by Krista Walsh
“So many nights I woke up screaming,” he said. His voice sounded tinny and it echoed in her ears, as though he spoke from the end of a long tunnel. Emmett looped his fingers around hers, and his skin was ice cold. “I remembered my nightmares. Real nightmares. Ones I had lived in the war. I woke up remembering how it felt to cling to life, seeing death just beyond the chasm, and knowing one more step would send me plunging into it. Every night I woke up to the shadows in my room. I couldn’t always make them out, but after I stopped screaming, I often saw a man outside my room. Old.”
“Yes, old,” another spirit jumped in. She looked to be around the same age as the first, with the same haggard appearance. Her hair was bound up in rags to produce perfect ringlets when she let them down, which now she never would. Her nightgown was high-necked and covered in lace. “He came when I screamed. He told me he was there to help. That he would make me feel better. But I never felt well when I saw him. Just sick.”
She hugged her arms close around her middle, as if whatever ailed her persisted after death.
As more spirits spoke, Daphne learned that they all had similar stories. Some described anger, others fear, some intense grief, but always they woke up screaming, and if there was anyone nearby, it was the old man. Daphne watched the wordless ghosts while the others spoke and saw the recognition in their eternal gazes. Some nodded, while others clasped their hands in front of their chests, begging her to understand, to hear, to help.
“Did any of you see what killed you?”
“Not us,” said the girl. “Whatever attacked us those nights didn’t kill us. We died from other things.”
Daphne looked from her to the spirits with their mouths glued shut and thought she understood. Emmett’s gaze never left the shimmering crowd, but she read the confusion in his knitted brow and narrowed eyes.
“All of you who are trapped in this hospital were attacked in the same way — likely by the same man or creature,” she said to the girl. “The ones with their mouths glued shut are the people this man killed?”
The spirits nodded, and Daphne frowned. Why some and not the others?
“Those of you who weren’t killed by this creature, how did you die?” She watched them closely to make sure she hadn’t offended them with her question, but they stepped forward, eager to speak.
“I died of typhus,” said a little girl with pigtails and ruffles on her nightgown.
“A gunshot got me first,” said the soldier with a pained smile. “Didn’t kill me right away, but infection set in and they couldn’t fight it back.”
Daphne rubbed her brow, allowing the pieces of the puzzle to settle in the confused mess of her thoughts. “What about the others? How did the creature kill them?”
As one, they shook their heads.
“We never saw,” said a young boy with a fair-haired bowl cut. His striped pajamas looked a size too big for him, as though they’d been lent to him by an older brother.
“But it was always the same,” the little girl said. “They would start laughing. Always laughing first. And then they got angry.”
The older girl nodded. “I heard them raging at night, every couple of months. It sounded like madness. I felt the same when it came for me. Like I was losing my mind.”
The young soldier’s mouth tugged down at the corners. “Only the healthy ones died.”
So many stood before her — at least twenty in the room, but floating limbs passed through the wall from other spirits that must have crowded the room behind them. She guessed more stood out in the hallway as well. So many victims across so many decades, and yet they all saw the same thing.
How is this possible? Daphne held the thought in her mind, not wanting to express her incredulity to those who had so willingly put their faith in her.
“He still comes around, that old man,” said the little girl with the pigtails. She clung to the hand of the older girl.
“He whistles as he walks,” the boy added, and Daphne’s blood went cold as Emmett squeezed her hand. “He wants to make sure we hear him. That we know he’s still around.”
In front of the crowd, Mary Ruth reappeared. As though strengthened by her brothers and sisters in death, the fear she’d shown before had vanished. She stood before them, her arms at her sides, her hands curled into fists against the folds of her nightdress.
Daphne looked to Mary Ruth, and the woman nodded. “I remember now. He was at the house the night I died. Old and worn, but always around. He told me he would help me. That he would make it all better. That night, I died.”
Daphne’s mind reeled, and she pressed her hand against the cold floor to keep from losing her balance.
Mary Ruth had died in 1893, before the house was converted into a hospital, so how could the same man have been here a few weeks ago, whistling past Emmett’s room?
“Who is he?” Daphne asked. “Did you know his name?”
“No,” said Mary Ruth, and her brow furrowed. “He said he was there to help, but I never understood how he thought he could help me. I’d seen him around the house, but he was only there to look after the estate. He was the old caretaker.”
12
“What was that? What just happened?” Emmett slid his hands over his shaved hair and marched down the front steps toward Daphne’s car without looking back at the house.
“We got some answers,” Daphne replied, although she knew that wasn’t what he meant.
“Answers from what? You saw them right? Were all those ghosts really there? Or did I just hallucinate that whole thing and it’s all in my head? Shit!”
His questions yanked Daphne out of her own musings, and she turned to him. “Breathe, Emmett. I need you to breathe.”
She rested her hands on Emmett’s shoulders and stared at him until he calmed down enough to meet her gaze. He shifted his weight on his feet and glanced back toward the hospital, as though expecting the ghosts to follow them outside.
“They all died here?” He asked the question with the wonder of someone seeing the horrors of the world for the first time.
