The drive to the lake should be thirty minutes at best, but Grace manages to do it in a little less than twenty. She barely takes her foot off the gas the whole way, and Landis thinks that maybe there’s a joke in there somewhere, about someone who works for local law enforcement driving like a maniac, but he can’t make the mental leap to actually figure out how to phrase it. His thoughts are still stuck on Mal, on what happens next if Mal is gone forever. On how the rest of Paper Museum, crammed in the back of the car with Otter, is going to take it.
Grace parks at the bottom of the lake house’s driveway, presumably to keep Abbie from hearing the car roll up outside the house. It’s a smart move. Landis unhooks his seatbelt and pushes on the door handle, anxious to get inside and see what the damage is, but Grace puts a hand on his arm to stop him.
“We need a plan.”
“We don’t have time,” Landis says desperately. “Mal -”
“Mal can hold his own,” Grace says. “You know that. But if what that guy just told us is true, Abbie - she’s killed people before, not just ghosts. She’s probably dangerous.”
“If she’s been killing ghosts with just her bare hands, she’s probably strong, too,” Otter chips in from the backseat. His voice is quieter than usual - it’s pretty obvious what he’s thinking about, so Landis and Grace don’t press him. He keeps going anyway. “I mean, I guess it’s basically the same as killing a normal person with your bare hands, but there’s still that, uh, resistance. And if she’s been doing it by herself without any of them getting away…”
“She’s probably pretty strong,” Grace agrees. “So we need a plan.”
“Jeremy and I can go in after her,” Danton says. Landis peers into the backseat to see that he’s squished in the middle, his head resting on Otter’s shoulder. “She probably wouldn’t hear us coming as soon as she’d hear any of you. And, I mean, if she can touch us, we can touch her, right?”
Jeremy says nothing. He looks somehow more pale than usual, and he’s wringing his hands, the expression on his face says that he’s either extremely worried, or has to throw up. Maybe both.
Landis shakes his head. “No. No way. I’m not letting any of you put yourselves in danger over this.”
There’s got to be a better way to get the jump on her, he thinks, tuning Paper Museum out as they all start to protest over one another. We should be at the advantage here. Abbie’s never been to the lake house before, and I lived in it for four fucking years. There’s got to be something she doesn’t know about, something that can give us an edge, here. Something I left in the house, or -
“The back porch,” he says out loud, as the image of it pops into his mind. Everyone else in the car shuts up abruptly, and Landis can feel five pairs of eyes turn onto him.
“What about the back porch?” Grace asks.
“The sliding glass door. It unlocks from the inside and the outside.”
“Okay,” Grace says, “so maybe we come at her from both ends of the house. Some of us go through the front door, and some come through the back, in case she tries to run. But that’s banking on the fact that she’s not, I don’t know, upstairs or something.”
“Danton and I can cover upstairs,” Jeremy says, speaking up at last.
“I’ll go around back,” Landis adds quickly. “Grace, you and Otter wait out in front. I think if she tries to run, she’ll probably go for her car.”
Grace nods. Landis takes it as permission to go, and climbs out of the car. He slips into the tree line as soon as he can, out of sight of the lake house’s windows, but always close enough to keep an eye on Grace and Otter as they make their way up the driveway. They pass out of view as he rounds the side of the house, and Landis looks out in front of him to see the lake, looming on the horizon. His breath sticks in his throat.
It can’t hurt you. He forces his feet to move so that he doesn’t just stand there frozen, opening his mouth and letting the air flood back into his lungs. Whatever was there before, it’s gone. Whatever it was before, it’s just a lake now.
It’s not a very convincing sentiment, all things considered. But the last time he saw the lake, it was the dead of winter, the surface hard and frozen. Now, in warm weather, its surface lit by the brilliant pinks and purples of the sunset, it looks almost friendly. Landis steals glances at the over his shoulder as he creeps up onto the back porch, trying to overwrite his mental images of the dark, icy surface, of the hands reaching up from beneath the water. By the time he gets to the sliding glass door, he feels almost safe to turn his back on the lake for a moment.
Landis goes slowly and carefully, crouching in a shadow as he peers inside the lake house. There’s no sign of anyone in the kitchen - everything inside looks untouched, exactly the way he left it. If he didn’t know any better, hadn’t seen Abbie’s car parked right out front, he’d swear no one was inside at all. He finds the lock on the sliding glass door and presses it with a finger, switching it from Closed to Open. The sharp clicking noise it makes is louder than expected, but hopefully not as loud from a few rooms away.
The door groans a little in protest as Landis inches it open, going slow, only making enough of a space for himself to turn sideways and slip inside. He takes off his shoes once he’s in, to keep them from making noise on the hard tile floor.
“Get the hell off of me,” someone says loudly, somewhere nearby.
Landis presses himself against the wall, just next to the divider between the kitchen and the den, and turns his head just slightly to peer inside. It’s too dark in there to see much, but he can hear the sounds of a struggle, of someone trying to scramble away, across the floor.
“Get -” the voice says sharply, and this time it’s recognizable, even as the owner of it cuts himself off to gag and wheeze. Landis’s heart lurches up into his throat. Mal’s breathing, even from the next room over, sounds sick and labored, and Landis knows enough about the sounds someone makes when they’re being choked to death to surmise what’s going on.
You can’t go in there yet, he tells himself, digging his nails into the drywall to keep from launching himself into the den. If you’re going to take her by surprise, you can’t just use your fists. There’s no way you’re strong enough to beat her one on one without a weapon.
He casts a glance over his shoulder, at the knife rack, and realizes too late that the two biggest ones are absent. Of course. Grace took them when we went out to the island. They’re probably still out there - or the police confiscated them. Either way, they’re not here, so that’s no fucking use. But -
A thought occurs to him, an image, like the thought of the sliding glass door before. A hard, yellow rectangle of plastic, slipped inside of the drawer next to the sink. Landis can almost feel the weight of it in his hand already, feel the grooves in the sliding switch under his thumb as he presses it upwards and extends the blade. He swallows hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat.
The utility knife is just where he expected it would be. He flicks the blade up, debates snapping it off to use a fresh, sharp one, but the noise would almost certainly alert Abbie to his presence. The old blade will have to do. There’s no dried blood on it, so it must be relatively fresh.
Shoes still off, Landis slinks back towards the den, the sound of Mal slowly asphyxiating ringing in his ears. He can barely afford to be this careful, this slow, but he knows he can’t afford not to be, either. He thinks about where he’ll stab Abbie - it’ll have to be non-lethal, so maybe in the thigh, maybe in the stomach, or her side. Maybe in the arm first, to make her let go of Mal.
It isn’t until he’s two steps into the den that he realizes Abbie doesn’t have her back to him. She’s facing him, smiling at him, with both hands wrapped around Mal’s throat. Mal grasps at her forearms, coughing, convulsing weakly as his eyes start to roll back in his head. His lips move like he’s trying to say something, but nothing resembling words comes out from between them. Abbie laughs, a sound like broken glass spilling onto pavement.
“Landis! So nice of you to join us.”
landis is like murder is just like riding a bike. you never really forget how to do it