material, and he was, in fact, he himself, Frost Crane, was the suit that Snapping Jaws wore as it came through him.
And then Snapping Jaws told Frost where to find the pitchfork of his dreams.
2
“Mira’s gone,” Jack Fleetwood said. He stood in the doorway to Cali’s room; she had just opened her eyes and was shocked to see him standing there.
“Gone?” she asked, rubbing sleep from her eyes and the last fragments of dreams fro
m her memory. “What ... what do you mean?”
“Gone as in gone,” Jack said. Worry was in his features, in his eyes. For the first time he looked concerned about his daughter. “She didn’t sleep in her bed, and I can’t find her.”
“Maybe she went to the village?” Cab’ offered.
Jack shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s not like her. Chefs already going through rooms, trying to see if she’s hiding, but I know her. She doesn’t hide. I’m sure she’s all right, wherever she is. I’m sure she is. But I just wish I knew where she was. I just wish she was here. I’m going to keep looking around. In about an hour we’ll have coffee in the library, all right?”
3
Chet carried one of the large boxes into the library; two of them already sat in the middle of the floor on the Persian rug. Frost came in, walking as if he had been drinking all morning, and Cali came downstairs a few minutes later, fresh from her morning bath. Jack had already laid out some buttered toast, coffee, and tea on the black-lacquered table near one of the overstuffed chairs.
“You cold?” Cali asked, noticing that Frost had his shirt buttoned up to his collar, which was turned up, and a long jacket wrapped around him as if it were twenty below.
“A little,” Frost said. “Yes.”
Cali raised her eyebrows in a silent question for Chet, who noticed. He went over to her; all she said was, “Jack can’t find Mira.”
Ivy strode into the library, wearing what looked like muddy work boots, her jeans tucked into them, her black sweater looking filthy, and that tired look about her, as if she’d carried an enormous burden for years and would not let it go.
4
“I got some sleep, thanks to some pills,” Ivy said matter-of-factly, after she’d settled into one of the chairs by the fireplace. “Look, I don’t think this experiment is going to work. At least not the way it was planned.” She shot a glance over to Jack, then scanned the rest of them. “I know you’ve only been here a couple of days. I’ve been here for months, and I’m beginning to think ... well, I want to inspire you here. Now. I wasn’t going to show you any of this, partly because of its possible value, and partly because Jack and I didn’t want to influence any of you in any way. We wanted the purity of Harrow to filter through each of you. Each of your abilities. But now I think we need a nudge.”
“Both Ivy and I think what’s in these boxes is what makes Harrow most unique. Particularly among haunted houses,” Jack added, and then quickly shut up again, like a boy who was about to get a scolding.
“Justin Gravesend was not just a member of a secret society in the late 1800s. He was a bit of a grandmaster for them, and as such, he collected quite a bit—objects both sacred and profane. These are some of them. We don’t yet know how valuable they truly are, but they are, at the very least, intriguing. And perhaps something within them will help each of you.” She looked directly at Cali. “Particularly you, Cali. I would think that if you could focus on any one of these objects ...”
“I haven’t felt it,” Cali said. “Not since coming here. I feel like it’s gone.”
“We all do,” Chet said softly.
Frost said nothing, but watched the cardboard boxes as if they contained gold. He kept pulling his collar up around his neck.
“Well, let’s try, anyway,” Ivy said. And for the first time since Cali had seen her, it seemed as if a spell had been broken. Ivy did not appear to be intimidating or unusual or driven or even beautiful. She was a woman, an ordinary woman, who had somehow gotten trapped inside an idea of a house that might hold something important for her.
“Jack, would you do the honors?” Ivy asked.
Jack Fleetwood stood up and went over to the box farthest from Ivy.
“No,” she said. “This one. By me.”
Dutifully—an obedient lover, Cali thought, and then wasn’t sure why she had thought it—Jack stepped over the box he’d approached and then knelt down in front of Ivy, opening the box nearest her.
“Gravesend created a museum within the house, and most of the artifacts have been lost over time. There were stories of mummies and great underground tombs, rebuilt from Mayan and Egyptian temples, and even a story that there was a torture chamber—a medieval torture chamber, at that—somewhere within the walls, but all we’ve uncovered are empty rooms. But some items were either found in the rubble from the fire, or Jack and I found them in the cellars. I want you to see these. I want each of you to handle them to see if you have any reaction or insight into them, beyond what we know.”
