Echoes of the Dead (24 page)

A faint smile flickered on Sarah’s pale lips.

Kelsey stood and moved toward the tight little group’s border. She hesitated for a moment almost as though an invisible barrier held her in place. She felt the hesitation in her arms and legs, a heaviness which clung to her. The tapping noise had grown louder. Sarah wanted some medication. She needed painkillers for her head. The tapping stopped, and icy silence hung in the air, a thick, blue-black nothing. She turned and looked toward Sarah.

The pills—a small vial of Advil for travel—waited in Kelsey’s suitcase on the second floor. The sound of her heart rattled her chest and worked into her arms and legs. She moved, one step, then another. Sarah needed the pain pills. She needed more than Kelsey could provide, but the pills would be a start. The stairs squeaked under Kelsey’s bare foot. She paused.

They hadn’t squeaked before.

A man mumbled in his sleep.

Kelsey lowered her head and climbed the remaining stairs in quick, padding steps, not stopping to listen or waiting for any response from the woodwork. It groaned, she knew, just like a good, old house should. The house had dropped its guard in the basement. The house was alive—not silly as Sarah had said at all. It was a monster and they were inside, swallowed by the beast. Toys like mice to a cat. After a quick trip to the yellow room, she could go, running if she chose, back downstairs. She would have the pills for Sarah. The house had all of them, any time it wanted.

Kelsey flicked the wall switch without thinking. The hallway remained dark. She looked over her shoulder, thinking of the flashlights on the coffee table next to Sarah’s couch. She could go back—she
should
go back and grab one of them. Her hand stuck to the wall. Her feet wouldn’t move.

No, Kels. Just a quick trip to your room, grab the pills, and head down.

She listened. The tapping had stopped; no sound moved through the silent house save her hurried breath.

Easy enough.

She trotted down the hall. Toes tapped against the carpet runner as she went. She almost floated over the floor like a ghost. A ghost. A spirit.
Tap, tap, tap
…

Her hand froze against the cold, metal doorknob. She blinked and turned the knob. They’d left the curtains open earlier in the day, and a blue glow washed over both beds from the open window. The sky, still starless, was dark, but not the full, soul-stealing dark inside the house. Shadows waited, thick and predatory, in the yellow room’s corners. The color—yellow—was a myth lost to the deep blue of moonless nights.

Kelsey stepped into the room, trying to remember where she’d left her bag with her pills.

In and out.

Knock, knock.

Who’s there? 

The sound, the knocking, came to her louder than it had on the first floor. This was a second floor sound, not some distant third floor code, not the same, quiet scratches she and Erin clambered to the attic to find.

Knock, knock.

The hallway past the stairs. Kelsey turned her back on the open window, moved away from the bed, her open bag, and the pills for Sarah. She paused in the open doorway, feeling the weight of hallway shadow.

Knock, knock.

“Hello,” she said. The emptiness swallowed her voice in one gulp.

The knocking came from the bathroom—or the non-bathroom, the empty space behind a door at the hallway’s opposite end. Kelsey found her feet moving, taking her forward, step by step, until she faced the door. No one stirred below. She listened, holding her own breath so as not to taint her ears.

A scratching sound leaked from under the door.

Someone was inside.

Kelsey gulped a breath and pushed the door open—click—and tumbled inside.

Empty.

“Hello,” she said again, sure of the sound from inside the empty space, sure of the knocking and the scraping sound not unlike a stick against a large rock.

A large rock or a cave wall.

Kelsey shivered. The other door beckoned—the closet door. It curled a finger toward Kelsey and asked her to open it. She moved through the empty, smooth-floored room. Her feet padded until they brought her to the threshold.
Empty
, that’s what Erin had said. The little closet in the not-bathroom had been empty when Ben checked. Kelsey wrapped her fingers on the knob, turned, and pulled.

The space behind the door opened black and deep, impossible for her eyes to measure.

Knock, knock.

“Help,” a voice said. It was tiny, a little girl’s voice. “Help me, Daddy.”

Kelsey stepped forward; one hand extended in front while the other clung to the doorknob. Her fingers slipped away from the metal. The door hung in space, a portal to somewhere else, a place of wood and glass and logic. The other hand, the one which groped in the darkness, moved through unreality. This was no closet, no small, empty opening. She bit her lip and waited, listening for the voice.

“I’m lost,” it said—
she
said, a girl of nine or ten from the voice’s tone and volume.

Kelsey glanced once more at the door, took a breath, and plunged into the dark, groping with both hands now, reaching in front and to the sides to find the walls. Her knuckles dragged against stone. She stopped, felt on both sides, and noted a rough, circular cavern. Her hands played with its boundaries. Behind her, the door had vanished, leaving no lingering ambient light.

She found herself in a cave.

Impossible.

“No, Kels, it’s not.”

The voice was just as impossible. Maybe more so.

“Dad?”

“Here.” A flame danced. A man appeared next to her in the dark, her father as he was fifteen years ago. Smooth skin covered his face with hints of crinkled crow’s feet near his eyes. His blue eyes shimmered with the light. A pair of thick-framed glasses rested halfway down his nose. He held a lighter—a gunmetal grey Zippo—in his right hand. Its light warmed his face.  She knew the inscription on the lighter,
To Hank with Love
, from her mother. It had been a gift for their fifteenth wedding anniversary, the year he gave up smoking.

“I always thought it was a bit ironic,” he said, nodding toward the lighter.

“I was just thinking about the lighter. Mom gave it to me after your…” Kelsey’s tongue felt as though it was made of sponge, thick and dry and uncomfortable in her mouth. She couldn’t say the word
funeral
. The lighter was in her suitcase. She remembered putting it in her suitcase. “How did you—”

“Shhh. Don’t worry about the little things. I have someone you need to see.” He moved further into the tunnel. The yellow flame cast a halo on the rock walls as he walked.

