The 'Geisters

THE TOWER OF LIGHT

“I’d apologize for not telling you about this place,” said Ian as they climbed down a sweeping set of stairs past a long, empty registration desk and a little lobby, “but really, I don’t feel I owe you that. If your boss Krenk had won the bid to make my winery—if he’d shown the vision… then you probably would have had an idea all on your own what was happening here. But in the end… couldn’t trust him.”

“Because it’s a secret conference centre,” said Ann.

They moved past the registration desk and into a glassed-in corridor. Outside, Ann thought she could see the dawn coming—a hint of pink over treetops.

“Because I couldn’t trust him,” said Ian. “When you’re involved in something like I am—we are—trust is paramount.”

“Like a bottom trusts a top,” said Ann. “You’ve got to keep your safe words straight.”

Ian gave her a look.

“It’s not like that,” he said, and she said, “Of course it’s not.”

The corridor went down a gentle slope, and turned. Double doors at the far end led to the Octagon Ballroom, according to the signage. They stopped there. Ian thrust his hands into his pockets and looked down at his bare feet, as though he were waiting, for something.

“This would have been a good place to hold the wedding,” observed Ann, and Ian chuckled at that.

“Who was it who a moment ago said we should drop pretense?”

In spite of herself, Ann smiled. Ian folded his arms and leaned against the glass.

“It’s not rape,” he said. “But I can see how you’d think it is. Because it’s certainly sexual. And consent… well, it’s complicated.”

Ann leaned against the glass opposite him, folded her arms to mirror Rickhardt. “I have to hear this,” she said.

“You ever read any of Stephen King’s stuff?”

“I started the Dark Tower series in high school. I read the book with the story about the boys going to find a body in the woods. Otherwise, you can imagine his stuff might not be my thing.”

“Yeah. He also wrote a non-fiction book, early on, called Danse Macabre. He came up with a hierarchy in it, of the sort of thing that a writer of horror fiction aims for. It’s a hierarchy of fear. At the bottom is the simple gross-out—torture, or maiming; up from that is horror: the face of the monster, giant fucking bugs, zombies on the march. And finally… there’s terror. King calls that the finest emotion of all. And in that—we are in agreement.”

“All right. So what does this have to—”

Ian kept going. “Yeah, so here’s how he describes terror. It’s the cold hand that touches you in the dark. It’s coming home and realizing all the furniture in your house has been replaced by furniture that’s exactly the same. It’s the knowledge that reality is tearing away underneath you. That there’s a dark place underneath it that has nothing to do with you, except that it maybe wants to eat you.

“That, Ann, is the nub of it. It’s more complicated than that. But that is what we all share—and what you and I share too.”

“I don’t think we share anything.”

“Well it may be true that we don’t share the sexual component. If that’s what you’re guessing.”

“Hirsch seemed to think that there was more to poltergeists than sex, though.”

“Yes,” said Rickhardt, “he does. I think it’s fair to say that the American guys like to think about it that way. I think it’s in their national character; they can only enjoy something if they pin it to manifest destiny, divine will. So of course, the ’geists are a gateway to the divine. What else did he tell you?”

“He told me about you,” said Ann. “He said he’d protect me from you.”

Ian smirked. “Those guys can be pretty judgmental down there in the sunshine state. But you knew enough to not fall into his arms, didn’t you?”

“The Insect decided that for me.”

“It made the right choice. They have a place outside of St. Augustine. Visited there once. They were inducing comas at the time. They thought it enhanced things; unleashed the Id or some shit. But it was a bad idea. I don’t think they’re doing that anymore. But still. Nowhere you’d want to go.”

“So terror,” said Ann. “You’re telling me that this is a kink for terror.”

“It sounds so tawdry when you reduce it to that. The Americans take it too far in the other direction, maybe. But there’s a big difference between what we do in these walls… and what goes on at a German fetish bar, say. Those people are playing a game, with their leather costumes and safe words.

“We’re doing the real thing, Ann. When we stare into the abyss—it really is staring back.”

“And yet, in the end it simply arouses you sexually.”

“There you go again, being all reductive.”

“Is there a more nuanced way that I should be thinking about this?”

Ian opened his mouth to speak, then shook his head and smiled, a little sheepishly.

“So it’s like really raping children rather than just looking at child pornography,” said Ann, “if you were a pedophile, I mean.”

“A ’geister,” said Ian, not smiling now, “is what I am.”

“That’s a cute name,” said Ann. “But I’m willing to bet that when I came to you ’geisters’ attention, I wasn’t much more than eight years old. Hirsch told me that much… that they’d been watching me for some time. And there’s that little girl I met. With what—Mister Sleepy? Tell me—is Dr. Sunderland a ’geister too? I remember that Philip warned me about him. Did he touch Philip?”

“Wow,” said Ian, “cards on the table.”

Behind him, the sky was lightening. Ann could see it resolving behind the bare branches of the denuded woods around here. The tree branches descended down beneath the floor so it became clear that this wasn’t just a covered walkway between buildings. They were on an enclosed bridge, crossing a ravine.

“He at least worked for you, didn’t he? We thought he was helping us—but he wasn’t, was he?”

“He was helping you,” said Ian. “You either would have burned down your house or been in the nuthatch within a year if you hadn’t gone there. Sunderland put your ’geist, the Insect, someplace safe. Someplace where it couldn’t hurt anybody, and nobody could hurt it.”

“And it worked great.”

“It worked for a long time. We should’ve been following closer. The accident… that should’ve tipped us off. But it didn’t fit the profile. So you got away from us for a while.”

“And then—Michael.”

“He was a good kid,” said Ian.

“He was a rapist. A fucking liar,” said Ann.

Ian nodded in agreement. “He was a liar. He had an agenda in your marriage that he didn’t tell you about. But I’ll tell you—he would’ve treated you well, if he’d had the chance.”

“How would that have worked? He’d keep me in white wine and video games upstairs, while he and his friends, what—terrified each other to orgasm in the rumpus room?” Ann shook her head. “Where the hell did you find him, anyway? And did you promise me to him? It really did seem as though we just met, the way… you know, normal people meet.”

“Michael I found on the internet,” said Ian. “You think of us as this terrible secret society, and while it’s true that we communicate—really, it’s not a big secret. We’re a community. We have websites and chat rooms just like anybody.”

“How perfectly innocent of you.”

“Well I wouldn’t go that far. But we pay attention to those chatrooms—because that, really, is just the modern variation of how all of us got involved with each other. Me, I was bit old for that. I came to this through EC horror comics, those Warren magazines… Famous Monsters of Film Land. I met people…. Well, Michael just signed himself up on “Spectral Women,” and we started up a friendship. Good thing for him, too—he was still in Capetown, and would’ve got himself killed if he stayed there longer.”

“He didn’t speak a lot about South Africa,” said Ann.

“He was taking a lot of risks. His family had a bit of money. His dad was a lawyer, like him. He’d had a post with the government, during Apartheid, gone into practice afterward. They had a nice big house. A compound, really. You could spend your whole life there, not step out at all. Got the sense it was designed for that; Mr. Voors had some enemies. Or at least, he thought he did.”

Ann’s fists clenched, but she kept them at her side. You have some enemies too, Rickhardt. “What risks did he take?” she asked.

