A light in the growing darkness.

A circle of light.

A hand grabbed his arm and a familiar voice said, "Are you okay?"

"Lee?"

"Yeah, it's me. Come on. Let's get you back to the others, okay?"

He was talking slowly, calmingly. Like he expected Tony to go off the deep end at any moment. As the last of the light disappeared and there was nothing in the upstairs hall but him and Lee and Tina's flashlight, as Karl started crying again, Tony had to admit that the deep end had its attractions.

Lee took his arm as he stumbled and got him to the stairs where other hands helped steady him as he descended.

Once in the hall, he swayed and sank slowly to his knees.

"Amy, get the wastebasket out of the drawing room." Tina's voice. "But . . ."

"Quickly."

Just quickly enough.

Tony puked until his stomach emptied, then took a swallow of water and puked again. Finally, when even the dry heaves stopped, he wiped his mouth and sat back on his heels.

Wordlessly, Zev handed him a tissue.

He wiped his mouth and dropped it in the bucket. "Thanks."

The music director shrugged. "Hey, not the first time I've seen you toss your cookies."

"Man, you two had a seriously twisted relationship!"

"He had the flu," Zev explained shortly, accepting a water bottle from Amy and pa.s.sing it over. "You okay now?"

"I think so." Physically anyway.

"What happened?"

Polite "let's pretend Tony's not puking" conversations stopped. Tony glanced around the hall and found all attention directed at him. Not surprising, really-they must've thought he'd gone insane. He sighed. He'd been afraid he was going to have to say this at some point; he'd just hoped to put it off as long as possible.

I could still lie.

Except that he'd figured out what the house-the malevolent thing was up to-and if he couldn't save Ca.s.sie and Stephen, there were another eighteen people in danger. Coworkers. Friends. Kids. Lying wouldn't help them.

Another deep breath.

"I see dead people."

Someone snickered. Kate found her voice first. "Bulls.h.i.t."

"No." Lee came slowly down the stairs, eyes locked on Tony's face. "I believe him."

Chapter Six.

"SO ALL THE TIME I'm growing up, I heard about my mum's cousin who married a rich guy, had two kids, a big house, and the perfect life except that her husband went nuts and killed the kids and himself. End of perfect life.

She dies in the loony bin fifteen years later." Graham took another pull on his beer. "You sure you don't want one?"

"I'm sure." CB leaned forward, the chair creaking under his weight. "Get on with it."

"Yeah, okay. Maybe that story's why it's always been about dead people for me. Maybe not. Who knows? Point is, I never forgot it and a few years back, when I was at loose ends, I decided to go looking for the house. You know; the house where the perfect life ended." He jerked his head toward the window. "That house. I showed up right about the time the last caretaker took a walk out to the highway and stepped in front of an eighteen wheeler. It seemed like a sign-the timing and all-and, next thing I know, I'm employed. A month later, I'm in that second- floor bathroom-the bathroom where it happened, where my mum's cousin's kids got whacked-and I look in the mirror and there's these two dead kids standing behind me. I turn around and there s nothing there. I keep going back to the bathroom and I keep seeing them and I work at it . . ."

"You work at it?"

"Yeah, you know, I open up to it. I reach out to the other realm," he added when CB clearly didn't understand. "Never mind, it's not important. Soon I can see them even outside the mirror and soon after that we start talking. They're a little vague at first, after all they've been trapped at the moment of their deaths for years, but the longer we talk the more they remember who they were."

"What does this have to do with my daughters?"

"I'm getting there; you're not going to get what's happening without the background stuff. So while I'm talking to the family-that's the two dead kids in case you lost track-I'm scoping out the rest of the house and spiritually, that's one crowded piece of real estate." A long drink, then he set the bottle down on the table and leaned forward, mirroring CB's position. "Bad stuff leaves its mark, okay? I'm guessing with all the weird c.r.a.p Creighton Caulfield brought into the house, he got his hands on a piece that wasn't just weird-it was out-and-out evil. Just to be on the safe side, though, I checked to make sure they didn't build the house on some kind of off-limits Indian burial site and they didn't. The First Nations out here, they're on top of that stuff."

