Page 47 of The Chain House

“It’s fucking okay, Billy,” she said.

He laughed at that, and then said, “Say, what’s on your side of the wall?”

“A map,” she said. “Looks like a map of … the world of Oliver Crown.”

“Yeah, same,” he said. “Does the chain come through over there inside the area marked Untrustables?”

“Yes.”

“Same,” he said. “Figures.”

“What does?”

“Malone goes into detail about it in one of the books,” he said. “Crown and Crows, I think. Or maybe Feast or Famine. But this is how they imprison everyone in the world of Oliver Crown. Special houses, like prisons, they call Chain Houses. Two to three floors high, and all the prisoners are connected by chains through the walls and ceilings and floors. It’s brutal.”

Beth closed her eyes, too tired to fight, but knowing at some point her life would depend on her ability to do so. But her mind kept going back and forth between looking for a way out now or conserving her energy for an escape at the right moment. She longed to look out the window across the room and breathe the fresh air coming in between the bars, but knew her chain wouldn’t allow it, not with Billy on the other side of the wall.

Her eyes flashed open at the sound of movement directly below her. A door opened down there, followed by footsteps, and then a chain rattling.

“What’s going on over there?” Billy said.

“I don’t know,” Beth said. “It’s coming from the room below me.”

Seconds later she heard a power drill churning, and then louder as it appeared to be coming through her floor. She screamed when the drill bit emerged in a tiny mound of splintered wood and dust.

The drill bit disappeared into the floor, and then emerged again seconds later, and bit by bit, the hole in the floor grew larger.

Not stopping, she knew, until it was big enough for another chain to fit through.

CHAPTER20

SHIT, THOUGHT TREVOR Harper.

Shit, shit, shit.

What did you do? he thought as he stared at Jake Hall’s felled body in the middle of the living room floor, standing, Louisville Slugger still in his shaking hands, inside a house he’d never entered until now, a house he’d often wondered about, what it looked like inside, what it smelled like inside, what it sounded like inside when the two of them weren’t fighting.

Jake’s eyes were open, but they weren’t moving.

His eyelids weren’t blinking.

That’s because you killed him, Tommy.

I’m not Tommy, he thought. I’m Trevor now, just as I have been for twenty years. Dr. Trevor Harper, PhD, and I should be home right now prepping for my fall course load.

“What did you do?”

It wasn’t his voice this time, or even Tommy’s from yesteryear, but Lizzie’s voice from across the room, because that’s where she’d crab-walked, backward, into the wall, as soon as he’d come in swinging.

“Trevor, what did you do?”

I don’t know, he said, or thought he’d said, but the words never came out, not really.

“I think you killed him. Jesus Christ, you killed Jake …”

“No …” he said, not so much as an answer to what she’d said, but in general. Everything right now was a no, because this couldn’t be happening.

Long time coming though, Tommy. About time you fought back.