“There was something going on around his house—maybe those enemies at work. Michael told me about some experiences he’d had as a little kid. Faces at his windows; cold drafts. It might have been the real thing. It probably was. And it was terrifying. But of course—”

“—he got to like it.”

“He did,” said Ian. “He saw it all as a mystery at first, like he was in one of those boy detective books, where the haunting would turn out to have a perfectly rational explanation for the thing that he saw.”

“What did he see?”

“Would it help you understand if I said Michael saw a beautiful, naked girl?” Ian chuckled. “I don’t know exactly what he saw. I’m sure he didn’t know exactly what he saw. He was only twelve, when he started into it.”

“That’s young,” said Ann, and Ian gave her a look that she couldn’t quite apprehend.

“Ten years later, he could have learned everything he needed to know with a Google search. As it was, he did his work the old-fashioned way. He left the compound. He went to the library. Started asking around. He visited shops. Found out about séances, and covens, and ‘secret ceremonies.’ Got him robbed a couple of times. Could have got him killed, given the times. Finally, years later, he got himself mixed up with a sangoma—a witch doctor, sort of a healer woman. She was a beautiful girl, now. Not much older than him.”

“Did she seduce him?”

“Oh, in a way. But by that time, he’d found the websites—the chatrooms. She was showing him things—and he, the little idiot, was taking pictures and telling stories and bringing them to us, uploading them to a room we had running on GEnie.”

“What?”

“Before your time,” said Rickhardt. “But the point is, they were up there. Where anybody could see. That was when I noticed him. They were real treasures. There was one in particular—of a human femur, dug out of a grave it looked like, floating in the air above a woman, who was floating herself, just a foot off the ground. It was taken in a Capetown slum, in what looked like early morning. The sun made it all golden. I got in touch with him directly, because I wanted to know if it had been manipulated. He offered to show me the negative.”

“Negative?”

“He shot it on film,” said Ian. “No camera phones in those days.”

“That sounds risky,” said Ann, and Ian allowed as it was.

“I tried to steer him away from that—if nothing else, it wasn’t making it any easier with his family, who didn’t like him consorting with the sangoma and her friends, and there was trouble there too. Michael very nearly didn’t make it out of there. Do you know what necklacing is?”

Ann nodded. “Michael told me about it on our first date,” she said. “He didn’t use the term. He just called it a tire thing. But I looked it up.”

Back when that was the worst thing that I thought Michael brought to this relationship.

“Yeah, it’s never far from his mind. You fill up a tire with gasoline, put it around your victim’s neck and light it on fire. Watch him die. It takes a long time.

“They got as far as pouring the gasoline in the tire and putting it over his head, before they let him go. It was a warning. He’d followed his sangoma girl to an exorcism for a little girl. The family had been ANC, during Apartheid, and they were, shall we say, private people. They caught him taking pictures. They wanted to make sure that didn’t happen again, but didn’t quite want to kill him. Still—the display made an impression.”

“He didn’t tell me about that part.”

“Of course he didn’t; he was ashamed of what he did. He was a liar, and he was compelled toward these things… the ’geists. That compulsion—we all accept it, but nobody’s proud of it. But he wasn’t some monster. None of us are.” Ian rubbed the back of his neck and looked outside, over Ann’s shoulder. What was he looking for? “Most of what he was, you knew: an immigrant from South Africa who took his law degree at Osgoode and didn’t speak with his father anymore. I sponsored him, and I helped him with his tuition, and he stayed with me in Toronto while he was studying, and he became—yes, like a son to me.”

“And from pretty early on, you had him zeroed in on me.”

“It was all he ever wanted,” said Ian. “He would have treated you well.”

Dawn broke over the woods. It was a winter sky, although winter had not yet come. Ann wondered if it would storm. She thought that it should. Storm had followed her from Alabama, through the midwest and across the border, in hail and rain and funnel clouds. It should be here now.

But there was no storm outside; thin branches reached up from the depths in a deathly stillness. The clouds overhead hung quiet and thin. It all lay beyond clean, dry glass. There were no messages for Ann, or anyone, in this landscape.

Ian was watching the landscape too. In the morning gloom, he seemed hunched, small, and very old. His face was sallow, and dark rings cradled his eyes, which cast over treetops—looking for any sign of life out there. It seemed, for that instant, as though the breath caught in both their throats, each of them trapped in droplets of psychic amber: a kind of limbo. Neither of them wanted to take a step further. They’d been killing time at the threshold, telling ghost stories about Michael Voors here at the end of the night.

Now the light had come.

Ann imagined them on another bridge—the one that she needed to cross every time she needed to obtain entry to the Insect’s prison. The pallid morning light grew over the ravine, and it seemed as though the treetops themselves sank as the earth distended below them. The plate glass on either side might as well have been open gallery windows, extended from the flagstone floor to the thatch and timber roof, separated by Grecian columns, wrapped in dark ivy. The door at the end was thick oak, bound in iron, held tight by a bar, and twelve sturdy locks. And the light, awful and sickly as it was, filled the hallway here and gave it its name.

The Hallway of Light.

“Ian,” said Ann finally, when her breath found her again, “what’s behind that door?”

“You don’t have to go,” he said, “if you’d rather not.”

“It’s the Insect, right?”

Ian said nothing. He shut his eyes tightly, bit on his lower lip. In the Hallway of Light in her mind, he was a shrivelled gnome, shrinking and crumbling in the sun. Ann studied him.

“Oh my,” she said. “Ian. You’re terrified.”

Ian didn’t answer.

She nodded. “Whatever’s behind that door. It’s as good as it gets for you, isn’t it?”

Ian whispered to himself.

“Well I’m not afraid,” she said, and knocked on the door three times, sharply.

When the door opened, Ann wondered briefly whether the hand that opened it would be human. This time, it was. She recognized its owner immediately.

“I didn’t catch your name back in the orchard,” she said.

Mister Sleepy’s babysitter had changed clothes.

Now he was wearing a crisp white tunic and matching trousers, both made from loose-woven cotton. Ann had seen ensembles like this in Little India on Gerrard Street.

“It’s Peter,” he said. “Hello, Mrs. Voors. Hope you’re feeling refreshed.”

“As you’d expect.”

“Quite,” he said, and looked over to Ian, and nodded. Ian nodded back.

“Well why don’t you come in, Mrs. Voors.”

Peter stepped aside, and beckoned Ann into a small sitting room, with couches like the one Ann had woken up on to either side of the door. Opposite walls had small dark wooden tables underneath mirrors, with table lamps on each.

There were no windows. On the far side of the room, there was another set of doors much like this one. They were propped open, to darkness.

“How’s your little girl?” Ann asked.

“She’s just fine, ma’am. Though as you’ve probably guessed, she’s not my child.”

Ian jumped in: “Peter’s up from Tennessee. With his niece. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s where you’re from,” said Ann. “You probably don’t remember, but you and I met. In Mobile.”

“I reckon we did meet, Mrs. Voors, at least nearly,” said Peter. “Glad you made it here safe.”

Was he glad? Ann had to wonder. He was a southerner: probably one of Rickhardt’s judgemental Americans; maybe from the same little coven that’d spawned John Hirsch. If he’d taken her at the Rosedale Arms, she doubted he’d have brought her here, to Southern Ontario. Assuming he could have wrangled her and the Insect, likely she would have wound up in whatever facility they’d built at St. Augustine.

