House (26 page)

“There's only one of her,” Leslie said.

“We should cut
her
,” Randy said.

Susan looked up at the writing on the wall.

The Wages of Sin Is One Dead Body
“Maybe you all deserve to die tonight. That's what he wants. That's . . . all of us dead. I thought . . . but I think you're just going to get us all killed. You . . .” Her next few words were garbled. “You . . . ba . . . the way out . . . hate . . . blood.”

Susan looked at them as if she hadn't noticed her own speech skipping.

“Only those with eyes to see the truth can see it,” she said. “I think you're all blind as ba . . . the . . . finish . . . ma . . . Jack's going to ki . . . heart . . . to die.”

“She's with White!” a Leslie said.

A shiver touched the skin on Jack's back. What if she was actually White's ally? It would explain how she'd managed to live so long.

He reached for his weapon.

The black smoke began to pour out of the cut in his palm while his hand was extended toward Leslie.

He froze, stunned by the surreal sight. Black fog pouring out, falling vertically, hitting the ground and spreading. Like liquid nitrogen.

How was that possible? He was unreal? The
other
Jack was the real Jack?

His eyes met Leslie's, which were stricken with terror.

“I told you, Jack,” Susan said. “You're all guilty . . . You . . .”

But the rest of her sentence was smothered by a loud moan that reverberated around them.

A thick column of black smoke poured out of the large round vent near the ceiling through which Jack and Leslie had first entered the room. Fog just like the fog that came from Jack's hand. An inky black streak over two feet in diameter. It shot out several feet then took a turn straight down and flowed to the floor, where it spread toward them.

Two thoughts collided in Jack's mind. The first was that Randy was going to most certainly kill him now. And then the other Jack, whom he'd believed to be the real Jack.

The second was that his only chance at survival was to grab the gun still in Leslie's frozen hand as she stared at the black smoke now filling the room from the bottom up.

The fog rushed around his feet and sent a slicing pain up his legs.

The Leslies screamed. The Randys backpedaled in a hopeless attempt to avoid the rapidly rising blanket of fog.

The fog touched the door where Susan stood, slamming it shut in her face. If she was with White, she was leaving them to their own demise.

Jack stepped forward and grabbed Randy's shotgun from Leslie's grip. He pivoted, expecting hot lead to fill his body at any moment, though he wasn't sure he'd be able to distinguish it from the pain that now screamed through his body. The fog was like an acid.

The other Randy saw what he'd done and swung his gun back in line.

Jack lunged to his left and fired at Randy.

The fog swirled over his head before he could see what, if any, damage he'd inflicted. The sound of another shot buffeted his ears. He chambered another round and fired blindly in the direction of the sound.

Then the room filled with a series of booms, like rolling thunder, as shotguns on all sides fired in rapid succession. Screams and grunts.

The sound of bodies falling. Guns clattering on concrete.

Then nothing but the beating of Jack's heart to accompany the ringing in his ears.

A whooshing sound enveloped him. The black fog began rushing back into the ceiling the way it had come. Jack stood still, blinded by the smoke. He hadn't been hit, but he suddenly wasn't sure that was a good thing. What if Leslie had been struck? Or Stephanie?

His body was shaking from head to toe, more from shock than from the pain brought on by the smoke. Randy had gotten his standoff.

The smoke level fell below his head.

Leslie stood on his left, staring. One Leslie.

Randy and Stephanie stood on his right, shocked. One Randy, one Stephanie.

Then the black fog was gone. No Susan, no dead bodies. Jack, Leslie, Randy, and Stephanie stared at one another in silence.

It was Stephanie who broke the quiet. “Oh, God,” she mumbled. And by the way she said it, Jack thought it might be a prayer of desperation.

He looked at his palm. No fog, just red blood. But staring up at them all, Jack knew a few other things now.

He knew that Randy intended to kill him.

He knew he had what it took to kill Randy.

He knew he could leak black smoke.

