The Haunting of Ashburn House Page 8

  Shivers ran up Adrienne’s back. Something had been creeping up on her, but she hadn’t even known it was happening until she held her breath and realised how perfectly, completely silent the world felt.

  It’s like last night. She approached the window slowly, cautiously, her breath held. The sun was seconds away from setting, and the moon and a thousand pinpricks of starlight illuminated the woods outside her house.

  She rested her fingertips on the sill and bent closer. Her breath created a small puff of condensation on the glass as she examined the world below. The window faced the town, and house lights created a glowing map of the settlement. The walk had only taken her fifteen minutes, but the village seemed an insurmountable distance from her vantage point.

  She tried to swallow, but her mouth was dry. The silence was pressing against her, squeezing her, making her feel feverish. The world was waiting for something, and every second that passed built the tension to overwhelming heights.

  Then it happened. Whatever had been building up released, like opening a floodgate, and the silence was shattered as a flurry of birds poured out of the treetops, their screams and beating wings a cacophony. Mixed amongst the shrieks was a screeching that only lasted a second before cutting off abruptly. Adrienne squeezed her eyes closed and waited for the sounds to fade.

  Just like last night. What is it? Do the townspeople feel it? Will they know what I’m talking about if I ask them, or will they think I’m crazy?

  The flutters and bird calls died away, and the woods were returned to peaceful rest. Adrienne stayed at the window and watched the trees and the town for a long time. The glass did a poor job of insulating against the outside air, and she was shivering when she turned back to the room.

  It was too dark to see anything except faint outlines in the moonlight. She briefly considered taking one of the candles to guide her climb downstairs but chose to risk a blind descent.

  She still wasn’t sure what the attic’s purpose had been, but she didn’t want to light a single one of its candles.

  14

  Missing Last Night

  The wooden boards were gone, clawed through, and her scabbed fingers dug into rich, tightly packed dirt. Her mouth was open, but there was no air left to drag into her starved lungs. The soil was crushing her, suffocating her, filling every crevice around her. It got under her eyelids and filled her mouth and made each twitch of her fingertips a battle. But she kept digging, scratching, clawing, fighting for every inch she gained. She could be patient. The dirt would not last forever.

  — § —

  A loud beating noise pulled Adrienne out of her dream. She started upright and inhaled. She’d been holding her breath as she slept, and a wave of dizziness made her grimace as she waited for the room to steady itself.

  What happened? Images of digging through heavy soil flashed through her mind, and she shook her head in an attempt to flick the memory out of it.

  She was in the bedroom Edith had prepared for her. The travel case sat in the wardrobe, and the laptop was already set up on the desk. It had been a battle to carry the case up the stairs the night before, holding the lantern in one hand and muttering choice swear words as she navigated the bend.

  The events in the attic had unsettled her, and she’d wanted to keep Wolfgang with her that night, but her fluffy monster seemed determined to roam during the witching hours and had refused to be picked up.

  The beating noise came again, and Adrienne realised someone was knocking at the front door. She scrambled out of bed and tugged some jeans and a jacket over her pyjamas. Jeez, I must’ve overslept. What time is it?

  A glance at the window made her blink in surprise. Okay, so I didn’t oversleep. Maybe this town just wakes up super early.

  The sun had risen but not by much. Wispy, smoggy clouds dimmed what should have been a brilliant sunrise into a faint, apathetic glow. When she leaned close to the glass, Adrienne could see heavy mist gathered about the yard and drifting between the trees’ trunks. Amid that was the silvery glint of a familiar sedan. Jayne?

  The knocks came again, this time beating louder and maintained for longer. Adrienne dashed out of the room, through the hallway of portraits, and jogged down the stairs. “Coming! I’m coming!”

  When I told her to drop by anytime, I didn’t expect her to take it so literally. Maybe she wants to have breakfast.

  Adrienne was breathless by the time she reached the door. Her hair was a disaster, she knew, but there wasn’t much she could do for it except run her fingers through it and flip it over her shoulder. She opened the door and grinned at the lady waiting on the porch. “Hey, good morning!”

