Manchester House (18 page)

Night had been to this world before.

“Are you going to let me in on any of this, Ingrid?” Holzer finally asked.

Another shudder went through the house, causing one of the guestrooms near the main hall to expand to five times its normal size. The only reason Holzer knew this was because he watched it happen. Total expansive reversal of time and space. Einstein would have shit bricks at what they were all seeing.

Still, Night refused to answer Holzer’s question. The man only looked at his friend with his tired eyes, shaking his head in silence.

There were steady attacks of knocking taking place at the mansion’s many windows, which all were new, sparkling, and unbroken glass. The volume of sounds was enough to cause all in the house to jump with surprise-even Night. Only Lars was unaffected, looking on in controlled surprise.

At the windows of the house were hundreds of faces. All were pleading for Holzer or anyone else to let them in. They seemed horrified and tired.

“Let me in!” one of them yelled, a man by the sound of it.

“Mommie!” a young girl cried. “I want my Mommie.”

“Sweet Jesus, this is all too much for me to handle.” Teresa started to cry, trying her best to hold her shaking hands over her ears and closing her eyes so that she didn’t have to see them anymore. “Stop it!” she yelled.

Silence.

The windows were clear.

The night sky, although still purple, looked remarkably calm.

The mansion was back in its original state.

All appeared quiet. All appeared normal.

Holzer’s concentration was suddenly broken by Night’s strong hand landing on his shoulder. The action practically scared Holzer to death. In turning to meet his friend, the professor was greeted with kind and understanding eyes. That was always the funny thing about Ingrid Night: although weather-beaten and tough appearing, he always retained the kindness in his eyes.

“My dear friend,” Night said, “you know I would do nothing to put you and your colleges in serious danger, do you not?”

“I know,” Holzer reassured. He gave his friend a playful wink. “You’re still a pain in the ass, though.”

Night laughed tiredly. “As you Americans are so fond of saying, tell me something I don’t already know.”

Another rumble went through the house, shaking it violently. So violently, in fact, that it knocked everyone down and almost caused Night to leave his circle.

“So violent,” Holzer stated, adjusting his glasses. The professor turned his EMR device on again, hoping that it would at least try to work.

Nothing.

Holzer gave Night a look of disappointment.

“Your science, I fear, is of no use in this world, Jonathon.”

“I’m starting to believe that, sir,” Holzer said. He placed the EMR device in his back pocket. “Still, I will try.”

“I would not expect otherwise.”

Holzer pointed to the blessed circle. “When will you be able to leave that thing?”

Night calmly looked at his watch. “Soon.”

Holzer shook his head.

All eyes turned to Sinclair, who for the last half-hour had been huffing and pacing the floor, looking out the window at the incredible sights of the surrounding activity. It was hard for the cameraman to accept what was happening. He tried to explain to everyone that there was some kind of chemical reaction going on inside the house that was causing all of them to mass hallucinate. No one accepted his logic.

“Will he be okay?” Night asked, concerned.

“Putting aside his aloof nature, Ingrid, Mr. Sinclair is a logical man.” He looked up at Night, pausing. “This is hard for him to accept. He will have to change his whole belief system after all of this, and as you know that will not happen overnight.”

Night shook his head. He’d once had a crisis of faith, many decades ago. But that was another life. Another faith. Best worth forgetting.

“This is crazy,” Sinclair said under his breath.

Night’s muscles started to tighten with anticipation.

Holzer swallowed hard.

Sinclair was heading toward Manchester House’s front door.

* * *

“I have had enough of this!” Sinclair repeated, grabbing the doorknob of the house. It was his intention to leave, go home, and get drunk.

“I would not do that, Mr. Sinclair!” Night said, his voice thundering with authority.

“And why not?”

Night gave the cameraman a sly glance through the brim of his hat. He smiled with a genuine admiration for Sinclair’s courage and focused desire to leave. He found it amusing, but he understood the human motivation to be in control of one’s own destiny. Night knew this philosophy to be a cheap lie, but nonetheless he understood.

“Well, Quaker Oats man? Why can’t I leave?” Sinclair challenged, his face dripping with sweat.

“Because!” Night huffed. “We are not in Kansasanymore.”

