Page 29 of A Heart So Haunted
I pressed at a dangling piece of sheet rock, then pulled it off in a puff of dust, as Emma exclaimed, “Just do it! It’s for your safety!”
“Okay, okay!”
I leaned closer and flicked the dust away. Whatever it was, it was solid wood. Not a support beam or a stud. Had it been covered on purpose?
A tightness started in my throat. I scratched the inside of my wrist. Dug a fingernail in. A slight, barely there hint of pain to ground myself. Focus.
I’d seen people cover plenty of things before—fireplaces they didn’t want to take out, linen closets, sometimes crawl spaces (which I wouldn’t recommend). But this looked different.
With a sharp breath, I stuck my arm through the hole. Brushed my fingertips over the bevel—sure enough, it felt like a door.
Emma crouched next to me. “Oh! What is that?”
“Is that a door?” Sayer leaned over my shoulder, his head inches from mine. I leaned away.
“I think so?” I said. I swallowed once, twice, a trickle of excitement bleeding into my veins. Sayer grumbled something that sounded like, “Should be, it hurt well enough.”
“Should we try and open it?” Emma whispered, so quiet I almost missed it.
“I don’t know,” I said.
The molding was bumpy in a few places, which usually meant it was handcrafted, not mass-produced. I stretched my arm completely through, fingertips searching for an end. There it was.
By feel, I couldn’t reach far enough to tell if it were bedroom door—where would the room have been? Or overly large window shutters. But where this was placed, right beside the stairs that led to the third-floor attic and my bedroom, meant this wasn’t a window, but perhaps an old linen closet.
But I didn’t remember Aunt Cadence mentioning a renovation. As far as I knew, she hadn’t so much as changed furniture since she’d moved in.
I reached up, searching.
“Do you feel anything?” Emma whispered. Her breath tickled my temple. Sayer, unable to see anything, straightened.
I winced. “I can’t—”
My fingers wrapped around a knobby doorhandle. Then something shifted in the air, like a wet blanket draping over a shivering body in a cold wind. Goosebumps crawled all over me. My peripheral grew shadowed, spotty, until the speckles bled into splotches and everything vanished.
The hallway went dark.
I blinked but saw nothing but darkness, as if someone had turned out the lights in a windowless room. Only muffled voices—maybe Sayer and Emma—mumbled far, far away. I squinted, squeezed my eyes, focused on the thrum of my heart in my ears.
Tell me I am no man, a voice growled. Unfamiliar, gritty.Tell me!
I blinked again, hard. Then, ever so faintly, shapes appeared in a gray haze around me. I wasn’t in the hallway anymore, but a … room.
Specifically, a library. Or an office. Like dust gathering, the haze formed a desk and shelves and cracked windows. Black grease slithered from the shelves and crevices, like someone had turned an ink pot over and not wiped it up in time.
My body jerked to stand. My joints were oiled and strong, my frame … different.
Something told me I was no longerme, but someone else. When I stood, I was eye level with the top shelf beside me. The tingle under my skin screamed the desire to move, to walk, to pace, to leave, but yet this body kept still.
The eyes that were not mine shuttered. A cherrywood desk with bulbous legs, one broken, teetered at an angle to my left.
A garbled voice, notthisbody’s, said,You are a coward before you are a man.
Then, distant, separate, over and over the same string of words:Nor I, you. Never you.
When I blinked again, the room disappeared. The desk, the voices. Everything—gone, like a daydream.
Now, I sat crouched by the hole in the wall, my fingers still wrapped around the doorknob. Emma still hunched beside me, waiting for my response.
