House Haunted (38 page)

As Brennan entered the cellar, the dial on his meter flipped over to maximum and the faceplate shattered.

“Holy shit,” he said. The cellar was rumbling like a steam turbine about to blow, veins of pulsing red fire crawling over the walls, ceiling, and floor.

Falconi jumped down beside him. “Jesus.” He kneeled to study the two bodies on the floor, one barely recognizable, the other a torso in a suit, with a jelly-beaten head. In the pocket of the second corpse was a Russian handgun with a silencer. Falconi wrapped it in a handkerchief and put it in his pocket.

“Gaimes killed these two,” Falconi said. He took out the .44 Magnum in his shoulder holster.

Putting the deionizer down, Brennan cried out suddenly, throwing his hands to his eyes.

“What is it?” Falconi said.

Brennan's breathing steadied. Slowly, he took his hands away from his eyes, blinking. “It's all right,” he said. “I told you she could get to me like this. I'd still be blind if I didn't know it wasn't real. Just stay together, like I told you.”

They went over the rest of the cellar, searching in vain for the weapon that had been used on the two corpses.

“Let's go upstairs,” Brennan said.

Brennan bearing his equipment, they mounted the steps to the first floor. Falconi moved in front when they reached the top. “Now I go first,” he said.

He eased the cellar door open. It hinged back, showing a kitchen with wildly pulsing walls. The hum was even louder. His .44 out, held up in front of him, Falconi stepped out into the kitchen, turning his gaze from side to side. He saw nothing.

Then he did. On the kitchen counter was a pile of severed human fingers that twitched, squirting blood from their cut ends, jerking away from each other, dancing over the countertop.

Falconi closed his eyes; opened then. The fingers were gone.

“Shit,” he muttered, checking to see that there really was only a clean countertop where the fingers had been.

“Another hallucination,” Brennan said, entering the kitchen behind Falconi.

They heard rattling chains, the drag of metal across the floor, thumps, echoing moans.

“Welcome to a real haunted house,” Brennan said. The sounds abruptly ceased.

“Let's check the pantry,” Brennan said.

Falconi heard a sound at the cellar door behind him. He wheeled, looked into the cellar opening.

He was no longer in the house.

He was on a roof on East Thirty-third Street, in New York City. A wind was blowing. It was 1973, the last week in March. He was a rookie and there was a tight knot of fear in his belly.

The woman in the picture on his desk was standing not five feet from him.

They had told him how to handle these things at the academy, but he had never done it for real. She looked less scared than he was. In fact, she looked calm. She was overweight, and she wore a housecoat, and her hair was in tangles, blown by the blustery wind.

A windy March day. The sky was deep cold blue, warming toward spring. The day before, the temperature had risen to fifty-five degrees, but now it was back down in the forties. There were fat round clouds blowing through the blue sky.

“Don't come any closer,” the woman said, matter-of-factly. Standing on the ledge of the brick wall, three feet above the roof, she looked like she could touch the clouds if she wanted to.

He inched his foot closer, trying to keep a reasonable look on his face, and said, “Why don't you sit down on the wall and we'll talk about it?”

She calmly turned away from him.

He was supposed to keep talking, to wait while his partner got the jump team in place with its nets, but he was sure she was about to go.

He lunged, catching the fabric of her housecoat at the shoulder as she stepped off. He dug his fingers into the housecoat. The top of the ledge hit painfully into his underarm, but he held on.

She pried at his fingers, trying to make him let go.

His arm was turning numb. He edged his face up and over the wall. She looked up at him.

“Help me,” he said, breathing hard. “Hold on to my arm and help me. Please.”

The calm look never left her face. “I told you not to come any closer.” She let go of his hand, shrugged herself out of the housecoat, her arm pulling past the shoulder he held tightly, and fell soundlessly to the pavement below.

He stood up, gasping for breath, trying not to cry, shaking, holding the housecoat. He looked over the wall, saw her bent body in the street, the jump team looking up at him, their nets half out of their van, a crowd already forming around the body. . .

He looked over the wall; the March air was so cold. He climbed up on the wall, looked down. He let go of the housecoat, watched it flutter down in the wind.

You were wrong
, a voice told him.
You killed her
. . .

“Yes . . .”

Jump. . .

He stepped—

“Lieutenant!”

Falconi looked down the cellar steps, felt himself losing his balance. A hand was on him, steadying him.

He turned around. Brennan pulled him back away from the cellar opening.

“What the hell happened?” Brennan asked.

Falconi looked into the cellar. “The woman in the picture. I killed her . . .”

Brennan shook him. “Falconi!”

Falconi's eyes, his mind, were elsewhere. “I
killed
her, it was my fault,
I should have waited ...”

Brennan shook him again. “Falconi!”

Tears were streaming from Falconi's eyes; he stared into the black opening of the cellar.
“My God, I didn't listen, was wrong, I killed her. . .

Falconi blinked; he turned toward Brennan and his eyes seemed to refocus on his surroundings. “Jesus,” he said.

“Listen to me,” Brennan said. “If she can get to you with this, she'll use it again.”

Falconi had come back to himself. He shook Brennan off, took a shuddering breath. “I'm all right,” he said.

Brennan looked at him levelly. “Are you sure?”

Falconi seemed himself again. His gaze was as level as Brennan's, “Yes.” He edged past Brennan, away from the cellar door.

Brennan took him by the arm. “Stay with me.” Falcon nodded.

