The Spite House(92)
“Anyone else feel that?” Dana said, zipping her jacket all the way up.
Millie nodded, brought her hands up to her mouth to warm them.
Eunice felt an awful exhilaration, like she was the passenger in a car moving much too fast, taking corners without slowing, weaving between other cars, narrowly dodging disaster by inches and milliseconds. When she heard someone on the stairs behind her, she became so light-headed she almost couldn’t feel the strain in her chest.
She turned and saw Eric come down the stairs.
“When did you get here?” she asked him. He didn’t say anything and didn’t quite look like himself. He was more intense than he’d been before. Angrier, maybe. She had apologized for not being forthright with him, and for what Max Renner did, even though that wasn’t her fault. What else could he be angry about?
“I thought you weren’t coming,” she said, then heard Neal behind her say, “Eunice, what are you doing?”
“You don’t look well,” Eunice said to Eric. The hardness of his glare couldn’t hide the fatigue in his eyes. Had he lost weight? Over the phone he sounded at peace. It stunned her to see him in this condition. Had the house done this to him since he’d arrived? When did he get here? How long had he waited for them upstairs? “You should leave, Eric. I told you, you don’t have to be here.”
Neal said, “Eunice, you’re worrying me. This isn’t funny.”
“Eunice, who are you talking to?” Millie said.
Hearing this, Eunice glanced back at the others, who stared at her like she was holding a knife to her own throat.
“I’m talking to Eric,” Eunice said, closer to a question than a statement. In response Dana’s eyes got wider, and Millie just shook her head. Neal moved closer to her, but cautiously. He was shivering and she saw a confusion in his eyes that made her smile, despite her mounting fear. Her friend Neal Lassiter, confident king of skeptics, was struck by uncertainty for perhaps the first time since he was a teen.
She turned to Eric again and saw someone else in front of him. An old man kneeling, his head bowed, his hands on his head as if to keep his skull from exploding.
“Forgive me,” the old man said. “Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me please. Let me go, please. Let me just go. I’ll help you. I’ll do anything. I can help you. Please, please forgive me.”
“What is that?” Dana said. “Am I the only one hearing someth—?”
The children’s laughter cut her short. Eunice felt the cold encroach on her. It was electric, radioactive, so cold it burned. The children laughed harder. At Eunice, at the miserable old man who must have been their uncle Peter. Or were they laughing at something else? Something very soon to come.
That distant screaming Eunice thought she’d heard a moment ago was closer and louder now. Flying through the night, toward the house. Eunice’s heart was in a vise. Her legs weakened. She heard people calling her name. Not just the living people in the house with her, but those on their way, and who were not alive.
Amid the distant chorus of the dead calling out to her, she did not hear her mother, father, Cousin Oscar, Aunt Val, or any other member of the family taken before her, and she did not know if this was a godsend or an omen.
CHAPTER 44
“Eric”
He was the secret-keeper. The one who never told his wife or children the story about his grandfather and what that could mean about him, what it meant for all of them. He was the one who didn’t tell his older daughter why he planned all along to get back to his grandparents’ house in Odessa, Texas. That is, until he happened upon a place with even older ghosts, and more of them.
He was the part of Eric who didn’t trust that Stacy was really alive again. The one who could not accept the answers he was given, who was obsessed with finding answers that would ensure he could keep his daughter safe. Even learn to bring his girls back from the dead, if it came to that. He was willing to give up his own life to find out. But the girls still needed him out there, in the living world, as much as they unwittingly needed him here among the spirits. So he gave all that he could spare—the part of himself that Eleanor and Owen taught him to surrender.
The house had started to pull This Eric away from him on his first night inside, without him realizing it. The children and the house recognized what they needed from him, long before he realized what he could get from them, or that he would even want anything from them. They were patient, opportunistic, and vicious enough to make other spirits tremble. They seized him just when he needed them most. And they showed him how power could be drawn from anger. That power allowed them to do so much more than haunt and frighten someone, which was all most of the dead managed to do. Even the souls that cursed the Houghtons ultimately did little beyond wait for each family member to die, then terrorize them at the moment of death. They could have done worse things to truly enact their vengeance if they knew how, but those men allowed their rage to dominate them, when they could have let it empower them. The children were different. They could draw a living, breathing person into the dark and keep them there forever.
This part of Eric that made the deal with the children was made up of all his anger, his necessary secrets and distrust. He had more in common with his grandfather, who came back to ensure his family’s protection and wreak his vengeance. His grandfather defied death to show how deeply he refused to forgive. And This Eric did not forgive, either. Not Eunice Houghton, who hid things from him while encouraging him to stay in Degener, putting his children in harm’s way. Not Peter Masson, a coward who—in life—tried to disguise selfishness as a virtue, and took two children away from a place they loved, then failed to protect them. Worse, he refused to act when he could have saved Stacy. If Peter had done what he should have, Eric would have made his deal with him, instead of with the children. He more than earned what awaited him, in Eric’s eyes.