Phantom Heart Read online

  So I’d been the one to keep us knitted together after the shattering earthquake of loss. As much as any eleven-year-old girl could. I’d learned how to change diapers. I’d done some trial-and-error laundry. I’d insisted on things like puzzle nights, and taco dates, and other things that removed us from our suddenly too-empty home. And I’d babied the baby when Dad hadn’t been whole enough to attempt it.

  I’d done all right. Up until tonight. When I’d finally reached the moment I’d always known would come sooner or later—though I never would have dreamed it would arrive this way. The moment when I wasn’t sure I could handle being the glue. When my years of life experience and my book knowledge didn’t add up to enough.

  On the bright side, it certainly felt better not to have to face this moment alone.

  I shut my eyes to stave off the tears that I’d managed to hold at bay this long. Instead of more sadness and fear, though, a gratitude so intense that I began to shake washed through me. And now, in order to keep from having a total breakdown, I had to squeeze the big warm hand that felt nothing like the last one I had clasped.

  Exhausted and numb, I tried to fit some of the puzzle pieces of the nightmare together.

  Zedok. He had to have been responsible for the chandelier. While that part seemed obvious, nothing else did.

  All those masked figures. Who or what were they? Prisoners just like Erik?

  According to Lucas and the Paranormal Spectator documentary, only four people counting Erik had died as a direct result of the curse. But Lucas said that the mummy-unwrapping party had taken place during a masquerade . . . Could everyone who had attended the party have become trapped in the house? Victims of the curse?

  If that was the answer, it still didn’t explain the masked girl in the cellar doorway. The one who had looked just like . . .

  I glanced toward Lucas again, suddenly wanting to let everything come spilling out. Clearly, he suspected the cause of the chandelier crash. What must he be thinking?

  He wasn’t asking me for the same reason I wasn’t telling him. And that was because of Charlie.

  “Rastin,” I said, my voice sounding like a stranger’s to my own ears. “Tell me you heard back from him.”

  “Ah,” Lucas said, his grasp on my hand tightening, the squeeze telling me that yes, he had been reading between the lines. “N-no.”

  I shut my tired eyes, allowing the force of that one word to detonate through me in a bomb of silent devastation.

  Over the intercom, someone paged a doctor. Various beeps floated this way and that.

  Soon, it would be morning. Dad would wake up. He would ask me again what had happened. After that, only one thing was certain. He would insist that we, all three of us, go back to the house that Erik had told me never to enter again.

  And Erik. Poor Erik.

  I couldn’t get the sight of that cheekbone out of my mind. Or forget the way his skeletal hand had clasped mine. The too-angular feel of his form when I’d flung my arms around him, pressing my body against his rail-thin one.

  Dead. He was dead. But somehow . . . alive.

  The horror of it caused me to convulse once, which caused Charlie to whimper and cling to me harder, and Lucas to squeeze my hand again.

  Erik was still in that house. And had been since he’d died. A prisoner. Forever.

  Even if I could somehow convince my dad to leave, how could I go knowing that Erik was still there?

  “There’s . . . something I forgot in the house,” I said to Lucas, who slowly turned his head my way. “I have to go back for it.”

  “You can’t,” he said. “Not alone.”

  I fell silent at the implications.

  “Your dad,” Lucas said. “He’ll probably be here all day. And they’ll come . . . if I call them.”

  I gathered his meaning with the same reluctance as before.

  “It’s almost morning,” Lucas said, his way of pressing the issue when I didn’t answer. “Does Charlie have somewhere she can stay?”

  Since I was still a minor, Charlie and I had to stay with a friend’s family until Dad got discharged. But I could just tell the hospital I was riding with Lucas to pick up my stuff from the house first.

  Deciding to spare Lucas the details, I nodded in answer to his question.

  In response, he released my hand, then walked out into the hallway to make his call.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Zedok

  Luckily, Mr. Armand had survived the attack.

  Still, though, there was no cause for relief.

  Standing beneath the pristine twin of the chandelier on my side of Moldavia, in the exact place where it lay decimated on the Armands’ side, I glanced to where the discarded mask of Madness lay on the floor, shuddering from the aftershocks of its defeat.

  Once more, I wore the countenance of Valor. Paradoxically, our reunion was owed only to Madness, whose violent actions had brought about the one thing that could have returned me to my senses.

  In inflicting injury upon Mr. Armand, I had left him and thus his family with no other choice but to come back and to stay. For where was one such as Mr. Armand to go with a broken leg? Aside from that, were not the man’s savings as well as his livelihood instilled within this house?

  This war against myself. As always, I stood only to lose it. The only difference now was that I had something to lose.

  Rastin. Where are you?

  At last, Madness’s mask dissolved. Released from my fear that he would rise as soon as my back was turned and usurp me a second time, I turned on my heel and strode down the dark hallway. From there, I once again passed the threshold between worlds to enter the Armands’ sunlit kitchen. Morning light glinted on the surface of the cluttered table.

  In the center of the bric-a-brac and scattered papers there still dwelled the vase of roses.

