The House That Death Built (13 page)

She got better.

He moved her to a different
hospital. One that was not third- or second- or even first-rate. This was a
place reserved for the truly wealthy, for those so famous that no one knew
their names, only the things they had done, the fantastic inventions and
innovations and practices and products that moved the world.

The woman improved, bit by bit.

He needed money for it, to be
sure. And he hated how he got it. But each time he wanted to stop, he asked
himself how long she would survive without what he was doing.

He kept working.

Kept giving money to her.

She got better, bit by bit, and
the light gradually returned to his life.

But in his quiet moments, the
seconds and minutes of his life when he was alone with himself and had no one
to lie to, he admitted that the light was different. It was shaded at the
edges.

The darkness was his.

And his alone.

Aaron hadn't wanted to be here.

Hadn't wanted to do the job.

Hadn't wanted to do
any
of
the jobs.

At first it started slowly.
Nothing he thought would hurt anyone. Rob had met him in a bar. Found out he
worked for a safe company and plied him with both drink and questions for the
rest of the night.

Rob was so pleasant. So
personable. So kind.

They became friends – or so Aaron
thought. Though looking back he could see that the friendship, the offers to buy
round after round when they started meeting regularly at the bar, the questions
into his family and personal life had all been for deeper, darker purposes than
mere friendship.

Dee got sick. And Rob told him he
had a way to get her some money. To pay for the hospital bills that had mounted
so quickly there was no hope he could ever pay for them. The hospitals were
calling, their debt collectors giving lie to their outward protestations that
her health was their primary concern.

She was dying. That was why he
did it. Dying, and the cruddy place they were going to ship her to wasn't
really a hospital, it was a debtor's prison. No chains or walls keeping her in,
just outdated equipment and barely-competent doctors who would restrict her to
an old, sprung mattress and wait for her to finish dying.

He couldn't let that happen.

He did the job. Tommy and Kayla
seemed different on that job, too – calmer and more in control. But that had
just been another ruse. Another bit of play-acting, this one designed to fool him
into believing that no one was getting hurt. Not
really
hurt. Money and
jewels would either be replaced by insurance or would be lost by people who
could damn well
afford
to lose them.

Not like him. Not like Dee, who
had finally been moved to the county hospital where she lay on a cot in the
hall more often than she enjoyed even the basic privilege of dying in privacy.
She had tubes going in and out, voided into a bag and a bedpan, and all of it
for the world to see.

He had to get her out.

The first job wasn't enough. Nor
the second.

On the third, Rob turned over his
cut to Aaron. "Take care of her," he said, and there were tears in
his eyes.
Tears.
"Take care of Dee. She sounds like a good woman,
and no good woman…." His voice strangled itself to nothing. He looked
away. Waved Aaron off.

Aaron heard noises coming from
Rob's apartment, sounds he took to be concerned sobs.

Another thing that, looking back,
he saw as a lie. The man hadn't been crying, he'd been laughing.

Aaron quit. He moved to a
different, better job at another safe company. Then another. And a fourth. In
the space of a few years he'd worked at half the companies producing high-end
safes in the U.S. At every one that had an office or satellite factory in a
hundred-mile radius.

He kept meeting Rob. Floating him
information and then accompanying him on the jobs themselves. And it was all
worth it because Dee was getting good help and getting good medicine and
getting
better
.

She went into remission.

He went to Rob – to his
friend
– and explained he was done.

Rob broke his arm. Threatened to
do much worse to Dee. And as soon as Aaron's arm was good enough, he went on
another job.

He had never shared details of
what he knew with Rob. Had never shared
how
he kept his security
clearance when he left each safe company,
how
he tunneled into back
doors to find out if potential marks – their names supplied by Rob, though he
had no idea how the man got them in the first place – had safes he could hack
or crack. Rob had asked, but that information Aaron had kept close to the vest.

Because, in his heart of hearts,
in his deepest places, he already knew. From the beginning he knew who Rob was,
what
he was, and that he didn't give a damn about Dee. He knew from the
beginning, in a place so far inside his heart it had no name, that Rob just
wanted to help
Rob
, and that what he gave, he expected back a thousand
fold.

Aaron kept protesting. But he
kept doing the jobs. Because Dee was still better, he owed it to Rob, he
couldn't stop because who knew what would happen then?

And, mostly, that lie worked for
him. Even on the job – that terrible job a few years ago where the whole family
had been butchered – even then, he somehow managed to convince himself it was
worth it.

For Dee.

But now there were screams again.
Not screams punctuated by guns firing, but the deep-throated screams of a big
man on the floor. Tommy was rocking back and forth, blood
spurting
between the fingers he had wrapped around his shin. Kayla was saying something,
but Aaron couldn't really tell what it was – his hearing was strange all of a
sudden. Everything sounded like his ears had been stuffed full of cotton.

