The House That Jack Built (47 page)

    'Pepper!' called Effie, as loud as she dared. She glanced at the kitchen door, terrified that Jack Belias was going to come bursting out of it at any moment. 'Pepper! Where are you? Norman! Brewster! Is anybody there?'

    She started to climb the stairs. It was then that she heard a woman sobbing. Painful, and low, and agonised; and this time she knew who it was.

    She hurried up to the landing. She saw the plaster-creature lying smashed to pieces, scattered across the floor. She stopped for a moment, to listen again, and the woman was still sobbing. I'm coming, Gina, she thought to herself. And this time I'm going to set you free.

    Downstairs, she heard a door slam. She knew what that was. Jack Belias, coming out of the cellar, angrier than ever. She started to climb the second flight of stairs just as she heard the swing door joink, and Jack Belias crossing the hallway. She heard his pumps scuffing quickly up the stairs, and the tip of his cane rattling against the banisters.

    Gasping, she reached the turn in the stairs, just below the stained-glass window. But Jack Belias was too fast and too angry for her. He came running up the stairs like a dark automaton, and caught hold of her sleeve.

    'Let go of me!' Effie screamed. 'Norman! Norman! Help me!'

    Jack Belias swung his cane, but Effie deliberately dropped onto the floor, and rolled around, and he missed her. She felt the sharp draught of the cane, less than an inch away from her face.

    'Get up and take your punishment!' he roared at her. 'Get up, you bitch, and take your punishment!'

    He swung again, but Effie clambered to her feet, and he struck a blow against the banisters that jarred his hands. 'Take your punishment, you bitch!'

    He swung his cane right back and accidentally struck the stained-glass window. A whole panel of lilies broke, and dropped down onto the stairs. Jack Belias turned around, and looked up at the window. It cracked, and began to slip, and he shouted out, 'No!'

    But the lead between the glass panels was crumbling and fatigued, and the frame was half-rotted, and with no warning at all the whole window collapsed on top of him, showers of splintering coloured glass. It sounded like hailstones falling, it sounded like bells chiming. Jack Belias stood with his arms shielding his head, and then - when the last pane had dropped to the floor - he lowered his arms and looked up at Effie with the most demonic expression that she had ever seen on anyone's face. He was so angry that he scarcely looked human. Pieces of broken glass surrounded his feet - a lily, a castle, and half of a nun's face, with one eye closed.

    'I swear to God that I'll break you,' he told her. 'I swear to Almighty God.'

    They stood in silence for a moment, confronting each other. Then Effie heard the sobbing noise again. Not loudly; not as anguished as before; but deeply sorrowful. Without a word, she turned and hurried up the stairs. 'No!' shouted Jack Belias, after her. But she was determined not to be stopped. She knew what she had to do, and she knew that this was her last chance to do it.

    She reached the blue-carpeted bedroom, turned the handle and opened the door. Brewster was lying on his side beside the bed, in a dark lake of blood. The discarded poker lay nearby.

    
Gina,
thought Effie.
Oh, God. She's blind. She must have thought that Brewster was-

    She heard the sobbing again. It was coming from another bedroom, further along the corridor. Effie burst out of the bedroom just as Jack Belias reached the landing, and they almost collided. He tried to snatch her arm but she slapped the side of his head, and then suddenly stopped and tripped him up. He fell heavily sideways onto the floor, but he still managed to twist around and catch her a glancing blow on the leg with his cane.

    They struggled and pushed each other. Jack Belias hit her across the shoulder and she screamed and shoved him in the chest.

    As they fought, one of the bedroom doors opened and a figure staggered out of it, swathed in a white blood-spattered sheet. It bumped into one side of the corridor and then started to hobble away, groping wildly at the walls so that it could find its way. It sobbed, as it ran, a high-pitched desperate sob.

    Effie tore herself free from Jack Belias and started to run.

    'Come back here, bitch!' he shouted, and came after her in furious pursuit.

    Up ahead, the white staggering figure almost tripped on the temporary flooring that covered the place where Morton Walker had fallen to his death. Effie ran after it, her whole body exploding with adrenaline.

