In the night beyond the frosted glass, the great old walnut tree swayed, its forked branches like the gnarled bones of a blackened skeleton, clawing the air.
She laughed at herself. No reason why Ethan wouldn’t come to the front door right now.
Carly was about to release the curtain when she saw something behind her reflected in the glass; a green radiance emanated from the hall outside her bedroom door. It grew stronger, brighter. Her breath caught as she slowly turned. She almost spoke. She almost said “Mother” because she knew what this was about. Mom’s spirit had returned, and after mulling everything over, there seemed only one explanation for all that had happened, irrational and crazy as it seemed.
The word stilled on her lips. The phone was within reach.
The glow became more brilliant. A black figure took shape in its midst, standing in her doorway. It was a woman’s silhouette, clearly outlined but featureless, its depth imperceptible, almost as if the figure itself were a portal to some interdimensional place where dead souls stirred, where darkness reigned.
Carly stepped backward. Her leg caught in a pile of laundry, then hit a stack of schoolbooks and she stumbled. She fell back against the wall.
“Carly,” the figure said.
Carly could not speak. Her response was in the form of very short breaths. In. In. In. Out.
God help me, she thought.
“I’m here to protect you, Carly. I only want to protect you.”
The depthless woman came into the room. Her voice was unmistakably Mom’s. It sounded as if it spoke to her from down the hall, through a distance greater than really existed between them. As the emerald luminescence that filled the hall behind the ghostly silhouette grew stronger, Carly felt the strength in her body begin to wane. She trembled, her muscles tensing and then releasing for no apparent reason. Her breathing deepened without her doing it herself, and her pulse sped up as the form came for her.
The shape came closer. It walked through her bed.
Carly tripped and fell to the floor. She crawled backward against the wall, hands clutching the carpet. The rest of her muscles had lost their power. Tears were streaming over her cheeks.
When the black form came closer, she could see into it. To some empyrean cosmos, some astral realm beyond the bounds of space ... stars or crystalline clouds swirled, drew her in ... and the face of her mother smiling was like an etching on black glass, a memory of her in some way she’d never truly been ... the way she always thought she could be.
“I’ll be with you forever, Carly. They’ll never hurt you again.”
A sound like thunder trembled the house to its foundation. Green witch-fire ripped through the bedroom window, branched like crackling electricity down the hall and up the stairs. The charge of energy engulfed the house like lightning.
In that moment, the portal opened and let the true form of her mother through. Rather, what was left of her ... what Davis Crowley had made of her. The twisted form of the wraith, the imprisoned soul of her mother a fiend incarnate, stood as a half-real monster before her daughter.
Carly looked into its burning eyes, regarding the sunken features: the curled ears, strands of hair and ectoplasm dripping from the sallow flesh like slime, the razored talons used to slaughter so many this very night, the twisted body like the unholy union of woman and goat.
The wraith of Elizabeth Wagner’s imprisoned soul threw back its head and emitted what could only be described as a scream. The sound expressed so much pain, rage, woe, and anguish that it cut into Carly’s heart, causing new tears of grief.
When Carly opened to her mother’s suffering, her mother joined with her—in spirit, mind, and body—and she understood it all.
The wraith siphoned into Carly’s body like smoke through a suddenly opened window. Carly’s mouth opened, but, instead of her own voice, the predatory anguished scream of the wraith issued forth. As Carly convulsed against the sudden invasion of the spirit, her body was violently ripped from the floor, slid up the wall, and slammed against the upper corner of the wall and ceiling. With her back pinned against the ceiling, her muscles thrashed against the invasion.
Karen reached the top of the stairs at a panicked sprint. She froze in the doorway, braced against the threshold of the door.
Carly’s body writhed like a bag of snakes. Her arms and legs extended, she did a slow but awkward crab-walk across the ceiling. When she spotted Karen, her head snapped into an unnatural kink. Carly’s eyes opened, but they were no longer her eyes—they were eyes of beryl fire, smoldering with tendrils of ghostly smoke.
Karen braced herself in the doorway of Carly’s room, processing what she saw before her, unbelieving yet terrified.
“Carly!” she cried. “Dear Jesus, no!”
With a satanic roar, the girl’s body flew from the ceiling at Karen.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Gavin climbed the stairs of the witch house on Washington Hill. The stillness of its surroundings and the abandoned feeling of the lot set him ill-at-ease. He’d seen the light on in the window at the top of the house’s corner tower, so he knew she was here. He was armed, and he wouldn’t be turned away this time. Vanessa had to answer for what she’d told the girls ... and if she had more information than she’d been letting on all this time, she’d better answer for that too. It was clear to him now that, even if she wasn’t at the heart of what had been happening, she sure as hell knew something, which he’d always suspected was the case. Even if she really didn’t know where Davis had gotten to, and wasn’t aware of his plans for Beth, she knew more than he did. Gavin damn well intended to uncover that information right now.
He approached the stairs cautiously, eyes focused on the edge of the porch. He expected the creature he’d seen there the other night to come growling from its icy lair, but it wasn’t there. As Gavin stepped up onto the porch, he felt his chest tighten. A voice inside of him said to be quiet, to draw his gun and just walk in, and that feeling—that intuition—was one hell of a thing to ignore when you’d been a cop as long as he had. Those instincts were more than impressions or fear; they were insight, precognition.
