The House That Death Built

by Michaelbrent Collings

  (He's taller than I am!)

  – on two spots of nothing to either side of the smudge, then leaned forward and began to lap the blood up.

  The sight of it – the impossibility of it – drove TJ forward. He took several steps. The dog kept licking the smudge, taking no notice of him.

  No, it notices me. It just doesn't care, because it knows who's in charge here.

  TJ reached out a shaking hand. Touched the spot beside the thing's left paw. It was cold. Hard.

  Glass.

  Why's this here? How'd it get here?

  Then, suddenly, the dog stopped lapping at the blood spattered on the other side of the glass. It perked its head to the side, and TJ took an involuntary step back. The thing glanced at him, but its attention was somewhere else. The others had gone still, too. No more scratching at that one door, no more tossing themselves at it like NFL linemen. They just stood. Waited.

  Then, as one, they ran to the end of the hall and disappeared down the stairs. The one that had been leaning on the glass didn't spare a backward glance, just dropped to the floor and disappeared with the others.

  The blood was gone. There was just smeared glass in a hallway that clearly was anything but just a hallway.

  "What…." He couldn't even complete the thought. He didn't have words to express the depth of his confusion. The night had been perfect. And now this – whatever it was.

  Susan had stayed behind when he crept up to the glass that bisected the hall. Her whisper slid through the air and made the hairs on his neck rise.

  "They're doing it," she said.

  He turned. "What are –"

  She was already gone. He caught a glimpse of her rear leg as she ran back into her room. TJ looked back at the glass – he couldn't help it, it drew his gaze as the near-invisible focal point of whatever insanity had enveloped him – and then followed her.

  He ran into her room.

  Stopped.

  Susan was nowhere to be seen.

  Gone.

  27

  Rob looked at the thin sliver of metal he had just pulled from his cheek. It glinted dully – a dark nail painted with bright blood.

  He dropped the nail. It plinked on the bare wood floor of the attic, and he began pulling more nails from his cheek, his hand. The hand ones made him happy in a way – he'd gotten his hand over the left side of his face when the sound hit him, and the placement of some of the nails and ball bearings embedded in his palm convinced him he would have lost an eye if he'd moved any slower.

  The lights had been rigged. Some kind of explosive charge rigged to the contact wires, and when he flipped the switch it didn't turn on the bulbs, it blew them up and sent the bits of shrapnel – ball bearings and nails and shards of metal – that had been packed inside the glass shells flinging outward.

  Bombs. They made bombs.

  He heard a groan: Kayla, kneeling on the floor and digging ball bearings and jagged bits of metal out of her side with a tiny screwdriver.

  Tommy was silent. Laying on the floor, motionless. Rob could see that he'd been hit, too – his shirt and pants were shredded in numerous places, and his mask was a mess. But he wasn't making any noise. Maybe the blood loss from his leg was too much.

  Gone. Too bad, man.

  Rob saw Aaron. He must have dropped on the far side of Tommy when the explosion happened. As far as Rob could see, his least-favorite safecracker hadn't been hit at all. Just looking around from behind Tommy like some alternate-universe groundhog checking to see if it was safe to come out or if there'd be another six weeks of Apocalyptic metal rain.

  Figures. Figures he'd be the one to avoid getting hit.

  Rob pulled the last of the nails from his face. They'd stapled his mask to him, but as soon as they were gone he yanked the tattered fabric away. Kayla did the same, and Aaron followed suit a moment later.

  Masks were for staying quiet, staying unknown. That ship had definitely sailed.

  Tommy suddenly moaned –

  (Not dead after all.)

  – and sat upright with a jerk. "What's happening?" he said. He looked around the group, one eye moving in rapid circles as he tried to take in everything at once.

  The other eye was gone. Just a mangled mass of mask and skin in a clotted knot where an eye should have been. Tommy didn't even seem to notice.

  "What's happening?" he asked again, then followed it up with a shriek: "WHAT'S HAPPENING?"

  He pulled his gun and pointed it at Rob. Rob's guts coiled in a cold mass. He wondered if it wasn't their surroundings that would kill him, but one of his own team.

  Then the gun flitted over to point at Kayla. At Aaron, who pushed away from the spot near Tommy and slammed against the back wall of the attic.

  "What's happening? I said what's happening? Answer me!"

  Rob didn't know if Tommy would have heard anyone if they did answer. Looked like the guy had blown a serious gasket.

  The gun retrained on him. Rob's hands went up as he saw how it trembled, how close Tommy was to killing someone just as a way of reasserting his grip on the universe. "Easy, man," he said. "Easy, Tommy. We're all in the dark here."

  Tommy's lowered his gun. Still, he kept it in his trembling grasp as he looked around with an eye that tried to see everything at once and managed to see nothing at all.

  Aaron brought up his light – that blood-red light that he used when working on safes –

  (How'd he manage to keep holding onto that thing?)

  – and swung it around. Unlike the Maglites the rest of the team held, his light didn't slash its way through the shadows. It was a paintbrush, shading pitch black into a lighter shade of crimson. It illuminated, but brought no real brightness, and no safety.