  Keeping my gaze on the flowers, my hand went to the cravat lacing my throat, pulling it free. Next, I undid the buttons of Valor’s waistcoat.

  Distress sneaking over me, calling me to stop as I had last time, I seized one of the blooms before I could convince myself to delay this dark surgery further. I snapped its head from its stem, prepared to do what I should have done. What the medium had instructed me to do. But then the ominous click of the basement door followed by the slow creak of its opening halted me.

  “Shall we ever forget it?” asked a horrible voice.

  I spun to find him framed in the cellar doorway, a blood-red figure backed by the blackness of our basement.

  “Her voice, you mean?” I asked. Because, with the invisible barrier between houses separating us, it was safe to converse with him.

  “Her arms,” Wrath corrected. “Locked around us that way. Like we were more to her than what we are.”

  “Than what we ever could be,” I said, taking my turn to correct him.

  “Yes,” he agreed, the calmness in his answer startling me.

  “You want her that badly,” I whispered. “Enough to take her by force? To keep her with you against her will?”

  “I tried to tell you.”

  “You tried to trick me.”

  For once, his skeleton’s face seemed to echo as much sorrow as it did rage. “So make me go away,” he said. “Make us all go away. If you can.”

  “And here I’d thought you’d come to dissuade me,” I remarked bitterly.

  “I think we agree she must return,” replied Wrath. “Bereft of Hope, you now hold in your hand your final defense. Hers. So I know what you will do. Unlike you, I do not expect Valor to behave any other way than how he must. As is true of the rest of us, you cannot help yourself.”

  Could it be he was being genuine? Or was he merely trying to enmesh me in some new plot? Either way, it didn’t matter. Wrath was right. There were no other options left to me.

  Without anoth
er word, I seated myself in one of the Armands’ chairs. Keeping the rose clasped loosely in one gloved hand so as not to damage it, I then pried open with the other the final barrier of Valor’s white dress shirt.

  The slit made by the Egyptian priest in my lower left side still existed and so would serve as my avenue. And with no muscle or sinew, no organs or collagen to contend with, I found the contortion needed to properly place the rose within the center left of my rib cage easy enough to execute.

  The moment I released my hold on the rose was the moment that flower became heart.

  With a crackle of straining bone, I withdrew my arm and hand.

  Though I did not have to look to know Wrath had vanished, I turned my head to peer at his doorway anyway.

  It of course stood empty, the piece of my soul he represented once more quarantined within my bosom, lashed together with all the others by an object as tenuous as my certainty that in doing the only thing I could do . . . I had done the right thing.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Stephanie

  After seeing Charlie off with our friend’s mom, who I fed an excuse about needing to stay with Dad, I left the hospital with Lucas. And finally, during our ride to the rendezvous point with the rest of SPOoKy, I confessed to him about the interactions with Erik.

  I started with the pictures I’d found in the attic. From there, I told him about meeting Erik in that first dream and how he had warned me of Zedok. I explained about finding the graves behind our house, and how Erik’s name on the last one had led me to seek Lucas out. I even told him about how adamant Erik had been that I not have investigators over to the house. That Erik had admitted to being the figure under the sheet, and about the promise I’d made to Erik to free him. I left out the detail of the almost-kiss, though. And also all those things Erik had said to me leading up to it.

  Things were already so complicated. And, after all that had happened between me and Lucas at the dance, sharing that particular brush with Erik seemed like something that could only tangle things further. So, instead, I launched into a play-by-play of last night’s events, starting with Charlie waking up in the middle of the night and ending with the chandelier.

  As far as answers went, I had no solid suggestions to offer him. Just the pieces to a scattered puzzle. A mangled, nonsensical mess that Lucas let me dump at his feet.

  To his credit, he drove with an impassive expression while I laid out everything, including Erik’s battle with the other masked figures, and how he’d fought to free me from them. I explained about the two sides of the house, too, and how Erik had ejected me from his own shortly before the chandelier had come down.

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” he asked, predictably. “The dreams, for instance. Erik. Did he tell you not to?”

  “No,” I said, fidgeting. “I just spent so much time wondering if they really were dreams or not. And besides that . . . I didn’t want you to think Charlotte was right about me.”

  He got quiet after that, driving a while longer, then taking another turn toward our destination. Finally, just when I thought Lucas wouldn’t say anything else, he spoke again.

  “You care about him.”

  I glanced his way, but he kept his eyes on the road. Oddly, there’d been no jealousy in his voice. There had been something else, though. Something like worry mixed with mistrust.

  “Dad is why I have to go back in,” I admitted after a pause. “But Erik is why I want to.”

  I only really worried about what Lucas thought of me after that. Because he immediately went silent again. Not only that, but, having reached the café where we’d be meeting the team, he parallel parked with way too much ease, never having to redo or hold up traffic like I would have.

  That was what made me sure he’d written me off.

  Killing the ignition, Lucas turned to look at me. He was about to say something, until he stopped himself, his jaw flexing.

