“Your revenge is over, Jack,” I said. “Her family didn't harm you. Let it go. You need to let it all go and move on—”

  “Where is Andromeda? I heard she wants to play with me.” The sound of the little girl's name in his mouth sickened me. I thought of Lonnie, calling for Jack in order to scare his sister and brother.

  Unseen others moved in the abandoned house, scurrying wetly and whispering through walls. I could only think of the dead children from the swamp.

  I didn't know where Andra was, but I certainly wasn't going to tell him that. If he thought I knew, then he could waste his time and energy pursuing me instead of finding her. I'd be the wild goose in this chase.

  “I'll never tell you where I hid her,” I said.

  Then I slammed the door built into the back of the cupboard, and I turned and ran away down the passage.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The way back was not the same as the way in.

  The passageways had shifted, growing longer and more winding. Their floors, walls, and ceiling were made of jumbles of wooden bric-a-brac, from wall paneling to hardwood tiles and roof shingles, dinnerware and bowls and cups that might have come from the old woodworking factory. There were broken chairs and children's toys—a rocking horse, a doll, toy soldiers.

  All of this jutted up irregularly from the floor area. Sharp points of broken wood poked out from the walls of debris on either side. I kept tripping over piles of woodwork as I tried to run.

  Hearing Jack's footsteps and the trailing chorus of wetly whispering voices, I turned down a side passage that looked wide and promising at first. It soon narrowed until I was crawling. Splinters of broken furniture above dragged like claws across my back as I wormed forward.

  The crawlspace ended at a square red door decorated with a wreath that had long since shriveled to a brown husk. It was so low I would have to crawl through on my hands and knees; good thing I was already in that position.

  I grabbed the green knob and pulled the door open.

  Beyond lay the smells of freshly baked cinnamon bread and a crackling fireplace that lit the room. A modest fir stood in the corner, hung with a few homemade ornaments.

  From the fireplace and woodwork, I recognized it as the front parlor of the boardinghouse, where the Browns kept their board games and television.

  The television was gone, though, and the furniture was from a different era, heavier and handmade.

  Cabinet Jack, looking more youthful and alive than the phantom I'd encountered, sat on the sofa near the fireplace, grinning wide and holding a couple of bulky, folded woolen stockings. On his lap sat Solange, and beside them her younger brother Raynard. I recognized the children from their photographs.

  “Yes, the Christmas elves told me to deliver these personally,” Jack told the children, waving the stockings around. “But only to the most special children in town.”

  “Pick me!” Solange said.

  “Pick me, too!” Raynard echoed.

  “Hmm…” Jack rubbed his chin, looking at Solange, who offered him a wide smile, as if trying to copy his expression. “Well, that certainly is a pretty smile.”

  “I have a pretty smile, too!” The boy pulled his lips out wide in either direction, showing all his teeth.

  “This one must be yours, then. The stocking for a special boy.” Jack handed him one, and Raynard eagerly reached inside. He drew out a wooden locomotive. He gaped at it, then excitedly rolled it along the floor.

  “Is the other one for a special girl?” Solange asked.

  “Lucky for you, yes.” He held it out to her, and she reached inside, giggling. Then she looked puzzled, until she drew out a wooden hairbrush with flowers and rabbits carved into the back.

  “Oh, it's so pretty!” She immediately put it to use on her long golden hair. “I'll use it every day.”

  “Can you keep a secret?” Jack whispered, and the little girl nodded. “I made that brush, not the elves. But don't tell anyone.”

  “I won't,” she whispered back.

  “Do you promise?” he asked, and she nodded.

  “Solange! Raynard! Why are you out of bed?” A woman's sharp, French-accented voice sounded from somewhere, though I didn't see anyone step into the room.

  “Mister Jack gave us presents!” Solange replied.

  “Surely they can stay up late on such a special night.” Jack smiled a little wider.

  “They cannot,” the woman's disembodied voice replied. “To bed! Now!”

  Looking glum, the children complied, taking their gifts and vanishing into the shadows.

