by Jane Godman
Silence stretched between them, interrupted only by the patter of rain gently hitting the ground and the faint, relentless hush of waves hitting the shore.
“My mother died back in April,” he finally said, voice so low she wasn’t sure she’d heard him at all. “Cancer. She’d been sick a long time, but by April she’d been at the end. Allen, my stepfather, and I had been relieving each other at the hospital so she wouldn’t be alone when it happened.”
His throat jumped, and Carly’s chest tightened. “You don’t have to tell me if it’s too difficult.”
He looked up and fixed his dark eyes on her face. “By then, between the morphine and the disease she wasn’t really there. Do you know what I mean?”
She nodded. There were stages of death and in those final stages a person’s consciousness ebbed in and out, the gaps between growing larger and larger until there was only the mechanical body functions—heart beating, lungs drawing breath—until the body shut down, too.
“Anyway, it was late and I had dosed off, but I woke up because she was touching my arm and she was trying to talk, asking me not to go. I thought she was trying to tell me she didn’t want to be alone, that she was afraid, but then she said, ‘They’ll devour you.’”
A shiver scurried up Carly’s spine. “Was it her voice on the EVP?”
He shook his head. “It threw me because it’s a woman, and those words were so close to what she’d said, but it wasn’t her. It was the last thing she ever said to me. She slipped back out and she was gone before morning. Do you think it’s a coincidence?”
“If it is, it’s pretty bloody spectacular.” But what did it mean? She didn’t have a clue. “Do you still want us to go?”
“Can you tell me what the hell is in this house?”
“Not until I’ve investigated.”
“I’ve seen things here, heard things.”
She smiled. “I know. Will you tell me?”
“Yeah,” he nodded, and pushed away from the wall. “I’ll tell you.”
Chapter Six
What in the hell was he doing? He followed Carly back to the study. If he could have made a bigger ass of himself, he didn’t know how. He’d heard that voice, those words, and the air sucked from his lungs. He couldn’t breathe. Slick cold still crept over his skin every time he played the words in his head.
They walked back into the study and Andy looked up from the computer. His gaze bounced between him and Carly, while he waited for an explanation.
“The rain’s let up,” Carly said. “You might as well start setting up at The Devil’s Eye, while I ask Declan the preliminary questions.”
“Might as well,” Andy agreed, getting up from his chair.
“We’ll meet you there in about a half hour, I’d say.”
Once Andy had gone, he sat in the chair behind the desk. “What did you want to ask me? Let’s get this over with.”
She sat opposite him, gently arched brows lifting, that teasing smile pulling at her full lips. “This isn’t a trip to the dentist, you know? It’s not going to be half as terrible as you think.”
He’d rather be getting a root canal, actually. “What do you want to know?”
She dug a pen and notepad from her bag. “I need to ask you some questions about what you know of Stonecliff’s history. Don’t look so horrified. I promise I won’t shove sharp things under your fingernails to make you talk. This will all be virtually painless.”
“If you say so,” he muttered. A part of him still couldn’t believe he’d agreed to do this.
Carly flashed her mono-dimpled smile and tapped the tip of her pen on the paper. “How long have you been here at Stonecliff?”
“A little more than a week.”
She nodded and made a note on the paper. “Did you know about the house’s history before you arrived?”
“The murders, you mean?” he asked, with a frown. When would she ask about the ghosts?
She looked up from the paper and shrugged. “Among other things.”
“I didn’t know anything about the house, except that it belonged to my father and he was dead.”
She frowned, a faint line forming between her delicately arched brows. “What was your relationship with your father before his death?”
“Why do you need to know that?”
A pink flush crept into her cheeks and she pushed her hair back from her face. “I guess I don’t, really. I’m trying to establish how much you knew about the estate before you experienced phenomena, and the scenario you’re describing sounds very similar to what your sister, Brynn, went through.”
The sister who’d turned up to milk a dying man out of whatever she could get her hands on. “I doubt it.”
“Really, Brynn was sent away when she was a toddler, guardianship granted to her maternal grandparents in the States. They let her believe both her parents had died when in reality her mother hadn’t died until she was eleven, and you know when your father died. She only found out the truth this past spring when Eleri contacted her.”
He frowned. Not quite the way Warlow had described it. “I knew about my father.”
“You never wanted to meet him?”
He shook his head. “Nope.”
“Why not?”
No way he’d admit to Carly he and his mother had hidden from the man for the bulk of his childhood. That he’d grown up with an underlying fear of what would happen if the man ever found them.
“My mother left him before I was born. He relinquished his rights when she remarried. I have a good relationship with my stepfather. I didn’t feel I was missing out. What does any of this have to do with your investigation?”
She shrugged. “I’m just being nosy now.”
He snorted in spite of himself. “At least you admit it.”
“You never saw the estate, then, before you arrived?”
He shook. “The lawyer told me I had inherited a house on the coast, but didn’t tell me anything else. Like I might have trouble selling it because of the people murdered here for twenty years.”
