The Haunted Heart: Winter (3 page)

Then again, if I
was
losing it, I’d
probably be the last to get the memo. People who should know seemed
to believe that was how it worked.

“Is this all?” Murdoch asked in an
undertone. “Is this all that happens?”

I shook my head. How would I know?

He put his hand out, and I grabbed his
wrist. “No. Don’t do that.”

He looked at me. I don’t suppose he could
read my face in the indistinct light any better than I could read
his.

I said, “I’m not sure what will happen if
she touches you.”

“
She?
”

We both caught the movement at the same
instant, turning back to the mirror. There she was, floating
beneath the silvery surface like a drowning victim in a cheesy
horror film. Except there was nothing funny here.

She seemed dimmer now, further away, less
distinct in form and feature. Granted, she hadn’t exactly been
solid to start with.

Murdoch sucked in a breath. “This is some
crazy shit,” he said softly.

I nodded.

We watched in silence. Yes, she was smaller,
paler, more vaporous and insubstantial. Comparatively speaking.
Because for an ordinary mirror, that thing was way too immediate
and real for comfort.

“It’s not going to grow fangs and jump out
at us, is it?” Murdoch said. He was joking, but I could hear the
unease in his voice. I could hear it my own when I replied.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what she
wants.”

“Did you try to communicate with it?”

“I don’t know if you could call it that. She
was laughing at me.”

“Laughing?” He looked briefly from the
mirror.

“She’s not as — she was bigger before. More
solid. I could see her more clearly. She could see me. She was
laughing. Then she tried to put her hand through the mirror, like
she was trying to find a way through.” I could see the gleam of his
eyes. “That’s when I came to get you.”

He grunted acknowledgement and turned back
to the mirror, which was steadily growing more dim. “She’s losing
altitude fast,” he commented.

I smiled. I liked his humor. Maybe it was
just bravado, but it helped. “It must be almost daybreak.”

“Yeah. My thought. Isn’t that how it works
with ghosts? They disappear at cockcrow?”

Murdoch had put it into words. One word. The
word I had been trying to find a way around, a way past.

Ghost.

Along with all the rest of this junk I
seemed to have acquired a ghost.

“If the campfire stories are right,” I said.
“I don’t know. This is a new experience for me.”

“I should hope.”

We watched in silence as the diaphanous form
grew fainter and fainter, and finally dispersed. By then, night was
retreating from the edges of the room, fading to gray. It was not
light yet, but it was no longer witching hour. The haunting was
over for now.

I felt shaky with relief.

Murdoch also seemed to have concluded the
danger was past. He sat back and scratched the back of his neck.
“Wow. That was different.”

I nodded.

He looked at me. It was light enough that I
could now make out his features in the gloom. “What are you going
to do?”

Good question. Call the Ghostbusters? An
exorcist? The local news station? “I don’t know. I’m not going to
be sleeping here while I try to figure it out, though.”

“No. I sure as shit wouldn’t.” He glanced at
the mirror, which now reflected our two fatigued faces and
bloodshot eyes. He climbed to his feet and stretched, arms over his
head, muscles rippling beneath his furred chest. He yawned,
displaying an impressive set of choppers. “You can crash at my pad
for a few hours.”

“Thank you,” I said, and I didn’t have to
fake the gratitude. I had never felt as alone as I had this night.
For a lot of reasons. It made me appreciate the simple kindness of
one human offering another a few inches of space beneath his
umbrella.

We didn’t say anything on the weary trek
downstairs to Murdoch’s quarters. I was preoccupied with my
thoughts, and I guess Murdoch was too. Sure, I’d watched
The
X-Files
and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. Like everybody I
grew up with, I was pretty open to the idea of the paranormal, but
this was still seriously cray cray. Maybe I was sleeping. Maybe
this whole thing was a dream and in a minute or two I was going to
wake up on the grimy floor in a puddle of drool.

Next to me, Kirk kept giving those
gargantuan yawns, so he must have been serious about needing his
forty winks.

