Housefic: American Gothic, Part One
Title: American Gothic
Author: nightdog_barks, third_owl, and pwcorgigirl
Characters: House, Wilson
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: No
Spoilers: Yes, for the Season 8 series finale arc.
Summary: Halloween comes early for House and Wilson when they seek shelter from a storm. This part is 5,666 words.
Disclaimer: Don't own 'em. Never will.
Author Notes: This is set in the Riververse -- a ficverse set after the end of Season 8 and in which House and Wilson's road trip has continued longer than either of them would've ever thought. This fic takes place a month or so after the events of Will It Go Round in Circles. The cut-text is from Ray Bradbury's short story Homecoming. The second half of the story will be posted tomorrow night.
Beta: Our intrepid First Readers, with especial thanks to srsly_yes and joe_pike_junior.
American Gothic
It's about to start raining. It's about to start raining, and the promise of the relief it will bring from the hundred-degree heat would make House happy under other circumstances, such as if he weren't on a motorcycle. The soft grey mists of San Francisco are a distant memory -- riding in the rain is like being shot to death by a bug-sized army of pellet-gun commandos. Who shoot ice pellets. No matter that you were nearing heatstroke a few minutes ago; windchill conquers all.
Wilson has also learned this, and when House gives him the nod, he nods back. They are now on the lookout for shelter.
They'll have to look for a while out here in the dust bowl. No overpasses. No hotels. No gas stations, no restaurants, not even a tree for Toto to pee on in this part of Kansas. Or are they in Nebraska? House doesn't know; he doesn't remember seeing a state-border sign and under the circumstances he supposes it doesn't matter. A few rusted-out tractor husks suggest that this land was farmed, once. They'll either luck out, and find someone's old barn or something, or they won't. If it gets bad enough, and it might, he'd even settle for an ancient outhouse.
What House actually hopes for isn't the barn itself, much less a one-holer, but a nice big root cellar dug deep in the ground. Wilson may not have noticed yet, but the sky behind them is faintly green, the clouds roiling and muttering with thunder.
Right on cue, Wilson looks at him again, glances at the sky, and opens up the throttle. They can't outrun the storm, but they can damn sure speed up the hunt for safety.
The line of trees catches their attention from a long way off. Dark grey-green in the endless sea of grass, another relic of the days when this was farmland, before the money or the water or both dried up.
The windbreak forms a screen of tall weeds, leaves, and trunks. With all that, and the dust flying ahead of the storm's downdraft, they don't see the house until they've overshot it and have to turn back. A gravel driveway, the pebbles scattered so that the path is mostly raw dirt now, leads up to a patch of bare ground sheltered by the tattered shell of a garage. It's missing most of its shingles and part of the back wall, but it'll provide some cover for the bikes. As for the house ...
Perfect, House thinks. Everything's still standing -- two floors, an attic; there's got to be a basement. And he knows at a glance that nobody's home. Nobody's been home for a long, long time.
They've gotten in with no problem at all, if you don't count Wilson bleeding all over everything as a problem, which House does not.
He'd insisted on standing at the door with hat (helmet) in hand like a suitor come to call. Knocking, and shouting hello.
"It's abandoned, you idiot," House said.
"Yes, but we're stopping here. If someone else already has, I'd like to know that now."
"Because the engine's still warm on that Buick." The Buick in question was sinking in a sea of grass, its windshield smashed out and its dash sprouting wheat. House guesses the last time the car's radio was on was to catch Truman announcing a police action in Korea. "I say the non-crippled guy gets to climb through the window."
"I'm not breaking a window," said Wilson. He'd have been doing the full hands-on-hips thing, but his helmet was in one hand and his phone in the other, and he was scowling at that more than at House.
"Bad news?"
"No news. No signal. Did I mention I'm not breaking a window?"
"Seriously? The flying monkeys are about to carry us to Oz, and you're fretting about property damage?"
"No, bodily damage. Is that one cracked open?"
"You fail as a criminal," House announced. "How do you ever expect to land on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list this way?"
Wilson didn't answer; he had set the helmet down and was jacking around with the window when the rain started to blow in sideways across the long prairie porch. "A little help here?"
House lifted his cane, thought first about breaking the window, second about Wilson's head, and finally opted for helping him shimmy the window from side to side to unstick the sash and wrestle it up as far as it would go before it stuck again, this time for good. Wilson sighed and started to wriggle through, but no sooner was he halfway into the living room than he jerked and hissed in pain.
"Nail," he grunted. "Poking out somewhere. Dammit." There were drops of blood on the sill, seeping through the dry-cracked white paint to the raw wood beneath. He squirmed the rest of the way through awkwardly, holding his right hand away from his body and out of the reach of any more lurking hazards. House looked at the red-splotched sill and thought of Rorschach blots while he waited for Wilson to open the front door, and as he crossed the threshold he'd looked back at the listing wood stairs up to the porch.
They were already slick with rain.
The house looks sturdy enough on the inside, unlike the porch steps. Wilson's hand is still bleeding; must've been a pretty sharp nail. House isn't too concerned, though; he knows Wilson's tetanus booster is up to date.
Wilson puts his helmet on the dusty mantel in the front room and cradles one bloodied hand with the other. He's dripped a spoor of red drops in an uneven trail, from the front porch where they shimmied open the window to the front room where they're standing now. Drips everywhere except the entryway where he let House in, and that's only because of the entryway rug, a long, skinny affair in a hideous, faded maroon paisley that House is certain he last saw in Schuykill Haven, P.A., in his Great-Aunt Myrna's creaky old Victorian.
"I have to go get the saddlebags, don't I?" The weary way Wilson says it, you'd think he was Sisyphus, back at the bottom of the hill.
"Only if you want the first-aid kit," House replies. Wilson can be a metaphor for futility on his own damn time. As if reading House's mind, Wilson sighs and heads back out.
"House, c'mere," Wilson says. He's dropped the saddlebags to the floor, he's dripping with rain and blood, and he's fishing things out of their tiny first-aid kit. He stands as House approaches, reaching for the stricken right hand.
Next thing House knows, Wilson's using their scalpel ("Don't leave home without it," House had said) to slice a long strip off the hem of House's t-shirt. House stands there stunned for a moment; this was not at all what he thought was about to happen.
"Yours is dry," Wilson says, "and we're out of gauze. Gimme a hand."
"Wrap it around and hold onto the end and you'll be okay for now. We can do a real-doctor job after we've figured out how close we are to Ragnarök-on-the-Plains."
"Hnh?" Wilson's got a twist of blue t-shirt between his teeth; his jaw muscles are tensed and he can't answer properly.
"The radio," House says. "Where's the radio?"
By way of answer Wilson uses one booted toe to push a saddlebag in House's direction. "Insde pock't," he mumbles around the cloth.
"Fine," House grouses. "I have to do everything, as usual."
Wilson mumbles something else, unintelligible this time, but he's smiling, whatever it is.
The radio isn't in an inside pocket, House notes with great satisfaction, but it is nestled in a black carrying-case, tucked in between two rolls of clean socks.
