Kris felt Sadie press up close to her side.
“It kind of stinks in here, doesn’t it?” Kris asked.
Sadie did not reply.
Hargrove didn’t even bother coming in, Kris realized. If he had, he would have noticed this stench. He left the key beneath the planter and drove the hell away. He hasn’t been inside this place in months. Maybe years.
At the far end of the kitchen, just past a small breakfast nook nestled under a long row of narrow windows, a rectangular archway opened into the great room. The plaster ceiling of the kitchen abruptly vanished, replaced by a cathedral ceiling ribbed with walnut beams that spanned the width of the room and disappeared into shadowed corners. Spiderwebs hovered there, thick as spun sugar, like pale ghosts in the darkness.
Kris held out a flattened palm to Sadie. “Stay here.”
True to its name, the great room was as massive as the front entryway was constricting. A brown leather couch—its cushions sinking, its hide cracked—faced a fireplace constructed from the same fieldstones that made up the house’s crumbling foundation. The firebox was wide and deep and stained black from decades of soot. Above a mantel made from a halved cedar trunk, the chimney rose like a guard standing at attention, its stone face disappearing through the exposed planks of the ceiling high above.
Flanking the leather couch were two chairs, one a bare-bones mission-style glider fashioned from solid oak where young Krissy had spent many summer evenings cuddled up to her mother’s chest, the other an armchair with cushions upholstered in a busy print featuring fishermen pulling bass the size of Atlantic salmon into a steel canoe. This chair had been her father’s favorite, and Kris could still see him sitting there with his morning coffee, steam curling up around the rough patch of stubble he called his “summer beard.”
Mounted over the fireplace mantel was an antique hickory fishing rod complete with a Western’s winding casting reel. Kris reached up and tapped the handle hard enough that it spun one full rotation, pulling in a length of invisible line.
The far end of the room was all glass, composed entirely of four narrow windows stretching from floor to ceiling. They narrowed at the top, following the upward slant of the roof until they met at the peak. The panes glowed a warm yellow, but the light did not appear to penetrate any farther. It was held back by layers of dirt.
Kris stared up at the illuminated monoliths towering over her.
You’ve been here before.
Of course, she had. Her father had brought her and her mother to the lake house every summer until that last summer when her mother—
Not here, Kris realized. Not these windows, but ones just like them.
A church.
Holy Cross Catholic Church in Blantonville, Kansas. The sanctuary hot and musty. The priest in his violet vestment. The sound of sniffling and choked voices echoing from the ornate Gothic ceiling high above.
The cathedral ceiling.
There was Krissy, ten years old, sitting beside her father in the first pew, his body rigid and straight, his sweaty hands clasped so tightly that the tips of his fingers were bloodless and white. She kept her head bowed, not wanting to make eye contact with anyone for fear they would feel compelled to speak to her, to say those things that meant little and changed nothing: I’m so sorry, it’s going to get better, God has a plan for us all, she is at peace now, she is in heaven, God has called her home.
Called her home.
And she went, little Krissy Barlow thought bitterly. He called and she left us.
She remembered the casket at the front of the sanctuary. Its black, glossy surface glistened like the curved back of a beetle. In there was the fleshy shell that had once contained her mother. Now it was empty. The mortician had done his best to preserve it, applying too much makeup to the withered, sunken face in an effort to make the cheeks look less like shadowed valleys between bone, the eyes less like sinkholes, the lips less like dried, cracked strips of meat. But even at her young age, Krissy had known the thing in the coffin was a husk.
She was called home, and the rest of them were left behind to bear the weight of her absence.
The smell was worse in the hallway.
Kris stood at the edge of the entryway and stared down the dim corridor. There were no windows. The first two doors—one to her left and another a little farther down on her right—were closed tight. At the far end, a third door was open just an inch or two, and except for the soft glow of light from within this room and a slanted shaft of sunshine drifting down from an unseen staircase across from it, the hall was dark.
She stepped into the gloom, scanning the wall as she went. There had to be a light switch somewhere. The shadows grew thicker around her, as did that odor of rot and decay. Whatever was causing the nauseating scent was in the hallway with her. It was too dim to see, but it was there, she knew it, just as she knew the light switch was there. She imagined kneeling down and reaching into the deepest shadows that swirled like black mist at the base of the wall, her fingers grazing matted fur, her fingertips sinking in to touch damp, spongy flesh writhing with ravenous maggots.
And then the shadows were peeling away, stripped from her and the hall around her by the yellowish-white glow of sunlight. She had reached the third door. She shoved it lightly, and it swung open a few more inches on angry hinges. As it did, the swath of light in the hall expanded, forcing the shadows farther into retreat.
Slowly, Kris turned. Across from her, the hall cut a sharp right angle, continuing for another fifteen feet before coming to a dead end. To the right, a steep staircase sliced the hallway in half. The steps rose up to a landing lit by golden sunshine from a small, square window.
Kris drew a short breath in through her nose. The stench was down here with her. There was no mistaking it.
She guided herself into that narrow passageway to the left of the stairs. The underside of the staircase was completely exposed, each step mirrored in a strange upside-down ascension.
Something was piled in a heap in the corner, something black and jagged, as if the shadows beneath the stairs had shattered into pieces like glass. This was the source of the smell. Whatever that thing was, it was rotting into the floorboards like a fly dissolving in the gullet of a pitcher plant.
Kris pulled up the neck of her T-shirt to cover her mouth and nose as she stepped closer to the object in the corner. Bits of it were scattered about like fallen leaves, the pieces long and slender with bristled edges.
Feathers, she realized.
She glanced to the thing in the corner. It was splayed out like a poorly drawn star. For a moment, she stared at it, trying to make sense of its odd dimensions.
A wing. Frozen in full extension. Talons curled as if around an invisible branch. Another wing folded unnaturally in half. A black pupil set against a yellow eye like a moon dwarfed by the enormity of its sun.
A bird.
She could not be sure of the species. It was smaller than a crow. A grackle perhaps. In this light—or lack of it—it was impossible to determine if the creature had a grackle’s trademark purple hood.
Does it matter? Kris asked herself. It’s a dead bird, and it’s stinking up the house.
But was that possible? The stench had been revolting from the moment she opened the front door. Could this small, pathetic beast be the cause of that?
Maybe there are more, the voice from the back of her mind—the voice of Shadow Kris—whispered. Or maybe there are other dead things here. Hiding. Waiting to be found.