Ghost House Revenge (19 page)

Derek snaked his hand under her pillow. His daughter turned in her sleep, mumbling
something. Thinking he had awakened her, he stepped back into the shadows. Alicen
moved again, and in the thin shaft of moonlight, Derek saw the glistening facets of
the diamond in her opened palm. Carefully he took it.

He could barely make out the banister and wheelchair lift as he reached the stairs,
and he touched them both as he walked down. The dining room was dimly lit by moonlight
shining through the bay windows. By contrast, the kitchen was almost blinding. Someone
had left the light on, and he squeezed his eyes shut until they could adjust. At last,
removing the ring from his bathrobe pocket, he walked to the oven. If he hid the ring
there, it would look as if Sarah had dropped it when she fell.

Derek bent toward the floor but stopped when he heard a noise behind him, a dull thud,
like a heavy footstep. He looked over his shoulder. There was no one behind him, and
when he turned back to the oven, he saw only his reflection in its glass door. He
laughed at his fears, then proceeded with his task.

All at once there was another thud, and he felt a flash of pain. This noise had sounded
from his own back, something knocking against it and sending him flying forward. His
face came down hard on the oven door handle, a pain shot up through his forehead.
He dropped to the floor in a flurry of gray mists and twinkling lights.

He was too stunned to react when he heard laughter. Then, as if through water, he
saw a young woman standing over him, her smile a familiar one. He wanted to scream,
but he couldn’t. He couldn’t even open his mouth.

She bent closer to him, smiling all the while, and ran her fingernails over his stomach
as if to rip it open. From far away, Derek heard the sound of cloth tearing, and he
thought it was his flesh.
No, no, no!
His mind echoed the plea over and over.

“I wanted you,” he heard her say, in an eerily seductive way. “I’ve wanted you for
so long, Derek Miller.”

“No,” Derek said aloud, barely hearing his voice.

She was on top of him, her small frame somehow crushing his muscular body. He closed
his eyes tightly, something deep inside his will making him do so. He would open them
again, and she wouldn’t be there. She didn’t exist. She was his imagination.

She was still there.

“My Derek, my handsome lover Derek,” she breathed.

Her face came closer and closer to his. He could see the repulsive veins, the thin
blue lips, the filmy eyes. He couldn’t turn from her, for when he did, he felt something
rip at the sides of his head. She had him by two handfuls of hair.

“Give me what you would give a woman,” she whispered, pressing her lips to his.

It was cold. My God, it was so cold! Something like a fish was pushing into Derek’s
mouth. He realized with horror that it was the woman’s tongue. Her hands left his
hair and slid down his chest, kneading the matted black hair. Mercifully, her lips
left his.

Why can’t I move? I’m stronger than her! I’m str
—

She bit him hard on the stomach, then kissed him over and over as if to make up for
the wound. It was impossible, crazy.
Derek didn’t want this. Not from her repulsive lips, her cold hands. He tried to push
her away, but it was like moving lead.

But for a moment her touch shattered him so that he had no thoughts. His arms dropped
weakly to his sides. He felt himself floating, higher and higher. Only when he was
still again did he dare to open his eyes. She was sitting up, straddling him, her
smile red. He wanted to kill her for using him this way, and yet something told him
that that was impossible.

Something told him she was already dead.

“No,” he whispered, falling at last into blackness.

The woman stood up, holding the ring in her hand. This was good, but it didn’t satisfy
her lustful needs. She wanted him through his own free will, not forcefully as tonight.
And she would have him, soon. She smiled to think of owning that handsome man, of
having him as her lover. And her anticipations made her desire to destroy the VanBuren
family all the stronger.

She found Alicen waiting for her in the upstairs hallway. She handed the child the
ring, then stepped back into the shadows. There was no need for words. Alicen knew
exactly what to do. She entered her father’s room, barely seeing the bed and dresser
there. Walking to the floor grating, she knelt down and pushed her fingers between
the woven strips of iron. It creaked softly. She felt pain where the iron pinched
the soft underside of her hands, but she did not stop.