"First things first," House says, thumbing the little radio on. "Let's see if the Dodgers are playing a day game at Ebbets Field."
"It's a transistor, House, not a time machine," Wilson says, finally finished wrapping up his hand so that it looks like an amorphous blue paw. "How about a weather report?"
"We're in Kansas in mid-summer and the sky is green. We already know the weather report. What we need to know is what direction these supercells are moving." House dials the volume on the radio higher, the better to hear it over the barrage of rain on the old tin roof. "And we need to find a light source, and see if this place has a basement. Hold onto that first-aid kit -- we might run into more rabid nails."
"Or I might hurt you," Wilson mutters, but the kit disappears into his jacket.
The radio is stubbornly silent, all across the band.
"When's the last time you checked the batteries in this thing?"
"Put new ones in two days ago. It helps if you hit the 'on' button."
"Hit it yourself." House tosses the radio underhand; it thunks against Wilson's chest, smearing the dirty raindrops on the leather. What follows is a good minute of scowling, fumbling, shaking, and tweaking, all to no avail.
"That's ... weird." Finally Wilson gives up and forces House to wait another two minutes as he tucks the useless radio back into the bag. His face squinches up into a horrible expression, and House has the deeply wonderful knowledge that Wilson's fingers have encountered that splat-ball entity, the toy Wilson himself bought in Loma Linda, bringing the curse upon his own head. The thing is blue, sparkly, and, out of its blister-pack, has the exact feel of a giant, cold, gelatinous booger -- something House takes an unholy delight in and which Wilson hates, so of course House whaps! the ball at Wilson every chance he gets. Wilson takes his hand out of the bag, still looking like he wants to wipe it on something, but all he says is, "Come on. Let's find that basement."
The house is a rambling old thing, with sections built on over time by carpenters of increasingly lesser skills. The main entryway narrows to a hallway that goes straight through to the back of the house and hangs a right to open out in the kitchen. There are painted-over windows and odd-sized doors in unexpected places.
"No vandalism," Wilson says, looking out a dusty window with wavy old glass. "No broken windows, no graffiti."
"No decaying rubbers stuck to the floor," House says. "The real sign that a place is way off the map."
The door to the basement is in one of those weird, unexpected places. Not in the triangular piece of wall beneath the stairs, back by the kitchen, but in the hallway, between a bedroom and a bath, right where you'd expect to find a linen closet.
And it is fucking cold in that hallway, despite the fact that the window at the far end would've been letting sunshine in all day, and the quickly-weakening beam of Wilson's "travel-size" LED flashlight doesn't make it far down the basement stairs. They can see enough to know the steps are narrow, they are steep, and there's a wall on the left. Only the left. Nothing on the right, not a rail, nothing but blackness. "Stairway to Hades," says House, but Wilson doesn't smile at the joke. Wilson doesn't even seem to be breathing; he's hunched over like he thinks something might jump out of the trees at him, if there were trees, and House's shoulders tighten in sympathetic tension.
The flashlight gives out completely, Wilson's apparent trance breaks, and they stand blinking at each other in the deep shadow of the hall. They can hear rain, see lightning flashes through the moth-eaten curtains on the windows, the usual noise and lightshow of a thunderstorm, but nothing more ominous yet. A half-dozen yokels-on-television are yammering away in House's head about it soundin' like a big ol' freight train when it comes, and House hopes that's true.
"Maybe," Wilson offers, and why does his voice sound so different in the dark? "Maybe they left a candle around here somewhere."
"Maybe they did," House says, and takes a step back, away from that cellar doorway. The tightness in his shoulders eases almost immediately, but he's still cold. "Let's look around. Call out if you see a Tin Man or a Scarecrow on the horizon." He's turning, ready to gimp back down the hallway, when Wilson touches his arm.
"We should stick together," Wilson says, and House opens his mouth, ready to snap something back about Cowardly Lions afraid of the dark, when that strange, stressed expression on Wilson's face stops him. They stand there for a minute as the thunder rumbles and growls outside, and then House nods.
"Okay," he says. "Lead on."
They've found four ladderback chairs, seat cushions covered in a dust-choked sateen cloth the color of toadstools, more rolls of that hideous paisley runner, and a twin-size mattress on the floor in the room with the discarded baby doll. A stack of crumbling newspapers dated August 1973. A bucket in the kitchen beneath the sink, threatening to rust through, but it hasn't yet, which is good, because the ugly truth is they're likely to be here a while and there is no way the plumbing works.
"Upstairs," Wilson says. "There might be a candle, or a lantern, or ... something."
Upstairs, naturally. On his leg, which is aching more with each round of lightning strikes. "If all we find is another dead flashlight, I'll beat you over the head with it."
Wilson turns around, looking him over for a moment, before silently going to the saddlebags and rummaging around. He returns with House's canteen and one of his own oxycodone pills, the ones he'd been prescribed just before he got scarlet fever. House could hug him.
"I'll go," Wilson says. "Faster that way. We might have to hit the basement any time."
And it's just at that moment that the basement door slams shut. House damn near drops his pill, then quickly washes it down into the safety of his stomach. "Like I'd let you have all the fun," he says, and he follows Wilson to the stairs leading up. His leg will just have to cope. At least there's a banister and a wall.
Upstairs is like downstairs, only more so. Sickly greenish-yellow light seeps in through permanently unshuttered windows, so that the rooms littered with old furniture and stray bits of paper are filled with an unearthly glow.
These people left in a hurry, House thinks. They didn't bother taking all their things, or selling them, or giving them away, maybe because by then there were no takers left in this godforsaken land.
The master bathroom cabinet is full of old glass prescription bottles, their contents blurred around the edges and crumbling with age. Digitalis, Valium, something called Bellergal whose active components House can't make out in the deepening shadows. When lightning flashes outside, he thinks he sees scopolamine listed on the label, but then it, and the face of the girl he just saw in the medicine cabinet mirror, disappear in the darkness.
Wait a minute. Girl?
House blinks, and looks again. No, a shadow. Had to have been Wilson. "Wilson!"
"You find a candle?"
"No. Valium and a few pairs of bell-bottoms. If I had to wear that shit, I'd tranq myself, too. You were in here. Why didn't you look?"
"I was down the hall. They ... left their clothes?"
"Some. Closet's also got a suitcase, rod and reel, and a wedding dress. Don't get any ideas; definitely not your size. Oh, and I call dibs on the recliner, unless something's living in the cushions, in which case it's all yours. You're sure you weren't in here?"
"I'd have remembered those curtains."
"Stand in the doorway."
"Why?"
"Just do it. I'm testing a theory." He goes back to the medicine cabinet, opens it, angles the mirror in every possible way. Nothing.
"What theory?"
"The theory that I'm having an interesting reaction to your oxycodone. Does this joint have an attic?"
Wilson steps aside silently. House gives the medicine cabinet mirror a few more swings, opening and closing, but it remains obstinately clear. No girl. No Wilson. No shadow of Wilson. On the other hand ... no Kutner or Amber, so that's good.
