by Lisa Cach
The question reminded Megan that she was there for a purpose, not just to sightsee. “I guess I should wait.”
He laughed. “You sound so disappointed.”
She thought he sounded delighted at her enthusiastic response to the hall, almost as if a compliment to the house was a compliment to him. Maybe it was. She looked at him now and saw not just a man but a man with a stunning Victorian mansion that he would rebuild to its former glory with his own two hands. Her inner damsel had palpitations at the thought. “Give me the grand tour.”
“Any special instructions I should follow as we go through the house? Should I think positive, ghost-accepting thoughts? Burn incense? Spit over my shoulder?”
She wrinkled her nose, reconsidering. “Actually, maybe you should stay here while I walk around on my own.”
His cheerful expression faded. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“You’re going to be a distraction.”
“The house isn’t safe: it’s a construction zone. You got badly frightened driving in the front gate. You were in a blind panic. I don’t like to think of the harm you could do yourself if that happened again, in here.”
“I know how not to fall through holes in the floor. And hey, if I break a leg, that’s what your liability insurance is for.”
“Megan—”
“Case, I know what I’m doing, so let me do it the way I see fit. I have more experience with this type of thing than you do, after all.”
He threw up his hands. “Fine! Do it your way. But I’m going to stay right here, and I want you to yell if anything happens. Yell, and stay right where you are. No running down the halls.”
“But if I get really scared, can I throw myself out a window?”
“Sarcasm doesn’t become you.”
She felt a flush of embarrassment and pressed her lips together. Sarcasm was the defense of the weak, and weak was exactly what she was feeling. “See you in fifteen minutes,” she said, and turned to go up the stairs.
“I’ll be right here.”
Megan looked up the stairs. The upper floor looked dark. Abandoned. Stuffed with evil spirits, no doubt.
You’re a real idiot, you know that, Megan? she berated herself as she put her hand to the rail and began to climb. A moment’s injured pride because a man wanted to protect you, and now you’re going upstairs alone. Dumb, dumb, du—
She stopped, standing still. She clenched the rail more tightly and closed her eyes, an instant from another time filling her senses.
Joy. Such joy! Excitement. The sense of a thousand possibilities for the future.
Megan opened her eyes and looked over the rail, down into the entry. It wasn’t Case she saw; it was the hall in another era. The doors were open, sunlight seeming to carry in on its rays a stream of finely dressed visitors. The men wore dark three-piece suits and sported mustaches. The women were corseted to pouter-pigeon chests, their skirts trailing behind them. Hats the size of turkey platters slanted across their heads, feathers and plumes set at graceful angles.
The image faded, the dusty, battered floor of the hall reappearing, Case standing and looking up at her with concern.
She gave him a quick smile of reassurance and continued up the stairs.
Case listened as Megan moved around on the floor above. Her footsteps went methodically down the hall and into one room after the other, pausing briefly in each and then moving on. With the floors bare of any carpet, her footsteps were as loud as if she wore taps on her shoes.
The deathly still quiet of the house helped carry the sound. It almost seemed as if the house itself were listening to her movements, holding its breath to hear her better.
A shiver flushed over Case’s skin. It felt as if the house were waiting to see what she did, waiting to see if she was going to put a foot wrong and pry too deeply into its secrets.
The house, or whatever was in it, wouldn’t like that.
Her footsteps continued on, easy and unhurried, and then suddenly they stopped; then came a quick one-two dance of steps as if she were startled.
Silence again.
His heart pounded, and sweat broke out over his body. His muscles tensed, ready for him to fly up the stairs and drag her away from whatever was waiting for her.
He clenched his fists against the urge, forcing himself to stay where he was. It had never hurt him, whatever it was, so there was no rational reason to think Megan was in any danger. She was in her element. She knew how to deal with this type of thing far better than he did.
Didn’t she?
There were no such things as ghosts. There was nothing here to hurt her but her own imagination.
He listened hard, waiting for her footsteps to resume.
A faint buzz started in his ears. He shook his head, trying to clear it, then felt a shiver go over his skin. He looked down at his arm and saw that it was rising in gooseflesh.
The buzzing sound grew louder, and through it he thought he heard the sound of running footsteps overhead.
He felt a cold touch on his cheek, as of a hand laid against his face. His eyes widened, his senses picking out the pressure of palm and fingertips, cold as frost. He froze in shock, then yelped and jerked back.
The cold touch came with him, and then it moved. The palm lifted, and icy fingertips trailed down over his jaw to his neck, dripping snow into the artery just beneath the skin.
He could hear his blood pounding, sending chilled fluid up into his brain. Terror seeped up out of his gut, flooding him with the urge to flee.
No! Not with Megan still upstairs.
He gritted his teeth and forced himself to stand still. There was no use trying to fight it off, no use in flailing or crying out. Such actions, he’d learned these past weeks, were like a starting pistol to the racehorse of panic. If he let himself move so much as an inch more, instinct would take over, and he’d run from the house screaming.
He wasn’t a proud man, but for God’s sake, he wanted to preserve some dignity.
And he didn’t want it to win so easily.
