The Blackham Mansion Haunting (The Downwinders Book 4) (14 page)

Lorenzo believed that Bingham spawned the new houses
initially, and kept Abraham, Joseph, and Althea separately in one, before the
house started spawning copies on its own, when people completed the loop.
How
did Bingham do that?
she wondered.
He’s not just running around killing
people; he must have some kind of power. Did that force mutate in the
radiation? Has his ability morphed right along with his appearance, and when he
tries to sedate a captive, it goes off rails and knocks the person back to the
real world, to wherever they were the day before? Something he can’t control?

She stepped on the gas. Thirty more minutes, and she’d be at
Carma’s.

▪
▪
▪

“I can’t call the agency, it’s too late in the evening!”
Carma said, hysteria rising in her voice. “They’re closed! I don’t know how to
reach any of them after hours!”

“Carma!” Deem said, trying to calm her down. “I can book the
ticket on my laptop. Winn doesn’t need a paper ticket. He can go right to the
airport and use his ID to take the flight.”

“Oh!” Carma said, lowering her hand to her hair and adjusting
it, as though the crisis she had momentarily wrapped herself in had somehow
knocked her hair off balance. “Could you? I’ll reimburse you. Just let me know
how much it costs.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Deem said. “I can pay for Winn’s
ticket home.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Carma said, turning to walk into the
kitchen. “I think we could all use a drink,” came her voice as it trailed off.

Deem sat down next to David. “That’s some story,” David said.
“I can’t remember seeing the Creepsis, but I have had nightmares. Had one just
before you got home.”

Deem looked at him. His eyes were sunken and surrounded by
large, black rings.
He doesn’t look like he’s been sleeping at all,
Deem
thought.

“Do you remember them?” she asked. “The nightmares?”

“They become clearer each time I dream. I’m trapped in a
house. It’s as though it’s under construction, because there’s rooms missing
everywhere, but I can’t get out of it, no matter what I try. I can’t remember
if it’s the Blackham mansion or not, I’m still fuzzy on some details. The house
is full of dread, of not being able to get away from something that’s always chasing
me.”

“You don’t remember the Creepsis injecting you?” Deem asked.
“If my theory is right, that’s how you wound up back here, and Winn wound up in
Montana.”

“No, I don’t remember that part.”

Carma returned with a tray of cordials. She passed a Baileys
on the rocks to Deem. It was a triple. Then she gave David a mug that looked
like tea, little wisps of steam rising from it. Finally she took the other
Baileys, a smaller one, for herself. “Drink up” she said, sitting across from
them.

Deem took a sip of her drink. She noticed David hesitantly
sniffing his tea. The look on his face told her he’d been forced to drink a lot
of it lately, and was becoming sick of it.

“There’s something I’m just not comfortable with,” Carma
said, tapping the side of her glass with her fingernails. “The bit about the
house collapse.”

“You don’t think it will work?” Deem asked.

“Oh, I think it might work, but I’m not so sure about the
Creepsis being dead as a result of it. He might be wrong about that.”

“He said that’s what Jacob’s father suggested,” Deem replied.
“And he’s been right about so much else.”

“I couldn’t disagree more,” Carma said. “When it comes to
mistakes, Lorenzo made many. Entrusting his journal to someone who didn’t or
couldn’t help him, failing to reach Jacob, trapping himself — I’m not sure I’d
trust his thoughts on the collapse, either.”

“Well, what then?” Deem asked. “Collapsing the house would eliminate
the threat of people becoming trapped in duplicate houses. If it doesn’t kill
the Creepsis, at least we’d be boxing it in.”

“You don’t know that it will eliminate the ongoing threat,”
Carma warned. “You wouldn’t know for sure until you performed the collapse and
opened the front door, to see whether or not a kitchen appeared. Its ability to
duplicate may still exist, even after you perform the collapse.”

“Great,” Deem said despondently, taking a large gulp of her
drink. “No options that would do any good.”

“We need more information,” Carma said. “We must form a plan
that is more thought-out than Lorenzo’s, based less on assumption. The man
can’t be blamed; he did his best for a hundred and twenty years ago. We must
rack our brains for resources we can turn to. I’ll do so for the rest of the
evening, and I suggest you do the same, Deem. As for you, David, I think you
should rest some. You’re looking even weaker, I’m afraid.”

“Come along, I’ll take you up,” Deem said, setting down her
glass and standing. She watched as David stood and wobbled a little on his
feet, gaining balance before he turned to walk upstairs.

