The Haunting of Ashburn House Page 17

  So Edith is responsible for the missing articles. Why? I could understand it if the stories had become a curiosity in the town and people were reading and gossiping about them, but it sounds like no one had touched the newspapers since they were donated to the library. That means Edith wasn’t stopping a problem but… preventing one? Was there something in those articles that could incriminate her in her family’s deaths?

  Adrienne, winded, slowed to a brisk walk as she started along the forest trail. She couldn’t believe her mind had jumped so quickly to considering Edith’s guilt. It goes to show how powerful circumstantial evidence can be. Edith was the only surviving family member, and she removed the evidence from the newspapers, and that’s enough to implicate her. But Greg already said the police discounted Edith as a suspect. Besides, it stretches believability to think that an eight-year-old could kill and butcher four able-bodied adults.

  Daylight had morphed into twilight, but she was making good progress along the path and soon reached the zigzagging steps. She jumped up them, paused to catch her breath at the top, then set off at a jog.

  The missing body is another matter. It seems too coincidental that it was removed within weeks of Edith’s return to town. Unless… unless there was someone in Ipson who wanted to torment her. Digging up a loved one’s body would be a horrible but creative way to do that.

  It was growing hard to see. Adrienne followed the zigzagging path as well as she could, but shapes blended together in the twilight. She was still five minutes from the house when she realised she’d gone off the trail.

  She turned, bent, and hunted for the path. It’s already so dark. How long until sunset? One minute? Two? Anxiety made her breath come in quick, low pants. She tried to retrace her steps but suspected she was going in the wrong direction and couldn’t guess which way to turn to correct herself.

  The house is on top of the hill. As long as I keep going up, I can’t miss it. Unless I end up on the mountain instead…

  A bird burst out of a tree ahead of her. It spiralled into the sky in a flurry of wings and squawks. Adrienne froze, shoulders hunched and shopping clutched against her chest, as she waited for the phenomenon to shake the rest of the birds from their boughs.

  It didn’t.

  She blinked at her surroundings and realised night had fallen. For the second day, the sunset panic hadn’t returned.

  Thank mercy.

  With no deadline looming over her, Adrienne could afford to take a few minutes to find the torch in her shopping bag, tear the packaging off, and load its battery. The torch was designed to clip onto a keychain, and its beam was narrow and weak compared to the store’s more expensive brands. But it would be a small and handy substitute for the lamp in case the power was cut again, and it would work well enough to guide her through the forest.

  Even with the light, she was forced to move carefully. The moon was as good as full, but very little of it permeated the canopy, and the forest floor was littered with debris. On several occasions, she stepped on a pile of dead leaves, expecting solid ground below, only to have her foot plunge into a hidden hole.

  The daytime birds were near silent, but night creatures were waking up. A colony of bats chattered behind her, and she even caught a faint, high-pitched wail that she thought might be a fox.

  She was just starting to worry that she’d trekked past the hill and was climbing the mountain when she started noticing the darker, sickly trees that she associated with Ashburn. She began breathing a little more easily and quickened her pace.

  Something shifted to her right, and Adrienne turned her light towards it. The narrow beam danced across a patchwork of foliage and shadows, but she couldn’t see anything sentient. She licked at her dry lips and kept walking.

  The startle had planted the idea that she was no longer alone, and it was hard to shake. Adrienne started imagining she could hear leaves crunching barely ten paces behind her, mixed with low, ragged breathing. She turned, panning her light in a slow arc, hunting amongst the gently moving boughs and trailing vines. There—the dull glint of an eye! She fixed the light on the area, but it was empty. Her skin turned clammy, and her heart knocked against her ribcage.

  Being careful not to remove her light or gaze from the forest, Adrienne reached into the shopping bag and searched for the mace amongst the food.

  A branch snapped to her left. Logic fled. Adrienne turned, ran, stumbled, righted herself, and ran again. The light arced wildly as she moved her arms, providing stuttering glimpses of her surroundings. She was making too much noise to hear if she were being followed, and she no longer tried to point herself uphill but aimed for any gap she could see between trees, her only goal being to put as much space between herself and the stranger as possible.

