House of Reckoning (30 page)

He waited, afraid that Sarah was going to give him that look—the look the rest of the kids at school always gave him.

The look his father gave him.

But instead she reached out a finger and touched the fragile edges of the scarred leather binding. Finally, she opened the cover to expose the frontispiece, and Nick heard her gasp as she gazed at a photograph of a house with a man standing by the front door, then read the caption beneath it.

“I drew that house,” she whispered.
“Exactly
like that, with charcoal!”

Nick stared at her.

“It was my first or second day here,” she told him. “How could I have done that? How could I have drawn Bettina’s house the way it used to be when I hadn’t even seen it the way it is now?” Without waiting for Nick to answer, Sarah scanned the title page.

She turned the page.

The first photograph looked like a prison, but the caption said it was a hospital. It was still under construction, and the men working on it wore the black-and-white-striped garb of nineteenth-century prisoners as they leaned on their shovels next to newly planted saplings, with the building in the background.

Nick sat silently as Sarah turned the pages, and as he watched her, the murmurs in his head began to rise.

Rise, as if in anticipation.

She turned another page, exposing a plate in which nearly a dozen inmates stood in front of the house, their placement looking deliberately posed and the smiles they displayed for the camera appearing forced even in the ancient photograph.

“Look!”
said a voice so sharp and loud it made Nick jump.
“There I am!”

“Wait,” Nick said as Sarah started to turn another page. “Did you hear that?”

Her hand froze a few inches above the page and she looked up at him. “Hear what?”

Nick ran his finger over the photograph, and as he touched each face in turn, the voices in his mind rose and fell, almost as if he were running through the stations on a radio.

“It’s them,” Nick whispered, his voice sounding haunted even to himself. “These are the people whose voices I hear.” He waited, again
half expecting Sarah to get up and walk out of the library, but instead she simply studied the picture for several more seconds, then looked up at him again.

“Are you sure?”

He nodded.

“You hear them now?”

Nick nodded again.

“Then let’s try something. I’m going to turn the page.”

A moment later they were gazing at a couple standing on the lawn in front of Shutters. The man wore a formal black suit, while the woman, clad in a white dress, was wearing an elaborate hat on her head and gloves that came past her elbows.

“Do you still hear the voices?” Sarah asked.

Nick hesitated, then nodded. “But not as loud—they’re just sort of whispering now.”

Sarah turned more pages, and the voices in Nick’s head faded, but then he reached out a hand to stop her. His eyes fixed on a photograph of Boone and Astrid and their two daughters and two sons. “Look,” he said, pointing at one of the teenage girls. “She looks exactly like you.”

Sarah leaned closer and gazed at the young woman’s face.

The girl didn’t look like her—didn’t look like her at all.

It looked exactly like her mother, and she didn’t look anything like her mother. “No,” she said, “it looks like—”

“It looks like
you,”
Nick insisted. “It looks
exactly
like you.”

“Sarah?”

The single word was spoken so clearly in her mother’s voice that Sarah’s head jerked up and she looked around, half expecting to see her mother standing behind her.

But there was nobody.

“It’s time, Sarah,”
her mother’s voice said again.
“Time to go home. Time to go back where you belong.”

She gazed down at the picture. The image—the image of her mother—was smiling at her, but the voice wasn’t coming from the pages of the book.

It was coming from inside her head.

Apparently, what had been happening to Nick for years was now happening to her, too. She tore her eyes away from the picture and looked at Nick. “I heard her,” she said. “My mother—she said it’s time for me to go home.”

“Home?” Nick echoed. “The Garveys’?”

She shook her head. “Where I belong. She said I have to go back where I belong.” Her eyes shifted to the book, and Nick understood in an instant.

“Shutters,” he breathed.

Sarah nodded.

Nick closed the book. “We have to go out there, Sarah.” The voices in his head began murmuring.

“I can’t,” Sarah said, her eyes pleading with him. “I have to go back to the Garveys’. I promised Angie—”

“Go
home,”
her mother’s voice said.
“Go back where you belong.”

“We have to go,” Nick said. “It’s where the people in my head are.”

Sarah touched his arm. “Nick, they’re all …” Her voice trailed off, but Nick completed her sentence.

“They’re all dead,” he said softly. “They must all be in the old cemetery.” Inside his head, the murmuring grew louder. “I think I have to go up there. And I think you have to go with me.”

Sarah looked deep into his eyes. “Are you sure?”

He nodded. “We have to go. Both of us. You know we do.”

Sarah took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

I
should have stayed with Nick
.

It wasn’t the first time the thought had crossed Sarah’s mind since the two of them left the library separately, neither one willing to risk being seen together. And Nick had insisted she couldn’t miss the old graveyard—it was only two hundred yards off the road to Shutters, and the trail was both good and well-marked.

And the sun had still been high and the sky blue.

Now the sun was dropping fast and the sky had turned a steel gray, and the shadows of the forest fell across the road. Even though the trail was right there where Nick said it would be, the shiver that went through Sarah as she gazed at it was far colder than the afternoon. But she hadn’t stayed with him, and it was too late to turn back now.

She stepped off the road and started along the trail, and with every step she took the path seemed to grow narrower, the forest denser. She froze as something moved in the brush off to the right, unconsciously holding her breath as she listened.

Silence.

Slowly letting her breath out, but still straining to hear every sound, she took another step down the path.

