Bloodstone (24 page)

The heaviness of the house wrapped itself around him. He coughed and blinked as the dust swirled against his face like the wings of tiny moths. Smothering silence returned his greeting. Had Jeb heard him fall? He listened, but there were no answering footsteps, no shouts or cursed words. Maybe he could chance the flashlight now. He drew it from his pocket, cupped his palms around the bulb, and flicked it on. The beam glowed a soft red through his flesh, giving his hands a bloody, raw look. He stood up carefully and let a single ray of light escape. It illuminated a room filled with the ghostly shapes of furniture under white sheets.

He was standing between a dining room and a kitchen. Dust was everywhere, coating the floor, the sheets, the walls, swirling lazily in the air. An intricate glass chandelier hung over the dining room table. On the dark, paneled walls were expensive-looking landscapes and portraits of stiff-jawed men and women in period clothing. Against the wall, on top of a cabinet filled with china, sat the marble bust of a man with blank white eyes.

Directly ahead of him, leading through an archway and into the dark, was a line of footprints.

As he passed through the archway and found himself in an empty hall, the echoes began. It seemed just right to call them that; what other word would better describe the voices that seemed to float and hiss and careen all around him, fading in and out like a badly tuned radio?

There was carpeting here. The hall had low ceilings and the same dark-paneled walls. Paintings draped and festooned with cobwebs hung neatly on each side. It seemed to stretch the full length of the house. A tunnel leading through
the heart of this monstrous building, icy cold and empty and running with tainted blood.

(…
saw him dancing in the dining room
…)

(…
such a lovely house
…)

Smith cupped his hand over the light. Blackness surrounded him once again. He felt like he was standing backstage in a theater, listening to the whispers of a nervous cast before opening night.

(…
I really have to go
…)

(…
Frederick…we mustn’t
…)

His heartbeat sped up another notch, and he felt the panic edging in again through the heavy dark. Not Frederick Thomas, the man who had built this horrible house; he was dead, long dead.

Don’t listen to them, William. They can’t hurt you
.

Angel!
His mind went instantly out to her, and he caught himself feeling in the dark for her hand. But it was not quite her voice; feminine, yes, but older. The voice was calm and yet firm.

You must not listen to them. Just mental footprints, echoes
of things that happened a long time ago
.

He probed, reaching out tentatively, and felt her open her mind to him willingly, allowing him to see everything, her life spread out and frozen before his eyes like a photograph. He saw her childhood, Joseph’s death through her eyes, her long years of waiting. Waiting for him. Annie.

Never mind that now. You must go forward to find the answers.
Follow Jeb’s track, and soon you will know everything.
What you have always wanted to know. Who you are
.

He shook his head. No. But his mind was filled with fire, his palms wet with sweat. Her words remained with him.

Help me, Annie
.

No answer this time. He probed for her again and touched only emptiness. He wondered if she had ever been there at all.

The voices returned.

(…
do you love me
…)

(…
no, Frederick, please
…)

They had become more insistent, pleading with him, or with someone else long dead. He closed his mind to them. He could not afford to listen to this house’s ghosts. He had a feeling that if he let them in he could drift here forever, slowly becoming one of the ghosts himself as he mindlessly wandered these deserted rooms, searching for something he no longer knew how to find.

As he followed the prints a cobweb brushed his face, and he wiped it away, only to feel a plump wriggling body on his skin. The spider, big as a bumblebee, ran down his arm and dropped to the floor. He kept going, past rooms filled with dusty, white shapes, furniture and sculptures and other unknown things hidden under sheets. Mirrors with delicately carved frames next to shelves of books. The house would be a goldmine for antique dealers. All these old treasures slowly rotting away in the dampness. Why would Henry Thomas have wanted such a thing to happen?

Maybe he knew things about this house other people
didn’t. Things that he decided should remain hidden
.

The footprints ended at a half-open door on the left side of the hall. He pushed the door open, revealing what must have been the Thomas study. The chamber was empty. Lines of books on mahogany shelves, a heavy, ancient grandfather clock, its striker long silent, an old rolltop desk, a cabinet filled with sculptures and vases and figurines, a big stone fireplace taking up the middle of a wall. The rug under his feet looked Persian and had once been expensive, though now it was covered with dust and had begun to rot through in places. Above the desk hung a portrait of a man dressed in a black coat. His skull-like face held a long prominent nose and thin hard mouth, and yet there was something familiar in his eyes, staring out from beneath hooded brows.

The sound of something heavy being dropped came from somewhere close. He jerked the flashlight away from the painting to another closed door across the room. He crossed
the moth-eaten rug, swung the door open and found himself at the top of a staircase leading down into blackness. A damp, moldy smell wafted up at him.

You’re not really thinking of going down there, are you?

He waited another minute, perfectly still, listening for more sounds, but heard nothing. He took a step down onto the staircase, dust wafting up into the beam of his light. Then another. He pointed the flashlight down into the depths. The darkness ate up the light greedily. He went down.

At the bottom of the steps he found a vast chamber with a stone floor. The coldness from the square stones radiated up through the soles of his shoes. When he lifted the flashlight he could see a wall about thirty feet ahead of him, made of dark, packed earth and crossed with wooden beams. The air was wet; in many spots, chunks of wood from the beams had rotted or been gnawed away. Somewhere nearby he heard water dripping.

