Liam pulled out his phone and called the station. Jack, on the desk, answered the phone.
“Get a car out to the Merlin place for me, will you, Jack? I’ve got some teenagers.”
“Sure. Are you arresting them?” Jack asked.
“No, I just want them taken home. But I think there’s still someone in the house. The lights are down. I need some backup.”
The three teens were still huddled in front of him. He hung up and asked their names. The girl was Jane Tracy, the boy with the roller was Hank Carlin and the last was Joshua Bell. They had just come in as a prank.
“You know, it’s like…it’s like a haunted house. Like at Disney World,” Hank said. “We just wanted to have some fun. We weren’t going to steal anything. Please, can we get out? It can kill you, too, Officer, you don’t know…it’s terrible!”
“The Addams family…the Munsters…,” Jane said. “We just wanted to see. They said he had all kinds of treasures…Can we just get out?” she begged again.
He didn’t blame them. There was something creepy about the house. The hanging utensils cast strange shadows in the glare of his flashlight, while a rocker by the fire seemed to move. Dust motes seemed like misted forms in the artificial light, as well.
“All right, come on.”
He turned, and the three came running up behind him like metal drawn to a magnet; he thought he’d trip, they were so tight against him.
Scared. They had scared themselves in the place. They’d wanted a spooky challenge; they had found one in the Merlin house.
They went out to the porch. Liam hoped the patrol car would hurry. If the door had been unlocked, someone else had gotten in. That someone might have provided the shadows and touches that had scared them so badly.
He wanted to find the trespasser before it was too late.
The three remained stuck to him like glue while they stood on the porch. “Hey!” he said. “You’ll be home in a few minutes. Look, there’s someone still in there. That person was trying to scare you out. But it’s a good lesson. No trespassing. It can be dangerous.”
“They weren’t just trying to scare us, and it wasn’t any person,” Jane said. “They wanted to kill us—they would have killed us. They were ghosts, evil spirits!”
“Jane, it’s just a house,” Liam said.
“Then the house wanted to kill us.”
“What makes you say that?” he asked.
“Because we heard it!” she whispered. “We all heard it! It was horrible, a horrible whisper in the darkness saying, ‘You’re going to die. I’m going to kill you.’”
“And he was there,” Joshua said gravely. “I saw him. I saw old man Merlin. His eyes were burning in the darkness. I felt him, felt him put his hands around my throat.”
“He shoved me,” Jane said.
Just then the patrol car arrived and Art Saunders and Ricky Long emerged. “Art, get these three home,” Liam instructed. “Ricky, come with me. Lights are out, and I want to search the place.”
“Yessir,” Art called. “You three, get your little juvenile-delinquent butts into the car,” he said to the kids.
Ricky Long had been with the department about three years. He was a good cop. He’d seen some bad things in his brief stint.
He looked sick as he walked toward the house.
“You want me to search it with you, sir?” he asked.
“Ricky, it’s a house. If there’s something in it, it’s flesh and blood. Yes, we’re supposed to guard lives and personal property. I’ll take the upstairs, you take the downstairs.”
Ricky nodded slowly.
Liam left him to search through the ground floor. Upstairs, he went methodically from room to room, aware that Bartholomew was at his back.
“I don’t like this place,” Bartholomew whispered.
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.
Chapter Two
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