She didn’t see any such thing. She saw her breath, coiling and white. She saw a boy-shaped shadow flicker behind a support column.
Dahlia froze. If she was patient, he might …
… yes. A round head, or the suggestion of one. The impression of eyes, sunken and dark, in a face that was no more substantial than a shadow.
“Buddy?” she breathed. “Is that you?”
She took a step toward the hiding spirit, but the boylike wisp shuddered and threatened to vanish.
“No, please, don’t go. I won’t hurt you. I couldn’t if I wanted to. Just so we’re clear, though … you know … don’t you?” She shoved her hands up under her armpits, and shivered. “You’re dead. You’ve been dead a long time, but you weren’t … you didn’t…”
You were a grown-ass man when you died, she wanted to say. For whatever reason, she didn’t. It was easier to think of this faint, cowering thing as a child. It might’ve been deliberate—dead children aren’t as scary as dead men, isn’t that what she’d told Gabe? Or had Gabe told her that? Her head felt uncomfortably full again, all that spun cotton crammed between her ears. She opened her mouth, yawned, and popped them.
Buddy didn’t acknowledge anything she said. He only stared, and when she made any motion toward him, he wobbled in distress. But he was letting her see him. He was hiding, but he wasn’t running away.
“Is this—” She bobbed her head toward the message on the floor. “—directed at you? Did Abigail blame you for what happened?”
The boy’s head shot up, but he wasn’t looking at Dahlia anymore. He was looking at the far wall. The rumbling sky was throwing lightning now, and it was flashing so bright in the dim space that she could see a vague black mist over there. It swirled and congealed. In the middle, there were two dark places that might have stood for eyes.
“Buddy?”
She looked back to the support where the little thing had stashed itself, but he was gone. She was alone with this new thing, and it didn’t look happy. It grew before her eyes, until it was much larger than a person. Much darker, much more hateful, much less solid. A roaring hum vibrated between her ears, and in that hum she heard words—but not clearly. She heard them the way you think you hear words when the radio is stuck between two stations and only white noise comes through.
She began to back away, but changed her mind. She needed to get back to the hatch. There was nothing here for Music City, no good wood to pull from the floors, and the windows were all broken and splintered. There was nothing to be saved, not a tiny ghost boy, and not this swirling beast that fixed her in its sights—if it even had eyes at all.
It did not feel like daytime.
It did not feel like just-past-breakfast, when the power was on, and the house was full of people who were awake, and working hard, working fast. This thing in front of her—it should’ve come at night, but it had come after dawn, when everyone else was downstairs. It had come with a cold, stale smell like frozen pond water, thick with mud. It spread with a viscous rolling, billowing sprawl as slow and thick as oil in winter.
Dahlia could not freeze. The hatch was only a few yards away.
Something buzzed in her jeans pocket. She tagged it, wondering what it could possibly be. This was too small to be her phone. It fit in the almost decorative slot below her right hip.
Harder and harder it shook, until its presence was painful against her hip bone. She jammed two fingers in there and yanked out the small metal pendulum she’d found in Hazel’s room. Once exposed, it lunged toward the hatch. Dahlia barely caught it by the bauble at the other end of its chain—but she did catch it, and she let it draw her to that hatch, within mere feet of the angry thing with claws that could carve wood like a holiday turkey.
She flung herself down the stairs and dropped the trapdoor behind her, but it flew open again, and that chilled, weird stink blasted down into the corridor.
The pendulum said to keep moving, and Dahlia couldn’t argue with it. She followed it into the hall, a couple of doors down, and into Hazel’s room—where the door slammed shut and locked itself behind her.
The door shook and rattled.
Clutching the pendulum like it could protect her, Dahlia stood before the dresser and stared back at that locked door, panting even though she hadn’t run far, and she wasn’t really tired. She was scared for her life, because whatever Abigail was, she could haunt by day and slice up floors, so why not skin and bone?
