Yet someone was home. A light burned in a second-floor window, and another up in the turret.
This is where I belong,
the girl had said.
Michael shook his head, brows knitted. In the backseat he heard Jillian mumble softly in her sleep. She whimpered, as though she were having a bad dream.
“Listen, are you sure—” he began, turning to the girl.
But even as he spoke, she popped open her door.
“Wait. Wait a second,” he said quickly.
She held the door open and turned to him. Her face had gone slack again, the same distant eyes, the same vacant expression she had worn when he had first gotten a close look at her illuminated by his brake lights.
“Come find me,” she whispered, her voice smaller than ever. She sounded even younger, then. A tiny child, afraid to go to sleep alone at night. Afraid of monsters in the closet.
“Find me if you can. Will you?”
Michael blinked, trying to make sense of it. He nodded. “Sure. Sure, I will. But listen, sweetie, I don't think you should—”
She turned away, running up the hill toward that dark shambles of a house. Her blond hair flew behind her as she ran, catching the moonlight, though the rest of her seemed to be enveloped by the night.
There was a dinging noise inside the Volvo. She had left the door open. Michael swore and glanced into the backseat. Jillian's expression was troubled, reinforcing his thought that she might be having a nightmare. He got out of the car, engine still running, and walked around to shut the passenger door. The interior of the Volvo went dark, save for the glow from the dash.
He turned to watch the girl as she reached the front porch of the house. She went up the steps and in moments she had disappeared inside as if the place had swallowed her. No one had come to the door to greet her. No other lights had come on. Save for those two illuminated windows, in fact, the place looked deserted. Uninhabited.
Michael took a step toward the house.
Wait. What the fuck are you doing?
He stopped, staring up at the house, conflicted. He swayed, his balance off, and bent his knees a little to keep from falling.
Just go. Get in the car and go. You heard her say it. This is where she belongs.
The temptation to drive away was powerful. Her parents had to be there. They were probably sleeping. Was she young enough to realize that she could just sneak in and they wouldn't know she was gone? Was it possible they could have been sleeping the whole time? But that made no sense. He had picked her up miles from here. On foot, it would have taken a long time for a little girl to travel that distance.
So what, Michael? What's your plan? If the place is empty, you'd have to go to the police. And if it's not, if the parents are freaks and that's why she was nervous, well, you'll still have to go to the police. It's like quantum science, that German physicist and his cat. As long as you don't go up there, you'll never know, so neither option is true.
He started around the front of the car, unwilling to even look up the hill again. But when he reached his door, when he opened it, he knew he was fooling himself. He had to know that the girl was safe.
Besides,
he thought, glancing around at the road and the woods,
you don't have a goddamn clue how to get out of here. Without some directions from her parents or whoever, you won't get home till morning.
With a sigh, he glanced into the backseat to check on Jillian. She was still completely out, but he felt a moment of trepidation leaving her alone in the car. Another look around, however, and he realized that the chances of another car going by, never mind anyone on foot, were next to nil at this time of night. Michael reached into the Volvo and turned the engine off. He pulled his keys out, shut the door, and clicked the button that locked the doors. The locks slid into place with a reassuringly solid thump.
Michael gazed up at the house again. Though his extremities were still sort of numb, he felt the bite of the chilly wind on his cheeks as he started up the hill. The moment he began to climb toward the house, however, he felt his equilibrium failing again.
How many bottles of Guinness did I have?
he wondered, and for the first time, realized that with his friends buying him drinks, he had lost track. Now here he was in the middle of nowhere, getting himself involved in something that was clearly none of his business.
He managed to stumble up the hill, though the longer he stayed on his feet, the more his stomach began to feel queasy. Michael was determined now, though. He was practically at their doorstep. There was no way he was going home without finding out exactly what was going on here. What kind of people were they?
Only when he reached the porch did he pause to really look at the house again. He gazed up at it, craning his head so far back that he nearly tumbled down the hill. It was even more dilapidated than he had thought. Several windows were cracked. On the porch there was a swing; it rocked gently, set in motion by the wind, emitting a steady creak that sent icy fingers of dread dancing up his spine.
The front door was not entirely closed. Even from the base of the stairs he could see that it hung open several inches, only darkness inside.
He wanted to turn around. To go straight to the car, to his blissfully unconscious wife, and get out of there. To forget about the little girl, and this entire night.
