The book on the table burst into sudden, white-hot flame.
I still don’t really remember what happened next.
My memory turned black and soggy at the edges, like a poisoned pond. Now and then a flash of an image would rise up through the sludge of uncertainty, but everything felt like bits and pieces and maybes. I thought I heard Prue scream my name, and I thought I caught a glimpse of her bright red hair, glowing with the light on the table. My grandmother threw the black cloth back over it, beating out the flames before they could jump up and catch the edges of her white jacket.
I couldn’t tell if I was breathing fire and smoke out, or if I was dragging it into my chest. Every inch of my skin sparked with heat. The rumbling started deep in my chest. A rattling that made my teeth chatter and fingers twitch. My bones felt like they were rearranging into spiky, crooked lines.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, yawned a voice in my ear.
A stampede of feet thundered toward the staircase, shaking the floor pressed against my cheek. But a pair was moving toward me, not away, pristine high heels click-click-clacking against the stone, the toes pointed like knives.
Get up, I thought, get up now. With a grunt, I flopped onto my back, trying to get my arms under me. A wave of dizzy sickness washed from my head down to my numb toes, blurring the darkness. When it finally cleared, I saw Prue for real, standing on the stairs. Her face was as white as the wax dripping from the candles.
“Prosper! Prosper!” She tried to dart toward me, but Great-Uncle Theodore wrapped his enormous arms around her middle and hauled her kicking and screaming off her feet.
“No!” I choked out. I had to help Prue, I had to protect Prue, that was my job—but Great-Uncle Bartholomew was coming toward me, something long and silver clutched between his hands. The curve of the blade caught the winking candlelight from above, and I knew what it was.
A knife.
Rayburn slammed the rubber end of his cane against my shoulder, pinning me to the floor. I tried to kick at his knobbed knees, to take the old geezer down with me, but it was like the rest of my body wasn’t listening to my brain. Grandmother’s tight face was swimming in front of mine. A look of total disgust, worse than what she normally wore when she looked at me, slipped into place. She took the knife in her hand.
No! a voice bellowed in my ears. Not this night, nor any other!
A ferocious wind came ripping down through the open door at the top of the stairs. It threw a shrieking Aunt Claudia halfway down the stone steps and devoured every candle flame. We were in darkness.
Everyone was screaming now. Feet pounded the ground in rolls of thunder, making the floor shiver and moan. Something wicked sharp drew across my left arm, just below my elbow, and I let out a scream of pain that sent the dogs upstairs into a howling rage. Agony filled the wound like hot wax, burning my skin, my veins, my bone.
There was this explosion of movement over my head. The reeking smell of sweat and pine flooded my nose, just as a blur of white went flying two inches from my face. The collision sent Rayburn and Grandmother down into a knot of wrinkled old limbs.
I kicked my feet out, using them to roll away. The knife skittered off, clattering against the tile. I stretched an arm out, reaching for it to fend off the other monsters, when a pale hand darted down to pick it up.
In the dark, I couldn’t really see the stranger’s face. I only recognized him from his stink, and the way his oversize white shirt puffed out around him like a dandelion. The heat came off him like an overworked lamp. I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees to crawl away—because it’s one thing when it’s your family that’s trying to put you six feet under, but I wasn’t about to let a stranger gut me. Not when I needed to find Prue.
Instead of the stab of burning metal I expected to feel through my spine, two hands came down to grip the back of my uniform blazer. That was the only warning I got. Next thing I knew, I had been tossed over the stranger’s shoulder like a sack of rice.
“You okay, kid?” The words made the man’s narrow shoulders vibrate. I couldn’t speak and the guy couldn’t see me nod, but the fact that I was breathing seemed to be enough for him.
The smoke detector and sprinklers switched on at once, turning panicked yells into gasps at the sudden attack of frigid water.
“You!” Grandmother yelled through the hiss of the sprinkler. I couldn’t see her face, only the family members stupid enough to still be standing around on the stairs, staring. I didn’t see her at all, not until the man turned back toward the stairs and began to run.
