The Dead House - Dawn Kurtagich Page 0,91

fast, and each exhale spills blood from his nostrils.

“Oh, my God, John, please!”

Kaitlyn grabs him as he collapses, his weight on top of her legs. Her cries die away as she watches him breathe, her hand pressed to the wound she created.

“It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay.” Over and over, she says it. “I didn’t mean to… I didn’t mean to!”

His eyes stare as his breath quickens, and more and more blood spills from the wound in his neck. He twitches, twitches again, and Kaitlyn stifles a sob as she strokes his hair. It is a terrible, lengthy process, during which Kaitlyn watches, her face contorted.

Ari stirs, coughs, leaning over to gasp in desperate breaths. His eyes meet the scene in front of him just as John stops his desperate inhalations, seizes briefly, and then stills.

Kaitlyn’s lips tremble, and her eyes fill with tears.

Ari staggers to his feet and hurries over to the door. He swings it shut just in time to contain Kaitlyn’s scream, which lingers on and on, as she bends over John’s dead, bloodied body. When the scream ends, another takes its place, and another. She grips John’s shirt, now vividly scarlet, and Ari has to pry her fingers free.

She continues to scream.

One must wonder why, in all the minutes John lay dying, she didn’t call for help.

For several long minutes, Ari keeps guard at the door while Kaitlyn sits over John’s body, her whole frame a small, sunken heap. She is shaking.

“We need to do something,” Ari says quietly. He is hoarse. “Kait. We need to get rid of the body.”

Kaitlyn doesn’t stir.

“His body,” Ari says slowly. “We need to get rid of it.”

“I didn’t… mean to—”

“Kaitlyn. If they find him and see that knife—and your hand? They’ll lock you away for life.”

“Maybe they should.”

“Stop that. We’ll take him to the chapel. To the Forgotten Garden. We’ll bury him there with the graves. It’s more than five hours until sunup. We’ll make it.”

“I’m a… I stabbed…” Her words slur, and she begins to mumble incoherently.

Ari walks over to her and slaps her, hard. Her head is flung back with the impact, and she expels a tiny squeak.

“We—need—to—get—rid—of—the—body.” Ari enunciates each word. “The Forgotten Garden. We’ll bury him. I need your help.”

Kaitlyn peers up at him through her tears and nods. “The Forgotten Garden… okay.”

Ari helps her to her feet, and then they each grab one end of John; Kaitlyn takes his feet but drops them soon after, her arms shaking. It takes them five minutes to climb the stairs, Ari dragging most of John’s weight, at which point the motion-activated camera clicks off.

[END OF CLIP]

103

Diary of Kaitlyn Johnson

Date, Time, and Location Not Noted

The smell is evolving—is that bad?

I closed my eyes to shut out the memories of my life, which now includes the hardest heartache ever experienced. I fell into sleep—sleep that still feels like falling. I fell into the dark, felt vaguely the moment when Ari left me to go to his dorm and clean John’s grave dirt from under his fingernails, and then I was fully asleep and in the Dead House, and all was silent. I sensed its emptiness like a weight—knew I was alone. Whatever darkness lingered before had now moved on.

Or maybe it only slumbered.

Or maybe it’s so much a part of me now that I can no longer distinguish it.

But the smell—that old mildew scent—had changed, deepened, turned into something like fine musk, and I liked it.

This was it, I knew. For if the house was empty, or sleeping, I had a chance to find the door.

Knowing that John was the Shyan didn’t make this easier, but at least it cleared the path. For, without the Shyan to lead and contain it, surely the Olen would subside into the fabric from which it had come. The fabric of time and space and a universe I could never understand.

I was angry not to have fought harder to locate Carly while she was still there, still a part of me. But if I could find the doorway that Haji spoke of, the one Carly had been dragged through, then I could go beyond and have a chance of finding her—maybe we were still linked by some invisible thread. The thread we had always taken for granted.

I tried not to dwell too hard on the thought that, if the Dead House was my mind, and I found the door… was I then going out of my mind? An unwelcome sensation like cold water