The House That Death Built (9 page)

He moved toward the closed
bedroom door. Cracked his knuckles.

Aaron wasn't the only one who
needed a life lesson tonight.

"Oh, Donna!"

Aaron sat in the car with the
others, and tried to cast his mind as far away as possible.

The task was beyond him. He tried
to picture
her
– dark eyes that always seemed a bit sad, like she knew
your most secret sorrows and felt them with you. A smile so bright it pushed
away that sadness, tempered it into something stronger than it had any right to
be.

He was hers, completely and
utterly.

Liar. Not completely, because if
she owned you like that you wouldn't be under Rob's thumb.

I'm doing it for us. For
her
.

The last thought – he wasn't sure
if it was true or not.

What if I just killed myself?
Then she'd be okay. Rob wouldn't come for her – why would he bother?

There would be no reason for Rob
to do anything to Dee if Aaron was gone. But then, he had no trouble picturing
Rob hurting his wife – or worse – just for the sheer spite of it.

No. For us.

He tried again to push himself
away; to place his mind somewhere so far and so safe he wouldn't be able to see
what was right beside him and all around him.

He failed. Every time he tried to
capture Dee's face in his mind, it was replaced by Rob's angry expression.
Every time he tried to fall into the memory of her eyes, he saw Tommy's quietly
homicidal rage, the sociopathic stare Kayla turned on everyone and everything.

Every time he tried to
escape
…
he just found himself right back where he started. In a dark car in a dark
night surrounded by people whose thoughts and goals were blacker than either.

Tommy and Kayla sat in the back
of the car, the rustle of their black clothes and the occasional clink of the
tools they each had stuffed in the many pockets they wore the only sounds they
made in the night. Rob made even less noise. Aaron knew if he looked over he'd
see the man driving, face illuminated to ghost-tones by the dash lights.

The houses outside might have
helped ease his spirits, if it were only daytime. They were driving through
Spurwing Green, the richest area in a part of the world famous for riches. The
houses weren't houses in the way that ordinary folks understood the terms, they
were more like the New World's answer to the castles of feudal times. Each held
in its quiet grasp a Lord or Lady, master of all they surveyed. Safe behind
their privacy walls and their security systems.

Until the marauders come. The
invaders.

Us.

This is what the house looks
like.

It is nice –
very
nice –
though its obvious value comes not so much from its size (though it is large)
or its spacious grounds (though spacious they are), or even the topiaries and
fountains that grace its surroundings (though there are, of course, many of
those).

No, its value can be seen, even
by the least discerning eye, in the details. In the
whole
.

This house, unlike many others in
the surrounding miles of estates, is not white. It is a tan that darkens to
gray-brown in the night. A place the darkness has begun to infect with a quiet,
ugly disease.

A cancer not of body, not of
heart or lungs or lymph. A cancer of the soul.

A place where death has come to
call.

The house is surrounded by a lawn
big enough to be called a meadow. Trees that lend shade during the day, and
that deepen shadows at night. Bushes that bring beauty in the light, that transform
to malignant growths in the dark.

There are fountains, but they are
silent. No water passes through them, and the stone cherubim stand motionless
as death, imprisoned forever in silent moments of torture.

Many windows stare out from the
sides of the house. In daytime they shine, during the early hours of the night
they glow warmly.

Now, they are dark – eyes blinded
nightly by the dark cataracts of a black sky. All but one – a single blazing
square of light through glass on the second floor. The light brings no courage,
no cheer. It seems out of place. A beacon that will serve not to guide ships
through rocky shoals, but to guide evil to its prey.

There are shadows all around.

One of the shadows moves.

Heads toward the single bright
window.

Begins to climb.

It was an anniversary day, and
Dad had come home happier than he ever was. Some anniversaries could do that to
you: anniversaries that were so special they required one's full attention.
Days so important they merited nothing but cheer, nothing but brightness.

Even at seventeen years old,
Susan Crawford knew this. She knew that this was a special, important day.

That was why she was in here. She
had stayed up long enough to greet her dad, to see his special smile, to hear
him say loving words to Mom.

Then off to her bedroom. Mom and
Dad would be in bed soon – she knew what that meant, too. And that meant she got
to make a call. One she'd been looking forward to for a while. Ever since she
met
him
.

TJ Field had been a surprise. Not
like the kids Susan knew at school. He was rougher, harder in a certain light.
The rough edges didn't detract from his good looks, though – they heightened
them, the way shadows will heighten reliefs carved into a wall.

But he made everything better. He
completed the world she and her parents had made here, in a house she could
never help but think was too big for them.

When TJ came, he filled it – or
at least, filled it enough. And sometimes enough was just right.

She looked at the clock that sat
on her dresser. All of five minutes later than it had been the last time she
looked.