If the opportunity arose, would he do that now?

He didn’t give her the chance to ask. “I’ll tell the Doctor you’re in,” he said. “Excuse me a moment, please.”

“The Doctor?” Ann asked as he stepped through the doors and into darkness. Ian said nothing.

“What is this place?” said Ann finally.

“It’s the Octagon: which is to say, an octagon. We pitched it as an homage, to the old octagon houses that used to be safe houses for the Underground Railroad here in Upper Canada.”

“Back in the day. When slavery was more, um, institutionalized? Nice juxtaposition.”

Rickhardt barked a laugh. “Good one,” he said. “Of course, the octagon has other symbolism too. Older symbolism.”

Ann wouldn’t bite. “And it’s a ballroom?” she said instead.

“It’s not. ‘Ballroom’ is what’s written on the plans we filed with the township.”

“So no weddings here,” said Ann.

“No,” he said. “Maybe next time.”

Ian sat down on one of the couches. Ann made a point of sitting on the other. “Must have cost you a fortune,” she said, and Ian nodded.

“As you can tell by now,” he said, “I’m not what you’d call stingy. And,” he added, as the door beyond them swung open, into the darkness, “I’m not alone.”

Ann blinked, as the man who was surely the Doctor stepped from it, into the light.

“Look at you,” said Charlie Sunderland.

He had lost some hair, and gained a little weight, but not so much of either, given that Ann had last seen him more than fifteen years ago. He wore a pair of dark slacks, a white shirt and unlike Rickhardt and Peter, dark leather shoes. He stepped forward, gingerly shut the door behind him. He looked as though he’d gotten some sun.

“You’re all grown,” he continued, as he moved to sit on Ann’s couch. Ian withdrew perceptibly. It was as though Dracula had stepped into the room. Or more aptly, Josef Mengele.

If Ann looked at him in just the right way, she thought she might scream.

She had guessed about Sunderland being here, being involved; Ian had as much as confirmed it.

But the fact of him, here—it was a blunt, visceral thing; the dangling string off the end of a long continuum that had begun in a little room years ago, and continued in another little room in the woods, and finished here. She crossed her legs and folded her hands on her knee, and knitted her fingers together tightly.

Sunderland smiled gently.

“I can imagine,” he said, “that you’re angry with me.”

Ann shut her eyes. She imagined that she was angry, too. She didn’t say anything though.

“Well, you might have cause to be,” he said. “If nothing else, I didn’t do a very good job then, in fulfilling my promise to your parents.”

“That’s true,” said Ann, opening her eyes again. “You didn’t do any kind of job.

“They died, because you weren’t trying to help me at all. You were trying to turn me into what—a courtesan?”

His smile faded a little, and he looked at her. “Oh dear,” he said. “I may have left you with the impression just now that I am here to apologize to you.” Dr. Sunderland ran a forefinger along the back of the couch; if they were sitting any nearer one another, it might have seemed as though he were trying to seduce her.

“You’ve been drinking,” he continued, “a lot. And you’re exhausted. You haven’t really slept in nearly twenty-four hours—possibly longer. Most of that time, you’ve been driving, and for most of that drive, you’ve been terrified. You have no capacity left, do you? You don’t even know why you’re here right now.”

Dr. Sunderland spoke in slow, measured tones that had a lulling effect. Ann drew a deep breath, and blinked.

“So why,” he said, “don’t you simply repeat the words again: ‘Belaim, foredawned, sheepmorne…’”

“Fuck off,” said Ann, and at that, Dr. Sunderland was quiet. He blinked, as though he’d been slapped. Ian, on the other couch, started to get up, but Sunderland motioned for him to sit.

“We are very close to a thing right now, Ann,” said Sunderland. “A very big thing. And you’re angry, very understandably angry. Would I be too far off the mark if I said that you thought you might be able to disrupt this thing of ours? Perhaps hurt myself, and Mr. Rickhardt here, and the rest of us?”

Ann didn’t answer.

He sighed. “We do need you here right now. If you want to use your time here, attempting to call down the heavens on all of us… well, that’s up to you. I’d understand.”

“You don’t think I can.”

“You know you can’t,” said Sunderland. “If you could, you would have by now.”

“Ask Mr. Hirsch what I can do,” she said.

Sunderland ignored the comment. “We are on the edge of something very big, Ann. I think on some level you know that. I think that is why you came back here.”

“I came back here,” she said, “to get my brother.”

Sunderland nodded. “And you’re still here, even though you’ve been told that he’s gone ‘home.’ Why do you suppose that is?”

“Because…” Ann took a breath, stifled a yawn “… because I don’t believe that.”

And he smiled, broadly. “That’s an excellent instinct you have,” he said.

Ann sat up. “Is he here?” she asked, and Sunderland motioned with one long arm to the doors, now shut.

“Through there,” he said.

Rickhardt tried to hold Ann’s hand as Sunderland held the door open for them. Ann pulled away. Sunderland was right in some of his observations; she was exhausted, and the wine from the other wing of this place had left a sour taste in her mouth. The world had a shimmer to it that she recognized, from the morning after all-night study sessions. But he was wrong: that she came here, on any level giving a shit about the thing that Sunderland and his ’geisters were on the verge of discovering, or extracting, or whatever it was he had planned; and oh, he was wrong about the fact that she had no power.

She was sure he was wrong about that.

He had to be.

Darkness enveloped her as the doors shut behind them, and Ann fought an instant of panic. Should she have taken Ian Rickhardt’s hand? The air was suddenly icy cold, as though she’d stepped into a big refrigerated room. The only sound was her own heartbeat, which accelerated in a rush of adrenaline. Screaming might have helped; but as it had moments before, her breath caught still in her throat. She couldn’t so much as whisper.

She could walk, though, and she did so, stumbling forward, hands held in front of her. It seemed as though she were running down a ramp of some sort.

The darkness split in front of her in a vertical line of dim light. As it spread further, Ann could see that what was opening was a curtain being drawn—they had stepped into a small circle defined by a thick curtain. It rattled aside on its bar on top, and as it did, Ann found her breath. She stepped forward, and as she did, she was struck by the truth of it:

This wasn’t a ballroom at all. It was a tower.

It was a pit.

They were standing on a wide balcony, that circled an octagonal atrium measuring perhaps thirty feet across. A single pillar, with a spiral staircase, ran up the middle; a narrow walkway extended to the staircase from a spot opposite where they stood.

There were more walkways: the balcony was one of at least three; there was one maybe ten feet over Ann’s head, and another as far below. The floor, as she peered over, was a dozen feet below that. It may have gone down further; Ann’s angle of view didn’t afford her much opportunity to see, and the only light came from an octagonal skylight directly above, and this morning it didn’t offer up much.

But she could tell that in each of the eight walls of this place, there was a curtain, like the one she’d just passed through—one on each level, one on each wall. Each of those curtains, Ann guessed, would lead to another door: and that door would lead to… what? A space that would be a slice of the octagon pie. At least as big as the little lounge they’d found themselves in. She found herself mapping it in her head—grasping for some measure of orientation.