A scream broke through. One he
never thought he would hear.

Rob.

The man shrieked, a clipped sound
that might have been humorous in other circumstances. Now it was a driving
spike that bored into Aaron and pierced the defenses his mind had erected
against whatever was happening.

Tommy bleeding.

My hands in his blood, holding
down the handkerchief – how did it even get there, how did
I
even get here?

Rob
screaming
.

He looked at Rob, saw him stumble
back, catching himself just before he would have plowed into the thin wire that
stretched across the hall.

What –?

Then he followed Rob's gaze.

Screamed.

Inside the master bedroom they
had just left, clearly visible from the hall, stood a figure.

Something about the person's
posture told Aaron that it was a man. But the outline and stance were all he
had to go on, because the man had no face.

He was dressed all in black. Head
to toe, he looked almost like a fifth, previously unknown member of the team of
thieves that had invaded this place. He even wore pants that bulged with extra
pockets.

Black, all black, all shadow in
the shadowed space of the room beyond the door at the end of the hall.

His face was covered by a mask.
The mask was so white it seemed to glow – and after only an instant Aaron
realized it
was
glowing. Not the green glow of most glow-in-the-dark
paints, the mask had been treated with something that made it a bright white
wound in the darkness. Made it stand out like the terrifying reality of a
nightmare that simply won't let go.

The perfect whiteness of the mask
was broken by three black holes: two downward crescents that lay beside each
other, and one larger, upward-tilting crescent. It was a Greek theater mask.
The mask that symbolized comedy, half of a duality – comedy and tragedy – that
the Greeks used to represent the sum of all emotion.

His mind, suddenly spinning,
wondered where the tragedy might be found.

His mind, suddenly spinning,
feared he might find out soon.

The man in the mask raised a
hand. His arm turned to an upright square and then he slowly waved. His arm
seemed to sway back and forth, caught in an eddy that no one else could feel.
With the mask standing out in such stark relief, the gesture was a mockery of
goodwill.

He heard Kayla gasp out a quick,
"What the –"

The end of her sentence swallowed
in sound as Kayla screamed again. This time the scream wasn't surprise or
terror, it was a sudden rage. The sound of a wild animal that went to sleep
free and woke in a cage.

She was up and running before her
sharp screech ended. She didn't seem to remember the gun in her hand, either,
just ran at the happyface figure in the master bedroom. She got up speed in
only a few steps, her legs pumping faster than Aaron would have thought
possible in such a short time. She ran three steps, four, five… then Kayla
bounced off nothing but air.

Aaron heard the distinctive crack
of a nose breaking. Blood arced from her face, and hung in the empty air where
she had come to so sudden a stop.

Rob moved as she fell. He stepped
aside, allowing her to crumple in a graceless heap on the floor, then
approached the spot where the blood hung in the air –

(
What's
going on
, how
is any of this
happening
?
)

– and put his hands up. One held
his gun, the other clutched his flashlight. As he reached out, in the instant
his hands stopped in midair, something glinted. A reflection from a transparent
wall that cut across the hall, creating a wall even more invisible than had
been the wire that slashed Tommy's leg.

"How did this get –"
began Rob. Then he stopped himself, raised the gun, and fired at Happyface.

The bullet-whine shrieked, but in
the wrong direction. The buzz of an angry hornet sizzled past Aaron's ringing
ears. Rob went down at the same moment, and several stunned seconds passed
before Aaron realized what had happened.

Not just glass. Bulletproof.
Maybe plexiglass or polycarbonate or –

WHAT THE HELL DOES IT MATTER WHAT
IT IS?

Rob moaned. He sat up and touched
the sticky streak on his temple where the bullet passed after bouncing off the
invisible wall; he had come
this
close to canoeing his own skull.

Aaron looked at Happyface.

The figure waved again. And it
was Aaron's imagination –

(
has to be my imagination has
to be what's going on am I going crazy what's happening?
)

– but the dark smile seemed
somehow to widen. The unmoving blackness of the man's mouth seemed to speak to
him.

I'm going to kill you. Kill you
all, and it will be just. So. FUN!

Perfect night.

Perfect night, so why was it
wrong, why was there that sound why was there so much
screaming
?

TJ woke and his hand flung out
automatically but there was nothing but sheets and blankets beside him. An
empty bed that had been full only a few minutes ago.

Was
it minutes? Did I fall
asleep? Did she? How long have I been here?

That jerked him nearly to full
wakefulness; made him sit upright in bed, shaking off the last of the sleep
that had grabbed him.

