I walked to the front door, and my breath hitched in my chest. I lifted a trembling hand. Before I knocked, the door flung open and a thin, sunken woman with white hair pulled back from her face stood surveying me.
“Are you coming in or not?” the woman asked sharply.
I followed her in, hesitating for only a moment. The door slammed behind me. I turned expecting someone standing there, but I was alone in the foyer.
The old woman shuffled along dark wood floors into a vast sitting room with furniture jumbled on threadbare rugs.
“Sit down,” the woman insisted, motioning toward a stiff black chair with cracks in its leather cushion.
She sat opposite me, and I noticed her eyes had an opaque sheen. I wondered if she was blind. Though she stared at me for a long time, as if she saw me clearly.
“Tell me what you want,” the woman said, her cheeks sunken so that the bones of her face cast huge shadows in the dim light.
“I want my husband back,” I whispered.
“Do you?” the woman asked, her wrinkled hands hovering in the air as if she were reaching out, asking the question not of me, but the empty space between us.
She reached down. Her gnarled hands clutched a cup of bitter-smelling tea with surprising steadiness. She held me in the most intense steely gaze and I wanted to break the stare, but feared she would consider me weak and choose not to help me. “Because when you open that door, you don’t get to choose what comes through,” the old woman hissed.
“I’ll do whatever it takes. I need guidance, that’s all, a place to start.”
I set the envelope of cash on the table between us. Her thin, chapped lips curved at the corners. I felt sure she knew I’d placed five hundred dollars in the envelope with no need to count it.
She stood and shuffled out of the room, and returned with a tattered, stained book as large as the old dictionaries at the public library. I was amazed that she was able to carry it. She set it on the table with a thud and nimbly flipped it open to the exact page she wanted. She pulled out a notebook of yellowing paper and scratched words on the page in tiny cursive handwriting.
As she wrote, I stayed perfectly still. I feared at any moment she would realize what a terrible mistake she was making.
Somewhere in the ancient, heavy house, a clock chimed. It reverberated along the walls and floorboards, and it reminded me of the tolling bells of an old church from my childhood. A church that always smelled of dust and the talcum powder of old skin. The church my mother insisted we attend every Sunday, when I was eight years old, during one of her rare periods of sobriety. She’d had a nightmare about the devil and suddenly believed in an angry God who punished those who did not worship.
I shivered and counted ten chimes.
Night had fallen, and I was not sure when, because I swore I’d been in the old woman’s house for only a few minutes. But when I returned my gaze to the yellowing paper, her hand no longer moved across the page. Her chair sat empty. She had folded the paper in half and left it behind. The smoldering candles on the fireplace mantel had burned down and sat gooey in their waxy red bases.
I shook my head and looked around, expecting to see her, but only emptiness greeted me. I stood, and my back and legs ached as though had I been in the chair for a long time.
When I opened the front door, a violent wind pulled the door from my hand. The wind caught the folded paper and sent it, in a whoosh, back into the house. I fought the door closed and returned to the shadowy hallway. I got on my hands and knees and looked beneath a heavy buffet. Dirt and balls of cat hair greeted me, but no slip of paper.
A loud bang sent me reeling back into the room, and I whipped around. It was only the front door, slamming in the wind, but a chill streaked down my spine.
Only desperation to have that piece of paper kept me in the old woman’s house. I returned to the floor and slid my hand under an ancient-looking sofa, and then continued to a cabinet filled with moth-eaten books and half-melted candles. I eyed a few of the titles, dealing with the esoteric, and noticed the spine of a withered red book.
“Calling Back the Dead,” the title promised, and I eased open the cabinet door that groaned in protest but gave way beneath my insistent fingers. I pulled the book from several others and blew a layer of dust off the surface. The cover held the image of a shadowy figure with its mouth stretched wide, and as I looked into the gaping mouth, a thousand other dimensions seemed to pour forth.
In an instant, I saw the beginning of all life in an explosion of light, and then the desperate crawling from the primordial muck to become dwellers of the land. I saw men, skin and bones, and women with flesh sagging, tearing at each other with sharp, taloned fingers. I gazed at radiant beings of light fleeing from the dense, darkened earth. The cold wind of their absence numbed me, and maybe I cried out, but could not say because already the image of a mother nursing a dead child had overtaken my sight. And then she too vanished, replaced by a field, the soil freshly tilled, heaped with rotting bodies. The bodies writhed and climbed up out of their shallow graves to trek across the field toward me.
The old woman snatched the book from my hand, and with unnatural speed returned it to the cabinet and locked the glass door. Her eyes gleamed, and I recognized both anger and glee there, as if she wanted me to find that book, but also felt protective of its secrets. She thrust the paper I had been searching for into my hand and shoved me out the door.
I stood on her porch, and a gust of wind brought me back to reality or sanity or somewhere between. My knees wobbled, and I imagined sinking down and sitting on the porch, wrapping my arms tight around my legs, and willing away the horrors that had just beseeched me.
I needed to get away from her house. It rose behind me like one of the undead things crawling from the earth. I stumbled and nearly fell getting to my car, but once inside I could breathe again.
I tucked the paper in my purse. As I pulled from her driveway, I glanced in the rear-view mirror and slammed the brakes.
Sammy stood behind me. He reached toward the car, and in the taillights his eyes were two red orbs. I gasped and clutched the handle, cursing my locked car door. I hit the unlock button, thrust the door open, and stumbled into the night.
The empty driveway yawned before me. Dried leaves swirled in the crackling air.
“He’s dead,” I whispered, a reminder that never quite took hold. “Sammy is dead.”
CHAPTER 35
Now
Sarah
Sarah watched the man’s face twitch when Will held open his palm and revealed the key resting in its center.
The man reached out, but Will jerked his hand back.
“I’ll hang onto it,” Will said.
The man smirked but said nothing, and a sense of unease fell over Sarah.
Dr. K insisted they return to the forest at night, lest the curious eyes of the construction crew at Building Fifty spot them. Sarah stuffed her hands into the pockets of her brown suede jacket, pressing her chin to her chest to protect her neck against the icy wind that slithered cold beneath her collar.
As they walked through the asylum forest, the old doctor grew livelier, his pace quickening.
As they neared the hill, a three-quarters moon lighting their way, Sarah heard a voice.