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Chapter

“Of course I’m going with you,” Heather declared as we returned to my car.

The meeting with the lawyer had ended with a couple dozen of my signatures on papers, along with three times that in initials, and I had no idea what they were — for all I knew, I might have just signed away my soul or first-born child — but it got me a set of keys, an address, and printed directions.

“It’s four hours away,” I said, “and I’m going to be there overnight. No matter if Rawlin said the haunted part was just a joke of Uncle Jack’s, no way is your dad going to be okay with you overnighting with me.”

Mike and Heather’s dad was cool — I liked him a lot and thought he liked me, but that was as his son’s friend, not his daughter’s … nighttime companion.

“A joke.” Heather cocked her head to the side. “Or … is it?”

“That’s just Uncle Jack’s weird sense of humor — remember how some of his stories always had some kind of weird angle, like ghosts and elves and stuff?”

“Yeah, so what if some of them were real?” Heather buckled her seatbelt while I put the Prius in gear and navigated the parking garage. “Look, you just inherited a haunted mansion and you’re going to spend the night there — there is no way I’m letting you go alone. You’d probably come back possessed or get trapped by an incubus or something.”

I felt myself flush red. “I, ah, think it’s succubus … incubus is the guy.”

“Whatever,” Heather said. “And you haven’t had a date in, like, three years, so maybe you need to change things up and find some new options.”

“It hasn’t been that long,” I protested, though it felt like it had been. My last relationship hadn’t ended that great and I’d decided to concentrate on my studies — which got me excellent grades, but still left me delivering bad Chinese food, and worse, drunks, for a living.

“It doesn’t matter,” Heather said. She grabbed the folded paper with directions from the dash where I’d tossed it and quickly took a picture of it with her phone. “There — now either I come with you or I’ll call Maria and she’ll drive me up there. Then you’ll have to deal with both of us.”

I groaned. “Fine,” I agreed. Heather’s friend Maria was a stuck-up brat and I absolutely believed Heather would follow up on the threat. All I needed was for the two of them to show up on my doorstep too late for me to make them drive all the way home.

I drove Heather to her house and waited a surprisingly short period of time for her to return with a backpack and two of her archery cases.

“I texted Mom that I’m staying at Maria’s — she’ll cover for me,” Heather said, digging in her backpack. “And I got salt and sage — that’s what we’re supposed to burn to cast out spirits, right? Sage?”

I looked at the cardboard cylinder of salt and smaller, red-topped spice jar. “That’s poultry seasoning.”

“It’s got sage in it!” Heather turned the jar around to show me the ingredients. “Probably a lot of other good stuff to burn, too.”

“Why the bows?”

Heather shrugged. “It’s out in the boonies, right? Maybe I can get some forest shooting done in the morning. I need the practice with trees and shit.” She glanced toward the back of the car. “There’s not much room back there with my bows and all your stabby-gear … what do you do if a ride has luggage?”

I shrugged. “Drunks don’t usually come with suitcases, and I like to be able to stop at the dojo if I want to, without driving home to pick shit up.”

I drove back to my apartment to quickly pack a bag of my own — pajamas, change of clothes, and a few toiletries — then we got on the road.

It was a four-hour drive on the highway before we got to the right exit — one with not even a gas station or a fast-food joint near the off-ramp, just an exit onto a narrow, two-lane road surrounded by forest. Several miles along that brought us to the small town nearest Uncle Jack’s property — so small it didn’t even have a big box store close enough to drive the Main Street shops out of business. I noticed a butcher, general store, ice cream shop, and hardware store on the way through town, all looking like they’d been there since the buildings along Main Street had first been built.

Just as we were through the short stretch of businesses, I pulled a quick U-turn and went back to park in front of the general store.

“We’re going to need food for tonight and breakfast tomorrow, probably,” I explained at Heather’s questioning look. “I don’t even know if the place has power or water turned on, and I doubt there’s any delivery out there.”

I kicked myself a little for not asking the lawyer, Rawlin, about water and power.

“Good idea,” Heather said, hopping out to enter the store with me. “I was thinking delivery, but there might not be internet or cell service in a haunted house.” She grinned. “Ectoplasm probably blocks the signal.”

I sighed and then a second thought about what we might need for the night sent me across the street to the hardware store to buy a couple flashlights, extra batteries, a cooler and a small camping stove, then I went into the general store and loaded up a basket with what I thought we might need for the night and morning — mostly canned stews, a loaf of bread, peanut butter and jelly, and whatever snacks Heather kept tossing in. We certainly over-bought, but better to have too much than too little. I topped that off with two bags of ice, two twelve-packs of soda, and a case of bottled water. We wound up with three or four times what we needed for one night, but it would all keep, so we could leave it at the manor for the next visit.

