The Last to See Me (The Last Ghost #1) - M Dressler Page 0,11

it with the flat of her hand. “I’ve been keeping it closed. Should I open it? Or do you need to?”

“Go right ahead.”

She turns the tight brass knob. The door opens inward with a little breath.

“And the lights?”

“Please.”

She tucks her hand into the dark.

Electricity. A little miracle. Nobody thinks of it that way anymore. Once, light was hard work for us, for maids like me and Frances, who had to lug oil, every day, to fill the lamps; to say nothing of the toil at Lighthouse Point, where a single beam had to be turned by a chain and fed hour after hour, night after night.

I stay perched on Ellen’s shoulder while Pratt slips into the mote-filled room. He finds, of course, nothing there. Nothing but the blank, dusty shelves and counters, no life left, though Lambry servants once ducked inside to rest and whisper where no one could hear them, and children snuck in to pinch a stick of cinnamon, and Mrs. Lambry, after her family were all dead and gone, would sweep in and close the door behind her and stand in the darkness, managing her breath, trying to get her life to slide in and out without getting it caught between her ribs.

Pratt is moving his bulk around, now and again lifting a hand to touch a surface or stroke his chest, as though he’s trying to manage his breathing, too. That’s an odd thing. Each time he touches his chest, I see the hunter’s band at his wrist more clearly. The gouged black markings striped into the silver. The thickness of it, like a cuff a man in chains might wear. Any ghost worth her salt knows what such a band is, the watch with no face, the clock that keeps no time. If only such things didn’t exist, our village would still house spirits by the score, and the mirrors would be full and dancing, and the cemetery empty. If only the hunters lacked their tools.

But Pratt is going about his evil in a way I don’t follow. He’s brought no other devices with him, nothing other than the band. He keeps tapping and stroking his chest, as though the only meter he needed were inside him.

“Mr. Pratt?” Ellen blinks.

He closes his eyes and again he lifts his fingers to his chest. “Yes. Something was here.”

Ellen backs away from the door. “You feel it right … right now?”

He opens his eyes, excited. “Something flared and then was controlled. A residue’s all that’s left now. But something. Enough. To begin.”

“Is that good?”

“It’s excellent.”

“But I don’t get it—what do you do next? Don’t you have to—get it, before it gets away?”

“It’s already gotten away. It’s probably found a safe hollow, somewhere. An empty space that it can fill. An unsettled space or room. Or the image or feeling of a room. They don’t like tightness. Claustrophobia. Feeling trapped.”

“But this village is full of rooms. How do you find the right one?”

He closes the pantry door carefully behind him. “Patience. Care. Gentleness. Attention. Slowness. Then more patience, if necessary.”

“And how long will we—I mean how long do the Danes, and the heirs, have to be patient for?”

“For as long as it takes me to crack its shell. A haunt is like a hermit crab on the move”—he points Ellen toward the grand staircase—“always stealing what doesn’t belong to it. It has no real home. So it can be forced out into the open. Forced to act. We’ll want to catch it moving, unsteady. That’s when it’s at its most vulnerable. When it’s exposed for what it is, a migrant with no country.”

But don’t the living need to move to survive, too? As the Irish did when they came across the ocean, and a continent? And would that be stealing, too? From logging camp to logging camp my father and mother trudged, trying to make their way in this new world, this grand America they hoped would be better than the old country. Up and down the coast they moved, until my mother started having babies, one after another, with me the last one, the one that sent her to her final home. And then it was me always on the move. From cot to cot I was carried, by my Da, until I could walk on my own and started to work bringing lunch pails to my father and the other men at the mills. And then, when my father died, I moved again, to the boardinghouse on