Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set

by James M Matheson

  She nearly broke her neck racing down the rough, uneven wooden steps. Her foot slipped at the bottom and she only caught herself by catching hold of the edges of the rough stones of the wall. She got her feet under her and stumbled forward into a maze of leftover things from past residents. Justina had said the house was rented out a few times before the bank took it over and none of those tenants wanted to stay.

  They left in such a hurry that they didn’t even take all of their stuff with them.

  She edged around a stack of cardboard boxes full of newspapers and past a metal shelf rack full of paint cans and rusted spray cans of household cleaners. In the far corner the furnace sat cold and unused, probably for years. It was just a hunk of metal now--a modern art sculpture of metal grates and pipes jutting off at odd angles.

  From the top of the basement stairs she heard Officer Clausen. “I’ll find you. There is nowhere to run now.”

  Katie nearly smacked herself in the forehead. Of course Clausen was right. Now that she was in the basement she had nowhere to go. Hiding was all well and good--if she could find a good enough spot to hide in--but how long could she stay hidden? How long would it take Clausen with her police officer skills to do a thorough search and find her?

  What she needed, was a weapon.

  There was firewood stacked in a corner that had been there for God alone knew how long, damp and moldy. It would probably fall apart in her hands if she tried to use it as a club.

  One of the paint cans? No.

  “Move, Katie,” she reminded herself in a voice that was barely a whisper. “Move!”

  She went as fast as she could across the basement level. It was an open space that spanned the length of the house above, crammed with old wheelbarrows and boxes of Christmas ornaments that had seen better days and books that were layered with dust. There was nothing that would make a decent weapon.

  At the back wall, there was a space between another shelving unit holding empty plant vases and canning jars and other things. Katie sucked in her breath, and squeezed herself between the shelves and the wall. She moved in, further and further. It was the best hiding space she could find.

  To her surprise, when she got past the other edge of the metal racks there was an opening, a space created by stone walls and a stack of cardboard boxes sealed up with packing tape.

  It was like a secret little alcove big enough for five people to stand shoulder to shoulder and completely cut off from the rest of the room. If she’d gotten further in the refit of the house she would have gone through the junk down here. Then she would have found this space.

  It was perfect for her to hide in.

  “Katie,” Officer Clausen’s voice came to her in a sing song. It was muffled here in her hidey-hole. “I’m coming for you, Katie. I’m coming for you.”

  She barely breathed. Why would a police officer from the Port Cable police department be doing this to her? Sure, her and the chief were on the outs because he was a ginormous dunce, but she didn’t have anything against Officer Clausen. She actually liked Officer Clausen. What was going on here?

  “I see you.”

  Clausen’s voice was so close it chilled Katie’s blood. Just on the other side of the boxes. There was no way she could be seen here.

  Barely above a whisper, she said on the exhale of a silent breath, “I’m invisible here. No one can see me. I’m invisible.”

  Through the boxes in front of her--through them--came a dark shadowy form. It walked right into her little hiding space, and smiled.

  “Hello there, Katie. I found you.”

  Chapter 17

  This wasn’t Officer Clausen.

  It was Bill’s face Katie saw as she screamed and flattened herself into the wall. His form was melting through the barrier of cardboard boxes and crowding her in the empty space. He smiled with his pretty face and then spoke to her with the voice of Officer Debbie Clausen.

  “Found you.”

  Katie’s brain was in overload. She felt like every neuron in her mind was melting. He was here, and he shouldn’t be here, because that was something very solid that he had just skipped right through as if it was nothing, and that was not his voice he was talking with.

  “Like that trick?” he said to her, his voice returning to his own. Once again he sounded just like the man whose spell she had fallen under. “You can’t hide from me. You can’t ever leave me. Don’t you ever disobey me again. You hear me?”

  “You...you’re a...”

  He quirked an eyebrow at her. “Yes?”

  “You’re a...”

  He stepped closer and now she could see the blazing light in his crystal blue eyes. “Say it.”

  She couldn’t make herself form the word.

  “Say it.”

  She couldn’t do it.

  “Say it!”

  The answer came out of her in a little hoarse groan, too quiet to be heard.

  He leaned in closer, until his face was almost touching hers. “Don’t mumble. Speak up. Do you think I deserve to be spoken to that way? Now, say it. Say it!”

  “You’re a ghost!” Katie screamed.

  She still couldn’t believe it. Everything she had thought about him was true. The reason why he showed up out of nowhere and disappeared just as quickly. Why the upstairs hall never squeaked when he walked there. How she couldn’t remember anything about being with him except that he’d taken her to bed and then she’d fallen asleep and each time her heart had ended up wrapped around him just a little bit tighter.

  He was starting to control her. Worming his way inside of her and making her belong to him. Just like he had to Justina.

  Just like he had to Emily.

  “You killed her,” Katie said. She was scared out of her wits and trembling so hard that she just knew her legs were going to give out on her any second but her mouth just kept running. “You killed your own daughter. She was pregnant and you killed her.”

  “That ungrateful girl! I gave her everything. I gave her a home. I gave her food and clothing and guidance! I gave her my love!”

