It was fully dark when Vic returned to the house. She entered by the front door. Lights were on, which showcased how messy everything looked taken apart. The walls were a dirty white and a bit yellowed with the wallpaper gone, and brown paper covered the tile to protect it. The cat was strolling through the great hall and came up to Vic as she entered. It rubbed up against her legs purring. She picked it up and it nestled into her arms.

  She saw the light shining out from the library door and went to look. She pushed the door open and stepped inside. Michael was sitting behind the desk as always looking at Victoria’s diary. He looked up as she walked in. Vic hugged the cat before setting it down to scurry away. She stripped off her coat and dropped it on the settee with her bag, pushed up her sleeves and took a chair opposite Michael.

  “Did you find anything interesting?” She crossed her legs.

  “How far did you get when you looked at it the other night?” He reached for his coffee.

  “Not far. A year or two in. It’s good to have the diary. It will bring so much to my dissertation.” She picked cat fur off her blouse.

  “What if I told you Edward and the men in his social club didn’t die in a fire?” Excitement gleamed in his eyes.

  “If they didn’t die in fire, then how did they die?”

  “This is where it gets weird,” He turned the pages in the diary to the one he had marked. “This entry dated January 1, 1911. Virginia says that the men were found turned inside out.” He stated.

  “I don’t understand, what does that mean?” She asked, puzzled.

  Michael told her that the police lied and the lie made it into the paper. The social club the men belonged to was not a social club at all, but a secret society that did rituals. For what purpose he didn’t know, but he had gathered his members during the party and they slipped away to perform some ritual. The purpose of he didn’t know, but Virginia in her anger had done something to ruin the ritual. She was angry at him for having a mistress. It was mentioned in a previous entry. She had confronted him about it and told him to stop. He laughed in her face. In order to get back at him she ruined his ritual, but whatever she did caused the deaths of all those men. And not only that, Edward’s body was never recovered. All the bodies they found looked like they’d been turned inside out.

  Vic looked horrified. She didn’t even know how to respond to this. This was so far out of left field. The papers said they died in a fire on New Year's Eve, and this diary entry said there was no fire. This made no sense.

  “This makes no sense. How could a failed ritual cause people to turn inside out?” She replied.

  “Because it’s real, all of it.” He remarked.

  “What’s real,” She was confused.

  “The ritual, ghosts, magic.” He explained.

  “That’s just ridiculous!” She exclaimed. “Science has never proven the existence of ghosts. Anecdotes don’t count. Magic is just magical thinking. Wanting it to be real doesn’t make it happen.”

  “Think about it. There are all sorts of weird things that have been happening around here. Not only to you, but to me as well, and to Megan.” He entreated. “I’ve been smelling roses around my wife and children. Though Megan claims to not be wearing perfume, or using incense. And I've seen things out of the corner of my eye, but when I look there is nothing there. I’ve smelled cigars in this room and when I enquired with the work crew they all claimed that it wasn’t them.”

  “I smelled cigars in here one day. I thought it was you.” She added.

  “See? And let’s not forget what happened to you in the basement. You were terrified.” He said.

  “But that was an intruder.” She Commented.

  “Was it? Was it really? The police found nothing but a broken window that a bird had come through. When I went to fix the window there were still jagged pieces of glass in the frame. There were feathers attached, but no blood. I think it was a ghost or something that tried to attack you. And what about the apparition that both you and Megan saw in the mirror. You said yourself that you had no other explanation than that it was a ghost.” He iterated.

  “Yes, but ghosts are not real. It could have been a bird.” She protested.

  “Did you hear the flutter of wings as it flew by? He probed.

  “No, but…”

  Michael cut her off. “No buts. What’s that saying? When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

  Vic looked pained. She didn’t like where this was going.

  “Can you think of any other things that were weird, or that you brushed off?” He inquired.

