New Decameron Seventeen: Elizabeth Wein (Patreon)

  Haunted House

by Elizabeth Wein

Sandy Nissley was the youngest of five children, and by the time she was ready for high school her father was retired. The Nissleys’ large old early twentieth century duplex at Twenty-Four-Twelve North Second Street had become three bedrooms and a whole storey too big for them, and Sandy’s parents decided to move into something a lot smaller. They weren’t going far, and Sandy would be closer to her school. The change didn’t turn Sandy’s world on its head. But she dreamed about the house she’d grown up in.

She dreamed extra attics and cellars for it. She dreamed she was sleeping in her own bedroom, and she’d always think in the dream: How amazing that I get to sleep in this house one more time! Sandy dreamed again and again about the staircases: the wide golden oak staircase at the front of the house, and the narrow, unlit utility staircase at the back. She dreamed she was crawling under the antique safety gate at the top of the back staircase. The gate was a lost childhood memory for her anyway, because it had finally fallen off and been used for kindling when Sandy was ten. It was strange to dream about it. Why did her mind keep showing her this random piece of woodwork?

Sandy dreamed she was trying to share the house with the new inhabitants, hiding her books and clothes and Barbies that she no longer played with under secret trapdoors in the closets.

She dreamed she was sitting next to her grandfather as he parked the car in front of her old house. “Welcome to Tara!” her grandfather would bellow in her dream, just as he’d always done when he pulled up at Twenty-Four-Twelve. The house was right on the street and had no front yard to speak of, but the wedding-cake columns of the three-level front porches and balconies made it look like a southern plantation mansion. “Welcome to Tara!”

Behind the white pillars and porches and balconies it was just an ordinary brick city house. When they decided to move, Sandy’s parents had lived in Twenty-Four-Twelve for twenty-nine years. Sandy had lived there fifteen of those. She’d actually been born in 2412. The slender pussy willow twig she had planted on a cat’s grave in the back yard when she was three years old had grown into a tree whose uppermost branches reached as high as the three tall storeys of the house itself.

Sandy knew every corner and stair tread, every iron radiator and painted brass doorknob and disused electrical outlet of the house by heart. She had roller-skated up and down the long basement and had climbed over the roof to rescue one of the cats on the morning her oldest sister graduated from high school. She knew how to turn each cranky skeleton key, and where to hold the door with your knee, so that the lock’s old unoiled tumblers would click and fall and you could open the balcony doors. She knew how you could push ashes of a dead fire into a little pan in the back of the fireplace and collect them from a drawer set in the wall on the outside of the house. She knew that there had once been a servants’ bell. She knew there had once been a sliding door between the dining room and the lobby, now boarded over and invisible. She knew the exact date of the claw-footed bathtub’s manufacture, printed on its hidden underside, which she’d discovered by lying on the chipped antique tiles of the bathroom floor and reaching under the tub to trace the raised cast iron lettering with her fingertip.

Sandy always imagined the houses in books in the image of her own. The long pier mirror above her living room mantelpiece led Alice through the looking glass; the tall wardrobe on the first floor landing, too big ever to leave the house when it changed owners, led to a land called Narnia. Once Sandy read a book that described a house whose stair treads were hinged and opened like boxes, and she explored her own house and found that the bottom step of the back staircase was also hinged, a small, neglected, empty cupboard which her parents told her had been filled with rotting fur when they moved in.

The Nissleys moved during the summer before Sandy started tenth grade. They were in and out of both houses, the old one and the new one, all summer long. Sometimes before Sandy opened her eyes in the morning she couldn’t remember which house she was in. On the very last day before they gave all the keys to the estate agent, Sandy went into every single room and touched every wall to say goodbye—even inside the closets. She couldn’t quite believe she was leaving the house forever.

After they left, Sandy avoided having to pass the house. She didn’t want to see other people going in and out. She didn’t want to see someone else’s porch furniture on the balconies, or someone else’s car parked out front. She’d been at school when the new owners had looked at the house, and had avoided meeting them while the move was going on. She was a little jealous of them.

But the dreams and the lingering homesickness and, finally, curiosity, overwhelmed her envy. Plus, her grown brothers and sisters were all coming for the Nissleys’ first ever Thanksgiving dinner in the new house, and Sandy wanted to be the one who could proudly tell them what was going on in the old house. So the weekend before Thanksgiving, Sandy took the Number Two bus to the corner of Second and Seneca Streets. She crossed the familiar intersection, climbed the heartbreaking sandstone steps to the proud and silly porch (“Welcome to Tara!”), and rang the new doorbell.

