The chalk figure winked at him.
Smiled.
There was only one tooth in its poorly drawn mouth and that should have made it look goofy, comical, but instead it lent the face an air of wildness, and Norton was afraid to continue down the steps, afraid to pass beneath the gaze of the face. It was a strange facet of human nature, but horror was much more frightening on a small scale than a large one. More than all of the talk of the Other Side and the afterlife, more than the possibility of dire epic consequences, it was the intimate simplicity of this chalk drawing that spoke directly to his fear center, that dried up the saliva in his mouth and made his heart pound wildly, his blood run cold.
The round face tilted to the left, to the right, its single toothed mouth opening and closing.
It was laughing.
Norton ran. He did it without thinking, without planning, without pausing to consider his options and weigh the outcomes. At that second, he wanted only to get away from that horrible drawing and its terrifying movements, and he bolted back up the few steps he'd descended and took off down the hallway as fast as his old legs would carry him. He considered stopping before reaching the library, not wanting to see his family or let them know he was here, but he could still visualize in his mind the rocking movement of the laughing face, the opening and closing mouth, and in his imagination it was making a horrible clicking noise, like a school film projector, the individual sounds synchronized precisely with the drawing's movements, and that made him run all the faster.
He sped by the library door, hoping no one saw him but not pausing to check. His plan was to go down the back stairs, but here, finally, he stopped, afraid he'd see another graffiti drawing on this back wall. There was nothing there, though. At least nothing he could see in the dim light. He took a deep breath, gathered his courage, and ran downstairs.
He reached the bottom of the steps without incident, and immediately moved away from the stairwell. His heart was still thumping in his chest so hard that he felt as if he would go into cardiac arrest any second, but already he was ashamed of himself for running, and even as he backed away from the staircase, he swore that he would not give in to fear again. He'd panicked, acted on instinct, and he was determined that next time he would stand his ground, would think before he acted.
Next time?
Yes. There would be a next time.
Norton looked around. He'd lived in this House until he was eighteen, had spent the last few days in it (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), but right now he could not say precisely where in the House he was. The intersecting corridors and closed doors did not look familiar to him, and his sense of direction seemed to be off. He could not get his bearings. If he remembered right, the back stairs ended near the laundry and storage rooms.
This certainly didn't look like the laundry area, but he walked over to the closed door opposite him and pulled it open.
The room before him was huge, twice the size of the library, as big as the sitting room and the dining room combined. No pictures hung on its bare walls. There was no furniture.
The room was completely empty except for the books.
Still holding on to the doorknob, Norton stared.
Books, hundreds of them, had been placed on end and stood next to each other like dominoes, making a trail that snaked through an elaborate design covering almost the entire floor of the massive space, twisting and curving, circling around, making sudden sharp turns at sharp angles.
He didn't know whether it was what he was supposed to do or not supposed to do, but it was what he wanted to do, and he kicked over the first book, the one closest to the door, and watched as the rest of them all went down sequentially, the room suddenly echoing with a series of rapid-fire slaps and muffled thuds, dust jacket hitting dust jacket, cover smacking cover, everything hitting the floor.
It took a good two minutes for all of the books to go down, for the wave to pass through the room, and he stood there unmoving, his eyes following the falling books as the pattern wound around the opposite side of the room and then finally returned to the area near the door.
Now that the books were flat, he could see the design they had been arranged to make.
The same face as the chalk drawing.
The single-toothed mouth grinned crazily upward at the ceiling.
Norton backed away. Again, his first instinct was to run, but he checked that impulse and instead breathed deeply, forcing himself to remain in place. This face did not move, did not wink, did not laugh, showed no sign of animation. He thought for a moment, then walked into the room, kicking books to the right and to the left, destroying the carefully wrought pattern. He strode all the way to the opposite wall and all the way back, and when he was through it looked as though the books had simply been dumped into this room haphazardly, without any thought to their placement, and he closed the door behind him and started off down the hall toward where he thought the front of the House should be.
He ended up in another junction of two corridors. He turned left, and now he recognized where he was. This hallway led to the foyer and the front of the House.
A snake slithered across the floor in front of him--a green snake with a pale, barely visible underbelly--and he thought of Laurie. Where were the others now? He wondered. In their own childhood Houses? Going through their own tests and trials and tribulations?
He watched the snake flatten, slide through the thin space under the bathroom door.
It was amazing how quickly he'd fallen back into the rhythm of the House. He was scared--he couldn't claim to be unaffected by the manifestations thrown at him-- but they did not really surprise him, and he did not question them. He accepted their existence, considered them as much a part of the House as the wallpaper and light fixtures.
Just as he had all those decades ago.
He knew now that it was because the House was on the border, that it was the mixing of the material world and the . . . other world which created these surreal shifts in reality, but this understanding was on a purely intellectual level. As a child, long before he'd been made aware of the purpose of the House, he had adjusted to its wild displays and bizarre juxtapositions, and acceptance had been achieved long before understanding.
There was a noise behind him, a tapping. He turned And it was Carole.
Seeing her ghost was almost like seeing an old friend.
In life, they hadn't gotten along particularly well. At least not for the past half decade or so. And after her death, seeing her ghost around their home and last night, especially, had been frightening and disturbing. But his life had taken a 180-degree turn, and here, in this House, he was glad to see her ghost. It was comforting, a pleasant surprise, and he looked at her naked form and found himself smiling. "Carole," he said.
She did not smile back. "Your family is waiting for you."
He shook his head as though he had not heard correctly.
"What?"
"You need to talk to your family. Your parents. Your brother. Your sisters."
There was no expression on her face, only a dispassionate blankness, and his own smile had completely disappeared.
The last thing he wanted to do was talk to his family. "Why?" he asked.
"That is why you are here."
"To meet with them?"
The ghost nodded.
"I will," he said. "Eventually."
"No you won't."
He met her eyes. "Maybe I won't."
"You can't keep avoiding them," Carole said.
"Watch me."
The two of them faced each other, and he realized suddenly that the reason he was so apprehensive about meeting his family again was because he felt responsible for their deaths. It was his fault they had been killed. If he had not stopped seeing Donna, if he had not dumped her, she would not have taken this revenge on him. Hell, if he hadn't gotten involved with her in the first place, if he had not stoned seeing her, he would not have had to stop seeing her. No matter which way he sliced it, it was his fault that his parents, his brother, and his sisters had been murdered, and that was why he had been unwilling to talk to them, to meet them, why he had been so uncomfortable even seeing them again. He didn't know if this version of his family knew what had happened to them or what would happen to them, but he was afraid that they'd confront him about it, that they'd blame him, and while he could handle supernatural snakes and recurring ghosts and book-faces, he did not think he would be able to handle that.