Rockinghorse (10 page)

The room was empty of life.

“Dad?” Jackie said, moving to his side. She pointed. “Look at the keys on the piano.”

The family moved slowly into the ballroom and stared in disbelief.

The piano bench was empty, but the keys were being depressed, the music swelling, louder and wilder than before.

Lucas heard Tracy suck in her breath in shock and disbelief. “Steady, now,” he cautioned them all. “It's got to be some sort of . . . Christ, I don't know. Player piano, I guess. Because that,” he said, pointing to the polished grand piano playing by itself, “is impossible.”

With his words still echoing in the hallway, the music became still louder and wilder, the invisible fingers pounding the keys.

Laughter began ringing through the house. Above them, the sounds of a horse whinneying and nickering came to them.

“That horse again,” Jackie whispered to her brother, too low for the parents to hear.

Johnny swallowed hard and nodded his head. He did not trust himself to speak.

“What in the hell is going on in this house?” Lucas offered up the question to anyone who might have an answer.

No one did.

The music came crashing to an end, leaving a dead, still silence.

Someone, or some
thing
laughed from the depths of the huge old mansion. The laughter was mocking.

“All right,” Lucas said. “This has gone on long enough. Who are you?” he yelled. “What do you want?”

His words echoed back to him in the silence of the great house.

The lights went out.

“Somebody's in the house!” Johnny said. “I can hear them.”

“
They're coming at us!
” Jackie yelled, her cry startling everybody. “
Across the room!
”

All could now make out shapes and forms, rushing toward the small group.

“
Dad!
” Johnny yelled, as hands fell on his slender shoulders, spinning him around. The boy whirled and broke free of the hard hands. He kicked out, his bare foot striking his attacker in the groin. The black-clad form screamed in anguish. Johnny put a shoulder into the belly of a second man, sending the man sprawling on the marble floor.

Tracy felt herself lifted off her feet, a hard, callused hand fumbling under her pajama top, squeezing her breasts. She screamed as her old, almost-but-not-quite-forgotten fear returned to her. She fought the man, but he was much bigger and much stronger. His breath was hot on her face and it stank. She struggled but could not prevent herself being dragged away from her family, into a small dressing room off the ballroom. She was forced to the floor, on her back. Her screaming intensified as black fear gripped her in a sweaty hand, turning her almost mindless.

In the hallway, Jackie clawed and bit and struck at the shapes that surrounded her. She slapped at hands that tried to touch her in forbidden places. She screamed for someone to come to her, to help her, not realizing that no sound was pushing past her lips.

The girl was powerless to prevent her attackers from fondling her. They laughed as they did, their stinking breath fouling the air. Their bodies pushed close to the terrified girl, the old sweat odors almost making her sick.

Johnny had lost sight of the murky forms of his parents and sister. Panic seized the boy and he tried to rush into where he believed the moving melee to be. He was grabbed by the shoulders and flung backward, sliding on the marble floor, hitting his head on a baseboard. Bright lights whipped through his head, and he was momentarily stunned as blackness took him into cold arms.

Lucas had not had a fistfight since his early college days. He had never been a troublemaking youth, and going to public school as he had, had never played much contact sports. But one memory that he had finally had to seek psychiatric help to deal with, and had thought he had whipped after all these years, returned to him in a hot rush of ugly recurrence. Lucas screamed in rage, striking out at the forms and shapes that threatened his family and himself.

An eerie light began shining and seeping downward from the top landing of the mansion. The sounds of galloping hooves reached his ears.

“In the
house
?” he said aloud.

His voice gave away his position in the dark hallway. A hard fist caught him a glancing blow on the shoulder, knocking him spinning and sprawling to the floor.

The breath was knocked from him and he struggled to get to his feet, his wife's almost-insane screaming filling his head.

