Just in front of them a staircase led to the second floor, a window at the landing illuminating them. To the left a living room stretched out and blended into a dining room. Dixie hadn’t turned on any lights and the furniture stood around them in shadows. Then she slipped away from him and in seconds was on the landing halfway up the stairs.
“Markus?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Coming.”
The stairs creaked. The wood felt soft, yielding. Dixie Witte waited on the landing, and Mark was glad, because there she looked nothing like Lauren. Then she took another step away, into the darkness, and in silhouette she could have passed for his wife once more.
Were you here, Lauren? Were you ever inside this house?
He dearly hoped not. He knew that she hadn’t been killed here, but all the same, he prayed she had never been inside. It was that kind of place.
From the landing, he noticed what he thought at first were odd shadows on the walls. Then he realized they were actually paintings, and when he leaned close enough, he saw that the pictures had been painted directly onto the wall. The ancient plaster was the only canvas.
The paintings were strange symbols. Mark couldn’t make them out very well in the dark, but they seemed heavy on circles and triangles. Masonic symbols? He leaned closer to the wall, trying to identify the shapes. Not Masonic symbols, or at least not any he’d seen before. The triangles blended into a circle with what appeared to be a spiral at the center. In the uneven moonlight, the spiral drew the eye and made Mark feel suddenly dizzy. He put a hand against the plaster to steady himself.
Dixie Witte came back down the steps, took his belt loop again, and let her body press against his. When she spoke, she reached up so that her lips were next to his ear.
“She’s close to us now, Markus. I can feel her. It’s so special. I can’t explain just how special it is. But if you can trust, if you can open yourself to the energy…you’ll feel her too. Are you able to trust?”
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t try, just believe. Soon my energy will cease, and hers will replace it. You’ll know when it happens. You’ll feel her within me.”
The house felt too hot, with none of the fresh breezes scented with oranges to cool him here. He wondered if she’d paid the boy, the strange boy who spoke of the dead. Fifty cents if I do the whole tree, he’d said. Someone cut off his hands. Put them in a cigar box, he’d said. You ever seen something like that?
There was sweat on Mark’s forehead and he was breathing hard, as if the stairs had been a laborious climb. Dixie moved her hand to his forehead and wiped off the beads of perspiration gently. Her hand felt cool and wonderful. He didn’t want her to step away. If anything, he wanted her to come closer, press tighter.
You’ll feel her within me.
What he felt was sick. Disoriented and dizzy. Were there no fans in this damn house, no open windows? It was like a tomb.
“Trust,” Dixie Witte breathed in his ear. “You’ve got to trust.” Then she stepped away again, heading up the next flight of stairs. “She’ll have the answers for you. She knows if it was Garland Webb. She knows, Markus. She’s the only one who does.”
He climbed after her, sweating freely now. At the top of the stairs Dixie turned toward a room that was on the side of the house facing away from the moonlight, which left it in total darkness. Mark followed her in and his sense of claustrophobia rose to new heights. The room was small but it was also blacked out, with thick curtains over the windows, and smells of sage and other incense hung heavy in the air. Cloying and unpleasant, nothing like those cool orange-scented breezes in the yard. He thought of the strange boy again and wondered if he should ask about him. She would know who he was, who had told him that story about the man named Walter with the severed hands. Maybe it had been Dixie. She certainly seemed right for the part. Or maybe one of the people who’d passed through, the angry people. They come and they go, the boy had said.
“We’ll try to make contact with her now,” Dixie said. “With Lauren.” She stepped close to him and then, in a strange and sudden motion, she slid down to her knees and took his hands, gripping them tightly, bowing before him. “Close your eyes and trust. You’re resisting. You’re not open yet. Just trust.”
He could barely make out her shape. The room was that dark. Cave dark, he would have said once, before he got a lesson in what cave dark really was. She held his hands and swayed in silence, and he tried to find the part of himself that felt scorn for this, the part of himself that should be laughing at the whole act, but he couldn’t. That part was gone now, in this place. She was compelling. And disturbing. The most disturbing thing since that boy…
They come and they go.
The boy had pointed at the big house when he said it. Not the guesthouse. He had pointed indisputably at the old house, the one where angry people came and went.
Dixie Witte had begun to hum, a low and eerie sound, and her fingers were sliding over his hands, tracing the lines on his palms.
“Lauren,” she whispered. “Lauren, join us.”
Mark didn’t like hearing the sound of his wife’s name from her. He wanted to tell her to stop saying it. But Lauren had given this woman respect; that was what had brought her here in the first place. Unlike Mark, who for two years had settled for the transcripts of police interviews, and now he had to-
Too young.
The thought came to his mind unbidden, a blitzing image, the opening page of one of the police transcripts. They’d asked Dixie to state her name and age. She’d said she was fifty-two.
Mark stepped back fast, releasing the woman’s hands and fumbling in his jacket. She got as far as “Markus, you’ve got to relax-” before he withdrew the tactical light from his pocket and hit the thumb switch.
These days they gave the label tactical to everything from socks to polo shirts, but with the Surefire light, it was more than an adjective-the light was a weapon in its own right. The thumb trigger flooded five hundred lumens directly into Dixie Witte’s eyes, approximately ten times more light than human night vision is prepared to handle, and the overload both blinds and freezes. She lifted her hands and swore at Mark in a harsh voice that bore no similarity to her Tennessee Williams-heroine tone.
“Who are you?” Mark said. “Who in the hell are you? You’re not Dixie, and you’re not in the right house, so-”
He stopped talking abruptly, the woman’s identity suddenly unimportant. The flashlight had caught a glint of metal and drawn his eye to an old table just behind her shoulder. Knives glittered from every inch of it. A dozen, at least, and no standard blades in the mix. There were fat, curved bolo machete blades, hard-angled tanto tips like small samurai swords, an ancient knife with a stone cutting edge and a bone handle. Ancient, but honed. Any of them would kill you, and cruelly. They were not knives designed for simplicity. They were designed for pain.
“What was the plan?” Mark said. His voice was hoarse. It took an effort to look away from the knives and back to the blond woman who’d promised to find his wife’s energy. A moment ago she’d looked weak and under attack, on her knees and temporarily blinded. Now she lowered her hands and smiled with empty contempt.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” she said. “But it wasn’t up to you, was it? I bet that’s even what you tell people. I bet you’ve said that already. If you haven’t, you will soon. You’ll explain how you ended up in this room. Do you know what word you’re going to use? Called. That’s what you’ll say. You felt called here. You might blame the dead bitch, but when you’re alone with your thoughts, you’ll know that’s not true. She’s the smallest part of it. And you’ll be sure of that by the end.”