The door was answered by a lanky boy who was about her own age but nearly two feet taller than Sandy. She recognized him from her high school varsity basketball team. He stooped a little, unaccustomed to his height, a sheepish Michael Jordan look-alike.

“Hi—I’m Sandy Nissley. We both go to William Penn. I—I used to live here,” Sandy managed to blurt, feeling like an elementary school kid in the shadow of the boy’s extreme height.

“Cool,” he said. “I’m Justin Bell. Didn’t you used to live here?”

“I grew up here,” Sandy said. “I was born here.” It came out sounding like, “This is my house.” She started to apologize; but then she was inside.

She had expected it to be the most surreal moment of her life, living the dream. But it was perfectly ordinary. It was a house—lived in, furnished. The battered swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room was gone. A new chandelier hung over the dining room table. The walls, which had all been painted a stark white when Sandy had lived in the house, had been papered. It was different. It was no longer hers.

The boy brought her through the house to the kitchen, where his mother sat at a table doing a crossword puzzle. The Bell family had installed a new kitchen, with the sink facing the back yard and the fridge next to it, everything in the wrong place in Sandy’s mind.

“Hi,” said Sandy to the boy’s mother as she looked up, startled and inquisitive, but friendly. “I’m Sandy Nissley. I used to live here. We owned this house for twenty-nine years. I grew up here. I’m not checking up on you. I just got homesick.”

It came out in a rush.

“Well, come for a tour,” said the woman. “I’m Ginny Bell. So I guess you were here during the Hurricane Ida flood? That must have been something.”

“There was eight feet of water in the living room,” Sandy said proudly. “We had to live in the Route 83 Quality Inn for four months while everything got fixed. I can show you how high up the staircase the water came.”

They shared secrets. The Bells had uncovered newspaper from the 1920s under the linoleum when they’d re-laid the kitchen floor. The Nissleys and the family in the duplex next door at 2410 used to decorate the front pillars together at Christmas. Sandy and Justin and Ginny Bell traded stories like old friends, although they had nothing in common.

They had everything in common. They had the house in common. 

“I used to open the windows up here when it snowed,” Sandy said, in the larger attic room, which she used to share with her older sister Karen. “The traffic always sounded so different in the snow.”

The room smelled the same. The attic rooms had always felt a little as though they still belonged to a previous generation of owners; for a long time the Nissleys had not bothered to replace or paint over the dark gray tartan wallpaper that had been in those rooms when they bought the house, and until they had had the place completely rewired, the only electric light in the attic came from glass wall sconces that dated to the 1950s.

“We rewired the house after the Ida flood,” Sandy said. “Before that, there was no light at the top of the attic stairs. Me and my sister used to have to come up here, up these stairs, in the dark, every night, and then we’d have to feel our way down the passage into the main part of the room before we could turn on a light. When our cousins came to stay, none of them would sleep up here. Silly, though, because none of us ever saw any ghosts in twenty-nine years.”

Shut up, Sandy thought, stopping herself before she said anything else. These people must think I’m some kind of escaped lunatic.

“There is a ghost on the stairs,” said Justin.

Sandy stood still. She felt as though she were looking at the attic room from upside-down, as though her known world had suddenly shifted away from her, leaving her standing in a parallel universe.

“Oh, Justin,” said his mother in derisive tones.

“There is. I saw it twice when we first moved in, and Cecile sees it all the time.”

“You never seen no ghost in this house,” said Ginny Bell, mock-boxing Justin’s ears, though he was taller than his mother.

“What kind of ghost?” Sandy asked, her voice very low, because she was afraid that if she tried to speak normally she would reveal herself by squeaking.

“It climbs up the back stairs,” Justin said, and Sandy’s skin crawled. She must have shivered, because Ginny laughed.

“Don’t go scaring people, Justin!”

“No,” Sandy said, trying to rally her wits. “I’m not scared. It’s just that—it’s so unfair! I was born here, I lived here all my life, and I would have given anything to have this house give me some clue about its past—you found newspaper under the floorboards and a ghost, too—”

She stopped, hearing herself sound ridiculous. “What kind of ghost?” she repeated.

