Phobic (30 page)

My arms barely hold me up, they wobble so badly. I sink on my heels and wipe a quivering hand across my mouth. I have to find her.

Unsteady, I push to my feet. But my knees give out. Pain impales my side, pulling a cry from my tangy lips. And I break. I fall to the floor like a puppet whose strings have just been snipped. My fingers curl against the hardwood, and my lower lip collapses as tears gush past it. Poor Thomas. Poor Ada.

I want someone. Anyone. But Garrett has Joel, and Todd will just try to make me come to his house. There’s no way I can leave now. I have to stop this. To figure it out.

I don’t know where the strength comes from, but I ignore the lancing pain in my side and push to my feet, cleaving to the counter for support. My limbs vibrate with a weakness I can’t shake. A hand at my side, I grimace and force my feet to the open blackness beyond the basement door.

“Ada,” I call down. But my voice is weak, scarcely a squeak.

For some reason, even though the glow has lifted, I can still see the hooks dangling from the ceiling down there, hooks rusted over with dried blood. The metal operating tables, the hacksaws and dull blades. My dad knew what was happening down here, and my mom had to know. They should never have let it happen.

Trembling, I stand at the top and force my voice.

“He was the Spare-Tooth Bandit, wasn’t he?”

The feeling of a presence is my answer. I grit my jaw. I hear her voice before I see her. And to my intense relief, it comes from behind me, not in the basement.

“Yes.”

Ada looks out to the window and the now dirt street trapped in time. Her form is just an outline, like a smoky, blue drawing someone didn’t take the time to fill in. The brick houses I’m used to have vanished—I wonder if that means I’m
in
the past now. A pair of women in long classy dresses and wearing bonnets passes, and Ada speaks.

“He took me off the streets when my mother died. Gave me a decent vocation. In return, I cannot betray him.”

“What he asked you to do was wrong,” I say, still shaking from head to toe. I can’t believe she’s defending him. “And I don’t even know exactly what it is.”

“Mr. Garrett is a brilliant man,” Ada says. “But he is something like Faustus who sold his soul for black magic and Dr. Frankenstein who used human parts to fabricate a monster.”

“Okay,” I say, trying to wrap my brain around her references. I sink into the chaise—the same place I sat the first time I saw her in that stunning dress. My stomach throbs. “Frankenstein I’ve heard of.” But at least the dudes were dead before he stole their parts!

“Dr. Faustus gained all the knowledge he could through mortal means, but it was not enough. He dealt his soul to the devil, promising eternal servitude for a few short years of black magic. Garrett has no soul, I am certain of it. No one with a soul can do what he does and manage to live with himself. And all in the name of
science
.”

“What exactly is he doing, Ada?” I ask again. Her rambling doesn’t tell me much. I’m trying to connect pieces and conclusions I drew from the journal and newspaper clippings, but my brain is too tormented with pictures of Thomas’ last moments. I attempt to move my foot, but even that small motion zaps pain right into my stitches.

She turns away. “It is a fearful sight.”

“Yeah, I was just down there, remember?” Silence stretches between us. My gut hasn’t settled, and blood whizzes through like it’s trying to steer clear of my brain and the images implanted there. “Please tell me.”

“He captures men. And women. He steals their limbs in a dreadful fashion; mutilates their faculties. But he is not decent enough to simply end their misery—he leaves them in grotesque disfigurement and relies on Thomas to distribute the bodies and me to clean up the disarray.”

“And the Frankenstein part? Is he—trying to build a human or something?”

“No,” Ada says, rubbing her ghostly arms. Fading, orange light from the window plays through her translucent body. “He claims it is science, but it is filthy magic, if you were to ask me. He dabbles in time. It is how I live on though I know I am dead. It is how this house lives on, perfectly restored as the day it was completed.”

Garrett’s journal. The pictures, diagrams and drawings—it all makes sense.

“You mean—?”

