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“I was … I was … I d-dreamed,” she stammered.
“Of who?”
“A man, a bath of white. The blood is the cure, the tie. A winged being. An angel, maybe.”
“Not an angel. Something new. Old. Everything.”
“Why did you touch her?” Valerie cried. “Everyone wants her. Why?”
“Do you want to make it end?”
“I thought I did. I thought I had ended this. She’s dead.”
“Would you rather be sure?”
Valerie nodded, her voice a scream inside, begging her limbs to take her back into the elevator. Press the button. To leave and never come back. Take Nicholas and leave that wretched town.Tabula rasa.They’d picked the wrong place.She’dpicked the wrong place.
“If you want that voice to stop, the dreams to stop, finish it. Do you want to finish it?” he asked.
Valerie swayed, and the word was on her tongue, ready to fall out.Yes.
The Deacon smiled and then jerked his head, looking out of the cave. His brow furrowed, and he sniffed the air. When he looked back at Valerie, his earlier patience was gone.
He shoved Valerie into the elevator, pressing a button on the outside, sending her up. He shouted to her, his white eyes staring as she watched from the door as he grew smaller.
“Come back at dawn if you’re tired of being alone. I need you here with me forever.” The words bit her like a snake, and the image of his red lipped smile would keep her from sleep no matter how hard she tried.
TWENTY-FIVE
My inability to take any order at the time felt like my strength. My defiance was intoxicating, and I felt euphoric in my rebellion, in my ability to firmly defy those who tried to order me around. Sorina had said to stay away, and I didn’t plan to listen. Valerie had asked me to join her for dinner at the Deacon’s for the holiday—finally naming herfriend—and I’d said no, leaving out thefuckI’d wanted to throw in for flair. And so school let out, and I reveled in the quiet of my mind. I walked the streets, the cold not scaring me, hoping to find Sorina and her black rope, too afraid to show up at her house again demanding another game of mirrors and flesh. I was firm in my answer to the women in my life, but still treading a line of fear and want. I had yet to chase as I wanted to in my dreams. But I would soon.
It was as if the Archer house called to me that cold night at the end of Thanksgiving break when I set out alone. We’d made plans to check it out in our small groups, but the more time I spent with Billy, Jessica, Nicole, and Kyrie together, the more we bickered and laughed, and fell into an unusual sort of unlikely friendship. Amber was still gone, Samantha was still a memory, and maybe we were scared to learn if the Archer House was important or not. If we kept putting it off, we’d never know. And there was safety in that.
But my dreams were never safe and often pushed me to wake, to wander. I’d seen the house before I woke, with the red circle behind it, glowing in the night like a portal. I didn’t want to step through, but my feet carried me to the entrance, my hand reached for the door just as I woke in a sweat, cold air slipping into my room from the cracked window.
I’d looked up, hoping to see Sorina. Disappointed that she wasn’t there, I dressed, spurred by my dream, leashed by my defiance.
I didn’t turn on my flashlight until I shut the front door of the Archer house.
Spiderwebs glittered, and an orb of light flashed back at me from a door on the opposite end. I quickly shut the flashlight off, worried someone on the other side of the house would see it.
Maybe I’d watched too many scary movies on TV through the Halloween season, read too many horror stories. After burning through the King novels I owned, I’d read a depraved novel calledThe Girl Next Doorby Jack Ketchum that had almost turned me off from the written word. I’d reluctantly taken a collection of Christopher Pike novels from Nicole after confiding in her about the horrors I’d read in the Ketchum novel, leaving out the part that it all felt too close to home in some ways. The pallet cleanse had been nice, and as I read about teenagers hunting ghosts and hiding from killers, visions of the Archer house lingered in my mind, blurring with the fictional houses in the stories I consumed.
Now the house was real, surrounding me. I thought I felt it breathe. But maybe that was something else.
Someoneelse.
I clicked the light on again but kept it low to the ground, illuminating my shoes.
The old floorboards creaked beneath me, and every sound felt amplified. I explored the house in quiet concentration, the sound of the house and its age lost to my wandering thoughts, though my ears and eyes were alert. I held my breath when I heard the Sheriff drive by, but he never paused, never pulled in. I didn’t dare go up the stairs when I took in the state of the steps.
I went to the basement, my heart beating, my imagination whirling between fiction and my dreams.
In the dark, with you, I am unafraid.
But Sorina wasn’t there to shield me from dark things in the night. Real or not. When no winged beast emerged from the dark of the basement, and my investigation showed me nothing more than an old house littered with beer bottles, condoms, and cigarette butts, I felt more disappointment than relief.
Defeated, I left the Archer house, and cut across the road after watching the Sheriff’s taillights fade into the dark as he drove toward the grocery store.
