House of Reckoning (15 page)

The medicine! Take another dose of the medicine!

Even as the thought flashed into his mind, he was sliding his chair back. “Excuse me,” he mumbled. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

His mother frowned worriedly but nodded and didn’t ask him any questions.

Nick ran up to his room, tore open his backpack, and retrieved the pill bottle. He shook out one of the pills, but before he could even put it into his mouth, let alone wash it down with a swallow of water, his vision narrowed, then darkened.

A moment later he could see nothing at all.

But he could hear the voices rising, hear the moaning and wailing growing louder.

So loud it would soon consume him.

His hands shaking uncontrollably now, he somehow managed to force the pill between his lips and to swallow it with what little saliva he could muster in his suddenly bone-dry mouth.

Now he began feeling his way toward the bed, knowing that if his parents found him on the floor, they’d call an ambulance. At least if he made it to the bed they might just let him sleep.

If he could sleep.

He found the bed, crept onto it and lay still. After a few moments, points of light began to appear, then spread. He was in a room, a dark, fetid, stinking room, with—

“Help us!”
The voices erupted in his brain and began to shriek.
“Save us.”

Nick whimpered, but his brain was no longer his to command, and
he lay writhing on the bed watching helplessly as the visions rose before his eyes and the howling, pleading demons filled his ears.

Corpses!

There were rotting corpses everywhere!

Corpses that were still standing and gazing at him and—

Nick shoved a corner of his quilt into his mouth to keep himself from screaming at the vision of the dead and the dying howling in their agony in the dank prison where they were mired in their own filth.

The visions grew more lurid, and the screaming rose, and now he could smell the putrefaction in his nostrils and taste the rot on his tongue, and all he could do was lie on his bed, listening, crying, mutely begging for them to stop, for the horror finally to pass.

But it didn’t pass, and when he was finally exhausted, he lay still, trying desperately to hold on to whatever might remain of his sanity.

Or was it already gone?

Was he already lost forever?

Time no longer had any meaning, and he didn’t hear the sound of his parents entering his room. But at the touch of his mother’s hand, he jerked spasmodically upright and clung to her, his moans echoing those of the creatures in his head.

She held him and rocked him as he sobbed, and slowly he began to feel her tears on his cheeks.

But he never felt the needle that slid deep into his arm, and barely noticed his consciousness begin to fade away before a quiet darkness enveloped him and he relaxed into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.

I
should make her stay, Bettina Philips thought as she stood at the front door of Shutters, watching Sarah make her slow way down the driveway, until finally she vanished into the darkness. But she’d tried, and Sarah Crane had brushed aside every argument she offered.

She had seen how upset Sarah was by what she’d drawn, but just as she began explaining that an artist can’t always know what’s hidden inside them until the image finds its own moment of expression, Sarah caught sight of the clock and insisted that she had to go home, upset or not.

She wouldn’t even accept another cup of tea, let alone the ride Bettina offered. But Bettina understood that: if anyone saw Sarah getting out of her car, there was no telling how her foster parents might punish her.

So Sarah had walked out into the wintry night wearing a jacket barely heavy enough for fall, and now she was gone, and as Bettina finally swung the heavy oak door closed she felt something she hadn’t experienced in a long time.

She felt lonely.

Trying to shake off the feeling, she returned to the studio to gaze
once more at the drawing that still stood on the easel. Perching on the stool in front of it, she studied the way Sarah had used a combination of light and shadow to indicate total darkness. And the angle of the beams in the dark chamber’s ceiling perfectly indicated the tight proportions of the space.

The beams …

Bettina leaned forward, cocking her head.

There was something familiar about those beams.

A chill began to crawl up her spine.

Sarah had drawn Shutters sight unseen on her first day in class. And not as the old manse currently was, either, but the way it had been when it was first built.

Was it possible this was another view of her house from sometime in the past? Could a room like this have ever existed within these walls?

No. Of course not. And yet …

She knew those beams
.

Bettina unclipped the drawing from the easel and took it out into the entry hall, scanning the ceiling and the way the walls joined, but knowing even as she gazed upward that the beams in the picture would be gone in the opposite direction.

Grabbing a sweater from the coat tree in the foyer and turning lights on as she went, she carried the drawing down the steep flight of stairs that led from the kitchen into the cold basement that never seemed to warm up, even in the midst of the hottest summer.

Tonight it felt even colder than it ever had.

The musty smell felt choking in her throat, but she ignored it as she moved among the shrouded furniture and the old filing cabinets that held so much of her family’s history. Tonight, though, she ignored everything but the beams overhead, eyeing not only the angles at which they ran, but the way they connected with one another.

The enormous timbers that had supported the house for nearly two centuries still held, now chalky white with age and cobwebs, but never painted or covered with plaster or drywall.

But nothing matched Sarah’s sketch, at least not nearly as perfectly as the drawing of the house had hewn to the original. Still, there were probably areas in the basement that she had never seen. The old coal chute and bin and furnace that took up so much room long ago had been torn out and replaced by the oil-burning furnace that was
now installed in a tiny portion of the area the coal-fueled system had required.

How many other areas of the basement had been reconfigured over the stretch of decades that had run their course since the foundation was laid?

And where to begin to look?

Furniture and ancient machinery were stacked high at the far end of the chamber in which she stood, blocking her from even reaching the pull chains on the series of ancient lightbulbs that someone had strung among the joists somewhere in the far distant past.

Nor could she get close to the far end without moving what looked like several tons of things past generations had consigned to the darkness, and she wasn’t about to go fumbling through it until she could reach the lights.

But she could see nothing that looked even close to the small dungeonlike chamber Sarah had drawn.

