The Inn (28 page)

T
he soles of his shoes making sticking sounds as he walked through the blood on the floor, Zeke draped a sheet over Chad's dead body.

The poor man.
But he was a fool, too
, Zeke thought. He should have accepted the offer Zeke and Cordelia had made him. They might not have been able to make good on the offer, but Chad would be alive today, sitting at home with a mug of coffee, riding out this storm.

Zeke stood looking down at the body. He'd draped many sheets in his years in this house. The first had been over the headless corpse of Andrew McGurk. Zeke had been just a teenager then. He and old Mr. Devlin had managed to pull McGurk back out of the fireplace, but the house had already gotten his head.

It was that episode that had finally convinced old man Devlin to brick over the fireplace. But eventually his son, Cordelia's husband, had unbricked it. The pattern repeated itself every generation.

The worst had been the baby. That poor woman, hiding out here from her rich father's goons, had thought she was safe. From her father, yes. From the house, no.

Zeke had found the baby's arm in the ash dump. That was all that was left of her.

All his adult life he'd been covering up corpses, wiping up blood. Ever since he'd taken this infernal job, he'd been enslaved to this house, a prisoner of its terrible secrets. No more. He wanted an end to this before he died.

And bricking up the fireplace was no longer enough.

He sighed and turned to leave the room.

And walked directly into Jack, who had been standing there in the doorway, unknown to Zeke, watching him.

“What are you doing in here?” Jack asked him.

“Giving the dead a little respect,” Zeke replied, his voice surly.

Jack grabbed the old man by the front of his shirt. “Don't interfere, Zeke. You must give the house what it needs.”

Zeke struggled, but couldn't break free of Jack's grip. “Oh, Mr. Jack, please try to see things as they are! We can't do it anymore! The house will take us all. Don't you care?”

“The house will make us successful,” Jack told him, tightening his hold on Zeke's shirt. “That's what they've promised. My father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather—they all understood that!”

“Until they died broken men, the ones they loved destroyed around them!”

Jack's hand loosened its grip, and Zeke took the opportunity to move away from him.

“Your mother, Jack! Don't you remember?”

Jack's eyes clouded over.

“The house took your mother! She didn't die of cancer. She didn't die in a hospital. Your father lied to you, Jack. She died here—horribly—”

Jack's arm suddenly swung out. The back of his hand connected with Zeke's face, and the frail old man went flying across the room, hitting his head against the wall. He slid down into a clump on the floor.

“Think of your wife,” Zeke managed to whimper, as his head throbbed and the room around him began to spin. “Think of Annabel.”

But Jack just stalked out of the room.

Zeke put his face in his hands and cried. Eventually, everything went dark.

A
nnabel thought she heard shouting from another room. She steadied herself, bracing for the worst. Then she heard footsteps clomping down the hall. Jack's footsteps, she thought. Hard, heavy, angry. Was he coming in here? Was he going to kill her? Annabel began to tremble violently. But the footsteps went right past the door and up the steps to the attic. Annabel heard the door to the attic open and close.

For the moment, she let out a sigh of relief.

But she was not out of danger. Far from it. Zeke had told her to wait for him, but she was no longer willing to wait. For all she knew, the shouting she heard from the other room had been an altercation between Jack and the old man, and Zeke was never going to emerge the winner from a fight like that. He might even be dead.

Annabel had to get out of the house. She'd take her chances outside. Better to freeze to death than get hacked up like Chad.

Or worse.

She flew to the window. But when she tried to lift it, the stubborn thing wouldn't budge.

She tried again. Still it didn't move.

It hadn't been opened in years, Annabel figured. It was painted shut decades ago. Cordelia had never brought fresh air into this room. Suddenly, Annabel panicked. Her palms got sweaty again. She was trapped.

“No!” she screamed.

She looked around for something with which to smash the window. The iron doorstop would have worked, but the cops had claimed it as evidence after Cordelia's death. There wasn't anything in the room that looked strong enough. Finally, Annabel ran over to the bed, hoping the little man would not leap out from under it and grab her ankle. She snatched the pillows off the bed and removed their cases. Then she opened Cordelia's drawer and yanked out one of the dead woman's lacy old slips. Annabel proceeded to wrap the slip around her right hand, and then pulled both pillowcases over that. Balling her hand into a fist, she walked back to the window.

