The Face in the House

31

Malcolm was freezing cold. He stood in the living room at Thornewood House—the seance room, as they liked to call it—but there was no table, no curtain, no strange shadows. It was the same room, but different. The furniture was ornate, upholstered chairs with rich, carved wooden legs, thick, luxurious rugs, everything heavy and baroque.

It was beautiful. It was from another time.

But he was so cold. Chilled to the bone. So cold his limbs ached. He crouched to the floor and hugged his knees for warmth. It didn't help.

He felt a tickle at the back of his neck, a soft, almost imperceptible scratch. He flinched away and turned to find the source. A black spider hung from the ceiling, suspended right before his bespectacled eyes.

He thought he should scream, should recoil in disgust, but a sense of warmth overtook him, soothed his instincts. He relaxed his muscles. More spiders appeared from above, dropping down like little bungee jumpers. Others crawled from beneath their hiding places—under the rug, the couch, a crack in the wall—and approached him on the floor.

In unison, the spiders went to work. They crawled up his legs, along his arms, up his back—everywhere—and spun their delicate, silver webs. His body shuddered, not from the crawling sensation, but from the ecstasy of the heat warming his skin, his bones. He let the spiders envelope him, cocoon him in a cradle of warmth and comfort. He watched as they spun their web over his eyes, blinding him behind a silky curtain. The darkness was a relief. He let his eyes fall closed.

Just as he felt the dream slipping away into a black serenity, a voice pierced through. It startled him out of his comfort, shrieked and wailed at him, words he couldn't make out, but its meaning was clear: LEAVE. It was the voice, that animal voice, the one that nearly tore a hole through his psyche. It was back, haunting him, louder than before, angrier than before. He heard pure anguish in its growl, murder in its cry . . .

His eyes flew open, the dream dissolved. The voice was gone, and the room was silent. He was in bed, in the upstairs bedroom.

Malcolm had never been much of a dreamer. When he did dream, they were of the uninspired, cliche variety—taking a test he forgot to study for, showing up to class totally naked, teeth falling loose from his gums—dreams his mind plagiarized from textbooks and dream dictionaries. Most nights, his sleep was dreamless and serene.

That is, until he entered Thornewood House. Now, his dreams were intense, vivid, and memorable. They came to him nightly, sometimes in twos or threes, one dream streaming seamlessly into the next, leaving his head heavy and his heart racing as he woke each morning. Sometimes, if he happened to wake too soon, when the stillness of the house told him it was still dead of night, he struggled, in that state of semi-consciousness, to discern dream from reality.

It was dead of night, but this particular dream had been powerful enough to catapult him into a dizzy consciousness. He took a deep breath, trying to soothe his pounding heart, his vibrating nerves. As he calmed down, he noticed Owen's bed was empty. It wasn't a surprise—Owen had started stealing off in the night days ago—but he was disappointed. He had wanted to talk about the dream, to get it out of his mind. He stepped out of bed and let his feet take him where they wanted to go.

The house was lifeless: quiet and dark and still as death. Even the usually warm and bright kitchen was cold and covered in shadow. When he entered the basement, and crept through the now-familiar hidden doorway, he found that the darkest place in the house was at that moment, the most alive. Beakers bubbled and clinked, an open flame roared, steam danced in the air and disappeared into the shadows above.