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.
JULY 14
Day 19
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