shelves over here. There is a book open, lying face down as though the page where someone stopped reading is being saved, on the couch. Some of the pages have fallen out and lie on the floor. There is a line of cleanliness down the middle of a table, through the dust, as though someone’s finger had drawn along it as they walked by. Without knowing why, I shiver.
“Hello!” I call again, ignoring my cowardice. My voice sounds stronger and clearer than I expect it to. “Is anyone here?”
“Rose!” Luke adds his voice to mine. “Rose Gray, are you here?”
“Through those doors or up the stairs?” I whisper to him. There is obviously no one here in this room with us, although the book and the line drawn through the dust suggest otherwise.
“Through the doors,” he jerks his head towards the first one.
“Great, a closet,” I mutter once I get up the courage to open the door. “No one here but moths.”
We try the other and it leads to the kitchen. Luke shines the light around to reveal an old stove, a rusted and filthy kitchen sink, cans of unopened food on the floor where they had apparently tumbled out of the pantry and a broken chair lying on the floor. I could be wrong but it doesn’t feel as though anyone has set foot in this kitchen for years and years. And yet, I still feel a presence in this house, a sense of being watched, a feeling that I am not the only one holding my breath and listening.
“Do you think the stairs will hold?” I ask as we enter back into the living area.
“Beats me,” Luke replies, as he shines the beam of the flashlight up the staircase. It must be my imagination working overtime again because I think for a moment that I see a flash of something moving in the dark. I take the flashlight from Luke and without a word, I begin the climb first. The stairs seem as though they should shake and tremble beneath us, like the fragile things they appear to be, but they hold our weight well enough and barely creak with our footfalls. The more I climb, the more my flashlight illuminates and I can see the top of the stairway, the hallway to my left with doors to what I presume to be bedrooms over the kitchen area, and a gaping hole in to my right where the tree had crashed through and caused most of the roof to cave in. The cool night air comes through and lifts my hair, causing goose bumps on my arms and drying the nervous clamminess on my body. We obviously can’t go to the right and so I wind the short corner and reach out for the knob to one of the bedrooms. My fingers curl around it and I grasp it and try to turn.
It’s locked. From inside I can hear a scuttling sound, like something scraping the floor or a body pushing itself away in a hurry.
I look over my shoulder at Luke. He shrugs.
“Hello?” I call softly though the closed door. “Is anyone in there? I won’t hurt you. Please open the door.”
Silence. Nothing but silence.
I rattle the knob. Still nothing. I press my ear to the door and listen. Is it my imagination or do I hear breathing on the other side? Like the feeling I would get as a little girl after a nightmare when I would huddle under my blankets and swear I could hear the breathing of a monster under my bed. I try to stop my own breathing but the harder I try, the more shallow and loud it seems and the more my heartbeat thuds in my own ears.
“Maybe we should just come back tomorrow,” Luke says in a normal voice. Does he want the person behind the door to hear him? “Bring the police even.”
“No!” I shoo him away and put my ear again to the door. My fingers have rested all this time on the knob and as if guided by instinct I attempt to turn it again.
This time, it turns.
The door creaks open. There is no one there.
Chapter Fourteen
The let down and disappointment hits me like a ton of bricks. My breath that I’ve been holding is let out in a rush. My eyes take in the scene before me: a dingy mattress on the floor with a ratty blue blanket, a dresser with broken drawers hanging lopsided or