Comes the Night (30 page)

Brooke

A
LL
B
ROOKE HEARD
was Alex’s frightened gasp. And all she saw was Alex’s cast shooting straight up and through the ceiling like she’d been fired from a cannon. Then Maryanne falling on her ass. Of course, Maryanne didn’t land with a thump, but sank several feet into the earth. She flailed and scrabbled like a cat dumped into a swimming pool until her momentum stopped. Then, with a yelp—not a primal shriek, thank God!—she rocketed up through the ceiling in a pretty damned good imitation of Alex.

Brooke was wound almost as tightly as the others, but the sight of Maryanne sinking into the earth floor had kept her riveted. Now, realizing she was alone with her raw fear and revulsion, she shot up after her friends. Straight up through the sitting room, which happened to be above where they’d been searching, through God only knew whose bedroom and into the attic.

Maryanne and Alex were sobbing and retching when Brooke joined them. Unfortunately, she knew just how they felt. Was in fact making some very similar sounds herself.

It was the nails.

Horror from the dead-body-hunting expedition aside, they were reeling from the quick, careless trip through the floorboards of no fewer than three floors. All those nails... Just because there wasn’t enough iron in them to paralyze a caster the way that poker had immobilized Brooke, it didn’t mean those little nails didn’t take their toll. The fatigue of this exposure was pretty damned close to what Brooke had felt in the aftermath of the poker ordeal, and it hurt like the devil.

“Weak,” Maryanne said. “Need to get back in.”

They all blundered toward their originals, who lay wild-eyed on the floor, limbs jerking spastically. As she looked down at herself, Brooke felt her original’s heart pounding like a piston in her chest, felt the nausea in the pit of her stomach, the clammy chill of sweat on her skin.

Alex was the first to try to reunite with her original, but her frantic efforts were fruitless, not to mention totally terrifying to behold. It looked as though cast and original were locked in a battle.

For some reason, this scared Brooke more than the episode in the basement. Nearly mindless with panic, she dove into her own body. Or rather,
tried
to. Her terror level—in both consciousnesses—blasted into the stratosphere when she realized she couldn’t get in.

“We’re locked out!” she cried.

“The window!” Maryanne said. “We have to come back to our bodies through the window.”

Still ridden by panic, Brooke zoomed toward the stained glass, only to be stopped at the last second by Maryanne’s cry.

“No, Brooke! Not that way!” she shouted. “You don’t know what would happen if you go out through the window again. Go out through the wall and come back in like we always do, through the window.”

Of course! The window was the portal. It was through the window that they left their bodies and through the window that they shot back in.

Steeling herself, Brooke pushed through the wall. It was all she could do to bull through it, and the moment she was outside, she shot to the window and started rapping on it frantically.

“I want in, I want in, I want in!” she shouted.

Her re-entry was more forceful than ever before, throwing her body hard across the room. Her shoulder clipped the leg of the old pedestal table. The good news was the force of the impact didn’t budge the table. Middle of the night or not, people would have come running if it had toppled. But that was also the bad news—the table didn’t budge. Her shoulder screamed in agony. She didn’t care, though. She was back.

She barely had time to sit up when Maryanne came shooting toward her. Brooke rolled on her hip to present her backside and braced herself, letting Maryanne collide with her. The other girl let out an
umph
as the breath left her body on impact. Still, she obviously recognized it for a pretty soft landing, because she muttered a quick ‘thank you’.

Then Alex came sliding toward them. With a lightning fast reaction, Maryanne caught her and pinned her, arresting her slide before she could slam headfirst into the wall.

Maryanne lay partially atop Alex’s legs, her arms wrapped around Alex’s waist. For a moment, all was silent. Then Alex started sobbing inconsolably, but softly.

Maryanne lifted her head. “What’s the matter? Are you hurt?”

“They buried her... ”

“I know,” Maryanne said, blinking back tears as she hugged Alex. “Right there in their own basement. And left her there all these years.”

“
Alive
,” Alex choked out. “They buried her alive. When I touched her skull... Oh, Maryanne, I just knew it.”

“What?” Brooke hissed. “Her own family buried her
alive
?”

Maryanne started to cry. “Those... bastards!”

This time, no one turned a hair at Maryanne’s language.

