The Spite House(51)

He would go back into the building and make something happen. Make the spirit that spoke to him tremble and weep when he bellowed back at it. Make it remember that it was dead, and not like Stacy had been, or like they said his grandfather had been, but forever dead. Never coming back, because it lacked the will to do so. All it could do was shout at the occasional intruder and scare them because they failed to understand how weak and sad it really was. The man he wanted to be would make the ghost cower, run screaming back to its grave. How exactly, he didn’t know, but he knew that man could make it happen.

Except that man wouldn’t have been here in the first place, because he wouldn’t have let Stacy die. Somehow, he wouldn’t have let that happen.

Eric shook the grief and shame away before it overcame him, brought him back to his knees. He looked again at the spite house and saw that the old man—Pete Masson, whose life possessed Eric in his sleep the night before last—was no longer in the window. He tried to collect his thoughts, assemble them into something that could make sense of all of this. Provide answers.

That was why he was here, wasn’t it? Yes, he and the girls needed the money, but he needed his answers just as much. They left home ultimately because he didn’t have a better answer for what they should do after Stacy came back, and that was because he didn’t have an answer for how she had come back, or if it was even really her.

He was starting to get some answers about the nature of death and what came after, though. He just had to think about all he’d been through, dating back to when he was a child. The cold was key. He felt it naturally again, outdoors, and noted how different it was from the deep freeze he felt in the orphanage and in the spite house, and in his grandparents’ house when the ghost fire burned. He never felt anything close to that around his grandfather, despite the rumors some of his neighbors and even distant family members once spread. That “Ol’ Fred” actually died in that fire and that the living version of him wasn’t alive at all, but a dead man impersonating a living one. But if he really was dead, the cold would have been all over him and bleeding out of him. You’d have been able to feel it from twenty feet away. That wasn’t the case, nor was it with Stacy. The difference, though, was that he’d only heard stories about what happened to his grandfather. Gossip, second and thirdhand conjecture. He knew what happened to his little girl. What she came back from. So for her not to carry the cold of death meant something, he just couldn’t yet say exactly what.

The house could still help him with that. There was more than the old man inside. Along with the ghost children, there was the crying woman. Then there was the phantom projection of himself that he’d seen there. Things he didn’t understand, but that he could learn from. There was even the myth that Eunice shared with him earlier today, that the house could make the living disappear. If it could do that and also make the dead reappear, as he’d already experienced, then maybe it was a bridge of sorts. Maybe he could use it to find out how some people made it across. How some people came back again. He wanted to be sure that it was really Stacy who returned, not an impostor. And if it really was her, he needed to be sure she wouldn’t disappear on him without warning. Without at least giving him a chance, this time, to say goodbye.

No, it was never going to come to that. He wasn’t ever going to need to say goodbye, at least not until the day he died. He wasn’t going to outlive his child. One way or another, he could not let that happen.

As he approached the house, still weary and aching, he saw the woman from the hall standing in the open doorway. Still blue, her expression full of anguish. Her mouth did not move when she spoke to him. He heard her clearly through the wind and distance.

There are no dreams in this house. Only lies. Lies, lies, lies. They’ve trapped me here. They’ll trap you. His lies and theirs. No dreams, only lies.

If that was true, if the house was full of lies, not answers, then couldn’t she be lying to him now? And even a lie can reveal a truth if you find out why someone is telling it.

Eric continued toward the house. He would take his chances with it. The woman retreated before he came to the door and he did not see where she went. He walked up the stairs to the master bedroom. Exhaustion seized him at last, just as he reached for the journal on the bed. Later, he would awaken in darkness without remembering the moments before he’d fallen asleep. He wouldn’t remember filling page after page of the journal, but he would remember what he wrote, because it came to him as he slept. Not as a dream, however, because dreams truly did not exist in the Masson House.





CHAPTER 23



Masson



The most frustrating part of getting the men from the AEF to believe him was convincing them that he disappeared at all. As far as his superiors were concerned, Peter Masson died a year before, on the battlefield near Saint-?tienne.

“There must have been a mistake, sir,” Peter said to the interviewing officer. “I’m not dead. I’m here.”

“Yes, clearly you’re here,” the interviewer said. “But maybe the ‘mistake’ is on your end, and you’re not who you believe you are.”

“I’ve given you all my information, sir. My signature is on my recruitment card. I can write it for you if you give me a pen, so you can see it matches. I can tell you anything else you need to know. If you send me back home my brother will recognize me within a hundred yards. I am Peter Masson, sir.”