“On this plane,” Whitehall agreed. “Not the others. And until she’s gone in every existence, there’s a chance. Now, there’s a reason you haven’t withered beneath the strain of playing host. We’re going to find out why.”
Delaney’s chest felt stitched tight. It was difficult to draw breath. The ropes chafed her wrists bloody. Coins bit into her skin. As discreetly as she could, she scooped a penny into her hand, tucking it out of sight.
“Tell me,” Whitehall ordered, “what the creature says when it speaks to you.”
She didn’t have a chance to formulate a response. All at once, the candles guttered out. Something shattered against stone. In the sudden onset of dark, the dead swarmed her like flies. She heard the buzz of them between her ears, their cries overlapping and strange. Shriveled and shrill, a tinnitus whistle through her skull.
And then, beneath it, a laugh like crinkling paper.
“My dear, my darling, my Dickie,” came a voice she recognized—a voice she’d heard slithering through the twilit dark of Whitehall’s second-story studio. A voice that belonged to a face mottled with decay, a skeleton’s grin, a corpse’s stare. “You left me home. You know how I despise being left at home.”
Ah,murmured the thing in her veins.My brethren.
A mass shuffling moved through the room. It was the sound of shadows, shambling one into the other. It was the scrape of something unnatural dragging over stone.
“Get out,” Delaney heard Whitehall command. “I did not invite you.”
“I go where you go, old friend. You and I and we.”
The candles flared to life all at once, flames climbing preternaturally high. It threw the room first into stark relief, and then into chaos. Lit from beneath, Whitehall looked suddenly skeletal, the hollows of him engulfed in shadow, his mouth an open O of horror.
At the wall, the first of the names caught flame.
I believe,sang the beast in her bones,it is time for us to bring this chapter to a close.
Eric Hayes had never been all that interested in immortality. He’d never had aspirations of cheating the afterlife. He had, for all intents and purposes, led a very normal life. There were no horror movies allowed in his house. No video games, no ghost stories. He’d been made to brush his teeth and go to bed at a reasonable hour. He said his prayers every night, the way his grandmother taught him. He received decent grades in school. He had a solid group of friends. He’d played fullback for his high school’s football team until, in his junior year, he’d been in such a horrible collision midplay that it landed him in the hospital with a spinal injury that left him unable to walk for weeks.
“GiGi says you saw Jesus,” his sister sang to him when he woke. She’d been perched on the edge of his bed, little legs kicking, her hair done in bows, the fat head of her favorite bear sagging onto its protruding stomach. “I heard her telling your coach you’re not allowed to play anymore.”
He’d had few encounters with the preternatural. Once, when he was eleven years old, his grandmother found him and his sister crouched around a Ouija board and she’d smacked him so hard across the back of the knuckles his hand stung for hours.
“That’s evil,” she’d said, in the soft, unflinching way she said everything. “Out. I won’t have it in my house.”
He’d grown up attending church. Not passionately, but obediently. Every Sunday found him trying fruitlessly to fit his fast-stretching limbs into a too-thin wooden pew. Head down, Bible open, the buttons on his checkered dress shirt done up so close to his throat he’d become convinced his grandmother meant to choke him with it. He’d mouth along with the rest of the congregation as they sang the hymns. With his grandmother’s elbow in his side, he’d mumble the words of the doxology: “Praise him, praise him, praise him, praise him, Jesus, blessed Savior, he’s worthy to be praised.”
Sometimes—after his accident—when the congregation bowed their heads to pray, he thought he saw the great glass icons move behind the pulpit. A drip of blood. A rustle of robes. The crook of a finger. It was only ever out of the corner of his eye. It was only ever a trick of the light.
It chilled him all the same.
He’d never been tempted by the things that tempted Richard Whitehall. Fooling death, channeling things that had no name. “Toying with the devil,” his grandmother would say. She’d cross herself and make him say a penance. She’d heat him a bowl of soup and tell him, again, how Christ spent forty days and forty nights in the wilderness.
He’d staked everything he had on the promise of a football scholarship. But then the accident happened. The scouts stopped calling. His medical bills piled higher. His grandmother started forgetting little things. She left the burners lit on the stove. She let the house fill with smoke. And so he’d registered for the placement test the day he turned seventeen. If it hadn’t been for his injury, his proctor said, they might have placed him in the pros.
He’d been a hell of a fullback.
Instead, his written submission, his cognitive exam all landed him at Godbole. Marvelous, Whitehall called him, delighted by his ability to see the doors move out of the corner of his eye. Only ever a glimpse. Only ever a shudder. When he stepped through a rift in time and space, he felt the impact all along his spinal cord. A crunch of bone. A grit of teeth. And then it was over.
It was only meant to be a free ride. He hadn’t wanted to play around with the occult. But then his grandmother forgot his name at Thanksgiving dinner. Sometime after that, his sister called to say she’d found her standing down by the harbor in an early December snow, her feet bare, her nightgown unraveling.
The doctors told them it was incurable. Just a part of aging.
But Whitehall had a remedy.
Eric hadn’t wanted to watch anyone die, he only wanted to stop death in its tracks.
He certainly hadn’t wanted to smash into Colton Price’s car. But he’d been speeding, driving as fast as he could, and the wheels lost traction as he took the corner onto the narrow street toward Price’s family home. Skidding, he’d done his best to apply the brakes. He’d pumped and let go. Pumped and let go. He gave the wheel space to turn. He’d been raised on Boston winters, and he knew how to handle himself in inclement weather.
He still slammed into Colton’s BMW anyway.
