I viewed one card after another until I’d gone through the whole stack. All of them were of Rose’s house, and as I’d observed earlier, they had been taken from different angles at different times of the day.
What an odd collection, I thought as I went back to the first card.
This time I studied the images more carefully, turning the viewer slightly until I caught the best light. I tried to peer into the windows of Rose’s house, into the treetops, even underneath her front porch. The longer I studied those photographs the more unsettled I became.
I was certain the shots weren’t random. Rose had deliberately set out to photograph her house from every possible angle in every conceivable light. But why?
As I scoured the images for clues, I suddenly had the feeling of being watched. The sensation was so strong that I lowered the viewer to scan the garden. Then I lifted my gaze to the windows at the back of Nelda’s house. No one was around. No one watched me. So why the crawl of flesh at the back of my neck? Why the tingle at my spine?
I glanced over my shoulder. The door to the guest cottage was closed. I saw no one at the windows. No one in the shadows.
I turned back to the garden, bringing the viewer to my eyes once more. I started to remove the card from the holder when my gaze lit on the enclosure beneath the front porch.
Something was there staring back at the camera lens. At me.
I couldn’t see anything. No gleaming eyes. No flash of pale skin or hair. But something was there just the same.
I inserted another card, my gaze going straight to the enclosure. Something was still there, still watching.
I went back through the whole stack, circling Rose’s house through the lens of the viewer.
And suddenly I knew the purpose of all those images. I knew what Rose had wanted to show me.
She’d been trying to capture in three dimensions what she had trapped beneath her house.
Forty-One
Slipping the ribbon from my neck, I traced the skeleton key with my fingertip, wanting to believe that, like hallowed ground, the metal could protect me from the ghosts and the malcontent and any evil that I’d yet to encounter. It had some power, I felt certain. There must have been a reason why Rose had worn it to her grave.
A breeze swept through the garden, deepening the scent of Nelda’s roses. My senses were so heightened, I could hear the flutter of moth wings in the four-o’clocks and the satin-like whisper of the moonflowers unfurling. A songbird trilled in the magnolia tree. A train whistle sounded in the distance. Loneliness settled over me as twilight crept in from the garden.
I sat alone on the steps, clutching Rose’s key until the mosquitoes drove me inside. Then I locked up, slipped out of my clothes and into my new cotton nightgown before climbing between the cool sheets.
I placed the viewer on the floor and shoved it underneath the bed. I wouldn’t look at those images again tonight. Whatever Rose had trapped beneath her house could wait until morning.
Maybe nothing had been there at all, I tried to convince myself. Maybe it was best not to borrow trouble.
*
But trouble found me just the same.
It came with a tapping on my door, a sound so tentative that I thought for a moment I might still be dreaming. Then it grew louder, more insistent, and my eyes popped open as I bolted upright in bed. Something was out there on the porch wanting in.
My instinct was to huddle under the covers, but instead I slid out of bed and padded to the door. A lace curtain hung over the glass, and I parted the panels to peer out. The moon had gone behind a cloud and the porch lay in darkness.
I had almost managed to convince myself that I’d imagined the sound when I heard it again. Not a knock or a tap as I’d first thought, but the click of a lone cicada.
I spotted her in the shadows then. The humpback in-between. The childlike entity that was half in, half out.
Why I unlocked the door and stepped out on the porch, I couldn’t say. Despite my fear, I was drawn to her.
She was dressed in a garment blackened with age, and she clutched something in one hand that I couldn’t make out in the darkness. When the clouds drifted away, I could see her face in the moonlight. Her nose, her mouth, her eyes. Features that were no longer human and hadn’t been for a very long time.
Her skin looked dark and leathered and yet somehow fragile, as though it might crumble to ash from the slightest touch. And I could smell her. The same odor of must and old death that I’d detected in my cellar.
We stood with gazes locked for the longest time, but when I made a slight move, she stopped me with a sound that was only a little less aggressive than the rattle. Her mouth was open and what might once have been teeth clacked together in a chilling staccato.