The Dead House

“Of course I came,” was the first thing she said when she sat down across from me. “You’re my best friend.”


The visit was nothing more than hidden messages that I didn’t really understand. Except when she spoke of Ari. I haven’t forgotten him. I wish he would write to me. I don’t understand why he doesn’t. Maybe they won’t let him. I miss his smell.

They dragged me away, but they didn’t sedate me. They just locked me in my room—how long before they take you away from me too, Dee? How long before they steal these pages and plot against me once more?

I must be careful what I write. I should tell you, though:




[The rest of this page has been torn off. Where she hid the paper, as well as what it contained, is a mystery.]





62




The Johnson Claydon Diaries



Twenty-fifth Entry

I fall into the Dead House when I am awake now. I thought I was awake… sitting on the floor, my pages in hand…

Something changed in the ambience of the room, a shifting, a darkening… and I looked down; I sat on waterlogged floorboards, so old and moldy that they sank under my weight. Claydon was gone…

Get out of the house. Get out of the house.

I got to my feet, and the room opened out before me, from the deep umbra into the dim main room of the house, which creaked and subtly moved so I couldn’t focus on any one object. Once a picture frame, empty, now a light fixture, dusty. Once an armchair, warped, now a rickety table, cracked and peeling. It formed and unformed like a breath released and forgotten.

“Carly?” I called, hoping the house would shift, allow her to scream—anything that would pinpoint her location, up or down.

I thought of the attic in the main Elmbridge building, where secrets were hidden. Up. As good a choice as any.

Crazy

Kaitie

crazy

Kaitie.

The stairs were normal when I looked at them, but as I glanced to the top landing, they seemed to warp and move, shift and sigh, all in my peripheral vision. The house had control of them, like everything else. When I looked back, they were once again still, innocent. Lying.

“You can’t keep her,” I muttered, all the while wondering why I was saying it. “She’s mine.”

I repeated the rhyme that was Carly’s favorite when we were young, holding on to the memory of her presence, something I never realized I could sense deep inside me until she was gone.

“Yesternight,” I began, “upon the stair… I saw a girl who wasn’t there… she wasn’t there again today. I wish I wish, she’d go away… Yesternight upon the stair…”

On and on, I said the rhyme; on and on, I climbed, and the staircase never ended. The house had changed from a refuge to a trap overnight, and I couldn’t shake the notion that it was keeping me away from Carly.

“I will get her,” I told the house, and I hated with a passion I have never felt before.

No sooner had I spoken the words than I was at the last step, facing a door I had never seen. It was old, bolted from the outside. I put my hand on the bolt, intending to slide it away, when I sensed in the core of me that there was something I didn’t want to see behind the door.

Don’t be afraid.

But I was. Because I could feel a desire locked away in there—something that wanted out. Desperately. Impatiently. Something big. Something that wasn’t Carly.

I dropped my hand, knowing somehow that the house would never have given her to me so easily, and the door thundered, rattling on its hinges. It raged, it yelled, yet it never spoke a word.

“Trickery,” I breathed at the house, my will deflated and shriveled as an old balloon. “Trickery-trick-trickery.”

The door quieted.

Creeeaaaaaak.

I stepped backwards.

Ssshhhhhrrrrk.

A noise down in the dark.

Crrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeaaaaaaak.

“Carly?”

The sound continued, inching closer to me out of the darkness.

“Carly, tell me that’s you.”

Sssssshhhrrrkk.

I felt the grin in that umbra. Something wasn’t right. I turned, and I ran down the stairs, but they were endless, and the dark shadows behind me never seemed to recede, no matter how fast I ran.

Finally, because I knew it was a dream and because the thing in the dark was so very close, I launched myself over the railing. I fell for a long time, but I don’t remember landing. Only that all of a sudden I was in the doorway and the house was screaming, foul breath forcing me backwards—tearing me away.

I clung to the doorframe, needing to stay, needing to go into the basement—the only place left hidden—needing to find her.

GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!

I flew out the door, past the crumbling mountainside, towards the mists, which roared up to meet me.


I woke up on the floor, sticky with my own sweat, the echoes of the voice of the house ringing in my ears. Even now I can hear it—Get out of my house. Get out of my house. It doesn’t want me snooping.

My Voice is nearby, Dee. He laughs, and he sings: The house is mine. The house is mine.

I really am crazy, aren’t I?

The devil’s in the details.





63


41 days until the incident