Кей Хупер - Chill Of Fear

"You know about that?"

Becca nodded. "Uh-huh. Missy told me."

"Do you know—" Diana steadied her voice. "Do you know why our mother was trapped on this side of the door?"

"That's why you crossed over, isn't it? And why you crossed over all the way, in the flesh. You tried too hard. Because it means so much to you. Because you have to know what happened to your mama."

"Answer me, Becca. Do you know what happened to her? Do you know where she is?"

Becca turned and began walking down the long corridor.

Immediately, Diana followed. "Becca—"

"Don't get too far from the door, Diana."

Diana hesitated, glanced back. But the green door was still there. She continued to follow the little girl. "I've followed you guides most of my life," she said, not without a touch of bitterness. "Always following, always doing whatever it was you needed me to do. Dammit, this time I need something. Why can't one of you help me for a change?"

"We've been helping you all along, Diana."

"Oh, sure. Leaving me up to my waist in a lake, or driving my father's car down a highway—"

"That wasn't us."

"What do you mean, it wasn't you? I blacked out, and—"

"The drugs were too strong. They pulled you back before you were supposed to go."

Diana didn't find that terribly reassuring. "So just because I came out of most blackouts safe at home doesn't mean that's where I was the whole time, I gather?"

"Well, it's very helpful for us to have someone who can cross over in the flesh," Becca said. "Most mediums can barely see or talk to us, much less walk with us."

"Speaking of which," Diana said, "where are we going?" The words were barely out of her mouth when she stopped abruptly, momentarily disoriented, because she and Becca were no longer in the long corridor. Instead, they were standing in the garden outside the conservatory.

They were still in the gray time, which meant the garden was as motionless as a photograph and looked blurred and one-dimensional and colorless, and the landscape's lighting did nothing to change any of that.

Becca, who had also stopped, turned to face her. "Since you're here, we have to take the chance. There's something you need to see."

"Oh, God, not again." Diana frowned at her. "I told you, I have a question of my own this time."

"Then maybe he can answer it for you."

"He? He, who?"

Becca nodded toward the conservatory. "In there."

Diana would have protested again, but in a blink her child guide was gone, and she found herself alone. "Dammit." With little choice in the matter, she went into the conservatory.

For some reason, she wasn't surprised to see that the artistic workshop had left evidence of its existence on this side of the door.

There were the paintings propped on easels — except that there seemed to be an awful lot of them, a forest of them. Diana picked her way through slowly, looking at each in turn, feeling her scalp crawl and tingle unpleasantly.

These weren't the paintings she remembered from the workshop. There had been violence in those, images from troubled minds, but... not like this.

One after another, these images spoke of abject terror. Faces twisted in hideous grimaces. Bodies contorted into violent poses. Explosions destroying. Weapons tearing flesh. Disease, starvation, torture.

And symbolic as well as literal images of fear. Darkness slashed through with lightning bolts. Spiders. Snakes. Creepy alleyways. Lonely, deserted country roads. A broken window. A fly caught in a web.

Diana paused at last before the painting of an image that was terrifyingly familiar. A dark, dark space, tiny, airless, perhaps a closet. And in the back corner, her arms wrapped tightly around her up-drawn legs, sat a little girl with long dark hair and a tearstained face.

"Amazing how easy it is to identify her, isn't it? That tiny figure in that small, dark corner. She could be anyone. But she could only be Missy."

Diana stepped quickly to the side so that she could see beyond the painting. "You? What the hell are you doing here?"

"Waiting for you," Beau said.

Nate knew he should go home to bed, get a fresh start in the morning — later in the morning — but he also knew he'd be too restless to sleep. There was paperwork awaiting him back at the station, but that held even less appeal, and he wasn't really surprised to find himself just casually wandering past Stephanie's slightly open office door.

She was sitting at her desk, frowning over what he felt was an uncharacteristically untidy jumble of papers spread out on the blotter.

"You're working late," he said from the doorway.

Stephanie looked up with a start, but then smiled. "Not exactly work. Or at least, not work I'm being paid to do. I wanted to keep looking through the old files, see if I could find something useful."

"I could have been anybody, you know," he told her, pushing the door the rest of the way open. "Sneaking up on you — " He broke off, rather sheepishly, because the door creaked loudly as it opened wide enough to admit him.

Stephanie grinned and moved a stack of papers to reveal a gleaming .45 automatic. "I'm fast, especially with the adrenaline rush. If I hadn't instantly recognized your voice, you would have been looking down the barrel of this before you could get anywhere near the desk."

Nate sat down in her visitor's chair. "Never mind fast — are you any good with that?"

"Yes. And I have a license for it. A license to carry it, for that matter." Soberly, she added, "I think our nighttime security is pretty good, especially with your people patrolling as well, but with a killer here somewhere, I'm taking no chances. Army brat, remember?"

"I remember. And I feel a bit better about you working late alone down here. But only a bit." He paused. "You do realize this killer is likely to be someone you know? Or at least that he'll wear a familiar face?"

"The thought had occurred. In a place like The Lodge, all dressed in its Victorian grandeur, it'd be easy to imagine that only the odd maniac wandering past could possibly have sullied our good name with something as distasteful as murder."

He lifted an eyebrow at her.

Descending to normality, Stephanie said, "Except that this place never really was unsullied, was it?"

"Not according to Quentin."

"And not according to what records I've gone over so far. Did you know that the first death recorded on these grounds happened while the place was being built?"

"Yeah, one of my people found mention of that in a historical database. Not so uncommon around construction sites, especially over a hundred years ago."

"Yeah. But this guy didn't fall from a scaffold or get crushed by falling stone, or anything like that. The local doctor at the time stated in writing that the victim was frightened to death."

"Frightened? Of what?"

"Nobody could say. They came to work early one morning, and there he was, just lying near the foreman's shack. No cuts, no bruises. Place wasn't far enough along to even have security out here, not that they needed much in those days. Bottom line, nobody saw anything."

"Frightened to death. Heart attack?" Nate guessed.

"The doc stated that his heart stopped — but that it wasn't diseased, wasn't enlarged, wasn't any of the things they believed in those days showed signs of trouble. And, apparently, he looked scared out of his mind. His face was frozen in an expression of absolute terror."

Nate was silent, frowning.

"That's not all," Stephanie continued. "Another half dozen men died during the construction of The Lodge and its stables. And all the deaths were...just a little bit strange. Surefooted men falling. Skilled men having accidents with tools. Healthy men getting very sick very suddenly."