by K. F. Breene
A dull collection of thunks announced that Scarlet was attempting to retrieve the flashlight. She was breathing heavily, and Braiden’s arms tightened just a bit more, his fingertips digging into my back.
“Cliff,” she croaked before clearing her throat. “It’s Cliff. It looks like—” She gagged. “Something hit him on the head, but…I don’t see the weapon…”
The beam of light slid over a four-poster bed with a little bench at its base. A bare table sat in the corner, with three chairs pushed in around it. Next, the light swept the far side of the room, traveling along the ground until it caught the edge of a doorframe. A double door, both doors standing open, led to another room, sprinkled with a little more natural light. A small couch sat near what was probably a window, though it obviously didn’t have direct access to the moonlight. A chair sat opposite it, with a little table between them. There might’ve been another chair facing the couch, but Scarlet didn’t investigate further.
She slid the light along the ground back toward us, searching for the murder weapon. As she did so, I noticed a familiar theme in the room: masculine. Bold colors, men’s items on the surfaces, a pair of men’s slippers at the end of the bed.
“Is this one of the husband’s rooms?” I asked quietly, each sweep of the flashlight confirming my suspicion.
Scarlet slowed for just a moment, finding a razor and gentleman’s comb near the washbasin.
“That is definitely odd, having all this set up for someone that died.” She shook her head and ripped the beam of the flashlight back to the ground. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Maybe the person took the weapon with him, like the knife thrower,” Braiden murmured.
“Maybe. I don’t see it. But it would be hard to spot it without proper light.” Scarlet rubbed the side of her horrorstruck face. Still, if I knew her, she was clinging to logic—whatever logic was possible in this place—so as not to derail into a state of complete panic. I was fighting that same battle.
“We should get going.” I rested my forehead on Braiden’s chest and willed myself to step away. “We need to keep moving.”
“Ella…” Scarlet’s voice wavered and Braiden’s body went rigid.
We’d clearly stayed in one place too long.
Scarlet’s shaking light illuminated a spot next to the couch in the other room. A burly man with giant forearms and squat legs spread wide for balance stood with a gun in his hand.
“What are the chances that the gun doesn’t work?” I asked, dread flowering.
“That’s the way out.” Scarlet was losing her fight with panic. “It’s the only way out.”
“It’s not the only way.” Braiden pushed me away from him and grabbed my hand. He leapt over Cliff’s body, forcing me to follow. Scarlet hurried behind us, racing for the lesser of two evils—the door we’d come through.
A blast shook my bones and made me clench my teeth. I barely noticed something smacking the wall to our right, probably the bullet.
I staggered into the back of Braiden, who had stopped in his tracks.
“The gun works,” Scarlet said in a high-pitched voice. “The gun works. Go through. Go through. Go through!”
“I can’t! It’s a secret door from this side. I can’t find—”
“Move.” Scarlet shoved me out of the way. “Very few people get creative with secret doors. You know how to open a few, you know how to open them all.”
“How do you know how to open a few?” Braiden got out of the way, his gaze swinging to the opened double doors. “Crap.”
I swung around to look. Dim light flickered from the outer room. The room we were in was still dark, but now a fresh vase of flowers adorned the little table in the corner, and little plates with fresh bread dabbed with butter sat in front of each of the seats.
Despite the situation, my stomach growled and my mouth started salivating.
The man in the door took a drunken step in our direction, his gun hand swaying with his body.
“She has a secret cubby in her room,” I said to Braiden through numb lips, shifting from side to side, waiting for that man to stop and take aim. “Ever since she found it, she’s been slightly obsessed with secret doors.”
“You would be surprised how many historic houses have them. Especially the families that had a keen interest in alcohol.” Scarlet felt around beside a gaudy picture frame.
“Why alcohol?” Braiden’s hand covered my shoulder and he held on a little too tightly as the man stepped farther into the room. The man jerked a little, and I realized he’d burped.
