He didn’t so much stumble as he just slowed down a step. “You think you’re seeing a ghost?”
“See? I told you it sounded crazy.”
“No, really. I promised I’d listen. I’m listening. I’m just not sure I understand. Why would she be haunting you, this ghost of yours?”
“Because she looks almost exactly like me,” Katie explained. “I don’t know. That’s the best I can come up with. I mean, I’m staying in the Inn now and that used to be her home but it’s not like I disturbed her grave or anything. I don’t want to go anywhere near the graveyard. She just looks like me. It’s crazy, I know, but there it is.”
She pictured the photo in the book at the Inn, where she had first seen Dorathea and noticed the similarities between them. The same photo had been in that one book in the library. She told Mason about that, and she told him about the history that she had learned in the library as well. She told him about the book on witches, leaving out the part about the music spell because even after living it that was too much for her.
She kept talking, and she felt better for it with each step. She told him about the rampant belief in witchcraft back in the early days of Twilight Ridge. She told him about the founding fathers stoning their wives, and then burying them like nothing at all had happened.
When she ran out of things to say, she held a hand to her forehead, rubbing circles to ease the painful thrum of the headache that was getting worse again.
He frowned at her as she talked, and by the time she was done talking the frown was nearly a scowl. “I think you might be judging them, the original residents of the town, based on your own experience.”
She snorted. “As if. They killed five women, Mason, because they thought they were witches. That’s about as ignorant as it gets.”
His shoulders rolled in a slow shrug. “I don’t know about that. I don’t think people have changed much in a century or two. In my opinion, people can be pretty ignorant and narrowminded right now, here in the present. They don’t want to believe what’s right in front of them but at the same time they don’t do anything to find the truth. They just want to live in their happy little plastic bubble and never think for themselves.”
Katie stopped, and looked up into his face. She felt very vulnerable asking him what she needed to ask him next. “Do you believe in ghosts, Mason?”
“Well, that depends.”
For a moment there was a sinking feeling in the pit of Katie’s stomach, like she’d just taken this leap of faith only to find out that Mason wasn’t holding a net out for her after all. She needed to explain herself better, but she just couldn’t think. The grinding throb of the headache just would not leave her alone.
“Hold on,” he said, reading her expression. “Let me explain myself. The reason I said it depends when it comes to ghosts, is I don’t know if you mean the goofy television variety where they rattle chains and make bad jokes about being shadows of their former selves, or if you mean the actual soul of a person trapped in the world of the living and unable to move on?”
Katie had never looked at it that way before. “If you had seen some of the things that I’ve seen,” she told him, “then the friendly Caspar variety wouldn’t enter into it.”
The grass was rustling around her feet, tall and thick, and it only now occurred to her that they weren’t on the sidewalk anymore. In fact, they weren’t on the streets of Twilight Ridge at all. At some point, they had started walking through a field but she’d been so caught up in unloading all of her pent-up fears and frustrations that she hadn’t even noticed.
“Where are we?” she asked.
Mason took her hand in his and led her to a waist-high wrought iron fence streaked with rust and leaning at an angle. The grass and weeds were a tangle around the metal pickets, growing through the spaces between from both sides.
“It’s not much to look at right now,” he told her, walking them through the gap in the fence, under an arch with the words Twilight Ridge Cemetery worked into the shaped metal. “The groundskeepers haven’t been here in a few weeks. It’s the off season, you understand.”
A sign at the front had a welcome for tourists, and a little history of the cemetery, and then in bold letters a notice saying that this property was closed to everyone after the hour of eight o’clock, PM. Anyone found here would be considered to be trespassing.
Mason strode right past the sign.
Around her, Katie saw headstones standing tall and crooked. A lot of them were weathered and hard to read, but others still held the names of the person buried beneath them, along with their year of birth and death. The most recent date she saw was 1913.
They were in the graveyard. The one place Katie definitely wanted to avoid. Now...here they were.
“Mason,” she asked him slowly. “Why are we here?”
“Because,” he told her. “I do believe in ghosts.”
Chapter 18
Katie backed away from him until her legs bumped up against the fence. Where was the opening? Wasn’t it right there a second ago? The fence wasn’t that tall, she could jump over it. She could get out.
Why couldn’t she get out?
She stood where she was, in this graveyard, watching Mason, drawn to him again like she had been before. There was a pull there that she couldn’t explain. Not attraction. Something else.
Whatever it was, kept her rooted to this spot.
He looked over his shoulder and smiled at her, then stopped in front of a row of graves at the far side of the little enclosure.
When he stopped, he knelt down, his head bent low in reverence.
Then he turned to her and smiled.
“Come on. You’ll want to see this.”
With a wave of his hand, he motioned her closer, the face of his wristwatch catching the fading light of the sun. Twilight had come to Twilight Ridge, and Katie felt like she was trapped by the approaching dark.
The graveyard wasn’t that big. There must be a more modern one somewhere that people were buried in nowadays. This was for show. This was the historical dead of Twilight Ridge, the few who had been deemed worthy enough to rest in this soil. She went over to Mason, obeying him without knowing why, her footsteps not quite her own. She had to see what he wanted here in this cemetery. It was important that she see it.