Rayburn was knocked out. Grandmother struggled to shove his weight off her. Every hair on her head was standing straight up. The water had stopped, but the hissing hadn’t. And I didn’t understand why, until I looked down.
I was losing it. My brain had up and left the joint. It must have, because I was literally smoking. The water on my clothes evaporated, rising up from my skin and jacket in white steam. It was like someone had cranked up the temperature to a thousand degrees. I was breathing in gulp after deep gulp of air that smelled like cooked meat, smoke, and rotten eggs.
Flee, the same prim voice rang out in my mind. Flee, Maggot. I will aid thee this once.
I think the stranger must have heard this—he had to have—because he launched himself forward at cannonball speed. Several hands reached out only to scream as soon as they touched me. Their palms were blistered, as if I’d burnt them.
By the time we reached the top of the stairs, the smoke in the dungeon hid most of the wreckage. Faces floated into sight, only to be swallowed again by drifting gray swirls of it. The very last thing I saw before the emergency lights cut back out was my grandmother, fighting to get to her feet on broken high heels, her white dress nearly black with soot and filth.
“Do not take that child!” she screamed.
The buzzing strength seemed to go out of me with the next deep breath I took. All of a sudden it was impossible to keep my eyes open. They felt so heavy….I felt so heavy.
Wake up, I commanded myself. WAKE UP! The stranger’s grip on the back of my knees went tight as he kicked a door open. My lungs flooded with cold, clean air, and my eyes stung with tears. I needed to find Prue, I couldn’t leave without Prue—
No. The voice was echoing and sleek all at once. Definitely not older than me, even though his vowels all curled and rolled in a strange way.
No, the voice continued. Now we shall rest.
And it wasn’t like I had a choice about it. The words boiled up between my ears, locked inside my throbbing skull, and I dropped into a deep, dark sleep.
The enormous black cat, a panther, paced toward me, each claw ticking against the ground. Awaken the singing bone, awaken the singing bone, it purred into the darkness, tail curling like a question mark. Green eyes tracked me, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t so much as flinch. It felt like I was caught in someone’s damp fist, and it squeezed tighter each time I took a breath. And then the cat did something I didn’t expect, something it never had before: the light inside the creature’s eyes flared to a vivid, molten green.
And then it fled.
What is the singing bone? I tried shouting, but my mouth felt like it had been sewn shut. I couldn’t move. Just tell me….Just tell me…just—let—me—wake up!
WAKE. UP.
The words bellowed through me, bouncing off my brain and shooting awareness through me. My left arm felt like it was covered in open sores, and moving it a little—waking the sleeping limb back up—made me taste puke. I kept my eyes squeezed shut, trying to take in one deep breath after another, but the scratchy blankets were wrapped too tight around me. I kicked them off, twisting to get away from the smothering heat.
The breeze coming through the window was blissfully cool and dry, carrying a hint of smoke from a nearby fireplace. Mom must have been baking a pie downstairs again, because cinnamon mingled with a hint of lavender, spicing the air. Somewhere nearby, kids were laughing, the wheels of their passing bicyc
les crunching a path through fallen leaves. A dog barked after them, but was drowned out by the sound of a passing car.
I breathed out a sigh as I turned over onto my stomach, pressing my face into the pillow. The knot my stomach had tied itself into finally released.
I was home.
Safe.
Okay.
It had been the nightmare to end all nightmares. But it had only been a nightmare.
And then, I opened my eyes.
And stared into the perfectly round, enormous yellow eyes of a black ball of fluff.
“What,” I wheezed out, “the crap?”
It hissed, flashing two vampire-sharp teeth as it sank two sets of claws into my chest.
“Ow!” My body reacted before my brain, jerking in surprise. The fluff ball—a kitten?—darted to safety beneath the couch, quick as a shadow. I crashed to the floor a second later, sending up an explosion of dust as I hit the rug. In between trying to hack up my lung and sneeze out my brains, I waited for the black blotches in my vision to clear and the unfamiliar room to appear.