Don't wanna get found.

He was half into his pants before
he realized that something specific had pulled him out of his slumber. Something
completely unrelated to the sleep-soaked fear that Sue's parents might find him
in here.

Something that didn't belong.

He looked at the bed, and it only
registered that he was alone in the same moment that the second scream came.

Where's Sue?

Panic drove the breath from his
body.

Several more screams sounded.

Then something louder. So loud,
even through the closed door, that it made him wince and step back.

A gunshot.

TJ knew what guns sounded like.
He heard them a lot in his neighborhood – a place where on some streets the
kids did their homework or watched TV on the floor. Sitting on a couch or at a
table was an open invitation to get hit by stray bullets from drive-bys or drug
disputes or just the random arguments that could so easily escalate when the
added pressure of a life without hope was tossed in.

Nothing beautiful happened where
he lived. That's why Sue had been such a surprise. Her car had broken down and
the tow truck took her to the nearest garage – the place where TJ worked. Her
presence alone wasn't a surprise – in one of those quirks of big city life, the
ghetto world he inhabited was only a few miles away from one of the most
expensive shopping malls around, so expensive cars driven by expensive people
were not unusual at the garage.

The surprise was that she
noticed
him. Usually the kind of people who drove cars that got towed in from a few
miles to the west were the kind of people who expected nothing to inconvenience
them. They paid not to be inconvenienced – personal assistants who not only
arranged their schedules, but picked up and dropped off their dry cleaning; nannies
to watch whatever children they'd cranked out as a self-commentary on their own
value to society; cars that were expensive enough that any performance less
than perfection was not just unacceptable, but offensive.

Usually those people came in
angry, got angrier when they saw the kind of place they'd been towed to, and
raged
once they heard what the problem was with their cars.

Not Sue. She'd just asked if she
could be told as soon as possible what the problem was. She said she'd be happy
to wait until then.

No one like her had ever stayed
for the outcome. They all called cabs and hightailed it out as quickly as
possible, like they were afraid poverty was a disease they might catch if they
stayed in this place long enough. Sue didn't call a cab or a friend or a rich
daddy (and TJ'd been working at the garage long enough to know they
all
had a rich daddy). She went into the "waiting room" that was more of
a "broom closet with seats," sat down in one of the two vinyl seats
against the dirty wall, and began leafing through a copy of Motor Trend that TJ
was pretty sure featured the Model-T as the Best Car of the Year.

TJ figured out what was wrong
with the car – enough metal shavings in the oil to cover a junkyard magnet and
a spun rod as a consequence. It wasn't normal to find that, and he figured he
must be looking at a super-rich bitch whose "employees" (what he'd
learned was the modern name for slaves) had taken some petty revenge on her
while the car was parked at
L'Estate de Familia
.

He went into the waiting room,
noting what she was reading – another surprise since it wasn't the expected
view of a woman with her nose deep in her iPhone 18 or whatever model they were
up to now. When he told her what the problem was, she asked if it could be
fixed quickly, and when he told her it was going to take a specialist and a
couple days, she neither ranted at him nor cursed the horrible luck that was
going to have her slumming some other car that would cost enough to feed a
family of four for several years. She just asked if he would be so kind as to
drive her home.

She said it like that, too.
"Would you be so kind?" There was no tremor in her voice. She wasn't
angry, wasn't even afraid – which a pretty, rich, white girl should have been
in this part of the city. She just asked if he would take her home.

TJ almost laughed. Almost asked
if she thought this was a cab service.

He didn't. He just told Ernesto
he'd be back when he got back, then got his car – a junker 1980 Datsun Bluebird
that smelled heavily of oil and only held together thanks to the serious
intercession of duct tape and baling wire – and walked her to it.

Again, surprise: she didn't
recoil at the car, didn't shrink from placing her Special Flower body against
the worn seats. She just got in.

He closed the door for her. It
wasn't like she waited for him to do it, like she expected it – he just reached
out and started closing the door while saying, "You all the way
inside?" She flashed him a quick smile and nodded, and he didn't feel like
a servant before a Lady, he felt for the first time in his life like a
man
.
Not an easy feeling for a guy who grew up with a mom who still disappeared to
crack houses whenever she could manage it, and with a father whose identity
he'd never known.

He liked it, though. Liked it a
lot. It made him think all the way to her "house" – which was bigger
than five of Ernesto's garages put together – what it would be like to have
someone like her in his life. Someone he could worship, but that would be okay
because it would be someone
worth
worshipping.

He wished he could ask her out.
Knew that it would never happen. She was from a different world, a different
universe entirely. People from different universes don't mix.

He didn't ask her out.

So she asked him, instead.

