"I can't find Billingham ," she said.
"I ... I think he's gone," Stormy told her.
There was a brief flash of lucidity, a quick second in which he saw panic and fear and incomprehension on her face. She knew the butler had been part of the House, and she knew that if he was gone, something was seriously amiss. Then her usual tight expression of stoic immobility settled into place, and she said, "You will have to serve in his place, then."
Stormy nodded. "Do you want me to help you up the stairs?"
"No," she told him. "I want you to draw my bath. I will bathe tonight in blood. Have my tub filled with goat's blood. Temperature tepid."
He nodded dumbly, watched her struggle up the steps.
From far down the first-floor hall, he heard his mother wailing, heard his father bellow, "Billingham!"
He stood in the foyer, unmoving. What had he accomplished?
Nothing. He'd tried his damnedest and confronted his parents, put it all on the line, and they had remained unmovable, entrenched, fatalistically resigned to things as they were. Everything was exactly the same as it was before.
He sighed. You really couldn't go home again.
Still, he felt better for having talked to his parents, for having confronted them, for having at least tried to stop their abandonment of Billingham and the House, to change their increasing reliance on Donielle.
If he had it to do over again, he would not run away from home. He would stay in the House with his parents, and try to work things out with them.
There was no sign of his grandmother on the stairs, he could not hear the tapping of her cane, so he walked up the steps to make sure she was all right. She was not in the second- or third-floor hallways, and he knocked on the door of her bedroom. "Grandma?"
No answer.
He tried to open the door, but it was locked.
He knocked on the door of her bathroom, but again there was no answer, and he put his ear to the wood, listening for sound.
Nothing.
Could she have gone somewhere else? He started toward the stairs again, but his eye was caught by the open door to his bedroom. Had it been open before?
He didn't think so.
"Hello?" he called out tentatively. He poked his head into the room, and there was a sudden shift of atmosphere and air pressure, a lightening of mood. He saw earthquake debris strewn across the floor of the bedroom, and against the opposite wall, a broken television.
He was back.
Norton Norton understood the change immediately.
After the shaking stopped, he let go of the banister and stood, glancing around. The restrained House in which he'd spent the last several days, the House he'd shared with Laurie and Daniel and Stormy and Mark, was gone. This was the House of old, the wildly unpredictable House in which he'd grown up, and the sudden electric silence, the thick heavy air, theundefinable undercurrent that ran like a river of sludge beneath the surface reality around him, all told him that he was home.
Just to make sure, he walked down the hall to the room in which Stormy had been staying. The door was open, but there was no sign of Stormy or anyone else.
The room was what it had been in his childhood: a sewing room for his mother.
With an almost audible snap, the wall of silence was broken, and from farther down the hall he heard sound, noise. Low conversation. Laughter.
It was coming from the library, and he moved quietly, carefully, down the corridor. The lights were low, the hallway dark, and while the shadows provided him with cover, they also added to the already spooky and intimidating atmosphere. He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and tried not to breathe too loudly as he walked past Barren's room, past the bathroom, and to the library.
He stopped just before the door, poked his head around the edge of the door frame.
And saw his family.
He ducked quickly back, his heart pounding. It was suddenly hard to breathe; he felt as though he'd been punched in the stomach, and try as he might, he could not seem to suck enough air into his lungs. It was not a surprise, seeing his family. In fact, it was exactly what he'd expected. But somehow the reality of it carried an emotional weight no amount of imagining or intellectual preparation could anticipate.
They were playing Parcheesi, seated around the game table in the center of the room, and they looked the way they had when he was about twelve or so. His sisters were both wearing the calico party dresses their mother had made for them and which they'd worn, with a little letting-out, through most of their teens. Bella, the eldest, was feigning an air of disinterest in the game, as though family activities like this were juvenile and beneath her, but both his other sister Estelle and his brother Barren were laughing and joking with each other in an obviously competitive way. His parents, still in their early forties, sat across from each other, separating the sisters, smiling amusedly.
It was the type of evening they'd often spent at home together, after a hard day apart working and going to school, only there was something wrong this time, something out of place, and it took him a moment to realize what it was.
There were no books in the library.
How could he have not noticed something so obvious?
The floor-to-ceiling shelves were all empty. The dark wood wall behind the blank shelves lent the room the same air of formality it had possessed with the books, but it was as though they were playing Parcheesi in an empty house, an abandoned house, and the effect was creepy.
What had happened to the books? he wondered.
Where had they gone? All of his father's books had been in place downstairs, in the den.
But that had been back at the other House, the current House.
He was confused. Was he on the Other Side now?
Was the House allowing him to visit the ghosts, the souls, the spirits of his murdered family? Or, with the bizarre concept of time that seemed to exist in the House, were all time periods still extant? Could the House pop him in and out of different eras at will?
Either way, he could not face his family now, could not meet them. He would do so later, when he felt stronger, but for now he needed to be alone, to think, to sort things out.
One thing he'd always tried to impart to his students was the effect of the past on the present, the extent to which actions had reactions and events had repercussions that rippled forward into the future. Perhaps that was at the root of what was happening to him now.
Maybe the House was giving him an opportunity to discover the source of the ripples that had spread outward to resurrect Carole and affect the lives of Daniel and Stormy and Laurie and Mark.
Maybe it was giving him a chance to change it.
The thought was at once exciting and terrifying, but both emotions were small and intensely personal. If what Billingson--Billings--said was true, if the House--the Houses--really did maintain a barrier protecting the physical material world from the intrusion of the Other Side, then this was as big as ... no, bigger than . . .
being granted the chance to go back into time and kill the pre-Nazi Hitler.
But emotionally it didn't feel that way. He supposed it was because these were things he had just learned and the enormity of Nazi Germany and World War II had been validated by society, by the world, and had been drilled into him for over half a century, but the fact remained that this seemed much smaller in scope, much more personal and localized.
Considering the consequences, he supposed that was a good thing.
Norton moved away from the doorway, back down the hall, careful not to make a sound. Even after all these years, he remembered the location of the creaky spots in the floor, and he made a concerted effort to avoid them.
Once again, he found himself at the top of the stairs.
He started down, but when he glanced up from the steps, he saw graffiti on the wall of the stairwell ahead of him, a huge blue chalk drawing of a face, a simplistic rendering that looked as though it had been done by a not particularly talented five-year-old.