“Scooter?” he called, and immediately felt an utter fool. The name was so silly that saying it out loud was like nails on a blackboard.
“Hello?” he ventured. The only response was the creaking of the porch swing and the silence from the dark interior of the house.
Michael hesitated, glancing back down at the car. The face of that little lost girl was etched deeply in his mind.
Find me if you can. Will you?
What the hell had that meant?
He started up the steps, agonizingly aware of the moldering house. The paint was peeling, flaking. And as he climbed the stairs he caught a scent on the breeze, the smell of old newspaper and of decay.
“Hello?” he tried again.
Someone's got to be here. The girl went right in the front door. The place might feel empty, but it isn't. It can't be.
There was no doorbell.
Fuck it.
Someone
is here.
Michael knocked on the door three times in quick succession. The sound echoed down the hill and inside the house. The force of his knocking swung the door inward, until it hung half open.
“Hello,” he said again. Or perhaps this time he only thought it.
With one final glance down at the car, he took a breath, nodded determinedly, and went inside.
CHAPTER THREE
The house creaked with age and the wind. Michael had expected dust to fill his nose, had expected the place to be empty, save for dirt and broken furniture and cobwebs. But the house was not at all what he expected. What he found instead was worse, in a way.
Moonlight streamed in through the windows, casting a yellow gleam of illumination, though the corners were lost in shadow. It seemed odd, that luminescence. The moon had not seemed quite so bright when he was outside—not nearly bright enough to provide him so much light.
The house was clean. That was the thing that really surprised him. Not a single dust mote floated in the splashes of moonlight that dappled the foyer. Something struck him as odd about the wallpaper, and the paintings on the walls. As he ventured deeper into the house and peered into the moon-washed parlor to the right, Michael realized what it was.
The house was a relic out of time, as if it had been decorated in the 1940s and had remained untouched since then. It reminded him of his childhood, and of old Mrs. Standish, who had been born in the house across the street and had lived there until she died. Whenever Michael had to sell chocolate bars or raffle tickets as school fund-raisers, Mrs. Standish was always generous with her time and her money. By then she had lived in the house nearly eighty years, and even the knickknacks on her shelves had yellowed.
This place was like that. Blanched. Yellowed, and not just by the moonlight. The sofa and the carpet and the divan in the parlor were all faded. Michael stood in the foyer, looking in, and then his gaze drifted toward the grand staircase ahead of him, and the corridor that ran alongside it into the heart of the house.
It was like stepping into an old sepia-toned photograph.
Despite the cracked windows and the disrepair of the exterior, someone obviously lived here or it wouldn't have been kept clean at all. Michael shuddered as he thought of that little girl having to live in this dreary old place.
The girl.
He realized that he had not heard a single sound since he had entered. Now he took a deep breath and moved deeper into the house. He ought to call her name. He knew that. Yet he was reluctant to disturb the silence, as though doing so might awaken something better left sleeping.
He licked his lips to moisten them, the rich, earthy taste of stout still on his tongue and palate.
“Hello?” he ventured. His voice was a dry rasp, and the house seemed to swallow the sound.
Listing slightly to one side, as though trying to keep his balance on shipboard, he started down the corridor that ran beside the stairs. The air inside the house was crisp and unsettlingly odorless, so that when he caught just the whiff of a scent, it made him pause and blink his eyes several times, trying to determine what it was.
Cocoa. Hot cocoa.
Michael shook his head, knitting his brows. That made no sense. And anyway, the scent was gone almost the instant he had recognized it. He started forward again, only to stop himself at the realization that the arched entrance to the dining room was on his right. His head felt muddled again, worse than it had before. He peered into the grand old room, with its wide windows, its crystal chandelier, and the high-backed chairs around its long, elegant, claw-foot table.
Perfectly clean, yet the wallpaper here was just like elsewhere in the house, and the upholstery on the seats was faded.
How?
his mind ventured. Michael glanced back the way he had come and realized he had no memory of having walked the last dozen feet or so of that corridor. He glanced about him. The corridor continued straight ahead. To his left, beneath the stairs, was a heavy door that he felt sure led to the cellar.
Not there,
he told himself, shivering.
No way did that little girl go down there.
Ignoring the door under the stairs, he continued along the corridor. It was ridiculous, the way he swayed, as though he had continued drinking long after he knew he had stopped.