“A little girl. Cecile, my little sister, she saw her on the front stairs, but I’ve only seen her in the back. This ghost walks up the back staircase—” Justin paused, for dramatic effect “—and then it crawls onto the landing.”

There was a silence.

“That’s it?” said Sandy.

“That’s it? It creeps me out,” said Justin. “Why does this little girl suddenly go down on her hands and knees at the top of the stairs?”

“To crawl under the gate,” said Sandy.

“The gate?”

Sandy glowed with pleasure. She could explain a quirk of the house that made no sense to its current occupants. “It was a sort of half-gate. A safety gate, to stop you running down the hall and falling down the back stairs in the dark. When you came up the stairs you had to reach over the top to unlatch it, but if you were little, you could just crawl under it. I used to crawl under it all the time.”

Ginny listened with the most peculiar expression of awe and disbelief mingled in her face. Sandy’s own story matched and verified her children’s fish tale.

“Whose ghost is it?” Justin asked.

“Maybe the people who first lived in the house?” Sandy guessed. “I was born here. Maybe other people were, too.”

Sandy went home on the bus bursting with the news. She wanted to tell her favorite sister, the one she used to share the attic room with, and couldn’t wait for her to arrive on Wednesday. She called Karen at college.

“Hey, Sandy!” Karen greeted her. “Is the new house ready for Thanksgiving?”

“Twenty-Four-Twelve has a ghost,” Sandy announced over the phone.

Karen, at the other end, was silent for so long that Sandy thought they must have lost the connection.

“Hello? Hello?”

“I’m here. I thought you said Twenty-Four-Twelve has a ghost. Honey, you need to move on!”

“I went to visit our old house. I talked to the people who live there now. They were really nice, I liked them, I felt like they were taking care of it. But the thing is, the boy who lives there now, he and his sister have seen a ghost climbing up the stairs.”

There was another long silence, and then Karen finally asked cautiously, “The back stairs?”

“Yes!” Suspicion suddenly cut through Sandy’s excitement, and the nape of her neck was revisited by the curious skin-crawling feeling she’d had talking to Justin about it. “What makes you think the back stairs?”

Karen said flatly, “I’ve seen it too.”

There was another pause.

“YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME,” Sandy screeched into the phone, and the other bus passengers stared at her. Sandy scrunched down in her seat.

“No,” her sister said, and Sandy could hear how serious she was. Karen repeated, “I did see it.”

“This is so unfair,” Sandy hissed.

Karen laughed, a little nervously. “Unfair?”

“I always wanted that house to have a ghost. It needed a ghost. I needed a ghost. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You were just a little girl,” Karen said reasonably. “You were too scared of the dark to go up to our bedroom by yourself. No one else ever said anything, why should I?”

As soon as she got home, Sandy did an internet search for the street address.

2412 N 2nd St

2412 North 2nd St

2412 N Second St

Bingo.

She found the address in the scanned archives of the local newspaper dating to June 1918. A couple by the name of Robert and Elaine Kauffman had been married in the house.

Applying herself with more dedication and careful research than she’d ever invested in her schoolwork, over the next couple of days Sandy tracked down their aging grandson—also called Bob Kauffman.

“I’m going to send him a Christmas card,” Sandy told Karen as they sat at the table in the new kitchen breaking up breadcrumbs for the Thanksgiving turkey stuffing. “Next week won’t be too early—and it’ll give me an excuse for sending him the story I found in the Evening News.”

Karen wasn’t disapproving, but she wasn’t as enthusiastic about the idea as Sandy was.

“Don’t do anything embarrassing,” she said.

“Like what? What’s embarrassing about ‘I used to live in your grandparents’ house and I found this wedding announcement for them and I thought you’d like to have a copy’?”

“Like say, ‘I used to live in your grandparents’ house and it’s haunted and I wish you could tell me who haunts it.’”

Sandy said nothing.

“Please don’t mention the ghost,” Karen pleaded.

Sandy didn’t. But in her card to Bob Kauffman she did pour out her own long confession of homesickness and possession. She mailed it before she had time to regret it, and when she did regret it, she tried to forget about it.

A week later, Bob sent her a Christmas card in return. It was an oversized card with a picture of snowmen on skis. And tucked inside it was a homemade DVD.