"Fine," House mutters, and slaps the cabinet door shut.
The attic is sticky, and dusty, and hot, and its low ceiling follows the pitch of the roof, so they can only stand upright in the center of the room. The whirly-bird turbines on the roof are silent, broken and rusted to a standstill, so the air sits motionless, holding in the summer heat. There's about as much up here as on the other two floors -- a couple of folding chairs, a card table, the skeleton frame of an old bicycle. Perched on the card table are a pair of ornate bird cages, their wrought-iron bars rising to a curved dome, but when House looks closely, the cage floors are covered with a layer of fine grey ash.
On opposite walls there are shelves full of knickknacks -- House investigates one while Wilson rifles through the other.
House's shelf holds a row of cheap paperbacks, spines broken, the edges and corners of the pages soft and fuzzed and dogeared. Next to the books, a pink china pig grins up at him, its curly tail pressed tight against its plump body. A slot in its back betrays its purpose, and House picks it up and gives it a shake. Something rattles inside and he turns it over.
The cork plug disintegrates between his fingers; he swipes his palm on his jeans, holds his hand out and turns the pig right side up.
His reward is a few wheat pennies and another, smaller coin, which, when he holds it up in the dim light, reveals itself to be a worn Mercury dime.
House sets the pig back on the shelf and pockets the loose change.
"Always a class act, House," says Wilson. The rain's eased off so he's not shouting. "Raid the piggy bank while ignoring the candles right beside it." Wilson reaches into his pocket and produces a lighter. As in, cigarette lighter. It's one of those cheap plastic things, the kind they put beside the register at small-town drugstores next to the Juicy Fruit gum and the Know Your Star Sign! booklets.
"You've had that this whole time?" House demands.
"What if I have?" Wilson says. "It's not like I could keep my thumb on this thing forever."
House wants to say there are other places Wilson might keep his thumb, but the main thing is that oncologists have no business carrying lighters around. "You don't smoke. I'd smell it on you."
"No, but you never know when you might need to destroy a little evidence. Candles, House. Grab one and let's get down from here before there's no 'here' anymore."
"Ain't heard no freight train comin' yet," House drawls. He's plucking books from the shelf beneath the candles and the pig. Yellowed volumes, their covers full of beautiful women being ravished by even prettier men who've forgotten to put their shirts on. Flower petals and long hair are swirling around in some kind of pastel-colored wind-tunnel. Hastily he shoves Heiress to Scandal and Passion's Sweet Captive inside his jacket, and feels a tiny rifle-barrel jabbing his finger as the books cram in on top of one of the toy soldiers he's been carrying around since Barstow.
"Deal with it, private," he mutters, but he uses the other pocket for the pair of homemade candles. He knows they're homemade because his mom was into that for a while. The crafty crafter in this house used two jelly jars and a souvenir glass from Wall Drug. He and Wilson have been there.
"House." Wilson has frozen in mid-flick of his Bic. "Shit. Grab one more trashy book and let's go!"
"No need to -- " freak out, House starts to say, but then he sees the thing Wilson's seeing, out the window. It's far away, but the sky is bright behind it and he knows that shape.
"Fuck," he says, and he's down the hall with Wilson right behind him. In the room they just left, he hears something shatter, like glass, but no way in hell is he going back to look.
Probably the damn pig hitting the floor.
Wilson's cheap little Bic is just enough light to help them get down the basement stairs unharmed. Safely underground, they light their two candles and brace themselves for whatever fresh horrors lie in wait down here.
There's nothing to brace for. The basement is ... a basement, a vaguely rectangular space following what must have been the original footprint of the house before the crazy builders -- House hesitates to call them architects -- started tacking on extra rooms. An alcove near the stairs marks the spot of a former coal chute or cold cellar.
It's dry, cool, and weirdly clean, even if the linoleum is curling up along the walls. There are file cabinets, the old metal kind. Some stacks of papers. High up on one wall there's a homemade wooden shelf with a few tools, a couple of old Tonka trucks, a hurricane lamp and a half-empty bottle of fuel oil with its cap rusted shut. It's as normal as the attic was bizarre. And then, in the corner near the ancient washer and dryer, they find the two big beanbag chairs, same era as the closet full of bell-bottoms, upstairs.
House is so relieved, he could cry. Either that or it's the leg pain. He and Wilson look at the chairs, at each other, and back toward the stairs, and he can see they've come to the same conclusion. That little alcove, enclosed on three sides, will be the safest spot, if they can ignore the ghosts of the cankered potatoes and pale turnips stored there over the years. With only two hands between them, they have to set their candles down so they can drag the beanbags over. House props them against the back wall and sinks gratefully into a cushioned seat, leaving Wilson to fetch their candles and the old lantern.
He wrenches open the oil jug, fills the old lantern, and manages to light the brittle wick from one of their candles. "Next patient," he says. Wilson's busy staring off into space, the way he does when he's thinking about whatever dumb thing he has blessedly decided not to share. "Come on, you're wasting billable hours."
Wilson snorts at him, but comes over and takes a seat. "I was hoping for a better doctor," he says, "but this clinic can't even pay its electric bill." He gives his hand over to House without protest.
To House's surprise, the wound -- a deep slice about an inch long, on the heel of Wilson's palm -- is still oozing a steady creep of blood. There's no swelling or redness, and Wilson doesn't have a fever or elevated heart rate or any other of the ominous symptoms of septicemia. Not that he would, this soon after the injury, but recent history has proven that disease progression in Wilson is not subject to the usual rules. He cleans it carefully, using extra alcohol and ignoring Wilson's muffled gasps, and when he's done he wraps it in another strip of blue cotton.
"You owe me a new t-shirt," he growls.
They've arranged themselves on the big old beanbag chairs in much the same way they've been doing on any ordinary night, in one bed or the other at their various hotels. The chairs are so old that their thick, pebbly vinyl has stiffened and doesn't even smell like vinyl anymore, but so far there have been no ruptures.
"Come on," House demands, looping his arm through Wilson's and pulling him, and his beanbag, closer. "Need the support on this side or my bag flattens out."
"Sounds like a personal problem," Wilson says, because this is what they do now: Move ever further into each other's space while giving each other crap about it.
Their jostling and nudging stops only because they're beginning to hear it. The big It, and damn if it doesn't sound just like a train.
They wedge themselves more tightly together, cursing as the ground starts to rumble. The noise grows, shaking the old house to its foundation, and rattles the tool shelf until it seems the bolts holding it to the wall will pop loose like hot rivets. They huddle, heads down and their arms around each other as the thing closes in, its roar drowning out all other sounds except the whistle, a high-pitched scream that seems to go on forever until finally it begins to fade. House can feel it, the whistle, in his bones, even after it's gone.
The thing leaves a dead silence in its wake. He and Wilson just sit there a while, probably because small talk would be stupid. They already know what happened and that they didn't die. The remaining questions can't be answered until they can safely go back up the stairs, and since the first tornado is often not the last, they're not in any hurry.
