Not that he had noticed any wind earlier.
Brian turned the doorknob.
Brian turned the knob the other way.
Brian tugged.
Brian fiddled with the locking mechanism.
He could hear it click, but no matter whether he had the switch to the right or to the left, the door did not budge.
And then, just when he was beginning to think maybe he should simply pick up a chair and fling it through the window to make his escape, he heard Kyla's voice from upstairs: "Brian? Is that you? Something goofy happened to the door to my room—and we're all stuck in here."
Brian was weighing her good looks against the option of ignoring her when Mrs. Zolla spoke up—without her accent: "Brian, before you come upstairs, can you check the kitchen? I put some water on to make deviled eggs, and it must be boiling over by now."
So. No rat soup planned for supper. That was a relief. And there was a reasonable explanation for where everybody had gotten to. The front door must simply be old and finicky: weather-stuck. Good thing no one had seen him overreact.
Since he'd already taken care of the boiling water, Brian headed for the stairs. "Which is your room?" he asked.
"First," the several family members answered simultaneously.
Brian admired the rich, curved staircase, the banister with carved wooden newels.
Nice house. Too bad about the family.
He opened the door, and a body fell out, a young woman with a bloody T-shirt and a knife sticking out of her back.
At the same moment Brian was registering that, the next door in the hallway opened, and there stood Kyla, Trevor, and Mr. and Mrs. Zolla.
So much for a sexy French maid costume—Kyla and her brother looked like younger versions of their parents. Dark hair. Pale faces. Clawed fingers. Vampires. They were all vampires.
And it was time to stop looking for a rational explanation for any of this.
"Quick!" Trevor called. "He's found the last victim! Don't let him get away!"
Brian spun around to run down the stairs, but his feet got tangled in the legs of the young woman who had fallen out of the closet. Rigor mortis must have set in, for she was positively stiff, and the next thing Brian knew, he was tumbling down the stairs.
He thought he'd reached the bottom—he was sure he had hit every single step on the way down—and he tried to stand up while he was still dizzy. Apparently, though, he hadn't been at the bottom after all, and he hit a couple more steps before coming to rest in a heap on the living room floor. He was sore all over, with his leg bent under him at an angle that was definitely scary.
Still, he began to crawl toward the door before he remembered that it was somehow sealed.
And that his car was minus a tire.
Behind him, he could hear footsteps clambering down the stairs. Someone was swearing, which—for a moment—he kind of thought might have been himself, but it was Trevor. And Kyla was giving frantic little gasps and crying, "Brian! Bri! Are you all right?"
He shrank away from the feel of hands on his shoulders, but they were gentle hands and when his eyes finally were able to focus, he saw that Kyla was kneeling in front of him, peering anxiously into his face. "Are you all right?" she demanded again, which was a strange thing for a vampire to ask. Then she said, "Here, give me that pillow."
Was she going to smother him?
No, she put the pillow, which her mother had whisked off the couch, between his head and the wall.
"Don't move him," Mr. Zolla said, having lost his accent also. "I'll call 911."
While Mr. Zolla picked up the phone in the living room and began telling someone that there had been a falling-down-the-stairs accident, Mrs. Zolla said to Brian, "I'm so sorry. It was supposed to be a joke. Obviously it went too far. I'm so sorry. We never thought you'd fall down the stairs."
Brian cast a wary glance back up the landing, where the body still lay.
Trevor must have seen where he was looking. "It's a mannequin," he said. "From the costume rental place where I work."
Brian's leg was beginning to throb. Much as he wanted to believe...
"C'mon," Kyla said, "Bri. You know I'm not a vampire. I go to school with you. During the day."
That was a good point.
But Brian couldn't tear his gaze off where the mannequin, or the body, lay. "The rat," he said, surprising himself at how slurred and unsteady his voice sounded. "The bags of blood."
"Brian," Kyla said in a tone somewhere between disbelief at how gullible he was and not wanting to chastise him since he was injured because of her—and her crazy family. "They're just novelties. My family loves Halloween. We go wild with the idea of pretending to be something we're not." She pulled the plastic fangs out of her mouth, took off her dark wig to reveal her pinned-up blond hair, ran the back of her hand across her pale cheek to smudge the makeup off her normal-colored skin, and peeled off the latex gloves that gave her fingers that look of claws.
Mr. Zolla was off the phone, and he crouched down beside Brian and shoved his Red Cross bag at him.
Brian shrank away from him, which meant leaning into Kyla, who—whatever was going on—was one of them.
"It's tomato juice mixed with cran-grape juice," Kyla's dad said. "Probably not a flavor that's going to catch on like wildfire, but it's certainly not real blood. Taste it."
Brian shook his head, unable to rid himself of the lingering fear that they wanted him to taste human blood because that would turn him into a vampire.
Mrs. Zolla must have gone out to the kitchen, because she was carrying the dripping rat on a slotted spoon. "It's just a plush toy," she said. "It's for cats to play with. Look."
Maybe. Brian couldn't bring himself to look that closely. His head was beginning to ache, and he thought he might become sick to his stomach. Concussion, he thought. These nutcases have given me a concussion.
