A Heart So Haunted, page 7
I peeled the shipping lid back, stared at the handles inside, and frowned.
They weren’t what I ordered.
I pulled out a barstool, collapsing into it and covering my face with my hands. “I should have just gotten the ones from Home Depot,” I groaned. I suppose this was my punishment for trying to save a few dollars.
The front door burst open.
I jumped.
Emma strode in, white tank and shorts plastered to her body. Sweat dewed her collarbone. Her knees were patched with porcelain, as were her hands and areas around her mouth, but it only emphasized the honey in her hair and the deepness in her eyes.
“I come bearing gifts.” She dropped two reusable shopping bags on the counter, both covered in palm trees and toucans. “I’m ready to strip some wallpaper, boss.” She withdrew a bottle of fabric softener and a handle of vinegar. When mixed with portions of hot water, it usually stripped wallpaper like a champ.
I sighed. “Hopefully.”
Her nose wrinkled. “What’s wrong with you?”
I shrugged. Mom. The primer taking so long to dry. The cabinet handles. Everything.
When she continued to stare at me, I said, “That wallpaper’s been up so long, I don’t know if it’ll come off in one go.”
Emma’s hands dropped, but her shoulders tightened. “I got it. Don’t worry.”
A muffled, “No!” came from upstairs. Then a heavy thud, like a box filled with donation clothes, dropping to the floor. “Lanny!”
I stifled a groan. My head dropped back, eyes closed. “What?”
“I think I chipped the sink.” A pause. “Or not.”
I sighed, then said, loud enough for Sayer to hear me over his music, “I’m replacing it anyway.”
More banging. Emma slipped out of the pantry with an old deli meat container and a pack of toothpicks. She peeled the plastic lid off, set it aside, and got to work opening the vinegar bottle.
With all these fumes, we’d be as high as a kite before sundown.
Sayer’s footsteps grew louder. I pictured him leaning over the banister, glasses askew. “I’ll go ahead and tear up this transition strip. I splintered it when I tripped and—”
“That’s fine.”
He shuffled away.
I slipped from the stool and opened one of the three windows in the breakfast nook, then flipped the living room fan on. A separate, short fan hummed in the corner of the kitchen floor, facing the last section of wall that hadn’t dried yet.
“See? Who needs expensive contractors when you have us to help you,” Emma said, pert. She poured a cup of vinegar in the container, then unscrewed the fabric softener. “Cheap labor and great community.”
I nodded, biting my lip. She was right. Not necessarily about the cheap labor, but the great company—and a reason for the house to be filled with explainable noises. Not children crying, which I’d failed to mention to either of them yet.
The idea of explaining what I’d heard—or what I hadn’t heard, since the crying hadn’t woken up Emma—made all four corners of my heart twist into knots.
“I saw Ivan in town,” she said. She measured out the softener, careful to not look up.
“Mm.”
“He asked about you. I didn’t know he still lived here.”
I continued arranging the roosters.
“He seemed—interested.”
“You know I’m not the dating type,” I told her. Heat started in the middle of my back. Tingles through my fingers, but not from butterflies.
“He’s a nice guy, Lan.” She started stirring the stripping concoction with a couple of toothpicks, then unpacked the rest of her finds. A packet of switchblades, a new set of screwdrivers, and a box of 120-grit sanding pads. “If nothing really happened back at graduation, why don’t you just talk to him? He doesn’t have hard feelings. Otherwise he wouldn’t have asked about you.”
I left the roosters to grab the shipping tape. I ripped three long strips off and plastered the rooster box shut. “I told you. We went different ways. It would be awkward.”
“But people reconnect all the time—and he said he’d already run into you.” She paused. “You didn’t tell me.”
I prickled. “There was nothing to tell. He said hi. I said hi. I left.”
The air grew charged. Metallic shards, jittering between us.
“Lan—”
A crash from the second floor broke Emma’s sentence. The dingy kitchen light fixture, dangling and centered above the island, rattled.