His rooms were a comfortable clutter of
books and dirty dishes and assorted odds and ends. If there was a
matching piece of furniture, it wasn’t in view, but it was all
good, solid stuff and built to last. There were two framed posters
of Jules Verne book covers
The 500 Millions of the Begum
and
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
, and a set of
barbells. The infamous guitar was on a stand near the bookcase
which was crammed with volumes, old and new. Sand dollars and
shells filled a wooden bowl on a low coffee table the size of a
raft. The long leather sofa was covered with newspapers.

Murdoch picked up the newspapers and dumped
them on the half-buried coffee table. “I’ll get you a blanket.”

“Thanks.” I sat down on the sofa, and then
shifted. There was a CD case in the crack between the cushions.
Linkin Park
Minutes to Midnight
.

Murdoch returned with what looked like a
couple of wool army blankets. “So you inherited all that junk
upstairs from the old man?”

“My Great-Uncle Winston. Yes. And there’s
probably half a million dollars worth of
junk
up there.”

“I’ll take your word for it. Is there some
kind of record of where your great-uncle found all the different
pieces in his collection?”

“Their provenance, you mean? Yeah. He kept
pretty detailed records, but I don’t recall seeing any notes like
haunted mirror.
”

Murdoch snorted with what was apparently
amusement. Or maybe the dust was getting to him. He tossed me the
blankets. “Make yourself comfortable. Just don’t wake me up before
ten hundred hours.”

“Huh?” That was some sleeping in he planned
to do.

“Ten o’clock.”

“Oh. Gotcha. You were in the army,
right?”

He did a double take. “The
army
?
Er…yeah. Sure. Sleep well. And if you can’t sleep, don’t get up and
start pacing around.”

I gave him a thumbs up — which was politer
than my first thought.

He vanished down the hall and I heard a door
close firmly. I shook out the blankets, which smelled of mothballs.
I was still chilled. The heating here was mostly wishful thinking.
Drafts whispered under every door and window, and the old radiator
pipes banged and clanged like they were about to explode from the
effort of warming this cavern.

I wrapped myself in the camphor-scented
folds and then fished amongst the newspapers and periodicals on the
coffee table for something to read.

Chris Pine grinned slyly from the cover of
OUT
magazine. I threw a guilty look at the silent hallway.
Now
that
I hadn’t seen coming. It was heartening though. I
wasn’t looking for a friend, but it was a relief to know there was
no potential enemy here.

I flipped open the magazine and began to
read.

Kirk didn’t go in for lots of fancy gadgets
or appliances. He had a vintage Faberware percolator, a machine for
people who take their first cup of the day very seriously. I found
coffee beans, a manual grinder which would have looked right at
home in Great-Uncle Winston’s museum, and made a pot of
Sumatra.

It wasn’t long after the dry rustic
fragrance began to waft through the kitchen that I heard the creak
of Kirk’s bedroom door. He appeared in the kitchen a few seconds
later clad in the same pair of faded jeans and a black and green
plaid flannel shirt. His hair looked less like a raven’s wing and
more like a raven’s nest. Did he stand on his head in bed?

“Hey, there you are,” I greeted him. “And
it’s barely ten hundred oh thirty hours.”

Kirk gave me a bleak look from beneath his
black brows.

“It’s snowing,” I said. “Hard. How do you
like your coffee?”

“Are you always this painfully
cheerful?”

Now that really was funny. I laughed. “Well,
you know how it is.”

“No. I don’t.”

I said cheerfully, “Once you give into the
darkness, it’s hard to break free.”

He growled, “I like darkness before my first
cup of coffee.”

I got two earthenware mugs from the
cupboard. “You like darkness
in
your coffee or would you
prefer cream and sugar?”

“Cream. Brown sugar. In the canister behind
you.”

I took mine black, but I found the sugar,
got cream from the mostly empty fridge, doctored his coffee. Kirk
accepted it with another of those uncommunicative grunts. He had
squeezed into the breakfast nook and was staring gloomily out the
narrow arched windows. The snow was forming white mounds at the
bottom of the foggy glass, like an ant farm winter wonderland.

