“I’ll handle her,” Dad said. “You won’t lose your job.”
I saw it out of the corner of my eye, a rare gleam of silver in the dark office. A framed photo. In it, my own dad was proudly holding up his new diploma from Harvard. My aunts had hooked their arms through his. It was embarrassing, but just seeing Dad’s grinning face made me feel a little better.
But there was something weird about the photo. Aunt Claudia had her other hand on another boy’s shoulder. This one stood off to the side of the group, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, a Harvard cap pulled down over his head. He had been photographed from the side and his face was turned down, but it could have been…it could have been my uncle.
The line clicked as Mellie hung up the phone in the kitchen. Before I could ask him what was going on, the words flew out of Dad’s mouth.
“Prosper, listen to me—you have to get your sister and get out of the Cottage right now. Right now. I can’t believe she’d do this, that she’d be so—” The connection flickered. “Mom and I are trying to get home, but—”
A milky-white light flooded the room as the door behind me was thrown open. I dropped the phone in shock, which gave Grannie Dearest an opening to scoop it up off the floor and slam it back down on the receiver.
“Hey!” I protested. “I was talking to—”
My grandmother stood staring at me for a moment, her chest heaving and her face flushed with rage. “You,” she began, hauling me out of the office with surprising force. “You have been the stone in my shoe since the day you were born.”
“Yeah, well, you’re no diamond either, Grannie.”
Dad read a mythology book to us once that had a story about a monster called Medusa, the one with a nest of snakes for hair that could turn any person into stone with one look. Well, she might have lacked the snakes, but the fury burning in my grandmother’s eyes turned my limbs into cement. I couldn’t even swallow.
“I only hope it’s you,” she hissed, grabbed the collar of my shirt, and dragged me toward the stairs.
Rayburn, the Cottage’s spidery butler, met us on the landing between the first and second floor with Prue. His cane stomped out an impatient beat on the rug, right by her foot. For a guy that personally raised three generations of Redding kids and saw—literally—hundreds of Reddings come and go, he had a surprising amount of hate for anyone under the age of forty.
He had been opening the front door for so long that no one knew which came first, the house or Rayburn. He didn’t work in the Cottage—he haunted it.
“Madam.” His voice was hoarse and crackled with age. “The others will meet us downstairs.”
Prue, who had been watching the line of family members shove their way down the hall below, whirled around. “What’s going on?”
Prosper, listen to me, Dad had said, you have to get your sister and get out of the Cottage right now.
I could grab Prue and we could run. Sure, she was bigger than me, but I wouldn’t need to carry her. Everyone was heading toward the back of the Cottage, but we could head out the front door. It would be easy, but I needed to get her attention—
The stairs behind me creaked as Great-Uncle Bartholomew and Great-Uncle Theodore came down behind us. Granddad’s brothers might have been in their sixties, but they were tall, with the huge shoulders of former football players. Bartholomew held out his arm to Prue, who—stupid, stupid, stupid!—took it without question, and began chattering with him as he led her down the stairs.
I started down after her, my feet thundering down the first two steps. I tried to squeeze between them, stretching out my hand as far as I could to catch hers. But I was moving too fast, and my balance was all wrong. I gripped her fingers hard and yanked both of us back to keep from stumbling forward into Bartholomew. My vision flashed to black as we fell against the stairs in a tangled mess.
“Sorry,” I gasped out. “Sorry, but, Prue—”
She pushed me off her and stood, her face bright pink with anger. “What’s your deal? I don’t need you to hold my hand anymore—I don’t need your help. God, can you just grow up?”
I took a step back, feeling the sting of her words right down to my guts, but she only glared and turned away. My whole body jerked as Great-Uncle Theodore wrapped one arm around my shoulders, squeezing me hard enough to make my spine crack. I sagged against him, looking at the family-crest pin he had on his ivory jacket instead of the back of Prue’s hair.
Which was why I didn’t notice we were heading to the dungeon until we were already there.
When I was little, I used to think the Cottage had its own secret voice. One that would slither up to you when the lamps were switched off and you only had a night-light to protect you from the darkness. It whispered about the people who had lived within its bones, died in its beds; it groaned under the weight of the centuries it saw. Come downstairs, it would hiss, come down, and down, and down, and down… Down the hidden servant passages, down past the darkened kitchen, down to the basement where things were left to be forgotten. Down to the heavy door that was locked every day, every second, always.
To the dungeon.
It was supposed to be a joke, but why did it have to stay locked all the time if it was just for storage? What did Grandmother put down there that she didn’t want the rest of us to see? In the long, long, long life of the Cottage, I wondered how many people had actually been down there, and how few had ever held its heavy iron key.
Rayburn had a weird sixth sense about that locked door, and he had the totally terrifying habit of jumping out of the shadows whenever anyone got within breathing distance of it. And even if he wasn’t there, there were four—count ’em, four—steel locks on the door, each needing a different key. David liked to tell me about all the torture devices that were down there that Grandmother was only waiting to use on me. She’ll pop you into the armor that’s filled with spikes. She’ll see if you can lie down on the bed of nails without them sinking into your guts. She’ll strap you in and turn a wheel until your limbs are ripped off and blood is splattered across the walls—
I really hated the Cottage. And I extra-hated David.
Great-Uncle Bartholomew grunted as he shoved me through the door. I tried to catch the frame with my arms, but he was way bigger and way heavier, and I didn’t want my arms pulled out of my sockets. I might need them in the near future.