Once it did, she walked to the next door. When her hand hovered over the doorknob, the sound of tiny pattering feet trailed down the hall, first heading toward her, then away. A child’s footsteps, light and teasing. A soft giggle, muffled. Pinching the inside of her cheek between her teeth, Alison took two more steps, pushing away a long tendril of dusty web.
A door slammed. One loud bang then a creaking shudder of wood. In the distance, not close. She clamped both hands over her mouth to hold in a shriek, spun around, and her foot caught on the rug. As her upper body pitched to the right, her knees bent and canted to the left. The skin on her hip and back pulled. With a moan, she swayed, one hand questing for the wall. She didn’t find it in time to stop her descent, only to slow it down into a semi-controlled tumble. She landed hard on her hands and knees, her left hand resting on a hard patch of carpet, the fibers matted and dark with a stain.
She scrambled to her feet. Lumbered down the hallway, back toward the stairs. A sob caught in her throat. She had nowhere to run, nowhere to go. Maybe the front door had opened. Maybe she’d find the way out. She hobbled down the steps, her mouth dry, and paused at the second floor landing. Peered around the corner.
Another long hallway, twice as wide as the one she’d left; another thick layer of dust on the floor. Doors lined each side of the hall, all of them closed. She turned back to the staircase. Gripping the railing tight enough to make her fingers ache, she descended.
A low rhythmic squeal slid through the air. She gripped the railing tight and kept moving, each step slow and careful. Violet chaos twisted inside her mind, a feverish babble of nonsense. Her brow glistened with a thin sheen of sweat, despite the chill.
The foyer appeared exactly the same. There was another squeak, the raspy squeal of old metal. The door leading into the turret stood open, but it had been locked. She’d tried it. On tiptoe, she headed for the open door, her mouth dry, pulse skittering.
Maybe it’s a trap.
She shoved the voice away. The entire house held her trapped. What difference did one room make? Five feet from the door, a cold chill skimmed her arm then vanished. She recoiled. Footprints appeared on the floor, tiny footprints, not her own, heading through the doorway.
The circular room was larger than she expected. The tiny footprints curved past the doorway, over to the back wall, and disappeared inches shy of the baseboard molding. And standing in-between the side windows, a grandfather clock with carved, elegant wood in a deep, burnished shade of mahogany, with not a speck of dust anywhere. A long oval of glass revealed a brass pendulum below the ornate face. Black scrollwork hands stood frozen at a minute after twelve. The pendulum hung motionless. A spindle-thin second hand with a tip shaped like the sharp end of an iron gate sat atop the hand marking the hour.
A tiny tick sounded from inside the cabinet, and the pendulum swung in a slow arc from right to left. A sonorous chime rang out; she cried out and jerked back.
The pendulum swung back and forth. The second hand ticked counter-clockwise, its pointed tip skimming across the Roman numerals. “No,” she said. The clock chimed again. She held her hands over her ears. The second hand continued to move, giving time back instead of stealing it away.
She extended her hand. Her fingertips grazed the glass. Heat flared through her palm, a deep heat, but that wasn’t right because her fingers were dead and numb and she couldn’t
no air
breathe. Grey mist swirled in place of air, creeping down into her throat. Heat pressed from the inside. The grey took her in, pulling her down. Her arms flailed as she tried to grab onto something. Anything. The clock chimed, the second hand ticked wrong, so wrong, and she, and she—
—reeled forward, her shin bumping against something unseen, and she fell to her knees. The quiet fading chime of the clock echoed away.
Trembling, Alison stood in the middle of her living room. The photo album lay face down on the coffee table. She took two steps forward before the strength left her legs, and she sank to the floor like a balloon full of empty.
When the rubbery sensation left her limbs, she raked cobwebs from her hair. A thin glimmer of dust coated her arms and legs.
“This isn’t possible,” she said, her voice paper thin.
