Though Larry suspected that they had moved on, he had no choice but to make a quick search of the house. He climbed the porch steps and pushed open the front door. Inside, he closed the door behind him. He spotted a wooden hall table and dragged it in front of the door so he’d hear them move it if they tried to get out that way.
“Honey, son, I’m home,” he called out, his words unintelligible even to his own ears.
Pistol at the ready, moving quickly but as quietly as he could—not to mask his approach, but so that he’d hear footsteps making for an exit—he went from room to room, opening closets, looking behind sofas and under beds. The house had a single floor, except for a loft overlooking the living room, and he finished his search in less than ninety seconds. At the front door, he shoved the table aside and strode out, leaving the door open behind him.
Having had a few moments to catch his breath, he was rejuvenated. He barely noticed the throb in his neck or shoulder, though the cold air hitting his ruined cheek hurt like a bitch. But he felt fresh again and it showed in the speed of his strides as he ran. He knew they weren’t far ahead. He knew they were moving far, far more slowly than he. He knew where they were going and what they’d find when they got there. He wanted to catch them there, to stop them there. It was conceivable that they’d move on before he arrived, and if they did, it didn’t matter; the next house was much too far for them to reach before he ran them down. Still, he’d rather catch them at the house just around the bend in the trees and put an end to the chase. And then, finally, he’d take them—carry them, drag them, if he had to—back to his house, to his basement, into their nightmares, into his dreams.
ALICE FELL AGAIN. Her ankle hurt her like nothing had ever hurt her before. Every step sent bright, electric flashes of pain straight up to her brain.
“Come on, Alice,” Miguel urged.
She shook her head. “I need a second.”
“We don’t have a second.”
“I know, but I need one anyway.”
His eyes were those of a hunted animal.
“Go on, Miguel,” she said. “Keep running. I’ll try to hide. Maybe we’ll both get lucky.”
She didn’t think she’d be able to hide, but she thought again that finding her might slow Larry down long enough for Miguel to get away.
“No,” he said. “Now please get up, Alice, because I can’t carry you or drag you but I’ll try if you don’t get up.”
Alice nodded, sucked in a big breath, and pushed to her feet, trying to put as little weight as possible on her damaged ankle.
Together, they stumbled and hobbled through the darkness. Ten yards to their right, the lake shimmered in the moonlight, but Alice and Miguel stayed in the trees, even though their footing was more precarious, because they’d be harder to spot in the shadows of the forest until they reached the next house.
Alice limped along. Miguel, still weighed down by his backpack, plodded along beside her. The next house had better come soon, Alice thought, because they were pretty much spent.
“I think I see it,” Miguel said.
Alice looked up—she’d taken to trudging along with her eyes on the ground so as to avoid tripping on root or rock, limb or log—and she saw, through the trees just ahead, stone walls.
“Thank God,” she said as they left the cover of the trees. She looked up at the building. And what a building it was.
It was a castle. A stone castle in the middle of New Hampshire, constructed of what looked like big blocks of gray granite. Parapets adorned each corner of the square structure, complete with slits in the stone, the same kind through which archers defended their castles half a millennium ago. The tops of the walls, three stories and eighty feet above, were crenellated. Stone gargoyles stuck out from the wall in various places, a very few intact but most broken. In fact, the entire castle seemed to be in a state of disrepair. Some of the windows, Alice now noticed, were boarded up from the inside. Some of the stones in the wall, especially near the ground, were missing. Great cracks appeared in places and vines had wormed their way inside. Someone had spray-painted “Megadeth” in foot-high letters across the wall below the windows to the right of the front doorway. The door itself was massive, at least ten feet tall. It hung askew on huge, rusted hinges and was partly open. Through the small opening into the castle, Alice saw only darkness.
Her heart dropped like a stone. This place was empty. There was no one here to help them. And they simply couldn’t run anymore.
