Every House Is Haunted (16 page)

There was a brief flash of light that seemed to have no source. The scene in the testing area seemed unchanged. Then the group in the observation booth realized that although they could see the convicts, writhing on the floor in soundless agony, they could also see
through
them, as if they were ghosts.

But you don’t usually see ghosts in so much pain
, Wendy thought.

The pages from Black Book were now lying on the floor of the testing area.

Why not? They’ve already done their part
.

The apparitions began to shrink and collapse into themselves. Because the observation booth was soundproof, the entire sequence played out in silence. It was like watching a clip of some special-effects-laden movie for which the soundtrack had yet to be recorded.

There were now two spheres of shimmering blue light hovering over the floor of the testing area. Great spikes of electricity crackled off them. The spikes grew taller and taller until they met in the centre of the room. Something began to happen, some sort of reaction.

It’s happening
, Wendy thought.
I don’t know what
it
is but it’s happening!

Something that looked like a swarm of fireflies began to materialize in the space between the two spheres. They grew larger as the spheres channelled energy into them. The fireflies started to merge with one another to form an expanding ball of red-orange light. It spread across the air like a festering wound, and by the time the blue spheres had fizzled out, their energy spent, the ball of light filled the entire room.

There was another flash, and in the half-second before it disappeared, Wendy glimpsed an enormous silhouette against the red-orange glow. Then she was looking at something her eyes refused to transmit to the receptors in her brain. Something that at first glance looked like some strange new species of whale.

It lay on the floor of the testing area, unmoving, in about a foot of steaming green water that must have been brought from whatever place it had been snatched.

A thirty-foot-long creature with the basic shape of a whale, but with the plates and ridges of a rhinoceros. Its mouth, crusted with things that might have been barnacles, hung slightly open to reveal rows of triangular shark’s teeth, each one as big as a human fist.

Of the convicts, there was no sign.

Over the next two weeks, several more guests of the state of Nevada came to Project Wellspring and stood shirtless, smiling even, as pages from Black Book were applied to their chests. They never smiled for very long. The entities that appeared in their place were a rogue’s gallery of nightmarish entities and hellish abominations. They shared only one common similarity.

They all showed up either dead or dying.

To anyone who saw one of these creatures suddenly appear in a room where there had been only a pair of men before, this would have seemed like a blessing. But Vanners only grew more annoyed as the experiments went on.

With the exception of the whale-thing, Wendy saw none of these creatures. Since she, Thumper, and Tara were technically part of R&D, they were not authorized to be on Sub-Level Two, where the experiments took place. Vanners had only invited Wendy that first time as a courtesy—perhaps because he wasn’t convinced anything was going to happen.

What little she learned about the experiments, she gleaned from the hushed (and horrified) conversations she overheard from those in the Applications department.

According to one worker, the reason the creatures were showing up dead was because their DNA was in such a state of flux that they couldn’t live any longer than a few minutes before undergoing complete cellular breakdown.

One creature that showed up must have been especially bad because Vanners gave the entire Applications department the rest of the day off.

Afterward, he had gone to Wendy and asked her about the pictograms in Black Book, specifically the ones that denoted the human form. Wendy brought up a high-resolution scan of the symbol on her computer.

“Why’s it so small and bent over like that?” Vanners asked, pointing at the curled, almost comma-shaped symbol.

“Thumper thinks it might be symbolic of the act of realization,” she lied. “The bent-over figure representing the subject undergoing the . . . process.”

Vanners nodded but his eyes had a faraway look.

He walked off, zipping through the cubicle-maze like a man on a mission.

Wendy supposed that was probably close to the truth.

Over the following weeks the stories she heard were no longer about convicts.

They were about children.

They arranged to meet at Wendy’s house. She was on the porch when they arrived, pacing back and forth.

“Do you think it’s safe to talk out here?” Thumper asked.