▪
▪ ▪

“That’s unbelievable!” Winn said, eating a sandwich Carma had
prepared. “All the way to Montana?”

Deem had just finished relating the events that Winn no
longer remembered, including the entire story Lorenzo told them while inside
Blackham mansion. He looked stunned.

“Why Montana?” Winn asked. “Why am I not trapped in a house
back in Paragonah?”

“I have a theory,” Deem replied. “In the beginning, when
Bingham attacked people like Abraham and Joseph, he was somehow able to store
their bodies in duplicates of the house. These were duplicates he created, not
spawned by someone completing the loop. So he has this ability. I think that
ability morphed into something a little fucked up when the radiation hit.”

“What?” Winn asked.

“Bingham turned into the Creepsis, right? Head shifted to his
back, and he looked even more like a giant, twisted spider. And he stabbed you
with something, a sharp stinger that came out of its neck…where its head used
to be. I think what it injected into you was supposed to transfer you to a
duplicate house, in addition to paralyzing you. The radiation fucked it up, and
now it sends you back to wherever you were a day ago, instead.”

“If you’re right,” Carma said, “I imagine it’s very
frustrating for the Creepsis.”

“So that means there’s still a duplicate house in Paragonah with
my name on it,” Winn replied. “Waiting for me.”

“And the same thing happened to David,” Carma added.
“Whatever the Creepsis injected into him, it’s slowly destroying him. He’s
becoming weaker and weaker, plagued by nightmares and visions of a house.”

“A house that’s not yet complete,” Deem said. “He said the
house he was seeing was under construction.”

“Perhaps that’s what the radiation fucked up,” Winn said. “It
slowed down the creation of the duplicate house, and David couldn’t be sent
there until it was finished.”

“Whether the fallout is to blame for the slowness of its
construction or the creature’s control of things doesn’t matter in the end,”
Carma said. “It may all be true, or only partially true. I suspect that when
the house is finished, David will be pulled back to it. His body will go
comatose, and he’ll be trapped in the house that has been prepared for him,
just like Henry and the others.”

“We don’t have much time,” Deem said.

“We need a plan,” Winn answered. “Right now.”

“Carma feels that collapsing the house won’t kill the
Creepsis,” Deem said. “He’ll still be there.”

“The collapse will bring every body that’s been stored in all
the duplicates into one house, the original, right?” Winn said. “That will
include David, if he’s taken before we can perform the collapse.”

“But how do we get him out?” Deem asked.

“He won’t be trapped at that point,” Winn replied. “He just
leaves the River.”

“That’s the type of assumption that got Lorenzo into
trouble,” Carma said. “I advise against presumption. You’re much better off
assuming you’ll need to eliminate the Creepsis in order to free David. You’ll
at least want to go in knowing how you’d get rid of it. Once it’s in the same
house with you, along with all those bodies from the past, you’d better have
some way of taking it out.”

“Where is David, now?” Winn asked.

“He’s upstairs, still asleep,” Deem replied. “He had a bad
night. Lots of nightmares. He looks awful.”

“Poor kid,” Winn said, finishing his sandwich. “Where do we
start? Any ideas, Carma?”

“I’ve racked my brain all night, and I can’t think of
anything,” she replied.

“I want to call Steven and Roy,” Deem said. “They’ve been
helpful in the past. They might have ideas, or know someone.”

“Go for it,” Winn replied.

Deem pulled her phone from her pocket and dialed Steven’s
house in Seattle. She put it on speakerphone and set it down between the three
of them.

“Hello?” Steven answered.

“Hi Steven, it’s Deem,” Deem said, waiting for Steven’s response.
After a few moments of pleasantries and the introduction of Carma, Deem
continued.

“Have you ever heard of a house that can duplicate itself?
And trap people inside the duplicates?” she asked.

“Is that what you’re facing?” Steven asked. “Wow, that’s intense.”

“We’ve got a friend who will soon be trapped in it, so we
need to figure out how to handle it. It may involve a creature, too. The house
was originally haunted by the spirit of a murderer, who preyed on people who
conducted a séance in the house. The radiation here has since changed him from
a human into something twisted. We’ve been calling it the Creepsis, which is
what the locals have called it for years. Any ideas?”

“Nothing comes to mind,” Steven replied. “Dad?”

“Can’t think of anything, Deem,” came Roy’s voice through the
phone. “Sounds challenging.”

“We believe we can collapse the duplicate houses into one,
but we still need a way to get rid of the Creepsis once that happens.”

“Well, there’s damn few things you can use as weapons in the
River,” Roy said. “Lots of objects will transform, but most aren’t weapons. We
don’t have anything like that, that I know of. You, son?”

