Rockinghorse (14 page)

“No, ma'am,” Jackie and Johnny both spoke in unison.

Johnny said, “We didn't dream it. I thought it was, at first. But it wasn't a dream.”

“It was real,” Jackie insisted.

Tracy lost her fragile grip on her temper. “Oh, come on!” she almost shouted the words. “Now you've both been taught—and I thought the lessons stuck—not to lie. You are both sitting there lying to us.”

The kids shook their heads and silently stayed with their story.

“Damn!” Tracy snorted in exasperation. She looked at Lucas.

He said, “Johnny, what did . . . Desdemona look like?”

“She seemed to be very sad,” the boy replied. “I never saw her smile. And her eyes seemed to be very sad.”

Lucas nodded his head, a sick feeling forming in the pit of his stomach. It couldn't be. It just couldn't be. It wasn't possible. “How about Delilah?”

The boy grinned sheepishly. “She . . . ah, kinda was dressed, well, different from the others; her legs showed a lot. And she liked to flirt a lot. Made me feel funny. Sort of.”

“But you liked the feeling?” the father asked gently, a faint smile on his lips.

“Yes, sir.”

“Lucas? . . .”

He cut off his wife's building protest with a wave of his hand. “Jackie, what did Firman look like?”

“Oh, he was
strange
! He was dressed like . . . like you see old-timey gypsies dressed in the movies. Maybe like a pirate, too. He had a ring in one ear and he wore a real bright red bandana around his head.”

“And Doran?”

“Oh, he wouldn't have anything to do with me.” He wasn't . . . unfriendly, not really. He just didn't get too close to me, that's all. Come to think of it, Doran sat away from all the others all the time.”

“All right,” Lucas said. “Thank you both. Now you go to your rooms and you stay there,” he told them. “And I mean that, kids. Don't push us any further.”

“Yes, sir,” they both echoed.

When the kids had gone, Tracy turned to her husband, irritation and confusion mixing on her face. “Lucas, now what in the world was that nonsense all about? ”

“It wasn't nonsense, Trace. At least I don't think it was. Listen, Desdemona is the girl of sadness. Delilah is the temptress. Firman means a traveler to distant places—the wanderer. Doran is the stranger. As a lark, I took a course in name origin in college—an elective. Tracy, there is no way those kids could have known all that.
No way
they could have put mode of dress with names. We have smart kids, yeah, but not that smart, not this young.”

“Are you saying—are you suggesting? . . .” she sputtered to a halt.

“Tracy, I don't know what I'm suggesting, if anything. What I do know for sure is this: Their descriptions fit the names. Other than that, I don't know. But I do think they . . . they believe they're telling the truth.”

She could only sit in her chair and stare at her husband. One whale of a good argument was just at the tip of her tongue.

Jackie's screaming cut off the argument before it could take shape. Both parents ran to the girl's room.

Lucas was the first one to enter the room. “What's wrong?”

“A man. An ugly man!” Jackie said, pointing to the window. She sat in the middle of her bed. “He was looking in that window.”

“Have you seen him before?” Tracy asked.

“In town,” Jackie said. “He always stared at me.”

“The son of a bitch!” Lucas said, losing the slender hold on his temper. He looked at Tracy. “Stay with her.”

Lucas grabbed his shotgun, checked to make certain it was loaded, and jacked a round into the chamber as he ran toward the kitchen. He ran out the kitchen door onto the veranda, lifting the shotgun. He watched as a man ran into the woods in back of the mansion. Slowly, he lowered the shotgun. The range was too far.

“Goddamn it!” he cursed. “I gotta get a rifle.”

“Good God!” his wife's outraged voice reached him. “This is . . . this is positively disgusting.”

Lucas went back into the house, walking slowly to Jackie's bedroom, cradling the shotgun in his arms. I feel like Daniel Boone, he thought. Entering the bedroom, he said, “What's wrong?”

Tracy looked at him and pointed to the window.

Lucas's stomach did a slow rollover of revulsion at the sight.

