by H. P. Bayne
With his head bowed, he kept the worst of the gusts from hitting him full in the face. He saw the first tree and pulled Dez into what he hoped was a straight line. It was hard to tell with the snow blowing in sideways, easy to become disoriented in entirely white surroundings. Any footprints they’d left on the way to the cottage were long gone, lost to the snow.
Nonetheless, a second tree came into view, a hazy vertical line ahead and to the left. They reached it and kept going. Sully wished someone would have thought to put up a fence at the back of the property. They could have played it so much smarter, staying next to it on the walk to the cottage and counting steps so they’d know when to turn to reach the house. The problem was, John had planted numerous trees along the property’s northernmost border, and Mrs. Carr had been walking too fast to allow him time or opportunity to count.
They were flying blind, and every minute they were out here, Sully’s anxiety grew.
Or maybe, something else was to blame.
He felt it before he saw it, eyes fixed on him from somewhere nearby. His skin crawled with more than the cold as he swivelled to search for the source. Nothing beside him, nothing behind. He turned to again face their path.
She stood directly in front of him.
Sully stopped so suddenly, Dez yelped. “What?”
“She’s here,” Sully said.
“Where?”
“Right in front of me.”
“Now?” Dez’s voice was unnaturally high.
Sully nodded, but directed his next comment at the ghost. “I know your name is Lilian, and I know you’ve been murdered. I want to help you—”
“But not now,” Dez cut in. “Come on, we need to keep moving.”
Sully agreed. “We’ll come and find you when the storm breaks. We have to get inside.”
She didn’t move, remaining positioned directly in his path. Her right arm lifted, the index finger of one pale, bloody hand extending in the direction of what Sully believed was the wooded area behind the property. Along with the gesture came a sense of urgency, one Sully felt as if it were his own. There was something she wanted them to see, something bringing with it a sense of desperation.
Sully tried to rebuild his internal walls, to regain a sense of himself within what she was imposing on him, but it was difficult when he was anxious. He needed to focus, and it was next to impossible in a world with nothing to focus on.
Or almost nothing. Sully forced his eyes from hers to Dez’s.
“She wants to show me something in the woods.”
“Not now,” Dez said.
“She’s insistent.”
“So am I.” Dez’s eyes narrowed. “You’re letting her in. Stop it.”
Sully held Dez’s eye and attempted a deep breath. His throat protested, the cold air making him cough and doing nothing for his stress levels.
“Damn it,” he muttered.
Moments like this, Dez was a godsend. He got an arm firmly around Sully and towed him forward, marching him forcibly toward what Sully hoped was the house.
“We’ll be back,” Dez called out, presumably to Lilian. “We won’t do anyone any good if we get lost and freeze to death.”
Lilian, though, wasn’t going down so easy. She reappeared in front of Sully, hands reaching for his face.
He managed to get out Dez’s name before icy fingers brushed his cheeks.
The vision exploded inside his brain, forcing him from his world into hers. Just a quick glimpse.
A hallway bathed in shadow. A bar of light eking from beneath a door to the left.
She drifted slowly toward the door, anticipation building as she neared. A strange mix of expectation and dread of the unknown played on her mind as she closed the distance to the light.
The door at last stood in front of her, it’s knob within easy reach.
She stretched out a hand to grasp it.
The vision dissipated as quickly as it had come. Sully found himself being half-carried through the snow, his feet barely making contact with the ground. Dez’s arm pulled tight around his middle, leaving no chance of his slipping the grip.
“Dez, I’m good.”
Dez either hadn’t heard or was ignoring him, so Sully tried again.
“Hey, Dez, I’m—”
“I heard you.” He didn’t relax his grip, though he let Sully down enough to walk more fully on his own. “It’s the middle of a friggin’ blizzard. This isn’t the time to let some ghost drag you off on a hunt for her body or whatever.”
“We don’t know what she was doing.”
“Don’t care. All I care about is getting us the hell out of this mess before we get lost and freeze to death in a snowbank.”
No arguing what amounted to a very solid point. She hadn’t led Sully anywhere—not yet, anyway—but the visions the ghosts implanted always left him disoriented as to time and place. But for Dez’s presence and his inclination to put a stop to things before they got out of hand, Sully wasn’t sure where he’d be now. Dez had Sully’s best interests at heart. Ghosts didn’t. They were locked inside their own personal hell. It was hard to see the plight of others when you were drowning beneath the weight of your own.
Dez continued to set a brisk pace until they all but collided with the side of what Sully knew to be the poolhouse. Dez turned them to the right forty-five degrees. A few slow, careful steps, and they should find the pool.
Once they located its edge, they took a few paces to the right, enabling them to trace its side. The path leading to the house was easier to find, bordered as it was by ornamental trees. At last, they slipped between the house’s side wings, their location made obvious by the lessening of wind and increased visibility. From here, Sully could make out the image of Thornview Hall, rising up like a predator from the shadows, each window a beast’s eye, watching them. Waiting.
A light showed through a ground floor window, and Sully suspected Mrs. Carr had left it on for them. The rest of the house was in darkness, poised in silence.
