by Kay Hooper
Quentin sensed danger in that question, though he couldn’t have said just why. “Maybe. On some level. But as gifted as you are, that isn’t your natural state, Diana.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No, of course not. We exist in the . . . everyday world of the living. Physically and emotionally, this is where we belong. What we tap in to in order to use our abilities is a place we visit, not a place we live.”
She looked at him as if she would have asked another question, but instead said, “I suppose you’re right.”
Again, Quentin felt uneasy without knowing why. The little voice he sometimes heard was silent, and yet he had the sense of something being slightly off, even wrong.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m tired.” She smiled faintly. “It’s . . . been a long day.”
“Yeah. Look, until we know what’s going on here, I’d feel better if you didn’t spend the night in your cottage. Why don’t you take my bed, and I’ll bunk down on the sofa bed in the sitting room?”
She didn’t exactly protest, but said, “Nate has officers patrolling the grounds.”
“I know. Still.”
“There are plenty of empty rooms here in the main building.”
Steadily, he repeated, “I know.”
Diana looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. “Okay. Thanks.”
And it wasn’t until a few minutes later, when they were in his suite and she was about to close the door of the bedroom, that Diana went back to a subject they had touched on earlier.
“There is something between us.”
At the moment, there was a door between them. A door she was about to close.
He stood there looking down at her, wanting to say more than he knew he should.
Not now. Not yet. She had been through so much, and her own words told him she was too confused and unsettled to be able to handle anything more right now.
So all he said was, “There was always something between us, Diana. Try to get some sleep.”
At first it seemed she’d question that, but finally she just nodded, and murmured, “Good night.” And closed the door.
Diana didn’t know if it would work. Whatever control she sometimes managed to have while in the gray time, the fact was that as far as she knew, she herself had never instigated that . . . process. She had always been called, summoned really, by one or more of the guides. Dragged from sleep or into one of the scary blackouts without so much as a by-your-leave.
Or, as in the most recent case, by the voice in her mind she thought now had probably always been Missy.
Which meant she hadn’t a clue how to, on her own and without prompting, fashion or open a door into that realm.
But she had to try. Because among the countless puzzles and questions of this day, one question stood out from the rest, haunting her.
She had to at least try to find the answer.
Quentin wouldn’t approve, she knew that. And she also knew that his likely disapproval was worth paying attention to for the simple reason that he was far more experienced in psychic matters than she was—consciously, at any rate—and very likely knew when something paranormal shouldn’t be attempted.
Which was why she hadn’t told him she was going to try this.
She made herself comfortable on his bed, lying atop the turned-down covers, propped up with an extra pillow. She turned off all but the lamp on the nightstand, so that the room was only softly lighted.
Even as she closed her eyes and tried to relax, Diana was aware of the nagging notion that attempting this so near in time and place to a vicious murder was probably not the safest thing she could have done.
That didn’t stop her either.
Not knowing how else to do it, she breathed steadily, evenly, and concentrated on trying to make herself boneless. Limp. One muscle at a time, limb by limb. Then, when she felt as relaxed as she was likely to become, she tried to visualize a door. Rather to her surprise, it was very easy to do, forming rapidly in her mind’s eye as though it stood just before her.
And to her increasing uneasiness, the door was green.
Diana hesitated, but in the end her need to find the answer to the question haunting her was stronger, even, than her instincts for self-preservation. She reached out and grasped the doorknob, surprised to “feel” it as though it were actually real, and turned it.
She opened the door and stepped through into the gray time. A long corridor stretched before her, cold and gray and virtually featureless.
Diana hesitated again, still holding the door open as she half turned to gaze back through it. Eerily, she saw Quentin’s bedroom, the lamp on the nightstand glowing warmly, the turned-back covers and banked pillows on the bed.
The empty bed.
“I’m here,” she heard herself murmur, her voice as always hollow in the gray time. “I’m here physically.”
She hadn’t counted on that.
“This is not a good idea.”
Startled, Diana turned quickly back toward the corridor, and the doorknob slipped from her hand. She found herself facing the little girl who had guided her down to the stables, Becca.
“You’re not supposed to be here, not yet,” Becca told her.
Diana glanced back over her shoulder to see the green door closed behind her. “As long as I remember where this door is, I can get back,” she said.
Becca shook her head. “That’s not the way things work here. The door won’t be in the same place. The place won’t be in the same place.”
“I’m not in the mood for riddles, Becca.”
The little girl heaved a sigh. “It’s not a riddle, it’s just the way things are. You’ll remember if you think about it. You made the door, so you carry it with you. Sort of.”
“Then I’ll be able to find it if I need to leave in a hurry, won’t I?”
“I hope so.”
Diana tried to pretend to herself that the little chill she felt was entirely due to the usual coldness of the gray time rather than to the child’s obvious doubt.
“Where’s Missy?” she asked Becca.
Becca cocked her head to one side, as though listening to some distant sound. “You really shouldn’t be here, Diana. Killing Ellie was just the start. It knows about you now. And it wants you.”
