Secret Unleashed

According to Google Maps it was supposed to take about an hour to drive from downtown San Francisco to San Jose. Google Maps, as it turned out, was a filthy liar whose mother was a hamster and whose father smelled of elderberries. Close to two hours after we’d left our hotel, we pulled into the parking lot of the Winchester Mystery House. Between Google Maps, our GPS and Holden’s backseat driving, I was about ready to turn the car west and drive us all straight into the ocean. Adding insult to injury was the fact the parking lot was so crammed full of cars it took me an extra ten minutes to find parking.

I hadn’t expected moonlight tours through an old mansion to be so popular. Thankfully we’d given ourselves plenty of extra time for the trip, and had prepurchased our tickets online. That spark of genius belonged to Maxime, and seeing the snakelike line of tourists waiting at the ticket kiosk, I was glad I’d listened to him.

I’d have been a lot happier to bypass the tour altogether and just break into the place, but Maxime had shot my idea down in no time. Apparently the house was such a maze, many tourists a day would get lost in it, requiring retrieval. If we went in on our own without a tour guide to bring us to the Tiffany window, we’d end up spending hours going around in circles to find it. I had to admit once he’d explained it, it made more sense to do this the human way.

We queued up in the prepaid ticket line behind a family from Florida. I knew they were from Florida because they all wore identical yellow T-shirts that proclaimed, Wilson Family Vacation Florida to California (or Bust!) in giant black letters on the back.

“Man alive, what a line,” the mother said, laughing at herself like our wait time was hilarious. “Just lines everywhere.”

“Mmm,” I replied. I didn’t want to engage her in discussion. If we were going into the house to steal something, I didn’t want to stick out in anyone’s memory.

“Where y’all from?” Evidently I was wearing my Please talk to me hat today. I thought I’d burned that one.

“New York,” I said.

“Ohhhhh, New York. New York City? The Big Apple! City that never sleeps. Mad-hattan!” Again she laughed at herself as though any of what she’d said had been a joke. If she was angling for a prize because she knew eight thousand nicknames for the city I lived in, she’d be waiting for a while.

“Yup, that’s the one.”

Undeterred by my obvious disinterest in our conversation, she turned around to look at me. She had a sweet face, round cheeks and a short bobbed haircut that screamed mom. In her mid- or late- thirties, she wore the roundness of someone who no longer tried to be skinny but clearly stayed somewhat fit chasing the three rugrats at her side.

“Oh my, you look so young to have a son.” She gave Maxime a once-over.

We’d debated how best to sell Max to humans who might ask. I was twenty-three, but thanks to the blessings of my genetic makeup, I appeared younger. Young enough I’d still be getting ID’d at bars in ten years, and certainly too young to have a thirteen-year-old son.

“Younger brother,” I explained.

Her concerned expression faded. She gave Holden a cursory glance, and at first I thought she was going to ask what role he played in our weird family, but she got distracted by her cursory inspection and ended up not saying anything at all about him.

“Very nice of you to bring him out here.” Her cheeks were flushed red, and she looked from Holden to Maxime. “Do you do a lot with your sister?”

My God this woman was chatty.

“I go where she goes,” he said with a shrug, playing the part of a bored teenage boy to a T. Instead of meeting her gaze and compelling her to leave us alone, he stared at his shoes and shut down any further questions she might ask him.

“Have you been—?”

“Oh good, the line is moving.” Next time, I didn’t care how lost we got, I was going to break in instead of mingling with human tourists. They talked too much. How could people talk this much to absolute strangers? What about me invited conversation? I didn’t think I had a naturally sweet face—and had been told as much on a number of occasions—so why me?

We were ushered into a courtyard where I intentionally angled my “family” away from hers.

“Secret made a new friend,” Holden teased.

“Shhh, you’ll make her come over here. That’s the last thing we need. If Ma Florida latches on to us, we’ll never be able to break away from the tour.”

That quieted him down.

Thankfully my line buddy had two sons who were desperate to annoy the ever-loving bejesus out of our poor tour guide. We were handed flashlights, and most of the sensible adults tested them once to be sure they worked, then left them off until the tour began. The Wilson boys from Florida, though, managed to have a full-on lightsaber battle with theirs, complete with poorly conceived sound effects.

Once their mother relieved them of the flashlights, they started in on a barrage of questions, only some of which related to the house.

I wasn’t a big fan of kids, and these ones were the type so annoying they might convince non-parents never to conceive, but they were a blessing in disguise. If our guide was busy dealing with their nattering for the whole tour, we might get more time before they realized we were missing.

Point one for the Wilson family from Florida.

The tour commenced, and the guide—a chubby, curly-haired kid who was about seventeen—began his monotone, memorized speech about the house’s history. Since we were on the moonlight tour, I gathered we’d be given a few spooky bonus facts along the way, but in the initial few rooms we relearned all the stuff I’d read on the website.

The guide led us into an old storage room where all the guests wedged in together to hear him tell us about the cost of carpeting and how many different kinds of wood were ordered to make the parquet floors. The back wall of the room was floor-to-ceiling glass, and behind it were several backlit Tiffany windows.

I caught Maxime’s attention and jutted my chin towards them, wondering if the window we were looking for might have been moved among them. I didn’t see it, but I wasn’t as familiar with it as the young vampire was. He might be able to see something I was missing.

He shook his head.

The group followed our guide up a set of switchback stairs—the Wilson boys stomping loudly and making ghost noises as they went—and we remained towards the back, letting everyone else get ahead of us.

The house was just as bizarre as I’d imagined from Maxime’s history lesson, but seeing it in person made me a little sad. It lacked a lot of the color and polish I’d seen in the older pictures. Maybe it was because I was seeing it at night, but I felt as if some of what made the house special had slipped away over the years.

For a house to have life, someone needed to live in it. And though hundreds of people visited the Winchester Mansion daily, everything had the gray, dismal feeling of abandonment. No one lived here, no one loved the place the way only a homeowner can. I was sad for the house, and sad for Sarah Winchester that her legacy was these depressing walls and weird corridors.

In one of the upper parlors a vignette had been staged with actors portraying Winchester and her psychic. They’d gone overboard on the cliches, dressing the psychic in full gypsy gear with giant hoop earrings and a glowing crystal ball. Her long fingernails clicked on the glass, making the small bulb inside vibrate. The employee they had playing Sarah Winchester wore a terrible wig and gasped at everything the gypsy said.

In the back of the room, beyond a velvet rope meant to keep guests out, I saw a weak blue-white light. It drifted, barely visible beyond the old glass doors, and I couldn’t make out a face. I knew a ghost when I saw one, and there was no mistaking that glow. It seemed to be watching the playacting with the same attention as the tour guests were. When the show was over, the light bobbed slightly, then drifted out of sight.

In a house this old any number of spirits could have gathered, but I had my suspicions I was seeing the former owner herself.

Poor Sarah. In life she’d wanted so badly to avoid being haunted she’d moved here to build this place. Now she was forced to roam the halls of her unfinished monstrosity forever.