  She thought about when she returned to her room after they’d been drinking wine and the hallway seemed to stretch off into the distance. She mentioned that, but explained that she was drunk and must have imagined it.

  “Did you imagine those thorny scratches on your arms?” He asked.

  Vic turned white as a sheet. “I was sleepwalking.”

  “I don’t think you got those scratches and dirt under your nails in the garden. I think it happened in your dream. When I found you, you were walking down the stairs, and you weren’t cold like you would have been if you’d gone outside to dig in the dirt.” He added.

  A chill ran up Vic’s spine. She had reasoned it away with faulty logic, but if it was true that she had been injured in the nightmare she didn’t want to go to sleep ever again.

  Megan strode through the door and they stopped talking. Megan was suspicious. “What are the two of you discussing to go so quiet?” She looked at Vic who looked like a deer in headlights.

  "Oh, we were just discussing old architectural features of the house. You know, the kind of stuff Vic is here to help us with." He responded.

  Megan looked disbelieving. “The children are ready for bed and they’d like you to tell them a story.”

  Michael excused himself as he stood from the chair. Reaching Megan he slid his arm around her and they disappeared out the door.

  Vic stood and wandered over to one of the bookshelves. She didn’t want to think about the implications of what her nightmares could mean. She’d gotten scratched up by running into things while sleepwalking before, but never had she been injured in a dream and woke up with the wounds. She distracted herself by reading the titles of the books on the shelf. Most were old, with fabric covers. She noticed books by Agatha Christie. She surmised that they had belonged to Virginia, since she had lived here alone after her children died until her death in the 1950s.

  She was lost in thought when she felt Michael walk back into the room and right up behind her. She was waiting for him to say something when she smelled cigars. She whirled around and there was nobody there. There was no way! They had just been talking about the smell of cigars. Michael had to be playing a joke on her. She walked over to the door and peered out into the lit hall. Empty. She was starting to come around.

  She walked over to the cluttered desk and began looking through more newspaper clippings that were sitting there. There were several articles about people who entered the house and disappeared. Never to be seen from again. There was a workman here, A child there. Not all at once, but over the course of decades several people who had visited this house just up and disappeared. There was a teenager in the 80s who broke in with his friends. They got drunk, wandered around the house, and when they got spooked they all ran out. After exiting the house the kids realized that they didn’t have their friend with them, but they wouldn’t go back in to look for him. They figured that he’d make his own way out and the rest went home. The next day they realized that their friend had never made it home. They stayed quiet for a few days and that’s when they told their parents about what happened. They said they’d seen ghosts in the house and that it was haunted and that the house must have swallowed their friend. Nobody believed them. The police went in to search for the boy and didn’t find him. They wrote him off as a runaway.

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  Looking through the articles dated from the 1930s and 1940s several family members of Virginia also vanished. She had an Uncle who came with his family for a visit and one day and he could not be found. The police suspected that he left his family to start a new life elsewhere, and a grown niece had also disappeared. All searches turned up nothing.

  After the tragedy that had killed all those men and then the disappearances the house received a reputation as being haunted. Nobody wanted to go near the place, but Virginia continued to live here until her death. The articles claimed she was alone save for her trusted cat. An orange tabby named Kitty. Vic put the article down. That’s so odd. It was a strange coincidence that she had an orange tabby named Kitty, when there was currently an orange tabby named Kitty. She was sure it was only a coincidence. Tabby’s were common and it’s not far-fetched to have a cat named Kitty. She was certain that was all it was, a strange coincidence.

  Michael returned after 30 minutes and found her engrossed in the newspaper articles that covered the desk.

  “Fascinating stuff, isn’t it?” He walked over.

  “Did you know about all the missing people before you bought the house?” She inquired.

  “I knew of a couple, but didn’t know that there were that many who had disappeared over the years. It’s quite eerie.”

  Vic looked through all the clippings again and began to count on her fingers. First one hand, then two, then back to her first, with two fingers up. “Twelve people went missing in this house. That’s a lot even if it is just coincidence.”