Ann approached the railing. Like the finish on the balcony, it was made of dark wood, and the rail was padded with what felt like real leather. She leaned on it, and tried to look down, then up. The lattice of the skylight reminded her of a spider’s web—an effect that she expected was the intent of whichever architect Rickhardt had finally hired to build this thing. It looked like some 18th-century idea of a prison, or an insane asylum, where the cells ringed the atrium, and the guards watched from the middle. A panopticon.

“See, Ann,” said Ian Rickhardt from behind her, “just keep holding on.”

On the other side of the chamber, one of the curtains wavered. Something moved out—Ann was sure she could see it, a small figure—but it was gone as fast as it had come.

“Ann,” said Ian, so close that she could feel his breath on her neck. Ann shifted aside, and turned.

Ian wasn’t there. He was standing an eighth of the way around the balcony, gazing dreamily into the centre. His left arm was hanging out from his body, at about twenty degrees, his fingers curled and spread—

—as though he were holding someone’s hand.

Dr. Sunderland leaned against the wall, beside the curtain they’d just come through. He had his arms folded tight, but despite the body language he didn’t seem perturbed; just cold, like Ann. He motioned her to come closer, and she came.

“It is a poltergeist that is holding Ian’s hand,” he said quietly, nearly whispering it in Ann’s ear, “in case you hadn’t guessed.”

Ann swallowed hard.

“And he thinks it’s me,” she said. “Holding his hand.”

“Oh, I think it’s dawning on him that it’s not,” said Dr. Sunderland. “Look.”

Ian was looking at Ann, and looking down at his hand, his eyes widened in marvel and, Ann supposed, that terror he so craved. Dr. Sunderland smiled.

“It’s one of the games they play,” he said, “before it gets more serious. The spectral hand, holding your own, in the dark. You think that it was your friend’s hand. But when the light comes on, and you say, ‘Thank God you were there holding my hand,’ your friend says: ‘I wasn’t holding your hand.’ It’s an old Shirley Jackson trick.”

“Shirley Jackson?”

“The Haunting of Hill House?” said Dr. Sunderland, and regarded Ann. “No? Well I can hardly blame you for staying clear of haunted house novels, given your upbringing. But it’s fair to say that Shirley Jackson’s the Marquis de Sade for the ’geisters.”

The curtain behind Ian billowed, and for only an instant a shadow fell across Ian Rickhardt, and then his shirt billowed too. He bent down, as though he could see something more than just moving shadows, shifting curtains. Sunderland shook his head bemusedly, and pushed himself away from the wall.

“Mr. Rickhardt!” he called. “We do still have business, yes?”

Rickhardt seemed to consider that, but Ann suspected it was for show. “You take care of it,” he said. “I’ll catch up.”

As they watched, he fell to his hands and knees and crawled through the curtains, and was gone.

“The heart wants,” said Charlie Sunderland wryly, “what the heart wants.”

The air seemed to warm as he spoke—or rather, the chill began to flee. Ann felt her shoulders relaxing, and only from that realized how tightly hunched she’d been. Sunderland also flexed his fingers. He looked at Ann.

“Now I will apologize,” said Sunderland. “We’re not all like Rickhardt. Some of us—”

“—are like Hirsch?”

Sunderland nodded. “Some are like him.”

“And you aren’t like either of them.”

“I’m not,” said Sunderland, and he flexed the fingers of both hands, as though re-introducing blood flow into them. “Would you please follow me?” he said, and headed around the balcony to the little bridge to the staircase.

They climbed down the narrow spiral, past two other floors. On each of them, Ann saw eight more sets of curtains. She asked what was behind them.

“Rooms,” said Sunderland, “some of them containing poltergeists. Several of them also containing men.”

“Is Philip in one of those rooms?” she asked sharply, and was surprised when Dr. Sunderland merely nodded.

Ann halted between floors, clutching the twisting metal bannister.

“Is he safe?”

“Oh no,” said Sunderland.

“Don’t joke,” she said.

Sunderland shrugged and said, “All right.”

He circled the spiral once, then stopped as he realized that Ann wasn’t following.

“You don’t remember much from our time together, do you?”

Ann peered down at him through the empty risers. “I remember more and more,” she said. “I remember the three of us—and the knife. But you drugged us, didn’t you? Up at that lodge of yours.”

“Only as needed. But you remember the knife. I’m not quite sure what that refers to.”

“There was a scalpel,” said Ann. “You set it in front of Philip, as he slept, after you’d injected him, and it floated—”

“Floated?”

“Yes. It was ‘just the three of us,’ you’d said. After you injected Philip with something to knock him out. You said you needed to isolate me. You explained, ‘now it is just the three of us.’”

“And you remember this?” he said. “Did Philip tell you about it?”

Ann thought about that. It had come to her as she imagined talking to Philip, as she shut her eyes in the Rosedale Arms. Philip had reminded her. But she was there.

“I remembered it.”

“Fascinating,” said Sunderland softly. He climbed back up around the spiral, so he stood nearly face to face with Ann.

“What’s so fascinating?”

“All that did happen,” he said. “I injected Philip with scopolamine that day. There was an… event involving a scalpel. But I don’t see how you could have known about it, Ann.”

“Why is that?”

“You weren’t there.”

Ann took a step backward. “What—”

“It was just Philip, and myself… and as it turned out, the Insect.”

“I was there,” said Ann, and before she could say more, Sunderland raised his hand.

“I don’t doubt that you were,” he said, “on some level. In some form. But physically… physically, you weren’t present.”

Ann considered that. He was drugging them. Of course he was drugging them. Jesus wept.

“Tell me, Ann, does the Insect speak with you? Tell you things, from places you can’t possibly be?”

Ann clutched onto the railing, with both hands.

“Are you going to tell me where Philip is?” she asked.

“Not just at the moment,” said Sunderland. “I’d like you to answer my question, though.”

The railing on the staircase was iron, and although the air was warmer here it was cold as ice as Ann gripped it. Don’t let him touch you, Philip had said, that time they had first gone to Sunderland’s clinic in Etobicoke. She shut her eyes, tight enough that colour flashed across her retinas in a sheet of red.

“What were you doing with Philip,” she said, “when I wasn’t there?”

“Treating him,” said Sunderland sharply. “Now answer my question. Does the Insect speak with you?”

“All the time,” said Ann, returning his tone in kind. “Now what did you do to Philip? Did you touch him?”

“No. I did not. Had the Insect told you that I had?”

The red fractured and lightened to an orange, and a yellow. The metal was freezing cold.

“Where is Philip?”

It wasn’t just the metal, now—the air chilled around her, and that chill deepened into her bones. Ann’s teeth began to chatter.

Sunderland put his hand on Ann’s arm. It was hot by contrast, and although she tried to throw him off, he held tight.

“I never touched Philip,” he said. “I was treating him.”

“You were treating me,” said Ann. “I remember that much.”

“Ann—Ann, open your eyes and look at me.”

This Ann did, as green images blossomed from within the yellow in her retinas.

“If I were only treating you,” he said, “I would have only brought you to the lodge.”

“I was the one with the Insect,” said Ann. She could barely speak through the cold.

