“How long do these things usually last?” she asked.
“Not usually more than a day, thank God,” Saul said. “I’d be willing to bet this will be over soon.”
“It better be,” Rory said, his eyes finding the porthole over the sink. “I just can’t believe this shit.”
“It’s crappy luck for sure,” Saul agreed.
Luck. The word almost made Karen laugh aloud, but she sipped her coffee instead. A dead brother. Sanity that was shaky at best. Not exactly what she would call luck but in a way, these things were no different than they had been before she’d ever arrived. Before Rory had called her. Or…if what he said was true — before she had called him.
Could that be possible? Did she have Sean’s hand-written will somewhere?
Maybe the answer was in Rory’s office. Maybe that was why he’d been so weird about her being in there earlier. Was he afraid she had been looking for the paper? Or, more importantly, afraid she’d found it?
Outside the wind howled like something alive and ravenous, something with sharp teeth and a very bad temper. At this point she had to wonder if that’s exactly what it was.
Another crashing tree and she spilled her coffee down the front of her sweater, yelping with fright.
“Fuck this,” she spat, standing up abruptly. “I’m getting out of here even if I have to walk every step of the way.”
Saul rose and protested, as she knew he would, but she pushed him aside and kept walking, heading for the front door.
“You can’t just leave,” he said, keeping pace with her.
“No? Watch me.”
He grabbed her arm, but she shook herself free, snapping, “Don’t touch me! I have to get out of here! Don’t you get it?”
“No, I don’t fucking get it!” He was shouting now, she realized. They both were.
She stopped and faced him. “I think this fucking house wants to kill me. I think it killed Sean and that’s what this has been about. I’m leaving.”
“That makes no sense, Karen. A house can’t hold a grudge. You’re talking crazy!”
She raised her hands. “Because I am crazy, remember? My own brother even thought I was.”
Reaching the front door, she yanked it open before he could stop her and a blast of wind hit her like a truck, knocking her backwards, and if Saul hadn’t been there to grab her, she would probably have landed square on her ass.
A dervish of pine needles, dead leaves, and small branches whipped past them and they both raised their hands to shield their eyes, but not before they saw what was out there.
Trees.
So many trees had encroached upon the house, effectively surrounding them, close enough to touch, snuggled right up to the porch. A wall of trees, impossibly close to each other, in a way they could never have survived in nature, their branches and roots entwined with each other so it was impossible to tell which of the low hanging branches belonged to which tree.
Wind pounded them back from the doorway, still spewing all manner of debris at them and, squinting against the assault, she clearly saw something moving out there, winding its way around the trunks of the pines, barely able to squeeze past them. A flash of red moving forward, towards them, towards the porch, the open door.
Barking hysterically, the dog bolted up the steps, over the threshold and past them. Karen and Saul, once they realized what it was, barely gave the animal a passing glance, too entranced by the trees.
The front door slammed closed, Rory panting with the effort, shoving his shoulder against it and then all was still again.
The three of them stood looking around at the mess all over the floor and on the furniture.
“It’s not the house that doesn’t want us to leave,” Rory said. “It’s the forest.”
Karen pulled strands of hair out of her mouth. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”
The men looked at her.
“Why would an entire forest be angry at us?” she explained. “You said yourself that that dog has lived in the woods for how long? A year? Two years? How could that be possible if the forest was haunted or pissed off or whatever the hell you think it is?”
“What then?” Saul asked.
“I don’t know. The house itself? Maybe its energy is strong enough to control the woods around us.”
“I thought we agreed the house was only making us see things that aren’t real.” She shook her head, unable to answer. She had to admit she was just grasping at straws and had no idea what she was talking about. It was the writer in her trying to come up with a motive for something she knew nothing about. Addressing Rory, she asked, “What do you know about Frank Storm?”
For the first time since she’d met him, Rory looked guilty of something. “Only what I’ve managed to dig up on the guy since I bought this place, which isn’t much. I’ve already told Saul most of it.”
“So?” she asked. “What? Was he a murderer or anything like that?”
“No!” Rory actually sounded offended at the idea. “He was just a sailor. He had a family. A wife and a daughter. This was after his sailing days. He built this house to look as much like a ship as he could, missing his sailing days I guess. This was before any of the rest of the town was erected. He was one of the forefathers.”
Saul, having heard all this before, focused on looking out the front portholes, his face ashen, presumably at the sight of all those trees crowding up against the house.
“Go on,” Karen said.
Shaking his head, clearly not seeing the point in getting into all this ancient history, Rory said, “Apparently, the girl got sick and died. Something called typhus. Supposedly it shouldn’t have killed her, but since they were out here in the middle of nowhere, they couldn’t get the kid to a doctor. It just got worse and worse. And apparently, it was during a terrible wind storm.” He said this last sentence slowly, as if he was really listening to himself instead of just relating a story he’d told a dozen times before. He cleared his throat nervously before adding, “I’ve researched typhus a little. The article said it was caused by lice and…uh…fleas and another name for it was ‘Ship Fever’.”
Karen’s jaw dropped and Saul spun away from the window. “You never told me that.”
Rory shrugged. “I guess I didn’t think anything of it. Once they realized the kid was so sick, storm or no storm, she was probably gonna die. There was no place to take her. There was no town at all. The closest place was Indigo Bend.”
“What happened after that?” Karen asked.
“His wife died of the same thing a couple months later. That’s pretty much all I know.”
“He must have been devastated.”
“Probably. What difference does it make?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. For whatever reason though, the story made her less embarrassed about the horrible things she’d seen in Rory’s office and she told them about seeing Sean and about the little girl who’d sprouted branches from her shoulders.
The two men gaped at her. “You should have told us this before,” Saul said.
She went over and sat on the couch, rubbing her face with her hands. Her voice was muffled when she spoke. “I still wasn’t convinced it was the house. I mean, I thought it was partly the house, but mostly I figured I was just losing my mind.”