Home Before Dark: A Novel (30 page)

In my line of work, I’ve crossed paths with plenty of landscapers. Some are true artists, crafting elaborate groundscapes with attention paid to color, shape, and texture. Others are basic laborers, trained only to yank weeds and shovel mulch. But all of them have told me the same thing: plant ivy at your own peril. Gone unchecked, it spreads and climbs and persists more than any other vine.

The ivy behind Baneberry Hall has done all three for decades. It’s thick—jungle thick—and scales the back of the house in a verdant swath that climbs past the second-floor windows. If there is a door back there, the ivy hides it completely.

At first, I try swiping at some vines, hoping they’ll fall away from the wall. If only it were that easy. When that doesn’t work, I shove my hands into the thick of it and blindly feel around, my fingers brushing nothing but exterior wall.

But then I feel it.

Wood.

I do more tugging and brushing until a door begins to take shape deep within the vines. Short and narrow, it’s less a door and more like
a flat board where a proper door should be located. There’s not even a handle—just a rusted bolt that I slide to the side.

The door cracks open, and I give it a pull, widening it until there’s a gap big enough for me to fit through. Then, like a diver about to submerge, I take a deep breath and push through the curtain of ivy.

Once inside, I can barely see. There’s no overhead light that I can find, and the ivy outside allows only dapples of moonlight to pass through. Luckily, I anticipated this and came prepared with a flashlight.

I switch it on and am greeted by a brick wall slick with moisture. A millipede scurries across it, fleeing the light. To my left is more wall. To my right is inky darkness that stretches beyond the flashlight’s glow. I move through it, arriving shortly at a set of wooden steps.

The sight confounds me.

How did I never know this was here?

It makes me wonder if my parents knew about it. Probably not. I’d like to think that had my father been aware of a secret staircase in the back of Baneberry Hall, he would have put it in the Book. It would have been too appropriately Gothic to resist.

I climb the steps slowly, taking them one at a time. I have no idea where they lead, and that makes me nervous. So nervous that the flashlight I’m gripping trembles, casting a jittery glow on the stairwell walls.

After a dozen steps, I reach a landing that could be right out of a Hammer film. It’s small and creaky, with a skein of cobwebs in the corner. I pause there, disoriented, with no clue how far I’ve climbed or where I am inside the house.

I get a better idea once I ascend twelve more steps and a second landing, which would put me firmly on the second floor. There’s a door here as well—similar to the one hidden behind the ivy. Smooth and featureless, save for another bolt keeping it shut.

I slide the bolt.

I pull the door.

Beyond it is a closet of some sort.

The flashlight’s beam lands on several little white dresses hanging inside. Behind them is a thin slice of light.

More doors.

Reaching past the dresses, I push them open and see a bedroom.

My
bedroom.

I stumble through the doors and rotate around the room, seeing my bed, my suitcases, the knife sitting atop my nightstand.

Then I see the armoire.

The doorway through which I’ve just emerged.

Shock overwhelms me. I stare at the armoire, uncomprehending, when in truth the situation is easy to understand.

There is a direct route from outside into the bedroom.

It’s why my father had felt it necessary to nail those boards across the armoire doors.

It’s how Hannah Ditmer got into the house unnoticed and without disturbing the doors and windows.

It’s how anyone with knowledge of the passageway can get inside.

Another wave of shock strikes. A real wallop that leaves me tilting sideways, on the verge of being bowled right over.

This entrance into Baneberry Hall isn’t new. It’s been around for decades. Likely since the place was built.

Someone had access to this room back when we lived here.

When I slept here.

It wasn’t Mister Shadow who crept into my room at night, whispering to me.

It was someone else.

Someone real.

The first bell didn’t ring until shortly after two p.m.

The sound of it snapped me out of the waking stupor I’d been in and out of since sitting down the day before. In all that time, I’d barely moved. I hadn’t eaten. I certainly hadn’t showered. When I did leave my post, it was only to relieve myself. By midmorning, I’d even stopped doing that, fearful I’d miss an all-important bell chime. Now two bottles of my urine sat in a corner of the kitchen.

I understood—as best as one could in a state of such extreme exhaustion—that I was probably going crazy. These weren’t the actions of a sane man. But each time I was on the cusp of leaving the kitchen, something happened to remind me that I wasn’t insane.

Baneberry Hall was.

During my twenty-hour vigil in the kitchen, the house had been alive with noise. Sounds no home should make under normal circumstances. Sounds that I had nonetheless grown accustomed to hearing.

Music trickling down from the third-floor study and quietly drifting through empty rooms above.

“You are sixteen, going on seventeen.”

The sound of William Garson walking up and down the second-floor hallway, punctuating each step with a strike of his cane.

