The Visitor(4)

I must have still been on edge from that ghostly visitation because the moment I spotted the open cellar door, my heart gave a painful jerk.

Tamping down a premature panic, I crossed the yard to the steps, but before I could call down, an odor wafted up to me—the smell of musk, earth and more faintly, decay. Not the stench of active rot, but the fusty perfume of old death.

Phantom fragrances were often attached to ghosts. Devlin’s dead daughter had smelled of jasmine, and the sightless apparition of dust and dried lavender.

But this was not the scent of a ghost.

A cloud passed over the sun and I shivered. When the sun came back out, a shadowy face stared up at me from the gloom of the cellar.





Three

“Amelia?”

My heart stuttered for a fraction of a second as I tried to catch my breath. The shock of hearing my name on some odious creature’s lips stunned me. Then reason intervened and I realized the voice was a familiar one. A safe one.

“Hey, I didn’t scare you, did I?” Macon Dawes called up.

I could just make out his features in the dusky light. Tousled hair, tired eyes, slightly pointed chin. Not a demon, not some loathsome half being from an in-between world, but the pleasantly human visage of my upstairs neighbor.

But that smell...

I clutched the stair rail as I struggled to quiet my pounding heart. “I was a bit startled. I wasn’t expecting to find anyone in the cellar at this hour.”

“Did the hammering wake you up?” He placed a foot on the bottom step as he continued to stare up at me. He wore black Chucks nearly identical to the ones I had on, torn jeans and an old plaid shirt thrown over a threadbare T-shirt. The ordinariness of his rumpled appearance comforted me. “Sorry about that. I should have realized all that banging would go straight up the walls to your place.”

“I didn’t hear a thing,” I assured him. “I was just having some tea in the garden when I noticed the open door.”

“Still, it wouldn’t kill me to mind my manners. I’m so used to my crazy schedule at the hospital I forget there are folks like you keeping normal hours out there in the real world.”

“No harm done.” I went down a step or two. Now that my pulse had settled, I was genuinely curious. Macon was a student at the nearby Medical University of South Carolina, so I’d grown used to his coming and going at all hours. But so much early-morning activity was unusual even for him. “What are you building down there?”

“Building? Nothing. Just reinforcing some of the shelving so we can have a little more storage space.” He motioned toward the depths of the cellar. “Have you been down here lately? This place is a firetrap. You wouldn’t believe all the useless crap I’ve come across. Cartons of old textbooks and magazines, trunks of moth-eaten clothing and something that looks suspiciously like a mummified bat.”

I descended another step. “What’s that smell?”

He wrinkled his nose. “You should have gotten a whiff earlier before I aired out the place. I think something’s nesting down here.”

“Nesting?” I asked in alarm. “Like what?”

“Rats, maybe. Or possums. And did I mention the spiders?” He ran fingers through his hair with an exaggerated shudder.

“Do you need a hand?” I asked with little enthusiasm because the mention of spiders gave me pause. I’d had a mild case of arachnophobia since childhood and despite my years of prowling through web-shrouded tombs and infested mausoleums, I’d never quite managed to conquer my aversion.

“Thanks, but if you’ll make sure all your belongings are marked, I’ll take care of the rest.”

“I don’t have much. Just a few boxes that were left behind when I moved in. I’ll come down and take a look, though.”

I started down the steps, reluctant to leave the sunlight in the garden for the dimness of the basement. The house had been built on the site of the chapel of an orphanage that had burned to the ground at the turn of the last century. The cellar was the only thing that remained of the original structure, and sometimes when I went down there, I had an uncomfortable feeling that something lay hidden and waiting behind those brick walls. Something other than spiders and rodents.

The house had always provided a shield from the ghosts—a safe haven—but sometimes I wondered if the cellar might be a back door through the protective firewall of hallowed ground. The only spirit to ever breach my inner sanctum had been the ghost of Devlin’s daughter. Somehow she’d found a way inside my house, and if she could do it, how long before I experienced another intrusion?

I continued downward, my footsteps echoing eerily in the dank stillness. A second stairway at the back of the cellar led to the kitchen, but the door had been boarded up during one of the renovations. Once upon a time, that fortified passage had made me feel safer inside the house, but now I wondered if my peace of mind had ever been anything more than an illusion.

Funny how the same sealed door could make one feel secure on one side and trapped on the other. As I reached the bottom of the steps, I became overly aware of that single exit. Claustrophobia pressed in on me. For an archaeologist turned cemetery restorer, I tended to have a lot of inconvenient hang-ups.

“What’s that noise?” I cocked my head with a frown.

Macon paused. “I don’t hear anything.”