“Thanks,” Amber told Trevor, and gave his arm a quick squeeze. The heat had continued to intensify, and sweat poured off her. She wiped a hand across her brow to mop it away, but she only succeeded in smearing the moisture around.
Drew looked equally uncomfortable, but he didn’t bother trying to wipe his sweat away. He just let it drip off him and fall to the ground. “Whatever we do, we’d better do it fast, before we succumb to either the heat or smoke inhalation.”
The latter was a real problem, Trevor thought, as smoke was rising from the fire Stockslager had started, a fire that was spreading. How long would it take for the smoke to build up in the barn, as closed as it was? More to the point, if the fire continued to spread, how long before they couldn’t escape it and were burned to death?
Stockslager came toward them, raising his hands and reaching for them with sausage-thick fingers as he approached. His dead face remained expressionless, but Trevor sensed a malign delight emanating from the man as he headed toward them.
“This is an illusion, right?” he said. “Maybe we can wish it away, use our minds to dispel it.”
Drew shook his head, keeping his eyes on Stockslager as he came toward them. “If it were that easy to counter Greg’s illusions, they’d never have progressed to this point. They’d have disappeared the moment we saw them, if for no other reason than our subconscious minds would’ve rejected them.”
Stockslager was coming uncomfortably close by this point, and the three friends ran past him to the other side of the barn. He shot another stream of moonshine, followed by another burst of fire. Both missed, but now a second section of the barn was aflame. Stockslager could only move so fast on his dead legs, and although he turned and continued toward the friends, he did so slowly, giving them time to talk.
“But we can counter the illusions,” Trevor insisted. “Amber did it with the hunters.”
“She did it using the scenario against itself,” Drew said. “That’s what we have to do here.”
Something about what Drew had said spurred a thought in him about how Amber had used the last illusion against itself. When he had been there before, during his visit to the Historical Society, it had been during the time period when Stockslager had been alive, and it had been winter outside. This current scenario was the spring of fifteen years ago, but both times were illusions, so why couldn’t they both be real? Or at least as real as they needed to be?
He specialized in paranormal and supernatural lore, and he knew that elemental forces often played a large role in various mythologies, belief systems, and magic rituals. Not only that, but the concepts of opposing and complementary forces were also vital. Right now, Stockslager was, at least symbolically, a creature of fire. And the opposite of fire was water. They had no water on them, but water could take on different forms, and one of those forms was present in abundance on the night when the police had come for Stockslager. But to access it, Trevor needed to make an opening in the barn, an opening between this time period and the earlier one. But how could he do that? Drew, at least the teenager he appeared to be, carried a backpack, but he knew there were no tools in there, nothing that could bash a hole in the side of a barn. Drew hadn’t packed such tools fifteen years ago, so there wouldn’t be any in there now. If only he still had hold of the tire iron he’d carried with him into the rec center. If he had, he could use it to—
Wait a minute. He didn’t remember dropping the tire iron. He did remember dropping the camera he’d been holding when they’d been transformed into their teenage selves—he’d let go of it when the werewolf hunters had attacked—but not the tire iron. It had seemed to vanish when they’d become teenagers again. But just because he could no longer see the tire iron or feel it didn’t mean it wasn’t still gripped tight in his hand. He might look like a teenager, but in reality, he was a man in his early thirties. And there was a good chance that the man still had hold of a tire iron and didn’t know it.
Unless, of course, he’d dropped the tire iron when he thought he was dropping the illusory camera . . .
Stockslager shot a third stream of ’shine at them, and Trevor was so lost in thought that the alcohol would have hit him full on if Drew hadn’t caught hold of his arm and yanked him out of the way. As before, Stockslager followed up with a blast of flame, and a third fire blossomed into life.