At last, the grating gave way, and she lifted it out. Alicen reached deep inside the
cavity and dropped the ring. It made a soft tap against the floor. Then she replaced
the grating, pushing it down hard so that it would not come loose again. Less than
five minutes later, she was in her own bed. The smile on her face as she fell asleep
was a triumphant one.

The night watchman at the Belle Bay Funeral Parlor sat up a little straighter in his
chair when he felt a cold breeze brush past him. He looked behind him, saw that the
back entrance was tightly closed, and shrugged. It was an old building, and drafts
like that weren’t uncommon. He checked his watch: 5
A.M
. Two more hours and his shift would be over.

He was flipping through the pages of a girlie magazine when he heard a dull thud from
one of the other rooms. He stood up, fingering the nightstick in his belt, and walked
carefully toward the noise.

“Who’s in there?” he asked.

Across the icy, refrigerated room, he could see the sheet-wrapped body of the latest
Jane Doe to enter the morgue. A young blonde who had been found rotting on the nearby
beach. The autopsy said it was a drug overdose but that the actual cause of death
was probably drowning.

“Too many low-lifes in this town,” the guard said with a quick glimpse at the shrouded
corpse. The bump made by its nose under the sheets cast a long, grotesque shadow in
the lamplight. The guard saw now that an ashtray, left here by the coroner, had fallen
to the floor. He put it back up on a table and left the room. The night was silent
once more.

Bored, he decided to put his head down and rest—for just a few minutes. He didn’t
feel the touch on his arm that turned that rest into a deep, deep sleep. Nor did he
see the back door opening. He was snoring when the body of Jane Doe was dragged feet-first
through the door into a back alley, pulled by unseen hands.

Melanie entered the kitchen the next morning to find Derek slumped in a chair, an
icepack to his swollen mouth. A thin bruise covered the bridge of his nose and spread
out under each closed eye.

“Derek?”

He opened his eyes. “Good morning,” he said groggily.

“It certainly doesn’t look like it’s been a good morning for you,” Melanie said. “What
on earth happened?”

Conscious for about an hour, Derek had prepared himself for the questions he knew
would come. He shifted in his seat and adjusted the icepack to speak more easily.

“I was up in the night to get a cup of tea,” he said. “I slipped on the floor and
hit the oven handle.”

Melanie shook her head in sympathy, then went to the cupboard to find a bottle of
aspirin. She shook two of the tablets into her palm and handed them to Derek with
a glass of water.

The cold glass felt strange against his teeth, and Derek grimaced when he put it down
on the table. Melanie gasped.

“Derek, you’ve broken your teeth!” she cried.

Not for the first time that morning, Derek ran his tongue around his mouth. It scraped
over the remains of one front tooth and the thread of the tooth beside it. He tasted
blood. Then he pointed to the oven door handle in explanation.

Melanie took the sponge from the sink and tried to scrub the stains from the chrome.
She looked over her shoulder at him. For the first time, Melanie felt sorry for Derek.
He looked so vulnerable, obviously hiding a good deal of pain. But sorrow turned to
shock when she noticed a circle of red dots on his stomach, where his robe had fallen
open.

Teeth marks?

She turned from the sight. It was just a love bite, of course. Derek did have a girlfriend,
after all. It had nothing to do with his accident and was none of her business.

“Melanie?”

“Hmm?”

“Would you do me a big favor?” Derek asked. “Would you drive Gary into work today?
I couldn’t make it, and I don’t want him to miss a day because of me.”

“Sure,” Melanie said. She rinsed out the sponge, then thought better of using it again
and dropped it in the trash can.

“Derek,” she said, “you should really see a dentist today. Why don’t you let me call
ours after breakfast? Then I could drop you off on the way to the city.”

“I can call a taxi,” Derek said.

“Never mind,” Melanie answered. “It isn’t out of the way. And don’t worry, you’ll
feel better soon.”

He didn’t feel better. Not now, several hours into the morning with a numb upper lip.
He rested on the couch in the library, two temporary teeth in his mouth. It was more
than the physical hurting that fatigued him. It was the mental anguish, the trying
to remember. Derek needed to recall what had happened the night before so much that
all thoughts of Alicen and the ring were obliterated. Maybe he had gone to get tea
and had fallen, just like he told Melanie. But bits and pieces of a nightmare kept
coming back to him, making him think there was much more to it than that.

