Katie slammed the book shut. This was too much. She was not going to let herself get caught up in this. So the town had a history, and that one woman’s face looked a lot like hers, but that didn’t mean she had to get involved.
She wanted to call Riley. She wanted to hear his voice and tell him what was going on and let him tell her that it was all just nonsense. He might not be here but he’d believe her without question. It must be the middle of the afternoon for him back in Oregon so it would be the perfect time to call him...
She checked her watch for the time and gasped.
Mason was going to be waiting for her. They had agreed to meet for coffee and she’d been so wrapped up in what she was reading she nearly forgot. Had she really been at the library for this long?
Rushing out with a little wave to Franklin, Katie stopped on the sidewalk for her bearings. The café was...that way. She kept checking her watch every few steps. She was going to just make it, but the call to Riley was going to have to wait.
She got to the café early, and a quick look around the room told her that Mason wasn’t there yet. Time enough for her to go to the restroom and wash her face.
There was one bathroom for men and women, and it was just a little room with a sink and a mirror and a commode. She set the bag of dishes down and ran some water, splashing it in her hands and then over her face.
When she looked up again into the mirror, it wasn’t her face looking back at her.
It wasn’t, but it was. Her cheeks were thinner. Her hair was up instead of down. Her eyes were just a bit wider.
It was the face from the photographs.
Then she blinked, and it was her face again. It was just her.
She swallowed back a sudden lump in her throat and left the bathroom, the bag of dishes in her hand.
Her only thought was of getting out of here, back to the Inn, and laying down. Everything felt wrong. She felt like she’d somehow stepped out of her skin and now she was trying to stuff herself back in but there just wasn’t enough room.
Back in the café, she found Mason waiting for her.
Chapter 9
“Hey there,” Mason greeted her. He was there already, sitting at a table. He must have come in when she was in washing her face.
When she was seeing the reflection of a witch staring back at her from the mirror...
“I got us a table,” he said when she didn’t respond to him. “Hope that’s okay?”
“Uh, yeah. Thanks.” Her headache was back, throbbing slowly in time with her pulse. “Let’s just sit down.”
“After you.”
She grimaced as he held out a chair for her. She didn’t like men doing things for her. She’d worked a long time to prove her independence. It was a nice enough gesture, but she was perfectly capable of getting into her own chair.
“I can do it myself,” she snapped, pulling the chair out of his hand and resettling it in almost the same position.
He looked at her a little oddly, but then he nodded and sat down across from her. Men, Katie heard herself thinking. They were always so condescending. Always ready to tell you what you couldn’t do and what your place was and...and...
She took a deep breath and realized she wasn’t making any sense. Her head was killing her.
“I’m sorry,” she told him. “Can I get a glass of water, do you think?”
“Sure thing.” He immediately flagged down a server and explained they’d like to start with two waters. The young teenage girl in her café uniform frowned. She knew that a couple sitting down to drink water weren’t going to spend very much.
“Don’t worry,” Mason said to her. “We’ll order something else in a bit. Just getting started.”
That seemed to make the young woman feel better and off she went to get the glasses of water. Katie watched Mason, and how easily he made it look to be nice to people. She felt a tug inside of her, a kind of pull in his direction. Not that she was looking for an attraction to this man but she could see how easy it would be.
Her, a woman far from home, him a cute reporter who was smart and funny. It was practically a Hallmark movie.
And if she wasn’t already with Riley, she might even see where that would go.
Her head throbbed, and she forgot what she had just been thinking.
She tasted the water when it came, and it was okay. Not metallic, not refreshing, just water. Exactly what she needed right now.
With a sigh, she tried to ease herself into her chair and just enjoy being here with Mason.
“So what have you been up to?” he asked her, picking up one of the menus.
“I was...” She stopped for a moment, putting her fingers to her temple. Her headache was getting worse. She gulped some more of the water from her glass. “Sorry. I guess I’m just a little dehydrated, maybe. I was at the library.”
His eyebrows quirked up. “Oh? Looking for some summer reading?”
“No, I was...” Ow. Seriously, her head was starting to really hurt. “I was looking up the history of the town. The buildings, and...the founders. Their wives.”
Ow.
He looked at her, keenly interested now. “What did you find out?”
“Well, this town has some crazy history.”
He laughed at that, and she smiled with him.
“I’ll say,” he added. “I’ve looked into a lot of the things that people don’t even remember about their roots here. Did you find out how the wives of the founders died?”
“I certainly did. Hard to believe anything like that ever happened, you know?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Which part? The stoning to death, or the witchcraft?”
She blinked at him. Reaching for her water glass, she found it was empty. Her mouth was still so dry. When had she finished off the water? “Um. I meant the stoning and the killing. Come on, you’re a reporter. You believe in facts and the truth. You don’t believe in witchcraft, do you?”
