The Invited(59)

This seemed like a bad idea. Maybe Mike had been right to run. But if her mother had been here, if Dicky knew something that might help, she had to find out.

She moved down the hallway, passing guest rooms on the right and left. Some of the doors were closed. The ones that were open revealed rooms full of furniture, paintings, old clothes hung on racks. Boxes and trunks. An old piano with a water-stained top and peeling keys. Light passed through the leaded-glass windows; shadows stretched across the floor with fingers that seemed to reach for her, to pull her in.

    The hallway ended with a set of heavy wooden double doors, one of which was propped open like a gaping mouth, musty darkness behind. BAR AND LOUNGE, read an old, faded sign above the doors.

She crept into the room, thinking she should call out again but afraid to make a sound in this place. Afraid because she had the strong sense that she wasn’t alone. That someone, something, was watching her.

The lights were out, but dim sunlight filtering through the dusty windows gave the room a hazy glow. There was a bar along the back wall, long and made from a dark wood coated with dust and grime, decades of neglect. Behind the bar, shelves. On the shelves, a random assortment of objects: a baseball, Christmas ornaments, old cigar boxes, and a bottle of tequila still half full. The bottle of tequila felt sad to Olive somehow, like the bar was longing for the old days, beckoning for one more customer to come up and have a drink.

She turned from the bar, went over to the other side of the room, which was dominated by a massive old fireplace surrounded by bricks and a crumbling hearth. There was a mantel above the fireplace littered with candlesticks and half-burned candles. There were little brass bowls full of ashes. Above the mantel, a black cloth was draped over something that hung from the wall. A mirror, maybe? Didn’t people sometimes cover mirrors when a person died? Olive thought she’d seen that in a movie once.

But why?

Maybe so you wouldn’t see the dead person looking back at you.

The thought, which came from nowhere, gave her chills. She looked away from the cloth-covered mirror, then back again. Had the cloth moved? Rippled slightly as though something was pushing from behind it?

This place was giving her the big-time creeps. She hated to think of her mother lurking around here with a bunch of weirdos, looking for dead people in the mirror, maybe.

Half a dozen chairs had been pushed back in a rough circle in front of the old fireplace. The chairs were in bad shape: broken arms, stuffing coming out in places, covered in dark mysterious stains. Olive thought she’d have to be pretty darn worn-out before she’d sit in one of those.

    Then she noticed the floor.

The stained and worn maroon carpeting had been pulled up, cut out in this part of the room. The bare wooden floor was exposed: old wide pine boards held down with rusty nails. But there, on the floor in front of the fireplace, someone had done a drawing in yellow chalk. Olive saw the piece of thick chalk resting on the mantel with the candles—it was like what kids used on the elementary school playground to draw courts for hopscotch or foursquare.

But this hadn’t been done by a kid playing hopscotch.

The design on the floor was a large circle. Inside the circle, an equilateral triangle. In the center of the triangle, a square with another circle inside it. And in the center of the final circle, an eye.

The same design as Mama’s necklace!

I see all.

This was proof! Proof that Mama had been here. Had she done the drawing?

Olive stepped toward it, then back again. She had a really bad feeling that if she stepped into the circle, something terrible would happen.

It was a door, maybe.

A door to the mirror world.

Jeez, she told herself. Enough with the crazy thoughts.

“What are you doing up here?” a voice barked behind her. She jumped like an idiot, like a girl in a movie who is easily frightened. She nearly stumbled into the chalk drawing (doorway) but stopped herself.

She turned.

It was a man with a little potbelly that hung over his too-tight jeans, which had been tucked into shiny black cowboy boots with toes so pointy they looked dangerous. His salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back in a greasy-looking ponytail. He wore a denim shirt with silver snaps that was tight over the bulge of his belly. He had an angular, chiseled face with a big cowboy-style handlebar mustache. And strapped to his waist was a fancy tooled-leather holster holding a single-action revolver. He put his fingers on it now, just resting there, just making sure the gun was there, and making sure Olive knew it.

The infamous Dicky Barns.





CHAPTER 17



Helen





AUGUST 3, 2015

“You’re going to do what?” Nate said.

“Riley’s bringing her Ouija board over. We’re going to bring it up to the house and try to contact Hattie.”

Nate was crouched over his laptop, reading about deer and albinism. He’d had a couple more sightings of his white deer in the last two and a half weeks but still hadn’t managed to get a picture of her. His nature journal was open to the spread where he’d drawn the deer and taken notes. The shiny, heavily penciled-in eyes of the doe gazed up at Helen.

Nate stared at her. “This is a joke, right?”

Helen laughed. “I know, it’s a little crazy, isn’t it? Riley suggested it. You know she’s into all that occult stuff.”