  Michael sat next to Vic. “What do you think is going on?”

  Puzzled, she said, “I can’t really say. I’m only just starting to wrap my head around that ghosts and hauntings may be real. I’m still not fully convinced, but things don’t add up and ghosts, hauntings seem to be the only explanation.”

  “I’ve been telling you that there are things we as humans don’t fully understand,” Michael was animated.

  “That’s what I don’t get and why it’s hard to wrap my head around,” She sighed. “Science hasn’t captured any proof of the existence of ghosts.”

  “What about all those videos on the internet?” He put forth.

  “They can be easily faked. Even if somebody did manage to capture a real ghost on film, hundreds of people leap to debunk it.” Vic Added.

  “I think some of those videos do show real ghosts and paranormal activity.” He interjected.

  “That may be, but at this point it’s impossible to tell.” Vic was greatly enjoying the conversation as was Michael.

  “You see…” Michael’s words cut off. The lights went out. He got up and made his way to the light switch. He flicked it back and forth a few times. The lights in the great hall were out too. “Must be the breaker. I better go down and get the power back on. You stay here.”

  “Oh, no!” Vic leapt from her chair. “I’m not waiting around in the dark for something to happen to me. I’m going with you. At least that way if something does happen, we’ll be together.”

  He nodded. They both turned on the flashlight app on their phones and shined them in front of themselves. They pushed through the darkness into the great hall, vast in its emptiness. Their shuffling echoed. They didn’t have to go far to reach the servants’ stairs. The door creaked as Michael opened it and stepped inside, Vic following closely behind.

  The light from their phones did not shine far. The inky blackness of the stairwell seemed to push back against the intrusion of light. The stairwell felt narrower than usual and every footstep echoed as they descended into the basement. At the bottom Michael turned the doorknob and pushed it open quietly.

  The hallway that stretched from one side of the house to the other lay in silent stillness. The light from their phones barely reached ten feet in front of them. It was almost like the darkness was eating their light. Their breath came out in a cloud, the temperature had dropped considerably. They trudged down the hall toward the cellar. Vic breathed shallowly, it felt like they should make as little noise as possible. The blackness seemed to inch closer around them the nearer they came to the cellar. By the time they reached the door their lights only breached five feet around them into the darkness.

  Ice crystals had formed on the doorknob and Michael jerked his hand back as he touched it. “It’s so cold it burns,” He grabbed the doorknob again, this time with the sleeve of his shirt. He turned it and pushed, but it caught. The door was stuck. He pushed into it with his shoulder and it budged open. They shuffled inside, using their phones to look around. They couldn’t see far into the darkness, but Michael knew where the circuit breakers were and he headed in that direction. A strong smell of sulfur filled the air. As he moved further into the room gaunt and mangled figures came out of the darkness and shuffled in his and Vic’s direction. Their clothing was not of modern make and hung from them in rags.

  The figure in the front was missing his face. His jaw hung from the upper, bloody portion, attached only by a string. His left eyeball hung from the socket, and his right eye was burned away. He shuffled forward, arms hanging at his sides, and his sight unseeing. The figure to his right was once a fat man. His front side was an open, bloody mess with strips of flesh hanging down. A black ichor ran down his chin to his chest and then mixed with the blood. He too, waddled forward with his arms at his sides. A third figure to the left of them had been a tall slender man, but he limped forward headless, with a bloody hole where his neck should be. One arm hung limply, barely attached by a piece of sinew. His clothing was shredded and blackened, and one of his feet was bent at an odd angle. Behind them were others, all mangled in different ways, limping and shuffling towards them. Menacingly they came.