“Ann,” said Sunderland, “please come down the rest of the way. I want to talk to you, and run some—”

Sunderland didn’t finish. There was a fierce gust of air that whirled about and robbed Ann of her breath. She shut her eyes, on a bloom of violet on her lids. She half-expected when she opened them again to find Sunderland gone, plucked from the stairs and smashed to the ground—or perhaps against the skylight.

Sunderland hadn’t moved.

“I want,” he said levelly, “to talk to you and run some tests. Tell that to your Insect. Tell it—tell yourself, that when we do this, it’ll be time to meet up with Philip.”

“I want to see him now.”

“Ann. No. Not quite yet. We have to take this process step by step. You’re in a fragile state right now.”

Ann thought to herself: I could just push you right now, over the edge of this goddamn staircase. I bet I could do that, fragile as you say I am. I bet I could.

But she knew that she wouldn’t. In spite of all that had happened, Ann was a little dismayed and a little relieved to realize that she didn’t quite have a murder in her.

The staircase bottomed out on a concrete floor. Ann was surprised to find that she could see—from above, it had seemed pitch black. But this far down, her eyes adjusted to the gloom and the skylight did its work. The central park was illuminated with a dull light. Like the floor of a barn. Its walls were lost in shadows between sturdy steel girders and wooden crossbeams. Ann squinted up the column of light. This whole structure, basement to roof, couldn’t have been any less than a hundred feet.

That would be a long way to fall, Ann thought. Sunderland might have been thinking the same thing; as soon as he stepped off the staircase, he had discreetly moved himself underneath the lip of the lowest balcony, and leaned against the girder there, almost in the manner of an embrace.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s sit and talk.”

Past the pillar, Ann could see that a small living space had been arranged: another couch like the ones upstairs, and a little table, and two wing-backed armchairs. There was an antique-looking floor lamp between them, with three orchid-shaped shades, unlit.

Ann waited for Sunderland to settle on the couch, and selected the farthest armchair.

“Let’s get this done,” she said.

Sunderland steepled his fingers in front of his face. In the dark, he might have been smiling.

“Mr. Hirsch,” he said. “I wanted to ask you about him.”

“I’m… sorry about that.”

“Really? Why should you be sorry? You didn’t do anything. The poor man had a stroke!” Sunderland shifted so he leaned forward. “Thank God he was in a hospital when it happened.”

“What did you want to ask me?”

“What was he up to? What exactly?”

“There was trouble with the FAA, of course. He was there to represent me. Didn’t you read the papers?”

Sunderland reached up to the light and pulled a chain. Two of the three lamps glowed. They didn’t cast much light beyond the circle in which they sat—the rest of the space seemed darker in contrast. But Ann got a good look at Sunderland’s face. He’d moved his hands, and she could tell for certain: he wasn’t smiling at all.

“What was he up to, in the hospital room?” Sunderland’s eyes were lost in the shadow of his brow. He shifted to the very front of the sofa, his hands wringing in front of him.

“What do you think?” Ann snapped. “What was Ian up to? What are any of you up to? Do you want a detailed description?”

Sunderland sat back a hair, opened his hands in a gesture of appeasement. “All right, no. I’ll be more direct. Was he… praying?”

In spite of herself, Ann laughed. “Praying? No.” She thought about Hirsch, letting his trousers slide off him, letting himself be taken—like a noon-hour philanderer at a suburban rub-and-tug. “Not praying.” Sunderland sat quietly, eyebrows raised slightly, waiting for more. “He was making an offer.”

“Yes,” said Sunderland. “An offer to take you away. To St. Augustine, yes?”

“That’s where he said. Ian tells me they’re religious whack-jobs there. And that I’m better off here.”

“Well yes, he would,” said Sunderland. “Did you think it was a good idea to go with him? With Hirsch, I mean?”

Ann thought about that. She’d been pretty hostile to the idea at the time—but in retrospect, it might’ve made sense. It might have been for the best. She’d left Miami on her own, and left a trail of victims as she went. Penny and her husband at the motel probably wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep for a month after what they’d seen; and the border…

There were corpses at the border.

All that might never have happened, if Ann had gone along quietly—let herself be locked up, or put into a coma, or whatever it was they did there. Or, she supposed, if she had kept the Insect under control in the first place.

“I didn’t think it was a good idea,” said Ann. “No.”

“Were you afraid that he might abduct you?”

“I think those fears were founded, given everything.”

“Fair point. But did you have them?”

“Sure,” said Ann. “He laid out my situation for me pretty… pretty starkly, I think.”

“And he didn’t pray.”

“You keep coming back to that,” said Ann. “Closest he came was offering me communion, from his hip flask.” Sunderland seemed not to understand, so Ann elaborated. “Scotch. He offered me a slug of scotch.”

“Ah.”

“Not what you had in mind,” said Ann, and Sunderland shook his head.

“Should he have prayed?” she asked. “Because he’s part of that religious sect. Who would he be praying to?”

Sunderland opened his mouth to answer, but something changed in his expression and stopped and looked over Ann’s shoulder.

“He shoulda been prayin’ to your Insect,” said a child’s voice. “That was his grave mistake, an’ he paid for it dear. Ain’t that right, Doctor Sunderland?”

It was the girl—Peter’s niece. Ann recognized her from the vineyard.

She was wearing a fresh white bathrobe that was too big for her. She grinned a little sheepishly as she saw Ann looking at her.

“Hi,” she said, and Ann said “Hi.”

She turned to Sunderland. “It’s okay now. Mister Sleepy’s taken care of everything. Everyone’s back in their rooms.” She crossed the sitting area to Sunderland’s side, and whispered something in his ear, pointing at Ann with her thumb as she did so.

“Thank you, Lisa,” he said.

“Where’s your Uncle Pete?” asked Ann.

“He’s resting,” said Lisa. “Late night.”

“Ann LeSage, please meet Lisa Dumont.” Dr. Sunderland got up.

“How do you do?” said Lisa. She didn’t come over to shake Ann’s hand, but she waved again. She smiled, but looked at Ann sidelong—like she was trying to put her finger on something. Ann knew the feeling.

“I’m doing pretty crappy, thanks.”

Lisa took a step back, and Dr. Sunderland stepped up and put a hand on her shoulder.

“It’s all right,” he said to her, and Ann heard, in her ear: It’s all right, like an echo. She only felt the hand on her shoulder by its sudden absence; when she looked, she saw nothing behind her but empty air.

“All right, Lisa,” said Dr. Sunderland. “We need to talk, Ann and I. Go and see to Mister Sleepy.”

Lisa stuck her tongue out at him.

“Mister Sleepy can take care of himself,” she said.

Dr. Sunderland looked at her, and seemed about to say something to object. But finally, he shook his head.

Lisa sat down in one of the chairs, curled her legs up under her and looked at Ann levelly.

“You look bad,” she said.

Ann rubbed her eyes. They stung. “I’m not sure how to take that,” she said.

“Yeah, don’t take it wrong. Like you said, you’re feelin’ crappy. I get it.”

Lisa gave a quick, nervous-sounding laugh, then went quiet, and started to twirl a lock of hair in her fingers. Ann couldn’t really see her face in this light. But she felt her eyes on her.

“The Insect is pretty scary,” Lisa finally said.

Ann agreed. “Mister Sleepy is pretty scary too,” she said.

Lisa shrugged.

