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.

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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.