He checked that the lights upstairs were off and windows locked, alarms set. He did the same for the ground floor. All was secure. He wondered if he should text Lester tonight, see if his super had made contact with that casting agent and given him the video. Or maybe it was it too soon to press the issue? There was a fine line between eager and stalker. No doubt about it, Samantha June’s compliments had warmed his ambitious soul.
He grabbed his backpack and was about to head for the front door when something rattled behind him. The mansion was settling. It happened all the time. One of the reasons people thought old buildings were haunted was because of all the noise they made just succumbing to the force of gravity. He turned to look, saw nothing, and started walking.
Another rattle.
He paused. He hoped it wasn’t rats again. They could make a terrible mess that he’d have to clean up in the morning before the first tour. They chewed up anything and everything, and they weren’t housebroken. He decided that he really should check. He’d have to let Ed know as soon as possible, maybe text him tonight—
He turned around.
Rattling again.
The sound appeared to be coming from the locked basement door. Rats on the other side of it? His breath caught as he drew closer. The knob was turning. The knob frozen since forever! A chill shot up his spine. Someone on the other side is trying to turn it.
How had someone gotten into the basement? Was it one of the tourists? All the entrances and exits leading down there were sealed tight.
The knob stopped moving.
“What the…?”
Then, without warning, bam!
The Door jolted from a powerful impact on the far side, as if someone large and powerful had crashed a shoulder against it. The suddenness and the violence rocked Garrett back on his heels. Sawdust and plaster rained down from the top of the doorjamb. The wooden center panels of The Door bowed outward. No human being could do that unless they had a battering ram.
Bam, bam, bam!
And between the jarring crashes, something was thrashing and scraping on the other side as if desperate, furious—
The pack slipped from his hand to the floor. As he turned and ran across the room, the rhythmic bashing continued behind him, echoing through the empty house. The thing wanted out.
Wild to get away, he grabbed the knob of the entrance door. It didn’t move—it was frozen solid like the knob to the basement had been. He tried again, throwing his full weight against it, and the knob suddenly glowed red hot in his grip. Searing pain ripped through his fingers and raced up his arm. With a howl he jerked his hand away.
The frantic noises behind him immediately ceased.
In the smothering quiet all he could hear was his own panting. When he glanced back at the basement door, the blood drained from his face and a moan of disbelief escaped his throat.
The Door, sealed shut not a minute ago, hung open.
Wide open.
An icy breeze rushed through it. He could smell the dank, chilly air rising from the basement. Someone had opened The Door that couldn’t be opened.
From the inside …
What was racing through his mind was not possible. There had to be another explanation. It had to be a trick, some kind of elaborate practical joke. He looked down at his hand. The palm and underside of his fingers were bright red and they throbbed painfully. No way was he going to try the superheated doorknob a second time. As he hurried back to the living room the rigged candlestick levitated from the floor, hovered for an instant, then flew straight at him, barely missing his head.
The whoosh of air as it hurtled past turned a skeptic into a horrified believer. As unlikely as it seemed, there was no denying the evidence of his five senses. The madwoman’s portrait loomed over him. Don’t look up. Don’t look up. Whatever you do, don’t look up.
Grabbing a heavy chair by the arms, he hammer-tossed it with all his might at the leaded bay window. The chair stopped in midair just short of its target, and instead of shattering the glass so he could crawl out, like a demented boomerang it reversed course and slammed into him squarely, knocking him onto his back.
He rolled onto his hands and knees and scrambled under the only protection in sight: a circular dining table. The table legs screeched on the floor as the heavy piece of furniture slid away from his cowering form, scraping across the room and leaving him completely exposed. A glowing green substance oozed from the walls. It was thick and gooey, and it moved counter to the laws of gravity, spreading up and sideways as well as down the historic and irreplaceable butterfly chintz wallpaper. A wave of dizziness swept over him and he thought he was going to faint.
He pushed to his feet and ran in a blind panic, crying, “I have a family!” He whirled left and right.