She scribbled something on the paper. “When did you find out?”
“The first time I spoke to the real estate agent. She told me we could have trouble selling because of the house’s history. When I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, she filled me in.”
“Did you have that conversation before or after your first strange experience at Stonecliff?” she asked, without looking up from her notepad.
“After.”
She lifted her steely gaze to his, her expression intent. “When did you first experience something unusual?”
“My first night here.” His heart rate kicked up. “I woke and there was a man—or I thought he was a man at first—standing at the end of my bed. I couldn’t see anything except his outline, but he looked like he was wearing a long coat and an old fedora. He was like a shadow in the dark, which doesn’t make sense. You need light to cast a shadow. Then I saw two red eyes, and I knew it wasn’t a man at all.”
Carly’s pen flew over the notepad, her gaze flickering to his face as she wrote. “Did you notice any sounds or smells?”
“There was a weird gurgling like it was struggling to breathe, and it stunk, like the bog, but stronger.”
Her head snapped up. “Do you mean The Devil’s Eye?”
“Yeah.” The glint in her silver eyes left him uneasy.
“Did you make that connection just now?”
“I noticed it the first time I saw The Devil’s Eye.”
“Before or after you spoke to the estate agent?”
“Before.”
“Huh.” She dropped her gaze to the pad and wrote quickly. “Interesting.”
“Why’s that?”
“Other witnesses have described a smell similar to what you described, but none drew a comparison to The Devil’s Eye—where the murders took place. It’s an interesting connection, that’s all. What happened next?”
“Nothing. I tu
rned on the light and it disappeared. I thought I had dreamed the whole thing.”
“When did you begin to suspect it wasn’t a dream?”
“I had nearly the exact same experience the following night.”
Her brows lifted. “And the night after that?”
Heat stole into his face. “I’ve been sleeping with the lights on ever since.”
Her mouth twitched. “I don’t blame you. Have you seen it again since then?”
“I’m not sure,” he admitted, frowning. “Two nights ago, I was in the kitchen and heard scratching at the back door. Mrs. Voyle had just left and I worried she’d fallen or something, but she’d already gone.”
“You opened the door to investigate?” Carly’s attention remained on her notes.
“Sort of.” Declan reached back and scratched the top of his head. This all sounded crazy. “I guess Mrs. Voyle hadn’t closed the door properly when she left, because when I was about to grab the doorknob, the wind must have kicked up and blown the door open. There was no one outside. I don’t know what the scratching had been, but I could see those glowing eyes watching from the trees. And it smelled like campfire this time, faint but there.”
“Could someone nearby have been burning leaves or something?”
“Maybe, but I smelled it again in my bathroom yesterday morning.”
Carly’s head jerked up, gaze narrowing. “The smell of fire in your bathroom?”
He nodded, a chill dancing up his spine just remembering the experience. A part of him didn’t want to tell her the rest. He wanted to forget the whole thing, pretend it never happened. Yet this was the experience he wanted clarified. As disturbing as the shadow man and his glowing eyes had been, the burned woman had turned his soul cold with terror.
He launched into the story before he could change his mind. When he finished, Carly stared at him with wide eyes, her hand on the page still. He shifted in his seat, rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. Shit, he must sound like an absolute lunatic.
He stood and shoved both hands through his hair. “Isn’t this where you tell me about everyone else who’s seen this woman?”
Carly blinked as if he’d snapped her out of a trance. “Um…right…it’s just…” She cleared her throat. Hell, had his story shaken her? That didn’t bode well. “No one I interviewed mentioned fire smells or a burned woman.”
“Great. What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. While no one reported a similar experience, the phenomena could tie in to the estate’s history.”
“There was a fire here?”
“Not here in this house.” She gestured to the floor. “But at the Worthing house.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She frowned. “You haven’t seen the ruins on the far side of The Devil’s Eye?”
“Warlow said there was nothing there, just more forest.” Anger gathered inside him like a slow-building storm. The bastard had lied.
“The ruins of the original house are there. Not that there’s much left, just the foundation stones. There’s a second driveway, too. It’s where police believe the murderers were bringing in their victims without anyone at Stonecliff seeing.”
“What happened to the house?”
“Jonas Worthing owned the property before your great-great uncle purchased the land. He had built a large house farther in the woods, on the far side of The Devil’s Eye. As the story goes, his eldest daughter went mad and set fire to the house one night. The whole family and all their servants burned to death.”
A slow nausea rolled through him. Was this the woman he’d seen? Maybe Jonas Worthing’s wife, or one of the servants, or—God forbid—the man’s crazy daughter herself.
“I can’t believe Warlow didn’t tell me about all of this.” What else was the man keeping from him?
* * *
Apprehension wrapped around Declan like a fist the moment he caught sight of The Devil’s Eye. The rain had stopped, the slate clouds giving way to dull gray. Long grass at the water’s edge bowed beneath the wet. The woods felt unnaturally quiet. No birds flitting between the trees, no small animals darting through the underbrush, just cold wind rattling the bare branches.