“Whach you doin’ herr, you filthy…” His heavily slurred words trailed away and he wiped his face with the forearm of his gun clutching hand. “You bitch. Li-ar! I knrrow.” He punctuated his words with a jab of the gun. “I know. You dunthink I know? I do.”
“Keep him talking. I feel the cracks. I know where the door is. I just need…” Scarlet bent, running her hands along the bottom.
“It wasn’t me,” I blurted, because I wasn’t very good at improvisation.
The man leaned back, then aggressively tilted forward. “No?” He turned the gun toward Braiden, who flinched. “Then who irz dat, huh? Who irsss that?” He swayed backward. “I’ll tell you who—” His burp turned into a groan. “I’ll-tell-you-who.” He swung the gun up. “A dead man.”
“Hurry, Scarlet.” I stepped in front of Braiden, waving my hands in front of me. “I can explain. It was my sister, see. My sister. She has done me wrong. All wrong.”
The man swayed to one side, and strangely, the gun swayed in the opposite direction. He opened his eyes wider, then closed one eye to study me.
“Yer sis—ter? Urrrugh.” He rubbed his chest with the gun.
“Yeah. Yes.” I wiped at the sweat running down my face, scoping out the room and trying to plot a path I could use to sprint past him. I’d have to leap over shapes I could barely see, which I wasn’t desperate to try. Scarlet would undoubtedly fall if I didn’t. Then this guy, drunk or no, would have a clear, close-up shot. “She’s my twin.” At this point I was just babbling the first thing that came to mind. “She’s my twin, and this is her boyfriend. He’s visiting, but she is gone, so I have to get him some…milk.”
“What in the world?” I heard Scarlet mutter, and I couldn’t tell if she was reacting to my nonsensical story or some quirk of the secret door.
“Twin?” the man said, staggering a step closer to keep his balance. “I ain’t no—met no twin.”
“Sure you have. You have. Remember? That one night, when you were drinking?” I drew circles in the air with my finger, half hoping he’d try to follow the motion with his eyes and fall down.
“But sherr-was in o-ur bed.” He shook the gun at me. “Our bed. You were. You were! With him!” He punched off a wild shot, and the sound of the blast weakened my knees. My stomach swam.
I would’ve dropped like lead but for Braiden catching me under the arms and pulling me close. “Now or never, Scarlet,” Braiden said, bracing himself to move.
The man swayed, staggered, and hefted the gun again. “You lyin’, cheatin’—”
“Now!” Scarlet pulled the door open and burst through it into the lit space beyond. Braiden and I were right behind her. A metal click sounded behind us, followed by a slew of mumbled swears. For some reason, the ghost man’s revolver only had two bullets in it. The logic of this place was…well, it certainly wasn’t logical, but this once it had worked in our favor.
Count my lucky stars.
Braiden had shoved the door closed after I’d gone through it, and we tore down the hallway, quickly passing the door used by the Charming Man, thankfully closed, and moving on to the kid-sized one. Scarlet grabbed the handle, turned, and pushed it open. She scampered through it without a sound.
The room inside was dark, though I now knew better than to assume that meant it was empty. I clicked on my flashlight, adding its beam to Scarlet’s. An old-fashioned crib sat in the corner with a rotted mobile h
anging over it. A baby stroller sat at the other end of the room and a rocking chair stood empty in another corner. Clearly it was intended as a nursery, but only for one child. A baby.
“Isn’t the whole point of the story that she never had a kid?” I asked as we hurried to the door. A huge solarium greeted us, three times the size of the one we’d seen before. The other one had to be on the opposite side of the house, though my sense of direction was completely skewed. This time, though, the opening didn’t extend from the roof level to the bottom level. Here there was glass sectioning off the second floor from those above and below, the panes poised at different angles that caught and threw the moonlight.