"Get. On. With. It." CB growled. Had one of his writers pitched him a plot so heavily weighted with cliche, that writer would be back working the Tim Horton's drive-through before he got to the second act. Cliche applied to his daughters, however, that made a compelling story.

"Right. Now, Creighton Caulfield, he was a piece of work. n.o.body liked him and the stuff he liked, well, you don't want to know a guy who likes that kind of stuff, see? And, fed by Caulfield, the bit of bad keeps getting bigger. After a while, it's no longer a mark left by bad stuff, it's reached a critical ma.s.s and it's now a bad thing all on its own. By the time Caulfield dies, it's a full-sized malevolence."

He paused, waiting for comment, but CB only nodded, so he went on. "Trouble is nothing's feeding it anymore.

Caulfield's gone and nothing's making it any bigger. So it starts working on the new people in the house and a lot more proactively than just lying around and waiting for them to slip on it like some kind of evil banana peel. It finds the weakest link." Snickering, he sat back. "You are . . ."

"I wouldn't." Not a suggestion.

Graham's mouth snapped shut and he sighed. "You know, you should really keep a sense of humor about this or it's going to be a long night."

"A short night for you if you don't finish the story."

"What?" Then he found the threat. "Uh, right. So the malevolence finds the person most open to it and kicks him round the bend, but this person doesn't get to go bye-bye until he's offed someone else. The whole d.a.m.ned place, and I use the word d.a.m.ned in its literal sense, is full of murders and suicides and every death feeds the malevolence and makes it stronger, more realized."

"Again, and for the last time-what does this have to do with my daughters?"

"I'm getting there. In the mid-seventies, a woman named Eva Kranby tossed her baby in a lit fireplace and then killed herself. Her husband-another seriously rich guy . . ."

"The Kranby of Kranby Groceries?"

"No idea. Wherever this guy got his money, losing his wife and baby just crushed him, but he wouldn't sell the house.

He's living in New Zealand now, but he still won't sell. The house has been empty ever since except for the caretakers.

The first guy, he's a total stoner and when the house makes a move he thinks he's having a bad acid trip and takes off. No food for the house. Next guy, he's a religious nut who spends a lot of time praying and finally snaps, goes babbling to his minister about exorcisms and the like and he's gone. Still no food for the house. Next guy, the guy I replace, actually does kill himself, but he does it away from the property. So there's been nothing new coming in for a number of years and hardly anyone to work on, so by the time I get here, in order to keep from just bleeding away energy, the house goes dormant and as long as you're careful not to wake it up, it's perfectly safe. Okay, some parts of it, like the ballroom, can be freak shows in their own right-we're talking a lot of trapped dead in there and you spend any time in with them, next thing you know, you're going to be joining the dance. There was this electrician, back during the first caretaker, got brought in to fix some wiring or something and they found him dead in the ballroom. They called it a heart attack, but it was exhaustion."

"So the house has killed after the Kranbys."

"In technical post mortem talk, he wasn't killed, he died-I got the feeling that was the ballroom acting on its own."

He frowned. "Mind you, the malevolence was still awake then, so who knows. Not something I'd want to risk anyway.

The dead, one at a time, not so big a problem, but you get them in groups and they're like teenagers. Could get up to anything."

"We were going to use the ballroom."

"Yeah, I heard. Good thing you changed your mind." A quick glance at the window and the dark shadow of the house against the night sky. "Or a moot point. Hard to say."

"And, I note, you didn't say. Anything."

"Well, you didn't use the ballroom, did you? I figured as long as the malevolence was asleep, no problem. You got anyone that's too sensitive on staff, and I've seen your show so I'm thinking that's not likely, and they might be getting the whole cold chills and bad feeling about things, but that's all. There's only one thing that can wake the house."