He was so stunned he didn't
answer for – well, it seemed like forever. She didn't move. Just stood there
outside his car, one hand on the sill of his open window, leaning in so close
he could smell her hair.

That was the clearest memory he
had of that day – her hair. It smelled like some flower. He didn't know what
flower it was, but he knew he would remember it for the rest of his life. The
day a princess came down the castle steps and asked for his company.

He finally nodded, drove off –
and it was nearly an hour before he realized he hadn't gotten her number, she
hadn't gotten his. No way it would happen now.

He wanted to turn around and
drive back, but knew she would have come to her senses by now, and didn't want
to face the humiliation of asking for something he would never get.

He went back to work. Ernesto
only screamed at him for ten minutes, which meant he still had a job – also
more than he deserved.

He'd never see her again. That
was all right, he guessed. Not just because they didn't belong together, but
because the memory alone might be enough to get him through the craptastic
thing he called a life.

He finished work about nine that
night. Ernesto didn't pay by the hour, he paid by the job – not strictly legal,
but hardly the type of thing TJ could complain about – and there were a couple
tough ones that he had to finish if he hoped to have enough dough for splurging
on food or rent.

He tossed his tools in their
boxes. Wiped his hands on some shop towels that had forgotten what color they
originally were, then walked out the back door. Headed back to the Bluebird
that was so emblematic of his life.

And she was there.

He stopped in his tracks when he
saw her – leaning not against the shiny Mercedes nearby, but against his own
car – and for the second time that day his mouth hung open and he couldn't
speak.

She shrugged. "I didn't know
when you'd get around to calling me, and I wanted to see you." Then,
incredibly, she looked embarrassed, as though suddenly unsure; as though she
were the one imposing on him. "I hope you don't mind."

He strode forward, grabbed her in
his arms, and kissed her.

It wasn't a conquest. It wasn't a
proof that he could do it – most of his friends approached women with one of
those two things as their goal at all times.

This wasn't anything so easy. It
was….

It was catching a dream. Wrapping
around and holding tight to it in the one moment it impossibly solidified into
a reality.

She kissed him back.

He saw her every chance he could
after that. He was twenty, she was only seventeen, but coming from a place
where girls regularly turned up pregnant at twelve, the difference in their
ages didn't bother him overmuch.

And it wasn't like they'd ever
had sex. He was interested, sure – his body literally ached with desire
sometimes. But she wasn't ready, he could feel that. And he wouldn't make a
move until she did.

Which was what made tonight so
perfect. She'd been dropping veiled hints for a long time. Just little words or
looks that said she was considering moving their relationship to a new, far
more physical level.

When she told him to come by her
room – not her house, but her
room
– tonight, he knew it was happening.

He'd met her parents on several
occasions. She'd never snuck out to meet him, never seemed ashamed of him in
any way. When she invited him to pick her up the first time, he expected to
meet her at the gate or at a servants' quarters or something. But the gate
swung open and he heard her voice on the intercom saying, "Come on up to
the house, TJ!" and Mr. and Mrs. Crawford were cordially waiting inside
the foyer.

They were nice. They didn't seem
overly worried about where he came from or why their daughter would bother with
him.

Still, he got a weird vibe from
them. Like they were judging something about him that not even he was aware of.
They were all smiles and kindness, offered him food or drink, but he still got a
case of the heebies that brought along its pal, jeebies.

He knew his feelings were they
weren't judging him, though – he was judging himself. Because he couldn't
believe this was happening; couldn't believe that not only had the goddess
descended from Heaven, but he'd actually been invited through the pearly gates
to greet her family.

He always came to the front door.
Mr. and Mrs. Crawford – he never could call them Jason and Aimee, no matter how
much they invited him to – were always waiting. Always offered him refreshment.
Always waved goodbye when he and Sue drove off in his Bluebird.

He always came to the front door.

Until tonight.

"Come to my room. I'll be
waiting."

He did. She played at
protestation, but her hands traveled all over him as she whispered the words.
Desire made her tremble almost as much as he himself was trembling.

And, when it happened, it was
beyond amazing. It was perfect. Just like she was perfect.

But now his goddess was gone.
There were screams in the house, and gunshots, and Sue was gone from the bed
where he had fallen asleep, and for a moment he wondered if Mr. Crawford had
peeked in on them and seen his daughter wrapped up in the arms of scum and had
taken it on himself to end his daughter's shame with a bullet.

No. He wouldn't. He couldn't. No
one could hurt Sue. No one could
ever
hurt –

He heard more screaming, and the
screaming drove him to the door. He pulled on the door, then remembered it
opened out – an architectural quirk he'd never understood but figured had to
have something to do with being richer than God – and switched to pulling.

Still no give.