God damn it, he wasn’t some four-year-old scared of the bogeyman, crying for Mama. He was a grown man, and he didn’t believe in ghosts!
“This is my house,” he said in a low voice, barely audible over the buzzing in his head. “Whatever the hell you are, you’re not welcome here!” he said more loudly, wanting to hear his own words. “If you’re dead, then go toward the fucking light, will you? Leave me the hell alone!”
A shard of ice went through his chest.
His heart stopped, taking his breath with it.
A stunned surprise hit him first. Crap, it’s never done this before!
His mouth gaped, seeking air that wouldn’t come. All at once, his heart thudded to life, too fast. His breath came back in quick gasps. Sweat broke out all over his body. Numbness crept up his jaw and over his face.
Pain shot down his left arm.
A wild terror that he was having a heart attack swept through his mind. Dad died of a heart attack…
His vision swam, and he knew he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. He felt himself beginning to separate from his body, and he grabbed for the newel post at the bottom of the staircase, clinging to it to stay upright and, if possible, to stay alive.
The goddamn thing is killing me!
And then, one brief, rational thought: I’ve got to stop it from hurting Megan.
He cast his gaze up the staircase, his mouth working as if to call out, the numbness preventing it. Stars danced before his eyes, the edges of his vision going black.
Crap.
Megan moved slowly down the hallway, her mind wandering to the moment in the car when she’d realized Case’s hand was on her shoulder, her body touching his. A thrill shot through her, making her inner muscles clench.
Will he make a move on me after dinner? Maybe put his arm around me on the way to the car?
She imagined that, imagined being up close against his side. Another thrill coursed
through her.
And if he puts his coat around my shoulders, because it’s gotten chilly…
A faint gasp of sound reached her ears.
A thump of fear beat at her heart, chasing out her erotic thoughts. She stopped, turning her head, trying to pick up the sound again. Had that been a real-world gasp or an otherworld gasp?
Or had it been her own movements?
“Case?” she said aloud, wondering if he’d come silently up the stairs and snuck into a room, trying to keep an eye on her.
No answer.
A prickle of unease crawled up the back of her neck. The hallway, with its many doors and half-deconstructed walls, felt less empty than it had a moment ago.
There was a movement at the corner of her eye and a scratch of sound.
She jumped, drawing in a quick breath and turning.
A window was visible through the open doorway of a room, the cane of a climbing rose waving in the breeze, its thorns brushing against the glass.
Megan released a breath and shook her head. She was letting her imagination go to work on her. Never a good thing.
She waved back at the rose, then continued down the hall, glancing into rooms, finding the same thing in each: bare floors, faded and peeling wallpaper, a marble fireplace lost under layers of dirt, dusty dark-wood furniture stacked in a pile in the center of the room. She didn’t spend more than a moment or two in each room, as there were no strong, obvious impressions they were giving off. She’d continue searching for something obvious, then come back to these rooms if she came up blank elsewhere.
She wouldn’t mind coming back to take a closer look at the furniture, either. The place was a treasure trove of Victorian furnishings, and she itched to pull apart a few of those intriguing piles and see what goodies lay hidden. She’d love to claim first dibs for her shop.
The wide hallway came to a T at the end. To the left, the corridor ended a few feet later at a massive wooden door. To the right, the hall continued a dozen more feet, with a couple of doors to either side and one at the end.
She went left, to the massive door. The light was poor in the hall, and the patina of the wood was dark, so it wasn’t until she was up close to the door that she saw there was a stylized border of flowers painted along the edges of the door, with a central decoration in the center of each of the door’s panels. The flowers had been worn away around the knob, where hands must have repeatedly brushed against them. She laid her own fingertips against the painted flowers and closed her eyes.
For a moment, she was transported. Her hand now held a paintbrush, and the smells of linseed oil and turpentine were strong in the air. She painted the petal on a flower and then felt the touch of a loving hand on her hair.
Megan lifted her hand from the door and opened her eyes. It was the original mistress of the house who had painted that door.
She smiled. That Victorian woman had been a gentle spirit, a young bride much loved by her older husband. Megan turned the knob and pushed it open.
It was obviously the master suite. The large room with its tall windows was filled with natural light, and in the center of the room stood a massive tester bed, devoid of mattress or bedding but still with its original faded dusty fabric pleated in intricate folds and drapes on the underside of the tester.
Megan approached it in wonder: the thing was a Gothic monstrosity, a behemoth, a tumorous heap of grotesquely carved wood.
She loved it.
She loved it the way a wine critic might love white zinfandel: with full knowledge that her choice was awful. But she loved it. It proclaimed itself the king of beds. A place in which grand lovemaking could be done. It was a bed meant to see conception, birth, and death.
Drawn to it, she laid her hand against one massively thick, bulbous post.
The emotions rolled over her. Loneliness. Loss. Never-ending waves of grief.
Megan jerked her hand away, a sob in her throat, tears starting in her eyes. Sadness flowed through her, borrowed from the bed but finding its own channels in her grief over her mother.
It was a bed of mourning.
