Then she was falling.
The ground opened up in front of her and she hit hard against something that took her breath away. When she opened her eyes again, she wanted to scream, and she couldn’t.
There was a dead man staring at her from inside his open coffin.
She was in a grave. The cemetery. No. Oh, no, no, no, no, no! This was not happening. This could not be happening.
Somehow, it was. There were walls of dirt all around her. Too high to climb. The grave had been dug open and now she was in it. She could feel the soil under her hands. She could smell the loamy scent of the earth and the fetid stench of rot from right in front of her.
The dead man turned its face to her. Dry and cracked flesh had peeled away from his bones. Empty, blank eyes held her transfixed.
The jaw cracked open. The rank stench of death overwhelmed her.
“You’ll be with me soon,” the dead man said.
“No,” Katie repeated, the word a breathless whisper on her lips. “This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening!”
The corpse breathed out a rattling gasp, and began to stir. “Do you have the time?”
Katie woke up with a start, in bed, the sheets tangled around her and sweat making her nightgown cling to her skin. She gulped in breath after breath, remembering how she’d had all the air knocked out of her lungs just a moment before. The stench of death was still there at the back of her throat...
No. That was a dream. Just a dream.
Damn. It had been so real.
She threw the blankets away and swung her feet to the floor. Her legs were shaking as she got out of bed. She had no desire to go back to sleep. Not now, and maybe not for the rest of the night, but there was something she needed to find anyway.
Right.
Now.
Next to her, Riley stirred and pushed up on one elbow. “Katie? What’s wrong?”
She didn’t answer him. She stumbled in the dark to find the light switch and then found her way to the closet. The box she wanted was in the back, under almost everything else. When they’d moved into this room at the end of the hallway she’d been amazed at the closet space. At the time she thought that there was no way they could ever fill up that whole space.
Two people living together collected a lot of things. Some of these things, she’d just as soon never look at again.
The pull string over her head made a clicking sound as she turned the light on. Most of her souvenirs from her haunted experiences were back home in an apartment that she maintained out west. She had a box here, in her closet, for the one single object that she’d collected from her encounter with the witch’s ghost a few weeks ago.
A man’s watch.
She opened the box, and there it was. It had been on the witch right at the end and now it was here, in this box. The big round dial stared up at her, the hands stuck at the exact time the witch had been sent to whatever Hell evil spirits went to when they got exorcised from the land of the living.
Katie had never paid much attention to the watch. It was an old-style thing, from back when precise mechanical engineering was used to create a timepiece that can be handed down to your children. Back before cheap digital watches from Japan were all anyone knew. It was heavy, and the strap was actual leather, and the knob on the side was just waiting for someone to wind it up.
No way did she want to make this thing run again. It represented a terrifying moment in her life and because of that, she’d never really looked at it before now.
“You’ll be with me soon...do you have the time?”
The dream had been talking to her. Before now this was just a watch. Now she turned the watch over.
On the back, engraved on the metal cover plate, were the initials B.V. Under that, there was an inscription.
“To my loving husband. May you rot in Hell.”
She blinked at that and read it again. What an odd thing to put on someone’s watch. Was it supposed to be a joke?
It certainly didn’t sound like one. In the shadow of her dream, it sounded sinister.
Katie brought the watch up close, holding it to the light, making sure she wasn’t missing anything.
A hand settled on her shoulder.
She jumped, and twisted around so fast that she toppled backward and landed on her rump, pain rocketing up her spine.
“Hey,” Riley said to her, “take it easy. It’s just me. Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
Her heart was hammering too fast for her to speak. Instead, she handed him the watch, pointing to the inscription. He took it from her and read it. His lips silently framed the words.
“Wow, that’s harsh,” he said. “This is the watch, right? I mean, the one you got from the witch? Why are you looking at it now?”
“I, um, had a dream.”
She explained it to him, telling him every little detail, and when she started to shake he held her close and brought her back to the bed. She curled into herself and he snuggled up to her, wrapping his arm around her.
The part about the open grave, and the corpse, made her gag. It was a long moment before she could say anything else but she forced herself to get it all out, all in a rush, because she knew if she stopped she wouldn’t be able to start again.
When there were no more words for her to say, she was exhausted. Sleep was a relief when it came for her again, and she relaxed into it, hoping there would be no more dreams.
Chapter 7
In the daylight, it all seemed so silly.
Katie figured that she must have seen the inscription on that watch at some point and just not realized it. A passing glance and it was committed to the back of her memory where trivial things like that lived. On top of that, she’d been worrying about the ghosts showing up at the Inn, and the combination of the two could very well be why she was dreaming about dead people in their graves.
That’s all it was. Just coincidence.
In the bright sunlight of a Tuesday morning, she could believe it was true.