“We have to hide inside,” Alice said. “We have to hide and hope he thinks we kept running when we found this place empty.”
Miguel nodded. He gripped his knife tightly and walked up to the door. To Alice, he looked so very small in front of that enormous door. He pushed on the door but couldn’t get it to swing open. He might have been able to slip through the opening, but instead waited for Alice. She walked forward, put both hands on the door, and shoved. It didn’t budge. It was huge and heavy and the hinges were rusty. She pushed again, harder, then again even harder, and it finally scraped along the floor, grating against the stone, the old hinges screeching in protest. When she’d opened it just enough for the two of them to enter, she stood back and watched Miguel walk without hesitation into the dark and empty castle.
I wonder if I look that brave, Alice thought as she followed the boy through the doorway and into the darkness beyond. Once inside, she and Miguel leaned into the heavy door together and, with a screech of rusty hinges, it closed as far as its crooked state would allow.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
BOONE SIMPLY COULD not believe what he was doing. It was surreal, something he could not have imagined doing just yesterday. He was sitting in the back of a small open boat, out on a huge lake, cutting through the water with the wind drenching him with cold October night air. He should have been crippled with fear, blind as a worm, assaulted by half a dozen symptoms of a panic attack. Instead, he trusted his new companion Nathan, and he trusted Alice’s soothing words, which he replayed like a mantra in his head—and here he was cutting across the open lake through the open air with Nathan manning the tiller of the boat’s outboard motor. Boone kept expecting to feel the familiar panic-induced paralysis creeping up, but it had yet to start clawing at him. He was beginning to think that it might not come at all. Soon, Boone felt safe enough to turn the volume down on Alice’s voice in his head.
“So how about telling me where we’re going?” he said as he tried to ignore the wind on his face, in his hair, on his skin.
“There’s a castle not far across the lake,” Nathan said as he adjusted the tiller a few degrees.
“A castle?”
“Bloomington Castle. A slightly nutty railroad baron built it in the nineteenth century. The guy made a ton of money building boxcars or something. Anyway, he supposedly always wanted to live in a castle, so he built one here on Lake Winnipesaukee. I’ve seen it. Looks just like a place where King Arthur would have hung his hat—or crown, I guess.”
“And why are we going there?” Nathan hesitated, so Boone prodded him. “Nathan?”
The older man blew out a breath. “I’m not really sure, to be honest, but I think it’s got something to do with Jeremy.”
“Your son?”
“Yeah. That’s what I think, anyway.”
“What makes you think that?”
Nathan hesitated again. Boone waited a few moments before finally saying, “Come on, Nathan.”
Nathan said, “Uh…well, it’s, uh—”
“Yeah?”
“It’s gonna sound a little crazy to you, Boone.”
Boone thought about his own reasons for being in a boat in the middle of a lake, far from home, on a mission he didn’t even know. “Maybe things don’t sound as crazy to me as they might to some people.”
Boone waited some more while Nathan seemed to chew on that for a moment. “Okay, then,” Nathan said, “it started a little less than two weeks ago.”
In a few short min
utes, Nathan told him all about his dreams. Boone was silent.
Nathan said, “You’re thinking of jumping out of this boat, wondering if you could swim to shore, am I right? I wouldn’t blame you a bit if you were, but I’d advise against it. Water’s cold and the shore’s a ways off still.”
“Well,” Boone said, “that might have been the case two days ago, but now I think I can believe just about anything.”
Boone told Nathan about the supernatural roommate who’d recently taken up residence in his apartment. He told him about the pictures and the computer and the voices and the things flying off the walls. When he was finished, he said, “How about you, Nathan? Thinking of abandoning ship?”
Nathan chuckled. “Hey, after seeing you standing there covered with glass, like in my dream, I’m ready to believe anything, too.”
Boone nodded. After a moment, he said, “So what, then? Jeremy gets you up here to find him, right?”
“That’s what I think. Or it’s what I hope anyway.”