Before any of them could react to the hideousness hanging in the window, a noise from the floor above them turned their heads.

On the landing above the living quarters, the rocking horse began slowly rocking back and forth, its runners squeaking and groaning. Its tail twitched and its eyes gleamed with evil glee. It could scarcely control its urge to whinny in happiness. Faster and faster it rocked, until its movements resembled a frenzy. It bumped into the railing, the walls, banging and crashing.

Below the wildly gyrating wooden horse, man and wife and brother and sister looked at one another in shock and disbelief.

“Lucas . . . ?” Tracy said.

He shook his head and clicked the shotgun off safety. He stepped out into the hall, Tracy beside him.

The noise stopped.

The house was plunged into a deathlike silence.

“What was that, Lucas?”

He remembered the gold rocking-horse pin in his jeans pocket. “Has to be. It has to be that damn rocking horse.”

“Lucas, you're talking as strangely as the kids. It's just a wooden hobbyhorse. Nothing more. It can't—”

A nickering, whinnying sound from above them stopped her protests. She paled as her eyes met her husband's level gaze. “Can it be?” she whispered.

“I don't know,” he replied, as the house once more fell silent. “First things first,” he said grimly. “What in the hell was that thing that man hung outside the window?”

“I don't know. Neither of us got close enough to it to tell. Whatever it is, it's disgusting.”

“God!” Lucas said, looking at the bloody thing. “It's what left of a dog. It's been tortured and skinned.” He fought back sickness as he opened his knife and cut the cord, dropping the animal to the ground. “I'll bury it later.”

Above them, the rocking horse began rocking and whinnying and snorting. Its rocking intensified. It once more began banging into walls, snorting and whinnying as it did so.

“That's it!” Lucas shouted. “Goddamn it, I've had all I'm going to take.”

Ignoring Tracy's hands that tried to prevent him from leaving, Lucas jerked free and ran down the hall to the stairwell. He looked up. The rocking horse was looking down at him. Its eyes seemed to mock him. It whinnied tauntingly. Lucas raised the shotgun and pulled the trigger. The railing and bannisters caught most of the load, but a few shot struck the hobbyhorse. It seemed to cry in pain as it jerked back from the railing.

“I'm dreaming all this,” Lucas said.

The rocking horse appeared once more at the landing and spat at him, whinnying derisively.

Then it pulled back, disappearing.

Lucas ran up the curving steps until he reached the landing. There, he stood in numb shock, staring. The rocking horse was bucking and snorting and lunging around the small space afforded the landing. Its painted-on teeth no longer seemed painted-on. They were real and yellowed. The horse jumped at Lucas, its runners leaving the carpet. The runners seemed to actually strike at Lucas. The mouth was now open. It tried to bite him. Lucas dodged, hearing the teeth snap as they just missed his forearm.

Not believing it, but forced to admit to the truth taking place before his eyes, Lucas cursed the hobbyhorse and lifted the shotgun. He pulled the trigger, again and again, emptying the shotgun into the rocking horse.

Wild shrieks of pain filled the landing. The rocking horse howled in agony, as if its wood could actually experience the pain from the buckshot. The horse splintered under the impact of buckshot and the body separated from the runners. Half the hobbyhorse's face was blown off; a foul-smelling liquid splattered the walls. Pieces of the horse were scattered all over the landing.

Lucas lowered the smoking shotgun. His arms felt as if they weighed a ton apiece. He was suddenly very tired.

He looked at the horse, not believing any of what he was seeing. The horse, or what was left of it, was jerking spasmodically on the landing floor. Its mangled head was still trying to bite, the yellowed teeth snapping, the jaws working in fury and pain.

Lucas backed up against the wall.

“Oh, my God, Lucas!” Tracy cried, reaching his side. “Look!” she pointed.

Bright red blood was pouring from the blown-open stomach of the wooden horse. Bright red stinking blood. The blood was rapidly covering the floor, soaking into the worn carpet.

“It isn't possible,” Lucas said. “No, by God, it just isn't possible.”

