His voice died without echo in the heavy oppressive air, and there was no answering noise from anywhere else in the House.
Funny. He could have sworn he was back in the same House he'd shared with his compatriots. It certainly looked and felt that way to him. But he seemed to be completely alone, and he wondered if they'd been trapped somewhere else. In their own pasts, perhaps.
Or if they'd been killed.
He hoped to God that wasn't the case.
Stormy walked into the dining room, into the kitchen.
There were crackers in one of the cupboards, and he took out the box, grabbing a handful. He was hungry, he realized. He felt as though he'd been running a marathon or working out in a gym. He was drained, enervated, and he felt the need to bolster himself with nourishment. He searched through all of the other cupboards as well as the refrigerator, but he found only two other items.
A can of fruit cocktail.
And a hunk of cheddar cheese.
He ate neither, left them in the cupboard and refrigerator, respectively, feeling chilled.
He finished off the box of crackers, poured himself a glass of water.
So what was next?
It was clear that he had done something, accomplished something. He'd been set down in the household of his childhood for a reason, and while that reason was still unclear, the fact that he was back, had been returned, meant that he had completed whatever it was he'd been expected to do.
But the purpose of it was still unknown, even the assumptions behind it nebulous. How could changing the specifics of his own past life affect anything having to do with the Houses and this border that was supposed to protect--what?--the known universe from supernatural forces?
It was the mixture of the cosmic and the personal that he found so hard to accept. He had never bought into the Christian idea that God would ignore wars and atrocities and holocausts yet intervene on behalf of a housewife with marital problems. It seemed absurd and inconsistent to him. Highly illogical, to quote the great Mr. Spock.
But he knew now that the Infinite was illogical, that the epic and the intimate were inexorably intertwined, and while it might be hard to grasp and difficult to adjust to, a missed appointment could have as much consequence as the troop movements of an army a thousand soldiers strong, could lead to the movement of an army a thousand soldiers strong. In the grand scheme of things, individual actions and large-scale events were both equally important. Here in the House and on the Other Side, that truism seemed to be even more pronounced.
Feelings and emotions were as tangible as actions, and while he might not understand the specifics of it, he knew that reconnecting with his parents and confronting Doniellehad somehow had a profound impact on the House and therefore the world.
He looked out the kitchen windows at the white fog that obscured whatever lay outside.
The Ones Who Went Before.
For the first time since Billings had spoken that terrifying name to him, Stormy thought about the builders of the Houses. What did they look like? Did they have a definite shape and form? He would never know and was not sure that he wanted to know.
What about the Houses themselves? If they had been around as long as Billings had intimated, they could not have always looked like this. What had been here before them? Teepees? Caves?
It was a creepy line of thought, and Stormy forced himself to back away from it. There would be time for that later. There were more immediate concerns at present.
He needed to find out where he was, when he was, where the others were, and how they were going to escape from here.
Crackers were stuck between his teeth, and he poured himself another glass of water and rinsed his mouth out in the sink before embarking on a floor-by-floor search of the House.
He went through every room on the first floor, then wandered upstairs, looking for one of the others, looking for ... something. He saw nothing unusual until he reached the third story. There, across the hall from his bedroom, was a door that had not been there before, a door he did not remember. He felt suddenly nervous and was not sure he wanted to look inside, especially not alone, but he forced himself to be brave, opened the door, and peeked into the room.
"Oh, Jesus," he breathed.
Butchery.
This deserved the title. The black room before him was the site of almost unbelievable carnage. Faces hung from hooks on the wall like hats, the drooping, sagging skin contorting their former shapes into stretched mockeries of human forms. Bones and skulls and pieces of flesh lay strewn across the blood-spattered floor next to a pile of discarded gossamer that looked like the empty bodies of the cloudlike ghosts he'd seen on the Other Side. Metal instruments that could only be tools of torture were scattered about the room.
On the top of a marble table was Billings.
The butler had been stabbed. No, not just stabbed.
Slit open. His mouth was frozen in arictus of agony, and his eyes were wide, staring. The red imprint of a kiss--lipstick? blood?--could be seen on his white forehead.
Stormy remained in the doorway, afraid to enter the room. He didn't know what this meant, where it fit into anything, but it scared the hell out of him, and the confirmation that Billings was dead hit him much harder than expected.
What were they going to do now? Their guiding light was gone.
What was he going to do now? That was the big question.
Because the others weren't anywhere to be found.
For all he knew, they had been killed as well and their bloody corpses awaited him in some other room of the House.
He thought he detected movement to the right of Billings'
body, and immediately he shifted his attention in that direction. At first he saw nothing, but he squinted his eyes, looked more carefully.
A shade, a shadow--Norton?--was standing near the foot of the table, its indistinct form covered with blood, staring at its own outstretched hands with an expression that could be read as horror, could be read as awe. The face was obscure, faded into transparency, but there was something about the shape of its body, its stance, the movement of its head and arms, that reminded him of Norton, and he was suddenly sure that the old man was dead.
He called out Norton's name, tried to communicate with the ghost or whatever it was, but no matter what he said or how much he gesticulated, he could not seem to capture the figure's attention.
There was additional movement in the far corner of the dark room, a flash of white in his peripheral vision, and Stormy quickly glanced over at that area.
Donielle.
She had no trouble seeing him. The girl smiled in his direction, and her lips were bright crimson, there were flecks of blood on her teeth. She lifted her shift, and he saw smears of red on her crotch where she'd been . . .
touching herself. "Come and get it," she said, giggling.
Her voice seemed to come from far away.
Looking at her now, Stormy could not understand how he had ever even been tempted.
She turned around and bent over, still giggling. "Kiss it!" she said.
He slammed the door of the room as hard as he could, backing toward his bedroom across the hall. More than anything, he needed time to think, time to sort things out, but he had the feeling that was exactly what he was not going to get. He was filled with the sudden conviction that things were coming to a head, that whatever it had all been building toward had arrived, that the girl had almost achieved her goal.
That he was next.
Reaching behind him, his hands felt the jamb of his bedroom doorway and he turned around. But it was not his room. It was the black room again, and amid the bloody mayhem,Donielle stood at the foot ofBillings's table with her shift hiked up and rubbed herself with bloody hands.