“The insides of the houses are almost certainly bugged,” Wendy said, “but I can’t see them bugging the outsides. It doesn’t matter anyway. What I want to do—what I
have
to do—is going to happen tonight, and they won’t have time to stop me.”

“
Tonight?
” Thumper exclaimed. “Jesus, Wendy. If what we’ve heard is true, then we have to do something, yes, of course—but
tonight
? We need to plan this out, we need to—”

“I have a plan,” Wendy said, in what she hoped was a confident voice. “If we do it quickly, I think we can get away with it. But it has to be tonight.”

“But how do we know the stories are true?” Tara said. “How do we really know they’ve started using children in the experiments?”

“I told you what Vanners said,” Wendy said. “He asked me about the human pictograms in Black Book. I’m almost positive he was testing me, trying to feel out how much I knew. He’s figured out that the key to bringing over live creatures from whatever godforsaken hell they come from is not scum-of-the-earth death row inmates. It’s children. The younger the better, I’m willing to bet.”

Tara paled. She lowered her eyes and nodded, as if she had known the truth all along but needed to hear it spoken aloud.

“The day before Vanners came to see me something happened. Something that may not have tipped him off to the truth, but it certainly put him on the right track.”

Thumper perked up. “What was it?”

“I can’t say for certain,” Wendy said, “but I’d be willing to make a guess.”

She let them think about it for a moment.

“Oh God,” Tara blurted. “You think they killed an innocent man.”

Thumper ran a trembling hand over his face and sat down hard on the porch steps. The thought that Black Book had been able to do what a jury of a man’s peers had been either unable or unwilling to do made him feel sick to his stomach.

“I don’t think it happened on purpose,” Wendy said. “But I think it clued Vanners in on what Black Book really wants.”

“You’re talking about babies.” Tara said. “You really think they’d do that? Kill babies?”

“I think Vanners will do whatever’s necessary to bring those things over alive and healthy.”

“But why?” Thumper said. “What the hell do they want with them?”

“My guess would be military applications.”

“What, you think they’re going to harness them? Train them like attack dogs? Do you think those things can be housebroken?”

“No,” Wendy said, “but I think they’re going to try.”

Wendy moved stealthily down the corridor to the gymnasium, constantly looking over her shoulder, waiting for the men in the black fatigues to pop out and arrest her. What would happen then? Would she be charged under the Secrecy Act? Or would she be shot on the spot and buried somewhere in the desert?

Tara and Thumper were back in the office area, sitting in their cubicles and waiting for her. Since the experiments had begun, the R&D staff had switched to a rotating evenings-and-midnights schedule. So there was nothing unusual about them working late.

Wendy slipped quietly into the dark gymnasium and over to the equipment closet.

There was an electronic card-reader on the door. It was a recent addition.

The reason for the heightened security was related to a story Wendy had heard from the Applications rumour mill.

Since they had switched from convicts to children, the experiments had been successful. Supposedly the armoury on Sub-Level Three had been converted into some kind of holding pen. It was here that the creatures—the
live
ones, that is—were being kept.

Wendy had no intention of going down to Sub-Level Three, which the Applications people called “the Zoo,” but she had been very interested in the part about how the weapons and ammunition in the armoury had been temporarily moved into the large and mostly vacant gymnasium equipment closet.

She took out her key-card, crossed herself with it, and slid it into the reader.

The green light came on and the lock snapped open.

Wendy muttered a prayer of thanks and stepped into the dark room.

Her second stop was to the storage closet where all of Horowitz’s belongings had been stored following the investigation into his death. Since it was located on Sub-Level One, Wendy’s key-card gave her access to it.

She found the stack of cardboard boxes that contained all of the books and papers and other assorted items that had been taken from the professor’s study. She found his wallet in a plastic evidence bag, and took it out. The leather crackled when she opened the wallet, making her think of the way the pages of Black Book had crackled when she opened it for the first time.

Just as she had hoped, the security guards hadn’t bothered to catalogue the wallet’s contents. If they had, they surely would have confiscated the red plastic card with “
S3
” printed on it in gold letters.