“Mister Sleepy gets it done. He always did. But yours. It’s hard. It’ll do anything.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Ann.

Lisa leaned forward. “Mister Sleepy knows,” she said. “The Insect is big. That’s why old Mr. Hirsch ought’ve been prayin’.”

Ann didn’t disagree.

“Mister Sleepy says it’s going to eat you up.”

“Lisa!” said Dr. Sunderland. He had moved across the room, just at the edge of the light. “You know that’s not so. Don’t listen to that, Ann.”

“Quiet, Doctor,” said Lisa, in a voice so bossy it nearly made Ann smile. “You don’t know.”

“What do you mean, eat me up?”

Ann’s eyes slowly adjusted to the dark. She could see that Lisa looked very serious.

“Well it’s nothing new,” she said. “The Insect’s been eatin’ you for years. That’s what Mister Sleepy says.”

“Ann—” said Sunderland. But although Lisa didn’t so much as look at him, he cut off.

“Mister Sleepy says the Insect will eat everybody before too long.”

Ann squinted. Charlie Sunderland was gone now.

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you,” said Lisa.

“I’m sorry?” said Ann.

“Mister Sleepy says if I ask you nicely, maybe the Insect won’t eat me.” Lisa was talking more quickly now. “Mister Sleepy can be real helpful. That’s what he’s made for. He’s not like the girls; he’s not for that. Mister Sleepy’s for helpin’.” She held her hands together in front of her. “I hope the Insect ain’t too mad about Mister Sleepy helpin’ catch you. You know I let you go, back at that motel, right?”

As Lisa spoke, she began to sob. And it dawned on Ann: this little girl was begging. Ann reached over to touch Lisa’s arm.

“It’s all right,” she said, and it must have been the wrong thing to say. Lisa recoiled, drew her arm back to her shoulder, and scrunched away in the chair.

Then she cried even harder. “I’m sorry! I don’t mind if you touch me, not really!”

Ann’s hand fluttered back. Oh God, she thought. And then she thought about Lisa’s Uncle Peter Dumont, and Ian Rickhardt’s flaccid defence of their shared predilection, and she wondered. Mister Sleepy wasn’t for that.

What about Lisa?

“It’s all right,” Ann said. “I’m not going to touch you if you don’t want me to.”

Lisa calmed down, but only marginally. She was still terrified. She swallowed, and folded her hands into her lap, and looked at them.

“I can help you, y’know,” said Lisa. “I can help you talk to the Insect. That’s good, right? I can help you and the Insect do whatever you want.”

Ann wasn’t sure that the Insect needed anybody’s help. But the offer was interesting. It certainly brought up some questions. Lisa Dumont wasn’t more than eight years old—just a little younger than Ann was when she visited Dr. Sunderland’s offices in Etobicoke, and they were all trying to figure out what exactly was happening when the lights went out at the Lake House. Ann didn’t even have a name for the Insect then. Lisa Dumont had somehow developed a genuine rapport. So much so, that she and… and Mister Sleepy could actively work as a team—and offer their services.

How had it been when Lisa rolled in with the ’geisters here? Did she offer them services? Did her uncle?

What did Lisa and Mister Sleepy get in return?

The temperature was dropping again—more rapidly this time. It was as though a door had opened onto an icy winter night, and the frozen breeze was being drawn inside. Lisa was looking around rapidly now, head turning this way and that, as though she’d lost her way suddenly.

“P-please,” she said, “Mister Sleepy says he’ll be good.”

In the centre of the room, a shadow moved. Ann looked, and at first there seemed to be nothing.

“Take me with you,” she said. “I c-can teach you how to talk with yours. We’re not like the other ones. We can work together.”

That wasn’t quite right, though; as Ann looked the shadow returned again, a blurred smudge across the concrete floor. It was circling the chamber, whatever thing it was that was casting it.

“Don’t,” said Lisa, and the shadow sharpened. “Please!” she said. “Please!”

Peter Dumont appeared on the staircase, coming down. He bent, peered under the lip of the bottom-most balcony.

“Easy, hon,” he said. “Just calm down—everything’s fine.”

The words of Lisa’s uncle didn’t seem to have too much effect on her nerves. But they sure shut her up—she drew a deep breath.

“Doctor Sunderland says you’ve been telling stories, now,” he said.

Ann reached over to touch Lisa’s arm. This time, the girl didn’t pull away.

“We’re in danger here,” Lisa said.

“No,” said Peter. “Not at all. Ol’ Mister Sleepy’s got it all under control.” He finished coming down the stairs. At the bottom, he folded his hands in front of him.

“It’s past Mister Sleepy,” said Lisa. “Insect’s goin’ to get us.”

“It’s not going to get us.” Peter looked to Ann. “Mrs. Voors—if you’d excuse us, we have to have a talk.”

“I think I’ll stay,” said Ann. “For the moment.”

He sighed. “The Insect can’t do anything for right now. It’s here under control. Its husband lost control of it. But now it’s back.”

“Its husband hasn’t,” said Lisa. Tears were running down her cheek now. “He hasn’t lost control.”

“He’s—excuse me, Mrs. Voors—he’s dead, sweetie.”

Lisa shook her head slowly. “He never died,” she said.

“Mrs. Voors, I really got to apologize,” said Peter as he crossed the floor. His breath clouded in front of him. “She’s a good girl. She doesn’t mean—”

Ann felt her ears popping an instant before it happened. Peter Dumont’s left shoulder jerked back, as though he’d been struck—and then his right joined it, and he started to fall backwards.

He never hit the ground. Lisa screamed as the air rushed past them, and Peter’s feet left the floor. He hovered there for an instant—eyes comically wide—and then a gust of wind nearly knocked them all down, and Peter was gone.

Lisa’s scream gurgled quiet as the air rushed from the space, and Ann felt her own breath hitch, and she feared she might suffocate.

The instant hung between them. Ann looked at Lisa, and she thought: The husband wasn’t dead?

Michael was still alive? He was ashes; it didn’t make sense, no sense at all.

Before she could puzzle it out, the body of Peter Dumont fell to the floor. From the way he landed, on his stomach, head turned hard to the right…

Ann had no doubt he was dead.

Then came a tap-tapping sound—as from a sudden summer hailstorm, here in this gigantic octagonal silo. The stones bounced on the concrete, and it was only as some of them careered into the sitting room that Ann realized it wasn’t hail.

It was glass, from the skylight, utterly pulverized.

It had not made a sound when it shattered.

The “hailstorm” stopped as fast as it had begun.

The only sound in the space was the quiet sobbing from Lisa, and a wind that howled over the now-open rooftop. Ann stood carefully, but it was still too quickly. She felt the world grey a bit, but she steadied herself on the back of the chair for the moment.

Lisa got up. She tiptoed gingerly through the broken glass and knelt at her uncle’s side. Under the light from above, she looked almost angelic, as she leaned over Peter’s body and studied it—as though looking for an “on” switch to make him move again. A breeze came up, hard enough to lift the ends of her hair. She was no longer sobbing.

Ann walked slowly to the middle of the chamber. The wind picked at her jacket, tugged at her hair. It was icy, but it didn’t chill her.

Lisa looked up at her, and up into the light. Her face was streaked with tears.