It was the most important thing in the world.
When she was close enough, Mason bent back the long blades of grass and the wildflowers growing around the headstones. The flowers were black with shriveled leaves, and they tore apart at the slightest touch of his hand.
As each stone was revealed, Katie recognized the names of the women in the photographs. The wives of the first settlers of Twilight Ridge. The women who had been murdered for being witches.
In the middle, just a little apart from the other four, was Dorathea Snidge.
“Put to death this date,” the faded lettering read, “that the curse of witchcraft might be blighted from God’s people.”
“Kind of harsh,” Mason remarked, rubbing dirt off his hands. “Don’t you think? It wasn’t enough that they killed her, they had to brand her for eternity. All that’s missing is Hawthorne’s scarlet letter burned into the stone.”
Katie wanted to leave now. More than ever, she wanted out of this town. She was still being drawn toward Mason, toward the graves, but she couldn’t let that keep her here. She had to leave.
With one single step pain blossomed at the back of her skull. The headache dug into her and ran black tendrils through her brain and the tissues of her body, effectively nailing her body in place.
She.
Could
Not.
Move.
“It wasn’t right what they did to her,” Mason continued, ignoring her discomfort. He motioned to the other gravestones as well. “What they did to all of them. They were just trying to live their lives. They were trying to worship how they felt was right. Freedom of religion is something we take for granted today, of cour
se. It would be decades before men had the absolute right to worship without prosecution.”
He laughed bitterly. “And,” he added, “another century and more before women ever had the same right. She was a woman born in the wrong time. The things she could have accomplished back then could have been astounding. For this town, for the world, for the men who blindly killed her because they couldn’t understand her power.”
Katie wanted to move. She couldn’t.
Mason stood up, and stared with cold intent directly at her. “If only she were alive today.”
“Why?” Katie managed to ask, as tears started to fall out of the corners of her eyes.
“Why...what?” he asked. “That wasn’t very specific. Why am I so interested? Why do I know so much about this? Or, do you mean why do I care?”
He stepped closer, and Katie rocked back, unable to move without stabbing pain lancing down her spine.
Her agony made him smile. “Well, you are a strong one, aren’t you? Good. Oh, Katie, I’ve been waiting for someone like you for years. I come back here, to Twilight Ridge, nearly every year at this same time. The anniversary of when Dorathea was murdered by her hypocrite bastard of a husband. She’s closer now than any other time of the year. I can feel her, you know? Well, of course you know, because you’ve felt her too. You’ve even seen her, haven’t you?”
Deep inside, Katie felt a hand stroking her soul. Dorathea, right here with her.
Inside of her.
An image slipped into her mind. Her, in the library, trying to open that book until it finally flew open and spread dust everywhere. She remembered inhaling it, how it tasted and how it smelled...and how it felt.
Inside of her.
The ghostly finger stroked her soul again. She squirmed. It was the sensation of being turned inside out. Of being violated so deeply that she thought she might never be clean again.
“Why?” she said, as her stomach twisted into knots. “Just tell me what’s happening. Why are you doing this?”
He laughed again, and the sound of it was full of hideous promise. “I’m showing you the truth, Katie. This is what journalists do, after all. We expose the truth. We tell the story. Well, here’s the story, Katie.” His unruly brown hair stirred in a sudden sharp breeze.
She didn’t like him this close. She didn’t feel safe with him. Not anymore.
“Dorathea Snidge had a baby,” she said. It all came to her in a rush now. “She had a baby, and he lived.”
He clapped his hands together, thrilled that she had caught on. “Yes! She had a baby. Ebenezer thought the child was the seed of the Devil. He even accused Dorathea of fucking a demon because he thought he was too old to produce a kid of his own. Well. Despite her husband’s attempts to kill the baby, Dorathea kept their son alive. It was sent to relatives, away from this hellhole. He grew up, and had a family of his own, and his children had children, as children do when they grow up, and after a few generations, do you know what you get?”
Katie knew the answer, but she didn’t want it to be true. She wanted to go back in time and leave this place like she had planned to. Or better yet, if she could change things and never come here at all. She wished for it. She prayed for it.
When she opened her eyes, she was still here in this graveyard. Mason was still here with her.
And then it hit her that when Mason had asked her about the ghost she was seeing, he called the ghost a ‘she.’ He already knew it was the ghost of a woman.
He already knew who the ghost was. Now she knew why.
Dorathea’s lineage didn’t end with her. The baby survived, and a long line of descendants had led them right here.
To Mason.
“Dorathea,” he explained, “is my ancestor. My great, great, great-and-such grandmother. She died because evil men thought they were doing God’s work. But now, oh yes, now...”
He ran a finger down the front of her, from her breastbone to her navel, and inside of herself Katie could feel another finger doing the same, mirroring every touch of Mason’s.
The pull between them was so strong that Katie felt herself circling around him, spinning out of control, falling into him.
