by P. T. Phronk
Craig didn’t seem to notice. “We’ve got a guest room. Several, actually. I think we have more guest rooms than we’ve ever had guests.” He laughed, then shook off another cough.
Marcus returned from upstairs. “She’s going to keep an eye on Trista,” he said, then headed to the kitchen to make tea.
I sat for a while, staring at the shadows, thinking about the voice I’d heard come out of nowhere when I was upstairs.
“This place is even creepier in the dark, huh?” Caleb said.
A whistle came from the kitchen. Both Caleb and I jumped. It was only the kettle that Marcus was putting on; the gas stove, at least, still worked. “I’m glad I’m not the only one creeped out here!” I said.
“There are stories here. Creepy stories. A lot of them,” Caleb said.
Marcus carried cups of tea into the room, the steam rising off of them like tiny, powerless ghosts. I filled the silence. “Do tell. If we’re stuck here all night, we’re going to need stories.”
Marcus rolled his eyes. Caleb looked at his father for approval, who took a tea from Marcus with one hand while mimicking a blabbing mouth with the other. “You guys and your stories. You’re going to give this poor girl a heart attack, but go on, don’t leave her hanging.”
“For me, it’s always been because of all the angles,” Caleb said. “So many rooms, so many corners, so much carved wood in so many different shapes. Sometimes I imagine things. Sometimes I see things. Usually it’s just me.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Usually?”
Marcus offered me a tea, but I passed. My stomach had been feeling off since my odd fit of nerves upstairs. “Sometimes people see the dog,” Marcus said, passing the tea to Ash instead.
Caleb shivered. “Dad did, once.”
Craig stopped poking at his chair. “Yeah. That was a year or two ago, wasn’t it? Earlier that day I was telling Caleb about the dog I had here when I was younger. We’d always talked about getting another dog, but with me not home much, then the kids getting older, well. You know. Anyway, later that day, I was fixing a drink in the ball room, and I looked up from behind the bar, and there he was, sitting behind the curtain.”
I leaned forward. “Behind the curtain?”
“They’re kind of see-through, the curtains there. It seemed so real … my big, shaggy dog, sitting there and panting. He was at the window, you see, except for some reason he was facing me instead of guarding the front drive, like he used to do all the time. His messy hair puffed up the fabric. Except it wasn’t really my dog, was it? No, his eyes caught the light just right, and … those weren’t my dog’s eyes. They didn’t recognize me or greet me. And they glowed, like a cat’s eyes at night.
“I was thinking, maybe a coyote got in from outside and got tangled in the curtain. So I walked slowly, around the chairs, across the ball room. And … and this is the part that freaked out Trista and Jasmine when I told them … if I was only seeing things, just mistaking ruffles in the fabric for my dog’s face, it would go away as I got closer and saw it from another angle, right?” Worry lines in Craig’s face got deeper in the flickering light from the candles. “Except the closer I got, the clearer those shining eyes got, and the more I could see just a few grey hairs among the dog’s black coat. Still, he’s just sitting there! Not struggling against the curtain, just sitting behind it, facing me. And he blinks. He blinks, he licks his lips, I can even hear his tail thumping against the wall as that clumsy oaf wags it.”
“Craig’s got a very detailed imagination,” Marcus said. “I always say he should write a book now that he’s got some downtime.”
The shadows flickering around the room took on new meaning. The curly sculpture on a side table cast a wagging tail. The edges of a chair formed an animal’s quivering ears.
“Well, yes, it could’ve been my imagination,” Craig said, leaning back. “Anyway, that’s when I tripped on the edge of a tablecloth. Nearly wiped right the heck out. I was only distracted for a moment, but when I shook it off and looked up again, it was only curtains over by the window.”
“What if it wasn’t your imagination?” Caleb asked.
I felt weak. What if, what if. I let out a sigh. The candles on the table in front of us thrashed and the steam from the cups of tea swirled.
