by P. T. Phronk
Ash shook his head and turned his back on Marcus, then said quietly, so only I could hear, “Family, man. Wife squirts out a kid and suddenly the smartest dudes become delusional saps.”
“Amy!” Craig shouted. “Come in here, now!”
I found myself scowling, which made Ash smirk. He clearly lacked some sort of compassion mechanism in his head, but in that moment, with Craig issuing an order like I was his servant, I kind of felt where he was coming from when he openly resisted this strange family. Perhaps that open hostility became charming with time, which explained why they kept him around.
A metallic clang echoed throughout the house. That must have been Caleb in the basement, trying to chop open the door. We’d designed those safe room doors to withstand everything from blowtorches to ballistics. An axe, or whatever he was using, would only chip the paint.
Where did he get a blade so quickly? Was he the only one with a weapon here? The reality of the situation started to set in: one of these people had killed Trista just minutes ago. That person could still pose a danger to the rest of us.
Marcus glanced from Ash to Craig to me, never taking his eyes away from the rest of us despite attending to Jasmine. He was probably coming to similar conclusions as me. “Craig,” he said softly, his deep voice a rumble. Craig was still in the control room, fixated on the screen. “Craig! It’s not going to work. Let’s get away from here. We need to talk about this. We need to figure out who …” He glanced at Ash for a moment. “I mean, we need to figure out what to do.”
Craig didn’t move. His eyes never left the monitor in the control room while we stared in at him from the hall. People weren’t so different than machines—sometimes getting them going just required the right keywords. So I tried a few on Craig. “If I examine the door directly, maybe I can get us in there.”
He stirred. “Yes. Yes, let’s examine the door.”
We went down the stairs to the main floor again, each of us jumping at odd sounds, glancing at every dark corner, keeping an eye on each other. On the main floor, most of the candles had gone out, which suited me just fine, but the others lamented the loss of the light. Marcus rooted through a drawer and found a flashlight, which he handed to Jasmine. It seemed to steady her shaking hands.
The stairs to the basement were at the end of the west wing of the house, past the family room and kitchen, past another branching hallway, and past a laundry room bigger than most people’s bedrooms. I tried to picture Ash doing the family’s laundry, but couldn’t quite do it. Could he even fathom his own role? Did he resent smoothing every tie, polishing every loafer?
The stairs were not as creaky as I felt they should be in an old home like this, and the hallway we walked down was only creepy owing to the darkness, lit by Jasmine’s swaying flashlight. They seemed to use this area primarily for storage. Through the open doorways of the maze-like basement, I caught glimpses of towering boxes, piles of toys, stacks of old bricks, wood spiked with rusty nails, and what could have been the oozing form of a deflated bouncy castle.
A metallic squeal, like Freddy Krueger’s claws on a chalkboard, came from up ahead.
The hallway opened up into a larger room that seemed, from the look and the musty smell of it, to have been carved right into the earth below the house. I recognized the layout, but walls always looked perfectly smooth in architectural drawings. In person, they were irregular, built around boulders that had sat in the ground for thousands of years and sat there still, perhaps providing some load-bearing functionality for the house above. Even the stone floor had cracked and shifted during the century or more it had rested below the house.
The safe room was another story. It sat in the middle of the basement—a room within a room, sleek and modern, with a few decorative touches I’d designed myself. Customizable doors weren’t part of the original product plan, until I stood up in a meeting and pointed out that the people in these rooms could be staring at that door for days, or even weeks, so maybe they should have some say in what colour it’s painted.
Caleb scraped the paint off with a rusty crowbar.
“Caleb!” Craig said. “What do you think you’re doing?”
No answer from Caleb. He continued chiseling at the edge of the door, causing an awful screech that made the center of my chest vibrate.
“What is that crazy motherfucker doing?” Marcus asked, squinting to make out Caleb in the beam of Jasmine’s flashlight.
“Don’t call him crazy. Please.” Craig’s voice wavered.
“Sorry, Craig. I didn’t mean that.” Marcus pulled out his phone and approached Caleb, holding it face-out so the screen provided a bit more light. He touched Caleb’s shoulder, causing him to jump and back away, putting an end to that horrible screeching. “Man, that isn’t going to work. Ask Amy, she’s the expert here. Is whacking at the handle going to work?”
In the light of Marcus’s phone, I could see that Caleb had scraped the yellow paint away in a circle around the lever-like handle that opened the door if the correct code was entered on the keypad beside it. “If it worked, I’d be out of a job pretty quick.”
“See?” Marcus said.
Craig approached the keypad, which was a full alphanumeric layout, still backlit and powered by the backup battery within the room. He started trying his password again. Then another. Another. If I watched carefully, I’d probably know enough of his internet passwords to ruin his life.
“I thought it would loosen the handle enough,” Caleb mumbled. He let the crowbar clang to the ground.
Marcus turned his phone around, and it lit up dark splotches on the ground. Maybe blood. Maybe evidence, except we’d stomped all over it now.