  This was it. Any second now, he’d accuse me of lying or suggest I seek professional help. He’d tell me to get out of his car and never—

  “I believe you,” he said.

  Several beats passed in which I didn’t breathe.

  “You . . . do?” I asked, in case he might have changed his mind in the seconds it took me to find my voice.

  “What I meant to say,” he corrected, “is that I believe that’s what you experienced.”

  I frowned, nausea churning in my empty stomach. Because that was basically a polite way of saying he didn’t believe me.

  “I know what I saw,” I said.

  “I’m not saying you didn’t see it,” replied Lucas. “And I’m not saying what happened to you, Charlie, and your dad wasn’t paranormal. Obviously, Zedok is as real as we’ve all been afraid he was. But the legend of Moldavia is just that. Ghosts, even demons. Stephanie. They . . . they’re not physical beings.”

  “I already told you,” I started again. “Erik isn’t a ghost. He said so himself. I didn’t believe him either. Not until I saw him. Not until I—” I stopped. I could feel myself dancing around a few key details. The almost-kiss. How I’d flung my arms around Erik in that moment when I’d been so relieved to have him at my side again—a familiar presence in a sea of strangeness. Did I think Lucas would judge me? Was I afraid he’d feel betrayed? Or was I more afraid he would refuse to help me help Erik?

  “I know you saw him,” Lucas said, taking my hand in a gesture that, though sweet, told me he most definitely did not know. Which made me worry that whatever he was planning to do with SPOoKy might be a bad idea. Perhaps I should have gone back into the house for Erik alone. But then, that felt like a bad idea, too.

  “Lucas—”

  “The incident with the sheet,” he said, interrupting me. “Erik confirmed that was him, right? But, in that moment, he wasn’t really there. Physically speaking, I mean.”

  “Not in the same way as last night,” I agreed. “But . . . he was there.”

  “But do you see what I’m saying?” he asked. “If he was real then you’d have seen him then, too.”

  I went silent. Lucas had a point, which was too logical to deny. Either Erik was a ghost . . . or he wasn’t. But then, on the flip side, sheets couldn’t settle over mist.

  “I know none of it makes sense,” I whispered at last. “I can’t explain it. And I don’t expect you to—”

  “We know how to perform a cleansing ritual,” he blurted. “To clear a property of spirts. As investigators . . . it’s pretty much all we’ve got.”

  Turning my head to stare forward, I went silent. Because what he was telling me was that SPOoKy was equipped to handle ghosts . . . and ghosts only. Still . . . the cleansing ritual was something. And Zedok at least had been a ghost. Or something like one. He’d dissolved into nothing when I’d pulled his mask free. Perhaps a cleansing ritual could get rid of him.

  Then again, hadn’t an exorcism ritual almost killed Rastin Shirazi in front of a camera?

  “Spirits,” said Lucas, “certain kinds of darker entities can make you see things. They can cause hallucinations.”

  “You think Zedok made me see those things?”

  “I think something did.”

  “What about Erik?”

  “I . . . I’m not ready to tell you what I think about Erik,” he said, a comment that caused my stomach to unwind so that it could twist itself the other way.

  “Why?” I demanded.

  “I’ll tell you,” he promised. “But . . . only after we do this. For now, just know that I have my reasons.”

  What did he think? That Erik wasn’t who he said he was? That he could somehow be in league with this thing? Or even that he didn’t exist at all? Whatever Lucas thought, I had no other choice but to wait and find out.

  “What happens to us if it doesn’t work?” I asked instead of pressing the issue.

 
“Then, whatever this thing is, it’s out of our league anyway,” he replied, like he’d already thought that part through. “And we’ll have to try something else. But right now, I think you have to agree, as far as options go, this is the only one we have.”

  I frowned, still discomfited by his refusal to see things from my perspective—to even bend just a little. “But just in case it’s not a ghost we’re trying to get rid of—”

  “Stephanie.”

  “What?”

  “Do you trust me?” he asked, turning his head to me with those beautiful, oceanic eyes.

  In response, I could only gape at him. Because why did he have to ask me that question?

  “I’m afraid to,” I said. “Especially when you don’t know what we’re up against.”

  “That’s just it,” he said. “I think I do.”

  “I see,” I said, reading the subtext loud and clear. My opinion couldn’t be trusted.

  He went silent. Which at first made me even angrier. But then I asked myself what it would mean if Lucas was right about my having hallucinated. I’d done my job by telling him what had happened to me. Now it was up to him to tell me what that meant. I didn’t like it. But he’d asked me for my trust—something I wanted to give him. And he’d never given me a reason not to grant it.

  “Okay,” I allowed after several beats. “I trust you. But then . . . what now?”

  He let out a sigh, as if he’d been afraid he wouldn’t have gotten past this barrier with me. In truth, he still hadn’t. But I needed help and so did Erik.

  “As the story stands,” Lucas plowed forward, “I can tell you right now, the others won’t believe it. But if I give them my version, I think they’ll believe me.”

  “So . . .” I paused, not understanding. “What are you saying?”

  He frowned. “I’m saying that you should let me do the talking.”