“Poor girl,” Craig said. “Our poor guest. You wouldn’t know it with all the bickering, but we have good stories here too. This house has served the family very well for generations.”
Caleb nodded enthusiastically.
But the candles were still flickering in a way that set my imagination off, reminding me of things I’d imagined a thousand times before no matter how much I tried not to. Todd, trapped in that house, alone after being left by his father, by his mother. The flames licking at the door, tendrils of smoke unfurling into the room.
The smell of the tea was making me sick.
“Is she okay?” Ash asked, looking up from his watch.
“I … honestly? I’m feeling …” I couldn’t even get the words out. “Would you mind showing me to one of those guest rooms?”
Craig and Marcus fawned over me, offering me everything from more tea to Advil to brandy, but I told them I just needed rest. Craig showed me up to the second floor again. More flickering candles glowed down at the end of the west wing of the house, where Jasmine was keeping watch over Trista. Craig touched my shoulder to direct me the other way, past more closed doors than any house needed to have, and into a bedroom. Marcus arrived a moment later with fresh sheets and pillows.
“Thank you,” I said, trying to smile. “One quick call in the morning and everything will be fixed. Don’t you worry about Trista.”
“You’re the one not feeling well. Don’t you tell us what to worry about,” Marcus said as he lit a candle on a desk.
Craig laughed. “That’s right. If you need anything at all, just shout. I imagine we’ll be up all night anyway.”
I had to admit, it was primordially comforting to have these two dads so worried about my well-being, but I did need to rest, so I told them I’d be fine, and thanked them for the accommodations.
Finally, I was alone. The room had probably been Trista’s at some point in the past, judging by the pink wallpaper and the mirror adorned with fake flowers. Now it was a guest room. If I had to guess, as soon as she entered her teens, Trista had moved to the room furthest from her parents, even if it was smaller. I’d have done the same thing when I was a kid, if there were any extra rooms to move to.
She’d taken that concept a little further by getting herself stuck in the safe room though.
I took a deep breath, trying to let the little joke I’d told in my own head ease the tension I felt in every muscle. It worked for a moment. I closed my eyes as soon as my head hit the pillow, but I was not asleep for long.
At first I thought it was the muttering from downstairs, or the near-constant thunder outside, that interrupted my sleep. But even in my half-awake state, I could tell that those sounds had become background noise and faded from my consciousness. Something closer had awoken me.
I sat up and pulled the sheets to my chin, like a child would do, in this child’s room, and I listened. Nothing. Just the background noise.
Finally, I allowed my mind to wander again. I went over the possibilities for solving this problem with the security system. The passwords had been changed, which could have been due to one of the users screwing up, or it could have been a problem with our back-end password expiry system. It didn’t matter. What was stranger was that the emails to reset the passwords weren’t being sent. It could have been an outage on our end, but the storm couldn’t have been interfering with all the servers that handled the emails, which were redundant and distributed throughout the world—unless all the dingbats who believed in the imminent end of the world were right.
But there had to be a solution, and I’d find it sooner or later. That was always the difference between me and Wes. He loved mystery for the sake of mystery, findin
g questions with no clear answer, and no clear need for an answer. He had free-floating curiosity. Whereas me, I solve problems. Even when I left Wes, under the guise of visiting my sister, it was a specific solution to specific problem: I hypothesized that temporarily depriving him of my problem-solving skills would make him realize how much he needed them. How much he needed me. It would fix our marriage and our family right up.
That solution didn’t work. Todd died and Wes went missing. Great problem-solving, Amy.
Something was breathing in the dark.
I snapped my attention back to the present. I slowed my own breath, gradually exhaling through my mouth so my nose wouldn’t whistle.
It was by the foot of the bed—whatever was breathing. I could hear it. The candle had burned out, and I couldn’t see anything in the dark, but it sounded like it was just over the edge of the mattress, where I wouldn’t have been able to see it anyway. Right where my feet would have dangled over the edge of the bed if I were asleep. Breathing.
