The Supernaturals (35 page)

“I don’t go looking for the feeling. My curse is the mere touching of someone, or something. Our Indian friend goes in search of trouble. He wants to connect with his gift, and that can be very dangerous. It’s like inviting a vampire into your house. Once done, it can’t be undone. Mr. Lonetree is fucking with something that, once in his head, may not want to leave.”

“That sounds ominous,” Jason said as he once more bit down on his pipe.

“I guess that’s why we’re both standing in this freaking hallway in the wee hours of the morning. Yes, Mr. Sanborn, very ominous.”

Jennifer checked the
last item off her list, frowning in frustration when John groaned and pushed the latest and last item away in his sleep. The small silver framed photo of the Lindemann children, taken around the pool at Summer Place sometime in the early summer of 1932, hadn’t sparked anything in Lonetree’s sleep colored world. She laid the silver frame on the bell cart and then examined the sleeping man. His sleep wasn’t what she would have called restful. He turned his head to the left and then to the right, and then became still again. He had released his long black hair and it was splayed out on the pillow. He shook, and then his body calmed once more.

“Well, that’s it for the house items,” she said softly. She leaned over, listening as John mumbled in his sleep. The words were of his native language; Jennifer couldn’t understand them, but she found it all to be fascinating. She reached out and touched John’s hair and he immediately calmed. She smiled and straightened. She would keep her little secret to herself. She didn’t want John to know how she was starting to feel about him, so early. She knew most men would shy away from her, but she felt the goodness in Lonetree and she clung to it like a drowning swimmer hugging a buoy.

She returned to the bell cart and the items Wallace Lindemann had brought from Summer Place. She felt frustrated that John had shown no reaction to any of the items on the cart. From the large framed painting of the family Lindemann, which she thought for sure would elicit some response, to the small household items such as the doilies from the sedans and arm chairs. Even the bottles of very aged whiskey, which she thought may have been left there by accident by Wallace Lindemann, had no effect on John’s sleep patterns. While some of them caused a stir, nothing seemed to make him Dream Walk.

Jennifer shook her head. She took the cart by its large frame and started pushing it toward the corner of the room. Something on the floor became entangled in the small wheels of the cart, stopping her. She knelt down, thinking that maybe her sweater had fallen from the desk chair. In the darkness, she felt the material. It wasn’t her sweater. She pulled, and felt the fabric tear. Pulling the cart backward, she tried again. The material came free into her hand and she held it close to her face. It was a dress. She felt the straps and the length as she stood and walked toward the desk. With one look at John, who was still sleeping peacefully, she turned the desk lamp toward the wall so as not to wake him, and switched it on. holding the dress close to the light. It was a black sequined gown. Jenny froze. She scrambled to find her list of items that Lindemann had brought, scanning it one line at a time. She turned and looked at the bell cart. then at the old and dusty dress again. She knew she had not seen the dress at any time, when she had been inventorying, removing or replacing the items on the cart.

“How did this get here?” she asked herself. She turned toward the bed, watching John’s chest raise and lower in peaceful sleep. A few of the black sequins had fallen off, onto the desk. She closed her eyes and made a decision. Easing up to the large bed, she sat on its edge. The recorder on the desk still showed its red light; the small device was recording. She slowly brought the evening dress up and placed it over John’s exposed hands as if she were covering a baby with a blanket.

John’s reaction was immediate. He sat straight up in bed and his eyes flew open, staring straight ahead. Jennifer eased herself from the bed and backed away, her heart racing at a thousand miles per hour. John took the dress into both hands and then twirled it into a knot, it was if he were wadding up a set of papers. Jennifer swallowed. His haunted eyes still remained fixed on something straight ahead, it was if he were seeing something that scared the hell out of him.

The temperature in the room suddenly fell by thirty degrees. She could see the vapor of her breath as she breathed in and out. She absentmindedly reached for her sweater on the back of the desk chair, but fumbled it as she watched John’s eyes. Summer Place was here and in this room.

The house was here, and John Lonetree was seeing it.

John looked around
frantically. He knew, without ever having seen the house, exactly where he was. He was standing in the corner of a room. The bedside table lamp was on but it was like seeing the room through a wet coating of gauze, or a double thick layer of mosquito netting. The light was diffused and gave the large room a brownish, darker tint.

In his dream state, he felt another presence in the bedroom.
No
, he thought,
two others
. One was a young girl standing at the foot of the bed, the other a tall and striking dark-haired woman standing next to her. The smaller girl nodded her head and left the room. The other turned and looked down at the item the girl had left on the foot of the bed. Lonetree looked from that blurry, hazy thing on the bed, to the black sequined dress knotted in his hands. He saw the woman lift the dress up and look it over. The black sequins shined brightly in the lamplight from the table. John watched as the tall woman held the dress up to her front and looked it over in the full length mirror by the dressing screen. He could feel, not see, the woman snap the thin black strap. She played with the dress a moment, and then lowered it in thought.

In the haze of the diffuse light, John looked down at the dress he held in his own hands, and then shook it out. He saw the broken strap on the left side and wondered if that was what the woman was seeing. He looked up just as the tall woman opened the bedroom door. She stepped through and looked left, and then right.

“Hallo, die junge Dame?” the woman said in thick German. John though she was asking for the young lady. “Mein Kleid scheint gerissen zu werden…” The tall woman was frustrated. “Young lady, my dress seems to have been torn…Young lady?”

