Aftersight (25 page)

We wandered the northern part of the estate for hours, finally arriving at the old manor house just before four o'clock. By then the wind made the branches overhead bow and sway with increasingly urgent whispers. The old castle — it really did seem like a castle, with battlements showing like teeth along its rooftops — was half-covered by shadows that hollowed out its empty windows and masked its insides in darkness. Gaps in the masonry showed glimpses of the mansion's dark bowels. Four and, in places, five stories high, the ruins of the old house hinted at the Waltham family's long history of wealth and influence.

In the centuries since people last lived there, the woods behind the house had moved in along its back three sides, as if to swallow the broken stonework and make it its own. Maple branches grew into and through its upper-story windows, and ivy and blackberry vines covered it in layers. The walls and wild growth seemed both to support and hold each other up.

A dozen enormous elms and cottonwoods grew in the front yard. Sara dismounted and tethered her horse to a large fallen branch with leaves still green and growing. "Come on," she said and when we made no move to get down added, "Well, surely you're not afraid, are you?"

"Hadn't we ought to head back?" Becky asked, trying to keep her horse still while she studied the darkening sky. "There's obviously a storm coming and I don't want to be caught out in it. My hair will get all wet."

That did it. I slipped down from Maestro's saddle and tied off his reins, taking off my velvet-covered riding helmet and hanging it by its straps on the downed tree limb. "You can wait for us here, if you want." I retrieved my oversized, pink sweatshirt from my saddlebag and slipped it on over my riding jacket. "We won't be too long, I don't think."

Becky exchanged glances with Nicole as if to say,
What's her problem?

Best to let it be,
Nicole's eyes seemed to reply. Nicole dismounted, forcing Becky to follow or be left behind.

The grey evening light was fading as we approached the ruins' battered façade. Wind shook the branches overhead with a warning hiss of leaves, as if the trees were asking for silence for those who'd once lost their lives here. Eroded old steps led to a wide arched opening, where carved wooden doors would have stood had they not been rotted away by the elements. The lacquered parquet floor that might have once gleamed in the open foyer had long ago buckled from the heat of the ancient fire and collapsed into the living quarters blow. Now only a tangle of bramble was left behind, warning us with their thorny vines about what would happen if we should take a bad step and fall into their grasp.

Only the mansion's weathered, fire-charred bones remained, but I could imagine the home's former glory. The grand staircase rose up into nothing now. Its main landing had disappeared long ago to reveal doorways lined along the upper gallery. Walls still held where wood and plaster had failed, leaving a crumbling maze of stone, mortar, and arched passages. Here and there, ivy scaled the walls, flapping in the growing breeze, making the shadows appear to come alive.

"Come on," I said, "there must be a way in."

We moved cautiously around the right side of the house, where a curtain of blackberry vines climbed into the trees, leaving a dark tent full of spiderwebs and clinging tufts of tree cotton. I pushed the opening wider with a stick and slipped inside, followed by a reluctant Nicole, Sara, and Becky. We moved along the mansion's outer wall for twenty yards before a wide slash in the house's foundation opened into a dark cellar.

We slid down onto the chamber's dirt floor. The space ahead was buried in shadow. Only the dusty grey light falling from the crack overhead allowed any light to see by. I had an obscure sense of an opening in the wall up ahead and, somewhere beyond it, tunnels flowing to the right and left. A sporadic breeze blew out of the dark hole, coughing up odors of old things rotting and decomposing in dim, damp places.

"Does anyone have a torch?" asked Sara.

"I do in my purse back home," Nicole answered, "Maybe I should go back and get it."

I pulled out my flashlight and clicked it on, pointing it into each of the girls' faces. "I've got one. Come on, let's check it out. It'll be fun."

I pushed on through the opening in the wall, as if daring them to follow.

"Come on, guys," Becky protested, "I don't think this is a good idea. I'm not going any farther. I'm staying right here." But Nicole and Sara followed me and, soon after, Becky, too.

