Page 80 of The Premonition at Withers Farm
The door refused to give, and Molly looked wildly around for a tool or something to break the window beside it. She was desperate now. Desperate to get out of the house.
A crowbar! She remembered seeing one on a shelf in the basement.
Fear ironically gave Molly the courage to run down the stairs. The gravestones in the wall seemed to move. The unfinished names and dates swirled as if she were suffering from astigmatism and seeing double. Molly’s foot caught the edge of a plastic bin. She sprawled onto the floor, her fingers jamming into the concrete edge of the covered pit in the basement floor.
Molly scurried away from it on her hands and knees. She caught sight of the crowbar and grabbed for it, pulling herself up by holding on to the plastic shelving Trent had installed.
Twisting around, Molly rushed back to the stairs. Her feet met the wooden step, and hope pushed her up the first few stairs. She lifted her face to look at the door she was about to bust open, but she was instead met with the back of the basement door. Closed? The poltergeist had shut the basement door!
Molly twisted the doorknob, shoving the door with her shoulder. It refused to open. It wouldn’t budge. It was a heavydoor, the old kind that wasn’t hollow but solid. Something had either wedged it shut or held it shut from the other side. She couldn’t recall a lock on the door. Molly banged on it with her palm.
“Let me out!” She banged again, then hefted the crowbar and tried to hook it between the door and the jamb. It didn’t budge either. Of course, the basement door would be more solid than anything else in this place!
Molly bit her lip, tasting blood. She rammed the crowbar against the wood of the door, hoping to bust through. It bounced off as if she were hitting rock. What was this door made of? Molly lost her balance and grappled for the wall before she fell down the steps.
Her backside hit the top step. Molly lost her grip of the crowbar and it clattered down the stairs.
Tendrils of fog drifted through the crack between the floor and the bottom of the door. They were coming for her. A spirit seeping through the seam, and it would float upward, morphing into the form of, who? January Rabine? Was she the one haunting? Angry? The Withers sisters from 1910? Had they never left this place, or did they—?
Molly stiffened.
Her delusions cleared for a moment. The fog was no ghostly apparition. It was—smoke? It was coming in stronger now. Thicker. She heard footsteps pounding on the floor above her.
“I watched her die.” The words replayed and cut through the terrorized and delusional haze of Molly’s brain. “I watched her die,” she repeated aloud, grounding herself in reality. It had been a human voice. An admission. A final confession. Not an otherworldly entity but someone all too real, all too dangerous.
And now they would watch her die.
Here in the gravestone basement.
26
Perliett
The sky was dark, and Perliett blinked groggily. Her head was pounding, the pain shooting from her neck through her scalp. Her back was sore, lying on uneven ground. Cornstalks rose on either side of her, blocking out the moonlight. Leaves, sticky with their sharp edges, scraped at her face.
Perliett groaned, flexing her left shoulder that felt as if a fist had bruised it. She couldn’t remember what had happened, but her mother—she was at home, unconscious—that was it! She’d been trying to get help. The whistling. The chuckle...
Her eyes flew open. Tassels from the stalks hung over her. Perliett tried to sit, but everything in her ached. She moaned, wiping at her face with the back of her hand. When she pulled it away, she saw darkness smeared across it. Blood?
She’d been attacked. Perliett knew it now. She frantically ran her hands down her body. She was still clothed in her nightgown, but it was torn at the hemline and under her arms. She pulled her legs up, feeling them. They throbbed with the pain of being beaten by something hard.
A memory pulled at her.
Tough hands grabbing her from the road, dragging her into the corn as she screamed. A hand clubbing the side of her face to silence her.
Now Perliett screamed again, this time a shortened version of the long one she recalled ripping through her throat and leaving it sore. She batted the spider away that was crawling on her leg, its hairy legs tickling her skin. Perliett managed to get to her knees. Further inspection of her body brought her relief that she was only bruised, battered, but not violated and no broken bones.
She sucked in a shaky breath. The cornfield stretched like dark sentinels in rows. The road was nowhere in sight, yet Perliett sensed she was not alone.
“H-hello?” she whispered. Using a full voice felt too startling, too dangerous.
The wind blew across the cornstalks that rose over her head. The corn rustled. Something snapped.
“London Bridge is falling down...” A child’s singsong voice filtered through the stalks.
Perliett whirled, trying to see through the shadows and rows of corn.
“...falling down...”
