Temptation: A Novel (32 page)

93. Fear

The front door to the house is partially open. I knock on it just to be polite

even though that’s kind of insane when you think of it

and then wait for several minutes.

Nothing.

“Hello?”

I don’t see the figure who was waving toward me. I don’t hear anything either.

If someone’s in there, I’ll see him soon enough.

I slowly open the door. Surprisingly, it doesn’t creak. Doors always creak in the movies when they shouldn’t. Right?

It’s a small relief.

The house doesn’t look completely empty since there are lights on. I wonder where Gus is and if he’s going to wander out of the family room eating a fudge stick and picking his nose. I call out for anyone again but don’t hear anything.

I am standing in the room full of dead animal heads hanging on the walls.

I hate this room.

The bulging shapes on the walls around me feel like an animal intervention. I definitely want to get out of this
room.

I take a few steps and hear the wood floor creak. But that’s all I hear.

“Christopher.”

I jerk around. If my head weren’t attached to my body it would be rolling around like a bowling ball. The voice is low, whispered but somehow loud.

It’s that same voice. The one I heard when I crashed below the cabin right after moving here. The one I heard in the tunnel below my house.

The voice with the quasi-lisp.

“Chrisssss.”

It’s coming from upstairs.

Leave now get out of here right now.

I grip a fist and hold the flashlight.

No.

It’s just in my mind. Like the nightmares I’ve been having and the visions.

“Move it,” I tell myself, trying to sound like Coach Brinks.

The voice isn’t the only thing that seems and feels … off. It’s everything. Not just the fact that I’m in this huge house by myself. Trespassing.

No.

It’s this feeling—the same feeling I’ve gotten ever since coming here. That something’s right there in front of me, something I can touch or even taste, something right in front of my face, yet I’m alone.

What’s that?

I hear something in the hallway behind me. In a room next to me. Footsteps. Voices. Shuffled, muffled, distorted.

I turn around and know someone’s going to be there.

But nothing.

I feel cold as I begin to walk up the steps. Something brushes by me.

No that’s impossible

But it
feels
like something—no, someone—brushes by me going up the stairs.

Again. Something touches my neck. Then my arm. Then wipes my leg.

I’m by the wide stairs and I sprint up them, the noise downstairs getting louder. Now I feel like I’m being touched all over, but I don’t see anything.

I get to the top of the stairs and wipe myself all over like I’ve just run out of a cave and I’m covered with cobwebs. But my hand can’t wipe off anything.

The voice comes again.

“Chrisssss.”

I shiver, the wave going all the way to my feet.

Get out of here Chris now.

These little games began when I checked out that cabin behind my house. But this isn’t an abandoned shack, and that voice isn’t in my head.

I feel like I’m being watched, like there are ghosts and spirits all around me. It’s hard to take in my surroundings as I head down the hallway to the first room on the left.

The door is open, a faint light spilling out of it.

I feel something dripping down my back. Again I try to wipe it away, but my hand comes back empty.

My arms and legs feel weak and loose.

Then I walk inside and see the figure sitting in the chair behind the big desk. He smiles but doesn’t look evil or demented.

It’s the man I saw that day on the deck of the house. The man who surely just got me to come inside.

He’s bald, except for white hair on the sides. He’s got a round face and smiles a friendly smile.

This can’t be my great-grandfather, because this guy looks like he’s only fifty or sixty.

But he’s not Mr. Staunch so who is he?

“You’ve come to the right place, Christopher.”

The voice is the same.

“Please, come in,” he says.

I feel my heart beating. The room is spinning.

What am I doing here?

“You’ve come for answers, dear boy. And you’ve waited long enough. It’s time, don’t you think?”

I nod and look around, down the hallway and back down the stairs.

“We’re alone, just you and me. Please, come in.”

I take a few steps into the room but then stay put, close to the entrance and the stairs and the exit. The man leans back in the chair, tightening his narrow lips, gazing at me with eyes that don’t seem to blink.

“I started right around your age too,” he says in a voice, strong and Southern and in no rush to speak. “The visions, the dreams. Seeing things that weren’t there. Feeling them too. It’s okay. You will learn to control these in time.”

“Who are you?”

“I think you know, even if your mind and heart doubt it. My name is Walter Kinner. They used to call me Wally as a child, but I ended that soon enough. There is no dignity in Wally, don’t you agree?”

“You don’t look—”

“Old? Old enough?” He laughs. “Can’t see the resemblance? I can see it, Chris. You’ve got the Kinner genes in you. Do you ever. Like your uncle. Except, well, I would say even more of a Kinner than Robert.”

“Where is my uncle?”

He just shakes his head. The man who I still don’t truly believe is my great-grandfather is wearing dress pants and a button-down shirt, as if he might be leaving for the office any minute. He wears a big ring on one hand—not a wedding ring, but something that looks as if it were made a long time ago.

“That is a good question, Chris. I was hoping you’d help find him. But he’s no use to us, not anymore.”

I look around the room. On one wall is a massive bookshelf with tons of books. There’s a shelf unit with various things on it, like mementos or something.

