“We’ve got to do something,” he said. “Otherwise, I don’t think we’re going to make it through the night.”
Emma nodded. “Sara’s going back.”
Blue sat up a little straighter. “Back to where?”
“Ottawa. We’ve got to stop the man who’s doing this to us. If we can do that, and if Esmeralda finds Jamie and can bring him back, maybe the House’ll return to where it belongs.”
If, if, Blue thought. His gaze shifted to Sara.
“How’re you planning to do that?” he asked.
He’d thought that they were trapped here, but if Emma and Sara had come up with a way out... Hope rose in him, momentarily quelling the whispers and constant nattering that worried at the edge of his mind.
“With Pukwudji’s help,” Sara said. “Whatever caught me in the glade and kept me there didn’t seem to affect him.
If I can get to the garden where he’s waiting for me, I think he can take me back to Ottawa.”
“And then?” Blue asked.
Sara looked puzzled. “Then what?”
“That’s what I want to know. What are you going to do if you do get back? How’re you going to find this guy? Where would you even start to look?”
“He’s tapping into the House, right?”
“I guess.”
At least that’s what the man in the forest had told Emma. Blue wasn’t so ready to put as much faith in what he had to say as Emma was, although he had to admit that the man had been spot on the money so far—especially when it came to how the Otherworld was going to mess up their heads.
“I’m a Tamson,” Sara said. “Just like Jamie and his dad and his granddad. I can feel the connection that Jamie has with the House. I’m hoping to use it, to tap into however the man’s drawing off the House’s energy and following that trail back to where he is.”
“You can do that?”
“Not here—with the forest blocking me—but away from its influence, I think I can.”
It sounded like clutching at straws, Blue thought, but he didn’t have anything better to offer. That brought him around to the other thing that was worrying him.
“Just say you do find this guy,” he said. “He’ll be dangerous—seriously dangerous.”
Sara nodded.
“That’s why we thought you should go with her,” Emma said.
And leave you? Blue thought. If Sara and he did manage to return to Ottawa, there was no guarantee that they’d be able to get back here. Thinking of Emma trapped here woke a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.
She seemed to sense what he was thinking. Crossing the room, she sat on her heels in front of him and laid her hands on his knees.
“It’s not that I want you to go,” she said.
“You mean that?” he asked.
She leaned forward to kiss him. “We’ve got things to work out, I don’t deny that, but I want to work them out. Before we can do that, though, we’ve got to deal with this.”
“I hear you,” Blue said.
She smiled. “You’re the best we’ve got, so it’s got to be you who goes. I don’t see any alternatives.”
As she rose to her feet, Blue stood up with her. He enfolded her in his arms, marveling—as it seemed he hadn’t had the chance to in ages—at just how perfectly their bodies fit against each other. For all his weariness, he felt renewed. The nattering at the edge of his mind dimmed, faded, and was gone.
When she finally stepped back from his embrace there was a wistful look in her eyes that made Blue’s heart sing. He knew then, as he always had, that he’d do anything for her.
“I’ll be back for you,” he said.
“I know you will.”
He looked over Emma’s shoulder to where Sara stood watching them. She had that scared-but-I’ll-be-brave look in her features that was so familiar to him, but there was a happiness for him there as well.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s figure out how we can get to the garden.”
“It’s funny,” Tim said.
He leaned up against the wall, positioned so that he could look over the barricade and down the length of corridor. His line of sight took in the top of the nearby stairway, where he could see the hindquarters of the bear that they’d been forced to shoot earlier. It lay where it had fallen, gathering flies. Sitting on the banister just above the corpse was one of the owls, wide eyes regarding him with an unblinking gaze.
The birds freaked him, making him happy to be armed. The butt of his shotgun was on the ground by his right foot. He had the barrel in his hand, held against his thigh. The cold smoothness of the metal was comforting against his palm. He glanced at Cal to see if Cal was listening, then returned his gaze to the corridor.
“Used to be,” he went on, “that my biggest problem was whether to write a play in verse or regular dialogue. Now I wonder if I’m still going to be alive this time tomorrow.”
Talking helped ease the weird feeling in his head that came clamoring up through his thoughts each time the conversation lagged. Because it had been quiet for twenty minutes or so, he and Cal had the watch to themselves, allowing the others to get some well-earned rest. He doubted they were sleeping. Tim liked Cal well enough, but he wished he were here with someone else—someone who wasn’t quite so morose.
“So what’s with you and Julianne?” he asked.
That brought a quick response.
“Why?” Cal asked. “What did she say?”
“She didn’t say anything. It’s just that you’re usually about as close to her as a burr that got snagged on her sweater, but now you’re avoiding her like she’s got the plague or something.”
“Maybe I’ve got the plague,” Cal said.
Normally, Tim wasn’t one to pry. But he needed to talk—just to keep the weird feeling in his head at bay—and since he’d exhausted a number of other lines of conversation already with little response from his companion, he decided to just press on. At least he’d gotten some return on this particular subject.