John felt himself move from the shadows and the woman seemed to have felt the movement. She half turned and looked around the room, but seeing nothing, she turned back to the hallway, then stepped out with the black dress in her hands. John followed with the ever present veil confusing his vision. He saw the woman slowly make her way down the third floor hallway. Lonetree knew he was in Summer Place, and he also knew he was in the presence of the German diva Gwyneth Gerhardt. She seemed to be examining doors as she went to the right down the hallway. She turned when John came out of the bedroom, almost as if she were feeling Lonetree close to a hundred years after the fact. She looked at the spot where he stood for the longest time, and then turned away and continued toward the end of the long hall.

John tried his best to get a bearing on exactly where he was, so that he could relay this information to Gabriel later. He started to get the uneasy feeling that he wasn’t alone in his pursuit of the German opera star. There was another presence not far away from him. No, it was more than one, he thought. He didn’t feel threatened by the multiple entities, but he knew that they were most curious as to what the diva was up to. John wondered if maybe he was only expressing his own thoughts outwardly to the point where he was flashing back on himself.

Suddenly the atmosphere changed dramatically, just as the diva approached a large set of double doors at the end of the hallway. John stopped in his tracks. He felt a warning shudder from his own body. He could sense concern from the other presences. Try as he might, John couldn’t connect with whatever was there with him, but he knew that whoever it was feared for the diva. Suddenly the warm and inviting temperature changed in the hallway. From the end of the corridor to where he stood, the glass fronts of picture frames frosted over, and he even saw the Diva’s breath mist from her mouth. She placed an ear up to the large double doors. He wanted to warn her that something had changed, but found—as usual—that he was merely an observer with no voice or ability to affect his surroundings. He did, however, the multiple presences in the hallway move forward, stop, and then move again, as if hesitant but wanting to warn the diva.

The loud slam made John jump. It was if a cannon ball had struck the wall next to him. The diva didn’t seem to hear anything. She reached for the handle on the left side door. John held his hand out, wanting to warn her away. He saw the dress in his outstretched hand and his attention was drawn to it momentarily. The German woman disappeared into the sewing room. John felt the other entities in the hallway all gather around the double doors, and he sensed wailing, crying; a horrible crucible of anguish from all around him. He tried to single out the voices, but could only make out five or six. The rest were lost, as if coming from a further distance. Gwyneth Gerhardt started screaming inside the room. John took three quick steps toward the sewing room but stopped as a door to his left opened. A man stepped out in a long-tailed tuxedo. He adjusted his tie and looked around the hallway. John wanted to grab the mustachioed man and shake him, awakening him to the fact that a woman needed his help in the sewing room. The man looked around as if sensing something, and then he shrugged his shoulders and stamped his feet. He was feeling the cold also. Gwyneth screamed, pounding on the giant double doors of the sewing room. The feminine voices cried out with her, sharing her anguish.

John watched the man in the tuxedo leave for the stairs. He tried to grab the man but his hand passed right through him. John yelled, “Stop!” But the man continued on his way.

The entities ceased their wailing and crying. John sensed panic, terror, pure animal fear. Something was coming down the hallway from behind him. He slowly turned as all of the entities vanished in a sudden rush of warm air. Then the hallway grew even colder than it had been a moment before. The footsteps sounded like a hollow ball striking the carpet runner. They shook the house as they came toward John. He closed his eyes, forcing his body to turn. As he did, the giant footsteps came to a stop. He felt its breath as it leaned in close to him. When he opened his eyes, all he could see was a misty blur. But he knew that hiding underneath the trick of light was a living, breathing human being. The evil rolled off it in waves that almost made John sick to his stomach. All the while, Gwyneth Gerhardt kept pounding on the doors and screaming for help. Her voice was breaking, losing all of its womanly humanity and becoming animalistic and desperate. Lonetree was reminded of a deer caught in a trap.

The thing came mere inches from his face. He heard the sniffing sound as it smelled him—first up, and then down. He felt the severe cold as it leaned in close. The thing turned toward the sewing room door, then it leaned down and close to him once more. He felt triumph from the cold, evil-smelling entity as it studied him. He knew the thing was smiling, satisfied about something.

“They are mine, Shaman, mine forever,” it said in a husky, deep voice. “You are so easy to disperse, so easy to kill. You will never make it to your gathering. Stay out!”

With the last words John felt the thing push him into the wall. It suddenly moved away, the blur of its camouflage acting as a bubble of disguise as it approached the sewing room. The screaming stopped as the thing pressed against the double doors. John’s eyes widened when he saw the oak press inward. He even heard the cracking of the thick wood. Then the doors snapped back and all of the air was sucked out of the hallway. He heard one last scream.

“You should have not followed!” came the thick, horrible voice from the sewing room. Then it was over.

John opened his
eyes and saw the dress in his hands. He tried desperately to throw it off, but he had twisted it so thoroughly that it wouldn’t free itself.

Jennifer, wide eyed and in a state of terror at what John had been shouting aloud, reached out and tried to unwind the dress from Lonetree’s hands. She finally managed to remove it and tossed it across the room just as the door opened. Jason and George had been trying to get in since the moment John’s screams and shouts of warning had reached them in the hallway.

“What the hell—?”

Jennifer held up a hand. She splayed her fingers as she watched John. Finally, he reached up and ran his fingers through his long hair. He looked up and saw Jennifer.

“Where’s Gabriel and the others?”

Jennifer turned to Jason for the answer.

“He and Julie Reilly left for the Poconos. It seems Kyle Pritchard and Paul Lowell have turned up. Paul’s very dead.”

Jennifer sat on the bed and took John’s hand. “Did you learn anything?” she asked him. As the two men stepped further into the room, John turned and planted his feet firmly on the carpet. He was careful not to move his hand out of Jenny’s.

“I think so,” he said, looking into her concerned face. “I don’t think we can beat whatever’s in that house. It’s been killing for a very long time.”

“It seems the house has allowed at least Kyle Pritchard to live,” Sanborn said as he fumbled for his pipe.