Chills. I’ve got motherfucking chills going down my spine.
Hell, it’s been a long time since I felt that.
“So, let me get this straight,” Perry says. “You believe the same thing as your stepfather.”
“Believe?” He purses his lips quizzically.
“Yeah. That her ghost is here.”
“Oh. Well, of course her ghost is here. It’s been here since the day she died. I see her all the time.”
“You do?” I ask, and once again, I don’t think the guy is lying.
“That’s right,” he says with a quick smile, his teeth flashing white. “Why do you think I’m giving you the tour?”
“But then why give us one hundred grand if you can just talk to her for free?”
He laughs, the sound falling flat in this place. “Because my father doesn’t trust me. I don’t even think he believes me, to be honest. Maybe because I’m too close to her, I don’t know. Maybe it’s a jealousy thing. Either way, he doesn’t want me doing it.”
“Not even to pass a message?” I ask.
“Who said anything about passing messages?” Atlas says.
“Your father did,” I tell him, getting an uneasy feeling about all of this.
“Oh. I see.” He slides a hand into a pocket and shrugs. “If he has a message for her, then I don’t know about it. It doesn’t matter, he’s here all the time yelling at her, even though he rarely sees her himself.”
I raise my palm. “Okay, okay. This is getting way beyond the thing that we were told. How do I know that you’re not lying to us?”
“You know I’m not.”
“Stop fucking acting like I’m supposed to know you, I don’t. And you don’t fucking know me.”
He sighs tiredly, pinching the bridge of his nose. “This isn’t the best place for an argument. The more we fight, the more the bad shit will come out.”
“Bad shit?” Perry says, her eyes glowing. “Is that a technical term?”
“Tell us why we’re really here,” I tell him. “Or we’re walking.” And taking the money, but I don’t say that.
He looks us both in the eyes. “Fine. There are no secrets here. My mother is dead, but she hasn’t moved on. She…can’t. For one reason or another. She’s stuck in this house. She just needs a little…push.”
“A push?” I ask, narrowing my eyes. “Which way?”
He grins at me. “I suppose that’s up to her now. At any rate, my father picked you two because you’re somewhat famous and I went along with it because my mother said you would do.”
I shake my head. “I don’t know what to make of it. What are we supposed to do?”
“He wants us to open the Veil,” Perry says quietly. “I won’t do it.”
Atlas smiles. “You don’t need to open the Veil, my dear. It’s already open.”
I swallow, my body feeling hot and cold. “What do you mean?”
“Samhain,” he says. “The most powerful day of the year for a witch. The Veil walls are thin, and in here there are no walls.”
That’s why I’m here.
The woman’s voice slices through my head again, my eyes going wide.
“Dex?” Perry asks in concern.
But I can’t move.
My eyes are glued to the space in the dark beyond Atlas.
The graying body of a dead woman slowly disappearing into the black.
Fuck!
“Dex,” Perry says again, sharper now.
You’ll have to come back, the voice says. I know how hard that thought gets you.
Fucking hell, and I do have a fucking erection, don’t I?
We’ll be here. Waiting.
Then the voice stops and I can move again.
“You okay?” Atlas asks, and luckily no one is pointing their flashlight at my crotch.
“I’m fine,” I say, swallowing.
“You look like you saw a ghost,” he says, smirking.
“Well I kind of fucking did.”
“What did you see?” Perry asks.
“Maybe his mother?” I say, pointing to the dark room where, of course, there’s nothing. “I gotta tell you something, I’m not fucking going in there.”
Atlas stares into the black for a moment and then nods. “Understood. Come on, I’ll give you a tour of the rest of the house.”
He walks around us, and even though I don’t want a fucking tour, I refuse to be left alone with Perry in this hall. We hurry after him, but the immense darkness at my back feels like a black hole, and if I don’t escape from it fast enough, it’s going to suck me back in with that dead woman.
“So, wait a minute,” Perry says to Atlas, catching up to him. “If the walls are down in this house, why do you need us to do anything?”
“Because I don’t have what you guys have,” he says, leading us over to the stairs. “Your gift. Just because the Veil is down or thin, doesn’t mean spirits will walk through. They might not even know they can. They need to be drawn out. They need to be shown the way. That’s what the two of you have always done. That’s your purpose in life.”
Oh, Perry isn’t going to like that.
“Purpose?” she practically spits out as we climb the stairs. “I have a purpose in life and it’s not this. It never was.”
He glances down at her. “I suppose if you tell yourself that enough times, sooner or later it might be true.” He smiles. “But you’re here, aren’t you?”
“For a fuckload of money!”
“Easy now,” he says. “Last time we had words, your husband saw a ghost. Do you want that to happen again?”
“I thought we were here to see ghosts,” I tell him as we get to the second floor.
“You’re here to talk to my mother,” he says. “What you saw wasn’t my mother. You definitely don’t want to see her again.”
“Fucking hell, what else should we not want to see?” I mutter under my breath.
But as Atlas takes us from room to room on the second floor, showing us different bedrooms, still fully furnished, filling us in on some of the seemingly harmless history of the so-called Stimson House,