“What?” he asked. “You guys have a fight or something?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
For a long moment he thought he wasn’t going to get an answer, but then Cal sighed. He didn’t look at Tim, just stared down the corridor across the top of his side of the barricade and spoke in a subdued voice.
“When everything first started,” he asked. “When the forest just appeared the way it did—did anything happen to you?”
“Happen to me how?”
“Like inside you,” Cal said. “Did it change you?”
Tim considered the emphasis his companion had put on “change.” He remembered being freaked, but then everything started to happen so fast.... He’d also had the benefit of being around Esmeralda and Blue, who seemed not just more together in terms of organization, but used to this kind of thing. That had helped.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I mean, I see things differently, I guess....”
And wasn’t that the understatement of the year? His entire perspective had undergone a jolting shift. Mostly he tried not to think about it because, when he did, the first image that came rolling up behind his eyes was that of three green-skinned children, hanging like dead fruit from the old oak by the fountain. He didn’t think that that was quite what Cal was driving at.
“Something happened to you?” he added.
He glanced at his companion in time to catch him nod.
“Oh, yeah,” Cal said.
And then Cal explained that moment of piercing insight that had come to him, standing there in the hall and looking at Julianne as she seemed to glow with her own inner light. He started out haltingly, obviously embarrassed, but he carried on all the way to the end.
When Cal was done, Tim didn’t say anything for a long moment. He could empathize with Cal to some degree—anyone who didn’t think Julianne was gorgeous really ought to have their hormones checked—but he felt that Cal had blown t
he whole thing way out of proportion.
“But it’s all part of a game,” he said finally. “The whole courtship thing.”
“You don’t understand,” Cal began.
“No, I do. Really. But think about what you’ve been saying.”
“That’s all I ever do.”
“Try it from a different perspective, then,” Tim said. “Look, there’s nothing wrong with a man finding a woman attractive and fantasizing about her; women find men attractive and do the same thing. You didn’t want to do any weird shit with her, you just wanted to make love with her. There’s nothing wrong or twisted about that.”
Cal shook his head. “It’s the way I was coming on to her. I knew she was the kind of woman who always had guys hitting on her, so I deliberately tried to just be her pal, figuring I’d be her friend first and then maybe the other stuff would happen. I was pretending, you see? Our whole relationship was based on a lie because while I was being her pal, all I really wanted was her body.”
“So you never liked her.”
“Of course I liked her.”
Tim shook his head. “You’re just screwing yourself up, man. What you should do is talk to her. If she doesn’t want to be your lover, that’s going to be a drag, but maybe you could still be friends.”
Cal didn’t appear to have heard him.
“It’s like there was something missing inside me before,” he said. “Compassion, or empathy. I should have taken the time to see how it would look from her perspective.”
Tim glanced down the hall toward the Postman’s Room.
“Well, heads up,” he said. “Here comes your chance to make things right.”
Tim thought Cal was going to vault across the barricade and just bolt when he saw Julianne approaching them, but he held his ground. A flush colored the back of his neck and he stared down at his shoes.
“Blue needs a hand from one of you guys,” Julianne said.
Tim started to step forward. Talk about your perfect timing, he thought. Maybe somebody could salvage something worthwhile out of all this crap they were going through. But Cal moved more quickly.
“I’ll go,” he mumbled and hurried by Julianne, clutching his rifle against his chest and not looking at her.
Julianne’s gaze followed his retreating figure, then returned to Tim, who just shrugged.
“Guess he just likes being useful,” he said, but he could see in Julianne’s eyes that she knew exactly why Cal had fled.
Julianne sighed and took up Cal’s position on the other side of the barricade. She carried her shotgun with familiarity, but didn’t seem particularly happy about having to lug it around. She looked over the barricade and down the corridor, but things were still quiet. The dead bear remained by the stairs, the buzz of the flies on its corpse getting louder as more and more of them arrived for the feast. The owl still watched them with what Tim couldn’t help thinking was an unforgiving gaze.
His gaze shifted back to his companion. He’d take looking at Julianne over all of this weird shit any time. Long before Cal had shown up at the House, he’d done his own shuffle and dance with her until she made it plain—but nicely—that she wasn’t interested in being more than friends. What she offered as a friend more than made up for his disappointment, but it didn’t stop him from teasing her.
“So,” he said. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
She gave him a quick smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, but Tim could see that she appreciated his attempt at levity.
“I could ask you the same thing,” she said.
“But I’m not a girl.”
“Or nice?” she asked.
She arched her eyebrows as she spoke—trying to get into a bantering mood, Tim thought.
“Depends on your definition of nice,” he said and he launched into a silly description of what he thought the word meant that, by the time he was done, had her smile finally reaching her eyes.
* * *
It took Sara a moment to place the intense young man who joined them in the room directly across the hall from the Postman’s Room. She’d been meeting too many people today to keep them all straight without a fair amount of concentration. His name came to her just a half breath before Judy noticed him.
“Hey, Cal,” Judy said. “How’re you holding up?”
