Empty Vessels Page 10

  Keith tried to move as stealthily as he could, ducking between trees, even if he felt fairly stupid doing it, as if he was a kid play-acting at a spy in a movie. It brought him as close as he could get without being in the open, and giving up on it, he darted forward, jogging up creaking front steps, soft with rot.

  At the top, he spared a moment to be grateful that they hadn't collapsed under him. He'd have been some big hero, he thought, if he broke his leg before even getting inside.

  He put a hand on the doorknob first, testing it. There was always the chance it was left unlocked for the Terrors to come and go, and he wouldn't have to send Lucas in first at all, but it rattled without opening, the knob not fully turning.

  "There's definitely something in there that's not a Terror," he muttered under his breath. "Whatever's controlling them can lock people out during the day."

  "Well, we'd all thought as much, since the bottle was enchanted," Lucas said. "Going to do your thing?"

  "Just a second," Keith said. "Maybe I can see something of who it is…"

  He focused, trying to draw memories out of the doorknob. He knew he shouldn't rely on it working. Sometimes he could force things to show up, but other times it was like flinging his mind against a blank wall over and over.

  The metal of the knob warmed under his hand and he began to pick up vague things. Terrors, for sure, that lingering sense of fear and loss that always followed them. He focused harder, trying to imagine what might come in and out, saw misty shapes, the Terrors passing back and forth through the open door, but he didn't see what opened the door for them. Just a vague fog that he couldn't put shape to.

  "No good," he said finally, when a headache threatened to start. He still needed to use his other abilities—he couldn't let himself overdo it on this. "I can't get anything."

  The cool brush of Lucas's hand passed over the back of his neck. Despite himself, he shivered. "You did your best," Lucas said. "Ready to light it up? I'll dart in as soon as you do."

  "Thanks," Keith said. "I can't risk setting it on fire, so I need to be… as delicate as I can."

  Lucas let out a soft laugh. "It's like the inverse of your usual skills, huh? Starting electronics instead of stopping them, and stopping fires instead of starting them."

  He was a bit worried he wouldn't be able to do the latter. He had pyrokinesis, had used it instead of a lighter back when he smoked, when his parents confiscated his lighters from him to try to make him stop. But there wasn't much reason to do anything with fire on a regular basis, and he was deeply out of practice.

  "Inverse," he said, and tried to sound as confident as he could without raising his voice above a whisper. "I can do that."

  Keith drew a deep breath in and let it out, trying to dismiss his headache, trying to center himself and calm down. Working with energy was always fiddly, and doing it while this scared was a recipe for disaster.

  He leaned his forehead against the cool wood of the door, pressed his hands there, tried to tune out the lingering sense of Terrors and just breathed in slowly. The wet, rotting wood scent reminded him of the horned boy—of Hiraeth—and he focused on that image rather than the situation around him. He was trusted enough by Hiraeth to be given a name that he didn't give humans. He was supported by Lucas, that cold, reassuring brush on the back of his neck, the determination to help however he could.

  He found the old wiring system and let the faintest of pulses run along it, his mind fracturing as it followed the wires as they split and rejoined, found what lights had bulbs in them and what didn't, found which of those lights had burned out wiring inside and which ones didn't. Found broken ends of wiring and pressed away on them with his pyrokinesis, pulling the air away from fire so that his tiny spark wouldn't even risk anything there. Found where those wires connected and retraced their path so that they would be blocked off from him when he set the others off.

  There would be dark spots still, mostly in the basement, where more of the wiring had been chewed on by rats. Hopefully they wouldn't have to go down there.

  For a moment—he wasn't sure how long, leaning against the door and breathing, time meaningless in context of the speed of electricity—he wasn't Keith anymore, was only impulse.

  And then he'd found all the wiring, had barred off all the places that electricity couldn't touch, had found all the ones that it could, and shot that spark back into his own mind.

  He exhaled and pressed electricity out.