He found himself pinned to the floor, with people pounding on him. But not with fists. They were using sticks. Lucas howled in rage as his oldest fear boiled once more to the surface. He rolled on the floor, but was unable to get away from the sticks that struck him painfully. Each time he tried to rise, he was pushed back to the cool floor, and the beating continued. Little by little, he felt his adulthood being stripped away from him, spinning him back in time, back to his young teens, back to that awful afternoon in that alley in New York City.

Back to when . . .

“
NO!
” he screamed. “
NO!
” He mustered all his courage and mentally fought away the horrible memories he had tried for so long to dissolve in his mind.

“Lucas!” Tracy screamed. “Oh, God, Lucas, please help me.”

Tracy's pajama bottoms had been torn from her. Strong hands spread her naked legs wide and pinned her ankles to the floor. Hands fumbled between her legs, fondling her, attempting to bring wetness to the dryness.

“
Lucas!
” she screamed.

Lucas lunged against the legs that encircled him. He kicked out and heard the breath gush from one man as the toe of his moccasin struck the man in the stomach. Lucas's kicking and jerking startled the circle of men, almost as if they had suspected he would not do something like that. Or had been told, the fleeting thought came to Lucas.

He fought away the dark shapes and rose to his feet just as Jackie's cries reached him. That, coupled with his wife's cries for help, gave the man new strength. He fumbled in the dark and found a vase, jerking it from its stand. He smashed the expensive vase over the head of a shapeless form. The man—Lucas supposed it was a man—crumpled to the floor, unconscious.

“Tracy!” Lucas called.

“Here!” she returned the shout.

Lucas ran through the open door, colliding with several black-dressed forms, knocking them all sprawling. He grabbed another and slung him against a wall. Lucas drew back his right arm and smashed his elbow into the man's face. The whatever-in-the-hell-it-was screamed hoarsely and jerked his gloved hands to his face, not in time to catch the sudden spurting of blood from his mashed and broken nose. The blood gushed all over Lucas's T-shirt.

Now Lucas's elbow hurt as well as his split knuckles.

Lucas could scarcely make out the shape of his wife getting to her feet.

“The kids!” she cried. “Where are the kids, Lucas?”

Before he could answer, someone grabbed him from behind and pinned his arms to his side. Lucas leaned forward slightly, twisted like he'd seen tough guys do in the movies—and to his surprise, it worked. The man flopped on the floor. Enraged, yelling—even though he would not know he was doing so until afterward, when Tracy would tell him he had been roaring like an angry bull—Lucas stomped the man in the face with his moccasin.

Now his foot hurt, too.

He looked around. Tracy was on her feet, struggling into her torn pajama bottoms. That done, she picked up a cane-bottomed chair and said, “I'm all right, Lucas. Go find the kids, please.”

Lucas grabbed a man who was moaning, attempting to rise from the floor, and with one hand firmly on his collar, the other hand on the man's jeans' seat, bodily hurled him out the open doorway. The man smashed into a wall across the hall. He slumped to the floor, stunned.

“Jackie!” Lucas yelled. “Johnny! Where are you kids? Sing out!”

To Jackie, the men who now held her, fumbling at her youthfulness, were like creatures from another planet. They were formless, shapeless, faceless. When she was much younger, between seven and nine, her overriding passion had been watching any movie that held monsters and hideous things within its celluloid frames. Her parents had not caught her obsession in time, and had not known she was staying up all hours of the night listening and watching TV in her room, the sound pouring into her head from an earphone. She was on the verge of not being able to separate reality from fiction when her parents caught it, due mostly to a drastic drop in her grades at school. Always a straight-A student, her grades had plummeted to near failure. Jackie had undergone intensive therapy with the best child psychologist Lucas and Tracy could find, and finally the problem had been solved—they hoped.

Now it all was returning, much more swiftly than it had originally come.

Hot stinking breath filled Jackie's nostrils as hands roamed her young body. She was flung back several years, back to when she imagined all those beings and monsters were real (no one had ever fully convinced her they weren't). Now she was their captive.

She screamed, the sound finally pushing past her lips, the shrieking filling the level of the house. It brought her dad on the run, the killing rage building within him.

