That didn't stop her either.
Not knowing how else to do it, she breathed steadily, evenly, and concentrated on trying to make herself boneless. Limp. One muscle at a time, limb by limb. Then, when she felt as relaxed as she was likely to become, she tried to visualize a door. Rather to her surprise, it was very easy to do, forming rapidly in her mind's eye as though it stood just before her.
And to her increasing uneasiness, the door was green.
Diana hesitated, but in the end her need to find the answer to the question haunting her was stronger, even, than her instincts for self-preservation. She reached out and grasped the doorknob, surprised to "feel" it as though it were actually real, and turned it.
She opened the door and stepped through into the gray time. A long corridor stretched before her, cold and gray and virtually featureless.
Diana hesitated again, still holding the door open as she half turned to gaze back through it. Eerily, she saw Quentin's bedroom, the lamp on the nightstand glowing warmly, the turned-back covers and banked pillows on the bed.
The empty bed.
"I'm here," she heard herself murmur, her voice as always hollow in the gray time. "I'm here physically."
She hadn't counted on that.
"This is not a good idea."
Startled, Diana turned quickly back toward the corridor, and the doorknob slipped from her hand. She found herself facing the little girl who had guided her down to the stables, Becca.
"You're not supposed to be here, not yet," Becca told her.
Diana glanced back over her shoulder to see the green door closed behind her. "As long as I remember where this door is, I can get back," she said.
Becca shook her head. "That's not the way things work here. The door won't be in the same place. The place won't be in the same place."
"I'm not in the mood for riddles, Becca."
The little girl heaved a sigh. "It's not a riddle, it's just the way things are. You'll remember if you think about it. You made the door, so you carry it with you. Sort of."
"Then I'll be able to find it if I need to leave in a hurry, won't I?"
"I hope so."
Diana tried to pretend to herself that the little chill she felt was entirely due to the usual coldness of the gray time rather than to the child's obvious doubt.
"Where's Missy?" she asked Becca.
Becca cocked her head to one side, as though listening to some distant sound. "You really shouldn't be here, Diana. Killing Ellie was just the start. It knows about you now. And it wants you."
"Why?" Diana asked, as steadily as she could manage.
"Because you're finding the secrets. You found Jeremy's bones. You found the trap door and the caves. You found the picture of you and Missy."
"But those are just — pieces of the puzzle."
"And you have almost all of them now. You'll be able to help us stop it this time." Her certainty wavered. "I think."
That didn't reassure Diana very much. "Look, Becca, I need to talk to Missy."
"Missy isn't here anymore."
CHAPTER 17
Diana felt a deeper chill. "What do you mean?"
"I mean she isn't here. When you opened the door the last time, when she held your hand, she left the gray time and returned with you."
"Why?"
"Something she needs to do, I expect."
Slowly, Diana said, "I didn't see her. When I was back with Quentin, I didn't see her."
"Sometimes, we don't want to be seen, even by mediums. Besides, I expect you were upset. Remembering about your mama and all."
"You know about that?"
Becca nodded. "Uh-huh. Missy told me."
"Do you know—" Diana steadied her voice. "Do you know why our mother was trapped on this side of the door?"
"That's why you crossed over, isn't it? And why you crossed over all the way, in the flesh. You tried too hard. Because it means so much to you. Because you have to know what happened to your mama."
"Answer me, Becca. Do you know what happened to her? Do you know where she is?"
Becca turned and began walking down the long corridor.
Immediately, Diana followed. "Becca—"
"Don't get too far from the door, Diana."
Diana hesitated, glanced back. But the green door was still there. She continued to follow the little girl. "I've followed you guides most of my life," she said, not without a touch of bitterness. "Always following, always doing whatever it was you needed me to do. Dammit, this time I need something. Why can't one of you help me for a change?"
"We've been helping you all along, Diana."
"Oh, sure. Leaving me up to my waist in a lake, or driving my father's car down a highway—"
"That wasn't us."
"What do you mean, it wasn't you? I blacked out, and—"
"The drugs were too strong. They pulled you back before you were supposed to go."
Diana didn't find that terribly reassuring. "So just because I came out of most blackouts safe at home doesn't mean that's where I was the whole time, I gather?"
"Well, it's very helpful for us to have someone who can cross over in the flesh," Becca said. "Most mediums can barely see or talk to us, much less walk with us."
"Speaking of which," Diana said, "where are we going?" The words were barely out of her mouth when she stopped abruptly, momentarily disoriented, because she and Becca were no longer in the long corridor. Instead, they were standing in the garden outside the conservatory.
They were still in the gray time, which meant the garden was as motionless as a photograph and looked blurred and one-dimensional and colorless, and the landscape's lighting did nothing to change any of that.
Becca, who had also stopped, turned to face her. "Since you're here, we have to take the chance. There's something you need to see."
"Oh, God, not again." Diana frowned at her. "I told you, I have a question of my own this time."
"Then maybe he can answer it for you."
"He? He, who?"
Becca nodded toward the conservatory. "In there."
Diana would have protested again, but in a blink her child guide was gone, and she found herself alone. "Dammit." With little choice in the matter, she went into the conservatory.
For some reason, she wasn't surprised to see that the artistic workshop had left evidence of its existence on this side of the door.
There were the paintings propped on easels — except that there seemed to be an awful lot of them, a forest of them. Diana picked her way through slowly, looking at each in turn, feeling her scalp crawl and tingle unpleasantly.
These weren't the paintings she remembered from the workshop. There had been violence in those, images from troubled minds, but... not like this.
One after another, these images spoke of abject terror. Faces twisted in hideous grimaces. Bodies contorted into violent poses. Explosions destroying. Weapons tearing flesh. Disease, starvation, torture.
And symbolic as well as literal images of fear. Darkness slashed through with lightning bolts. Spiders. Snakes. Creepy alleyways. Lonely, deserted country roads. A broken window. A fly caught in a web.
Diana paused at last before the painting of an image that was terrifyingly familiar. A dark, dark space, tiny, airless, perhaps a closet. And in the back corner, her arms wrapped tightly around her up-drawn legs, sat a little girl with long dark hair and a tearstained face.
"Amazing how easy it is to identify her, isn't it? That tiny figure in that small, dark corner. She could be anyone. But she could only be Missy."
Diana stepped quickly to the side so that she could see beyond the painting. "You? What the hell are you doing here?"
"Waiting for you," Beau said.