And he knew that he was guilty of a desire to kill Randy, of bitterness toward Stephanie, of a hundred other smudges on his life. And this killer didn't seem the kind to let them slide.

Not without one dead body. House rules.

The object of this game was to survive by killing, but Jack was sure that real survival wasn't simply a matter of killing or being killed. It was really about confronting the wages of sin, whatever that meant. It was about life as much as it was about death. What kind of contest didn't consist of at least two contestants? If this was a contest between good and evil, then where was the good?

Jack didn't know. And this, too, returned the tremor to his knees.

27
4:48 am

IT TOOK THEM SEVERAL MINUTES TO SETTLE into the full dread of their predicament. They were truly, hopelessly trapped by a killer who could reach out and tinker with their lives at his whim in a house that seemed to flow at his will.

Something had happened to Stephanie, but she wasn't talking about it. Her breath smelled like sulfur, and she was oddly quiet.

Jack didn't want to appear threatening to Randy, so he gave the shotgun to Leslie and quietly asked her to keep an eye on Randy. He went out of his way to appear gracious to the man, knowing that he would look for any excuse to force a confrontation.

That left Randy to stew and occasionally glance up at the words on the wall.

The Wages of Sin Is One Dead Body
They tried to make sense of the multiple characters and the fog that had swallowed them. They'd all seen the same thing; that much was a comfort, however slight. And they all agreed that the house was deliberately manipulating them to expose their own base tendencies. Their sins, maybe. Their eventual submission to the killer's demand that they surrender to the murderer in them all.

This they all agreed on, with Leslie's help. But despite her pinpointing the issues at hand, this shared knowledge didn't offer any solutions. Understanding that you were falling down a cliff didn't provide the proverbial branch to break your fall. Leslie could describe her understanding of the cliff, but she couldn't point to any branches.

“We're screwed,” Randy said after a lull in their otherwise-intense discussion. “We're out of options. We're in the sticks in a possessed house that's making us see ghosts or whatever these things that keep popping up are.” His voice was resigned. “We're all going to die.”

No one argued.

Jack walked over to Leslie and casually took the gun back.

“There's only one way out of this,” Randy said.

The gun felt surprisingly comfortable in Jack's hands. Knowing what he did about Randy gave him half a mind to end it right here with a little standoff of his own. He was justified. He knew the man fully intended to kill him at some point.

“What's that, Randy?” he asked, pumping the action. Only two shots left—he would have to be careful.

“You know what I'm talking about,” Randy said. He looked at the words on the wall.

“Tell me.” Jack faced him, suddenly itching for the same confrontation on Randy's mind.

“He wants one of us dead,” Randy said, withdrawing the knife from his belt.

“You want to kill me, Randy? Hmm? Is that it?”

“I didn't say that. Do you want me dead?”

“Did I say that?”

They stared off in silence.

“I'm just saying that he's got us trapped down here for as long as it takes for one of us to kill another. Someone has to die. Either one of us, or the girl.”

“The girl? Who said anything about the girl?”

“White told me. The others don't count. Betty, Stewart, Pete—they don't mean anything. But Susan does.”

“Unless she's working with him,” Leslie said. “She's gone again. Why? There's something wrong with her.”

“Maybe,” Jack said. “I'm not willing to concede that—”

“Well, what are you willing to concede?” Randy demanded. “He wants a dead body, we give—”

“You
really
believe he'll be satisfied with just one of us blowing someone else's head off?” Jack said.

“I think he'll follow his own rules,” Leslie said. “He may not let us all live, but as long as we don't give in to his demands, he won't kill us, either. We start killing each other, and the game is over.”

“What's our time?” Randy said.

Jack checked his watch. The crystal was cracked. “Four fifty-two.”

Randy chuckled ruefully. Sweat beaded his face. “An hour and change. If one of us doesn't kill someone else pretty soon, he's going to kill us—”

The door rattled. Fists beat on it. “You in there? Let us in!”

A man's voice. Not the familiar sound of White's deep voice behind a tin mask.

Stephanie backed away from the door. “Is . . . is that him?”