Lucas threw a rolling block into the legs of those surrounding his daughter, sending several thrashing on the floor. He would not feel the bruises on his body until the next day. Lucas began fighting like a madman, both fists pumping and flailing, his blows missing more often than striking a target. But it was effective.

He heard someone call out, calling in a muffled tone of voice. He could not make out the words. The black-draped shapes began dissolving into the darkness.

Huddled in a near-naked ball of hurt and confusion in a corner of the room, Jackie's sobbing brought Lucas panting back into reality. He found her torn clothing and she slipped into what remained of her pajamas.

Lucas looked around the gloom, listening intently. He could detect no alien sounds. Whatever had attacked them appeared to be gone.

Lucas cautiously, and as quietly as possible, gathered his family around him. Tracy worked the nearest light switch. The lights popped back on in the great mansion, all of them, as if centrally controlled by one switch.

“How? . . .” Tracy let that slide off into silence.

“Dad?” Jackie sobbed. “Who were those people? Why were they doing that to us?”

“I don't know, baby,” Lucas told her as he stroked her hair.

She put her arms around his waist and he held her close.

“I hate this damn house!” Johnny said, considerable heat in his voice.

“Well, folks,” Lucas said, “I'm not too terribly thrilled with it myself—at this moment. But let's all try to get ourselves under control and maybe things will look better in the daylight. OK? We'll talk about it then.”

It was at that moment the shakes hit them all. To a person they felt their knees go weak and the muscles in their legs turn to jelly, unable to support their weight. They all either leaned against the wall or sat on the floor until the trembling stopped.

“God!” Tracy said. “I always thought the actors' reactions were staged for the camera after some death-defying scene. Never will I laugh at them again.”

“Can we all stand?” Lucas said. “Good. Jackie, take your brother's hand and grab onto your mother's hand with the other. Everybody got a grip? OK. We're going into our bedroom. Let's go.”

With Lucas leading the way, they marched down the hallway. Along the way, they saw nothing ominous except shadows, playing what to them seemed hideous scenes in the darkness of the mansion. In the bedroom, Lucas firmly closed the door behind them.

Making certain all the windows were shut and locked, Lucas found the answer to his earlier unspoken question concerning guns. He took the .45 from his nightstand drawer, jacked a round into the chamber, and slipped into his trousers, putting on slip-on boots he had bought in Palma. He slipped some cartridges into his pocket and turned to his family.

“Lock the door behind me. Don't let anyone into the room that you don't personally know. Tracy, get that butcher knife and be ready to use it. You think you can?”

Her smile was unpleasant. “You just let someone try to hurt these kids,” she said, the fierceness of motherhood surfacing.

Lucas smiled through his pain. He was beginning to feel as if he were one large walking bruise. “I think I know what is happening here, gang. I don't know
who
is behind it, but I believe someone, or a group of people, is doing their best to run us out of here.”

“Why?” Tracy asked. “What would they have to gain by doing that?”

“That I can't answer. But it's got to have something to do with the house. It has to. That's the only explanation.”

“What are you going to do right now, Lucas?” she asked.

“I am going to make sure this house is secure.” He looked at Johnny and Jackie. “Hang in there, gang.”

“Yes, sir,” they said.

“One thing for sure, Lucas,” Tracy said, just before Lucas stepped out into the hall. “I gave one of those men a terrible bite on the forearm. I bit a chunk of flesh out.”

“Be sure and tell that to Kyle. OK, gang. Wish me luck.”

Tracy kissed him on the cheek and he stepped into the hall.

The bedroom door closed behind him, and he stood there until he heard the lock slide in place. Jacking back the hammer on the .45, he began his prowling of the house.

He could hear his heart thumping in his chest, the life-sustaining muscle still not beating at its slow regular rate. Expecting the lights to go dark at any moment, Lucas shifted the .45 to his left hand, wiped his sweaty hand, then once more gripped the butt firmly in his right hand.