Echoes of the Dead (22 page)

“I found a radio in the RV… I thought it was Howard’s.” Ben shook his head, his face still pale and surly. “We can’t seem to speak to him, though, just like the others. It’s just him, talking. He’s just talking… Expecting a reply, maybe. He’s probably expecting us to contact him…”

“Where is he?” Kelsey asked as she pushed stray strands of curls behind her ears. “Did he say where he was?”

“Just that he was cold. He asked us to talk to him. We tried. He asked us to say something, anything, so he’d know we were looking for him.” Ben’s voice was lifeless and stiff.

“We were,” Kelsey said. “Erin and I were on the third floor.”

“What?” Johnny turned to the stairs. The blackness in his eyes sent a shudder through her bones. Johnny’s eyes burned through her with that faraway look, the impossible thousand-yard-stare. “The third floor?”

“I went up to check on Erin, you remember? She wanted to go outside and start a search party for the crew.” Kelsey rubbed her arms. “We heard something on the third floor. Knocking, like wood on wood.”

 “So?” Ben asked. He’d slumped into the high-backed chair again and was pulling at the nape of his hair. “So what?”

“We thought somebody was on the third floor.” Kelsey looked at her hands.

Johnny’s eyes narrowed. “Did you find anything? A clue? Something which might lead to Howard?”

Kelsey shook her head. “Dust. Your bedroom. Nothing else.”

“Jesus, Kels. Where’s Erin now?” Johnny moved toward her, the empty look in his eyes vanishing, replaced with a feverish, living black.

“She’s still… She said she wanted to check the other rooms before coming down. You called for me…”

Ben snorted.

“I’m sure she’s fine.” A crawling heat crossed Kelsey’s back and worked up her neck. “She has to be fine. I was just with her—not five minutes ago.”

“Fuck. We can’t leave anyone alone—” Johnny strode to the foot of the stairs. “I’ll get her. Stay put, all of you, until I come back.”

“But there was nothing,” Kelsey said. “We looked up there and found an empty room.  We checked in your room, Johnny. That’s where the sound appeared to come from, but nothing. No one was there. She’ll be down in minute.” She wanted to reach out and grab his arm, hold him in place. He’d called her name, not Erin’s. It wasn’t fair.

“I’ll bring her down.”

Johnny disappeared, thumping up the stairs toward Erin. Toward the beautiful, young blonde. Kelsey’s shoulders dropped. Her stomach turned sour and sank to her feet.

“What about the other rooms?” Daniel asked. “You said you checked others, yes?”

Kelsey stood frozen, statue-like, for a moment. When she looked at Daniel, the near-panic in his eyes, a wild, wide-eyed stare, surprised her. He was the last one. If something happened to Erin, it would just be the four of them. The four of them and then…

“Did you check my room?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Kelsey said. The words were stale and tasteless in her mouth. She glanced back toward the stairs. A loud bang echoed from above followed by stomping feet.
Johnny’s
feet. Erin didn’t stomp like that. “We made it to two rooms, and then Johnny yelled. He called out my name.”

Another bang came from upstairs. Johnny’s muted voice dropped from above, too indistinct to make out.

“Erin’s gone,” Ben said, slumping in the high-backed chair. “She’s gone like the others. Poof. Poof. Poof. The fucking snow is still falling outside. We’re here, inside.  This is mine. My mess. I’ve done this. I’ve stirred up a world of shit.”

Kelsey knelt at Sarah’s head and stroked her hair. She looked peaceful, sleeping. Someone—Johnny or Ben or Daniel—had cleaned and bandaged her head. They were alone now, just Sarah and her. Erin knew what was coming—she feared it more than anything else. Maybe that was it. Maybe it was the fear which found her.

Footsteps thumped on the stairs. Johnny clutched the rail as he landed on the bottom step. “She’s not up there.”

“No.  This is not possible,” Daniel said. He shrunk toward the wall. “People do not vanish—Howard was lost, yes? I can understand this. Then the others. The snow. It is all possible. But Erin, she was just here. This is not possible. The house did not swallow her.”

