Page 41 of The Premonition at Withers Farm

Molly realized vaguely she’d not been downstairs since the day they’d first toured the house. Her hand gripping the stair rail, Molly stopped on the bottom step. The whisper had ceased. Her skin prickled at the basement cold. She reached, fumbling in the dark for the string to the lightbulb. Finding it, light flooded the gloomy basement.

It spanned the length of the kitchen and dining room. Spiderwebs collected in the rafters. A water heater stood in the far corner. A few crates were stacked haphazardly. Empty. Leaning against the wall where she saw—

Merlin Bachman

b. October 1, 1890, d. Otober

They had scrapped the tombstone after someone had misspelledOctober. Now it helped to hold up the foundation. The memorial marker to a dead man who no one remembered anymore. A lifeless story.

This basement was anything but dead. It was alive. She could feel it. Sense it. Alive with the untold stories of the dead carved into the foundation, mistaken names and dates causing them to be cast aside. What if no one had remade their markers? What if their graves remained unheralded to this day, and these tombstones in her basement foundation were the thwarted efforts to remember them?

Who caught his blood? I, said the Fish.

Molly repeated the words soundlessly, even though her mouth moved. Something was off. Dreadfully wrong. This place—this basement—thisfarm. She could feel it lurking in the air. A secret sin, something so dreadful that time was disguising it, but reality was trying to expose it.

She lunged for the stairs.

She had to get away from it.

Too much death.

All around her.

It pressed in on her lungs, stealing her breath. Suffocating her sense of reason, her sense of beingalive.

Stumbling up the stairs, her knee struck the edge of one and she slipped.

...with my little dish, I caught his blood.

Molly grabbed for the stairs to regain her balance. As she did so, she looked up toward the light coming from the room above.

Her scream strangled in her throat as she stared into the lifeless eyes of January Rabine. She stood at the top of the stairwell, her stringy hair hanging over her shoulders, brushing her torso. Her hand was outstretched, her eyes a glassy white.

No. It couldn’t be.

January wasdead!

Molly clawed for the railing, her fingernail splitting as it connected with stone wall instead.

“Go away.” Her command scraped from her throat as a hoarse whisper.

January’s body blurred as Molly’s vision made the dead woman double, then merge, then double again, like an awful shadow that wove and dodged through Molly’s reality.

Molly scrambled to get away from her, and as she did, the stairs gave way beneath her. Falling into the dank basement, surrounded by gravestones, felt like falling into a grave. She would be buried alive as January watched from the grave’s edge.

14

Perliett

Why did everything awful happen at night? In the darkness? Where ghouls and goblins lurked in the deep places. It had been nighttime when Eunice Withers was murdered. It was nighttime again, and while she appreciated being recognized as a caregiver—if not a bona fidedoctor—Perliett wasn’t particularly keen on midnight runs.

Perliett hooked her laces on her shoes and gave Maribeth a reassuring look. “I’ll be fine, Mother.”

“Fine doesn’t keep youalive.” Genuine worry marred Maribeth’s face. “I wish I wasn’t feeling so ill.” She sniffed, holding a handkerchief to her running nose. Her eyes were watery from congestion. “Summer colds are miserably inconvenient, and I truly hate your rushing out in the middle of the night. Detective Poll has given me insufficient reason to believe the killer isn’t still roaming about like the devil on the prowl.”

“I’m not alone.” Perliett tilted her head toward the carriage that waited outside, driven by young Brody Hannity—the grandson of another local farming neighbor.

“A nine-year-old boy is certainly not a knight in shining armor,” Maribeth observed. She withdrew her handkerchieffrom her face and straightened with resolve. “I will come as well. We’ll take our own carriage.”