For the first time, Michael began to wonder if someone had doped him, or dropped something into his drink. Ecstasy, maybe. He had no experience with the drug, so he could not compare this light-headedness to its effects.
“Shit,” he said, pausing to bring a hand up to squeeze the bridge of his nose. He sighed and dropped his hand away.
And discovered he was standing in the middle of the kitchen.
“Jesus,” Michael whispered. He flinched back from what his eyes saw, D'Artagnan boots heavy on the kitchen floor. Abruptly he felt absurd, standing there in the kitchen of strangers in his masquerade costume.
He should leave, he knew that. He was intruding. A drunken man—
and yes, you are drunk. No use denying it.
An idiot in a costume, wandering around a house that didn't belong to him. What would the girl's parents think if they found him there, now? Would anything he could say to them come out right? Thoughts of the police continued to plague him.
But the house . . . there's something not right about this place.
“Fuck it,” he whispered. He had seen her come in. Despite its outer appearance, the place was clean enough. Someone lived here. That meant there was someone here who was responsible for her.
Michael felt himself fading again. The alcohol.
Or maybe it's not. Maybe it's just this place. Maybe I'm fading just like the wallpaper. Just like the furniture.
A frisson of alarm went through him. What the hell had he been thinking, coming in here? An image of Jillian passed out on the backseat of the car swam up into his mind. His responsibility was to her.
Heels rapping on the kitchen floor, he turned in a circle as he got his bearings. One door probably led to a pantry. There was another tall, wide door that he assumed would take him back to the main corridor. And then there was a narrow door that hung open to reveal a set of steps leading upward. Back stairs, not at all uncommon in houses of this age and size. But with the luminous moonlight not extending itself up into that stairwell, there were only shadows up there.
Fire.
Michael frowned, nostrils flaring. He sniffed the air, and caught the scent again. Logs burning in a fireplace.
He took a step toward the exit.
Peppermint.
Another, and he froze.
Popcorn.
Fresh popcorn, with plenty of butter.
A breeze came from somewhere else in the house, one of the cracked windows, he assumed. It caressed his face, and brought with it the smell of new-fallen snow. Yet with the next draft he was sure it was not that clean winter scent, but the smell of spring rain and flowers.
Michael listed so badly to one side that he nearly fell over.
It occurred to him that if someone had put something in his drink, he could be hallucinating. A finger of dread traced along his spine, and yet he also found the thought oddly comforting. It was, at least, an explanation.
He took a deep breath, careful to inhale through his mouth to avoid any more strange aromas. Then he started for the door again, intent on getting out of there. Whoever lived in this fucked-up house, he was happy to leave them to it. A tiny voice in the back of his head reminded him that he had no way of knowing how to get out of the neighborhood, but he ignored it. He just wanted to be gone from here.
His hand was on the knob. His eyelids fluttered and he thought he might black out again, or whatever it was that had been happening to him before. His fingers curled more tightly on the brass door handle, and he refused to let go. The feeling passed. He tugged the door open and was relieved to see the hallway beyond. A bit further down was the entrance into the dining room. On the far end he would emerge into the foyer, and the front door was waiting for him.
Come find me.
He blinked. The little girl—
Scooter, she said her name was Scooter
—had said those words. But now he'd heard them spoken again. Somewhere nearby. In the house.
Come find me.
Michael dragged the back of his hand across his mouth and glanced over at the narrow doorway, and the steps that rose up into darkness beyond.
“Olly-olly-all-come-free!”
The voice was distant, drifting down those stairs to him, but it made him stagger back a step, just the same. It was not in his head. It had not sprung from a bottle, like the cottony taste in his mouth and the way he had lost seconds here and there since entering the house.
The voice had broken the silence, and now it was followed by a rapid scatter of footsteps upstairs. Children. Not just the one girl, but several of them. He could hear their laughter, a distant trilling like morning songbirds, like water over stones in the brook behind his childhood home.
His hand came off the doorknob.
He blinked, took one swaying step, and opened his eyes to find himself on the third step up that narrow, shadowed stairwell.
Michael hesitated. His foot hovered, ready to descend, to retreat. But the laughter came again, from upstairs. In his mind he heard those words again.
Come find me.
Hadn't she seemed frightened then, when she spoke those words? Or, if not frightened, then at least very sad?
She had. He knew she had.
But now there was this sound, the giddy laughter of little girls.
