The Spite House(43)

Given the previous night’s disruption, they were ready to sleep less than three hours after the sun went down. Spending the night together downstairs again was an easy decision. The only one willing to go back upstairs after dark was Stacy.

“I’m not scared anymore,” she said. “If that boy comes back, Dess said she’d beat his ass, and his sister too.”

Eric looked at Dess. “Is that what she said?”

“She’s rephrasing it a little,” Dess said, “and I think she must have gotten that one word from you.”

“Mm.”

He had stopped at a general store and picked up a few board games after visiting the library, and they played for a short while until Stacy yawned one last time and went to her corner of the sofa to sleep. Dess was next, leaving Eric to fight off sleep alone for a little while longer.

He lay back, rested his head on the throw pillow, and wondered how his heart could beat so fast while his brain was so desperate to turn off. The pops and cracks and creaks of the house settling and being pushed by the wind did not appear to bother Dess or Stacy, but they left him twitchy and stiff. He craned his neck to stretch it as though it might turn to stone if he didn’t.

How much time passed before he heard the thump-thump of footsteps? He thought he might have actually fallen asleep before he heard it, or at least been on the verge. Now he was as awake as he’d be if he heard a smoke alarm, except he felt no urge to leave. He sat up and faced the stairs.

He saw a pair of bare feet on the highest step visible to him. If made to guess, given their size, he would have said they belonged to a woman, but they might have been a man’s. They stood out more starkly in the dark than they should have. He thought they carried a bluish, chilled hue that he began to feel the longer he stared.

I’m dreaming, he thought, and a voice came behind his own so close it had to be attached. “There are no dreams in this house.” She sounded sad, angry, and afraid, like she needed his help and had asked for it several times already.

The person on the stairs took the next step up, out of sight. Eric stood and started toward them. He paused a moment.

He shouldn’t go upstairs.

Why not?

His girls. He couldn’t leave them alone.

Why not? They’d stay down here, where it was safe. He would go upstairs to see who or what else was in the house. Wasn’t that why he was here? Wasn’t that the job? And the sooner he could find out exactly what was happening here and inform Eunice, the sooner he would get to leave and never come back. Avoiding it all didn’t do him any good. If he was going to be here, then he should do his job and finish it as soon as possible.

Besides, maybe he’d find what he was really here for upstairs. What he’d run from last night without thinking. The truth might be up there. The truth about what he’d really seen in his grandfather’s house years ago, and what it meant about himself and his kids. His youngest especially. He had to find the answers, for his own sake as well as theirs. They deserved to know.

He recognized that this justification did not come entirely from him, and perhaps came entirely apart from him, but it moved him, nonetheless. Brought him to the stairs and up to the second floor, where he heard something above him. Door hinges groaning. More thumping footsteps, moving a little faster, almost as if chased.

Eric went to the third floor, barely feeling his own weight as he took each step. The door to the first bedroom, Stacy’s room, was closed. The door to the floating hallway was as open as an invitation. The light was on inside. The voice that told him this could not be a dream moved toward him again. It didn’t feel like it was in his head, or like it was just a disembodied voice drifting in darkness. It sounded like it belonged to someone present, and nearby.

When he stepped into the hall, a man cried out in misery above him. Eric was shocked still. He looked up, saw only the ceiling, not the hovering specter that he expected. When he could move again, he turned around to leave, but the hallway door he had come through was closed. When he touched the knob it felt like his hand might freeze to it. He pulled it back and shook out the pain. He tried again and it was even colder. He felt it all the way up to his shoulder, then couldn’t feel his arm at all an instant later.

At the other end of the hall, the woman was crying. There was a mix of confusion and fury in her sobs, and in between them he heard her say, “Why can’t I get back? It can’t keep me here. I have to get back.”

He walked toward that end of the hall, hoping that either of its doors might be open, or would let him through. The woman would hopefully let him pass. She came into view more clearly as he came closer. She was crouched on the floor, hair covering her face. Was she digging at something? Looking at something? He got the impression that even she did not know what she was doing, that she wasn’t even thinking of what she was doing.

And then, with another step, she was no longer there.

Her vanishing wasn’t what made him stop, however. The sensation of someone standing behind him did. Even though he wanted to run, his body turned as if remotely controlled. When he got all the way around, the light died, and he only got a glimpse of what was before him. A man as tall as him, wearing his clothes, wearing his face, reflecting his complete, paralytic terror.

Eric’s legs gave out and he dropped to the floor. The oxygen in the hall got thinner, his chest tightened, his mind crushed under wave upon wave of panic. What the hell had he just seen? Why’d he even come up here? Something led him up the stairs. It took hold, removed the idea of resistance, and now here he was.