Darkest Night - Smoke And Mirrors Part 13

"Uh . . . yeah."

"Good."

There was a black cat sitting at the top of the stairs. He ignored it. The door behind the cat was also locked.

"You have to the count of three, Mr. Brummel."

The door opened on two. Mr. Brummel didn't look happy, but he was smart enough to move well back out of the way.

"Tell me," CB commanded as he stepped into the apartment.

Graham Brummel snorted. "Or you'll what? Call the cops?"

"No."

The single word carried threat disproportionate to its size.

"You guys know what's going on?"

Brother and sister exchanged a look as identical as injuries allowed.

"Sort of," Ca.s.sie allowed at last.

Tony sighed and slid a few steps farther into the dining room. There were about half a dozen arguments going on in the front hall, and so far he hadn't been missed. " 'Sort of ' isn't good enough."

"It's mostly Graham's theory."

"Graham?"

"Graham Brummel, the caretaker. He's kind of a distant cousin," Ca.s.sie explained. "When he got the job as caretaker about six years ago, he began using the blood tie to pull us more into the world. That's why we're aware and the rest aren't."

The rest. Oh, yeah, that sounded good. Tony sank down on one of the folding chairs the caterers had provided and resisted the urge to beat his head against the table. "Start at the beginning."

"The beginning?" She took a deep breath-or seemed to take a deep breath since she wasn't actually breathing. "All right. The house is . . ."

"Or holds," Stephen interrupted.

"Right; it is or holds a malevolence."

"A malevolent what?" Tony demanded impatiently.

Ca.s.sie frowned. "There's no need to be rude. You know, we don't have to help you."

"You're right." Not that they'd been a lot of help so far-a little late with the warning. "I apologize."

Mollified, she gave the folds of her skirt a bit of a fluff before continuing. "Graham says it's just a malevolence."

"A piece of bad stuff?"

"Very bad," Ca.s.sie agreed. "And it collects tormented spirits. Graham thinks it got the idea from Creighton Caulfield who collected some very weird stuff. He thinks Mr. Caulfield was the template for its personality." Tony held up a hand. "So, cutting to the chase-the malevolence, the evil thing in the house wants to collect us?"

"Probably. It hasn't added anything since Karl and his mother and that was almost thirty years ago."

"I didn't see his mother."

Stephen snorted. "Of course, you didn't. Karl's like a night-light, he's on all the time."

That seemed to jibe with Amy's theory of the youngest being the strongest. "And Mr. Brummel knew this when CB rented the house?"

"Yes and no. He knew the background of the house, but he also believed that because the house had been empty for so long, the malevolence was dormant."

"Sleeping," Stephen offered as Tony frowned.

"Yeah, I know what dormant means. Looks like he was wrong."

"No, he was right. We can feel it now, like we could before, but the feeling only just started up again."

Great. Somehow, they'd screwed themselves. "So shooting here woke it?"

Stephen shrugged and adjusted his head. "Graham says only blood can wake it."

He leaned in closer, his eyes narrowed, his nose flared-he looked like a poster boy for dire warnings. "You don't want to be bleeding, not in this house."

"Yeah, but all the blood we used is fake!"

He'd been standing not three feet from the steps when she fell, close enough to hear her knee make that soft hard definite tissue damage sound, and he had a pretty good idea of where she'd impacted with the porch. Weirdly, while there'd been lines of red dribbling down her shin, he couldn't find any blood on the stones.

"Oh, c.r.a.p."

"Tony?" Holding one of the candles carefully out in front of him, Zev peered into the dining room. "What are you doing sitting all alone in the dark?"

He wasn't alone and the two ghosts shed enough light for conversation. Probably not a good idea to mention that though. "I'm . . . uh, just thinking."

"Well, think in the foyer. Peter wants us all to stay together."

"In the foyer?"

"He doesn't think we should leave Everett."

As they left the dining room together, Amy's voice rose to meet them. "Look, what we're involved in here is clearly beyond the usual and a seance is a perfectly valid way to contact the restless spirits holding us in this house."

"Restless spirits," Mason scoffed from the stairs. "That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard."

But he almost sounded as though he was trying to convince himself.

"Do you have a better explanation, then?" Amy asked him. "Does anyone?"

No one did.

"So why not hold a seance?"

Tony turned just enough to raise an eyebrow at Ca.s.sie.

The ghost shrugged. "Well, the one with the purple hair would be perfectly safe, but make sure the younger girl isn't involved. If she can hear Karl, she could easily get possessed. That's what happened to Karl's mother."

"Not our fault," Stephen muttered. "We were minding our own business and she saw us in the bathroom mirror."

"So she tried to contact us and got grabbed by something else."

"The evil thing?"