She hummed to herself as she walked around the streets of Twilight Ridge. This wasn’t like the dream. This time she remembered every step that had brought her here. Breakfast was over at the Inn, and she’d told Riley that she was going to get some air and clear her head. It was the perfect day for it, too. Unseasonably warm and bright.
Now there was a couple of hours before she had to worry about making lunch. The guests were either up in their rooms or exploring Twilight Ridge, and Riley was busy back at the Inn, putting that lock on the basement door that they’d talked about.
There was nothing for her to do, except nothing at all.
Ahead of her on the sidewalk a woman greeted her with a wave. “Hi, Katie. This is so strange, I was just thinking about you earlier and now here you are!”
Katie smiled at Heather Donahue. They’d met around town a number of times and Katie felt like they were fast becoming good friends. She had two adorable kids who attended the local school, a boy and a girl, and she did some sort of work from home. Tax preparation, Katie thought.
“How was the grand opening of the Heritage Inn?” Heather checked her watch as she stood there, obviously in a rush to get somewhere even as she made small talk. “We’re so happy to have you as part of our town. Say, you should come to our meeting Friday night. You’d fit right in.”
Katie didn’t understand. “What meeting?”
“Oh, just a little club some of the wives in Twilight Ridge started. We come together, and we talk about the issues in town and what to do about them. Things like that.”
“Well, that sounds wonderful.” Katie wasn’t sure ‘wonderful’ was the right word but she didn’t want to offend Heather by saying that sounded boring, either. “There’s just one problem. I’m not a wife.”
Heather laughed. “Even better. You’ll have that fresh perspective that we’ve been missing. Especially since you just moved in. Oh, say you’ll come, please? We meet at seven at my house, and all you need to bring is yo
urself and a snack tray or some chips. Please? It would be so great to have someone else there that I can talk to. If I have to listen to Brenda talk about her son at Yale one more time I might just lose it.”
Katie was laughing now, too. “All right, all right. I’ll be there if I can. I’ll bring pretzels? How’s that sound?”
“Perfect! I’ll see you there. Have to run, great to talk to you, good luck with the Inn!”
She was off again just like that. Katie had never known her to stay still for more than a few minutes at a time. Joining a social group in town might be good for her. It would be nice to make some more friends here in town, if she and Riley planned on staying for a while. Which they did. On the other hand, the idea of sitting and munching on finger sandwiches while everyone talked about tax rates and tourism dollars, however, made her want to pull her fingernails out.
As she started walking again, her footsteps slowed, and then stopped. This spot...it just occurred to her where she was. It was the same spot from in her dream. The exact spot where someone had called her name and sent her running through the fields and right into the graveyard.
Into that grave.
She looked over her shoulder. There was no one there.
Not even realizing what she was doing, Katie started walking. A dozen steps later she was on the path that brought tourists to the Twilight Ridge cemetery. The place where the wives of the original settlers--and other prominent dead folks--were buried.
Katie did not like being here. The markers for the five graves in the back still stood tall and imposing. Those were the wives of the original founders. The groundskeepers had fixed up the mysterious upheaval of the ground from two weeks ago, when it had looked like those graves had erupted from the inside out, but Katie knew what had really happened.
The wives in those graves had all been witches, and they had nearly succeeded in rising from the dead.
She shivered now in the warmth of mid-morning. Those events were still fresh in her mind. So was the dream last night.
She remembered exactly which grave she had fallen into. It was in the newer plots, toward the front by the gate.
“You’ll be with me soon.”
Not that one.
“Soon...”
She walked down another row.
“Do you have the time?”
The one...right there.
A part of her had expected the grave to be open like it had been in the dream. An open grave, an open casket, and a dead man staring at her.
Thankfully that’s not what she found. The grave was still sealed. Grass grew over the softly packed dirt. The small headstone with the rounded top stood there, just like in her dream. Now that she had time, and now that she wasn’t scared out of her wits, she read the name carved there.
Boris Vykroft, died 1921.
She looked hard at that name. The date didn’t concern her so much, because every stone in this cemetery was historical and old, but the name held her transfixed.
Boris Vykroft.
B.V.
Just like the initials on the watch.
Around her, the day became darker. The weight of something unseen settled over her. As she stared at that gravestone she had the same sensation of falling that she had felt in her dream last night. Like she was tumbling, helplessly, into the grave where the dead man waited for her...
Katie turned around on her heel and left the cemetery as quickly as she could. She passed a few tourists on their way to check out the graves, with their cameras out and their cellphones recording everything. She smiled and rushed past, not wanting to talk to anyone.
She had the strongest desire to tell them to run, but then she told herself she was just being silly again.
But was she, really?
That dream last night had been more than a dream, after all. It wasn’t just coincidence. Something was happening to her. There had been enough weirdness in her life that she knew better than to ignore stuff like this when it happened. This all meant something, whether she understood it or not.