“Why?” Diana asked, as steadily as she could manage.
“Because you’re finding the secrets. You found Jeremy’s bones. You found the trap door and the caves. You found the picture of you and Missy.”
“But those are just—pieces of the puzzle.”
“And you have almost all of them now. You’ll be able to help us stop it this time.” Her certainty wavered. “I think.”
That didn’t reassure Diana very much. “Look, Becca, I need to talk to Missy.”
“Missy isn’t here anymore.”
Diana felt a deeper chill. “What do you mean?”
“I mean she isn’t here. When you opened the door the last time, when she held your hand, she left the gray time and returned with you.”
“Why?”
“Something she needs to do, I expect.”
Slowly, Diana said, “I didn’t see her. When I was back with Quentin, I didn’t see her.”
“Sometimes, we don’t want to be seen, even by mediums. Besides, I expect you were upset. Remembering about your mama and all.”
“You know about that?”
Becca nodded. “Uh-huh. Missy told me.”
“Do you know—” Diana steadied her voice. “Do you know why our mother was trapped on this side of the door?”
“That’s why you crossed over, isn’t it? And why you crossed over all the way, in the flesh. You tried too hard. Because it means so much to you. Because you have to know what happened to your mama.”
“Answer me, Becca. Do you know what happened to her? Do you know where she is?”
Becca turned and began walking down the long corridor.
Immediately, Diana fol
lowed. “Becca—”
“Don’t get too far from the door, Diana.”
Diana hesitated, glanced back. But the green door was still there. She continued to follow the little girl. “I’ve followed you guides most of my life,” she said, not without a touch of bitterness. “Always following, always doing whatever it was you needed me to do. Dammit, this time I need something. Why can’t one of you help me for a change?”
“We’ve been helping you all along, Diana.”
“Oh, sure. Leaving me up to my waist in a lake, or driving my father’s car down a highway—”
“That wasn’t us.”
“What do you mean, it wasn’t you? I blacked out, and—”
“The drugs were too strong. They pulled you back before you were supposed to go.”
Diana didn’t find that terribly reassuring. “So just because I came out of most blackouts safe at home doesn’t mean that’s where I was the whole time, I gather?”
“Well, it’s very helpful for us to have someone who can cross over in the flesh,” Becca said. “Most mediums can barely see or talk to us, much less walk with us.”
“Speaking of which,” Diana said, “where are we going?” The words were barely out of her mouth when she stopped abruptly, momentarily disoriented, because she and Becca were no longer in the long corridor. Instead, they were standing in the garden outside the conservatory.
They were still in the gray time, which meant the garden was as motionless as a photograph and looked blurred and one-dimensional and colorless, and the landscape’s lighting did nothing to change any of that.
Becca, who had also stopped, turned to face her. “Since you’re here, we have to take the chance. There’s something you need to see.”
“Oh, God, not again.” Diana frowned at her. “I told you, I have a question of my own this time.”
“Then maybe he can answer it for you.”
“He? He, who?”
Becca nodded toward the conservatory. “In there.”
Diana would have protested again, but in a blink her child guide was gone, and she found herself alone. “Dammit.” With little choice in the matter, she went into the conservatory.
For some reason, she wasn’t surprised to see that the artistic workshop had left evidence of its existence on this side of the door.
There were the paintings propped on easels—except that there seemed to be an awful lot of them, a forest of them. Diana picked her way through slowly, looking at each in turn, feeling her scalp crawl and tingle unpleasantly.
These weren’t the paintings she remembered from the workshop. There had been violence in those, images from troubled minds, but . . . not like this.
One after another, these images spoke of abject terror. Faces twisted in hideous grimaces. Bodies contorted into violent poses. Explosions destroying. Weapons tearing flesh. Disease, starvation, torture.
And symbolic as well as literal images of fear. Darkness slashed through with lightning bolts. Spiders. Snakes. Creepy alleyways. Lonely, deserted country roads. A broken window. A fly caught in a web.
Diana paused at last before the painting of an image that was terrifyingly familiar. A dark, dark space, tiny, airless, perhaps a closet. And in the back corner, her arms wrapped tightly around her up-drawn legs, sat a little girl with long dark hair and a tearstained face.
“Amazing how easy it is to identify her, isn’t it? That tiny figure in that small, dark corner. She could be anyone. But she could only be Missy.”
Diana stepped quickly to the side so that she could see beyond the painting. “You? What the hell are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you,” Beau said.
Nate knew he should go home to bed, get a fresh start in the morning—later in the morning—but he also knew he’d be too restless to sleep. There was paperwork awaiting him back at the station, but that held even less appeal, and he wasn’t really surprised to find himself just casually wandering past Stephanie’s slightly open office door.
She was sitting at her desk, frowning over what he felt was an uncharacteristically untidy jumble of papers spread out on the blotter.
“You’re working late,” he said from the doorway.
