Every House Is Haunted (13 page)

“She says it burns.”

“Oh, I see. Does it burn you?”

The boy looked confused. “I don’t know. We don’t go near it.”

“The light always seemed warm to me,” Jodie said offhandedly. “But I’ve never been burned by it.”

The girl scowled. “You don’t know anything,” she said. “You’ve never seen it. You
can’t
see it.”

“It’s a white light,” Jodie said. “Or at least that’s how it looks at first. But as you get closer, you can see it’s actually made up of many different colours. Maybe all the colours in the universe.”

The boy nodded slowly.

“And if you stare at it long enough, it seems to sing your name, over and over again.”

“Yes!” he cried out, then covered his mouth. “That’s it.”

“You don’t know anything,” the girl said, but she didn’t sound so sure now.

“You don’t have to believe me.” Jodie held up the book for them to see. “But maybe you’ll change your mind after hearing about Alice.”

“She doesn’t know anything either.”

Jodie shrugged. “Okay. I’ll make you deal. If you aren’t convinced, I’ll come back tomorrow and read you another story. And if you’re still not convinced, I’ll come back again the day after that and read another one.”

“I don’t care about rabbits or rabbit holes,” the girl said.

“Okay,” Jodie said. “Tomorrow I’ll tell you a story about a garden.”

“A garden?” the girl said sceptically.

“A
secret
garden,” Jodie clarified. She thought back to the case she’d just finished in Redlands. She had read eighty-four books before the kids had finally trusted her enough to pass on. She hoped this case would tie up faster than that. Brian didn’t have that kind of time. But then this wasn’t the sort of thing one could rush.

“Is the garden magic, too?” the boy asked.

Jodie opened the book and turned to the first page.

“You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out,” she said. “I suppose we all will.”

Human innocence in its purest form is a newborn child.

It usually wears off in six to eight weeks.

Wendy sat in the dry, airless sauna of her car, rubbing her finger over the bright yellow sticker on the corner of the windshield and thinking:
That was the weirdest job interview I’ve ever been to.

One of her professors at Stanford had helped to set it up.
It’s a translation gig
, he had said.
Perfect for someone with a doctoral degree in applied linguistics. Ancient language decipherment.
He was right. It was right up her alley. She wasn’t really interested in teaching, and she hadn’t found any other research gigs that interested her. Ancient language dicipherment was hard to come by outside of Greece or the Middle East. The pay wouldn’t be great, and she’d have to move to Nevada, but the job was in her field, and lodgings were included. Besides, she thought, it might be good to get away from California for awhile. So she called the number her prof had given her and spoke to a woman who told her to hold please while her call was redirected. A man came on the line and gave Wendy directions to their “training centre.”
We look forward to seeing you
, he said in a chipper voice.

Wendy headed east on I-80 and spent the night in a Reno hotel that advertised
COOL OUTDOOR POOL
and
ADULT MOVIES & KIDS VIDS
. The following day she got up early and put on her nicest outfit, a dusty rose blouse and a khaki pencil skirt. She applied what she hoped was a liberal amount of makeup, and was out the door.

After picking up a toasted bagel and a bottle of grapefruit juice, she got back in her old Dodge with its fickle A/C and continued east on I-80. The Nevada scenery was as dull and lifeless as the surface of Mars. There wasn’t much to see except sand, rocks, and the tenacious desert plants that added a small splash of colour to the landscape. California wasn’t so far removed from the desert, but this was particularly bleak. And the heat! California was hot, but Nevada was
stifling
.

Passing through the town of Lovelock, Wendy grabbed her purse off the passenger seat and rooted around inside for the directions the man on the phone had given to her.

Wendy was one of those people who never seemed to have pen and paper at hand when she needed to write down important information. She found the paper napkin on which she’d written the directions, and saw that the words, scribbled in eyeliner pencil, had smudged in the desert heat. In fact, the small stockpile of makeup in her purse appeared to be undergoing the Revlon equivalent of thermonuclear meltdown.

