by Ann Charles
Oops! Was that why Caly had come looking for me? Or was the doll ghost or Ottó the result of my pairing? Or had something else come forth that I hadn’t realized with the distraction of Ottó, the doll, and Caly?
Shaking off my worries for another middle of the night toss-and-turn festival, I closed my eyes and maneuvered the candles. Then I stared into the blackness, the flames flickering in my peripheral mind’s eye. After what felt like several minutes, I opened my mouth to ask Cornelius if I was doing something wrong, when he came walking out of the darkness and picked up one of the candles.
“Ready?” he asked.
“You didn’t do your humming thing,” I said, suddenly realizing that fact.
“I didn’t want to call her to us. We’re going to her.”
“We are?” That’s what Doc must have meant about my going back to the Hessler house.
“Grab that candle, Violet. I need you to lead the way since I haven’t been where we need to go.”
When I reached out and touched the candle, a wave of dizziness swept over me so strongly that I had to cover my eyes for a moment. When I lowered my hand, the candle was gone and I was standing outside under the starry night sky. In front of me, on the other side of a wrought iron gate, loomed the Victorian style Hessler house.
I stared up at the two-storied dwelling that had been the setting of so many of my nightmares. Even in the darkness, I could tell the house was different this time. The structure before me was younger and sturdier, the precursor of the dilapidated house I’d first seen back in July. A soft glow of light poured out through the windows on both floors, beckoning me inside out of the cold.
But I lingered, shivering with cold and dread, looking around for an option other than stepping inside Wilda’s lair. Wasn’t there a door number two? Another showcase on which I could bid?
The wood smoke in the air was thicker than before, the barking dog now silent. The street lights glowed white instead of orange, the street empty of any signs of life. The windows in the neighboring houses were all dark, shuttered, uninviting. In the distance, instead of lights dotting the hillside, there was nothing but blackness. That’s when I realized that I hadn’t stepped back in time but rather I’d entered the twisted world in which Wilda now lived.
“What are we waiting for?” Cornelius asked, joining me in front of the Hessler house. “We can’t remove her from here.”
At least I wasn’t alone. “I’m working up to it,” I told him, glad to have him by my side.
The front gate didn’t creak even a little. It was well-oiled apparently. We climbed the porch steps, the crunch of snow underfoot seemed muffled.
I raised my hand to knock.
“There’s no need,” Cornelius pointed at the door. “It’s already open.”
Was that Doc’s doing? Was he here somewhere, watching over us?
I pushed open the door and we stepped inside, shaking off the cold and snow from our shoes—a force of habit, even in dreamland. I looked over at Cornelius. “What now?”
The door slammed shut behind us, making me jump.
I shook my fist at it.
“Did you do that?” Cornelius asked.
The lights went out before I could answer.
Again, I wasn’t entirely surprised. Nor was I pleased about this. Walking through a well-lit haunted house was heart-stopping enough.
“No,” I told him. “I didn’t kill the lights either.”
I heard the sound of shoes scuffing the floor near the half-closed pocket doors that led into the dining room. When I squinted into the dark in that direction, I thought I saw the shape of a head in the darkness peeking around one of the doors. A giggle followed, then the shape was gone, the footfalls leading deeper into the house.
“There’s our little pest. I’m sure she’s the one responsible for our sudden lack of lighting. Let’s see what else she has in store for us.” I led the way toward the dining room, banging my knee on a table that hadn’t been in the sitting room when I’d gone through the house as Wolfgang’s real estate agent. “We need a flashlight.”
One appeared a moment later in Cornelius’s hand. He handed it to me.
“Where did this come from?”
“My pocket.” He pulled out a second flashlight.
“What other tricks do you have up your sleeve?” I jested.
“I’ve come prepared, Violet.”
I turned the light on him. “What do you mean?”
He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a chicken foot, handing it to me.
Next came a black feather.
“Raven or crow?” I asked.