“I’ve got an idea,” he told Drew and Amber. “Keep an eye on him, OK?” Without waiting for their acknowledgment, he turned to face the wooden wall. He looked down at his right hand. It appeared empty, but he told himself that it wasn’t, that he held a solid length of metal in it. Then he closed his eyes, and, concentrating as hard as he could, he raised his hand and swung it at the wall—
—and was rewarded with the solid thunk of metal striking wood.
He kept his eyes closed and continued concentrating as he swung a second, third, and fourth time. He felt the wall give way with the last blow, and a gust of cold winter air hit him in the face, the sudden change in temperature coming as a shock.
He opened his eyes, and although he still didn’t see a tire iron in his hand, he did see the splinter-edged hole he’d made in the wall, and he smiled with satisfaction. He then turned around to face Stockslager, who’d advanced much closer while Trevor had been making the hole.
“Stay clear,” Trevor warned his friends, and then, remembering how Amber had plunged her hands into the earth to summon the blood tendrils that had defeated the hunters, he slammed his palms against the wood to the left of the hole he’d created and thought about the blanket of snow that lay beneath the moonlight outside the barn on the night the police had come for Stockslager.
Frigid wind gusted through the hole Trevor had made, a hole that was more than a passage through space but also one through time. The wind brought snow with it, only a few flakes at first, but it became a torrent of white that streaked toward Stockslager. The snow struck his hot, reddened skin and turned to hissing steam. But more and more snow came billowing in, flying so forcefully that it broke more wood and widened the hole in the wall, making room for even more snow to enter.
Stockslager made no sound as the snow continued to pummel him, but he stepped backward on his unsteady dead legs, fat arms flailing in a vain effort to ward off the attack. The snow melted at first, forming a large puddle beneath Stockslager’s feet, but the sheer amount of it overwhelmed the fire raging inside him, and his body began to cool. Snow began to collect on him after that, covering him, and still more blew in from outside, packing onto him until he looked like a giant snowman. A giant immobile snowman, for he’d stopped moving.
The snow did more than cover him. It swirled around the interior of the barn, cooling it to winter temperatures and piling onto the fires he had ignited, smothering them.
Trevor turned to his friends and grinned. “Now, that’s how you bust a ghost!”
The snow-wind died away but not before opening a large enough hole in the barn wall for them to climb through. They went out one at a time, and when they were outside again, they were once more on the Lowry House property of fifteen years ago. It was still a cool April night, and they were still teenagers.
Well done, Greg said. Two down, one to go.
All three friends heard his voice and looked at the Lowry House looming before them in the dark. Without exchanging a word, they started walking toward it.
EIGHTEEN
As the three friends stepped onto the porch of the Lowry House, Drew processed what they’d learned from the last scenario they’d experienced. The longer this extended psychodrama continued, the more it told him about Greg’s mind-set. He might be infected by some kind of evil supernatural force that gave him his powers, but he was still a man, and Drew was certain that if they were going to have any chance of stopping him—and maybe even freeing him from the darkness that possessed him—it lay in understanding his psychological makeup. He told himself to remain calm and consider Greg as just another patient who needed his help, to think in terms of diagnosi
s and treatment. But it wasn’t easy to do, considering that they’d barely survived two nightmare scenarios and were about to walk into a third. If they hoped to survive this next test, he needed to remain sharp and stay in the present, be ready for anything. But to defeat Greg, he needed to be able to stay detached so that he could function as a psychologist. How could he do both?
Maybe he was thinking too much. Both Amber and Trevor had managed to exert control over Greg’s scenarios and nullify them, and they’d both done so by listening to their instincts. Maybe he should take a cue from his friends and let up on the intellectualizing a little.
Then again, perhaps they’d made it through the last two scenarios because Greg had wanted them to. If he was a sociopath, that meant that he was a master manipulator. Maybe he hoped to lull them into a false sense of security and then hit them with the most deadly scenario, one that they couldn’t defeat. Or maybe he wanted Drew to be thinking along these lines to foster a sense of paranoia so he’d begin making mistakes.
