so intently they seemed about to shatter.
The knocking had stopped.
Laurel watched from farther down the hall as they waited, suspended … Someone said, “It’s stopped.” Laurel’s heart was pounding so loudly she had no idea who had spoken.
Brendan grabbed the doorknob and pushed open the door. Laurel cringed back against the wall. The other three crowded around the door to look in. The room was seemingly untouched: the bed unmade, papers strewn on the writing table—but a very human disorder.
“It was in there,” Katrina said, looking through the door at the room.
The knocking started again. This time it was downstairs, muffled … curiously the sound seemed the exact same distance away. Slow, steady thumps.
Listening to it, all of Laurel’s suspicions about a human source fled her. She could feel in her marrow—this was other. It was mind-shattering, soul-shattering. Her whole body was in revolt against the essential wrongness of it, the irrationality, the impossibility. She could feel the same reaction in the other three; they all stood still and poised in disbelief, in outrage, in awe.
Brendan was the first to break the paralysis. He and Tyler strode down the hall, in the direction of the main stairs, Katrina right behind. By the time they reached the doorway to the next hall, they were running.
Laurel stood and looked through the doorway of Brendan’s room at the white walls, the narrow, monastic bed. The knocks continued steadily downstairs. She felt the hair on the back of her neck rise, and she turned and ran for the hall.
As she reached the bottom of the main stairs, she realized that the knocking had stopped. Voices came from the dining room, a few sharp sentences, then silence. Laurel darted across the entry hall toward the great room.
She passed through the archway and again felt a shock of static electricity that made her gasp aloud. What is that? She halted on the threshold … but the tingling was gone. She forced herself forward, walked across the wide expanse of the great room.
The other three stood around the long central table of the dining room, heads lifted toward the ceiling, not moving … just listening in the stillness.
Katrina started, “I don’t—”
Brendan lifted a warning hand and she fell silent.
The thumping started again—this time in the library, upstairs and on the other side of the house. Again, Laurel noticed that it sounded exactly the same distance away, not any closer or farther than any of the other knocks had been.
No one ran this time. Tyler’s face tightened, and Brendan looked resolute. They all walked back slowly, even deliberately, out the doorway of the dining room, across the floor of the great room toward the stairs. Brendan held the EMF reader up as they walked.
Laurel braced herself as she stepped back through the arch, but there was no sting of static this time. She saw Katrina glance at her speculatively and wondered if Katrina had felt the shock, too—but Laurel was too keyed up to speak. The EMF reader began beeping steadily as they all headed up the main stairs.
Brendan, in the lead, paused on the landing and they all stopped behind him, listening. The knocks continued, the slow, heavy raps. “Is this recording?” Brendan asked Tyler.
Tyler glanced back toward the first floor. “I don’t know. I mean, the cameras are on, but I don’t know if we’re picking up audio.”
“Go back down and check—,” Brendan started.
“No,” said Laurel violently. “No one goes off on their own.” She didn’t know why but it was imperative that they stay together.
After a moment Brendan nodded curtly and they all continued moving upstairs toward the slow, steady knocking, Tyler taking two stairs at a time. “Slow down,” Brendan snapped at him.
Tyler instantly flared up. “What are we doing, sneaking up on it?”
Brendan grabbed Tyler’s arm, halting all of them. “Just slow down. I want to see when it stops—”
At that moment, it did.
All four of them were still, heads raised, holding their breath …
“It heard us,” Katrina whispered, and no one laughed. They followed Brendan up the remaining stairs and across the hall to the library.
The heavy wood door was closed. And that’s weird, Laurel thought. Who would have closed it?
Brendan reached for the knob—then rattled it. He pushed on the door. “Locked,” he muttered.
“Is there a key?” Tyler asked.
“Maybe. There were some extras on the ring.”
On impulse, Laurel reached to the knob and turned it herself. The door swung open. Brendan looked at her and she shook her head, mystified. Then