She whacked the pane of glass as hard as she could.

“Oww!” she yelled.

But still it didn't break.

She tried once more. The glass in the old window didn't shatter, but it did pop out of the pane, tumbling down into the snow as a gust of cold air rushed into the room. But that wasn't good enough. The window had twelve panes, each separated by wooden frames. Annabel couldn't fit through the one pane that she'd removed. She'd have to pop out at least four of them, and she'd have to also break the wooden frames.

And try as she might, that old wood was impervious to her blows.

“Owwww!” Annabel cried out on her fifth attempt to break the wood. Even a second pane remained resistant to her assaults. She was making a great deal of noise. Jack would hear her. Or he'd be attracted by the sound of the wind gusting through the open space in the window. Snow was swirling into the room, encrusting the wall and the floor.

But she had to try. It was her only chance.

Annabel pulled her hand back to swing it once more against the window. But just as she did so, she spotted a sight she could not believe—something she hadn't dared let herself hope for.

A man was barreling up through the trees on a snowmobile.

It was Richard Carlson!

I
n the other room, Zeke was struggling to regain consciousness.

He dreamt. He was fifteen years old again, standing on the front porch, asking old Mr. Devlin for a job.

It was 1949. Back in those days, the Devlins maintained a farm out in back of the inn. A brood of hens clucked all around the place, and a rooster crowed from somewhere out in back. Old Mr. Devlin told Zeke he'd hire him to feed the chickens and cut the corn.

The young man ended up doing a lot more than that.

“Where is my baby?” the woman was screaming at him.

In his hands Zeke held the bloody pink arm. It looked as if it had come from a doll. The woman fainted dead away.

“Help me! Help me!” McGurk shrieked, as he was carried toward the fireplace.

Zeke grabbed hold of one leg, Mr. Devlin the other, but they were too late.

The sound of those creatures munching on McGurk's head haunted Zeke's dreams for the rest of his life.

But the worst, for him, was the attic.

In his dream, he walked those stairs, just as he had every day for the past twenty-three years. Everything that had come before had been terrible enough. But the attic these last two decades had been even more wicked.

She had been beautiful once.

Until the house had gotten to her.

The craziest thing of all, she loved the house. She would do anything for the house. The house that had tried to kill her.

In his dream, Zeke saw her as she once was. So beautiful. So innocent.

And then he saw her as she was today.

The knife—slashing Chad over and over, the way she had slashed others.

All for the house.

Zeke opened his eyes.

“No more,” he said to himself.

He would end this. He would do what successive generations of Devlins had failed to do. He would destroy the Blue Boy Inn.

“R
ichard! Oh, thank, God, Richard!”

He heard Annabel's voice as soon as he switched off the engine of the Ski-Doo. He lifted his goggles and looked up at the inn. There she was, shouting from a second-floor window over the front door. She had popped out a pane of glass, and was waving what looked like a pillowcase to get his attention.

“Annabel!” he shouted through the wind in response.

The snow had covered nearly the entire first floor of the house. From the second-floor window, it was only a matter of a few feet to jump to the little roof over the front porch, and then another couple of feet to the surface of the snow.

But given the wind, the cold, the softness of the snow, and the instability of the snowdrifts, Richard knew it was still going to be very difficult to get up there to Annabel and then get her back here to the Ski-Doo.

He started off across the snow.

“Annabel!” he called again.

Her face appeared at the open pane in the window. She placed her finger to her mouth, telling Richard to be quiet. He figured she was in danger. She didn't want someone else in the house to know that he was coming. He nodded and kept on approaching.

The snow, thankfully, was somewhat harder here. Richard sunk only to just below his knee with each step. He made it to the front porch, mostly buried in snow. By grabbing on to the trellis that was attached to the side of the porch, he was able to haul himself up onto the little roof, dislodging a couple of feet of snow as he went. His gloveless hand was freezing. He was pretty certain he'd end up with frostbite.