But if there really were such a room down here, wouldn’t it show on the original plans?

Of course! And when her parents built the garage forty years ago, they had found the original plans in her great-great-grandfather’s study.

Yet as she took a final look at the huge timbers in the ceiling—timbers whose proportions seemed perfectly to match those that Sarah had drawn—Bettina suddenly realized that she didn’t need the plans of the house to know the truth. Already she had little doubt that in the long-ago past someone had stored things somewhere in this basement that they intended to keep hidden forever.

And Sarah had drawn them.

Bettina pulled the sweater close around her neck and hurried back upstairs, turning off the light and firmly closing and locking the door.

The kitchen, still smelling of warm spiced tea and filled with bright light, seemed a safe haven, but Bettina moved straight through it, across the inlaid marble floor of the hall, and pushed open one of the heavy mahogany doors to the room that had not been used since it was her thrice-great-grandfather’s study.

Instead it had been left exactly as it was when Boone Philips died, the one room in the house that was always closed, and never used.

The one room that she herself had never played in as a child.

It had always been a cold room, but tonight it felt even colder than the rest of the house.

Bettina switched on the overhead chandelier and surveyed the glass-fronted cabinets, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with the brass library ladder on a rail, the leather chairs and massive desk.

Where to begin to look for a set of two-hundred-year-old plans?

Where had her parents found them?

The desk was as good a starting place as any.

Bettina perched on the cracking leather of the big desk chair, and the smell of old leather, and even older books, enveloped her.

She opened the front drawer of the desk, glanced at its jumble of pens, pencils, and paper clips, and closed it again.

The top drawer on the right-hand pedestal held Boone Philips’s personal engraved stationery, now yellowed and crisp.

The deep file drawer below that was filled with folders, but none of them thick enough to hold a series of house plans.

Still, she flipped quickly through them; they looked like old inmate files from the time when her ancestor was the last warden of the old prison. Maybe someday she’d donate these and the contents of the cabinets in the basement to the historical society. At least she’d be rid of them, and maybe the historians would find some use for them.

Then, just as she was about to close the drawer, she noticed something odd.

The drawer’s face seemed to be a few inches taller than the drawer was deep.

She closed the drawer and looked at the front of it, measuring its depth with her fingers, hand, and forearm. Then she opened it again and repeated the exercise. Sure enough, the bottom of the drawer was nearly three inches higher than it needed to be.

And when she felt the exterior bottom of the drawer, it was nearly even with the bottom of the drawer’s face.

The drawer had a false bottom.

Bettina lifted the files out of the drawer, stacking them on the desk.

Barely visible at the back of the drawer, she found a small notch in the drawer’s bottom. Taking a paper clip from the top drawer, she straightened it out, bent it so it formed a right angle, then fit it into the notch.

It came up without so much as a squeal.

And there, hidden away in the secret compartment that had been built into the desk, was a sheaf of handwritten pages.

A manuscript?

Bettina carefully pulled the papers out of the drawer.

Her thrice-great-grandfather was a writer? What had he written?

She quickly replaced the false bottom, put the files back where they’d originally been, and closed the drawer.

The house plans—even if they were here—could wait.

Leaving Sarah Crane’s drawing on the desk, she took the manuscript back to her studio, curled up on the chaise with a thick wool throw, and began to read.

With her coat buttoned up tight, her scarf wrapped around her mouth and nose, and the knit cap pulled well down over her ears, Sarah made her way slowly down the last few yards of the driveway, feeling each step out carefully.

The last thing she needed to do was trip in the dark.

And with her hands plunged deep in the warmth of her pockets, she might not be able to pull them out in time to catch herself if she fell. Then what would she do? There was no way Bettina Philips could hear her from here, and even if a car passed on the road, its windows would be closed. But if she pulled her hands out now, her fingers would freeze.

At last she came to the road, turned left, and started down into the village. For the first part of the long walk back to the Garveys’, all she’d been able to think about was the macabre drawing she’d made at Shutters. Where had it come from? And why couldn’t she remember drawing it? Was it possible that she
hadn’t
drawn it? That was certainly how it felt: like some strange force had just taken over, moving the charcoal all by itself. But as she came to the bright streetlight across from the town square, her mind shifted from where she’d been to where she was going.

What would it to be like to face the wrath of Angie Garvey?

A cold that was different from the icy chill in the air penetrated deep into her, making the night seem almost warm by comparison.

What was she going to say when her foster mother demanded to know where she’d been?

Should she try to lie and say she was at the library?

But she wasn’t very good at lying, and Angie would know right away that she wasn’t telling the truth.

Just walking out had been bad enough; if she lied about where she’d been—

She didn’t even want to think about what Angie might do. Not letting her visit her father would only be the beginning of it.

Five minutes later she turned the corner onto Quail Run, and stopped for a moment, still trying to think what she might say. The Garvey house was dark except for the bluish cast from the big-screen television that showed through the draperies. Still uncertain what she was going to say, Sarah took a deep breath and crossed the street. A moment later she climbed the three steps to the front porch, steeled herself, and opened the storm door.

The front door was locked.

Sarah moved to the window, peered through the sheer curtains, and saw Mitch Garvey’s foot propped up on the coffee table as he lay sprawled on the sofa that faced the television.

She knocked on the glass, but his foot didn’t even twitch.

She rang the bell and waited, shivering in the cold, but there were no answering lights, no sound, no movement of any kind.

Maybe they’d left the back door open for her.

Sarah closed the storm door, went around to the back of the house, and was about to try the back door when she saw a rolled up sleeping bag standing on its end right next to the dog door. Sitting on top of it was a small plate—not even covered—that held half a sandwich.