But the impossible was taking place, right before his eyes.

Tracy suddenly lost her ability to keep down the food she had eaten. She threw up, the vomit spraying the walls. The sickness was infectious, and Lucas's own stomach emptied. Both of them staggered backward, leaning against the wall for support.

Lige had come on a run when Jackie rang the buzzer for him; he had already been moving at the sounds of the booming shotgun.

He panted up the stairs and came to a dead halt before he got to the landing. He could see what was left of the rocking horse. And could both smell and see the blood.

“Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Mr. Bowers,” he said. “You shouldn't had oughta done that. Oh, Lordy. Now it's really come unglued.”

Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, Lucas snapped, “What in the hell are you babbling about, now, Lige?”

Lige lifted his eyes to meet Lucas. There was something odd flickering in the man's eyes. “You jist don't know what you've done here, Mr. Bowers. You done unleashed all the devils and demons. That there horse is part of this house. Been here ever since the house was built. The house'll git you for this. Hit'll git you, and hit'll git your family. But hit ain't gonna git me. No, sir. I'm a-leavin.' ”

He turned and ran down the steps.

“Lige!” Lucas shouted at his back. “Lige, damn you, come back here.”

“No, sir!” Lige called over his shoulder. “I'm a-leaving' here. I'll write and tell y'all where to send my pay. Good-bye!”

“You leave these grounds and I'll call the law on you—
Ira
!”

That stopped the man cold.

Jackie and Johnny stood under the archway leading to the stairwell, watching and listening.

“Lucas,” Tracy said. “Lige is
Ira
?”

“I think so,” he spoke softly, just loud enough for her to hear. “But it was a wild guess.”

Lige turned slowly. When he looked up, his eyes were filled with a combination of madness and hate. His hands were balled into fists. “That's two ways the law will get me, isn't it,
Mister
Bowers?”

“Two ways, at least, Ira. Why, Ira? Why all the pretense?”

“You're a lawyer and you're asking that?”

Lucas grunted his reply.

“Now what happens?” Lige/Ira called up the steps.

“That's up to you, Ira. All that talk about demons and devils—that was just an excuse for you to run, wasn't it? You knew I was getting very suspicious of you, didn't you?”

The man laughed and shook his head. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, ol' buddy,” Lige/Ira suddenly got very intimate with his speech, and his grammar improved greatly. “But all that was the truth.”

“Come off it, Ira.”

The man again smiled. “You'll see, Lucas. Oh, yes. You'll see.”

“Are you . . . do you really expect me to believe this house is
haunted
?”

“Buddy, this place is the devil's
own.
And you're an interloper—you and your family. And you'll all pay for violating something you don't understand. You should have stayed away, Lucas.”

“I think that is pure crap! What caused this rocking horse to seemingly come alive? And the blood—that isn't real, is it? You rigged all this to try to scare us away—right?”

“For a lawyer, Lucas, you're a goddamned fool. Seemingly come alive? The blood not real? Oh, Lucas, you didn't kill that old horse. It can't be killed. It'll be back. You just hang around and you'll see. As long as this house stands, that horse will be a part of it. That, and . . .” He paused, then laughed. “Well, you'll see.”

“Crap! ” Lucas spat the word. “You rigged all this. I know you did. You had to have rigged it. There is no other logical explanation.”

“Ol' buddy,” Lige/Ira said, “there is no logical explanation for anything about this house. You'll see, if you stay, and you probably will. You're that goddamned stupid.” He smiled.

Lucas had difficulty trying to control his temper.

“Who were those men who broke in here last night?”

Ira shrugged. “Why not? They were part of the Brotherhood.”

“The
what
?”

“The Brotherhood. And they'll be back, too. You'll never leave Georgia alive, Lucas. None of you will. If this house don't kill you, the Brotherhood will. You've been marked since before you were born, buddy. You're the weak link in the chain.”

“What in the hell are you talking about, Ira?”

The man shook his head. “How'd you put it together about me?”

“Mostly a guess. You were trying to act a lot older than you were.”