  Jack rose from the couch.

  “Beautiful children,” he said. “But of course, because they sprang from such a beautiful mother.”

  No reply came. The roaring blaze in the fireplace withered and died, the Christmas tree vanished, and the room turned cold and dark.

  Jack's gaze fell on me, as I watched from the hidden door in the cabinet.

  He shifted into the version of himself that I'd known, the dried, mummified, half-dead thing that had just pursued me from the house. He drew a jackknife from his stiff, stained leather carpenter's apron and unfolded it as he stalked toward me. Its handle was antler horn, like the tools Jason had found.

  “Where is she?” Jack demanded, his voice cracking and hoarse. “I need her.”

  Well, I wasn't about to get into a conversation with him. I slammed the back-of-the-cabinet door shut and pulled down the walls of broken wooden debris from the crazy passageway around me to block him inside.

  Then I crawled backward through the tunnel of broken woodwork, because it was the only way I could go.

  The Christmas-memory door rattled against the junk I'd brought down to block it. Then it slammed open an inch, nudging the shattered wood back. Another hard knock slammed it open wider, and his withered hand reached out, his moleskin shirt buttoned at the cuff.

  The central passage was like a landfill now, loose pieces rolling under my feet, threatening to send me crashing onto sharp stakes of jagged wood. If these were the pathways and tunnels of Jack's mind, then nowhere was truly safe for me to run. I was a character caught in his crazed dreams, lost inside his madness.

  Avoiding his approaching footsteps, I crawled down another twisting, slowly collapsing tunnel, ending at another miniature door, this one etched with butterflies and bunnies.

  I wasn't surprised when it opened onto the small sleeping room with the window and the bunk, decorated with the butterfly and bunny motif.

  Solange lay in the bunk, under a quilt. Jack leaned over her, a smiling shadow in the moonlight.

  “Solange,” he whispered.

  She blinked at him sleepily. “Where did you come from?”

  “From the land of secret doors,” he whispered. “I'll show you. Let's go on an adventure.”

  “Mother says to stay away from you now.”

  “Soon you'll move away to a distant town and never see me again. This is our last chance to play together.”

  Solange seemed to think it over, then nodded and got out of bed.

  Smiling, Jack turned toward me, because of course I was watching through the secret cabinet door through which he'd entered the little room, and through which he was preparing to kidnap Solange.

  Jack must have seen me, because his big grin faded, which is an effect I've had on people before. He withered and mummified—I'm not taking the blame for that—and Solange and her blankets vanished. The room turned dark and cold.

  “You.” Jack approached, this time drawing his chisel and pointing it at my face. He had to kneel to approach the hidden door. “Show me the way to her.”

  “Never,” I said, fairly confident in my response, considering I had no idea where she was.

  Again, I slammed the door in his face, and this time I pulled down double handfuls of woodworking junk, which seemed composed of stranger stuff than ever—arms and torsos of wooden mannequins, a wooden model of a head with a web of cryptic phrenology markings all over its surface.

  Running, stumbling, pushing my way through, sending things crashing and tumbling behind me to litter the path, I finally reached another doorway, one that was wide, almost full height, and vaguely familiar, made of dark, heavy wood.

  I turned the latch and opened it.

  The interior of the armoire was roughly the same as I'd seen it before, but the clothes were different, mostly old-timey, high-necked dresses and housecoats that smelled like floral perfume. I moved them aside as quietly as I could, trying not to let the hanger hooks scrape the rod.

  The armoire door was cracked slightly open. I stepped forward, past the clothes, and nudged it wider, hoping I'd found the way out of the maze of Jack's memories.

  The bed was different, not Dave and Nicole's but one with a curved wooden headboard. The lacy ruffled curtains and pillows, the doilies on seemingly every surface, the religious paintings, and the cloying perfume smell in the air all pretty much screamed that this was an elderly woman's room.

