Then her mother and father and Cutter all faded to mist, and she stood in the empty house, alone. There were boxes and objects, spiderwebs and dust, and there was something else in the house as well, something that seemed like a small black shadow, and then seemed to grow…dark, stygian, filling the house with some kind of evil.
The mummy rose from its sarcophagus and stared at her with rotted and empty eyes. It pointed at the black shadow, and its voice was as dry and brittle as death as it warned, “The house must have you. It’s up to you. Now you—you must come, and you must stop it from growing, from escaping. It’s loose, you see, the evil is on the loose, and it’s growing.”
The mummy wasn’t real. The mummy was dead. Liam had said so.
Terror filled her. She heard her name called. She turned. Liam was there, a tall, lanky teenager, reaching out to her. “Come here, come to me, it isn’t real, the mummy is dead, it’s in your imagination, in all the stories. Don’t believe in it, Kelsey—take my hand.”
There seemed to be a terrible roar. She turned, and the mummy was a swirling pile of darkness, a shadow, and the darkness was threatening to consume her.
Kelsey awoke with a start. She was in her charming living room, in her charming bungalow apartment, and she had fallen asleep with the television on.
And the movie channel she watched was showing Boris Karloff in The Mummy.
She laughed aloud at herself, turned off the TV, and decided that she was going to get things done, batten down the house, pack so she could leave in the morning, and then get a good night’s sleep. She wasn’t a coward; she had spent her childhood with Cutter, and really, she had to have some kind of sense of adventure.
I owe you, Cutter! I’m so sorry. I should have come to see you. I never should have let you die alone like that.
Please forgive me.
She wasn’t afraid.
The house was just a house.
And Cutter’s mummy was just preserved flesh that could now find a good home in a museum. Everything in perspective.
Cutter himself needed to rest at last, in peace.
She would see to it.
Liam shouted the officer’s name. “Ricky!”
There was no answer. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, however, he saw him on the floor, caught in the glow of light from his own fallen flashlight.
“Ricky!”
He rushed over to the man. Hunching down, he called for backup and an ambulance. He instantly checked for Ricky’s pulse, and was relieved to find that it was beating steadily.
Ricky groaned, and moved.
“Lie still. Where are you hurt? What happened?”
There was no sign of blood anywhere near Ricky.
As Liam spoke, Ricky opened his eyes, staring at Liam for a moment and then jerking around in panic. He stared across the room in the darkness. Liam aimed his flashlight beam in the area that seemed to be causing Ricky so much fear.
His light fell upon a suit of armor.
Ricky let out a scream, trying to choke it back.
“Ricky,” Liam said evenly, “it’s a suit of armor. Probably real, historic and worth a mint.”
“It moved!” Ricky declared.
Liam walked toward the armor. It was just that. Metal. It was buckled together by leather straps that had been made to replace the originals. They were probably period, but not historic.
The metal display stand was not on rollers. It hadn’t moved.
Liam turned to look at Ricky. He was rubbing the back of his head. It appeared that the man had seen the armor and backed himself into the edge of one of the display cases on the other side of the room.
“I swear to you, it moved!” Ricky told him.
He’d called for an ambulance. Even as Ricky stood, rubbing his head, and Liam checked all around the suit of armor, they heard the sound of a siren. Help was on its way.
Ricky winced, looking sheepish. “It moved. I’m telling you, it moved.”
“It’s dark down here, and you’ve heard all kinds of rumors about this place,” Liam said. He sighed, shaking his head. “Or maybe it did move, Ricky. Maybe a trespasser was in here, hiding behind the suit of armor, and when you knocked yourself out, he got away.”
Ricky’s mouth fell open. He was young, twenty-five years old. He was a good officer. Strong, usually sane and courteous. He could break up a barroom brawl like no other.
He protested weakly. “No…no, I would have seen a person.” He cleared his throat. “Oh, Lord, Lieutenant Beckett, please…maybe we could not mention this?” he asked hopefully.
Liam was irritated; he might have just lost his chance of finding whoever had broken in. But he said, “I’m not going to say anything—hell, I don’t want half the idiots in this city starting all kinds of rumors about haunted houses and animated suits of armor. Let the paramedics check you out. Just say you crashed into the display shelf, and that’s what I’ll say, too. It’s the truth.”He walked out. The paramedics were exiting their ambulance with their cases in their hands.