Both of us stood frozen. I turned, ready to storm the steps and see what had happened, when there was a rustle. Not as loud, but similar to shoes scuffing over hardwood. A low grunt followed. Almost meek, Sayer called down, “Uh … guys.”
The music Sayer had been playing quieted. Then clicked off.
“Can you, uh, come up here for a second?”
* * *
“What … is that?”
The three of us stared at the hole in a lengthy, detached silence. Walls were easy to patch. I’d done it before. Still, my lips parted, then shut. Over and over, until I swept my hair off the back of my neck and sighed in defeat.
“I don’t know,” Emma whispered. Her fingers drummed against her cheek.
“There’s something behind the wall?” My stomach pulled into itself like I might throw up. The hole gaped large enough to see through, but dark enough that I couldn’t exactly tell what it was.
“I’m so sorry,” Sayer said, hands in his hair. He started to pace. I shook my head, eyes shuttering. “I can fix it.”
“I don’t care about the strip,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“So I was pulling, right.” He bent down and grabbed the broken transition strip in both hands to re-create the image. “The strip broke and I fell backward into the hall and my head hit the wall and—” He splayed both hands open and shook them in emphasis. “This happened. I swear I didn’t mean to. It was really hard to pull up.” He held out the transition strip, as if proof were needed.
“Sometimes they can be.” I winced.
Emma stepped between us, arms out, then took Sayer’s cheek in one hand and grabbed the back of his nape with the other. “Are you dizzy? Can you tell me what day it is?”
“What are you doing?” He tried to pull away. “Stop. It. I’m fine.”
“There’s plaster in your hair.”
“It’s sheet rock, not plaster,” he corrected. He brushed himself off, then batted Emma’s hands away when she tried to grab his head again.
“Recite the date and time.” She took him by the shoulders instead and looked him dead in the eye. Sayer barely stood an inch taller than Emma. “I mean it. Pronto.”
He blinked. “June, uh, twelfth? Maybe four o’clock—”
“Wrong. It’s four thirty.”
“You know what I mean.”
I knelt while they bickered to get a better look. Sure enough, there was something on the other side.
She shook him a bit. “Sayer.” Held up her index finger. “Follow it.”
“What are you—”
I pressed at a dangling piece of sheet rock, then pulled it off in a puff of dust, as Emma exclaimed, “Just do it! It’s for your safety!”
“Okay, okay!”
I leaned closer and flicked the dust away. Whatever it was, it was solid wood. Not a support beam or a stud. Had it been covered on purpose?
A tightness started in my throat. I scratched the inside of my wrist. Dug a fingernail in. A slight, barely there hint of pain to ground myself. Focus.
I’d seen people cover plenty of things before—fireplaces they didn’t want to take out, linen closets, sometimes crawl spaces (which I wouldn’t recommend). But this looked different.
With a sharp breath, I stuck my arm through the hole. Brushed my fingertips over the bevel—sure enough, it felt like a door.
Emma crouched next to me. “Oh! What is that?”
“Is that a door?” Sayer leaned over my shoulder, his head inches from mine. I leaned away.
“I think so?” I said. I swallowed once, twice, a trickle of excitement bleeding into my veins. Sayer grumbled something that sounded like, “Should be, it hurt well enough.”
“Should we try and open it?” Emma whispered, so quiet I almost missed it.
“I don’t know,” I said.
The molding was bumpy in a few places, which usually meant it was handcrafted, not mass-produced. I stretched my arm completely through, fingertips searching for an end. There it was.
By feel, I couldn’t reach far enough to tell if it were bedroom door—where would the room have been? Or overly large window shutters. But where this was placed, right beside the stairs that led to the third-floor attic and my bedroom, meant this wasn’t a window, but perhaps an old linen closet.
But I didn’t remember Aunt Cadence mentioning a renovation. As far as I knew, she hadn’t so much as changed furniture since she’d moved in.
I reached up, searching.
