And yet she didn’t see him until too late.

He was behind the kitchen door, waiting. As she passed him, he lashed out. She felt the sting of the blade pierce her side, and the warmth of the blood flow down her leg. She spun, pointing the gun and firing. But he was too fast. Superhuman fast. She shot an enormous hole in the plaster of the kitchen wall. Then he was behind her again. A part of her brain knew she was about to die. The knife was positioned at the small of her back.

But then, chaos.

Paula heard a shout and then a thud. She whipped around to see her brother, bloodied but unbowed, tackling the man, sending him sprawling across the kitchen. Copper pots and pans, hanging over a counter, clattered to the tiled floor in all the commotion. Paula steadied her hands despite the pain in her side and tried to get the maniac in focus. But now he was tussling with Dean. She didn’t want to shoot her brother by mistake.

“Dean, get away from him!” she shouted.

For a second she saw the man’s face-his crazy dark eyes, the terrible scar down his left cheek. For that one fleeting second she had a chance to blow his head off. But then Dean grabbed the knife, trying to wrest it from his hands. Instead, the maniac growled like a beast and plunged the blade deep into Dean’s abdomen.

“No!” Paula screamed and fired.

The bullet blew a hole in the madman’s chest, and he fell back.

Paula rushed forward. Behind her, she realized, were Douglas and Carolyn. Dean was bleeding profusely now.

“We’ve got to get him to a hospital,” Carolyn said.

“Paula, too,” Douglas added.

“No, I’m fine,” Paula insisted.

She looked down at the man she had shot sprawled on the floor. There was no blood coming from the hole in his chest.

“Paula.”

The voice was Dean’s.

She bent down.

“You’ve always been there for me,” he managed to say.

She smiled. “You saved me this time, little brother.”

“Take care of Zac and Callie for me,” he rasped.

The tears began dropping down Paula’s cheeks. “We’re going to get you to a hospital,” she told him. “You’ll be fine.”

But even as she said the words she saw the life disappear from his eyes.

“Dean!” she cried.

Douglas lifted his body and carried it down the hall to the study. Carolyn followed, helping Paula walk. She could feel the blood still flowing steadily from the wound in her side. But all she was really aware of was the fact that her brother was dead.

Something made her turn back to see the madman who had killed him one more time.

And to her horror, he was no longer on the floor.

Chapter Twenty-nine

“Daddy?”

Chelsea peered into her father’s room.

The noise from downstairs had terrified her. She’d run to Ryan’s room, only to discover he was not there. There were screams and thuds from the foyer. What was going on? Had the terrors of that room escaped into the house?

Then she’d heard the gunshot. With mounting fear, Chelsea hurried down the corridor to her father’s room, barefoot and still in her pink nightie.

“Daddy?” she called again, taking a step into the room.

He didn’t seem to be here either. Where had they gone? Chelsea began to panic. Was she the only person left in the house?

She noticed her father’s suitcase on the floor. He had packed to leave. But he clearly hadn’t left quite yet.

That was when she noticed the splatter of red dots on the wall.

Blood.

She took a couple of steps around to the other side of the bed. The moisture on her feet told her she was walking in blood.

She saw her father lying on the floor. His arms were twisted up in an odd angle.

“Daddy!” she screamed.

Her foot hit something. At first she thought it might have been a boot or a shoe.

But then the object rolled over like a bowling ball.

Dead eyes looked up at her.

It was her father’s head.

Chelsea screamed.

Chapter Thirty

“What is going on in this house?” Karen asked as she wrapped Paula’s wound with a tablecloth.

In one corner of the room, Linda was trying to console her crying, terrified children. At the window, Carolyn kept watch, while Douglas, now holding the rifle, stood guarding the parlor doors.

“Where’s everybody else?” Douglas asked. “Uncle Howie, Uncle Philip, Ryan, Chelsea?”

“Last I knew, Philip, Ryan, and Chelsea were still in their rooms,” Carolyn said. “Your uncle was in the dining room. But he must have fled when he heard the commotion in the foyer. Let’s hope he’s hiding.”

“Or that maniac got him already,” Douglas said.

“Who is he?” Paula wanted to know. “You said you knew him, Carolyn.”

Carolyn sighed. It was surreal. The jubilation of just an hour ago had been turned topsy-turvy into a nightmare of disbelief. They had thought they had won. The curse seemed to be ended. They had survived the night in the room; they had sent Clem’s spirit to rest in peace. It should have been over. The power that room held over their lives should have been ended.

But instead Carolyn now faced the greatest fear of her life.

David Cooke.

“I was in a relationship with him some time ago,” she revealed. “He killed a girl. I found out about it only after he was gone. Then I gave evidence to the police.”

“Well, that creature I shot,” Paula said, “is definitely not human. I blew a hole right through its chest, but still it got up and walked.”

“He’s a zombie,” Carolyn said. She knew this to be the case; she had experience with such things, after all. “He’s not a ghost like Clem, but he’s clearly still in the power of whatever force controls that room.”

“But you broke the curse,” Linda said tearfully. “You survived the night. Dean always believed that if someone could survive a night in that room, its power would be broken and we would be free.”

“Apparently,” Douglas said, “all we did was piss it off.”

Carolyn ran her hands through her hair. She realized there was blood on her fingers. “It needs a vessel to act against us,” she said, understanding dawning on her. “For eighty years it used Clem. Now that we took Clem away from it, it needed someone else. So it settled on David.”

“I don’t understand what connection your ex-boyfriend has with that room,” Douglas said.

Carolyn shook her head. “I doubt there’s a connection. But the room knows more than we gave it credit for. Whether it found David and brought him here-or whether he came here on his own, looking for revenge on me-the room clearly understood he could be used against us, and so it took over his mind and his body.” She shuddered. “What that means is that anyone could be used against us. The forces that control that room can see into our minds and our hearts.”

The children began to cry again. Linda clasped them to her breast.

“I’m sorry,” Carolyn said. “I don’t mean to frighten them. But they need to understand how serious this is.”

“Will someone please explain to me what the hell is going on?” Karen cried.

Paula took a deep breath and recapped, as best she could, the long, terrible ordeal of the family curse and the reason why she had been so opposed to having children. Meanwhile, Carolyn once again checked her cell phone and then the house phone. Both remained dead.

“That gun isn’t going to be much help to us,” she said softly to Douglas.

He shrugged. “Well, it might slow him down a little, and give the kids at least a chance to get away.”

Suddenly they both tensed. The doorknobs of the parlor doors had begun to turn.

Douglas aimed the gun at the doors and shouted over his shoulder, “Linda, take the kids and go out the window!”

But just then the doors opened.

“Hold your fire!” Carolyn yelled.

It was Chelsea.

The girl ran into the parlor straight into Carolyn’s arms. She was sobbing. Her mascara ran down her face in black streaks.