The cameraman rolled his eyes. “Spare me the Wizard of Oz line, please.” In a huff, the cameraman opened the front door of Manchester House and thundered out. He slammed the door behind him.

“Professor?” Teresa said. Her voice dripped with worry.

Holzer turned to Night, his eyes filled with questions.

“He will be back, Jonathon,” Night reassured.

“And if not?”

Night shook his head. His eyes held within them a finality that Holzer tried to ignore.

Sinclair had only walked five feet from the safety of Manchester House before he realized the mistake he had made. He felt the strange sensation of being watched. The cameraman soon broke out in a cold nervous sweat. Sinclair had never felt so frightened in all of his life.

“Just keep walking until you get to the car,” Sinclair told himself. He closed his eyes, walking forward, hoping against hope that the purple sky he was seeing wasn’t real.

There was a scent to the air which was unfamiliar to the cameraman. A sweet, sickly smell. The kind of smell one encounters when discovering a dead animal on the road for the first time. The stench of death hadn’t attacked the discoverer yet, only the smell of sugary blood. That was what the aroma reminded Sinclair of.

Something stirred in the woods.

“Ahhhhhhhhhh!” a howling voice echoed through the darkness of the trees ahead.

Sinclair stopped, shaking uncontrollably. “Who’s there?” Sinclair said, waving an empty fist in the air in front of him.

Sinclair noticed that he had ventured far away from Manchester House. He was quite near the shantytown discovered by him and his team hours before. The deserted town was dark and foreboding to the cameraman, only seeming to bring up dark thoughts and empty promises. This was where William Manchester had forced his workforce to live and die. This was where the rich fed off the rotting carcasses of the poor.

This was hell.

Sinclair felt quite alone.

He had to fight the urge to turn back, running toward the insanity of Manchester House. Toward other people. Toward safety.

“It’s just all in your head, man,” Sinclair tried to reassure himself. He started to see movement in the shadows of the rundown shanty shacks in the deserted little town rotting in the woods of Manchester House. “Just calm down and keep going.”

The sound of several footsteps echoed around Sinclair. He knew that he was no longer alone.

The cameraman turned back toward the direction of Manchester House and found himself looking into the rotted-out eyes of a Civil War soldier.

“Jesus Christ!” Sinclair shouted, falling to the ground repulsed.

“Help me! Please!” the Civil War soldier pleaded, his arms extended, helplessly grabbing out at Sinclair but never really touching him. “I can’t take this anymore! I’m a soldier in the United States Army. I’m with the Maine 69
^th
Battalion. Please, I can’t seem to find my way home. Please!”

The specter seemed to pass Sinclair, hoping to grab hold of someone, disappearing in the mist surrounding the shantytown.

“What the hell was that?” Sinclair yelled, falling to the ground.

For several seconds, the cameraman sat on the ground, breathing heavily. The wind stopped its attack and it became quiet.

“Have to get back to the house,” Sinclair said. “Just make your feet work, get up off your ass, and start walking, man.”

Before Sinclair could react, before he could make his terrified limbs work, the ground below him seemed to come to life and limbs of both men and women broke through the soil, holding him down.

“What?” Sinclair shouted, fighting the arms, hands, and fingers grabbing at him. “What is this?”

“Help us!”

“Yes. Help us!”

“We do not belong here.”

“Show us the way to peace.”

“I will love you if you can help me.”

“Dear God! I want to be with my wife.”

“Jonathon! Where is my Jonathon?”

The voices echoed in Sinclair’s head, all assaulting him with an unending plea for help. So overwhelming was all of this that the cameraman almost lost his sanity. He fought, trying to break away from the grasps of so many corpses coming up from the ground, but to no avail. Sinclair was their prisoner.

Sinclair started to scream. A scream he had never before uttered.

Not knowing how or why, the cameraman broke free, dashing away from the soil, the reaching arms and hands, and headed back toward Manchester House.

The ghosts of the shantytown had other ideas.

Before Sinclair could reach the safety of Manchester House, he came face to face with a wall of rotting souls, all wanting to use his life-force as a means to find a way toward the other side-toward the gates of Heaven or Hell. Anywhere but where they were.

