Shivers Box Set: Darkening Around Me\Legacy of Darkness\The Devil's Eye\Black Rose (3 page)

“I’m not afraid of the dark if that’s what you’re asking,” I replied.

How to tell him that I was afraid of him and my reaction to him? That his hands on my skin scared me because my skin was off-limits and the last thing I sensed in him was control or discipline.

“The dark of Thornleigh is something to fear. Don’t be too brave for your own good. Not here and not with me,” Miles warned.

He must have felt my pulse leap beneath his thumb, but I didn’t care. I had been much more vulnerable than this before and I’d survived.

“It isn’t dark. Not really. I can see the shape of things. I can see the gleam of your eyes,” I said.

It was true. The firelight hadn’t left us in inky nothingness. Everything was indistinct but recognizable. I saw when he closed his eyes and moistened his lips and when he leaned slightly toward me as if he would…before he spoke again.

“Don’t explore the shadows. Don’t leave your room at night and don’t…don’t… One week. We have only one week,” he said and this time his words were rushed, as if he was afraid to be interrupted. I couldn’t see his expression, but his fingers had tightened on my skin, urgent and tense.

I would never know what the third warning would have been. The lights hummed back to life and O’Keefe let his hands trail down and away from me as he stood up and moved back. I looked up at his face, but even with the added light I couldn’t read the expression that claimed it. His dark eyes were shuttered and his mouth was tight.

* * *

There was no internet connection at Thornleigh. No way to check email or use a search engine. Even my phone was glitchy. I couldn’t get online and I hadn’t received any replies to my texts since I arrived.

I finally had to accept that they weren’t getting through.

It should have been annoying or even humorous. There were Robinson Crusoe jokes to be made. But then I recognized the slight flutter in my chest for what it really was.

Panic
.

There was a phone on the table in the hall directly down from my room. I remembered passing it and marveling at its archaeological quality. Big, black with a rotary dial, it was at least a chance for contact with the outside world.

I had already called my aunt and my parents from the airport, but I wanted to hear light, familiar voices. The door to my room opened with hardly a creak and I stepped into the hallway. It was several degrees cooler and infinitely darker in the passage, but I could make out the table and the phone. I padded toward it feeling as if I was reaching for a crutch in the need to hear my aunt’s voice, but hurrying the last steps nevertheless.

I was startled by the size and weight of the telephone receiver in my hand when I picked it up. I held the cool earpiece to my cheek and reached for the dial. Then, disappointment hit.
Nothing
. No dial tone. No sound whatsoever. Just dead emptiness. I jiggled the receiver rest. I tried several numbers on the rotary dial, surprised at how hard it was to actually get it to turn.

Still nothing
.

The lines might have been down because of the storm. Or the old phone might have outlived its usefulness sometime before I was born.

I was alone with O’Keefe in a haunted house. I didn’t for one minute believe that it was haunted by a ghost, but I had definitely seen some expectation of darkness in my host’s eyes. I might not believe in poltergeists, but I definitely believed in being haunted. I had personal experience with it myself. I climbed and ran to get away from it. I avoided my workshop because I was afraid of what my craft might reveal about how deep my cuts actually bled.

With all those thoughts haunting me, I needed a hint of normalcy. I needed distraction. A few cat memes would not be remiss.

There was one room in the house that might help me. I’d seen it on my way to my bedroom. The library. It had been huge and dark and gloomy, but huge meant shelves upon shelves of something that might make up for the fact that I couldn’t connect to the web to download a book to occupy me until the rain had passed.

I put the receiver back on the phone with a solid thump.

The need to run burned in my knees, but I wasn’t familiar enough with my surroundings. Right now, the only place I knew of to stretch my legs was the garden pathways. The thought of going back into the garden at night was not a cheerful one. My mind jeered at me with images of me running all right. But in those imaginings I was running from something or someone, my feet pounding and my heart pumping and always the idea that I would never be able to run fast enough.

