“Are you all right?”
The question had come from the other side of the door, from out in the hallway. It was Carlson’s voice. He was back, coming to check on her.
Or rather, to check on Madame Marie Laveau.
There was no more time. She had to go. She had to get out.
On the bedside table was a lamp with a twisting metal base. Katie quickly picked it up and yanked the cord out of the wall, and brought it back to the window.
“Hello?” Carlson called into the room. He added a knock, and Katie wondered why he was being so polite to someone he was holding hostage. “Are you all right? I’m coming in.”
No time, there was no time!
Hauling back the lamp, she swung it as hard as she could.
Glass shattered. The wooden framework between the panes cracked and splintered. She threw her arm up over her eyes--a little late--to keep the glass fragments from cutting her face.
“What’s going on in there?” Carlson asked, his voice raising and his accent as thick as she’d ever heard it. “Hold on!”
Katie heard the handle rattle as he unlocked it from his side.
She had to act fast. Using the base of the lamp she broke away the pieces of the window still left in the frame. When the hole was wide enough for her to get through, she leaned out past the wall and looked down.
It was only the second floor, but it was a ways down. There was no fire escape. No rescue ladder. No way to get down.
Except jump.
Behind her, the door opened.
That was it, then. She was leaving. If she broke an ankle getting out of here it would be worth it.
Leaning further out she put her hands on the sill and levered one leg over and out.
Then Carlson had her by the elbow, pulling her back in.
“No,” she told him. “No! Let me go! Let me go!”
“What are you doing?” he sounded frantic to get her back inside, and she could only imagine the things he would do to her now that he had her caught again. “Stop it. Stop it!”
“Leave me alone!”
She was already being dragged back into the bedroom. She stopped trying to get out and threw a fist at him instead. He blocked it easily, but didn’t try to strike back.
“Katie, stop it! You’re safe here! It’s over!”
She stared at him, all thoughts of leaving forgotten. He wasn’t trying to hurt her. He wasn’t trying to control her.
And...he called her Katie, not Laveau.
Chapter 32
“So, it was all a dream?”
Nothing made sense about any of this. Carlson had sat with her on the edge of his bed for a few hours now to explain everything to her. He’d been patient, and kind, and he’d made sure not to sit too close once he saw how terrified she was of him.
Only, the story he told her was very different than what she remembered.
“Katie, you’ve been having horrible headaches for the last couple of days.” He reached out for her hand, but then pulled back. “Sorry, I know this is a lot to take in. You haven’t been feeling right. I took you to the hospital but they just sent you away with some aspirin and told you to rest.”
She ran her hand through her hair. “So it was a dream.”
“Ma chere, you’ve been sleeping for two days straight. You’ve been having nightmares almost nonstop and one time I found you wandering around downstairs, convinced that you’d killed someone. I brought you back up here, and put you to bed, and after that I kept the door locked so that you wouldn’t wander off again.”
“Sleepwalking.” Katie couldn’t believe it. It was all a dream. A fever dream by the sound of it. She hadn’t seen any zombies. She hadn’t been held down on a cold basement floor while maniacs chanted over her.
And, she had not been invaded by a voodoo queen’s spirit.
It was almost a relief to know she had hallucinated it all.
Or it would be, if she believed him.
“Well. That sort of thing’s never happened to me before.” She stretched, keeping an eye on him as she edged a little further away on the mattress. “I mean, I don’t usually walk around in my sleep.”
He leaned over to kiss her cheek. “I like a woman with a few quirks.”
She cringed at the feel of his lips on her skin, even though she tried to hide it. She didn’t want him to see how she was just biding her time until she could bolt from here. Getting into a relationship without knowing anything about the guy was always dangerous. Kind of like buying a house sight unseen. Only this time, it had been a hundred times worse.
He had to be lying. All the things she remembered couldn’t be made up. Her imagination wasn’t that good. She could remember the feel of psychotic voodoo acolytes all over her. The smell of burning candles still lingered on her skin. She could still hear the chanting.
“Tell you what,” Carlson said to her when she didn’t say anything. “How about I go and get for us some fantastic takeout for lunch? You’ll feel better after you get some real food in your stomach, I guarantee.”
This was her chance. Yes. Once he left, she could wait a few minutes, make sure he wasn’t coming back, and then leave.
“I think that would be great,” she said, jumping up from the bed and putting on her brightest smile. “Thanks. Maybe something from that place you took me to with the shrimp gumbo.”
He stared at her blankly, like he didn’t know what she was talking about.
“You know,” she told him. “The one on Bourbon Street. Where you took me for lunch.”
His expression was twisted. “Katie, we never went to lunch on Bourbon Street. We’ve been having a good time right here. Lots of delivery food. Takeout. I made you shrimp gumbo here, but we never went out for it.”