“I can’t believe you’re asking me that.”
Then came a pair of fuzzy dice with seven dots on each side.
“Fuzzy dice?”
“I bought those from a guy in Vegas who practices a new age style of voodoo. He swore they’d protect me from unhappy gremlins.”
“Are there actually happy gremlins out there?”
“Sure. Gremlins have gotten a bad rap in the media.”
Next came a quarter-sized ivory heart, then what looked like a shark’s tooth with symbolic carvings on it, then a vial of bones.
I should’ve brought the alligator tooth that Zelda had given me. “What are these?” I held up the vial. “Baby bird bones?”
He scoffed. “Why would I have bird bones?” He shined his light on the vial. “Those are the bones of a Siberian pixie faery.”
I squinted at the tiny vial. It looked like a bunch of tiny twigs and a pebble to me. How much did a vial of Siberian pixie faery bones cost on the free market these days?
Before I had a chance to ask, he pulled out a horseshoe, well-scuffed and scratched, then a tiki doll carved out of obsidian, then a …
“Okay, stop,” I told him, handing him back all of his protection trinkets. “I think you’ve covered all of our bases.”
He stuffed them all back into his wool coat pocket, which didn’t even bulge when he’d finished. “I told you I’ve come prepared for battle.”
“Oh, yeah? Then where’s your cannon?”
“In my pants.”
I did a double take. That comeback wasn’t Cornelius’s style, more like Ray’s. “I can’t believe you said that.”
“It’s true.” He reached into his pants’ pocket and pulled out something, holding it toward me. I shined the light on his open palm. A miniature brass cannon from the Civil War era sat there, ready for battle.
“It’s my lucky cannon,” he explained and pocketed it.
I should have known better than to ask.
Through the narrow doorway to the kitchen, I heard the sound of another giggle, then footfalls running away again.
“Come on.” We started to follow Wilda toward the kitchen, but suddenly she was behind us in the entryway where we’d stood moments before.
I strode back through the sitting room in time to hear a door upstairs slam closed. Standing at the base of the oak stairway, I glared up the steps into the darkness. “I’m not going to play hide-and-seek with her in this haunted house.” I’d been there and done that with her brother, and frankly, the idea of going up into the violet wallpapered room turned my feet into anvils. I looked over at Cornelius. “How can I get her to come to us?”
“I don’t know that you have that ability, but I do.”
“Get her down here so we can finish this and get the hell out of here.”
Cornelius started chanting under his breath.
Then I remembered that I was wearing his Viking helmet. I took it off. The horn was no longer broken. “Wait,” I said and switched hats with him, plopping the Abe Jr. hat on my head. “Okay, go.”
He sat down on the second step and started again, chanting, humming, calling the ghost to him.
I stood next to him, squinting up the stairwell into the dark, waiting for Wilda to appear.
I heard no footfalls.
No doors slamming.
No giggles.
Something poked me in the back.
I looked down and around.
A garish clown face looked up at me with a ghoulish grin, scaring me so badly that I almost swallowed my tongue.
“Roses are red,” Wilda’s high-pitched child’s voice filled my head. “Violet is blue. Mother is mad. She’s coming for you.”
God, I hated that stupid poem!
My hand snaked out, latching onto her arm. “Gotcha, you little shit! What do we do now, Cornelius?”
He kept humming and chanting, lost in his own rhythm.
Wilda let out an ear-piercing shriek. She started tugging to be free, but I held tightly, stronger by far.
“Cornelius!” I yelled in the midst of the frenzy, but he continued to sit there, unaffected by the cacophony.
Wilda kicked out at me and then twisted in my arms, her teeth gnashing, trying to take a piece out of me. Why was everyone so into biting these days? I struggled to hold her, turning her around so her back was to me and bending down to lock her in a bear hug.
She stilled so suddenly that for a moment I thought I’d squeezed her to death. Then she whimpered, “Let me go.”
