Atlas stares into the black for a moment and then nods. “Understood. Come on, I’ll give you a tour of the rest of the house.”
He walks around us, and even though I don’t want a fucking tour, I refuse to be left alone with Perry in this hall. We hurry after him, but the immense darkness at my back feels like a black hole, and if I don’t escape from it fast enough, it’s going to suck me back in with that dead woman.
“So, wait a minute,” Perry says to Atlas, catching up to him. “If the walls are down in this house, why do you need us to do anything?”
“Because I don’t have what you guys have,” he says, leading us over to the stairs. “Your gift. Just because the Veil is down or thin, doesn’t mean spirits will walk through. They might not even know they can. They need to be drawn out. They need to be shown the way. That’s what the two of you have always done. That’s your purpose in life.”
Oh, Perry isn’t going to like that.
“Purpose?” she practically spits out as we climb the stairs. “I have a purpose in life and it’s not this. It never was.”
He glances down at her. “I suppose if you tell yourself that enough times, sooner or later it might be true.” He smiles. “But you’re here, aren’t you?”
“For a fuckload of money!”
“Easy now,” he says. “Last time we had words, your husband saw a ghost. Do you want that to happen again?”
“I thought we were here to see ghosts,” I tell him as we get to the second floor.
“You’re here to talk to my mother,” he says. “What you saw wasn’t my mother. You definitely don’t want to see her again.”
“Fucking hell, what else should we not want to see?” I mutter under my breath.
But as Atlas takes us from room to room on the second floor, showing us different bedrooms, still fully furnished, filling us in on some of the seemingly harmless history of the so-called Stimson House, we never see anything else.
That is, until we get to the third floor.
Where I had seen the light from outside.
On that floor I stop dead when I see bloody water seeping out from underneath a doorway.
“Uh,” I say, pointing at it, and holy fuck have I never wanted a video camera as bad as I do right now. This is fucking gold.
“Oh my god,” Perry says softly, jumping back from the water as it seems to rush toward our feet. “What’s in there?” She stares at the door.
“It’s a bathroom,” Atlas says. “It’s locked and I don’t have a key.”
Oh, this Edgar Allan Fuck is lying, that much is true.
“And it seems we’re out of time,” he says, taking out his phone.
“What do you—?” My words are cut off by all the lights in the house going on at once.
Illuminating people standing all around us.
Dead people.
Fucking everywhere.
Perry and I scream bloody murder, our voices rattling through the house.
And then the lights go back off.
The dead people disappear.
The bloody water that was inches from my boots, retreats back under the door, like a film in reverse.
“November first,” Atlas says tiredly. “The walls have closed.”
I barely hear him, barely take in how quickly time has passed while we’ve been in this house.
All I hear is the rush of blood in my head.
The dry rasp of my breath as I try to breathe.
And all I feel is something deep inside me coming alive again, hitching a ride on the adrenaline that’s pumping through my veins.
I look down at Perry to see if she feels it too, the electricity, the heat, the desire. The…purpose. Because fuck it if Atlas wasn’t right about that.
She’s breathing hard, her hand to her chest and she looks scared.
Really wish that didn’t turn me on so much, but this house has fucked with me a bunch of different ways already.
And I want more.
I glance over at Atlas to see him watching me with curiosity, a gleam in his eye.
He knows. He knows what I have planned.
That’s why he brought us here.
“So,” he says carefully. “I’ll have to tell my father that it didn’t quite work this time.”
“This time?” Perry asks, giving her head a little shake. “No, we only agreed to this one time.”
“You won’t come back another night? I don’t think you’ll have any problems getting through.” He pauses, licking his lips. “Or are you just going to take the money and call it quits?”
“That’s not fair,” Perry says. She looks at me expectantly. “Dex? We’re not doing this again.”
But didn’t you feel it? Didn’t you feel plugged into the motherfucking universe?
I’m not sure if she hears me or not.
“We’ll think about it,” I tell Atlas, even though he knows I’ve already made up my mind. “Give us a few days.”
“Take all the time you want,” he says. “She’ll stay dead forever.”
What a callous way to think about your own mother, then again, I’ve thought that and worse about my own. Perhaps Atlas and I have more in common than I thought.
We make our way down the stairs, and I hold onto Perry’s hand the whole time to give her reassurance for the time being.
Then Atlas opens the front door and we step outside into the night. The air smiles like firecrackers again, it’s cold as hell, and I feel like every sense I have is suddenly heightened.
Ada and Jay are at the bottom of the steps and Ada immediately rushes toward us, pulling Perry into a hug. “Oh my god, are you okay?” she cries out. “We saw all the lights in the house go on. I saw a fucking ghost boy in the window!”
“Yeah, we, uh, saw all that,” Perry says.
We walk down the steps and then Atlas gives a nod, like he’s some old timey gentleman saying goodbye. “Let me know when you want to talk,” he says, and then he goes down the street, disappearing around the corner as quickly as he had appeared earlier.
“What the fuck was that?” Jay asks me. “That fucking house is not a house, is it?”
“I don’t know what that was,” Perry says. “I just want to get the hell out of here.”
“Oh, let’s go back to that hotel and get more drinks.” Ada claps her hands together, apparently able to turn from “I saw a ghost boy” to “More underage drinking!” in a heartbeat. “Do you think they’re still open?”
“Princess, it’s past midnight,” Jay says, putting his arm around her. “And we have our own hotel to get to.”
She grins at him, remembering.
We start walking down the street back the way we came, and the further we get from that house, the less of a pull it has on me. By the time we’re at the Sorrento Hotel and calling an Uber, it almost feels like a dream, like none of it happened at all.
But I know it happened.
I know what I saw.
I know what I felt.
And I know that I’ll be back.
With my camera next time.
THE END
…or…the beginning…
Have you heard the good news? This story continues on in CAME BACK HAUNTED, the all-new full-length novel, Experiment in Terror #10. Releasing on December 11th, 2020.