  The light over the porch flickered on with an audible popping sound, and the small windows on either side of the front door brightened slightly. He felt dizzy, unsteady, not at all like himself.

  But that cool touch was still on his neck and he grounded himself to it, turned to look at Lucas with a smile.

  "Nice, man," Lucas said, fond. "And to think you have trouble with a chip machine."

  He'd never really tried with things like that, never with that focus, but he didn't bother saying it, just shook his head and huffed. "Go," he said.

  Maybe the rest of the plan would go this smoothly too.

  Lucas dropped his hand, stepping forward and vanishing through the door. Alone even for just a second, Keith's pride started to give way to the anxiety shivering back through his chest.

  The door clicked and opened inward.

  chapter eight

  The musty air inside was thick with dust, which danced in the shadow-dappled sunlight filtering in through the windows. The front door had opened onto a large living room, sofa covered in a dust sheet, old pictures on the walls. One door in the room was open to show a kitchen and another, closed, led elsewhere on the floor. A stairway between the two doors led up to a second floor, with an open balcony overlooking the entryway.

  It was melancholy, abandoned, but appearance-wise wasn't terribly frightening. Well-lit as it was, it hardly looked like walking into some kind of haunted house.

  The feeling of the place, however, belied that look.

  Terrors had been here, quite a few of them, and frequently. He'd known that before walking in, but even so, couldn't stop the feeling of ice water trickling down his spine. The aching sense of hunger and loss and rage and want felt as if it was filling every corner of the room. His second sight danced with dark patches, the impression of movement out of the corner of his eyes enough to make his heart race, already anxious and afraid.

  But nobody had come racing into the room, nobody was challenging their intrusion, nobody had seemed to notice that they'd turned the lights on.

  "Split up?" Lucas murmured, his soundless voice pitched as low as it could go.

  They couldn’t go far from each other, but as long as they stayed on the same floor they could probably push the limit of their bond. "I'll take the kitchen," Keith whispered. "You mind going through the closed door…?"

  "Better than making too much sound," Lucas said softly. He nodded to Keith, formed a fist, and tapped him gently on the shoulder, just an impression of pressure, there and gone, before heading to the closed door.

  Keith tried to keep himself breathing evenly, and crept as quietly as he could to the kitchen. He felt a little silly about it, but whatever lived here might also be deep in the basement where the lighting was still off, and hadn't yet realized the lights had come on throughout the rest of the house.

  Making noise might tip that balance.

  It wasn't easy to move silently, though, the wood floor creaking with each step he took. He shuffled as best he could, moving as quickly as possible but still carefully shifting his weight. He found himself constantly debating about whether it was better to go fast, in case the Terrors' master wasn't home right now, or go quietly, in case it was.

  There was no way to know. No way to make an informed decision.

  The kitchen was in a decrepit state—but under the circumstances, it wasn't as bad as it could have been. As the dust sheets in the living room had implied, whoever had left the house had done so knowingly, and the garbage bin was empty. Likewise, no smell
of rot came from the fridge. He checked it anyway—it was just another place to store things, and bottles of souls could be put on the shelves there as easily as anywhere else—and found it empty except for a jar of pickles, a couple of cans of beer, and some ketchup.

  On some level, it was impulsively reassuring, but his mood, the atmosphere, was of a sort that ruined it as soon as relief came. What good did it do to know that the former owners, before they'd moved out, were just normal people?

  They weren't the threat.

  The floor of the kitchen was linoleum, peeling and a bit molded, but it muffled the floorboards a little more. It meant he was able to move faster than he had before, opening cupboards, peering through them quickly to look for glass bottles and moving on.

  Mostly bare, they didn't hide any secrets, except to assure him that whatever was here didn't eat food to live. At least, he corrected himself silently, nothing that would be stored normally.

  The kitchen had a doorless frame leading on to a dining room, and he felt for Lucas, making sure he wasn't straining him with distance. They were well within range of each other, and, a little regretful that he didn't have an excuse to back out, Keith stepped through into the dining room.