“A signal!” Marcus suddenly shouted. He pointed at his phone. “I saw a bar pop up. Just for a second.” He dialled 911, then held the phone to his ear, while Jasmine and I approached him and waited to hear if he got through. I became aware that we’d lost track of Ash on the way here. But there were so many shadows, and so few lights, that he could have still been in the room, looming just outside of view.
Marcus didn’t get an answer. “I’ll send an email. That way, if I get a signal again, even for a second, it’ll automatically send. I have a friend who’s a cop. You remember her, Caleb? She was at the pool party a few years ago.”
“I was a kid then. I kinda remember. She had her gun with her, and that made me scared, but she also had that hat.”
“She loves those stupid hats.” Marcus said, his voice deep, rumbling. I admired his ability to conjure some normalcy, even with all this happening, but I could tell from his strained voice that he was barely keeping it together. His fingernail clacked against the screen as he attempted to send his email. It didn't go through, but he seemed to think that it would try again if his phone ever picked up a signal. The hope of getting outside help seemed to ease all of their minds, if only a small bit.
Except a moment later, Craig was back trying passwords at the keypad, mouthing seemingly random words as he did it, like some half-remembered incantation.
Jasmine glanced nervously from one person to another, then into the shadows behind us, where Ash could have been, or not. Like me, she knew that one of us had killed her friend. I couldn’t rule out any of them, and they couldn’t rule me out—though their suspicious glances did fall on each other more than they did on me.
Caleb stared at the ceiling of the basement. “Did you hear that?” he mumbled, but nobody answered him.
The thick air suddenly felt colder.
These people needed me. I was the only objective outsider, the only expert, maybe the only real adult at the moment. When a moment of silence fell over the room, then thunder crashed above, they all looked to me. I got to work figuring out how to figure out what was going on here.
Part II
A Haunting
Chapter 4
We gathered back around the fire. I wouldn’t have chosen to be there, but at least nobody was offering me steaming fucking tea, and t
he rest of them seemed to calm down enough to function when they were back in the family room, though Craig couldn’t stop pacing.
I told them that we needed to stay together. I couldn’t quite bring myself to say why—one of you is responsible for killing Trista and ruining this family forever—but surely most of us were already thinking it.
During a moment of silence, I felt the sense of being stared at. I looked up to see that it was Ash, the reflection of the nearby fire thrashing in his eyes. “So?” he asked.
My role as the only objective one, the only one capable of making a good decision, was solidifying. I’d have to be a leader here. Unfortunately, I wasn’t coming up with any brilliant ideas to lead with. “So, we wait until morning, then get help.”
Ash nodded and sat back, fading back into the shadows.
“Unacceptable,” Craig said, swivelling at the end of his pacing route. “There must be a way into the room sooner. We don’t know if this storm will end by morning. The way things are going in the world, we don’t know if it will ever end.”
That sentiment was expressed often lately. The environmental catastrophe’s origins were still unknown—blamed on everything from global warming to visitors from outer space—and that exacerbated the sense that it could get worse at any moment. It could also end at any moment, but that sort of optimism was generally unacceptable to express in polite company.
My subconscious often served me nuggets of hope, though, and it had been working overtime while dealing with this chaos. “There could be one way in,” I said, the idea coming to me in real-time as I said it. “You didn’t get the password reset emails, but we were able to trigger the attempt to send them. The problem was somewhere between sending the emails and receiving them.” I fidgeted with my ponytail as I thought, ideas still flowing. “If we could receive them in a different way, in a different place, then send the right signal back, we could reset it and get access.”
“But we don’t have internet,” Caleb said. “How could we get the emails?”
“We don’t need access to the internet. The system is still a network that’s designed to be self-contained, and with the right …” I tried to think of a way to explain it in simple terms. “If we can get the right key, we can open the locks, all locally. We know the email address it’s trying to send it to. If we set up an email server locally, then we can get the reset email.”
“A man-in-the-middle attack on our own network,” Jasmine said.
“Right!”
Ash leaned forward again. “Wait, attack? You’re saying this system, which Craig paid his hard earned money for, can be attacked?”
He was such a dick.
I explained that with the right knowledge—like, say, the knowledge that comes with being the person who helped design the entire system, and the people who were rightfully supposed to have access to it—any system was hackable. “It’s not really an attack, except …” I wanted to say except to the person who killed Trista, but that could have come across as hostile. Dangerous, even, to express in the current company. So instead I, lamely, non-sequitured into: “except we need some tools. We just need a computer with an Ethernet port. We can even patch it into the safe room’s battery for power.”
All the family’s laptops were the newer kind, without Ethernet ports. Of course. These people had the money to upgrade their tech whenever something new came out—whereas I was still rocking a phone with a headphone jack, for Christ’s sake. They all listed the technology they had lying around, until Caleb muttered: “Trista’s old laptop.”
Apparently it was a Mac, sitting in storage now.
“I’ll show you where it is,” Craig said, standing.
“No,” I said. “I was serious. We need to stay together.”
“Not exactly ‘we’ though,” Marcus said. He pointed at me. “She’s good. Can we all agree that she’s good?”