A series of hard blows rained against Hazel’s door, echoing through the whole house. Dahlia was sure of this, and someone must have known that there were bad things afoot. Her voice shook when she said, “Fuck this!” but the door held despite her lack of faith, and she squeezed that little steel pendulum she’d taken from Hazel’s drawer.
She looked down at that drawer, and then up at the mirror.
Whatever was beating on the door gave it another half-dozen blows; Dahlia was positive that the force would push it off the frame and send it crashing inside.
But she was wrong. The door stayed where it was.
Dahlia was standing before the mirror. In the mirror, she looked ragged and wild. In the mirror, Hazel Withrow looked calm and barely dead at all.
Hazel wore a sharp suit of salmon polyester. Her hair was streaked with silver, and her glasses were the shaped like cat eyes. Her fingers were long, and they sported several expensive rings; her bones were thin, and the pleats in her pants were as crisp as the last day she pressed them.
She can’t come in.
“That’s why you keep it locked,” Dahlia stated. No question of it, though it sounded raspy coming from her fright-stiffened throat.
Anyone would go mad in this house without a refuge.
“Sister, I hear you.”
She’s weaker in the day. Not weak, but weaker. You’ve worn her out, for now.
“Hazel,” she said. “What do I do?”
Do your job. But don’t stay here tonight. Find a hotel, and return in the morning. You won’t be safe when the sun goes down.
“Aunt Hazel, please tell me,” she tried … but there was no one in the mirror. Dahlia was alone. Brad and Bobby were beating on the door, calling her name.
“I’m in here…,” she said; then, again, louder and stronger. “I’m in here!”
“Open the door!” Brad sounded as frantic as she’d felt ninety seconds ago.
“I’m trying!” She grabbed the knob and yanked it. It rolled over, easy as pie. She drew back the door and stared wildly at all three of them—Gabe had just joined the party, having run up the stairs sweating and covered with rain. “Dahl?” he asked, toppling toward her, pushing Brad and his father aside.
“The door slammed shut behind me! But … I’m fine. I’m shook up, is all.”
Bobby rubbed his hands on his pants. They were red and rough, and the knuckles were chapped from where he’d been banging on the door—as hard as Abigail had, almost. “What the hell just happened? We heard you running downstairs, and something banging around…”
She looked out into the hall, both ways. Seeing nothing, she waved them all inside Hazel’s room.
The guys filed in anxiously behind her. She closed the door and leaned her back against it, pretending she was only tired and winded.
“We’re all safe in here,” she said to herself, but she let them hear it. Her voice was normal again. She forced it to be. “Safer than we are out there. Hazel did something to the room—she made it a sanctuary, and Abigail can’t come inside. She can’t touch us.”
“Abigail was in the attic?” asked Bobby.
“She chased me out. Hazel opened the door, and let me come in here. Abigail tried to follow…” She rubbed her hands together, then on her jeans. When she did that, she could pretend they weren’t shaking. “But she didn’t. She couldn’t.”
“You sure you’re all right?” Brad asked.
She might’ve asked it in return. He looked as frazzled as she felt—or worse. God, she hoped
she didn’t look that frayed around the edges. Somebody had to hold it together, because the job wasn’t done yet, and she couldn’t walk away. She couldn’t even run.
“I’ve been better,” she told him, in case there was any solidarity in suffering. Anything else would’ve looked like a lie. “But whatever’s in the house—whoever’s in this house … I’ve been calling her Abigail, but she’s only a shadow, only some weird leftover—she hasn’t hurt any of you, has she?”
“She about scared the shit out of me,” Bobby complained. “Does that count?”
“But she didn’t touch you? She didn’t chase you, or try to harm you? Any of you?”
As she asked the question, she was already sure of it—Abigail didn’t want their attention, not like she wanted Dahlia’s. The realization didn’t make her feel special, so much as targeted. When the boys all shook their heads, admitting with manly grunts that no, Abigail was only scary as fuck, Dahlia tried to take some comfort in that. If Abigail wanted to pick on somebody, better it was her than one of the boys. Dahlia could take it. She had to. She was the boss.
The resolution made her calmer. It gave her direction.