“No, I don’t know of any,” Steven replied. “Perhaps there’s a
way to collapse it further, make it so small it’s irrelevant.”

“We’re concerned about our friend trapped inside,” Deem
replied. “We’re not sure if the energy that creates the duplicates comes from
the house itself, or from the Creepsis. If it’s from the Creepsis, that might
keep our friend trapped inside, even if we collapsed it to a pin prick.”

“I see,” Steven replied. “Well, we’ll have to mull it over
here, see if we can come up with anything.”

“Use that pinhead in Ballard,” they heard Roy mumble to
Steven on the other end.

“Pinhead?” Steven replied, as they had a conversation on
their own.

“Yeah, that tech geek with the database,” Roy said.

“Oh, you mean Elliott,” Steven replied. “His name is Elliott,
not pinhead or tech geek.”

“Whatever. We’ve got a huge credit with him, let’s have him
do a search,” Roy said.

“Not a bad idea,” Steven replied. “How urgent is this, guys?
It sounds pretty dire?”

“Very urgent,” Winn replied. “The clock is ticking.”

“Then Dad and I will leave to go talk to Elliott right away,
and I’ll let you know what we find out.”

“Well, that is, Steven will go,” Roy said. “I will probably
wait here to relay any important information.”

“What do we need a relay for?” Steven asked. “We’ve all got
cell phones, dad. You just don’t want to deal with Elliott.”

“No, I don’t,” Roy said. “The goddamn putz can’t even look up
from his phone for more than a half second.”

“After we get what we need from him, we’ll stop at that pie
place in Fremont. How about that?”

No response from Roy.

“Listen, guys,” Steven said, “we’re on this. I’ll let you go.
I’ll get back to you as soon as I know something, alright?”

“Thank you!” Deem said.

“Goodbye!” Winn added, and Deem ended the call.

“Let’s hope something comes of it,” Deem said. “They’ve come
through for me before.”

“I wouldn’t expect much if this Roy has anything to do with
it,” Carma said, standing and flattening her dress with her hands. “He sounds
like a piece of work.”

“The screen is blank,” Carma said. “It isn’t working.”

“Just wait,” Deem said. Deem and David were seated the end of
the dining room table, observing Deem’s laptop, and Winn and Carma were
standing behind them. A video call was about to begin.

“Who are we talking to, again?” David asked. Winn saw that
David could barely keep his head up. When he’d heard they were going to talk
with an expert on this type of haunted house, he’d insisted on participating,
but Winn was beginning to think it might have been a bad idea.

“Her name is Kari Happague,” Deem said. “She lives in
Virginia. We got her name from Steven and Roy.”

“From Steven and Roy’s database guy,” Winn corrected.

“Well, what do we do, just wait?” Carma asked, growing
impatient.

“I’m a little early,” Deem said. “She’s got another couple of
minutes still.”

Winn shifted from foot to foot. He’d not slept well the
previous night either. He was unnerved by the descriptions of David’s
nightmares, of houses half-built, waiting to act as holding cells for Creepsis
food. He had a few of the visions himself, and it made for a fitful night.
Around 3 AM, having just awoken from one of the nightmares, he’d begun to form
a desire to drive into town and have a big breakfast with lots of coffee. It
had distracted him from the disturbing images that flowed whenever he tried to
go back to sleep. Having seized on the breakfast plan for so many hours, he was
waylaid when Deem announced she’d scheduled a conference call for 9 AM.

The screen flickered to life, and the face of Kari Happague
appeared. She looked very thin and gaunt, and the way her face descended into
the camera accentuated the triangularness of it, making her head look a little
like a praying mantis.

“Hello?” she said on the other end. Her voice was high, and
she was cheery. A smile spread across her very small mouth. It didn’t have far
to spread.

“Hello, Kari!” Deem said. “I’ve got David, Winn, and Carma
here with me. Thank you for taking a moment this morning to talk with us.”

“Of course!” Kari said. Winn marveled at how much sound came
out of such a tiny mouth. “I’m on my lunch break here, so please don’t mind me
if I take a bite of something now and then, will you?”

Winn could see the tell-tale signs of a cubicle behind her
face.
She’s at work somewhere,
he thought. There were papers and a
calendar tacked to the soft panel walls of the cubicle. He watched as she
scooped a spoonful of yogurt into her tiny mouth. Winn was amazed that it
opened wide enough to allow a spoon to enter.

“Did you have a chance to read my email?” Deem asked.