And then there she was, gliding through The Door. Gertrude Aldridge, mass murderess, hauntress of the dark. Madness blazed in her eyes, evil in her predatory advance. She was floating, gliding toward him, shimmering, transparent … and wacko. “Okay, I don’t have a family, but I have roommates!”
He was so frightened he had no idea where he was heading—until he found himself on a narrow wooden staircase. He had never seen the stairs before, and under the mansion’s ground floor there was only one destination. It was the last place he wanted to be.
“Oh no!”
He was in the basement. The floor was cracking; an unnatural green light pulsed and shot upward through the fissures. A lavalike substance burbled. The staircase was coated with it and the ooze dripped, sticking to him. As Garrett spun on his heel to run back upstairs, his foot slipped on the stuff and he started to fall facedown. He caught himself on a tread above with his hands, which plunged them in goo. It was cold and pulpy. Pulling himself free, fingers trailing bubbling strands, he willed his legs into motion. His shoe made a sucking sound as it popped from the slime. He lurched upward, one step, then two.
His foot broke through a termite-weakened tread. As his ankle, then shin, slipped into the void, the rickety staircase trembled and fell to pieces under him. He held on, staring up at the top of the stairs where The Door, once a symbol of the dread unknown, was now his means of survival and escape.
Something was moving in the darkness toward him.
Adrenaline shot through his veins and he shouted in fear, legs windmilling as he fought to pull himself up.
That gum-chewing girl, she was wrong, he thought. Being scared isn’t fun at all.
Shivering violently, but unable to stop himself, he looked over his shoulder.
Glowing. Brilliantly. Hideously. She was reaching for him, reaching—
Garrett screamed and screamed.
2
“Da da DA da, dadada DA da…”
Erin Gilbert smiled over at the TV as she finished spraying the clothes in her closet with freshener. On the screen was the cute cartoon ghost show she used to watch when she was little—back before a ghost had ruined her life.
No time to dwell on that now. I have a lecture to give. And it might be the most important presentation she ever delivered. The fate of her wonderful, reinvented life depended on it. She adjusted her plain skirt and blouse before checking herself top to bottom one last time. The überconservative style choice projected an image of a serious scientist committed to teaching and research, and on a fast track to tenure at a major university.
Tenure! Go, Erin!
She grabbed her messenger bag and hurried off to her first lecture of the morning. As she left her apartment, she cast her mind back to The Incident, the catalyst that had ultimately led her into a life—and a brilliant career—in the world of hard science. She had been eight. So young to go through so much …
* * *
Second-grader Erin Gilbert was in love with life. She and her mom and dad lived in a picturesque little town in southern Michigan, a suburb of Battle Creek. She enjoyed being in the second grade and riding her bike back and forth under the canopy of tall trees on her street. Most of all she loved h
er little black dog, Corky. Her father said he was “part Spaniel, part who knows.” Her father worked as an executive in a big cereal company. Her mom stayed at home and volunteered with the Soroptimist club. Their house was built of white wood and brick, two stories with a wide, wraparound front porch and a two-person swing, tall, narrow windows, and it looked brand new, inside and out.
The house next door was also two stories, but with a very plain front like a box, and a few little bitty windows. It was painted a yucky yellow with ugly dark brown trim, and there was always smoke and a bad smell coming from the backyard because the old lady who lived there burned all her trash. Mrs. Barnard was short and round, with sunken eyes and wrinkles in her pale cheeks. When she wasn’t dressed up for Sunday church, she wore an apron over her housedress and stomped around in big clunky shoes.
Mrs. Barnard kept chickens in her backyard on the far side of her burn barrel. She fussed over all her poultry, but most of all over her beautiful rooster named Ernesto. He had shiny black feathers on his back and wings and a copper-colored chest. She carried him around the yard cradled in the crook of her arm like a big cat, stroking his head and back, and talking to him. He cackled and clucked back at her.
