The Last to See Me (The Last Ghost #1) - M Dressler Page 0,5
I mean, for help. I hate to say it, but you know it’s nothing but rubes out here for miles around. I get so tired of the inexperience, Charlie. There’s probably no help around here that can polish anything without streaking it. And did you see that poor little thing, in her factory seconds? Please. If I were her broker, I’d have to fire her and hire someone less … hick.”
“Embarrassing. You’re so right. But only a bellhop. And only for today.”
Coldness in their voices. Coldness, and looking down their noses at someone only wanting to do some work and to try to get ahead, if she could.
Sometimes, when it’s a case like this, the anger comes to me and I don’t stop it. Some people don’t deserve my quiet and my patience. There are some who believe this earth was made for them and them alone. There are some who believe theirs are the only hearts, the only drums of blood that count. And so, when they hear the wooden floor of an old house creaking, giving underneath them, they can’t imagine it could be anything but their own weight.
I shut the pantry door.
3
What the—?”
“Great,” Mrs. Dane sighed.
“The door is stuck. The knob’s not turning.”
I blew the lights out.
“Charlie?”
“Bad wiring. I knew it. These old houses.” He tried the switch again.
“Just open the door.”
“It still won’t turn.”
I know how to make a thing hard. Unforgiving. The knob, the more he tried it, stiffened, as though some heavy, cold pressure were fighting against him.
“Okay, Charlie, let’s get out of here. It’s getting stuffy.”
“Give me a second.”
“There’s got to be another light in here somewhere.”
“Then you find it.”
“I’m trying. I can’t feel anything, except—”
“What’s that? Is that you?”
A breath. A whisper. A hissing sound at his side. But not his wife. She’s backed away, as far as she can in the small room.
“Charlie?”
“Beth-y, is that you?”
“No.”
“It sounds like—a leak. Is it a broken pipe?”
“Charlie. Okay. Get us out of here. Please.”
“I can’t—”
“Just bang on the door. She’ll hear us, that silly waif outside.”
He banged and cried out: “Hey! Hey! Hey!”
In the dark, he strained to see. He reached out for his wife, his love. But she wasn’t there. Because a blackness, a blackness only a ghost can summon, was opening underneath them. His wife was near his feet, being pulled under. Pulling at him.
“Charlie! Help me!”
“Beth! Beth!”
He fell to his knees with her. He felt her wet, sinking cheeks. He reached for her arms. But his hands fluttered, thrashing, in something else. Water, water rising all around them.
He screamed.
When the living are near death I can hear their thoughts. Poor Charles Dane. He’d gotten himself cornered, trapped, tricked, as he’d never been tricked in his whole life. He’d always known there were dangers, deep things in the world, but he’d always imagined he was in charge of them, in charge of the light and the dark. Now he could feel his wife sinking, being sucked away from him, down, down, down into the blackness. The feeling of her slippery, shredding skin under his nails. Was this dying, sliding thing even his wife? What are we, who are we? What’s left of us in the end?
Then he felt my hands, groping, coiling around his knees. It was his turn. He kicked and fought. He screamed, I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go, as the water circled around his mouth, all his fear seeking a drain.
And my whispering told him, go on, give in, give in.
I kicked them both out, leaving them crumpled on the hallway floor.
Poor Mrs. Dane had wet herself.
I watched them from where I hung, under the winking pantry light. It took Dane a moment and then—I saw it in his bald, blank face—he understood what had just happened to them. Such things were still reported. Even though the hunters had been doing their work for twenty-five years, since the turn of the millennium, not every poor, dead thing in the world had been snuffed out the way some thought ghosts should be. Because there were still some of us left, in spite of all the work the hunters had done, over the years, to put us down. Because in an old house, you might still expect to find one of us, here or there. Even one who was willing to forget herself and what it would mean to show her anger, just for the treat of putting you in your place.