“I’m okay,” Cal said.
Sara didn’t think so. He didn’t look scared, but there was a paleness to his features and a haunted look in his eyes that spoke of some emotional turmoil. She couldn’t have said why, but she didn’t think it had anything to do with their all being trapped here in the Otherworld.
“Have you ever done any rope climbing?” Blue asked him.
“Some—back in high school.”
They were all crowded around the window overlooking the garden. Blue and Judy had removed the sliding windows from their grooves, passing them to Sara and Emma, who stacked them up against the wall out of the way. What they were doing now was lowering a rope out the window to check its length. The rope had been made by tying sheets together—something that Sara didn’t think was ever done except in the movies.
“We’re trying to keep this low-key,” Blue said, “because we don’t want to get people’s hopes up.”
Cal nodded, though it was obvious to Sara that he didn’t have a clue as to what Blue was talking about.
“We’re trying to get down to the garden,” she explained.
“Sara’s got a friend there,” Blue went on, “who might be able to take us back to Ottawa where we can deal with the sucker who’s got us trapped here.”
“You’ve really got it figured out who’s responsible for all of this?” Cal asked.
“We’re working on it,” Blue replied. “We’ll know better once we get back to Ottawa—if we can get back.”
“And this friend of Sara’s... ?”
“He’s a manitou,” Sara said. “One of the little mysteries that make their home here in the Otherworld—but he’s shy, so we can’t go in a crowd.”
“Oh... kay,” Cal said.
He was obviously still confused, Sara thought, but seemed willing to go along with things until they started making sense.
“So what do you want me to do?” Cal added.
“What we need,” Blue said, “is someone without a whole lot of weight to go down this rope and stand guard until Sara and I get down. I’d go myself, but we’re not so sure that the rope’s going to hold me, so I’m going last.”
“No problem,” Cal said.
“The thing is,” Blue went on, “if the rope breaks when any of us are going down, you’re going to be stuck in the garden—cut off from everybody else.”
“Why can’t I just go with you?” Cal asked.
“Pukwudji knows Blue,” Sara said, “but if anybody else is with me, he might not show up at all. He really is shy—almost to the point of it being a phobia.”
“I was going to do it,” Judy said, “but Mr. Big Shot here”—she nodded her head toward Blue—“says he wants me to stay.”
“I don’t want to sound crass,” Blue said, “or to belittle anybody else’s talents—including your own, Cal—but if something happens to us, if we don’t make it back, you’re going to need her mechanical expertise.”
“Julianne seemed to know her way around the bikes,” Judy complained.
Sara noticed the way Cal flinched at the mention of Julianne’s name and then she knew what was bothering him. She remembered the way he looked at Julianne and then put it all together. There was nothing worse than a one-sided love affair.
“Julianne knows how to use them and maybe change a spark plug,” Blue was saying to Judy, “but she can’t take things apart and put them back together again the way that you can. That—and any kind of medical knowledge—are going to be primo skills if you guys are stuck here.”
“And Esmeralda seemed to think that Julianne knows a lot of herbal lore,” Emma said.
“So yo
u should take care of the both of them,” Blue said.
“Get him,” Judy said. “Like we’re only as good as the services we provide. Sounds pretty cheesy to me.”
Blue gave her the finger.
“Why don’t you just go down the stairs?” Cal asked. “It seems quiet enough now.”
Blue shook his head. “There’s things moving around on the ground floor. How many or what, we don’t know, but we can hear them from Sean’s side of the corridor. Haven’t you guys heard anything on your side?”
“Like I said, it’s been quiet.”
“Well, we’ve been watching the garden for a half hour now,” Blue said, “and there’s nothing moving out there. Seems to me it’s the better risk. So what do you say—are you up for it?” When Cal nodded, Blue offered him a pair of cloth garden gloves that had coarse gray leather on the palms and fingers. “These’ll help you keep from slipping.”
Emma took Cal’s rifle and attached a shoulder strap to it while Cal put on the gloves. With Judy and Sara’s help, Blue shifted a big walnut dresser over to the window to which they’d attach the rope. When they had it tied and flung it back through the window, Blue peered down.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re ready to roll.”
Sara studied the nearest trees over Blue’s shoulder. The forest had marched almost right up to the House, filling the garden with its tall outgrowths. There didn’t appear to be anything of a threatening nature hiding under the boughs, though it was hard to tell because the light from the windows only went as far as the first few trees. There could be any number of the forest’s motley army of creatures hiding down there, just waiting for them to touch the ground.
“It looks clear,” she said, “except for those damn owls.”
She was sick of the birds. They were everywhere, watching, staring, prying. If she leaned out the window and looked up on either side of the window, she would see a half-dozen of the bloody things, perched on the eaves, staring back at her. Emma might think they were manitou drawn here by the magic that was being used to keep the House in the Otherworld, and she was probably right, but they weren’t acting like any of the manitou with which Sara was familiar. There was something profoundly disquieting about their silent scrutiny, as though they knew something....