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He smelled the acrid tang of copper over the musty scent of dust and disuse. He pried his eyes open to see rough brick walls in a small, windowless room. A bare bulb burned in an old, basic fixture overhead, just a socket dangling from a ratty wire. The ruddy orange light it shed implied the bulb had survived many decades here in the room he had never seen, still functional for its undisturbed state.
Unsure where he was, he craned his neck around. He thought he might recognize the wine racks along one wall.The wine cellar. A hidden room, maybe? I don’t remember ever hearing about this place.Two forms slumped in the darkest corner of the tiny room. He strained to see them and immediately wished he hadn’t.Our cook. The maid who stayed to help with dinner. Oh, God, I think they’re dead. No sign of Laura. Or Martin. What happened?
“You’re awake.” The woman’s voice came from behind him. Familiar, too familiar, yet so different Gregory still had to work to place it. “I was hoping you would wake up to talk to me before you sleep forever.”
The chair almost tipped as Gregory fought to turn around. A hand steadied it, then rested on his shoulder with an intimacy that made his skin crawl. Fingertips trailed over the back of his neck, his other shoulder, down his arm as Darlene walked around to stand in front of him.
“Mother? What the hell is going on?” Gregory demanded.
Darlene’s lips twisted into a malicious smile. “Mother. It has been such a long time since anyone called me that. It’s so sweet to hear it again. Close enough for our purposes, I think.”
A sluggish lassitude began to settle in. Gregory licked his lips. “You’ve gone insane. I call you that every day.”
“You calledDarlenethat every day. She and I, we have so much in common. Our motives might have been different, but our actions?” She stroked one fingertip over the side of Gregory’s jaw. “We are sisters in our crimes. That was why it was so easy to slip into her. She saw you dancing so sweetly, like the prince at a ball, and she realized there is no place for the wicked mother in the stories. Either she had to change, or she had to leave, but leaving meant you might discover her trespasses. As she struggled to make her choice, I made mine. A body. Two sons to keep eternally in the home I have never left.”
Two sons.Gregory’s mind struggled to wrestle her words into any form of sense. His mind had lost itself in a mist of confusion that deepened with every moment.Sleep forever. I’m bleeding. She’s trying to kill me.He glanced down. A puddle of alarming size had gathered at the base of his chair. By its size, she might have succeeded.I’m going to die.
He tried to look up again. The motion lagged between thought and action. As his head lifted, he saw a child cowering near the bodies in the corner. A young boy, perhaps eight, dressed in the simple clothes of an earlier time. Dirty. Terrified. Eyes fixed on Gregory, though not on his face. His chest, where he could feel the weight pressing again.
Gregory followed the child’s gaze to see a baby clinging to his own chest, crying in a voice he knew all too well. His vision flickered between the basement and the dirty living room in a cheap house, when he had looked down into the lifeless face of his brother and wondered why he didn’t cry.
Darlene crouched down in front of Gregory. “Don’t worry, my dear son. I will take that burden from you. That classless tart you danced with stole all my children from me, but I need not be alone. First, I will take that sweet little one you have carried for so long. Then, I will take you to join him. I think it’s rather fitting. You were this body’s baby. Now, you will be mine. You will replace the collection your whore stole. Though I do still have this.”
She stroked the stones of one wall. Smooth stones, unlike the rough brick that formed the other portions of masonry. As she did, Gregory saw the vague shape of a skeleton embedded in the stones, arms up and skull down as though the tiles had consumed it while it hung against them. A woman faded in, young face streaked with the tears of decades, dangling by ropes that no longer existed and bleeding from wounds in flesh long scoured from her bones.
The child in the corner stood, fists balled at his sides. When the young woman shook her head at him, he crouched back down, anger clear in his face.
“No,” Gregory murmured. “It can’t be. Ghosts don’t–”Ghosts don’t exist.Yet as he thought back to the moments with Gran, tender times where she caressed the air in front of his chest, or the moments when she insisted she saw a child in need of a governess, Gregory knew he had been wrong.
Ghosts had always existed. He had feared them because a corner of his mind knew he carried one.Hanna. The sparrows. The bottles. She was letting the souls of the Widow’s children go. And this…
He stared at the woman he had thought was his mother. “Marion Pritchard.”
“You are such a smart boy.” Darlene’s face smiled. “It will be a pleasure to have you here, the most delicious of vintages, to savor all through the years. The authorities will arrive, eventually. They will find your mother is the only one left alive. The estate will come to me, and my home will belong to me again. Perhaps I will turn it into a place for children who have nowhere to go. I would be glad to give them a home.”
Weakness had all but overcome him. Gregory fought to stay awake. “No. Gran.”
“Is in quite a state. While you had your unfortunate dinner party, I spent a great deal of time with her. She was very upset to find me hiding in her stepdaughter’s body. She’s not doing well at all.” Darlene chuckled, low and throaty. “Perhaps I will keep her as I kept dear Janette. A young woman and an old woman. Lovely, artistic contrast, don’t you think?”
Gregory tried to thrash in the ropes to loosen them. His body refused to do more than put up a feeble struggle. In the house above, a faint chime sounded. The doorbell. “I won’t let you hurt her.”
“Too late, my dear. Perhaps you should have listened when your mother spoke and turned that girl out of your house.” She cupped his chin roughly in her hand. “Mother always knows best.”
* * *
Greenhill Hall stooddark and quiet. Though Hanna should have expected it at this late hour, she couldn’t shake the feeling something was terribly wrong.
The cab driver didn’t linger for conversation. He took his payment and drove off at speed down the estate’s long driveway. Hanna pulled her phone out of her pocket to hit first Gregory’s number, then Martin’s, then the house line, heedless of international charges. No one answered.
It would be embarrassing for them if I called the police again, only to find out nothing is wrong. Emergency services have been out here too many times lately.Hanna trotted up to the front door to ring the doorbell. She waited and when she heard nothing, she tried the door. Locked, and in a grand gesture of commitment to her resignation, she had left her key on her dresser upstairs before she left. She rang the bell again.
Still no answer. She backed up from the door to look over all the windows. All curtains closed, no view indoors. The flashlight on her phone cast an anemic light, but it served to guide her to where she knew the window to Gregory’s office sat.
She rapped hard on the glass. “Gregory? Gregory, it’s Hanna. Gregory?”
Quiet. Quiet, but for the insistent chirps of sparrows from the back garden. Hanna’s nerves prickled. “Definitely something wrong,” she murmured to herself. “I should call the police and wait for them to get here.”
But the sparrows didn’t stir themselves when there would be no souls to catch, no deaths to foretell. Hanna listened to them call, and knew she had no time to wait for the authorities to arrive from the nearest township.The house is locked up. I don’t have a key. No one is answering. How do I get inside?
