15 Amityville Horrible by Kelley Armstrong Page B

me, her expression guarded.
    “You okay?” she said. “Or is this part of the show?”
    Cameron snapped, “If it was part of the show, the cameras would still be rolling.”
    “I just got spooked,” I said. “It happens, even to spiritualists.”
    I wanted to take a moment. Figure out whether I’d really heard that voice. But the cast and crew were waiting with growing impatience.
    “Roll on,” I said.
    When the camera was filming, I started toward the lit room. “It is rumored that the man who murdered Clara, Polly and Dawn has joined them in the spirit world, and he departed from this very attic. After killing Dawn, he came up here and hanged himself from the rafters. Perhaps…” I stepped into the lit room and motioned up. “These very rafters.”
    It was all bullshit, of course. But Becky had told me to wing it.
    “The family who lived in this house never realized they had a dead monster in their attic. Years later, it’s said that someone working on the house found his mummified remains, lying on the floor, rope still around his neck. The worker raced out and called for help, but when he returned with his supervisor, the body was gone. Worried that they’d be implicated in murder, they didn’t notify the homeowners or the authorities. But they told someone. Maybe a friend, maybe a spouse. And so the story was born. But without a body, it remains just that. A story.”
    As stories went, this one straddled the border between ridiculous and ludicrous. I’m a performer, not a writer. As long as I framed it as rumor, though, I’d spare the studio from lawsuits, which was really all that mattered. So I blathered on about the tormented and demented killer, whose spirit was eternally trapped here. Or so I’d heard.
    “If it’s true, then what we have here is a very strange and very dangerous situation,” I said. “In the basement, the ghosts of the victims, searching for peace. In the attic, the spirit of their killer. Searching for mercy? For forgiveness? Or endlessly hunting for his victims—”
    The door slammed shut. Everyone jumped.
    “Th-that’s not funny,” Cameron said, his voice wavering. “Who’s out there?”
    “Um, no one,” Frank said. “There was no one outside the—”
    Another slam. Then another. Two more in quick succession. In the basement, one of the twins started to scream.
    “What the hell?” Rory crossed the room and yanked on the door. It didn’t budge.
    Frank laughed nervously. “Well, you kids wanted a haunted house.”
    Rory strode to him. “Bullshit. You say no one was at the door? Show me the tape.”
    She seemed startled when he lifted the camera without argument. Cameron and Ricardo edged in to watch, along with Sal, who’d been standing off-camera.
    I walked to the door and tried the handle. No luck. I tried the other one, across the room. It had been closed when we came in. Closed and locked, as I now discovered.
    I glanced at the others. They were watching the tape, saying “Look!” and “Seriously?” and “Play that again,” and I knew what they were seeing. A door slamming with no one behind it.
    “Must be a draft,” Rory said. “Old houses are full of them.”
    “A draft slammed all the doors?” Frank said.
    Now, both twins were screaming in the basement.
    “They must be locked in, too,” Frank said.
    By this point, I was pretty sure I heard Wade’s screams joining the girls’. My team, though, stayed calm. Frank seemed the most panicked. Ricardo just looked confused. Both Sal and Rory were at the door, trying it, muttering between themselves that it was a trick, it had to be.
    “It is…ghost?” Ricardo said finally, his accent thick.
    “No,” Rory said. “It’s a house built on SFX. Flickering lights? Fine. But locking doors?” She took out her cell. “That violates my civil liberties. I didn’t sign anything that lets them do that.”
    She hit speed-dial, then lifted the phone to her ear. After a moment, she pulled it down,