15 Amityville Horrible by Kelley Armstrong Read Free Book Online Page A

normal. Just like yours. But this house holds a secret. A dark, bloody secret—Oh, wait. Not this house. The one three miles away that looks just like it. Close enough.
    They set me up on the balcony as the cast and crew gathered below. An even bigger crowd—curious onlookers—waited beyond the security tape. I felt like I was about to deliver the Gettysburg address. Or start quoting Juliet. My Romeo was indeed below, off to the side, watching me, a faint smile on his lips. I returned it, then fixed on a proper look of gravitas.
    “Many of us have heard the story of the house in Amityville,” I began, addressing the crowd. “How the horror truly began, on an autumn night in 1974, when Ronald DeFeo Jr. murdered his entire family, urged on by voices no one else could hear. A year later, the Lutz family moved into what they thought would be their dream home. Instead, it turned out to be a nightmare few of us could imagine…”
    Actually, “dream home” was a better description, if your dream includes exploiting tragedy for profit. Amityville was a hoax. Oh, sure, the Lutzs still claimed it was “mostly true,” but when they sued and were countersued, scrabbling for the profits, a judge decided, based on the evidence, that the book was a work of fiction. Maybe something did happen in that house, but there were no demon-pigs and secret Satanic rooms.
    Of course, I was forbidden to mention that. Forbidden by contract. Also, by contract, I had refused to say anything to suggest I believed it. So the script was worded like a campfire tale. They say that deep within that house, there is a room, painted red, not found on any blueprint…
    I said my spiel. Then I joined the crew on the lawn and it was Gregor’s turn. He’d been assigned the much less exciting task of telling other tales from Amityville’s past. Because we weren’t, you know, actually at the house, so we weren’t going to see that haunting. But who knew what other deep, dark secrets this sleepy New England town might hold…
    No one. Because there weren’t any. Put haunting and Amityville together, and you got a certain Dutch Colonial home by the water. That was it. So Gregor’s script had to stretch. A lot. He mentioned a massacre of Native Americans in 1644 and a suicide cult in 1931. There were even Hollywood connections. Maurice Barrymore died in the Amityville Asylum and Jim Morrison’s Wiccan High Priestess wife, Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, grew up in the township. The researches had found another so-called Satanic connection—a teen named Ricky Kasso, who’d held some kind of ceremony on the Amityville Horror house front lawn and later convinced friends to help him kill another teen as part of a ritual. Not surprisingly, Kasso was also an alumnus of the Amityville Asylum.
    It should have seemed like a desperate attempt to find scandal in a quiet town. Yet Gregor managed to make it sound as if the Amityville region was a hotbed of horror. Part of it was just him, his bookish looks, his Russian accent, his slightly stilted diction, all giving the ludicrous script an air of academia.
    I was making a mental note to congratulate Mike on choosing Gregor for the role—give credit where it’s due—when Gregor said, “Yet there is one more tale, perhaps the most tragic, an untold story of Amityville: the disappearance of three young women, from three eras, connected only by the mystery of their vanishing. Or, perhaps, by their killer.”
    I glanced over my shoulder at Jeremy, staying off camera. He caught my eye and I caught the message.
    Don’t jump to conclusions. Relax. Listen to the story. Everything is all right.
    Except it wasn’t all right, because Gregor went on to tell the story of those three young women, one from 1924, one from 1952 and one from 1988. Clara Davis, the first girl, left a wedding reception and was never seen again. Polly Watson, the second girl, had been last spotted leaving a church dance with a young man. And Dawn