A flicker drew Sully’s gaze upward. A light had snapped on in a third-floor room.
“There’s no one else here, is there?” Sully asked.
“No one Mrs. Carr mentioned. Why?” Dez followed Sully’s gaze upward, his jaw dropping as he spotted it. He stalled in his tracks, pausing both of them. “That wasn’t on a minute ago.”
Sully limited his response to a silent head shake. No, it hadn’t been.
Dez’s arm tightened around him. “Shit.” The word dragged out like a moan.
“What?”
“Don’t you see it?”
Dez was still staring up at the window, and Sully held his gaze there as he tried to see what Dez was referring to. “See what?”
The answer did nothing to quell Sully’s growing sense of unease. “A man. The shape of a man.”
Sully stared, unblinking at the spot. “In the lit window?”
“Of course, the lit window. God, don’t tell me you can’t see it.”
“I can’t see it.” In Sully’s peripheral vision, Dez’s head swivelled, and Sully adjusted his gaze to meet his eye.
“How can you not see it? It’s right there.” Dez accentuated the final two words with an index finger jabbing twice in the direction of the lit window.
Sully continued to stare, willing himself to see what Dez had. No use, and he was pretty sure he understood why. “I only see them if they’ve died by homicide, remember?”
“It’s gone now, anyway. I don’t like this, man.”
Sully forced a smile. “Neither do I, but we’ve got what we’ve got. One foot in front of the other, okay? Let’s go inside. I’m freezing.”
Dez shook his head and finished leading them to the back door. “I don’t get it. How the hell do I manage to see it if you can’t? I don’t even see the dead. Not normally, anyway.”
“Maybe it wanted you to see it.”
“Doesn’t make me feel better.”
“Look at it this way. It’s lik
e the show where the boss changes places with an employee for the day. We’ll each get a better idea of what the other usually goes through.”
Dez grimaced. “Still doesn’t make me feel better.”
He eased up enough Sully could escape his immediate side and open the back door to let them in. A welcome rush of warm air greeted them. As Dez closed the door, Sully bent to take off his boots. Dez stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“Leave them on.”
“They’re covered in snow.”
“So what?” Dez asked. “If we need to make a quick getaway, I don’t want to be fighting with laces. Anyway, what do we care if we leave a mess behind? It’s her fault we’re stuck in this hell house for the night instead of over in the cottage where it’s comparatively safe. We don’t owe her anything. You sure as hell don’t owe her anything.”
Sully had to concede the point, although he made sure to give his boots a long and thorough wipe on the doormat before treading farther. What Dez had said made sense. They might need to get out of here in a hurry, and Sully hadn’t yet ruled out the idea of sleeping in the SUV with the engine and heater running as needed. If he was thinking it, no doubt Dez was too.
But for now, there was something else they needed to do.
“We should check the room.”
Dez turned disbelieving eyes on him. “What?”
“The third floor. We should check.” When Dez didn’t appear any more sold, Sully crossed his arms. “You were a police officer. You faced down worse than this.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“We need to make sure it’s not a living person. The back door was left unlocked. Could be someone got in.”
Dez mirrored Sully’s cross-armed stance. “You said you didn’t see what I did. Pretty sure that means whatever I saw wasn’t a living human.”
Sully regarded him another couple of seconds, then uncrossed his arms and set off for the entrance hall and the staircase leading up. “Still have to check. If it’s an intruder, we can’t risk Mrs. Carr stumbling across him.”
“I hate you.” Dez followed him anyway.
This time, upon reaching the second floor, Sully led them to the left and the staircase on that side of the hall. They’d barely gone three steps when Dez drew them to a halt. “You hear that?”
Sully listened. Dull thuds sounded from overhead, seemingly moving from right to left.
“Footsteps,” Sully said.
Without waiting for Dez’s agreement, he turned and sprinted for the stairs leading up. A light flashed on, and Sully looked back to see Dez had flicked on the hall light as he ran along behind.
Sully reached the closed door to the third-floor steps and yanked it open. He could still hear the noises, though vaguely, as if they’d moved farther away. The light switch for the stairs was beside him, and he debated whether to turn it on.
Dez’s hand landed on his shoulder. “One of us should stay down here and keep watch. If it was a living person I saw, he could beetle it down the opposite staircase the second he hears someone else up there.”
Sully nodded. “Okay. I’ll go up. You head back toward the main stairs and keep watch.”
“Maybe I should go up.”
Sully managed a tight grin. “If this thing isn’t an actual person, do you want to figure out how to deal with it?”
A point with which Dez wasn’t likely to argue. He grimaced. “I’ll watch the other stairs.”
Sully patted Dez on the chest and reached for the light switch. He stopped just before flicking it on, interrupted by a final hushed comment from Dez. “Call if you need me up there.”
Sully waited until Dez had moved toward the opposite end of the hall before flipping the next light switch.
The stairs lit up, and Sully thundered up them, boots pounding the boards. He’d decided against stealth, no point given his plan was to light the place up and flush out a potential intruder—human or not.