“He’s gone,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” said Ann, uselessly. “Your uncle…”

“Not him,” she said sharply. “And he’s not my uncle. Not really. Mister Sleepy.”

Ann frowned.

“Mister Sleepy’s dead. Mister Sleepy’s dead too.”

Ann reached out to touch her, remembering only at the last instant how it had upset Lisa, and withdrew.

“My God.”

Ann turned. Dr. Sunderland emerged from behind her. His hair was dishevelled. A bruise was darkening on his face, and as he stumbled closer, she saw another one around his throat.

He hurried past Ann to Lisa, and knelt down beside her. The glass crunched under his knees, but if it cut, he didn’t let on.

“Oh, Lisa,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

She looked at him. “Mister Sleepy’s dead,” she said again.

Sunderland said, “I know,” and he put his arms around Lisa and held her—over the body of her kin, Peter Dumont, shattered with the glass as he fell from the top of the Insect’s tower. Then Sunderland did a thing that she had never seen him do before.

He let Lisa go, and put his hands together—and began to pray.

Ann stepped back. She had no business in this place, this tiny circle between little Lisa Dumont and her “therapist” Charlie Sunderland, and the corpse. Ann’s place was elsewhere.

The wind told her so.

She stepped around them, quiet as a ghost, and started back up the staircase.

Ann stopped climbing when the stairs ran out. The open air was just beyond her reach at the top of the tower. A part of herself understood that really, she had climbed out of a shaft—the Octagon was not that high off the ground—on a more fundamental level, she had begun to understand this place for what it was: a tower, where the Insect might sit, a prisoner.

It was not just the Insect being held here, of course; the ’geists tied to an unguessable number of women were kept here, kept in thrall to the appetites of their men.

And then there was Philip.

Of course he was here. In one of these very rooms.

She crossed the narrow bridge from the stairs to the balcony. It only made sense, to start at the top.

She found a curtain, and slipped behind it to the door, and opened it.

A rail-thin man with jet black hair cut long stood in front of a bathroom mirror, in a suite of rooms that resembled a decadent hotel room from a century ago. He was naked. He regarded himself steadily, as the deep red wallpaper surrounding the mirror undulated with faces and hands. The man’s lips trembled, half-open, and a pink tip of a tongue showed itself as he looked deep into the glass. Something in there was transfixing; he didn’t appear to notice Ann when she looked in, and he barely flinched when the straight razor lifted itself from the water glass on the vanity, opened and caressed the soft, lean skin at the base of his jaw.

She withdrew, and chose another curtain from those circling the balcony.

Behind that one, a door led into a hideous kitchen—floor, ceiling and countertop all panelled with the same yellow Formica. The refrigerator was a Frigidaire; the stove, an old harvest gold electric range. The room was spotless, except for what looked like pink cake icing, stuck in prints the shape of a child’s hands, on the ceiling. Watching them long enough, you could see them creep from one end of the room to another. A small, muscular man was curled on the floor beside the sink, where a garbage disposal hummed and crunched.

The next curtain in the Octagon had more money behind it: a wide, tastefully spare living room with deep chestnut floors that gleamed, furnished with several pieces Ann took to be Louis XIV. The only sound was the ticking of a grandfather clock. She looked around the room, and determining it empty, shut the door. Something heavy fell as she did so, but when she opened the door again to see, all was as it had been.

Ann continued. She looked in on a room furnished as a little girl’s bedroom; another, made up as a 1970s living room, complete with RCA television set and teak stereo cabinet as long as a coffin; a suburban two-car garage, with a ’70s-vintage Gremlin parked to one side, a wall of power tools along the other. The Gremlin was bright red. A man sat inside it, staring into the rearview mirror at the empty back seat—terrified, like the others.

That was the purpose of these rooms ringing the Octagon; small, familiar spaces where scenarios were tailored to the needs, which is to say fears, of the membership. Little curated rooms at Ian Rickhardt’s otherworldly fetish bar. The Haunted Hotel. The Accursed Kitchen. The Demon in the Gremlin.

Like the I-thought-you-were-holding-my-hand Shirley Jackson game, they were each crafted to help cultivate that sense of terror that Ian Rickhardt said all these men craved.

And they were each haunted—by the poltergeists that Rickhardt and his friends had raped into submission.

As Ann quietly shut the door on the garage and stepped back through the curtain, she thought: The only thing terrifying about these rooms is their existence.

She stepped through the next curtain and door—there were only three more on this top level—and turned the handle. This one smelled of antiseptic. The walls were covered in green tile, and there were IV stands and great hot lights, and carts full of instruments, surrounding an operating table, upon which was splayed the tiny corpse of a vivisected bluebird. There was the sound of a tap running, which she thought might be coming from behind a set of swinging double doors.

She would have closed the door then and there, but it occurred to her that this might be a place they’d have put Philip; it certainly had the life support equipment he might need.

Ann stepped into the room and went through the double doors.

It was a surgical scrub: there were hangers and drawers at the back of the room, where smocks and masks hung, and folded up rubber gloves were stacked neatly on shelves. Bisecting the room were sinks, six of them in an island, three backing on three. The water was running in the middle sink opposite Ann. Looking over the low tile divider, she could see a pair of child’s hands, reaching up over the sink’s edge, scrubbing themselves with a foamy dark soap. She couldn’t see more of the child from where she was standing.

Ann stepped around the bank of sinks, but as she did so, in just a blink, the hands shifted to the other side.

“Now you can’t get out,” said a little girl’s voice, “without going past me.”

Ann considered: this should have really thrown her, the trick of shifting sides on the surgery-prep sinks, the little-girl sing-song voice, happily informing her she was trapped; the likelihood, given that this place really was filled with ghosts, not just little tricks, that in fact she most likely was trapped.

But Ann didn’t feel a thing. And she realized, looking at those hands in the sink, a little blue around the nails, that she had never, truly, felt anything. This font of terror that Ian and Michael kept coming back to, and Sunderland couldn’t stop studying, and the fellows down in Florida worshipped, was dry for Ann.

It made sense. After all, for most of her life—she was the one washing her hands in the sinks, trapping her victims in the wash-up. Ann was the font.

Ann stepped around the sinks to head back to the operating room. Something flickered in the corner of her eye. She didn’t pay it any heed. She felt a tiny hand gripping her ankle. She kicked it away and kept moving. A child’s face, lips blue, long red hair streaking down her face to half-cover eyes that shone like dimes in a puddle, appeared in front of Ann’s face. She walked through it and pushed open the doors.

These poltergeists couldn’t make the terror. Not like the Insect could, for a simple reason. They didn’t kill.

The bluebird on the operating table writhed and sang as Ann opened the door, and let it shut behind her.

As far as Ann knew, it kept right on singing, even as Ann pulled open the curtain into the Octagon, and felt her breath freeze to rime on her throat, at the sight of the one who stood there waiting for her.

Philip LeSage towered over her.

He was tall—a head taller than her, easily.

He was not strong.

His shoulders hunched around his hollow chest. His arms, thin as broomsticks, were held aloft, as though waiting her embrace. The freezing air goosefleshed his pallid, naked skin. His eyes stared out at her from sunken hollows, and his mouth twisted from grin to grimace as his head bent slowly, side to side—the only acknowledgment he seemed to give of his own impossibility, there on the catwalk beyond the curtain.