  Her smile faltered. Jayne stood back, out of reach, and had her arms folded across her torso. Her face looked sickly and flat without any makeup, and her glossy hair was mussed from having fingers dragged through it too many times. Her expression held none of the warmth she’d shown the day before but a cold mixture of aggression and fear as she eyed Adrienne. “Is Marion here?”

  “Huh? No—uh—” Shock robbed Adrienne of coherency. Underneath the glare, Jayne’s eyelids were red and puffy, and dark shadows under them suggested she’d missed sleep. Adrienne took a step closer and extended a hand towards her friend, but Jayne flinched backwards, and her expression hardened. Something glinted in the hand she’d tucked under her other arm. A knife?

  Adrienne licked her lips. She was still foggy from sleep, but warning bells were starting to ring. “Why did you ask if Marion was here? Has something happened?”

  Jayne neither answered the questions nor took her eyes off Adrienne. The silence stretched until it was almost uncomfortable, then she spoke, her tone level and slow, as though she’d chosen the words carefully. “Did Marion come here last night? Have you seen her since yesterday morning?”

  “No.” The sense of wrongness was growing into hot anxiety. “Not since you dropped her off at work yesterday. Jayne, what’s happened?”

  The other woman was silent for another moment, then the hard, hostile expression cracked. She dropped her arms, and her face scrunched up as she fought against tears. “She’s missing—she said she was going to visit here after work—never came home—”

  “What?” Adrienne stepped onto the porch, and this time Jayne didn’t flinch away. A glimmer of silver flashed as Jayne pocketed the knife, then the other woman pressed her palms into her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Addy—I just—I don’t know what to think—I don’t know what to do—”

  “Okay. It’s okay.” Adrienne fought to keep her own fear out of her voice as she put her arm around Jayne’s shoulders and patted at her back. “Did she say why she was coming here?”

  “Yeah.” A drop hung from the end of Jayne’s nose, but she didn’t wipe it. “She felt bad that you didn’t have food and was going to bring you some stuff. Jams she’d made and tinned vegetables and things.”

  Adrienne scanned the misty yard as she tried to think. The early-morning bird chatter felt subdued to match the muted sun, and the frosty air was burning at her lungs. “Do you know what time she came here?”

  “Around seven last night. Not long after her shift finished.”

  “Have you spoken to her parents?” Adrienne cleared her throat as she realised how little she knew about the veterinary student. “Sorry, uh, does she have parents?”

  Jayne raised her head and rubbed the wet circles away from her eyes. She looked ghastly. “Yeah. I didn’t know she was missing until they called me at two in the morning. They thought she must have been with me. I’ve phoned Sarah and Beth and her boss, but no one’s seen her since she left work. This isn’t like her—she’s one of the most reliable people I know.”

  Crap. “Have you called the police?”

  Jayne shook her head.

  “You need to call them. Now. I, uh, I don’t have a phone. Do you?”

  “Yeah.” Jayne was already pulling a mobile out of her pocket. She looked at the screen and swore. “No signal. Hang on
, one bar—let me try—”

  Adrienne pulled the front door closed so that Wolfgang couldn’t escape and followed Jayne into the yard as the other woman searched for reception. Frost crunched under her sneakers, and the fog dotted her skin with tiny droplets as she waded through it. The air was intensely cold, and even with the extra layer of pyjamas under her clothes, she began to shake.

  Jayne looped across the yard, phone held above her head, as the single bar appeared and disappeared. They were moving towards the front of the driveway. Jayne’s car faced the exit, and the driver’s door stood open, waiting for its owner to dive inside to make a quick escape.

  She brought a knife and was prepared to bolt. What, did she think I murdered Marion or something? Adrienne twisted to see the house’s outline, dark and bleak, stretched high above them, and swallowed. Maybe she did. A stranger moves into the creepy house at the edge of town. Your friend goes to visit and never comes back. It’s like the start of a B-grade horror movie.

