Oh crap. She must have talked about the door, the click, the cold that ate the flame, and something living in the dark. How nutty would all that sound to these people? “I might … I might have made a mistake about that,” she said.
“Yes? And what mistake might that be?” When she was silent, Battle said, “Or mightn’t there have been something else you discovered below stairs, secreted down a hidden passage off the servants’ quarters? Something so horrible that your mind completely unhinged? That this is a hysterical fantasy of dual identities you’ve manufactured because it is preferable to the truth?”
“No,” she said, with a sudden, sickening dismay. “I … I know what I saw.” But did she? The doctors were always so pissed that she wouldn’t take her meds, and she blinked away so often.
Stop this. You know what you know. Listen to the way you think. It’s not like them at all. You know things they don’t. You’ve seen the future.
Kramer said, “No one doubts your sincere belief in the fiction you’ve written or the characters; the duality of the brain and variations de la personnalité that allow you to people your world. Anything is better than remembering what was really there: not a door—”
“No.” She felt her fist tighten around the knife. This was like The Bell Jar: Esther Greenwood going slowly nuts, déjà vu all over again. “No, there was a door, a hand, and it was cold, it was—”
“It was not a door, but a gap, a tomb, an abomination of a reliquary,” Battle said. “A pile of rubble, a heap of crumbling mortar and disintegrating brick. Not a phantasmagorical tale out of Poe or Wilkie Collins, but something real, with texture and color and a stink of decay—”
“Stop. I won’t listen to you.” This couldn’t be happening. She knew about 9/11 and movies, relativity and Hardy’s Paradox and Starbucks. “I don’t remember anything but my life, my life, my real—”
“And bones,” Battle interrupted. “Bones, Elizabeth.”
“B-bones?” She couldn’t pull in enough air. “No, no, I don’t know … I didn’t see—”
“But I did. I’ve seen the evidence myself in the blackened skeletal remains of the corpses you discovered below stairs. You found the murderer hard at work, a demon masquerading as a man; a monster that spirited you away and would’ve made you his next victim. There is no house to which you may return because he burned it to the ground in a futile attempt to obliterate any evidence of his crime. In that, at least, he has failed. But make no mistake: whatever feelings you may still have for him, this man is a lunatic. He is depravity and evil incarnate,” Battle said, in a voice so heavy with doom, with words so weighty with the inevitable, they felt as remorseless as hammer blows. “And he wears your father’s face.”
4
THE WORLD STOPPED. It just. Paused. The time was short, only as long as the speed of thought, but it was as if she were falling again, swooning into a great darkness from which she would never escape.
Then the world began to spin once more, and a flood of horror washed through her veins at the same instant that a bright flash, like the death of a lightbulb, popped in the black of her mind, as if the private movie that was her life had decided to start up again.
The image, every sensation, was crisp and brutally clear: broken bits of mortar on chill, packed earth; the funk of mold and something gassy and much fouler, like meat going green with decay; an empty black square from which rotten bricks had tumbled; and a scurrying, scritch-scratchy sound of rats’ feet over stone. Of whispers from shadows, in the dark. And when she lifted her candle and reached in … When she reached in, she’d touched …
Fingers, limp and still. A hand as cold and smooth as glass with nothing beyond the wrist but hard bone stringy with dead flesh and leathery sinew …
And, farther back, gleaming in the candle’s uncertian light, a face with wide, black, staring sockets …
No. Her mind shied away. No, that can’t be right, not when I can remember the others and Eric, Eric, where are you, where—
“Listen to him, Elizabeth,” Kramer said. “Inspector Battle is telling the truth. Your father was a monster. He would’ve murdered you.”
No, no, that wasn’t true. Her father was a pathetic asshole who strangled himself with the ratty laces of tattered All Stars. “No, I know what I saw, what I felt.” She was panting again as sobs swelled in her chest. “When I reached into the Dark Passages, something grabbed me and … and …” Her tongue stumbled.
“Yes?” Kramer prompted. Two attendants had sidled closer, but he put out a restraining hand. “What is it?”
The radios. She almost said those words aloud, but she’d sound even crazier spouting nonsense about boxes that talked. Radios would not be invented for, well, a long time. Yet talk of the murders had been on every station. Lily mentioned how that was all the radios talked about. Lily had known. So had Bode. Had the others?
The important thing was she hadn’t known one single solitary thing about the murders. Not. One.
And yet, at different points during this long night, she’d heard radios and words, so broken and distorted she barely understood. What issued from their mechanical throats were always portions of the same story, like the recurring theme of a melody she didn’t know, whose words she just couldn’t catch.
Police. Investigation. A young girl’s discovery of …
’Orrible murder. She could hear the Kramer of her Now in an exaggerated Cockney: ’orrible murders and ghastly crimes fit for a Victorian tabloid.
My God. She was shaking so hard, it was a wonder her body didn’t break into a million pieces. This Now … this is my reality? The rest was a … a delusion? A hallucination?
“Would you like to know how many children your father murdered, Miss Elizabeth?” Battle asked.
No, she didn’t need him to tell her, because she knew, exactly: There will be—
“Eight bodies,” Battle intoned, in his heavy doom-voice. “Eight children. Five boys, three girls. You’d have been the ninth.”
The same number I put in my story, the one I wrote for Kramer; the one he accused me of stealing from a dead man. Her heart boomed. Her skull was breaking apart. This was like when she’d perched on the other side of White Space, watching Lizzie crash, her mind so tangled in the little girl’s she’d felt Lizzie’s terror, known her thoughts. But that was House …