Everyone, including the camera and soundmen, turned toward the landing and the banister where Lionel Peterson was staring down.
“What in God’s name—” Damian Jackson started to ask.
“God has nothing to do with that, Detective,” George said. They looked down upon the large black shape standing in the light of the sensor at the base of the third floor stairs. The laser cast a red glow to its inky darkness. “Gabe, it’s grown in power, I feel its…hatred…no, his hatred.”
Kennedy looked at the entity and knew it was looking directly up at them.
“Is it Lindemann, George?”
“I…I…think so…no…Yes, it’s a man, definitely a man.”
Damian raised his gun but Kennedy placed a hand on the detective’s and lowered it.
“Come on, what the hell do you think you’re going to hit with that?”
Jackson was breathing deeply, hearing Kennedy’s words but also hanging onto the gun and its aim, simply because it was real, it was solid, and he could believe in it.
“Oh, man, listen to it,” the soundman said. He swung the boom mic over the edge of the banister.
Below them, the black shape stood its ground. It rolled like a thundercloud, turning its midsection into a jumble of mass, and every time it moved its chest area, they heard the ragged breathing. It was a deep, foreboding sound. They could make out the neck and the head. They all knew it looked up at them with extreme hatred; they could feel it.
“Temperature reading is twenty-five degrees and falling,” Gabriel said as he checked the thermometer on his digital watch.
“May I suggest that we move away from the landing,” Peterson said. He took a step backward, brushing by a frozen Damian Jackson. “I think Professor Kennedy has proven his point.”
As Julie Reilly stepped back from the railing, she heard a crack and the wall gave way, hitting her hard and pushing her forward into George Cordero. The cameraman turned just as the skeletal remains of Warren Miller fell across Julie’s backside. She screamed and George, who had turned, also froze just as Jackson just had at the landing. Gabriel moved first and pulled Julie out from under the body of his former student. He was shaking and almost screaming. As soon as Julie was free, he angrily turned back to the third floor banister. He gripped the rail, moving slowly at first, then faster, to the stairs.
“You son of a bitch!” he shouted at the thing staring up at him. The movement sensors flashed upward as the entity took a step up. “Is that what you’re good at, scaring and killing kids?”
“For God’s sake, you fool, what are you doing?” Peterson yelled, trying to pull the professor back from the stairs.
“MINE!” came the roar from the second floor as the thing took another two steps upward. The sensors illuminated brightly as it moved.
Gabriel shook himself and then looked at the faces lined in the green, red and blue laser grid. They were looking at him for an answer. For the first time, he knew he had a house full of believers. He turned back to the stairs.
“F.E. Lindemann, we know who you are!” he shouted.
The laughter came immediately — thick, full of spite, and accompanied by the smell of putrescence, as though a graveyard had opened and spilled forth its corpses.
“You’re mine!” the entity bellowed. The sound boomed, as if it had originated in hell and not twenty steps just below them.
Julie was trying to keep the bile down as she stared at the skeleton of Kennedy’s lost student. The voice called from the grill again.
“RUN!”
Only Julie and George Cordero heard, and then saw, the door three rooms down slowly open.
“The room…” Julie actually spit some of the bile from her mouth as the cameraman swung to his right from the entity to Julie as she spoke. “The room where the German opera star vanished close to a century…ago, has opened.” She quickly pushed George forward, and then the soundman. Then she screamed for Jackson and Peterson. Gabriel turned, and with one last look at the entity roiling and shifting three steps up from the bottom, turned and followed the others into the lost diva’s room.
“NO!” the entity screamed. The sensors illuminated the mass as it shot toward the third floor landing. The boom of footsteps sounded inside Summer Place and the house was shaken on its foundation.
As Gabriel and Jackson slammed the thick door home and bolted it, the entity slammed into the opposite side. The door bent inward but held. Jackson didn’t care any longer — he again pulled the gun and quickly fired two bullets through the door.
“Don’t do that! That door’s barely strong enough to—” Peterson started. The entity struck the door again, creating not only a dent in the wood, but a boom as if it had been struck by a cannonball. In the blackness of the room, they all gasped each time the mass struck the door. Damian was slowly backing away.
“Jesus, that thing wants to actually kill us!” the soundman screamed.
“Listen!” Gabriel said.
Out in the hallway, just as the entity struck the door a tremendous blow, they heard the deep and booming footsteps moving back down the hallway — in both directions.
“George?” Gabriel asked. He stared at the door as the beast outside hit it once more, shaking the thick wood in its frame.
“It’s still there…No; wait…Part of it is going to the sewing room, and…and—”
“What goddamn it?” Peterson screamed.
George tilted his head and closed his eyes. “Part of it is going to the ballroom…and another part is going outside!”
“Good God, it’s going for John and the others,” Gabriel said.
“But why outside?” Julie asked.
“The production van,” George said, his face draining of all color. “It wants to stop it all.”
Julie once more put the static filled earpiece into her ear and started calling a warning out to Harris Dalton and the production team outside.
“Use the camera to warn them,” Gabriel shouted, “and pray it’s still transmitting a live feed!”
Just as the words escaped Kennedy’s mouth, the door cracked straight down the middle.
The entity laughed, and then began screaming a single word that was heard all the way into the ballroom and the production van two hundred feet away.
“Mine, Mine, Mine!”
TWENTY-TWO
John’s breathing would go shallow one moment and then he would gasp for air the next. Jennifer and Leonard were both becoming worried that he was too far under. The way Lonetree and Gabriel had explained the Dream Walks, he never went so deep that his own movements wouldn’t wake him. But now he was thrashing, screaming and whimpering.
“Maybe we should try to wake him?” Leonard said.
Jennifer swallowed and bit her lower lip. There was a chance they would have to do just that.
John stood in the middle of the brightly lit ballroom watching men and women in formal attire roam the room with drinks while a string quartet played. People coursed in and around the rows of chairs that had been set up in front of the small stage. There were close to a hundred people of varying ages, and their dress was obviously from the twenties or thirties. John quickly stepped back as a small woman in a maid’s outfit walked right through him. He gasped as he felt the woman’s thoughts and feelings. When he turned around she was offering a glass of champagne to a couple who accepted without a thank you. She was angry that she had to perform two jobs during the night. As he watched, the small woman headed toward the crowded bar and placed the tray of filled glasses on the end. Then she wiped her hands and made her way toward the large double doors.