I scooted in across from him, taking my own
mug in both hands. The coffee was hot and flavorful with a sort of
earthy undertone.

Kirk stopped glowering at the weather,
raised his mug, slurped noisily. He put the mug down. “Last night
wasn’t the first time you noticed something wrong with the mirror,
was it?”

“Actually it was.”

He started frowning again. “You didn’t see
anything before that?”

“No.”

“How did it start? What did you notice
first?”

“I’d been working all afternoon and I was
taking a break —”

“Going for another stroll,” he inserted
grimly.

“And all at once I got this weird feeling of
being watched.”

Kirk said nothing.

“It was sort of unsettling because I
couldn’t shake the feeling. It went through my mind —”

“What went through your mind?” Kirk prompted
when I came to an abrupt stop.

“It’s going to sound crazy, but I wondered
if there was some kind of peep hole or spy hole or something.”

He looked taken aback. No wonder, since he’d
have been the most likely suspect for your friendly, neighborly
Peeping Tom. Not that my thoughts had been anything as coherent as
a fully formed suspicion.

“Anyway, I had this sense of apprehension,
of anxiety. It’s hard to explain. It wasn’t a rational feeling, but
it was…strong. Really strong.” I avoided his eyes. I could imagine
what his expression would be like. “I was trying to talk myself
through it and I happened to look at the mirror. Or maybe I saw
something out of the corner of my eye. But there it was, this sort
of filmy swirling.” I put the mug down. Even now the memory of it
made my hands a little shaky. “I kept thinking my eyes were playing
tricks on me. That I was just tired.”

I met Kirk’s gaze then. His expression was
grim but considering.

“So there I was, standing in front of the
mirror, telling myself it wasn’t happening, and,” I took a deep
breath, “it began to take form.”

Kirk didn’t say a word, didn’t blink, didn’t
move a muscle.

“That was the first time. The second time, I
mean after you came up and took a look and left again…”

“Go on.”

“I thought I saw it reach through the
glass.” Kirk’s face changed. I said hastily, “That is, I’m not one
hundred percent sure because I was going for the door, but just for
a second…it looked like fingertips stretched through.”

“Holy shit,” Kirk said sincerely.

A bell rang and we both jumped. Just like
that the spell was broken. We both looked around for the source of
that muted but insistent jangle. The doorbell? No, overhead. A
phone was ringing.

I jumped up, nearly knocking over the table.
“Damn. That’s my phone!”

If he had a response, I didn’t hear it. I
was already out the door and on my way upstairs.

T
here were only two
possible callers, and I broke track records trying to get up the
stairs before my not answering triggered the inevitable panic. I
didn’t make it in time.

“
Shit.
”

Chewing at a hangnail, I stood over the
black rotary dial phone, waiting. Sure enough, the phone jangled
again.

I snatched it off the cradle. “Flynn.”

“
Flynn.
” I could hear the relief
across the miles.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Are you all right? Your voice sounds
odd.”

“I’m out of breath. I was downstairs. It’s
two flights.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, honey. You didn’t answer
your cell phone.”

“I left it up here. Upstairs.”

“I suppose I should have left a
message.”

“That’s okay. It’s nice to talk to you.” We
both knew leaving a message wouldn’t have solved a thing. She’d
just keep calling until I actually picked up. Or she resorted to
calling 911.

Mom asked tentatively, “How is it
going?”

“There is a
lot
of stuff here.”

“Yes, I suppose there is. According to Mr.
McLennan, Winston ran that museum for fifty years. He just kept
buying and buying and buying things for his exhibits.”

“Yep,” I said cheerfully. “Old Winston was a
hoarder all right. This is going to keep me busy for quite a
while.”

“Well, that’s good…”

“Yep.”

“Are you sure it’s not too much for you,
though?”

“No way. This is what I need.”

“The thing is, Flynn.” Mom was proceeding
with caution. I could hear the painstaking care with which she
approached her real reason for calling. “Your father and I have
been talking it over, and we just don’t think you’re ready for
this.”

I’d been expecting this, so I was ready.
“Mom, you shouldn’t say that to me. It hurts my confidence.”