Jack drew out what Cali thought was at first a broken bowl. It was crude pottery but had curious figures drawn along it, and she thought it might be some ancient Grecian art. Jack took it over to Cali and put it in her hands; Chet leaned forward to look at it.
“A man who worked at the school named Gus Trask found this, after the fire. It came into the possession—at least temporarily—of the PSI Vista Foundation. I bought it as part of what I hope will be a valuable collection from Harrow.”
“What’s it for?”
“It may be an ordinary drinking bowl,” Ivy said. “We suspect that it is two thousand or more years old. The fact that it is only part of the bowl adds, for me, to its authenticity. We don’t know what it was used for ritually, but we do know what Justin Gravesend believed it to be; it was rumored that he owned such a bowl, and in the bowl the future could be divined.”
“My God,” Cali said. “Someone thinks this might be the holy grail?” She was joking, of course, but Ivy barely blinked.
Frost let out a little laugh that was more like a shriek, and Chet squinted as he looked up at Cali and then back to the bowl and its white and black markings.
“Gravesend thought so,” Jack said. “This probably isn’t the real thing. But the Chymera Magick believed it was.”
Cali held the bowl in her hand. She tried to let the darkness within her mind’s eye take over and emptied her thoughts, but she could not stop thinking about what the bowl might truly be. Or how crazy it was to even imagine that a grail actually existed, a cup that was used at the Last Supper or that caught the blood of Christ on the cross—an ancient, mystical idea that had always seemed more poetic to her than anything.
She could not concentrate. She was hyperaware of the others around her, and in some respects it was as if she’d donned the night goggles again and could see their green outlines in the dark of her mind.
She opened her eyes.
Ivy watched her with such an intense need in her eyes, it almost hurt to have to tell her. “Nothing,” Cali said.
Jack drew out another object. It caught the light from the chandelier above and glistened darkly.
“One obsidian dagger. Possibly sacrificial, definitely from an Aztec grave or holy site. Perhaps a Toltec relic, perhaps a more modern creation,” Jack said as he held it up for them to see. “How he got it, no one knows.” Other items came from each of the boxes, a catalog of unusual items: a warrior’s leather helmet, a long spike that Jack claimed was supposedly the object that the rather notorious Gilles de Rais, both the right-hand man to Joan of Arc and a notorious child-killer, used to disembowel the children he murdered in the fifteenth century (“It was alleged that de Rais himself had been a member of the Chymera Magick, assuming that group went back that far in history,” Jack added as he passed the spike to Cali); wrapped in paper, out came what looked like a stone head of a dog. “Head of a jackal sculpture. Probably not so old, but definitely part of what was probably once a recreation of an Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb, for the Chymera Magick’s ceremonies,” Jack said. Smaller pieces, sculptures, what Jack called “Venuses and goddess figures,” as well as one bit of shiny bronze that was in the shape of a large phallus. They passed the pieces around, although Frost seemed to have no interest in touching them, until the phallus reached him, and then he rubbed it a bit. Cali noticed that Frosts hands seemed to be peeling. Psoriasis? She hadn’t noticed it before.
“And now,” Ivy said, “I’v
e kept away from you somewhat for these past two days because I wanted you to pick up whatever vibes you could. I’m not a terribly secretive person, but I wanted to explore the house and find out what I could from it. Other than these artifacts, there hasn’t been much. Those symbols drawn down in the tunnel that you saw last night.” She shrugged. “It’s like a puzzle, and I was hoping you three could understand what pieces were missing.”
“I just don’t get it,” Chet said, frustration rising in his voice. “We’re brought here to hunt for ghosts, but you want something. You don’t want us to just find out things or, I don’t know, see ghosts.”
Ivy smiled, nearly sweetly, but there was something terrible in her smile nonetheless. “I want something that no one is supposed to get, I suppose.”
5
Ivy’s story
“Several years ago, I fell in love. That’s not all that unusual, but the guy I was in love with was—well, roughly your age, Chet. Perhaps a year younger, and I was ... older. Just a few years, but enough to make a difference. At first he lied and told me that he was my age, but I found out the truth. I felt our relationship was wrong and was going to break it off but discovered that I was pregnant with our child. I wasn’t sure what to do. The young man came from a good family, and he loved me, and he wanted to marry me. As much as I loved him, I felt he should not get married yet. He should get through college and then later, if we still loved each other, we could raise our child together and do the legal thing. One night his father came down with him to the city, to talk with me about how we were all going to handle this. Although I have been independently wealthy from a young age, I suspect his father felt I was after money in all this.
Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite) Page 55
