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She refused to be distracted, not by the creaks she heard of the old house settling, not by the wind starting to pick up and buffet the walls, rattling the windows, not by the pounding of her heart and the drumming of her pulse through her brain warning her that she was dancing too near the edge of a greater horror, that danger was nearing with every step she took.
She walked directly to her bedroom and shined her flashlight across the ceiling and down the far wall. “This is where it started for me,” she said around a dry mouth. Her twin bed, stripped of any bedding, the mattress seeming to have exploded as the stuffing had spewed through the split covering, stood where it had when she’d been a child, against the wall, the headboard beneath a window where she could look up and see the stars. Marlie’s bed had been shoved to the far side of the room, in front of the closet, the bed’s mattress intact but stained a dull, dirty gray.
She remembered Marlie, the desperation in her voice. “My sister told me to be quiet,” Kara said, remembering. “She woke me up, I think, and I argued, but she was insistent. I could tell something was going on, something weird, because she was usually a slob and her bed had been made and she had clothes folded on it. It just wasn’t like her. I didn’t want to go, but I let her take me upstairs.”
Kara followed the path they’d taken all those years ago, toward the end of the hall where the attic door was gaping open, hanging drunkenly from its hinges.
Fear curdled her blood, but she pressed forward. Cleared her throat. Ignored the feeling that something dark and evil lurked within these old walls. She couldn’t back out now. Wouldn’t.
“She was leading me and shushing me, telling me to be quiet.”
She paused at the doorway to the crooked, narrow stairs leading upward and for a second she was certain she felt the presence of malice, like the unseen breath of an evil beast skimming across her skin and raising the hairs on the back of her neck.
Don’t go up there. It’s bad. You know it’s bad.
Clenching her teeth, using the flashlight’s thin beam as her guide, she began mounting the stairs, Tate a step behind.
The attic was several degrees colder than the hallway below, a sharp breeze cutting through the broken glass of the only window. She remembered that night and staring out the dirty panes, wondering when Marlie would return. Wonderingifher sister would come back for her.
Inwardly she trembled and the back of her throat turned to cotton.
With her flashlight, she splashed a stream of illumination to the rafters where the window was cracked and the wind rushed inside. Evidence of an owl was obvious, though the bird wasn’t hidden in the shadows above. The musty smell of things long forgotten was all too familiar and her insides squeezed with the remembered fear of abandonment.
“She brought me up here and told me it was to keep me safe. Us safe,” Kara forced out, and drew her flashlight’s shaft of light down from the ceiling to the clutter within. Tate’s flashlight, too, illuminated the leftover fragments of lives once lived. Massive piles of furniture and stacked boxes, old vinyl records and tapes and rolled up rugs, all covered in years of cobwebs and dust.
Did she hear something—a humming over the sough of the wind, or . . . or did she imagine it?
Don’t create more problems. Just try to remember and get out. Get out fast.
Trembling inside, she closed her eyes as she recalled that terrifying night. “I was supposed to stay up here. Marlie promised she’d come back for me, but I got tired of waiting. It seemed like hours, but it could have been fifteen minutes. I really don’t know. I was just a kid. She . . . she did say there were bad people here or at least one bad person, I can’t remember exactly, but she didn’t say who it was and then she locked me up here. Locked! Can you imagine doing that to a seven-year-old?” She shook her head, eyes still closed as she said, “I was frantic to escape. Crazy to get out. And then I heard a scream. A bloodcurdling scream.”
Kara’s heart squeezed and her knees threatened to buckle.
She relived her fear, the panic as she tried to escape her attic prison. “I had to get out. Ihadto.” She shivered, not from the temperature in the room but from the memories as they tumbled through her mind. “It took some doing, but I was determined and then the lock sprang, the door opened and I was out. Free.” The memories shriveled and shrank away and she found herself once again back to reality, with Tate, in this horrid, hated attic, her eyes opening to the weird darkness, the blue shadows cast by their flashlights.
Once more she thought she heard a humming, so out of place in a cavernous garret.
“Do you hear that?” she asked Tate as he moved his flashlight’s beam over the nooks and crannies of the boxes, bags and junk that had been hauled up here.
“Hear what?”
“Something whirring or . . .”
Her phone vibrated in her pocket and she physically started. Retrieving her cell, she saw the anonymous text glowing on the small screen:
Get out. Get out now!
“What the hell?” Kara whispered, her breath clouding in the cold space. She was about to text back. “Tate—it’s happening again!”
“What?”
Before she could respond and demand to know who was on the other end of the connection, undulating bubbles appeared on the screen indicating that whoever was on the other end of the connection was typing into his or her cell.
“I don’t know, but they’re contacting me again . . . Oh, God.” The new message appeared in bold type:
Leave now! HE’S HERE!!!!
“He’s here? Who’s here?” she said, her fear congealing inside her.