“But what about me? Are we saying that Jeremy, who I’ve never even met, somehow reached out to me, too? Why? Why me?”
What Boone didn’t say, but wondered, was if it was indeed a ghost or spirit of some kind that had pushed him into all this, and Jeremy was indeed that entity, then wouldn’t that mean that Jeremy was a ghost—and therefore dead? But, of course, he didn’t give voice to that thought.
They cut through the water in silence until Nathan said, “I have no idea why he contacted you, Boone. Seems strange, I guess. But then again, what about any of this seems normal to you?”
Boone shook his head. “Good question. Not much, I suppose.”
“So I guess we’ll see how it all fits together.”
“I guess.”
Boone wasn’t sure whether this was truly all about Jeremy, but if it was, he hoped for his new friend’s sake that they found Jeremy, and found him alive.
The engine’s whine decreased and the boat slowed in the water.
“We’re almost there,” Nathan said. “I have no idea what we may be walking into, so I think we should go in quietly.”
“Makes sense.”
The boat thumped against something and Boone shot his hands out and gripped the railing beside him.
“Sorry, Boone,” Nathan said. “I should have warned you. We hit shore here. We’re about forty yards from the castle.”
Boone nodded. He felt Nathan grip his left arm and he let the older man lead him off the boat. Boone’s feet got a little wet before he stood on dry land.
“Okay, Boone,” Nathan said in a whisper, “let’s head down to the castle and find what there is to find. Can you see okay to walk along here at night?”
“Yeah, I’m all right,” he whispered as they started down the shoreline. After a few steps, he said, “Nathan? I hope we find what you’re hoping to find.”
Nathan walked in silence for a moment, then said, “Me, too.”
LARRY STOOD OUTSIDE the castle door, listening, thinking. It was possible they’d been here and left already, but he really didn’t think they’d had the time. He’d been moving far faster than they. And they had to have known he was right behind them, that they’d never make it to the next house along the lake, so they would have wanted to find someplace to hide. Which left the woods or the castle. The woods would have been smarter; they could have split up, both improving their individual odds of escaping. But Larry believed they would stay together. And he was betting they were in the castle. People believed in the illusion of safety behind walls. Larry knew better. Walls couldn’t keep out anyone who wanted badly enough to get in.
Suddenly, a sound—not too loud, but loud enough—carried to him from the castle. A faint creak. Larry smiled to himself, but only one half of his mouth rose. The other was paralyzed, as the muscles and nerves had been severed, leaving the right half of his face drooping and lifeless.
Can’t wait to make that bitch kiss this face, he thought.
With his pistol in his hand and the safety disengaged, he put his free hand against the door and pushed. It was heavy, but couldn’t resist his strength. In a moment it opened, the rusty hinges shrieking loudly, and Larry stepped into the castle. It was dark inside, but strangely, the darkness began to lessen. He looked out through one of several large windows scaling the walls—some were boarded over but many were not. One of the dark clouds that had been sailing through the sky all night was gliding past the almost-full moon, freeing it, and Larry found he could see quite well at the moment.
He took in his surroundings. He stood in a hexagonal entrance hall rising three stories. There was a great staircase ahead of him and rooms off to his left and to his right.
What would they do? They must have known that flight was no longer an option. They were surely too exhausted by now. That left only concealment or attack, and he didn’t think they had the courage or sufficient weaponry to attack. So they must have planned to hide and hope he guessed that they had, in fact, moved on. But he knew better. They were here. And he’d find them.
It made little sense to try to sneak up on them, wherever they were hiding. They would surely know he was here. They couldn’t have failed to hear the door screeching open. His best bet was a bold approach. Maybe if he was fearsome enough, they’d be scared into giving themselves away somehow.
“You might as well come out,” he said in words he barely understood himself. Damn this ripped cheek, this paralyzed face. “I know you’re here, Miguel. You, too, you sneaky bitch.”