“Very good, Lucas. But . . . now what?”

“More questions, Ira. Were you a part of those men who attacked me and my family?”

“Sure.”

Blind, red, hot rage filmed before Lucas's eyes. With an inhuman howl ripping from his throat, he dropped the empty shotgun to the landing floor and charged down the steps toward his brother. Ira braced himself and got in the first punch, a stinging right to Lucas's jaw. But Ira was fighting an enraged father and husband, and Lucas scarcely felt the blow. Lucas snapped a short left to Ira's mouth and the lips of the man turned crimson, blood leaking down, dribbling on his chin, dropping off to stain his dirty shirt. Ira swung a roundhouse right that Lucas ducked, and the father slammed a hard right fist into Ira's belly. Ira doubled over, gagging. Before Lucas could follow through, Ira stepped to one side and kicked Lucas on the leg, bringing a grunt of pain. Ira followed that with a wicked punch to the side of Lucas's head. Lucas backed up until the stars faded in his head, then charged his brother, grabbing the man's hips and propelling him backward, slamming the man into a wall, knocking the wind from him. Ira slumped to the floor. Just as Lucas drew back his foot to kick Ira in the face, the man scooted away and came to his feet, a knife in his hand. His grin was ugly.

“Now, Lucas,” he hissed. “Now I gut you like a fish.” He shifted the blade position to cutting edge up, for a gut-cut.

From the outside, a wolf began howling. He was joined by several more, their voices sending eerie calls throughout the mansion. Ira looked wildly around him as a strong wind began blowing, sending the drapes and curtains in the room billowing out like loose sails in a raging sea storm. The sky darkened, and lightning licked and slashed and flickered, followed by waves of seemingly endless thunder. The chorus of wolves grew more menacing as a loud voice was added to the din of confusion. It seemed to be a young voice, but a very powerful one; so loud it rattled the chandeliers.

Ira dropped the knife and put his hands over his ears as the sound became unbearable. His eyes were filled with an insane light. Then, lowering his hands, he grabbed up the knife, and charged Lucas, screaming as he came.

“I'll kill you, you bastard! I won't wait for the Brotherhood to do it. I'll kill you myself.”

An explosion filled the room. The strange sounds ceased abruptly. Ira was flung forward, a hole in his chest. He slammed to the floor, quivered once, and then died, blood spilling out of his body, staining the area around him.

The house became utterly, totally deathlike in silence. Lucas lifted his eyes from his dead brother to the man standing in the open doorway, a pistol in his right hand.

The man smiled and opened his western-style sports coat, revealing a gold star pinned to his shirt. “It's OK, folks. I heard and saw enough to know the shooting will be justified. Oh—I'm Bill Pugh, Sheriff of Edmund County. I was stoppin' by to introduce myself. Right sudden little storm we had, wasn't it? They do come up like that sometimes in the summer. Might have been my imagination, but did y'all hear a pack of dogs howlin'?”

* * *

“It's so odd,” Lucas said as they lay in bed, the cool breeze from the outside gently fanning their bodies.

“What's odd?” Tracy asked.

“I watched my own brother die today, and I felt nothing. Nothing. I still feel nothing. I don't think that's normal.”

“You didn't know your brother; didn't even have a mental picture of him. He was a stranger. Besides, isn't normal relative to the situation? I think I read that somewhere.”

“My own brother hated me so much he wanted to kill me. How he must have hated me. He must have fed off his own hate for me.”

“He was crazy,” she said flatly. “When I think of what he might have done . . . ” She was silent for a few seconds. “I'm just glad it wasn't you who killed him. Sheriff Pugh seems like a nice man.”

“Yes, he did. Well,” he sighed, “maybe things will start to settle down. I threw that damned rocking horse—or what remained of it—on the trash pile out back. I'll burn it first thing in the morning.”

“Good. It still frightens me. I just don't understand what caused it to . . . buck and jump and make those noises that it did. And that red liquid that poured from it.”