I was pretty sure there’d be a lot of visits while I figured out what to do with the place, and, if it was habitable, I might even give up my apartment and move in. That would save me the rent and I’d probably be the only rideshare in town — a monopoly.

Heather approached the counter with a case of beer, but pouted and reluctantly put it back when I pointed and shook my head.

“What if the spirits need to be appeased with alcohol?” Heather asked as we loaded the groceries in the back of the Prius. “What are you gonna do then, smart guy?”

“There are no spirits, and if there were, I don’t think a case of that swill would do much to appease them.”

“It’d go a long way to appeasing me,” Heather muttered. “Relaxing — I’ve got a lot of pent-up stuff to deal with these days.”

I laughed. “Like what?”

“I’ve got stuff!”

“Okay, okay!” I kept laughing as we drove out of town.

Seven miles past the town’s last house and we were back in a heavily forested area, starting to climb into the foothills of the nearby mountains.

“It should be along here on the right somewhere,” Heather said, reading from the directions. I’d tried putting the address in my GPS, but it kept telling me it wasn’t found. “There!”

I slowed and peered ahead, surprised Heather had been able to spot the small sign we were looking for, but there it was beside a narrow, gravel road barely wide enough for a single car. My Prius wouldn’t have any trouble with the width, but I began to wonder about the grade as I could see the road itself winding off into the trees and up a slope.

I brought the car to a stop halfway onto the shoulder and examined the sign.

Mercer Manor

Carved into a wooden board that might have once been quite nice, but was now faded and cracked with age. It hung from a slightly off-kilter iron post.

I laughed. “Watch it turn out to be a single-wide trailer Uncle Jack used as a hunting cabin or something.”

“Whatever it is, it’s yours now,” Heather said. “Let’s go see!”

I pulled the Prius onto the narrow, gravel track and quickly passed from the relative brightness of the main road into a gloomy tunnel overhung with trees. Only the occasional shaft of sunlight streamed through to light the ill-kept drive covered in frequent potholes and washouts where the bank on either side had eroded, either sending dirt down to cover part of the road or washing it away on the downhill side. Overgrown brush scraped the sides of the car and I started to worry that it would mess up the paint.

“This place is going to need ten grand worth of road work before I can even show it to someone,” I muttered, wondering just what kind of problems Uncle Jack had left me.

My concerns got even more intense when we arrived at the gate.

An old, brick wall stretched off beneath the trees in either direction, topped by iron spikes originally, but now with vines and fallen branches obscuring most of it. The gate itself was iron bars with fancy scrollwork at the top, but secured with a bright chain and padlock.

“Nice vibe,” Heather said, “very Gothic.”

“Yeah, sure,” I muttered.

I got out of the car and approached the gate, sorting through the ring of keys Rawlin had given me for one that looked like it might fit a padlock.

There were three possibilities on the keyring and the third one worked, unlocking the padlock with a sharp click that seemed to echo in the silent forest around us, followed by a series of clinks as I unwrapped the chain from the gate. The gates themselves opened surprisingly smoothly, turning easily and silently on their hinges as I pushed them fully off the road to let my Prius pass through.

The road past the gate was in better condition than that leading up to it, but only because the terrain was flatter. We seemed to be on some kind of plateau in the hills and the road simply curved through the forest for what seemed like forever, but my check of the odometer said less than a mile, before I could see light ahead.

Just past a sharp corner, the trees opened up into a rolling meadow — I would have said lawn, but it was so overgrown and had so many wildflowers that it seemed more like a meadow, reclaimed by nature from whatever state Uncle Jack had left it in seven years prior.

The road ran straight now, toward an imposing building a hundred yards away. It was built of grey stone, and despite its imposing height, three floors plus what was probably an attic, seemed to almost hunker down to hide in its own shadows from the bright, late-afternoon sunlight that bathed the overgrown lawn surrounding it.

“That’s … big,” Heather whispered as I let the car coast to a stop while I took in the sight. “I thought your uncle didn’t have any other family?”

“He didn’t.”

“All that house for one guy?”

“Apparently.”

“That’s weird.”

I nodded. That was the perfect way to describe my whole day.

I tapped the accelerator to get the car moving and the house only seemed to get larger and more ominous as we approached, until we pulled to a stop at the driveway’s end just at the bottom of a set of stairs that led up to the house’s porticoed entrance.

I parked the car and retrieved my backpack from the trunk while Heather lifted hers from the passenger footwell and closed her door behind her.