“Do you feel anything?” Emma whispered. Her breath tickled my temple. Sayer, unable to see anything, straightened.
I winced. “I can’t—”
My fingers wrapped around a knobby doorhandle. Then something shifted in the air, like a wet blanket draping over a shivering body in a cold wind. Goosebumps crawled all over me. My peripheral grew shadowed, spotty, until the speckles bled into splotches and everything vanished.
The hallway went dark.
I blinked but saw nothing but darkness, as if someone had turned out the lights in a windowless room. Only muffled voices—maybe Sayer and Emma—mumbled far, far away. I squinted, squeezed my eyes, focused on the thrum of my heart in my ears.
Tell me I am no man, a voice growled. Unfamiliar, gritty. Tell me!
I blinked again, hard. Then, ever so faintly, shapes appeared in a gray haze around me. I wasn’t in the hallway anymore, but a … room.
Specifically, a library. Or an office. Like dust gathering, the haze formed a desk and shelves and cracked windows. Black grease slithered from the shelves and crevices, like someone had turned an ink pot over and not wiped it up in time.
My body jerked to stand. My joints were oiled and strong, my frame … different.
Something told me I was no longer me, but someone else. When I stood, I was eye level with the top shelf beside me. The tingle under my skin screamed the desire to move, to walk, to pace, to leave, but yet this body kept still.
The eyes that were not mine shuttered. A cherrywood desk with bulbous legs, one broken, teetered at an angle to my left.
A garbled voice, not this body’s, said, You are a coward before you are a man.
Then, distant, separate, over and over the same string of words: Nor I, you. Never you.
When I blinked again, the room disappeared. The desk, the voices. Everything—gone, like a daydream.
Now, I sat crouched by the hole in the wall, my fingers still wrapped around the doorknob. Emma still hunched beside me, waiting for my response.
Every hair on my body stood on end.
“What?” I choked.
Her eyes bounced from my brow to my chin and back. “Are you okay?”
I gave a jerky nod. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Why?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. You looked sick for a second.”
“It’s just cold up here,” I said.
Wrong thing to say. Emma’s eyes narrowed this time, just enough for little alarm bells to ring. “Okay.”
I withdrew my hand from the doorknob and stood to brush off my shoulder. My sweatshirt was littered with little flecks of broken sheetrock. They peppered the floor, scattering.
“I’ll get a broom,” I said. I had already turned to head back down the stairs, my heart racing, face emptied of blood.
A door. A door that led to something.
Rationally, it could have been a closet. There wasn’t enough room for a bedroom to be there. Which was a completely logical explanation. Maybe it’d been covered before Aunt Cadence bought it, or maybe she’d covered it. Why would she waste perfectly good storage space, though?
Still, the little hairs on my arms stood at attention. A hidden room didn’t settle well in my stomach. First the light turning on by itself, and then the crying?
And what I’d heard—no, what I’d seen. Because I had seen something on the porch.
A hairline fissure cracked through the certainty I’d built up. What if there had been truth to Aunt Cadence’s words?
What if she hadn’t been lying?
I’d watched enough true crime and horror movies to make assumptions. A ghost haunted a place where they were tethered. Tethered to a place where they were murdered. Bodies could be hidden in walls, backyards, and attics.
Or boarded-up closets.
I needed to tell Emma. Sayer would faint from fear, and I’d be lying if I said the thought of him leaving didn’t make me anxious. There was something comforting about having them both here, so if I told either of them, it would need to be Emma, but even then, the thought of telling her about the boy made acid eat the back of my throat. She’d get excited. Do research. Tell someone. Someone would tell someone else, and then before I knew it, the house would be nearly confirmed haunted and it wouldn’t sell. It would sit on the market, collecting dust, and burning a hole in my already thin pocket.
By the time I found the broom and made it back up the stairs, Emma had Sayer’s head firmly grasped in her hands.
“You have a knot on the back of your head,” she said. Sayer made a grab for the broom, so I stepped out of reach.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “Just go get an ice pack and sit down.”