No, not quite breathing—panting. Heh heh heh.
It stopped. Surely I was hearing the ventilation system again, some fan lilting to one side, brushing against its housing rhythmically.
But then why did it stop?
Something shifted down there. Then I heard the smacking of lips, a slick tongue against skin, then a return to the panting. Heh heh heh.
My heart thumped so loud it drowned out the sound. I couldn’t stay here, and the sheets would not protect me, but somehow the thought of putting my bare feet on the floor with whatever was down there felt even more inconceivable.
Lightning flashed. All the angles and furniture cast shadows, but it was too much to take in during a millisecond of light.
Thunder. Then a high-pitched whine from the foot of the bed.
My God, I could just picture that big shaggy dog. The same one Craig saw in the ball room. The same one the family did not own.
I wrenched the pillow out from under my head and put it in front of me. Slowly, I kicked off the sheets, then leaned forward, picked up the pillow—for at least momentary protection against gnashing teeth—and crawled toward the foot of the bed. I peeked over.
Heh heh heh. It was right there. It was too dark to see anything except shifting shadows, but I could hear it. I could smell it. The air was pungent with breath that could only come from a mouth full of sharp teeth laced with bits of raw meat.
The lightning flashed. I clenched up, raising the pillow, expecting it to look up, notice me, eyes glowing.
But nothing was there. Only the scuffed hardwood floor. Of course nothing was there; what could it have been? A dog? A nonexistent dog from some a bored millionaire’s flight of imagination?
I let out a breath I’d been holding for a minute, then put the pillow behind my head and lay back. When I listened again, I could hear nothing unusual, just the patter of rain, and the muttering voices from downstairs.
The voices stopped. A floor creaked as someone climbed the stairs, probably giving up on the day, heading to bed to try sleeping. A rattling cough let me know it was Craig. Pipes in the walls rattled as someone else used a sink. There were a lot of sounds here. Could one of them explain what I had heard?
Sure, just let yourself believe that, I thought.
I was about to let myself take another deep breath, when a woman’s scream filled the house. She paused for only a moment, then screamed again until her lungs were out of air.
It was just past midnight in the Foster mansion, and everybody was awake. The residents of the household arrived from all angles, upstairs and down, converging on the control room where the scream had originated.
I arrived just after Craig, who held a panicking Jasmine in his arms.
“There now. Now, there,” he said to her. Nonspecific designations of time and place, just words untethered from any actual times, any actual places. When those words didn’t soothe her, Craig tried guessing at the cause of her tears. “Did you fall asleep and have a bad dream? No? Did you see someone outside the window? It wasn’t one of those hallucinations of Caleb’s, was it?”
Marcus entered, with Caleb just behind him. Marcus pushed past me and took over from Craig, holding his daughter close. Jasmine reached for him without thinking, like a toddler flailing for her bottle. Finally, she caught her breath and pointed at the screen. “It’s … her.”
Craig leaned forward and studied the screen, especially the upper-right corner displaying his daughter. One of his hands came to his face.
Ash hovered in the doorway to the room. I shuffled further inside to make space for him.
Craig turned to the rest of us and seemed to study our faces, his eyes flicking wildly between them. His fingertips caressed the screen, turned at such an angle that we couldn't quite see it, then his hand returned to his face. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again.
“She’s dead,” Jasmine cried.
Chapter 3
The control room felt like it was squeezing in around me.
A whimper escaped from Craig’s lips. “My baby. No, no … my baby.”
Caleb grabbed the edge of the screen and turned it around so everybody could see. It showed the same camera’s-eye view as before, from up high in the corner of the safe room, looking down at Trista. Except this time she wasn’t pounding on the door, she wasn’t screaming, she wasn’t crying. This time, she was lying on the floor face-down.
