by Jessi Gage
Thirteen years later, he still hadn’t found The One, and the older he got, the closer he came to accepting she didn’t exist. Maybe God intended him to be single forever, like the apostle Paul.
“But, pot roast, man,” Theo whined. “Come on, you really going to eat all that yourself?”
Probably not, and truth be told, he liked hanging with Theo. If he couldn’t find The One, at least he had good friends that made him laugh. “Fine. Come on in, but take—”
“Off your boots. Yeah, yeah. I know the rules.”
“And lay off the personal life.”
“That’s cool. I’ll just tell you about my weekend.” Theo waggled his brows as he unlaced his boots, and Emmett groaned, dreading the latest edition of Theo’s Conquests.
Sometimes he envied Theo. Unfettered by Emmett’s “churchy beliefs,” his friend reveled in the worldly passions Paul warned against, worldly passions Emmett had vowed to forsake as a seventeen-year-old in youth group. Though he would never admit to it, he often fantasized about acting like Theo and exploring some passions of his own. Heck, he more than fantasized about it. It was a downright temptation.
He didn’t need Theo adding fuel to what was already a fire raging out of control. “Make it the edited version and you’ve got yourself a deal.” He took off his own boots and headed inside.
Theo padded ahead of him to the fridge and pulled out two beers. “Oh, yeah, got to be careful of those virgin ears.” He said it without a trace of sarcasm as he popped open the brews and handed one to Emmett. It had been a long time since any of his friends had given him grief for being a virgin. In fact, the older he got, the more they seemed to go easy on him.
Theo took a swig of beer and pulled up a chair at the kitchen table. “PG version it is.” He gave Emmett the kind of smile you give a guy who just got out of the hospital after a suicide attempt, cautious and laced with pity.
He preferred getting grief.
* * * *
Grandma Nina had one of those houses where the stairs to the basement ran directly under the stairs from the main level to the second floor. Jade made her way to the paneled basement door and jiggled the brass knob until the door creaked open. A waft of cold air caressed her, as if the basement were sighing with relief.
Weird. Must be a window open down there or something creating a pressure differential.
Feeling along the wall, she found what she supposed was the light switch. She’d been expecting a regular flip-switch, but this was a little black knob. She tried pushing it. Nothing. Pulling. Nothing. Twisting…
Ker-chunk. No lights came on, of course, but they would as soon as she flipped the breakers. Unless she’d just turned on the sprinklers or something.
As she descended the stairs, the cold grew more intense, almost heavier. A shiver racked her body, and an old Wordsworth verse she’d memorized in English Lit whispered like a Gothic chant in her mind.
Not Chaos, not
The darkest pit of lowest Erebus,
Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out
By help of dreams—can breed such fear and awe
“All right, brain, that’s enough out of you. The basement is not scary. I am not scared.” She just needed a flashlight. That would take the edge off the creep factor.
Climbing out of the basement put her across the rear hall from the kitchen. Even at sunset and without lights, the plentiful windows and sliding glass door to the deck made a cheery haven of the space where she’d helped Grandma Nina bake countless batches of cookies. It should have felt tired and dated with fifties-brown linoleum and eggshell-white enamel cabinets. The yellow curtains should have clashed with the shades of buttermilk, tan, and traffic-cone orange in the wallpaper. But somehow it all came together to fill her up with cheerful memories.
She glided her fingertips over the sturdy, round table where she’d helped Grandma Nina roll piecrusts over dustings of flour. She palmed the back of her usual chair, remembering sitting there the weekend of Grandpa Earl’s funeral and telling Grandma Nina with a mouthful of oven-warm brownie that she was the best cook ever. “Cooking is what you do when you have a man in the house to feed,” her grandmother had said with a poke at her ribs. “Baking is what you do when you have granddaughters to fatten up.”
Grandma Nina should be here. The power should not be shut off. The kitchen should be filled with the scents of fattening treats.