He waited but heard nothing. He looked at the arched doorway to his left, then his right, and chose left. As he walked, he stepped over decades of detritus—broken boards, stones, empty beer bottles, a used condom. Though the house was styled after a medieval castle fortress, it did not sprawl. It was square and three stories high. The footprint of the structure allowed for maybe half a dozen rooms per floor, but there were no offshoots from the building for kitchens or servants’ quarters. It was a fairly contained environment.
“Okay, we’ll do it the hard way,” he said loudly, spraying blood with every unintelligible word. “But I warn you—every minute longer it takes me to find you is another hour I take torturing you before I finally bleed you out.”
THEY WERE TRAPPED. They never should have entered the castle. Alice didn’t know what she’d been thinking. She knew they couldn’t run anymore and the woods seemed so open; they’d felt so vulnerable out there. So the castle had seemed the only option. But it was a trap. He’d find them and kill them. She only hoped he’d just kill them. After the way they’d hurt him, ruined his face like that, Alice could imagine him wanting to exact a terrible revenge before he finally slaughtered them like lambs.
She could hear him moving around down on the first floor, grunting out angry breaths. Every now and then he said something but his words were too wet and mangled to understand. He sounded like a wounded animal trying to mimic human speech. It was chilling. Still, though his words were unclear, the menace in them was unmistakable. Every time he spoke, Alice shivered.
She and Miguel were crouched behind a rotting armoire in the second bedroom from the top of the stairs on the second floor. They each held a knife in a white-knuckled fist. She had convinced him to trust her with his backpack, which had been weighing him down terribly with whatever was inside. Alice had the bag over her shoulder. She’d promised him she would never let it go, but the vow she made to herself was a little different—she’d do her best to escape with it, but if the worst happened, she’d ditch it in a heartbeat. If it came to that, at least she’d have freed the boy of his burden, giving him a better chance to reach safety before fatigue robbed him of his strength and breath.
Their plan was to hide where they were until they heard Larry enter the first bedroom, and while he was searching it, they’d slip past the door, sneak down the stairs, and wait in the shadows at the bottom until he entered the second room. While Larry searched that, they’d leave the castle and make for the ne
xt house down the lakeshore, hoping for better luck there than they’d had so far. By leaving Larry to search several more bedrooms on the second floor before having to search the entire third floor, she and Miguel hoped they’d build enough of a head start to reach safety before Larry realized that they had escaped.
The trick would be making it past the first bedroom and down the stairs quickly and quietly enough. Alice prayed they’d have time. Larry would have to search each room thoroughly to be certain they weren’t hiding there before moving to the next room. She and Miguel had looked quickly in the first room. There was a dusty four-poster bed covered with a tattered, moldy bedspread rotted through in places. Larry would have to look behind and under the bed. He’d also have to look inside the armoire in that room, as well as the closet and the attached bathroom, which probably wasn’t in keeping with the architectural style of a medieval castle, but it was hard to blame the man who built the place for wanting the modern comforts that weren’t available in the Middle Ages.
Larry called out something and again, Alice couldn’t understand him. His tone of voice, though, froze the marrow in her bones. He wasn’t far away. Sounded like he was climbing the stone staircase. His footsteps slowed at the top of the stairs, then stopped. She heard his breaths. He sounded like she imagined a gored bull sounded near the end of a bullfight, blood and mucus spraying with each exhale.
She held her breath. She felt Miguel, who was crouching beside her, do the same. Finally, Larry’s footsteps started again, then grew faint. He must have entered the first bedroom.
“Now,” she whispered into Miguel’s ear.
Without hesitation, he rose from his crouch and moved toward the door. As quietly as she could, Alice did the same, biting back the pain lancing through her ankle. Miguel stopped at the door, peeked around the frame, and looked out into the hall. Without taking the time to look back at her, he nodded and stepped through. Alice followed.
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