Invisible pressure bore into Declan’s back.. The feeling that something was watching them from the trees, waiting, settled over him.
Andy had been busy since he’d left them. He’d placed several small folding tables at various points around the bog. Meters he didn’t recognize set up on some, recording devices on others. Two video cameras on tripods had been positioned on either side of The Devil’s Eye.
“Take these,” Carly said, handing him a notepad like hers and a pen. “I want you to record everything you’re experiencing. Anything you see, smell, hear, even what you’re feeling. Nothing is insignificant. Do you have a watch?”
“Just my phone.” He patted his coat pocket.
“That should be good enough. Make note of the time if you experience something. Also, if you see or hear something, try not to react. I know that might be difficult, but it’s important that your experiences don’t influence ours.”
He nodded and sat in one of the folding lawn chairs Andy had set up, more than a little amazed by Carly’s methodical efficiency. How had he ever thought this woman was a flake?
She sat in the chair next to him, Andy opposite.
“So now what?”
A faint smile pulled at her mouth. “We wait.”
“I thought you would have done this sort of thing at night,” he said.
“Too hard to see. I never understand these ghost shows on television that insist on doing everything in the dark.”
“Atmosphere,” Andy muttered.
“I don’t know how they’re not tripping all over each other,” Carly said wryly. She turned to Declan. “Unless you’re investigating a subject that is dependent on light and dark, there really is no need for it to be dark. Here, for instance, most experiences took place in the day, so it would make sense to investigate during the day. Now, when we experiment with your shadow man, that will be something else, entirely.”
A jolt coursed through Declan and he stiffened in his seat. “It’s not my shadow man.”
“Of course. I’m sorry.”
Bad enough to hear his mother’s last words from her deathbed spoken by some disembodied voice. It had left him feeling targeted, as though whatever was happening at Stonecliff was not merely ghostly activity, but activity settled on him. The idea made his skin crawl. Maybe he should just get out of here. Hop in that battered Land Rover and keep driving until he hit the airport.
He glanced at Carly, and leaving didn’t hold quiet the same appeal. Probably in part because he kept noticing the way her jeans hugged the gentle curve of her ass and those long legs that went on forever. Or the way her hair still looked like warm caramel even in the low light.
She wasn’t his usual type. Too slender and willowy. He normally liked women a little curvier. But there was something about those soft smiles, that single-minded focus while she worked… He liked her.
“I forgot to bring crisps.” Andy sighed.
“I’ve a packet in my bag. Help yourself,” Carly told him without looking up from whatever she was writing.
Andy stood and walked over to a large black duffel bag sitting at the edge of the trees.
“Can I ask you something?” Declan said.
Carly looked up from her notes. “Go ahead.”
“Was it the murders that made you want to investigate here?”
“Not specifically,” she said carefully. “Stonecliff came to my attention this past winter. Reece—your sister Brynn’s fiancé—worked here for a short time in February and March. He and Brynn saw the shadow man, and Reece had contacted me hoping I could shed some light on what he was dealing with.”
A strange flicker lit in his chest that felt all too close to jealousy. “How do you know him? Is he into this ghost stuff, too?”
&n
bsp; She chuckled. “I actually met Reece years ago when I was an undergrad and involved in a study on inherited psi phenomena. He and his uncle were part of the test group.”
Declan cocked a brow. “He’d inherited psi phenomena?”
“As best I can tell, absolutely. He’s a natural medium. He can communicate with the dead.”
Bullshit. And this was the guy his sister was with? Some con artist?
Not your sister. Brynn and Eleri are nothing to you. It doesn’t matter who they date, live with or marry.
“You look…annoyed.”
“I’m fine. Please continue telling me how Reece needs you to tell him what the shadow man is—even though he can apparently talk to ghosts.”
She shot him a pointed glare. “Shadow people are not spirits in the traditional sense.”
He frowned. “So what are they?”
“No one knows for certain. There are only theories. Shadow people are well documented for inducing strong feelings of fear—though, reportedly they don’t seem to interact much except to watch the people they come into contact with. Also, there are reports from all over the world, describing the man you saw.”
He frowned. “So this same ghost haunts people all over the word?”
“It’s not a ghost. There are three prominent theories. The first is demonic, based on the fear they generate, the second, an inter-dimensional traveler, and third, a manifestation of evil.”
“Tell me you don’t believe we’re dealing with an inter-dimensional traveler,” he said, only half joking.
“Ha.” Andy flopped back into the chair with a bag of potato chips. “With Carly, it’s all about evil. Hasn’t she explained her theory to you yet?”
She paled, her gaze darting to Andy before returning to Declan.
“Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like this?”
“It’s really not that big a deal,” she said with a shrug. “I explained to you about the unusually high levels of GMFs at the location. So if we factor that in with the history of the estate—two separate murder sprees, series of deaths, strange phenomena, shadow people, which are said to be a manifestation of evil—could a location with such high magnetic energy absorb from the evil acts committed and in turn project that energy, drawing more to it?”