Chapter Thirteen
A deep, bone-shaking rumble passed through the house. Earthquake! Annie thought, snapping awake. Her bed heaved from side to side as if caught in the grip of a giant, palsied hand. A lamp hanging from the ceiling swayed precariously, and the walls spat bits of plaster onto the floor. The bedroom door swung on its hinges.
But through that door, red-orange light flickered, and panic coursed through Annie’s veins. Not an earthquake after all, she feared, but an explosion of some kind, resulting in a fire. She sniffed the air: hot and pungent, stinking of sulfur.
She pushed off the covers and made for the open door. It was like walking into a furnace. Should she go out the bedroom window instead? She couldn’t even call for help unless she could get to the phone in the living room—the other alternative was driving several miles into cell phone range.
While she stood by the doorway, frozen with indecision, the realization dawned that the shaking, jolting motion had stopped, and although the uneven reddish glow continued, there were no sounds of fire. She listened for the muffled roar of flames, but the house had gone quiet since that initial deep growl. The sweltering waves of heat and the flickering light still said “fire,” but the silence said otherwise. She clapped her hands once to ensure that her deafness hadn’t returned.
Her insides roiling, Annie went through the open door and down the short stub of a hallway. At its end, the glow painted the wall in roses and oranges.
With sweat rolling off her body, Annie turned the corner into the living room.
And stopped, hands out to brace herself against the entryway.
The living room floor was gone.
In its place was an impossible hole. The room’s walls remained intact, but the floor had been gutted, and sheer, rocky cliffs plummeted down into—well, she couldn’t tell what. She leaned over the edge to look down and an attack of vertigo swept over her. The cliff walls seemed to tilt, and she clutched at the real walls, the entryway that grounded her and let her know that the world had not lost all its moorings, and only that kept her from sailing over the edge and into the abyss.
She couldn’t see any bottom to the hole.
She lowered herself carefully to her knees, then pressed herself flat against the hot floorboards so she wouldn’t fall, and edged up so that just her head was over the side. From below came a rush of dry heat and that flickering light and the smell that burned her nostrils as if she had pumped acid into them, but the cliff walls faded into the glow and there was no end point, no solidity, nothing but a flaming emptiness that might have been the center of the Earth or the gates of Hell.
A Hell in which Annie had never believed.
Like her unnatural gift—or curse—of empathy, though, did she have to believe in it now that it had been forced onto her?
The glow of distant fire was hypnotic, and Annie felt her eyelids growing heavier, threatening to close. Inside her head, voices sounded—her father, Ryan Ellis, a wife beating, check kiting, thug named Wil Mortenson she had shot to death once when he aimed a weapon at her—calling to her to join them, and her fingertips scrabbled at the floor to keep her from sliding over the edge. Finally, she could hold her eyes open no longer.
She awoke in the same spot, lying on the floor in the entryway, with her head on the knotty planks of the living room floor. The wood was cool, intact. Light streamed in through the windows, the cheerful cries of birds drifting in with it. The sulfur smell—if it had ever been there at all—was gone.
A dream, then? Annie pushed herself to her feet, her muscles stiff and aching from the hours spent flat on the floor of her new house. A dream, but not like any she’d ever had before, and accompanied by sleepwalking.
Was it a vestige of the empathy—something about this house affecting her in a new and profound way? She hoped not. She was hardly in a position to move again so soon.
She went into the cramped bathroom, with trembling hands ran water into a cup, and swallowed three ibuprofen tablets. A couple shots of something stronger might help, but she didn’t want to begin her first full day in a new place, on a new job, by drinking herself into oblivion, however tempting it might be.
Besides, if she had been drinking the night before, she might have been unsteady on her feet, dizzy, and she could well have fallen into that hole.
Because no matter how impossible it seemed, despite the fact that the hole had left behind absolutely no evidence of its reality, she couldn’t quite believe it hadn’t been there. The fact that she was still here meant only that she had been lucky. One more step and she might still be dropping, falling through the flames and into forever.