Mrs. Barnard had no close family who visited her, but Sundays she drove to church in the ’52 Plymouth sedan she kept in her sagging garage. Church and chickens and lots of smoke. That summed up Mrs. Barnard.
Plus grumpy.
Every morning at sunrise, Ernesto woke up the Gilberts with his crowing. And when he started to crow, Corky started to bark. It made her parents angry (and sleepy), but there was nothing they could do about it, really. At least, that was what they used to say.
Corky was very interested in Mrs. Barnard’s chickens, which were kept safe in a sturdy wire mesh coop, and there was a four-foot-high wooden fence separating the sides of the two yards. He’d tried to dig under the fence any number of times, but Erin lined the fence with stones to keep him on the Gilberts’ side of the fence.
One day after school, Erin was playing with Corky in her yard, throwing an old tennis ball for him to fetch. He was a very energetic who-knows Spaniel and it took a lot of fetch to tire him out. She had just extricated the soggy ball from his mouth when a loud commotion at the fence made her and the dog look up. Waving his black wings to keep his balance, Ernesto perched on top of the fence, pretending to be an eagle.
Mrs. Barnard rushed up to the rickety wooden slats and tried to catch him, but she was too slow. The bird let out a squawk and flapped clumsily down into Erin’s yard. Realizing the danger, she made a grab for Corky’s collar. Her fingers couldn’t get a firm grip and he shot away. In a blink, the dog jumped on the chicken. Over the terrible squawking and growling as the two fought, Erin could hear Mrs. Barnard screaming at her, and she saw the old woman trying desperately to climb over the chest-high barrier.
Then Corky got hold of Ernesto by the back of the neck and bit down. Bright blood started squirting in all directions as the two of them rolled on the grass. Ernesto stopped squawking and flapping. When he went limp, Corky ran off to his doghouse with the rooster in his mouth, dragging it inside with him. He was madly wagging his stub of a tail.
On the other side of the fence, Mrs. Barnard shrieked and screamed for the longest time. “You!” she shouted at Erin, over and over again. “You better watch out!” Her face throbbed bright red and her nose ran and she sobbed and wailed. She kept stopping in the middle of crying to put the ball of her fist against the middle of her chest and she closed her eyes like something in there hurt.
Then Mrs. Barnard disappeared into the house. A little while later, Animal Control came out and she ordered them to take Corky away and put him to sleep. But the lady told Mrs. Barnard that Ernesto had flown onto private property so it was trespassing and fair game. And Corky was licensed with all his shots, so there was nothing to be done.
After that, every time Mrs. Barnard saw Erin and her dog she yelled threats at them: “You better watch out!” And she took to burning her trash at all hours, so the nasty smoke would blow into their house. She seemed to get angrier and angrier by the day. Erin asked her father if she should apologize or send her a card, or maybe they could get her another baby rooster, but he said that would only stir her up more.
The Incident created a very tense atmosphere on the quiet, tree-lined street. At her parents’ request Erin stopped playing in the backyard with her pup. Poor Corky got very restless and barky, which made her parents cranky. They said they didn’t blame him, but Erin was worried. What if they called Animal Control and ordered them to put Corky to sleep?
Then Mrs. Barnard started parking her junky car in front of their driveway, blocking it, and instead of just burning her trash she took to throwing it over the fence.
Erin’s father had to call the police. The officer took notes and then went over to talk to Mrs. Barnard. It was very exciting and at the same time scary.
The day after the policeman came, when Erin walked home from school she saw an ambulance parked in Mrs. Barnard’s front yard. She got a glimpse of the old woman laid out on a gurney as people wheeled it out of the front door. She was covered up to her chin with a warm, soft blanket and an oxygen mask covered the bottom half of her face.
Erin’s mother hurried out and pulled her inside their house, so she didn’t see what happened next, but later she overheard her parents talking about how Mrs. Barnard had died in her front yard with the paramedics trying to save her. They took her dead body away in the ambulance very quietly, without running their siren or lights.
“That old lunatic won’t ever bother us again,” her father said.