Thinking too much, he decided. Definitely.
They walked up to the front door of the Lowry House, and he shone his flashlight on the doorknob. “It wasn’t locked the night we came here as teenagers,” he said. He tried the knob, and it turned beneath his hand as if freshly oiled. He pushed the door, and it swung open without the obligatory screeching hinges that one might expect of any self-respecting haunted house.
He led the way with his flashlight, and Amber and Trevor followed, Amber keeping close behind, her hand on his shoulder. The air inside the house smelled stale and moldy, and it felt several degrees cooler than outside.
The short foyer was empty of furniture or carpet, and there were no pictures on the walls. The plaster was cracked in several places and splotched with dark patches of mold.
“When we were teenagers, did we leave the door open or close it behind us?” Trevor asked. He spoke in a hushed voice, as if they were in church.
“We probably closed it,” Amber said. “Just in case any police drove by and noticed that it was open.”
Trevor turned to close the door, but Drew stopped him. “We don’t have to worry about police now,” he said. “And who knows? We might need to make a quick getaway.”
“But if we don’t close it—and better yet, lock it and shove a couch or something up against it—something nasty might sneak in when we’re not looking and creep up on us from behind,” Trevor said.
“Whatever surprises Greg has in store for us, a locked door isn’t going to stop them,” Drew pointed out. “Especially since the door, like everything else around us, is only an illusion created by him.”
“Which means leaving it open doesn’t matter, either,” Trevor countered. “He can just think it closed whenever he wants.”
Before Drew could respond, Amber cut in. “I’m not sure all of this is just an elaborate figment of Greg’s imagination. Remember, I said that he’s making it, at least partially, from our memories. We’re also standing on the physical location where the Lowry House once stood. However powerful he is, he still needs material to work with, like a sculptor needs clay. What if he is not only using our memories but also drawing on the spiritual forces on the land here?”
“It makes sense,” Drew said. “It would explain why we’ve been able to intuit some of the details of our original investigation of the Lowry House as we go and why we’ve been able to influence the scenarios. They are, at least partially, ours, too. And if this location possesses strong residual psychic energy, maybe we’re tapping into it as well.”
“In that case,” Trevor said, “maybe I can wish up an Uzi that fires silver bullets.” He squeezed his eyes shut in concentration and held out his empty hand, but no weapon appeared. He opened his eyes and sighed. “It was worth a shot.”
“Let’s go,” Drew said. “It’s rude to keep our host waiting.”
They walked into the living room and found it as empty as the foyer. No furniture, no carpet, no wall decorations. Drew felt a coldness in the pit of his stomach as he remembered the hallucination he’d experienced while talking with Greg in the hotel lobby.
“This is where I saw Mr. Lowry sitting on his couch, gripping his nine-millimeter. He had a hunting knife sitting by his side, and he said he was trying to decide which one to use. I vote we head straight upstairs. That’s where Lowry killed his family and himself. Whatever’s waiting for us in this scenario is probably up there.”
Amber and Trevor nodded their agreement, and they left the living room in search of the stairs. They were easy enough to find, at the end of a hallway that led to several smaller rooms on the ground floor.
The air seemed to grow colder as they reached the second floor, and Amber began shivering. Drew put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.
“I’m cold, too,” Trevor said. “Who’s going to warm me up?” He spoke in a near-whisper, and his breath misted on the cold air.
“I think I remember that,” Amber said, ignoring him. “The cold, I mean. It got a lot colder as we came closer to the bedroom where Mr. Lowry killed his children.”
Drew shone his flashlight beam on the door to their right. “This is the room,” he said.
They looked at the door in silence for a moment. There was a light coating of frost on the door’s surface and the knob, and waves of cold radiated from the wood.
“So, do we go in or not?” Trevor asked. “If we want to continue following in our teenage footsteps, we should go inside. It’s what we would’ve done then.”
