House (24 page)

Leslie kept walking. She was trying to be confident, but she was trembling.

“Leslie?” Jack said.

“What makes you think you can shove your twisted world down a little boy's throat and not pay for it, huh?” she said in a bitter hiss.
On the edge of snapping,
Jack thought. She was talking about Pete.

“Leslie . . .”

“You're guilty, Betty. You're guilty too. And your sins are about to find you out.”

Leslie walked behind her, then past her. Betty's face was drawn tight. She watched Leslie like a hawk. It was the first time Jack had seen her stripped of command.

“You believe in hell, Betty? I don't. But looking at you, I sure wish I did, because whatever hell is, it was made for you and your son. You can either join us against White or we can take you out. How's that for a game?”

Jack was only eight feet from Betty now. But her knife was pressed tight to Susan's neck.

Her eyes swiveled from Leslie to Jack, then back. She suddenly released Susan, dropped the knife, and lifted both hands. Susan ducked to her right.

“Listen to me, Jack,” Susan said, spinning back. “He who has ears to hear . . . Can you hear me?”

“Okay, you win,” Betty said. “I know . . .”

“Kill her, Jack,” Leslie said.

Susan was speaking as well, but Jack couldn't make out her words. The voices spun through his mind.

“. . . how to kill White,” Betty said. “I can show you . . .”

“Kill her!” Leslie cried.

“. . . how to kill him.”

Susan finished a long run-on. “And if that doesn't make sense, it's not really supposed to.”

What?
Jack looked at Susan and Leslie. “What?”

“What?” Leslie repeated, clueless.

“What's she saying? Susan.”

Leslie glanced at the girl. “Nothing.”

Silence fell. Betty's head jerked spastically for the length of a second, and then her smile returned. Jack's nerves were strung tight. Or had he seen more? Now his mind was really playing tricks.

He tried to summarize the present scenario. Leslie on his right, insisting that he swing away and bludgeon her to kingdom come. Susan on his left, staring at him in shock. Betty in the middle, hands raised by her head, smiling nervously.

“Kill her!” Leslie screamed.

Jack swung. He heard a crack. Betty's skull. The blade hit Betty with enough force to send her reeling into the mirror five feet behind her. The glass shattered.

Betty dropped to the floor and landed on her rear end. A trickle of blood ran from her ear.

They all stared, not quite believing. Black fog seeped from the wound.

“Follow me!” Susan said. “Run!” She ran toward the door that led into the room with four sofas.

Jack spied the shotgun, the one Betty had hauled into Pete's room. Leaning against the desk. He let the spade clatter to the floor, snatched up the better weapon.

“Out the back!” Leslie cried. “Susan—”

“No, Susan's right,” Jack said. “We're closer to the stairs. Up the stairs. Come on!” This time he'd shoot the locks off.

He ran after Susan, who was just peeling into the main hall with the stairs when Jack spun into the living room.

Leslie sprinted on his heels.

In that hall was a flight of stairs that ran up to the main floor. If Randy was right and White was in the basement, they'd be safe on the main floor. They could exit from there. And with the gun he would have no trouble dealing with any lock.

Jack's heart pounded. They were going to make it.

What about Stephanie and Randy? Hopefully they'd made it out by now. He had Susan and Leslie.

He spilled into the hall and almost ran over Susan, who'd stopped and was staring in the opposite direction of the stairs.

“Let's go, let's—”

Leslie screamed.

Jack spun back and saw that she too was now staring at the far end of the hall, face white. He whirled.

The killer faced them from the shadows, unmoving. Black trench coat hanging open down the middle. Tin plate covering all but his eyes, and a slit for his mouth. Shotgun pointing casually at the floor.

“One dead body,” he said, his voice deadened behind the mask. “The hag doesn't count.”

White started to walk toward them.

“Follow me!” Susan cried. She flung open the door directly across the hall and ran through.

White's gun boomed. The load hit the door behind Susan, slamming it shut. If history was any judge, it was probably locked.

“Shoot him!” Leslie screamed.

Jack jerked his shotgun up and fired a wild shot into the wall.

His arms were weak. All Jack could think of now was getting out. Up the stairs, past the door. White's shotgun came up.

“Hurry!”

Jack leaped onto the stairs and took them three at a time with Leslie pounding up behind him. They didn't have Susan, he knew that, but he also knew that they would soon both be dead if he didn't get past this door.

Boom!
White's shot tore into the shiplap siding beside him.

He pumped a round into the chamber as he ran, aimed at the door latch, and pulled the trigger before his foot was firmly planted on the landing.

The blast knocked him back into Leslie, who gave him a shove toward the door. It had been released from the shattered locking mechanism and swung free.

“Go, go!”

He dived through the door, tripped on the riser, and sprawled onto the floor.

Leslie was hung up behind him, trapped momentarily by the door, which had bounced off the adjacent wall hard enough to swing shut.

“Leslie!”

A beat passed.

Then she plowed in and pulled up. She took in the room in wonder, ignoring him entirely.

“What . . . what is this?”

A door to Jack's right suddenly flew open. Randy and Stephanie ran through, winded, eyes disbelieving.

Then the rest of the room came into clear view. And it wasn't the hallway he expected to see.

They were back in the boiler room.

“Oh God oh God oh God!” Stephanie mumbled.

25
4:25 am

THE BOILER ROOM HAD CHANGED, LESLIE saw. Large red letters had been scrawled on the walls.

The Wages of Sin Is One Dead Body

Randy's nostrils flared with rage. Stephanie's eyes flittered with fear. Whatever had happened to them had changed them, she thought. Her own mind was in a meltdown; she knew it well, but that didn't preclude her from judging others. Of the four of them, only Jack seemed to be himself.