“
Shit
,” she muttered, tossing her purse back onto the seat. She almost missed her turn-off, and reduced her speed. She checked her rearview mirror, but there was no one behind her. No one coming in the opposite direction, either.

Mars, indeed.

The “training centre” turned out to be a dusty, weather-beaten trailer with plastic sheets covering the windows. It was standing in the corner of a crushed-gravel parking lot off the side road Wendy had turned onto after leaving the Interstate. A wooden sign on the post, as faded and dusty as the trailer, said
WEATHER MONITORING STATION 7
.

She looked at the napkin and confirmed that this was where she was supposed to be. She stepped out of her car, and the heat fell on her like a heavy cloak. She walked hesitantly toward the trailer, went up the creaking wooden steps, and knocked on the door.

“It’s open!” a familiar voice boomed from inside.

Wendy opened the door and stepped into a small, unfinished room. A plank table and two plastic contour chairs were the only furnishings—unless you counted the rows of miniature cacti that lined the window sills.

Sitting in the chair on the other side of the table was the chipper man she had spoken to on the phone. He was barrel-chested, thin-faced, and had a crewcut so short his pink scalp showed through. He was wearing white pants and a bright green blazer that looked about two sizes too small.
COYOTE SPRINGS OUTDOOR SERVICES
was embroidered in gold thread over the breast pocket.

“Mr. Vanners?” Wendy asked, a little doubtfully.

“Please, have a seat.” He gestured to the empty chair.

Wendy sat down. Outside, the wind howled around the eaves and whipped sand against the plastic sheets that covered the windows.

“Thank you for coming,” Vanners said. “I know you’ve come a long way.”

“No problem.”

“So. You like books?” he asked in a way Wendy had found was typically reserved for people who didn’t. Vanners certainly didn’t sound—or look—anything like the beetle-browed academic she had been expecting. She didn’t like to generalize, but at the same time she got a very distinct vibe that Vanners was an operations man and the research position didn’t overly concern him.

“Uh, yes,” Wendy said, trying to readjust to the tenor of the conversation.

“Excellent, excellent,” Vanners said, smiling. In his bright green blazer, with his hands folded neatly on the table before him, he looked like a salesman for a landscaping company.

“So what kind of work would I be doing?”

“Oh, just some basic decipherment. You might have to dabble in a little Egyptian, Greek—maybe even a little Arabic—whatever the work requires. Nothing one of Wilkins’ kids couldn’t handle.”

“You know Professor Wilkins?”

“Oh sure. He’s sort of a talent scout for our organization. I’m the recruiter.”

Wendy nodded, but like all of her responses to this man, it was tentative and unsure. She felt as if she were being graded in some manner that she didn’t quite understand. As if Vanners were speaking in some kind of . . . well, code.

“What kind of company do you work for?” She glanced again at his jacket.
COYOTE SPRINGS OUTDOOR SERVICES
? It didn’t sound like the kind of organization that needed a freshly minted linguistics expert, not unless Bigfoot had turned up speaking ancient Sumerian.

Vanners steepled his fingers under his chin and leaned back in his chair. “We’re a research firm with a few government contracts.”

“That’s kind of vague.”

Vanners grinned. “But kind of exciting, too, isn’t it? I mean, aren’t you curious?”

“How long is the contract for?”

“It’s research,” he said with a shrug. “Could be two weeks, could be two years. A lot of it depends on you.”

Wendy thought about it for a moment.

“Did you happen to notice any buildings around here once you got off the Interstate?” Vanners asked suddenly.

Wendy shook her head. “No. Not a thing. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much nothing in my life.”

“There’s a road,” Vanners said, “about ten miles north of the turnoff you took to get here. It’s little more than a trail, full of chuckholes and washouts, and you’d have to be looking for it to see it. It runs exactly twenty-five-point-four miles to a building. Once upon a time it was a glove factory. Now it belongs to us.”

Vanners reached into his jacket and took out a square yellow sticker. It looked like a miniature road-sign, except the symbol on it wasn’t one Wendy recognized. It showed what appeared to be an erupting volcano. Vanners handed it to her.

