“That does seem possible, but the evidence tells me otherwise. You said your little brother was six. Could he write?”
I stared at her, lost. “What?”
“Could he write?” Her voice was patient. “He would have been learning at that age. Some children take to writing faster than others. But the words on the wall downstairs are perfectly formed, and they are written in a straight line. They don’t look like a child’s lettering. And we’ve just established that Ben was never an adult.”
I shook my head. “He could—he knew some of his letters. His name.” I didn’t add that Ben was a slow learner because he wasn’t enrolled in school. He learned reading and writing from his siblings,and the three of us weren’t exactly disciplinarians. We didn’t try all that hard to teach him.
The fact was that when he died, Ben was a slow, sloppy reader, and he could barely write at all.
I had been too blind to see it. But I would know Ben’s handwriting, such as it was. And his handwriting wasn’t on the downstairs wall.
Charlotte took a small, slim book from her briefcase and handed it to me without a word.
“What’s this?” I took the book from her.
“It’s from the attic. It was propped up against a box.”
The book was yellowed, its few pages bound between delicate covers. A children’s book calledFairfield Rabbit.On the pastel green cover was an ink illustration of a fat rabbit with chubby cheeks and kind eyes, his ears flopping. The rabbit wore a striped waistcoat. The book looked very old.
“This wasn’t in the attic,” I argued. “I’ve never seen this before.”
“And yet it was there today,” Charlotte said.
I opened the cover and turned to the title page. The book was published in 1904. Written in ink on the corner of the page, the words faded with over eighty years of age, was an inscription.
To Edward Whitten, from his sister Anne. On his fifth birthday. August 3, 1905.
The handwriting was neat and straight. Schoolroom handwriting.
“Edward Whitten,” I said aloud. The words hung in the air of my bedroom, seemed to bloom in the dusty emptiness. The knuckle in my brain tapped again, as if the name was a memory.
I looked up and locked gazes with Charlotte. “Who is Anne Whitten?” I asked.
Something screamed.
I dropped the book and gripped my temples. The scream wound higher, stronger, reverberating in my skull. Charlotte dropped to a crouch, her hands over her head. Her mouth was open. She wasscreaming, too, but it wasn’t her scream in my head. It was something else.
There was a footstep in the hall, heavy and angry. It was the thing that had grabbed me in the living room. It was screaming, and it was coming.
I grabbed Charlotte’s instruments and shoved them into her briefcase. Then I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her from the room, toward the stairs. She sagged in my grip, disoriented. I dug my fingers in harder and pulled her down the stairs behind me.
Another step sounded in the hall behind me, and another. The scream wound on and on, in no need of breath.
Charlotte stumbled, but I kept her moving, getting behind her and pushing her down the front hall toward the door. Gripping her shoulders, I sidled past her and twisted the knob, kicking the door open. Then I shoved her past the porch and into the front yard.
The scream went silent. Charlotte fell to her knees in the grass, gasping. I dropped her briefcase beside her and spun to look at the house.
In an upstairs window, a shadowy figure moved, brushing one of the curtains. Then it was gone.
I watched for another moment as the ringing slowly subsided in my ears, but nothing else moved.
“Vail.” Charlotte’s normally calm voice was a rasp. She stood, trying to brush the dirt from her knees.
“You need to get out of here,” I told her. “You need to run from this place. Right now.”
Her skin was ghastly gray, her eyes wild. “What was that?”
“I don’t know.”