She was somewhat surprised by how little she felt for Randy now. And Jack hadn't reacted to her advances, not that she had anticipated much more. Still, if there was one person who could lead them out of this, it was probably Jack.

“Give me the shotgun,” Randy snapped, glaring at Jack.

“This is wrong, so wrong,” Leslie said.

“Give me the gun,” Randy repeated, holding out a hand.

Leslie walked in a wide circle on numb legs, staring at that writing in red. “How's this possible? I don't understand. Something spiritual is happening, isn't it?”

“I thought you were too intelligent to believe in the supernatural,” Stephanie said.

“I am.” And she was. But how could she deny the physical impossibility of what had just happened? “I am. But the house seems to know what we're going to do before we do it! And it knows us!”

“Knows us?”

She looked at Stephanie. “Our weaknesses. Our fears. The sin we—”

“I said, give me the gun!” Randy shouted, lifting his shotgun.

Leslie became enraged. “Stop it!”

“I don't trust him,” came the snarl.

“Don't you see what's happening here, you idiot? We're back in the boiler room. And we're turning on each other. We're wearing down!” She knew she was babbling, but she pressed on. “It knows what it's doing! Our minds are wearing us down, knowing what haunts us.”

“I see that. I still don't trust him.”

Stephanie was blinking at Leslie. “You really think that?”

“You have a better explanation? This whole thing is spiritual. Evil. All that, but it's more personal. But spiritual is really mental, right? I mean, we have to deal with this killer on a different level to satisfy his psychosis. Make him think we are responding on some spiritual level or . . .” Or what. She didn't know or what. “This is crap, just plain crap!”

“I'm not going to give you my gun,” Jack said, eyeing Randy suspiciously. He checked to see how many rounds remained. Just one. Good thing he checked. He fished the spare shells out of his pants and loaded them.

Leslie walked over and shoved Randy's gun down. “You're losing your mind! You hear me, Randy? Stop this!”

“Are you two nuts?” Stephanie demanded. “We're trapped in this basement and you're squabbling over guns?”

Randy glanced at her, then slowly lowered his weapon, reloaded it.

“So you still think this is just in our minds?” Stephanie snapped. “If there's anyone who should be shot here, it's you.”

Leslie ignored the woman. Nothing any of them said now would surprise her. And Stephanie was right about one thing—they were trapped.

Jack drilled Randy with a stare. “What happened back there? How did you get back in here?”

“Through the back exit,” Randy said.

“You're sure it was an exit?”

“I saw White step in through that door earlier. Of course I'm sure.”

“How did
you
get in?” Stephanie asked.

“Up the stairs. This was supposed to be the main level.”

“We're trapped,” Leslie said.

“All in our minds?” Jack said.

She ignored him.

The house groaned.

“And that's
not
the pipes,” Stephanie said. “This house is alive.”

It was such a clear, obvious truth that none of them dared suggest differently.

Leslie walked over to one of the boilers and put her hand on it. She rapped on it with her knuckles as if testing to see that it was real, then faced them, face flushed.

“There's no way out, is there?”

Her eyes settled on Randy, who was staring at the wall.

The Wages of Sin Is One Dead Body
House rule number three:
Give me one dead body, and I might let rule two slide.

The killer was demanding one dead body as a payment for their sin. Fanatical, religious nonsense, but Leslie couldn't shake the feeling that if they didn't play the game this way, they would die.

So what was she supposed to do? Kill her sin? Blow Pete's head off ? Or kiss his face and do whatever he wanted as a form of penitence?

The inbreds didn't count; they all knew that. They also knew that White could have killed them by now if he wanted to.

This was why religion should be banned in civilized countries. She glared at the wall and stifled a scream of fury.

Jack gripped the shotgun a little tighter. Of the four of them, Randy was the most likely to satisfy White's demand.

And what about him? If it came right down to it, would he kill one of them to save the other three? In spite of the house rules, Jack suspected White probably wouldn't be satisfied with just one dead body. He recalled the newspaper accounts. Whole families, murdered.

On the other hand, Jack wasn't sure he wouldn't comply, particularly if it was in self-defense. What confused him was the “wages of sin” bit on the wall. Maybe Leslie was right, and the killer was religiously motivated. Whatever was happening to them was as much spiritual or psychosomatic as physical.

The problem was, he didn't have a clue what that meant. How do you defeat a killer—or a house, for that matter—that's rubbing your own sin in your face?

Comply?
One dead body.
Randy's dead body.

“There's only one way out,” Stephanie said.

The sound of metal scraping against metal squealed through the room. Jack swiveled his head up just in time to see something drop through the shadows between two large pipes twenty feet above them.

His pulse spiked. It was a body. On a thick rope.

The body fell for ten feet then bounced at the end of the rope, hung by a noose drawn tight around its neck.

Leslie jumped out of the way with a startled cry.

The rope creaked over the swaying weight. Slowly the body turned until they could all see who it was.

At the end of the rope, as dead as a sack of rocks, hung Randy Messarue.

Randy?

They were all too stunned to react immediately. A voice was screaming through Jack's mind, telling him that this body on the end of this rope had serious implications, but he was too shocked to isolate them.

Randy's dead eyes were closed and his mouth was cracked. From the crack seeped a thin tendril of black smoke that streamed down toward the floor. It hit the ground and spread out on the concrete.

The meaning of this dead body hit Jack then, like an eighteen-wheeler barreling out of the black night. If Randy was dead, who was the Randy next to him?