When Wendy returned to the office area, Thumper and Tara popped out of their cubicles like a pair of jack-in-the-boxes.

“Did you get them?

Wendy slipped her hands into the wide pockets of her coat and took out a pair of nine-millimetre pistols. From her inside pocket she produced a number of extra clips. She hadn’t bothered to grab one for Tara. She had never fired a gun before, and they all agreed that tonight wasn’t the best time to start.

Thumper picked up one of the pistols. “I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

They stood in silence for a long moment. Then:

“My mom always says you do the thing you’re most afraid of first, and then you get the courage afterwards.”

Wendy and Thumper looked at Tara. It was the most either one of them had ever heard her say at one time.

They walked in single file down the corridor to the elevator that would take them to the lab. Professor Horowitz’s key-card opened the doors, and they stepped inside. Wendy looked at the control panel, and her face crumpled.

“It’s what I thought,” she said, indicating the buttons. “This lift doesn’t go to the surface. Once we get the kids we’re going to have to take this elevator back up here, go back the way we came, and take the other elevator up to the glove factory.”

“That sounds like an awfully long walk,” Thumper said.

The elevator doors opened on Sub-Level Two. Wendy, Thumper, and Tara stepped out into a corridor they had been down only once before. There was a large pressure door up ahead on the left side—the entrance to the testing area, they knew. At the far end, the corridor took a left turn and continued on to the observation booth.

They moved quickly, passing the pressure door and continuing around the bend to the entrance to the observation booth. Wendy took a deep breath, then swiped Horowitz’s key-card through the reader.

Thumper moved quickly into the room, followed by Wendy, with Tara taking up the rear.

Wendy had been expecting a roomful of armed sentries and important-looking bureaucrats in expensive suits. What she saw was the same thing she had seen the last time she was here: Vanners and a young lab tech running the whole show. Only this time Vanners had an incredulous look on his face that quickly turned to blackest hate.

“What the hell is this?”

Wendy shoved the gun in his face. “We’re shutting you down, Vanners.”

The lab tech’s hand was inching slowly toward a red button on the console before him. Thumper saw it, and brought his fist down hard, breaking a few of the young man’s fingers by the sound.

Vanners smiled snidely. “Do you really think you’ll get out of here alive? With only a couple of handguns between you?”

Wendy moved over to the console and pressed the button that sealed the testing room door. Below, the six guards in the room continued working, unaware that anything was going on in the observation booth.

They were positioning a small fleet of what looked like pedestals on wheels. Wendy counted ten of them. Surmounting each one was a child’s bassinet. One guard standing off to the side was holding a thin sheaf of papers.

“You’re here for the kids?” Vanners growled.

Thumper grabbed him by the back of the neck and pushed him toward the glass partition. Wendy put her gun to Vanners’ temple and pressed the toggle switch on the intercom.

“Hello, gentlemen. I’m afraid we’re going to have a change of plans tonight.”

Six pairs of eyes stared up at the tableau within the observation booth.

“This is what’s going to happen. First, you’re going to put your weapons on the floor. That includes the sidearms on your belts, and the pages of Black Book. Secondly, you’re going to back up against the far wall and stay there until I say you can move. If you fail to do either of these things, I’m going to pull the trigger. No warnings.”

“This won’t stop anything,” Vanners said. “You think we can’t get more kids?”

Wendy reached down and picked Black Book up off the console where it was lying. “They’re not much good to you without this, are they?”

Vanners clenched his fists and said nothing. His breathing was heavy and there was a burning sun in each cheek.

“Maybe you could open a nursery,” Thumper added.

After collecting the security guards’ and Vanners’ key-cards, they opted to tie them up and leave them. They had gotten what they came for, and they saw no point in executing anyone in cold blood—although, Thumper pointed out, that was precisely what would happen to
them
if they didn’t get out of the glove factory before the next shift of guards showed up.