There was no point in resisting. She couldn’t climb the fence, so she’d have to figure out how to disable it. She was thinking about this when the woman said, “And, oh yes, dear, there’s one other thing-you’re not allowed to hit me. That’s against the rules.”
She swung the flashlight and hit Sabrina full in the face.
As Sabrina howled in pain and blood poured from her nose, the woman regarded her with the sympathetic eyes, the caretaker eyes.
“Let’s not have a problem like this again,” she said. “It’s bad for everyone, isn’t it? But as Eli always says, rules need to be enforced or they aren’t rules at all. It’s a matter of energy, dear. Whatever you put out will be returned to you. It will pay to remember that while you’re here.”
13
By the time Mark had worked his way through the house, he was talking softly to himself. It was more a prayer than anything else. Please tell me she was never here. Please tell me she was never in this place.
The idea of Lauren gunned down in that dark thicket of bamboo beside the ditch had always felt more than horrific enough.
That was before he’d seen the house.
Between the ground floor, the stairwell, and the upstairs bedrooms, he counted sixty-seven paintings on the walls and chalk drawings on the floors, all some variation of a spiral theme. Each one pulled him in like a hypnotic eye. Beyond the spiral imagery, there was only one constant to the artwork: the center of each spiral was black. Even in the chalk drawings, black paint had been used in the center.
What mattered the most to him, though, was in the bedroom at the far end of the upstairs hall. There, words had been painted among the drawings. Each drawing was carefully, artistically done, clean and precise. The words were not. They were lettered unevenly, growing larger and bolder, conveying a sort of mania, and while Mark didn’t understand their meaning, the words were familiar.
Rise the Dark the DARK will RISE RiSE the DaRK RiSE rise will RISE the DARK
The only unexplained words in the notebook that Lauren had left on the passenger seat of her car before she’d stepped out of it on her way to death. As Mark had told the detectives, that was the first time he’d seen the phrase.
And the last, until now.
The house was so stifling that he felt dizzy when he moved too fast, but as he read those words he felt a chill. Every time. And he returned to them often. As he searched the rest of the house, he kept interrupting his progress to go back to that room and stare at the wall in the glow of the flashlight.
Did you see this, baby? Were you here?
He had to order himself away from that wall, force his attention elsewhere, and elsewhere the hypnotic-eye drawings loomed in every corner, like funhouse mirrors.
Sweat was dripping down his face and along his spine, but now it felt like the clammy sweat of sickness. He went to wipe his face with his jacket and realized he’d taken it off and wasn’t carrying it any longer. At one point he’d been holding it. Where had he put it? He couldn’t remember. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand instead, and the flashlight beam bobbed crazily around the walls, catching first one spiral drawing and then the next.
No. Not spirals. You’re using the wrong word.
That was true. There was a term for the shape in those drawings, and it wasn’t spiral. It was-
Vortex.
He heard the word in his own head but it seemed to be spoken in someone else’s voice. It was a sensation he’d had before in a place he didn’t want to remember-endless caverns of damp, dark stone-on a day when he’d been certain he’d never see daylight again. See any kind of light. The voices down there had saved him, though. Maybe. He tried not to think of them often.
They’re gathering here for something. But what?
The house provided no answers. Nor did it provide much in the way of tangible evidence of who its occupants were. There were no computers or phones, though there were power cords and chargers; no mail, none of the standard artifacts of modern human existence. The closest thing Mark found was a bookshelf filled with texts that had clearly been read often, and recently. Most of them were books about energy and psychic phenomena, but there was also an investment in the works of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. Mark combed through every closet and every drawer and found not a single piece of paper with a name or even a clue as to the identity of the blond woman. Perhaps Dixie Witte-the real Dixie Witte, the one in the guesthouse awaiting him now-would be able to answer that simply enough, but Mark didn’t want to leave the property until he was convinced he’d seen all there was. Once he walked out, he didn’t think he’d be coming back without a subpoena…and, truthfully, he hoped he’d never be back at all. There was something sick about the place.
Rise the Dark the DARK will RISE RiSE the DaRK RiSE rise will RISE the DARK
They were words of madness, and yet he stood looking at them again as if he were intending to solve a riddle. He played the light over each wildly painted letter, trying to think of what the phrase might be from. A poem, a song? The look of the word rise reminded him of something, and eventually he got it-the Manson Family. They’d painted the word in blood at the home of their victims. The Tate house. No, not Tate. The second house. The LaBiancas. Husband and wife, butchered in their own home. Rise. The Manson girls had been in that house before. They’d broken in and moved things around, let the dog out, just generally left a sense of intrusion, invasion. Creepy-crawling, they’d called in. That house was where the police had found the words helter skelter too. Had inspiration from that bloody summer of 1969 found its way to Cassadaga? The Manson Family, with their pretty young girls with changed names, new identities.
I have many brothers, the blond woman had said.
They come and they go, the boy had told him about the people in the house.
He moved away from the wall, panning the light from left to right across the room to illuminate those odd drawings, and felt dizzy again.
Rise the dark. The dark rise.
Again he heard a voice in his head that was not his own. A male voice, but not one he knew, saying: Too long in here, Markus. Too long. Time to go.
He pulled away from the wall with an effort, went down the stairs, and noted numbly that his jacket was on the floor in the living room. He gathered that up and was about to head for the front door and escape when he realized that he hadn’t checked the kitchen. He’d been about to when he’d had one of those strange urges to go back upstairs and revisit the bizarre painted words. As bad as he wanted out, he couldn’t go yet. He had to finish the job. See everything there was to see.
There wasn’t much in the kitchen, but a door there led to a cellar. He hadn’t expected to find a cellar, because houses of that age in Florida usually didn’t have basements. They were built over crawl spaces most often, prepared for tropical rains and flooding. The house at 49B, though, didn’t have a Florida look. It had been built by a Northerner for a Northerner. As soon as Mark opened the door that led downstairs, the air told him why the basement had been a bad idea. The trapped smell of a thousand floods leaked out, a sickeningly sweet mustiness.
The cellar ceiling was so low that there was no way he could stand up, and he had to go down the bottom steps in an awkward crouch. The confinement, paired with the smell of damp stone, brought back memories of Indiana caves, and he wanted none of those.