  This, too, was a quick search. The table was dusty with disuse, and the china cabinet sat empty. He checked the chairs, both on top and underneath, but it was clear this room was not in any particular recent use. Beyond the table, a back door looked onto the woods. He kept a nervous eye on it as he did his perfunctory examination.

  With that done, he shuffled hurriedly back through the kitchen and reemerged in the living room, giving it a brief search while he waited for Lucas to return. He doubted he'd find anything there in particular—it hardly seemed as though anyone would go to the bother of collecting Other essences only to drop them in the first room they entered—but he had the time. He checked under the dust cloths to make sure nothing was placed between the furniture and the floor, searched end tables.

  The main thing that he noticed was that the floor wasn't quite as dusty as the dining room had been. Although dust floated visibly through the air, it had been disturbed fairly recently.

  No surprise there.

  Movement at the second door startled him, kicked his heart back into hammering too fast and too hard, but it was only Lucas, returning by pushing himself through the solid material of the door. He didn't comment on his dislike of it, but his eyes had gone empty, his mouth a hole in his transparent face.

  Lucas came right back to Keith's side and brushed his arm before talking, again as hushed as he could. "Well?"

  "Nothing," Keith murmured. "Just a kitchen and a dining room, then the back door. You?"

  "A bathroom. And a work room of some kind, wood table and normal tools, an old wood saw. There were no bottles, though. The stairs to the basement were there too, behind a door." Lucas looked at Keith uneasily. "So what's next? Upstairs or downstairs?"

  Keith couldn't repress a shudder. Too many horror movies were conspiring to convince him that they'd have to go down to the basement to find what they were looking for. "Upstairs," he said. "The wiring downstairs was damaged, so the lights are out. If the Terrors stay in the house—" and they probably did "—they'll all be downstairs right now. If we don't find her upstairs, we should just leave and figure out next steps."

  Lucas let out a shudder, probably for similar reasons, but just turned to face the stairs up. "Right," he said. "Wish I could test the stairs for you, man."

  Giving him a sickly smile, Keith said, "If I fall through and break my leg, you go get the horned boy to call an ambulance. Think you can go that far on your own?"

  "Guess we'd find out," Lucas said, smiling grimly.

  "Guess so," Keith agreed, and started for the stairs before he could completely psyche himself out.

  They creaked underfoot but actually seemed much less likely to give than the ones outside. They'd stayed much drier and had, accordingly, rotted significantly less. He still hoped he wouldn't have to run up and down them at any point, and the noise didn't bring him any comfort.

  Lucas followed behind him, silent and weightless.

  At the top, they both stopped and glanced down the hall. There were what seemed to be four rooms total lining the narrow hallway-balcony overlooking the entry room. One door sat shortly to the right of the stairs at one end of the hall, one directly across the stairs, one further down the hall, and one at the left end of the hallway. Two rooms each, Keith thought.

  If nothing was here, they'd have no choice but to leave empty-handed. He swallowed.

  "I'll take the right," he breathed. "You take straight ahead?"

  "You're the boss," Lucas agreed. He looked aside at Keith briefly, not moving, one hand drifting up as if he wanted to do something—Keith wasn't sure what. It looked almost like a handshake, that open hand reaching halfway to his chest, then hesitating and falling again. But Lucas turned away after, heading for the door in front of them.

  Keith swallowed and turned too, fingers closing slowly around the cold knob of the door to the right. Out of the periphery of his vision, he saw Lucas stride forward and through the second door.

  He pushed the door open. It let out an awful groan, and Keith could practically taste his own heartbeat, bile-sour and erratic, but still nothing seemed to react to it.

  It was going well, he reminded himself. He had to hold onto that thought.

  The room inside was another bathroom, the window inside broken and letting in gusts of cold air that drew a shiver out of him. It was in stark whites and blacks, a checkerboard pattern on the floor with several tiles broken, a clawfoot bathtub, a single standing sink. Some graffiti was written on the wall—insults, a phone number with the 8s turned into breasts—and it occurred to him for the first time that he'd never considered the possibility of squatters here. Yet something else to worry about.