And suddenly the brush just ahead seemed to explode as a deer burst from the bushes, crossed the path in a single leap, and vanished into the forest as Sarah’s body burned with the shot of adrenaline the fleeing deer had triggered.

Quickening her step until her hip would let her go no faster, she came to the old cemetery less than a minute later. A misty fog drifting in from the lake was settling into the low areas of the weed-choked potter’s field, tendrils of it swirling silently with each tiny breath of air, like tentacles seeking something to grasp.

Sarah shivered and pulled her coat more snugly around her throat.

But where was Nick? If he didn’t get here in the next few minutes, it would be too dark to find anything at all.

What had they even been thinking of? What were they hoping to find? “Don’t worry,” Nick had told her just before they left the library. “The voices will tell me. I’m sure of it!” Which had seemed perfectly sensible in the bright light of the library. But now, with the afternoon light fading, the sky darkening, and the fog drifting in …

Bettina felt Pyewackett stiffen in her lap, and a second later first Rocky and then Cooper rose to their feet, their hackles rising.

“What is it?” she asked. “What’s …”

Her voice died on her lips as she felt the house tremble.

She rose from her chair as Pyewackett jumped from her lap and disappeared through the door to the great central hall, but instead of following the cat, the dogs ran to the French doors leading to the terrace, and Cooper began barking. Frowning, Bettina went to the doors, too, and peered out into the gathering fog and darkness. “What is it, Coop?” she asked again. “Do you want to go out?” The dog’s body began quivering, and a series of excited yelps emerged from his throat as he rose up and pawed at the door handles.

“All right,” she said, turning the handle. But before she could push the door open, Cooper had hurled himself against it, throwing it wide, then plunged across the terrace and down to the lawn, Rocky following after him. “No!” Bettina called, but it was too late. Cooper had already bounded off into the fog.

Pulling on a jacket, she set out after him, following the sound of his barking.

“Sarah? Is that you?” It was Nick’s voice, but it was no more than a harsh whisper floating through the swirling mist from the far side of the field. Then she saw him silhouetted against the glassy expanse of the lake beyond, and she started toward him, picking her way across the field. But the moment she was close enough to see him clearly, she knew they’d wasted their time, and his words confirmed it.

“I don’t hear anything. No voices at all.”

And suddenly the whole thing once again seemed like a terrible mistake. Even if she ran all the way back to the Garveys—which she couldn’t—she’d still be so late they’d—

She didn’t even want to think about what they might do.

“What are we going to do?” she whispered, as much to herself as to Nick. “I can’t go back to the Garveys’ now.”

“I don’t know,” he said, kicking at a frozen clump of grass. “I was so sure—”

He was interrupted by the howling of a dog, and an instant later they saw it—a great black shape charging out of the forest, coming straight at them. As Nick instinctively stepped in front of Sarah, the animal vanished into a patch of fog, but they could still hear its baying, and a moment later it reappeared, mouth gaping. The memory of Conner West’s German shepherd rose in his mind, and along with it, the voices, too, came alive.

“Kill it!”
one of them screamed.
“Kill it now!”

The dog was almost upon them, and Nick raised his arm, ready to strike down the lunging animal, when Sarah pushed him aside.

“Coopie!” she cried as the dog, its tail wagging furiously, nearly rolled over in its effort to stop before ramming right into her. Then it rose up, put its forepaws against her chest and licked her face.

As Nick stared at her in stunned silence, Sarah grinned, and gave the dog a quick hug before pushing him back to the ground. “This is Cooper! One of Bettina’s dogs.”

Cooper dropped to his haunches in front of Nick and raised one of his forepaws. Without thinking, Nick took it, and found himself first shaking hands with and then being licked by the same animal he’d thought was going to kill him only a few seconds before. A moment
later a much smaller dog came bouncing across the field, followed by a voice calling out from the direction of the house.

“Cooper? Rocky? Bad dogs! Come
back
here.”

“Rocky?” Nick echoed, looking down at the little mutt that was now scratching at his leg, begging to be picked up. “His name is ‘Rocky’? What kind of name is that for—”

But Sarah was no longer listening to him. “Bettina?” she called as she waved to the figure now emerging from the hedge that screened the old cemetery from the house. “They’re over here!”

“Sarah?” Bettina replied as she hurried toward them. “Nick? What on earth are you two doing out here? It’s almost dark, not to mention freezing!”

Nick glanced uncertainly at Sarah.

“We—We thought this was where Nick’s voices were coming from,” Sarah began. “I mean, we found a book in the library, and there was a picture in it, and we thought—”

“It was me,” Nick broke in. “It was all my idea. I thought the voices belonged to the people in one of the pictures. They were inmates in the old asylum, but they worked in the house and—” He abruptly fell silent as his mistake dawned on him.

The house! That’s where he should have gone. Not the graveyard. And Bettina Philips was nodding.

“They’re not out here,” Nick breathed, speaking as much to himself as to anyone else. “They’re in the house—they’ve always been in the house.”

And in his head the voices once more spoke, uttering a single word in quiet unison.

“Yesss …”

They started back toward Shutters, but instead of Bettina leading the way, it was Nick who strode ahead, Sarah beside him, with the dogs trailing along at their heels. And the closer he drew to the house, the more certain Nick became that the key to what had been going on in his mind ever since he was a boy lay inside the stone walls of the great house that now loomed in the twilight, barely visible through the fog, looking like something out of a nightmare.