We went up the stairs to the front doors and I started fumbling with the keyring, looking for one that might fit.

“See if it’s open first,” Heather whispered.

“What?”

She nodded at the door. “Check if it’s open first.”

“What? Why?”

“Because that would be super-creepy. An old abandoned house where the door just swings open with a creak when you touch it?” She shivered.

“There’ve been people up here taking care of the place,” I said, reaching for knob. “There’s no way they would have left —”

The knob turned and the door slowly swung inward with a loud, laborious creak.

Heather grinned. “Awesome.”

I peered into the shadowy interior revealed by the open door, then frowned at Heather.

“You seem pretty enthusiastic about this maybe turning into some kind of psycho-murder night.”

Heather shrugged. “It’s been a boring summer.”

Chapter

The interior of the house was filled with shadows — not even light from the windows, since they appeared to all be covered with heavy drapes of some sort.

I flicked on my flashlight and shone the beam through the doorway, but there wasn’t much to see. The entryway was rather small, with stairs leading both up and down to the right and a set of double-doors on the left just opposite the stairs going up. Straight ahead there was an archway just beyond those doors and stairs, but I couldn’t see much past that due to the darkness.

“This is so creepy,” Heather whispered, turning her own flashlight on. She crept closer to me and wrapped an arm around mine. “You go first.”

I chuckled and patted her hand on my arm, trying not to show just how much I kind of liked her hanging on me like that and giving me the role of leader and protector, then stepped over the threshold to explore.

The double doors to the left opened into a library with bookcases reaching to the ceiling and a fireplace along one wall. The bookcases were covered in a heavy, canvas sheeting so we couldn’t see the books there. More sheets draped the furniture that filled the middle space with what looked like a long sofa and three large chairs around a central table.

One corner of the room was part of the rounder, tower-shape we’d noted on the front of the house, the outer walls of that were covered with windows, five of them, with benches below them. The windows were covered, but not with normal curtains — maybe there were curtains behind, but the outer covering was the same sort of canvas sheeting that covered the furniture and the front of the bookshelves.

I tugged at one of the sheets covering a bookcase and the fabric came loose easily to pile up on the floor, revealing shelf after shelf of books. Not paperbacks or something, either, these were old, cloth- and leather-bound, with faded and scuffed gilt lettering for the titles.

Heather stepped forward and shone her flashlight on the books.

“I’m never going home,” she muttered, running a finger along the titles, first one row and then another, before she gasped. “Oh, my God, these are all Churchills.”

“What?”

“Winston Churchill? He’s kind of famous?”

I shrugged, but bent to look at the books. “Didn’t know he was an author, too. What’d he write? Like, mysteries or something? That’s an English thing, right?”

Heather rolled her eyes. “Histories,” she said, “memoirs, political commentary. This one —” She carefully pulled a book from the shelf and randomly paged through it. “— The People’s Rights? This is from so early in his life, and it’s fascinating to see how his views shifted and changed as he got older, lived through two world wars, and —” She broke off, frowning and staring at the book for a moment before carefully turning to the title page. “Alex — this is a first edition.”

I chuckled. “I have no idea what that means, but I’m glad you like it.”

Heather, slowly and carefully, returned the book to its place.

“It means I just had, like, ten grand in the palm of my hand.” Heather ran a finger along the shelf of books, reading titles but being careful now not to touch the books themselves. “These can’t all be first editions, can they?”

I eyed the shelf, counting. “I certainly hope so — if they’re all worth ten grand then things are looking up.”

“You can’t sell them!” Heather looked down, embarrassed. “I mean, you can — they’re yours and stuff — but…” She trailed off and looked around the library. “Your uncle must have spent years, decades, maybe, tracking these down. Just these few shelves are so amazing.”

I walked over to the windowed seating area and tugged at one of the sheets covering a window.

“Amazing or not, I’m going to have to find the money to fix this place up somewhere.”

There were no curtains behind the canvas sheet — maybe they were all in storage or something?

I cleared the rest of the windows, letting some light into the shadowy room.

There was a sort of chandelier fixture hanging from the ceiling with what looked like bulbs in it. They weren’t candles, at least.

“Do you see a light switch anywhere?”

“No,” Heather muttered, pulling the sheet away from a second bookshelf and reading more titles.

I started checking the walls for a switch while Heather uncovered the rest of the bookcases. I found a switch, but nothing happened when I flipped it.

“No power,” I said, disappointed.

“Maybe the breaker?” Heather suggested, “we should check that before calling the power company.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “but let’s uncover the rest of the windows first, while there’s still daylight.”

If the problem was more than a breaker, at least we’d have some light during the day and I didn’t want to waste any of it searching for the breaker panel.