Katie sat back down on the bed. No. This wasn’t possible. He was so convincing. So certain that nothing she was describing had ever happened. If she didn’t remember it so clearly, she might have even believed his lies herself.
Were they lies? Could she be remembering things wrong, could he be right, could she be crazy?
No, she told herself. Swallowing back a lump in her throat she made herself a promise that she wasn’t insane.
But what if she was?
“It’s all right,” he told her, again. “I won’t push you until you feel up to it. Stay here. I’ll go get us some food and be right back.”
“Carlson...”
She stopped herself. She had been about to say she couldn’t stay here forever. She had been about to tell him she knew he was an evil bastard who dabbled in black magic.
Forget it, a faint voice said in her mind. Forget it all.
Katie froze, her gaze stuck on Carlson’s. That voice in her mind. That was the same voice she’d been hearing for days now.
That proved that at least part of this horror was real.
He kissed her forehead again, and she was too tangled in her own thoughts to do anything but let it happen.
“See you, ma chere.”
He hummed to himself as he left the room, and closed the door behind him.
Katie tensed. Her hands gripped the edge of the mattress. She put her feet flat against the floor. Then she counted up to one hundred.
And then she did it again, just to be sure.
Then she ran to the bedroom door.
The door was locked.
Katie panicked, because he’d locked her in again and there was no other way out--
But then she remembered. The window. She’d broken out the window and it was a long drop but she could make it if she took it easy and went slow.
Yes. That would work. She could get away.
Turning around, she practically lunged for the window. She had to get away.
The window wasn’t there. She was facing a blank wall.
No window.
Katie felt a scream building inside of her, coming out as a little whimper. Not again. Not again. The world could not reshape itself again. There was a window the
re. A window right there!
On that wall, across from the bedroom door.
The bedroom door that was...right here...
When she turned back to the locked door, it was only another wall.
The room had shrunk down to a narrow space, walls all around, no matter where she turned, there were walls.
Walls.
Walls...
Chapter 33
Katie took a breath. She had to believe she was still in Carlson’s bedroom. She had to believe that some part of this nightmare wasn’t her imagination.
She was not crazy.
Banging her fist against the wall didn’t change what she was seeing. The pain of it lanced up her arm to her elbow. It was real.
This was real.
She wasn’t crazy.
Katie swallowed, and held back the tears. It would have been better if she was insane. She just wanted out.
She just wanted out!
Turning around nearly in a circle, she found a hallway stretching away from her. At the end, it turned to the right, and kept going out of sight. There was no other way for her to go. Whatever force was holding her hostage wanted her to go this way.
There was no source of light, but she could see everything. The cracked ceiling molding. The peeling wallpaper.
She recognized that wallpaper. It was the same from the hallway that had led her down to the basement in Xavier’s house.
Was that where she was? Could she possibly have gone form Carlson’s apartment, back to this house of horrors?
For that matter, had she ever really been in Carlson’s apartment in the first place?
Katie shook her head, walking straight ahead with her hand feeling along the wall for support. This was how she’d found that door before. The one that led her to the basement. Was that what was going to happen this time?
She put her other hand on the opposite side. The seams in the paper strips flipped under her fingertips rhythmically. She didn’t want to miss it, if another door popped up out of nowhere.
Around the corner, she stopped. A woman in a long black dress stood there. She blocked Katie’s way, a scowl tugging at the mole on her pale face. Those dangly earrings hung limply from her lobes.
Madam Parlander.
She stared at Katie without saying a word. In the silence, Katie could hear her heart beating. She almost sighed in relief.
“You’re alive,” she whispered, never happier to say those two words in all of her life. “I was sure that I saw you dead. Um. Murdered, I mean. Not by me, except I thought it was me, then I found out it wasn’t. I think. It’s a long story, I guess, but the point is that if you’re alive then maybe it wasn’t real, after all, and I can just--”
Madam Parlander put a finger up over her lips, asking Katie to be quiet.
“What? Why?” Katie lowered her voice anyway, even though there was no one around to see them, let alone hear them. “Listen, please, I’m trying to leave and I’m all turned around. I just want to get out. Can you help me?”
Instead of answering, Madam Parlander lifted a hand, and turned it over, revealing a deck of playing cards.
“I don’t have time for a reading. Look, I’m sure you’re really good at all of this voodoo stuff but I just want to get out of here.”
She reached over to grab hold of the fortune teller’s arm, to shake some sense into her if that was what it took.
Her hand went right through. The woman’s body was as substantial as smoke.
Katie gasped and stepped back. Madam Parlander looked down at the spot where Katie had touched her, frowning as if not sure why she wasn’t solid flesh and blood.
The answer came easily to Katie. Parlander really was dead.
She was a ghost.
A ghost who wanted something from Katie.
“I didn’t kill you,” she was quick to repeat. “Just, you know, head toward the light. I need to go. Please, I need to go.”