Kyla took the Red Cross bag from her father and brought it closer to Brian's face. "Smell it," she insisted. She held it under his nose until he could hold his breath no longer.
He caught the unmistakable whiff of tomatoes.
"It was all a joke that went too far," Kyla said.
In another moment, he would allow himself to get angry, to let them know that he would encourage his parents to sue them right out of their pretty furnishings. But for now, he asked, "The flat tire?"
"That was me," Trevor admitted. "I let the air out. Not to worry: We've got a pump."
Brian shook his head, which was a mistake as far as his headache was concerned. "Why?" he asked.
"To keep you here till eight thirty," Kyla said.
"You might have asked," Brian grumbled. He was looking at the phone Mr. Zolla had been talking into and noticed that the cord was pulled out of the wall. He would ask about that in a moment, but for now he asked, "What's at eight thirty?"
"Moon comes up," Trevor explained.
"Full moon," Mrs. Zolla said.
"We're not vampires," Mr. Zolla started, and Kyla finished, "We're werewolves."
Brian was sure they were joking again...
Right up until the moment when he realized they weren't.
I Want to Thank You
Thank you.
Thank you so much for letting me in your house.
The townsfolk just seemed to suddenly go mad. It must be because it's All Hallows' Eve. There's no other reason for them to have decided I'm a witch and come after me. I didn't do anything.
Truly.
I'm a good girl. I always do what I'm told, and I never gossip about people or spread rumors.
So thank you from the bottom of my heart.
It was just coincidence that Mistress Charity fell down the same stairs she'd just been chastising me for not cleaning properly.
I have no powers. I have no evil in me.
I would never do her harm.
I would never do anyone harm.
Just like you. I can see the kindness in your eyes. That's why you let me
in when I came running, running away from them, through the woods, and found myself on your doorstep.
I appreciate the protection you offered me when they banged on your front door and demanded you hand me over. Thank you for telling them you had never seen me.
You're obviously as kind a man as you are rich.
I see you have many fine things in your house. A man who surrounds himself with beauty must have a beautiful soul. And that's a good thing to know.
The people who accused me will be gone now. It's been hours and they must be far away now, searching elsewhere, or come to their senses.
I appreciate your hospitality. I appreciate your hiding me in this basement room where—even if they had forced themselves in—they would never have found me.
I am in your debt for your saving me from them.
I truly believe that this coffin you have down here is simply your way of looking ahead till the time—God grant many years from now—when you die.
I won't tell anyone.
Now please, please, please, let me go.
When and How
"I will tell you," the psychic said, "when and how you are going to die."
He paused to take a long drag on his cigarette, and Marissa's friends giggled and poked her in the back.
"Can you do that?" Marissa was surprised at the offer. She had thought this was the one question fortune-tellers shied away from. That was how this whole trip had started: Cara's mom had told them how the friend of someone she had once worked with had gone to a tarot reader who laid out the cards, turned pale, then said, "I can't do this," and returned the woman's money. Later that week, after going out to a downtown nightclub, Cara's mom's friend's friend had been attacked and killed in a parking garage.
The five of them, Marissa, Cara, JoLyn, Daphne, and Rodney—whom they liked to describe as the group's token male—hadn't been sure of the story. "Did that really happen?" Cara had asked her mom.
And though Cara's mom had assured them it had—a long time ago—with moms it was sometimes hard to tell these things for sure. It may well have been less a real incident than a warning against downtown or nightclubs or parking garages. Rodney had pointed out that many urban legends seemed like they might have gotten their starts as somebody's mom warning about something.
But Cara's mom's telling the story—in response to something Marissa could no longer even remember—had gotten the friends interested in going to Lily Dale, the psychic community in upstate New York, to get their fortunes told. What better way, they had decided, for five high school seniors to spend Halloween night, especially since they were too old for trick-or-treating, and too tall to bluff it, and the girls were all on diets, anyway. Rodney was not on a diet, as he had one of those metabolisms where he could eat anything without worrying about it ending up on his hips or butt, but he had given up trick-or-treating even earlier than the girls had, when his voice changed.
So off they went to Lily Dale.
This psychic had not been their first choice. They had stopped at several pretty little gingerbread Victorian houses in the community, which had signs picturing stars, or teacups, or tarot cards. But psychics were more expensive than the five of them had anticipated. Fifty dollars a session had been the going rate, no split sessions. They had already gotten back into Daphne's car—never mind they had driven two and a half hours to get here—when they noticed his tacky ranch house. On the front lawn was a sign that had a pair of penetrating eyes. No face—just the eyes. Either an optometrist or a psychic, and considering where they were, they guessed psychic. Since the house wasn't as nice as the others, they'd hoped his rate might be lower.
He was short and skinny and swarthy and stank of the cigarettes he chain-smoked, which were also short and skinny and dark—probably European. Apparently, Europeans hadn't heard that smoking was bad for you.
Fifty dollars a session, he'd told them—hadn't these people ever heard that price-fixing was illegal? But then he'd said that—if they preferred—for fifty dollars he would answer one question from each of them.