“Yes, quite thorough,” Kari replied. “Very vivid, too.
Exciting! I’m jealous!”

I can’t believe this woman is an expert,
Winn thought.
She seems like a
typical office worker, more interested in going home to watch reality
television.

“We’re concerned about David here, as I wrote,” Deem said.
“We need some way to stop the threat.”

“Well, I’m in agreement with your friend Carma that
collapsing the houses will not get rid of the…” She looked down at something
below the camera. “Creepsis. What a charming name! There are many names for it,
but I like this one a lot!”

Someone walked into the frame behind her, and Kari raised a
finger to the camera, pausing them, while she took a folder from the person and
they exchanged a few words. When she was finished, the person left, and Kari
dropped the papers into a basket behind her. Then she spooned another glob of
yogurt into her mouth.

“Sorry about that — mortgages are really heating up this
week! So, listen, no, you won’t get rid of your Creepsis by collapsing the
houses using the method you describe. It’ll still be there. And anyone trapped
won’t be released until it’s gone.” Another scoop of yogurt.

“What about ending the duplication of houses? Will it do
that?” Winn asked.

“No, handsome, it won’t,” Kari answered, the lilt in her
accent increasing. “It just collapses them all, it doesn’t stop new duplicates.
So it’s important that you don’t leave the house after the collapse, don’t walk
through any outer doors, because the first duplicate house you see will be one
that traps you and makes a new duplicate.” She smiled at Winn. “I was wondering
if you talked! What a deep, masculine voice you have! You got me all warm
inside!”

I can only imagine what Deem’s thinking,
Winn thought.

“Any idea on what we can do?” Deem asked, her voice monotone.

“If the man who went in before was planning to collapse it
with elemental fire and used a Haas Box to take something inside, I’m pretty
sure he took in matura, which is easy enough to make. It’s completely inert in
the River unless you take it in with a Haas Box.”

“What is matura?” David asked.

“It’s chopped up male pine cones mixed with a trace of
gunpowder,” Carma offered.

“Correct!” Kari responded. “Once mixed, it has to age for a
month, so your best bet is to go for the matura already inside the house and
hope it’s still there. Find the body with the Haas Box, figure out how far
they’d made it through the process, and complete it.”

“I’m operating off a process described by a hundred-year-old
ghost,” Deem said. “Just so we don’t screw this up, can you repeat what the steps
are, exactly?”

“Pour matura on the ground in one of the four corners of the
house,” Kari said. “It doesn’t take a lot, just a teeny pile of it. Burn it
with elemental fire. Then repeat in the other three corners. Doesn’t matter if
you do it on the ground floor, the basement, or the attic. Once you burn the
fourth corner, the duplicates will collapse.” Now a stick of celery went to her
mouth, and she bit it off.

“And if we discover that Jacob had already started the
process?” Winn asked. “Do we start from scratch, or just complete what he’s
already done?”

“Ooo, I just love your voice!” Kari replied, smiling. “Just
complete it, if you can decipher what was already done. Doesn’t matter that
it’s been hundreds of years, as long as a corner was treated, it’ll work.”

“And it doesn’t matter that we’re doing it in one of the
duplicates?” Deem asked. “It doesn’t have to be done in the original, or
anything like that?”

“Nope!” Kari answered. “Any copy will do!”

“Then we come to the part that has us really thrown,” Deem
said. “Killing the Creepsis once the houses have all collapsed.”

“Oh, it might be worse than that,” Kari said, her eyes
distracted, as though she was looking at something else on her screen. “Depending
on what kind of soulspider it is, once it kills and ingests a body, it’s able
to control the remains. However many people were trapped in those duplicates
will all be concentrated in one single house, and it’ll have control over all
of them.”

“Like, reanimation?” David said. “Whoa!”

“I know! There was this mansion in Alabama I did, only thing
that saved me was how big it was. Hundreds of corpses, all come to life and
ready to hold me down so the soulspider could sting me. Completely crazy. Oh,
hold on just a second, would you?”

Kari picked up a phone and slid off the headphones she was
using. “No,” they could hear her speaking, through the still active microphone.
“No. Tell her to send it to me again, I don’t have it...no, I won’t release it
until I have a copy…no! No, that’s not how it works. I can’t send the routing
form without the 24B, or they’ll just send it right back. No…no! There’s no
other way!” She hung up. “Some people!” she said, rolling her eyes as she
slipped the headphones back on her head. “Sorry about that. Where were we?”

“How do we defeat the Creepsis? How did you kill your
creature in the house in Alabama?”