She wiped her hands on her pants and stiffened, staring at her hands. At her fingers. Ten finger-piggies, all lined up in a row, healthy and whole, with pink nails and the half-moon of white tucked against the cuticles. She flipped her hands over. The skin of her palms gleamed pale and lined.
She closed her eyes. A haunted photo album, a haunted house inside the album, a little ghost that left footprints in the dust, and a clock that ran backward. Yes, she could almost bring herself to believe in those things, but she had eight fingers, not ten. Ghosts and clocks could not bring back what doctors cut away. Using the tip of her left index finger, she poked her right eyelid and felt the hard plastic beneath the lid. If she wasn’t wearing her eye, would the album have replaced that, too?
Beneath her right sleeve, she found smooth skin with a layer of fine hairs. She clutched her chest and exhaled sharply. In a flash, she removed her shirt and traced her fingers around the curve of her breasts—two of them—the nipples hardening beneath her palms.
Perfect skin disappeared into the waistband of her pants. She discarded the rest of her clothing. Warm air from the heat vent caressed her legs.
Then she lifted her hands to her face. Traced her fingertips along her cheekbones, her jawline, her eyelashes, eyelids, and brows. Tears filled her eye.
Go away, Monstergirl. Go away and never come back.
She smiled, running her fingers along the curve of her lips. A real smile. No grimace. No ruined flesh. The Monstergirl had gone to live with the tiger.
She raced into the kitchen, her steps even. Pushed aside the window blind and angled her face until a ghostly image with high cheekbones and wide eyes appeared in the glass. Laughter bubbled up and out. Later, she would think about the how and why. For now, her reflection was enough. So much more than enough. Long, thick tendrils of hair spilled over her forehead, tickling her skin.
“How am I going to explain this?”
The tiger swallowed me up and made me whole.
The explanation didn’t matter. She didn’t have to hide anymore. She could go out in public. She could get a job, make friends, live.
She could stop being afraid.
CHAPTER 9
Confusion set in as bright sunlight danced across her face and then she remembered she’d opened all the blinds and curtains before going to bed, giggling in schoolgirl fashion. If she’d listened to her mother and thrown out the album, she would never have known. Who would think it possible? How would she even explain it? She wiped the sleep from her eyes and yawned, the skin pulling in a hateful, familiar way.
“No. Oh, please, no.”
Eight fingers, not ten. She screamed against her lineless palms. The skin on her cheek pulled again. She knew this sensation. She didn’t need a reflection.
A face like homemade sin—something her grandmother had said long, long ago, referring to a neighbor lady with an unfortunate set of features, but the phrase fit, it fit so well, like a smooth leather glove to hide runnels of flesh and scar tissue fingers. Like a scarf tugged down to keep out the eyes with their ever-present questions, their revulsion, their pity. Somebody beat her with a stick full of hideous. Another phrase with cruel perfection in its words, only it hadn’t been a stick at all, but it didn’t matter. Sticks and stones or flesh and burns. They boiled (and wasn’t that a funny choice of words) down to one thing and one thing only: ugly, ugly, UGLY.
Sometime in the night, her old face, her old body, monstrous and scarred, had crept back in and settled into its rightful place. In her mind, Alison could hear its gentle, terrible laughter, feel its smug satisfaction, could taste its triumph on her tongue—a cup full of bitterness and sorrow swallowed too slow.
You can’t run away from yourself, you stupid girl.
You thought you were whole again, but you’re still a walking nightmare. You’ll never be anything other than what you are. A Monstergirl. And all the tigers in the world won’t help you, won’t change you. You are trapped forever.
She put her face in her hands. Nothing but weight against her palms. The same thing she’d felt for years. Not worse than the monstrosity wearing her ruined skin, but it was a final slap in an argument gone too far. The photo album was little more than a trick, a cruel trick designed to tease and hurt. With a shout, she jumped from the bed, stumbled down the stairs, and closed all the blinds and curtains in a frantic rush.
The photo album still sat face down on the coffee table. She lowered herself to the floor and flipped the album open to George’s photo.
