Page 46 of Crazy Spooky Love
“Is there any electricity down there?” I ask, looking at Isaac, whose expression is enough to tell me the answer is a big fatno.
“I don’t think the bulb would still work, even if there was,” Artie muses, pulling his phone out and clicking the flashlight on. Marina and I do the same, and Isaac looks grudgingly impressed.
“You all carry torches?”
“They’re mobile phones. They have torches in them these days.”
He scowls. “Sometimes I’m glad I’m dead. All of this technology is beyond me.”
“You won’t say that if we find the murder weapon and technology helps clear your name.”
“I know we’re only getting one side of the conversation so I might be wrong, but you really should try to be a bit more grateful that we’re all putting our lives in danger for you here, Isaac,” Marina mutters, gripping the bottom of my T-shirt tightly as we follow Artie slowly down the cellar steps, our phones held aloft to light the way. It’s more than gloomy down here. I’m glad of the slim shaft of daylight that picks out the steps.
“Well, someone certainly liked their wine,” Marina says as she runs an appreciative hand over the dusty bottles laid on their sides in a rack built into one wall. As you’d expect from a place on the scale of Scarborough House, the cellar is quite large, and from what I can make out, it houses at least a century’s worth of junk.
“My brother and his cronies, and no doubt his son too.” Isaac’s sniffy tone tells me that he wasn’t a wine fan or, more likely, he never got the chance to live the high life if he was thrown out of the family in disgrace in his early twenties. I can’t imagine how life was for him after that; it must have had a pretty catastrophic effect.
“Did you never see your family at all afterward?”
“My mother sent for me shortly before her death.”
“She did?” I whisper in the darkness. “What did she want?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t come.”
I can’t make Isaac out in the low light and his monotone delivery tells me precisely nothing. I don’t know if he regrets not coming back to hear his mother’s final words, or if he’s still furious and would do the same again if he had to make the choice right now.
I don’t get much time to dwell on it though, because the cellar door above us suddenly slams decisively shut and plunges the place into complete darkness aside from our phones.
“Oh no!” I yelp loudly, horrified by the suddenHammer House of Horrorturn of events. Artie makes a similarly shocked sound, while Marina’s choice of words is far more explicit as she grabs hold of the hem of my T-shirt again and winds it around her fist to make sure we remain right next to each other.
“Is this the bit where we all get murdered?”
Her shaky whisper only scares me more. Marina does not, repeatnot,get scared. Neither do I. I see ghosts, remember? I am officially hardcore. Isaac is the only one who seems completely unmoved, most probably because he’s the only one among us who isn’t preoccupied by the possibility of imminent death.
“Let me go and see what the devil’s going on up there,” he says, agitated, and then he disappears into thin air, dispensing with his usual habit of observing the rules of the living because speed is of the essence.
“This is the first time I’ve ever wished I was a ghost,” Marina whispers when I tell them that Isaac has gone upstairs to investigate.
“You might be in a few minutes,” I joke, but unsurprisingly she doesn’t laugh. She goes to snip back, but I shush her because I can hear voices.
“Isaac is arguing with someone…Lloyd, I think?”
“What are they saying?”
“Shush,” I say, flapping a hand in the darkness as I strain to listen.
“I can hear them too,” Artie says suddenly, clutching my arm. “Oh my God, I can hear the ghosts, Melody!”
Marina lets go of my T-shirt. “Sorry, Artie. Unless we’ve both been bashed over the head and died at the same time, there’s living, breathing people up there, because I can hear them too.”
She pauses, and for a moment all I can hear is our own labored breathing.
“Women, I think?”
We all struggle to hear. She’s right. Behind Isaac and Lloyd’s heated debate, there are quieter female voices too. For a moment I fear Gran has turned up to meddle again, but why the hell would she lock me in a cellar? I listen harder, and no, it isn’t Gran, or anyone else I know well enough to recognize.
“I’ll just go up there and hammer on the door.” Marina stomps toward the steps but I hang onto her arm.
