House by Frank Peretti

quickly, now eager to follow his own advice. Gun first, Leslie second, because it was clear that without a gun, they were dead men. Whatever this house was, it wasn’t a quaint little inn inhabited by ordinary proprietors filled with goodwill toward weary travelers.
    The sickness here was palpable. Death hunted them all, and the only way to survive might very well be to kill.
    Jack blinked at the boldness of his own thoughts and stepped onto the concrete floor. Randy clumped slowly down the steps behind.
    The basement opened up before Jack. One low-wattage bulb hung from the ceiling. He let the lighter die. A wide concrete-and-brick hall with three corroded steel doors on each side ended in a solid redbrick wall. The corridor looked like something out of an old prison movie.
    Water trickled down the right wall in a couple of wet trails, then ran along the floor into a grate.
    â€œWhat’s that smell?” Randy asked. “What is this place?”
    â€œThe basement.”
    â€œLooks more like a . . . sewer.”
    â€œLet’s go.”
    â€œThat smell . . .”
    Jack tried to ignore the sickly stench. He walked up the hall, now faced with an unexpected dilemma. The thought of opening one of the doors, any of the doors, struck him as foolish. But short of going back upstairs, there was no other option.
    Jack hurried to the first one on his right. Put his hand on the rusted handle. He hesitated.
    Crack!
    The muffled sound of Stewart’s progress on the heavy meat-locker door reminded him of the terror close behind. He turned the knob. Pushed the door.
    The room that opened up to them was dimly lit by another bare low-wattage bulb. No immediate threat, no gun in the face, no booby trap, no spring-loaded arrow aimed for their hearts. Just a room.
    No, not just a room.
    Jack and Randy gazed about. Four burgundy sofas, two quite new, two very old with torn upholstery. Lots of throw pillows. A tan-and-black woven rug covered most of the concrete. Paintings. At least a dozen paintings hung on brick walls. Almost homey in an eccentric sort of way. A strange blend of the old and the new, grungy and clean.
    Jack walked in. “Look for a gun, a gun cabinet. Hurry.”
    There was an old potbellied stove at one end of the room, shined clean as if it had never been used. A thick cobweb peppered with mummified bugs stretched from the top of the stovepipe to the adjacent wall. Why would they clean the stove and leave the web?
    Other interesting pieces of furniture were set about—a loom, a coatrack, an antique rocker . . . a rusted washing machine?
    The room added a whole new dimension to Jack’s understanding of Betty and Stewart. The problem was, the dimension wasn’t clear.
    And then Jack saw something that cleared things up a bit. There was a pentagram painted in red on the wall to his left. A threat scrawled in black ran through it. The wages of sin is death.
    Stewart’s accusations filled his ears: Guilty as sin. Below the pentagram sat a sofa table, and on that table stood a ring of black candles. Looked like the hosts were a religious lot.
    Somewhere deep in the house a door slammed.
    â€œWhat was that?” Randy asked.
    â€œCheck that closet,” Jack said, pointing to a door beside the pentagram. He ran across the room to a second closet door. “Keep looking!”
    The closet he tried was filled with junk. Candles. Rags. A broom. Nothing that looked like a gun or anything he could imagine using to incapacitate Pete, which he thought it might come down to.
    â€œUh, Jack?”
    When he turned back, he saw that Randy’s door opened into another room.
    â€œWhat is it?” He hurried across the room.
    â€œAnother room.”
    â€œI can see that. What . . .”
    He poked his head into the room. Gray concrete, all sides. Heavy cobwebs in all the corners and along the walls. A single writing desk in the middle of the room. No other furniture. Looked like a huge