Every House Is Haunted (24 page)

She considered opening her mind, just a little bit, to see if she could pick anything up from the house. But that probably wasn’t a good idea. In fact, it might even be a bad idea. To do such a thing in a place like this was like raising your chin to Mike Tyson and saying
Come on, big boy, gimme your best shot
. 17 Ashley Avenue was not the heavyweight champeen of haunted houses, but it probably still packed a wallop.

Sally wandered into the bathroom where, according to the police report, Mr. Weston had had his “accident.” The mirror over the sink was gone, and she could see the contents of the medicine cabinet. This struck her as an invasion of privacy, and she averted her eyes, turning instead to the old-fashioned clawfooted tub.

It was here that Mrs. Weston had found her husband, covered in broken glass, his throat slit. The report suggested that Mrs. Weston had panicked at the sight, went to call 911, and fell down the stairs, breaking her neck.

It was a good story, but Sally had a couple of problems with it.

For starters, the report said Mr. Weston had been standing on the edge of the bathtub to hang a shower curtain and lost his balance. As he fell he reached out blindly and grabbed the mirror over the sink, pulling it off its hinges. When he landed in the tub, the mirror shattered, and a piece of it slit his throat.

Sally supposed such a thing was possible, but not very likely.

The part about Mrs. Weston going downstairs to call 911 didn’t make sense, either. If that’s what she was really doing, why didn’t she use the phone in the master bedroom? It was closer.

She was scared. She panicked.

Yes, and in her agitated state she tripped over her own feet and fell down the stairs.

Again, it wasn’t an impossible scenario, but an extremely unlikely one.

Sally went into the master bedroom. All of the furniture was draped with white sheets. Sally went over to a tall, slender piece, pulled off the sheet, and let out a frightened gasp when she saw her reflection in a gilt-framed mirror. The sheet caught on the bottom corner and rocked the mirror back on its feet. Sally reached out and caught it before it fell backwards. She didn’t need seven years of bad luck, thank you very much.

As she was replacing the sheet, she heard Charles in her head admonishing her:
Don’t touch anything
. She stuck her tongue out at her reflection, which responded in kind. She flung the sheet onto the bed and went over to the window that looked out on the overgrown lot next to the house. From this vantage point the diamond shape of the old baseball diamond was even more apparent.

She turned to her left and took the sheet off the piece of furniture standing next to the window. It was an old vanity bench. It was beautiful. She didn’t know anything about antiques, but it looked expensive. The wood was cherry and polished to a high gloss.

Sally sat down on the bench and looked into the mirror. Another mirror. Mirrors all over the place. Two mirrors in the bedroom, a broken mirror in the bathroom.

An idea came to her then, in much the same way as the one about opening her mind to the house had come earlier. Closing her eyes, she reached out and placed her hands on the surface of the mirror. Sometimes she could pick up impressions from inanimate objects. It was called psychometry, and the Group held it in very high regard.

The glass was cool under her hands. There was an abrupt cracking sound that Sally heard not with her ears but with her mind. A psychic sound. The crack of a bat. A baseball bat.

Her eyes flew open. A whitish blur came flying in through the open window and struck the vanity mirror. There was another sound—the unmistaken crash of breaking glass—and Sally felt a sharp pain in her left eye. Her vision in that eye immediately turned red, as if a filter had been placed over it. She clamped her hand over it and felt something jagged and sharp cut into her palm.
There was a piece of glass sticking out of her eye!
She opened her mouth to scream but all that came out was a dry squeak. She stood up, her hand still clamped over her eye, and tripped over the bench in her rush to escape the room and find help.

She tried to keep her balance and probably would have succeeded if her foot hadn’t come down on the baseball that had broken the mirror. Her foot went backward while the ball shot forward. Her legs were swept out from under her—prompting a sudden strange association: her airplane ride to Toronto, her first airplane ride anywhere, and the mechanical vibration as the landing gear was pulled into the main body of the plane—and then she was falling . . . falling face-first onto the hardwood floor. The shard of glass sliding directly into her brain, killing her instantly.

Sally took her hands off the mirror and opened her eyes. She wasn’t blind or dead, but she was crying. Suddenly she didn’t want to sit here anymore. She didn’t want to be in this house anymore.

She stood up abruptly, knocking the bench over. She held her arms out for balance, then walked around it, give it a wide berth, and made a beeline for the hallway.

Her attention was so focused on the bench that she didn’t notice the gilt-framed mirror had inexplicably moved across the room—right into her path of travel. She saw it at the last moment, tried to dodge around it, but her foot clipped the bottom corner and sent it crashing to the floor.

Sally swore and crouched down to pick it up. The frame was empty. All the glass was on the floor. As she stared at it, something strange happened.

The pieces started to move. Not very much at first, but they
were
moving. As if the floor was vibrating and causing them to dance ever so slightly.

Then one piece flew into the air and hung there. Another piece leaped up and joined it. Then another. And another. Soon glass was flying into the air like grease on a hot plate, joining the growing mass which hung there.

The floor was bare in a matter of seconds, and a vaguely humanoid shape constructed of broken glass stood before her. It was a flat, dwarfish form, with stumpy arms and stumpy legs. But there hadn’t been that much glass to work with.

Staring at the thing which had been a mirror until a few seconds ago, Sally was reminded of another wayward girl who had wandered into a place she probably should have left well enough alone. But she didn’t think Alice had ever encountered a looking-glass creature like this one in her travels through Wonderland.

It took a step toward her. Its foot made a crunching, tinkling sound on the hardwood floor. The overhead fixture sent wild flashes of light along the walls as it took another step toward her. Sally thought of Mrs. Weston and her trip down the stairs.

She hadn’t gone running for the telephone, Sally realized.