The silver DVD fell into Sandy’s lap as she opened the card with shaking hands.

I didn’t tell him about the ghost, Sandy reminded herself frantically. She couldn’t remember exactly what she had told him, because she’d written it all in the card in purple ink in a fit of daring and hadn’t done anything sensible like compose and save the message for editing on the computer. I told him a ton of stuff about the house but I KNOW I didn’t tell him about the ghost, because Karen said I shouldn’t, and I didn’t want him to think I was crazy.

“Dear Sandy Nissley,” Bob Kauffman’s handwritten Christmas card began. “Thank you so much for sending me my grandparents’ wedding announcement from the 1918 Evening News. I did not grow up in your old house, but my mother did. My grandmother lived there until I was ten and I used to visit her.”

Sandy felt as though she were doing something illegal. She folded the DVD back into the card, went into the bathroom, and locked the door. Then she got out the card again and read it the whole way through.

“The house was far outside the city center when I was a boy,” Bob’s letter went on. “My grandpa owned seven lots in that part of town, and your old house stands on three of them. That’s why the house is so much bigger than the houses around it. Grandpa’s duplexes stood smack in the middle of an enormous lawn surrounded by trees, because he owned all the land around the building. When my grandma died and my mother inherited the duplexes, she sold the lots on either side and used some of the money to redo the bathrooms and upgrade the electricity and get the sidewalks paved. But she could never bring herself to sell those houses; she only ever rented them. My sister and I sold them myself, when our mother died and left them to us.

“My mother grew up in 2412, just the way you did. You said you think houses collect memories, and 2412 collected some good ones. My grandmother was married from that house and so was my mother, twenty years later—married on the front porch. They put garlands of roses and ivy around those big white columns. The guests all stood on the front lawn and in the street. There weren’t many automobiles then, and they held up the street car service for an hour that day, special, so that the wedding wouldn’t be interrupted. They had the reception in the garden with a tent, and a band, and electric lights hanging in the trees. A couple of those trees are still there, the basswood in the yard behind 2416, and the big Norway maple between 2416 and 2418.”

This information—a history, a story line, a life for the house that dominated her dreams—left Sandy reeling, despite Bob’s dry telling. How grand it was, that a tree in a garden two houses down the street once stood in her garden. A wedding on the front porch, wreaths of roses draped over the balconies, the city bus service officially halted for an hour!

“You’ll wonder how I can describe all this,” Bob Kauffman’s letter continued, “when I wasn’t even born at the time. Well, there’s a film of my mother’s wedding made in 1938, would you believe it? They hired a professional filmmaker. They couldn’t do any shooting inside in those days because they didn’t have the lighting for it; so my mother and dad standing on the porch don’t show up too well, but the house does look a treat. We had the film transferred to digital a while back. I’m going to enclose a copy for you, because you liked the house so much, and I think you’d like to see a picture of it in its glory days.”

The letter was signed, “Your friend, Bob.”

That was the DVD he’d sent—the 1938 film of his mother’s wedding.

But Sandy couldn’t watch it right away. Her father was watching TV, and her mother was at the computer in the new den, and Sandy’s laptop didn’t have a DVD drive. She’d have to wait till she got home from school the next day. She wasn’t sure how she’d explain what she was watching, either. Maybe she could watch it at a friend’s house? She’d have to plan—

OH MY GOSH, Sandy thought, I’ll be too excited to sleep tonight, thinking about it!

But she did sleep.

She dreamed she was there, at Bob Kauffman’s mother’s wedding. She went in through the back door, into the kitchen. The house was in its glory, in its prime; settled, no longer new, but not yet old, either. The transom window above the kitchen door, long since painted shut, stood open. Sandy stood in the kitchen for a moment trying to place the familiar and yet unknown wooden cupboards, polished hardwood shining with brass knobs and hinges. Then she recognized them as her father’s basement cabinets, long ago painted white, the paint now cracked and peeling as the wood warped and the drawers stuck permanently open, their useful life finished by the Ida flood.

In Sandy’s dream of 1938 there was no one in the kitchen. The house stood expectant but uninhabited, all its attention focused on the wedding ceremony taking place on the front porch. Sandy opened the door to the back staircase and went up. At the top was the little wooden gate she had crawled beneath as a child. It, too, had been painted white by the time Sandy knew it, but now its dark wood was polished as highly as all the other wood surfaces of the house, its brass catch gleaming. She crawled under the gate, a tight fit now that she was in high school, just for the pleasure of doing it again.