He set his menu down. “Why not? Aren’t there things about this world that we still don’t understand? Is it so impossible to believe that there are things some people can do with the natural world that we would call sorcery? I’m not talking about riding on broomsticks or talking to cats. That’s all Hollywood stuff. I mean real things. Healing sickness. Growing better crops. That sort of thing.”
“Raising the dead?” Katie asked him.
The pain behind her eyes flared.
Mason laughed. “Hey, medical sciences have advanced radically since then. We now know that some people we thought were ‘dead’ were only in comas, or only on the cusp of death, and they could be brought back. Is it so hard to imagine that some people in the 1800s knew those secrets already before modern medicine?”
“I guess, but...” She really had nothing to say to that. She knew as well as anyone that the sciences of today would look like magic to someone from the 1800s. Maybe Mason had half a point.
Still...
“I don’t buy it,” she said. “There’s no such things as witches.”
When she said it, a pressure started in her head, laying itself over the pulsing ache that had followed her from the library.
“It’s all right,” he told her. “Maybe I can convince you to believe in things you can’t see.”
She nearly laughed at that. If only he knew the things she’d seen.
Reaching over, he put his hand over hers.
Her headache spiked, like a long hot needle had been driven through her brain from front to back.
Sucking in a breath, she yanked back her hand. She pressed her fingers harder against her temples. She closed her eyes, and counted to five.
When she did, the pain got worse. Stars blossomed in her vision. A ringing started in her ears.
“Mason,” she said, “I’m sorry. I need to go back to the Inn, I think.”
“Oh?” He seemed genuinely disappointed. “Are you sure you can’t stay? I was really hoping to talk to you.”
Katie tried to recapture a smile and faile
d. “I have to go. I’m really sorry. I’ll try to find you tomorrow if I’m still in town, okay?”
He was still saying something to her as she rushed out of the café and blindly up the street, realizing after a minute or two that she was headed the wrong way. A turn here and then her next left brought her back on track, even though she could barely open her eyes through the ache in her skull.
The door to the Harper Inn squeaked when she opened it, and the noise ran through her like the sound of a freight train. All of her nerves were ragged and raw. Everything made the pain worse.
She didn’t see Maggie on her way upstairs and that was just as well because she wasn’t up for talking to anyone now. Except Riley. She really wanted to call Riley and have him talk to her and make everything better.
In her room, she stumbled to the dresser, and took a look at herself in the mirror. Maybe she needed some aspirin. Or a doctor.
Her face was different again. Thinner. More severe. The hair wasn’t quite the same. It was still her but then she smiled, and she didn’t remember smiling, and she wondered if maybe that woman in the mirror wasn’t her at all.
Maybe it was Dorathea Snidge.
Silly woman, she thought to herself. Of course that’s you! “You’re just making things complicated. When Ebenezer comes home he’ll see how pretty you’ve made yourself and then you’ll see how happy he is with you...”
Katie blinked, and gasped out a breath as if she’d been holding the air in, and then she looked at herself again. It was just her reflection. Only her, and no one else, and certainly not Dorathea Snidge. That was just a woman in a photograph.
It was the headache, she figured. Just the headache. It was making her see things that weren’t there, mixing everything up with the fright she’d given herself in the library earlier. Just her emotions running wild.
She stripped out of her clothes, still feeling fuzzy and detached from everything, and then she fell into bed.
A stray thought floated through her mind before she dropped off into unconsciousness, something about how she was going to call Riley.
Call Riley? she heard herself asking.
Who was Riley?
Chapter 10
Katie woke up from a deep sleep tangled in the sheets on her bed. They were around her throat, and they were choking her, and her sweaty hands were having trouble grasping them to pull them away from her.
She was having a nightmare. At least, she thought she did. Now, as she tried to remember, everything was fuzzy and indistinct. Images came and went and nothing made sense. There was only the impression of darkness, of figures moving through a gloom to come after her.
That, and one word that was repeated over and over.
Witch.
When she was finally able to throw the blankets aside, she sat there, taking long slow breaths, and pushing her hands through her hair. She wasn’t sure anymore what she’d been dreaming, but she did know one thing for certain.
The headache was gone.
“Well, that’s a relief.”
She got out of bed feeling like she didn’t weigh anything at all. It was such a relief not to have that pain pulsating inside her skull. If the road to Hell was paved with good intentions, then the road to Heaven was paved with small miracles.
Humming to herself, she walked over to the mirror above the dresser, in just her bra and panties, her bare feet cold against the floor. She decided she would start out this morning with a walk around town, and really take one last look around the place before she left. There were still a few antique places she could browse through if she really wanted but she had a feeling that she had already seen the best that Twilight Ridge had to offer.
She looked around for the bag with her ceramic dishes in them. It was nowhere to be seen.
That was odd, she thought. Maybe she’d put it away under the bed. She had been really out of it when she got back to the Inn after running out on Mason. Like she had been drunk and hungover without the pleasure of the several glasses of wine that usually got her to that point.
Some wine would be nice, actually. A glass of wine and nice hot bath and her boyfriend there to rub her feet. That, and slide into the bath with her. Hmm. That’d be nice.
