“You don't have to.”
But it
was
working. The six chairs were clumped together in the center holding Mason, Ashley, Tina, Peter, Sorge, and Pavinâwho had a bad back and couldn't sit on the floor. Around them in a loose circle, backs to the chairs, were Adam, Saleen, Zev, Brianna, Kate, Mouse, Lee, and Brenda. Amy was slowly walking the circumference, holding the largest blade of her Swiss army knife out over the salt and singing softly under her breath.
Tony, placed at her starting point so she'd know where to finish, couldn't hear the actual words but the tune sounded disturbingly like Painted Ponies. Disturbing because Amy and Joan Baez went together like reality TV and actual dramatic content. When she reached him, she drew what looked like an infinity sign in the air with the knife point.
“There. It's closed. Negative energy can't get in. We're safe.” She snapped the knife blade shut. “If you want to leave the circle at any time, let me know and I'll open a door.”
“Isn't this just a little tree-of-life tote bag for you?” Tony murmured under the rising sound of relieved conversation. Stephen drifted into and out of the circle again looking bored.
“Bite me. I'm a well rounded, multifaceted person.”
“Uh-huh. You're making this up as you go along, aren't you?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Do you question my kung fu, Grasshopper?”
“I would if I knew what the hell you were talking . . .” He could hear music. But Karl was still crying.
“Tony?”
“What the fuck is happening now?” Kate. And Mouse didn't look happy. Tony could only see a bit of Hartley's hair on the other side of the chairs, but the boom operator never looked happy, so he wasn't sure actually seeing his face would help. Lee untangled himself from Brenda's arms and slowly stood.
“I hear music.” Brianna launched herself to her feet, but Zev dragged her back.
“I think you all do,” he said, looking around the circle and finally settling on Tony. “What is it?”
Tony, in turned, looked to Cassie who had backed into her brother's arms, her remaining eye wide and frightened.
“It's the ballroom.”
“What's so bad about the ballroom?” he demanded.
“There's a lot of people in there,” Stephen explained. “So it's strong. It pulls. Cassie got lured in there once, just after Graham brought us back.” His arm around her waist pulled her closer still. “I almost didn't get her out. If it had been going, with the music and all, I think we'd still be there. When Cassie told Graham about it, he closed the doors and told us to stay away from it. Really helpful after the fact.”
“Why can we hear it
and
Karl?” Tony waved a hand around the hall, still dark and full of his muttering coworkers. “The replay hasn't even started yet.”
“I told you, it's powerful.”
“But contained?”
“I guess. If the doors are closed. We're going up to the bathroom now, it's
our
place. We're safe there.” The last sentence hung in empty air.
“Tony? Hey!” Amy grabbed his arm and jerked him around to face her. “You want to share with the living?”
So he told them.
Amy paled. “I left the ballroom doors open.”
“Are you sure?”
She was.
“Is anyone
surprised?
” Mason snapped.
As it happened, no one was.
“I want to go dancing,” Brianna whined.
“Tony . . .”
And the soundtrack of his life started playing the
Mighty Mouse
theme. “I'm on it.”
He was almost to the edge of the lantern light when he realized voices were yelling about breaking the circle and that he hadn't brought a light of his own. He lifted his left foot, about to turn. The replay started before it hit the floor.
The music was suddenly a lot louder and vaguely familiar. People were talking and laughing, the clink of glassware suggesting expensive booze of some kind was flowing freely. Champagne, maybe. People who lived in houses like this weren't the type to open a few two-fours for friends. Faintly, he could hear the rhythmic pattern of dress shoes against a wooden floor. Step. Step. Slide.
No point in going back for a light, so he trotted out of the foyer and down the hall.
Turned out that the sound of dancing was muffled because the ballroom doors were closed.
He frowned.
Except Amy was sure she'd left the doors open.
All right, they were open in his time but not in the replay. And that was no help. In order for Graham's protections to work, they had to be closed in his time. Which he wasn't exactly in.
Great.
The music faltered. It was live, not recorded.
Someone in the ballroom banged on the closed doors.
Which weren't only locked, they were barred.
On this side.
He reached for the bar but couldn't touch it.
The music stopped.
Muffled thuds. A lot of padded somethings hitting the floor.
Bodies?
You think?
He could hear coughing, choking, what might be a little thrashing. And he could smell . . .
The lights in the hall were electric and they looked new, the wires surface-mounted along the moldings. Henry had found him an apartment in Toronto with the same surface-mounted wires, surface mounted because the building had started out with gas lights. Apparently, so had this house. If the electric lights were new, then the gas lines were probably still in place.
Three guesses about what's killing the people in the ballroom, and the first two don't count.
Someone had opened the gas jets. Since all the murdering someones had, so far, stuck around for the actual deaths, Tony'd have been willing to bet that they'd barred these doors and gone back into the ballroom through the service door, locking it behind them with the key. Not that it really mattered.
A whole ballroom full of dead people. No wonder it was powerful.
And in his time, the doors were open.
The music started up again although the odds were good it wasn't exactly
live
anymore. Other replays had stopped with death. This one kept going.
Had it reset to begin again or were the dead dancing? Given the night so far, he'd bet on the latter.
He was standing in front of the doors in his time as well as in the replayâhe'd established that movement was timeless beyond a doubt in the conservatory. Which was a good thing because right now doubt would be a bad thing. Eyes closed so as not to be distracted, he clung to an image of the open doors, held out his hand, said the seven words, and
reached
.
The doors are already closed,
memory insisted.
Yeah, well, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
Once again, Tony could hear people talking and laughing, but it didn't sound like they were having a good time. Although he couldn't hear actual words, the voices had a nails-on-a-chalkboard kind of timbre and the laughter carried more than a hint of desperation. Step, step, slide had become shuffle, shuffle, drag.