He was just grateful that it was his left hand. He'd need his right for shooting his gun, if necessary.

Standing on top of the porch roof, Richard could see Annabel's face much more clearly. She looked terrified. Her hair was disheveled, and Richard believed he could discern blood on her hands and clothes. She was wearing a coat. Apparently, she'd been thinking of going out the window herself.

He grabbed hold of the ledge that ran above the porch and out under the windows of the second floor. It was only about six inches wide, but once he'd knocked the snow off it, Richard figured the ledge would be sufficient to get him over to Annabel's window. He hoisted himself up. For a second, his bare hand slipped, and he dangled precariously over the snow. But he steadied himself, and scrambled up onto the ledge. He took a deep breath, and then began inching his way toward Annabel.

“Can you break the window frame?” she was asking him in a desperate whisper as he got closer. “Break it and we can get out of here.”

“Yes,” he told her. “I think so.”

He positioned himself outside the window and tried to punch it in. The wood was too strong. He would have thought such an old house would buckle easily under his fist.

“Oh, please,” Annabel was begging. “Jack's in here! He's gone mad! And there's a woman—with a knife!”

Richard tried punching through the window again, but still it held firm. Finally, he reached down and grabbed his gun. It wasn't easy to do. His gun had been encased in a protective pouch to shield it from the snow. He should have unsnapped it before climbing up here. Richard cursed himself for being too hasty. He had to get the gun out of the pouch while managing to remain balanced on the six-inch ledge outside the window.

He was successful. He gripped the gun by its barrel and used the grip to whack the window. On his second try, he heard the wood crack. On the third, it smashed inward, the glass panes popping out, one of them smashing onto the floor inside.

Richard swung himself inside. It was the only way he could help Annabel out.

She threw her arms around him. “Thank God!”

“Anyone else in the house that needs help?” he asked. “Is Chad—?”

Annabel began to cry. “He's dead. The woman killed him.”

“No one else then?”

“Well, there's Zeke,” she said. “He tried to help me. I don't know what's happened to him. Last I heard, he was in the room down the hall.”

“Stand by the window,” Richard said. “Be prepared to jump onto the porch roof, then follow the tracks I made back to the snowmobile. Do you know how to ride one?”

“Me?” Even under such distress, Annabel seemed to find the idea humorous. “No, not at all!”

Richard frowned. “If Zeke needs our help, I can't just leave him. If something happens to me, I want you to be able to escape on your own.” He handed her the keys. “I'll be right back. Just hold these, just in case.”

“I'll never be able to drive it . . .” Annabel said, but she zipped them inside the pocket of Neville's coat nonetheless.

“I can't just abandon a man who might be in danger here,” Richard said, looking over toward the door. “Tell me. Does Jack have a gun?”

“No, there's no gun in the house,” Annabel said. “But that woman has a knife—”

“Who is this woman? Do you know?”

Annabel shook her head. “I've never seen her before. But I think she's been living in the attic.”

Richard approached the door and listened intently through it. “I've got to go out there and see if I can spot Zeke. If he's not within sight, we'll beat it. But I have to at least give him a chance.” He turned the knob carefully.

“The door's locked,” Annabel told him.

But it wasn't. The door creaked open under Richard's grip. “Stay by the window!” he ordered Annabel, as he stepped out into the hallway, his gun held high. “And use the keys to get away on the snowmobile if you need to.”

The corridor was empty. Richard took three large steps down toward the only other room with an open door and glanced inside. All he could see was a tremendous amount of blood on the floor. A bloody sheet was crumpled in one corner, as if someone had tried to mop up the blood.

He couldn't go searching the house for Zeke. He might risk Annabel's life if he did so. He ran back down the hallway, throwing open doors as he went. The rooms were all empty. He'd done what he could

“Come on,” Richard said, holstering his gun and hurrying back into the room where Annabel awaited. “Let's get out of here. I'll send in reinforcements as soon as I can.”

Annabel gripped him by the shoulders. “I can't believe you made it here,” she said. “I really thought I was going to die.”

Richard gave her a small smile. “You can buy me a cup of coffee later to thank me. For now, let's just get the hell—”