He stopped on the second-most top stair and centred himself. He felt it, the sensation of being watched, as if something had anticipated his arrival. As he turned the corner, leaving the enclosed staircase behind and putting the darkened hallway in front of him, Dez seemed very far away. The hall was swathed in silence, shadows having grown since he’d last been up here, each potentially concealing dangers.
His mind flashed back to the word used by Mrs. Carr: “Demon.” He still wasn’t sure he believed in such things, but he was experienced enough to know there were parts of the paranormal world he had yet to discover, parts he hoped never to see.
He couldn’t shake the feeling he was about to learn something he would never be able to unlearn.
With a breath, he went to work rebuilding his defences, putting up the wall he hoped would protect him. He had abilities beyond sight, knew he could control anything coming at him. But control came with a price. Use of that element of his gift opened up a dark part of himself, a part that had once nearly killed Dez. Sully would willingly take being bounced off every wall on this floor by a dark entity if it meant Dez stayed safe.
Didn’t mean he couldn’t try to protect himself. One more internal scan, the walls of his aura constructed as well as they could be, he reached for a light switch visible in the castoff glow from the stairwell. The shadows dissipated into light as the hall lit up before him, intimidating in its length. Doors stood closed to many of the rooms, concealing potential dangers everywhere.
As he edged forward, other words spoken by Mrs. Carr returned to him, her reference to the house being unbearable after his visits. His friend Marc had once described Sully’s aura as a beacon, summoning the dead to him, like a lighthouse to boats adrift in a thick fog. His whole life had been plagued by homicide victims, each needing help. Everywhere he went, they found him. And he knew his power was far greater than even that. If his light attracted ghosts in need of help, his darkness drew in dark.
He felt very exposed, laid bare to unseen eyes. He stopped, convincing himself he meant to listen for movement. Better than admitting to himself he was scared to take another step.
No sounds came to his ears. No more footsteps, no shifting. His eyes settled on the coatrack at the end of the hall on which the robe still hung. The robe wasn’t moving now, dangling limply off its hook.
An unsettling thought came to Sully. He’d read about tsunamis, how the ocean would first draw itself back and back, into the distance, like an in-breath into the deepest part of the lungs. Then, with a tremendous exhale, the water would surge forward with devastating force, destroying everything with the inability or ignorance to get out of the way.
That’s what was happening now.
The house was inhaling.
He glanced over his shoulder. The stairs were there, a few steps away if he ran. He returned his gaze to the hall in front of him and took a step back.
The light snapped off.
Sully’s stomach dropped. He spun on his heel, hand fumbling along the darkened wall for the light switch. He found the edges of the plate with frantic fingers and traced toward its centre for the switch. Locating it, he moved a thumb beneath, about to flip it up.
A cold, wet hand closed over his.
Sully yelped and jumped back, yanking his hand from the invisible fingers. His eyes had yet to readjust to the dark, but he knew he wouldn’t see anything anyway. He turned and ran for it, toward the stairs at the opposite end of the hall, where the robe hung. Halfway down the hall, he drew up short as a bar of light snapped across the floor from below a closed door.
The room with the open window, the one he and Dez had seen lit from below. It had been dark as he’d made his way down the hallway. Someone—something—had turned it back on.
The image Lilian had planted in his brain returned forcefully. She’d seen this, had experienced the same thing, turning his current ordeal into some sort of horrific déjà vu.
One unsettling difference, of course. Lilian was dead.
Had she been showing him the
moments leading to her death? If so, what lay in wait for him on the other side of the door?
Sully’s heart pounded out a mad rhythm, threatening to burst from his ribcage and make off back down the hall without him. A presence behind him forced him onward. Going back would mean running straight through whatever it was—if it let him.
The room was directly in front of him now, only a closed door separating him from the space behind. He was being compelled toward it, being pushed to go through it. It was the last thing he wanted to do and yet the exact thing he knew he’d have to do. This room was the centre of something. It’s unexplained odours, phantom lights and very essence were proof enough.
It felt like the epicentre of evil.
He held his breath, stretched a hand toward the knob.
And drew his fingers back. This wasn’t the time. Survival instinct bested psychic need. He knew if he entered something bad was going to happen.
He glanced to the right. The coatrack and the stairs beside it were within reach, just a short run. Easily done once he pulled himself away.
He took a step back.
The door fired open so hard it banged against the inner wall. Sully jumped, meant to step back and run as he called out for Dez. A force behind him, with all the power of a plough wind, shoved him forward.
Into the room.
One minute, he was staring in horror at the seemingly empty space. The next, the world around him changed.
It was daylight, and he recognized the sitting room downstairs. As was usual for him, the image came without sound, although he could see well enough to know where he was and who he was with.
Lowell Braddock.
He sat in one of the room’s plush chairs, head in hands, massaging his temples as if to ease away a tension headache. He turned to the window, then rose slowly, like his body weighed a ton.
Sully glanced out the window to see what had drawn Lowell’s attention. Immediately, he recognized his father’s SUV.
Flynn.
Sully tried to move for the door, but he was trapped in place. Lowell was at the front door now, and Flynn Braddock stormed in, face contorted in torment and barely controlled rage. Lowell turned, and a fake grin flashed.