Total pages in book: 171
Estimated words: 159050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 795(@200wpm)___ 636(@250wpm)___ 530(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 159050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 795(@200wpm)___ 636(@250wpm)___ 530(@300wpm)
Knight was frozen to the floor, so still he could hear the rhythm of his own heart. This was madness if he ever saw it. “He would have tossed you away and buried you so that everyone forgot you ever existed.”
“He wouldn’t have, because unlike all those other men, I’d have been there with him willingly.” The way Elliot melted into the darkness in the far corner was unnerving at best.
“Go on then. Ask him. That’s where he died. I’m pretty sure he’ll answer his superfan,” Knight mocked, but he hated the cold tremors running down his arms like ghostly fingers.
Instead of coming back with yet another made-up argument, Elliot looked around with eyes wide as saucers. The flashlight made his shadow dance over the wall like a giant spider. “Mr. Fane? William? Can you hear us?”
Knight’s skin crawled when some rodent moved close by, scratching the floor with its claws, but he leaned against the wall and just watched Elliot. “Yeah, William Fane, we’re waiting!”
Elliot looked like a ghost himself with the wig and white makeup exaggerated by pale light. Seeing him like this, walking the floor that obscured the devil’s sigil, made Knight imagine William Fane pacing between those walls and thinking of new ways to torment others.
“You have to excuse my friend’s rudeness, Mr. Fane, but I assure you he and I are nothing alike. All we want is some answers.”
“Come out, come out,” called out Knight, blowing vapor out of his lips.
Elliot closed the door quietly, as if there was a baby napping somewhere that he didn’t want to wake up. “Just in case,” he whispered. “We invite you back, Mr. Fane.”
Another scratch had Knight looking toward the corner, but it was followed by another, coming from the same direction even though there was nothing to see there. Had rats made a nest under the floor? But before he could seriously consider that possibility, his mind registered a pattern in the noises, one that didn’t make any sense at all.
Footsteps.
Elliot glanced toward the door but the sounds weren’t coming from the staircase. They were inside. As if the room were much bigger and the person was approaching from afar, from beyond the wall across from Knight. Though it was surely rats, or someone’s footsteps echoing from the floor above.
The empty chamber felt like a walk-in fridge, and Knight wasn’t sure if it had been that cold when they first entered. His skin was crawling with goose bumps, and he itched to leave, but how would that have looked like in front of Elliot? If Knight proposed they leave so soon he’d have surely think Knight was a scaredy cat panicking over ghost stories at midnight.
“Is that you, Mr. Fane?” Elliot asked, and Knight wished he’d just shut up. No, he wished he hadn’t teased Elliot. The silence thudded in his ears, so complete as if there was a vacuum around the room. And then, a voice.
Coming from behind his back.
“Guests. How delightful.”
With his joints stiff as rusty cogs Knight turned around, and his stomach sank all the way to the bare floor.
William Fane stood between him and the only exit. The portraits hadn’t done justice to his features, which were firmer and more masculine than it was strictly fashionable for a man of his position in the early 1800s, but it was him. Knight had so little doubts about the man’s identity that his head was already spinning with uncertainty. Was he going mad?
The burgundy suit Fane wore was as immaculate as it could possibly be, but the spots of a matching color on the fine vest of cream silk told a story very different from the way William Fane used to present himself in public. His hair was on the shorter side and styled into shaggy waves, his lips redder than they should be on a man, and so were his cheeks, stained with some kind of rouge.
Knight could barely breathe.
Elliot stood equally frozen, staring at the solid presence with his lips parted. “Is this for real?”
Fane turned his attention to Elliot, pale eyes moving slowly, emotionless as if he were a reptile. “Oh, it is very real, my dear boy. You wouldn’t revoke your invitation after all, now would you?”
“Never,” Elliot whispered, already taking a step toward the apparition.
“I would,” Knight hissed in a frenzy. He should have known this could happen. The devil himself had dominion over this place. What had he been thinking to ask a ghost back into the world of the living? “I revoke the invitation.”
“Don’t!” Elliot shoved Knight without much strength.
Fane cocked his head to the side and laughed out loud. His voice carried as if there was an echo in the room when nothing like that happened to Knight’s and Elliot’s speech. “Don’t be ridiculous. You cannot revoke an invitation to my own house!” He frowned and bared his teeth at Knight.