Chapter 5
Sable
My limbs feel weightless and featherlight. A slight breeze would carry me across a field. My throat feels empty but choked. Like there are a million words and ragged screams caught in there, but only air fills the space.
I blink against the darkness. It’s like peering through a foggy window that’s turned the universe black and white. The edges are murky. Sharp lines are blurry. A low whirring filters through my ears. High-pitched, yet it has a base timber. It’s like floating in between time and space.
Where am I?
It’s chilled but not cold. Hot but not warm. An unsteady place in between that never feels quite right.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
How did I get here?
Dead, something in the back of my mind says.
I blink, trying to make sense of my surroundings. A soundless cry rips from my throat as I turn my head and come to a seated position. Pain thunders down my spine from the crack in my neck. White and black spots scatter over my vision as my throat catches again.
Where am I?
Look.
I can’t.
I don’t understand.
My hands, they’re like mist.
Look.
What’s happening?
It’s cold.
Is it?
Look.
Who is that?
He looks familiar. Why? He looks… I don’t know. He’s blurred. Yet not.
His lips are moving. He’s saying something. He’s… he’s beautiful. Those eyes—something’s not right about them. They’re different somehow. The wrong shade. And his voice… his mouth is still moving, and a deep, rumbling sound comes from his chest.
“Start talking.”
The words make sense but not at all. They ring a distant bell that makes my tongue roll, trying to do as he asks, except nothing comes out. All the sentences are tangled because… I don’t understand.
What’s happening?
Does he hear me ask the question? Did my lips form each letter?
He’s saying something again, but I can’t hear anything save muffled sounds.
What’s hap—
He moves closer, shadows twisting the darkness around him as he closes the distance—a great beast of the night that turns nightmares into reality. His hand reaches for me. I’m not sure whether to be frightened and run, or find out what’s happening. Either way, I can’t get my body to comply.
Warmth grips my jaw. A single touch and then everything ceases to exist.
I feel like death. If death had a feeling.
An ache. A constant drain. A foreboding hollow in the center of my chest as it feels like a void is sucking my very essence from me.
Is this how Ella felt?
It happens again: the snap of my neck followed by a soundless cry.
But the world is different. There are hairline cracks over my vision, but much of the fog has cleared to reveal hints of color—muted greens and traces of reds.
Hard lines are crisper, and the world holds texture, like the grains in the wooden floor and the fibers of the carpet.
My limbs still feel… I don’t understand how they feel. Solid mist. Like they’re there but not exactly.
Movement to the side catches my attention. It takes too long for my brain to catch up with the rest of my body as I slowly turn my head and blink at the figure. A man. Familiar again. How? One doesn’t forget a man who looks like that.
He’s like mist too.
No, like unknown matter that hails from the aether.
The space around him seems to vibrate, humming a tune that my ears can’t pick up.
And his eyes—they’re blue, abnormally so.
A crystalline color that looks like they’re glowing silver.
They’re a source of light on their own, as strong as the threads of moonlight seeping in between the manor’s boarded-up windows.
I open my mouth to ask what’s happening, but still nothing comes out. My tongue refuses to curve around the syllables, like the air in my throat is barbed with blades.
“You’re dead.”
Dead? No, that’s not right. I’m here. I can see. My fingers—I can move them. Toes too. Not dead. I can’t be.
He storms closer, and this time, my body complies. Barely. I inch away from his raised arm, but become weightless the moment he drags me onto my feet and spins me round so he’s at my back.
My stomach sinks to my feet. There’s a body on the floor.
It isn’t moving. I can’t see the rise and fall of her flesh beneath the sweater, or any hint of color in her pale skin.
Black hair fans out over her face and onto the floor, the silver strands at the front of her head spilling over the black like a makeshift halo.
That… that’s me.
My sweater. My dyed hair.
This can’t be right. I look down at my hands then at the woman on the floor. “I… I don’t…”
The man huffs beside me. “Come on. Get it all out.”
“Understand…” I blink hard, willing my mind to make sense of what’s happening.
It can’t be me. I’m here, and he…
He mutters something I don’t catch, storming up to the woman. “As I said: dead.”
I watch, frozen, as he kicks the lifeless body. She rolls to the side with a thump, and the hair falls from her face—my face. Round cheeks, full lips parted in a perpetual gasp, and empty, brown eyes staring back at me. Dead.