I don’t have a warrant. I can’t just go wandering into this house.
No, he told himself, but his daughter’s safety was at stake, and he was pretty sure that if he explained himself at the station ...
They’d think I’ve lost my fucking ticket to Reality Station.
He pulled open the screen door. His hand hovered, ready to knock.
Are you really going to ignore this—an instinct that’s kept you alive for seventeen years as a cop?
No. Hell no.
He grasped the cold knob and turned it lightly. It clicked—unlocked. He turned it just a quarter-inch more to free the tongue from the latch plate. He remembered from the other day that the door opened on hinges silent as a grave, so he pushed it slowly open and stepped into the dark foyer. The smell of old books, candles, wood smoke, and dust drifted to him. Warmth emanated from the back rooms, where he could see a dying fire flicker in the hearth. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the shadows.
A staircase was a few feet in, to his left. He took a step toward it, thinking it must lead to the tower room.
Gavin took a few careful steps across the foyer to the bottom stair and started up.
He froze in mid-step.
Something was hunched on the stairs. A dark shape, like a deformed gorilla with disturbingly human features, stirred at his approach. He realized it was the creature he’d seen under the porch when he’d come by the other day. The dog? But something had happened to it since then.
It had changed.
It gave a terrible growl, the sound a cross between a scared dog and a human in pain.
Then it lunged for him.
Gavin stepped back off the stair an
d reached for his gun. His heel struck the curled edge of the wood stair and he lost his balance. It was a fortunate accident—if he’d not fallen backward, he would have taken the full brunt of the creature’s attack. He hit the floor hard, with a thud that echoed up the stairway into the upper rooms of the house. Gavin grunted, air forced from his lungs. His gun, which he’d just freed from its holster, flew clattering into the dark shadows.
The creature caught him with one paw-like hand. Its claws ripped the fabric of his shirt and tore the flesh over his ribs. Gavin cried, forcing his arms in front of him to shove the stinking beast away. When his hands met the creature’s girth, he felt a terrible blend of soft human skin and mangy fur on its torso. It looked down at him. In the relative dark of the house, he could only make out some of its features. But that was enough. Enough to see humanness in the eyes, to see the twisted snout that was half dog, half man. And the bared fangs that dripped with bloodied saliva as it gnashed the meat of his forearm.
Gavin cried out and rolled, trying to pull his arm free, but the uneven jaws locked down like a jagged vice. He kicked his legs, and at the same time gripped the lower jaw of the creature with his free hand. He pried the bottom jaw loose and scrambled free.
Gavin did a backward spider walk across the floor. He headed for the darkness into which his gun had flown. He groped for the weapon, keeping an eye on the creature as it growled, coming nearer. One eye flashed in the awful face, a reflection of madness. It barked and lunged again. Gavin let loose a powerful kick, which caught the pitiful beast in the throat and sent it flailing backwards. It made a sound like a dog’s pained yelp. He found his gun.
The creature’s claws skittered across the floor as it hurried to regain its footing. It ran out the front door into the snow-covered yard.
He hurried to his feet. He could see its shape as it loped for the thorny archway of twisted wood that made up the entrance to the yard. Gavin leveled his pistol at the thing.
The creature had just reached the street.
Gavin fired once. The muzzle flash lit his face. The sound clapped the night and rang in his ears.
The thing tumbled forward onto the sidewalk in front of the house. It lay twitching, and then was still. A dark shape, unmoving.
Above the ringing in his ears from the gunshot, he heard a woman crying out in pain. Moaning sounds drifted to him down the spiral staircase.
Vanessa.
Gavin rushed up the stairs.
He found Vanessa Maeveen in her upstairs study, lying on her side upon the floor in a widening pool of blood. Gavin took the sparest of moments to marvel at the contents of the library, the affectations of occultism and metaphysical studies. But all of that was secondary to getting her the help she required ... and getting the information he needed.
Vanessa lay with one arm twisted and broken beneath her, legs splayed from the ravaging beast, which left her raw and shredded between her legs. Her gown was ripped open. One breast was eaten away, the other served as an obscene reminder of her once beautiful body. There were claw marks up and down her face, which seemed startlingly older and more wrinkled than he remembered. It didn’t seem a natural aging, either ... but as if something evil had drained her of life. He reached down and put a hand gently to one side of her head. Her hair on that side was caked with blood. He realized there were two deep bites taken out of her neck.
“Vanessa,” Gavin said. “Good God.” He pulled out his cell phone to call 911, and with a final burst of effort she knocked his phone away.
“No,” she said, her voice a rasping version of its former silken purr.
“You need medical attention,” he said, retrieving his phone.
“I need to die,” she said.
“Don’t give up, Vanessa. You’re not too far gone yet.”
“Touching,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Your concern is touching. But,” she coughed, “I know it’s not for me.”
“You’re delirious.”
“Why ... why did you come?”
“You know why I came. Carly was here with her friend the other day. She said you told her—”
“The truth. I told her the truth.”