"You saw what she did to Karl, what do you think?"

"I think . . ." Which was when Tony realized that the hall had gone quiet. And everyone was staring at him. "I . . . um . .

. I think a seance is a bad idea. I mean, if we are being held by restless spirits, by the kind of spirits who'd trap us in the house and keep us away from Everett, do we even want to talk to them?"

Amy rolled her eyes. "Well, duh, Tony. They can tell us why we're here and what we have to do in order to get out!"

"Survive until morning?" Stephen suggested. "And we're not restless, we're just bored."

Karl's crying had gotten louder.

"We're not having a seance." There was a definitive tone in Tina's voice that said this was the final word on the subject. "This is not the time to start playing about with things no one truly understands. Not when we're in the middle of a situation we don't understand. And we are most certainly not involving the children in that sort of potentially dangerous nonsense."

"They wouldn't be involved," Amy protested.

"You couldn't get the little one far enough away," Ca.s.sie said quietly.

A little too quietly.

Tony turned. He could barely see her.

Stephen glanced down at his nearly transparent hands and grimaced. "Show time."

The sound lingered a moment after he vanished. It was the only sound. Karl had stopped crying.

A door slammed upstairs.

"I know what you're doing!" A man. Not so much shouting as shrieking in rage. He sounded . . . Like he's gone totally bug f.u.c.k. Tony jumped at the hollow thunk of something heavy and sharp impacting with one of the second-floor doors.

Heavy and sharp.

"Back in 1957, September twenty-sixth to be exact, Stephen and Ca.s.sandra Mills' father freaked and attacked them with an ax."

Show time.

"Oh, no . . ." He was halfway up the stairs before he realized he'd started moving. A hand grabbed at his leg, but he shook it off. Voices called his name, he ignored them.

The man-Mr. Mills-yanked the blade of the ax out of the door to Mason's dressing room. Except it wasn't the door to Mason's dressing room; the hall had reverted to pre-70s renovation carpeting and wallpaper. The small part of Tony's mind not antic.i.p.ating terror took a moment to note it was an improvement. And I guess that explains why the lights are back on.

Mr. Mills staggered sideways as the ax came free and screamed, "You can't hide from me!"

White showed all around his eyes. The skin of his face was nearly gray except for a dark spot of color high on each cheek. Blood oozed out of the cut where he'd driven his teeth through his lip, mixed with saliva, and dribbled down his chin.

Bugf.u.c.k seemed a fairly accurate diagnosis.

The door opened across the hall and Ca.s.sie stepped out, pulling it nearly closed behind her. Her face was flushed, her hair messy, but her head was intact. "Daddy, what are you . . . ?"

Mr. Mills roared and charged toward her swinging wildly.

Ca.s.sie stared at him in astonishment, lips slightly parted, frozen in place.

At the last possible instant, the door behind her opened and Stephen dove out into the hall, one arm around his sister's waist, taking them both out from under the blade of the ax.

Which came out of the plaster and lathe a lot faster than it had out of the wood.

Holding hands, Ca.s.sie and Stephen ran down the hall and into the bathroom, slamming the door.

"No!" Tony stepped out into the hall. "You'll be trapped!"

Mr. Mills seemed to realize the same thing because he started to laugh maniacally.

"Hey! Crazy guy!"

No response. The ax chopped into the bathroom door.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n it, you can't do this! They're your kids!"

Another chop and a kick and the door was open.

Ca.s.sie screamed.

He couldn't let this happen. It didn't matter that they were already dead. That this had happened almost forty freaking years ago. He couldn't stand by and do nothing. He raced down the hall and threw his arms around Mr. Mills, hoping to pin the ax to his side.

Mr. Mills walked into the bathroom, swinging the ax, like he wasn't even there.

"Filth!"

The first blow took Stephen in the side of the neck, the force of it driving him to his knees. Ca.s.sie screamed again and tried to drag her brother with her into the bathtub. Her father reached past his dying son, grabbed the strap of her dress and yanked her forward. She stumbled and slipped on Stephen's blood. The strap tore. As the pressure released, she spun around just as the ax came down, chopping the chunk out of her head.

Tony really hoped that she wasn't the one moaning as she crumpled to lie beside her brother. He really hoped it was him.

Splattered with the blood of his children, Mr. Mills turned and walked out of the bathroom, Tony backing hurriedly out of his way. Once in the hall, he looked down at the b.l.o.o.d.y ax as though he'd never seen it before, as though he had no idea whose brains and hair were stuck along its length, then he adjusted his grip and slammed the blade down between his own eyes.

Tony skipped back as the body fell and realized the light was disappearing. "No . . ." He wasn't going to be stuck up here with . . . with . . .

"Tony!"