“No, I don’t,” Blake said calmly. “I think that was it. I don’t think it was even a very big one. There may be a few small aftershocks later,” he said, trying to soothe everyone.
“You said there wouldn’t be any earthquakes.” Sybil glared at him accusingly.
“It was just a small one, Syb,” he said insistently. “Welcome to San Francisco, kids,” he said to his children, trying to make light of it. “It’s fine.” Nothing had fallen or gotten damaged. It had just scared the hell out of them. They had never experienced an earthquake before.
“Do you think we should go downstairs and make sure nothing fell and broke?” Sybil asked, worried. They had candelabra with crystal drops, a lot of lamps, and a number of small delicate objects that could have fallen in the rooms downstairs. And dishes in the kitchen that could have slipped off the shelves if the cupboards had opened.
“You can if you want to,” Blake answered. “I’m sure it’s fine.” None of the others were anxious to go anywhere, in case it wasn’t over, or the aftershocks would be too strong. “Why don’t we watch something on TV?” Blake suggested to the children and switched on the remote. All three piled into their parents’ bed, where they saw on CNN that it had been a 5.1 earthquake on the Richter scale in San Francisco, with the epicenter 150 miles away, where it had registered 6.4. It wasn’t huge, but it had been a noticeable quake.
“I’m going downstairs to check,” Sybil said in a soft voice, and Blake nodded, and indicated that he’d stay with the kids.
Sybil turned the lights on in the second-floor hall, and headed down the stairs to the main floor. She wanted to check the living room and the kitchen to see if anything had fallen and broken, and she had just passed the dining room when a woman in a grand gown walked past her. She looked like a dowager, and she looked right at Sybil and spoke to her clearly as she leaned on her cane.
“I thought the chandelier was going to fall right on my head. We have to ask Phillips to check it tomorrow.” And then she narrowed her eyes at Sybil, as a man in a kilt approached her. “And what are you doing downstairs practically naked?” She looked sternly disapproving at Sybil and headed toward the stairs with the man in the kilt, who was reassuring her that it had only been a small quake. As Sybil stared at them, a little boy ran past her, with a terribly pale young woman holding his hand, as a man and a woman left the dining room less hastily and smiled at Sybil, and a tall, handsome young man in white tie and tails asked her if she was all right. There was a young woman with him in an evening dress, and Sybil felt as though she had lost her mind as she tried to answer them and couldn’t speak. And as she turned to look at them on the grand staircase, where they’d been headed, she saw them disappear, and suddenly she was alone in the main hall. She looked at the family portraits she and Blake had hung, and she knew exactly who they were. And while she tried to absorb it, a stern-looking man also in white tie and tails stared at her from the dining room doorway and closed the door. She had no idea who he was, and she didn’t know the names of the others, but they were clearly the Butterfields who had lived there a century before. She was shaking as she ran to the kitchen, saw nothing broken, decided not to check the living room, and raced upstairs. As she entered her bedroom, she was breathless and deathly pale.
“Are you all right?” Blake asked her, and she shook her head to indicate that she wasn’t, and then remembered the children in their bed, whom she had momentarily forgotten about completely in the terror and confusion of what she’d just seen. “I’m fine,” she managed to croak out, as Caroline stared at her more closely.
“You’re pale, Mom. Do you feel sick?”
“The earthquake just took me by surprise—I’m fine,” she insisted, lying down next to her daughter on her pillow and waiting for them to leave. They had all calmed down an hour later, when their father switched off the TV.
“The excitement is over, back to your rooms,” he said firmly, and went to tuck Charlie in, while Sybil lay on their bed, trying to understand what she’d seen. She knew who, but couldn’t figure out how or why.
“What happened to you?” Blake asked her when he came back from putting their youngest son to bed. “You looked like you’d seen a ghost.”
“I did,” she whispered so Charlie couldn’t hear her, still pale. “Eight of them…nine including a man I didn’t recognize in the dining room. They were all leaving the dining room, talking about the earthquake, and headed up the stairs…and the old dowager accused me of standing there naked in my nightgown…and when they reached the top of the stairs, they all disappeared. All of them! They were the people in the portraits, even the little boy.” Her voice was shaking as she described them to him.
Blake grinned at her as she lay there looking terrified. “What did you drink while you were downstairs?” Sybil sat bolt upright in bed and glared at him in frightened fury.
“Don’t give me that! You lied about the earthquake, you said there wouldn’t be one, and now we just had one on our second day. And a whole family of ghosts just walked past me in our new house. No wonder the bank practically gave it away. They must have been scaring the hell out of people for the last forty years!”
“Sybil, please. You’re upset about the earthquake. It jarred your mind. Besides, the bank would’ve had to tell us if anyone had seen ghosts here. It’s the law.” Legally, in California, the bank had to disclose it if a house was thought to have ghosts, but maybe they didn’t know.
“I am going to jar your head if you don’t listen to me. I just saw the whole Butterfield clan leave the dining room and walk up the stairs and disappear. Two of them talked to me. The young man in uniform in the portrait downstairs. He was in white tie and tails. He asked if I was all right. And the old dowager scolded me, and I saw the old man in the kilt, he was talking to her. And they all saw me, I could tell. I saw them, plain as day.” She was badly shaken and Blake was skeptical.
“Do you want a drink now?” he offered, trying not to make fun of her, but he thought the shock of the earthquake, and the fear, had played tricks with her mind. She was obviously more afraid of earthquakes than he’d realized.
“I do not want a drink. I want to know what the hell is going on here. If our children start to see them around the house, they’ll be out of here in five minutes, and this house is toast. Especially Charlie.”
“I don’t know anything about psychic phenomena, but if you didn’t imagine it, maybe earthquakes shake ghosts out into the open. I’m sure they’ll disappear again if that’s the case. They weren’t in the front hall to greet us when we got here, after all.” He couldn’t take her seriously. It sounded absurd to Blake. He was a practical person, but Sybil was too.
“No, but they could have been. Maybe they’re all here in the house, just waiting to scare us away.” She looked panicked.