* * *

I met Mary’s aunt in the library. I wouldn’t have known she was blind by the way she cleaned. I attributed her slow, methodical movements to age and habit. Her hair was gray and piled high on her head, held with unseen pins in an elaborate style from a time before wash and wear. She had a careful familiarity with the books she dusted. Her fingers weren’t nimble and quick, but they were sure, never hesitating from one volume to another.

“It’s quite a collection,” I offered, sure she’d seen me walk into the room in the wavy glass of the antique mirror behind the mantle. I tried not to look at it much myself because of the odd way reflections seemed to play in old glass.

Only then did she startle and jump, turning toward me with dim, unseeing eyes.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to surprise you,” I said.

Thankfully, she didn’t frown or faint. She merely nodded and turned back to her work.

“If I was easily frightened, I wouldn’t have worked here for thirty years,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“I thought one week was the limit?” I replied, jokingly but not. Not really joking at all.

“Well, I come and go, don’t I?” she said, continuing to dust each book in turn. “I’ve tried to keep the place habitable even when no one lived here.”

“Thirty years. That’s a lot of dusting,” I said.

I looked around the room at the floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with aging tomes. For some reason, her dusting seemed less OCD and more tragic, as if she’d set herself a Herculean task that no one would ever even appreciate should she accomplish it.

“The first O’Keefe didn’t read. But he definitely collected. Oh, yes, he definitely collected,” she said, still dusting, one book after another. Pulled it out, slid the grimy cloth over each cover, front then back, then the top of the pages, then the binding, then the bottom. And then she slid it back into place. Again and again. “I’m Mrs. Scott,” she offered.

“I don’t know how you do it,” I said. I had only been in the room long enough to see her dust several books and I already wanted to run screaming for fresh air and sunshine.

My heart thumped in my chest. And not just because of her endless patience for her never-ending task. I was imagining what it would be like to walk the halls of this giant, dark house blind to who or what might be around me.

I swallowed. My mouth had gone dry. I allowed a look at myself in the mirror and saw my face floating pale among the shadows. My green eyes were wide. They were also darker than they should have been. More shadows or faults in the old glass? I couldn’t be sure.

Behind me, the hall was even darker and beyond that the whole empty house. Or was it? Was it really empty after all? Since I’d stepped into the garden, the spot in the middle of my back between my shoulder blades had been tingling. Thornleigh definitely encouraged it. So many rooms. So many shadowy corners. And mingling in the size and the darkness, there was a heavy feeling of disuse, of dust and decay. Poor Mrs. Scott had her work cut out for her.

“I’ve been blind since I was a little girl. They said it was scarlet fever. These days even my hearing is fading.”

She turned to me suddenly. So suddenly, it was my turn to start. Her eyes were a pale, unfocused blue. Her face was wrinkled to the point that it was impossible to decide what she might have looked like years ago before her skin began to sag. She was pretty now. The kind of pretty a nice, neat elderly woman acquires when all her edges have softened and all her softness has sharpened.

“I’m no audience, that’s for sure,” she said. It sounded like a warning. “I can’t see at all and I can’t hear well and even when I could hear I refused to listen. You shouldn’t stay. Thornleigh is hard on people who can see.”

I thought of O’Keefe and how very deeply he seemed to see me when we’d met earlier. With his artist’s eyes, Thornleigh would be the hardest on him of all.

“I’ll be fine,” I assured her. The words came easily to my lips. They’d been my go-to platitude for a long, long time.
I’ll be fine…even when the pain won’t fade and the nightmares keep me up at night
.

Mrs. Scott closed her eyes and lifted her chin. She tilted her face to the side as if she was listening with her failing ears to something I couldn’t hear.

“Maybe,” she finally said just as the moment grew awkward.

Her eyes popped open and I almost gasped because the hallway behind me was reflected in her widened black pupils, and it looked as if it stretched on forever in the curvature of her eyeball.

“Maybe not,” she continued.

I didn’t know what to say to that. No one had ever challenged my assurances before. It was easier to accept I was okay rather than try to prove to me otherwise.

My neck prickled and I had to glance back to prove to myself and to my instincts that some black hole to eternity hadn’t opened behind me while Mrs. Scott had distracted me with her dusting and her creepy proclamations.

