“Why can’t we find it?” Evie asked. “I don’t understand why I can’t find the entrance. It was here before. It’s almost…” It’s almost as if the house is hiding it from us, she’d started to say. “Let’s keep looking. I’m sure I must be remembering it wrong. There’s a parlor to the right.”
They came to it, but the parlor’s pocket doors were closed. “These were open before.”
With effort, they slid them open. Jericho’s flashlight moved slowly around the room. But it was different, too. The sheets had been removed from the furniture.
“It wasn’t this way before,” Evie whispered.
“It’s like it was expecting us,” Jericho said quietly.
“Why did you say ‘it’?” Evie asked. Jericho didn’t answer, but they were both feeling it—the house. The house was waiting.
Evie’s flashlight beam crawled across the walls. They seemed to bow outward just slightly. Like lungs, breathing, she thought, and then chased the thought away. It was hard to see anything in the gloom. Her beam traveled to the broken mirror, blinding her with the reflection. She blinked, and in the afterimage she could swear she’d seen somber, ghostly faces. Gasping, she swung the light around, but there was nothing behind her. The house groaned and creaked.
“I don’t like this,” Jericho said.
“What choice do we have? If we don’t stop him now, tonight, he’ll manifest fully. And then we can’t fight him.”
“But we don’t have the pendant anymore. How are we…” He lowered his voice, as if the house might be listening. “How are we going to bind his spirit?”
“We’ll find something else,” Evie whispered back. “Or we’ll burn this place down if we have to.”
Jericho moved his hand up and down. “Do you see that light?” He followed the thin beam to a rosette carved into the fireplace. “I think there might be something behind this.” He put his face close, trying to see.
“Jericho, don’t!” Evie called suddenly.
A gust of dusty air blew into Jericho’s face. He coughed and sputtered and waved it away. It had a sickeningly sweet smell, like dying flowers. Jericho blinked and shook his head.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. Fine,” he said, but his voice shook.
The fireplace flared to life, and Evie and Jericho both jumped.
“He knows we’re here,” Evie whispered.
“How can he know that?”
“I think… I think the house is telling him. We have to hurry. What time is it?”
Jericho checked his watch again. “Eleven twenty.”
“You said that last time I asked.”
Jericho moved his watch into the beam of Evie’s flashlight again. The second hand wasn’t moving. “It’s not working. It was working fine before we…”
Entered the house. He didn’t need to say it.
“I don’t like this,” Jericho whispered, wiping beads of sweat from his forehead. He was a bit glassy-eyed, and Evie wished that he had his full strength. “You think that whatever is keeping his spirit alive is hidden somewhere inside this house?”
Evie nodded.
“Then I say we waste no time. Let’s burn it. Burn it and run.”
The wind gusted against the house and it groaned. Will had been very clear that they needed to dispatch the ghost of John Hobbes on his own terms: They should bind him to the pendant and burn it. But the police had the pendant, and Will was in custody. It was up to Evie and Jericho.
“Burn it and run,” Evie agreed. She grabbed one can of kerosene. There was an awful lot of house to cover. “We have to destroy it utterly. I’ll take the upstairs. You work down here.”
Jericho shook his head. “I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
“Jericho, be reasonable.”
“No. We stay together.”
“Let’s get to work, then.”
They moved quickly from room to room, splashing kerosene over anything that might burn. Evie crept up into the attic room that had once belonged to Ida Knowles. Through a crack in the boards nailed to the window, she could see the city in the distance. People were out there, reveling, dancing, celebrating the comet’s return, with no idea what it signified. From downstairs came the faint, dull thrum of music. It sounded vaguely like voices raised in the singing of a hymn. She motioned Jericho to stop sloshing the kerosene and stand still, but she no longer heard it.
