The Night Sister

A framed drawing of the tower was propped against the side of the desk. Piper picked it up. Also done in pencil, it showed the outside of the tower: the door, the windows, and the battlements. She looked at it carefully, noticing the attention to detail—each rock a different shape and shade, the shadows in the open doorway seeming almost alive somehow. Amy’s grandfather was a talented artist.

Then she noticed it: there, in those shadows, was something else. Faint writing; ghostly unfamiliar letters she could barely make out. She pulled the picture closer and squinted down at it, finally understanding what the problem was.

The writing was backward.

“There’s something written on the other side of this drawing,” she said. Amy snatched it from her, immediately flipped the frame over, and went to work bending the wire brads that held the cardboard back on. Soon she’d pried one edge out; then the whole piece of thin black cardboard was in her hand, the drawing on top of it. She carefully pulled them apart and turned the tower drawing over.

On the other side was the original sketch for the tower. There were dimensions for its diameter and height, and the plan for the floor joists and rafters. In the right-hand margin were calculations for the amount of cement, lime, and sand that would be needed.

The drawing showed the three floors the girls had all explored: ground floor, second floor, and the rooftop surrounded by the ring of battlements.

But there was something else: a fourth floor, a basement room that looked as if it was accessed by a trapdoor in the floor above. This room was labeled with Amy grandfather’s careful lettering: “oubliette.”

“What’s ‘oubliette’ mean?” Amy asked.

Piper jumped up, went to the desk, and got the heavy dictionary she’d seen there when they first entered the office. She thumbed through the alphabet until she got to “O.” Otter. Ottoman. Ouabain (Piper’s eye caught on this a moment—a poison).

“Here it is,” Piper said. With her finger on the word, she blinked down at the definition; her voice shook as she read it out loud: “?‘A concealed dungeon with a trapdoor in the ceiling as the only means of entrance or exit.’?”

“Holy crap!” Amy exclaimed. “A dungeon? There’s a hidden dungeon at the bottom of the tower?”

“We don’t know that,” Piper said. “I mean, it’s here in the drawing, but—”

“Come on,” Amy said, already on her way out of the office, “we’ve gotta go find it!”





2013





Piper


Piper dumped the flowered duffel bag in her car, her hands trembling.

She knew what she’d typed.

How, then, did the page get filled with 29 rooms over and over and over?

She started the engine, yanked the shifter into reverse, and hit the gas; gravel spat out from under her tires as she backed up, spun around, and headed down the steep driveway.

Was she going crazy? Had she typed the words herself in a sort of fugue state?

She remembered Amy’s obsession with hypnosis—with that damn book she’d found that had belonged to Sylvie. Amy would say that it was possible to do just about anything in a trance state. Even to receive messages from the dead.

“Damn it,” Piper said, hitting the steering wheel with the palm of her hand. Just then she was passing the tower, and she glanced inside, through the doorway blocked by two boards forming an X. Danger, warned the dripping red spray paint above.

A shadow moved across the floor inside.

There was someone in there!

Piper slammed on the brakes, heart hammering, palms sweating.

Maybe there had been someone in the house with her after all. Someone who had replaced her paper with another. (But how? When?) Improbable as it seemed, Piper clung to this new idea. It felt far better than believing that either a ghost or Piper herself had typed the message.