In its day, the cellar might have been a place to store wine, preserves, and root vegetables, but whatever was left of the tools and receptacles that might have survived the fire had long ago been carted away. Now it was just a wet hole smelling of mud and mold. As we pushed past arched passages and cobwebs, we could occasionally see light leaking down through the vines overhead, throwing spidery shadows across the crusty dirt floor. Twice our path was blocked by pools of water that, in the dim light, looked like they might go on forever, and once an opening in the floor seemed to plunge bottomless into the depths of the earth.

When I stopped suddenly, Sara nearly bowled over me. We were in a long, narrow room with stone stairs leading up into a dark snarl of roots. The ruined manor house loomed large and heavy above us like something saggy and old, waiting to fall and collapse in on itself. We seemed to be beneath the castle's exact center.

Several times I thought I'd heard something above us; heard something or maybe
felt
something, I wasn't quite sure. Whatever it was, I was picking it up from some place deep inside me where my five physical senses blended with another sense I didn't have a name for.

"Quiet," I whispered. "Listen."

At first there was nothing but the weak sigh of wind no louder than the faintest exhale. Then everything was quiet, perfectly quiet. Finally, it came through. The creak of floorboards settling, the sense of joists groaning with weight, then, all at once, the
k
u
thump
,
kuthump
,
kuthump
of heavy boots on solid plank flooring.

"But there isn't anything to walk—" Sara said before the three of us stifled her.

We waited in the dark. The unexplained noises had silenced but we felt the barest sense of creaking joints and sagging wood. There was also a presence, a feeling that something overhead had taken notice of us and was listening as intently as we were.

I think I noticed it first, shadows moving all around us, flitting from right to left in the doorway ahead, darting back and forth, from the back and to the side. It was as if something in the old manor house was waking the way insects that are used to the dark will squirm when their hiding place is kicked over and exposed. I felt psychic fingers around us probing and prodding the shadows, groping blindly, closing in.

Becky found Nicole's hand; I found Sara's. Together we moved back through the doorway and back the way we came. Though no one said it, we all seemed to understand how important it was not to panic.

For as many turns and twists our original path had taken, I led us to our starting point as if I'd known a secret way. Nicole and I pushed Becky up through the crack in the foundation and she turned around and helped up Sara and Nicole. I was the last to leave, using my flashlight to take a final few glances around.

I was about to turn back toward the exit when the oval of my flashlight settled on something white moving in the room's back corner...

A face. An ugly, pale, grimacing face, scowling in the midst of a thousand fleshy wrinkles.

The by-now familiar face of the old man in black.

Becky

Old Manor House Ruins, Waltham Estate

A Few Minutes Later

My insides melted at the sound of Cali's shriek. I sprang up, colliding with the house's stone wall before getting my bearings and sprinting through the tent of overhanging vines. I vaguely heard the patter and drum in the leaves overhead but only when I tore out from the shelter did I realize that it was raining. Water poured all around me in a steady stream, splattering my hair and clothing. The sound of footsteps beside me sent me into a second panic, but then a familiar voice called out.

"Becky, it's me. It's Sara. Stop! We have to stop and go back!"

"No, the horses!" I yelled over the rain and the wind. I tugged at Sara's lapel, urging her to follow me. At first she resisted, but then she stumbled into a run alongside me.

Our boots slapped through muddy puddles toward the patch of grass where we'd left our horses. Cali's helmet still hung upturned on the branch where she'd left it, its insides collecting water. The fallen branch where we'd tied our reins had been dragged a dozen yards toward the trail, ending in a muddy confusion of hoofprints. The horses were gone.

"Oh-no-oh-no-oh-no," I repeated, pressing my hands into my forehead and walking randomly back and forth across the scene.

"Pipe down," Sara called back. "Just let me think." She squatted in the mud at the base of the tree, closing her eyes and leaning back against the thick trunk. "All right, I can feel them now, the horses. They're fleeing into the woods. Jasper and Yorick are together, I think, but Pepper and Maestro are off on their own. Whatever happened, they've been given quite a scare."

