Page 114 of Black Curtain

He kicked the handle, hard, with a booted foot.

The door didn’t give.

He tried kicking it sideways a few times, maybe in the hopes of breaking the handle off.

When the kicking moved neither the handle nor the wood, Armel threw a muscular shoulder against the door. It was solid wood and didn’t budge, but he tried that a few times before realizing it was futile. Muttering curses under his breath, Armel walked to the second door he had just passed.

Jerking open the unlocked handle, he walked inside.

Kiko, Dexter, and Nick followed.

Nick got there first. He stepped out of the doorway to let the others in, but never stopped staring at the human version of his sire as Armel walked deeper into the room. The crib stood there once more, but it no longer looked empty. Nick felt a shiver of dread, glancing at the quilted blankets that hung over the sides. More blankets were stacked on a nearby rocking chair, and a low fire burned in the grate, likely to keep the chill off the room. An ornately-carved table stood nearby, stacked with cups and bottles and what might have been cloth diapers.

Armel walked directly to the crib itself.

Gripping one wooden side, he glanced down at whatever was inside. After a few seconds of frowning at it, Armel bent lower to touch it, as if to reassure himself that whatever was inside remained intact.

Nick felt another ripple of shock go through him.

A sibling? Did Brick have a brother? A sister?

Before he could make himself walk over there, Armel turned to a door set in the wall to his left, what must be the same wall shared with the locked room at the end of the hall.

Brick walked to the door and tried the handle.

This time, when he felt over the top of the doorframe, he found a brass key.

Nick glanced to the other side of the nursery, frowning.

He realized there was another door there, directly opposite this one.

So that’s where the woman had come from, when they’d first seen her in that large bedroom. She left that room at the end, passed through the nursery, then came into the bedroom where Nick, Kiko, and Dex had been standing.

Kiko must have been right.

That larger room with the broken bedframe must be the master bedroom.

Virginie and Denis, Brick’s parents, had sandwiched their children’s nursery between their own bedroom and the room at the end of the hall… a room they locked from the outside, one that required scythes and left them splattered with other people’s blood.

They’d placed the nursery betweenthatand where they slept as husband and wife.

The thought made Nick feel nauseated, even before Armel finished opening the locked door. Once he had finished, and walked inside, Nick didn’t think. He didn’t bother to look at Kiko and Dex to get their opinion.

He simply followed his sire inside.

As soon as he breached the threshold, he came to a complete stop.

He stopped so fast, Dex ran into him… and Kiko ran into Dex.

Then the other two walked around him and all three of them just stood there.

None of them moved.

From what Nick could tell, the two humans with him, the real ones, barely breathed.

Then Kiko turned away from the doorway…

…and threw up on the floor.

---