Liam stopped. “Bartholomew, you are a ghost.”
“I still don’t like this place. There is something here. Remnants of evil and pain. Maybe it’s in all this creepy stuff. Mummies, coffins, shrunken skulls. Evil spirits, the memories of pain and sacrifice and human suffering. Miasma on the air. Let’s get this done and get out.”
“Bartholomew, someone human was in here. Doors don’t unlock themselves.”
“What if evil spirits unlock them to lure in the innocent?” Bartholomew asked. “I may be a ghost, but we both know that evil isn’t something that dies easily.”
Liam wondered if Kelsey Donovan was going to have Joe Richter sell the place for her, or if she’d come to Key West herself. He’d have to ask Richter. If Kelsey was going to come down and move back into the house, he had to stop whatever the hell was going on.
“Cutter Merlin wasn’t an evil man,” he said.
Bartholomew sniffed, sidestepping a huge stone gargoyle probably procured from a medieval church somewhere in Europe.
The gargoyle’s huge shoulders hunched and the eyes seemed to stare at them with malice.
“They say he practiced black magic!” Bartholomew told him.
“People make up whatever they wish regarding an old hermit,” Liam said sadly.
“He was some kind of a wizard. Or a witch, maybe. Men can be witches, right? Yeah, that’s right. They hanged men as witches in Salem, Massachusetts. And in Europe, too,” Bartholomew said.
“They hanged a bunch of innocent people caught up in hysteria or a land grab,” Liam said firmly.
As he did so, he heard a scream again. Male this time, hoarse and curt…and somehow just as bloodcurdling as the first he had heard that evening.
The sound came again, a scream of abject terror.
Then, it was broken off. Midstream, as if the screamer had…
As if the screamer’s throat had been slit.
Ricky. Ricky Long, screaming from the ground floor….
And then—not.
Liam forgot Bartholomew and the idiotic imaginations of the masses and went tearing down the stairs.
2
Liam’s call had opened the door to the past.
Odd—that was actually what she had done in her mind, she realized. Closed a door. And as if that door had been real and tangible, she had set her hand on the knob and turned it.
Cutter Merlin, her mother’s father, had been so many things. He had doctorates in history and archaeology, and he had been the best storyteller she had ever known. His beautiful old house in Key West had been like a treasure trove, filled with things, and each thing had offered a story. She had loved growing up with the exotic. While her friends could be easily scared, she loved the idea that she lived with a real Egyptian mummy. At campfires she had told great tales herself, describing how she had awakened once to find the mummy standing over her…reaching out for her.
It had been great. The others had squealed with fear and delight.
Except for Liam, of course. She could remember the way he would scoff at her stories. He was two years older than she was, but in their small community they often wound up at the same extracurricular events, and even when they were in grade school, they had battled.
“Yeah, sure!” Liam said, mocking her story. “Like the mummy really got up. The mummy is old and dead and rotten, and if you let me in the house, I’ll prove it!” he would say.
“Ask my grandfather!” she’d dared him.
“I’ll be happy to,” he’d assured her. But he never did. He didn’t want to prove his words, because her stories made her popular.
And they were good stories, of course.
He’d been so elusive; that little bit older, somehow, even for a boy, more mature.
And sometimes, when they were grouped together out on the beach at Fort Zachary Taylor, she told stories that were true about the aboriginal tribes her grand father had known, getting a little bit dramatic by adding the fact that Cutter had barely escaped with his life—and his own head.
Liam listened, rolling his eyes at her embellishments.
She had been tall, since girls did tend to grow faster than boys. But Liam had grown quickly, too, and by the time they had reached their early teens, he had stood at least an inch over her, and when she would talk, he would lean against a doorframe, arms crossed over his chest, that amused and disbelieving look on his face.
But when her mother had died, he had been like the Rock of Gibraltar, telling her to go ahead and break down when she had tried so hard not to cry in public, and he had held her while she had sobbed for an hour. He had been her strength that night, smoothing her hair back, just being there, never saying that it was all right that her mother was dead, just saying that it was all right to cry.
And then…
Then she hadn’t seen him again. Her father took her away from Key West, hurriedly, one night. She had left most of her belongings, taking only one suitcase, because her father had been in such a rush.