He stepped forward.
Something brushed past his hip.
Something from his time because nothing in the replay could touch him.
Oh, crap!
Hand. Words.
Reach!
He opened his eyes just as the door slammed shut. Just in time to see a pale, corpse-gray hand snatched back from the front of Brianna's pinafore. An almost familiar pattern glowed gold against the wood.
CB's younger daughter turned and glared at him, squinting a little in the lantern light radiating out from behind him. “I wanted to go dancing!” she shrieked, and kicked him in the shin.
“Brianna!” Zev rushed past. “Are you all right?”
“I wanted to danceâand he closed the door!”
“Tony couldn't have closed the door, he's not close enough.” He grabbed her wrist and pulled her hand away from the brass door pull. “And you don't want to go in there, it's all . . .” He glanced up at Tony. “Full of dead people?”
Tony nodded.
“I want to see dead people!”
“No, you don't.”
“Do, too!”
“Tom . . .”
“Tom is boring, he's just lying there!” She folded her arms. “I want to see the gross dead baby, or I want to go in there and dance with dead people!”
“Why don't we . . .”
“No!”
“Cheese!” The odd acoustics in the house had no luck at all in muffling Ashley's voice. “You get your skinny butt back here, or I'm telling Mom you put those pictures of her in her underwear up on the Net!”
“Did not!”
“So?”
Brianna yanked herself free of Zev's grip and charged past Tony back toward the entrance hall, the darkness between the lanterns of less concern than getting to her sister. “I'm gonna rip your tongue out, Ashes!”
“They're really very nice kids,” Zev murmured as he passed.
“Sure.” Tony turned to see Lee standing behind him with a lantern. “Zev thinks they're nice kids,” he said, suddenly at a loss for words.
“That's because Zev likes kids. And Zev's never picked up a prop they've broken, then
fixed
with a tube and a half of Crazy Glue, and then gotten his picture in the tabloids brandishing a four-and-a-half foot cross in a hospital emergency room.”
“It was a good picture.”
“That's little comfort.” Lee stared past Tony at the ballroom doors. “I can still hear the music.”
“Yeah. Me, too.” Although it was faint, distant. Distorted. “We should get back.”
He didn't understand the moment of silence that followed his suggestion.
“Right.” Lee turned as Tony came even with him and they fell into step. “Tony, why do you think I can hear the baby?”
He asked like he had a theory. Like he knew and he was just asking Tony to confirm his suspicions. Had he started to remember the shadows?
“Why me and Mouse and Kate and Hartley? Oh, and you . . . of course.”
The pause was disconcerting.
Why “of course” me?
None of the shadow-held remembered the experience and Arra had wiped the memories of everyone on the soundstage after the final battle. Lee was asking like he thought Tony knew the answer and just wasn't telling. If the shadow-held were more sensitive to the stuff the house was throwing at them, did that mean the house was restoring their memories?
“Why do you ask?”
“Last spring Mouse and Kate and Hartley all had lapses of memory, somewhat like mine. I had an . . . incident on the set. So did you. I thought it might be connected.”
“I guess it might be.” That seemed safe enough.
“I'm pretty sure Mason is hearing things, too. Remember that friend of his that showed up on the set just before the gas leak?”
They'd gone with the traditional explanation for a group of disoriented people whose memories had just been magically wiped. Had to have been a gas leak. Also the traditional explanation for a ballroom of dead people as it turned out.
“His name was Michael Swan,” Lee continued, before Tony could answer. “I asked Mason about him, and he had no idea who I was talking about. Everyone else remembered him, though.”
Mason had been shadow-held at the time. Of course he wouldn't remember.
Just like Lee didn't remember the actual weird shitâa shadow from another world in his body, the Shadowlord after his bodyâonly the stuff around the weird. Unfortunately, he seemed to have gathered enough pieces to start trying to put two and two together. Fortunately, since two and two made five in this instance, it was unlikely he'd come up with the actual answer.
Suddenly realizing he was about to step out of the circle of lantern light, Tony stopped and turned. Lee was standing about five paces back, watching him. “What?”
“You changed since all that happened.”
“Changed?”
“You're more confident. You're interacting with CB. And you don't . . .” He paused and brushed his hair back off his face, almost as though he wasn't sure he wanted to continue. “. . . you don't watch me like you used to.”
“What?”
“You used to . . . there was this expression . . . I mean, every time I turned around you were . . .” He shrugged. “I guess I got used to it.”
“Sorry.” Tony had no idea what he was apologizing for, but it was all he could think of.
“Yeah. We should get back.”
“Sure.”
Four or five steps in an uncomfortable silence, then, “Did I mention everyone's a little pissed at you because you broke through the circle?”
“No.”
“Well, they are.”
A little pissed was a bit of an understatement. Kate was ready to throw him to the wolves and nothing said seemed to calm her down.
“He's putting us all in danger! We need to get rid of him!”
“And how do you suggest we do that, eh?”
Shut up, Sorge. You're not helping.
Tony shot a whose-side-are-you-on glance at the DP, who answered with a Gallic and totally noncommittal shrug.
“We lock him away somewhere safe,” Kate insisted. “Where he can't hurt us.”
“He hasn't done anything to hurt us!” Amy snapped.
“Oh, yeah? How do you know? How do you know he didn't arrange all this? He sees things we don't. We only have his word for what's going on.”
“She's right!”
Brenda. Big surprise. Tony shuffled a little closer to Lee. While Brenda hadn't been shadow-held, she was more than keeping up in the freaking-out department. Plus, lately, it seemed that she didn't much like him although he didn't . . .
Right. I'm an idiot.
He would have shuffled away again, but Lee grabbed his arm. Comfort? Restraint? Tony had no idea.
He misses the way I used to look at him? What the hell's up with that?