holding up the EMF—but something had changed. The device was silent. Brendan stared down at it, flicked at the switch. “It’s gone dead.”
Tyler hefted the camcorder, checked it, and paled. “Camera’s dead, too.”
“But—that’s not electrical,” Laurel heard herself saying.
“It fried the equipment?” Tyler muttered, and Laurel thought in that moment that he looked more confused and vulnerable than she had ever seen him.
Brendan strode toward the archway. The rest followed. “Watch out!” he cautioned. There was more broken glass on the floor, and on the butler’s table under the lamp. Laurel could see bits of broken glass under the sconces on the stairs, and gleaming shattered pieces in the hallway. When did this happen? she thought wildly. Why didn’t we hear it?
And then all around them they heard the sounds—like lightbulbs popping and bottles shattering and glass cracking—all at once, a prolonged destruction … and completely aural. There was no movement, no sign of anything stirring or breaking, just a reverberation of sound. Katrina pressed her hands to her ears and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block it out.
And then silence.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
They chased it for hours, on and off all day, until they were exhausted and shaking. It seemed like an hour … it seemed like three days. But wherever they were in the house, the knocking was somewhere else. They never saw anything move; whatever it was they were chasing was always a step ahead of them, as if deliberately taunting them.
They were being played with, completely. Several times they tried waiting in a room, not following the knocking. And the knocking would start in one room, then move to another, then back to the room it had just left. Slow, leisurely, taunting, until at one point Katrina screamed at the ceiling, “What do you want?”
There was a silence … then the knocking started in another room.
It was like being under siege. But by what?
There was a force of personality there, undeniably.
It’s the randomness that feels so insane, Laurel thought. It does seem to be communicating, trying to communicate, but what? Or at least—it seems to have intention.
There was no further assault of sound after the glass breaking; in fact, the knocking slowed down considerably after that auditory blowout.
When finally it stopped, Katrina had curled up and fallen asleep on the couch in the great room, like a fatigued child. Brendan found the digital camera was working, and they had no idea if it had been working all along, as they had not thought to use it. He went around the house clicking off photos of the damage, which was really nothing more than some upside-down paintings, broken lightbulbs and lamp fixtures, a few shattered bowls. Whatever It was, it seemed not to like glass; or perhaps it only wanted to leave them in the dark
And no one thought of leaving.
While there had been pockets of terror throughout the day, there had been nothing at all like an assault, or physical threat. They were all spacey from the adrenaline rushes and crashes but they were also raw with impatience for something else to happen.
They all drifted in the house: Brendan prowled relentlessly with the digital camera and the EMF reader, checking and rechecking levels. Tyler disappeared into his bedroom, and when Laurel went to get a broom from the narrow closet by the servants’ kitchen, she could hear soft snoring from his room. There was glass everywhere and she wanted to get it up before dark, or at least pushed into corners.
She started in the servants’ kitchen and the back part of the hall, and when she stepped through the lounge into the central part of the hall, the door to Brendan’s room was still closed. She hurried by it, putting as much distance between herself and the room as she could before she resumed her sweeping.
It took more than an hour to make her way all the way around the house. Twilight was descending and she could see the white nymph at the tip of the circle of lawn through the windows as she walked across the front hall, toward the great room in the fading light. Katrina sat on the couch, curled up in blankets; she was awake, staring out through the windows. She did not look up when Laurel stepped in. Tyler stood in front of one of the upside-down paintings, looking absurdly like a quizzical patron in a modern art gallery.
Brendan was at the desk, writing by candlelight, which startled Laurel, until she realized