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David stepped farther into the foyer and halted when he heard what he first thought were footsteps. Here and on the upper level, the floors were of tightly joined, darkly stained walnut. The rooms featured replicas of antique Persian carpets, but no carpet runners softened the hallways on either level. These steps were heavy and rhythmic. Then he realized they were not footfalls, after all, but instead the low throbbing that he had heard—and felt—rising from the basement on his previous visit. The sound was much louder this time, insistent. And now the electronic hum, woven from several frequencies, swelled in accompaniment.
The air became chilly. His breath plumed in a cold smoke.
He recalled what Richard Mathers reported about his experiences in this place. Mathers believed that he had been face-to-face with someone or something invisible. David knew better. No spirit roamed the hallway; the noise and the cold rose from whatever machinery lay in the cellar.
He also remembered the dream that had afflicted him in the early hours of Tuesday morning, when recollections of real events, buried in his subconscious, had fashioned a nightmare of timepieces that had run out of time, of clockless rooms, of driving his Porsche into a void, with its digital clock blinking zeroes. He looked now at his wristwatch and saw that the second hand—and surely the other two as well—was frozen, as if there might be no future in this place, only this one moment, eternal.
And yet time passed here. If time were frozen, he would not be able to move, and all within these walls would lie in stasis.
Down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass. Day by day, a sea of weirdness had washed through his life, and now it seemed that a high tide of unreason might sweep him away.
The recollection of one dream reminded him of yet another, which was related to the elusive memory that he had been trying to recall since his previous visit to the house, when he had seen the ampule of blood hanging on a chain above her bed.
The Thursday night when he first met Maddison, he’d come home and slept as if drugged, and he dreamed of seeking her in the Island Hotel. At one point he found himself in a makeshift infirmary, lying on a cot, while a nurse in a black uniform drew his blood, assuring him that she was a phlebotomist. I have much experience of blood.
The dream had been one in which he’d at moments thought he was at least half-awake, in a twilight land between sleep’s fantasy and reality. The nurse had been Emily. Or Maddison. And hadn’t she told him not to remember, to sleep and forget?
If that was the source of the blood in the pendant hanging above her bed, if it was in fact his blood, drawn while he slept, drawn by Maddison after she admitted herself to his house a night before their first date, then the truth he sought was going to be more extraordinary and fearsome than anything that even his much exercised novelistic imagination could conceive.
But there could be no going back. He had traveled too far out of the territory of everyday life, had discovered dimensions to the world that he had never imagined, had killed a man. If he didn’t at least learn the truth about Emily, he had nothing to go back to, nothing but frustrated curiosity and doubt and loneliness that would end in emotional—if not physical—oblivion.
Carrying the tote, he continued along the hall and startled when the living room, which had been brightly lighted, abruptly fell into darkness. He turned to his right, peering into the gloom.
Blazing at the tall windows, an extended barrage of lightning revealed an empty chamber, all the furniture gone, storm flares and storm shadows imprinting a flickering series of kaleidoscopic black-and-white patterns on the floor and walls. The quick strobing light revealed what appeared to be haunting spirits, gossamer ectoplasmic shapes that undulated in midair, but they were instead the tattered remnants of fantastic, elaborately woven spiderwebs hanging from the deeply coffered ceiling, alike to those that he had seen in the garage on his previous visit.
The hallway lights dimmed, brightened, dimmed, as though the power might fail. With each dimming, the suggestion of water stains began to appear on the walls along with fractal patterns of mold, which faded away each time the lights brightened.
David feared nothing and everything. The bomb he carried was a defense against being overpowered, but it was also a commitment to give his life for Emily—or Maddison—if necessary. When a man was willing to die for someone else, ready to die, he feared nothing in practice; no threat could deter him. However, he could still dread the unknown, which in this case seemed to be everything: the house, the people in it, and their purpose.
“Stay back, keep away,” he said, not sure to whom or what he was speaking. His index finger curled around the slack length of floss that served as a trigger wire.