The House That Death Built Read Online Free Page B

immovable object sliding home with irresistible
force.
    The three lights disappeared,
replaced by a countdown timer: 12:00:00.
    Hours, minutes, seconds.
    Twelve hours before the safe
could be opened.
    James rocked back on his knees.
He moaned.
    Silence ruled for an instant.
Then Rob spoke, rage barely contained behind a demon's grin. "I guess we
always knew at least one of you was going to die," he said. "Turns
out it's going to be even more."
    The sad-eyed man gasped.
"Don't –"
    At the same time, Evan rolled
over to his back. Looking up. Seeing what was coming.
    Seeing, and screaming, and then
silent as Rob pulled the trigger.

6

    Beth Schaffer heard the sound.
She had never shot a gun. Never been to a range, never heard someone else
shoot.
    It was so loud.
    The sound wasn't just noise, it
was the growl of a creature hungry, rabid. The scream of something beyond good
or evil. It was elemental. Pure force, without will.
    The sound hammered its way
through the room. It would have bludgeoned her to her knees if she hadn't
already been there. As it was, she curled over so far her nose nearly touched
the floor.
    She turned her head.
    It was crazy. The final madness
in a night where sanity fled screaming into the darkest of places. She should
have looked away – that was what you did, right? When something so dangerous
reared its head and roared its most terrible roar? You looked away, you looked
anywhere but to its source.
    But she did look.
    And she saw .
    The body had already fallen to
the floor. A long, limber form. Slim, but without any of the awkward gangliness
that marked so many of his peers. The body of a person making a near-seamless
transition from boy to man.
    But that transition was over.
Stopped by the creature. The gun.
    No. Not the gun. The man behind
it.
    Does it matter who did it?
    Evan was laying on his back on
the closet floor. Eyes looking right at her. The brightness that had always
been there dimmed slightly.
    Still alive. He can make it .
    A ragged red circle was on his
chest. Growing as blood pulsed out.
    He coughed. More blood escaped
his mouth. It leaped out like the tentacle of some awful creature that had been
born even as her son – her baby boy – began to die. Then the tentacle fell,
fell apart, splattered on the floor.
    Evan somehow saw her. Somehow
understood what she was feeling. He smiled. Mouthed something.
    Beth shook her head. Didn't know
why – what did it matter that she didn't understand what he was saying?
    What does anything matter?
    He mouthed it again. Again. And
on the fourth repetition she understood.
    It's okay, Mom.
    Then the last lingering
brightness dimmed. His eyes sagged. Not closed entirely, small crescents of
white still visible.
    Gone.
    She saw it. Saw the moment her
boy left a world too cruel to hold him.
    As she did, her sanity also left.
But there was no transition from this awful place to another, better one.
Instead it threw off the tethers of rational thought, spun out of control. An
elemental creature just as dangerous in its own way as the thing that had ended
her son.
    She screamed. Felt the carpet
beneath her, and it wasn't like she was pushing herself away from it, but like
it was falling away from her. Like the world itself fell away, withdrew from
something too awful to touch.
    She threw herself at the nearest
of the people who had brought this madness to her. It was the big man, the one
who seemed the most evil of them all.
    No. Not the most evil. Just the
most out of control.
    The one who killed Evan is the
most evil. The men in the closet are the ones who will be destroyed.
    But this one first.
    The thoughts fired rapidly
through her mind, taking no more time than her short flight allowed.
    Then the thoughts, the last
vestiges of Beth Schaffer, fell away with the ground below. She simply was .
    She hit the big man. Didn't knock
him down, but that didn't matter. Her hands were already hooked, but now curved
still further, expensively-manicured nails