“Fine.” His nostrils flared as he slipped out of Emma’s grip.
“Wait, don’t walk too fast.” She trailed after him, one careful step at a time. I waited until their voices faded down into the living room before turning back to the hole.
The broom handle grew slick in my hand. What would happen if I touched the doorknob again? Could I open it without knocking out the rest of the wall?
Would I see something again?
I set the broom down, wiped my hands on my leg. And reached back through the hole. I fumbled for the doorknob until I finally found it.
A cold sense of disappointment filled my stomach. I turned it and tugged, but the sheetrock was too close for me to get a glimpse inside. I’d need to knock the rest of it out if I wanted a better look.
That fissure of doubt grew larger, morphed into a crack in my chest.
Once Harthwait grows dark, Aunt Cadence’s voice had whispered.
The sun started to slide up the walls, closer to the ceiling. The foyer would be dark within the hour. By seven thirty, the trees would have the house blocked from most direct sunlight. We’d be in a cocoon while the sky started to streak with pinks and reds. The house itself already shrouded in night.
I shivered and started to sweep the dust and sheetrock from the floor.
She couldn’t have been telling the truth.
Hauntings didn’t happen. They were stories, make believe, a figment of the imagination, and all I had to do was box it up and toss it away.
Once I’d gotten most of the pieces, I used the hammer Sayer left behind and removed the nails from where the transition strip had broken, and gathered everything into the dustpan. I ignored the tug behind my belly button when I turned to leave. Almost like a nudge—or a tether.
I started down the steps.
Don’t leave, the door seemed to whisper. Please come back.
Chapter Six
I fell asleep on the couch sometime after ten o’clock to the sound of a cooking show. Emma had disappeared upstairs hours before, and I should have followed, but my body ached too much, and the thought of mustering anymore energy to crawl into my own bed felt almost sinister.
Down here, the dishwasher hummed with the murmur of the TV. I hadn’t bothered to shut the windows in the living room, so the symphony of frog chirps and owl hoots accompanied the far, far distant sound of cars whispering over paved roads. Every once in a while, the honk of a tractor trailer sidled in.
With the company of noise, the loneliness avoided me.
“Call now and receive a free gift …” a woman on the TV said.
I shifted under my blanket. The cushions didn’t feel all that lumpy or cramped. I never understood why anyone would complain about sleeping on the couch when it felt like this.
I wiggled my toes. Stretched a bit. If I focused, I could almost convince myself that I was young again, and after years of needling, Aunt Denny finally relented and let me sleep over.
“But only down here,” she might have said. “We can watch a movie.”
Sleep nudged me. Then it swallowed me.
Not just sleep—but a dream.
Stars peppered the sky, the air blanketed my shoulders heavily, the feel of a truck bed against the sharpness of my tailbone. A driveway?
No, the sunroom off the library. Not a truck bed. A wooden bench.
That familiar scent—musk, sand, and shampoo that I would recognize anywhere.
Not this—anything but this, I thought.
Dreams, I’d come to find out, weren’t always a happy figment of the imagination. Sometimes they were the ugliest moments, long shoved in a box and tucked away, brought back out for show and tell. A reminder of what could have happened. Of what didn’t happen.
Or, of what did.
A hand slipped up my shirt, the other in the waist of my shorts.
“Ivan, wait,” I whispered.
Ivan’s russet head looked almost golden in the moonlight. The glass ceiling to an open sky the only source of luminescence, the door to the main house shut tight. Just us. He curled over me in a partial crouch, his mouth against my neck.
“Ivan,” I urged. I pushed at his shoulders.
“What, Lan?” he whispered. He pulled back. My neck remained damp. I wanted to wipe it off. All of it, away, dirty, filthy—
“Someone might see—” I started.
“You always say that,” he said. He looked seventeen again, all prematurely broad shoulders that hadn’t filled in yet. I glanced to the ceiling.