They all nodded, tacitly understanding that good in this context meant that I hadn’t just murdered the heiress to the family fortune. So I got directions to the storage room, trying to repeat them back after I realized I wouldn’t be able to memorize every left, right, right, left. Craig shook his head after I screwed it up for the second time.
“It’s the one I told you about,” Caleb interjected.
The room he’d refused to go in before. I had a vague idea of where it was. “I know exactly where it is,” I said. “Be right back.”
I became lost almost immediately. I took the stairs near the basement entrance to get to the second floor, figuring I was just there, so I could orient myself, but by the time I was upstairs, I realized I was in entirely the wrong wing of the house, and coming from a different angle made orientation hopeless. Then I got distracted peering into rooms, trying to figure out where the various hallways and offshoots led, and lost my bearings entirely.
It’s not like the place was a castle, but the sheer number of rooms packed in, each with identical doors, made it difficult to tell which room was which, and that made it difficult to tell which direction was which.
When I was a kid I saw that movie Labyrinth. It frustrated me how Jennifer Connelly was a smart girl, and she did everything right, yet she still got lost in the God damn Labyrinth because of everyone else’s God damn meddling and incompetence.
I felt like I needed to cry.
I also felt like I needed to pee.
I found myself in the upper-floor kitchen I’d spotted earlier. A sliding door led to a covered patio, where the rain was coming in sideways and doing a number on a full living room’s worth of wicker furniture, which Ash should really have covered up.
These people had three different living rooms, two kitchens, countless bedrooms. Surely they had a nearby place to take a leak.
I began opening doors. Suddenly, I felt like an invader, intruding on territory I was entirely unsuited to be wandering at night. The next door surely wouldn’t be a bathroom, but a kinky sex room, or the stash of illegal secrets that got Trista killed, or …
The next door opened into a completely empty room. These people had so many rooms that they could just leave one empty. But then the next one was almost as bad as my anxiety-riddled fantasies: it was a bathroom, but quite obviously the main bathroom. The one where the master of the house probably kept his medicine, or his condoms, or …
I really had to piss.
I quietly closed the door, dropped my slacks, then hovered for a moment over the seat where Craig likely parked his ass for a shit every morning. When I sat, I could swear it was still warm, but surely that was my imagination. My mind projecting my fears onto my buttcheeks.
I closed my eyes as the relief washed over me. Out of me. I exhaled.
When I opened my eyes, the shower curtain in front of me was moving.
The plain fabric swayed for a moment, then lay still. My imagination again? My breath? I thought of Craig’s dog, sitting behind the curtain in the ball room. The same dog that sat at the end of my bed.
I held my breath. I could only hear the white noise of the rain.
I darted forward, nearly tripping on the pants around my ankles, and pulled the shower curtain aside.
The dog was not there. Just like he was not at the foot of my bed. It was only Craig’s shampoo, conditioner, and body wash—all Old Spice—perched on the sill of a window that would light up the shower in the daylight. It must have been just lovely in there, getting all soapy, watching the shower curtain sway in the natural breezes of an old house with leaky windows. I allowed myself to imagine being in there with Craig, just for a second. A smile snuck onto my face as I finished up, then stood in front of the mirror. Dear Lord, my makeup was a mess, with dark streaks jutting from the corners of my baggy eyes. I must have cried at some point, even though I could not recall when. I borrowed a tissue from a box on the marble countertop to wipe away the stray streaks, then poked the little handle on the garbage can beside the toilet to toss it away.
The can was filled with a rat’s nest of denta
l floss. Layers of it spiraled nearly to the top, with bits of food and spots of blood all mixed within it.
Craig let his toilet paper hang over the front of the roll.
I didn’t belong here. I’d never use Old Spice. I always hung my toilet paper behind the roll. And that horrible floss nest felt like coming across some creature’s secret lair—a little personal stash it would return to at any moment, beaks and claws and teeth ready to tear the invader apart.
I took one last glance in the mirror, wiped a bead of sweat from my forehead, and—
An eyeball stared at me.
I whirled around. The eye gazed at me from behind the window. It blinked once, long eyelashes flecked with raindrops. It was far too large. Wasn’t I on the second floor?
Lightning flashed. The eye backed away, briefly revealing a lumpy nose beside it before fading into darkness. The shower curtain swayed like someone had swished past it.
I stepped backward, my fingers grasping for the doorknob. This was impossible. No person could reach the second-floor window. And had that eye not taken up far too much of the window pane?
As I spilled out into the hall, the word giant was on my lips. “A giant,” I whispered out loud. “I’m hallucinating a fucking giant.”
The thunder crashed outside, and I imagined it as the giant’s thumping footsteps, circling the house, crashing through the forest swinging spindly arms, another barrier to ever getting out of here.
The walls felt too close and my heart twitched like it wanted to exit through my esophagus, threatening a panic attack I hadn’t had since I was a teenager. Thump, thump, thump. I saw faces in the walls’ carved wooden panels and moulding. As my vision faded around the edges, I reached out, like I was the one crashing through the forest in the dark. If I could just reach the stairs and will my legs to carry me down, I’d be back with people. Surely whatever was going on up here wouldn’t follow me down and show itself in front of others.