“Not until you let Cornelius go.”
“No. I won’t. And you can’t make me.”
Criminy, it was one thing to discipline an obnoxious kid in real life, but how did you make a bratty ghost child obey? I was at a total loss on what to do next.
Doc.
I closed my eyes and pictured two candles, one lit, one not. Following Cornelius’s earlier instructions, I used one to light the other and then focused on the black space in between them, trying to conjure Doc this time.
Nothing happened, at least not with Doc. Wilda on the other hand, began struggling again. After several seconds of fighting her and finally subduing her again, I closed my eyes and this time took the candles and held them together, merging the flames. Little bursts of light billowed up, then I pulled them apart again and stared into the black space. Come on, Doc.
Still nothing.
Damn it. I opened my eyes.
Cornelius was gone.
I looked up the stairs and all around us, but he was nowhere to be seen. “Where did he go?” I asked Wilda.
“I let him go.”
What? Had I somehow spurred her to free him with my candle trick? “Why?”
“I got what we wanted.”
There was that royal “we” again.
My stomach dropped. Oh no. She hadn’t somehow killed him, had she? “What’s that?”
“You.”
Suddenly, my strength ebbed and I could no longer hold her. She pulled free of my grasp and turned, her garish clown face had a sad smile painted on it now.
“Violet, the one that I love,” Wilda said, only her voice sounded more like her brother’s.
I took a step backward, stumbling as another wave of dizziness washed over me, Cornelius’s stove pipe hat fell to the floor. I bent to retrieve it and when I lifted it, I saw something shiny inside the black silk lining. I stuck my hand inside the hat and pulled out the top of the clown cookie jar.
What the hell?
Wilda cried out and snatched it out of my hand. “Where did you get this? Mother is going to be very angry. This is her favorite cookie jar. Nobody is supposed to touch it.”
A loud slam boomed from overhead, making the whole house shake. The sound seemed to rumble for several seconds, echoing throughout the house. It sounded like the Fourth of July fireworks earlier this year over the Open Cut in Lead.
I took a step back, aiming the beam up the stair steps. “What was that?”
Wilda’s clown face turned toward the stairwell. “Uh oh,” she said and giggled nervously.
My flashlight went dark. I banged it on my leg but had no luck. “Shit.” Now what?
Footfalls creaked across the floor up on the landing. I cringed with each step, squinting into the shadows. They stopped at the top of the stairs.
“You’ve done it,” Wilda whispered.
“Done what?”
“Woken Mother.”
I heard another creak from the top of the steps.
“You’re the one who kept screaming,” I told the brat.
Wilda let out a whimper and hid behind me.
Wait a second. Why was she hiding? It was her mother.
Silence stretched, wrapping around me, trussing me up like a mummy. My focus tunneled, centering on the thick shadows at the top of the stairs. My pulse was pounding so loud the partiers down at the Purple Door Saloon must have heard it.
I saw the shadows shift, sort of ripple even, but I couldn’t make out anything definite in the darkness.
A warm fetid breath of air puffed against the right side of my face, heating my skin. Then I heard what sounded like a low-pitched, inward scream in my right ear, growing louder and steadier with each beat of my heart, which was busy trying to break land speed records. The whole right side of my body tingled, goosebumps spreading from head to toe.
Wilda’s mother was beside me. I could feel her energy making my hair stand on end like static electricity.
Gulping, I slowly turned my head to the right … and stared straight into Mrs. Hessler’s face.
Her cheeks were paler than in the picture I’d seen of her months ago up in her bedroom. Her chin was unnaturally long, as if she were being stretched. Her nose looked more pointed, her eyes black, bottomless pits. Her hair seemed to float in water around her, alive even though she was long dead.
The inward scream stopped. Her thin lips pulled back from her teeth, reminding me of a partially decayed body I once saw in Layne’s archaeology books. “Child killer,” she snarled, her teeth chattering like wind-up teeth.