"Probably wasn't even the one we saw," House says. "We were down here, what? Twenty minutes, before it hit? That's a long time for one to stay on the ground." House stretches his leg out and kneads the knots in the thigh. "News tomorrow ought to be interesting."
"Yeah." Wilson, rather than edging away now that the immediate threat is past, has stayed put with his arm around House's back, his bandaged hand on House's shoulder. "I hope no one got hurt."
"You try to go out there and find someone to save, and I'll kick your ass."
Wilson laughs, for the first time since they got here. "I'll settle for saving ourselves this time." He's still doing that weird thing, though. Looking around like he's waiting for ... the cops to bust in and arrest them for trespassing, or something. "I've never been through anything, uh, quite like this."
"Pulling all-nighters, surviving on junk food? Thought you went to med school."
And that seems to do the trick, getting Wilson's attention onto House instead of onto their current situation and whatever is making him so twitchy. They tell each other college stories -- the hardest course, the best pranks, which city has the best bars, Baltimore or Montreal? -- until both run out of things to tell and are making shit up to see what the other will believe.
It's at that point that Wilson gets up and grabs the lantern. "Where are you going?" House says.
"Want to make sure we still have bikes. And I don't know about you, but I'm starved, and all our junk food's in our bags, up there. Provided half the house didn't just get nuked."
And of course, now that Wilson's said it, House's stomach growls.
"Okay," he says. "It's your turn to tip the pizza guy anyway."
It's dark upstairs, darker than it was before. Rain is still coming down, and Wilson can see flashes of lightning in the distance. He ventures into the living room, where he can look out the dirt-filmed picture window, but it's impossible to see any details outside, and anyway the lantern just casts his own reflection in the glass.
He sure doesn't look like he used to.
Something's tickling his wrist -- damned place is probably crawling with bugs -- and he swipes at it with his free hand. His fingers come up blood-smeared, and he holds up his injured hand to see a thread of blood trickling down his forearm from the sodden blue bandage.
The cut must have been deeper than he thought. It doesn't hurt much, especially not for the amount of blood coming from it.
The droplets don't make a sound as they fall on the dry planks under his feet. Trail of breadcrumbs, Wilson thinks, and he looks around, but there's no telltale drips behind him, nothing to indicate he's even here. He bends down and holds the lantern close -- another droplet falls, a gust of wind lashes rain against a window, and for a split-second he doesn't need the lantern as a bolt of lightning illuminates the room in a brilliant white flash.
One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, and the droplet's gone, seeped into the wood, right through the layer of varnish as the thunder rolls. Every hair on Wilson's neck is standing straight up.
You're feeding the house, an entirely-too-calm voice inside his head observes, and Wilson shoves that voice away, fast, because that voice has no business being here, saying crazy shit like that. It was a trick of the light, nothing else.
He needs to pick up the bags, that's it. But first ...
There's a wad of clean paper napkins in his jeans pocket from the last time they stopped to eat at a roadside diner. Wilson sets the lantern down on the floor and stuffs them under the makeshift bandage. It'll do until he can get back to House.
He goes back to the entryway and manages, after a fashion, to sling the tail bag with their snacks and water in it over one shoulder.
"Wilson!"
Wilson blows out a soft breath as he stands up and adjusts the bag's strap.
"Hey! Wilson!"
"Damn it, House," Wilson mumbles, and then, louder, "I'm coming! Just a minute!"
"Willlssonnn," House sings out, and oh, Wilson knows that taunting tone only too well. Bastard.
"House, I -- " Wilson begins, then stops.
The voice isn't coming from downstairs.
Wilson swears again. How the hell did House get past him and upstairs without Wilson seeing?
"Wilson," the voice says, softly this time, and Wilson wheels around, holding the lantern so it lights the stairs leading up.
There's no one there.
Well, of course there's no one there, Wilson thinks. There's no one there at all.
"Oh, Wilson," the voice croons, and this time it's definitely coming from upstairs.
Wilson hoists the lantern higher, and makes himself look away from the light, into the corners, into the shadows, the right angles where the wall meets the weathered, scuffed floorboards. A hidden passage, that has to be it. Something behind a bookcase, activated by a sconce, and isn't that a funny word, sconce? Nobody ever uses --
"Wilson," the voice says, and there's a hitch at the end, Wilson can hear it, like someone stifling ... a laugh.
"House?" Wilson's feet move by instinct, closer to the steps. The voice is silent. "House? Damn it, House, this isn't funny!"
"Wilson," and now the voice has a pleading tone, and "help me," the voice says, or at least that's what Wilson thinks it says, because the voice is weakening.
Son of a bitch. Whatever shit House is pulling, there's a chance he hurt himself in the process; he is House, after all. Wilson starts up the stairs. If he gets up there and House is okay?
Wilson is going to fucking kill him.
In the basement, House is listening to music.
Not on his iPod, not on one of their phones. There's music coming from somewhere, though, faint but clear, and it sounds awfully like a swing band, one of the groups that criss-crossed the country in the 1930s and '40s. It sounds like they're playing "String of Pearls," or maybe it's "Moonlight Serenade" -- House always did get the two mixed up.
Great, House thinks. Someone must be in a car outside, out here to check on the place now that the worst of the storm has passed. Radio on, an NPR station doing a "Greatest Generation" pledge drive, car windows down, and just wait, there'll be footsteps on the porch any second now. He gets up and moves to the tiny half-windows that face the driveway, ready to see a set of headlights and a shadowy, shotgun-toting figure, but what he can actually see is: nothing. Blackness and more blackness, and when he holds his candle to the filthy glass, he can make out only dirt and the vague shapes of dead weeds.
If there's a car, and a visitor, he won't know until it's too late. Maybe it's Wilson; maybe Wilson finally got the damn radio to work, and left it at the top of the stairs just to mess with House's mind. An "A" for his creativity, if so, but then there's the other question.
Where the hell is Wilson?
The voice gets louder, then softer, then loud again, but Wilson can't make out any of the words beyond the occasional hissed "Wilson!" as he climbs, past the second floor, higher --
He knocks on the frame of the attic door. "Hello?" he tries. And "hello?" again. "I'm coming in! House, this had better be good!"
The first thing he sees in the attic is the shattered china pig, pink and white shards of porcelain scattered on the floor. Beside the broken pieces, children's spelling blocks in a jumble, except they're not a jumble, not really ...
The faded gray R on the rhinoceros block is facing upwards, as is the blue U topped with an umbrella. "House, did you ... " Wilson starts to ask, and a slight movement he catches at the edge of his vision stops him.
The N block with the crescent moon and the stars -- Night? -- has flipped to the letter side. The blocks now spell out RUN.
No, Wilson thinks. No. He takes a step back, all the way back thirty years in half a second. He tears his eyes away from the blocks; the corners of the attic room are dark and the lantern flame casts a feeble light. Whoever's here, it isn't House.
And that's when someone touches him on the shoulder.
