She laughed. “No, I didn’t know. But by all means. Key West is beautiful. Come on down.”
He sniffed.
At last he left, still offering dire warnings to her.
She needed to pack, but she wandered out to the porch and gazed at the pool she shared with the others who lived in the group of old bungalows. She stared at the water.
Cold water. Even heated, it was still cold, in her mind.
Key West had warm water. Beautiful, warm water.
A sudden scream startled her and brought her back inside. She had a habit of keeping the television on for company. One of the movie channels was running an all-day marathon of classic horror movies.
Someone was running from a werewolf.
She smiled and sat, and then stretched out on her sofa, watching the television. As she did so, her eyes grew heavy. A nap would be great; she had tossed and turned through the night.
As she felt herself nodding off, she thought about fighting sleep.
She knew that she would dream.
It seemed that a scene from a movie was unfolding. The house was distant at first, sitting on its little spit of land. The water around it was aqua and beautiful, as it could only be around Florida and the Caribbean.
But then dark clouds covered the soft blue of the sky, and the ocean became black, as if it were a vast pit of tar.
The camera lens within her dreaming eye came closer and closer, and the old Victorian with its gingerbread façade came clearer to her view. She heard a creaking sound and saw the door was open, that the wind was playing havoc with the hinges.
She was in the house again, and she heard the screams and the wailing, and she saw her father, as she had seen him that day, holding her mother, the sound of his grief terrible. She ran toward him, screaming herself, calling for her mother.
Then Cutter himself came running down the stairs, crying out in horror. He sank down and she felt herself freeze, just standing there as she had on that day.
Then her mother and father and Cutter all faded to mist, and she stood in the empty house, alone. There were boxes and objects, spiderwebs and dust, and there was something else in the house as well, something that seemed like a small black shadow, and then seemed to grow…dark, stygian, filling the house with some kind of evil.
The mummy rose from its sarcophagus and stared at her with rotted and empty eyes. It pointed at the black shadow, and its voice was as dry and brittle as death as it warned, “The house must have you. It’s up to you. Now you—you must come, and you must stop it from growing, from escaping. It’s loose, you see, the evil is on the loose, and it’s growing.”
The mummy wasn’t real. The mummy was dead. Liam had said so.
Terror filled her. She heard her name called. She turned. Liam was there, a tall, lanky teenager, reaching out to her. “Come here, come to me, it isn’t real, the mummy is dead, it’s in your imagination, in all the stories. Don’t believe in it, Kelsey—take my hand.”
There seemed to be a terrible roar. She turned, and the mummy was a swirling pile of darkness, a shadow, and the darkness was threatening to consume her.
Kelsey awoke with a start. She was in her charming living room, in her charming bungalow apartment, and she had fallen asleep with the television on.
And the movie channel she watched was showing Boris Karloff in The Mummy.
She laughed aloud at herself, turned off the TV, and decided that she was going to get things done, batten down the house, pack so she could leave in the morning, and then get a good night’s sleep. She wasn’t a coward; she had spent her childhood with Cutter, and really, she had to have some kind of sense of adventure.
I owe you, Cutter! I’m so sorry. I should have come to see you. I never should have let you die alone like that.
Please forgive me.
She wasn’t afraid.
The house was just a house.
And Cutter’s mummy was just preserved flesh that could now find a good home in a museum. Everything in perspective.
Cutter himself needed to rest at last, in peace.
She would see to it.
Liam shouted the officer’s name. “Ricky!”
There was no answer. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, however, he saw him on the floor, caught in the glow of light from his own fallen flashlight.
“Ricky!”
He rushed over to the man. Hunching down, he called for backup and an ambulance. He instantly checked for Ricky’s pulse, and was relieved to find that it was beating steadily.
Ricky groaned, and moved.
“Lie still. Where are you hurt? What happened?”
There was no sign of blood anywhere near Ricky.
As Liam spoke, Ricky opened his eyes, staring at Liam for a moment and then jerking around in panic. He stared across the room in the darkness. Liam aimed his flashlight beam in the area that seemed to be causing Ricky so much fear.
His light fell upon a suit of armor.
Ricky let out a scream, trying to choke it back.
“Ricky,” Liam said evenly, “it’s a suit of armor. Probably real, historic and worth a mint.”
“It moved!” Ricky declared.
Liam walked toward the armor. It was just that. Metal. It was buckled together by leather straps that had been made to replace the originals. They were probably period, but not historic.
The metal display stand was not on rollers. It hadn’t moved.
Liam turned to look at Ricky. He was rubbing the back of his head. It appeared that the man had seen the armor and backed himself into the edge of one of the display cases on the other side of the room.
“I swear to you, it moved!” Ricky told him.
He’d called for an ambulance. Even as Ricky stood, rubbing his head, and Liam checked all around the suit of armor, they heard the sound of a siren. Help was on its way.
Ricky winced, looking sheepish. “It moved. I’m telling you, it moved.”
“It’s dark down here, and you’ve heard all kinds of rumors about this place,” Liam said. He sighed, shaking his head. “Or maybe it did move, Ricky. Maybe a trespasser was in here, hiding behind the suit of armor, and when you knocked yourself out, he got away.”
Ricky’s mouth fell open. He was young, twenty-five years old. He was a good officer. Strong, usually sane and courteous. He could break up a barroom brawl like no other.
He protested weakly. “No…no, I would have seen a person.” He cleared his throat. “Oh, Lord, Lieutenant Beckett, please…maybe we could not mention this?” he asked hopefully.
Liam was irritated; he might have just lost his chance of finding whoever had broken in. But he said, “I’m not going to say anything—hell, I don’t want half the idiots in this city starting all kinds of rumors about haunted houses and animated suits of armor. Let the paramedics check you out. Just say you crashed into the display shelf, and that’s what I’ll say, too. It’s the truth.”
He walked out. The paramedics were exiting their ambulance with their cases in their hands.
“It’s a knock on the head, self-inflicted,” Liam said. “I think he’s fine, but check him out, please.”
The paramedics nodded and headed for the house. A patrol car came sliding up to park beside the