  The lady in the bed wasn't elderly, though. She wasn't Nicole, either. In the moonlight, I recognized Aurelie's haughty, pretty face from her photographs, her lips full and red, her golden hair splayed out in waves around her.

  Beside her lay the shorter, lumpier frame of Charles Collins, snoring softly through the gap in his teeth, his Coke-bottle glasses on the doily-draped nightstand beside him, under his late aunt's delicate hurricane lamp painted with songbirds.

  “She gave herself to him,” Jack whispered behind me, nearly freezing my left ear solid with the icy chill of his voice. “And how could he resist such temptation? No man could.”

  “So you murdered her children.”

  “Her rejection tormented me like fire. I needed her to suffer as I suffered. Then, I thought, she might understand me.”

  “You're beyond sick. And you really need to brush up on your understanding of consent in relationships.” I pushed the mirrored door wide open and leaped out.

  I landed on my feet and turned back toward him. I loosened a strap of my backpack and slung it around in front of me, then unzipped it and reached inside, ready to try my hopeful attempt at a secret weapon against him.

  The closet lay dark and quiet, though the blue blazers inside swayed as if someone had just passed through.

  The bed lay empty, and the master bedroom was restored to its modern condition, including our cameras set up to watch it by night.

  Someone pounded on the door to the room and kept it trying to push it open, so I unlocked it.

  The door flew open, and Stacey staggered into the room, visibly panicked. Neither Penny nor Jason was with her. The power was still out, and she swung her flashlight around the room until it landed on me.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, while she asked the exact same question, effectively jinxing each other, though neither of us mentioned this out loud.

  “It's…not going well,” Stacey said, and she continued searching the room.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “Where are the kids?” I asked Stacey while she looked in the master bathroom and closet in a way that didn't really reassure me that she had any idea. “Uh, hello? Stacey?”

  “They took off!” Stacey finally answered, nearly exploding in frustration. “Penny blew out the candles to make it dark, and the two of them just ran out of the room. She and Jason are in cahoots, I'm telling you!”

  “In cahoots about what?”

  “About ditching me, for one thing. They ran in here and locked the door. And now they're nowhere!”

  I looked at the doors to the upstairs porch, but they were still latched from the inside.

  “They must have left through the armoire.” I pointed my light inside, revealing the back panel, which stood partially open.

  “But wouldn't you have seen them?” Stacey asked. “Didn't you just come out of there?”

  “I took a different path, though. It led through Jack's soul.”

  “Sounds twisted.”

  “Twisted, dark, and pointy.” I slid Nicole's clothes aside and shone my light into the dusty passage beyond. “At least it looks normal again.”

  I took a deep breath, tried to ready myself mentally, and stepped once more into the mirrored armoire, and the hidden passage beyond it, which had reverted to its more natural form, instead of the nightmarish interior of Jack's mind.

  “Penny! Jason!” Stacey called as she followed me into the narrow passage between walls.

  “Andra!” I called.

  “We are doing a terrible job of watching these kids,” Stacey said. “I swear I was a better babysitter when I was sixteen.”

  “Caleb!” I added for good measure.

  “Wait, the nose ring kid's back in play, too?”

  “He's in here somewhere. Penny was hiding him in her room. Then, when we showed up, she put him into a secret passage that we didn't know about but she did.”

  “Ooh. Boy smuggling. Scandalous. And it explains why she stayed up in her room, even with the power out and her little sister missing.”

  We searched through the passageways. The door to the little windowless room where we'd found Penny with the mysterious carved jewelry was wide open, so we crawled out through that cabinet and looked around. The bedroom door was open, so we returned to the main upstairs hall, still calling uselessly for all the missing children.

  “May as well check Jack's room,” I said, rounding the corner to the dark little hallway that led nowhere but the attic bedroom stairs.

  The door was closed and locked from the inside. I pressed my ear against it and heard footsteps, then voices. Someone was up there.

  I drew out my lock picks and worked as quickly as I could, while listening to their muffled voices through the door.

  “Just lie there and let it happen,” Penny was saying.

