Page 44 of House of Roots and Ruin
The other stayed behind.
I wasn’t seeing double.
I ducked down, cowering in the gauzy curtains, childishly convinced that if I couldn’t see them, then they certainly couldn’t see me, and if they couldn’t see me, then I must be safe.
What were they? Their screams, their bellows, those weren’t the sounds a human throat was capable of. They were too high, too loud, too…wicked.
A shiver ran over me even as I broke into a sweat. I felt clammy and sick as I remembered the strange pace at which Rosalie and Ligeia had moved through the halls of Highmoor, the way their whispers were heard directly behind my ears, even as I watched them walk away from me.
I dared to peek down into the gardens once more.
The woman had moved.
She now sat on the bough of a tree, ten feet off the ground, her skirts falling over the branches like a satin waterfall. Her mouth opened, stretched too wide, too gaping, and againthat sound.
“That’s not possible,” I murmured.
How had she climbed a tree so quickly? How was she making—
She shrieked again.
—those cries?
I leaned against the wall, keeping my back to the window, to the woman, to that awful noise, and covered my ears.
A ghost,a small voice within my head whispered.You’re seeing a ghost.
“That’s not possible,” I repeated, resolution tightening my voice. “The candles,” I murmured, grasping the thought with the desperation of a drowning man searching for a life preserver. “The candles are supposed to keep them away. Light another a candle.”
The same candles you saw Hanna light hundreds of times?the voice asked unhelpfully.Hanna Whitten who has been dead and gone these last twelve years? Those candles?
Another scream echoed through the night.
Why didn’t anyone else hear it?
Unbidden memories of my last conversation with Camille welled up in my mind, like a festering blister swelled to the point of bursting.
Do you know how strange you look, speaking to them, carrying on entire conversations overheard as one-sided? You look mad, Verity, as though you’ve entirely lost your mind.
As the screams echoed around me, I sniffed, pushing back tears.
The halls had been still when I’d checked.
No one else in the manor heard any of this.
If they were ghosts, if ghosts were real, others would have seen them. Others would have heard them.
But no one else did. No one else had.
It was all me.
It was all in my mind.
Camille was right.
I was mad.
Dear Camille,