I’m dead.
Heat stings my eyes.
“No.” I shake my head, staggering back from—from me.
No, no, no, no, no.
With each unspoken word, my movements grow more frantic. He’s wrong. Can’t he see that I’m right here? He sees me. I can’t be dead. I—I have to be alive. My—my things. Ella’s things. I can’t lose them. They’re the only things I have of hers.
If I’m dead, someone could take them.
Someone’s going to take the manor. I’m going to lose everything.
“If you start wailing, I’m going to kill you again.”
I heave for breath, clutching at my chest. This is a joke. I never died. This is just a bad dream from one too many glasses of shitty wine, and I’ll wake up any second. I—
Oh God.
I’m at the manor. This is Ella’s room. I drew those sigils on the floor to summon her, and he appeared instead. He—fuck, he murdered me.
My hand flies up to my neck.
Again. He said he’d kill me again.
I scramble back to get away from him. I’m dead. I’m going to lose everything. I don’t—Why is everything so blurry?
The man watches me, lips curled into an impatient sneer. As if I’m inconveniencing him.
I trip over my feet trying to get away, which sends me careening toward the wall. I brace for impact that never hits. My torso goes straight through the plaster, and I throw my hands out to catch myself against the floor.
What…? I slowly twist my head round to find half my body is out of sight, hidden behind the wall in my sister’s room.
The world shifts again before I can get my bearings.
A strangled cry rips from my lips as the floor beneath me gives way, and then I’m free-falling from the ceiling into the study.
The matted Persian rug races up to greet me, and pain explodes from my side on impact. It shocks the panic into submission.
Oxygen punches from my lungs, and I groan, rolling onto my back as I blink back the dots clouding my vision. I stare at the peeling paint above me, breathing hard, the same words on repeat. I can’t be dead. I can’t be dead. I can’t be dead. Then, finally, something new.
I fell through the ceiling.
No, I—this—
The thump of footsteps stirs me out of my stupor.
Still, my body is too slow to catch up to my brain.
I scramble onto my feet and sprint for the entrance before he can get to me.
This is a bad dream. I’ll wake up screaming any second now to the tick, tick, tick of the clock.
My alarm will go off, and I’ll go back to being berated by strangers on the phone.
This can’t be real.
My feet go skidding around a corner, utterly silent, as if I’m not there. The front door looms ahead, my promise of freedom. But he’s at the top of the stairs, scowling at me.
His boot hits the first step like a bolt of lightning. It cracks through the hollow manor—all that remains of my broken dreams.
I force my legs to move as fast as they can, raising my hand toward the handle, only to fall right through, stumbling onto the porch.
No.
No.
Oh God.
Tremors ripple through my bones. I have to get out of here.
I’m not dead. And yet the wet earth doesn’t soak into my jeans.
The grass doesn’t ripple as I charge across the unkempt field.
My footing doesn’t catch on the raised roots; I don’t trip over the rubbish.
Clouds of condensation don’t plume in front of me with each hard pant as I close the distance to the gate I came through.
Tears stream down my face as pure panic sinks its teeth into me. I push my legs harder, expecting to hear my pulse roar in my ears, but there’s only insect song drifting through the air.
I’m dead. There’s no other way to explain it. This isn’t a bad dream. There—
I crash into a hard wall and am thrown back onto the ground. Gasping, I blink up at the cloudy sky, attempting to realign my equilibrium before shifting back onto my feet to make for the gate that’s only a yard away.
A stone lodges itself in the pit of my stomach, weighing me down as I inch closer, trying to make sense of what I hit.
There’s nothing but air.
The sight of the man making his way down the driveway has a surge of adrenaline flooding my veins, and I shoot forward, only to crash into a—into nothing right at the threshold of the gate. I try again, hitting the same invisible wall, as if there’s a fence all around the boundary of the manor.
The thing in my stomach grows sharp claws that causes bile to curdle in my chest as I try, and try, and try, and try, ramming into that invisible wall each time.
My feet lead me round the edges of the property, where I test out every single possible way out, only to be met with the same resistance.
I don’t make it through the concrete fence or over it.
The same invisible wall keeps me trapped here, at Eldrith Manor.
With the man who killed me.
Because there’s no denying what I am now: a ghost.