“Take them back,” she shrieked. George’s face stared at hers with his somber expression. “Take them all back!” She turned to the photo of the house and pressed both hands flat. “Please, please, take them back.” Hot tears ran down her cheek, dripping on the back of her hands, the edges of the photograph.
She slammed her hands up and down on the photo, rage spiraling in a hot coil of scarlet within her.
Not fair. You can’t take them away and then give them back. That’s. Not. Fair.
With a guttural cry, she hurled the album across the room. It banged into the wall, knocked a vase to the floor in a shatter of glass, the dried flowers within crumbling to bits, and landed with a heavy thump. The pages fluttered down with a soft whisk-whisk, but the cover stayed open. Taunting. Teasing.
The anger slipped away, leaving behind a horrible, hurtful sense of loss.
“Please take them back,” she said once more, her voice thick.
She inhaled. Exhaled. Pressed one hand to her chest. Without the distraction of her scars, the truth settled its weight on her. No imagination. No tricks of the light. She’d been inside the album. With the ghosts.
A low moan slipped from her lips. She didn’t believe in ghosts. They were movie creations, novel frights, silly explanations for logical occurrences. Yet the footprints she’d seen on the floor, the child’s giggle, the slamming door…no one else had been in the house with her. No one real. She was sure of it.
The house…she’d fallen into the photo album. Into the house. She covered her eyes. But it wasn’t possible. People couldn’t fall into photo albums.
A wave of dizziness struck and on its heels, a rush of exhaustion. The room spun and she swayed on her feet. Her muscles aching with the effort, she staggered toward the couch.
Her eyes snapped open. Darkness, a dry mouth, and a head that felt stuffed with cotton wool. She fumbled for the light, wincing against the bright. Her muscles felt wrenched out of place and tangled back together. She’d slept the day away. The entire day.
Was this some sort of side-effect of the album? A price to pay for entry? A penalty? She glared at the album. Would that she could conjure an explanation by thought alone.
Some of the indigo smudges of ink above the paper tiger line were darker. She rubbed sleep from her eye. Yes, something was different. The page now held loops and whirls in place of blank space, but more the suggestion of print rather than legible text, as though the words were pushing out of the paper world into the real but had not completed the journey.
The words in their current state only hinted at their hidden meaning, yet goosebumps pebbled her left arm as she tried to make sense of the puzzle within.
“Time, stop, yes, locked, pedal, fast, mental, hear, hour, web,” she muttered. “LDS? Mormons?” If the album coughed up another word or two (or ten), she might be able to make some sense out of it, but as it stood now, it was gibberish. Secrets within secrets within secrets. Like her scars and the ghosts.
She yawned, but she refused to go back to sleep. She’d slept enough. Maybe Elena didn’t know where the album came from, but someone had to know something. Her scars had been gone. Gone. She had most definitely not imagined that.
She fired up her laptop, typed Pennington House in the search bar, and clicked on the first link, a short article about the fire. It didn’t offer much more than the newspaper clipping, save for one salient point—Pennington House was in Towson, Maryland. A local house after all. The second link, on a website listing some of Baltimore County’s most notable old houses, offered a bit more:
Edmund Pennington, the son of one of Maryland’s most prominent families, had Pennington House built in 1878 as a wedding gift to his wife, Lillian. Two years later, Lillian died giving birth to their son, George.
Edmund remarried two years later, and he and his second wife, Eleanor, had three children. Sadly, none of those children lived to adulthood. One died as an infant, the other two in early childhood. Not long after their deaths, Eleanor passed away in a tragic fall.
Upon Edmund’s death in 1899, George Pennington, at nineteen, inherited the family home. As a wealthy man of leisure, George gained a small measure of notoriety for his avid interest in photography. Local families frequently had their portraits taken while attending one of Pennington House’s famous soirees and often requested that he take the postmortem photographs of their loved ones, a practice popular during that time.