“She couldn’t have,” Scarlet said, glancing back before nodding, apparently checking to make sure Braiden had followed us. “If they searched this house, there’s no way they would’ve missed a child. But she tried for a long time. She probably set up the nursery in the hopes it would happen.” Scarlet pointed down the way at an open door at the end of the corridor. “That’s where we just were. So that…” There was no door between the far room and the one nursery. Just wall. There had been three doors in the tunnel, and there were two here.
I shivered and hurried away from it. “Let’s just go the opposite direction and hope that dark-haired guy stays put. He seemed harmless, which probably means he’s the most dangerous thing in this mansion.”
“I bet he’s the third husband.” Scarlet hazarded another backward glance as we worked around the solarium. “He died, right? I’m hazy on which did what. I didn’t get that far into my research.”
“It’s said that he disappeared. They didn’t see him when they searched the house, and the Old Woman always said he was traveling. They eventually came to the conclusion that the Old Woman killed him.” I looked down a softly lit hallway. Gentle music was playing from one of the rooms at the end. “At least, that’s the story I’ve always heard. I’ve never looked it up or anything.”
“Well, I guess we know where he could’ve hidden,” Braiden said.
Scarlet clicked off her flashlight, and I followed suit. We crept down the hall, looking in all directions. We passed a large sunroom outfitted with chairs, tables, and couches. If it hadn’t been part of a haunted house, it might have been a lovely place to spend the day. Through a door beyond was a collection of pots placed as if they’d once contained plants. Like in the sunroom, the ceiling was glass.
“She seemed to like light and plant life,” Braiden murmured. “That doesn’t speak of someone who kills children.”
“Sociopath, maybe,” Scarlet said.
A soft glow from an open doorway brightened the floor ahead. This was the source of the tranquil music. If this had been any other situation, in any other house, I would’ve loved to wander into that space and take a load off. To sink into a soft chair with a world-weary sigh and accept a warm drink.
Getting closer, I could see shelves of books through the large and stately sliding double doors. It was the library. It had to be. I would have given anything in the world to check out a library in a house like this. I had no doubt the volumes in there would widen my eyes.
“Walk faster, Ella—you don’t know what might pop out of that room.” Scarlet reached back and grabbed my sweatshirt, giving it a yank. I wondered why Braiden hadn’t already stepped in and pushed me along.
A quick backward glance froze my blood.
He wore a soft smile and a longing expression, looking at the opened doors. His feet had slowed like mine had, and now he was drifting to that side of the wide hallway.
It wasn’t the desire to sit down that had called to me, I realized. It was the room in general.
As if on cue, she emerged, young and vibrant and beautiful. Her hair was perfectly styled in curls atop her head and her red lips drifted up into a smile. Solid, without any translucency at all, she held out her hand.
“Please,” she said in a musical voice. “Join me. I have so much to tell you.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
“What in the holy—” Scarlet grabbed my reaching hand and yanked it away, making me take a big step with it. “Run!”
“But—”
“Run!” She flung me with unexpected strength.
I crashed into the far wall, near a closed door. There was certainly an abundance of doors in this house.
“Braiden, you idiot, that’s her!” Scarlet screamed. “Don’t touch her!”
I heard a slap as I reached for the handle.
“No, no. Don’t go through that one,” the ghost said, her musical voice echoing around my skull in a strange and terrifying way. “Not that one. That was my séance room.”
“Lay off the weights, would ya? You’re like a stone wall.” Scarlet pushed Braiden toward me.
I stood frozen with my hand on the knob, everything in me saying to turn away from that door.
“Go! What’s wrong with you?” Scarlet reached around me, batted my hand away, and turned the handle.
“She said it was a séance room,” I muttered, blinking stupidly at the tiny square room within.
“Who did?” Scarlet pushed me into the space and turned back for Braiden. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“You didn’t?” Fear crawled up my spine. I wanted to go back to that library. I wanted to sit down with that beautiful woman and hear what she had to say.
“Why does she walk through town as a hunched, middle-aged woman?” I asked. “She’s beautiful. So vibrant. Why not walk the streets as she is?”
