The Shape of Night(57)

“Before you moved into Brodie’s Watch, did you believe in ghosts?”

To that, I can muster no rebuttal. Although I am facing the sea, I feel the house looming behind me, watching me. I’m afraid to hear her answer, but I ask the question anyway. “What happened to the family?”

“They hadn’t believed in ghosts before, but they realized something was in their home. Something they’d all seen and experienced. The husband searched newspaper archives and found an article about Abigail’s suicide. He assumed it was her ghost haunting the house, and ghosts can’t hurt you, right? Plus it made excellent dinner chitchat. We have a ghost in our house! Isn’t that cool? But slowly it dawned on the family that what haunted their house was something different.

“The four-year-old began waking up every night, screaming in terror. She said something was choking her, and the mother actually saw marks on her neck.”

My heart is suddenly pounding. “What sort of marks?”

“They looked like the imprint of fingers on her throat. Fingers that were too long to be a child’s. Then the eight-year-old began waking up with nosebleeds. They took her to the doctor and he could find no reason for the bleeding. Even then they remained in the house, because they’d sunk so much of their savings into it. Then one night, something happened that changed everything. The husband heard a banging outside and he went out to investigate. The instant he stepped outside, the front door swung shut behind him, locking him out. He banged on the door, but his family couldn’t hear him. Yet he could hear what was happening inside the house. His daughters screaming. His wife, falling down the stairs. He broke a window to get inside, and he found her lying dazed at the bottom of the stairs. She insisted that something had pushed her. Something wanted her dead.

    “The family moved out that same night. And the next morning, I got the phone call.”

“You’ve seen the house?”

“Yes. I drove there the very next day. It was a handsome building, with a wraparound porch and twelve-foot ceilings. Just the sort of home a wealthy merchant would build for his family. When I arrived, the husband was waiting in the front yard, but he refused to go inside. He just gave me the key and told me to look around for myself. I went in alone.”

“And what did you find?”

“Nothing. At first.” Once again she eyes Brodie’s Watch, as if afraid to turn her back on it. “I walked through the kitchen, the living room. It all seemed perfectly normal. I climbed the stairs to the bedrooms and again, nothing struck me as out of the ordinary. But then I went downstairs to the kitchen and opened the door to the cellar. That was when I smelled it.”

“What?”

“The stench of decay. Of death. I didn’t want to go down those stairs, but I forced myself to take a few steps. Then I lifted my flashlight and saw the marks carved into the ceiling. Talon marks, Ava. As if a beast had clawed its way into the house from below. That was as far as I got. I backed out of the cellar, walked out the front door, and I never set foot in the house again. Because I already knew the family couldn’t return. I knew what they were dealing with. It wasn’t a ghost. It was something far more powerful, something that had probably been there for a long, long time. There are many words for what they are. Demons. Strigoi. Baital. But they all have this in common: They are evil. And they are dangerous.”

“Is that what Captain Brodie is?”

“I don’t know what he is, Ava. This could be just a haunting, a spiritual echo of the man who once lived here. That’s what I assumed at first, because you haven’t experienced anything that’s scared you. But when I look at the history of Brodie’s Watch, when I know that four women have died here…”

    “From natural causes. From an accident.”

“True, but what kept those women here? Why did they turn their backs on marriage and families to spend the rest of their lives alone in this house?”

Because of him. Because of the pleasures of the turret.

I look up at the house, and the memory of what happened in the turret makes my cheeks burn.

“What made them stay here? Grow old and die here?” Maeve asks, studying me. “Do you know?”

“He…the captain…”

“What about him?”

“He understands me. He makes me feel I belong here.”

“What else does he make you feel?”

I turn away, my face on fire. She doesn’t press the question and silence hangs between us for a painfully long time, long enough for her to gather that my secret is too embarrassing to share with anyone.

“Whatever he offers you, it comes with a price,” she warns.

“I’m not afraid of him. And the women who lived here before me, they must not have been afraid, either. They could have chosen to leave, but they didn’t. They stayed in this house.”

“They also died in this house.”

“Only after years of living here.”

“Is that how you see your future? As a prisoner of Brodie’s Watch? Growing old here, dying here?”

“We all have to die somewhere.”

She takes me by the shoulders and forces me to look her in the eyes. “Ava, do you hear yourself?”

I’m so startled by her touch that for a moment I don’t speak. Only now do I process what I’ve just said. We all have to die somewhere. Is that really what I want, to turn my back on the world of the living?