For that matter, Alex barely seemed to hear anything. “They probably didn’t know she was alive,” she said, her eyes eerily inward looking. “They bashed her skull, I think—it had a big dent in it—so they probably assumed she was dead. But she wasn’t. Oh, God, she wasn’t.”

Brooke felt the tears pouring down her cheeks, but she climbed to her feet and dusted herself off.

“It’s okay,” she said, as much to assure herself as them. “It was a long time ago, and it must have been beyond horrifying, dying that way. But it can’t be helped now.” Brooke drew a long, shaky breath. “We’re okay, though. We’re all okay. That’s the main thing, right? And we know where Connie’s body is.”

The girls just clung tighter.

“All right, make that
I’m okay
,” Brooke said. “I’m not so sure about the two of you.” With that, she walked over to the window. The window she’d almost tried to shoot out of. What would have happened? Would the second trip through have transformed her cast into something else? And if so, what? Or might she simply have disappeared, leaving her original to live out her days in a hospital bed?

She pondered that horrifying prospect a while, since it was marginally less horrifying than thinking about a 17-year-old girl going through the tortures of hell, only to have her head bashed in and be thrown in a hole and buried alive.

Behind her, she heard the girls getting up at last. When she turned, they were wiping their faces.

“Sorry about that,” Maryanne said. “I guess I lost it there.”

“God, don’t apologize,” Alex said. “You’re not the only one. And you must have been a wreck to start with. You must have felt the horror of that place the whole while we were down there. I only felt it briefly, when I touched Connie’s bones. Her poor shattered
skull
.”

“Maryanne almost touched them too,” Brooke interjected, before they could go off on another crying jag. “You knocked her ass over teakettle when you shot up out of there, and she fell right into the ground.”

Alex looked at Maryanne. “Oh, crap. Sorry.”

Maryanne waved it off. “It’s okay. I caught myself before I fell far. And I didn’t touch anything. But it did scare the heck out of me. It’s a wonder I didn’t overtake you on your way back here.”

Alex snorted. “Nothing was overtaking me. I have never been that freaked out. I was on edge to start—with the combination of claustrophobia and absolute blackness and crawly things and the fear of encountering some cast-off hunk of iron and getting stuck... Then finding Connie’s skeleton, touching her skull and feeling all that horror... ”

“Oh, God, I think I’m going to be sick,” Maryanne said.

“Suck it up,” Brooke warned, even though her own stomach pitched at the thought of being trapped below ground with a corpse. “No puking up here, remember?” Then she turned to Alex. “What’d it feel like? And how can you be so sure it’s Connie? Could you tell by how it felt?”

“Oh, yeah,” Alex said. “It was Connie, all right. And it felt awful. All that grief. And omigod, the
anger
for what they did to her!”

Brooke rubbed her sore shoulder. “She’s pissed, huh?”

“Righteously. It’s as if all her fury... all the horror... stayed with her somehow. Concentrated right into her bones. Maryanne, that must be what you were feeling down there.”

They stood in silence for a moment.

“Oh, and by the way, we can touch bone,” Alex said. “It’s solid to us, like copper or iron.”

Brooke blinked. “But if you couldn’t pass through it, how could you know its essence? How could know it’s Connie?”

“Oh, I felt it.” Alex shuddered out a breath. “It’s probably a good thing I couldn’t pass through it. I don’t know if I could have stood it. I’d probably still be screaming.”

Another silent pause while they thought about that.

Again, it was Alex who broke the silence. “So, I guess we have to dig her up, huh?”

Brooke rolled her sore shoulder. “Why bother?”

“Duh,” Maryanne said. “So Connie can try to reunite with her remains, of course.”

“The bones wouldn’t have to be exposed for that,” Brooke pointed out. “Connie can sink down into the ground just as easily as Alex did.”

“No,” Alex shook her head. “No, we have to be able to see what happens. Unless the bones are exposed, we won’t know for sure if she’s successful or if she just ran into an old pipe and got trapped down there. Unless you want to be the one to go down and check?”

“Hell no!” Brooke said. “I’m not going down there.”

“Then we dig,” Alex said.

“In our regular bodies?” Maryanne asked.

“Yep. No copper shovels required.”

“But how will we get away with doing that?” Maryanne asked.

Alex smiled wanly. “Easy. American Thanksgiving is coming right up, and this place basically shuts down for four days.”

“We get the time off too? Canadian students?”

