Shaky, Mack flipped off the television. Silence fell over the room.
He looked for Misty and saw her space on the rug, empty. Walking slowly, he left the sitting room, and peered into the kitchen. His half-eaten can of ham sat near the sink. Warmth filled the room from the wood-fire, but Misty wasn’t lounging on the rug before it.
As he started down the hall toward the front door, he spotted her. Erect, the fur on her back prickly, she stared at the door. Her ears stood at sharp points, and she released a low growl registering in her diaphragm.
Her legs were tense, as if preparing to attack.
Mack stopped, pulse jumping, and lifted his gaze to the closed door.
“What is it, girl? Somebody out there?” He tried to make his voice light, reduce the tremors starting in his brain and reverberating out through his hands and legs.
The knock on the door startled him so bad that Mack jumped backwards and hit a side table, sending his bag crashing to the ground. The contents spewed out, rolled across the scarred wood floor.
From the corner of his eye he saw an apple, a pair of socks and, to his horror, the little leather pouch. It lay on its side, the twine holding the strange rocks within it from spilling out.
Misty barked at the door. The knock had come only once, loud and clear, but nothing followed.
Mack walked to the door.
“Who’s there?” he called, hand shaking as he reached for the knob.
Misty didn’t move, her entire body taut as Mack jerked open the door.
Night greeted them - cold and sharp and desolate.
No one stood on the porch.
Mack didn’t sleep that night, but walked to the kitchen, took out a bottle of Jim Beam and sat at the kitchen table.
Chapter 14
Liv
“I’ve prepared a special room for you, Liv,” Stephen told her.
She had come to in the back seat of his car. Her arms were bound against her body by thick fabric, and when she gazed down, she realized he’d secured her in a straitjacket.
The drug had not worn off, and she stumbled and nearly fell as he pulled her from the car.
The hospital rose against a backdrop of starry sky. Dense woods surrounded the buildings.
“But first,” he went on. “I have a very special place to show you.”
They walked into the forest, up a hill of tall grass and down into a shadowy valley of warped trees. A willow that seemed to brush the stars stood in the center of the space.
It might have been beautiful. The dark silhouette of trees against a starry sky. The sounds of the wild, except in the small basin of forest, there were no sounds.
The instant they’d moved down the hill, the crickets and owls ceased their cries. As if not a single living thing — bug, mammal or reptile — occupied the damp grove.
But that wasn’t right either. Because Liv sensed that something alive did indeed reside there. The ground seemed to expand and contract, as if with breath. She felt hungry eyes upon her, and though no one spoke, in her mind she heard whispers. Not the whispers of the spirits she and George had contacted so many times, but cunning, insidious whispers.
She thought of a man she’d once encountered in Boston. He’d pulled to the curb, near the orphanage, in a sleek maroon Chevy and rolled down his window. On the sidewalk stood Virgil Tort, an eight-year-old with pop-bottle glasses. He’d been at the orphanage for two months because his mother had given birth to her sixth baby and couldn’t handle her slow-learning child.
“Hey, little boy,” the man in the car had called out. “Give ya a nickel if you help me find a fuel station. And I’ll get ya an ice cream too.”
Liv had been pushing a double stroller with two infants who’d just fallen asleep, but her head popped up at the man’s voice.
He was a bad man and if he got Virgil Tort into his car, Liv knew they’d never see the boy again.
“Push the babies,” she directed one of the older girls from the orphanage.
Virgil had just stepped off the curb as the man pushed open his passenger door.
“No!” Liv had shrieked, running to Virgil and yanking him by his arm away from the maroon car and the horrors that awaited him.
The driver hadn’t said a word. He sped off, his passenger door hanging open, and disappeared around the corner.
Liv had held a crying Virgil for five minutes, reassuring him that he wasn’t in trouble but that he should never, ever get into a car with a stranger.
As she stood, chilled in the dark forest, a similar voice seemed to be luring her to come closer, to take a peek at what lay in the dense trees.
“Stephen,” she started, but a hole had opened in the brush before him, and he pulled her inside.
She wanted to dig in her heels and buck away from him, but with her arms pinned against her sides, she wouldn’t get far.
“You feel it, Liv. You do.” He wasn’t asking, and yet he was. There was a note of desperation in his voice.
His pupils had grown large, washing the color from his eye. The gleam in Stephen’s eyes was a familiar one. She’d witnessed it almost twenty years before, on Halloween night, 1945.
Yes, she did feel it. An aliveness permeated the damp, dark chamber they’d entered. A hunger.
The straightjacket squeezed Liv too tight, and she felt hot and short of breath.
“The eye,” she murmured. “We’re in the eye.”
Stephen’s eyes widened at her words.
“Yes,” he hissed. “The eye.”
He moved across the room to a wooden pedestal that held a huge book. A book of magic, she thought, though not the healing magic George had taught her. This was a book like those George hid beneath the floorboards, a dark book created by dark men.
“It’s all real. All the things I read about as a boy. Witches and wizards, people who speak to the dead, even those who bring them back, Liv. It’s all here. Those people have passed through this chamber. They sat in that chair. I’ve seen dozens with my own eyes.”
He spoke now like the boy she’d known. His voice high and excited, as if they’d just left the picture show and he couldn’t wait to gush about the film.
“Don’t you ever get tired, Stephen? Tired of chasing this elusive force?”
He seemed not to hear her as he pressed his hands against the brick walls.
“I feel it. I feel you,” he whispered.
Liv watched him and shuddered. She imagined just beyond those bricks, something waited; something with teeth.
“I want it,” Stephen told her. “The power. You can help me get it, Liv. Destiny, that’s what brought you here.”
Stephen was silent on their walk back to the asylum.
At a large brick building, he fished out his keys and unlocked a door.
He led her up a dark, echoey stairway. Heavy white doors closed off each floor. They walked until Liv’s legs burned, and then he stopped, pulling out another keyring.
She stood stiff, arms pressed against her sides, fearing if she moved too much, she might plummet down the cement stairs behind her.
When the door swung open, she gazed into a large attic with angled ceilings and wood beams cutting toward the floor. A single lamp sat on the floor near the door, casting long, dark on the walls.
A bird took flight from a rafter and soared away, disappearing into a shadowy crevice in the high-pointed ceiling.
In the center of the room, a little cot stood. She saw a bedpan, a glass pitcher of water, and a plate of bread.
“It’s meager, to be sure,” Stephen offered, “but under the circumstances, you must make do. I wasn’t expecting you, Liv. But I hated to put you in the asylum with the other patients. They can be a rough lot.”