“Maybe it’s time you told me the truth.”
Vanessa’s eyes rolled with agony and then settled on Gavin. What he saw there pained him. They were full of the ache of her betrayal, of her life destroyed, and while Gavin had to remind himself that she’d allowed her life to be destroyed, that it had been her choice to follow this path—he still had compassion for her. He held her gently.
“What was that thing?”
Vanessa smiled. “My paramour, your nemesis.”
“Davis Crowley. That ... thing was Davis Crowley?”
She nodded affirmative. An awful swirl of feelings assaulted Gavin as he realized she must have done something to him. Something terrible. His stomach sickened, he looked at his forearm, bleeding from his ragged bite. So many questions pushed to the surface—why didn’t she tell him? Why had she let him go on? Why ... but he had to get to the bottom of things quickly. She didn’t have much time left, and she was the only one who held the answers.
“Is that ... is he ... the one killing these people in town? These teenagers?”
“No, dear. Davis has been serving his sentence right here, where he needed to be ... until now. Now he’s free, and soon, so will I be free. Soon ...” She drifted again. Gavin gently urged her to speak some more.
“You mustn’t kill him,” Vanessa hissed. “If you do, the wraith will go free. It’s loosely bound to him, you see, because of his sorcery. Because he bewitched her. Your wife. Your Elizabeth.”
“What does this have to do with Beth?”
“He enslaved her, he ...” she coughed again and blood came up this time, flecked her lips. “It was his plan all along. That she would die and be his slave from beyond, from the afterlife ... a wraith to do his bidding. She is tied to him as long as he is alive. Although, it seems she has grown in power as his mind has deteriorated ... my fault. I transformed him, but didn’t consider that he would go insane, that his grip on the wraith would weaken and it would begin acting of its own will.” She gasped and coughed. Blood flowed over her lips. “Don’t kill him! He must die of natural causes, otherwise ...” She took a breath and seemed suddenly drained.
“I’m calling nine-one-one.” He grasped the phone. She reached up with startling force, gripping his hand with her frail fingers.
“Don’t kill him. Whoever kills him will be cursed by the wraith for all time. But if he dies of natural causes, Elizabeth will be released into the afterlife ... to finally be at peace.” Coughing again, Vanessa’s hand released his and fell limp. “She is still bound to him,” she said quietly. “Loosely. But if he dies somewhere, quietly ... perhaps there is a chance for your wife to have a peaceful existence in the afterlife.”
“You’re ... you’re talking crazy.” But Gavin heard every word. And after what he’d seen, all of this was falling into place. The ghost in the house. The deaths of the kids. All of them kids that Carly had known. Had they done Carly some kind of wrong? Was Beth somehow trying to protect Carly from beyond the grave?
Vanessa’s eyes scanned his. The light of life was fading fast. All of his questions would go forever unanswered. And the main thing, right now, was to save Carly. To stop the killing.
“It’s not bound to him, Vanessa. It’s been running rampant. It’s killing children. It’s got to stop. There has to be some way to stop it ... stop her.”
She shook her head ever so faintly. “No. Her will is strong. Your daughter’s friend opened a portal for her ... and now ... she will come for your daughter. She has been killing to protect her ... and now she will come to live with her again.”
“Tell me how to stop her.”
Vanessa’s head went limp. A final dribble of dark blood ran from the corner of her mouth to the floor. Her eyes stared sightlessly into the hall of the house that had been her fortress against the world, her self-imposed exile finally at an end.
“Tell me!” Gavin yelled. His eyes blurred with tears. He struggled to call 911. He blubbered to the operator, managed to give the address. He disconnected the call and tried to collect himself. He had to—
“Oh God,” he whispered. Every inch of skin crawled over his body, his muscles tensed with the horror of his realization.
Don’t kill him.
A flash of the creature, lying dead on the sidewalk in front of the house.
Gavin ran downstairs, feet thudding heavily down into the foyer. He swung open the front door. He rushed into the frigid air, pounded down the front stairs. His feet slipped on the icy walkway as he made his way to the sidewalk where he’d shot the creature that once had been Davis Crowley.
He reached the spot where his bullet struck the thing, but all that marked its former presence was a circle of blood staining the dirty snow.
The beast was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The possessed form of Carly Wagner flew from the bedroom ceiling, swooping down at Karen like a white-winged bat. Karen had only a moment to take in the luminous, burning green eyes, the ghostly pallor of the girl she’d come to love, the unnatural snarl—not to mention the fact that she was floating on the ceiling—before the girl’s body came swiftly toward her, fingers curled into a facsimile of talons.
Karen screamed, falling backward into the hall. Her head thudded against drywall. She scrambled to stand as the surreal vision of the girl hovered above her. Her skin seemed to glow, regarding Karen with inhuman eyes of unbridled fury. She paused there in mid-air, as if considering her quarry—her prey—before her feet lowered to the ground. As Carly came to rest a few feet away, illuminating the hall with her otherworldly light, Karen scrambled to her feet and backed slowly toward the staircase. Her heart raced. Blood surged in her ears. Her throat tightened to prohibit a scream.
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