“Yeah, us too,” Alex said. “They pretty much have to close up. As they’ve discovered, it turns into a ghost town around here anyway, between the American students who go home and the Canadian ones who skip school to rush down to the shopping outlets in Kittery and Freeport for Black Friday. The school calls it a professional development day, but I think all the teachers head across the border too.”

“Right,” Maryanne said. “Border town. I keep forgetting.” She chewed her lip a second. “It’ll still be tricky, though, won’t it? I mean, Betts and the old caretaker guy must still be here?”

“Not if everyone leaves, which they’re strongly encouraged to do.”

“Wait a minute—you
have
to go home?” Maryanne’s voice rose with anxiety.

“Relax, Maryanne. They can’t make you go home for any of the vacation periods. Well, except for summer break, I suppose,” Alex replied, her tone soothing. “But pretty much everyone does take off for Thanksgiving. Or they just go away shopping in the States, like I said. And when the joint empties out, Betts takes off too. That just leaves John Smith, who lives over three miles away, and he only checks in twice a day, at 7:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m., like clockwork.”

“Wow, Robbins.” Brooke lifted an admiring eyebrow. “How do you know all that?”

Alex lifted a shoulder in a casual shrug. “I always pretended to go home but didn’t. No point going home when my friends in Halifax were away at university, since it’s not a Canadian holiday. Well, except for Anika, who goes to Dal right there in Halifax, but she’s stuck in classes.”

Brooke grinned. “Of course! You stayed here and partied 24–7 with your Mansbridge friends!”

“I used to,” Alex confessed. “I’d pretty much just creep back in to rummage for food and to sleep the day away, then head back out again.”

“Okay, so we’ll pretend to leave, then sneak back into the house to excavate the bones?” Maryanne asked. “Is that the plan?”

“That’s the plan,” Alex agreed.

“Somebody has to tell Connie,” Maryanne pointed out.

“I will,” Alex said, to no one’s surprise.

“What do we do if we’re wrong and she’s not ready to do this?”

“She’s ready,” Alex asserted. “But if for some reason she’s not, I think we still dig up the remains, still call the police. At the very least, she’d get a proper burial in the cemetery.”

“Where Connie’s cast could fuse with her remains any time she wanted,” Brooke murmured. “Provided they stick her in a wooden casket, I mean. Not one of those titanium jobs. Who knows what the titanium might be alloyed with?”

“Oh, boy, wouldn’t
that
suck?” Maryanne shuddered. “We’d have to dig her up
again
!”

“I don’t think we have to worry about that,” Alex said. “I mean, she has no family left, right? They’ll probably give her a cheap-assed wooden casket, if not one of those cardboard ones.”

“A cardboard casket?” Maryanne sounded horrified.

Brooke shrugged. “Environmentally friendly, I guess.”

“Oh, shit.” Brooke sucked in a breath. “What if they
cremate
her? Would she be locked out forever then? Or could she maybe get back into her ashes?”

Maryanne moaned.

“Thank you for that contribution, Brooke,” Alex said, then sighed. “Look, I really don’t think we have to worry about that stuff. I think she’s ready.”

“Well, you’d know better than us,” Brooke said, not without a little snideness. “You know, with all that extra visiting.”

Alex ignored the dig. “So, do we have a plan?” She looked from one to the other. “Are we agreed?”

“Agreed,” Maryanne said.

“Agreed,” Brooke echoed, already planning ahead.

Maybe Thanksgiving wouldn’t suck ditchwater after all.

She’d been dreading going home. Her mom and the step-Fuehrer were going to be away anyway, visiting his relatives, and she’d have been alone. And sure as shit, Herr Kommandant would have cleaned out the liquor cabinet.
The jerk
. But she hadn’t seen much alternative. She figured Maryanne and Alex would be off to their respective families, and she’d pretty much burned her bridges with the locals, who looked at her like she was Typhoid Mary, thanks to that HPV gag she’d pulled on Seth. And thanks also to... well... her general bitchiness. That last thought gave her a pang. Maybe she could work on that bitchy thing, at least with her roomies.

Brooke’s mind whirled. They could pack their bags and head out in Brooke’s rental. Pretend they were all headed to the Fredericton airport to catch flights home. Instead, they could go to a local motel and have a pajama party while the rest of the house emptied out. Give Betts and Smith a chance to satisfy themselves the place really was abandoned. Then the girls could sneak back the next day.