"But how could they have..." I looked at Sara, trying to make sense of it. "Someone would have had to untie them."

"Yes, but
who
?" Sara asked. "There's nobody here but us."

"That's not exactly true," Cali said, trudging up from the house with Nicole at her side. "I saw him. I saw the old man."

"The horses are gone!" I cried, marching up to Cali with the intention of slapping her. "This is all your fault. I told you we should go back!"

"Didn't you hear what I said?" Cali replied. "I saw the old man."

"Of course you saw the old man!" I screamed, anger welling up inside me. I shoved Cali hard, but it only succeeded in knocking me back off my own feet. I fell with a splat on my butt in the mud.

"Y'all done now?" asked Nicole. "We've gotta stop fightin'. That's what it wants. That's what it's tryin' to do. Don't you see? It's trying to split us up. That's what it's been tryin' to do from the beginnin'." Nicole held out her hand for me and helped me to stand. "It knows we're strongest when we're together. It can't get to us when we're together."

I looked into Nicole's soothing green eyes. She was right, of course, but that didn't mean I had to like it. If they'd just listened to me in the beginning, none of this would have happened. "'We're not spending the night, just taking a look!'" I yelled mockingly. "Now what?"

"The stable master knows where we've gone," Sara said hopefully. "They know where to look."

"I don't believe Maestro left me," Cali said deflatedly.

"Is there a road that leads up here?" I asked.

"No," Sara said sheepishly, "not as such. There was until recently, but a bridge washed out during a storm last November. But they can follow on horses."

Daylight was dwindling. Sunset wasn't for another couple of hours, but the thick cloud cover made it seem much later.

"What do we do?" Sara asked. "Go back to the ruins?"

"I'm not going near that house," I said. "No way."

Cali looked calmly at Nicole. "What does Charlie say?"

Nicole gazed at the ground and took a deep breath that was more sigh than exhale. "Going back to the house isn't such a good idea."

"Okay," Cali said, "we'll flippin' walk back. Are you happy? Sara, do you know the way?"

"I believe so," she answered.

"Well, no one's stopping you."

We trudged on through the woods in the deepening twilight in roughly the same order we'd ridden out that day. Sara led us down what she considered to be the right path but, as she liked to point out, the trail looked much different from nine feet up than it did at five. Nicole and I kept right behind her, trusting that she could find the way home without our help. Cali seemed to keep purposefully back from the rest of us, walking sulkily, the hood of her pink sweatshirt thrown up around her head as if to hide her face as much as keep her head dry.

The rain fell without a break. The sound of falling water added a sense of depth to the darkness. I was wet, cold, and uncomfortable. I could see my breath mist out in front of me whenever there was enough light. I'd been trembling for the past half-hour and my teeth knocked against each other so hard that they made a clicking noise that was noticeable even above our footsteps.

We took shelter for a few minutes under an old weeping beech tree whose branches grew down to the ground, forming a perfect canopy of leaves. Our tall black boots were still new and beautiful, since we'd only worn them while riding. If I'd known we were going to be breaking them in today, I'd have worn thicker socks.

We stood in silence, listening to the water falling all around us. Although the rain had finally stopped, the leaves were saturated. Eventually, Nicole asked, "How much longer do you think?"

"I'm not quite certain," Sara replied hesitantly. "It can't be much farther now, can it?"

I sat on what felt like a low-lying branch, rocking back and forth and praying. If Sir Alex could project into Cali's out-of-body experiences, he must be able to find us in the dark on his family's own estate. I kept thinking of the blazing hearth back in our sitting room.

"Guys, we gotta keep going," I said at last, trying as hard as I could to dam my rising flood of panic. "If we stay any longer, I think I'm gonna freeze to death."

A break in the clouds allowed a beam of moonlight to brighten the terrain around us. The patch of grass beyond the weeping beech tree looked newly trimmed and tended, not like the wild growth in the woods that we'd just tramped through. The trees were now spaced more widely apart and in the distance we could see a gravel path wending through a grove of chestnut trees and a park bench huddled alone near a stand of old, gnarled ash.