Within These Walls (32 page)

48

V
IVI FELT LIKE
she was about to explode. She kept out of the way while her dad—who was acting seriously weird—­gestured with his hands and explained to the arriving officer exactly what he had seen. She believed him—
boy
, did she believe him—but she wasn’t about to let him know. On top of the fact that she wasn’t thrilled to be interacting with him, she was supposed to keep what she knew to herself. A secret, just like Echo had said.

He’ll ruin everything.

She tried to imagine the furniture stacked the way he had ­described, an impossible feat, like the towers of rocks people piled on beaches and mountaintops. But rather than
their
furniture, she kept picturing what didn’t belong to them at all—an ugly plaid-­patterned couch, a crappy old armchair, a TV stuck in an odd-­looking wooden chest. And on top of the pile was a knotted tapestry, its dangling beads tap-tap-tapping in the dark, blown by a nonexistent breeze.

And then there was Jeff. The moment her dad had announced his death to the dispatcher, Vivi had been desperate to sprint up the stairs and lock herself inside her room. Her father derailed her impromptu Ouija session by busting into her room unannounced. But before she had heard him stomping up the stairs, she had whispered to Jeff’s dearly departed:

I know you’re here. I’m going to help.

A second later, her dad—who it felt as though she hadn’t seen in weeks—was throwing open her door. She scrambled to push the Ouija board out of view, but he was too busy snatching her up by the arm to notice. Downstairs, the furniture was supposedly screwed up and the car was missing—a car that, somehow, magically reappeared as soon as their backs were turned.
How did they
do that?
They. The people living within the walls. Jeff’s brood. She knew it was them. Positive. One hundred percent.

But the longer she waited for her dad to give her the go-ahead to return to her room, the more she was starting to suspect there was something more to this house than the ghosts that haunted it. There was something broken here. Something that didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the world. It was as though there had been a shift that had never quite managed to reset itself. Like switching the channel on the radio, where you could still hear the station you’d been searching for, but there would be another song playing ever so faintly beneath the first. Transference—it was how ghosts traveled from the real world to a place beyond the living. Either Jeff’s family was stuck in a constant state of travel or the house had somehow been stripped of the boundary between here and nowhere.

The officer didn’t say much, and because everything was back in order and the car was where it had always been parked, he couldn’t do much, either. When the cop finally pulled his cruiser out of the driveway, her dad waved his hand at the door as if dismissing the guy as a phony.

“Whatever,” he muttered, then turned around and gave Jeanie a defeated look. “Get your stuff.”

“I don’t want to leave.”

He shook his head at her. “I didn’t ask you what you want, kid. We’re going.”

Her only hope was to reason with him. She couldn’t possibly
leave. Not now. Not with Jeffrey on the other side, waiting for her to reach out to him.

“If we leave, they win, Dad. They’re just trying to scare us.” If he wanted to believe in intruders, she’d let him. “I’m not going to Seattle . . . I’ll go back to New York to be with Mom before I move in with Uncle Mark.”

That statement brought a change to her father’s expression, as she knew it would. Even though he still loved Mom, the thing that would hurt her father the most was for Vivi to pick her mother over him. It was something he would never say, but she understood regardless.

“I want to stay here with you.” It was a lie. She didn’t give a damn about staying with him anymore, just as she didn’t care about being with her mom, either. As far as she was concerned, both her parents could disappear off the face of the earth; she’d be happy without them. After all, she was going to have a new family by then. A bigger family that understood, that actually
cared
. “You wanted to move here to work on your book,” she reminded him, “so that’s what you’re gonna do. Work on your book.”

“No, Jeanie.” Her dad’s shoulders fell, and for a second she thought he was going to cry.
Jeanie.
The name was so foreign, as though she hadn’t heard it in years. “It’s over,” he told her and looked away, as if considering something.

“No, Dad. It’s
not
over.” She walked over to him, determined to do whatever it took to get him to agree to stay, if only for one more night. She didn’t just want to reach Jeff, she
needed
to. He was dead, but she could still meet him. Jeff had said it himself when he had written “
see you soon
” on the back of the photo that was now pushpinned to her closet wall. And maybe that would take her dying like those other kids, maybe that’s why they had killed themselves . . . but why
they
had done it was beyond the point. If that’s what it took to
be with Jeffrey Halcomb, perhaps death wasn’t as bad an idea as it initially seemed.