They checked the kitchen, the small pantry, laundry room behind it. In the windowed dryer door Falconi saw a severed head, bobbing languidly from side to side.

He closed his eyes; when he opened them, the head was gone.

They moved cautiously through the swinging doors of the kitchen, checking the rooms down the hallway. All were empty. The noise was almost deafening. The walls brightened; veins of red lights bulged out with each crimson beat. The hum deepened to a rumbling roar.

When they edged out into the living room, Falconi discovered two more corpses just inside the parlor, near the foyer leading to the front door.

Falconi examined papers on the bodies. “The missing Russians,” he said, raising his voice to be heard. He studied the bullet wound in Viktor Borodin's body, an entrance in the throat out the back of the head. “Gaimes didn't do this. He never used a gun. He never would, according to Minkowski. Too impersonal.” He took out the gun he'd found on the body in the cellar, studied the barrel. “The fellow with the suit on downstairs must be the Pole.”

Brennan said, “The other one in the cellar must have been the kid from Bermuda. That leaves Ray Garver and Laura Hutchins. West and north. Your man Guinty said the glow was stronger from the west bedroom.”

“We'll check them both.”

One step at a time, they mounted the stairs to the second floor. Falconi held his .44 ready in front of him.

The north bedroom faced them. Brennan stood before the door, examining the cracks in it.

“Get back,” Falconi said. He stood with both hands on the .44 and pushed the door open.

Ready to fire, Falconi moved quickly into the room. “Jesus.”

Brennan followed him in, and gagged at the sight of what was on the bed. He turned to lean on the doorjamb.

As Falconi joined him he said, “Ray Garver's the only one left.”

From the west bedroom came a scream, followed immediately by another.

Falconi and Brennan ran toward the west door. The screams built to a frenzy. Falconi, holding his gun up, motioned Brennan to stand on the opposite side.

Falconi was turning to kick the door in when it flew open. There was a burst of screeching within. A man in a wheelchair hurtled by them. The chair hit the second floor railing and burst through. The man rose out of the chair in midflight, hands before him like a diver, and plunged to the floor below, hitting hard.

Falconi was moving to the stairway when Brennan grabbed his arm. Falconi turned to look into the doorway of the north bedroom.

The figure of a young girl with red hair stood there. She was almost solid, floating just above the floor, her feet nearly touching it.

Red lines of force from the walls and ceiling were concentrating, flowing and rising up through the floor into her.

“Soon . . .” she said, her voice a deep, echoing well, at me with the rumbling generator's roar of the house.

“Go downstairs,” Brennan said to Falconi, “and get that man out of the house.” He set the deionizer down, quickly opened the case and turned it on.

Falconi's eyes were riveted to Bridget, who floated serenely in the flowing web of red energy.

“Move!” Brennan said, pushing Falconi until he turned and stumbled down the stairs.

Brennan turned up the deionizer, and suddenly the flow of energy to Bridget diminished. The serene look on her face vanished and she focused her eyes on Brennan.

“You can't stop me . . .” the bottomless voice said. “Where is Bridget?” Ted Brennan said.

“In here. In the tunnel between worlds. She's been here all this time. Soon the fourth will be dead, and then I will enter this world.” The thing, using Bridget's lips, smiled. “This life.”

“Let me speak with her.”

“No.” The thing stared malevolently at Brennan. “Soon you'll die. You'll all die.”

The thing began to moan, a low, rattling, grinding sound. Once again, the red flow of energy began to increase.

Brennan glanced down at Falconi, who was bent over the prone body of the man in the wheelchair. “Well?”

Falconi looked up. “He's still alive. I think his neck's broken. If I move him, he might die on me.”

“If you don't get him out of the house, we're all dead!” Falconi lifted the man gently under the arms and tried to straighten his broken body.

Brennan adjusted the deionizer; once again, the flow of red fire to Bridget diminished.

This time, when Bridget's eyes focused on Brennan, the malevolence was gone.

“Bridget!” Brennan shouted.

Bridget opened her mouth. “Yes . . .” a tiny, weak voice spoke from a great distance.

“Bridget,” Ted Brennan said, “you have to fight it!”

“It has me trapped, in the tunnel . . .”

Brennan fumbled the music box from pocket. “Listen to this, Bridget.”

The mouth opened, but no whisper of sound came out. Brennan wound the music box and opened it.

“Do you know this song, Bridget? Do you remember it?”

“Yes . . .” Suddenly the voice was stronger. Tears tracked her cheeks. As the melody began, she looked at Brennan and sang in a sweet, sad voice:

“Why do you weep?

The bells are not ringing,

The town is asleep.

The night at your window

Is nestled in deep.

The stars in the heavens

Are gently singing—

Why do you weep?”

“Do you remember it?” Bridget said, beginning to cry.

A gate opened in Brennan's mind. “My God.” He knew the song, now. He saw the soft, indistinct face looming over him, heard the resigned sadness, the infinite sorrow in the voice.

He saw the face of his mother.

It was Bridget.

“My God. My God.” Brennan fell to his knees. He looked up at her, and she was smiling through her tears. “Mother . . .”

“Yes,” she said. “When this began, when this horrible thing took me so long ago, I began to call you. It took so long for you to come. So long . . .”

“My father . . .”

“His family had money. They took you away from me. My family agreed. It was so easy to listen to the sounds in my head. Before I killed myself, I wrote your father a note asking him to never tell you who I was. I was so ashamed. Your father loved me as much as he loved you, and he followed my wishes. I was so wrong. But I got through to you. I got through . . .”