CB waited out the caretaker's pause for effect with barely concealed impatience. It was, as a result, a short pause.

"Blood. One of your people got blood on the house. I warned them not to, so it's nothing to do with me. The house woke up. The malevolence is starving-the energy from the trapped dead is enough to keep it from fading, but that's all- and it doesn't have time to be subtle, so when the sun set, it locked everything down. It'll use what energy it has stored to score big, to get it enough juice to keep it going for years and years. Your guy outside says there's nineteen people in there. It'll use what's in the house already to drive the weak ones mad and they'll do the rest."

"The weak will murder the strong and then commit suicide?"

A long swallow finished the beer. "Yeah."

"How do we stop this?"

"Just like that? How do we stop this?" Brows drawn in, Graham stared across the empty bottle at his audience. "This is the part where you tell me that I'm crazy and that's the most preposterous story you've ever heard."

"I'm in television, syndicated television at that. Your story is derivative but hardly preposterous." Although belief came more from the gate to another world that opened into his soundstage. "Also, my own people have informed me that they cannot get into the house. Now then . . ." His hands closed slowly into fists. ". . . how do we stop this?"

Pale cheeks paled further as Graham Brummel suddenly realized he was also in a certain amount of danger. "We can't. We can only wait until morning and see who survives."

"That's not good enough."

"Look . . ." All flippancy had left his voice. ". . . I understand. It's your people in there, your kids, but you can't even touch the house right now, so it's a fair a.s.sumption we can't get inside."

"Is there a way for the people inside to get out?"

Graham shrugged. "You got me. I'm not inside."

"Theorize."

"Okay. Well, I guess that if someone took on the malevolence and won, then the house'd open up."

Given the plot thus far, that seemed to follow. "Good." "But that's not going to happen. Your people are sitting ducks. They won't have a clue what's going on and the house is going to work them like the barker works the rubes at a carny. It'll twist them and terrify them and they'll stop thinking for themselves."

"Don't count on it."

"What, because they're television people and they're used to weird?"

"That, too." CB heaved himself up out of the chair and reached into his pocket for his cell phone.

"You can't call in. I thought your people told you that. It's sucking all the power out of . . ." He stopped as CB raised a ma.s.sive hand, shrugged, and wove his way around the stacks of old newspapers and books to the kitchen for another beer.

His people had told him that, which was why he hadn't spent the last twenty minutes on the phone. What he needed now was a second opinion. "Mr. Fitzroy? It's Chester Bane. Mr. Foster seems to have gotten himself into a situation and we could use your insight. No, we're on location . . . Yes, that's right. I'll be waiting for you in the driveway. Thank you."

"If that's a cop you called," Graham muttered, twisting the lid off another bottle as he came out of the kitchen. "They can't help. And the X-Files left Vancouver years ago."

"He's not a cop. Now, you . . ."

"Me?"

"What are you? A wizard?" CB stared down at the beer sprayed nearly to the tips of his highly polished Italian loafers.

"Not a wizard. What then?"

"I thought I told you. It's all about dead people for me-I'm a medium."

"Ah."

"You believe that, too?"

"Yes."

"Jesus." Dropping back into his chair, Graham took a long drink. "You're either the most open-minded guy I've ever met or the most gullible."

"Do I look gullible?"

"Uh, no. Sorry." He rubbed the shadow of stubble on his chin with one hand and under the weight of CB's gaze, began to talk again. "I used to work the carnival circuit till that kind of thing pretty much shut down. Then I did a bit of freelance, but I just don't got John Edward's touch, you know? Say, you're a producer. When this is over, do you think you could . . . ?"

"No."

"Yeah, fine, whatever. I guess you got a right to be cranky; after all, the house has got your kids."

CB walked over to the window and stared at the roofline barely visible through the rain. "The house may have bitten off more than it can chew."

"So . . ." Brianna glared up at Tony through narrowed eyes. ". . . you lied about the baby."

"Yes."

"Was it, like, way gross?"

"Yes."