Out of Body

Chapter 42

What Marley wanted most was to leave her workroom, lock the door behind her and find Gray.

“You do not run away.” The Ushers started a new attack and she shook her head. “Keep working,” they told her.

“Do you know where this is?” Marley said to them, indicating the house. “This is why it was given to me. Because it’s a replica of the place where those missing women are. Please help me find the real house, or whatever it is.” She had asked them before, but got only hushed gabbling in response.

The same agitated, rising and falling sounds made her light-headed. “Hush. Answer my question.” She couldn’t bear the noise.

“You push and fuss,” they told her. “Work on the house and be ready to travel. Soon.”

Unwillingly, she faced the bench and selected a tool. She began the painstaking task of removing flakes of varnish and laquer from the wall facing the front gate. She had closed the back of the house again, unable to look at that cupboard and the stairs, or to remember the pounding she had felt when she was last there—and the cries she’d heard.

The flakes came away more easily than she expected and she lowered her goggles over her eyes again. Perhaps the refinishing wasn’t as old as she had thought. The longer materials remained in place, the more they tended to cling, one layer to another, and be hard to remove.

This was not an item she would ever sell—in fact the sooner she could be rid of it, the better. Belle, whoever she may have been, must have recognized Marley as a sister-traveler and hoped the dollhouse would become her portal.

A small, very sharp-edged chisel wouldn’t have been her usual choice for the job, but she took up the tool and began sliding it beneath the red outer coat. It lifted in remarkably large pieces and beneath each one she found more of the faded terra-cotta-colored finish that appeared to have been stippled to look like stucco.

She worked steadily for half an hour before standing back to look at her efforts. Now she knew that in addition to the added door at one corner of the building, galleries had probably been removed from an upper story. The marks where they had been could be seen now, together with the remnants of flowers painted on the walls as if hanging down—to depict the way the pretty local balconies were loaded with plants.

Surely there had been a front door. She started lifting flakes in the center front, only to have pieces of green curl away where the elevated lawns met the base of the house. Having seen the basement disguised by the mound, she knew to expect any alterations. But evidence that pillars had been removed surprised her. Why go to such lengths to disguise a dollhouse?

The basement, she realized, was not actually beneath ground level—it simply had grass-covered earth mounded against its walls. It had been hidden from the outside.

The front door began to appear in the center between places where two pillars had been.

The chatter began again. Different than she had heard before. Agitation was something she expected, but this became a rising and falling wail, anguish, and not a single discernable word except, No, repeated again and again.

Marley worked faster and faster, steadily revealing the walls of the dollhouse as they had once been.

She dropped the chisel. Not accidentally, but because it fell from her fingers of its own volition.

The room darkened.

Winnie gave a single muffled whine.

No lights formed on the ceiling, no sign of a funnel appeared, and the Ushers were quiet.

Marley’s eyes opened wide. She couldn’t blink. A deep, deep longing didn’t shock her. She wanted Gray. He was her and she was him and together they were a whole with twice the power of their individuality. When she had first seen him, complete with the scars that were imprinted on his memory but not his face, he had come to her because they were destined to be together. Their Bonding had been preordained.

A wind or a strong current wrapped her body and carried her backward. She stumbled over Winnie, but couldn’t react. The dog didn’t cry out.

Free falling, she tried to move her arms, but they remained splayed at her sides until she settled on her back, staring upward into the darkness.

Marley had no feeling at all, other than anticipation.

She saw a small room, old-fashioned, but plush. A woman, older and plainly dressed in gray, but wearing an elaborate rose-colored tulle hat, paced, wringing her hands, but it wasn’t the woman that held Marley’s attention.

A little girl sat on the edge of a straight-backed chair and whereas the woman moved in shadow, the child was illuminated as if by a spotlight. Thin with blond braids and dressed in a white buttoned blouse and jeans, her sneakered feet swung inches off the floor.

She stared ahead, her blue eyes huge behind round glasses.

She stared at Marley.

The child took gulps of air through her mouth. She coughed, but never looked away from Marley. Tears ran slowly down the girl’s cheeks.

Marley tried to speak to her, but couldn’t.

Two small hands extended toward Marley and the little girl said, “Come and get me, please. He said if you come I can go home.”

Marley reached for the girl. “Where are you?” she said, and this time had no difficulty speaking. “Tell me where to find you.”

In front of the child, the face of Pearl Brite appeared. This time the woman’s beautiful skin was marred by the type of welts Marley knew too well. “You’ll know how to come,” Pearl said. “He says you’ve been here before, but you must come quickly or it’ll be too late.”

But she didn’t know how to get there. These visions had nothing to do with the house. There had been no portal. She had not left her body. There was power worked upon her, yes, but a different power.

It was that creature, she was sure of it.

“I don’t know how to come to you,” she said, choking on each word.

“Be ready,” Pearl said, and dropped her voice to a faint whisper. “He’s torturing us.”