“Where is it now?” her husband said.
“Upstairs.”
“Have it come down and unlock the door.” Gelbaugh had moved away from the stairs and was apparently across the room, near the furnace.
“Channeling doesn’t work that way,” Amelia’s husband said.
“Margaret said it doesn’t want us to leave,” Amelia said.
“Why did it take Margaret?”
“Not Margaret. The angel.”
“A beastie gets lonely?” Gelbaugh said. “I thought all those hounds of hell hung out together in one big pack?”
“You don’t understand theology,” said the claustrophobe, forgetting his panic in the rush of a channeling experience. “In the pantheon of demons and angels, there’s a definite hierarchy, and some are lesser demons.”
“Wonderful. So we can look forward to yet more politics in the next life. That’s comforting.”
Wayne touched the cool masonry with his hand, easing his way toward the newer portion of the hotel, where the kitchen and dining room were. He felt disembodied in the utter darkness, no longer sure of his moorings. He could have been drifting in deep space, submerged in oil, or encased in liquid nitrogen and dreaming of one day having his corpse reanimated.
“Okay, people,” he called, more to reassure himself than to keep them informed. “I’m checking out the new wing.”
“Meet you there,” Gelbaugh called from the other side of the basement.
Amelia continued her spacey, droning delivery, talking about Margaret Percival coming down to the basement through the service entrance and—
Service entrance?
“Amelia,” Wayne yelled. “The service entrance. Where’s that at?”
“She can’t talk right now, she’s channeling,” her ever-helpful husband said.
“I need to know where that entrance is.”
“Behind the kitchen,” she said, then continued recounting Margaret’s visit to the basement. “And Belial found her her here. She never left.”
The boiler gave a dismal sigh but didn’t ignite, as if something in there agreed with Ameila.
Wayne reviewed his mental snapshots of the basement. The kitchen likely lay in the section where the pipes and wires had tangled and multiplied like a nest of snakes. He moved faster, chafing his hands on the crude stonework. A sense of urgency juiced him up.
If Amelia’s right about a demon running loose up there, and Kendra—
He bumped his head on a pipe. Even if he was lucky enough to find a door, it would probably be locked, too, but he might have more luck jimmying it open if it was flimsier than the main entrance.
The rumbling came again. He was nearly to the kitchen when a scream ripped through the dead air of the basement.
Chapter 43
“Kendra?”
The voice came swimming down to her through a sea of night.
She grunted, trying to suck oxygen into the brick tombs of her lungs. Maybe this was death, and God was calling her onto the carpet. Time to pay for that Tegan and Sara CD she’d shoplifted, all the movies she’d illegally downloaded, that lie she’d told her teacher when she skipped out on a chemistry test. So it all caught up with you, just the way the televangelists said.
Emily Dee paints herself into one last corner.
She heard her name again. God must have figured out she was hardheaded and had to be told several times. Might as well go in with attitude blazing.
“Who turned out the lights?” she whispered with a scant scrap of air.
“Whew, thought you’d knocked your noggin,” Cody said. His hands moved over her, unhurried and confident. “Any broken bones?”
“It hurts too much to tell.”
“Well, at least we’re out of the clutches of Demon Child up there.”
Cody helped her sit up, and she brushed the plaster dust from her face and shoulders. She could just make out his face, and only a dim square of distant light from a window broke the blackness.
“The electricity must be out,” Cody said.
“Did the demons do it?”
“So you’re a believer now, huh?”
“Nothing says ‘bone-chilling horror’ like floating kids with bloody red eyes,” she said. “So, now what?”
She could barely make out Cody’s silhouette as he glanced back up at the ceiling. “Sure you don’t want your sketch pad?”
Something fluttered down from the torn gap and Kendra ducked, thinking it was a bird or a flock of bats. Or a flock of flying dead kids.
The pad landed at her feet and she swooped it up. “Thanks, Bruce,” she whispered.
A thump came from the service closet, as if the flashlight had bounced down the attic stairs. Then the floor quivered beneath her feet, wood groaning. Broken glass tinkled in the distance. The motion stopped as suddenly as it began.
“Whoa,” Cody said. “Earthquake.”
“No. The Appalachians are stable. Oldest mountains on Earth.”
“Bummer. So we can rule out natural causes?”
“Better hit the control room and see what’s going on. There’s nobody on this floor.” Kendra tucked her sketch pad under her arm and headed down the hall, wondering if any guests occupied the rooms. If so, they were staying put, and since most of them were participating in the hunt, they should be prowling around and enjoying the darkness.
As her eyes adjusted, she was better able to see the hole in the ceiling. A wisp of shadow appeared there, and she was about to mention it to Cody, but it faded fast enough for her to chalk it up to imagination. Wishful thinking worked two ways in the paranormal game: seeing things that weren’t there, and not seeing things that were probably there but you hoped weren’t.
Rochester, Bruce, Dorrie. How many other kids were hanging around the hotel when they should be off playing in the Great Playground in the Sky? And what about you, Mom? What’s here that’s better than wherever you’re supposed to be?
“No flashlight, no walkie-talkie,” Cody said behind her.
“And no weapons,” Kendra said, knowing how silly the declaration sounded. You couldn’t suck ghosts up into a vacuum cleaner and dump them out on a stiff breeze. You could give them the paranormal version of talk therapy and convince them to go toward the light, but they had to be willing to listen.
If Cody was right and these entities were demonic, then they would have no reason to check out. After all, they’d probably been here so long they had metaphysical squatter’s rights.
Which means Mom is a demon?
Cody reached out, touched her back, and let his hand trail down until he found her hand. They walked side by side, limping a little, moving carefully in the gloom.
“Why here?” she asked Cody, feeling a little safer now that they’d moved some distance from the attic access and the hole in the ceiling. The sense of security was illogical, because spirits didn’t need doors, but it was instinctive and reassuring nonetheless.
“You could spend years researching,” Cody said. “But at some point, somebody invited one in. And the others probably showed up like sharks at a bloodbath. They feed on weakness and depravity. The idea of ‘sin’ is not just something invented by priests to control people’s behavior. It’s about knowing right and wrong and still choosing wrong.”
“So demons sniff out a broken soul and come set up shop?”
“Something like that.”
“How do you explain the kids?”
“It’s a shell game. Demons use whatever façade does the job. And the job is to create doubt and confusion, to weaken all they encounter, to disturb the structure and rules of this world. This is God’s turf, and nothing makes them happier than to piss in the shrubbery.”
The rumbling came again, and this time Kendra steadied herself against the wall until the quake passed. They were near the window, and they could see the lawn and the dirt road leading to the White Horse. “No traffic,” Kendra said.
“It’s after midnight in the offseason,” Cody said.
“Nobody comes, nobody goes, huh?”
“That’s your dad’s decision. He’s still in charge, after all.”