The vibration of another human being walking down the hall below her inched its way up Margot’s stricken spine. She bolted up and closed the door to the storage room, then slid the stack of heavy boxes in front of it. Grabbing the gun from its wooden cigar box, she backed herself into a corner. The gun trembled violently in her fingers as she trained it on the door. Panicked, she realized she didn’t even know how to work the thing. Is there a safety? Are there even bullets in the chamber? She was shaking too hard to check and realized she might as easily shoot herself as anyone else. She set the thing down and stifled a sob.
Myron will be home in a few hours, she told herself, squeezing her eyes shut, praying whoever it was wouldn’t find her up there naked. Just a few more hours. Margot hugged her knees to her chest, the gun by her side, her mind curling into itself. A dream. This is all a terrible dream. The voice. The song. The blood. The murder.
The stifling heat of the storage room kept climbing above ninety degrees as the afternoon sun beat down harder on the roof. Margot lay there, baking with the old newspapers as scenes from 1931 played in her head again and again. He was just a little boy.
Ten feet below her, a shadow wandered from room to room, humming softly to itself.
34
The Rawlings Family
January 24, 1931
Georgina Rawlings woke to the sound of singing. She sat up in bed and held her breath, listening. It was coming from the backyard.
Standing at the window, she pressed her nose to the cold glass and looked out over the blanket of snow that covered her garden. The roses had been cut back to dead twigs. The tulips and daffodils lay sleeping beneath the snow. She searched the perfect plane of white for signs of life, footsteps, or shadows and saw nothing. With her eyes open, the singing was almost impossible to hear, so she shut them, her lids squinting to catch what wasn’t there.
Under the inaudible melody, the steady rhythm of marching feet vibrated deep in the ground, up through the stones in the foundation, through the hewn wood. Eyes shut, her face went slack as though seeing it all laid out before her. The chanting of the Believers as they marched in their circle under the stars, pleading with their angels to deliver them a message. The Shaker schoolhouse and gathering house burning.
They died the wrong way.
She opened her eyes with a start as if expecting to see the Believers marching in their slow circle down in the garden. Her skin glowed pale in the light of the full moon. It gazed down at her with the unblinking eye of heaven. There were no clouds to hide what had happened there, and she stared back into the light until her eyes watered. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
A faint laugh burst somewhere above her beyond the ceiling, and Georgina woke from her trance. A pair of footsteps padded lightly overhead. The lady of the house stumbled away from the window, clutching her nightgown to her chest. The laugh came again, clearer now, mocking her.
The old Shaker woman had warned them. The dead do not rest easy here.
It all made sense to Georgina now after hearing Ninny’s stories. After her husband’s horrible death and the financial ruin that followed. After all the babies she’d lost. After reading the beautiful Shaker tales of the angels that sang and the Second Coming. The truth had come to her in waves of recognition one after another as she’d sat and read and let the fever open her mind.
She put a hand over her mouth to keep it quiet. “They’re here . . . they’ve come for us,” she whispered into her palms, backing herself into the corner, searching the darkened room for signs of them.
At the opposite end of the house, little Walter sat up in his bed. He’d stopped sleeping through the night when they’d found his father dead in his office. Wide awake at 2:15 a.m., he sat there in the dark and listened too.
Georgina opened the door to her bedroom and peered out into the hallway. The fear on her face mixed with anticipation as she searched the darkened foyer below for signs of Ninny’s dead or her husband’s hulking shadow. Puddles of moonlight collected on the stairs and on the polished wood floors of the foyer. The carved railing threw long dripping shadows onto the walls.
The laughter fell from the ceiling once again, deeper now. Sinister.
Georgina shrank against the wall, her heart rattling her ribs. The deep timbre of a man’s voice sounded in the dark, its words muffled but the intent clear. Listen. Obey. Her eyes widened. Walter has come back from the grave. Heavy footfalls thumped over her head, and what blood she had left dropped from her heart to her feet.
“Dear God. What do you want from me?” she whispered and stifled a sob with the back of her hand. Then, breathing deep, she recited a verse from the Shaker prayer book sitting by her bedside. “The dead come unto me so that I might see. His angels bear golden fruit from the tree of paradise and word from the kingdom of heaven . . .”
She took a brave step down the hallway. Drifting toward the attic door, Georgina appeared to be a ghost herself. Floating past Ella’s back hallway in her white nightgown, pale skin drawn tight over her thinning frame, her eyes were two hollows peering out from the bone.
The maid didn’t stir. Exhausted from a day of worry and secrecy spent waiting for the hard fist of the law to pound on the front door, Ella simply rolled over in the middle of a dream and continued to snore in a low and even saw.
Little Walter stiffened at the sound of footsteps outside his bedroom door and slid down from his perch on the pillows. Squinting through his keyhole, he glimpsed a shroud of white and his mother’s thin hand as it turned the corner to the attic. The ring his father had given her caught a sparkle of moonlight.
Ella had locked the attic door as usual that evening, leaving the key resting on the casing above it. Georgina felt the ledge over her head before even trying the handle. They’d kept the door locked ever since Ella had found Walter hiding in the crawl space with his father’s gun.
Behind the door, low voices whispered to one another. She pressed her ear to the wood, listening to the dead as they conspired together. Angry. Vengeful. What do they want from us?
They went silent when she rattled the key into the lock. They held still as she swung the door open and mounted the steps toward the yellow glow of a single incandescent bulb burning at the other end of the attic.
Georgina didn’t notice the small face of her son appear at the bottom of the stairwell. His worried eyes peered up the steps after her. Mother?
35
The Spielman Family
August 9, 2018
Margot woke with a start. Hot air rushed into her lungs, thick and soupy. Her naked body muddy with sweat and dust, she gaped at the unfamiliar walls until it all came back to her. The attic. The murder. The song. The intruder. The gun on the floor.
Horror and confusion lined her face. Have I lost my mind? She pulled herself to her feet, eyeing the barricaded door. Is someone still out there?
Myron’s muffled voice came from two floors down. “Hello? Margot? . . . Anybody home?”
Her entire body went slack. Thank God. She pushed the boxes to the side and flung open the door to the storage room. “Myron! Myron, up here!”
She ran across the attic floor to the stairwell, nearly tumbling down the steps. When she reached the door, she pounded it with her bruised fists. “Myron! Help! I’m up here! I’m locked in!”
“What?” The sound of feet rushed up the back stairs, then pounded into the hall. “Margot?”