“The glove factory is a secure facility. Unless you have one of those stickers on the windshield of your car, you can’t get within thirty miles of it. The security detail is very tight. No fences, no guard patrols, no watchtowers, but they’re always watching. And if they see someone coming down the road and they don’t have that sticker showing . . .”

Vanners flashed a wicked grin and spread his hands in a way that suggested all kinds of things, none of them pleasant.

“I suggest you put that on your car before you leave today,” he said, nodding at the sticker in her hand.

“So I got the job?” Wendy said.

“Your qualifications check out, and you said you like books. That’s enough for now.”

This is completely absurd
, Wendy thought. But when Vanners reached across the table and offered his hand, she shook it. It was a job, after all. And if she didn’t like it, she could always quit. Right?

Wendy put the sticker on her windshield before she headed back to Reno.

Entering her room at the hotel, she found a thick booklet with a red vellum cover lying in the middle of the double bed. She stared at it for a long moment before picking it up.

On the inside cover was a Post-It note with a message written in a looping hand:
Think of this as the first of two books that will change your life. This one’s our standard non-disclosure package. Read it, sign it, and bring it with you on Monday.—V.

Wendy went to the small bar fridge and took out a Coke. Then she sat down at the kitchen table and began to read. After she was finished she sat quietly with her hand resting on the cover of the booklet.

After a moment, she got up and began looking for a writing implement. Something better than an eyeliner pencil.

The following Monday, she drove out to the glove factory. She went over a rise, and there it was, at the bottom of a wide valley.

It was an old army Quonset hut—
old
being the operative word. The roof was full of holes, some of which looked big enough for Wendy to drive her car through. The wooden rafters supporting the centre of the building had collapsed sometime in the building’s long existence, giving it a hunched, shoulder-shrugging indifference.
Yeah, I’m old
, it seemed to say,
but
what can you do?

Wendy drove down the flank of the hill and turned into a sand-covered parking lot. She pulled up alongside a silver pickup truck that made her Dodge look like a soapbox racer by comparison. There was a yellow sticker in the corner of the pickup’s windshield.

Taking up her purse and the non-disclosure booklet from the passenger seat, she stepped out into the dry heat of the morning and walked over to what she assumed was the building’s entrance—a splintering wooden door that looked as if it would fall off its hinges if someone so much as breathed on it.

It was unlocked. She pushed it open and stepped inside. The shadowy interior was broken by spears of light coming in through the holes in the roof. The ancient smells of oil and leather suffused the dusty air, thick and cloying. A row of light bulbs was strung across the raftered ceiling, sagging in the spot where the roof had caved in. A large generator thrummed in the far corner, and thick insulated cables ran from it to an elevator that stood in the centre of the large, cavernous room.

The doors stood open.

Down the rabbit hole I go
, Wendy thought, and stepped inside.

The elevator doors opened on a long hallway that ended at another door. As she walked slowly toward it, purse clutched in one hand, the non-disclosure agreement in the other, the door opened and Vanners appeared. He had traded in his green blazer for an oxford shirt and chinos, and there was a red plastic card hanging on a lanyard around his neck.

“Wendy!” he said, beaming. “So glad you could make it.”

“Good morning,” she said, a little uncertainly.

“Please forgive the cloak-and-dagger bit.” Vanners led her through the door into another hallway. “I assure you we keep all of that business aboveground. Down here things run like any other office.”

As they walked, the wall on the left side of the corridor turned into a glass partition, and Wendy saw that Vanners wasn’t kidding. From the tone of the non-disclosure agreement, she had been expecting Area 51. But what she saw on the other side of the glass was nothing more sinister that an office building that just happened to be underground.

Vanners took her through a door that led inside.

“This is Research and Development, where you’ll be working,” he said. “The project’s still in its conception phase—something we’re hoping you’ll kickstart along once you get settled. We’re only operating at fifteen-percent capacity, as you can clearly see, so feel free to pick whatever cube you want.”