Shadow Days

  “Good morning,” he said. Logan was wearing a crisp white shirt with a black cashmere sweater draped around his shoulders.

  I was about to ask when his polo match was and then I realized he’d probably take the question seriously. from the way he smirked at my crumpled jeans and hiking boots, he didn’t think much of my wardrobe either.

  “Morning,” I said. “I wrote down the address.”

  He took the slip of paper and frowned. “We aren’t going to a dealership?”

  “Nah,” I said. “There’s a truck I’m just going to take off someone’s hands. I don’t need to bother with a dealership.”

  “Mmmmmm” was his reply.

  I was impressed that we managed to have a conversation, if a completely uninteresting one, about all the real estate Logan’s father owned in town, that lasted the duration of the trip.

  “That’s it; turn here.” I broke into his explanation of luxury housing developments, pointing at the tired-looking blue pickup with a for Sale sign tucked beneath its windshield wipers.

  Logan started laughing but tried to pretend he was coughing when he realized I was serious. He frowned, eyeing me. “Does Bosque not give you an adequate allowance?”

  “This is all need,” I said, not meeting his gaze. I was uncomfortable enough with the wad of cash in my pocket. I didn’t need to think about the fact that I could have used the money Bosque gave me each month for “discretionary spending” to buy a new car and have enough left over for at least three more. I was grateful that Bosque wanted me to have everything I needed or wanted, but I didn’t want 34

  to end up becoming someone defined by my wealth. In other words, I didn’t want to be Logan Bane.

  I hurried out of the car and was about to tell Logan he didn’t need to join me, but he was already climbing from the driver’s seat.

  A man who looked like he could be my grandfather, as well as a onetime member of a biker gang, came out of the ranch-style house.

  “You Shay?” he asked, looking at me, at Logan, and at the Mercedes.

  I managed a smile. “Yeah.”

  “And you want the truck?”

  “If it runs as well as you claim,” I said.

  He laughed, offering me a grin with more gaps than teeth.

  “Bought it new. Maintained it myself. Should last you ten more years if you bother to take care of it.”

  “Sounds great.”The guy selling the truck looked from me to Logan as if trying to suss out how the two of us had ended up in each other’s company. I was wondering the same thing. At least Logan had brought the CL600 and not the Lotus. Maybe he’d thought if I saw the Mercedes, I’d change my mind about borrowing it. Not a chance.

  “Cash okay?” I asked, rubbing the back of my neck.

  One of his bushy eyebrows went up. “Course.”

  I handed him the money and he frowned.

  “fifteen hundred, right?” I said.

  “Yep.” The man’s shoulders were tight. His eyes wandered to Logan. Logan was gazing at the old man like he was a circus freak.

  The man shuddered.

  I stood there, waiting while he seemed to think something over.

  He said, “Title and registration are in the glove box. Keys are too.”

  “Thanks.” I reached out to shake his hand, but he turned away, walking at a fast clip to his front door.

  “The locals are interesting, aren’t they?”

  I jumped at the sound of Logan’s voice right next to me.

  35

  He smiled, glancing at the truck. “So you’re an antiques col-lector?”

  “Thanks for the ride, Logan,” I said.

  “Let me know if I can be of any further assistance.” He swaggered back to the Mercedes with a lazy wave.

  A loud banging drew my attention to the house. The grizzled truck seller was hammering something to the front door. It was only after I’d gotten into the truck that I saw what it was. The man slipped into the darkness of his house, closing the door behind him. A cruci-fix was suspended in the center of the whitewashed wood.

  The engine roared to life when I turned the key in the ignition. I rested my head on the steering wheel and did my best to convince myself that driving back to Portland wasn’t an option.

  36

  five

  E

  At midnigHt i Counted two things I’d accomplished and could be proud of: I had a mode of transportation that I was pretty sure could handle anything I threw at it and I had a blog.

  I wouldn’t have thought writing a blog would give me any real sense of satisfaction. But it did. I worried a little that my sudden smugness as I gazed into the glowing screen of my laptop might have been linked to the fact that I didn’t have anyone to talk to and the blog was a way of talking to myself without feeling crazy. But I also thought Ally would approve, and even more people had populated my facebook page, so I felt inspired to write something for them.

  Bonus that cute girls were starting to show up. facebook = cute girls I didn’t know, one in particular named Melissa, feeling sorry for me and writing nice messages so I wouldn’t be lonely. How’s that work?

  I wasn’t complaining. Maybe I should act even more lonely. All in all, it had been a decent day.

  I could have sworn I’d just closed my eyes when I sat bolt upright in bed. The clock informed me I’d been asleep about five hours, but nothing in the dark room could tell me why I was awake. And I knew something had woken me. A sound. A crash from above.

  I held my breath, listening. Nothing. Only the pounding of my pulse.

  38

  Must have been a dream.

  I got out my iPod, put on “Broken Bells,” and waited to drift off.

  Though I’d pretty much convinced myself that a nightmare had jolted me awake, the first thing I did the next morning was head to the third floor. I wandered slowly through the east wing corridor that was above my bedroom. Methodically checking each room, I found only unused bedrooms and sitting rooms, but no evidence of the crash that had woken me. That left me feeling like an idiot, so I decided to forget about the nightmare and take myself out to breakfast.

