Page 194 of Love at First Fright

His hand closed around a shard. Long. Vicious. Blood made it slippery.

He turned.

Those empty eyes found mine.

Then he drove the glass into my side.

It slid easily between two ribs. I’d felt the deliberate precision of it. The wrongness of Michael’s strength, Michael’s face, Michael’s body doing this terrible thing.

Michael screamed.

The sound ripped out of him—agonised and horrified. His eyes flooded with awareness, with comprehension, with absolute terror at what his hands were doing.

“I’m sorry,” he sobbed. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t stop, I can’t—”

The glass twisted.

Everything went dark.

A different kind of dark. Final. Complete.

Until I opened my eyes again as something else.

I floated there, at the bottom of the stairs, translucent and shaking. Processing.

Michael had done it. Michael had killed me. Been forced to kill me.

What had happened next? I didn’t know for sure, but I could easily imagine.

Michael’s parents came home. Found their paralysed son at the bottom of the basement stairs, covered in blood, cradling his dead guitar teacher. Their boy who couldn’t walk had somehow made it down those stairs. Had somehow killed someone.

No wonder there were no police records. No missing person reports. No investigation.

Just a family trying to protect their traumatised child, cleaning up the evidence of something they couldn’t possibly explain. That Michael couldn’t explain. What happened to him in the twenty-seven years that followed? Had he managed to forgive himself?

And me. Trapped here. No body to be found, no funeral, no closure. Just another ghost in Grimthorne Manor’s collection.

I looked at the doorway. At the darkness that had inhaled Harrison, Brad, Evelyn, Father Ashworth.

Cornelius waited inside there.

What could he do to me? Kill me again?

The thought should have been funny. Should have brought some bitter amusement.

Instead, terror crawled through my incorporeal form. Because death wasn’t the worst thing. Existence after death proved that.

But non-existence? Being erased?

Who knew what that malevolent presence was capable of?

And Charlie.

Charlie wasn’t actually safe in that cupboard. Not really. Not with this door open, not with Cornelius loose, not with the manor’s protections shattered.

There was no other choice.

I went into the darkness.