  A moment later, a more normal light joined the glow of Aaron's flashlight: Kayla brought out her Maglite and turned it on. Rob leaned down – slowly, he didn't want to do anything that might set Tommy off – and picked up his own light from where it had fallen when he tossed himself away from the deathstairs.

  They swung the lights around. Just walls and empty space. The attic was huge, but other than the bare rafters above and the wooden walls on all sides, there was –

  Rob stopped moving. The icy feeling that had clenched his center when Tommy pointed his gun at him was replaced by a warm, oily sensation that made him feel like throwing up.

  Nothing in the attic. Not until the farthest wall. And there….

  A small, closed window.

  Below the window… a card table.

  On the card table… a single piece of paper, folded in half so it stood like a tent on the center of the table.

  Kayla muttered a curse.

  Tommy made a sound that could have been a sob of pain or rage or terror.

  Aaron was silent.

  Rob waited. When no one else moved, he began walking toward the table. Because, really, what else was there to do?

  28

  TJ couldn't believe what he saw. Not at first. Susan had to be in here – there was nowhere else she could have gotten to.

  The window was shut tightly – no way she could have opened it, gone through, closed it again, then disappeared from view so fast he couldn't see any of it happen.

  Closet?

  No real possibility of her getting in the closet and shutting that door, either. But he checked anyway. Her closet was bigger than his bedroom at home, but there was nowhere she could have been hiding. It was just the usual clothes and shoes.

  He moved to the bathroom next. The door was already hanging open, and the angle of the mirror allowed him to see most of what was inside – and what wasn't – before he even got there. Still, he had to check.

  Before he got there, he heard something behind him. Just a whisper, but it was so loud in the preternatural stillness of the room it felt like someone had sucker-punched him. He spun as the door to the hall began to close. He ran back to it, reached the door just as it fell flush with the jamb and clicked shut.

  He
grabbed the doorknob. Jiggled it.

  Locked.

  "Susan?" he shouted, pounding on the door. No way she could have done this – no way she could have slipped past him and then closed him in without his seeing it – but who else was there to call? "Sue!"

  "Under here."

  Again, the sound was so surprising it acted as an assault. He jerked in place, then spun quickly toward the source of the sound. Again, nothing but an empty room.

  "Under here."

  This time he was ready enough for a voice that he managed not to jump. He just knelt and looked for the source of the words.

  Under the bed. Sue was there, and when he saw her TJ almost screamed because it wasn't Sue after all it wasn't all of her it was just half of her there, half of her under the bed like she'd been cut in half and left for him to find.

  "Come on," she said. With those words, understanding penetrated. She hadn't been cut in half; it just looked like that because she was leaning out of a trapdoor under her bed.

  A trapdoor?

  "Sue, what's going on?" he managed.

  "No time. Come on." She wiggled back on her elbows, scooching further into the darkness until she disappeared.

  TJ stood still for a moment. Everything about this was wrong. Not least of which that he didn't even understand what "this" was.

  "Come on. Hurry." Her voice floated out of the black square beneath her bed like the voice of a ghost from the grave.

  Tommy looked at the door to the hall. Locked. He could go out the window, but then what would happen to Sue?

  He followed her into the darkness.

  29

  Kayla watched Rob as he took the first few steps toward the table at the far end of the attic, then swung her flashlight beam over to Tommy. Her brother had pulled what was left of his mask from what was left of his face. She almost couldn't stand to look at it: one eye gone, one side of his face pulped and still shining with dozens of ball bearings and metal shards.

  Tommy's mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, and she knew he was seeing it, too. That he saw the table and knew what she knew – what they all knew – that this wasn't any kind of accident. Not just the trap on the stairs or the explosion Rob had caused by turning on the "lights." This room itself was waiting for them. Had been prepared for them all by someone whose purposes she couldn't even begin to guess.

  "No," he finally managed. "No way."

  He struggled to roll over, going to hands and knees before pushing himself into an upright kneel. He tried to rise to his feet but seemed to have forgotten the injured leg. He put that foot down first, then cried out as the leg buckled under him. He pitched forward, and Kayla barely managed to get under his arm and keep him from falling to the floor. Aaron moved to take the big man's other arm.

  "Get away from him," she snarled. Not even sure why it mattered that Aaron not touch him, but convinced in that moment that the only way for her or Tommy was to get out together – and get out alone.

  We'll gut them all if we have to. Me and Tommy are getting out of here.

  "Why is this happening?" Tommy whispered as she helped him to stand. She had no answer.

  He began hobbling toward the table. She almost shouted, "No, don't, we can't go that way!" before she realized it wasn't the table he was headed for – it was the window beyond it.

  The window was small, but she thought Tommy could probably push his way through – and that meant they all could. More important, she could see the dim gleam of starlight beyond the glass.

  "I gotta get out of here," said Tommy. He wasn't talking to her, she could tell. It was the sound of a man dancing on the thin line between life and death, just the smallest push required to make him tumble down one side or the other.

  "I know," she said. Tommy's remaining eye was glassy, and he stumbled without seeming to notice what had happened. He actually shambled forward on his knee before she jerked him back to his feet.