“It’s a knock on the head, self-inflicted,” Liam said. “I think he’s fine, but check him out, please.”
The paramedics nodded and headed for the house. A patrol car came sliding up to park beside the rescue vehicle. He sent the two officers inside, telling them to secure the residence before they left.
He stepped down to the lawn and looked back at the house. He felt the presence behind him and didn’t turn.
“Did you see anything?” he asked softly.
“No, I was with you,” Bartholomew said.
“Well, what do you think?”
“I don’t like the place, if that’s what you mean.”
“Is there anything in it? Anyone?”
“I sense—something,” Bartholomew said.
“I’m telling you, this has to do with something human,” Liam said flatly. “Maybe. I’m human,” Bartholomew protested.
“You’re a ghost.”
“But I was human. Evil isn’t…it isn’t necessarily human.”
Liam groaned softly. “We both know that human beings are the ones who carry out physical cruelty and injury to one another.”
“Well, we don’t actually know everything,” Bartholomew said.
“If I were going to be hounded by a ghost,” Liam said, “you’d think it would be one who knew a little more about eternity.”
“There’s no one in the house now,” Bartholomew told him indignantly. “No one who isn’t supposed to be there. No one human.”
“Someone else was in that house tonight,” Liam said with certainty.
“I think so, too,” Bartholomew said.
“And now?”
“Whatever is in there isn’t human,” Bartholomew said quietly. “So, what now?”
There was nothing else to be done for the night.
“Now? Hell, I’m heading back for a new batch of fish and chips,” Liam said. But as he walked toward his car, he hesitated. It was dark now on the little peninsula. But there were three acres surrounding the house. There was a strip of beach on the property, and near that there were mangrove swamps and bits of pine and brush on higher ground. The house itself was built up on a large slab of coral and limestone, but surrounding it were dozens of places where someone could conceivably hide, or places where one might stash a small vessel like a canoe, or…
Hell. A decent swimmer could make it across to the mainland easily.
In the darkness, someone could hide with little chance of actually being discovered. He would need a helicopter and megalights to find someone in the night.
He made a mental note to get an electrician out there in the morning.
When he reached O’Hara’s, he found Katie, David and Jamie at a table, all dining on fish and chips themselves.
“Well?” David asked curiously.
“Teenagers,” he said.
“They mess anything up?” David asked.
“They were huddled together in the kitchen, terrified,” Liam said. “They thought the shadows were coming after them.”
Katie laughed. “I can well imagine that place at night. They must have been scared out of their wits.”
“Hey, that place is frightening to an adult,” Jamie O’Hara said.
Liam was surprised that Jamie might have ever found anything frightening. He was a solid man with gray hair, bright eyes, and the calm confidence that made him a good man in any situation and—in Key West—a good barkeep. He could stare down any man about to get in a brawl, and if a punch was thrown, he had the brawn to walk an unruly guest right out to the street.
He’d been both a friend—and something of a parental figure to all of them.
“Cutter Merlin was born and bred right here, and he was popular with folks when he was a young man. He was our version of Indiana Jones, I suppose,” Jamie said. “When he got older, that’s when folks started talking about him. They said that he got himself into too many places that maybe he shouldn’t have gone. It wasn’t until his daughter died, though, that folks started saying that he might have been a Satanist, or a witch. Trying to explain that wiccans, or witches, practiced an ancient form of religion that had to do with nature and that Satanism meant worship of the Devil didn’t seem to go over. After his daughter died, people said everything in the world about him. He’d signed the Devil’s book. He held Black Masses. You name it, people said it.”
“He was a nice old man, and a great storyteller,” Katie said. “I was out there a few times. Kelsey is a few years older than me, but we were in a sailing class together, and we all went to her place for a picnic after the final day. Cutter was great. He dressed up in a suit of armor, then showed us how heavy it was and why a knight needed a squire. He was wonderful.”
Jamie shrugged. “Well, you know how people gossip, and you know how rumors start. People said that his daughter died because he’d signed a pact with the Devil—and that was why Kelsey’s father got her the hell out the minute he could after his wife passed away.”