Stephanie looked up with a start, but then smiled. “Not exactly work. Or at least, not work I’m being paid to do. I wanted to keep looking through the old files, see if I could find something useful.”
“I could have been anybody, you know,” he told her, pushing the door the rest of the way open. “Sneaking up on you—” He broke off, rather sheepishly, because the door creaked loudly as it opened wide enough to admit him.
Stephanie grinned and moved a stack of papers to reveal a gleaming .45 automatic. “I’m fast, especially with the adrenaline rush. If I hadn’t instantly recognized your voice, you would have been looking down the barrel of this before you could get anywhere near the desk.”
Nate sat down in her visitor’s chair. “Never mind fast—are you any good with that?”
“Yes. And I have a license for it. A license to carry it, for that matter.” Soberly, she added, “I think our nighttime security is pretty good, especially with your people patrolling as well, but with a killer here somewhere, I’m taking no chances. Army brat, remember?”
“I remember. And I feel a bit better about you working late alone down here. But only a bit.” He paused. “You do realize this killer is likely to be someone you know? Or at least that he’ll wear a familiar face?”
“The thought had occurred. In a place like The Lodge, all dressed in its Victorian grandeur, it’d be easy to imagine that only the odd maniac wandering past could possibly have sullied our good name with something as distasteful as murder.”
He lifted an eyebrow at her.
Descending to normality, Stephanie said, “Except that this place never really was unsullied, was it?”
“Not according to Quentin.”
“And not according to what records I’ve gone over so far. Did you know that the first death recorded on these grounds happened while the place was being built?”
“Yeah, one of my people found mention of that in a historical database. Not so uncommon around construction sites, especially over a hundred years ago.”
“Yeah. But this guy didn’t fall from a scaffold or get crushed by falling stone, or anything like that. The local doctor at the time stated in writing that the victim was frightened to death.”
“Frightened? Of what?”
“Nobody could say. They came to work early one morning, and there he was, just lying near the foreman’s shack. No cuts, no bruises. Place wasn’t far enough along to even have security out here, not that they needed much in those days. Bottom line, nobody saw anything.”
“Frightened to death. Heart attack?” Nate guessed.
“The doc stated that his heart stopped—but that it wasn’t diseased, wasn’t enlarged, wasn’t any of the things they believed in those days showed signs of trouble. And, apparently, he looked scared out of his mind. His face was frozen in an expression of absolute terror.”
Nate was silent, frowning.
“That’s not all,” Stephanie continued. “Another half dozen men died during the construction of The Lodge and its stables. And all the deaths were . . . just a little bit strange. Surefooted men falling. Skilled men having accidents with tools. Healthy men getting very sick very suddenly.”
“What about after construction?”
“Well, then the records get just a bit murky.” She shrugged, frowning a little herself. “I know enough about record-keeping to know that the entries I’ve found so far concerning illnesses, disappearances, and deaths here were noted with an absolute minimum of detail, almost casually.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that from the get-go, any sort of bad news for The Lodge—especially of the death-on-the-grounds variety—was strongly downplayed.”
“Wouldn’t that be expected for a hotel?”
“To a certain e
xtent, yeah. But your average hotel, when faced with the disappearance, death, or even murder of one of its guests, would have paperwork up the wazoo. Police reports, security reports, doctors’ statements. Every piece of paper that could possibly be required to acquit the hotel and all its employees of any wrongdoing.”
“Which The Lodge doesn’t have.”
“Like I said. If you ask me, somebody very early on made the decision of how bad news was to be handled. And whether it became habit or an ironclad rule, that’s how it was done from that point onward.”
“No paperwork.”
“No paperwork, and only the bare mention of an occurrence. Name, date, not much more. Usually buried in accounts of the day-to-day running of the place.”
Nate rested his forearm on her desk, fingers drumming absently. “I know how many deaths and disappearances we’re talking about in the last twenty-five years, thanks to Quentin’s obsession. What about before that? How many?”
“Oh, jeez, it’ll be weeks before I can tell you that. I’m barely up to about 1925.”
“Okay. How many up to 1925?”
Stephanie drew a breath. “Counting the deaths during construction, I have reported on the grounds of The Lodge more than a dozen deaths by 1925.”
It took a minute, but Nate finally said, “Of those, how many were suspicious?”
“In my opinion? All of them, Nate. All of them.”
“Are you dead?” Diana asked incredulously.
Beau smiled. “No.”
She took a step closer, uncertain. “Are you a medium?”
“No.”
Diana looked around her at the gray easels with their gray canvases daubed and stroked with varying shades of gray paint. She looked at the gray plants here and there in the conservatory, looked down at her own gray self and then up at him. Gray too. Everything was gray.
“Then I repeat. What the hell are you doing here?”
“I told you. Waiting for you.”
“Beau, do you know where we are?”
“I think you call it the gray time.”
“What do you call it?”
He looked around him, as though in mild curiosity, and said, “Your name fits. It’s an interesting place. Or—time.”