She returned her gaze to the book
that sat on the bed in front of her.
AP Physics
. Normally it wasn't hard
to concentrate on the information it held – she had a special affinity for the
way things were built, for the way they came together at the smallest levels –
but tonight she stared at the lines of text and math and none of it made sense.

There was only the night.
This
night.

And a noise.

She glanced at her window.

Did I hear something?

She waited a moment, staring out
at the night. The small hairs on the back of her neck rose with a feeling of…
what?

Expectation.

Hope.

The night seemed to stretch on
forever beyond her window.

And, at last, she turned away
from the darkness. Not back to her book – any pretense of studying was gone for
good. Instead she turned to the dressing table that sat in one corner of a –

(
huge, enormous, nearly-empty
)

– room. She was dressed for bed,
wearing the boxers and tank top that were her favorite sleepwear. She'd brushed
her teeth –

(
like a good little girl!
)

– scrubbed her face. She might as
well complete the nighttime ritual while she waited….

For the night to truly begin.

She sat in front of the dressing
table. A discrete light sat atop the mirror – not the tacky brightness you saw
in movies about movies, where starlets sat in front of a globe-lit mirror and
made impossibly pretty faces even more impossibly pretty, but a light perfectly
designed to throw maximum light against your face without turning it into a series
of crags and flaws.

She wondered, not for the first
time, what it had set Mom and Dad back to buy it. Whatever it had been, it was
too much. There were better things to spend their money on.

Not much she could do about that.
What was past was past. Only the future could be changed, molded, perfected.

She took the brush that sat on
the table top, began to pass it over and through her hair. Sweep, sweep, sweep.
She could feel the strands separating, flowing back together, softening.

Sweep, sweep, swee –

Scratch
.

She spun again. Looked at the
window. The darkness.

"Is there someone out
there?" she called. Then chided herself for being silly.

She turned back to her task.
Sweep, sweep, swee –

And saw the shadow in the mirror
an instant before she felt a hand on her shoulder. A scream tried to break
free, but it was muffled, then silenced, by the other hand that clapped over
her mouth and nose.

She was sitting on a stool, and
the man behind her spun her around. She looked into green eyes.

The hand came away from her
mouth.

She punched the intruder. Hard.

"You… you…
bastard
!"

She meant the words, but TJ just
laughed them off. Still rough around the edges, but the laugh softened him.
Just barely, just enough to make him look –

(
innocent
)

– younger. Unaware of the life he
would lead, and happy because of that fact.

He laughed again.

"You shouldn't be
here," she said, her voice something between a hiss and a whisper. She
tried to put some level of irritation in her voice, but failed. She was glad he
was here, tonight.

Anniversaries should be special. Certainly
for her parents – and with TJ's arrival this anniversary became special for
her, too.

TJ leaned in and kissed her ear.
A gentle nip that sent shudders through her frame. "I shouldn't be
here?" he whispered. "And yet you called me." He paused, but
didn't move from his spot near her, so close she could feel every breath
against her neck. "And you turned off the alarm for me."

"How do you know that?"
It was all she could think to say – the first and only words that sprung to
mind. She could barely think at all, he was so close.

TJ drew back. Cupped a hand to
his ear. Frowned. "You hear that?"

She listened. Half-expecting to
hear more noises coming from outside.

"I don't hear
anything."

TJ's frown was swallowed by a
wide grin. "Exactly."

Susan crossed her arms in another
attempt to be angry. She failed, so settled for a mock-anger that she knew he
would see through.

"How do you know I turned it
off for
you
? The gardener is pretty hot."

TJ shook his head solemnly.
"An affair with the gardener? You're not that cliché."

He leaned in for a kiss, this one
full on her lips, but she held him back. "Seriously," she said,
forcing herself to say the words that were expected of her, "you should
go. My dad will be
pissed
if he finds you here."

TJ kissed her hard enough she
felt it in the soles of her feet. "Let him be pissed."

He kept kissing her, long kisses
interrupted by smaller ones like periods at the ends of unspoken sentences.
"I'm… not… kidding," Susan said between the kisses. "You don't
want to see him angry."

"What, does he turn into the
Hulk or something?"

She giggled. "Nothing so
dramatic. He's more the Batman type." She sighed. "But it's been a
long day."

"Do tell." He kissed
her again.

"TJ, please…."

He held her tight in arms that
were strong from hours spent in the garage where he worked. Where she had found
him. "I like it when you ask nicely," he said.

They kissed. He pulled her to the
bed, and sank down on top of her. The kiss seemed to have weight, pressing her
down down down into a place she'd never found before.

No. I found it when I found
him
.

"You should go," she
said. The words held no meaning, and TJ knew it.

"I will… eventually."

"Today's not good for
this."

"Sure it is. Today, and
every day."

She didn't resist any longer. And
this had been what she intended, hadn't it? Hadn't she wanted this to happen
the moment she saw him? Hadn't every moment since then led to this single
place, this singular time?

She surrendered to the moment.