There Should Have Been Eight, page 14
I promised myself I’d give him a full update once we were back.
“It’s not the fun reunion we all expected, huh?” Aaron said softly after we were out of earshot of the others. “Sorry, Gracie. I promised you a great time.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” she murmured, squeezing his arm as she leaned against him.
It struck me then that Grace was the unknown here, the one person whose motives we couldn’t hope to guess at—we didn’t know her well enough. Wouldn’t that be easy? Just blame the newcomer in our midst like we were in some incestuous backwoods settlement that went around kidnapping hitchhikers.
I rolled my eyes at myself, because the truth of it was that poor Grace had no horse in this race. She was just an innocent bystander caught in the currents that tied the seven of us together.
“It’s not your fault,” she continued now. “It’s this house. Bad juju all around.”
“I’m beginning to agree with you.” All the tiny hairs on my body were standing up, taut and alert. “It’s as if it’s holding on to all the bad energy from the past.” I thought of Clara’s tight script, the painstaking work she’d done to hide the ugly reality of her life.
I knew deep in my gut that she’d shared none of that with her family back in England. It would’ve only hurt them—they were helpless to do anything for her. And so she’d dealt alone with this life of whispering madness that could well have led to murder.
A glimpse of the eerie family portrait up ahead.
“This is it.” Turning consciously away from that unnerving piece of art, I pointed out the tapestry that covered the now broken door.
Pulling it aside, Aaron turned on his flashlight. “Wow, apologies, Lu, but I almost didn’t believe you on the secret room.”
“I saw it and I still hardly believe it.” I entered with him, while Grace hovered outside.
“You can wait there, Gracie,” Aaron said with his customary gentleness, then mouthed “afraid of the dark” to me.
Bile burned my throat, but I just nodded. If only I could stand outside the dark, too, but the dark was coming for me.
There would never be any escape.
“No.” Grace’s shoulders rose, her face set. “I’m more frightened standing out here by myself. Especially if we do think someone did that to Darcie. Do we?”
“It was an accident.” Aaron took her hand with a smile of encouragement. “It’s only us eight in the house, remember?”
That was exactly the problem, though, wasn’t it? It was only the eight of us in this house. And unlike Aaron, I wasn’t so sure that I could trust all of my friends. Poor Grace. She didn’t even know most of us that well, and she was now stuck with us in a house straight out of a gothic novel.
Wanting to hurry this up for her and for myself, I flashed the beam of my light at the spot I thought I’d seen a door. Air rushed out of me. “There it is.”
“Did you see these bookshelves?” Grace said from my right at the same time. She pulled out a slim volume as Aaron went to check the door handle.
“It’s in Latin,” she muttered, sliding it back while I was still digesting the fact that she could make out anything in this light. “I think I recognized the word ‘demon’ from school.”
I wanted to ask what kind of school taught Latin in this day and age, then remembered that she’d been educated at boarding schools in Europe. Answer had to be rich people schools.
I wondered idly if that meant Grace was rich. Be nice for Aaron if she was; if anyone deserved a break in life, it was him. He’d worked all through high school and university, and was currently doing a ton to support his younger siblings through higher education.
“It’s open.” Aaron pushed the door into empty space on the other side.
The smooth transition made me frown. “The door to this room was locked.” I glanced back at the splintered edges that were a silent testament to what it had taken to get in. Ash was going to be paying the price for that in a few hours.
“Darcie must’ve locked it after she came inside.” Grace slid back another book. “Did you check her pockets for a key?”
I shook my head.
Though Grace’s words made sense, I couldn’t understand why Darcie would’ve locked up when she was the only one who knew about the secret passage in the first place.
“This one is in English,” Grace muttered, shifting to catch more of the glow from my flashlight.
The pages blazed a painful white to my eyes.
“It’s a book of spells. Dark stuff. Cursing-your-neighbor kind of thing.” Shuddering, she shoved it back onto the shelf. “Luna, do you mind if I go after Aaron into the passage?”
The weight of the dark at my back was suffocating. “No problem.” I fell in behind her.
“Gah!” Aaron made a jerking motion, paused. “Uh, sorry. Cobwebs.” He sounded so sheepish that it broke the tension, had us giggling. “At exactly the height of my face.”
“It doesn’t count unless a spider sets up home in your hair,” I said.
“I hate you,” he muttered without force, while Grace patted his back and said, “It’s okay, sweetie. Spiders prefer other nesting places.”
Not listening to Aaron’s rumbled response, I ran the beam of my flashlight on either side of me. “Narrow.” Not enough to be uncomfortable, but meant for single file.
“Yeah.” Aaron coughed into the crook of his elbow. “I’ll stay up front—unless you want to swap? You did find this place.”
“No, go on.” A few steps in, I couldn’t help glancing back at the door through which we’d entered, my neck prickling.
“What if it isn’t just us eight?” Grace whispered. “I mean, if there’s one secret room, there could be others, right?”
My entire face went cold, her words giving shape to the primal fear in my gut.
I snapped my attention back to the other two.
“We’d have noticed,” Aaron argued. “We’ve been all over the house. I’d have noticed if a ton of food went missing. Ash and Darcie might’ve stocked it, but they asked me to make the shopping list.”