She had been chased.

Charles ran around the side of the house and up the porch steps. He experienced a brief nightmare moment when he thought the front door was locked, but then he pushed instead of pulled, and ran into the main foyer. He saw Sally lying on the floor at the top of the stairs. Her eyes and mouth were open wide in what was almost a burlesque of fright. It was an expression Charles has seen on a hundred horror movie posters: the terrified starlet cowering before the monster. Sally was no Julie Adams, but that was okay, because the thing standing over her was no Creature from the Black Lagoon, either. It had a short, squat body that seemed to be composed entirely of broken glass.

As he watched, the creature swung one of its jagged hands in a glittering arc that opened a long red line on the palm of one of Sally’s upraised hands.

Charles’s heart seemed to freeze solid in his chest. He clutched at his chest, and realized he was still holding the T.R.T. baseball. Then, without realizing what he was doing or why, he turned to his side, dropping his arm as he did so, and leaned into a position he had seen a thousand times on ESPN. He adjusted his hold on the baseball, made sure he had a firm grip, and turned his head to the left (looking for the catcher’s sign, he guessed). A half-second later the rest of his body started to turn; his arm came around last, snapping through the air in a whip-like motion that ended with the release of the ball.

It shot through the air like a bullet fired from a gun, striking the glass creature dead centre and exploding its strangely fragmented body into a thousand pieces. Shrapnel flew everywhere. Sally still had her hands raised and was able to protect herself from the worst of it. Charles raced up the stairs and looked her over. Three fingers on her left hand were sliced open and would require stitches; on her right hand, a piece of glass was embedded in the webbing between the thumb and index finger. Another piece was sticking out of her thigh.

“Can you walk?”

Sally nodded and took Charles’s hand. He started to lead her down the stairs, but she stopped him and turned back around. She crouched down, teetering on her injured leg, and picked up the T.R.T. baseball sitting amongst the broken glass.

As her fingers made contact with the old rawhide, she saw a flash of images.
The vanity. The open window. The scratch baseball game taking place outside. Kids hollering and laughing. “Eddie’s OUT, Eddie’s OUT!” The crack of a bat, followed by the crash of broken glass. Then everything turns red.

The images faded away.

Sally clutched the baseball to her chest and for a moment Charles thought she was going to start reciting the Pledge of Allegiance . . . or maybe a couple of verses of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” He took her arm again and led her down the stairs and out of the house.

He put her in the car and fastened her seatbelt.

“She was trying to make herself pretty,” Sally said in a low, dreamy voice. She gripped the baseball close to her chest and looked up at Charles. “But she was never pretty again.
She was never pretty again, Charles
.”

Charles closed her door and went around to the driver’s side. As he slipped behind the wheel, he realized he forgot to lock the door of the house. He took the key out of his pocket and ran with it outstretched in his hand to the porch. He locked the door and ran back to the car.

As they pulled away from the house, Sally looked over at the overgrown lot. She clenched the baseball tighter. Her blood dripped across the old, cracked rawhide. The baseball didn’t mind. It was like coming home.

Stanton was almost out of air and the suns were coming up. He glanced down at his digital chronometer again, and the luminous red numerals seemed to scream at him.

“All right, boys. Pack it in.”

Fydenchuck was down on one knee, collecting a sample of the cobalt-coloured soil. He looked up and stared off at the horizon. “We’re gonna miss a real romantic moment here, bwana.”

“Oh, sure.” Klein came over, waving his telemetry wand through the air lackadaisically. He looked like a cut-rate magician bored with his craft. “If your idea of romance is getting chopped into coleslaw.”

Fydenchuck tilted his head in mock consideration. “Susan might be down with that. I have a theory she was raised by a pack of rabid wolverines.”

“Susan?” The wand dipped a bit in Klein’s hand. “What happened to Julia?”

“Julia . . .” Fydenchuck shuddered. “She belongs out here.”

Klein shook his head. “You’re sick.”

“Hey, she might survive. It’s entirely possible. I tell you, that girl is
fierce
.”

“Pack it up,” Stanton repeated, a bit more impatiently this time. He was referring to their equipment, but he also meant their shtick. As the team leader he tended to refrain from taking part in the banter and frivolty which was, he knew, really more of a defence mechanism than anything else. That aside, Stanton didn’t joke about the rifts. There was nothing funny about them. Not one little thing.

He checked his chronometer again. “The neural signal is breaking down. Get ready to shift. At five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .”

Klein and Fydenchuck disappeared. Not in a flash of light or a confluence of strange energies or even a theatrical cloud of stage smoke—they simply winked out of existence as though they were never there.

“This now concludes our broadcast day,” Stanton muttered as he depressed the button on the back of his glove, and then he was gone, too.

There was a brief sensation of displacement, like a tugging in the middle of his chest, and then he was back on the dais in the broadcasting chamber. Klein and Fydenchuck had stepped down to the main floor to make room for him. The small platform was barely big enough for two men, much less three. They would install a wider one for the next stage of the project, no doubt, after additional funding had been approved, after the board decided to send over bigger teams of explorers. Not that it would make any difference. They hadn’t found much of anything in the rifts, and Stanton didn’t think sending larger groups of people would change that.

Fydenchuck kicked the dust off the soles of his heavy boots, first one and then the other, while Klein took off his gloves, being mindful of the cords that fed power to the shifter buttons on the back of each one. They took off their masks in unison and breathed the cool air that was pumped into the chamber from the large industrial vents overhead. The chamber had an extremely high ceiling, with rows of windows set high up on either side, one row for the gallery, the other for the control room. Having so many people looking down on them always made Stanton think of the amphitheatres in hospital operating rooms. Except in here the patient never made it.