But that night, Erin was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of a cock crowing. She recognized the rooster’s voice at once—it was Ernesto. She listened with her covers pulled up to just below her eyes, but the noise didn’t repeat. And Corky hadn’t heard it or he would’ve started barking downstairs. It couldn’t have been Ernesto, she assured herself. She had watched her father pull his mangled body out of the doghouse—a rooster that would never wake up anybody ever again.
After a minute or two, she decided she must’ve dreamed it. She slipped further down in the warm bed and closed her eyes. She was just drifting off again when she smelled something icky and familiar—burning trash. Her heart started to pound. With eyes tightly closed she was suddenly wide awake.
Then something touched her on the nose. Cold like an ice cube or a snowball.
“You!”
She jerked and her eyes flew open. She would have screamed, but her throat closed up.
Death had changed Mrs. Barnard, and not in a good way. Her skin was gray and her eyeballs were white. Her compact, grandmotherly body was stretched like a funhouse mirror; she was sticklike and tall, legs and arms so long that she could stand flat on the floor at the foot of the bed and reach over it to grab both sides of the headboard. Her fingernails scratched into the wood as she shook the bed. Erin flopped left and right, struggling not to fall off.
“You better watch out!” the apparition shrieked down at her.
The burning trash smell blasted from Mrs. Barnard’s gaping mouth and as it washed over Erin, she held her breath to keep from inhaling it. She was terrified and at the same time fascinated by the strange turn of events. If Mrs. Barnard was dead, was this really her ghost? The old woman’s face seemed to pull this way and that, milky eyes by turns bulging then sunken, and Erin could see through the shifting form to the curtained bedroom window behind it.
“You better—uh, uh…”
The ghost convulsed above her, as if choking on something deep in its guts, eyes squeezed shut, mouth gaping, strange narrow tongue extended onto its chin.
“Uh, uh…”
Then the dam broke. With a mighty lurch that quaked the bedframe, Mrs. Barnard threw up.
A torrent of what looked like blood gushed from her mouth and poured onto Erin’s face and chest. It was red like blood but it wasn’t warm, and it w
as so gooey and sticky it was barely liquid. Mrs. Barnard kept retching and the stuff kept splattering down. Erin struggled for air, thinking for sure she would drown in it.
Somehow she twisted away and slipped out the side of the covers. She ran out of her room, barefoot and screaming down the hall to her parents’ bedroom. They were already awakened and sitting up in bed when she burst into the room. She burrowed into the covers between them, burying her head and pleading, “Don’t let Mrs. Barnard get me! Her blood is all over my bed!”
Her father jumped out of bed while her mother held her and tried to comfort her. When he came back he said, “There’s nothing there.”
“You just had a nightmare, Erin,” her mother said. “No more ice cream for you after 7 P.M.”
“Nightmares just happen sometimes, honey,” her father said, trying to assure her. “They’re nothing to worry about. They’re perfectly natural.”
After the perfectly natural nightmares—the cock’s crow, the smell of burning trash, the angry spirit barfing buckets of red goo on her face—repeated night after night for the next month, her parents told her they were going to get her some help. She assumed they meant that they would help her get rid of Mrs. Barnard. But she was wrong.
* * *
Erin sat alone in the backseat of their car as her father and mother drove her to see a new doctor. She was scared when they first told her, but her parents promised she wouldn’t be getting any shots because this wasn’t a “shot doctor.” They pulled up in front of a one-story house in a different suburb of Battle Creek. It didn’t look like a doctor’s office. They went up the walk to the front door and her father rang the bell. When the door opened, it smelled like someone was baking cookies inside.
Erin thought Dr. Marsha Malone was pretty. She had beautiful chocolate skin and gold jewelry. And she was fun to talk to. She made jokes while just the two of them played board games, asked a lot of questions, and unlike her parents, never seemed upset by the answers Erin gave her. Her office was like a living room, only in a separate part of the house off the driveway, and it always smelled like ginger cookies.