“Oh God.” Ann whispered it as the ice spread from her throat and along her nerves. Philip was a quadriplegic. Normally he couldn’t do much more than lift his little finger; he could barely control the movement of his own head.

But of course, it wasn’t Philip.

His hips swayed, his naked member swinging semi-erect between tree-branch legs. His hands settled gently on her shoulders and his face drew closer to hers.

“I couldn’t have you searching the whole tower.”

The voice was a low buzz, from rattling glass and humming wires—the wind.

The Insect.

Ann pulled back. “No,” she said. “No, stop it.”

Philip pulled back too, his mouth twisted around another word that translated, easily: “Have it your way. I’m going home.”

He turned as if on point. His bare feet touched the balcony floor, and moved in a simulacrum of walking, around to the ramp that led to the staircase. Ann sat frozen for a time, watching him. When he got to the stairs, he turned back—the Insect turned him back—and he beckoned.

Ann felt like she was encased in ice; it physically hurt to walk, nearly. But she followed. Philip looked like a giant’s skeleton from this distance, with just bits of flesh and tufted hair. His eyes were black pits in the grey light coming from above. Ann joined him on the staircase, and together, they moved down.

Was that why he had decided to stay here? Ann had thought Ian might be lying about Philip’s choosing, but this made sense: the ’geisters offered him mobility of a kind, hauled along by the unseen hands of the poltergeists. Was that what made it home for him?

God. He was so tall.

It had been a decade since Philip had stood; it had been a decade since Ann had seen him upright. He was a giant when she was a little girl, but that had changed with the bed and the chair, laying him flat or folding him up. Now, his arms folded around her, holding tight with muscles that were barely sinew, nerves that were dead wiring.

This must be agony for him.

Philip stepped off the stairs and onto one of the narrow bridges. They had only gone down one floor and were back on the level onto which she and Rickhardt and Sunderland had originally arrived. They crossed the bridge quickly; Philip’s stride was improving—or more realistically, the ’geist’s ability to manipulate Philip’s numb limbs was growing stronger.

They passed through a curtain halfway round the Octagon. It would have been directly above the kitchen set-piece, unless Ann missed her guess.

“Let me get the door,” said Ann, first to Philip, then, absurdly she thought, again to the air around them. But she had to: she didn’t want the Insect twisting him more than necessary. This wasn’t good for him. What was all this motion doing to his spine?

Philip “stood” to the side as Ann turned the handle, and as she looked through, into this room, she realized something. No one had lied. Not Ian Rickhardt, not Susan Rickhardt, not anyone.

Philip had gone home.

But for the empty scooter set by the thick burgundy curtains, this space was a note-perfect recreation of the kitchen, living and dining rooms of the Lake House.

Ann stepped inside, and beckoned Philip—or the thing that bore Philip—to follow. It even smelled familiar… that still fresh scent of spruce sap, latex paint, and bacon, the last of which their dad liked to cook way too much of.

It was incredible, in the attention to detail—and the totality of the effect.

Philip came into the room. Any pretense of walking was gone. His feet slid across the tile floor, the tips of his toes squeaking like pencil erasers. His arms dangled listlessly. His head lolled, so much so that Ann thought that he might have fainted from the indignity, or possibly worse… that in its puppet game, the Insect had killed him.

But he blinked, his head righted, and for a moment he looked steadily at her, as he had countless times. In this very room.

No. In a room that this room strongly resembled. But not here. Not this room.

All appearances to the contrary, they were not home.

Philip hovered and then settled into the seat of his scooter. His arms lifted and folded over his lap. The Insect adjusted his head so that it fit comfortably into the rest.

Ann took a dining room chair and brought it next to Philip. She sat beside him, and put her hands on his. The flesh was clammy. She heard him exhale raggedly. She might have done the same.

“I made a mistake,” said Ann, looking her brother in the eye. “I shouldn’t have married Michael.”

Philip made a quiet noise. I know.

“I thought I loved him—but I didn’t. And he didn’t love me either.”

Philip looked away.

Ann leaned in. “Have we had this conversation?”

Did he nod then? Or did the Insect?

“Did you talk to me,” she said, “in that dark school corridor?”

He turned back to her and met her eyes again. There was no nod this time, no shake of the head.

But there was an answer.

The room turned icy—and there came a familiar squeaking sound. Ann turned and looked toward the mirror above the telephone. It had frosted over. And written on it were the words:

“All right,” said Ann, “am I talking to you now, Philip? Are you talking to me?”

Ann stared at the glass as the words faded, and considered that “we.”

Did the Insect belong to both of them? Did the Insect talk to Philip, just as it had to Ann?

Perhaps so. Perhaps, that was why Rickhardt had brought Philip here, to this facsimile of the Lake House, as it looked in the 1990s, when Charlie Sunderland had collected such detailed information about the LeSage family’s domestic arrangements. Ann walked over to the curtains. They were thicker than the ones that had hung in the living room of the Lake House at any time Ann recalled. But they covered a more damning anomaly; there was no window here that could look out onto the lake, or the woodlot that surrounded the real Lake House.

Was that the nature of all these rooms she wondered? Each slice of the Octagon, a slice of memory from… a ’geist and its vessel?

The ’geisters had gone to great lengths to quarantine the ’geist from the vessel early in life—so they would grow apart, like two branches from a split tree-stem. Were these rooms, then, a means to draw the ’geist out, from the point of that separation?

And was this room—their presence in it—an attempt to do something more, with the Insect, and Ann… and Philip?

Ann turned and leaned against the curtain, the hard wall behind it. The refrigerator door hung open in the kitchen at the other side.

She crossed the room to close it, and as she did so, the upper cupboard doors opened.

Pale blue plates and bowls were stacked neatly—they were of a pattern that caused a sharp lancet of nostalgia in her. They matched the coffee cups that were stacked next to them. The bins that held pasta and rice and cereal against moths were in their place. The refrigerator was stocked with jugs of milk and a big carton of orange juice and a good dozen bottles of beer, and the freezer overtop was filled with tupperwared leftovers and frozen vegetables.

Ann’s hand hovered over the beer.

You could just disappear into this room, couldn’t you?

Ann pulled her hand away and shut the refrigerator door, and turned to lean on it to keep it shut. The mirror in the dining room was frosty again, but for the words:

She could disappear, just like Susan Rickhardt disappeared. Like the other vessels disappeared; not into some boozy distraction… well not only into some boozy distraction… but into her actual childhood—into the mire of bona fide, pure nostalgia; life as memory. It was a tempting pact. The frost faded and dribbled down the glass, obscuring the words. Ann looked at her melting reflection. She looked ghastly. Her eyes were hollow and dark, her hair hung in rattails over her face. The jean jacket she’d worn here was filthy, and her shoulders hung low.

She was exhausted, and thirsty, and hungry….

And she had found Philip, which had been all she’d been thinking about for more than twenty-four hours… and the Insect too—she’d found her way back to the Insect. She’d found her way home.

And she was done.

Ann turned away from herself, and stumbled to the sofa, where she let herself collapse, into the Insect’s tender care and her brother’s protective supervision.

As she dozed off, she had the definite sense of the two of them—the Insect and her brother—sharing a knowing glance.