  The way he said that set Katie’s teeth on edge. She could see it now. Almost as if this house and the spirits who dwelled within were sending her another vision of the past. Bill had loved his daughter, not in the way a father loved his daughter, but in the way a man loves a woman that he owns.

  “The baby was yours.” She hadn’t seen it, until now. Bill was the father of his own daughter’s baby. This man hadn’t just physically abused his family. He had abused his daughter in every way possible. “You did that--to your own daughter.”

  “She was mine! She needed to know the way of the world and it was up to me to teach her.”

  His voice was fuzzy now, hollow sounding and echoey and Katie wondered if it had always been that way and she just hadn’t noticed. He had worked a spell on her to hide his true nature, all the while trying to entice her into becoming his. What would her fate have been, if she’d given herself over to him?

  What was her fate going to be now?

  “You killed your own daughter,” she accused him. “You killed your daughter because she was pregnant with your child!”

  “I took her up to her room,” Bill explained, as if remembering the details of his former life for the first time. “She told me she was going to run away with that Miguel boy and I told her no. That was when she told me she was pregnant. My daughter had never lain with another man. Never! Just me, so I could teach her and guide her... She should not have gotten pregnant! That was bad of her. Very bad! She had to be punished.”

  Katie managed to take a single step to her right, back toward the narrow way behind the shelves. Could she get away from him? Would she ever be able to get away from him?

  “She fought me. My daughter fought with me and she struck me. I will not stand for my family disobeying me. I will not stand for it! Do you hear me! I will not stand for this nonsense!”

  He raised his hand like he was going to strike Katie. Only,
she didn’t think this man’s ghost was even seeing her. She was certain he was seeing his own past, standing in the moment when he struck his daughter hard enough to kill her. Then, when she was dead, he brought her downstairs to the living room and placed her inside the wall to hide her.

  “We were fixing some weather damage to the inside of the living room,” Bill explained. It was almost like he was speaking directly to Katie’s thoughts. “The wall was exposed already. I put Emily in there and I did the rest of the repairs myself to give my daughter a proper burial. I didn’t let anyone else in the room until I was done. Emily will always be a part of this house. Always.”

  She dared another few steps away from him.

  He gestured wildly. “I told her mother that she had run away. I had to tell her something. It was easy to believe because Katie had always been such a willful girl. We had to tell a different lie to the town, of course, because we had a reputation to uphold. We said she went away to college and never came home. But for my wife, I said she had run away.”

  “You were a monster.” That word had never held as much meaning for Katie as it did now.

  He shrugged a shoulder in a blur of shadowy movement. “Sometimes you have to make a mess to make things better.”

  The way he said it this time terrified Katie.

  She was close enough to touch the shelves now. As the ghost stood there, transfixed by the bad things he had done in life, she bolted. She pushed herself through the narrow passage along the wall and out into the open again and then she sprinted through the chaos of forgotten possessions in the basement to the stairs. She saw them there, waiting to take her to safety, and she sobbed in relief.

  Just as her foot fell on the first stair, a hand grabbed her wrist, and held her fast.

  His touch was cold now. Before, whenever Bill would take hold of her or kiss her, his caress had been warm and inviting. Now it was so cold it burned her and she cried out in pain. “Let me go! Bill, let me go!”

  “I will never let you leave me! You are mine. Do you hear me, Katie? You are mine!”

  “No,” she managed to say. “I’m not. I don’t belong to you.”

  “Yes. You do.”

  He pulled her back, and the pain was as real as the pleasure she’d taken with him.

  “Let me go!” she pleaded. He was a ghost, she thought to herself. He shouldn’t be able to be this real or this strong or this--

  “Daddy,” a new voice said. “Daddy, please.”

  Just a few feet away, Katie watched as a pretty teenage girl with long flowing hair faded into view. Emily Knox was wearing the same white dress that Katie had seen her wearing in her vision. The one she had on the day her father took her up to her room, and killed her.

  “Emily,” he breathed.

  The sound of her name from his dead lips filled the room. She held her arms out to him. A daughter, pleading for her father’s love.

  Katie couldn’t move. She was watching something impossible play out right in front of her eyes. She felt like she was going insane. She rubbed her eyes. She blinked them. When she opened them again, the specters of father and daughter were still there.

  “Let it be over, Daddy.” Emily’s eyes blinked at tears that glistened on her cheeks with a light that didn’t come from the basement. “You killed me. You killed my baby. Isn’t that enough? This should be over.”

  Fury raged in the face of William Frank Knox. “You are my daughter and you will do as I say. Get back in your room where you belong.”

  “No, Daddy.” Now her outstretched arms lifted up to cover her face, as if to protect herself.

  “Go to your room.”

  “I’m leaving, Daddy. I can’t stay here anymore.”

  “You will go to your room, and you will stay there until I tell you that you can come out!”

  Katie took a step back down the stairs. She knew she should step in. She knew she should say something or do something. Her heart went out to Emily, dead at the hands of a jealous and abusive father. There was no way for her to change what had happened in the past.

  What could she possibly do now?

