Page 53 of We Live Here Now

It was exactly as the burned and dying man had told me. I watched James for a week and he was truly a reformed character. Everything I liked about him was still there, but his drinking was moderate and his humor good. He was all I had thought him to bein the heyday of our friendship. He did not question this change in himself but was determined to get back to Bristol and start work on repairing his business and his marriage.

Before he left for good, I had to test the second part of the story I had heard so long ago in the hospital.

James had gone to Exeter overnight to visit with an estranged brother, and I took one of his unwashed shirts, socks he had ridden his horse in, a handkerchief, and cleaned his brush of loose hair, and then put the strange collection in a warming pan and carried it to the top-floor bedroom. I waited until I heard him return, and then set light to the contents, ensuring the flames stayed within the pan. I would not set fire to the house like the dying man had. They shot up unnaturally strong, and I was glad there were no furnishings for them to reach, and I knew in that instant something had changed. I could feel it in the air of the house and hear it in the rage of the boots that ran up the stairs and the angry bellow of my name.

“Christopher? Christopher?”

I got to my feet, the other item I’d brought upstairs hidden behind my back, and braced myself for his entry.

“You murderous bastard,” he said in the doorway. “Part of me was stuck in this awful room, in the darkness of it, trapped in this house for a week. I will kill you for that, I swear, you odious nothing of a man.” He rushed at me, his temper of old fully returned, but I stood my ground, and as he threw himself at me and we fell to the ground I pulled the carving knife from behind my back and he impaled himself on it.

Once again, I had murdered my friend. This time I would not let the dark part of him out.

James has left. He has returned to Bristol full of cheer. He did not see the blood in the upstairs room that I will now go and scrub clean. I cannot keep this journal because they will put me in the madhouse if anyone finds it, but neither can I bring myself to dispose of it. Before I leave this house and country for good, I willfind a place to hide it. It belongs in this house. A secret within a secret.

And now I must go and clean the room again. Because Hannah arrives tonight.

I cannot wait to kill her.

I close the cover, the journal creaking with age, spine threatening to give way, my head reeling. If I’ve gone mad, I’ve not gone mad alone. Suddenly, the “ghost” is starting to make a crazy kind of sense. I summarize what I’ve learned from these old pages.

First: If you put a dead body in the room upstairs, the person comes out alive and well and with no memory of their own murder.

Second: Not all of the person comes out. Only the best version of them. Parts of them—theworstparts, the parts the murderer doesn’t like—get trapped inside the room.

Third: If you burn some items of their clothing or hair, items with their DNA on them, the two parts become whole again. Then they remember.

That’s why Fortuna had that odd collection of Gerald’s possessions in a box. In case she felt guilty and decided to make him whole again. Too late now. That’s what she’d said. It was too late because Gerald died of cancer. So the part of him trapped in the room would have died with him.

It’s not a ghost in the house. It’s part of a person.

My skin prickles as I remember my accusations at the party I was so embarrassed of. Maybe I wasn’t wrong. Could Georgina Usher have been murdered by Sally Freemantle after all? Has part of her soul or essence or whatever been trapped here all these years? I stare down at the book, my mouth drying and hands sweating. I’m not mad. Mrs. Tucker wasn’t either.

I google Georgina again, rummaging through her artwork and her life, clicking into various articles and interviews, scanning them for any great changes in her life or the way she was mentioned. There’s nothing. Then I read one that stops me dead. It’s an interview from two years ago, and in it she’s chronicling a lifelong battle with drinkand drugs, addictions she says she’d been struggling with since her late teens.

I carefully open the journal again and look back at the last entry, where Christopher Hopper talks about the changes in James after he’d come out of the room.

Everything I liked about him was still there, but his drinking was moderate and his humor good. He was all I had thought him to be in the heyday of our friendship.

His drinking was moderate. The element of his personality that drank too much, that veered toward addiction, that part was left in the room. Wouldn’t the same have happened with Georgina?

I lean back against the wall, my head and heart both racing. If not Georgina, then who else could be stuck in the house? Who else could have been murdered here and come out changed?

The obvious answer strikes me so suddenly that for a moment I don’t even breathe. There’s only one person it can be. One person whose radical shift in personality has been commented on while I’ve been living here. I think back to those letters appearing on the bathroom mirror that morning.

Yes, the entity was trying to spellFreemantle.

But not to spell the murderer’s name. The person trapped in the house was writing her own name. Her maiden name, as she wasn’t married when she was killed.

Half of Sally Freemantle is trapped in this house.

From outside comes the surprising sound of tires on gravel—it’s only midafternoon—and I hurry as best I can up the stairs and replace the book before Freddie sees it.

68

Freddie

“Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

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