“We cannot rest,” a soul cried out.

“Yes! Help us.”

“Help us! Help us! HELP US! HELP US!”

Sinclair stopped running toward the mansion.

He knew that there was no way he could break through the wall of bodies coming toward him. They were a ragtag mob representing all timelines. He saw young men, old women, Native Americans, and Union Soldiers dressed in Civil War blue. They were in various stages of rot and death. Some were skeletons held together with only the barest of hopes, resembling what had once been human.

Sinclair found himself crying helplessly. What could he do?

As if on cue a steady hand, filled with both strength and direction, clamped onto Sinclair’s forearm, pulling him in another direction.

At first the cameraman began to panic, believing yet another ghost had grabbed hold of him. However, something fantastic began to happen. The way toward Manchester House began to clear. He was slowly reaching the safety of his friends.

“What the hell’s going on here?”

Sinclair looked up at the person who had grabbed hold of him and stared into the eyes of Lars. Lars, the silent yet faithful manservant of Ingrid Night who, by all accounts, seemed to venture through this strange spirit world with the same ease a cat uses to scale the ledge of a skyscraper.

“Lars!” Sinclair said, laughing with relief. “Damn you, you ugly son of a bitch. I’ve never been so happy to see anyone in all my life.”

Lars looked back into Sinclair’s eyes, giving him a short “I told you so” stare, but, in his seriousness, he was happy to see that his services were both needed and appreciated. Lars gave Sinclair a dry smile, and pointed a finger back toward the front door of the mansion.

Sinclair was no fool. He followed Lars with all of his strength.

Within sight of Manchester House’s porch, the cameraman started to relax. In less than five steps, Sinclair knew that he would be back on the home’s property and within the safety of Holzer and Night. All was well.

Lars, on the other hand, knew differently.

Sinclair’s legs began to sink in the mud. It appeared that it had also rained in this spirit world at the same time it had rained in the real world of men. The lawn began to bubble in a pool of wet mud, almost quicksand-like. The cameraman found himself swimming in the brown liquid, desperately grabbing for a solid footing-a footing that no longer existed.

“Lars!” Sinclair screamed, spitting mud out of his mouth. “I’m sinking. Help me, God damn it.”

Lars looked on, not really knowing what to do. He could not communicate his intentions to Sinclair, and Sinclair, it appeared, was in no mood to play charades. So the deaf man tried his best to place into action the means needed to save a fellow comrade.

Sinclair found himself sinking in the mud up to his chin. So close was the cameraman to the house that the splashing mud sprinkled the bottom step of the mansion’s porch.

Lars jumped on top of a porch swing which appeared to have been placed hanging on a nearby tree as an afterthought and offered Sinclair a steady hand. In his struggle, the cameraman reached, slipped, and failed to make contact.

Sinclair sank below the mud, disappearing in a stream of bubbles. Gone.

Lars looked on.

All the spirits seemed to laugh, realizing that the cameraman had failed to reach his goal. They rejoiced in the knowledge that soon, upon his death, Sinclair would be joining them in their torment, reaching out, praying, in pain and very lost.

Lars still looked on. In his hands now, he seemed to be holding a small piece of rope. A rope, the deaf mute feared, that was too late in arriving.

Then in a burst of energy, Sinclair’s arm exploded up out of the mud and found Lars’. The deaf man pulled with all of his might, raising the cameraman up and out of the danger he was in.

As soon as Sinclair was safe, the ground under his feet turned solid again. Grass grew there. It appeared as if nothing had ever happened.

“Let’s get the hell out of here, Lars,” Sinclair huffed, wiping mud off his face.

Lars silently agreed.

Both men entered Manchester House.

Safety.

The world going on outside Manchester House would have been one of normality, if seen by an innocent passerby. All appeared as it had. There was no sign nor sound which gave any kind of clue to the abnormal.

Nothing.

Suddenly, bright lights could be seen shooting from all the windows, and if someone were nearby, they would have heard a furious roar, explosion, and the sound of something heavy landing on the mansion’s property. The mansion itself shook violently, as if it had been the object that had just landed, giving all who cared to notice the impression that a great force had just been seriously put into motion.