“Garrett uses magic, along with the human fragments to create an elixir. And he must repeat the process every year to maintain the illusion.”

“What process?”

“Thirteen pieces. From thirteen specimens. And always the thirteenth must be from your modern world, to complete the connection to the past.”

I stand, but my knees buckle. My mother knew. And that means—

“My father helped Garrett, didn’t he? That’s the responsibility he felt he had to this house.” The responsibility Joel mentioned. The conversation I overheard.

I think of people who disappeared or were killed around Cedarvale through the years. Oh gosh, my dad could have been the cause. I shake my head. If it had been my mom Dad wouldn’t have insisted we move the house. We would have just left after she was gone.

I rope my hair around my shoulder and grip as hard as I can. If my mother is innocent after all, there’s no way I can possibly prove it.

But hold up. If Dad was killing people, how is it that
he
never got caught? My gaze flickers to the window, to the yard outside. The gazebo. The statues, the fountain. Dad outside, digging in the patch of dirt out back. Joel doing the same, complaining how he didn’t want this. How Dad had told him to prep the dirt. In the patch out back.

I hear Mom’s voice, drunkenly singing the words to what I thought had been an innocent nursery rhyme.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

“Oh my gosh.”

It was no garden.

It was a cemetery.

I get the sudden urge to empty my stomach again.

“What was in it for him?” I ask, feeling absent, like my body is somewhere else while my mind is forced to stay. My mind keeps conjuring up images of Dad sneaking body parts out of the house in the middle of the night.

“Immortality,” Ada says with understanding in her eyes. Like she feels sorry for me.

“But he’s dead.”

“Are you certain?”

I blink. This is almost too much. Dad died. We had a funeral. We buried him. “Whoa, wait. Are you saying my father is still
alive
? How? I saw them take him away. I—I saw his body go into the ground.” In a real cemetery.

Even as I speak, though, I’m struck with odd acceptance. Why else would his voice tap across the channels, breach through the TV to give me some message, if he wasn’t still attached to this house in some way? The noises, the voices, they can’t all be from Ada. I think again of the pictures of grandparents, great-grandparents, and the great-greats dispersed throughout the house.

“Where are they?” I ask.

“There’s a reason the door has no handle,” Ada says.

“The door? The
floating
door?” It can’t be, yet somehow I know it is. “My dad agreed to that? To be a part of this house like you are?”

“Our souls are lost after death, Miss Crenshaw,” Ada explains. “Your father, and his before him, ensured he would be in good company. With family.”

Oh barf. What an inheritance I have. I think of Shane Turcott’s question when he cornered me after finding out the truth about my mom.
Does murder run in the family?

Apparently it does. Lucky me. I wonder if this means Joel was being groomed for this as well. If he’s murdered anyone for Garrett yet. And was my mother in on it?

I shudder. I can’t think about it.

“And what happens now that my dad is gone? Is that why I can see you now? Your world?”

Ada nods. “You released my trapped spirit when you opened that door, and Garrett is unaware. He is too focused on how he will get his thirteenth specimen this time around to maintain the spell.”

Shivers rake over me, but Ada keeps speaking. “All his others are the same men and women as they have always been. Thomas was the twelfth.”

The same men and women dying over and over. Bleh.

“And who is the thirteenth this time around?” My hand goes to my side. The stitches ache, and Ada’s ethereal expression lowers before she fades.

That conversation I overheard the night I saw the bloodstain in the trap door—I hadn’t given it any more thought since. But I already know the answer to my own question.
Get someone else—I won’t do it.

Joel.

M
y pulse pops in my ears, and I move to keep from blacking out. Too late, the room tilts. The floor lurches beneath my feet, and my arms circle like helicopter blades. Unable to steady myself, I thump to the floor.

“Joel,” I say. “I have to get back down there.” For a second I consider trying to find a way to get
in
the floating door, but Ada made it clear that’s reserved for the people who’ve helped Garrett. Joel refused—as far as I know. And as far as I know he’s not dead yet. Or I hope not.