Madam Parlander upturned the deck of cards and let them all slip out. They fluttered to the floor like bizarre butterflies, spreading themselves out in a pattern that looked random at first, until more and more of them fell into place. They landed edge to edge, something that wouldn’t be possible if a ghostly hand wasn’t guiding them.
They formed a five pointed star surrounded by a circle. A pentagram.
It wasn’t quite a perfect circle around the outside. Katie saw a gap, where a single card should go.
There was a card missing from the deck.
Katie squinted down at the design on the floor. All the cards had landed face up, but she couldn’t tell which one wasn’t there. She wasn’t going to take the time to find each one in sequence, either, because if her memory served her there were fifty-two cards in a deck and she just didn’t have the time to count off each one.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t understand. Maybe if you could just tell me what you want we could both get on with--"
She’d almost said “with our lives” but she stopped herself in time. She might have a life, but Madam Parlander didn’t.
“Just let me go,” she said. “I just want to get out.”
She turned to run back the way she came. There must be a way out. There must be.
The walls had moved again. There was no hallway behind her. Just a wall with peeling, ugly wallpaper. Her only way out, was through the ghost.
The cards on the floor fluttered, and stirred, and turned themselves around. They leaned on each other, forming rows of tented triangles, flat cards slipping in between. A house of cards built itself up between herself and the ghost.
Madam Parlander directed them as they went, waving her finger like a conductor directing a symphony.
“Stop,” Katie heard herself saying.
When the cards were assembled, Parlander pointed her finger at the very bottom. Where the basement of a house would be.
“Stop it,” Katie said.
Parlander pointed harder.
The cards at the very bottom began to smoke.
Katie felt a heat rising in herself as well. A feeling of something inside that wasn’t her.
Like someone else was waking up deep, deep inside.
The cards burst into flame, an angry red and orange fire that burned from the center until it consumed the whole thing from the bottom up.
“I said, stop it!” Kate was screaming now, and as she did her voice became darker, shadowy, and less her own.
Her vision swam, and then separated, and she was looking out from the inside, less herself and more...someone else.
Madam Parlander opened her mouth, about to say something connected to the cards, and the burning house.
Katie’s hand shot forward and into the center of the ghost’s chest, and when she did a power flowed through her that was dark and gritty. It exploded through Parlander and shredded her apart until there was nothing left but wisps of color that clung to the ratty wallpaper all around.
The way forward was clear. Katie stumbled blindly down the hallway, tears brimming in her eyes as she tried to ignore what had just happened.
Parlander was really dead. Really murdered.
Worse than that, something was inside of her. Something was riding her.
The loa of Marie Laveau.
Katie was possessed.
She needed to escape. She needed to leave.
All she could do was stumble down the hallway, wherever it was taking her.
Chapter 34
If she ran fast enough, maybe she could outrun her fate.
Or maybe, a darker part of her mind said to her, she would just run until she died.
The hallway turned corners, left and right, and suddenly began to slope downward. She slowed her steps, even when every bit of everything inside of her told her to just keep flinging herself headlong toward wherever this was leading her.
She was afraid she knew where this was going, and she did not want to go there. Not again.
Not the basement.
There was no way to avoid it. She didn’t turn around but she knew if she did that there wouldn’t be a way back. The hallway was pushing her. She was trapped.
Another right turn brought her to a door.
“Please don’t make me go in there,” she whispered. “Please. I just want to leave.”
The voice that kept telling her to forget about everything snickered in her mind. It is time. I wasn’t strong enough before. Now I’ve rested. Now I have grown. There is less of you, and more of me.
“I am Katie Pearson,” she insisted, wiping tears away with the palms of her hands. “You can’t take that away from me.”
I can. I have. Carlson has played his part, and given you just enough of a lead to send you running down here. You are mine. I am you, and I will be me again. You will die so I may live.
“No. Please, leave me be. Let me go.”
Go? You have nowhere to go. Nowhere but where I let you go.
In front of her, the door opened. There was darkness ahead, and Katie knew with all of her heart that if she stepped through there would be no coming back. She would be lost forever.
She planted her feet. She wasn’t going through that door.
Behind her, the wall pushed into her back. It was moving, and it wasn’t going to allow her to stay where she was.
Katie tried to push back. She braced her hands against the doorway. She strained every muscle in her body and still she was pushed inescapably toward the darkness in front of her.
The wall crept forward, and pushed her through the doorway, and then it was pressing against her fingers on the frame of the door. It began pressing down on her knuckles. She felt the pain of it and the crushing weight of it and she knew that if she didn’t pull her hands out she was going to lose her fingers for good.
She screamed. It hurt, and she screamed.
The darkness swallowed her, and she screamed.
She tugged her hands free of the pressure but not before she felt her skin tear and blood running down her hands.
With a hollow thud, the wall joined with the door, and there was nothing but the darkness around her.
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 94