“Okay,” Heather said, reluctantly following me from the library.

A door in the library’s back wall opened into an office space with a large desk, leather chair, and filing cabinets, but those were empty. Two large windows behind the desk revealed a small screened porch. Beyond that was a dining room at the rear of the house, with windows overlooking the back grounds that were in as much of a wild state as the front.

A short hallway brought us past another set of stairs, the back door along with attached mudroom, and eventually to the kitchen with some rather old-looking appliances. The refrigerator and freezer doors were propped open and there seemed to be no pilot light burning in the gas stove.

Past the kitchen was another round space, I figured there was a tower at the back of the house like there was at the front. The two spaces were on opposite corners, so that kind of made sense.

From there I could see the still open front door and between was a sort of sitting room with a large fireplace, covered sofa and chairs, along with some other covered furniture I couldn’t identify and didn’t want to take the time to uncover.

“Up or down?” Heather asked.

I thought for a moment. “Up — we can get the upstairs windows uncovered and take advantage of the daylight, then check the basement for a breaker box. That way, if there’s still no power, we’ll at least have seen the place in the light.”

“Sounds good,” Heather said and followed me back to the entryway, then up the stairs.

The second floor was bedrooms and bathrooms — four of each with the largest being at the front of the house and incorporating the tower space as a sort of sitting area. We didn’t bother to uncover the furniture, but did the windows. I was a little surprised that each bedroom had its own bath as well — the house seemed to be from a time where that wouldn’t have been the norm, but maybe Uncle Jack had renovated or something?

The third floor was a surprise — I’d assumed it would be more bedrooms, but the open space at the top of the stairs had four doors leading off it. One to yet another bathroom, another to an unfinished space with bare floors and walls, and two others on either side of the stairs that opened into a sort of merged workout space that ran behind the stairs. About thirty feet by forty feet, half the room was filled with exercise equipment — a treadmill, weight machine, and others — while the other half was open, the floor covered in mats with empty wooden racks attached to each wall.

“I think these are real tatami,” I said, kneeling to run a hand over the mats.

“As opposed to imaginary?”

“I mean not synthetic.” I stood up, nodding. “These are traditional — woven straw stuffed with rice straw. These have been used a lot, but they’re still in good shape.” I looked around at the walls. “I wonder why all the weapon racks are empty.”

“I wonder how your Uncle Jack got all that equipment up those stairs,” Heather said, looking back at the area used as a gym.

“Yeah,” I agreed. There were some big pieces there and I wouldn’t have wanted to be involved in moving them at all, much less up those stairs.

“Up or down?” Heather asked. “Basement or attic?”

I considered that — the attic was just above us, but I wanted to see if the lack of power was just something at the breaker box. I didn’t think the attic would have enough windows to light it.

“Basement,” I said finally, and led the way back down the stairs. “Let’s try and get the power on before we go up there.”

Past the first few steps, the basement stairs were like an inky well, hardly penetrated by our flashlights.

I led the way, shining my light this way and that to trace out the walls and look for a breaker box.

“Over there,” Heather said, shining her light on one of the walls.

The breaker box itself looked old — older than I expected — and when I opened it, I was surprised.

“Fuses? Really?”

Did they even sell fuses anymore? I examined the box closer, trying to figure out how I was supposed to even tell if one of the fuses needed to be replaced, then I noticed a fat, ceramic plug on a shelf nearby that seemed exactly the same size as a hole at the top of the box.

I took that in hand and examined it, then shrugged.

I set it against the hole and — eyes clenched shut and expecting to be blown across the room by some electrical arc — shoved it into place with an audible click.

The basement lights came on, bathing the space in a bright, electric glow.

“What the actual fuck?” Heather whispered.

Chapter

The door on the basement wall opposite the fuse box was massive.

Two doors, really, each made of what appeared to be a single piece of wood. They were framed in roughly squared off timber at least a foot on a side. I counted no fewer than four deadbolts locking the two doors in place, plus several barrel bolts along the top and bottom of each door — the top ones setting into the massive framing timbers and the bottom into holes drilled into the basement floor’s concrete. To top things off, two timbers, four inches square, were in place against the doors, held tight by brackets attached to the frames.

“Okay,” I said, “you have to admit that’s creepy.”

“Yeah,” Heather agreed, drawing it out.

We both walked over to the door and examined it carefully so as not to touch it.

“That’s a lot of hardware for a basement door,” Heather observed.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“Do you … think he kept someone in there?”

