Starter House(29)

Ella Dane had closed her computer and was stirring a pan of refried beans on the stove. “We’re having burritos,” she said. “Grab some plates, would you?”

Lacey opened the cabinet and pulled out a couple of plates. “Did you?”

Ella Dane moved the pan off the heat. “There was a draft on my neck.”

Lacey took a breath and held it. Ella Dane used to read tarot for her friends, and then stopped, five years ago, because (she said) she was getting too good at it and did not want to open herself to demonic influences. Her last boyfriend, Jack McMure, specialized in spiritual cleansing, coming into homes that had suffered violent crimes or unhappy deaths and chanting until the spirits left. If anyone would believe her, Ella Dane would, but Ella Dane had lived in the house for a month and sensed nothing. And if she did believe, she’d call Jack in, and Lacey would have to explain it to Eric.

“Are you feeling something in the house?” Ella Dane said. “Bibbits has been nervous. He’s an old soul, you know. Very sensitive.”

“There’s a little boy; he keeps coming in,” Lacey said, and something crashed upstairs: broken glass, and then something heavy, tumbling and shattering as it fell.

“Bibbits!” Ella Dane cried, and the dog barked once and then retreated to the safety of a cage of chair legs. He was shivering, with his black lips pulled off his teeth in a soundless snarl, and the stub of his tail tucked low. His panting accelerated and deepened into a cough.

The house rang with cracks and claps, and a long rending splinter, some thick piece of wood, twisted until its fibers ripped, and the air conditioner surged on again, flooding chill air from every vent. Ella Dane rushed for the stairs, with Lacey following more slowly. Footsteps crossed the upstairs hall, which was visibly empty, with a fat serpent of dust drifting and the afternoon light striking slant columns through it. The footsteps hurried through the dust, and not one mote turned in their wake. The bathroom door slammed open and rebounded from the wall.

“Who’s there?” Ella Dane said in a soothing voice. “We won’t hurt you.”

Her courage took Lacey’s breath away. This invisible thing shook the house from door to roof, and Ella Dane promised not to hurt it? Lacey wished she herself could be so bold.

All the upstairs doors stood open, except Ella Dane’s. The dust rotated through the sun-slant, and behind the white door Ella Dane’s room exploded. Lacey shrieked and covered her face, while Ella Dane hugged her. The noise went on and on, a pounding fury, footsteps racing around the room, splintering wood, flying objects crashing into walls; such a sound should have been the harmony to a scream of rage, yet they heard no voice. It ended at last, and Lacey saw she had squeezed her mother’s hands white.

“Who’s there?” Ella Dane said again, massaging her knuckles. She opened the bedroom door.

The window was broken and its frame hung in long deadly shards from the wall. The room was shattered, destroyed, the furniture broken to bits. Ella Dane’s clothes and books were shredded. Pieces of the dresser and the bed jutted from the drywall. Parts of the ceiling were shattered; Lacey saw the beams, and shreds of pink insulation bulging down from the attic. It looked like the kind of damage left by a tornado, dresser drawers freakishly impaling the wall, a paperback book driven into the ceiling.

Lacey pressed her hands over her mouth. She couldn’t think about Drew, angry for a reason she couldn’t guess and dangerous in his anger, or about Ella Dane who owned so little, that little now ruined—she could only think of Eric. He couldn’t see this, his mind didn’t work this way, he couldn’t stand it. She thought of the way he’d been ready to give up their engagement, their life together, everything, just because it turned out his parents were crooks. His mind didn’t change easily. That was her job, to find out the new life and lead him into it. This, though, was a life he would not live. She started gathering shreds of purple batik cotton, the remains of Ella Dane’s favorite skirt. “We have to clean it up right now,” she said. “Help me.”

There was no glass on the floor under the empty window. The window had been broken from inside. Ella Dane took the purple cotton scraps from Lacey’s hands. “What’s in your house?” she asked. “Is this a poltergeist? How long has this been happening?”

“How come you don’t know?”

“You said there was a little boy. A spirit?”

“I don’t know.”

“A ghost? He talks to you, you see him? And he’s hidden from me—that’s not just an imprint, that’s intelligent. Maybe even demonic.” Ella Dane seemed to take to this idea with a gleeful excitement. “Has it touched you?”