House (28 page)

Jack was aiming to fire again, when the pressure at his back caved. He stumbled back.

The door was open?

The group surged back through the doorway. But Jack's view was of the hall, not the space they were entering.

The moment the man behind the tin mask saw that the door had been opened, he stopped. But instead of raising his shotgun and firing into his escaping prey, he stood still.

Jack was the last through. He scrambled for the door, eyes glued to the Tin Man.

“Lock it!” Randy screamed. He was seeing what Jack saw. A scene from the darkest of horror stories.

At the last moment, just as they were shoving the door closed, White grabbed his tin mask and tilted it up, exposing his full face.

It was a face from the grave, half of it bared to the bone. White's jaws snapped wide, as wide as the mask itself, and he roared at them.

Black fog streamed from his mouth. Blasted toward the door.

The door slammed shut. Randy threw the bolt.

A shock wave hit the other side of the door with enough force to bend the wood and send both of them flying against the opposite wall. A thin wisp of black smoke drifted past the cracks.

But it held.

They managed to stand, panting, watching the door. But it didn't move.

“Guys?” Stephanie's voice from the dining room was stretched thin, laced with confusion.

Jack turned around. The first thing he noticed was that some of the lights were back on, blazing bright enough for him to see what Stephanie was looking at.

The once-cheerful dining room now looked as if it had been sitting vacant for a hundred years. Dust covered the paintings and walls. Paper peeled from the walls in long swaths. Most of the furniture remained, but it was covered in dust. The cushions on the good chairs were shredded, chewed by rats.

The table was strewn with rotten food, the same food they'd eaten earlier, crawling with worms and maggots. The stench was similar to the sick sulfuric odor from the basement.

With one glance through the arched entry, Jack saw that the dining room wasn't the only part of the house that had changed.

“It's . . . how's this possible?” Stephanie said.

No one answered as they took it all in, stunned. The house was dead. All of it.

Dead, very dead. But a death that was clearly alive.

30
5:20 am

IT TOOK THEM A FULL MINUTE TO STEP beyond shock and find reason.

“Are we imagining this?” Jack asked. “Or were we imagining earlier?”

“Is that possible?” Stephanie said. “I mean, we ate at this table, right?”

No one was quick with speculation, much less answers.

“This can't be real,” Lawdale said. “I've been in this house a hundred times.”

“It's real,” Susan said angrily. “I told you there's more going on here than you realize. I told you they're wrong.” She said something else. Or did she? Her lips kept moving for a few seconds, but no sound came out. Or was that Jack's imagination?

Jack stared at Susan, meeting her eyes. “They? You mean Stewart?”

She eyed him.

“You're saying they were demons or something?”

“Would explain why they don't count,” Randy said.

“Don't be ridiculous,” Leslie said. “Demons, please. This is about the imagination, not—”

“Shut up, Leslie!” Randy snapped. “Make up your mind! We don't have time for your psychobabble anymore. Call it what you want, we're in a world of hurt here. And we're running out of time.”

“. . . and he's going to kill you all,” Susan said, finishing her point.

Jack headed toward the kitchen then turned back to Lawdale. “How did you get in?”

“Back door.”

It was the first good look at the lawman Jack had taken since Lawdale opened the door. He'd removed his outer shirt and used a strip of it as a makeshift bandage on a wound to his upper arm. A bloody bandanna circled his head. His T-shirt was a well-worn Budweiser variety, untucked and hitched over both guns.

“What happened?”

“I had some trouble getting out. Halfway through the grate someone took a potshot at me, and I fell back through. Took me a few minutes to take him out.”

“Could explain why they were waiting,” Jack said. “But why did they let us go?”

“You call that letting us go?” Randy said.

Stephanie suddenly broke for the kitchen, running. “They let us go because upstairs is no better than the basement,” she said.

Jack followed quickly. He burst into the kitchen just as Stephanie took hold of the back door handle. She gave it a twist. Threw her weight into another twist. Fumbled with the dead bolt.

“It's locked!” she cried.