“I didn’t!” Kari replied. “Once I collapsed the place, I
rolled right out of the River, and the place sat there for two months,
super-haunted, until this guy from Alaska showed up with blue nightmare to
finish things.”

Winn felt Carma straighten next to him as Kari finished her
sentence. He turned to look at her. She was making a concerted effort to turn
her face from him, and not let him see her reaction.

“Blue nightmare is the best way to clean it out,” Kari
continued. “There are other ways, but I’ve found it works the easiest. It’s
hard to come by, though, and you need someone who knows how to use it, someone who’s
been trained on it.”

“That’s why you used a guy from Alaska?” Deem asked.

“Yes, and we had him scheduled for six months in advance!”
Kari slipped another piece of celery into her mouth and crunched on it.

“Can we use him? The Alaska guy?” Deem asked.

“No, he retired a few years ago,” Kari replied. “I’ll reply
to your email and give you the contact info for a couple of other people I
know. But I’m telling you, they won’t be available to help for months. They’re
always booked solid.”

“Fuck,” Winn muttered under his breath. He noticed Carma
raising a hand to her mouth, then she slowly began to move, stepping away from
him with tiny strides, gradually moving back into the kitchen.

“Thank you,” Deem said to Kari. “If you’d send it anyway, I’d
appreciate it. Anything else you’d suggest?”

“Well, we don’t have the radiation complication out here, so
I’m not sure what more to offer you that would be useful in your situation. I
know that drinking protection before you go in can help keep the soulspider
from detecting you. Of course that will only last a while; the other thing is
just to hide really well. It has to search through all those houses, so hiding
and remaining quiet can keep you alive for longer. Odds are it will eventually
find you, though. That’s about all I can think of.” Kari’s eyes darted to
another part of the screen. “Shoot. Sorry guys, I really have to go.”

“Thanks again, Kari,” Deem said, reaching for the laptop. “We
appreciate it.”

“Good luck!” Kari said, waving. Then the screen went blank.

Deem turned to look at David. “We need to get you back to
bed. You look awful.”

Winn rotated to see where Carma had gone. She’d disappeared
into the kitchen.

“Where’d Carma go?” Deem asked. “I could see her backing out
of the frame there at the end.”

“She got all squirrely when Kari mentioned the Alaska guy,”
Winn said. “Then she started to back out of the room quietly, like we wouldn’t
notice.”

“Something’s up,” Deem replied. “She knows something she
doesn’t want to tell us.”

“I’ll take David upstairs if you want to hunt her down,” Winn
said.

“Alright,” Deem replied, rising from the table. She put a
hand on David’s shoulder. “Hang in there. We’re making some headway.”

“I’ll try,” David said, pushing himself up from the table and
offering a weak smile. Winn wrapped David’s arm around his shoulder and helped
lift him through the dining room and back upstairs.

After he put David back to bed, Winn returned to the large
sitting room at the back of the house where he could hear Deem and Carma
talking.

“I don’t know what you mean!” Carma was saying as he entered
the room. Her chin was held high in a defiant stance.

“Winn said you got all weird when Kari mentioned the guy from
Alaska,” Deem said. “Didn’t you, Winn?”

“Come on, Carma,” Winn said. “You straightened up like a
board and started to sneak out of the room. We love you to death, but you’re a
terrible liar. Tell us.”

“You know this guy?” Deem asked.

“No, I don’t,” Carma said, beginning to pace and wring her
hands. “I don’t know him at all.”

“Carma,” Winn repeated. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure!” she said, stopping to turn to Winn. “I
should know whom I know and whom I don’t!” Then she resumed her pacing and wringing.

“Was it something else Kari said?” Deem asked.

Carma hesitated, waited to take the next step. Then she
continued.

“Ah, so it
was
something else,” Deem said.

“No!” Carma said, now shaking her head as she paced. “No, it
wasn’t! Stop questioning me!”

“David’s really sick upstairs, Carma,” Winn said. “If you
know something that could help…”

“I know he’s sick!” Carma replied. “Don’t you think I know
that?!”

Winn turned to look at Deem. Deem had her determined look
going.

“Why’d you back out of the room?” Deem asked Carma.

“I did no such thing!” Carma replied.

“We could see you do it on the display,” Deem said. “I
thought you had to go to the bathroom or something.”

“Yes, I had to go to the bathroom,” Carma said, stopping her
pacing and looking at Deem. She smiled, a forced, crinkly smile that was half
convincing except for her eyes darting right and left. “When one has to go, you
have to go. I felt it best to just slip away without making some big
announcement.”