  It was pouring, which was a bummer because I’d hoped to make a short, exploratory hike that afternoon. Armed with my laptop and some comics, I located a café in downtown Vail and had a huge stack of buttermilk pancakes while I read.

  Once I’d finished the comics, I pulled out my laptop and discovered I had even more facebook friends. Go, me. Or probably go, Ally. Her mother hen instincts probably had her recruiting people to visit my page like a madwoman. My mini geography quiz had been solved, so I uploaded more pictures, trying to make the locations a bit harder. I was trying to think up my next blog post when the waitress returned to fill my coffee cup for the tenth time.

  “You movin’ in, hon?” she asked.

  I laughed, but when I glanced at my watch said, “Oh.” Morning had drifted into afternoon. And it was still raining.

  “Just teasin’, sweet cheeks.” She smiled. “We’re havin’ a slow day. No rush.”

  “Thanks,” I said. It wasn’t like me to lose track of time, but after a few minutes I knew that wasn’t what had happened.

  I didn’t want to go home.

  That place didn’t feel right to me. from the nightmare I’d had, to the weird art, to the sheer emptiness of it. Sitting in a café until my blood was pure caffeine was a way of delaying my return to Rowan 39

  Estate. But I couldn’t stay here forever, even if the waitress said she didn’t mind.

  I paid the check and dashed through the spitting rain back to my truck, but I didn’t drive home. I’d figured a couple things out: I knew what my next blog post would be and I didn’t want to be alone in that house anymore.

  I was lying on my bed trying to get in touch with my inner tech geek and frustrated that what I’d thought was such a brilliant idea had ended up in fail mode. It was too late to go back to the store, but something had to be wrong with the handheld video ca
mera I’d brought home. Or maybe I’d read the directions too quickly and missed something.

  I’d wanted to get reactions. facebook was fun and the blog . . .

  introspective?

  But video? Video took things to the next level. If I had to have solitary confinement in Vail, at least I could show people what was happening and have a little more interaction with the outside world.

  Rowan Estate should have been the perfect place for my experiment.

  I’d never run out of weird stuff to tape, and it had that whole haunted mansion thing going for it. Sometimes a little too perfectly.

  I played back the video again. The first shots of the house were fine. My brief “hello” from my bedroom was fine, but once I went down the hall, the picture went haywire. It was all the more frustrat-ing because I’d thought shooting the winged statues would be my

  “hook” for the webisode. I guess my career in video journalism failed before it began. I watched the scenes one more time.

  To hell with it.

  I uploaded the video as it was. My eyes ached from rereading the tiny type in the instruction manual. Maybe someone online would know an easy fix for the camera. If not, I could start from scratch tomorrow.

  40

  My mouth was open, throat dry, and I knew I’d cried out in my sleep.

  It had happened again. I rubbed my eyes before I looked at the clock.

  5:00 a.m. Maybe it was a recurring nightmare, but the crash startling me from sleep had been identical to the sound that had woken me the night before. I rolled out of bed, and a chill made me shiver though sweat beaded on my chest. Stumbling to my closet, I groped around until my fingers closed around the neck of a baseball bat.

  The air was even colder in the hallway, making the hairs on my arms stand up and my skin prickle into gooseflesh. The blood roar-ing in my ears made me feel like an idiot at the same time that it tightened my grip on the bat. Trying to listen so hard it made me dizzy, I climbed the stairs to the third floor. A blast of frigid air hit me the moment I stepped into the east corridor.

  Isn’t heat supposed to rise?

  I wanted to turn into a pathetic, shuddering lump, but I forced myself to stand still because I thought I’d heard something. It might have been a breath of wind seeping in through the old windows, but it had sounded like whispering.

  I took the bat in both hands, moving toward the sound. My heart climbed into my throat, hard as a rock, and stuck there, choking me.

  Snatches of sound drifted toward me, a hissing of murmurs. It was closer now, just around the next corner. I inched forward, drew a quiet but deep breath, and steadied myself.

  With a shout I jumped around the corner into the next hallway.

  Something was there. Something huge. Its arms stretched toward me. And something other than arms, something much worse, loomed in the shadows behind the thing. I yelled and swung the bat as hard as I could.

  The bat met its target and cracked, splintering into sharp pieces as it disintegrated against the marble statue.

  “Goddammit!”

  I beat my fist against the wall. Those frickin’ statues. The cool 41

  pale stone face of the winged woman gazed serenely at me, unper-turbed by my attempt to club her to death with a bat.

  Exhausted and embarrassed, I convinced myself that the baseball bat was a far better sacrifice than one of my uncle’s precious pieces of art.

  I picked up the shards of woods, making my way to the kitchen to throw them out. I grabbed a tub of ice cream and headed back to my room, where I turned on the lights, plugged my iPod into speakers, and blasted the Ramones.