Jack pushed her aside and tried the door. It wouldn't budge.

“It's locked?” Leslie asked behind him.

Jack spun back and faced Lawdale. “You sure this is the way you came in?”

Lawdale didn't bother responding.

“Stand back,” Randy snapped. Within seconds, he'd pulled a plastic box of cartridges out of his pants, loaded the gun, and pumped a round.

Jack and Stephanie stepped back.

The blast tore into wood and shattered the lock. Jack tried again.

No luck. He looked at the seal. It felt like the whole door wasn't a door at all. Solid as a wall. Steel bars ran the length of the broken glass. That was new.

“Surely we can blast a hole,” Leslie said, not convincingly.

“How many shells do you have left, Randy?” Jack asked.

The man checked the box. “Eight.”

“Okay, save them. Where's that ax?”

Randy set down the shotgun, hurried to the meat locker, stepped over the broken door, and hauled out the ax hammer that Stewart had used to break out.

They watched in silence as he approached the back door, lined up the ax, and took a huge, grunting swing at the window. What glass connected with the ax head shattered. But the bars held firm.

Didn't even bend.

Possible,
Jack thought. Some kinds of steel might resist such a blow. But in this old house, improbable.

Randy took another swing. Again, not even a good dent.

“It's the same as the basement!” Stephanie cried.

“Hold on, just take it easy,” Lawdale ordered, stepping forward. He held out his hand for the ax, and Randy gave it to him. “There has to be a way out. If the doors are reinforced, we'll go through a wall.”

“Too many cabinets in here.” Lawdale returned to the dining room, saw there were no outer walls, then followed Jack to the main entrance. The wall around the front door bulged slightly under the force of the truck White had driven into the house.

They stared at the damage in wonder. Lack of damage, rather. Jack recalled splintering wood, flying plaster, disintegrating doorjambs. More illusions? Or was this the illusion?

“If a truck can't break a board at thirty miles an hour, that ax doesn't stand a chance.” Randy loaded another round.
Ca-chink
.

But Lawdale wasn't convinced. He stared at the wall in a kind of stupor, unbelieving. He suddenly began swinging at the wall in a rage.

Crash . . . crash . . . crash . . . crash!

Each blow bounced off after removing some paint. The wood itself, however, didn't so much as splinter.

Lawdale paused, breathing hard, then raced into the living room, yanked the sofa roughly out of his way, and smashed the window behind it with a cry of anger.

But the bars beyond didn't bend.

He went again, and a third time, before swiveling and taking a huge swipe at the brick on the fireplace.

Mortar sprayed as the ax hammer smashed through the brick. “Ha!”

“That's inside,” Randy said, dropping his shotgun and grabbing the ax from the man. “Try the back wall.” He swung the hammer through the opening, against the back of the fireplace.

Jack knew by the solid sound that it was hopeless. Randy stood back and stared into the ashes. The tin can still sat on one side where Jack had tossed it earlier.

Tin Man's tin can.

They could all see the writing curving over the bleached label.

Welcome to my house
House rules:
3. Give me one dead body, and I might
let rule two slide
.

Randy grunted, tossed the ax on the floor, and retrieved his shotgun.

“What's this?” Lawdale reached for the can.

“The can we told you about.”

Stephanie was pacing with both hands in her hair, brow wrinkled with stress. She whirled to Jack, eyes blazing with fury.

“How's this possible?! How can this be happening to me?”

“Keep your voice down, miss!” Lawdale snapped.

“And what good are you?” she yelled at him. “You could have gotten us out through that grate you found. Instead you come up with this”—she flung her hand out at him—“cockamamy plan that gets us trapped up here!”

“You got any better ideas?” Randy screamed at her.

Officer Lawdale had one of his pistols out of its holster and cocked by his ear almost too fast for Jack to see. He threw the can into the fireplace.

“The next time one of you yells at me, I put a bullet over your head to show you I mean business; the next time it'll be in your leg to bring you under control. If you hadn't noticed, there's five of us now. And over my dead body, all five of us live through the next hour. You got that?”