Johnny pulled a hand across his face, massaging his cheeks. He stepped off the stairs and started into the living room. His eyes fixed on Kelsey.

“Tell me everything, Kels. Tell me what happened to Erin.”

“I don’t know what happened to Erin. The last place I saw her was the third floor,” Kelsey said. “She was up there with me. I followed her. I’d gone up to her room when she was determined to go outside and find the crew. I wanted to stop her. We started talking. There was a noise from above, sort of like a piece of wood banging against the floor above us. Kelsey talked about seeing Howard—or seeing what he saw—”

“What?” Johnny grabbed her arms in both hands and stared into her face, as if he was willing her eyes to meet his. “What do you mean, seeing what he saw?”

“I—Erin said she could see things.” Kelsey tried to pull away. Johnny’s hands pressed into her flesh. Her arms began to go numb. “See things in the future. Other stuff.”

“She was a telepath. Maybe a psychic. Whatever you want to call it.” Ben’s mouth moved as he spoke, but he didn’t budge from the big chair. “I cast her because of her interest in the paranormal. Because she’d had experiences. I thought it might make things more interesting around here.”

“Fuck.” Johnny dropped Kelsey’s arms and stomped to the window. He swept the curtain aside.  The dark, outside sky threatened to swallow them all. Threatened with its otherness, its complete emptiness. Without any lights outside in the yard, it was impossible to tell if the snow continued to fall. It was blank, a black wall, cold and utterly unconcerned with their tiny struggles in the big brick house.

Kelsey sleepwalked to the chair opposite Ben and collapsed into it.

“This is fucking impossible, Ben. All of this.” Johnny rubbed his hand across the window. His skin squeaked against the glass. “People don’t disappear. She’s still in this house. Maybe in a room… A closet… Somewhere.”

“Were there any lights on?” Kelsey asked.

“What?”

“Lights on upstairs—in one of the rooms. Even on the second floor.”

Johnny shook his head.

A silence stole into the room, a quiet thick and tense and as anything Kelsey had felt in her twenty-seven years. Ben had cracked, broken down the seam until what was left didn’t seem to have the will to do anything. Something inside Johnny wound like the spring from an old children’s toy, coiling until it threatened to break. Kelsey had never seen him with such fire, such anger and frustration boiling under his skin. Daniel had dissolved into a frightened rabbit in the corner, ready to play dead or bolt if given half a chance. Sarah was…

The lights flickered and died.

“Great. Fucking great,” Johnny said. “Now snap—no power.”

“What now?” Daniel’s voice quavered.

A tiny penlight clicked to life in Ben’s hands. “We have other lights and plenty of batteries.”

“In the RV?” Johnny asked.

Ben covered his forehead with his free hand.

“At least we have a few spare flashlights on the dining room table. We left them there after the search for Howard.” Kelsey rose from her chair feeling as though she needed a way to ally with Johnny again. Erin was gone now. Erin gone and Sarah hurt... Kelsey pressed her hands against her temples and shook her head.

“What’s going on, Kels?” Johnny asked.

“Nothing.” She caught a sob in her throat and turned to face him. “Nothing.”

“We will freeze.” Daniel stepped from the shadows; a pale glow from the window framed his face. “We will freeze in this house without power.”

“The furnace is natural gas,” Kelsey said. “Erin and I checked down there earlier when looking for Howard.”

“The pilot will be out then,” Johnny said. “If it’s forced air, we’ll need power for the fan, too. Give me the light, Ben. Just for a second.”

“What the hell are you going to do with it?”

“Get a flashlight and then check in the basement for a breaker box or fuses.” Johnny reached out for the light, his face tight and serious. “I doubt it will help, but it’s the first step.”

“No breakers,” Kelsey muttered, but Johnny didn’t take notice.

“And then what? What happens if it’s outside, a down line or blown transformer?” Ben dropped the light in Johnny’s outstretched hand.

“I don’t know.” Johnny shook his head. He moved across the room toward the dining room opening. “Break up this furniture and start a fire.”

“I’m going with you,” Kelsey said.