I pressed my hurt arm tight to my chest, trying to breathe through the pain. My breath whistled in and out through my teeth as I looked around me.
Crap, crap, crap. Not a nightmare. Not a nightmare.
The ceiling above me was low and slanted upward sharply at the center. I wouldn’t be able to stand at the edges of it, but that didn’t matter much, considering all four sides of the room were crammed with furniture. The dark wooden beams loomed over old, broken furniture—all of which had been repurposed into something else. A table leg had been replaced with a stack of thick old leather-bound books. The back of a wooden chair hung from the wall, various vines draped over it like dark velvet ribbons. An old armoire’s drawers were pulled out and stuffed with dirt and small herbs, while bottles filled with murky yellow and brown mixtures and copper pots spilled over the upper shelves.
In the far corner, just beside a desk overflowing with books and sheets of paper starting to curl like fingernails, was a spiderweb-ridden spinning wheel.
A pop of orange unknown to nature caught my eye, and my gaze drifted down, slowly, until…Yes. I was wearing a bright orange shirt—one I definitely didn’t own. I pulled it out farther with my right hand, trying to see what was printed on it.
An enormous grinning jack-o’-lantern face. I didn’t know what was worse—that, or the fluffy knit socks protecting my toes from the chill. TRICK had been stitched on the right foot, TREAT on the other. And boxers. Boxers that drooped down to my knees, with hundreds of little green witches flying around on their broomsticks printed all over them.
More important, though, was the white bandage, wrapped neatly around my left arm, just under my elbow. An angry cloud of blood had soaked up through it, just like the red ink had through the pages of the book.
The night came back in flashes of smoke and light: The book. The knife. The voice. The stranger. And—
Prue! I dragged myself to my knees. I held my throbbing arm to my chest, and tried really, really, really hard to stay vertical. This wasn’t my house, and it wasn’t the Cottage either. And if I was here, where was Prue? Had the stranger grabbed her too?
My legs shook, but I got them under me, leaning back against the powder-blue couch I’d fallen off of. Wild ivy sidled its way through the open windows and cracks in the wall from the outside, as if seeking warmth. Their leaves curled as they withered with the turning season, the branches spread out like veins against the dark wood of the walls. For a second, I just stared at them, trying to match their colors to the paint I had hidden in a box under my bed. The late-afternoon sun flushed the room with pure cider-colored light, almost enough to brighten the soot on the old candle-crammed fireplace.
There was a cracked full-length mirror at the other end of the room, rimmed with a dusty gold frame. I hobbled over to it, tripping through piles of clothes and overflowing black trash bags leaning against the walls. When I was finally standing in front of it, I needed a full second to realize I was staring at myself.
It wasn’t just the bruise down the side of my face, blue and black and almost green in places. I poked a finger at the center of it and immediately wished I hadn’t. My dark hair was standing straight up, like tufts of raven feathers. I turned around, searching for a comb or water to try to pat it down, before remembering I had no idea where I was, and what I looked like and was wearing shouldn’t matter because of the real, looming chance I could be murdered.
Every Redding is known for something, you see. It would be just my luck to be the Redding Who Died While Dressed as a Giant Pumpkin.
I needed to get out of here, wherever that was. I limped over to an old rickety broom. It had been left leaning against a bookshelf that looked to be on the verge of vomiting up a thousand sheets of crumpled and torn pages. The knotted, curving wood of the handle was smooth to the touch, but the bristles themselves looked more like old straw bound together with twine. Thinking twice about hitting an attacker with what basically amounted to a dried-out twig, I picked up one of the copper pots instead.
There were two skinny beds pushed together in an L shape on the other side of the room, just next to where a stack of old leather trunks were piled up, separating that space from the small kitchen next to it. Actually, could you even call one sink, a metal cart, a mini fridge, and a microwave a kitchen?