************
To be continued ...
Author: nightdog_barks, third_owl, and pwcorgigirl
Characters: House, Wilson
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: No
Spoilers: Yes, for the Season 8 series finale arc.
Summary: Halloween comes early for House and Wilson when they seek shelter from a storm. This part is 5,666 words.
Disclaimer: Don't own 'em. Never will.
Author Notes: This is set in the Riververse -- a ficverse set after the end of Season 8 and in which House and Wilson's road trip has continued longer than either of them would've ever thought. This fic takes place a month or so after the events of Will It Go Round in Circles. The cut-text is from Ray Bradbury's short story Homecoming. The second half of the story will be posted tomorrow night.
Beta: Our intrepid First Readers, with especial thanks to srsly_yes and joe_pike_junior.
American Gothic
It's about to start raining. It's about to start raining, and the promise of the relief it will bring from the hundred-degree heat would make House happy under other circumstances, such as if he weren't on a motorcycle. The soft grey mists of San Francisco are a distant memory -- riding in the rain is like being shot to death by a bug-sized army of pellet-gun commandos. Who shoot ice pellets. No matter that you were nearing heatstroke a few minutes ago; windchill conquers all.
Wilson has also learned this, and when House gives him the nod, he nods back. They are now on the lookout for shelter.
They'll have to look for a while out here in the dust bowl. No overpasses. No hotels. No gas stations, no restaurants, not even a tree for Toto to pee on in this part of Kansas. Or are they in Nebraska? House doesn't know; he doesn't remember seeing a state-border sign and under the circumstances he supposes it doesn't matter. A few rusted-out tractor husks suggest that this land was farmed, once. They'll either luck out, and find someone's old barn or something, or they won't. If it gets bad enough, and it might, he'd even settle for an ancient outhouse.
What House actually hopes for isn't the barn itself, much less a one-holer, but a nice big root cellar dug deep in the ground. Wilson may not have noticed yet, but the sky behind them is faintly green, the clouds roiling and muttering with thunder.
Right on cue, Wilson looks at him again, glances at the sky, and opens up the throttle. They can't outrun the storm, but they can damn sure speed up the hunt for safety.
The line of trees catches their attention from a long way off. Dark grey-green in the endless sea of grass, another relic of the days when this was farmland, before the money or the water or both dried up.
The windbreak forms a screen of tall weeds, leaves, and trunks. With all that, and the dust flying ahead of the storm's downdraft, they don't see the house until they've overshot it and have to turn back. A gravel driveway, the pebbles scattered so that the path is mostly raw dirt now, leads up to a patch of bare ground sheltered by the tattered shell of a garage. It's missing most of its shingles and part of the back wall, but it'll provide some cover for the bikes. As for the house ...
Perfect, House thinks. Everything's still standing -- two floors, an attic; there's got to be a basement. And he knows at a glance that nobody's home. Nobody's been home for a long, long time.
They've gotten in with no problem at all, if you don't count Wilson bleeding all over everything as a problem, which House does not.
He'd insisted on standing at the door with hat (helmet) in hand like a suitor come to call. Knocking, and shouting hello.
"It's abandoned, you idiot," House said.
"Yes, but we're stopping here. If someone else already has, I'd like to know that now."
"Because the engine's still warm on that Buick." The Buick in question was sinking in a sea of grass, its windshield smashed out and its dash sprouting wheat. House guesses the last time the car's radio was on was to catch Truman announcing a police action in Korea. "I say the non-crippled guy gets to climb through the window."
"I'm not breaking a window," said Wilson. He'd have been doing the full hands-on-hips thing, but his helmet was in one hand and his phone in the other, and he was scowling at that more than at House.
"Bad news?"
"No news. No signal. Did I mention I'm not breaking a window?"
"Seriously? The flying monkeys are about to carry us to Oz, and you're fretting about property damage?"
"No, bodily damage. Is that one cracked open?"
"You fail as a criminal," House announced. "How do you ever expect to land on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list this way?"
Wilson didn't answer; he had set the helmet down and was jacking around with the window when the rain started to blow in sideways across the long prairie porch. "A little help here?"
House lifted his cane, thought first about breaking the window, second about Wilson's head, and finally opted for helping him shimmy the window from side to side to unstick the sash and wrestle it up as far as it would go before it stuck again, this time for good. Wilson sighed and started to wriggle through, but no sooner was he halfway into the living room than he jerked and hissed in pain.
"Nail," he grunted. "Poking out somewhere. Dammit." There were drops of blood on the sill, seeping through the dry-cracked white paint to the raw wood beneath. He squirmed the rest of the way through awkwardly, holding his right hand away from his body and out of the reach of any more lurking hazards. House looked at the red-splotched sill and thought of Rorschach blots while he waited for Wilson to open the front door, and as he crossed the threshold he'd looked back at the listing wood stairs up to the porch.
They were already slick with rain.
The house looks sturdy enough on the inside, unlike the porch steps. Wilson's hand is still bleeding; must've been a pretty sharp nail. House isn't too concerned, though; he knows Wilson's tetanus booster is up to date.
Wilson puts his helmet on the dusty mantel in the front room and cradles one bloodied hand with the other. He's dripped a spoor of red drops in an uneven trail, from the front porch where they shimmied open the window to the front room where they're standing now. Drips everywhere except the entryway where he let House in, and that's only because of the entryway rug, a long, skinny affair in a hideous, faded maroon paisley that House is certain he last saw in Schuykill Haven, P.A., in his Great-Aunt Myrna's creaky old Victorian.
"I have to go get the saddlebags, don't I?" The weary way Wilson says it, you'd think he was Sisyphus, back at the bottom of the hill.
"Only if you want the first-aid kit," House replies. Wilson can be a metaphor for futility on his own damn time. As if reading House's mind, Wilson sighs and heads back out.
"House, c'mere," Wilson says. He's dropped the saddlebags to the floor, he's dripping with rain and blood, and he's fishing things out of their tiny first-aid kit. He stands as House approaches, reaching for the stricken right hand.
Next thing House knows, Wilson's using their scalpel ("Don't leave home without it," House had said) to slice a long strip off the hem of House's t-shirt. House stands there stunned for a moment; this was not at all what he thought was about to happen.
"Yours is dry," Wilson says, "and we're out of gauze. Gimme a hand."
"Wrap it around and hold onto the end and you'll be okay for now. We can do a real-doctor job after we've figured out how close we are to Ragnarök-on-the-Plains."
"Hnh?" Wilson's got a twist of blue t-shirt between his teeth; his jaw muscles are tensed and he can't answer properly.
"The radio," House says. "Where's the radio?"
By way of answer Wilson uses one booted toe to push a saddlebag in House's direction. "Insde pock't," he mumbles around the cloth.
"Fine," House grouses. "I have to do everything, as usual."
Wilson mumbles something else, unintelligible this time, but he's smiling, whatever it is.
The radio isn't in an inside pocket, House notes with great satisfaction, but it is nestled in a black carrying-case, tucked in between two rolls of clean socks.