The doors to all the bedrooms were closed, and Sandy felt so strongly that she was an intruder in someone else’s house that she didn’t dare open them. She tiptoed down the hall until she reached the landing where the main staircase continued to the third floor, and she began to climb. Sandy paused on the landing halfway to the attic to look out, and saw a wide lawn decked with little tables. She blinked, and looked again. She had never seen anything from this window but the blank brick wall of the house next door, a dozen feet away.

At the top of the stairs, Sandy went into the larger of the two attic rooms, the one that faced the street, the one that had been her own bedroom. Details leaped out at her: a brass electric wall sconce that was older than any she had ever known, the floorboards shining and smelling of fresh wax. The brass doorknobs and lock plates of the room and closet were polished to glittering. Sandy went to her favorite window, opened it and leaned out. She couldn’t see anything immediately in front of the house, because the balcony hid the street below.

It was quiet, because (she knew) the wedding was in progress, and Sandy couldn’t hear the individual words of the ceremony being spoken on the porch two storeys below. She could hear cicadas humming, jays yelling in the tall shade trees, and the coo of a single mourning dove—familiar sounds, the sounds of her own street. Only it suddenly occurred to her, after a long time, that in her dream the birdsong was unbroken. There was no traffic.

But then she heard, distantly, the final wedding hymn, and a little orchestra beginning a bridal march. Sandy watched the camera crew on the balcony of the house across the street pack up their heavy, old-fashioned equipment, and then she went back down to the landing window so that she could watch the camera crew putting up the equipment again on a little platform on the other side of the lawn. The crashing pandemonium of the first trolley car coming down the line after the wedding startled her so much that she woke up.

Sandy lay awake in her new bedroom, across the city from the house where she had grown up, and thought about the ghost she had never seen. She longed to have the house belong to her in some secret, special way, some way that would make it hers forever. But she had left it, now; there were no more secrets for her there, no more of 2412’s opening stair treads or sliding doors or cast-iron dates for her to discover, no previous generation of linoleum for her to uncover, no porch swing to restore some day on those empty hooks on the terrace, no trees to plant. She, who knew the house more intimately than anyone ever could, who had climbed both its front and back balconies and over its roof, who had slept in every one of its five bedrooms and touched every single wall of every single room for goodbye on her last day there: she didn’t belong there any more. It wasn’t enough to know that the family who lived there now loved and kept it. Sandy wanted it to be hers forever. She wanted to haunt it.

She hid herself in the living room with the DVD while her father was making chili and her mother was wrapping Christmas presents. Sandy slid the disc into the player and muted the sound. As the black and white film appeared on the screen she laughed at herself for muting the disc.

There wasn’t any sound. It was a silent film.

There, on the television screen in miniature and in black and white, was the imagery of Sandy’s dream. There was a panned view of North Second Street in June of 1938, white concrete glinting with double trolley lines, grassy sidewalks twice as wide as Sandy had ever imagined them, no traffic, not even a single car parked by the curb. Elm trees dappled everything with leafy sunlight; they were dead now, stricken with blight long before Sandy was born.

Sandy’s subconscious filled in the color and sound where her conscious mind saw only black and white and heard only silence. Sandy watched the opening sequence of tree and track and rewound it all three times before she dared to let the eye of the silent, long-dead cameraman show her the young house at 2412 North Second Street.

It stood, unbelievably, recognizably, her house, in the center of a sea of behatted wedding guests. Sandy paused the film again to gaze—all those people, focused on her house. There, in the cathedral gloom of the flower-draped front porch, were the shadowy figures of the wedding party, the bride identifiable in white; and look, there was a porch swing, on the hooks Sandy had never seen in use—where was the cameraman standing? He was managing to fit in the entire house—you could even see a little figure leaning from one of the attic windows.

Sandy stopped the tape.

“I dreamed this,” she said aloud. “I watched those cameramen from that window. They were on the balcony of the house across the street.”

She slapped her hand over her mouth and glanced over her shoulder at the door. Why did this feel so secret?

Because it was crazy.

Sandy pressed play, unable to stop herself.

