Every House Is Haunted (26 page)

“You’re going to wear that tape out.”

Klein snapped his head around; his face stood out like a full moon in the darkened theatre.

“It’s on disc,” he said.

“I know,” Stanton said. He came down the aisle with its dim track lighting running along either side. “I was trying to get a laugh out of you.”

Klein turned back to the screen. “If I wanted a laugh, I wouldn’t be watching this.”

“True enough.”

He moved sideways along the row of seats and sat down next to Klein. “Why are you watching this?”

Klein shrugged. “I don’t know. Research, I guess.”

“Find anything?”

Even in the dark, Stanton could feel the look Klein was giving him. “Give me a break.”

From behind them a voice muttered: “Holy shit.”

They turned around and saw Fydenchuck’s unmistakable silhouette in the lighted doorway.

“Am I interrupting something?”

“We’re doing research,” Stanton said. He felt Klein giving him that look again.

“Is that what the kids are calling it these days? My, I
am
getting old.”

Fydenchuck sauntered down the aisle, hands in his pockets.

“I thought you had a date,” Klein said.

“You’re my date tonight, K-man.”

He slipped past Stanton and flopped down in the seat on Klein’s other side, propping his feet on the back of the seat in front of him.

“I like you better when you’re getting laid,” Klein said.

“And why is that, babyluv?”

“Because it usually means you’re somewhere else.”

Fydenchuck looked up at the screen. “I wish I was, now,” he said. “Why in the hell are we watching this depressing shit?”

“I told you,” Stanton said. “It’s research.”

“Research?” Fydenchuck frowned. “We’ve watched this thing a thousand times. So have the geeks. They went over it with a microscope, frame by frame, and they didn’t find a thing.”

“There has to be something,” Klein said. “It’s the only footage we have of what happens after . . . afterwards.”

Fydenchuck turned and looked at both of them. “You want to know what happened?” He pointed at the screen. “That dipshit refused his call and decided to stick around to watch the suns rise. The patient died and Cooper got dragged along for the ride. Only it wasn’t his time, see, and whoever—or whatever—it is that governs death chewed him up and spit him out.”

“They say he had a brain tumour,” Stanton said in a low, ruminative voice.

“Oh, right,” Fydenchuck said with a derisive snort. “He wasn’t crazy, he was suicidal. He was a terminal case—just like all of the patients in our happy little project—and he decided to hitch a ride into the great beyond? I don’t buy it.”

“Why not?”

The death of Justin Cooper had become a part of the institute’s apocrypha. After receiving the call to transmit out of the rift he was exploring, Cooper, for reasons known only to himself, decided to stay. Or that’s what they think happened. It was possible his suit had malfunctioned, although it was extremely unlikely. Every suit was equipped with three return buttons, one primary and two back-ups, and the chances of one or two failing, much less all three, were infinitesimal. An equipment check had been done before he left and everything was in proper working order. The other two members of his team were completely perplexed. They reported no unusual behaviour on Cooper’s part and pleaded total ignorance of any plans he might have had to remain in the rift after the suns came up. It wasn’t long before stories began to circulate that Cooper had been diagnosed with a brain tumour prior to his trip. The reason for his staying behind was narrowed down to one of three possible scenarios. One: he wanted to confront his own mortality and felt the only way to do it properly was through experiencing death by proxy. Two: he was hoping to obtain some knowledge which would somehow stay his own death. Three: he simply wanted to commit suicide.

The last was deemed the most likely explanation . . . that is, if Cooper really did have a brain tumour. The jury was still out on that one, and would be forever. His remains had never been recovered.

“Nobody knows what happens when those suns come up,” Fydenchuck said. “All we know is that when the sky starts to turn pink, then it’s time to pack your bags and get the hell out of there. If you want to kill yourself, you run a warm bath and find a dry-cleaning bag, or you swallow a bunch of sleeping pills. You don’t travel out to the borderlands of death and say, ‘God—or whoever—please take me!’ I don’t buy it for a minute.”

“Maybe that’s why he did it,” Klein said in a low voice. “Because it wasn’t a sure thing.”

“Please.” Fydenchuck shook his head in annoyance. “Cooper was a romantic. He thought he was Christopher fucking Columbus. He wanted to stand importantly on the shores of Death and look off into the distance as the suns come up. Well, he did it, and he paid the price for it.”

Stanton nodded at the remote control in Klein’s hand. “Play it again, Sam. But kill the sound, if you would.”

“Yeah,” Fydenchuck said, sliding down into his seat. “I don’t need to hear that broomhead screaming. I hear it enough in my dreams.”

“Take a knee, boys.”

Fydenchuck and Klein got down on one knee. Stanton stood over them, holding his helmet in the crook of his arm. They were on the dais in the broadcasting chamber. The seal door was maglocked and the air had already begun to change. There was a charged calm in the air, like the buildup before a powerful thunderstorm.

In a solemn voice, Stanton recited: “O Lord, guide us through the shadow lands which lie before us.”

