CHAPTER 42
Now
Corrie
“A re you going to bed?” Sarah asked, flipping off the light in her kitchen, and making her way to the living room.
I sat next to the fire, Archie asleep near my feet.
“Sarah,” I started, glancing toward the hall where Will slept in one of the spare rooms.
“Yeah?” Sarah sat on the rug next to me, brushing her fingers through Archie’s fur. “Are you feeling okay? Mazur said you might be sick for a few days.”
I searched her face, unable to shake the memory of Sammy’s final moments - the memory that had emerged in the chamber as my body lay lifeless, when the dark spirit abandoned me.
“You said Will was at the Halloween party?”
She nodded.
“And he was wearing a costume?”
“A ninja costume,” Sarah said slowly.
I shuddered at her confirmation though I’d already known. I had gazed at his pale blue eyes, a lock of black hair loose across his forehead. He had believed I was possessed, would have no memory of the event. He had almost been right.
“Corrie,” Sarah took my hand. “You’re ice cold.” She rubbed her hands on either side of my own.
“It was Will,” I whispered, tears spilling over my cheeks.
“No, Corrie,” Sarah shook her head. “The exorcism was my idea. It was the only way.”
“Not the exorcism,” I choked the words out, clutching her hands now, pleading with her to understand.
“Sarah?” his voice startled us both.
Will stood in the dark hallway.
I yanked my hand back, closed my mouth.
Sarah looked at me, frowned, and then at Will.
I saw her piecing thoughts together, beginning to understand what I had been trying to say.
“You couldn’t have recognized the knife,” Sarah murmured, shaking her head as if refusing to believe her own thoughts. “Not from the second floor of Kerry Manor.”
Will stepped from the hall into the light of the living room. I glanced at his hand, at the switchblade emerging from his fingers.
“She was going to kill him, Sarah,” he said, pointing at me. “She was standing over him with the knife.”
I shook my head.
Archie woke up and lifted sleepy eyes toward Sarah. His ears spiked as if he sensed her distress.
“I wasn’t, I didn’t,” I argued. “The spirit was controlling me, but I stopped it.” My voice shook.
Will shuddered.
“So I finished it,” he whispered.
“Why?” Sarah asked, her eyes a shade darker. Her hand had fallen on the heavy ceramic coffee mug I’d been drinking from.
“To prove my father’s innocence.” His face changed, grew defiant. “If there was another death, they’d have to question their bullshit beliefs. It was only a matter of time. Sammy was dead the day he moved his family into Kerry Manor. Don’t you get that? He sacrificed his whole family for the thrill of living in a haunted house.”
I touched my throat, remembered the blood pouring from the wound in Sammy’s throat.
“Arghhh,” I screamed, and snatched the mug from Sarah’s hand chucking it across the room.
Will ducked, and the mug smashed against the wall.
He didn’t fight.
As fast as he’d appeared on Halloween night, Will vanished down the dark hallway.
I raced after him, my teeth bared. A rage, previously unknown, exploded within me as I imagined ripping at his face with my fingernails.
He’d locked the bedroom door.
I shook the handle, and then reeled back, kicking the wood. The door splintered but didn’t open.
“Stop,” Sarah’s voice rang out as I lifted a heavy planter and prepared to smash it against the door.
She looked pale, her hand held in the air, her cell phone to her ear. I listened as she rattled off her address to the police.
“Corrie, he might have a gun in there.”
“Good,” I shouted. “I hope you do have a gun!”
I struck the door with the planter, ignoring the splinters of wood that stabbed my knuckles. The planter cracked and smashed on the floor.
Sarah rushed down the hallway, pushing me away from the shattered ceramic.
She pinned my arms against my sides, refusing to free me as I struggled against her. My anger turned to grief. I wept, burying my face in her neck.
Sarah
“I FOUND THIS IN HIS STUFF,” Sarah offered, laying a shabby notebook, with a neon green skull grinning from its cover, on Detective Collins’ desk.
Sarah had read the journal twice already, thumbing through the worn pages late into the night, passing it off to Corrie who cried a steady stream of tears onto the entries.
The first fifty pages of Will’s journal revealed his daily activities, the money he’d spent and saved, the books he was reading. In October, the entries grew darker. He ruminated on his father’s suicide, and made almost daily entries about the evil within Kerry Manor. Two days after Halloween, Will’s words took a more ominous turn.
Wrong? Yes. Evil? No. In the pursuit of evil, to aid the eradication of evil, one must abandon his conscience. It’s called collateral damage. I knew the day my father killed himself that I would have to take up the torch, shine a light into the shadow that looms over Kerry Manor. Now they will have to pay attention.
A more recent entry was dated only a week before he fled from Sarah’s home.
Guilt follows me. I’m staying at Sarah’s house - eleven days and counting. She’s HIS twin. She is kind, generous, funny. She does not see me as a broken kid, a victim of his father’s insanity, but as a friend, a confidante. She trusts my judgment, listens to me. I should have said NO in the arcade. I should have vanished into the world as I’d planned. Instead I’m here in their grief. It takes me back to my mother dead in the bath, my father slumped beside her, the beginning of the end of my life. She would never forgive me if she found out. But the evil is gone. I saw that black spirit trapped in the diamond. Was it worth it? Can I ever forgive myself?
“There was a time when Will had a lot of potential,” Collins told Sarah flipping through the pages. “But I think Will Slater died with his parents.” The detective tapped a folder with Will’s name on it. “Before his mother’s murder, he was an A student, a happy, inspired kid who liked to read science fiction books, and wanted to be a computer programmer. I’ve spoken with his friends, his teachers, people close with the family. They all said he was a different person after the murder-suicide. Not that I blame him. Tragedy shapes our lives one way or another. But no one is above the law.”
“Do you think you’ll find him?” Sarah asked, massaging her jaw and glancing at her watch.
She was meeting Paul Hudson, the New York Developer, to start plans on a thirty-condo ECO-community south of Traverse City.
Collins nodded.
“Eventually. He’s seventeen, and he’s broke. The problem will be charging him. It’s Corrie’s word against his, and I’m sure we both know what he’ll say.”
“That Corrie killed Sammy,” Sarah whispered, having thought the same herself.
“Exactly. We’ve got the knife, but it’s been wiped of prints. Theoretically, Corrie’s a more reliable witness but her lack of memory would be fuel to any defense attorney’s fire.”
“But he’s a murderer,” Sarah insisted, though she heard the lack of conviction in her voice. It was true, Will had murdered her brother, but she couldn’t ignore his reasons. Will was a sick kid, tormented by the murder of his mother and the suicide of his father. She considered his accusations that final night, his insistence that it was only a matter of time before Corrie - possessed by the spirit - murdered Sammy? Or perhaps it would have been Isis who died at the hands of that evil.