“What? Like a person?” I regarded the door in a new light — you used that many locks to be sure you kept something out or in. We were in a basement … what could Uncle Jake have been trying to keep out of his own basement? Keeping something in, on the other hand … made just as little sense unless I thought my uncle might, indeed, have been keeping someone locked up in his basement.

“I don’t think Uncle Jack would do that?” I said, making it more of a question than I liked.

“Should we open it?” Heather whispered.

I looked around the basement — it was a lot less imposing with the lights on, showing just old wooden shelves and boxes, but none of that made the locked door seem any less freaky.

If the door was to keep something out, then we were ill-equipped to deal with it, while if it was to keep something in … well, it had been seven years since Uncle Jack disappeared and if there was something still in there, I didn’t want to know what it was.

“I think we’ll wait on that.”

Heather nodded agreement. “Good choice.”

Heather and I went back up the stairs — I won’t say we fled, but we walked with intent and purpose. As we got to the first landing, though, we heard a thud from above, followed by what sounded like footsteps running away.

“What the fuck?” Heather whispered.

I held up a hand to quiet her and tried to listen, but there were no more sounds.

“Stay here while I take a look,” I whispered.

“Are you kidding? No. No splitting up in the spooky house when we heard a mysterious noise.” She shook her head. “And fuck a bunch of staying alone in the basement with a locked door to what’s probably a hellmouth or something.”

I sighed. “Fine, but stay back a step, okay?”

Heather nodded and I continued up, peeking around the banister to see what I could of the library and parlor. No one was visible, so I climbed the rest of the stairs and stood in the entryway looking around. I couldn’t recall anything about the footsteps that would indicate a direction, so didn’t know what to do next.

“Is it safe?” Heather whispered.

“Yeah, I think so.”

Heather scrambled up the last few stairs while I peered into the library and parlor.

“It might have been an animal — squirrel or raccoon or something that got in? Mr. Rawlin said the maintenance accounts were running low, so maybe they cut back. There might be some holes or something one could get through.”

Nothing in the library and I could see all of the parlor and most of the kitchen from the entryway. There were far fewer shadowy places to hide, now that the windows were clear and some of the lights were on.

“Squirrel, maybe?” I prompted again, then turned toward Heather. “Heather?”

The girl was standing, mouth half open and covered by her hands, as she stared at the floor.

“Heather? What’s wrong?”

“My backpack,” she whispered, pointing to where we’d left our packs earlier.

Mine was upright against the wall where I’d left it, but Heather’s was lying flat, top zipper undone and cover pulled back with some of the contents spilled onto the floor.

“Someone opened my backpack. Alex, there’s someone in here with us.”

*

“Okay,” I whispered, turning so I could keep an eye on the doors to the library and parlor, then backing slowly toward Heather. “Let’s think about this logically —”

“No! That’s how you get killed! Some doofus says, ‘let’s think about this logically,’ and convinces everybody that it’s all in their heads and the weird shit doesn’t mean anything — and that’s when the killing starts!”

“It could still be a raccoon, right? They’re clever, they get into shit, maybe one managed to get your backpack’s zipper open. Or this house has been empty for seven years, maybe there’s some homeless guy squatting here — homeless doesn’t mean serial killer. He might just have been looking for money or food and we scared him off. Or maybe it’s somebody that Rawlin guy hired — like, Uncle Jack put it in his will to have someone fuck with me the first night I stay here. Or do you think a scary, murderous spirit is the more likely explanation?”

“I think the low-likelihood, high-consequence ratio of the murderous spirit possibility still warrants us getting the fuck out of here!”

I almost laughed because it was Heather who’d wanted to come with me when she heard the place was haunted, but at the first sign of weirdness she was ready to bail.

“I’m betting on it being someone Rawlin hired on Uncle Jack’s instructions,” I said, then checked outside through the door we’d left open. “And it’s almost dark — remember he said the ‘haunted’ part was just something Uncle Jack made him say, but I still have to spend the night here, dusk to dawn, if I want to keep it.”

“Fine,” Heather grumbled, then knelt down to start putting the things that had fallen out of her backpack back into it. A moment later, she was digging through the backpack before turning to me with wide eyes. “You think a squirrel took my body wash? Really?”

“Your what?”

“My body wash? The special one that’s only available at Christmas? The one you like to sniff whenever I use it?”

I flushed. I knew exactly the one she meant, I just hadn’t known she knew I liked it — and, yes, I admit I did some sniffing when she used it. I liked it a lot, and I even went so far as to buy a bottle of my own, but the scent was different on me, as though it was altered by contact with Heather.

“I don’t —”

“Your nose twitches like a fucking rabbit whenever I wear it, which is why I brought it, and now it’s gone! That was my last bottle, too — I can’t get more until December!”