  Her foot caught in a vine. She cried out, fell, and rolled down a shallow incline. Branches stabbed at her. The crunching leaves sounded like a storm in her ears. Adrienne felt as though her heart might explode, but then she slumped to a halt, and the world was still and quiet once again.

  She didn’t move for a minute but kept her eyes closed and focussed on her surroundings. The heavy taint of organic decay came from the leaves and filled her nose. An owl chattered nervously behind her. Unlike in the earlier, cramped sections of the wood, she couldn’t feel any branches or bushes touching her. She lifted her head, opened her eyes, and saw why.

  Her fall had landed her in a clearing. The canopy was thinner and allowed more light through, which rained down in slanted cold-blue columns. Several hit the headstone; they made the aged rock look as though it were almost glowing.

  A cemetery for one.

  Adrienne rose carefully. She tried to assess herself without taking her eyes off her environment. Her ankle felt sore. It had twisted but not too badly. She could put her weight on it at least. The torch lay behind her, its beam uselessly directed at a tree trunk, and the shopping was scattered from where it had spilt out of her bag. She retrieved the torch first then shook the bag so that she could see inside. It only contained two bowls of instant noodles, so she dropped it and began searching around the area, moving the light slowly to pick out shapes and colours amongst the detritus.

  Whenever she found a piece of her shopping, she threw it back towards the bag, but stopped when she uncovered the mace. She tore it out of the packaging and squeezed the canister in her palm. The weight, small as it was, reassured her, and she allowed herself a few minutes to let her pulse slow.

  “This is good.” Her voice sounded strange; it was tinny and thin and seemed to be sucked into the woods. “It’s less than a minute to home from here, and we know which direction to go. We’re going to be fine.”

  She returned to her bag, shovelled all of the shopping she’d found back inside, and hooked it over her elbow. She thought she was still missing a few packets of food, but they could stay there until morning.

  A branch snapped, and Adrienne backed into the clearing as stress choked her. She tried to tell herself it was fine, that branches broke by themselves all the time, that no one could approach her without her hearing them, that the mace would protect her from anything that stalked through the night. But the primitive, instinctual part of her screamed for her to run.

  The forest was eerily quiet. She hadn’t heard anything since the owl’s anxious cry several minutes before. There were no bats, no birdcalls, not even any insects. It was horribly, nauseatingly similar to the calm that had come in the minutes before the sundown phenomenon.

  She turned back to the clearing, desperate to get her bearings and find the path that would lead home. The glittering tombstone drew her attention, and Adrienne frowned as she stepped closer. There was something wrong with the gravestone’s shadow. It stretched long and black ahead of the marker, but its angle didn’t match that of the rest of the shadows, and it was far darker than it should have been.

  Terrified prickles spread over Adrienne’s arms as she stopped at the shadow’s edge. She tried to swallow, but her throat wouldn’
t work.

  She wasn’t standing at the side of a shadow after all. Spread out ahead of her was a deep, black hole.

  The grave had been exhumed.

  30

  Unearthed

  She lifted her eyes to the tombstone. E ASHBURN. Forgotten But Not Gone. The gravestone was too old to belong to Edith but would be a close match for the Ashburn massacre. Eleanor.

  Or perhaps it was just the right age for a grave robbery that took place a decade later.

  Adrienne wet her lips. Pieces of the puzzle slotted into place, but the picture left her more confused than ever.

  Who dug up the grave?

  Disturbed earth had been scattered around the clearing. It was dry; the removal had to be at least a few hours old.

  Why?

  Her mind grabbed for an answer but found nothing. She couldn’t see a single reason for a grave to be exhumed when nothing of the corpse would remain and when the only person it held significance for had passed away.

  Unless…

  It was a stretch, but she couldn’t stop her mind from going there.