"First things first," House says, thumbing the little radio on. "Let's see if the Dodgers are playing a day game at Ebbets Field."
"It's a transistor, House, not a time machine," Wilson says, finally finished wrapping up his hand so that it looks like an amorphous blue paw. "How about a weather report?"
"We're in Kansas in mid-summer and the sky is green. We already know the weather report. What we need to know is what direction these supercells are moving." House dials the volume on the radio higher, the better to hear it over the barrage of rain on the old tin roof. "And we need to find a light source, and see if this place has a basement. Hold onto that first-aid kit -- we might run into more rabid nails."
"Or I might hurt you," Wilson mutters, but the kit disappears into his jacket.
The radio is stubbornly silent, all across the band.
"When's the last time you checked the batteries in this thing?"
"Put new ones in two days ago. It helps if you hit the 'on' button."
"Hit it yourself." House tosses the radio underhand; it thunks against Wilson's chest, smearing the dirty raindrops on the leather. What follows is a good minute of scowling, fumbling, shaking, and tweaking, all to no avail.
"That's ... weird." Finally Wilson gives up and forces House to wait another two minutes as he tucks the useless radio back into the bag. His face squinches up into a horrible expression, and House has the deeply wonderful knowledge that Wilson's fingers have encountered that splat-ball entity, the toy Wilson himself bought in Loma Linda, bringing the curse upon his own head. The thing is blue, sparkly, and, out of its blister-pack, has the exact feel of a giant, cold, gelatinous booger -- something House takes an unholy delight in and which Wilson hates, so of course House whaps! the ball at Wilson every chance he gets. Wilson takes his hand out of the bag, still looking like he wants to wipe it on something, but all he says is, "Come on. Let's find that basement."
The house is a rambling old thing, with sections built on over time by carpenters of increasingly lesser skills. The main entryway narrows to a hallway that goes straight through to the back of the house and hangs a right to open out in the kitchen. There are painted-over windows and odd-sized doors in unexpected places.
"No vandalism," Wilson says, looking out a dusty window with wavy old glass. "No broken windows, no graffiti."
"No decaying rubbers stuck to the floor," House says. "The real sign that a place is way off the map."
The door to the basement is in one of those weird, unexpected places. Not in the triangular piece of wall beneath the stairs, back by the kitchen, but in the hallway, between a bedroom and a bath, right where you'd expect to find a linen closet.
And it is fucking cold in that hallway, despite the fact that the window at the far end would've been letting sunshine in all day, and the quickly-weakening beam of Wilson's "travel-size" LED flashlight doesn't make it far down the basement stairs. They can see enough to know the steps are narrow, they are steep, and there's a wall on the left. Only the left. Nothing on the right, not a rail, nothing but blackness. "Stairway to Hades," says House, but Wilson doesn't smile at the joke. Wilson doesn't even seem to be breathing; he's hunched over like he thinks something might jump out of the trees at him, if there were trees, and House's shoulders tighten in sympathetic tension.
The flashlight gives out completely, Wilson's apparent trance breaks, and they stand blinking at each other in the deep shadow of the hall. They can hear rain, see lightning flashes through the moth-eaten curtains on the windows, the usual noise and lightshow of a thunderstorm, but nothing more ominous yet. A half-dozen yokels-on-television are yammering away in House's head about it soundin' like a big ol' freight train when it comes, and House hopes that's true.
"Maybe," Wilson offers, and why does his voice sound so different in the dark? "Maybe they left a candle around here somewhere."
"Maybe they did," House says, and takes a step back, away from that cellar doorway. The tightness in his shoulders eases almost immediately, but he's still cold. "Let's look around. Call out if you see a Tin Man or a Scarecrow on the horizon." He's turning, ready to gimp back down the hallway, when Wilson touches his arm.
"We should stick together," Wilson says, and House opens his mouth, ready to snap something back about Cowardly Lions afraid of the dark, when that strange, stressed expression on Wilson's face stops him. They stand there for a minute as the thunder rumbles and growls outside, and then House nods.
"Okay," he says. "Lead on."
They've found four ladderback chairs, seat cushions covered in a dust-choked sateen cloth the color of toadstools, more rolls of that hideous paisley runner, and a twin-size mattress on the floor in the room with the discarded baby doll. A stack of crumbling newspapers dated August 1973. A bucket in the kitchen beneath the sink, threatening to rust through, but it hasn't yet, which is good, because the ugly truth is they're likely to be here a while and there is no way the plumbing works.
"Upstairs," Wilson says. "There might be a candle, or a lantern, or ... something."
Upstairs, naturally. On his leg, which is aching more with each round of lightning strikes. "If all we find is another dead flashlight, I'll beat you over the head with it."
Wilson turns around, looking him over for a moment, before silently going to the saddlebags and rummaging around. He returns with House's canteen and one of his own oxycodone pills, the ones he'd been prescribed just before he got scarlet fever. House could hug him.
"I'll go," Wilson says. "Faster that way. We might have to hit the basement any time."
And it's just at that moment that the basement door slams shut. House damn near drops his pill, then quickly washes it down into the safety of his stomach. "Like I'd let you have all the fun," he says, and he follows Wilson to the stairs leading up. His leg will just have to cope. At least there's a banister and a wall.
Upstairs is like downstairs, only more so. Sickly greenish-yellow light seeps in through permanently unshuttered windows, so that the rooms littered with old furniture and stray bits of paper are filled with an unearthly glow.
These people left in a hurry, House thinks. They didn't bother taking all their things, or selling them, or giving them away, maybe because by then there were no takers left in this godforsaken land.
The master bathroom cabinet is full of old glass prescription bottles, their contents blurred around the edges and crumbling with age. Digitalis, Valium, something called Bellergal whose active components House can't make out in the deepening shadows. When lightning flashes outside, he thinks he sees scopolamine listed on the label, but then it, and the face of the girl he just saw in the medicine cabinet mirror, disappear in the darkness.
Wait a minute. Girl?
House blinks, and looks again. No, a shadow. Had to have been Wilson. "Wilson!"
"You find a candle?"
"No. Valium and a few pairs of bell-bottoms. If I had to wear that shit, I'd tranq myself, too. You were in here. Why didn't you look?"
"I was down the hall. They ... left their clothes?"
"Some. Closet's also got a suitcase, rod and reel, and a wedding dress. Don't get any ideas; definitely not your size. Oh, and I call dibs on the recliner, unless something's living in the cushions, in which case it's all yours. You're sure you weren't in here?"
"I'd have remembered those curtains."
"Stand in the doorway."
"Why?"
"Just do it. I'm testing a theory." He goes back to the medicine cabinet, opens it, angles the mirror in every possible way. Nothing.
"What theory?"
"The theory that I'm having an interesting reaction to your oxycodone. Does this joint have an attic?"
Wilson steps aside silently. House gives the medicine cabinet mirror a few more swings, opening and closing, but it remains obstinately clear. No girl. No Wilson. No shadow of Wilson. On the other hand ... no Kutner or Amber, so that's good.