“Ira rigged that liquid. As to its jumping around. . . I don't know. It sure did. And, Tracy, I could swear the damned thing tried to bite me. Damn!” he said, his voice full of disgust. “That's impossible. Hell, maybe Ira filled the damn thing full of Mexican jumping beans.”

Tracy laughed softly. “Oh, Lucas—
really
! It was. . . I guess, all the tension we had built up in us. But that strange storm, those wolves howling, that loud voice. I
know
these things were real. But I don't understand them. All those things Ira said.”

“Ira was just trying to frighten us. But what the kids said . . . I've been thinking about that. Trace, Thera means untamed.”

“The storm?”

“Maybe. If we want to believe in all that. Yes. Randolph is supposedly advised by wolves.”

“The howling?”

“Yes. Harod is known as the loud terror.”

“The loud voice.” This time it was not posed as a question.

“Yes. Aldis means from the oldest house, and Hall means from the master's house. I can't recall the rest of them; they'll come to me in time, I imagine.”

Before going to bed, Lucas had shown her the gold rocking-horse pin. She had commented on the workmanship and how lovely it was. Until she looked more closely at the tiny face of the horse. Then she had seen the evil there, and had said as much. Lucas had put the pin on his dresser.

She took his hand in hers. “Lucas, are you saying there might be some truth in the kids' stories?”

“Yes,” he replied, his voice containing a dead flatness. “I guess I am. I don't know any other way to explain it.”

“Then what Ira said about the house might also be true? ”

He elected not to reply to that.

She looked at him through the darkness, then sat up in bed and hugged her knees. She stared at her husband. “I want to go home, Lucas. Back to our real home.”

“I think that's a good idea, Trace,” he said, surprising her.

“You mean it, Lucas?”

“Yes. Why don't you, Tracy? Take the kids and head on back. I'll join you all later. I want to stay here a while longer.”

“No. Why?”

“No, why, what?”

“No, I won't go back without you. And why would you want to stay here?”

“A lot of reasons, Trace. The Brotherhood. That rang a long-forgotten bell in my head. I know something about the Brotherhood; I just can't dredge it up to the surface. But I will. There is more than just a mystery here, Trace. Much more. And I'm going to find out what it's all about. That is not a player piano in the ballroom. I checked. What does the little rocking-horse pin mean? Why did Ira come back here? Who are those people in the Gibson house? Those ghost-hunters that Kyle told me about, and he says no one else will talk about—were their deaths accidental, or planned? I lean toward the latter. Why did my grandfather warn me never to come to Edmund County? Why did Grandmother Bowers never leave the mansion? Where is she buried? Why was it held in secrecy? The strange deaths of the Garretts. Everything points toward . . .
something,
Trace. Something . . . planned. Something . . . evil. It intrigues me. And I'm going to get to the bottom of it.”

“Yes, Mr. Columbo,” she said with a sigh. “Whither thou goest, and all that.” She snuggled up close to him. “Goodnight, Inspector.”

* * *

“The Brotherhood never forgets, Lucas,” his grandfather's voice rang in his sleeping head. “And one never leaves the Brotherhood.”

“What is the Brotherhood, Granddad?” the young Lucas asked.

“It's why your father refuses to ever go back to Edmund County, boy. It's . . .”

The dream faded into emptiness. Lucas was left looking down a long tunnel. A spot of darkness was visible far at the other end. He began walking toward the darkness.

Lucas stirred in his restless, troubled dreaming.

“. . . evil, boy. The Brotherhood is a secret group of men. Women can join, but they're excluded from the meetings. Your uncle is part of the Brotherhood. That's the uncle you've never met. Your dad won't allow him to come near.”

“My uncle?”

“Your father's brother. He lives down in Edmund County. I haven't seen him in thirty years. Name is Joe Bowers. I told your grandmother if I ever saw him again, I'd shoot him.”

“I never knew I had an uncle,” Lucas said.

* * *

Something was interfering with the dream. A noise Lucas could not immediately identify. The noise was shattering the continuity of the dream. Then the noise became clearer. It was a tapping sound.