A hunt through a few drawers revealed a heavy Black & Decker flashlight. A quick test proved the batteries were kaput. Fabulous.
Fortunately, she remembered where Grandma Nina kept the candles. She pulled a box of red, tapered table-toppers from the pantry and found a silver candlestick in the china hutch in the dining room. After jamming three candles into the holder, she lit them and approached the basement again.
Still cold, even though leaving the door open should have let in some of the August heat. Must be a basement thing. Jade had grown up in a mobile home, so she didn’t really know. She certainly didn’t remember the basement being this cold, but when a girl had important things to do like building forts out of milk crates, temperature didn’t always register.
A flickering path led her down the stairs and into the valley of words created by Grandpa Earl’s bookshelves. She knew the contents by heart: works from Twain and Emerson to three-inch-thick picture encyclopedias, and periodicals. Lots and lots of periodicals. The cracked spines of a shelf’s worth of National Geographics felt like corrugated cardboard under her fingertips. These stacks had fascinated her for hours on end, probably because the only reading material in her mom’s trailer had been the phone book and bus schedule. Love of literature must skip a generation.
Between Grandma Nina’s candles and Grandpa Earl’s horde, the basement’s spook factor dropped considerably. Unfortunately, the temperature dropped too. Upstairs it was summer. Down here it was the dead of winter. What she wouldn’t give for a nice warm coat!
Hurrying past the washing machine and dryer, she found the breaker box and wasted no time flipping switches. Thunk…thunk…thunk. Overhead, the refrigerator kicked on with a muffled whir. Thunk…thunk…
Her breath fogged in front of her, and a feeling of being watched made her freeze with her thumb on the next switch. Something prickled on her neck. Movement of air? The brush of a spider web?
She whirled around to face Grandpa Earl’s stash. There in the wavering light, perfectly framed by the plain wooden shelf end, was the shadow man.
Shit.
Her breath came too fast. She wanted to run, but terror fused her feet to the floor.
She stared at the shadow with his top hat and cape. The cape snapped as if some wind she couldn’t feel struggled to rip it from his throat.
The shadow stared back.
Light. Light would make it go away.
It took every ounce of courage she possessed, but she turned her back on the shadow and continued flicking switches.
Thunk…thunk. A bare incandescent bulb overhead surged to life while a bank of fluorescent tubes over the washer and dryer woke more slowly.
She faced the shelves again, sure the light would banish the shadow. But he was still there, his edges made sharper, his presence undeniable.
“Oh, God.” Fear was like coolant in her veins.
She didn’t think. She ran.
Right past the shadow, straight up the stairs and into the kitchen. She gripped the back of a chair so hard her fingernails bit into the wood.
The warmer air of the main floor eased the chill from her skin, but her bones felt like ice. She was no longer holding the candlestick and had a vague memory of dropping it near the breaker box.
She hoped the candles had gone out. She was too chicken to venture back down the stairs to check. Instead she crept to the basement door on unsteady legs and listened for the crackle of fire. When she didn’t hear anything, she twisted the light-knob. The basement went dark. No telltale flickering suggested she should find an extinguisher.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts.”
While her pulse returned to normal, she inventoried the cupboards and made a shopping list. By the time she locked the house and got in her car to shop for groceries, her bones had thawed. By the time she drove through downtown Dover, she’d almost convinced herself Grandma Nina’s house wasn’t haunted.
Streetlights sprang to life as she passed the redbrick police and fire stations on Cyprus. A little further down, Cyprus and Maple formed the V of Dover’s heart. Between two roads, an enormous triangle of lush, green lawn narrowed to a gazebo-adorned point directly in front of Town Hall.
The perfectly-manicured grounds reminded her of when she’d gone to the Dover town fair with Jilly and Grandpa Earl. The lawn had been packed with rides and booths, the gazebo swathed in patriotic bunting and banners advertising a local radio station. Nineties rock had been blaring from speakers stacked in the bed of some disc jockey’s pick-up truck. Grandpa had bought them funnel cakes and let them shoot water pistols at metal duck silhouettes.