Tap-tap-tap.

And at 4:54 in the morning, a familiar noise from the study, so loud it reverberated through the house all the way down to the kitchen.

Thud.

Curtis Carver, I now knew. Hitting the floor when life left his body. An action his spirit was doomed to repeat every day for as long as Baneberry Hall was still standing.

But no sound caught my attention more than that single ring at two p.m. It was, after all, what I had been waiting for.

“Hello?” I said.

The same bell rang again. The Indigo Room.

Other bells began to chime a total of four times, repeating the pattern that made me understand the ringing in the first place.

HELLO

More bells rang. Four of them. One on the first row. One on the second. Back to the first, where the first bell in the row rang. Then again at the second with the chiming of the row’s second bell.

Together, it spelled out my name.

EWAN

“Hi, Curtis.” I coughed out a rueful chuckle. Yes, I was now on a first-name basis with a ghost. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

One bell.

I

Four more bells from all over the wall.

KNOW

“Then you also know I need your help.”

The last bell on the second row chimed—the start of a three-ring answer I knew well.

YES

“Then help me, Curtis,” I said. “Help me stop William Garson.”

One bell rang.

N

Then another.

O

I waited for more, inching forward in my chair. After ten seconds passed without the sound of any other bells, I said, “Why not?”

The same two bells rang again.

NO

“But he killed your daughter.”

I got those same two rings in response.

NO

“He didn’t?”

One ring. Two rings.

NO

“Then who did?”

Three bells rang a total of four times, the second one chiming twice on the second row.

LOOK

“At what?” I said, growing frustrated. “What should I be looking at?”

There was a pause during which I sat staring at the wall, waiting for a response. When it came—six bells ringing throughout the
wall, two of them chiming twice—I could barely keep up. It was only after they had quieted that I had time to match the bells to their corresponding letters.

The word it spelled was
PORTRAIT
.

“William Garson’s portrait?” I asked.

The second and third bells on the second row rang one last time.

NO

I was about to respond, but then the bells sprang to life again. Three rings followed by the shortest of pauses and then the same run of six bells and eight letters I’d just seen. Again, it took me a moment to figure it out.

When I did, I let out a gasp so loud and sudden that it echoed off the kitchen walls.

HER PORTRAIT

I rushed upstairs and moved through the great room. When I reached the front staircase, I looked up to see the chandelier aglow, even though it had been dark the last time I passed beneath it.

A sign that spirits were active. I felt foolish for not realizing it sooner.

I kept moving. Past the staircase. Into the Indigo Room. I didn’t stop until I was at the fireplace, looking up at the portrait Curtis had been referring to.

Indigo Garson.

I stared at the painting, wondering what I was supposed to be seeing. Nothing seemed amiss about it. It was a portrait of a young woman painted by a man who had been in love with her.

I didn’t find anything strange about that.

But then I looked to the white rabbit Indigo held in her hands. I’d previously noticed the chip of missing paint at the animal’s left eye. Considering it was the portrait’s only flaw, it was hard to miss.
But it also drew the eye away from the fact that the rabbit had been rendered in a slightly different manner than everything else. It wasn’t as detailed as the rest of the painting, as if it had been the work of an entirely different artist.

I moved close, studying the rabbit’s fur, which lacked the individual brushstrokes of Indigo’s shining hair. The paint there was thicker as well. Not overtly so. Just raised slightly higher than everything else. When I zeroed in on the rabbit’s missing eye, I saw within its socket another layer of paint behind it.

Someone had painted over the portrait.

Using a thumbnail, I scraped at the paint surrounding the rabbit’s eye. It fell off in tiny flecks that dusted the fireplace mantel. Each piece that was chipped away revealed a little bit more of the original portrait. Grays and red and browns.

I kept scraping until a sliver of paint lodged itself under my thumbnail—a needle prick of pain that shot through my entire hand. After that, I switched to a putty knife fished out of the utility drawer in the kitchen and kept scraping.

Slowly.

Methodically.

Careful not to also scrape the paint below, which emerged not unlike a freshly taken Polaroid. Color appearing from an expanse of white until the full picture was formed.

It wasn’t until the rabbit had been completely chipped away that my body succumbed to exhaustion. It began with dizziness, which overtook me at alarming speed. I staggered backward, the room spinning.

Everything went gray, and I realized I was falling. I hit the floor and remained there, sprawled on my back, the gray that swarmed my vision darkening into blackness.

Before I passed out, I caught one good look at the original portrait, now freshly exposed.

Indigo Garson, looking as angelic as she always had. Same alabaster skin and golden curls and beatific expression.

But it was no longer a rabbit held in her daintily gloved hands.

It was a snake.