George Pennington lived in the house alone until his death in 1935, at the age of fifty-five from unknown causes. Pennington House passed into the hands of a cousin, Bernard Landley, who lived in the house with his wife and children for only two years after which time the house exchanged hands several more times until it was caught in a legal dispute between two distant relatives. The house sat vacant for years and eventually fell into disrepair. In 1992, Pennington House burned to the ground. Arson was determined, however, no one was ever charged. The land is now owned by the county.
The website showed the same photos the newspaper article had featured.
The third link offered a different spin. Pennington House was included in their list of haunted places in Baltimore. There were reports of hearing thumps on the stairs, voices, and music. A handful of people had also seen shadows moving on the wall. There was a comments section where a few people had claimed to have gone into the house when they were young. One poster commented that the house was a stupid wreck and wasn’t haunted at all and anyone who thought so was a fool. Others disagreed, recounting their experiences—the same thumps and shadows. One comment took the breath from her lungs: My best friend and I went in it once. We goofed around, jumping out and making creepy noises. When we were about to leave, I heard a door slam from somewhere upstairs and then a clock started to chime, like one of those old-fashioned clocks. My friend couldn’t hear it, but it was like it was inside my head. Like I was listening to it with headphones. Then we both saw footprints on the floor. They weren’t our footprints. They just appeared, and they were kid footprints, not grownups, and they were coming toward me. We ran like hell out of there and never went back. My friend later said he didn’t see anything, but I know he did because he pissed himself when he saw them.
A notation at the bottom of the page said the house had been torn down after the fire and since then, no reports of anything strange had been reported.
Alison rubbed her hands together. So the house had been haunted even when it was real. She wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse, but now she knew she wasn’t imagining things.
George’s interest in photography explained the album, sort of, but it didn’t explain anything at all. How did a haunted house become a haunted photo album? Maybe there was no way to explain it. No rational way. Regardless of the how, George was a ghost inside the paper world and all but forgotten in the real.
She flipped to the photo of the house. Lowered her hand. Waited. No ghostly faces appeared in the window, the pages didn’t rustle or turn, and after a time, she took her hand away.
“So I was watching TV the other night and…”
Dark specks of pain swirled behind Alison’s lids, but a darker fog wrapped its arms around her and dragged her down, below the bite of Meredith’s hands.
She floated half-asleep, half-aware, similar to the pharmaceutical haze she’d slept in for months under the hospital lights. Except this time the pain didn’t pull her out of the daze screaming and crying.
“…I mean, who comes up with…”
This time, something tugged deep inside and took her under, inside a world of grey shadows and dusty footprints. Ticking clocks, chiming inside out and upside down. Laughter and windows opening to nowhere—
“Alison,” a voice said.
—and pipe smoke, drifting around her head, touching her shoulder—
“Alison?”
—shaking her arm.
Her eyes snapped open.
“I can’t believe you slept through that,” Meredith said. “That’s a first.”
“Sorry, I didn’t sleep well last night,” she lied.
“Gotcha. Um, I noticed something…interesting.”
“Interesting?”
“Yes. Interesting. Right here.” Meredith pressed her fingertips down on an area in the center of Alison’s right hipbone. “The scarring feels thinner.”
“Thinner?” She propped herself on her elbows, the dark lure of sleep instantly gone.
“Yes, thinner and the tissue here and here,” Meredith said, her fingers moving up and down, “is less ridged at the edges. Not a lot, but noticeably smoother. And the color is lighter. When do you go back to see your doctor?”
“Not for another couple of months. I just saw him, though, and he didn’t mention anything about any changes.”
Meredith helped her sit. “Maybe you should give him a call. I don’t want to jump the gun here, but I had to at least tell you about it because it looks like an improvement to me.”
“I’ll give him a call,” Alison said, but she looked past Meredith to the album, still on the coffee table.
“Okay, good.” Meredith said. “Time for some stretching.”
Paper Tigers Page 7