I hadn’t known the latter, though it made sense. “Place is huge,” I said, wondering why the hell I was adding fuel to the fire when it was the stuff of nightmares. “And one person wouldn’t need a lot of food.”
“How would they even have got here?” Aaron said, his voice a whisper, too.
As if the walls were listening in.
Stomach lurching, I remembered the rustling I’d put down to rats—then later to Darcie. But what if it hadn’t been either of those two? What if the walls were listening?
“Could be a squatter,” Grace said. “Like that case in America where that person lived in someone’s attic for years and only came out at night.”
“That’s an urban legend,” I said, though I wasn’t so sure.
“I’m saying the estate sits empty most of the time, right? Perfect place to stay if you don’t care that you’re in the middle of nowhere. Plus, there’s a pantry stocked with nonperishables.”
“But they’d have to go out sometime,” Aaron said, his tone firm. “I’m not buying that the squatter’s happy to sit in isolation forever. They couldn’t eat out the pantry, for one. The caretaker would notice.”
I didn’t want to say what I did next. “Easy enough to hide a vehicle in the bush at the foot of the mountains. Jim’s got no reason to go out there. He’s only responsible for the house and making sure any fallen fruit is cleaned up.”
“That’s it,” Aaron muttered, “I’m separating you and Gracie the minute we’re out of here. You’re dangerous together.”
“Sorry, sweetie.” Grace patted his shoulder again. “It’s this house. It’s getting to us.”
I allowed the topic to drift away, but I wondered if part of the reason Grace and I had clung to it was that it’d be less of a horror to have it be a stranger behind the odd occurrences. Because if there was no squatter . . . then it had to be one of us.
23
Do you see anything?” I asked Aaron after several minutes of walking. From what I could tell, we’d turned the corner, but that was it. This place had no other markers, no helpful arrows on the wall.
My jaw ached, my neck stiff.
“Nothing.” Thirty seconds or so later, our breathing loud in the silence, he said, “Hold on. I think I see a sliver of light. Switch off your flashlight.”
Sweat broke out along my spine. “Grace, you okay with that?”
Grace’s voice was unsteady as she said, “If it’s only for a second or two.”
“Here, take my hand. There you go. You’re good, Lu.”
With no escape hatches left, I forced myself to press down on the button that turned off the beam of light.
Spots flickered in my vision, fiery flashes of fading sight, and I had to place my hand against the wall to keep from screaming. But it did nothing to stop the mental babbling: Oh God. Oh God. Oh God!
“Oh, I see it, too!” Grace’s hand brushing my shoulder as she reached back. “Look!”
I could see easily enough over her diminutive height, but Aaron had to duck down to clear the sightline. And sure enough, there it was, a thin line of light beneath what had to be a doorway.
Air returned to my lungs in a stagnant rush.
Neither Aaron nor I turned on our flashlights as we headed toward that light. I still couldn’t see anything except for when I caught a glimpse around Aaron, but just knowing that the light was there, that we were getting closer to it, stopped me from panicking.
A voice at the back of my brain whispered that I was a fool, that I had to accept that there would be no light in my future, nothing but the cold embrace of the dark.
Get used to it, it said. Or you’ll go stark, raving mad.
Unable to deal with that while stuck in this damn passageway with its flat, stale air, the dust grit under my teeth, and no doubt a new crop of cobwebs in my hair, I focused on Grace’s scent. She used either a body spray or shampoo with lavender as a base ingredient.
It was a scent I knew to the bone after growing up with masses of the blooms in our yard at home. Mum had always had grand plans to dry them and make potpourri, but two active kids and a joyous social life kept her too busy to ever quite get to the task. So the lavender thrived unchecked, our yard abuzz with bees who loved the tall purple stalks.
The birds had brought other seeds, and I’d mischievously sprinkled a packet of wildflower seeds through the yard one spring. Over time, Mum’s wild garden had become a thing of stunning beauty, until the neighbors believed she’d planned it that way on purpose. Some of my first photographs had been of the garden in bloom as my parents sat on our little porch with cups of tea in hand and Cable zoomed around with his toy airplane.
Dad had hung one of those photographs in the hallway after having it professionally framed. It was still there, in among my brother’s sports certificates, the little shrine of trophies he’d collected over the years—and all the other photos of mine that my mum and dad had framed.
My parents knew how to love both their children, and I’d never appreciated the true gift of that until just now, when I thought of how Bea’s mother hadn’t been able to accept her daughter’s divergence. If there even had been a divergence.
Again, I had only Darcie’s word for Bea’s problems.
“I hope that door’s unlocked.” Grace’s voice wobbled. “Otherwise, fair warning, I’m gonna scream.”
I hadn’t even thought about that, but she was right. It would be a bit much to come this far and then find the door locked and have to make it all the way back . . . all the while trying not to think about the phantom squatter who might’ve decided to somehow block us in on that end, too.
My heart beat so fast it hurt.
But when we reached the light at last, the door swung smoothly open under Aaron’s hand . . . to a clanking rattle of sound.
