You've Been Warned--Again Read online

  I squeeze my own forehead, hoping I’ll pressure the vision away. But my mother only gets more there. I can’t deny what this is called. I can’t do it anymore.

  This is a mental breakdown. This is insanity.

  They’ll pull me out of college, toss me in the psych ward at Bellevue. They’ll shake their heads and whisper—What did you expect? She’s a Whitmore. It’s in their blood. Look at what happened to the brother. The only way out is down.

  Mother’s pale lips are mute, but an understanding passes between us. She’s calling to me across a channel my five senses can’t reach.

  She turns toward the bookshelf behind her and sweeps her slender white fingers across imaginary book spines. I catch the musty odor of old paper.

  She’s humming again, or I imagine she is. But the melody is laced with a primal, animal noise, a whimper of distress. The bleating of a goat. I can’t pretend it’s anything else.

  I have to chase this madness away. I snatch the candelabra by its base. Hot wax drapes over my fist but I don’t spare a second for the pain.

  When I raise the light overhead, the shadows turn and waver and Mother flits away. She’s gone, dispelled.

  The candlelight shows a random smear of tracks across the dusty floor just where she was standing. Not her bare feet, which have left no mark, but the definite stamp of shoe prints. The pattern makes no sense. The prints seem to veer toward the shelf, where they vanish completely.

  I bring the light closer, blending my tracks with the rest. It only takes a cursory search. One vertical stretch of trim is attached to the wall by hinges. You’d only notice if you were looking for them. If you knew to find them there.

  I take hold of the trim and pull it toward me. Nothing happens until I hold my breath and yank with a little more force. Somewhere in the wall, a mechanism disengages.

  I leap back, certain that the whole eight-foot shelving unit will collapse on me. But it only creaks away from the wall an inch. Because it’s exactly what I hoped it wouldn’t be.

  It’s a secret doorway.

  Chapter 19

  All I can see at first is dark. The fake shelf creaks open and I thrust the candelabra ahead of me, into the opening. That sulfur stench is so pungent here, this hidden space must be the source of it.

  My terror runs way deeper than simple fear for my safety. It’s like the opposite of a blessing, like I’ve unlocked a world where more than my body could be harmed.

  I should never have found this place, but I was led here by the dead soul of my mother—to warn me, to punish me, I don’t know.

  What’s becoming crystal clear is the presence of evil forces in this house, just like I was warned. It’s not my mind playing tricks on me. I’m not crazy. The understanding should’ve given me strength, but it made me all the more terrified. I had a chance of overcoming my own illusions, but what hope did I have against the spirit realm?

  As I pull the door farther open, the shelf gets wedged against the floor. It’s barely wide enough for me to squeeze inside, but I can’t push it any farther.

  I can’t do this at all, to be honest. I can’t convince myself to go in there. Not when I imagine the door locking shut behind me, a gust of underground air blowing out the candles…

  I have just enough nerve to reach my arm inside and illuminate the space with candlelight. Even then I’m petrified that someone will grab my arm and yank me in.

  From what I can see, it’s just a closet lined in brick, barely big enough for a person my size to lie down in either direction. The bricks look ancient, like this room has been hidden here since the house was first built.

  A voice cuts through the dead quiet and makes me yank my arm from the opening. But it’s not nearby. It’s just Chloe laughing in another part of the house.

  The damage is already done. I’ve scraped the candelabra against brick and knocked one of the candles out of its socket.

  My stomach drops when I realize what’s happened. The candle hits the closet floor, but it doesn’t go out. It burns there amid a clutter of what looks like flammable shreds of paper, or something else. Scattered rat dropping?

  I don’t have time to think this through. I can’t reach the candle from out here, and blowing on it might only spark a fire that would burn the whole house down.

  I hold my breath like I’m going underwater and push through the thin gap. The floor under my shoes is some weird terrain both rugged and slippery, but it’s not until I crouch down and pluck up the candle that I realize.