“Why you brought it?”

“Never mind, just, no squirrel took it.”

“Could still be a raccoon, right? They’re bigger, and they have those little thumbs.”

“Fine.” She pointed back into the depths of the house. “Go produce me a peppermint raccoon and I’ll believe you.”

Heather groaned and looked around as though she thought a ghost was going to come out of the walls or something, but I was determined. I certainly wasn’t going to give up my inheritance, weird as it was, over some bumps and thumps that were probably a trick of Uncle Jack’s. For all I knew, it was Uncle Jack himself who’d made the sounds.

Fake his own disappearance, hide for seven years, and hire a lawyer, all to play a practical joke on his nephew? Maybe? It was a non-zero chance, at least, and seemed more plausible than a murderous spirit deciding to go through Heather’s clothes.

“I’m not leaving,” I said. “If you’re really scared, you can take my car and find the nearest hotel — pick me up in the morning?”

“A hotel? Did you see the drive up here? The best I’d find would be a crappy motel with doors that open right on the parking lot and a kid named Norman manning the front desk. I bet his mom’s nice. No, thank you.”

“Looks like you’re staying then.”

I ignored Heather’s shifty looks and tried to exude some sort of confidence as I started unpacking the car. She eventually joined in, but I could tell she was still scared.

We didn’t bother putting things in the fridge, since it was propped open and not cold — the cooler would do well enough for our sodas and water overnight, and I was as determined to go home at dawn as I was to stay in the manor house overnight. I couldn’t find the gas valve for the stove — well, I found a couple possibilities, but I’d never worked with a gas stove before and decided not to risk messing something up, so I set up the camp stove out on the veranda. The bag of food came into the kitchen though.

Heather started looking through the bag and unpacking food.

“Did you … bring a can opener?” she asked after staring at a can of beef stew for a few seconds.

I froze — I had, in fact, neither bought nor brought a can opener, but if we couldn’t open the food and had to rely on the peanut butter and jelly sandwich fixings as our only meals, I knew Heather would never let me live it down. Ten years from now I’d be hearing about the time I tried to starve her. A couple of the cans had pull-tabs, but not the two Heather was holding.

“One second,” I said hurrying back out to the car where I was happy to find I still had my small toolbox in the back. I hurried back in with a hammer and screwdriver. “Hah!”

Heather raised an eyebrow. “Bowls, plates?”

I thought frantically about what else might be in my car, but … the damn thing didn’t even have hubcaps that might work as a bowl.

Heather rolled her eyes while I pondered how easy it was to forget the little things when you were in a hurry, and kicked myself for letting her come along. I did, in fact, have a can-opener in my camping gear, but I hadn’t brought my camping gear, because we were going to be staying in a house.

“Men,” she muttered, stalking out to my car.

I took the time to open all the kitchen cabinets and drawers in the hope there’d be some dishes or cutlery, but they were all empty. The water was on, at least, so we could shower — or, maybe, I didn’t know if the water heater was electric or gas or even if it had come on when we got the power working.

“Here,” Heather declared, returning and slapping something down on the counter next to me.

It was a plastic knife covered in dirt and hair.

“Where’d you get that?”

“Under your car seat — you should really clean more often.”

“It’s kind of nasty.”

Heather nodded. “That’s why it’s yours. This is mine.” She held up a plastic spoon still in a sealed package.

“Hey!”

My objection didn’t seem to matter as Heather slid the packaged spoon into her pocket.

Sticking me with a dirty knife to eat my food with seemed to have settled Heather down and she was no longer looking around like she thought something was going to jump out of the walls at her. Giving me shit usually relaxed her.

We went out and sat on the veranda in the growing darkness while I heated up a can of beef stew and another of ravioli on the camp stove. The screwdriver, after I held the tip in the stove’s flame for a minute to, maybe, sterilize it, and hammer did a fine, if somewhat messy, job of getting the lids off and I had to go back to my toolbox for a pair of pliers to move the cans on and off the camp stove. Once I declared them heated, Heather went to get us sodas from the cooler and we moved to sit on the veranda steps and look out over the meadow.

“This is actually kind of nice,” Heather said. “No one around for miles. No car sounds, just the birds.”

“Those are bugs.”

“What? Ew!”

“You say that every time we’re outside somewhere.”

“Because every time you try to convince me it’s icky-bugs and not pretty birds.”

I chuckled.

After dinner we cleaned up our mess and stored the garbage bag in the back of my car to pack out the next morning, then went upstairs to look more at the bedrooms and bathrooms. We started with the master bedroom, as I figured I’d let Heather have that for the night, and found some bedding stored in vacuum bags in the dresser drawers. The rest of the drawers were empty.