  Terror bubbled up in Vic so strongly that she thought she would scream. She didn’t know what to do, and so backpedaled away from them closer to the door. Michael froze where he was, not a muscle could twitch. He felt bile trying to work its way up his throat. After a moment he dove into action and managed to spin away from one of the figures right before it would have reached him. He rushed to the circuit breaker and crashed into one of the shelves nearby. Pain shot through his arm and his phone went flying through the spectors to smash into the stone floor. He pulled himself along to the circuit breaker and fumbled for the switch. The apparitions closed on Vic as she flattened herself against the wall. Michael found the switch and pushed it down, and then back up, resetting it.

  “The lights, Vic! Flip the switch!” He spoke in a hoarse whisper. The spectral fingers getting closer to him.

  Vic reached out blindly to her left near the door feeling for the switch. The mangled apparitions getting closer. Boney fingers reached for her and just when she thought they would touch her she found the switch and flipped it.

  Stark bright light flooded the room. Vic and Michael squinted in the brightness as their eyes adjusted. The spectral figures were gone as if they’d never been there. Michael let out a nervous laugh. Vic breathed a sigh of relief. Did they really just see that? Are they both crazy? No, They just experienced for themselves the reality of ghosts.

  Michael retrieved his phone, the glass was spider-webbed across the front. He shoved it in his pocket. “We do not, under any circumstance, mention any of this to Megan.”

  Vic agreed. She did not want to be witness to Megan’s overreaction if she heard about this. They made their way back upstairs, flipping light switches as they went. Once they were back safely within the confines of the library they were both excitedly chatting away. The terror they had felt in the moment, washed away by the light. Vic was now a believer. It was crazy. Her disbelief was fully rooted in science and the fact that science had no proof, but what they experienced defied everything she knew. The possibilities of this entangled her.

  They talked about what had happened. Were those apparitions harmless? Would they have just passed through them, or were they malevolent and reaching out to hurt them? Oh the stench. Could an overdose of sulfur cause hallucinations? She didn’t know, but the smell vanished with the ghosts and so it couldn’t have been a gas leak. Michael proposed marketing the Inn as a haunted inn when they were ready to open. Vic didn’t like the idea. Not that she didn’t think they’d make money that way, but that they’d gather more clientele with a mansion that had been restored to what it was in its heyday instead of a cheap thrill like Halloween attractions. Plus Michael would never get Megan to sign off on it.

  “I think we should dig a little deeper and find out what is really happening here,” Michael suggested. “Those ghosts we saw in the basement must have been the men to die in the fire, failed ritual, or whatever it was.”

  “It would make a compelling story for my dissertation, the history, not the ghost story.” Vic yawned. “I’d get laughed out of academia if I were to write about ghosts. This sounds childish, but would you mind walking me up to my room? I’m a grown woman and I should not be afraid to walk up on my own, but I am.” She laughed.

  They both stood up and walked into the great hall. Michael made for the servants’ stairs.

  “Can we take the main stairs?” She felt dumb.

  “Sure, why?” He was puzzled. These stairs were right here.

  “The Servants’ stairs give me the creeps.” She said.

  They walked down the great hall to the grand stairs and climbed up them. When they got to Vic’s room she was telling Michael goodnight when Megan walked around the corner from their room and saw them. She quickly hid a look of jealousy, but Vic saw it. She told Michael goodnight again and went inside her room.

  Once there she turned on all the lights, lit a few candles, and started another fire. She was so tired, but she wasn’t about to sleep in the dark. She quickly changed out of her clothes and had barely crawled into bed before she was asleep.

  This night no nightmares came for Vic. She wound up dreaming that she was at the New Years Eve ball where the men had died. Music filled the ballroom, women in beautiful dresses danced with handsome men. She saw Michael and Megan dressed the same dancing among the crowd. A Man In a well tailored jacket took her by the hand and led her onto the dance floor where they whirled away. Across the room she saw several men filing out and she knew they were the men who died. She tried to cross the dance floor to reach them, to stop them from making the same mistake twice, but her dance partner kept reaching for her and whirling her away.

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