Page 118 of Home Before Dark

I understood—as best as one could in a state of such extreme exhaustion—that I was probably going crazy. These weren’t the actions of a sane man. But each time I was on the cusp of leaving the kitchen, something happened to remind me that I wasn’t insane.

Baneberry Hall was.

During my twenty-hour vigil in the kitchen, the house had been alive with noise. Sounds no home should make under normal circumstances. Sounds that I had nonetheless grown accustomed to hearing.

Music trickling down from the third-floor study and quietly drifting through empty rooms above.

“You are sixteen, going on seventeen.”

The sound of William Garson walking up and down the second-floor hallway, punctuating each step with a strike of his cane.

Tap-tap-tap.

And at 4:54 in the morning, a familiar noise from the study, so loud it reverberated through the house all the way down to the kitchen.

Thud.

Curtis Carver, I now knew. Hitting the floor when life left his body. An action his spirit was doomed to repeat every day for as long as Baneberry Hall was still standing.

But no sound caught my attention more than that single ring at two p.m. It was, after all, what I had been waiting for.

“Hello?” I said.

The same bell rang again. The Indigo Room.

Other bells began to chime a total of four times, repeating the pattern that made me understand the ringing in the first place.

HELLO

More bells rang. Four of them. One on the first row. One on the second. Back to the first, where the first bell in the row rang. Then again at the second with the chiming of the row’s second bell.

Together, it spelled out my name.

EWAN

“Hi, Curtis.” I coughed out a rueful chuckle. Yes, I was now on a first-name basis with a ghost. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

One bell.

I

Four more bells from all over the wall.

KNOW

“Then you also know I need your help.”

The last bell on the second row chimed—the start of a three-ring answer I knew well.

YES

“Then help me, Curtis,” I said. “Help me stop William Garson.”

One bell rang.

N

Then another.

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