  There’s no paper, no feces. The floor is covered in candle wax. Piles and puddles and singed wicks, all of it long dried solid. I can’t guess how many candles have been melted onto this floor. Dozens, at least, but probably hundreds.

  My frantic breath sounds like it’s caught in a jar. I don’t know what I’ve found in this rotten heart of the house. Someone was lured here, over and over again, or maybe trapped here. Endless hours of melting, dripping wax.

  When I stand back up, the single candle pinched in my fingers illuminates the back wall. There’s some kind of graffiti scraped into the brick. It’s ragged and childlike, the size of a car tire, but whoever did it took his time cutting deep.

  I recognize what I’m seeing from a cultural anthropology course I took last year. Witchcraft and Magic. It’s a pentagram, an encircled five-pointed star turned upside down.

  This one has a crude sketch of a goat head laid over the pentagram shape. A memory brushes me like a cold hand in the dark: this isn’t a benign Wiccan pentacle. This is the Mark of Satan.

  “No, no, no. Way too much,” I plead.

  I am through with this closet, this house, Rhode Island.

  I step back from the devil goat scraped onto the wall by God knows who. A patch of floor goes off kilter under my weight and the sudden shift in balance slams me against the brick.

  The candle shudders. I’m sure it’s going to go out, but by some miracle it stays lit. That’s how I can see the disturbance I’ve made below me. The shifting floor has broken a seam in the wax. It’s a perfect square.

  A secret within a secret.

  Now, my desperate need to know has killed my caution. Every instinct tells me not to do this, but I fall to my knees and dig into the wax with my fingernails. My heart pounds and my fingers pry, and then the trap door opens.

  Underneath is not a passageway to Hades. There are no corpses or writhing snakes or petrified missing girls with ball gags in their mouths. It’s just a small compartment, like a safety deposit box.

  Inside is a desiccated bouquet of roses, still blood-red. A mangy teddy bear with both its eyes plucked out. A revolver that looks old enough to have been used in a Wild West shootout.

  I pick up the gun and tilt it toward the light. There are bullets loaded into the chamber.

  The sight of them is like someone else’s trauma lashing out at me from the past. I can’t explain it, but it’s all part of this house. That story Chloe told me, the one I thought was a lie…

  Underneath the other mementos is a framed picture, turned upside down. The matte backing is speckled with mold. Even as I reach for it, I know I’m Pandora unleashing her demons.

  Glass shards drop away, exposing the raw portrait underneath. It’s damp and moldy, but I can make out the faces of a little girl, a boy, a frail woman with eyes that pierce right into me, like an accusation.

  It’s a family of four. My thumb swipes the mold from the father’s face. Stephen Thorpe, I remember Chloe saying.

  He grins, chin tilted down, blond strands of hair cut across one eye. Seeing him, I’m shoved to the far side of the reality I’ve always believed. I have nothing to cling to.

  Stephen Thorpe, the stranger, hasn’t aged a day.

  Chapter 20

  Carter almost collides with Joanie on the landing. She tumbles up the stairs and drops so heavily against him that he thinks she’s fainted, except her eyes are alert and buzzing with terror.

  If she knew what he did to her sister, s
he wouldn’t be rushing to his arms. It can’t be him she’s afraid of.

  It’s something else. Someone else.

  She thrusts an object in his face, insisting, “Look at this! Look at what I found!” Maybe she thinks there’s some way out, if only she follows all the clues.

  Poor Joanie believes there’s a life to go back to. She doesn’t know the world outside is already dying. He envies her and he pities her. His feelings can’t be reconciled anymore. Not after what he’s done.

  What she’s showing him is a framed picture that looks like it’s been dredged out of a swamp. He has to hold her wrist to get a good look at it. When he realizes what he’s looking at, a gush of dread rushes through his system.

  He has seen this family in his dreams a hundred times since he moved into this house. He knows them. The Thorpes. The mother, the daughter, the son—all of them except the blond-haired man who stands behind them all.

