Page 34 of A Heart So Haunted
I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead. Nausea rolled in the roots of my belly. I started to lean over the side of the couch, then thought better of it, and took measured breaths instead. A low throb echoed behind my eyes. Not enough water during the day; that’s exactly what was wrong with me. I was dehydrated, and now I was paying for it.
The dream wasn’t real. Yes, it had happened. But not here. It had been in Cole Poston’s driveway after a football game on the tailgate of Ivan’s truck.
My skin grew clammy, my body curling into itself. I felt dirty—and—anddisgusting.
How long would I feel that way? How long would these images, these choices,his choiceshaunt me?
I untangled myself from the blanket, threw it over the back of the couch, and swung my legs over the side. I needed to go to bed. To forget. Sleep would take it away, and then this would all be a fevered afterthought in the morning.
Pressure crawled over my skin, like someone walking two fingers up my spine.
I glanced around the living room. The TV flickered over the walls. The foyer light was still on, just as I’d left it.
I stretched for the remote on the coffee table. Muted the TV. I don’t know how long I stood there, waiting for the pressure to release—the thunderous roar in my ears from the dream crept in.
Then, I felt it. A thread of floss that wound through my intestines and cinched around my spine. A tug, ever so slight, to go upstairs. The same tug I’d felt from the door earlier.
I couldn’t help it; I started for the steps. I didn’t realize until I entered the foyer, but the tree frogs no longer chirped. No distant, muffled highway.
The windows, I noted, had been shut.
I took the steps two at a time. Emma’s door, along with all the others besides mine, were closed. I rounded the landing, ready to find the hole in the wall, but stopped.
My lungs hitched.
The hole in the wall didn’t exist. Instead, a five-panel door stood, as if it had never been covered in the first place. Not a speckle of debris to be found on the floorboards.
The door glistened like oiled skin when I approached. My reflection warbled in the finish. I kept my steps light, leading with my toes, when I stopped in front of it. The tugging in my stomach eased.
Downstairs, the ticking of the grandfather clock grew louder, closer.
My eyes burned. Only once. I could open it one time, just to see what was on the other side. Then the paranoia would be put to rest and I wouldn’t have to think about this anymore.
I reached for the knob. All sound dulled in that moment—I didn’t hear anything but the rattle in my lungs. I forgot about the house, I forgot about the funeral, my mom, Vince, I forgot about everything.
The knob was warm to the touch. As if someone had held it for a long while before I came up here.
I twisted. The latch released with ease. I pulled the door open, ready to find blackness or empty shelves or dust bunnies or bones.
But I didn’t.
Chapter Seven
Cobwebs and musty particles floated through air on the other side of the doorway. Wide-planked floors—Harthwait’s floors—sat layered in dust, warped from years of abandonment. A few of the floorboards poked up at odd angles. Moth-eaten rugs lay bunched and flipped up at the corners, as if discarded in either a hurry or from a search. An old rocker sat in the corner, its back rail splintered in half.
I felt that tug again.
Something wasoffabout the place. It looked like Harthwait, sprawled like Harthwait. But instead of opening to the hallway I currently stood in, as if by an inverted mirror, it opened to what I assumed was the living room downstairs.
Or what had been.
A rug stood, rolled and propped, against the far corner of the room. A chandelier, swaddled in a thick layer of cobwebs, dangled in the center of a ceiling lined with crown molding. All of it much too elegant for a modern living room. Even the window latches were different: rounded, with a single latch in the center, instead of one on each side. Wallpaper unspooled from the walls, drifting in a breeze from the cracked windows. Leaves scattered across the furniture—wingback chairs, a slopedsofa that looked too hard to sit on comfortably, and a broken side table with the most delicate, bubbled legs I’d ever seen.
This was a hazy mirror of the living room I’d grown to know.
Every instinct in my body screamed to close the door, but my curiosity strengthened the longer I stared. My fingers inched closer to the doorframe. Just a peek wouldn’t hurt anyone. Then I’d close the door and be on my way to bed.
I took two steps inside. My hand fell away as I crossed the threshold. The air hung humid; much heavier than the other side of the door I’d just come from. It stuck to my skin, strangled my lungs.