Her hand lifted, long bony fingers reaching toward my face. I wanted to pull back. I needed to pull back. But I stood frozen, my eyes widening as her fingertips came closer, blurring.
The front door banged open behind us.
Mrs. Hessler’s head whipped around, her mouth gaping extra wide. Then she was gone and she took Wilda with her, flying out the door with a banshee scream that scraped over me like fingernails on a chalkboard and rattled the windows.
I ran after them out into the cold, fresh air, tripping on a charred and broken board and falling to my knees. When I looked up, I was back in the here and now. At least I figured it was present day since Cooper was sprawled out on his back on the grass below.
“Cooper?” I pushed to my feet and scrambled down to where he was slowly sitting up, shaking his head as if to clear it. “Are you okay?”
“What in the fuck was that?”
“Did you see her?”
“See who?”
“Mrs. Hessler. She just flew out of …” I looked back at the house that wasn’t there anymore, only the burned remains.
“What are you talking about, Parker? There was nobody here but you. Then this wind came out of nowhere and slammed into me, knocking me down.” He rubbed the back of his head as he got to his feet. “I think I blacked out for a second there.”
“I don’t think that was wind.” I reached out to steady him and he batted my hands away. “It was a ghost.”
The creases on his face deepened. “Christ. You really don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”
After the crazy shit he’d already witnessed, yes, but I bit my tongue rather than try to convince Cooper otherwise. Now was not the time, and I had a feeling we had bigger problems to juggle than his continued skepticism.
“Hell.” He winced while rolling his left shoulder. “Watching your back is hazardous to my health.”
He should try dodging an ax-swinging juggernaut. “Where’re the others?”
He jammed his thumb over his shoulder. “Still underground. You took off again, so I followed.”
“What did I do?”
He looked toward the burned pile of rubble that had once been a house. “You walked around the foundation like you were in some trance, then climbed the porch steps and t
urned into a statue.”
“Until that wind blew,” I said, replaying that last bit in my head. I shuddered at the memory of Mama Hessler. “Did Cornelius follow me?”
“No, you acted alone.”
So, I must somehow have brought Cornelius along mentally? Or had I made that up with him and his pocket full of tricks? I scratched my forehead. This ghost business fit me like a pair of wooden shoes, all clunky, slippery in the muddy spots; whereas playing executioner felt as natural as running barefoot through the sand.
“Is Doc okay?” I asked.
“Besides his infatuation with a crazy-haired troublemaker?” When I glared at him, he shrugged. “He was more cognizant during this run than when we were at Uncle Willis’s ranch.”
“Violet?” Natalie called in the darkness.
“We’re over here, Nat.”
She jogged over, giving me a glance over and then focusing on Cooper. “What happened to you?”
“Nothing, why?” His tone was surprisingly terse. He usually saved that level of snappiness for me.
“Wow.” She turned to me. “Is my head still attached or did he bite it clear off?”
Cooper sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Sorry, Natalie. It’s been a long week.”
I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
“Apology accepted.” She crossed her arms over her chest, her back still stiff when she faced him. “Anyway, Doc told me to find you and make sure you were okay. He said something about you’d been caught in the blast zone.”
“Doc’s coherent already?” I asked.
“He and Cornelius both are. You kicked them out early.”
“I did?”
“According to Doc you did. Cornelius opened his eyes first, then Doc shortly afterward. He didn’t wake up happy either, saying something to Cornelius about you opening the channel too wide and something else coming through.”
Mrs. Hessler.
“Crud! That was my doing?” I sank both hands into my hair, tugging it away from my face. Aunt Zoe had warned me about doing that very thing. “Double crud! Now what?”
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, Cornelius said you were successful in removing Wilda’s hold on him.”
So the little terror hadn’t lied when she’d claimed to have let him go. “I have a feeling her haunting him was a ruse.”