She started singing along with the radio as she emerged from downtown onto the arterial street leading to Wilmington’s strip malls. Her phone buzzed in the cup holder, but she was too busy navigating the grocery store parking lot to answer. After she parked, a glance at the display showed the call had been from Brad.
Pink’s lyrics died on her lips. Her cheek pulsed with the memory of Brad’s fist. Her face warmed with shame no man ever had a right to make a woman feel.
Without listening to the message, she deleted it. After a quick makeup check, she trudged into the store, grabbed up enough food and toilet paper to get her through the week, and headed home.
Home.
The word fit Grandma Nina’s house better than any place she’d ever lived, and yet the fit wasn’t perfect.
Probably because there’s a freaking ghost in the basement.
No. There had to be a reasonable explanation for what she’d seen tonight. And in the guest bedroom all those years ago.
“Old houses cast interesting shadows.”
Even if what she’d seen was more than the shadow of a curtain or a lamp, it was still just a shadow. Therefore, it couldn’t hit. That made Mr. Shadow less of a threat than Brad.
She unlocked the front door and hauled the groceries back to the kitchen, turning on every light in her path. A surreptitious glance at the basement door confirmed it was still tightly closed. Good.
Officially moving on, she put the groceries away and made dinner using the “Express Heat” burner on Grandma Nina’s retro stove. In three minutes, the tomato soup was hot as the sun. She poured half of it into a bowl and tossed in a handful of goldfish crackers.
Avoiding the basement door like the plague, she took the long route to the living room, through the front hall and around the foot of the stairs rather than through the dining room. Curling up in a worn recliner with her soup, she palmed the remote. The TV came on to a local channel with crappy reception, and she remembered Grandma Nina didn’t have cable. “Why do I need to pay them folks big bucks when I can get all my favorite shows on Netflix?”
She set her soup on the coffee table to go find her phone. Watching movies on the four-inch screen would have to do until she upgraded the house to wireless internet. When she plopped back down in the recliner and reached for her soup, her hand stopped mid-reach. The goldfish were arranged in the shape of an arrow.
Instinctively, she looked where it was pointing, to the open doorway joining the living and dining rooms.
Most of the antique, eight-seater dining room table was in view. There in the center, winking in the spill of light from the kitchen, was the silver candlestick she’d dropped in the basement. All three red candles were still jammed in place, but only the center candle was unscathed. The rightmost leaned at an angle, and the top half of the left had broken off. The configuration looked vaguely like a bloody hand giving the peace sign.
For a long, heart-hammering moment, she stared at the candlestick, waiting for her brain to make sense of how it had gotten there.
House burglar? Not likely. Nothing was missing. And if it had been an intruder looking to hock valuables, the silver candlestick would already be at the nearest pawnshop.
Prank? Hardly. She didn’t know anyone around here, let alone anyone who liked or hated her enough to prank her.
Betty or Joe McIntyre? Probably not. She’d gotten the keys from Betty this morning, so how would they have gotten in?
The only possible explanation was the one she did not want to consider. The shadow man had retrieved the candlestick from the basement. And played with her goldfish to make her notice.
“Shit.” She lived in a haunted house. She wasn’t just visiting for the weekend. She lived here now. With a ghost. That could move things. Maybe hurt things…or people. “Shit.”
Grandma Nina’s was the closest thing she’d ever known to a real home, and this shadow-ghost guy was messing with her, trying to scare her into leaving. She’d run from one man already. She didn’t have it in her to run from another. Besides, she had nowhere else to go.
Damn it. She was no weakling. It was time for scary things to run from her.
She shot out of her chair. “Hey, asshole,” she yelled toward the dining room and the out-of-sight basement door. “Get the hell out of my grandmother’s house.”