“Could be him without the mask,” Randy said, standing and raising the knife.

He started forward.

Jack grabbed his arm. “Hold on!”

Pounding again. “This is Officer Lawdale. Open this door immediately!”

Leslie looked a question at Jack.
Who?

“Lawdale! The highway patrolman Steph and I ran into.”

Leslie's face brightened. She ran forward, unlocked the door, and pulled it open.

Highway Patrolman Morton Lawdale stood in the doorway dressed in the same tight gray uniform they'd seen him in yesterday.

He had a revolver out, cocked by his ear. He glanced behind him and then entered the room, locking the door behind him.

“Well, well, well,” Lawdale said, scanning the room. “What kind of mess have we gotten ourselves into now?”

28
4:53 am

THE GAME HADN'T CHANGED, BUT THERE was a new feeling in the air. For the first time Jack felt a genuine sense of hope. Lawdale was undoubtedly quirky, but he carried himself with authority and confidence, something they all desperately needed.

Sweat darkened his gray shirt, which was otherwise dry. Apparently the rain had let up. His black leather boots were muddy, but Lawdale was unscathed. His now hatless head was covered in close-cropped blonde hair. He'd armed himself to the teeth before coming in. A gun on each hip, two more behind the belt at his back, blades on each ankle. Lawdale was nothing short of a gunslinger born into the wrong century.

To his knowledge no one had seen him enter the building, which he'd done without waiting for the backup he'd called in.

After grilling Leslie and Randy as to their identities and then assuring himself that each of the four was not mortally hurt, Lawdale demanded they tell him what had happened, all of it, and they fed it to him in long run-on sentences interrupted by his constant insistence for clarification. As the story quickly unfolded, Lawdale began to pace.

The house was still moaning and screeching above them, attracting his periodic glances to the ceiling. He offered no judgment one way or the other.

He told them how he'd come across Jack's car. His headlights had caught the red taillights of a car in the bush as he passed. Ordinarily he would have called it in without stopping, but he recognized Jack's blue Mustang.

“So we can get out of here, right?” Stephanie said. “You got in, so we can get out.”

“Hold on to your high notes, honey. Give me a moment.” He holstered his gun and slapped his palm with that black baton of his as he paced.

“Backup's on the way, but it might take them an hour or more.”

“You can't just take us out?” Stephanie cried.

He glanced at the ceiling in response to a groan. “You're saying a killer is out there. You're saying you've been hunted by three inbreds armed with shotguns. You're saying the house is haunted. You're saying there's no way out.” He leveled his eyes at Stephanie. “I'd say rushing out into the halls with guns blazing is a tad impulsive, wouldn't you? Give me a moment!”

Jack liked the man, quirks and all. Not even Randy in his rabid state would easily run over Lawdale.

“I've heard about the man,” Lawdale continued. “A serial killer who's been on the wires for a few months now. Known as Tin Man, which corresponds with this mask you described. His trail has been leading southeast. No surprise he's finally here, then.”

Lawdale slapped his palm with the stick. “Betty and Stewart are dead, you say?”

“We think so,” Randy said.

“But badly wounded at least,” Lawdale said.

“Right.”

“And this girl named Susan keeps going missing, which you think means she could be with him. I doubt that a young girl would be much use to a killer. I'd buy the argument that if she's more than a figment—”

“We didn't imagine her,” Jack said.

“Fine. Then I would give her the benefit of the doubt. The house, on the other hand . . .” His eyes settled on the wall.

The Wages of Sin Is One Dead Body
“. . . The house is what concerns me most.”

“But you believe us,” Leslie said.

“If I didn't believe you, I wouldn't be concerned, now would I?” He cracked his neck.

“A haunted house,” Stephanie said.

“Could be. You can deal with a man like White by putting him back with some lead in his gut. But the supernatural is a whole different thing.”

“You're a religious man?” Jack asked.

“Can't say that I am; can't say that I'm not. But I know that if what you're telling me about this house is accurate, it won't matter if we have a whole SWAT team outside.”