Johnny stared at her for a moment. “You don’t need—”

“No one goes alone,” Kelsey said, her jaw set. “I already messed up once. I’m not going to let it happen again.”

~

They headed into the basement with flashlights in hand, Kelsey leading the way. Perhaps it was the night’s effect or accumulated snow outside the basement windows, but the basement felt darker than it had before.
Deeper
, Kelsey thought, as though it was a bottomless well from which neither of them would return. Dark thoughts led to cold chills, and her body shook and shuddered before making the last step.

“Damn, Kels.  Are you okay?”

“Fine,” she said. “It’s just a basement.”

“Not in this house.  Nothing is
just
in this house.” He squeezed her shoulder and pushed by onto the concrete floor. His flashlight beam traveled around the room, revealing stacks of boxes, some brown cardboard and others wooden and aged like old fruit crates. “Damn. You didn’t say this place was stuffed with all this old shit.”

Kelsey felt it again, the cold, furry thing which moved about in her guts. Her tongue dried like a piece of sun-bleached leather. She moved it in her mouth, hoping to find words. The basement hadn’t been full of all those crates and boxes. It had been
empty
.

“Kels?” Johnny turned and blasted her face with his light. “What’s the matter? You’re pale as seagull shit.”

“None of this was here. None of these boxes,” she said, stepping to the floor beside Johnny. “Nothing—just the furnace and a few bare walls, unfinished walls.”

“Maybe you were in a hurry and didn’t notice.”

“No.”

“You must have missed them. Maybe only looked on one side of the room.” Johnny swung his flashlight beam in the other direction. A yellow disk skirted across a stone wall and cobweb-covered wooden case with round divots in each shelf to fit the necks of wine bottles. “Too bad there’s nothing left. Looks like a former owner might have been a bit of a wine connoisseur.”

“No—Johnny, none of this was here. Believe me.” Kelsey said, waving her flashlight at the wall. “Not the wine rack or the boxes or any of it. It’s bigger, too.”

“That’s impossible.”

“The bathroom upstairs wasn’t impossible. What about Erin vanishing, Johnny? It’s this fucking house, you said it yourself a moment ago.  ‘Nothing is
just
in this house.’”

Johnny turned his back and moved toward the nearest stack of boxes. Thick motes of dust danced in their flashlight beams, tumbling through the air. An odor hung about everything, the smell of age and rot and mildew. The basement hadn’t smelled of anything before—it was clean and fresh and untouched. Kelsey closed her eyes, remembering, and couldn’t conjure one microbe of dust when she’d descended with Erin earlier that day. It wasn’t the same basement. It couldn’t have been, just as the bathroom wasn’t the same as she’d remembered it from years before, but this—
this
happened in the span of a few hours, impossible for Ben to conjure even with the full spell-making power of Hollywood at his disposal. No magic had happened; no one else had been in the house except one lone, hunched figure in a second floor window.

“Maybe when we left in the RV…”

Johnny turned around. He’d opened the top box and his hands were lost inside. “What are you talking about?”

“All this,” she said, stepping closer to Johnny. “The basement, the bathroom. Maybe even the disappearing people.  Maybe it’s all part of the show.”

Johnny frowned. “The show? Are you nuts, Kels? If something happened to this basement—if—Ben didn’t have anything to do with it. He couldn’t have. It’s more likely you were just freaked out earlier and didn’t pay much attention.”

“You said it yourself about the bathroom, that he—”

“Easy.  Nobody had been here for months. It was enough to spook Sarah and make her want to leave. And that—that was enough to convince me to hotwire the damn RV.”

“The house is alive, Johnny.”

“Bullshit. It was Ben’s game and now it’s out of control.”

“How do you explain Erin?”

Johnny’s mouth twisted. Shadows poured like ink over his features, twisting into grotesque, not-quite human shapes. “I don’t know.”

“You knew a few minutes ago when you ran upstairs to find her.”

“Jesus, Kels. Is that it? Are you jealous?”

“She’s gone, isn’t she? We’re next Johnny.  This house—this
monster
is alive. It’s like a maze, a maze for my rats and we’re trapped. We’re the rats and the maze is alive.”