“Did he take the dishes and all his clothes?” I wondered.

It really looked like Uncle Jack had cleaned the place out of most things portable, leaving only the large furniture and a few pillows, towels, and sheets.

“Alright,” I said, as I fluffed the last pillow and tossed it on the bed. “Let’s go pick one for me.”

“What?”

“The bedroom I’m going to sleep in?”

“Oh, no.” Heather’s eyes were getting wide again as she looked around the room. “We are not separating in the scary-house. That’s exactly what the killer ghosts want us to do.”

“Seriously?”

I looked around the room — there were chairs and small sofas, but none big enough for me to stretch out on, and the flooring was hardwood with a couple rugs, none of which offered the sort of padding I wanted to spend the night on.

“Yes, seriously.” She shook her head. “Are you seriously objecting? What, do you think I’m going to take advantage of you in the night?”

I wasn’t really concerned about that — yeah, Heather had been getting flirtier and flirtier with me, but I figured that was just her, I don’t know, practicing on someone safe, maybe? Was that a thing?

What I was concerned about is having some sort of physical reaction to being that close and in bed with a truly beautiful young woman and weirding her out. Even if I thought of her as a little sister, there were apparently some parts of me that weren’t convinced.

Heather sighed, then gestured for me to follow her. I did, as she went across the hall to another bedroom. At first, I thought she’d seen my point and was picking a room for me, but she just opened dresser drawers in that room until she found more vacuum-packed bedding, then led me back to the master bedroom.

“Here,” she said, tossing the vacuum bag on the bed. “You can have your own blanky and tuck it under you so you don’t accidentally touch me in the night and get girl-cooties.”

Chapter

There wasn’t much to do in the house after dark — it didn’t even have a TV apparently — so we got ready for bed early and sat around messing with our phones. The signal wasn’t great, but it was there, surprisingly.

The showers did have water, but none hot — the heater was probably gas and not something I wanted to mess with tonight.

The long drive up had left me feeling grungy, so I went ahead and showered anyway, using a bar of soap Heather fished out of her backpack, then she decided to shower as well. While I was in the shower, she found another vacuum bag of towels in a closet and tossed one into the bathroom for me.

Then she made me help her move one of the short sofas to put behind the bedroom door so it couldn’t open, which was probably a fire code violation, at least.

“Do you really think a closed door will stop a killer ghost?” I asked as we set the sofa in place. “Maybe all this does it make it harder for us to get out when we’re running.”

Heather glared at me, then stomped off to take her shower.

I watched a couple more videos, yawning. It was still early, all things considered, but the day seemed to have taken more out of me than it should. The state of the property weighed on my mind — as it was, I couldn’t afford to fix the place up or tear down the house so I could sell the land, so what could I do? Just let it sit until the State foreclosed on it for the property taxes I also couldn’t pay?

Maybe there were enough first editions or whatever in the library to pay for what needed to be done … but I had a suspicion Heather might strangle me if I suggested selling those again.

At which point, I realized the water had turned off quite a while ago and Heather had been in the bathroom about three times as long as I had. I had time to hope I’d sterilized the screwdriver enough and not driven some kind of stomach bug into her stew.

I nearly strangled myself by swallowing my tongue as Heather came out of the bathroom.

Her hair was damp at the edges, darker from the water, and pulled straight back to fall down her back, exposing her shoulders, bare except for the thin straps that held up her top. That clung to her skin in the places she hadn’t fully dried off and the material was so thin the damp material seemed to disappear and show exactly what was under it, including the side of one breast. Her nipples poked prominently at the thin fabric, making it clear exactly how cold the shower, and the room itself, was.

“What?” she asked, crossing to where her backpack lay on the large dresser, then coming back to the bed with a hairbrush.

“Nothing!” I said — then cleared my throat to get rid of the high-pitched squeak and tried again. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

I stared intently at my phone, trying to ignore what I could see out of the corner of my eye.

Heather’s pajama bottoms were worse than the top — not that they were revealing, they covered things, it was just that they were loose shorts with leg holes that flared out a bit and were cut pretty high on the sides, so as she sat cross-legged on the bed and started brushing her hair, the openings in her shorts gaped wide, making it impossible not to wonder just how much they might expose given just a tiny shift in how she was sitting.

I tried to pay attention to the guy narrating a bunch of video clips of skate-boarders face-planting, but Heather’s hair-brushing seemed designed to distract me, as she raised both arms, elbows back, in a way that seemed to shove thinly-covered nipples directly at my eyes.

Did I mention there was no water heater and the water was cold?