“Six,” a soft voice said.

Susan stood quietly beside Leslie, who flinched.

“There's six of us,” she said.

“Then six. My point stands. Now we have about an hour, is that right?”

“Not quite,” Leslie said, holding her watch up to the lamp. “Dawn's at 6:17. Least that's what we've been—”

Something began to pound on the wall behind Jack. He jumped and spun. Again,
thump, thump, thump
, and this time he could see the wall vibrate with each hit. The dining room.

Lawdale pulled out his other gun. “Okay, backup will be here any minute. It's time we make whatever's behind this house think twice. We just have to stall till help comes. But that doesn't mean run. Bring your guns.” He strode across the foyer.

Thump, thump, thump!

“You sure that's a good idea?” Leslie said.

“You've been running all night. For all we know, this house is just feeding on your fear.”

“We're alive, aren't we?”

“I'm not sure you would be alive if I hadn't come in. Wait here.”

Jack raised a brow at Leslie's stare and went after Lawdale and Randy.

“What if it's trying to separate us again?” Stephanie demanded.

Thump, thump, thump!

“Wait!” She ran after them.

“You can't leave us alone!” Leslie's objection covered something Susan was trying to say. They both hurried into the hall after Jack and Stephanie.

After a quick jab of his head into the dining room, SWAT-team style, Lawdale stepped into the room and waved them on.

The pounding had stopped.

The room was as they'd left it. Empty.

“You catch my point,” Lawdale said. “From this point on—”

“What's that?” Leslie interrupted.

“What's what?”

She lifted a finger to her lips and listened. A sound like a garbled record, backward masked, played far away. Below them. In front of them.

The sound grew louder, unmistakable now, but unintelligible. Soft wailing bubbling behind, ebbing and flowing. Jack stepped into the hall. It was coming from the door to the basement.

They poured into the hall in a rough semicircle, listening intently to the strange sound, for the words, because it was a voice, most certainly a voice. At least one.

The door suddenly bent slightly inward.

Jack caught his breath.

Thump, thump, thump!

They all jumped as the door shook under the pounding.

A deep moan reverberated through the whole house. Fingers of black fog seeped under the door, drifted over the wood floor, and burned words into the door's surface.

ONE DEAD BODY . . .

OR SIX DEAD BODIES

Then the smoke was sucked back into the cracks, the sound ceased, and absolute stillness returned.

For ten seconds no one moved.

“Okay,” Lawdale said, stepping back. The light in his eyes revealed a tinge of panic. When he'd found them in the boiler room, he hadn't yet encountered the horrors of the house. Now he had, and it showed.

But it struck Jack that the look on Lawdale's face might not be panic at all. It could be eager determination. Even desire. What if . . . what if Lawdale was actually a part of the game? Not White's part, but a kind of counterpart? Good come to fight evil.

No. Couldn't be. They'd met him on the highway a hundred miles from here. And all of them could see that he was the same man they'd met.

Lawdale faced them, now clearly unnerved. “We have to get out. We tear this house down if we have to, both floors, all the windows, the attic, everything. Find a way out.”

“There is no way out,” Randy said.

“We
find
a way out!” Lawdale snapped.

31
5:29 am

THEY MOVED QUICKLY, FOLLOWING THE cop's orders to split up, thereby dividing the house's attention and confusing it, but Randy held out no hope for that plan. Stephanie had found a crowbar in the coat closet, and he'd raced upstairs with her because doing this last-ditch thing felt like it needed to be done, but only to buy himself a little thinking time before doing what really needed to be done.

Amazing how dramatically the place had changed. Aside from the layout, there was hardly any indication that they were in the same house. And this new house seemed to know that the end was coming. It had settled down, a calm before the storm.

With barely more than thirty minutes to go before this game ended, killing was now the only thing that needed to be done.

The question was, who? Jack, yeah, but Jack had his eyes on him and his barrel pointed in his general direction wherever they went. It was almost like White had visited Jack and warned him.