Page 92 of He Who Sleeps

Chapter 32

Somewhere in the housea clock chimed softly and Carter glanced at the time on his screen, sighing when he realized it was one in the morning. It had taken him hours and an exorbitant amount of money to get the original architectural plans for the house. The firm that had designed it was still in business, but they hadn't digitized their records from before they went online so he'd had to pay for them to find and scan these old drawings.

Luckily they were in good shape and he'd been going over them, but there weren't any hidden passageways or rooms built into the design and he couldn't see any obvious missing space from memory. It was a good thing Leo had been to the hardware store for the laser because it looked like they were going to have to measure the rooms and see if anything didn't add up.

He was about to close the laptop and go to bed when he heard a creak on the landing upstairs, followed by the very obvious sound of someone descending the stairs. Rather than call out and risk waking anyone else up, he quietly closed the laptop and headed toward the door. Out in the lobby, Rix was shuffling slowly across the space, his eyes open but completely vacant.

"You okay?" Carter whispered, but Rix didn't acknowledge him at all, even to glance in his direction. His movements had none of his usual grace or speed and after a couple of seconds, Carter realized that his brother had to be sleepwalking. Sliding his phone out of his pocket, he messaged Emerson to come downstairs as quietly as possible, and he set off after Rix to try and figure out where he was headed.

The sleeping man walked into the kitchen, heading straight for the walk-in pantry, opened the door and stepped in. For several long moments he simply stood there, shoulders slumped, breathing deeply, and then he startled and jumped back, crashing into a shelf of canned goods as he flailed about.

"Easy! Easy!" Carter soothed, just as Emerson appeared in pajamas pants at the door. "You were sleepwalking."

“That’s fucking new!” He hissed and looked around, his normal calm façade crumbling. Kendrix was never so pure as when he was awoken from sleep. That was when he allowed himself to be a man, not the thing his father had wrought. “Where the fuck are we?”

“The walk-in pantry,” Emerson said with a frown. “You got a craving for Fruit Loops?”

Kendrix scowled, his mask sliding into place. “I was fucking sleeping, asshole. I don’t know what the fuck is going on.”

Carter was mentally scanning the plans he'd just been looking at and frowned. The space did seem slightly smaller than it had been on the drawing but it was hard to tell. He stepped back and looked at the hallway, trying to figure out the junctions of the rooms.

"This backs onto the understairs cupboard," he said absently. That would be an easy space to alter without it looking any different on the plans. "And you could easily shave a foot off the kitchen and the library without it being obvious because of the cabinets and the shelving making it hard to measure. We can get Leo down here to measure, but I bet if there's a secret room or cache, the door is in there. This has to be the God guiding you."

“What were you dreaming?” Emerson asked.

Rix bared his teeth. “I don’t dream.”

“Be that as it may...” Emerson looked around. “We need the rest of them? Who is sleeping with Pet?”

"No point waking them all up if it's nothing," Carter said, stepping past Rix into the pantry and studying the joints of the walls.

“Well Rix was brought here, so let’s work on the idea that Rix knows?” Emerson said and looked to their friend.

“How the fuck do you propose I do that?”

“I don’t know, maybe calm down and feel?” he asked. “When I found the cache, I was just moving on autopilot...the feeling...” he shook his head. “What do you feel, Rix?”

“Cold,” he said immediately.