Page 61 of If I Stopped Haunting You

“Don’t do it, Neil,” Laszlo said.

Neil looked from his friend to the hall, but he shook his head and hurried after Penelope. He reached out and caught her wrist, tugging her gently to a stop.

“What?”

“I know you and I have had problems in the past. And I don’t need to know about… how you feel, or anything. I realize we are… working through things.…” He sighed and reached up to tug on his curls. “If you’ll let me show you, I found something I think you’d like to see.”

“What kind of thing?” she asked skeptically.

“Just trust me. Grab your jacket and boots and meet me in the mudroom past the kitchen.”

Neil jogged down the hall, buttoning up his jacket and slipping on his boots. Penelope appeared a moment later, bundled up to her neck, eyes narrowed as he motioned to the door.

“Just… trust me,” he said again, holding out a hand.

She frowned and stared down at it like the answers to the universe would spring out of his palm. With a sigh, she took it. Neil coughed to hide a smile.

Penelope trailed after him in the snow, shivering against the piercing cold. He peered at her every few seconds, stopping to let her catch up.

“What are we doing out here?” she huffed, sniffing.

His hands wanted to pull her into his side, but he resisted the urge.

“I was wandering out here earlier when I saw something sticking out of the snow.” They came to a stop before the tombstone, and Neil motioned to it, waiting for her reaction.

Expression carefully blank, she stooped before the tombstone and ran her fingers over the name.Hername.

“Okay,” she said. “It’s probably not my family, but that is a really weird and incredibly uncomfortable coincidence. Especially after…”

After the eyes in the cellar. The smell in the hall. The white thing disappearing into a room. The touch of something on Neil’s back.

The door slamming shut in the tower.

It was simply too much for a coincidence, and though Neil had walked into this castle unbelieving, everything tied back to the legends Fanny had spoken of, and he hated to admit that there had to be some truth to it all. Twice was a coincidence, but half a dozen odd things?

He turned to the castle, squinting against the glare of the snow. And that’s when he saw it, or ratherher,a figure standing before a window in the west wing. The very abandoned, very dark, and very creepy west wing that people claimed housed the ghostly woman who haunted the castle.

He motioned to Penelope, and she stood, her eyes unblinking as she peered at the woman in the window.

But she was not simply a woman. She was a ghost.

Dressed like someone from the early nineteenth century, her pale breasts were pushed up by stays, her chest and waist accentuated by a white empire-waisted dress. Half of her hair was secured in an updo, and the rest of her dark waves flowed in rivulets down her back as if someone had pulled the pins free. Neil could only see the left side of her body, and her pale, downcast eyes were watching them as if waiting.

But Neil knew at once who she was.

It was the woman in the portrait, the face captured in oil paint and tight, precise brushstrokes. It was the ghost they’d been warned of, the woman who haunted Skinner Castle. But she was not a woman in black, she was a woman in white. Somehow, that was even more terrifying.

Penelope took a hesitant step back in the snow, her hands tightening around Neil’s arm. Earlier, by the warmth of a fire or the privacy of the tower, he might have relished the way she was gripping his arm, but now it held the tightness of worry and fear.

Neil and Penelope watched in horror as the woman snapped fully toward them, and though they’d been unable to see it before, there was no mistaking the stark contrast of her right side and the rot along her body.

It tore at her clothes and skin, and though they were far away, Neil was certain he could see bone piercing out from between skin, the draping, discolored flesh that hung from her in shambles.

“The eyes in the cellar,” Penelope said slowly. “The thing in the hall. The smell.”

“The voice in the study.”

Penelope’s eyes widened. “The journal.”