The chamber contained nothing but stone and dirt and wooden beams. He played the light slowly along each wall, looking for the entrance to another chamber. The dirt walls were unbroken. He turned and flashed the light behind the stairs, but that space was empty.

He felt a cold draft touch his skin and flicked the light upward. High over his head were more heavy beams. He thought about them rotting through and giving way under the weight of the old house, burying him forever under thousands of pounds of stone and brick and wood. How would it feel to be buried alive?

The house seemed to be coming to life again overhead. He heard creakings, scratchings in the walls. A thump. The sound of footsteps, echoes of voices raised in anger and fear.

(
No, Frederick, keep away from me…I won’t have…
we can’t
…)

Shrieks. More sounds. Running footsteps. A grandfather clock, chiming deep in the bowels of the house. He imagined
the dusty old striker starting to swing, slowly at first, then gaining speed.

He stumbled for the stairs, the flashlight beam bobbing across empty space. Silence moved in again at the voices’ passing, such complete silence that it was a sound in and of itself. He played the light around the chamber and found it still empty.

The house creaked once, settled, and was still.

Oh my sweet Jesus
. He stood on shaky legs, realized he had forgotten to breathe, and took in lungfuls of the moist, moldy air. Jeb Taylor was gone. How he had disappeared was a mystery, but he was gone all the same.
The house
swallowed him up
.

Somewhere far away, someone seemed to sigh, as if in answer.

As he passed through the study again an unnamed thought made him pause. The house remained silent and still, as if waiting for him to leave. The room was empty, and yet…something was there. His eyes returned to the cracked painting that hung over the ancient desk. The old man’s eyes were black except for the glint of light in his pupils, which gave him the eerie appearance of life. Staring down at him. Watching.

That face. Where had he seen it?

He shined the light on the grandfather clock and found it silent and still. Even the striker was dusty; a cobweb stretched across its insides. It had not run in ten years.

Standing in the dark room, he found himself drifting back to the day before, the falls crashing beneath his feet at the spot of Joseph Arsenault’s tragic death. The constant noise of the water pulling him closer, like a whisper in the dark,
come to me, come to me
…His earlier feelings of loss and despair washed over him, along with the inevitable and relentless movement of time holding him helpless in its grip like an animal caught in the headlights.

If you persist, you will lose everything. You will never be
the same
.

The answers were here, all he wanted and more. He could feel them at his fingertips. He walked over to the desk and ran his finger along it, drawing a line in the thick dust. He rattled the top, and found it locked.

There would be a key, of course.

Full of a mindless, still growing need, he searched the room. A minute later the beam of the flashlight uncovered the key near the back of the mantle above the fireplace. He fitted it into the lock on the desk and heard it slide home with a distinct click. He rolled the top of the desk back on its frame.

Papers. Piles of them on the desk’s surface, shoved into cubbyholes. He grabbed some, found them to be yellow and crumbling in his hands. He unfolded them carefully, focusing the flashlight by holding it in his teeth. They were letters done in a spidery script, dated 1726, and addressed to a name he could not make out. He read from the first:
Darling
Henrietta: We have arrived at last
…

Billy set it gently on the desk and picked up a leather-bound diary, rotting in his hands, as old as the letters and inscribed with the same spidery script. He opened it, causing a small trickle of powdery dust to fall from the binding onto the desktop. On the inside cover, in fading ink, was written the name
Frederick Thomas
.

He put the diary down, his heart beating thickly in his throat. Thomas had written these probably at this very desk, hundreds of years ago. That they were genuine, he did not doubt; what they contained he could only guess.

More papers in another cubbyhole, the pages newer and whiter than the others. He pulled them free and smoothed them on the surface of the desk with a trembling hand. Stationery. At the top, above an address, was stamped the name
Henry Thomas
in bold, dark type. The first few pages were full of notes.

The amulet. Henry had brought it up into the light, and there it had waited until Ronnie Taylor came along and set it free.

The notes went on, scrawled with a familiar, heavy hand. Henry had been interested in genealogy. The pages were covered with names, along with references to places in Europe and America. The notes were apparently written as Henry read successive pages of Frederick’s old diary.

Finally, on the fourth page of notes, Henry had evidently read something that shook him badly.

The next three pages of notes were connected. Evidently Henry Thomas had done a lot more research on family history. The pages contained an intricate diagram of the Thomas family tree, beginning with Frederick and Henrietta, his sister.

Henrietta had borne him three children.

Dear God
. Those voices he had heard, those echoes. Frederick had brought his own sister here from England and had kept her as his mistress. He had done unspeakable things in this house, all in the name of…what?

The three children, all healthy, had all grown into adulthood and had children of their own. One of them, a male, carried on the Thomas name; the two women took the names of their husbands. The lines continued, mingling with the blood of the town until it seemed each and every resident had a drop of Thomas blood in their veins.

Finally, at the bottom of the third page, he saw something that chilled his own blood. One of the last spaces on the tree was blank, and circled in red ink.

His own birthdate.

Billy Smith felt a great weight pressing down on him from above that threatened to crush him into dust. Time passing slowly from generation to generation, tainted blood mingling, purifying, thickening, echoes of the past haunting each successive member of the Thomas family as they sat here at this very desk, writing first by the flicker of candlelight, then kerosene lamp, then finally electricity, the coming of the modern age brightening every shadowed corner of the room.