The house was a mystery. One that made his skin crawl with doubt and reluctance. Michael just wanted to be gone, but that did not keep his foot from moving up instead of down. One step. Then another. Passing up through the inky blackness of the back stairs until he emerged in a long second-story corridor, lined with rooms. Every door hung open. The moonlight spilled like mist from those open doors, illuminating the hall.
It's a dream,
he thought with a smile of disbelief.
I've passed out somewhere. That's the only answer. I'm asleep.
But the texture of the costume was rough on his skin. The boots were too tight on his feet. And he could still taste the stout in his mouth.
Cinnamon.
There was no breeze this time, but his nostrils were suddenly filled with the scent. Not just cinnamon, but sugar and baking apples. Apple pie, maybe. But layered with cinnamon.
A floorboard creaked behind him, down in the kitchen. Michael glanced down; in the narrow outline of the door at the bottom of the steps, something shifted. He was looking at it dead on, but it moved like the sort of phantom that usually appeared only in peripheral vision. So quickly that it was little more than an afterimage.
It left him only with the impression of silver, the color of moonlight on the surface of a lake at night. A ripple of silver. And a whisper. There had been a whisper, too. Not words. And not the wind. The whisper of something moving, pushing the air around it. Rustling down there in the kitchen, with not even a light sheen of dust to disturb as it passed.
Michael stared for several seconds down those stairs, trying to get another glimpse of whatever he had seen.
Another chorus of girlish laughter came to him from the back of the house. He looked down the hall.
Something flashed in the moonlight, ducking into one of the rooms back there. A little rush of air escaped his lips, and he stared again, narrowing his gaze, trying to make sense of what his eyes were showing him. A ripple of silver. An afterimage that stayed on his eyelids when he closed them, as though he had looked at the sun too long.
“That's enough,” he whispered, the words painfully simple.
He turned his back on the giggles and the shifting moonlight and started toward the front of the house. Far along the hall, he could see the balustrade at the top of the grand staircase. Michael began to move more quickly, his pulse racing. His own breathing was too loud in his ears. All he wanted was to get the hell out of there before he blacked out again, before his feet could take him in a direction no sober man would go.
Smells assaulted him now. Too many for him to separate them. It was as though he stumbled now through fairgrounds or a carnival, so overwhelming were the odors that filled the air. His stomach churned and bile burned up the back of his throat. His legs felt weak. A shudder went up his spine, and he knew if he turned and glanced back the way he had come he would see those silver ripples slipping from room to room, or gliding up the stairs in pursuit.
A soft chant began up ahead, coming from one of those side doors.
One, two, buckle your shoe.
Three, four, shut the door.
Five, six, pick up sticks.
Seven, eight, don't be late.
Nine, ten, do it again . . .
He stood frozen in the hall, listening, his heart pounding so hard in its bone cage that his chest hurt.
A little bit faster or your turn will end.
The laughter of small children seemed to fill the hall, streaming from every room. It was joined by a rhythmic shuffle, the backbeat of a jump rope. The sound of footsteps echoed off the walls. Michael shifted his gaze from left to right, certain he would see a little girl run into the hall, or do a ballerina pirouette.
The singsong chant faded. Once more he began to move, thinking only of leaving, of getting to the front stairs and the hell out of there. He reached an open door on the left. From within he heard a soft, lisping, baby-girl voice singing “I'm a Little Teapot.” Trembling, he paused an instant, then stepped over the threshold.
A child's bedroom. Pale and bleached of life, washed in moonlight. No sign of any occupant at all, and now the voice he had heard was hushed, distant, as though it came from a closet, or from outside the window.
“. . . Here is my handle, here is my spout . . .”
Spiders of dread crept all over his body. He flinched, staring at that empty room. As he turned to withdraw, he noticed the scrawl. Graffiti snaked all over one wall of that bedroom, but these were no filthy limericks or spray-painted gang tags.
Miss Friel Cuts the Cheese,
announced one.
Nikki and Danielle were here. Ruthie Loves Adam. Lizzie & Jason, TLA.
TLA.
Michael hadn't seen those three letters put together since grade school, but their meaning was fresh in his mind.
True Love, Always.
The sort of notion kids believed in, before they began to understand just how many obstacles there were to get in the way.
TLA
seemed so damned simple then. But
True Love, Always
could be hard work. Even when you got lucky, like he had, finding Jillian. Even then, it was work.