Page 9 of Some Kind of Haunted

Trying to breathe is not helping. I have no choice, so I watch that blackness. And as I do, slimy and unavoidable, the dark in the crack of the tower has eyes.

And I know they’re looking right at me.

Then there are millions of them, pouring out and slithering into the waiting, welcoming dark. For a moment, there’s only that slithery sound that I almost want to convince myself is the wind in the trees, but I know better.

How I wish I didn’t know better.

And then it starts. Terrible, sickening sucking sounds. I hear distant screams.

They’re feeding.

And I almost think I know exactly what they’re feeding on, so horrible that it makes my stomach twist and my gorge rise—

“Lex.”

It’s Logan’s voice.

I manage to tear my gaze away from the tower, but everything behind me is black. Just black. Maybe I am filled with that same blackness, too, like a poison—

I feel Logan’s hands on my shoulders. My eyes blink open, though I didn’t think they were closed, and I’m surrounded by soft light from a round, hand-painted lamp. I’m in a warm room.

I’m disoriented.

I’ve woken up from the nightmare, hallelujah, but . . . I’m not in bed. I’m also not standing under a crumbling clock tower, so that’s a win. But I am standing in the middle of an unfamiliar living room, not at all sure how I got here.

I look at Logan and actually see him this time. His expression is grim.

That is most assuredly not a win. Not on my sunshiney brother.

“Great,” I manage to get out, past my thick and scratchy throat. “One night in a flyover state and I’m sleepwalking.”

That’s the worst of it, I tell myself.

Even though I know better. Because I know full well that I’ve dreamed of that clock tower before, and more than once.

Long before we arrived in Iowa.

Chapter Five

I go back to bed, go through my routine all over again, and I take my damn pill this time. I sleep in snatches, but I don’t dream again. And when I wake up to daylight streaming in the dusty window of this airless room, I know I didn’t go anywhere else last night.

Thank God.

Because the routine works. Whatever I thought was happening last night when I woke up was clearly a product of sleepwalking, the thing that can only happen by not following my routine. It’s absurd to imagine I somehow dreamed something from this creepy town before coming here for the first time.

It’s just the way my warped brain works. I know this, and I’ve spent too long in my own fractured sanity to get so . . . amped over it.

Stick to the routine, stick to the coping mechanisms, and I can function like someone normal. It’s an important and hard-won life lesson I can’t lose just because I’m somewhere new and unfamiliar.

The sunlight and the dust motes make everything that happened last night seem ridiculous, up to and including creepy faces and antagonistic alleyways.

I get out of bed and shuffle out into the living room. There’s a neatly folded blanket and pillow on the couch, but no Logan. But since the house is barely big enough to hold my arms out straight in, I see him sitting at a table in the kitchen that could maybe fit two.

He’s got the legal documents from our grandmother’s lawyer spread out in front of him. More importantly, there is no coffee brewing. There is no hint of any coffee at all.

My twin knows me very well, because he doesn’t even look up at me. “We’re going to have to go to the grocery store for supplies, but our meeting with the knitting shop people is in thirty minutes and the closest grocery store is at least twenty away. However, before you freak out, there appears to be some kind of diner across the street. A diner will have coffee.”

I shove my wild hair out of my face. “Get groceries delivered. Just because we’re hanging out on the prairie doesn’t mean we have to act like pioneers.”