After a minute, he plays the recording of himself talking to the ghost, listening to the silence afterward. Disappointed, he replays it twice more as if the results will change.
“Sometimes you can see ghosts but can’t hear them,” he informs me. “Sometimes what they say comes after a twenty-minute delay. Or you don’t hear their voice until much later, after you’ve left.”
“Mm.” I want him to like me. I don’t want to question him, make him feel as if his beliefs are being attacked. And yet I cannot help saying, “So you’ve seen these ghosts yourself, I take it?”
“Well, no,” he admits. “This is just what I’ve heard.”
“Mm.”
His long-lashed eyes narrow. “It feels like I’m sharing all of my theories, but you’re not sharing yours.”
Dodging his gaze, I zoom the camera on the wallpaper border, but it just gets fuzzier. “I don’t have any theories.”
“I mean, you do. You wrote about ghosts inIt Howls.” The fifth book in my series. “They weren’t main characters, but youdidhave ghosts in there. I assume you collected some info while learning about them.”
“Not really. I pulled from general knowledge: ghosts are remnants of dead souls, who sometimes moan and kill living people when the whim strikes. Where’d you get all your theories, anyway?”
“From Ash.”
I shake my head. “You put too much stock into what a child says.”
We check out the final bedroom on this floor, which replaces the bathroom as my favorite. A pipe organ with six keys missing. Books about farming, printed in the 1800s, strewn about. Some are still readable, but splotched with mold and, in one case, insect eggs. I scoop the books up in spite of Morgan’s grimace, explaining that I can clean them later. An Orange County almanac’s pages have melded together and hardened, dense as rock. A sewing machine sits on a table, its teeth still biting down in the cuff of trousers small enough to fit a young boy. I pick up an empty, discolored bottle of C. C. Parsons’ Household Ammonia.
“Let’s go back downstairs,” he suggests. “I read an article from the fifties about a teenage boy and his girlfriend whosnuck out here. They said they heard a teakettle whistling in the kitchen, but the stove was off.”
“Moonville is certainly rich in stories,” I say, tracing the porcelain mane of a chipped rocking horse with one finger. “But what other types of stories do you like?” We have to have shared interestssomewhere, if I dig enough. “Any nonfiction?”
“Right now, I’m readingTrue Tales of Ghosts.”
I force a smile. “What about books that don’t involve ghosts?”
Morgan thinks for a minute, then grins broadly. “A few months ago I finished a book that teaches about how to unlock the power of telepathy. Wanna borrow? You’ll love it. I haven’t been able to unlock my inner powers of telepathy yet, but with some more practice, who knows!”
Oh dear.
We go back downstairs. As my foot presses a step, it lets out a loud groan. So does the next, and the one after that. They grumble even louder under Morgan’s weight; we exchange mystified looks. “These weren’t noisy when we were going up.”
Another oddity: once back in the living room, we notice a curio cabinet we don’t remember seeing earlier.
“We probably saw it but didn’t reallyseeit, because we’d just come into the house and were taking everything in at once,” I reason. “We weren’t paying attention.”
“Or.” His gaze travels, rapt on the piece of furniture. “It wasn’t here.”
I almost laugh. “A ghost cabinet?”
I’m only kidding, but he nods. “Sort of. This might be part of a flashback.” At my expression, he explains: “Memoriesthat have attached to a particular space are called flashbacks. It’s a super common phenomenon in Moonville because of all the magic here. The apparitions in a flashback aren’t actually ghosts. Magic is attracted to people experiencing spikes of heightened emotion, which can be happy moments, frightening ones, angry ones. Magic records it, and the recording plays on a loop, stamped in the place where the memory was made. Since high-emotion events can include untimely deaths, when you hear wailing or screaming, you could be hearing somebody’s final minutes over and over. So, if this theory is correct, it isn’t necessarily that a location is being haunted by ghosts—it’s that the location itself is still replaying a memory, even though the people in them are long gone. You can tell a flashback from a ghost by the way they don’t see or hear you, or attempt to communicate.”
The curio cabinet is old-fashioned, but so well-preserved that it looks brand-new, shelves stocked with medicine bottles, books, a sewing box, and porcelain horses.
Morgan takes a spool of blue thread from his backpack and rests it on a shelf.
Athumpfrom another room has us turning our heads away from the cabinet. He and I raise our eyebrows at each other, trailing into a dining room. Unlike the rest of the house, this room is properly decayed. Wallpaper has sloughed off, revealing grayish plaster. Two low-backed chairs flank a fireplace, hearth thick with brick dust, an easel in front of it, on which sits a painting of a basset hound. Our footsteps sound much louder here than anywhere else. The shift in atmosphere from living room to dining room is arresting. It feels like something’sstopped. As if we were operating on a timer, the house alive and listening, until now, and now it is just a house.
See, this is the part I love—I don’t believe, but part of me wants to, and it’s spectacular to get carried away by my imagination. My imagination and I haven’t been the greatest of friends lately; it abandons me whenever the second-guessing starts up.Not good enough. Not original enough. Delete and start again.
Thump.The floor beneath my right shoe quivers.
“It’s coming from below,” I say, keeping my voice hushed.