“Let’s call Echo, get her to stay here for a few nights,” she suggested. “That way you won’t be worried that people are breaking in. They wouldn’t dare break in if there are more people here, right? I’ll have someone to watch me, just like you want . . . and I’ll get to stay here, like I want. A compromise.” Echo would keep him busy if needed. Echo knew what Vivi had to do.

“A compromise,” he repeated.

“Exactly. How did I get so smart?” she asked him, feigning a silly grin—a smile she knew he loved. And while he still looked sad and worried and freaked-out, he couldn’t help but smile weakly in return. She felt a momentary pang of love for him, faint and fleeting, like the last chord of a song. That feeling vanished not a second later, vaporized beneath a succeeding thought:

It’s not you, it’s him.

Because if it hadn’t been for her father, her mother, her parents’ mutual failure, she could have been happy. She wasn’t going to let her second chance at happiness slip away.

49

W
HEN LUCAS RETURNED
to his study, it felt different.
He
felt different. All the anger he’d felt over the past few hours had drained out of him, and he was left feeling like a shell of himself—empty, tired, hardly able to put together what was going on. He sat at his desk and tried to make Jeanie proud by continuing his work, but he couldn’t concentrate. No matter how much coffee he choked down, his eyes refused to stay locked on his computer screen. His gaze constantly drifted to the pictures of Halcomb’s Faithful pinned to the corkboard.

Everything in the house had been put back in its rightful place, but the photographs on that corkboard remained upside down. It was a grim reminder that he wasn’t going insane. If all this stuff was just in his head, those computer printouts would have been right side up. Someone had been inside. Someone had rearranged their things and had forgotten to put the pictures back the way they had been.

He wanted to believe that, wanted to convince himself that this was nothing but a bunch of screwed-up kids paying tribute to a freshly dead cult leader. Jeffrey Halcomb’s suicide had yet to hit the Internet, and there was no doubt that news outlets would be announcing his passing first thing in the morning. But despite the lack of information, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Halcomb’s followers already knew. All it took was a single person, a quick phone call, to set off a chain reaction.

He glanced at his desk, a computer printout of Halcomb’s potential victims resting beneath his arm. The kids, Audra, January, the Stephenson couple; each name accompanied by the date of their demise. He had scribbled the word “DEAD” next to the question mark by Sandy Gleason’s name. And then there was Schwartz. And Hillstone.

See you soon? J.

He shuddered, snatched up his phone, scrolled through his contacts, and hit SEND when he reached Josh Morales’s name. “Hola
. This is Josh. I can’t—
”
Voice mail. Lucas hung up before the end of the recording and dialed the main Lambert number instead. Lumpy Annie answered after the third ring.

“Hi, hello, this is Lucas Graham again.”

“Oh.” Lumpy Annie sounded unsure. “Hi again, Mr. Graham. What can I do for you?”

“Is Officer Morales there? Josh Morales? Can you send for him? I’ll hold. I don’t mind.”

“Sorry,” she finally said. “He was here earlier, but after what happened with your friend Jeffrey Halcomb, he went home.”

An invisible hand squeezed the air out of Lucas’s lungs.

See you soon? J.

“So, he was there . . .”

“That’s right,” Annie said. “It was near the end of his shift anyway. He should be back in tomorrow.”

Except he won’t be.

Lucas swallowed against the lump in his throat.

He won’t be because he’ll be dead.

At that very moment, Lucas hadn’t been so sure of anything in his entire life.

“Mr. Graham?”

He pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it. He disconnected the call, slowly placed his phone on the desk blotter.

Thirty years ago, when the police had kicked in the double doors of Lucas’s current home, they had found Jeffrey Halcomb surrounded by corpses.

Audra Snow had been draped over his knee, like a damsel in distress having fainted at the sight of all of her lifeless friends. Except Audra’s shock had been overpowered by the cold burn of metal sliding into her womb. Her shock had come at the sight of the man she loved tearing her open from breastbone to pubis. She may have passed out before Halcomb had plunged his hands into her body and lifted out a baby of eight and a half months—a girl—but something told Lucas that she had seen him do it. She had felt that part of her being torn out. She had seen the squirming child, the umbilical cord that still connected it to her before her head had started to swim. Before her vision had gone dark.