“All right, so all she’s done is … be creepy as shit.”
Gabe read her better than she thought. “What about you, Dahl? Has she ever hurt you?”
“No, just scared me half to death. Well, I hit my head, once, when she scared me out of the tub and I fell,” she added, so it sounded like full disclosure. “But that’s the worst of it.”
She didn’t mention that Abigail had tried to do worse, and she didn’t say anything about the carved-up message in the attic, or how she’d wondered if the ghost could carve up bones the same way. She didn’t see any reason to.
Instead, Dahlia concluded, “She’s only scary. We can work around that. So here’s what we’re doing now, boys: First of all, scratch the attic. There’s nothing good up there, I checked.” The look Gabe shot her said he wouldn’t tell anyone about the carving if she didn’t. Bobby and Brad didn’t need to know. “Second, plan to wrap up before dark. Fuck this place, and Abigail right along with it. We’re getting a couple of hotel rooms. Bobby, you and Gabe can share, and Brad, you and me can bunk together, unless you want to front something with your own money. We’ll get something with two beds.”
Brad was not bothered by the sleeping suggestions; if anything, it came as a relief. But the time frame worried him. “Do you think we can get the place cleared out by then?” His eyebrows were all knotted up—and Dahlia wanted to think it was all about the job, but it probably wasn’t.
“No, but I don’t give a damn.” She was surprised to hear herself say it, and even more surprised to know it wasn’t bravado and bullshit. “We’ll get enough of it done, and that’s what matters. We’ll buckle down, get organized, and do what we can. The rest can wait for Daddy in the morning, and we can spend all day tomorrow tying up loose ends.”
“He’s going to think we’re crazy,” Gabe said.
Dahlia didn’t give a damn about that, either. “Only if we’re lucky. If he comes to town and the house stays quiet, yeah, he’ll think we’re crazy. But if he meets the resident poltergeist, he’ll understand why I’m with Augusta Withrow—why, if it were up to me, I’d burn this place to the ground and run.”
Bobby’s gaze swayed from side to side, like he was looking for someplace to spit for emphasis. “Let the whole world think we’re crazy, I don’t care. Actually…” He sat down on the side of the bed. “That gives me an idea. We’ve all got phones, right? And those phones have all got cameras. I say we keep them close at hand, and whip ’em out if shit goes south.”
“So you can … what? Sell the footage?” Dahlia flipped her palms up in the universal gesture of “What the fuck?”
“So we can have the footage. So if Uncle Chuck thinks we’re idiots, we can point to it and say, ‘See? Weird shit happened, and it was bad, and we weren’t jumping at shadows.’”
Brad sat on the edge of the dresser. It groaned, but held him. “That’s not a terrible idea.”
“See? Even the nerd thinks it’s a plan.”
“Yeah, I do. Because you know why every damn cable station has its own damn ghost-hunting show?”
“Wait. Not every channel…?” Gabe sort of asked.
“Yes, every last one of them,” Brad confirmed. “Not just the science fiction channel, but travel channels, true crime channels—shit, probably C-SPAN has one. I know for a fact the animal channel does. And … and it’s a riot, you know? Because nobody ever catches anything on camera except for shadows and little lights that could come from anywhere. So what are the odds,” he asked, half earnest and half tap-dancing on the edge of hysteria, “that any of us would actually catch anything?”
Bobby snorted. “Son, you ever see The Blair Witch Project?”
“Don’t call me ‘son.’ And that was fiction, you idiot. In real life, real people—real cameras … they don’t catch shit. It’s like … it’s like the cameras are some kind of talisman, keeping the supernatural at bay. If we all keep our cameras, or our camera phones running—”
Dahlia cut him off: “—then we’ll all be out of battery life in a couple of hours.”
He gave her a look like he wanted to kill her. “I have a regular camera.”
“Fine, then use that. If there’s any chance that a camera will scare her off, it’s worth trying. We have regular old digital cameras in the equipment stash. All right, everybody: Use your phones, use the cameras in the stash, and keep your things charged up if you can. If I’m going to get chased away by a ghost, I want some proof that I’m not a goddamn crybaby. So either we stay ghost-free, or we walk away with proof of the afterlife. It’s not exactly a win-win, but I’ll take it.”