  In a flash, Bill flew across the room at Emily, his arms raised to strike her, a scream of rage filling the air. Emily cowered from her father, afraid of the man who had terrorized his entire family for years. A man who had killed her.

  “Daddy please...don’t do it!”

  His response shook the walls. “I will kill you!”

  Above them, the door to the basement stairs creaked as someone opened it wider.

  Everything stopped. The world went as still as still could be. Katie looked up at the doorway, afraid of what she would see this time.

  Justina Knox stood there, clutching her hands to her chest. Her pale eyes focused on the ghost of her dead husband.

  “You will not,” she told him, “hurt our child any longer.”

  Bill staggered back a step. “You...you can’t be here.”

  “This house is never closed to me,” she told him. “I helped make this house a home. You can’t keep me out.”

  She came down a few steps, slowly, carefully, and then she smiled at Katie. “Hello, Miss Pearson. We have a lot to talk about, you and I, but I have a family matter to attend to first, it seems.”

  Bill’s specter raged wildly, throwing his arms around and screaming in wordless anger. “Get out. Get out get out get out! I make the decisions for this family. Me! ME!”

  “You gave up that right when you killed our daughter.”

  He swept forward, toward the stairs, and Katie stumbled back from the face of his wrath. Justina stood her ground.

  “LEAVE!” Bill roared, and the air rushed around them with the force of that command, whipping Katie’s hair around her face and tugging at her clothes.

  This time, Justina took a small step back as well.

  “Daddy.” Emily’s ghost had floated closer, her voice small and sounding like she was talking from very far away. “Let us go.”

  His spirit seemed to swell, growing taller and wider, darker, blurry, filling the space from floor to ceiling and towering over Emily. “You are mine! You will be mine until the end of the world! I am your father!”

  Justina took a deep breath and walked down the stairs past Katie. “No, you’re not. You’ve done too much evil to be this girl’s father.”

  The shadowy form swirled and seethed, a storm barely contained in one spot. He growled and sputtered and Katie knew that ghost or not, if he wanted her dead there was nothing she could do to stop him.

  As he bore down on Katie and Justina, Emily’s ghost flashed a brilliant gold color, flying into the storm of her father’s emotional turmoil, twisting up inside of him, fighting him in death in a way that she never could in life. They struggled together, the storm in the basement knocking over piles of everything in their way.

  “Stop!” Justina called over the maelstrom. “Stop it! You killed yourself once over what you did to our daughter. You murdered our Emily! You took her away and it ate you up inside until you committed suicide! You are a bad man! You always were a bad man and now I’m telling you to get out! Leave this house!”

  Emily tumbled out of the darkness. Her ghost whined and keened as she fell against the wall and lay still, her image fading in and out of sight.

  Huge and distorted, the face of William Frank Knox rose in the storm and glared down at Justina and Katie. It was the old woman he was focused on. The woman who had been his obedient wife for years. The woman who was now--finally--standing up to him.

  He growled at Justina like a beast. She stood her ground, and stabbed a shaky finger at him. “I said leave! You are no longer welcome here! This is no longer your home. Go away. Go! Go away!”

  The storm lifted up on itself and coiled into a tight ball of spectral energy. A scream that started at a low pitch and then rose through the octaves shook dust from the ceiling beams. It pressed against Katie’s ears painfully. She had to put her hands over the sides of her head and ev
en then it wasn’t enough to block it out.

  “Leave,” Justina said to him again, holding an arm up over her face, calling out above the turmoil. “Leave!”

  Katie fell to her knees, curling up on herself as the pressure of the storm built up around them. The cloud of evil that had once been William Frank Knox spun faster and faster, his face ever present on the front of the dark energy. His mouth hung open, his eyes wide, and just when Katie was sure she couldn’t take any more he burst apart with a feverish screech and a shockwave that radiated outward, through the whole house.

  Then he was gone, and it was over.

  Katie opened her eyes in time to see Justina fall to the floor in stages, her arm cushioning her head from striking the poured cement.

  She crawled over to check, and found the woman was still breathing. Blood trickled from her lips and her nose. Her eyes were open and staring, seeing nothing.

  “Oh no, oh no...Justina? Can you hear me?” Katie tried to remember where her cellphone was. Back pocket! Right. She reached for it, frantically dialing 911.

  A light radiated a pleasant warmth above her. Emily Knox had come to kneel over her mother. With a gentle hand she reached out to cradle the old woman’s face. More tears traced lines down her cheeks as she brought her eyes up to Katie.

  “It’s over. Please...tell my mother I love her.”

  Then her image wisped away, as if it had been taken from this world by a ghostly wind.

  “This is 911, what is the nature of your emergency?”

  The call had connected and the voice of the dispatcher was in Katie’s ear. She had to swallow several times before she could find her voice. It was over, she kept telling herself. It was over.

  “This is Katie Pearson,” she told the woman on the other end of the phone. “I’m at the Knox Estate. There’s been...an accident. Please send help.”

  Then she stayed on the line until the ambulance and the police arrived.

  Chapter 18

  “I suppose I should thank you, Miss Pearson.”