  Adrienne turned back to the driveway and stopped. A pair of tyre tracks led from the dirt drive to the edge of the forest. They were barely visible in the fog, but Adrienne didn’t think they’d been there before.

  A horrible, panicky premonition struck her. “Jayne? What time does the sun set around here?”

  “Huh?” Jayne had stopped beside her car and was still squinting at her phone. “A bit after seven, I think. Why?”

  Marion left work at seven. Sunset comes a little after that. And just after sunset, I watched the birds burst out of the trees and heard a strange screeching noise…

  Adrienne ran towards the forest, following the tyre tracks, her heart thundering in her throat and nausea rising in her stomach. Mist billowed around branches that had been snapped in half and trunks that had been scraped. Adrienne followed the path of destruction downhill for close to twenty metres, scrambling and slipping through the fallen leaves, before she saw the faint outline of a compact blue car submerged in the fog.

  15

  Search

  The car’s headlights were still on. They sent twin beams around the tree the vehicle had crashed into, and acted like spotlights through the swirling fog. It would have been beautiful if the implication weren’t so horrifying.

  Adrienne struggled to breathe. She slowed her descent as she neared the car, grabbing at the trunks to steady herself. The voice in the back of her mind was yelling that she should stay away, that she could be tampering with a crime scene, but the car’s door was hanging open, and Marion could still be inside. Adrienne couldn’t leave her there. What if she was in pain or—

  Some kind of ground-bound bird shot out of its hiding place in the weedy grass and crashed through the underbrush with a cackling, indignant cry. It startled Adrienne so badly that she stumbled, overbalanced, and hit the forest floor. She grunted, tried to roll into a sitting position, and slipped farther down the damp slope until she came to a stop beside the open car door.

  The driver’s seat was empty. She began to breathe again.

  “Adrienne? Addy?” Jayne was still at the top of the hill. Adrienne could see her coral-blue jacket between the trees.

  “Did you call the police?” Her voice was muffled by the mist, but it still seemed too loud for the reverential hush surrounding them.

  “No. Can’t get through.”

  “Keep trying. I found her car.”

  “What? Is she hurt?” Jayne began racing down the slope, crashing through the same trees and bushes Adrienne had plunged through a moment before.

  Adrienne rolled onto her knees then gained her feet. The area where the car had crashed was mostly flat, but the wet leaves were still treacherous, and she supported herself on the door as she looked in at the driver’s seat.

  The keys dangled from the ignition, and the internal lights were on, though Adrienne suspected the battery would be close to dead. A covered basket rested on the passenger seat. Adrienne scanned the headrest, seat, and windshield for any signs that her friend had been injured but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Then she caught the dull glisten of dried blood on the steering wheel. There wasn’t much, but its presence tightened her stomach.

  She drew back a little to see the front of the car. The bonnet had crumpled where it had hit the tree but not as badly as in some of the crashes she’d seen on the news. The force had evidently been enough to injure Marion—possibly a broken nose or a scabbed forehead where she’d jerked into the steering wheel—but the windshield was intact, and the airbags hadn’t deployed.

  Jayne skidded to a halt beside her and leaned through the doorway to examine the scene. Her breathing was ragged as she first locked onto the blood then peered around the front seats to check the back. “We need to look for her.”

  “Yeah.” Adrienne turned to scan the woods around them. “She might have tried to climb up to the house. Or she could have stumbled downhill if she was disoriented… which is kind of likely. We’re close enough to the house that I would have heard the car horn or loud yells, but she didn’t make a peep.”

  “I’ll go uphill,” Jayne said, already turning to begin the climb. “You search downhill. Call if you find anything.”

  “Okay.” Adrienne wrapped her arms around herself. She wished she’d had time to get a warmer jacket, but she wasn’t about to go back for one. If Marion were still in the woods, every minute she remained outside increased the risk of hypothermia. So Adrienne set her teeth, huffed in a frosty breath, and rounded the tree.