Daphne shrugged. “So they say.” She let him go and leaned against her car, staring up at the dark hospital windows. If anyone saw the lights flickering earlier, they hadn’t come out of their homes to see what was going on. If they walked by now, all they would see was two people standing outside an abandoned building.
Probably think we’re gawking over the murder, Daphne thought. And maybe they weren’t far off.
Harold had done this to the ghosts? The question spun through her thoughts and she worked to place this revelation against the man who had filled her in on Peony House’s history. She had searched him for magic and he’d had none. She’d been so sure of it. But no human man could live over a hundred years without looking over eighty. No human could have killed so many people in a way that left the police scratching their heads — not only over who had done it, but what exactly had been done.
A chill tugged the skin between Daphne’s shoulders, but she ignored it, brushing her hair out of her face.
“How are you so calm about this?” Emmett asked, relaxing enough to lean beside her, though his fingers tapped on the car door in a nervous rhythm.
Daphne glanced at him sidelong, debating how honest she could be with him. She doubted it would make him feel any better to learn that she was only a few questions shy of freaking out herself. After a moment, she tilted her head back to stare at the swirl of clouds passing over the half moon.
“Experience,” she said at last. “I wouldn’t say that was the least stressful encounter I’ve ever had, but I’ve been in the middle of things more times than I can count.”
Away from the spirits, Emmett pulled the pack of cigarettes and lighter from his pocket. He lit one and inhaled with the appreciation of a man taking his first breath of fresh air after being underwater. The sight awoke a long-buried craving in Daphne, but she swallowed it down.
After blowing out a trail of smoke, he said, “How does th
e news not hear about this? Why aren’t ghost-hunting shows flocking here?”
“They would be if they knew about it. I keep my world a secret, and so does everyone else who knows it’s real. The smart ones, anyway. Fortunately, the stupid ones aren’t believed by too many people.”
He took another puff of his cigarette and let it out as a deep sigh. Then he turned to her, still fidgeting. “Jack wasn’t there. Why not?”
A dozen theories from her training years buzzed through her shaken mind, but Emmett’s grief pushed her to say only, “I’m not sure. Mary Ruth told me that when she first died, her spirit body was too new to communicate with the man who had unstitched her mouth. Jack might have been there, unseen. I’m sure he knows you’re trying to help.”
Something she’d just said nagged at her, but she didn’t have the time to narrow down what it was before Emmett asked, “So, who’s this caretaker they talked about? You know him?”
She thought about Harold Cly and how harmless the old man had appeared. Curmudgeonly on the surface, with a gooey center underneath. Now it turned out that beneath the gooey center might lie a poisonous pit. She counted herself lucky she hadn’t pushed him hard enough to induce him to reveal it.
Parts of the story he’d dropped into their conversations made more sense to her now — his emphasis that much of what he knew came only from history stories he’d heard about Peony House; his delay in giving his date of birth — and she didn’t want to wait to call him out on it.
“Yeah,” she said. “I talked to him about the story. He seemed…nice.”
The word sounded empty after what she’d learned.
“What are you going to do if it’s him?” Emmett asked. His gaze followed her as she went around the front of the car. “Are you going to kill him?”
The question struck Daphne with surprise, and her hand lingered on the door handle. “I hope not. I just want to find out what he knows. Get him to explain how he could have been at the bedsides of victims across a hundred years. See if he has anything to do with Crispy. If he’s the man who hurt these people, I’ll go to the police.” Hunter’s face, flushed with anger, flashed before her eyes, and her stomach twisted at the thought of how that conversation would go. “Although I’ll need some time to figure out what to tell them. I don’t think they’ll have much luck arresting him based on the stories of ghosts and a bunch of covered-up cold cases.”
“But you’ll figure out a story?”
Daphne flashed him a grin. “I’m a journalist. I can always figure out a story.”
As she moved to get into her car, she spotted the sweep of a light beam shining from a second-story window, right where Denise had claimed to see it on the first night Daphne had visited.
“Is that the ghosts?” Emmett asked, taking a step back.
Daphne watched the pattern of light through the window, and the tension in her shoulders eased. “No, that’s a flashlight. There’s someone in there.”
“Then shouldn’t we get out of here? What’s if it’s the police?”
Daphne thought about how bad it would look if she went back in to find Hunter walking the hallways — or, even worse, Meg — but she couldn’t pass up the chance that it was someone else. Like maybe Charles returning to the scene of the crime.
She summoned her magic into her hands, and the heat pulsed in her veins, happily stretching inside her. Daphne felt uncomfortable with how easily the power came to her, as immediate as it had been in her criminal days. For a heartbeat, she was the woman she’d been before her life changed — wanting more, wanting all of it.
She ground her teeth and took control, clenching her fists at her sides. She was greater than her magic. It would not overwhelm her again.
The dirt around her feet swirled into the air with the rising wind and circled around her arms. Emmett stepped away from the car, away from her, and watched her in wide-eyed wonder, his lips moving soundlessly.
“Are you going to stay out here?” she asked.
He looked from the car to the hospital to her, and in the reflection in the car window she saw a glimpse of herself. The magic had suffused her body with enough strength that her hair rose around her head, sticking out in all directions. Her eyes had taken on a soft yellow glow, the same color that tinged the palms of her hands. She looked dangerous.
