Chapter Forty-three

Home.

It had been more than sixty years since Edward Leland had been inside his father's house, and he felt a jolt now as he stepped over the threshold.

It was partly one of recognition. Little had changed down here. The entrance hall remained as vast and cavernous as ever, the ceiling lost in darkness high above. The same chessboard tiles on the floor. The same shadowy doorways leading off to either side. Even the air smelled the same. He breathed in deeply, and it was like pressing his face into a long-forgotten childhood blanket.

But it was more than memory alone. There was a feeling of electricity here, as though the property had been cut off for a long time and his arrival had reconnected it to the grid, setting the walls and foundations humming. As though the house itself knew that a terrible wrong had been committed and was now going to be corrected.

Leland's footsteps echoed as he led Christopher Shaw across to the twinned staircases, the knife pressed into the base of the boy's spine. The two ascended. Leland knew where to go. He had researched what Hobbes had done to the layout of the house thirty years earlier while planning the fire.

The fire which should have erased the child from existence.

More recognition came as he followed Shaw into the small enclosed apartment at the heart of the building, but here it was tempered by disgust at the sight awaiting them. His father had allowed him in here on occasion. Leland would sit cross-legged on the rug and listen to tales of his future, a fire burning beside him in the iron grate, the flames crackling and popping and casting flickers of golden light across the walls and ornate fittings.

But Alan had stripped it down since taking ownership, reducing what had been a grand room into an empty, utilitarian space, fit for existence but not for life. The fireplace had been bricked up and painted over. The rich, soft carpet had been ripped away. The furniture was spartan and the painting was gone. There was barely comfort here now, never mind the opulence he remembered. And in that moment, Leland hated his brother more than ever.

You can't do this.

It's not allowed.

He looked across the room. There was just a dark, empty archway there. The door that led to the deeper chamber was gone.

Along with the rules their father had given them about never entering it.

He led Christopher Shaw across the room. The boy hesitated as they approached the archway. Not because he was frightened of what lay beyond—he would be familiar with that, of course—but because he had seen the bloodstains on the wall around the old bed frame. His father's blood. Perhaps he didn't know who Alan Hobbes had really been, but he knew the man had been good to him, and Leland savored the expression of dawning horror on the boy's face.

But only for a moment.

He pressed the knife a little harder into the boy's back, and the two of them continued on through the archway.

There was no sense of recognition now. Leland had always done what he was told—what he was meant to do—and so he had never entered this chamber and had nothing with which to compare the empty bookshelves and cases that he saw here now. His gaze moved over them anyway, finally settling on a large wooden cabinet. He felt the pull of its contents—the items within that had once belonged to their father before being scattered to the four winds, and which Alan had then spent his life and wealth gathering together.

And of course, one of which Alan had stolen as a boy. The sacred text he had used to commit the foulest and most unforgivable of blasphemies.

Leland forced Christopher Shaw over to the opposite side of the room, where the roof and part of the wall were open to the elements and a small, burnt bed frame rested against the wall.

"Sit down."

The boy did as he was told, slumping down onto the floorboards beside the remains of the bed. He was shivering and beaten—but appearances could always be deceptive. Leland had seen him testing the bindings around his wrists in the car, and he thought they looked a little looser now. It didn't matter. He put the cannister of gas down and retrieved the handcuffs he'd brought with him from the inner pocket of his suit. Keeping hold of the knife, he cuffed one of the boy's hands to the heavy leg of the bed.

Because it mattered that he died here, where he had been meant to.

Then Leland picked up the can, unscrewed the cap, and splashed the contents all over Shaw, soaking the boy and the bed and the floorboards around him. He shook out every last rattling drop as Shaw spluttered and screamed into the gag, his eyes screwed tightly shut and his legs kicking helplessly.

Leland tossed the can aside and stood back.

As he did, he heard a faint sound drifting in from the open wall above them. Tires crunching over gravel.

Someone was here.

Shaw heard it too. And despite his pain and distress, he tried to say something. It was difficult to make out the words, but as he had before, Leland could certainly make out the sentiment.

Don't hurt him.

"No, no," Leland said. "It's your sister who's coming. And I'm afraid I am going to hurt her very badly indeed."

Shaw looked back at him for a moment, then blinked rapidly and screwed his eyes shut again, calling out more meaningless noises now.

"I'll be back soon," Leland told him. "Don't worry."

And then he made his way downstairs to finish things.