  The headlights blinded her as she stepped into their beams, and she had to feel her way through the trees for the first few paces. That part of the woods was largely made up of tall, thin-trunked saplings and scrubby grass, though she still caught glimpses of the occasional collapsed forest giant. The mist wasn’t clearing as she’d hoped it would, and it made her exposed skin sticky and damp.

  “Marion!” Jayne’s voice floated to her, sounding almost like a wraith amongst the trees.

  Following her friend’s lead, Adrienne inhaled deeply and called, “Marion!”

  She held still, listening, but nothing reached her except erratic, muffled drips and irritated bird chatter.

  If I’d just been in a car crash, and it were pitch-black, which direction would I walk in? She turned in a circle, scanning the bushes and trunks surrounding the car, hoping the other woman might have huddled close to the accident. The fog played tricks on her, turning rocks and fallen trunks into humanoid shapes. She tried to remember what Marion had been wearing the day before. She thought it had been orange; that would make her easier to see, unless, of course, Marion had changed after her shift at the vet.

  “Marion!”

  Please be okay. Adrienne swallowed the lump in her throat and began following the car’s headlights. She was working off the idea that a disoriented and lost person would follow the course of least resistance, which was directly downhill. She zigzagged her path as she descended to cover as much ground as possible, peering into hollows and around shrubs and staying alert for any freshly broken branches or crushed grass that would suggest a human had tumbled through them.

  “Marion!”

  What happens if we can’t find her? It would take fifteen minutes for Jayne to drive to town, at least twenty or thirty minutes to muster a search team, and fifteen minutes to come back. That’s a long time when the temperature’s this low. But is it less of a gamble than what we’re doing now?

  “Marion!”

  A shape caught Adrienne’s notice, and she hurried forward, hope blooming through her, only to be disappointed as the mist cleared to reveal it was a stone. She scrunched her face as panic, which had been growing slowly in the background, rose to the surface.

  What if she’s dead? She only came here because you said you were low on food. You even heard her car go off the road but didn’t recognise what it was. If she’s dead… it’s probably your fault.

  “Marion!” Her voice was hoarse and sounded dulled by the mist. She was shaking, and not
just from the cold. “Marion!”

  She dropped her gaze and saw she’d stumbled onto a little dirt path that snaked through the trees. The scuffed impression of a sneaker lay just past where she stood.

  Adrienne frowned and bent low to examine it. The mark was smaller than her own foot, and she doubted Edith had ever worn sneakers.

  It could be a child’s. Jayne said they sometimes came through the forest as a dare. She raised her eyes in the direction the footprint pointed and saw another just ahead of it. Or it could be Marion’s.

  “Jayne?” No one answered. She’d come farther than she’d thought; even the car lights had faded from view.

  Adrienne squeezed her lips together. The footprint was a poor clue but the only one she had, so she followed it, doubling over while she jogged so that she could see the erratic prints. She kept her own feet clear of the marks, knowing that they might be needed for evidence—Please, please don’t let it come to that—as she followed the dirt trail through the woods.

  The path was leading upwards in a slow, meandering course. It seemed to have been designed as a hiking trail rather than a direct route of access to anywhere, and Adrienne struggled to keep track of her location relative to the house. She suspected the building was about a kilometre to her right, higher on the hill, but wasn’t certain she could find it if she needed to. The hill was half joined to the mountain behind it, and it would be very easy to climb the wrong slope and end up lost in the deep forest.

  Even though it wove and looped erratically, the trail seemed to be curving to the right. It was badly overgrown, and more than once, Adrienne thought she’d lost the footprints before finding them again several metres farther on. The trees were changing. They’d been tall and thin around the crash site but were growing bigger, darker, and uglier the farther she walked. Trunks that had once been straight were gnarled and full of whorls and jagged branches, and although the boughs had fewer leaves, the larger sizes made them more efficient at blocking out the sun. The mist took on a luminescent glow in the few beams of anaemic light that made it through.