The Ghost and The Graveyard (The Monk's Hill Witch) (4 page)

“Not exactly,” the woman said. “She didn’t break in. She had a key. And I haven’t actually confronted her about the attic.”

Oookay. This was odd. My brain jumped from speculating domestic abuse to dementia. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“My name is Prudence, dear.”

“Prudence, is the person in your home your caregiver? Are you ill?”

“Oh no, I’ve never even met her.”

“I’m not sure I understand. Someone is living in your home but you’ve never met the person, and she didn’t break in? Why don’t you just ask her to leave?”

“What a wonderful idea. Thank you. You’ve been a great help.”

The caller hung up, and the line disconnected. My hand reflexively shot forward and hit the button on my computer to log out.

“Freaking weird,” I said. I wondered what kind of situation the lady was in. Maybe she was an Alzheimer’s patient or something. She certainly wasn’t making any sense.

I was in the process of removing my headset and making plans for a long, hot bath when the sound of a door swinging open on squeaky hinges made me turn toward the stairs. The sound was coming from up, way up. I took three big steps toward the foyer.

I’m not sure what I noticed first, the woman herself or the light that surrounded her. Her face was a scowl and below her waist there was…nothing. Tendrils of mist—that was it. The glowing torso of an old lady leered at me from the top of my steps. I stopped breathing. I blinked once, then twice.

“
Get out of my house!
” she bellowed.

What the fuck?
A cold wind powered toward me, a whistling cyclone of fury that made the floor quake and the shutters bang against the walls from their place outside the windows. The pots and pans, hinged to the pot rack in the kitchen,
crash-boom-banged
in the mounting interior-tornado. Papers fluttered by, my notes and work papers, circling like misguided snowflakes. In the dining room, the chairs took turns pulling themselves out and then pushing themselves back in at the table.

Anyone in her right mind would have run, but I couldn’t move. My muscles were frozen with fear and my feet weighed two tons each. I couldn’t even breathe.

The torso moved down the stairs, never taking its wrinkled face or beady eyes off of me. “
Get out!
” she bellowed again.

I pinched myself. This had to be a nightmare. I’d fallen asleep at the computer and was having a nightmare. Why weren’t my muscles moving?

Closer, she drifted. I had to make a run for it. I had to move. My jaw sagged. I was still holding my breath.

A man stepped between the ghost and me. Where did
he
come from? He lifted two fingers over his shoulder, and the wind stopped, the pans clinked to a rest, the shutters halted their wicked cacophony.

“Oh thank God,” I said and let the air rush out of my burning lungs.

He turned toward the ghost, held out his hand, and said, “Prudence, come on. Knock it off. You’re scaring her.”

“
It’s my house!
” the old lady yelled.

“You don’t need it anymore and you can’t take care of it anyway. Please. Go back to the attic.” He waved his arm.

The spectral crone gave an exasperated sigh and dissolved into mist.

The man turned a gentle smile and warm, green eyes toward me. His sandy brown hair was unkempt and his chin was covered in stubble that somehow seemed to add to his character. He put his hands on the hips of his jeans, flipping the sides of his sport jacket back, arms akimbo like he didn’t know what to make of me.

“Th-thank you,” I stuttered.

“You’re welcome.”

I was about to ask who he was and where he had come from when I noticed smoke. After everything else, was the house on fire? I searched for the source.

Gray tendrils curled up from his feet.

“You’re on fire!” I said.

It advanced up his limbs, to his knees, to his hips, until the man was nothing but a mist with two green orbs where his eyes had been.

It was the loudest scream of my life. “
Aaaaaahhhhhhhh
!”

I don’t remember opening the door and I didn’t stop for my shoes. I ran into the cool night air, arms flailing, with an unyielding, high-pitched screech that was sure to wake any soul within a five-mile radius. Across the bridge and up the walkway, I raced to the stone cottage of the only other living person I knew in Red Grove—Rick Ordenes. I don’t remember knocking, only that the door opened and there was Rick.

“It was awful,” I whimpered as I grabbed his shoulders. My hands slapped bare flesh. He was completely naked.

But that wasn’t the most disturbing thing. His once-gray eyes had turned black as onyx and he didn’t look happy to see me. Then I caught sight of what was behind him.

The entire inside of the stone cottage glowed like a shrine. Candles flickered. Crosses reflected the light. Skulls—
human
skulls circled the room. A painting of a skeleton woman dressed like the Virgin Mary loomed against the far wall. And that was all I saw, because at that point my brain decided to turn off.

I’d never been prone to fainting, but the world tilted on its axis, threatening to toss me unfettered into the black universe. In slow motion, I fell backward, expecting to crack my head against the stone walkway.

The last thing I remember is Rick catching me in his arms as the darkness closed in around me.

Body and Soul

B
etween terror and oblivion, I lost track of time. All I knew was the sun was turning the inside of my eyelids red and I was lying somewhere soft, surrounded by the stench of dirty feet. I tentatively opened one eye and noticed a new ugly bouquet on what was undeniably the nightstand in my new house. This was a good sign, so I opened the other eye and surveyed my surroundings.

The quilt under my chin was the one from the master bedroom. I
was
back in the house, in my own room. Had Rick carried me home and put me to bed?

I peeked under the covers, relieved to find I was still wearing my scrubs. The good news was that Rick had not taken advantage of me in my fragile state. The bad news was that Rick had returned me to a haunted house and, by the looks of it, was some kind of hoodoo witchdoctor.

If I didn’t get my head around what happened last night, I was at serious risk of a mental breakdown. I sat bolt upright. Maybe this was it? Were hallucinations a symptom of a nervous breakdown? I was a nurse. Why couldn’t I remember the symptoms of a nervous breakdown? I needed to call Michelle.

