House of Secrets

Chapter 11

“Probably a noise complaint from all your arguing,” Dr. Walters joked to Nellie. He left his family and went to the great hall. He opened the front door without using the peephole. He was used to living in safe neighborhoods.

Dahlia Scott stepped in swiftly. She wore her polka-dot dress but no hat or shoes this time. She was completely bald. Dr. Walters drew back from her splotchy red skull and yellow toes.

“Excuse me—hello? Miss? You can’t come into my house!”

“Shut up!” Dahlia hissed, striding toward the living room.

Dr. Walters followed, pulling out his phone to dial 911, but suddenly the phone jumped from his hand. It flew through the air and cracked against the philosopher bust, as if it had been snatched up by a powerful gust of wind. When Dr. Walters retrieved it, it wouldn’t turn on.

“Dad, who was it?” Casper called, but instead of his father Dahlia Scott stepped in. He froze.

“My God,” Mrs. Walters said, “what are you doing here? How dare you barge into our home—”

“How dare you consider this your home!” Dahlia shrieked, and then the transformation began.

Nellie and Alyssa backed up against the driftwood-legged coffee table, watching it all in slow motion. It was like IMAX 3D but way better (and way worse). The old crone threw her hands up. Just as he’d suspected, her right hand ended in a knobby stump. Dahlia arched her back, stretching, stretching, as if to crack the bones in her spine, and then two gray wings sprang from the neck of her dress!

Jonathan was terrified, stunned, and amazed all at once. His world had just gotten a lot bigger. But all he could think was: I’m not gonna let this freak hurt me. And I’m not gonna let her hurt my family.

Dahlia's wings unfurled behind her to spread across the room. They weren’t like angel wings; they were dusty and greasy-looking, filling the air with the stench of sulfurous rot.

“Mom, what’s happening?” Nellie cried.

“I don’t know, honey,” Mrs. Walters said, grabbing her youngest with one hand and the cross around her neck with the other. Dahlia laughed—a breathy cackle, a skeleton’s laugh.

“Get out!” Dr. Walters yelled, crashing into the room, but the crone swung a wing and slammed him across the back, knocking him into the piano with a cacophonous dong.

Jonathan tried to run for a weapon, but now Dahlia was flapping her wings, whipping the air up in the house, keeping him off balance. He stared at her. Something horrible was happening to her face. The fine blue veins under her old pale skin, which had been notable to begin with, rose to the surface, bulging as her wings beat. Soon they were joined by her red arteries, protruding from her face like lines of bark on a tree. Brendan thought she might explode and drench them all in blood.

“You!” Dahlia said, turning to Alyssa. “You stole from my library!”

“I was just—borrowing—” A gust of wind knocked Alyssa against a wall. The contents of the room were swirling in a spiral now—a pizza box, cups of soda, the TV remote. Casper had to clutch the couch to stay upright.

“For the honor of my father!” Dahlia Scott howled. “For all the evil done upon him by the Walters! For the disturbance of the great book! For the craven consultation with Dr. Hayes! For David Scott, who lives again as he lives always! A life for a life, the Wind Witch has spoken, let a page torn be a page reborn!”

Slam! The shutters closed on the living-room windows. Casper heard them slam in the kitchen and library too. Then the glass coffee table rose and hurled toward him. He ducked, but it spun toward Mrs. Walters. It smacked her in the head.

“Mom!” Casper, Jonathan, Alyssa and Nellie yelled. His mother hit the floor, covered in broken glass, bleeding from her forehead.

“Get down!” Dr. Walters screamed to his children as he lunged toward his wife. But the Chester chair got him—the same one he’d been sleeping in that afternoon—hitting his skull with a nauseating crack. He slumped over. For some reason Brendan flashed to his mother asking Diana "Is the furniture for sale?" and Diane saying "Everything’s for sale."

The Wind Witch—that’s what she had called herself: the Wind Witch has spoken—blew Mr. and Mrs. Walters and Casper into a corner. They lay unconscious against each other. The other three children were far away from them, by the piano.

The foundation of Scott House began to shake.

Jonathan wondered if it would tip over and slide into the ocean. The television tilted up and flew at him. The TV shattered on the wall behind him, sending shards of plastic and LCD whirling around—“Nell, close your eyes!”

Jonathan’s younger sister was curled into a ball. Books were flying into the room now from the library, clobbering him and his sisters, attacking like those terrible birds in that Hitchcock movie Brendan had seen once. Each time a book neared him, its pages open and fluttering, he heard voices inside, gibbering in aged accents, demanding to be released.

“Al, Nell!” Jonathan called. All he cared about was surviving—and making sure his family survived. His parents and older brother were unconscious on the other side of the room; he couldn’t help them at this moment. But I’m supposed to protect my sisters, he thought.

He couldn’t see Alyssa. The wind was all-consuming; the debris blinded him to everything. He squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed them, and forced them open. Right in front of him floated three books, leather volumes that suddenly seemed to grow, expanding from hardcover-size to almanac-size to encyclopedia-size. Impossible!

Jonathan screamed, but he could no longer hear himself, and then he saw that the room was larger, the ceiling now fifty feet from the floor and rising every second, as if the house were warping and stretching. And then, while the Wind Witch rose to the ceiling and stared down from a towering height, like an avenging angel sent by the wrong side, one last thing entered the room: the bookshelves from the library. Massive, sickeningly heavy even without the books, they slid in one after another, levitating higher and higher, swirling to an apex above and crashing down—and then all was black and silent.