Page 35 of A Heart So Haunted
“Hello?” I called. I coughed.
The door slammed shut behind me.
I whirled.
Oh no.
The tug that brought me here snapped, replaced by an eruption of panic. I grabbed the doorknob. It was cold now, not warm like it had been a moment before. I pulled—it didn’t so much as jiggle. This couldn’t be happening right now.
I shoved my shoulder into the door. The hinges didn’t even rattle, and no matter how hard I twisted, the lock didn’t release, as if it were cemented in place.
I was locked in.
I beat against the door, frantic. “Emma! Emma, let me out! The knob won’t turn!” I pressed my mouth against the door crack. Labored breaths grated my throat. “Please!”
Still, the door didn’t rattle. My words bounced back against the humid air, each one falling to the floor in defeat. I strained to listen, for footsteps, for movement, but nothing came.
This side of the door wasn’t polished like the other side was. It wasn’t beautiful and enticing; just dull and brittle, like the floors beneath my bare feet.
Pretty on the outside, broken on the inside.
It had lured me in. And I’d taken the bait like a naive child and waltzed right through.
I needed to think—logically. I was still in the house, that much was obvious. Aunt Cadence had lived in Harthwait for years, as had other people before her. Not once had I heard her talk about someone going missing that lived there, which was a good thing. It wouldn’t swallow me alive. Maybe if I waited, the door would open on its own. No need to jump off the deep end just yet.
A faint, distant trickle of laughter sent chills over my skin.
I wasn’t alone in here.
“Hello?” I tried again.
No response.
I gathered myself, hands fisted in the hem of my sweatshirt, and examined the room for possible signs of life. The dust on the floor remained undisturbed of footprints, which meant the laughter had to have come from outside.
I crept closer to the closest window.
Everything was sogreen. The type of green that bloomed just after all the petals floated away in the last spring breeze. The kind of green that promised the start of early thunderstorms and newborn animals. That explained the heat, if summer was coming, but there were … snowflakes. Flecks of white drifted from the sky.
With a quiet exhale, I pressed my face to the warped glass. The longer I watched, I realized they weren’t white at all, but gray—because they were ashes.
I blinked furiously against the sharp, cloudless, blue sky. No sun, no rain, just ashes. It was so pretty, so unnervingly unnatural, that I wanted to walk outside to get a closer look.
Immediately, the muscles in my neck tensed, the little hairs on my arms stood at attention. I’d heard laughter. I was supposed to be looking for its source.
With quiet steps, I made my way through the parlor and into the foyer, only to stop again. A chandelier lay in shattered bits at the room’s center. Unlike the crystal one in the living room, this one’s iron-coated handles pointed at odd angles, candlesticks split and smashed around it.
“Momma?” A voice.
I looked up from the chandelier.
There, in what should have been Aunt Cadence’s office doorway, stood a boy. His hair, so blond it bordered white, stuck up and out in all directions. Dirt and grime clung to the creases of his neck. He couldn’t have been more than five or six years old, his feet bare, his pants soiled.
Ice swept through my blood. His voice, his stature—it matched.Momma.
“It’s you,” I whispered. He was the one I’d heard at night. And he’d been here, in this room, this entire time?
Blood dribbled from the boy’s mouth, onto his buttoned shirt. Three of those buttons were missing.