“She’s sleeping. She’s sleeping, right? Right?” Caleb asked nobody in particular.
But we could all see the red. We could all see that not a single pixel was moving. No, that wasn’t true; as I watched, the pool of blood around Trista’s body did get slightly larger.
“I gotta … I gotta call …” Ash muttered, turning to leave the room.
“No!” Craig said, pointing at Ash. “Close the door. Nobody leave this room.”
Ash closed the door, as he was commanded to do, and six people crowded around the desk. My elbow nearly knocked over a porcelain Hummel figurine from the book shelf behind me as I squeezed in, my shoulder against Marcus’s.
Everybody stared at the screen for a long moment, silent. She still didn’t move. The blood stopped spreading, and I spotted more red, in small spots leading from Trista to the yellow door of the safe room.
That’s when I saw it—writing. The image was too blurry to read it, but the smeared blood beside Trista had the structure of a short word. Her final word.
Craig began to cry, which caused him to cough. Caleb stood like a statue, even paler than before, trembling. Ash muttered something in his ear. Jasmine continued to sob quietly in her father’s arms.
My heart was breaking. I couldn’t stop thinking of Todd, my son, but was that selfish? What else could I do? What could I possibly do?
Finally, Craig roughly grabbed the keyboard. “We need to get in. We need to help her,” he said, his eyes flicking up to me. He mashed the keyboard until the system prompted him for a password again. He typed it in slowly, hunting and pecking with one finger.
D O N T C R Y. He exhaled, then continued typing. D O N T C R Y.
They were the words from the sticky note on the fridge. Which meant everybody in this house had access to the security system using the very insecure password—or more accurately, former password, because of course, it still didn’t work to unlock control of the system. Incorrect username or password. Craig stared at me, his eyes red.
I checked my phone. Still no signal, probably owing to the continued pounding of rain outside. I shook my head. “No internet or phone. I can’t get the failsafe passcode without a signal.”
A flurry of movement erupted beside me as Caleb elbowed Ash aside and opened the door. “I’ll go down there myself. I’ll chop that door down if I have to.”
“No!” Craig said. “We need to stay together.”
He was right, of course. This had become a murder scene, and someone in the room must have become a murderer. The writing beside her, and the splashes of
blood leading from Trista to the door, told me that she hadn’t done this to herself—someone had killed her and escaped, then she’d written something, like the name of her killer, in her own blood. I found myself trying to examine everybody’s hands, looking for the apocryphal red one, but they all moved so fast, and so many thoughts and memories intruded on my reasoning.
Nobody mentioned the writing. Did they not see it? Or did they fear angering the killer?
Despite Craig’s warnings, everyone spilled out into the hallway like the room was on fire. Caleb ran down the hall, then down the stairs.
“Are you going to just let him go?” Ash asked Craig.
“What the hell am I supposed to do, Ash?” He collapsed, his back against the wall, his head in his hands.
Ash tightened his lips and shook his head.
Jasmine stopped sobbing when they got into the hallway, but she still couldn’t stop glancing toward the door to the control room, as if Trista would walk out of it at any moment. Marcus held her at arm’s length and brushed her hair away from her eyes. “Honey,” he said, “did you see what happened? How did Trista get like that?”
Craig pried his head from his hands to pay attention.
“I … I went to check on her. I’ve been checking on her. I stepped out, just for a few minutes, just for half an hour. I came back and she was … she was like that.”
Craig’s face lit up. “Like that. What if she’s only hurt? Let me check. Maybe we can get in there in time to help her.” He stood on wobbly legs and returned to the control room.
Ash watched him go. “Man’s delusional. His son just became the heir to the family fortune and he lets the kid wander off right after the first in line bites the dust.”
Marcus started toward him. “Bites the dust? What the fuck is wrong with you?” Ash puffed up his scrawny chest, and Marcus’s fists clenched, but then Jasmine fell into another fit of tears, and her father deflated to go attend to her.
