Page 42 of Monstrous Travels as Wicked as Sin

Joe passed the tip of his tongue swiftly over dry lips. “Thanks.”

The floor held a thick layer of dust, recording each footprint as they stepped into the towering room. The walls were decorated with tapestries, paintings, everything old and antique and too much of all of it, mismatched and matched so that it should have been welcoming. The look was right, but every inch held a creeping dread, as though the décor itself breathed and desired their cruel demise.

Three interior doors came off the entranceway, and Percy led them directly forward and into a grand lounge. Everything, again, was thoroughly covered in that thick dust. “How long ago did Althea say they left?”

“Six months,” Joe supplied. “Seven now, since she’s been with us.”

Percy, in the centre of the room, turned sharply. “It can’t be. This dust— It’s on everything. And it’s undisturbed. How could that build up in seven months?” He ran a finger along the length of a picture frame, examining the brown powder that coated his fingertips. “It’s very fine.”

Joe dropped down, the floor creaking as he passed his hand across the smooth wooden boards. “This doesn’t feel like dust.” He ran his thumb over the soft, yielding brown. “And it’s dark. Too dark. It feels like?—”

“Ash,” Percy finished. His eyes went to the grand fireplace, black and gaunt and towering over them. Perfectly unused. The fresh logs that awaited burning were covered in just as thick a mess as all the rest of it. The lounge, the cushions, expensive ornaments Percy had seen Cleo buy at auction—every speck was covered in an even film. “What the hell’s happened here?”

Joe watched as Percy turned his attention to the ceiling—the floorboards of the level above. Anticipating Joe’s question, he supplied, “It’s carpeted. Whatever might be up there… It can’t explain this…”

A vase flew across the room and hit the wall with a loud smash, narrowly missing Joe’s head as it went. The vibration, the thump against that wall, set loose a chain reaction along the floorboards above, and a slow, thin shower of dust fell over their arms, hands, shoulders, all through their hair. Percy slowly turned his hand over, watching the almost weightless particles settle there.

He was shaken, to say the least. Shaken by the change and the tone of a place he knew well. Shaken by the rising fear that he had no idea what any of it meant. Child sacrifice was awful, routinely, yet he had steeled himself for that inevitability. This was something different. The house that seemed alive all around them. The death that seemed to have invaded the very ground upon which the house stood. The betrayal, if it was that, by his friend…

The first solid shards of doubt slid into his gut and hardened there with every speck of dust that settled over him.

This had to be larger than Cleo—larger than anything she could have done—because Percy had his suspicions about what that ashy substance was, as it touched their lips, landed on their eyelashes, as they breathed it deep into their lungs. And despite everything he had seen and heard, Cleo, doing what she would need to have done to make this—it was too incongruent.

It must have been something else.

Something much, much worse.

“We should do a search.” Joe was careful to hide his fear and disgust when he spoke, because Percy had never looked quite like he did at that moment. Not in front of Joe. They had a job to do, and there was no chance Percy would walk out on it, therefore Joe offered what little protection he could by taking control. “A methodical search. We’ll start on the left side of the house and work our way through. We’ll do the downstairs first, then we’ll go up. Stick together, make two clear sets offootprints, and we’ll check the dust for anyone else’s tracks as we go.”

The tight line of Percy’s jaw shifted ever so slightly. “Ghosts don’t leave footprints, handsome.”

With a glance at the broken vase, “If it’s only ghosts we’re dealing with, we’ll be fine. It’s not like we haven’t done it before.”

Percy’s shoulders softened, and his eyes mellowed a little, from confused and verging on desperate, to warm, with a touch of melancholy. “I’m glad you’re here. It gets very old doing this sort of thing alone. And it’s nice that it’s you.”

The infernal terror pounding at his every fibre was the only thing that prevented Joe from melting into a useless heap. It was one of those moments he felt like Percy’s only one. It brought his heart very close to bursting to be needed like that, the rare time Percy showed that soft shade of vulnerability.

Joe held his hand out, and Percy gladly took it.

CHAPTER TWENTY

MORBID MATHS

The two were in firm agreement that enabling a fast escape from the haunted house was probably a wise idea. They took the coffee table and a chair from the lounge to the same part of the wall they’d climbed over, and erected a sketchy platform.

This being done, they reentered Cleo’s home, and threaded their way through the wide and ever-changing lower floor. It was, just as Percy had said it would be, a strange time capsule. Items extravagant or intimate that had belonged to the many previous inhabitants were strewn here and there. Pieces raided from antique shops and opportunity stores. All of it curated with a loving eye.

For the second time in as many days, Joe got the unwelcome feeling of a vague… ‘fondness’ wasn’t the word, because he was set to despise Cleo from day one, but… He felt the presence of a whole and full person who must have had a sensitive temperament at times. He couldn’t help but imagine her placing that broken milk jug on the mantelpiece. Worthless, Percy said, but, to Joe, it was still pleasing. Something of a past and a home. Families sharing meals. The conjuring of the eye of the person who found it in a shop long ago and fell in love with it on thespot. That first honest and simple burst of love—an expression of the little hopes—the great hopes—people sometimes pin on inanimate objects.

Percy was quiet, but he filled the occasional too-long silence with guarded comments on certain items. Guarded, Joe knew, because it might upset him to hear too much about the way Cleo and Percy, together, related to those items. How many had he steered her towards? How many had he delighted in the discovery of? How often had he admired her taste and wealth?

Not where the John Constable painting was concerned, at least, Joe knew. Percy had once described Constable’s work as ‘cloying and dull all at once, with an offensive knowingness’. Joe got a small, pleased kick out of the hate-filled glare Percy sent the thing when he laid eyes on it a moment after Joe had. He couldn’t help but wonder what it was doing there. Did she love it? Was it an investment?

At about the midpoint of their reconnaissance, Joe paused at a small doorway leading through to a low hall, the floor of which was the only place they had discovered thus far that was free of the clinging dust. He stared warily down the passage for a time, and the longer he stood there, the less inclined he felt to explore it. The house was already disturbing, even for one as well versed in the supernatural as Joe was, but that passage… A kind of vertigo began to overtake him, and while the logical side of his mind told him his very purpose in being there was to explore such strange and forbidding areas, there was an accompanying nausea, a clawing dread, that prevented him taking a step closer.

Percy appeared at his side, his voice making Joe jump at the sudden reminder of life. “You feel it too.”

“The bricked-up fireplace?” asked Joe, eyes deep in the void.

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