A tiny metallic pop met her ears, and then the wall to the right of the wardrobe swung out, revealing a dark staircase.
Corrie stepped from the shadows, her eyes glassy, one of Isis’s teddy bears clutched to her chest. She looked into the bear’s face, running her hand over the shaggy brown fur. Sarah saw Corrie’s lips moving but could not hear her words.
A little stone of fear rested in the pit of Sarah’s stomach as she watched Corrie.
Corrie started to sing, “One for sorrow, two for mirth.” She swayed from side to side, her voice high and unnatural.
She wandered from the room, petting the bear and leaving the wall open behind her.
“Three for a funeral, four for a birth,” she sang as moved away down the hall.
Sarah waited until she heard Corrie’s footsteps on the main staircase, and then quickly shuffled to the dark stairway.
She crept up the stairs, inhaling dust and a smell of smoke, as if a candle had just been extinguished. At the landing she stared into darkness, fumbling her hands along the wall for a light switch but finding none. She fished out her phone and pressed the flashlight icon.
She shone the light across the room.
An old brass bed, child-sized, was tucked in one corner. Several of Isis’s toys lay strewn along the floor.
On a little table beside the bed lay a doll, odd and misshapen.
Sarah walked closer and stared at the antique and ugly thing. Its cracked, leathery body looked like real skin, with little patches of matted black fur poking forth.
“Cat’s fur,” she whispered, imagining who would fashion a doll from the corpse of a cat.
Someone had sewn hair to the doll’s head and this hair, she was sure, was human. Long and blonde mixed with other colors, what might have been golden red, and darker black shot through with gray. The mother’s hair, she thought.
Crude mismatched buttons were the doll’s eyes, and a jagged line of red yarn created a mouth twisted in a lopsided smile.
Beneath her, something banged, and Sarah dropped the doll, startled. She took a moment to understand what the sound had been.
Corrie had closed the door to the secret room.
CHAPTER 13
Now
Sarah
Sarah clicked the light on her phone and pressed against the wall, expecting to hear Corrie’s footfalls on the steps. Instead she heard Corrie skipping back down the hallway, the muffled nursery rhyme drifting through the floorboards.
After several minutes, she turned the light back on, wanting to search the room but overwhelmed with fear that Corrie had just trapped her inside.
Sarah crept down the steps.
“I’m fine,” she whispered, nudging her panic aside to focus on the dark wall before her. When Corrie had emerged earlier, she’d heard a click. There had to be a handle of some sort.
Sarah glided her phone’s light up and down the wall, searching.
“There’s nothing,” she moaned, feeling a growing heat in the stairwell. She pulled her t-shirt away and waved it, wiping sweat from her brow with her forearm.
Holding the phone in one hand, she allowed her free hand to roam across the wall, searching for an abnormality, a little crevice, something. Minutes ticked by, but the wall was flat and unblemished.
She glanced at her phone, knowing there was no reception.
What would happen if she banged on the door? Would Corrie let her out?
She leaned forward, resting her forehead against the wall and it swung out, sending her sprawling to the floor in the master bedroom. She rolled sideways and sat up, listening. Had Corrie heard?
No footsteps started up the stairs, but Sarah waited, oddly afraid that Corrie would step into the doorway at any moment and fix her with that blank stare.
When her sister-in-law didn’t appear, Sarah hurried from the room and down the stairs. She paused at the great room and then peeked around the corner. No sign of her. From deep in the house, the study perhaps, a high, childlike giggle rang out. Sarah slipped out the door and ran to her car.
“I’M HAPPY YOU CALLED.” Brook leaned over Sarah from behind. Her wavy dark hair, streaked with purple, brushed Sarah’s cheek.
Sarah leaned back against her chair and shut her eyes.
When she’d returned home from Kerry Manor, she’d dialed Brook without a second thought. Each time she drifted away from the memory of the awful little attic, Corrie’s childlike voice would pop into her mind and conjure the experience again.
She needed a friend, she needed her twin. He was her sounding board, her voice of reason, but he was dead. She missed him, and the missing had a life of its own - like a ghoul hunkering in the corner, slobbering at her with its needy, desperate eyes. She wanted to shut it in a closet, return to business as usual, get on with the falling-in-love with Brook thing. But she couldn’t.
She imagined Corrie in that huge, empty house, singing like a little girl. In a day or two, Amy would return Isis, and then what? Was she safe with her mother?
Brook spun Sarah’s chair around. She straddled her, sitting on Sarah’s lap, and looked into her eyes.
“I read if you stare someone in the eyes for four minutes, you’ll fall in love with them,” she said, her eyes searching Sarah’s face.
Brook’s skin was smooth and pale, unblemished. She wore dark eye makeup that caused her green eyes to pop like jewels in her pale face.
When Sarah had introduced Brook to Sammy at the Halloween party, he called her Elvira and winked at Sarah, hinting that he approved.
Unlike many of Sarah’s friends, Brook teetered on the edge of something playful and dark. She was not a jock. She wore long necklaces with silver spiders and cat’s eyes. When she’d arrived, Sarah spotted a guitar propped in her passenger seat.
Despite barely knowing her, Sarah suspected if she confided everything to Brook, she would believe her.
“Did you know about Kerry Manor before Halloween?” Sarah asked, planting her hands firmly on Brook’s thick thighs. Through her jeans, she felt her warmth.
“Yeah.” Brook nodded. “I was obsessed with the house for about a year when I was thirteen.”
“Really?” Sarah asked. “Why?”
“I grew up in Suttons Bay, pretty close to Northport. Old-timers still talked about Kerry Manor, and kids went up there to peek around. It had the same kind of allure as the old asylum. Abandoned, spooky, the perfect place for a séance.”
“A séance? You’re kidding, right?”
Brook turned her eyes into tiny slits and let out a diabolical cackle, leaning her head back and exposing her soft, pale throat.
“My girlfriend and I conned our neighbor into driving us up there with a Ouija board we bought at Walmart. Scariest half-hour of my life. To be honest, that’s why I went to your brother’s party. Gloria invited me, and I like Gloria, but she’s not the usual type I chum around with, if you know what I mean?”
Sarah grinned, imagining Gloria pumping her arms as she sped around the skating rink, insisting that all things in life were a competition even if you were traveling in a circle.
“I can see how that would be the case.”
“But when she mentioned Kerry Manor, I was all over it. I’d never gotten the house out of my head, and I’d never gone back. Figured if there was a whole house full of people, I’d be safe.”
Sarah lifted her eyebrows.
“You were afraid to go back?”
Brook crawled her hand, thick with silver rings, up Sarah’s arm and traced her collarbone.
“Yes, I was.”