  I wanted to pretend that it hadn’t happened. That I hadn’t climbed out of bed and crept upstairs. That I hadn’t attacked a sculpture with a baseball bat. And most of all, that beneath the cracking of the wood against marble, I hadn’t heard laughter.

  42

  six

  F

  PeoPle like suPernAturAl occurrences—even a

  whiff of the paranormal gets a lot of folks drooling. Or else people enjoy the suffering of others. Specifically my suffering. It could be both.

  Those were the types of conclusions I drew when I logged onto my media pages the next day and saw all the buzz about it. My initial reaction was sour at best. I could hardly muster cheerfulness given my previous night’s adventures.

  Give the people what they want. Or so they say.

  I was going to try my best to do just that, if for nothing but the sake of saving my sanity. When I moved through the empty halls of Rowan Estate, my jaw ached and my temples throbbed because I was listening so hard, waiting for any sign of the murmurs I’d heard the night before. But there was nothing. The only living thing in the house was me, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to last very long like this.

  The interactive aspect of the video and facebook worked the best for alleviating my sense of isolation, so I started there, reading through and responding to comments before trying out the video again. I got the same fuzzy crap anytime I tried filming the statues.

  Instead of stomping on the camera, I decided to try some experi-ments, approaching the sculptures from different angles. I got the same results every time.

  44

  I ditched the video and went for old school. My digital camera failed, giving me only blurred shadows where the statue should have been. I wished that was more of a surprise. And it meant another trip into town, but getting out of the mansion was pretty much a relief. I took the scenic route, though anywhere on this stretch of I-70 could qualify as scenic. But I’d decided to wind my way through the small mountain towns that dotted Vail Valley.

  The previous day’s rain had given way to gentle autumn sunlight.

  I drove with the windows down, steering my way through frisco’s Main Street. Catching sight of an open parking space right in front of the Next Page bookshop, I decided to stop in, not that I needed any more books, but frisco was much more my speed than Vail. I lingered in the bookstore, picking up three novels and a hiking guide for the region. I’d stared at a book titled Coast to Coast Ghosts: True Stories of Hauntings Across America, but I couldn’t bring myself to pick it up.

  I kept heading east and toyed with the idea of going all the way to Denver and spending the night there instead of returning to Vail.

  But it wasn’t like I knew anyone in Denver either. I doubled back but drove right through Vail without stopping. I did withhold the string of curses I wanted to shout out the window at the town that was getting under my skin. No reason to start a rumor that I was the new local crazy dude living alone in the weird mansion.

  Man, what if I am that guy?

  I was pulling into the parking lot of Avon’s Wal-Mart—the only place I thought I could find a cheap instant camera—when my phone buzzed. I didn’t recognize the number.

  “Shay?” I didn’t recognize the man’s voice. He spoke my name in a clipped, nervous fashion.

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  “Are you in Vail? Have they moved you into Rowan Estate?”

  I killed the engine. “Who is this?”

  45

  The line went dead. What the hell?

  I found the number in my call log and pressed the call button.

  A tinny voice answered, “The number you have dialed is not in service. Please check the number and try again.”

  The tension that had eased out of my limbs the farther I drove from Vail dug its way back into my shoulders. I slammed my fist into the steering wheel and took a few deep breaths before I went into the store.

  I hated that it was already dark by the time I got back to Rowan Estate, but that was my own doing. I had stayed in Avon for dinner, reading my novel and listening to the conversations of people around me. People who weren’t exiled from their friends. I wanted to punch myself in the gut for all the internal whining I was doing.

  It was pathetic. Several hours of reading about Katniss Everdeen’s problems made me decide my life wa
s pretty damn good. I was tired of feeling sorry for myself, and I was also just plain tired.

  It might have been smart for me to go to bed early, anticipating being woken at five in the morning again, but I wanted to finish up my experiment. Using the Polaroid I’d dug out from one of my boxes, I snapped photos of the statues and waited for them to develop. Blurry. No image. I snapped more photos with the instant camera I bought, wondering if it was even worth getting them developed. Time for manual labor.

  I started sketching and lost track of time. It was 1 a.m. when I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore. I dragged my sorry ass to bed, hoping I’d sleep through the night.

  No such luck.

  46

  seven

  A

  lACk of sleeP mAde me feel like a man possessed, and possession wasn’t something I wanted to think about, but I was trying my best not to let that show up on facebook. I didn’t want my new online friends to decide I had multiple personality disorder.

  Once I’d posted the sketches, the buzz was all about defining what they were. I had no idea, but Victoria and Liz had some interesting theories. None of which made me feel better about my living situation. I resisted the temptation to ask Liz if she’d accept a transfer student when she mentioned she was a teacher. I’d take mountains of homework over the stuff I was dealing with.

  When Victoria loaded that clip about the assassin angels from Doctor Who, I ran around the mansion double checking that none of the statues had moved. for a few minutes I’d been convinced that each night, when the crash woke me up, it meant the statues were systematically closing in on me. But all the winged, marble people were in the same places they’d been the day I moved in. I pretty much felt like an idiot after sprinting around the house.

  Other theories: gargoyles, but there were gargoyles like the ones I’d seen all over Europe on the outside of the house. These statues seemed different.