The police had witnessed the rest—Halcomb lifting the newborn he’d cut out with sloppy knife skills over his head in an offering to some unseen force. Streams of thick, congealing blood trailing down his arms and across his naked chest. They had screamed at him,
P
ut the baby down!
and Halcomb did as he was told. No physical resistance as the baby’s cries dwindled to wheezing, to gasping, and then to nothing at all. Lucas imagined Jeff being cuffed while wearing that disarming smile, one that said,
Come on, guys. Don’t do this. You know you want to join me. I can love you better than anyone ever has. I can show you the way to salvation.

But now Jeff was dead, and somehow the anger Lucas had felt had morphed to utter helplessness. He wanted to vomit, purge himself of an overwhelming sense of sadness he hated himself for feeling. Lucas wasn’t supposed to feel bad for Jeff. Monsters were meant to be put to death with nothing more than a dismissive wave of the hand. They were supposed to die, and when they did, the world was meant to celebrate. And yet all Lucas wanted to do was curl up into a ball and cry.

That was when it finally hit him—Jeffrey Halcomb’s true reason for wanting Lucas to move into the house where it had all happened. He wanted Lucas to feel exactly this, to have these inexplicable pangs of sympathy. Because there was something about standing in that living room and looking around, from stairs to kitchen, and thinking,
This is where it all happened, just a normal place, just normal people.
It was humanizing, a kernel of emotion growing in the deepest recesses of Lucas’s heart.

He narrowed his eyes at the envelope stuffed with old photographs, peered at the stacks of newspaper clippings he’d read a dozen times over. He glared at all the stuff Echo had given him out of the goodness of her own heart . . . those pictures making him that much more vulnerable, susceptible to the past, to the dead, to the deed. It was almost as if she’d handed those artifacts over to keep him rooted in Pier Pointe, a condolence to Jeff’s refusal to grant Lucas his interview.
Sorry about Jeff
—but here’s some stuff to keep you busy, to keep you right where you belong.

Something tripped over itself in Lucas’s chest.

A bubble of air lodged in his esophagus just above the hollow of his throat.

Suddenly, despite being seated, Lucas gripped the edge of his desk. Because what if . . . what if Echo . . .

You mean the visitor,
he thought.
The woman from the prison.

The same woman he’d called and asked to come over, who was now upstairs in the spare bedroom sleeping on the blow-up mattress to give him peace of mind.

Oh my God.

He jumped out of his chair, overwhelmed by the need to get to his kid. But a sense of vertigo rocked him where he stood. He caught himself against his desk, his hands skittering across its top. News articles scattered with a soft flutter of moth’s wings. Photographs spilled out of the old yellowed envelope and scattered across the floor
like a clumsy magician’s deck of cards. Lucas stared at the mess at his feet—the entire basis of his future fanned out before him on a stretch of grimy old carpet—and lowered himself to the floor. He plucked pictures off the rug, jammed them upside down and backward into the envelope again.

And then, somewhere in the house, two doors slammed one after the other—
bam
,
BAM
—like gunshots going off in some random corner, in some random room.

The envelope fell from his trembling hands, pictures spilling out once more.

He shot up, tried to regain his balance, stood stick-straight without taking a single step as his head spun. He would have run, would have launched himself up the stairs to make sure Jeanie was all right, but the duo of jarring slams was accompanied by voices . . .
multiple
voices. The girls he swore he had heard laughing from the shadows of the kitchen were back, now joined by the low murmur of men.

Lucas’s heart felt like a helium balloon, bumping up against his tonsils. Adrenaline spiked his blood, intensifying his queasiness. His vision blurred—no, wait. It wasn’t his eyesight. The walls were buzzing like tuning forks.

What the fuck is happening?

He turned around, shot a look at his corkboard.

If it’s still there,
he thought,
then
I’m
still here.

The corkboard was exactly where it should have been, but the voices didn’t cease.

Lucas dared to move away from his desk and toward the door, shocked by the weight of his legs. Walking felt like wading through a vat of something thick, viscous. It was as though time had slowed, but his thoughts continued to roll out as fast as ever.

It felt like hours before he finally reached the door. It took another day to press his ear to the wood and listen—a pointless child
hood reflex, because by the time he reached his destination, the voices were so loud they were booming in his ears.

He hesitated, afraid to see what was beyond the door. Because what if his doubts about Echo were right? What if, like an idiot, he had invited her into his home and she in turn had let the people from the orchard into his living room?
Someone
was out there other than Echo and Jeanie. There was no room for doubt.