  Unless Edith was buried here after all. If she’d made a request to be interred with her mother’s remains, would it be honoured? Not in a city, probably, but in a small and personal town like Ipson…

  Leaves crunched as though flattened under heavy feet.

  Adrienne turned and slowly, cautiously raised her torch towards the forest’s edge.

  A woman stood there, chin elevated, gaze fixed on Adrienne.

  No. Not a woman.

  A corpse.

  Her steel-grey hair flowed behind her in horribly long, matted strands. Her skin, ancient and rippled with a lifetime of wrinkles, still held remnants of the grave’s dirt. She was naked, but her figure was so crooked and malformed that the shock of her nudity paled in comparison to the terror her form inspired. Death had not been kind; her limbs were set at crooked angles, and her spine had warped like a twisting river. Bones protruded under the draping flesh. Hips jutted out, and her flat, sagging breasts couldn’t hide the sharpness of her ribs.

  Adrienne took a stumbling step back. Her legs had locked up. Her mind screamed. But she couldn’t drag her gaze from the dead woman.

  Edith had no embarrassment for her nakedness or her contorted form. She held her head high, and a powerful, self-assured arrogance lived about her heavy-lidded eyes. They were bleached white, empty of iris and pupil but alert and aware regardless. She released a breath, the sound guttural and rattling and permeating Adrienne’s bones.

  She tried to run. The shopping bag’s weight disoriented her, so she dropped it. She had barely enough mental presence to maintain her grip on the torch and the mace. Her legs wouldn’t work the way she wanted them to; they felt as though they were tangling on each other, stumbling her, and her arms pinwheeled as she tried to catch her balance.

  A glance over her shoulder confirmed that she was being followed. Edith seemed to be in no hurry but strode forward in long, patient paces, her limbs’ awkward angles accentuated as they moved. Adrienne faced forward again and focussed on making her legs move in the right order, and quickly.

  She was amongst the trees in five paces. The forest tried to slow her, but she wouldn’t allow it to. She could hear Edith’s movements between the painful, sharp gasps that stung her throat. The corpse made a strange clicking noise, as though the cartilage had worn away from her joints, and the bones scraped together with each step.

  Adrienne prayed she was running in the right direction. Her path carried her uphill, which taxed her shaking muscles and made every breath scorch her lungs. Fear and adrenaline kept her moving, pushing her to make every pace longer, every turn faster.

  Branches stung as they cut into her face and arms. Her legs were jarred with nearly every step as she misjudged where to place her feet. But she couldn’t slow down; the clicking was drawing closer.

  How? She was only walking before—

  Adrienne risked a look over her shoulder then yelped as her foot caught on a root and tumbled her forward. She let the momentum flip her over, regaining her feet as they touched ground, and launched herself forward without caring how badly her muscles screamed.

  She’d only glimpsed the dead woman for a fraction of a second, but that sight had seared itself into her mind and refused her any respite.

  Edith had been scuttling. She’d moved on all fours, her twisted frame writhing as she pressed through the trees, using hands and feet simultaneously to grip the trunks, branches and roots to propel herself forward. Her head had been raised, eyes directed at Adrienne, jaw stretched wide in a hungry leer.

  The trees cleared, and suddenly, Adrienne was running across the open lawn. Ashburn, her sanctuary, blotted out the stars ahead of her, and she raced for it, begging her legs to carry her, praying that her heart would hold up for another dozen beats.

  Searing, burning pain cut into her ankle. It threw Adrienne to the ground, and both the torch and the mace skidded out of her grip.

  Too slow. Her mind was stretched to breaking, and she wanted to laugh. Too slow, too slow.

  She turned to face the source of the pain. Unlike in the forest, there was nothing to smother the moon’s cold light, and it brought the area into terrible relief. Edith, crouched and looking more like a leathery animal than a human, had sunk her teeth through Adrienne’s jeans and into her ankle. The corpse’s long, bony fingers tightened around Adrienne’s foot and calf to reinforce its hold. Her flesh was cold, as though she’d stepped out of a fridge, and that sickened Adrienne more than anything—more than her protruding bones, more than her opaque, bloodshot eyes, more than the yellow teeth that had grown far out of their gums.