She stepped away from it and looked around at the rest of the room, but she had lost the heart to explore it. It seemed a place that had been built with hope and heart but had found only loss and pain.
She moved out of the room and on to the other end of the hall. One door led to an old-fashioned bath with a copper boiler mounted to the wall above the tub. It looked like it hadn’t been used in a century.
Behind the second door she discovered an old woman’s bedroom. Case hadn’t cleared it out like the others, and it still held a faint powdery scent. The wallpaper was pink cabbage roses, the furniture a mish-mash of Victorian, Art Deco, and bits of Danish Modern. The floor was covered in mustard-yellow wall-to-wall carpeting. A black rotary phone sat on the bedside table, and an enormous cabinet stereo in blond wood, with gold-flecked cloth over the speakers, squatted under a too-vivid painting of crashing waves.
Megan grimaced. Yeesh. What a charmless, tasteless room. Why on earth hadn’t Case stripped it?
She took a couple of steps inside, but the room was so ugly she didn’t want to open herself to it. The master bedroom was as much misery as she wanted to face for the day.
She stepped back into the hallway and moved toward the third door.
Something moved in her peripheral vision.
She shied, turning her head toward the movement.
All was still.
She squinted at the shadows at the end of the hall, in the corner near the servants’ stairs. Was that a shape? A shadow in shadows but the figure of a person?
The shadow moved, coming forward. Dark holes formed where the eyes and mouth would be.
Megan’s arms tingled, and her belly tightened. Her eyes widened, and she held motionless, staring, too scared to do anything else.
It wasn’t a thing any medium would want to admit, but she was afraid of ghosts.
And of the dark.
And of basements. And spiders. And all things that go bump in the night.
She’d only seen a true ghost, an active haunting, a handful of times, and most of those had been the recently deceased, lingering harmlessly before moving on.
This thing moving toward her was not dear old Grandmama saying good-bye.
Its mouth began to open.
She didn’t know who or what it was, and with sudden, cowardly certainty, she knew she didn’t want to know. She spun on her heel and took off running.
Her footsteps echoed in the long hallway, sounding as if there were someone following immediately behind her, breathing ghostly breaths down the back of her neck. The imagining was as bad as the real thing, and with a whining shriek in her throat, she upped her speed, sprinting to the head of the stairs.
She flew down them, her toes barely touching the treads. It wasn’t until she was almost at the bottom that she saw Case, collapsed at the newel post, eyes closed.
“Case!” she cried. “Case!” A new fear tore at her heart, and she leaped down the last few steps, crouching down beside him and putting her hand to his shoulder. “Case!” She shook him.
He moaned softly.
Relief washed through her. Thank God! He wasn’t dead.
“Wake up! Wake up!” She shook him again.
His eyes blinked open, confused at first and then with returning focus. As reality came back to him, he flinched and then quickly sat up, wincing as he did so.
“What happened?” Megan asked.
“I imagined that something attacked me,” he said in a tight, gasping whisper. He lifted his left hand and winced again. “Oh, God, I think it did something to my heart.”
A fresh sense of danger all around flushed over her. “What? How?” She cast a look over her shoulder, up the stairs. There was no sign of her dark ghost.
“I don’t know.” He described what had happened.
As he talked, some of Megan’s alarm drained away. “You were pretty worried about me u
p there on my own, weren’t you?”
“Hell yes!” he said, and got to his feet with her help. She could feel the clamminess of his skin and felt the shakiness of his muscles.
“You feel exhausted right now? Sore?”
He slanted a glance at her. “Yeah.”
She dug into her purse until she found the small bottle. She tapped a couple of white pills into her palm and held them out to him. “Here. Take these.”
“Aspirin?” he asked, taking them and tossing them back without water.
“Benadryl.”
He frowned. “An allergy medication? Why? I thought aspirin was the thing to take for heart attacks.”
“I’m not a doctor, obviously, but I think what you had was a panic attack. The Benadryl will take the edge off, help you get back on an even keel.”
“It wasn’t a damned panic attack,” he said, and motioned for her to follow him as he stomped weakly back toward the hall. “I’m not a pansy.”
Megan snorted.
He turned and glared.
She held up her hands. “Hey, it’s not your manhood I’m questioning. You sounded extremely male right then.”
He resumed walking. “It wasn’t a panic attack,” he grumbled.
“You’d rather it was a heart attack?” she asked, hurrying to keep up.
“No, I’m just saying. There’s a history of heart problems in my family.”
“Have you ever had any?”
“It wasn’t a panic attack.”
“So, you haven’t had any heart trouble. If you’ve been living in this house for months on your own, you’ve been under a huge amount of stress.”
“I can handle stress.”
“Maybe you can, but your body has its limits. Look, I know something about this. When my mom was dying…” Her voice broke, and she took a moment to get her throat back under control. “When my mom was dying and I was taking care of her, I started having panic attacks. I don’t have them anymore. It’s just a stress reaction when you’re overprimed for a fight-or-flight situation, that’s all.”
He was silent. They reached the door and stepped out into the daylight. Megan felt as if a cloud were lifted from her soul, the moment she was out of the house.