Kelsey hurried after the retreating man.

“Dad,” she called.

He turned and pressed a finger against his lips. A piece of Kelsey cried out, saying no, this couldn’t be her father. He was dead. She’d watched the coffin drop into the ground, a coffin whose high gloss polished surface she’d run her fingers across. Before that, she’d looked upon his wax-mannequin lips and folded hands. She knew dead. This man—this replacement father—was an illusion.

“A ghost,” she said, surprising herself with her own voice.

“You don’t believe in ghosts,” her father said as he continued through the tunnel.

Kelsey’s eyes narrowed. “But my father is dead.”

“Yes. So I am. But…” He looked over his shoulder. “Here I am, saving my little girl from the dark cave again.”

The chill which shot through Kelsey’s stomach did so with wrathful intensity, like a spear of ice forced through her intestines. This man, be it specter or ghost or figment of her imagination, brought her memories to the fore. She knew the little girl’s voice, the tiny voice crying for help behind the black veil.

It was her voice—her
own
ten-year-old voice.

They entered a high-ceilinged chamber, the roof high enough her father’s tiny light got lost among the shadows. Kelsey looked to her side and touched a railing. Her fingers played along the cold steel bar.

“This isn’t possible. I know this place.”

“You should.” Her father smiled and moved the lighter closer to the stony wall. “Where are we, Kels?”

“Wind Cave. I haven’t been here since I was a little girl. I know it’s Wind Cave because of the box work, the calcium formations up there.” One finger pointed toward a web of intricate white stone. “Wind Cave doesn’t have typical stalactites or stalagmites, but plenty of box work.”

“You were lost here,” he said.

“And you found me. It was dark and cold and I was afraid.”

“Not at first.”

“No… No, I wasn’t at first. I explored and then the lights went out. I’ve never been anywhere so dark. You came and found me with your lighter. You found me before the park rangers.”

Her father smiled.

Kelsey’s lips wavered on the edge of a smile, but turned downward. “But that’s a memory. Impossible. I’m not in a cave—I can’t be. This is a house, a rather big brick house in the middle of nowhere. I’m in north-central Kansas, seven-hundred miles from Wind Cave. Seven-hundred miles and seventeen years from you finding me.”

“Really?”

The voice changed, slid into something different. It was no longer her father’s voice, but that of an old friend, a man she hadn’t seen in years. She spun, her eyes scanning the cavern for the exit, but just as fast, she was no longer in a cavern. The room was plain and simple and covered in dust. From the sloping roof, she reckoned it must be the third floor.

“Kelsey?”

Jared stood five feet from Kelsey, his face pale and clean-shaven as it had been five years ago. He moved toward her in the blue room, arms open and hands extended. She backed away.

“Oh, God. Kelsey. I’ve been waiting for you…”

Her head spun. His hands clasped her arms.

“There’s something you should know.”

Kelsey pulled Jared close and gave him a crushing hug. She pushed away a moment later, searching his face. “You’re cold.  Your skin—it feels like ice.”

“I’m just a memory.”

“That’s impossible. I’m touching you—you’re right here. Of course we remembered you—we all did. We thought you were dead. Five years ago… Oh my God.” Kelsey’s face twisted as the realization dawned on her. “Have you been in this house for five years? How did you survive—”

“You aren’t listening, Kelsey. I’m just a memory. This house… This house shapes itself to memories. I’m so lonely Kels.”

A flood of thoughts merged in Kelsey’s brain. Dizzy, she held her forehead with one hand and backed away from Jared. He didn’t move. “The house… Memories? How—that’s not even possible.”

“Always the scientist.”

“Memories can’t stand in front of me. They’re locked away here, in your skull. I can’t touch my memories, but I can touch you.” Kelsey waved at Jared’s chest. “You’re flesh and blood—a little cold, but real.”

“Real. Of course. Just like your father.”

“He’s dead,” Kelsey said. “He died about a month ago—complications of a stroke. Are you trying to say that both of you are dead? That you’re a ghost then? I don’t—”

“Believe in ghosts. I know.” Jared nodded. “I don’t know how else to explain, Kelsey. This house…”

“I’ve seen things—illusions.”

Jared shook his head. He had yet to move from the spot where Kelsey first hugged him. “Memories, Kelsey. Your memories. Everyone else, too: Johnny, Sarah—”

“Erin. Jesus—the basement was Erin’s. Her memory at least. She mentioned her uncle’s house in California. But tonight, after she vanished, it took the shape of my new house in Springdale. The boxes were there… Everything. They even had Mom’s handwriting on the sides.”

“It was hers, now yours. You’ve got a powerful mind, Kelsey. You’ve brought me here.”

She shook her head.

“I’ve been here all the time. The house has kept me.” Jared looked at the wall. “It wants you, too. All of you.”

“My God… Where is Erin?”

“She’s not lost. She’s still here if you look hard enough. She’s still here just like I am.”

Kelsey wagged her head back and forth. “That’s impossible. Johnny looked for her. He checked every room on the second and third floors.  She’s not here. The crew is lost, too.”

“They’re not lost either. The house needed a break, that’s all. Too many memories in one place.”

Kelsey gestured toward the darkness behind her, imagining the tunnel back to the second floor bathroom must be hidden somewhere within. “They couldn’t find their way back to the house. Ben and Daniel heard them on the radio. They couldn’t find the damn house.”

“Maybe the house didn’t want to be found. Too many memories…”

“Didn’t’ want to be found?”

Jared nodded.