  "Get up," she barked. For the first time in her adult life, she wasn't enjoying this moment. The feeling that had accompanied her entire existence – that she was invincible, that no one could hurt her because she was just too important to the universe to be hurt – had begun to ebb since she ran into the glass wall in the hall. Her nose broke – it was still dripping blood, now she thought about it – and with it broke the shell of seeming invincibility that had surrounded her.

  Then the lights exploded. Shards of metal in her arm, her side, her leg. Nothing had hit her face, and she supposed she could have taken that as a kind of validation; that nothing too bad could happen to her. But she only felt dread. The fear that a perfect life might end so miserably, so stupidly.

  How am I gonna rule the world if I die in this little room?

  Tommy struggled to his feet. "I gotta get outta here," he said again. "Gotta get to a hospital."

  The words were coming in breathy gasps. Far from the deep sound of her brother's real voice. He seemed to have aged decades in the last minutes.

  She wondered if he could make it. Even if they got out of the house, how would they get down from the roof? Over the wall? Would he bleed out before then?

  She kind of wanted to see that.

  They swung wide of the table with its card, as though both might carry some communicable disease that would supply the final push into doom.

  They reached the window. She reached for the lower sash, pulled.

  It didn't give.

  Locked.

  What if it's not locked, what if it can't open? What if whoever's doing this has sealed –

  Tommy had a gun in his hand – she couldn't remember if he'd always held it or if he'd just gotten it out, and that lapse in her mind was frightening, too – and he used the butt to knock the glass out of the window. Then, without waiting, without even bothering to knock away the stray shards of glass that still clung like broken teeth to the gaping mouth of the window, he clambered through.

  She had been right about it – the window was small. She wasn't even sure if Tommy would be able to get through at all, maybe he'd just be able to push his head and one shoulder through and then get stuck and they'd all have to –

  SHING.

  Blood spattered. Arcs of it splashed over the inside wall of the attic, still more jetted out of Tommy's body as it jerked back into the attic.

  Not Tommy, that's not really Tommy, it can't be Tommy because where's his head where's his HEAD?

  Blood fountained for a few moments from the stump that had once connected neck to head. Then the gouts turned to trickles, then to seepage. She could see bone and flesh and holes that were his trachea and esophagus in cross-section.

  His head was gone.

  She looked back at the window. The glass was still knocked out, but she couldn't see starlight anymore. There was only an unbroken sheet of metal, gore-streaked and dripping – the blade of what she intuited was a guillotine.

  The window was gone. Better said, it had never really been there in the first place. Just a lie that was – like the nails under the stairs – a trap.

  And Tommy was gone.

  She knelt beside what was left of him and screamed. Pain, the terror born of a sudden realization that she could be hurt driving a shriek so loud and harsh that it tore at her throat –

  (just like Tommy's throat cut in two and now he's dead and what if it can happen to me too it's not possible but what IF)

  – and turned to a strangled whisper almost as fast as it had come.

  She looked at Rob, who was now standing beside the table. Aaron was standing behind him, neither of them looking at her or Tommy, both of them just staring at the card on the table.

  Rob picked it up after a moment. Flipped it open.

  "The robbed that smiles/Steals something from the thief." He spoke the words almost as a question. The voice of a man who can't quite believe that what he's seeing is actually happening. "What the –" He couldn't even finish the question, just threw the card back on the table, then threw his hands i
n the air in utter helplessness.

  The movement made his flashlight jitter, the light in the room weaving and dancing drunkenly. So she didn't notice at first. But when he dropped his hands she noticed consciously a detail that had tickled her subconscious when Rob first tossed the card to the table.

  The light had changed.

  Not Rob's flashlight, not even Aaron's red light. It was something else – a shift to the overall lighting that most people probably wouldn't even notice.

  But she wasn't most people. She was someone whose existence was measured in the smallest spaces between light and dark. She noticed.

  She looked away from Tommy, from Aaron and Rob and the table and the smear of blood and gristle that had once been a window.

  She looked at the wall to her side.

  There were numbers there. They hadn't been there when the thieves entered this place, she was sure of it.

  As if to confirm the thought, to show that the numbers were the newest entry in this game, they appeared on the other three walls of the attic. Each number was red, about a foot tall and six inches wide. They gleamed and flickered in the way peculiar to images created by a laser. She looked for the source, but couldn't find it. Just the numbers, the same on every wall.

  2:00

  Then, as she watched, the letters blinked and changed simultaneously.

  1:59….

  1:58….

  Rob had seen them, too. "What is this?" he asked in a weary-sounding voice.

  The words penetrated Kayla's grief over her brother's fate – and the more-important realization of her own mortality. She lowered her brother's headless corpse to the ground. Stood.

  1:50….

  1:49….

  "It's a countdown," said Aaron.

  "Are you shitting me?" screamed Kayla. Her voice was higher than she'd ever heard it. Still hoarse from her recent scream over Tommy's body, but all the more jagged for that rough edge. "I'm gonna find who's doing this and I'm gonna shove my fist so far up –"

  Rob reached out and slapped her. Hard. The pain sent shockwaves through her broken nose and she yowled.