The bride and groom kissed and walked down the wide porch steps together, out of the shadow of the house and into the sunlight of the vanished garden. There was the basswood Bob Kauffman had talked about. There was a carriage house, half-hidden behind the reception tent—Sandy let out a strangled yelp of excitement, pausing the DVD again and getting down on her knees in front of the screen in an effort to see. The vanished carriage house was a little miniature of 2412 itself, complete with dormer windows and wedding cake columns.

Then the filming switched to a different location, and showed wedding guests milling in the garden and a band playing at the side of the house. It was Sandy’s house and not her house: this view didn’t exist in her mind, shot as it was from somewhere in space that was now the middle of the house next door. The tall bay windows of 2412’s dining room stood open (Sandy couldn’t remember ever having seen them open in her lifetime), and the trumpeters stood inside them, facing out, above the rest of the band. The iron rail fence that Sandy remembered lining the narrow concrete path between 2412 and the house next door was gone; the path was gone. The lawn stretched out in a broad unbroken vista of this vanished summer day. None of it remained but the house itself.

Look, they are bringing blocks of ice up through the cellar door. There is a trellis covered with morning glories over one whole side of the back porch. And someone is watching it all from the window of the third floor landing, just the way I did in my dream.

Sandy watched the film through in fits and starts. Then she watched it again all at once. Then she watched it again slowly.

And then she quietly took the DVD out of the player and hid it in her bedroom.

That night Sandy went to bed with her mind reeling with images of her old house, but she slept soundly, content. She didn’t dream of anything she could remember.

As Sandy was getting ready for school the next morning she picked up the DVD to take with her. She wanted to make a copy of it for Karen. She put it back in the envelope Bob Kauffman’s Christmas card had come in, and noticed that there was another slip of note paper folded in the envelope which she hadn’t seen when she’d opened the card.

“Hope you enjoy the film,” Bob wrote. “I watched it again before I sent it to you, and I think it’s a beautiful piece of work for being as old as it is. There’s a strange thing about this movie, which I forgot until I watched it again tonight. If you look closely, throughout the film you can see someone standing in the attic window, or else the window on the third floor landing. No one ever figured out who that person was. There were a lot of people coming and going that day, but it’s strange that even during the wedding ceremony, when everyone else was out front, there’s always someone watching from the house. My mother used to say it was ‘the Spirit of the House.’ She said it was captured on film in this recording of her wedding. She used to see the Spirit of the House when she was a little girl. The Spirit was a girl about her own age, she said, climbing the back stairs and crawling under the stair gate. It couldn’t have been a ghost, because her parents built the house themselves. My mother thought it was the house’s own soul, I think. Maybe that’s a little crazy, but you said a house can collect memories, so maybe a house can have a soul, too. 2412 North Second Street has a good soul.”

The Spirit of the House?

But I dreamed I was watching from those windows before I saw the DVD, Sandy thought.

I am the only inhabitant of that house who has never seen its spirit. But in my dreams I do exactly what the spirit does.

Sandy laughed hilariously, unbelievably.

Sandy haunted her own house.

She sighed, content. She had left her mark on the house after all. Now she knew she could leave home.

**************************************************************

"She was the ghost! She was the spirit of the house, she was the ghost, I knew she was, did you know she was? Before she knew, I mean? I love that she was the ghost! I've never seen a story that does that!" Maya says

"I was sort of guessing," he says.

"And that's a new story, right? Never published anywhere before? We should nominate it for all the awards next year, the Nebula, the Hugo, the Nobel prize!"

"You get the Nobel prize for a body of work, not one story," he says, grinning.

"Well she has a great body of work, she should totally get it."

"All right," he agrees. "You've got a point. And you didn't have trouble believing in that family?"

"There was a family? I believed in the girl and the house. They were the important characters. She was the ghost, I love that so much." Maya is beaming.

"Another?" he asks. "Or do you want to race around the library to get rid of some of that energy?"

In response, Maya jumps up and starts to run. He runs after her, and they arrive back at the chairs almost together, but with Maya still just a little in the lead. The cat is back on the librarian's table, curled up on the mousemat in a patch of sunlight. He flicks an ear and opens one eye as they hurtle past then closes it again hastily,

Maya flings herself back into her chair. "All right, what next?" she asks.

"The Curse of the Mummy Paper, by Anna Tambour," he says, picking it off the top of the stack.

She takes the book and they read.