Chương 255: Book Eight, Chapter 12: Red Jack

The still, ghostly look on Bellanti's face, which I initially thought was a sign of nervous insanity, gradually shifted into what I can only describe as paranoid rage. He stared at me so completely still that it was as if he thought I couldn't see him if he didn't move. His gaze might have been a warning: "I know what you are, you can't fool me." Like how teenagers get stared at when they enter a mom-and-pop convenience store. Of course, I wasn't actually trying to fool him.

"Mr. Bellanti?" I asked quietly. He breathed evenly and didn't blink.

"We're not here to hurt you," I said.

"You're not here at all," he said without missing a beat. Honestly, I almost laughed at that response. He sounded so sure of himself, he had so much conviction that it was like he thought when he said the words, we would disappear. But we didn't.

"So who are these people, huh?" he yelled to the roof above.

"Huh? What kind of tricks have you cooked up this time, you old devil?" He had gone impressively mad.

"If we're doing tricks, I need to negotiate my share," Dina said. There was always an inner comedian in her, looking for the perfect opportunity to let through snark. It just got beaten out by the outsider most of the time.

"Not now," I said to her in a whisper.

"Funny," Bellanti said, moving his gaze to her.

"So funny, aren't you? Dressed in black—was that you drilling on the vault? Finally got through, didn't you?" He was talking to Dina, but his voice was loud, like he was still talking to whatever devil he had been addressing earlier. For the first time since we had walked in, he moved. He got up from the bed and walked over toward one of those chilled wine racks, popped open a cabinet, and drew a bottle out from inside. He was obviously quite practiced at it because he had it uncorked with the flash of a corkscrew.

He took a big chug of it right in front of us, swished it around inside his mouth, and swallowed hard.

"I'd offer you some, but why bother?" he asked.

"You're here to take it, right? Thieves. What a ruse. I suppose you'll be stealing it anyway. This bottle is worth three thousand dollars, you know," he said as he examined the label.

"Investment grade, they said. You can hardly trust the men who deal in these things on the black market, but I needed to turn my dollars into something less traceable, so beggars can't be choosers… It tastes like all the others." He took the bottom of the bottle and then thrust it at us like he was about to throw it, but he never let go. Instead, he let a few splashes of wine spray across the group and over the floor. He started to laugh as the wine hit us, as if he expected it to go right through.

"The world thinks you're dead," I said, trying to move things forward.

"We thought you were dead."

"Hoped you were, even," Dina said. He smiled.

"How long have you been in here?" I asked. It felt redundant, but sometimes when you were trying to get through a dialogue tree, you just had to click all the buttons, so to speak.

"See for yourself," he said, pointing to a wall near the bed where he had drawn up all of the cliché prison tally marks so that he could count the days he had spent locked inside that safe room.

"It's not a good calendar," he said.

"The only clock I had was that one over there, and it only tracks twelve hours at a time. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to track years twelve hours at a time?"

"Twice as hard," Camden mumbled under his breath. He laughed again. I almost laughed too at the sight of someone trying to watch a wall clock and hoping they wouldn't miss any of the hour hand's rotations.

"And that was before I realized its motor was running slow. I assume it's been years... four years, seven years?" He paused for a moment as he stared at us while taking another swig of his wine.

"Did they send you to finish me?" he asked. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. He was now looking person to person, and the player his eyes rested on was Nicole, so she was the one who responded.

"Did who send us?" she asked.

"You had a lot of enemies, and more than a few took credit for your disappearance." He laughed again. He just did that a lot. He must not have gotten a lot of socialization over the last five years, not with the living, at least.

"I wasn't talking about anyone on the outside, was I? How long before you talk me into leaving the vault, hmm? That's why you're here. Like my father and mother—to plead with me to leave the vault, right? Because I need to go out there and wander the house as it tries to eat me, right?!" Dina must have been happy for confirmation that ghosts of the dead appeared in this storyline.

"Your parents are dead," she said.

"You're saying their ghosts came to you?" His eyes began darting around the room, especially lingering at the hole in the barricade we had made and what lay beyond it.

"Them and others," he said.

"The ones I put in the ground. Every last one. I hear them whispering in the damn studs, telling me they know where I am, asking why I won't come out and meet them proper."

"You're saying the house is haunted?" Camden said in his best skeptical voice.

"Haunted?" Bellanti asked.

"No. The house is hungry, and it wants to eat me."

