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Yes,she tried to say, but the word didn’t come out. “I’m not sure,” was what she said instead.
“Ah.” Athena reached into the bucket she carried. “I always wondered how sensitive you were. Sensitive enough.”
“Enough for what? What’sinthere?” Hanna stared at her friend.
Athena took a deep breath and let it out through flattened lips. “Most ghosts are harmless. There are rare cases, often spirits driven by extreme malice or emotional strength, where the ghost has learned to do more with its environment than frighten those within it. What popular culture might call a poltergeist, or a wraith. A phantom.”
“Emotional strength.” Not a quality Hanna felt she had at that moment. She forced herself to breathe in, breathe out, breathe in again, to release the tension in her shoulders as each breath left her.
“Mm. Guilt, often. Fear. Hatred. Love. The big ones.” At last, she came out with one of the charms against evil Hanna had made fun of. “Put this on.”
It surprised Hanna to discover how difficult it was to push her muscles into functioning. “So a ghost’s guilty conscience is making me feel like I want to throw up, run away, cry, and curl up fetal, all at once.”
“No, Hanna. That isn’t a ghost you are feeling.” Athena stretched her mouth into a thin-lipped smile. “Thereareghosts here. Three who will never notice you. Two who will, and may resent you for your audacity to remain alive. The apparition of an old woman stands at that window there each night to keep watch. You could not feel any of those from here.”
It took three tries for Hanna to pull the charm’s shoddy chain over her head. The moment the pendant touched her skin, the miasma of terror dissipated. Her tattoo cooled. Whatever spiritual weight had attempted to flatten her stopped. In its wake, she felt light, hollow, washed too-clean by the torrents of adrenaline.
“Then what the hell was I feeling?” she asked.
“I have no idea what it is, though I suspect ‘the hell’ is not inaccurate,” Athena answered. “It is warded into the cellar now. Every year, I refresh the protections to keep it there. Very few people can feel it at all, or if they do, they feel only a sense of dread that enhances their ‘haunted house’ experience. You are one of the lucky few.”
“Lucky,” Hanna echoed.Not the word I’d use.“And you want us to go in there.”
“Our friend in the cellar isn’t going to refresh the linens,” Athena said wryly, and started toward the house again.
Hanna noticed her friend didn’t pull on a charm. “Can’t you feel it?”
“Naturally.”
“But you don’t have a charm on.”
“I prefer to be able to feel where it is.”
“Athena, have you ever seen it? Not just felt it, but seen it?”
Athena didn’t reply. She just stepped onto the porch to open the back door.
2
Someone Else’s Fairytale
“How do you sleep, knowing that place is on the same property? That the– Our Friend in the Cellar is ten minutes that way?” Hanna pointed toward the far wall, which stood between them, the forest, and the oddities that hung out in Athena’s rental.
“I worry more about the guests who rent the place,” Athena replied, nose still in her book. “The greater proportion of my uncanny lodgers remain bound to the house. The rest have not made it past the protections on this house, the main house, and in the woods between them. Drunken dudebros are not deterred by charms against evil.”
Hanna winced. “The world might be a better place if they were. Why do you live here?”
“It’s practical to.” Athena turned the page. “I own it, so I pay no rent on it. It allows me to maintain the rental house if my cleaning crew develops a sudden sensitivity to spiritual entities. And, in a more altruistic vein, to whom would I sell Our Friend in the Cellar? Unless a church would like a remote, wooded location for retreats and Come to Jesus meetings.”
“Come to Jesus, because he’s the only one who can drive off the nasty thing downstairs?”
“One of a few, anyway. I’d give Asatru sorts a go at it.”
Hanna fell silent, since talking about it reminded her she intended to sleep half a mile away from a haunted house full of frat boys on a break from classes. She’d heard them hooting and daring each other to stay up all night to investigate the haunting, assuring each other they were not afraid of any ghosts. They’d sounded like idiots.And no matter how annoying they sound, I’m glad I checked the locks on the cellar door myself.
Still, she couldn’t stop thinking about the spirits Athena said lingered in the main house. While Hanna hadn’t seen the Woman in the Window, or the Girl in the Corner, she’d fancied she’d felt their presences as she changed the pillowcases on the beds and ensured the milk in the kitchen’s ancient refrigerator had an expiration date in the future, not the past. A chill wind that blew against the back of her arm. The intense sensation that someone, somethingwatched her, but when she looked around, she saw no one there.
“Who are they?” she asked suddenly.