  Then again, he doubted any vagrants would survive what else was dwelling in the house, even if they'd been there once. That thought didn't make him any happier.

  He checked the room quickly. There was only one small cupboard over the sink and another underneath, and not much else that could hide anything. An orb weaver spider had built a web over the broken section of window, and the web pulsed in and out with the gusts of wind. He watched it out of the corner of his eye, paranoia convincing him the spider would somehow blow off onto him and he'd scream and draw attention.

  Anxious, he took hold of a cupboard door and opened it. His heart, already in his throat, tried to escape at what he saw inside—this was it.

  The rush of hope faded a moment later into a strange adrenaline shiver. The bottles filling the cupboard were undeniably similar to the one he'd seen in his vision, but these didn't feel enchanted to his senses, and the ends were still stoppered, not cut into spouts. They certainly didn't feel like they contained any captured souls. One of them even still seemed to have a small amount of perfume sitting in the bottom. This he picked up carefully, hesitated over, and then put into his backpack, wrapping it in the spare sweatshirt he'd put in there as padding to keep any bottles they grabbed safe.

  It wasn't what they'd come for, but it might be worth researching.

  Nothing else of interest seemed to be there, and he left the bathroom, shutting the door behind him, trying to put pressure on it as he closed it to keep it from screeching quite so badly a second time.

  He could move onto the next room now, take less time overall, but hesitated. It was important that Lucas knew where he was for sure, that they didn't lose track of each other even for a minute. So he waited outside the room, gazing down the balcony edge into the room below, watching for any sign of movement from the area of the basement stairs.

  At least he didn't have to wait long. Lucas came out a minute later, hesitantly.

  "Anything?" Keith asked.

  Lucas shook his head, then shrugged. "Nothing relevant. A study. There was maybe something to look up later, but it didn't have to do with those b
ottles. I'll tell you when we're out of here."

  When they had time, was what Lucas meant. Keith's heart leaped briefly at the thought that they were almost done here, at least for today—and again fell instantly. Only two rooms left to find her in, or it was a failure.

  "Me too," he said instead, thinking of the perfume. "I'll take the other hall-side door. You take the one at the end? I'm guessing it's a guest room and the master bedroom, judging from the rooms we've been in so far…"

  "Sounds good," Lucas said, and headed down the hall.

  Keith took a deep breath and opened the door further down the hall.

  His guess had been correct—at least, insofar that the room included a dresser and a bed—but the rest of it sent chills up his spine.

  The room was full of dolls.

  They were primarily porcelain and clay, from what he could tell, and wore fancy, frilly dresses. They looked to all the world like the kind he'd already seen both in Hiraeth's own antique store and the one they'd visited earlier, the one Lucas had been distracted by.

  But there were many, many more of them here than in either store. They were stacked on nearly every surface in the room, from bed to dresser, and piled in corners. They varied in size from about a foot tall to almost human height, and, as one, their glassy eyes were open and staring into the room.

  His skin crawled, but he stepped into the room.

  It was impossible not to feel as if they were watching his every move, and he felt himself holding his breath as he searched among them, shifting them around. He was almost afraid to dig too far into them—they were piled so that moving one might cause a chain reaction.

  Turning, he saw that near the wall by the door was something covered by another heavy cloth, tented. It looked like a chair—but from the shape, there was something sitting in it, and it struck him as odd. Even if the furniture downstairs was covered, neither the bed nor the dresser in this room were, and the dolls themselves were unprotected.

  That thought made him look over them again. They didn't seem terribly dusty compared to the rest of the house, and he frowned slightly. Was it coincidental, or had they been brought in later, moved around, cleaned off…? He was convinced, after a moment's thought, that it must be the case. Even if the previous tenant had a young daughter, the rest of the room wasn't decorated accordingly, and that meant whoever or whatever was controlling the Terrors had, for some reason, brought these dolls in.