She would also give herself away to whoever was inside. Struggling with her desire to hold on to a level of magic that would have drowned a lesser sorceress, she tamped it down. The magic cooled in her veins and the glow around her faded. The only sign now that she was anything more than human was the clumps of dirt swirling around her hands.
She let Emmett decide for himself what he’d do and started back to the front door. The crunching gravel behind her told her he’d chosen to come with her.
Once more they crossed the lobby and climbed the stairs. The dirt hovering around Daphne’s arms melded into clods, good-sized pellets if she needed to hurl them at something.
The ghosts had gone silent.
She rounded the last corner of the bend and the figure with the flashlight passed in front of a window. The light bounced off the glass to reveal the face of Laura Ancowitz.
Daphne dropped her magic, and Laura turned around with a jump, her flashlight beam directed at Daphne’s chest.
“Oh!” Laura exclaimed, flinging her arm up as if to protect herself. Then she stopped and let her hand fall to her side. “Miss Heartstone, you startled me. Although I thought you might be here — I saw your car out front. Are you still poking around for clues?”
Daphne relaxed, certain that Laura hadn’t seen the flying dirt before she’d turned around. “I admit I did come to snoop a bit to see if the police left anything behind. What brings you here?”
Laura smiled. “I often drop by when I’m in the area. It brings back such good memories for me.”
So soon after her encounter with the ghosts, Daphne’s suspicions were awakened by Laura’s presence. She stretched out her magic to see if anything in Laura responded, but the only energy that came back to her was human.
Sometimes coincidences do happen, Daph, she told herself, and relaxed again.
Laura brushed a stray lock of ash-blond hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear. The rest of her hair was pulled back with a pink ribbon, and her expensive beige raincoat, black slacks, and blue cashmere sweater looked out of place next to the decaying walls of Peony House.
“I like to walk the empty hallways at night,” she explained. “During the day, you can see all the flaws and the damage that time and the elements have done, but at night it’s all hidden. It makes it easier for me to see what this place could be like if I finally convinced Charles to let me have my way. Peony House could be so great again.”
Her eyes glazed over as if she were picturing it, then she gave herself a shake and smiled. “I saw your car and was about to head downstairs to speak with you. I thought it might be a good chance to see if you’ve learned anything new.” Her face scrunched up with amused regret. “I’m afraid I might have gotten you in trouble with a handsome detective. He came to speak with me, and I mentioned you’d stopped by. He didn’t seem overly pleased by the fact. I didn’t mean to give you away.”
Daphne waved her hand in dismissal, not wanting to think about her confrontation with Hunter. “Don’t worry about it. He probably knew anyway. He’s got a nose like a bloodhound.” She saw Laura’s attention shift to Emmett and gestured her hand toward him. “I’m being rude. Laura, this is Emmett. He’s…a friend.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Emmett.” She grinned and reached into her purse. “You look like you could use something to eat.”
“I —” he started, but shut up when he saw the baggie of scones. “Thanks!”
Daphne rolled her eyes and once again turned it down when Laura offered her one as well.
“I haven’t learned much,” she said, “but I do have a few more questions for you if you have time.”
“Of
course,” said Laura. “Why don’t we take a seat?”
She gestured to the stairs, and they all found a place — Emmett on the top step looking down, Laura leaning against the wall, and Daphne with her back against the banister. She felt like a student playing truant in high school, hiding on the back stairs to smoke between classes.
Emmett broke off a piece of the strawberry-vanilla scone and tipped the crumbling pastry into his mouth. A moan of pleasure escaped his throat, and Daphne bit down on her envy.
It would be unprofessional, she told herself, and tried to believe it.
Laura closed her eyes and tilted her head back as if she were listening to the silence. In a soft voice full of memories, she said, “When I was a little girl, I thought I heard voices in the hallways and the empty rooms here. I know now that was silly, but I think it’s why I formed such a connection with the estate. It was like having hundreds of imaginary friends, all playing where I played. An eternal game of hide and seek. Sometimes I still think I can hear them.” She opened her eyes and chuckled. “I’m sure it was just echoes through the pipes or something, but a child’s imagination knows no bounds.” She slapped her palms on her knees. “But enough of my nostalgia. You say you have more questions?”
Daphne nodded. “This might sound strange, but I was wondering about your brother. I went to speak with him again after I saw you — I needed to return some information he’d given me — and when I mentioned the history of Peony House, he seemed to get very defensive. According to the public records, there was a high number of unexplained deaths here. Do you know anything about them or why they would bother Charles so much?”
Laura’s gaze filled with sympathy at the mention of the deaths, but at Daphne’s question, she offered a short laugh. “I’m sure it’s because Charles hates everything to do with this hospital. This is the first I’m hearing about mysterious deaths, but if he knew about them, he probably sees them as another reason to forget Peony House ever existed. Every problem, every frustration around the estate is another thorn in his side. Did you know he’s trying to get this place torn down?” Her brow knitted in anger, and she balled her fists in her lap. “I’m working on getting Peony House named a heritage site, and can only hope the city council agrees with me.”