CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I set the wood back down on the pile. My heart began to beat rapidly. I don't know why. There was nothing frightening about the woman. She stood in front of the door to the smokehouse, with fog all around her, and I was nearly positive it was Brooke. But I didn't call out to her or wave.

My mouth went dry, and I squinted to see her better, but each time I tried to focus on her, she seemed to blur more. I felt a strange prickly heat along my back and felt feverish at the back of my scalp and along my forehead.

Brooke just stood there, and then she went inside the building.

My breathing was rapid, as if I'd run a mile, but in fact I had remained perfectly still for a minute or two. My heart rate felt as if it were increasing, and I suddenly thought of the one

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or two news stories I'd seen of men my age or even younger who suddenly dropped dead of heart attacks. It was pure fear within me, and I could not for the life of me understand why the idea of Brooke being inside the smokehouse would have such an effect on me.

It's not Brooke, some voice within me intoned. It's her. It's the Banshee. It's the ghost that Harry Withers believes is there. It's whatever killed Dad. It's something evil. Some malevolence that exists.

Some awful spirit of darkness that you conjured up.

Yes, you. Don't deny it. You three, playing your games, playing your Dark Game after dark. Using the game to conjure devils.

Using the Dark Game to bring something into existence.

Some force.

I would never before have entertained such an irrational thought. I did not believe in these things. I did not believe in the spirit world. In evil entities. In conjuring ghosts.

But the child that still lived within me, the boy who had kept his eyes closed and been with Brooke and Bruno as we played that game, as we took it to heights that our father would never have dreamed we would, that we remained long after dark, sneaking out of the house to go into the smokehouse, that awful little icy building and conjure the Banshee.

Bring her forth.

It has to be your imagination. It can't be real. You're under stress.

It's anxiety. It's normal under current conditions. Your life is all Jumblies. Your world is upside down. You have love and hate confused in your family. Your father whipped you when you were a boy. Your mother left you and never contacted any of you. You grew your imagination with your brother and sister in a game that

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was too powerful for young minds. Young minds that could create within themselves something hideously evil. Something dark.

The Dark Game wasn't supposed to be played at night.

The Dark Game wasn't supposed to go on like it did.

And one night, it got out of hand.

One night, the night when the Brain Fart began, it went too long. You almost died. You came to in the woods with blood on you; Brooke was found out in the field, shivering from cold; Bruno was soaked with fever-sweat. You three had done something terrible with the Dark Game.

Or it had done something terrible with you.

Your father knew.

He knew that it had gotten the better of you.

He knew that you were no match for the Dark Game.

He knew that whatever was in the smokehouse was evil.

He knew about the Banshee.

With all that burning in my brain, you'd think I would've not walked across the road and down the slight hill, crunching through snow, to find out who was inside the smokehouse.

But I had to. I could no longer take the sense that something in the world was so skewed that I might just be losing my mind, even as I was beginning to feel the hope of a renewal with Pola. The hope that something wonderful could be salvaged from the waste of my life and the nastiness of my father's death.

When I reached the smokehouse, I saw that the lock had been torn off.

Ripped away.

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I glanced back at the main house. I imagined Pola and Zack pulling out the Scrabble board or flipping through the stack of magazines Brooke kept by the coffee table.

From within the smokehouse:

The smell that came at me was like the stench of a dead animal, its stomach ripped open.

I had a flash of an image in my head:

My father, lying on the floor.

I entered that place regardless of fear and inner turmoil.

The place of punishment.

Some part of me had been hoping she would have vanished, this phantom, this Brain Fart of some kind. Or even that Brooke would be standing there, in a somnambulistic trance.

But instead, I saw her clearly.

She stood at the center of the smokehouse as the morning light entered, and even the light touched her skin. She had a corporeal presence. It was not Brooke, nor was it some other woman of the village. I felt a terrible hunger from her-the look in her eyes, the tortured grimace of her lips pulled back across her teeth, the sense I had that she was somehow a smudge of darkness, as if I could see her aura. I felt immediately that this was the woman I had sensed when I closed my eyes at night. This was the woman I had feared when Brooke went from room to room in the house. I felt electric waves of fury emanating from her-the only way I can describe it, for it did feel like a power surge in the air.

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Then the door to the smokehouse slammed shut behind me.

I felt a series of electrical shocks along my arms and up my spine. It was as if I had begun short-circuiting. I was barely aware of the blood that dripped from my nose, as it had when I'd been a boy and the air was too dry in winter.

I thought that I was dying right then.

Right there.

Darkness descended within the smokehouse, like a candle just snuffed, with only the diffuse glow from the door's window allowing me to see one square of light.

It fixed upon her face.

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