Something was happening.
Something important.
When she could catch her breath again she found her way back to Main Street and headed for the library. Although the internet might be a faster way to search for answers in this modern world, she knew that there was information in local libraries that never made it to the World Wide Web.
Sometimes the best way to learn anything was with books.
Chapter 8
The library was built differently than most of the other places in town. A lot of the houses were a hundred years old or better. Even some of the businesses, like her Inn, were that old. Of course, the Inn used to be a home itself but that was beside the point. Among all the history of Twilight Ridge, the library sat like a lump of red brick.
Katie had noticed it right away when she had first driven into Twilight Ridge on a whim. Her experience with flipping houses had given her a vast knowledge base of construction styles, and she had a good eye for the beauty that a skilled craftsman could lend to any building.
The library was just an eyesore.
It had been built in the late 1960s, Katie had learned, in a time period when municipal buildings were designed to be functional rather than attractive. It was perfectly square, back to front, and where it wasn’t brick it was poured concrete.
Surrounded by history and homes with real workmanship, looking at the library was like looking at mule standing in a pasture full of thoroughbred stallions.
Not that it really mattered to her. She wasn’t looking to renovate the library. There was no money in trying to resell municipal buildings. She’d learned that the hard way after taking a huge loss on an old school building in Nevada.
It was what was inside that was important.
The door opened silently for her as she went in. Just like every time she’d been here, the library was as quiet as a...
She’d been about to say tomb, but considering her dream last night and her experiences so far in Twilight Ridge, thought better of it.
A ceiling fan squeaked overhead, quietly loud in this sanctuary of silence. The rustling of a newspaper drew her attention to a table over by the periodical section, where a guy in gray jogging sweats was making his way through the sports section.
Marlin McCandry was the biggest antique seller in Twilight Ridge, both in terms of the number of items he sold, and in terms of his size. During her first few days here Katie hadn’t noticed his place because it was hidden in the back of his house, in an addition he’d built specifically as a shop for his wares. From what she could understand, he sold by invitation or private referral only. He didn’t have any patience for tourists wandering in off the street in shorts and baseball caps, is how he’d explained it to Katie.
After buying two matching sets of bureau drawers from Marlin for the Heritage Inn, sets that had supposedly belonged to Nathaniel Hawthorne himself, Katie was now a preferred customer of his.
He saw her now over the edge of his paper and gave her a wave with one meaty hand. Apparently, he was doing quite well for himself by selling old furniture and personal items that once belonged to the likes of Hawthorne and Benedict Arnold. His belly pressed right up to the table and his sweatshirt was filled out by his bulk in all the wrong ways. His pudgy face sported a frizzy brown beard the same color as his hair.
Katie wasn’t one to judge a person by their appearance. Marlin had always been friendly to her, just like most everyone in Twilight Ridge had been. He waved to her again now as he set his paper aside.
“Hey there, Katie. How’s tricks?”
From across the room, sitting behind the tall polished counter where books were checked in and out, the librarian raised one bony finger to his lips. “Shh.”
They were the only people in here, but Franklin Masters ran his library with a militant focus that would have made grizzled battlefield generals envious. He was a tall man, and scrawny, with stringy white hair that hung limply down to th
e shoulders of his black suit. A face wrinkly as a prune hid a razor-sharp mind.
He rarely spoke, but Katie had learned that everything he had to say was usually important.
And when he wanted silence in his library, that’s what he got.
She went over to the table and sat down across from Marlin, lowering her voice to barely more than a whisper. “I didn’t know you spent your mornings here.”
“Only sometimes,” he shrugged, dropping his voice to match hers. His New England accent was still loud and clear, though. It was an odd thing on such a large man. “I like to read the sports stats. Got a bet on this Sunday’s game. Should be a whopper.”
He dropped the R on that last word, pronouncing it whoppah.
Katie smiled. She’d heard him talk about his gambling before, and she suspected that maybe a goodly amount of his profits got funneled to that semi-legal pastime. Not that she cared, as long as he wasn’t breaking the law, or she didn’t know about it.
“So, Katie,” he asked, “what brings you here today? Thought you’d be super busy running the Inn now that you’re open.”
Supah busy, was how he said it. “Well,” she told him, “it turns out that I don’t actually have to be there all the time. I have to get back their soon, but I wanted to stop in here first.”
Which was mostly true. The library had not been on her list of errands this morning. Not until she saw that gravestone.
“Ah. Got some research to do, I take it?” He settled back into his chair, shifting his bulk between the armrests. “This is the place for that, sure enough. Books everywhere. I doubt anyone has ever read all of them. Some of them have been on those shelves their whole lives, and never once been opened, I suspect.”
Katie giggled at that image. Books, living a lonely life with no one coming to visit them. “I’m sure I can find what I’m looking for in here somewhere.”
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 51