They could have gotten back into the car again—a five-hour-wasted round-trip—or they could go with Mr. Chain-Smoking-Euro-Man. Warily, they stepped into his house.
For someone who looked into the future, his decor definitely looked into the past. The 1970s, Marissa guessed from the orange-golden rug and the woodlike paneling of his dining room. But maybe she was being unfair. Maybe the paneling was expensive stuff, and it was just the coating from all the nicotine that gave it its dark, lusterless matte finish. Along with the anonymous stains on the tablecloth and the gray metal file cabinet in the corner, and the fact that he had only one dining room chair and had pulled five folding chairs out of the closet for them, the decor did not inspire confidence.
So now Marissa—faced with a prediction regarding the when and how of her mortality—asked, "Can you do that?" with a slight hope that maybe her question would bring the psychic back to his senses. "Oh," he would say, "what's the matter with me? I forgot: That's not allowed. Let me predict something else." Then she wouldn't have to say, "I'm not sure I want to hear this," and have the others laugh at her.
The psychic took another long drag on his cigarette and asked, "Can I do that? Is that your question, then?"
What a creep.
"No," Marissa said, "that was not my question." Despite the anticipation of coming, despite the long drive to get here and the disappointment when it had appeared they wouldn't be able to find an affordable fortuneteller, despite Cara and Rodney and Daphne and JoLyn going first, she had not had a question in mind, and the death thing had been the psychic's suggestion. Still, it was an unsettling topic. She wanted to answer: "I only want to know when I'm going to die if it's going to be at least twenty years from now. Otherwise, tell me if I'm going to get accepted at one of the colleges where I applied." That was pretty close to the question Daphne had asked, and everyone had called it lame, but Marissa didn't think she was up to hearing something like: A serial killer will get you within a week.
Still, she supposed the psychic already considered himself generous for not automatically answering and charging her for that dumb "Can you do that?" question and would not give any unpaid-for hints.
"So"—the psychic held the foul cigarette pinched between his fingers and inhaled as though his lungs were in his toes—"I will tell you when and how you will die."
Marissa took a steadying breath.
"It will be just over fifty-six years from now, four months short of your seventy-fourth birthday."
Marissa stored those figures in her head to work out when she had a couple moments to herself—to see if he'd guessed her age correctly, since he had not asked. It would be easier to trust a psychic who had not only the ability to zero in on a person's age but also demonstrated good math skills. In any case, fifty-six years from now was a much better number than, say, next week.
"You will die," the psychic continued, "in a plane crash, while traveling from Rochester, New York, to Buffalo."
"Okay," Marissa said, slowly. She had never been on a plane, her grandparents all living within driving distance, and her parents believing in local vacationing. She figured if she hadn't flown anywhere in her seventeen years so far, she shouldn't miss skipping it later on. Besides that, she couldn't think of any reason she'd want to go to Buffalo. If this changed later in her life, Buffalo was only about an hour's drive away from Rochester. What kind of idiot would pay for a plane and spend more time going through airport security than it would take to drive where she wanted to go? She could readily arrange her life to exclude planes—and, in fact, Buffalo.
The psychic said, "I am not finished." He paused to take another toe-curling inhalation of his cigarette. "Your plane will crash in a sod farm in Batavia, New York, due to mechanical failure, sometime between 8:15 and 8:25 A.M., killing all aboard."
JoLyn poked Marissa and observed, "I can't imagine you being up early enough to catch an eight o'clock plane."
> Easy for her to scoff: Marissa fully intended to add Batavia to her list of things to avoid once she hit her seventies, just in case the psychic meant that the plane would crash on her rather than with her in it.
"So," Rodney said, "all Marissa has to do is avoid getting on a plane when she's seventy-three, and she'll miss her appointment with death and live forever. Sweet deal."
That was pretty close to Marissa's reasoning, but the psychic was wearing a self-satisfied smirk.
Daphne told Rodney, "Living till you're seventy-three is living forever."
"I wish I'd asked when I was going to die," Cara grumbled. She'd asked if she'd marry Bailey Leonard, and the psychic had simply said no—which was what Marissa would have guessed in any case, Cara's boyfriend being very obviously not as much in love with Cara as Cara was with him. Obvious to everyone but Cara, for whom the negative had come as a surprise. She had asked, "Well, who, then?" but the psychic had said that was another question, and if she really wanted an answer, the group would have to buy another round of questions—for (of course) fifty dollars.
While Cara had still been considering, Rodney had asked, "Who will I marry?"
Marissa had always suspected that Rodney had a bit of a crush on Cara—though Daphne maintained Marissa was a hopeless romantic and that none of the girls was or could ever be Rodney's type. Still, Marissa thought maybe he'd asked in the hope that the psychic would tell him he'd marry Cara.
But the psychic had told him he would not marry at all—which had caused Daphne to arch her eyebrows at Marissa.
Daphne, who was not a romantic, asked whether she would be accepted at Stanford, and the psychic had said yes, and that her acceptance would be in her mailbox Monday.
Marissa liked that this prediction would either come true or not in three days, which would give the rest of them a hint as to the psychic's accuracy, but JoLyn called it a waste of a good prediction. She asked, "Will I lead a happy life?"