Read Online The Haunting of James Hastings by Christopher Ransom - Free Book Online

began to thud above, continuing at a leisurely pace toward the back of the house. I knew Stacey was dead and that her body (her broken, discarded body with its obscenely bulging eye and contorted pelvic bones) had been cremated almost a year ago. I also knew that I had heard her voice, close enough to my ear to feel her breath, not two minutes ago.
     
    The footsteps approached the top of the stairs. There were fifteen stairs. I’d counted them many times. I tried and failed to count the footsteps coming down them now, but there couldn’t be more than a couple more to go—
     
    Thump, tha-thump , stop.
     
    Whatever it was had reached the bottom. I imagined it standing there, cold, eyes adjusting to the light, tracking my scent. I watched the short hall between the foyer and the kitchen, giving me a clear view to the front door. Even if it went through the front door, I’d see whatever this turned out to be.
     
    The footsteps scraped over the foyer oak. The brown rug bunched at one corner. A flat leather sandal came into view, smoothing the rug. A woman cleared her throat. The sandal became a shiny pale leg under denim cut-offs, a black t-shirt smeared with powder-blue paint, a mess of strawberry hair. She walked to the mouth of the kitchen and stopped. I was looking at her, a face, not Stacey’s, a stranger’s face. The woman was pale with wide goldfish eyes and a soft flared nose, everything rounded and smooth. She stood with her arms a few inches from her sides, posing in a manner that was almost masculine, cocky.
     
    ‘I’m sorry, James,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’
     
    Her voice was rich, just shy of assertive, and oddly calm. I had never heard it before. I was immediately disarmed by dual emotions. First an almost overwhelming attraction. She was not beautiful in the model sense, but comely, possessing the kind of strangely ordinary features that become harder to look away from the longer one regards them. The second was the disorienting feeling of familiarity, the kind which makes men in bars say, ‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ and mean it. I was frightened by her unexplained presence in my house, and yet I wanted to look into her eyes, sink into the glossy green wet of them.
     
    As a consequence my mouth seemed to fill with wool. She was still twenty feet away but I noticed how she flushed, as if she were reading my admiration and it embarrassed her, or excited her. She pulled a strand of hair over one ear and clasped her hands in front of her waist, mockingly prim.
     
    She said, ‘I’m here now. I’m your wife.’
     
    The word ‘wife’ was a tight band of leather around my neck, shunting my circulation. For a moment her voice echoed Stacey’s, but Stacey’s had been softer, younger. It wasn’t my wife’s voice this woman used.
     
    ‘You’re not my wife,’ I said. ‘My wife left a year ago.’
     
    Her charm deflated, and there was sadness now. ‘No, I said I’m here . . . about your wife.’
     
    Had I heard her wrong? I was certain I had not, and yet I must have.
     
    ‘I’ve been watching you for a little while,’ she said. ‘I was worried I would be too late.’
     
    ‘For what?’
     
    ‘To keep you from doing whatever it was you were thinking about doing upstairs.’
     
    I felt shame, and was once again at a loss for words.
     
    ‘This is going to be hard,’ she said. ‘Can we sit down?’
     
    I stared at her in wonder.
     
    ‘My name is Annette Copeland. I just moved in next door.’
     
    My new neighbor? The shadow on the porch? Was that why she looked familiar? No, I hadn’t seen her well enough to explain the intensity of my feelings now.
     
    ‘I know how your wife was killed,’ she said.
     
    How your wife was killed. Not ‘how she died’. Adrenaline blasted alcohol through my veins, pushing it through my pores in a cold sweat. In an instant I was sober.
     
    ‘I didn’t know what happened until a few weeks ago, otherwise I