"You're telling us," I said, "something's keeping you here?" He nodded his head and said, "It won't let me leave. I tried the front door, and it moved. Not the knob—the whole damn door. And the faces—" he gestured back toward the opening of the safe—"they press out of the walls like it's all skin and bone under there. My victims staring at me, laughing."

"I can only see knots and grain," Camden said. More laughter from Bellanti.

"I was the same at first," he said.

"Look harder." Oblivious Bystander be damned, I did as he asked, and I peeked out through the hole in the barricade to the room we had all been standing in not long before. I shone my flashlight out. Forgoing meta protection was worth the psychic abilities at that point. And there they were, the faces in the wood, this time much clearer than before.

I would never be able to recognize them other than the fact that they were human-shaped, but in my heart, I knew they were accusers seeking one more glimpse at the man hiding in the vault.

"Oh hell," I said.

"Now you see where we are," Bellanti said.

"They waited until I was living in the house a while, whispering to me, watching me get old and soft. Then the fall came, and they came with it."

"The fall?" Nicole asked.

"When it got cold, the sap started to run. The air tasted like rot. That's when the walls came alive." We let his words linger for a moment, but we had to get to work. We were halfway through the movie, and we didn't fully understand what we were up against, let alone how to defeat it. It was time to stop beating around the bush.

"Mr. Bellanti, you bought charms, wards, all that stuff upstairs," Nicole said.

"Was that because of the spirits? If so, why didn't they work?"

"I bought everything," Bellanti said.

"I brought priests, mediums, sand painters, a rabbi, three psychics, a ghost hunter—nothing worked. The house is wrong. They said it remembers things I'd rather forget." The intensity that he had begun with was rapidly becoming less stable by the moment.

"You've tried your best," he said.

"I'm not leaving, but you had better." He must not have been fully convinced that we were anything but apparitions meant to trick him.

"Do you mind if we take your stuff?" Dina asked. I ignored what she said, and so did he.

"We can take you with us," I said. A wide smile spread across his face.

"There it is," he said.

"I knew it was coming. You're here to save me. To take me out there where I can be picked clean. I'm no fool. I won't leave."

"I say we respect his decision," Dina said. She was really going for it. Simply leaving him behind would have been fine, but we could earn some brownie points by acting a little more human than we needed to.

"Jack, listen," I said.

"You're starving, you're dehydrated, I don't even want to know how long that toilet has been broken. You're—""Armed," he said, interrupting me.

"I'm armed." He reached from somewhere on his person, maybe his underwear even, and pulled out a pistol. This must have been scripted. My Moxie should have blown his out of the water.

"Easy now," Nicole said.

"Nobody wants trouble."

"You're not taking me back out there!" Bellanti screamed.

"You think I don't hear them right now? Whispering, 'Come out, Jack, come answer for what you've done!'""Nobody's whispering," I said.

"You don't hear it because they don't want you. They want me. Now move!" He waved the gun frantically, forcing us to go back through the hole in the barricade out into the room we had spent so much time waiting in. After we were all out, Bellanti reached toward the vault door and grabbed onto a handle.

"I'm closing it!" he screamed up at the ceiling.

"I'll punch my own ticket if that's what it takes! Then we'll see who haunts who!" He pulled on the vault door, trying to swing it closed. But it didn't budge. At some point in time, while we were inside the vault, the house had shifted, and now the vault door was set behind a wall. Panels had been placed over it like they had been over the entire outer wall, and an entire intersecting interior wall had come to pin the door open. It looked like it had been built that way.

Red Jack Bellanti refused to look up and see why the door wouldn't close. Instead, he closed his eyes, unwilling to stare at the wood.

"Why won't it close?" All of the ferocity from his voice was gone.

"Did you really come through?" he asked as a moment of clarity spread over him, and he realized that we weren't figments of his imagination or the minions of a dark lord.

"The house won't let you leave," he said.

"It's moving again, and you gave it an opening against me!" He pointed his gun at us, and we quickly ran down the hall away from the safe while he fired. Dina was lugging the leather case filled with jewels; it was the only thing small enough she could grab.

"He shot me!" Camden screamed. Even at first glance, it wasn't a fatal wound. How could it have been? Bellanti was just a basic NPC. Bellanti continued to scream and fire his gun until he was out of ammo.

"Get away from me!" he screamed.

"All of you! You won't take me! I won't go with you!" His voice started to fade as we moved away, and all I could hear from that direction was the creaking of wood and the shaking of earth as the house started to shift once again.