She strode to the dining room and picked up the candlestick. Wheeling on the closed basement door, she shouted. “You don’t scare me. I’m not leaving. Got it? If you got bags, pack ’em, mister, ’cause if I see you again, I’m tossing you out on your shadow ass.”
She was shaking like a leaf, but countless cat-fights with Boston’s bitchiest had honed her voice into a perfect weapon. Not an ounce of fear came through.
She glared at the basement door. When no response met her threat, she said, “That’s what I thought,” and marched past the basement door to put the candles away.
Chapter 4
The thread anchoring Joshua to Draonius went taut as his demon captor reeled him down to the abyss. Like always, the whipping winds of the physical plane had taken their toll. The red-tinged, sensation-devoid abyss was a haven after the onslaught he’d endured.
Joshua was the only of Draonius’s essences that could suffer the melee above and manage any sort of coherent activity. It made him valuable to the demon, which kept him safe, if a captive soul forever denied heaven’s succor could be called safe. But it also meant he had to earn his keep and serve as scout whenever Draonius bade him.
Unfortunately, in order to appease the demon, he would have to expose the young woman now living in Mercy’s old house. He didn’t want to betray her, but he was Draonius’s captive and servant. He felt oddly compelled to perform the demon’s will even though he retained the conscience he’d had in life. It made him feel painted into a corner. Never had the colloquial expression been more apt: he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.
No matter what he did, he was simply and forever damned. After more than a century, he’d stopped bemoaning the fact. At least he had not been reduced to a witless wretch, like Mercy.
The vile chill of Draonius’s presence closed over him. Show me everything, the demon commanded, his thoughts one with Joshua’s.
Perhaps he could find some way to protect the woman, but he kept that hope under lock and key as Draonius availed himself of all he had observed, rooting through Joshua’s memories with icy fingers of power.
The demon saw the woman as Joshua had found her, in the cellar with golden light flickering over her open, frightened face.
Lovely. Truly lovely. Her hair glistens like polished tiger’s eye. And those breasts.
He made a disgusting sound of animal appreciation before forcing Joshua to remember his exploration of the upper floor. There were her traveling trunks, emptied and stacked neatly
in the master bedroom closet beside her colorful collection of clothes. Her delicates occupied the drawers.
How delightful! Draonius crooned. She plans to stay for a spell.
He must find a way to warn the living woman from the house. She had no idea what grave peril she was in.
* * * *
Jade dumped her haunted soup down the garbage disposal. By the time she flipped the switch to silence the grinding, she’d stopped shaking. She pulled her phone from the pocket of her hoodie and debated whether to call Grandma Nina.
Hi Grandma, just checking in before bedtime. Say, did you know your house was haunted? ’Cause I just had a run-in with that shadow man you told me didn’t exist way back when.
Grandma Nina had her quirks, but superstition wasn’t one of them. She went to church on all the big holidays and made everyone hold hands for grace at Thanksgiving dinner. She’d made it clear she didn’t believe in ghosts.
If she called, Grandma Nina would probably think she was crazy. But she didn’t like the idea of being alone in the house with that thing and no one else knowing. While she debated calling her sister instead, her phone rang in her hand, making her squeak with surprise.
The display said it was Brad.
Jeez, couldn’t he take a hint?
She thought about sending him to voicemail, where she would delete the message without listening to it, just like the last one, but she hated to waste the adrenaline pumping courage through her veins.
She answered with a curt, “What do you want?”
“Hey, babe! Where you at? I’ve been trying to get you all day.” His warm tone tugged at her heart. Stupid heart.
Don’t buy what he’s selling. He’s pretending nothing’s wrong.
For a second, she was tempted to follow his lead. After all, he was someone she could talk to about Mr. Shadow. But her one-sided altercation with the ghost had left her feeling oddly ineffective. She was itching for someone to push who would push back, and Brad was the perfect candidate.