Before they could debate the issue further, the frost-coated knob turned, and the door swung open on its own.
“Guess Greg thought we needed a hint,” Trevor said.
Drew shone the flashlight into the room and stepped inside, Amber and Trevor following close behind.
This room, unlike the others they’d seen in the Lowry House, wasn’t empty. It was a child’s room—two children, actually—with a pair of beds and shelves containing books, toys, and stuffed animals and more stuff scattered on the floor. The walls were painted a cheerful lavender, and curtains displaying cartoon animals covered the window. There were four people in the room, but only one of them was alive. A child lay in each bed, a boy and a girl, both of them little more than toddlers. Their throats had been cut, the wounds so deep that their heads were almost severed from their bodies. Blood soaked the bedclothes, coated their headboards, was splashed on the wall. The children’s eyes were wide and staring, and their mouths were open, as if they’d died pleading for their lives. A blond woman in her thirties wearing a sheer blue nightgown lay on the floor, stretched at the feet of both beds. She lay on her side, revealing that her throat had been cut as savagely as her children’s, and blood soaked her nightgown and the carpet around her and matted her hair.
The only living denizen of the house stood near the window, blood-slick knife held at his side, tears streaming down his care-lined face as he gazed on his grisly handiwork.
“This time, I used the knife,” he said in a toneless voice.
It was John Lowry, looking much the same as he had in the hallucination Drew had experienced in the hotel lobby. Except that now he held his hunting knife instead of his gun, and his clothes were covered in his family’s blood.
He didn’t tear his gaze from his family as he spoke once more. “I didn’t want to do it. Really, I didn’t. But I had to, so I decided to do it as fast as I could, to minimize their suffering, you know? The kids first, so they wouldn’t have to hear their mother die, in case I couldn’t keep her quiet when I killed her. But Jimmy woke up as I was doing his sister and screamed, and that brought Helen.” He nodded toward his wife’s body. “So I had to do her while Jimmy watched. A hell of a thing, a boy having to watch his mother die. I’d have done anything to stop it, but the voices wouldn’t let me.” He let out a mournful sigh. “Only one thing left to do now.”
With a trembling hand, Lowry raised the knife to his own throat and pressed the edge of the blade to h
is flesh.
“Wait!” Drew said. “You don’t have to do that!”
Lowry stood there, trembling, tears continuing to slide down his cheeks and drip onto his shirt, mingling with the blood of his family. But he didn’t draw the knife blade across his throat. And then he stopped shaking, and a sly smile spread across his face. He lowered the knife.
“You know something?” he said. “The voices have changed their minds. They’ve given me a new task to do before I can rejoin my family. I’m supposed to kill you three.”
He raised his knife and started forward.
“Time for us to beat feet,” Trevor said.
Drew doubted that it would be that simple, given the variations that they’d experienced in the last two scenarios, but they could hardly stand there and let Lowry open up their throats, so the three friends turned and ran out of the room, history once again repeating itself.
The air in the hallway seemed even colder than it had a few moments ago, and their breath gusted clouds of steam as they hurried toward the stairs. But before they reached them, long metal blades, like knives only far larger, shot forth from the stairs, walls, and ceiling at haphazard angles, as if the friends were trapped inside a gigantic version of one of those boxes that stage magicians thrust swords into. The crisscrossing blades formed an impenetrable barrier, so rather than plunge ahead and be sliced into ribbons, they stopped running and turned back to face Lowry.
He’d followed them into the hallway, taking his time and grinning as if he enjoyed it, his demeanor far different from that of the sorrowful father he’d been only a few moments ago. As he came, knives jutted forth from his body, bloodlessly cutting through skin and slicing through clothing, until he resembled a nightmarish human porcupine with sharp steel blades in place of quills.
“Do you like my new look?” he asked. “I think it ups the entertainment value, don’t you?”
Although they heard Lowry’s voice, Drew knew that the words he spoke were Greg’s.
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