What the Dead Want(51)

The house looked like it had aged a century while they were gone. Thick dust covered everything, parts of the wall and ceiling were crumbling, furniture was missing, rags and books were lying around the floor.

The floors seemed to slope sharply down in some places and in others there were holes that went straight into the basement. The staircase was a gauntlet of fallen objects and smashed portraits.

There was no humming or buzzing of insects. No sound at all.

The smell of mold and earth and smoke and metal still permeated the place. They turned on the lights in every room they went through. Gretchen wondered if they were surrounded by specters. If ghosts were there now, reading the newspaper. Going through the pantry, sitting at the piano. But so far no spirit made itself clear to them.

“How long is it going to take?” Hawk asked.

“Shouldn’t be that long,” Gretchen said. “I’m just going to process the film and make a contact sheet. But first . . .” She went into the parlor and opened the liquor cabinet, got out the gin, and took a long gulp directly from the bottle.

Hawk watched her, shaking his head.

“You want some?” She offered it to him.

“No thanks, Esther.”

“It’ll put hair on your chest,” she said, and winked at him.

Hawk smiled. “I’m all right.”



The drink didn’t make Gretchen feel sick like it had the first night she was there; it relaxed her. And she was grateful for it as they headed up the stairs, because the idea of seeing the mirror—seeing the little girls now after having found the horrible photograph of their last moments—was overwhelming.

The house was silent; the uneven floors didn’t creak as they walked. But the portraits of her ancestors now seemed to give them smoldering hateful looks as they passed them on the stairs.

And then there they were. Rebecca and Celia, in front of the mirror holding hands, laughing maniacally at their reflections. Their mouths were covered in blood and they were mewling like cats. The gingham dress they had stuffed the cat into lay at their feet torn to pieces.

When Hawk and Gretchen tried to cross onto the attic stairs, the girls turned their heads in unison and stared at them with piercing dark eyes—then ran toward them.

“Help,” Celia shrieked. “Help us! Help!”

Hawk knelt and put out his arms to catch her—she ran to him frightened and trembling, then bit him fiercely on the chest, reached out and scratched his face. Rebecca started laughing.

He tried to hold her back at arm’s length but her tiny body was stronger than a grown man’s.

Gretchen crouched down too so she could look Celia in the eye.

“We know,” she said. “We know what happened.”

Rebecca shrieked and ran forward, trying to grab Celia and pull her away.

“Shhh,” Gretchen said. “We know.”

“We started the fire,” Rebecca said.

“You did not,” Hawk said, trying to hold both girls as they scratched and bit him.

“Let go, let go,” they chanted.

“We’re going to fix the house,” Gretchen said. “It’s okay.”

Celia’s voice changed. “Hey, sweets,” she said. Gretchen stepped back, shocked, and then fell to her knees weeping at the sound of it. It was her mother’s voice. It was Mona.

“Sweets,” Celia said with Mona’s voice. “It’s time for you to go home.” She watched Celia smile at her pain in hearing her mother, and the girls started laughing again. They’re crazy, Gretchen thought. And cruel. And suddenly it made perfect sense. They’re crazy from what happened. Enraged. They are trapped and they want everyone to feel pain.

“They have never ever been this strong,” Hawk said to her, still struggling to hold them off.

“I’ll bite you; I’ll kill you,” Celia hissed at him in her own voice. He grabbed Rebecca and held her, but Celia wrenched her from his hands and they ran back to the mirror and stood again transfixed, whispering their strange rhyme.

Sufferus Sufferus to taste of thee in our life’s last agony.

And it was then that Gretchen recognized the words from the prayer card she had seen the first hours in the house. It was a Communion prayer. They were praying, chanting the last words they had said before being set on fire. They were repeating it like an incantation.

“Why do they stand there like that?” he asked. “What’s holding them there?”

“C’mon,” Gretchen said. “There’s no time.” They bounded up to the attic, past the studio and into the darkroom, then slammed the door. The last time Gretchen had been in there—just last night—she had watched her aunt dying, writhing in pain at the very end. She quickly got out the jugs of chemicals, rewound the film in the Nikon, and popped it out of the camera. “I have to turn off all the lights for this,” she said. “Even the safelight.”

In the pitch-darkness she opened the roll and wound the film onto the spool, then put it in the black canister and poured in the first chemical, shaking the canister. Once the film was safely inside she turned on the safelight.

Hawk’s face was stricken in terror. The thing was in the room with them. The thing with the hooves. It was standing in the corner. Even bigger than before, and breathing heavily.

The thing’s horrible eyes squinted around the room as if it couldn’t see them but could smell them. How it could smell anything over its own terrible stench was a mystery.