On impact, the floorboards crumble upwards as if they don’t want me on them. Starting at one end of the room, the wood creaks and slithers in a wave. It disrupts itself on its way to me like a giant snake is slinking beneath them, unsettling them in its path. The thunderous noise and the creepy rumbling floorboards force me back into the hall, like it’s trying to keep me away.

“It won’t work, Ada! You can’t keep me out!” I drag my feet as though I have a sack of bricks strapped around each ankle. Walking gets easier the more I do it. I force my way past the library and perch against the main staircase looking into the kitchen. The floorboards haven’t stopped rumbling; they’re almost to me.

“Ada, stop!”

If Joel is anywhere, he’ll be in the basement. I’m sure Ada knows after my last excursion down there I’d rather slit my wrists than go back. But this is my brother we’re talking about. I can’t
not
go back. And I don’t see why she’s trying to stop me.

I stand my ground, even as it grinds beneath me, jarring my knees. I cling to the counter for support.

“Ada! How can I help him?”

My audition, the kids at school, it’s all meaningless if my brother dies. Gritting my teeth, I slump against the doorjamb. Frailty hatches all over me, like I’m perforated on the inside, and the vibrating floor doesn’t help at all. I peer out the window to my backyard. The roses are wilting, their branches rising from the ground like long, spiny fingers.

And the garden. Oh man, the garden.

The gash in the ceiling from when I cut my hand hovers above. The lath boards display like teeth in a painful grin. I wonder if Joel knows about this connection I have, or if he’s connected to the house, too. Even if I go down there, I’m not sure how I’ll help him.

I try again, and I have to yell over the ruckus and try another method to get her attention.

“Ada, just because the loop is repeating itself doesn’t mean you have to keep doing the same things every time!”

In an instant the unrest ceases. The furniture slides back on its own; the boards reassemble themselves into the floor, and I wish I could stop the pulsing in my bones.

“It is my only chance to be with Thomas again,” she says, and I jump and grip the bandage. She reappears, floaty-standing
in
the basement door. A picture frame sits in her hand. With a jolt, I recognize Thomas’ handsome face, frozen in the ashen effects of antique photography.

Ada stares at him with longing, but I close my eyes against the rush of images of Thomas’ last moments.

“And my master will hurt me if I do not go through with this.”

Hurt her? “But—how can he if you’re dead?”

“I am dead everywhere else, but here I am trapped. This house makes me alive. Because the house exists, so do I. Because this house is real, so am I.”

Ada keeps her glance to the picture in her hands. It’s uncanny, seeing her flicker through the wood. I wish she’d move.

“But he hurts you anyway, right? You know how this ends because you keep reliving it. Stand up to him. Change the way things are! I know what it’s like to be bullied, and you have to decide whether you’re going to just take it and let it control you, or whether you’re going to stand up against it!. Stand up to him. Stand up to Garrett.”

Ada’s head snaps up, and her silvery eyes are fierce. “I am standing up to him. I have found a way to free myself from this terrible chain. He needs someone to play a part, that is all. An actress.”

Before I can wonder what she means, a heavy slam comes from below, jerking both of our attention.

“Good heavens,” Ada says, her hand clutching her throat. In one swift movement she stuffs the frame back into the wall. It blends as if she never removed it. “He will be expecting me downstairs.”

“Joel,” I say, rushing forward. This is so bizarre, that her life goes on parallel to my own. I’ve been living here for
years
not knowing it. “Is he down there? Is he okay?”

“He is in the basement,” she says, disappearing into the wall. Her voice lingers to add, “And yes, he is well. For now.”

Alone in the kitchen, I huff and feel like stomping my foot. Now what? No way can I go back down there—not after I
know
what’s going on. But that’s the problem. I know what will happen to Joel if I don’t.