It seemed like a massive black swatch of evil, taunting and teasing her.
It was malignant; it was the darkness that lived in the house, that came out and killed.
She wanted to scream; the sound choked in her throat. She wanted to turn and flee down the hallway and waken Avery, but she couldn’t.
Rising, falling, rising, falling…
And there was a sound. Like a growl on the air, a whir, a laugh. Oh, God, yes, a soft laughing sound that mocked her.
She blinked.
It didn’t go away.
She worked her throat.
And then, somehow, she found the light switch for the stairway, and the switch that brought the parlor alive with a brilliant glow.
And it was still there, sleek and black, and moving…!
Turn! Scream!
She did neither. She was so frozen, she stared at it. And then, as she did so, she realized that it was doing the same thing, over and over again. And she wasn’t hearing a growl, a laugh, a whisper or any such thing. It was a whir, like the sound of a motor.
“What the hell?” she demanded, speaking aloud.
Angrily she walked down the stairs, straight toward the boxes. The closer she came, the more evident it was that she was seeing some kind of a magician’s trick.
When she reached the ground level and the boxes, crates and voodoo altar, she almost laughed aloud at herself.
One of the large crates was open. The evil, black, malignant shadow was nothing but a silky cloth, and it was springing up from a motorized board that sat in the open crate.
“Cutter!” she said, shaking her head. “Great trick! You almost gave your granddaughter a heart attack, you dear old geezer!”
She caught the flying material and twisted it around enough to see that it was controlled by wires, and the wires were controlled by a motor within the box and a simple switch turned it off. Something must have triggered it to start.
She heard her cell phone ringing from a distance, and she tried to remember where it was. In her purse, up the stairs, in her room. She hurried back up the stairs.
“Hello?” She caught it when it rang again for the second time.
“Kelsey!” It was Liam.
“Yes!”
“Oh, my God, you had me so worried. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, thanks, Liam. I’d fallen asleep. Avery is napping, too.”
“Why are you so breathless?”
“I was downstairs, and I left the phone upstairs.”
“Oh.” He sounded relieved. However, she must have sounded strange.
“Then what’s wrong?”
“Oh, I just gave myself a scare,” she said.
“How? You weren’t outside, in the secured area, were you?”
“No, no, of course not.”
“What happened?”
She laughed. “I really have to go through Cutter’s boxes. He’s got some magic tricks in them. He has something like a magician’s gig—black sheets that shoot up out of a crate.”
“What?”
“It’s all right, it’s all right, really. It’s a mechanized magician’s trick, that’s all. Where are you?” She tried to be casual. “I was just wondering if you wanted to stay and hang here and get started on something, or if you’d like dinner out.”
She thought that he hesitated a minute. “I’ll be right there,” he said. “Then we’ll decide, if that’s all right. But don’t do anything until I get there, okay? It’s locked up tight, right?”
She laughed. “Yes, sir, it’s locked up tight. Honestly. We came home, took naps and haven’t been out. I swear.”
“I’ll be right there.”
He hung up.
The house seemed too silent. Kelsey wanted to start reading the book her grandfather had been holding when he died, so she took it from the bedside table where she’d decided to keep it. She found her iPod and went downstairs. She turned on every light, brewed herself a cup of tea and walked past the crates with the magic trick toward Cutter’s office.
She felt uneasy. She had spent so much time working in the house. She didn’t remember seeing the open crate, or the magic trick. She set the tea and the book down, went back and opened the crate again.
She was perplexed. Magic tricks weren’t Cutter’s interest. The voodoo altar had been a piece of history—it had been taken from an old home just outside the French Quarter in New Orleans, and Cutter had purchased it from the new owner, who intended a redo of the entire place. He had been a businessman, uninterested in voodoo.
The mummy…Egyptian history. The coffin, a beautiful piece of Victorian funerary art. He had never, in her memory, purchased a cheap magician’s trick. Then again, she hadn’t really begun to go through his ledgers yet.
For some reason, the book seemed more important.
She went into Cutter’s library and took a seat behind his desk. Even with every light in the house on, she was surprised to still feel uncomfortable. Looking around, she found herself believing that something was just slightly out of place.
As if someone had been there.
But no one had been in the house.
Or had they?