“What the—”
The three of us stood in the pantry. The sounds we’d heard had been cans falling off the shelf attached to the back of the door we’d opened. Chickpeas, tomatoes, beetroot, corn, spaghetti, baked beans, more baked beans, mackerel in red sauce, sardines, and beside it, a can of black cherries.
I also spotted rice nearby, a bag of flour, dried fruits and nuts. More cans.
And the painting on the far wall.
My face dropped, my skin melting. “Her eyes weren’t like that before.”
Glancing over his shoulder, Aaron blurted out an expletive I’d never before heard come from his lips. Grace, meanwhile, had her hand over her mouth, her eyes awash in tears. She ran out of the pantry the next second, Aaron behind her.
I stayed, stared.
And took a photograph of the painting’s bloody, scratched-out eyes.
“Lu,” Aaron hissed from the doorway. “Get out of there.”
A niggle at the back of my mind, I nonetheless followed, all the way through the door from the kitchen to the lounge—behind him and a pale Grace. She’d dried her eyes, but they remained rimmed in red.
“That was quick.” Kaea looked at my hair, winced. “Um, Lunes, it’s not just a cobweb this time.”
I forgot everything, would’ve given in to the urge to flail and scream like a little girl, but Grace reached up to gently collect whatever it was that had decided to live on my head. “It’s only a wee thing,” she said, her voice soft. “I’ll go put it somewhere it won’t bother anyone.”
I stared after her.
Aaron’s pride was squared shoulders, a curve of the lips. “She’s not scared of bugs, any bugs.” A grin as he watched her take the bug out of the living room. “She wanted to be an entomologist as a child, but life took her in a different direction. My girl still loves bugs, though.”
Grace walked back in right as Aaron and I finished explaining about the secret passageway. “He’s got a nice cozy spot now,” she said, dusting off her hands. “And it looks like we proved our theory. Darcie must’ve been taking the shortcut to the pantry when she slipped, hit her head.”
No hint of our squatter theory. I didn’t bring it up, either—we had no proof, had been telling ghost stories in the dark.
Vansi frowned. “What position was Darcie in when you found her? Did it look like she’d fallen?”
I glanced at Ash slumped in an armchair, his face in one hand, and figured he must’ve been too distraught to give them anything useful. Flicking backward through my mental snapshots, I stopped at my first glimpse of Darcie’s crumpled form, the way her hair had lain around her in a halo.
“She could have,” I said slowly. “She was on her side on the ground, in a position it’d be natural to fall into in terms of the space.”
“I just . . .” Kaea chewed his lower lip. “It’s weird, that’s all. For her to injure herself that way when it’s obvious she knows the house inside out.”
“Freak accidents happen.” Phoenix’s pragmatic contribution.
Vansi nodded. “You’d be surprised how many people come into the ER because of household accidents. Slipping on a puddle of water in the laundry and getting a skull fracture from the edge of the washing machine, forgetting a step that’s been there for three decades and breaking a leg, grabbing the scalding handle of a cast-iron pan, we see it all.”
“Our bodies are far weaker than we think.” Phoenix put one arm around Vansi’s shoulders, hugging her to his side. “One mistake away from catastrophic failure.”
Hard to argue when they put it in such stark terms.
A rasp of air. “Uh . . .”
All our attention snapped immediately to Darcie. Ash dropped to his knees beside the sofa, took one of her hands in his. “Darceline?” A gentle touch to her hair, Ash careful to avoid the wounded area.
It took several minutes for her to come out of it, and she did so with a grimace. I’d moved to the end of the sofa by now, trying not to crowd her but also wanting to see how she was. When she opened her eyes, it was with a look of confused blankness . . . that turned to biting rage. “They hit me!”
Everyone froze.
“It’s okay, darling,” Ash soothed. “You’re safe. You’re with us.”
Darcie looked around wildly, whimpered. “My head . . .”
“You took quite a blow when you fell.” Phoenix took her wrist, fingers on her pulse. “Do you remember what happened?”
“Fell?” Darcie’s voice rose at the end in a questioning upstroke.
“That’s what we think happened,” Vansi began.
“Hold on, guys.” Kaea’s voice, firm and authoritative as he hobbled over using his cane.
I gave him my shoulder and he braced the heat of his muscular body against mine.
“She said someone hit her,” Kaea continued. “Didn’t you, Darcie?”
Rubbing at her forehead, Darcie struggled to sit up. Ash helped her.
Smeared red marked the checked blue-and-white fabric of the towel that had been under her head. Grace, closest to it, picked it up and slid it out of sight behind her back. Catching her gaze, I nodded in agreement. Darcie was barely holding it together as it was. The last thing she needed was to get upset by the sight of her own blood.
“I—” She squeezed her knees with her hands. “I was so sure, but it’s gone now.” Her voice trembled. “I c-can’t—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Phoenix said. “You took a hard blow. Your memories will settle after a while.”
I knew that was comfort, not truth. Sometimes, the memories never returned. It had been like that with me when I’d had one of those stupid household accidents V had described and whacked my head on the edge of an open cupboard door in my kitchen. I remembered standing up from looking inside the lower cupboards . . . and then I was waking up in the hospital.