It must have been an erotic dream. Derek figured that much out by the dull ache he
had felt in his groin when he had picked himself up off the floor early that morning.
In his patchy memory, he saw a blond woman straddling him,
laughing at him. She looked like that woman Janice, that crazy hitchhiker. Yet Derek
knew she couldn’t have been in the house. The door had been locked all night.

How, then, could he explain the teeth marks?

He looked down at his stomach and pulled his shirt out of his jeans. He ran his finger
over the red bumps, as he had done many times that morning, trying to tell himself
they weren’t what they seemed. He knew they looked like a human bite, but he wanted
another, saner explanation, something to tell him the terror he remembered so vaguely
was nothing more than a dream.

Suddenly the phone rang. Derek considered ignoring it, then thought that it might
be Gary, or even Liza. He crawled off the couch and stumbled out into the hall, the
phone’s high-pitched ringing hurting his ears. He lifted the receiver and mumbled
a greeting. There was no reply.

“Hello?” he repeated, his voice sounding slurred because of the Novocain. He started
to hang up but heard his name. “Yes, this is Derek,” he said, putting the phone to
his ear again. “Who’s this?”

“The woman who craves you,” a voice said, teasingly passionate.

Derek laughed. “Liza, you’re pretty fun—”

A loud, ear-shattering screech made him drop the receiver. It wasn’t Liza on the phone
at all, but some crank. Wisely, Derek hung up. When the phone rang again a moment
later, however, he picked it up against his better judgment.

“Hello?”

“Don’t hang up.”

“I won’t,” Derek promised. “Is this the woman from the roadside? Janice?”

“Yes.”

Derek sighed. “I thought I had made it clear that you weren’t to bother me any more.
What is it you want?”

“You, Derek Miller,” she said. “I want you.”

Derek swung the cord of the phone over the banister, then went to sit on the stairs.
Leaning against the double-twisted rungs, he answered, “I’m flattered. But you see,
kid, you’re wasting your time. Why don’t you find another fellow, someone your own
age? I already have a girlfriend.”

“EEEEEYYYYYAAAA!”

“Don’t do that!” Derek ordered. “Stop screaming.”

“I want you!” the woman shouted. “And I’ll make you want me!”

“Just leave me alone,” Derek said in an angry tone.

‘I’ll never leave you alone,” Janice hissed. There was a silence, and then suddenly
her voice took on the pleading quality of a little girl’s. “Please, Derek! We can
have so much fun together. Once I get rid of those people in that house.”

“Wait a minute,” Derek interrupted. “‘Those people’?”

“The VanBurens,” Janice said with a click of her tongue, as if Derek should have known.
“I want them out of there. I want them
dead!”

Derek resisted an urge to hang up and asked with forced calm, “Why? What did they
do to you?”

“I’ll tell you,” the woman said. “One night, I came to this house to visit Melanie.
But first I met the spirit of the house’s original owner. He sought my aid in his
getting revenge against the VanBurens. But not Melanie! He
loved
Melanie. He’d been following her for nearly two hundred years, and that night I was
going to help him have her, at last.”

Derek recalled the story of Jacob Armand and Lydia Browning. Was this some lunatic
who had also heard that tale? Someone making fun of the VanBurens’ troubles?

“But those evil children tried to stand in my way,” Janice said. “When I tried to
rid myself of Kyle, Melanie came to his defense. She defended a devil-child by striking
me across the head with a pistol! And now”—she paused—“I will walk in this limbo until
I have vengeance!”

Struck in the head? Derek thought. She must be brain damaged! That would explain it.
And Derek would bet all his money that Melanie had nothing at all to do with it. This
woman was just plain nuts!

“I don’t think this is very amusing,” Derek said soberly.

“I’m serious,” the woman said. ‘I’ll get rid of them, one by one. Melanie goes today.”

“What?” Derek cried. “What does that mean?”

But she had hung up on him. For a long time Derek sat holding the receiver on his
lap, not believing what he had just heard. This woman was deranged, no doubt. What
reason could she possibly have for hating the VanBurens?