  The stranger. Stephen Thorpe, the man who went crazy and killed his family, right here in this house, ten years ago. Except…

  “Where did you get this?” Carter asks.

  “In the library. There’s a secret room behind a shelf, and a trap door, under all this melted candle wax. Chloe told me a story about a murder—”

  “I know,” he tells her.

  It’s like a slap to her face. She blinks at him, dumbfounded.

  “You knew? And you moved here?” she asks.

  Of course, because the house called to him. And that secret room in the library called to him, too. Woke him from a sound sleep his very first night under this roof. Since then he’s spent hours in that room melting more wax onto the floor, waiting for some sign. Some reason.

  While that trap door was under him the whole time.

  Clever girl. There might’ve been hope for her once. But now? How could he explain to another person, even precious Joanie, what it means to awaken to the empty struggle of life?

  If he jabs the letter opener into the soft flesh under her chin, she might not even sense the pain before she’s dead. For her, for his natural daughter, he’ll be merciful.

  Joanie’s eyes flit to the weapon in his hand, like she can read his thoughts. But the danger doesn’t register with her. How could it? He’s her father, and he’s here to protect her.

  “We have to find Stella. I think she might be hurt. I think—”

  She stops cold because her eyes have locked on something in the hallway upstairs behind him.

  “Why don’t you tell her, Carter?” the stranger says. He has appeared at the top of the stairs. The way he presides over them, like he’s claimed ownership, or reclaimed it.

  “Leave us alone!” Joanie cries. “We know who you are.”

  “Come on, Cart. Put the kid out of her misery already.”

  “No…” Carter shakes his head. The fury screams inside him like a silent alarm. He wants to dispel it. He wants to buy Joanie’s simpler version of the truth, if only for one more minute:

  After a decade in hiding, Stephen Thorpe has returned to his house to menace the family that replaced the one he killed.

  Her story makes so much sense, it could even explain Martha and Stella’s deaths. It could offer Carter Whitmore a defense.

  If only it were true.

  “What’s going on? You know him? You knew about him?” Joanie asks. She’s beginning to understand. Nothing evades this girl for long. She’s backing down the stairs, unwilling to take her eyes off either of the men looming above her.

  “Aw, come on, Cart. You’re no fun,” the stranger chides. “Joanie, what your father won’t tell you—”

  “He’s not Stephen Thorpe,” Carter snaps.

  Joanie glances back at the portrait she’s holding. She flings it over the railing as if it’s caught fire. She’s struck off-balance, like Martha when she took that final tumble. When you can’t trust your own eyes, you’re lost.

  “What are you talking about?” she begs. “It’s him.…”

  “Thorpe killed himself the same night he murdered his family,” Carter tells her. He doesn’t mention that Stephen Thorpe slit his own throat right after he killed his daughter—his youngest, most trusting victim.

  “Then who…?” she says, pointing toward the stranger.

  “This man—this man, he’s…” Carter can’t put it into words.

  “Would you believe I’m his evil twin?” the stranger asks.

  Joanie gawks for a second, then shakes the ridiculous idea out of her head. She spins on her heels and rushes down the stairs, hitting every third step on the way.

  Time is speeding up again.

  Carter grips his letter opener. He knows what he must do.

  Chapter 21

  My legs can hardly carry me into the living room. I stumble, clutching for furniture too far out of reach. I hear myself whimpering like a wounded dog.

  I have to run. I have to get help.

  Into the kitchen, to the back deck, to Nate…

  But I feel dizzy. The doorway into the kitchen keeps shifting out of place. And that whimper, it’s coming from somewhere else, not me.

  A child with a hand pressed over her mouth—that’s what it sounds like. And a low, apelike grunt. My head is so crowded with ghosts I can’t trust my own senses.

  Especially what I see when I lurch through the kitchen door. Chloe’s body is tossed like a meat slab onto the butcher block counter. Her head hangs over the edge, her face wrenched with pain, her body convulsing.

  Nate’s trying to save her. He’s right there, tending to her, steadying her hips, he’s…

  Chloe bursts out laughing. At me.

