She had been hunched in terror against the wall. She had a frying pan clutched in her hands. She was dressed in capri pants and a tank top that left her stomach, and her cute little belly-button ring, visible. She was as skinny as a twig, maybe fourteen.
The boys seemed to gain courage from her. They both stood as well, and were each about an inch shorter than she was. One of them held a copper dough roller. The other was clutching a deep dish pan. Strange weapons—gained from the racks that stretched out over the brick island in the center of the room. Liam was surprised that none of them had grabbed the fire poker.
“Sir! There’s something awful in here!” one of the boys said.
“Awful!” the other repeated.
“How did you get in here?” Liam asked.
“The door was open,” the girl said. She was shaking. “Please…please get us out of here. We’ll never come back, never!”
“You can take us to jail—it will be okay!” the boy with the roller clutched in his hands told him, his eyes still huge and panicked.
“Look, just stay here, and I’ll check out the place and—”
“No!” The wail came out of the three of them in a chorus.
Liam sighed. “Look, if the door was open, someone was in here ahead of you. I’ve got to find whoever it is and—”
“No, oh, God, oh, no! You can’t leave us here! Please?” the girl begged.
Liam pulled out his phone and called the station. Jack, on the desk, answered the phone.
“Get a car out to the Merlin place for me, will you, Jack? I’ve got some teenagers.”
“Sure. Are you arresting them?” Jack asked.
“No, I just want them taken home. But I think there’s still someone in the house. The lights are down. I need some backup.”
The three teens were still huddled in front of him. He hung up and asked their names. The girl was Jane Tracy, the boy with the roller was Hank Carlin and the last was Joshua Bell. They had just come in as a prank.
“You know, it’s like…it’s like a haunted house. Like at Disney World,” Hank said. “We just wanted to have some fun. We weren’t going to steal anything. Please, can we get out? It can kill you, too, Officer, you don’t know…it’s terrible!”
“The Addams family…the Munsters…,” Jane said. “We just wanted to see. They said he had all kinds of treasures…. Can we just get out?” she begged again.
He didn’t blame them. There was something creepy about the house. The hanging utensils cast strange shadows in the glare of his flashlight, while a rocker by the fire seemed to move. Dust motes seemed like misted forms in the artificial light, as well.
“All right, come on.”
He turned, and the three came running up behind him like metal drawn to a magnet; he thought he’d trip, they were so tight against him.
Scared. They had scared themselves in the place. They’d wanted a spooky challenge; they had found one in the Merlin house.
They went out to the porch. Liam hoped the patrol car would hurry. If the door had been unlocked, someone else had gotten in. That someone might have provided the shadows and touches that had scared them so badly.
He wanted to find the trespasser before it was too late.
The three remained stuck to him like glue while they stood on the porch. “Hey!” he said. “You’ll be home in a few minutes. Look, there’s someone still in there. That person was trying to scare you out. But it’s a good lesson. No trespassing. It can be dangerous.”
“They weren’t just trying to scare us, and it wasn’t any person,” Jane said. “They wanted to kill us—they would have killed us. They were ghosts, evil spirits!”
“Jane, it’s just a house,” Liam said.
“Then the house wanted to kill us.”
“What makes you say that?” he asked.
“Because we heard it!” she whispered. “We all heard it! It was horrible, a horrible whisper in the darkness saying, ‘You’re going to die. I’m going to kill you.’”
“And he was there,” Joshua said gravely. “I saw him. I saw old man Merlin. His eyes were burning in the darkness. I felt him, felt him put his hands around my throat.”
“He shoved me,” Jane said.
Just then the patrol car arrived and Art Saunders and Ricky Long emerged. “Art, get these three home,” Liam instructed. “Ricky, come with me. Lights are out, and I want to search the place.”
“Yessir,” Art called. “You three, get your little juvenile-delinquent butts into the car,” he said to the kids.
Ricky Long had been with the department about three years. He was a good cop. He’d seen some bad things in his brief stint.
He looked sick as he walked toward the house.
“You want me to search it with you, sir?” he asked.
“Ricky, it’s a house. If there’s something in it, it’s flesh and blood. Yes, we’re supposed to guard lives and personal property. I’ll take the upstairs, you take the downstairs.”
Ricky nodded slowly.
Liam left him to search through the ground floor. Upstairs, he went methodically from room to room, aware that Bartholomew was at his back.
“I don’t like this place,” Bartholomew whispered.