“Now, Katie Pearson, you’re going to help me bring Dorathea back.”
Chapter 19
Mason’s smile showed teeth.
“My grandmother knew how to tap into the energies of the universe. Power like that is unheard of these days. She would use that power to help people and those ignorant fools killed her for it. Well, the joke’s on them!”
His hand was on her chin suddenly, turning her face so that she had to look into his deep green eyes. “Now she can come back, thanks to you.”
“I won’t do it,” Katie sputtered immediately, his fingers distorting her lips and mangling the sound of the words. “I won’t help you do it.”
One of his eyebrows lifted. “You won’t do what?”
“You want to let her ghost get into me. You want me to be her damned host! I won’t do it!”
He brought her face to his, pulled her in close, and kissed her mouth. It was rough. Her lips were mashed against her teeth. His tongue tasted her mouth. She put her hands on his chest and tried to push him away. He was like a stone pillar, and she couldn’t make him budge.
If she couldn’t stop him from kissing her how could she stop him from doing anything else?
He bit her. She tasted blood on her tongue, and felt the sting of a cut on her lip.
“Muh!” He made a sound of extreme enjoyment as he finished the kiss. “You’ll help me, Katie. You’ll help me because you don’t have any choice. Grandmother’s already inside of you. Now she can come back. She can come back through you!”
He put his finger to her lip, and smeared it with her blood, and then brought it up to his own lips and spread it like an obscene lipstick over his mouth.
She squirmed, and tried to move, tried to run, to crawl away, but the pain in her head was thumping and getting worse, and she couldn’t do anything without hearing the sound of her skull cracking. She felt the bone splitting. She didn’t dare move.
The witch was already inside of her.
That book, the dust, the headache that had clung to her brain ever since...
It was too late. The ghost had been inside of her all this time.
“Good girl,” Mason cooed to her.
She spit in his face. “I hate you.”
He wiped the wad of spittle off his cheek with the sleeve of his shirt. “You’re just scared. You’ll understand soon.”
Her vision was watery with tears now. “I won’t let you,” she said, but it came out in a whisper. Just a barely audible squeak.
“You’ve seen how much you look like her!” Mason waved his arms around wildly, spinning in a circle as it got darker and darker around them. The sun was almost gone. “You look just like her. You are the perfect vessel for her spirit. It’s time for her to come back and you were the woman we were waiting for. She can come back now through you!”
Katie felt something rising inside of her, hot and slimy and burning like acid. The cold that had settled into her skin evaporated in the wake of that surging heat until she thought her heart would melt.
She couldn’t stop it. She had to let it come out.
“The time has come, Grandmother!” Mason’s voice echoed out across the graveyard. The sun sparked on the horizon with a last glint of bright red, reflected in his eyes like fire. “The time has come for you to come back to the land of the living and have your revenge! Every person living in Twilight Ridge will die. You and me, Grandmother! We’ll bathe them all in blood for what their ancestors did to you!”
He speared Katie with a glance. She felt it go straight through her, and she felt the thing inside of her swell in response. Now she understood the sense of attraction that had existed between her and Mason. It was his great-and-such grandmother calling out to her own flesh and blood.
It was pulling her through Katie now, and all she co
uld do was stand there while he ranted, with her insides boiling away into molten lead.
“And I know who dies first,” Mason said, his voice dropping to a whisper as he leaned into Katie’s ear. “That woman who runs the Inn where you used to live, grandmother. She can be the first to die for sullying your home.”
Darkness fell across them as the sun finally surrendered itself to the night. Pale moonlight was the only illumination. Katie was well past panic now, hyperventilating and fighting the urge to throw up and trying not to imagine her head rupturing into tiny pieces from the pressure.
Something slick and vile rose in her throat, crawling its way up her bones and muscles and every fiber of her.
Whatever there was inside of her was rushing up and forcing its way out and Katie couldn’t keep it in. It was like liquid smoke pouring out of her mouth, her nostrils, the corner of her eyes. Katie gagged and tried to scream but the sound of it was choked out of her.
When it had poured itself out, the smoke twisted into the form of a woman. The face rippled as it took shape and drifted towards Katie.
She was looking at a face that was familiar and strange all at the same time.
This was the ghost of Dorathea Snidge.
The specter smiled at Katie, and like a puppet, she smiled back.
Then Dorathea turned to Mason.
A voice from beyond the grave spoke to him.
Yes. It is time.
The woman’s ghost surged. It billowed forward and funneled itself into a tight stream of spiritual energy.
Right.
Into.
Mason.
He rocked backward, losing his balance and falling over, dropping hard against the standing gravestone of his great, great, great-and-such grandmother.
When he crashed into it, the stone snapped in two right across the date of death. The jagged, broken edge slammed into his ribs and knocked the wind out of him.
Just as the last of the ghost rushed in.
Mason coughed, and smoke trailed out from between his teeth. He felt his hands slowly over his body and everywhere he touched Katie could see his flesh bulging, flowing and swelling and resettling under his clothes, as the ghost filled Mason’s body.
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 44