“You won’t find anything noteworthy in this room. The man of the house—he’s too smart for that.”

“How’d you know—can you read my mind?”

“It’s not quite like that, Christopher. Tell me something. Do you have thoughts running through your head all day long? Like a tornado that just keeps going? Even when you’re exhausted, the thoughts and voices keep going?”

I’ve begun to think that it’s ADD, but then again that’s what everybody thinks.

“Or tell me this,” he says, his dark eyes never leaving mine for even one second. “Do you ever get the idea that you can hear what someone else is thinking? Of course, you just assume it’s your own thoughts running wild. But how often does this thought occur to you? Right?”

“Are you really my relative?”

“Yes. This place is special. I know that the fine young pastor already introduced you to the miracles of the falls, correct? Amazing what the water can do to keep you looking younger.”

He smiles, and I feel a wave of ice prickle throughout me.

“There is something that our family—the men in our family—have been able to do since our forefather escaped from France and came to this place. This place that’s easily overlooked. This ‘ability,’ I’ll call it, was something that has been transferred down. Sometimes, well, not always so successfully. Sometimes it drives men to madness, or to brutality. There’s a reason the family line is devoid of males. But you, Christopher—moving away was perhaps the best thing that could have happened. It was always planned like that. And some plans work.”

“What was planned?” I ask.

I’m feeling a little better now, now that I don’t feel anything or hear anything other than his voice.

Go ahead, call him Walter, but don’t call him Wally.

“The interesting thing,” Walter says, ignoring my question as he shifts his chair back to stand, “is your issue of faith. Or rather, your lack of it.”

I swallow. He doesn’t come closer, but stands right by the desk. He’s surprisingly tall.

“Do you know the greatest thing about the world today? It’s what people think of God and Satan and all the angels and demons. It’s not that they openly disbelieve, Chris. It takes strength to do that, a strength like you have. But no. Most people are indifferent. Most people are
busy.”

He says that word as if it sounds like “bussssssy.” Or maybe that’s just my imagination.

“They view God as some all-powerful buffoon. They view the Devil as a silly magician with horns and a pitchfork who raises his voice but in the end really doesn’t do anything. Time and time again, God and Satan are put into tiny little boxes that people watch at the end of the day. But when it comes right down to it, they’re no longer afraid, are they? They’re more afraid of a hurricane or the stock market or a villain in a Batman movie than they are of these beings they’ve made into caricatures.”

Walter moves toward me, and I buckle back. He stops and waves a hand, telling me it’s okay.

“Chris—you have the power to see behind the mask. To go behind the curtains. To see what others cannot and will not see.”

I wait. I wait because I want more. Because this is making no sense and all the sense in the world and eventually, down the road one day maybe, I’ll connect the two.

“In Old Testament times, it was different. Men knew what an angel crossing their path looked like. They would fall down on their face in terror. Didn’t matter whether that angel was fallen or not. But nowadays, nobody notices anything anymore. Nowadays, the supernatural and the spiritual blend in with the superficial and the simple-minded. Everything is a joke. Nothing is real. Nothing means anything.”

He pauses, looking at me with hardening eyes and intense lips. “And
that
is where we get our power.
That
is exactly why the work we do is worthy. Why it continues to be necessary.”

“What work? What do you do?”

“Do you believe what I’m saying?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

“You’ve been saying that for a year. But all the things you’ve witnessed—after all of that, how can you not believe?”

“Believe in what? In God?”

“No, my boy.” He laughs and shakes his head, going over to the bookshelf to pick up a book. He waves it at me. “This is a Bible, son. But this only tells half the story.”

“Half?”

“Of course God is real. Even those who choose to say He does not exist know deep down that they’re fooling themselves. It’s not about believing in God. It’s about believing in yourself. This whole mind-set of forgiveness and peace and love—those are the things that make people disbelieve, that make them angry. As they should, because that is where the fallacy comes in.”

Again, I’m lost. I don’t know what he’s talking about or preaching for.

“The most powerful thing in this world, Christopher. The pastor told you what it was. It’s not love. It’s not for God so loving the world. It’s fear.
That
is what drives this world, and that is what makes people like you and me so powerful. Because—once you learn to control those fears and have others fear you—then life …”

He smiles.

I feel dizzy. Trapped. Cold. And confused.

“You wanted answers, my young man,” he says, tapping the desk. “They don’t reside in here. Nor do they reside with the owner of this house. What you will learn is that they reside in your heart. The answers you’ve been wrestling with time and time again.”

“What if I—everything you say—”

“Come on, spit it out.”

“What if you’re just crazy like the rest of the people around here?”

Walter puts the Bible on the desk, then stands in front of it.

Then he does something utterly bizarre.

He stands there, about ten feet away from me, extending his arms and opening up his hands as if he’s trying to catch falling raindrops or snowflakes.

“Crazy is not the word I would use, Christopher.”

His eyes and lips turn into a mocking smile.

Then something happens.

Those hands of his suddenly begin to change.

They begin to turn

no

frail and bony. Then spotted. Then sickly.

This happens with his face too.

All of a sudden, he begins hunching over. His hair disappearing, his round face shriveling, the eyes