"Fine," House mutters, and slaps the cabinet door shut.
The attic is sticky, and dusty, and hot, and its low ceiling follows the pitch of the roof, so they can only stand upright in the center of the room. The whirly-bird turbines on the roof are silent, broken and rusted to a standstill, so the air sits motionless, holding in the summer heat. There's about as much up here as on the other two floors -- a couple of folding chairs, a card table, the skeleton frame of an old bicycle. Perched on the card table are a pair of ornate bird cages, their wrought-iron bars rising to a curved dome, but when House looks closely, the cage floors are covered with a layer of fine grey ash.
On opposite walls there are shelves full of knickknacks -- House investigates one while Wilson rifles through the other.
House's shelf holds a row of cheap paperbacks, spines broken, the edges and corners of the pages soft and fuzzed and dogeared. Next to the books, a pink china pig grins up at him, its curly tail pressed tight against its plump body. A slot in its back betrays its purpose, and House picks it up and gives it a shake. Something rattles inside and he turns it over.
The cork plug disintegrates between his fingers; he swipes his palm on his jeans, holds his hand out and turns the pig right side up.
His reward is a few wheat pennies and another, smaller coin, which, when he holds it up in the dim light, reveals itself to be a worn Mercury dime.
House sets the pig back on the shelf and pockets the loose change.
"Always a class act, House," says Wilson. The rain's eased off so he's not shouting. "Raid the piggy bank while ignoring the candles right beside it." Wilson reaches into his pocket and produces a lighter. As in, cigarette lighter. It's one of those cheap plastic things, the kind they put beside the register at small-town drugstores next to the Juicy Fruit gum and the Know Your Star Sign! booklets.
"You've had that this whole time?" House demands.
"What if I have?" Wilson says. "It's not like I could keep my thumb on this thing forever."
House wants to say there are other places Wilson might keep his thumb, but the main thing is that oncologists have no business carrying lighters around. "You don't smoke. I'd smell it on you."
"No, but you never know when you might need to destroy a little evidence. Candles, House. Grab one and let's get down from here before there's no 'here' anymore."
"Ain't heard no freight train comin' yet," House drawls. He's plucking books from the shelf beneath the candles and the pig. Yellowed volumes, their covers full of beautiful women being ravished by even prettier men who've forgotten to put their shirts on. Flower petals and long hair are swirling around in some kind of pastel-colored wind-tunnel. Hastily he shoves Heiress to Scandal and Passion's Sweet Captive inside his jacket, and feels a tiny rifle-barrel jabbing his finger as the books cram in on top of one of the toy soldiers he's been carrying around since Barstow.
"Deal with it, private," he mutters, but he uses the other pocket for the pair of homemade candles. He knows they're homemade because his mom was into that for a while. The crafty crafter in this house used two jelly jars and a souvenir glass from Wall Drug. He and Wilson have been there.
"House." Wilson has frozen in mid-flick of his Bic. "Shit. Grab one more trashy book and let's go!"
"No need to -- " freak out, House starts to say, but then he sees the thing Wilson's seeing, out the window. It's far away, but the sky is bright behind it and he knows that shape.
"Fuck," he says, and he's down the hall with Wilson right behind him. In the room they just left, he hears something shatter, like glass, but no way in hell is he going back to look.
Probably the damn pig hitting the floor.
Wilson's cheap little Bic is just enough light to help them get down the basement stairs unharmed. Safely underground, they light their two candles and brace themselves for whatever fresh horrors lie in wait down here.
There's nothing to brace for. The basement is ... a basement, a vaguely rectangular space following what must have been the original footprint of the house before the crazy builders -- House hesitates to call them architects -- started tacking on extra rooms. An alcove near the stairs marks the spot of a former coal chute or cold cellar.
It's dry, cool, and weirdly clean, even if the linoleum is curling up along the walls. There are file cabinets, the old metal kind. Some stacks of papers. High up on one wall there's a homemade wooden shelf with a few tools, a couple of old Tonka trucks, a hurricane lamp and a half-empty bottle of fuel oil with its cap rusted shut. It's as normal as the attic was bizarre. And then, in the corner near the ancient washer and dryer, they find the two big beanbag chairs, same era as the closet full of bell-bottoms, upstairs.
House is so relieved, he could cry. Either that or it's the leg pain. He and Wilson look at the chairs, at each other, and back toward the stairs, and he can see they've come to the same conclusion. That little alcove, enclosed on three sides, will be the safest spot, if they can ignore the ghosts of the cankered potatoes and pale turnips stored there over the years. With only two hands between them, they have to set their candles down so they can drag the beanbags over. House props them against the back wall and sinks gratefully into a cushioned seat, leaving Wilson to fetch their candles and the old lantern.
He wrenches open the oil jug, fills the old lantern, and manages to light the brittle wick from one of their candles. "Next patient," he says. Wilson's busy staring off into space, the way he does when he's thinking about whatever dumb thing he has blessedly decided not to share. "Come on, you're wasting billable hours."
Wilson snorts at him, but comes over and takes a seat. "I was hoping for a better doctor," he says, "but this clinic can't even pay its electric bill." He gives his hand over to House without protest.
To House's surprise, the wound -- a deep slice about an inch long, on the heel of Wilson's palm -- is still oozing a steady creep of blood. There's no swelling or redness, and Wilson doesn't have a fever or elevated heart rate or any other of the ominous symptoms of septicemia. Not that he would, this soon after the injury, but recent history has proven that disease progression in Wilson is not subject to the usual rules. He cleans it carefully, using extra alcohol and ignoring Wilson's muffled gasps, and when he's done he wraps it in another strip of blue cotton.
"You owe me a new t-shirt," he growls.
They've arranged themselves on the big old beanbag chairs in much the same way they've been doing on any ordinary night, in one bed or the other at their various hotels. The chairs are so old that their thick, pebbly vinyl has stiffened and doesn't even smell like vinyl anymore, but so far there have been no ruptures.
"Come on," House demands, looping his arm through Wilson's and pulling him, and his beanbag, closer. "Need the support on this side or my bag flattens out."
"Sounds like a personal problem," Wilson says, because this is what they do now: Move ever further into each other's space while giving each other crap about it.
Their jostling and nudging stops only because they're beginning to hear it. The big It, and damn if it doesn't sound just like a train.
They wedge themselves more tightly together, cursing as the ground starts to rumble. The noise grows, shaking the old house to its foundation, and rattles the tool shelf until it seems the bolts holding it to the wall will pop loose like hot rivets. They huddle, heads down and their arms around each other as the thing closes in, its roar drowning out all other sounds except the whistle, a high-pitched scream that seems to go on forever until finally it begins to fade. House can feel it, the whistle, in his bones, even after it's gone.
The thing leaves a dead silence in its wake. He and Wilson just sit there a while, probably because small talk would be stupid. They already know what happened and that they didn't die. The remaining questions can't be answered until they can safely go back up the stairs, and since the first tornado is often not the last, they're not in any hurry.