“We can put them around the house, swap them out, change the batteries,” Brad pressed. “One on the mantel, one looking at the stairs, one in the bathrooms…”
“I think we only have two. But between those and the phones, we can get the place covered. Either Abigail will show herself, or we’ll have a nice, peaceful day of hard-ass manual labor,” she declared. She opened the bedroom door without any resistance from Aunt Hazel, stepped into the hall, pulled out her phone, and took a deep breath.
13
DAHLIA STOOD ON the front porch surveying the rain, the carriage house, the disassembled barn, the blue tarp with rocks on top and a corpse underneath. “Open up the trucks, and let’s start tearing this place down.”
Gabe was usually the first to get moving, but this time, he hesitated. “I don’t know, Dahl. The trucks are heavy, and it was hell to pay bringing them up so far into the yard. Me and Dad were talking, and maybe we should suck it up and drive them back to solid ground. We ain’t made of sugar. We won’t melt in the rain.”
“Both of those things are true, baby … but not everything we want to save can stand getting wet. And what solid ground would you recommend? The mountain is turning to swamp, right in front of us.”
“We could go out to the asphalt road and leave the trucks there,” Bobby proposed. “Pull ’em off to the side, so they won’t block traffic.”
Brad leaned on the railing and gestured out at the vast expanse of lawn. “That’s half a mile away! How are we supposed to load them with the real heavy items? The furniture, the flooring, the windows? The dollies won’t be any use to us, not across all that mud and monkey grass.”
“Then we don’t load them at all, not yet,” Dahlia declared. She was back on firmer footing, and it felt good—even as the memory of a black smoke thing with knife-sharp nails lingered behind her eyes. “We take the heavy stuff down to the sitting room and stack it up there. If we fill that up, we’ll start cramming it into the parlor across the foyer. We’ll leave it that way for now, and load the trucks when the weather permits. Boys, I know you just went to a lot of trouble to bring them up close, but you’re probably right. Take them back out to the road so they don’t get stuck in the Withrow swamp, and we don’t
wind up stranded here. Come sundown, we’ll lock up the house, grab some umbrellas, and make for the trucks. Tomorrow’s gonna suck, but it won’t suck as bad as another overnight in this hellhole.”
She half expected Bobby to make some obnoxious joke about how she’d seen too many of Brad’s ghost-hunting shows, but he didn’t say a word. All he did was nod, pull his keys out of his damp hoodie pocket, and tell his son, “Dahl left that big blue and white umbrella down in the foyer to dry. Why don’t you grab it?”
Brad took his phone out and fiddled with the camera’s settings. “I’ll get my charging cord, and I’ll prop this thing up wherever I’m working. I’m just going to let it record, and record, and record.”
“You do that, sweetheart. I’ll get mine ready, too. In case you’re right.” Any port in a storm—that’s what Daddy would say if he were here, and if he believed her.
“Oh, I’m right. You’ll see. Cameras are practically magic. They’ll keep this polterbitch away.”
She ratcheted a smile into place, and held it there. “If you catch her on camera, you can sell the footage and pay off your student loans ahead of schedule.”
When he was gone, Dahlia lingered. But Hazel didn’t reappear, so she went back to the master bedroom. This time, she didn’t brace the door behind her. Hazel was helpful. Hazel would open her room, if it needed opening. She relied on this thought, and propped herself up on it.
The little crew wasn’t alone in this, strangers in a house full of teeth, and not everything that lurked was murderous.
Blessings: counted.
In the bedroom where Dahlia had spent the first two nights on the job, the bay window seat was ruined. Rain had come in through the busted pane, and water had soaked it down to the supports. It wasn’t a shame, she didn’t think. They would’ve never gotten that whole thing out in one piece. Even if her dad were bringing the big lift, and the big trailer, it was too high up to cut it down safely. One way or another, it was doomed to ruin.