Hell House Read Free

sounded cheerful on the telephone the three times he'd called—and, alone, she'd wept and shaken, taken tranquilizers, hadn't slept or eaten, lost thirteen pounds, fought off compulsions to end it all. Met him at the airport finally, pale and smiling, told him that she'd had the flu.
    Edith closed her eyes and drew her legs up. She couldn't face that again. The worst haunted house in the world threatened her less than being alone.
    11:41 P.M.
    He couldn't sleep. Fischer opened his eyes and looked around the cabin of Deutsch's private plane. Strange to be sitting in an armchair in an airplane, he thought. Strange to be sitting in an airplane at all. He'd never flown in his life.
    Fischer reached for the coffeepot and poured himself another cupful. He rubbed a hand across his eyes and picked up one of the magazines lying on the coffee table in front of him. It was one of Deutsch's. What else? he thought.
    After a while his eyes went out of focus, and the words on the page began to blur together. Going back, he thought. The only one of nine people still walking around, and he was going back for more.
    They'd found him lying on the front porch of the house that morning in September 1940, naked, curled up like a fetus, shivering and staring into space. When they'd put him on a stretcher, he'd begun to scream and vomit blood, his muscles knotting, rocldike. He'd lain in a coma three months in the Caribou Falls Hospital. When he'd opened his eyes, he'd looked like a haggard man of thirty, a month short of his sixteenth birthday. Now he was forty-five, a lean, gray-haired man with dark eyes, his expression one of hard, suspicious readiness.
    Fischer straightened in the chair. Never mind; it's time, he thought. He wasn't fifteen anymore, wasn't naive or gullible, wasn't the credulous prey he'd been in 1940. Things would be different this time.
    He'd never dreamed in his wildest fancies that he'd be given a second chance at the house. After his mother had died, he'd traveled to the West Coast. Probably, he later realized, to get as far away as possible from Maine. He'd committed clumsy fraud in Los Angeles and San Francisco, deliberately alienating Spiritualists and scientists alike in order to be free of them.
    He'd existed barely for thirty years, washing dishes, doing farmwork, selling door to door, janitoring, anything to earn money without using his mind.
    Yet, somehow, he'd protected his ability and nurtured it. It was still there, maybe not as spectacular as it had been when he was fifteen, but very much intact—and backed now by the thoughtful caution of a man rather than the suicidal arrogance of a teenager. He was ready to shake loose the dormant psychic muscles, exercise and strengthen them, use them once more.
    Against that pesthole up in Maine.
    Against Hell House.

5
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    DECEMBER 21, 1970
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    11:19 A.M.
    The two black Cadillacs moved along the road, which twisted through dense forest. In the lead car was Deutsch's representative. Dr. Barrett, Edith, Florence Tanner, and Fischer rode in the second, chauffeur-driven limousine, Fischer sitting on the pull-down seat, facing the other three.
    Florence put her hand on Edith's. "I hope you didn't think me unfriendly before," she said. "It was only that I felt concern for you, going into that house."
    "I understand," said Edith. She drew her hand away.
    "I'd appreciate it, Miss Tanner," Barrett told her, "if you wouldn't alarm my wife prematurely."
    "I had no intention of doing that, Doctor. Still—" Florence hesitated, then went on. "You have prepared Mrs. Barrett, I trust."
    "My wife has been advised that there will be occurrences."
    Fischer grunted. "One way of putting it," he said. It was the first time he'd spoken in an hour.
    Barrett turned to him. "She has also been advised," he said, "that these occurrences will not, in any way, signify the presence of the dead."
    Fischer nodded, taking out a pack of cigarettes. "All right