Nothing
.

Only dust motes and shadows and old faded carpet that was more alarming to my senses than it had any right to be. An alarm that said a good home makeover would go a long way toward setting things right. There was something about the abandoned and forgotten quality in the air here that went beyond poor maintenance and shoddy upkeep. The house was almost willfully aged. As if it refused Mrs. Scott’s efforts to clean it. Yes. I know. Dark fancy. But how else to explain the dust when she worked so hard to get rid of it?

“No, really,” I said firmly, to settle my nerves and break the prophetic mood of her words.

“Maybe,” she said, unconvinced, and then she turned to slide another book from the shelf.

Go. Get sculpted
. All my friends had thought it was the best idea. And my therapist had called it “brilliant,” though there were times she worried that I forced myself into situations where bravery was necessary in order to prove the attack hadn’t turned me into a coward. If they all could see me now, reduced to being nervous of statues and shadows, their certainty might turn into dusty maybes, as well.

* * *

I chose a book at random, barely glancing at its cover, before murmuring a goodbye to Mrs. Scott. She didn’t pause again in her work, only dusting, dusting, dusting. There was a perpetual quality to her movements, as if she’d been at the task forever and would be at it forever still after I left.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I was able to walk away, but niggling unease prickled my subconscious because I knew she continued to dust even after.

I tucked the book I’d picked under my arm and made my way across the aged carpet. It noiselessly ate my footsteps all the way to the stairs.

I’d rushed down them earlier, twisting and turning with little thought as to what or who might be around the frequent bends. It wasn’t spiraled exactly, but it did curve, with landings at each floor.

My room was at the top, just beneath the attic.

Now that I’d come upon Mrs. Scott unexpectedly, I slowed my climb up the wooden treads, conscious that the thin runner beneath my feet wouldn’t mask my advance. “She’s coming,” each step seemed to announce.

Creak-creak-creeeaaak
.

For some reason, silence would have been better. I wanted to pass back to my room unnoticed. Why? I couldn’t be sure.

Intermittent wall sconces flickered. From the storm or faulty wiring, I couldn’t be sure. They didn’t illuminate the long, winding staircase as much as its dark corners demanded. Each landing I attained opened up onto a long, barely lit hallway lined with empty rooms.

I sneezed twice because the atmosphere was heavy with dust and age. Both times the explosive noise made me cringe and hold my breath.

Then, I knew I wasn’t alone.

Five treads before the final landing, there was a difference in the air. Respiration or the very atoms around me stirred by a second pulse? It was a deep and instinctive surety. I wished as I took each step that I didn’t recognize it as a prey-to-predator reaction. But I did recognize it. I knew it well. The attack hadn’t made me a coward. I’d traveled the world looking for challenges to prove it. But this time I might have gone too far because not being a coward and not being afraid were two different things. Thornleigh did unsettle me, but unreasonable fear wouldn’t chase me away. I wouldn’t let it. The flutter of it in my chest was only a constant reminder that I wasn’t as strong as I was determined to be.

Maybe I should have stopped, one foot above the other, with a superstitious shiver and a wishful sigh that the threat would stretch on forever rather than the sudden split second need to face it. Or maybe I should have gone back down in a stumbling fall all the way to poor Mrs. Scott and her dusty library.

I shook off both urges even as I caught the scent of rain in the air.

It was O’Keefe. He had paused on the landing, waiting for me. I was intimidated and glad all at the same time. While the landing barely left room for us both when I reached it and stood beside him, the staircase would have been worse. In its close confines, we would have been touching. Here, we were nearly touching.

Even that made my pulse quicken.

“I came to check that you’d found your room,” O’Keefe said.

I didn’t doubt him. I was nervous and oddly affected by him. My instincts were drawn to him and put off by him at the same time. But he seemed detached from me. Observant but totally untouched by what he saw.

“I went down for a book,” I explained, pulling the pilfered volume from where I’d tucked it. Only then did I see it was old and leather-bound. Probably some first edition and I’d grabbed it like a paperback from a grocery store shelf.