“This isn’t how she died. This is from…some other time. Before that. Twenty years before that, it looks like.” Scarlet slammed the door shut. “Finally. A door with a proper deadbolt.”
“No, wait—” I held out my hand to stop her, but it was done. She threw the deadbolt.
I didn’t know if I was reacting to potential danger, or the sadness that we were locking her out. Braiden had a confused expression that probably mirrored mine.
Scarlet clicked on her flashlight even though a large window let in enough light to see. The beam of light sailed over an empty table with two chairs. They were the only pieces of furniture in the room.
“This must be a room that connects a few areas of the house or something.” Scarlet frowned and eyed the two remaining doors. Of the four walls, three had doors, and one boasted a huge window. There were plenty of ways out, but not much reason to stay in.
“A séance room,” I repeated, rubbing my hands along my arms. I suddenly felt devoid of any sort of paranormal presence. From the moment we entered the house, I’d felt its energy—sometimes tingling, sometimes spiky and almost painful, and sometimes pressurized with danger—but this room felt like normal life.
Or what passed for normal in this town, anyway.
“Has it been lifted?” I asked, hope springing up. “Braiden, do you feel anything?”
His eyes shifted to me. I’d jogged him out of his daze. “What?”
“Did you feel the need to protect me back there?” I asked, that question suddenly taking precedence despite the lunacy of that choice.
He blinked and shook his head, looking at the deadbolted door. “I wanted to escort you inside. I wanted to sit and chat with you and her. My desire for—” He cut off abruptly, and the dreamy expression was wiped off his face. He gave me a flat look. “I didn’t feel any danger.”
“For what?” Scarlet asked, looking between the doors. When he didn’t answer, she gave him her full attention. “Your desire for what? Something in this house?”
His eyes were still rooted to mine. “Yes,” he said softly. His eyebrows pinched together. He blinked and looked away. Heat unfurled deep in my body. “I think she’s messing with our minds.” He ran his fingers through his hair.
“Of course she is messing with your minds. That’s her whole gig.” Scarlet huffed. “We need to pick a door, but I’m feeling gun-shy.”
“Did you feel threatened that first night?” I asked, drawing Braiden’s gaze back to me. “W
hen she pointed back at my house?”
A small crease formed between his brows. He swallowed. “I felt the need to protect you. But a moment ago, it felt like you would be safe. We’d all be safe.”
“You know…” Scarlet tapped her flashlight. “I’ve been wondering about something. There are so many violent characters in this house. Even the children. There’s no way all these people could’ve lived here. And they’re all men. Or mostly. If this house was so messed up it drove the people who lived here crazy, surely there’d be a woman or two wandering around. What if the paranormal crazy of this house has called to the spirits of all the violent offenders from the town?”
I exhaled, suddenly exhausted. “I have no idea, Scarlet.”
“You should think about it. It gives your mind something to do. Otherwise you might be tempted to curl up in a corner, start sobbing, and rock yourself back and forth.” Scarlet wrapped her fingers around the handle on the far door. “We’ll just have a little looky and see what horrors await us behind Door Number One.”
She turned the handle and opened the door slowly, a rusty sort of squeak filling the room. She paused to look out, and almost at the same time, the squeak stopped.
I tilted my head, listening. I could have sworn the squeak had lasted longer than the door moving.
“Dark,” Scarlet whispered, and a tiny squeak wormed through the following silence.
“Do you hear that?” I asked into the hush.
“What?” Scarlet asked.
But it didn’t repeat. Maybe Scarlet had accidentally nudged the door, something I couldn’t see through the gloom.
“Let’s go,” I said, my unease growing. “Let’s keep moving.”
Scarlet pulled the door open a little more before drifting through. She waited on the other side as I moved closer.
Without warning, the door slammed shut. I jolted back, surprised. The deadbolt on it slid home, and the rusty squeal started again.
Pounding sounded through the wood as I rushed forward, gripping the handle and cranking it over. Braiden was there a moment later, working at the deadbolt.