The Visitor(72)

I glanced over my shoulder. The door to the guest cottage was closed. I saw no one at the windows. No one in the shadows.

I turned back to the garden, bringing the viewer to my eyes once more. I started to remove the card from the holder when my gaze lit on the enclosure beneath the front porch.

Something was there staring back at the camera lens. At me.

I couldn’t see anything. No gleaming eyes. No flash of pale skin or hair. But something was there just the same.

I inserted another card, my gaze going straight to the enclosure. Something was still there, still watching.

I went back through the whole stack, circling Rose’s house through the lens of the viewer.

And suddenly I knew the purpose of all those images. I knew what Rose had wanted to show me.

She’d been trying to capture in three dimensions what she had trapped beneath her house.





Forty-One

Slipping the ribbon from my neck, I traced the skeleton key with my fingertip, wanting to believe that, like hallowed ground, the metal could protect me from the ghosts and the malcontent and any evil that I’d yet to encounter. It had some power, I felt certain. There must have been a reason why Rose had worn it to her grave.

A breeze swept through the garden, deepening the scent of Nelda’s roses. My senses were so heightened, I could hear the flutter of moth wings in the four-o’clocks and the satin-like whisper of the moonflowers unfurling. A songbird trilled in the magnolia tree. A train whistle sounded in the distance. Loneliness settled over me as twilight crept in from the garden.

I sat alone on the steps, clutching Rose’s key until the mosquitoes drove me inside. Then I locked up, slipped out of my clothes and into my new cotton nightgown before climbing between the cool sheets.

I placed the viewer on the floor and shoved it underneath the bed. I wouldn’t look at those images again tonight. Whatever Rose had trapped beneath her house could wait until morning.

Maybe nothing had been there at all, I tried to convince myself. Maybe it was best not to borrow trouble.

*

But trouble found me just the same.

It came with a tapping on my door, a sound so tentative that I thought for a moment I might still be dreaming. Then it grew louder, more insistent, and my eyes popped open as I bolted upright in bed. Something was out there on the porch wanting in.

My instinct was to huddle under the covers, but instead I slid out of bed and padded to the door. A lace curtain hung over the glass, and I parted the panels to peer out. The moon had gone behind a cloud and the porch lay in darkness.

I had almost managed to convince myself that I’d imagined the sound when I heard it again. Not a knock or a tap as I’d first thought, but the click of a lone cicada.

I spotted her in the shadows then. The humpback in-between. The childlike entity that was half in, half out.

Why I unlocked the door and stepped out on the porch, I couldn’t say. Despite my fear, I was drawn to her.

She was dressed in a garment blackened with age, and she clutched something in one hand that I couldn’t make out in the darkness. When the clouds drifted away, I could see her face in the moonlight. Her nose, her mouth, her eyes. Features that were no longer human and hadn’t been for a very long time.

Her skin looked dark and leathered and yet somehow fragile, as though it might crumble to ash from the slightest touch. And I could smell her. The same odor of must and old death that I’d detected in my cellar.

We stood with gazes locked for the longest time, but when I made a slight move, she stopped me with a sound that was only a little less aggressive than the rattle. Her mouth was open and what might once have been teeth clacked together in a chilling staccato.

I heard the squeak of the same phantom wheel that had manifested in my garden. As the sound grew closer, the entity threw back her head and an earsplitting whistle vibrated from the back of her throat. She flung out her arms in supplication a split second before she was sucked backward into the darkness.

I was so utterly flabbergasted by what had transpired that I failed to sense the newcomer. He stood at the edge of the garden gazing up at me, his expression unfathomable in the moonlight.





Forty-Two

“Amelia?”

My heart fluttered as I watched Devlin move through the garden and mount the steps. He must have come straight from work because he still had on his usual attire of dress pants and crisp cotton shirt. He’d removed his coat and tie, and his shirt was unbuttoned at the throat so that I could see the gleam of the silver chain around his neck.

When he reached the top stair, he took my shoulders. Then his gaze scoured the porch behind me, an indefinable expression on his face as if he’d seen something he couldn’t explain. A shadow? A flicker of light? If he’d caught a glimpse of Mott, he would never admit it. He would search and search until he came up with a logical explanation.

“Everything okay?” he asked, leaning in to brush my lips with his.

As distracted as I was by Mott’s strange visit, my senses were still so attuned to the night that it almost seemed as if I could hear his beating heart through his clothing. The sound was deep, steady, primal. I put a hand to my chest, where my own heart still pounded. “Everything’s fine. You gave me a start, though. I had no idea you were coming.”

“It was spur of the moment.” He cocked his head. “Are you sure you’re all right? What are you doing out here on the porch so late?”