Page 103 of Some Kind of Haunted

I’m standing here staring at some evil version of kind old Harrison, and I can’t make sense of it.

They must have gotten to him, I think. The slurping is everywhere and it’s making my skin crawl and my blood run cold inside me, but maybe this is what the slurping does. Is he possessed? Should I expect his head to start spinning and there to be a whole foaming-at-the-mouth thing?

If I’m going to need to find a priest, that might take a minute.

A minute I would gladly take rather than accept what’s happening right in front of me.

“You should have told me about the dreams, Lexi,” Harrison says, through that alarming viscous grin. “That wasn’t very good of you.”

The dreams. My dreams.

I don’t understand what’s happening but I still can’t manage to speak through the horror of it.

“You should have told me you knew about the rock. Things would be very different then.” Harrison is shaking his head and it sounds like him again.

Cheerful and kind—but everything about him is wrong, and the shadows that dance around him are worse. I wonder if this was there the whole time and I just didn’t see it, too busy being bored while he was doing demon things right in front of me.

Especially when his smile fades at the edges, caving to that blackness. “You should have told me you’d gotten your Darling hooks into my grandson. Things would be so different. But now we have to do this the hard way.”

I shake myself a little and try to think critically, past the horror and my agitated pulse that feels like a cardiac harbinger all its own. If he’s been somehow possessed or taken over, maybe the real Harrison is still in there. Maybe I can get him out.

But first, I have to know how bad this is. “Where’s Jack?” I ask him, and it’s a fight to keep my voice calm. “Where’s my brother?”

Did he hurt them? Or is it me he’s after?

He chuckles, that kindly old laugh that sounds sharp and mean here in the echoing center of the clock tower’s foundation. “Not here.”

“Where, then?” I ask.

He keeps going with the chuckling and there’s not one part of me that thinks that I’m dreaming this. I know I’m not. I know this is real, and as horrifying as this is, it feels like a kind of progress. It allows me not to cringe or cry in the face of this. To stand straight as this person I thought was not only harmless but an ally, even a friend, turning out to be . . . neither of those things.

Oh, Jack, I think, and it feels like anguish. This is going to kill you.

“Harrison, what is this?” I ask calmly. My pulse is still on high alert, but I’m keeping myself together. After all, I’ve spent a lot of time finding myself thrust into upsetting circumstances. Maybe the dreams were training me for the real shit. “What’s happening? Why did you bring me here?”

I bear down on certainty, on strength. I am the harbinger. A herald of things, a tool to help—like Jack said. Jack, who loves me. As I am.

Not if I get psychiatric help or become less dramatic. Not if I stop being too loud or too flashy or too much.

He loves me exactly as I am, here and now. So I owe him this. I owe myself this. I need to stand my ground, not run. I need to summon my strength and save the grandfather he loves. If I can.

I couldn’t save Cleo because I wasn’t awake. But I am wide-awake now.

“Harrison, I know this isn’t you,” I tell him, very seriously. Because surely the good man I’ve gotten to know over the past few weeks is inside whatever evil mask he’s showing me right now.

He throws his head back and cackles.

I swallow back the sick tide of horror that wants to rise inside me and pull me under. I force it down.

“Not me?” he echoes. And when he looks at me again, there’s nothing kind about him at all. It’s all cruelty and cunning, and that tide rushes toward me again. “You’re so easy to fool, Lexi. Is it the outsider in you? Or the Darling? Did your father raise you to be this stupid?” He laughs again, and it keeps getting worse. The chuckle has evolved into a horrible, nasty laugh that scrapes like knives against my skin. “I bet he’s the one who convinced you that you were crazy, didn’t he? No wonder you’re such a disaster.”

It’s appalling that these words come from Harrison, who I spent all those mornings with. Who taught me about the history of this place and made certain I wasn’t affected by the drafts from outside, and insisted that Jack bring us coffees to keep us warm. This kind old man, who felt like a sort of homecoming and told me the truth about myself that I wanted to believe so much that I convinced myself I must have dreamed it. And him.

The man I think I must have decided was a stand-in for the grandmother I never knew, because I trusted him.

This is the night before Halloween, something in me whispers. Devil’s Night. He was stalling.

But what’s much worse and far more immediate is the dawning realization that I really can’t move. It’s not just a feeling. I try to step back and find I physically can’t.