  Her bloodshot eyes bore into mine as Nate keeps thrusting. He doesn’t even realize I’m here. The last sturdy scaffolding of my life topples over.

  “Nathan…”

  “Oh, God,” he whines. “Joanie…”

  He brings his hands together at his crotch, backing away from Chloe. I want to avert my eyes, but there’s the burnt turkey, the shattered china and drying cranberry muck, the dead black CCTV screen.

  Chloe’s laughter makes something snap in my head. A literal crack like my ears are underwater. Of all the vulnerabilities in my armor that this house might’ve tested, it chose the weakest. It corrupted Nate—or, really, it found the depravity lurking inside of him and teased it out. It has trapped him and trussed him and hung him on display.

  There is no way out through here. I step back, but the riser between the kitchen and living room is an unexpected drop. I grab for anything that will keep me upright.…

  …but I’m caught. A fierce heat radiates from the hands that steady my shoulders. His lips against my ear, Stephen Thorpe whispers, “You deserve this.”

  The scream welling up inside me breaks loose. I want to dive out of his reach, but all I can do is crumple to the floor.

  His rolled-up sleeves show intricate tattoos that snake all over his forearms, strange creatures so entwined I can’t make anything out. They seem to slither across his flesh.

  “You want to hurt them,” he says.

  “I don’t.” I spit the words at him.

  “Don’t lie, Joanie. Wrath is the easiest sin to read.” His smirk could be pity; it could be amusement. Embers reflect in his eyes—except the hearth is behind him, and the fire is dead.

  “You killed my mother.…”

  “A lie and you know it,” he says.

  I grasp the edge of a credenza and get back on my feet. There’s a table lamp within reach. I snatch it by the base and swing it at his smug and deceitful face.

  Thorpe rears back. The electric cord snaps taut, yanks the lamp from my hand. It’s still plugged into the wall.

  “Oh, Joanie,” Thorpe says in mock disappointment.

  From out of nowhere, Nate throws his full weight onto Thorpe’s shoulders. He’s like a rabid animal, growling and snapping and tearing at Thorpe’s shirt.

  I’ve never seen Nate this way and it sickens me—even while I’m eager for him to lay th
e stranger out, pin him to the floor, make him surrender.

  Their struggle only lasts a few steps. Nate yelps as Thorpe twists his beard in one hand. What happens next is too swift for my eyes, but it ends with Nate flat on his back and groaning.

  Thorpe turns his attention back to me. His reflection in the clouded mirror is dark and distorted, an inhuman shape my brain can’t register. I’m falling apart. I don’t have the strength to fight, not with my faith shattered, not after Thorpe threw Nate like you’d toss a scarecrow.

  But then, behind him, my father appears. His bald and ruddy head glistens with sweat. He gnashes his teeth, ready to strike, and I feel a new rush of hope. Thorpe catches my gasp, but it’s too late for him.

  Father jabs the letter opener though the turtleneck, into the soft flesh behind his collarbone. Thorpe winces and slaps at the wound like he’s been stung. He pivots toward Father, chuckling. “Yikes,” he says, “Watch it there, fella—”

  Father shanks him twice more in the gut, grunting each time. I feel each stab like a vicarious electric charge.

  Thorpe doubles over with an “oof.” It’s like he’s being play-punched by a child. He coughs out a wheezy laugh, shaking his head at this inconvenient turn of events.

  “Die, already,” Father says, and stabs again.

  Thorpe raises his bloody index finger as if to call time out. But he stumbles away from my father, weaving drunkenly toward the furniture.

  I’m on the brink, both hands clasped over my mouth. The pain he must be in, it’s far more than I can watch, but I also can’t look away.

  Finally, Thorpe slumps into Father’s recliner. He breathes a heavy sigh and lifts his scotch glass from the side table. He takes one last gulp before his arm goes limp. The glass shatters on the floor.

  Thorpe saves his final glance for me, stares deep into my soul. And then his eyes go blank.

  Chapter 22