"Probably wasn't even the one we saw," House says. "We were down here, what? Twenty minutes, before it hit? That's a long time for one to stay on the ground." House stretches his leg out and kneads the knots in the thigh. "News tomorrow ought to be interesting."
"Yeah." Wilson, rather than edging away now that the immediate threat is past, has stayed put with his arm around House's back, his bandaged hand on House's shoulder. "I hope no one got hurt."
"You try to go out there and find someone to save, and I'll kick your ass."
Wilson laughs, for the first time since they got here. "I'll settle for saving ourselves this time." He's still doing that weird thing, though. Looking around like he's waiting for ... the cops to bust in and arrest them for trespassing, or something. "I've never been through anything, uh, quite like this."
"Pulling all-nighters, surviving on junk food? Thought you went to med school."
And that seems to do the trick, getting Wilson's attention onto House instead of onto their current situation and whatever is making him so twitchy. They tell each other college stories -- the hardest course, the best pranks, which city has the best bars, Baltimore or Montreal? -- until both run out of things to tell and are making shit up to see what the other will believe.
It's at that point that Wilson gets up and grabs the lantern. "Where are you going?" House says.
"Want to make sure we still have bikes. And I don't know about you, but I'm starved, and all our junk food's in our bags, up there. Provided half the house didn't just get nuked."
And of course, now that Wilson's said it, House's stomach growls.
"Okay," he says. "It's your turn to tip the pizza guy anyway."
It's dark upstairs, darker than it was before. Rain is still coming down, and Wilson can see flashes of lightning in the distance. He ventures into the living room, where he can look out the dirt-filmed picture window, but it's impossible to see any details outside, and anyway the lantern just casts his own reflection in the glass.
He sure doesn't look like he used to.
Something's tickling his wrist -- damned place is probably crawling with bugs -- and he swipes at it with his free hand. His fingers come up blood-smeared, and he holds up his injured hand to see a thread of blood trickling down his forearm from the sodden blue bandage.
The cut must have been deeper than he thought. It doesn't hurt much, especially not for the amount of blood coming from it.
The droplets don't make a sound as they fall on the dry planks under his feet. Trail of breadcrumbs, Wilson thinks, and he looks around, but there's no telltale drips behind him, nothing to indicate he's even here. He bends down and holds the lantern close -- another droplet falls, a gust of wind lashes rain against a window, and for a split-second he doesn't need the lantern as a bolt of lightning illuminates the room in a brilliant white flash.
One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, and the droplet's gone, seeped into the wood, right through the layer of varnish as the thunder rolls. Every hair on Wilson's neck is standing straight up.
You're feeding the house, an entirely-too-calm voice inside his head observes, and Wilson shoves that voice away, fast, because that voice has no business being here, saying crazy shit like that. It was a trick of the light, nothing else.
He needs to pick up the bags, that's it. But first ...
There's a wad of clean paper napkins in his jeans pocket from the last time they stopped to eat at a roadside diner. Wilson sets the lantern down on the floor and stuffs them under the makeshift bandage. It'll do until he can get back to House.
He goes back to the entryway and manages, after a fashion, to sling the tail bag with their snacks and water in it over one shoulder.
"Wilson!"
Wilson blows out a soft breath as he stands up and adjusts the bag's strap.
"Hey! Wilson!"
"Damn it, House," Wilson mumbles, and then, louder, "I'm coming! Just a minute!"
"Willlssonnn," House sings out, and oh, Wilson knows that taunting tone only too well. Bastard.
"House, I -- " Wilson begins, then stops.
The voice isn't coming from downstairs.
Wilson swears again. How the hell did House get past him and upstairs without Wilson seeing?
"Wilson," the voice says, softly this time, and Wilson wheels around, holding the lantern so it lights the stairs leading up.
There's no one there.
Well, of course there's no one there, Wilson thinks. There's no one there at all.
"Oh, Wilson," the voice croons, and this time it's definitely coming from upstairs.
Wilson hoists the lantern higher, and makes himself look away from the light, into the corners, into the shadows, the right angles where the wall meets the weathered, scuffed floorboards. A hidden passage, that has to be it. Something behind a bookcase, activated by a sconce, and isn't that a funny word, sconce? Nobody ever uses --
"Wilson," the voice says, and there's a hitch at the end, Wilson can hear it, like someone stifling ... a laugh.
"House?" Wilson's feet move by instinct, closer to the steps. The voice is silent. "House? Damn it, House, this isn't funny!"
"Wilson," and now the voice has a pleading tone, and "help me," the voice says, or at least that's what Wilson thinks it says, because the voice is weakening.
Son of a bitch. Whatever shit House is pulling, there's a chance he hurt himself in the process; he is House, after all. Wilson starts up the stairs. If he gets up there and House is okay?
Wilson is going to fucking kill him.
In the basement, House is listening to music.
Not on his iPod, not on one of their phones. There's music coming from somewhere, though, faint but clear, and it sounds awfully like a swing band, one of the groups that criss-crossed the country in the 1930s and '40s. It sounds like they're playing "String of Pearls," or maybe it's "Moonlight Serenade" -- House always did get the two mixed up.
Great, House thinks. Someone must be in a car outside, out here to check on the place now that the worst of the storm has passed. Radio on, an NPR station doing a "Greatest Generation" pledge drive, car windows down, and just wait, there'll be footsteps on the porch any second now. He gets up and moves to the tiny half-windows that face the driveway, ready to see a set of headlights and a shadowy, shotgun-toting figure, but what he can actually see is: nothing. Blackness and more blackness, and when he holds his candle to the filthy glass, he can make out only dirt and the vague shapes of dead weeds.
If there's a car, and a visitor, he won't know until it's too late. Maybe it's Wilson; maybe Wilson finally got the damn radio to work, and left it at the top of the stairs just to mess with House's mind. An "A" for his creativity, if so, but then there's the other question.
Where the hell is Wilson?
The voice gets louder, then softer, then loud again, but Wilson can't make out any of the words beyond the occasional hissed "Wilson!" as he climbs, past the second floor, higher --
He knocks on the frame of the attic door. "Hello?" he tries. And "hello?" again. "I'm coming in! House, this had better be good!"
The first thing he sees in the attic is the shattered china pig, pink and white shards of porcelain scattered on the floor. Beside the broken pieces, children's spelling blocks in a jumble, except they're not a jumble, not really ...
The faded gray R on the rhinoceros block is facing upwards, as is the blue U topped with an umbrella. "House, did you ... " Wilson starts to ask, and a slight movement he catches at the edge of his vision stops him.
The N block with the crescent moon and the stars -- Night? -- has flipped to the letter side. The blocks now spell out RUN.
No, Wilson thinks. No. He takes a step back, all the way back thirty years in half a second. He tears his eyes away from the blocks; the corners of the attic room are dark and the lantern flame casts a feeble light. Whoever's here, it isn't House.
And that's when someone touches him on the shoulder.
************
To be continued ...