Lucas squeezed the doorknob in the palm of his hand, willing it to open without having to turn it himself. A burst of laughter rumbled through the walls, as if someone was amused by his wishful thinking, of his wanting to take action without moving his feet.

He yanked the door open wide, ready to scream at whoever was out there, prepared to demand they explain themselves before he called the cops.

What the fuck are you doing in my house?!

Your house? Oh no, Lucas, that’s where you’re very much mistaken.

The chorus of voices stopped—a party disturbed by an uninvited guest.

The room was dark, just as he’d left it. Upstairs, the hallway light was on, but from where he stood, he could see Jeanie’s door was shut. It had slammed shut minutes—or had it been hours?—before. Virginia’s name ran across his tongue. He sucked in air, ready to yell up to her, to make sure she was all right. But his eyes adjusted to the dark faster than he could form the three syllables that made up her proper name. His shout was stillborn. Silent.

Because what was happening was impossible.

It was
impossible.

The living room wasn’t theirs.

In the moonlight, he could make out furniture he’d never seen before.

The flat screen was gone, replaced by an old boxed-in RCA monitor.

The overstuffed leather sofa was now a stiff-backed brown-and-orange plaid pullout.

Macramé hung where family photographs should have been.

He stepped out of his study and into a house that didn’t exist, nearly stumbled when his feet caught on the thick shag that hadn’t been there before. The air smelled of patchouli and weed and melted wax and the faint scent of pine.

And there, in a particularly dark corner, was a figure standing statuesque. A tall, gaunt man with skin pale enough to shine through the shadows. A man with wavy dark hair. Piercing eyes. A disarming smile that slowly curled up at the corners.

Up.

Up into a wide, nefarious grin.

Lucas stumbled backward, nearly falling into his study before slamming the door.

It’s him.

His pulse vibrated the plates of his skull.

It’s fucking
him.

Every second that passed was one closer to the insane realization he already knew.

“How?” he whispered, but he knew that, too. It hadn’t been a trick or a ploy or a schizophrenic delusion.

One hundred and fifty miles away, Jeffrey Halcomb’s corpse was cooling on a gurney. But here in Pier Pointe, despite the impossibility, he was alive and well. He had found his way back to the coast. He had returned to the house he had been pulled from, had returned to the house where . . .

Lucas’s gaze jumped back to the corkboard, all those faces staring out at him, smiling wider than he remembered,
grinning
at him, as though they’d been waiting for this very moment of epiphany.

His guts seemed to shift, rearranging themselves so that it was harder to breathe, to think, to stand up straight. Lucas couldn’t decide whether to jump out the window or rush out of his study armed with his empty coffeepot, swinging it like a wild man as he bolted for the stairs to get his kid.

Lucas shot his arm out across the varnished top of his desk, reached for his phone, missed. The device bounced off the side of his hand and skittered along the desk, landing among the pile of photographs and newspaper clippings with a soft thump. He crawled across the floor in a rush, his palms and knees hitting the ground hard as he shimmied to the opposite end of his desk. The phone was there, close to the wall outlet and the electrical cord that kept his laptop and coffeemaker powered up. He snatched the phone off the floor and pressed his back against the wall, thumbed the lock screen, and tapped the phone icon.

Josh’s text glowed bright against the home screen.

See you soon? J.

Lucas remembered having cleared it before placing another call to the police.

See you soon?

But there it was, taunting him.

 . . . soon?

J for Josh. For January. For Jeffrey. For . . .

Jeanie.

The phone tumbled from Lucas’s hand. He wiped his palm against the fabric of his pants, as if touching the phone would per
manently infect him with the terrified madness he was already feeling. He had to get upstairs. Had to get to his daughter. Had to make sure she was okay. It didn’t matter how scared he was.

He made to scramble to his feet, but again, his movements hitched in sudden pause. His lips parted in a quiet intake of air as a new photo winked up at him from among the pile he’d studied so closely. In it, Jeffrey Halcomb stood in the front yard with Congressman Snow’s house to his back. One arm was looped around a brunette’s shoulders, her long hair hanging around her face like silken drapes. His other arm was around Audra. Lucas narrowed his eyes and plucked the photo off the floor, bringing it in closer to his face to study the dark-haired woman. At first it had looked like Georgia, but something about her face was wrong.