My phone vibrated against my cheek, not because of an incoming call but because my hands were shaking. I listened to the ringing on the other end of the line.
Pick up, pick up, pick up.
I was brutally disappointed when her voicemail answered. I left a hasty, probably incomprehensible message and hung up.

The worst part was I didn’t even have work to distract me. I had the whole day off. A full twenty-four hours in a house where I’d seen (or hallucinated) two ghosts.

That was all it took to send me into a full-blown panic attack. My heart started to pound. I rubbed my aching chest. I was hyperventilating. Tangled thoughts jumbled through my mind, truth and dream, reality and fantasy. I cupped my hands over my mouth and nose and tried to slow my breathing. Eventually, the panic seemed to find its way out of me in a parade of fat tears, and I bawled uncontrollably into my hands.

“Shhh… Please don’t cry,” a man’s voice said from above me. It was a kind voice, low and soft, like you use to calm a skittish animal.

I leaped to my feet, eyes darting around the room. “Who’s there?” I yelled.

No answer.

I moved from the bed and backed toward the hallway. Nothing by the window or on either side of the walnut highboy. I approached the cracked door of the closet turned sideways, ready to Tae Bo the crap out of anything that moved. I delivered a roundhouse, kicking it open, but it was empty.

Only one place left to look. The door to the room was wide open. I approached it cautiously, knowing if someone was hiding behind it, I could be in grave danger. But I didn’t care anymore; I needed to know. I yanked the knob forward and stuck my head behind the door. Nothing.

That was it. I was losing my mind.

“Coffee,” I said to myself. “I need coffee now.”

I walked to the end of the hall to the stair landing, but instead of continuing down the stairs to the kitchen I had an uncontrollable impulse to look up. I hadn’t noticed before but the stairs continued to what I presumed was the attic. That’s where
she
had come from, the legless freak of nature who’d chased me out of my house. I remembered the shrill creak of the door before she’d appeared at the top of my stairs. A sudden chill goose-pimpled my flesh and sent horror-movie-style tingles through my scalp.

Compulsively, I climbed the staircase. I had to know. I had to face this fear. My legs shook more than a little and moved like dead weight. It took forever to make it to the painted white door with the cast-iron handle. It was locked. I tugged a little harder, jostling the knob, but it wouldn’t budge. The keyhole was the old-fashioned kind that took one of those long, roundish keys. I’d ask my dad if other keys came with the house. I needed to know what was in there.

One thing was for certain; no ghostly old ladies were attacking me. This was just an ordinary door to an ordinary attic. I still wasn’t sure what had happened last night. Exhaustion? Stress? Radon poisoning? (I’d have to ask my dad about that one.) But it wasn’t ghosts. This was mental.

I bounded down the stairs, feeling silly I’d ever entertained the idea that there were actually ghosts in the house. As I approached the foyer, a noise from the kitchen snapped me back into jumpy mode. I crouched down, slinking around the banister, and used the island counter as cover. Who the hell was in my house?

When I realized the sound was the coffeemaker, I stood, confused, and eyeballed my kitchen. The machine was percolating away, sending wafts of hazelnut in my direction. Now I needed to decide between three possibilities. One, I had lost my mind and actually made this coffee myself. Two, a ghost made me coffee. Or three, there was a living person in my house.

I went with three. “Rick?” I called. Maybe he’d stayed the night. That would explain the voice, as well. “Hello? Is someone here?”

Silence.

I started crying again and grabbed the sides of my hair. “Who is in my house?”

“I am. But I don’t think I should come out. I don’t want to scare you.” It was the man’s voice again, definitely not Rick’s.

I was afraid, but I was more afraid of losing my mind. “Please,” I said in barely a whisper, “I need to know.”

An orb of light in the middle of the living room floated toward me. It was the kind of thing you saw every day, dust reflecting the morning glow that seeped through the slats in the blinds. This one, however, grew as it approached in a way that made the room feel like a dark tunnel, and the orb, the light at the end of it. The brightness made me blink, and by the time I opened my eyes again, the transparent form of the smoking man from the night before leaned against my counter.

Several questions raced through my mind at once. Things like, why was he in my house? Was his body somewhere nearby? Did he mean me any harm? But the only thing that came out of my shocked mouth was, “I can see through you.”

“Ah, I’m stronger at night. It’s taking an enormous degree of effort for me to hold this form right now. I should be sleeping but I wanted to make sure you were all right. What Prudence did last night was unforgivable.”

My pulse pounded in my temples. Instinct told me to run. But where would I go? I swallowed hard and rolled with it. “How many of you are there? “

“Just the two of us.”

“You and the old woman who called me last night. Prudence.”

“Yes. I’m sorry we scared you.”

Was this real? Was a ghost really apologizing to me? He seemed friendly. I tried to think of friendly ghosts, like Casper, so that I didn’t pee in my pants—which, incidentally, were yesterday’s scrubs. I seriously needed a shower.

“And you switched the wine and made me coffee?”

“You said you needed the coffee, and that wine choice was a travesty. I had to do something.”

I wrinkled my brow. “Are you some kind of phantom food critic?”

“No. To be honest, I don’t know what I was before I died. There are lots of things I don’t remember. But Pinot gris is definitely the better choice with salmon.”

I folded my arms across my chest. “I like Shiraz.”

The corner of his mouth curled up in an uneven smile that I found oddly endearing.

“So, if you are going to be haunting me and choosing my drinks, the least you can do is tell me your name.”

He frowned and looked at the floor. “I can’t remember.”

“You mean, you don’t remember who you are—I mean were—at all?”