  “Does your little brother have to be here, though?” That was Caleb, sounding nervous.

  “He wants to see it.”

  “Uh, but—”

  “Shh. Maybe close your eyes, okay?”

  We'd found two or three of the missing kids, by the sound of it, depending on whether you wanted to count Caleb. I finished picking the lock and pushed open the long, rectangular trap door.

  The attic was gloomy, lit only by a couple of candles. These weren't scented ones in glass jars, but tall white candles that might have been used in a formal dining setting, or maybe a church.

  Every cabinet and closet door I could see in the thin, dancing red light was open, at least a little bit.

  “Someone's coming.” Jason's voice trembled with fear.

  “I know,” Penny said, sounding thrilled about it. “And he's almost here.”

  I rounded the bookshelves that had blocked most of my view of the bed.

  Caleb lay on the bare wooden bed platform, eyes closed, looking like a human sacrifice waiting to happen.

  Penny knelt beside him, her hand on his chest, as though she would be performing the sacrifice. She wore the beaded necklace, the carved ring with the jewel-like flower, and even the half-carved moon and stars bracelet that Jason's possessed hands had begun to make for her.

  Jason occupied a chair in the corner, shivering, knees drawn up to his chin.

  Penny scowled at Stacey and me as we arrived.

  “Stop!” I yelled, running toward Penny and Caleb on the bed.

  “Stop what?” Penny said. “We're just sitting here. Am I not allowed to sit in my own house? Who says? You? You don't even belong here, and you don't own me—”

  Every door in the room, small or large, slammed open at once, as if a powerful gale blasted out of each one. The attic air grew as painfully cold as the swamp had been when Jack and his horde of dead children arrived.

  On the bed, Caleb cried out in pain and arched up like he was being stabbed in the back. His eyes flew open.

  Then he settled back, a wide grin splitting his face. His bright gaze landed on me.

  Penny had been working on Jack's behalf, it seemed, bringing Caleb up here to be possessed.

  And we'd arrived too late to stop it.

  The possessed boy stood and stretched. There was a different look in his eye, a different set to his face and how he carried himself.

  “Leave the boy,” I said.

  He smiled. “But I just got here. And it's so nice and warm.” He caressed the torso of the body he'd stolen. “You don't know how I've missed warmth. Death is cold.”

  “Only if you try to cling to life when it should be over. You have to let go and move on. Your time has passed. Everyone you cared about is gone. Even Aurelie.”

  “Aurelie?” He looked from me to Stacey.

  “Yes. Aurelie moved on, lived her life, and passed away. You can do the same.” The secret weapon in my backpack wasn't going to work here, after all. I had very little faith in the other one, but it was time to try it out. “Stacey, can you bring up Aurelie's letter on your tablet?”

  “Sure.” Stacey looked puzzled but pulled her tablet from her backpack.

  “Can you read it to him?”

  “Okay…” Stacey cleared her throat. She began to read in an extra-deep Southern accent, like it was a diary entry in a Civil War documentary. “My dearest Solange and Raynard…You are the twin lights of my life, the sun and moon in my sky—”

  “She was French,” I whispered.

  “Oh, right.” Stacey switched to a theatrical French accent. “All that I do is with the hope of making a better future for you. My deepest wish is that you both experience in your own lives the same wonder and happiness and meaning that you have brought into mine. My greatest fear is that the hardness of this world will overcome you, and that I will not have prepared you for all the challenges you will face as you grow. Adult life is a maze with few signposts—”

  “Skip to the part about him,” I said. The entity inside the possessed boy appeared to be listening raptly at first, but he was starting to lose interest, to look around at the open cabinets and other dusty woodwork.

  We'd had time to review the letter on the drive over. The part Stacey was skipping told the children about their fathers. Solange's father had been a cold, cruel, moderately rich man Aurelie had married when she was very young, under pressure from her parents. Aurelie had run away to America to escape him, though it meant throwing herself into poverty. In America, she'd begun calling herself a widow.

 

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