    The figure was Gina Broughton; and she, Effie, was Gina Broughton, too - just as Craig had been overwhelmed by Jack Belias and Pepper had been taken over by the body and soul of Gaby Deslys.

    Effie understood now. Coincident lives, simultaneous events. She was Gina at the moment that Jack Belias had won her in his baccarat game; but up ahead of her was Gina after he had tortured her. Events were overlapping. Lives were overlapping. But the same nemesis was hard on both of their heels.

    'Gina!' screamed Effie. 'Gina, keep running! He's here!'

    The figure hesitated for a moment. In the gloom at the end of the corridor, it looked like a white candle flame flickering.

    'Don't stop!' Effie kept screaming. 'Whatever you do - don't stop!'

    Too close behind her, she heard Jack Belias' walking-cane beating at the walls, and the thick avid gasping of his breath. He was too breathless to curse at her now, but she knew that he wasn't going to stop. He wasn't going to stop until he had broken both of them; and made them admit what dirt they were.

    The white figure reached the floor-length window at the end of the corridor, one of the windows that looked out over the front of the house. Effie could see that she was struggling with the catch, and then suddenly she opened it.

    'Not that way!' Effie shouted, her voice hoarse. But it was too late. The figure had climbed out onto the parapet. Effie ran right up to the open window herself, and looked out, and the night was warm and breezy now, with a strong smell of smoke and recent thunderstorms. She could feel wind, she could see stars.

    The white figure was standing on the very corner of the parapet, twenty feet away. Her head was thrown back, her arms were outstretched. Her toes were curled right over the very edge. Thirty feet below her, the railings waited, with their tall, elaborate points.

    Her dark hair billowed and curled, and the breeze blew the sheet against her heavily-pregnant stomach. She looked wild and beautiful and infinitely frightening.

    'Don't!' Effie called. 'You don't have to! You never have to!'

    But at that moment, Jack Belias reached the window, and thrashed at Effie with his cane, striking her shoulder.

    'Where is she?' he raged. 'Where is she?'

    He leaned out of the window and saw her balanced on the parapet.

    'No!' he screeched at her. 'No... not again... you can't do it again!'

    Effie seized his sleeve and tried to twist him around. He cuffed her with the back of his hand so that she fell heavily against the wall. Then he cuffed her again, and kicked her in the hip. She raised both arms to protect herself.

    At that moment, however, he staggered and seemed to lose his balance. There was a deep
whoomph
further back along the corridor, and both of them turned. Out of the patch of temporary flooring, smoke was pouring, smoke mingled with thick orange sparks. The fire must have burned through to the library now, and the holes in floor and ceiling where Morton Walker had fallen were acting as a chimney.

    Jack Belias stared at the smoke for a long, horrified moment. The sparks flew out even more thickly, like a Roman candle, and then they saw tongues of flame. The whole house began to rumble and whistle as the fire relentlessly drew in air through any aperture it could - windows, doors, keyholes, ventilators. It sounded as if a giant locomotive were bearing down on them.

    Jack turned back to Effie. 'You did this! You did this, you bitch!'

    But there was something strange about his face. It was very much less like Jack Belias and very much more like Craig's. He seemed confused, and kept jerking up his walking-cane as if he were going to strike her, and then changing his mind and putting it down again.

    Flames began to leap out of the hole in the corridor floor and lick at the ceiling. Two bedroom door frames were already alright, and fire was beginning to run along the varnished skirting boards.

    Jack Belias stepped away from Effie, his legs moving as if his knees had rusted up. 'You did this, you bitch. I should have known.'

    He turned wildly back to the window. Gina was still standing on the parapet, her arms outstretched.

    A heavy explosion shook the house, followed by a seemingly endless cascade of broken glass. Another explosion, and another.

    'Bitch!' raged Jack Belias. 'Bitch, I'll kill you for this!'

    'Oh, you can kill me,' said Effie. 'You can do what you like to me. But you can never, ever break me. Look... there I am, standing outside, blinded, and tortured, and you still haven't broken me, and you never will.'