  She thrashed, twisted, and tried to kick free. Edith only tightened the bite, cutting through muscle, and Adrienne screamed. She threw her head back and saw Ashburn. Its porch was only ten paces away. It taunted her, offering salvation but asking her to fight for it.

  Closer than the house, though, was a small canister of red and white plastic. Adrienne threw her hand back, touched the mace, and coiled her fingers around it. Edith’s jaw continued to tighten, squeezing, drawing rivers of blood until Adrienne’s foot felt as though it had been dipped in acid. She aimed the canister at Edith’s face and squeezed.

  Even in the moon’s cool light, she could see the spray burst over the cadaver’s face. Edith’s grip loosened, her teeth coming free from Adrienne’s ankle, as she lifted her head. Adrienne waited for the wails of pain, but no noise came. Droplets of mace settled over the corpse’s opaque eyes, but they did not blink.

  She can’t feel pain. Of course she can’t; she’s dead.

  The mace had confused, but not harmed, Edith. Already, she was returning her attention to the bleeding ankle. A long black tongue extended over her white lips, licking up the hot red liquid smeared there, and her dead eyes flashed as they focussed on the soaked jeans.

  “Please.” Adrienne tried to pull free, but the fingers only tightened, digging into her harder every time she flinched. “Please, let me go, Edith, please!”

  The corpse froze, a flash of shock twitching at the wrinkled skin hanging on its face.

  Adrienne took advantage of the second’s confusion and fought with the only weapon she had left. She raised her uninjured leg, channelled all of her strength into it, and kicked the corpse. Her sneaker hit Edith’s jaw and snapped the head backwards.

  The fingers released their grip. Edith’s neck twisted horrifically, far past the point of where it should break, until the vertebrae were visible through her throat. Then it began to tilt forward again, righting itself, allowing the white eyes to fix on Adrienne.

  She didn’t hesitate. As soon as the fingers’ pressure relaxed, Adrienne began scrambling back, kicking and hobbling and dragging herself to Ashburn’s porch with everything she had.

  The clicking noise told her Edith was following. Adrienne’s leg hurt enough to make her scream, but she pushed the pain back as well as she could, tellin
g herself she had to ignore it, had to move past it, if she had any hope of survival. The clicking was close enough for the bony fingers to grab her again, the teeth to bite, but she was already pulling herself over the porch’s top step, crawling to the door, stretching to reach the knob.

  “Eeeeeediiiiiiith…”

  The word was like dead tree branches rattling against each other. The stench of decay was thick. The handle wouldn’t turn; she’d locked the door when she’d left that morning. Adrienne bit back a terrified cry as she scrambled to pull the key out of her pocket.

  Fingers touched her. She flinched against them, but they didn’t try to grab her. They tapped and nudged and prodded over her legs and back as Edith’s corpse crept up to hover above her.

  The key was in the lock. It was at a bad angle and difficult to turn.

  The cadaver was so close, and its stench was overwhelming. Lips, cold and wet and rotting, brushed her ear. “Weeeeeep for Eeeeeediiiiiith,” the corpse whispered.

  Then the door was open. Adrienne pitched herself into the house. Edith tried to follow, the moon’s light shining off her bulging, laughing eyes, and Adrienne kicked the door into her face. It created a horrible crunching noise as it hit her skull, but Adrienne only kicked harder and harder, pushing against the pressure until the latch clicked closed.

  Everything was quiet and dark and calm for a handful of seconds. Adrienne drew in gasping, sobbing breaths, her eyes squeezed closed to block out both pain and terror. Then a low, steady scrabbling began as Edith clawed at the door.

  Adrienne wanted to lie there forever, to close her eyes to the world and never move again, but the scratching sound was moving higher as Edith lifted herself up the door. Adrienne rolled over, flinching against pain, propped herself up, and turned the lock.