“See anything good?”

“What?” I jumped, guiltily. “See what? Where?”

She waved her hairbrush at my phone. “Anything good we could watch together before we go to sleep?”

“Oh … no, nothing good. Just whatever the algorithm thinks I should watch next, you know?”

“Oh, okay.”

She went back to brushing her hair. When she was done, she stretched and pulled her blankets back to, much to my relief, slide underneath and cover herself.

“I’m going to sleep then.”

“I’ll turn off the light,” I said, since I was closest to the door and the switch there.

“No!”

I looked to find her with wide eyes, blanket pulled up under her chin and just the fingers of both hands visible, grasping it.

“Are we scared of the dark?” I asked, smirking a little.

“I’m not scared!” She paused. “I’d just be more not-scared if the light was on. At least until I’m asleep. Could you stay awake, too? Just until I’m asleep?”

The snark I was going to give her for that died in my throat, because she actually did look scared — or at least very nervous — so I just nodded and traded my smirk for a look of reassurance.

“Yeah, I’ll stay awake for a while.”

*

I switched from the video app on my phone to catch up on some reading, figuring the noise of videos might keep Heather awake, but wound up reading the same page several dozen times — Heather was laying with her back to me, hair spread out on the pillow and the bare skin of her shoulders and upper back exposed. My hand seemed to keep wanting to reach over and rub her back — or even pull her closer to cuddle against me.

I was going to have to get those thoughts out of my head before Mike came home and caught me looking at his little sister in ways that would get me ass-kicked. Luckily Heather hadn’t noticed how much of an effect she was having on me today.

After a while I thought she’d managed to get to sleep. I’d given up on reading and found myself just watching her as the blanket went up and down with her slow, even breathing.

Oh, this is bad, I thought.

I don’t know why she was having this much of an effect on me today — we hung out all the time, nearly every day, even alone at my apartment, but everything about her was hitting harder now. I could even still smell the soapy freshness she had after her shower and found myself inhaling a lot deeper than I normally would — and wishing it was her body wash I was smelling instead of just soap. Or maybe not — that could put me in a really bad way.

“Get a grip on yourself, dude,” I muttered, rolling out of bed to hit the lights and get some sleep myself.

I lay in the dark for a while, trying not to think about Heather laying right next to me, and finally dozed off, only to be awakened later by a thump.

I sat up and listened carefully, but the sound didn’t repeat, so I closed my eyes again.

Thump

Okay, that was actually something out in the hallway — I got up and quietly went to the door, pressing my ear to it.

Thump

I froze. It wasn’t something that hit the door, it was duller and sounded farther away, but then there was a sort of pitter-patter, like of tiny feet drumming on the manor’s hardwood floors.

I frowned, listening.

Neither sound seemed to be from something as large as a person, making me more certain our mysterious “spirit” was some sort of animal that’d gotten inside somehow.

I glanced back at Heather, still asleep, and gave in to the urge to go out and catch thing so I could show her I was right … so I could show her there was nothing to be afraid of.

I softly crept back to the bed so I could grab my phone. If I couldn’t catch the thing, then a picture of a raccoon or whatever running around the hallway might do it.

Carefully lifting one end of the sofa we’d blocked the door with, I pivoted it enough that I could open the door slightly and slip through.

“Hello?” I whispered into the dark hallway.

I didn’t want to be too loud or turn on the lights in case it woke Heather.

There was more pitter-pattering toward the stairs, so I started carefully walking that way. Without a door between us, the sound was a lot clearer and I became more convinced that it was a raccoon or some other small animal. The sound was too light and the pattern too rapid for it to be a person.

“Crap,” I muttered as a small shadow darted for the stairs, along with more of the pattering feet I’d been following. At least I could conclusively say it was some sort of animal now, because the shadow had been tiny, maybe two feet tall, if that. I tried to put images of killer dolls out of my head.

“Come on, Rocky,” I whispered making my way down the dark stairs. That was what you called raccoons, right? “Come here … let me show that brat what she was so afraid of.”

I followed the sound to the first floor and thought I’d lost whatever it was, because there was no sign of where it’d gone, but then the pattering came from the stairs to the basement.

“Gotcha,” I whispered.

The basement was one large, open space. Yeah, there were shelves and boxes, but anything climbing on those would still be obvious. If I could block off the stairs somehow, then the thing would be trapped in the basement and I could show it to Heather when she woke up.

I switched on the basement lights, but didn’t see any animal, so I started down the steps, keeping my eyes on the space near the stairs so whatever it was couldn’t surprise me and dash back upstairs.

Then I stopped and stared at the far wall.

The door was open.