“Lord, guide us,” Fydenchuck and Klein said in unison. Their voices were a soft, hissing murmur inside their face masks.

“Show us the truth of your design, the mortal coil, the ribbon of life and death.”

“Lord, show us.”

“Keep us from the rifts between us until the time of our natural end.”

“Lord, keep us.”

“And bring us home safely.”

Stanton extended his free hand and Fydenchuck and Klein covered it with one of their own.

“Lord, bring us home,” they intoned.

Stanton put his helmet on, locked it in place, and flashed a thumbs-up at Finley standing at one of the gallery windows.

He pressed a button on the back of his gloved hand and Bill X’s frequency thumped into life. An electronic heartbeat. A death knell in stereo surround sound.

The three men activated their transmitters.

The sky was a deep, velvety blue. The landscape was dark and featureless in every direction.

Klein unholstered his telemetry wand.

Fydenchuck took out his little shovel.

Stanton watched them for a moment, then looked off toward the bleak horizon. He stared at one spot for a long time. He took the Zeiss-Ikon binoculars slung over his shoulder and raised them to his eyes. He adjusted the focus-knob, stared a bit longer, then lowered them. He cleared his throat, and spoke into the hands-free microphone that was recording the audio portion of this trip (video was running, too, but for reasons unknown, it didn’t always turn out).

“Looks like we’ve got something on the horizon,” he began. Fydenchuck and Klein looked up from what they were doing.

“It appears to be a dome-shaped structure. Can’t make out any external features.” He added: “Going to get a closer look.”

They stared at him for a long time.

“All right, boys, let’s go for a little run.”

They stood up but they didn’t run. They were loaded down with too much equipment, including the thirty-pound oxygen tanks strapped to their backs. But they went along at a steady trot, their breath hissing loudly through their respirators.

Ten minutes later they stopped to catch their breath. The dome-shape was closer now and more clearly defined: it was the same cobalt blue as the soil that Fydenchuck so assiduously took samples of. Except where the soil was rough and gritty, the dome was as smooth as a freshly laid egg.

Stanton started off again, and the others followed, keeping pace a few steps behind him, their eyes staring fixedly ahead. They reached the dome and walked slowly around its circumference in a tight group, almost stepping on each other’s feet in their subconscious need to stay close together.

The dome was about forty feet tall, Stanton judged, and about the same in diameter at its base. He looked over at the others. “What do you think?”

Fydenchuck shook his head. “Could be a natural formation, I guess.”

Klein shot him a cynical look. “Give me a break. We’ve been to dozens of rifts and never seen any formations, natural or otherwise.”

“It’s dark over here, in case you didn’t notice. Maybe we just never saw anything until now.”

“You don’t think this is unusual?” Stanton asked him.

Fydenchuck shrugged. “It’s weird, but everything over here is weird. There’s no wind—no air currents of any kind. Somehow I find that weirder than this.”

Klein looked at his wrist computer. “Neural frequencies are breaking down.” He looked over at Fydenchuck. The young man’s face had paled considerably in the last few seconds. “Station’s going off the air, and fast.”

Stanton glanced at his chronometer, then turned his eyes up to the sky. It was growing lighter at an alarming rate. It was like watching a nuclear bomb go off in slow motion.

“This is new.”

“I hate new,” Fydenchuck said, a little frantically. “New is highly overrated.”

“Agreed,” Klein said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“All right,” Stanton said, “I guess this concludes our broadcast . . .”

He was cut off by a sharp cracking sound. It seemed to come from all around them, loud enough to make all three men fall on their knees and clutch their heads in a futile attempt to block it out.

“Go!” Stanton yelled. “Break transmission now!”

He looked over at Klein and Fydenchuck. He blinked and they were gone. He pressed the button on the back of his glove, and just before he shifted, he looked up at the dome and saw where the sound was coming from.

The perfect smooth curvature of the dome was marred by a long jagged crack.

Klein and Fydenchuck were sitting on the floor of the chamber when Stanton appeared on the dais.

“What in the sweet hell was that?” Fydenchuck said, taking off his helmet.

“I don’t care,” Klein replied. “So long as I don’t hear it again. It felt like my skull was being split open.” He put a hand to his head, as if to make sure it was still there and in one piece.

Stanton stepped off the dais. “I don’t like it,” he said.

Fydenchuck glanced at him. “What’s to like?”

“That dome . . . how quickly the suns started coming up . . .” He shook his head. “I can take one surprise, but not two.”

“What do you think it means?” Klein asked.

“I think it means something’s changed,” Stanton said cryptically. “Something big.”

Before Klein could ask him to explain, Finley came in, his lab coat billowing out behind him. “What happened? What did you see?”

“No video?” Stanton asked.

“Nothing. Not even static. Bill’s condition deteriorated unexpectedly fast.”

“We noticed,” Fydenchuck said shortly.

Finley was about to say something when the intern’s frantic voice came over the chamber intercom.