    Jack Belias smashed his cane backward and forward against the wall. 'Break you! I'll break you! I'll break you now and I'll break you then!'

    He heaved himself out of the window, catching his shoe on the sill. Effie tried to snatch at his arm but he struck her again, and almost lost his balance.

    She looked into his face and he looked into hers.

    'Craig,' she said. 'Don't.'

    He frowned at her, and he did look like Craig. He looked even more like Craig than he had just a few moments before. The library floor was burning now. The clock was being destroyed: the device that had allowed Jack Belias to move from one year into another.

    'Craig,' Effie begged, a second time. 'Craig... come back in. It's over.'

    Jack Belias thought for a few seconds, and then gave her an almost imperceptible shake of his head.

    'Bitch,' he mouthed. Then he turned his back, and started to edge his way along the coping-stones, his feet spread like a tightrope walker.

    He was only six or seven feet away when Gina turned towards him. In spite of her blinded eyes, in spite of her bruises, she was desperately beautiful. She unwound the sheet from her body, and held it high, so that it billowed in the breeze. As for herself, she was pale and pregnant and perfectly naked, and she shone in the starlight like a statue.

    'No!' said Jack Belias, and lunged at the sheet.

    His feet scrabbled on the coping-stones, trying to catch his balance. He swayed forward, and then he swayed back. For one moment Effie thought that he would fall backward against the roof, and save himself. But then he suddenly screamed, 'Effie!' and dropped down into the night. There was a terrible pause. Then Effie heard a deep crunching noise, and the terrible resonance of iron railings when a heavy object is dropped on top of them.

    Effie stared at Gina in shock. Gina, still naked, standing on the parapet, her hands cupped under her swollen stomach.

    But then Gina seemed to fade. Her face began to melt like spun-sugar; her body became transparent. Within a few seconds her outline was nothing more than a pattern in the evening clouds. Effie found herself standing by the open window all alone, her eyes unexpectedly filled with tears.

    In the distance, down the driveway that led between the weathered trees, she saw blue and red lights flashing. An ambulance, and two police cars, closely followed by a firetruck. Tyres slewed on the shingle, doors slammed. She saw Pepper hurrying out of the house, and heard police radio voices, and then she heard somebody say, 'Jesus… have you seen this? There's a guy here, stuck on the railings. Musta jumped.'

    Effie saw Pepper turn around in shock, and then look up to the window where she was standing. Something passed between them then that only two women could understand.

    

    

    Valhalla burned throughout the night. At one point, there were eighteen firetrucks in attendance. Valhalla burned like the Norse palace it was named for, the palace of the dead. It burned as if it were determined to burn; as if it refused to be extinguished until it had completely consumed itself. Flames reached more than two hundred feet into the sky, and the blaze could be seen for nearly twenty miles.

    At dawn, the house was nothing more than a charred shell, with only one of its walls standing. The wind blew its ashes to the east, where the demons come from.

    

    

    She stood in the Putnam County morgue and looked at Craig's body and didn't know what to say. She supposed she ought to have kissed him and wished him goodbye, but somehow she felt as if she had already done that, a long time ago. There was still some coarseness about his face that reminded her of Jack Belias. Maybe he had always been a little like Jack Belias, in a way.

    'Okay?' asked the morgue attendant, and she nodded.

    Outside, looking crumpled and unshaven, Lieutenant Hook and Sergeant Winstanley were waiting for her. 'Mrs. Bellman? Just wanted you to know how sorry we were.'

    'Thank you,' she said, and kept on walking.

    'By the way,' called Lieutenant Hook. 'We checked your husband's fingerprints, post mortem. I thought you'd like to know that we've cleared him. Whoever killed those people, it wasn't him.'

    Effie said nothing. She didn't even turn around. She already knew that Craig was innocent.

    

    

    It was a warm, overcast morning. She sat in Walter Van Buren's office, dressed in black. Walter Van Buren was a few minutes late, and he came in flustered, balancing a Styrofoam cup of black coffee.