Where were those plates?
She turned back toward the bed. They must be under there.
From under the sheets, a dark form rose, misty and hazy. A woman, dressed in black.
A woman with her face.
Dorathea was standing in her room. She was right there, close enough to touch, a scowl on her face that spoke of death.
She reached out a single hand.
Katie bolted for the door, and then through it and into the hallway. In only her underwear she flew down the stairs holding back a scream, but only just barely.
At the bottom of the steps, she started across the floor to the exit, wondering how far she was planning on running. All the way back to Oregon, maybe, in her pink silk boyshorts.
Behind her, the hallway darkened, and filled with an evil presence.
“Katie,” she heard Maggie call out to her. “Come on over, now. Breakfast is ready.”
She skidded to a stop, turning to see Maggie smiling from the kitchen table, plates of bacon and eggs and toast laid out and smelling wonderful.
The dark presence of Dorathea Snidge started pouring down the stairs behind her.
“Maggie, we have to go,” Katie told her. “Right now. We have to leave.”
“Don’t be silly,” Maggie said, chuckling like nothing at all was wrong. “We just started to eat.”
The stairs began to shake. The ghost was coming and Katie couldn’t understand why Maggie couldn’t see it, hear it, feel it coming.
“Maggie, we have to go!”
Maggie lifted a plate up to her. “Bacon?”
Katie wanted to scream. This was crazy. The darkness behind her was starting to press in on the edges of her vision. The feeling of it was like an oily coldness washing over her very exposed skin.
She leapt away from the stairs, running for the dining room, intending to drag Maggie away from the table and out of this place where they could be safe.
When she got to the table, there were two people sitting there. Maggie, and one other.
Her boyfriend Riley.
Katie stared at him. He couldn’t be here. He wasn’t here.
Yet there he was.
“You should have waited for me,” he said. His pretty eyes were staring harshly at her. He looked worried. Scared. “You should have never come here without me. You’re in danger, Katie.”
“Damn it, Riley, you don’t think I know that? You don’t think I’ve been missing you like crazy and wanting you here, with me?”
Around her, the house began to warp. It creaked and groaned with the pressure of Dorathea’s spirit approaching.
“Bacon?” Maggie asked her again.
“You need to leave,” Riley told her. “You need to get out.”
His words stunned her, like a slap across the face, but in the next instant she understood. This wasn’t real. None of this was real. She wasn’t standing here in her underwear. This was just a dream. A stupid, nonsense dream.
Her overworked brain was trying to make sense of everything that had happened to her since arriving here in Twilight Ridge. The stories of murdered women and the way everyone seemed to be worried about her staying at the Harper Inn. The headache. The weirdness of another woman wearing her face.
She was scared. The dream was just about her being scared.
She looked at Riley, sitting there all worried about her, here but not here at the same time. “I love you,” she said to him.
“You need to leave,” he told her again.
“No, I don’t,” she said.
Turning away from him and taking in a deep breath, she faced the approaching swarm of Dorathea’s ghostly wrath.
“You’re not real,” Katie told the ghost.
Dorathea got closer, darker, filling the
house with her rage now.
Katie backed away a step, reminding herself this was a dream. “Go away, and let me sleep.”
A sound like distant thunder rumbled through the Inn, and Dorathea came sweeping down the stairs, her dark dress swirling, her eyes livid with black flames.
Katie backed up more. Her skin stippled with goosebumps. Her stomach tied itself in knots.
“Go away!”
The ghost reached for her.
“Go away!”
The long fingers of a shadowy hand stretched out for her.
Katie stumbled back, and fell to the floor, and the darkness loomed.
You are mine, Dorathea promised. I will take you and use you until there is nothing left of you. Nothing.
Katie tried to crawl away. This was just a dream. Just a dream!
You will be mine.
It’s just a damned dream!
MINE!
Dorathea swept down on her. Everything went black.
She woke up in her bed, the sheets tangled around her, sweat slick on her skin and making her hair damp.
Katie frantically tried to get enough breath. She sat on the edge of the bed, and shivered, remembering how the dream had ended. She died. The ghost had swept over her, and through her, tearing her apart until she couldn’t remember where she ended and Dorathea began. There was nothing left of her that hadn’t been tangled up with the ghost.
She gagged, and closed her eyes tight in the darkness of her room as the headache pounded. It wasn’t gone. That had been part of the dream, too.
Sighing heavily, she dropped herself back into the bed again. She needed to sleep this off, and forget all about things that weren’t real.
She pulled the pillow in tight, and held it close. With her eyes closed, she tried again to find sleep.
An arm reached out from behind her and curled over her shoulders possessively. Dark and hazy and somehow both hot and cold it wrapped itself tightly around Katie as the ghost caught hold of her.
Mine... Dorathea whispered.
Katie screamed.
When she woke up this time, she could still feel the ghostly touch of a hand on her skin.
It was hours before she found the will power to get back to sleep.
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 40