From beneath the couch, the ball of fluff hissed again. All I could see were its big, round glowing eyes.
“Yeah, well,” I said lamely, “I don’t like you either. So…there.”
It cocked its head to the side, and for a second, all I could think of was the enormous panther stalking through my dream. This kitten was so small, so overwhelmed by its own coat, it looked like a fur ball the nightmare creature had coughed up.
The unpolished floors creaked under my bare feet. Once my nose got past the sweet smells of the crisp outside air and the herbs and flowers hung up to dry over the desk, new stenches blossomed. Dust, mold, and sour milk. A single red leaf scurried across the unpolished floor, dancing with a loose newspaper clipping around the stained woven rug.
What was this place? Where was this place?
I didn’t notice them before, not when everything in the small space seemed to be piled onto something else. But the next breeze forced its way through the window, and I saw where the small cutout article had come from. There were rows of them tacked up across the wall, over one of the beds. I hugged the copper pot to my chest as I took a few steps forward. The wind ruffled them, and they rose and fell together as one, making it look like the walls were breathing. Mixed in with the articles were photographs, dozens of them, but not of the stranger or anyone in his family.
Oh no, they were pictures of my family.
Photoshoots from magazines. A super-stalkerish picture of me and Prue from last year’s Founder’s Day, just before I was pushed off the school float into the mud. Five years’ worth of family Christmas cards. Even snaps of Mom and Dad when they were younger—only a few years older than me.
REDDING FAMILY SETS NEW RECORD
ONE FAMILY’S FORTUNE IS A TOWN’S TREASURE
THE COTTAGE OF REDHOOD
All the newspaper and magazine clippings were either about someone in our family, the Cottage, or Redhood.
I crawled onto the unmade bed to get a closer look. Just to the right of them, pushed to the edge of it all like an afterthought, were drawings. Prints. All black-and-white, maybe ink—no, I recognized what they were now. The Redhood Museum had some just like these. They were colonial engravings. Only these didn’t depict happy little settlers planting crops or raising families. These engravings were almost creepier than seeing a photo of my grandmother back in her beauty-queen days. Men and women in bonnets and hats and long dresses and black coats stood around a fire, their arms raised. In another, a woman was huddled over a book, one hand clutching a broomstick.
I reached up and pulled one off the wall. Dread ran down my spine l
ike a claw. The people in that drawing were hanging from a tree branch like dead geese, ropes wrapped around their necks. And…I pulled the others down frantically, spreading them out over the bed in disbelief. In every single one was this little devil with horns, a spiked tail, a pitchfork, and bat wings.
My eyes drifted back up, landing on the handwritten family tree at the center of the mass of shivering articles. It started all the way back at Honor Redding. The red line that snaked down the center of it ended at my name.
Frantic, I searched the room for a phone or computer, something I could use to try to get in touch with my parents. I found none.
Of course. If I had been kidnapped, they wouldn’t want to give me any sort of means to escape. Sweat slid between my shoulder blades, leaving a trail of goose bumps behind it. Panicky noises rose in my throat, squeaking out a little with each breath. Even worse, the smell of rotten eggs was back. It was thick enough that I could taste it on my tongue.
I looked for my coat, my shoes, anything that would have helped me escape or at least figure out where I was. But just when I had given up and had one foot dangling out of the window, I heard the girl.
“—it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life!” Her voice was hoarse, like she was on the edge of tears. A random burst of thoughts fired off in my mind, trying to figure out where I had heard those exact same words before.
I reached for the small metal doorknob, and I was twisting it open before my brain could stop me. One deep breath in, and I stepped out into the dark hallway.
And it was dark. Long and narrow too, with only a sliver of light peeking through the black curtains hanging over the window at the opposite end of the hall. I felt something soft tickle my cheek and jerked back away from it, stumbling foot over foot. I flapped my arms, trying to keep my balance, but I only got more tangled in the long white cobwebs that drifted down from the ceiling.
The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding Page 4