“It will get worse on its own, guaranteed,” Grant said. “Once a haunting progresses to this level . . . it’s not going away without some intervention.” Turning to Wyatt, he continued. “We’re all here. Nothing is going to happen to her.”
Tess looked around. They weren’t all there. Where was Jane?
“Jane’s not here,” Tess said. At the thought of it, a darkness seemed to surround Tess, a feeling that something was lurking and waiting, and Jane was with it.
“Oftentimes, she goes off on her own,” Hunter said, breaking Tess’s train of thought. “I think we should check the rest of the downstairs and then head up to the studio.”
They left the drawing room and moved on, splitting into pairs, Grant and Hunter going one way, Tess and Wyatt the other. They walked slowly through the living room, devices in hand. Tess noticed hers was shaking. But the needle on her EMF was still at zero. No activity at all.
“Anybody getting anything?” Grant called out.
“Nothing here,” Wyatt called back.
They met at the bottom of the front staircase. Grant nodded to the group, and they started up, each of them holding out their various recording devices in front of them. Tess noticed Hunter stopped midway and pointed his video camera back down the stairs, recording what was behind them. Following them? Tess shivered at the thought of it.
The upstairs hallway was eerily quiet and empty, almost devoid of any sort of human presence, even their own. It was as though whatever was haunting the house had sucked the life completely out of it. As though death reigned there.
A mist seemed to be floating through the air, accumulating in corners, hanging at face height. It was so tangible Tess swished it away with her EMF, and sure enough, the device started clicking.
“There,” Grant whispered to Hunter, and the Scot trained his camera on Tess’s EMF. Tess felt the temperature drop and caught Grant’s eye. He confirmed it with a nod.
“Who are you?” he said. “What do you want from Tess?”
Wyatt held his voice recorder close to her.
The four of them looked at one another—nobody heard anything, except the clicking of the EMF. Tess thought it was deafeningly loud, as though it were coming from inside her own head.
Grant nodded his head toward the studio. Tess’s stomach knotted up. She knew, they all knew, the studio would be the epicenter of it all.
And that was where they found Jane.
She had covered the table in the main room with candles, which flickered in the darkness. Tess detected a pungent yet pleasing scent in the air. She guessed it was sage.
Jane was sitting in the middle of the floor, a ring of candles around her. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were moving slightly. It seemed that she was praying. Or whispering to the dead.
As the group walked into the room, Jane opened her eyes and smiled.
“I was just centering myself and the room,” she said. “Did you find anything?”
Grant nodded and motioned to Wyatt. “He got something on the recorder.” Wyatt rewound it and played the voice for Jane.
“No surprise there,” Jane said, reaching over and squeezing Tess’s hand. “This is your house. Of course you’re the focus of it.”
Grant had said as much before, but Tess didn’t like it any better now.
All at once, Tess heard a scratching sound. Not like the scratching from the studio. Electronic scratching. Like static.
And then, music wafted through the air, a faraway tune from long ago, from another time, another era.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy, when skies are gray
You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you
Please don’t take my sunshine away
She knew this song. Everyone did. Her father had sung it to her when she was a little girl. Most people thought of it as a sweet love song. But, for Tess, it was impossibly sad and even frightening. She had always hated it, even as a child.
But this wasn’t the upbeat version she knew . . . It was low and slow and threatening, as if each word were being growled out by a demon.
She looked around wildly at the others—they didn’t seem to hear it. Grant was fiddling with his meter. Hunter was saying something to Wyatt. Jane had taken one of the candles and was waving its smoke into the air.
Tess couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. And the air in the room seemed to be hazy, almost as if fog had descended around them. It was as though Tess had been pulled elsewhere, while also still remaining in this room.
Only Jane was looking at Tess. She said something, and then her eyes grew wide. Tess watched her mouth move. “Tess,” she said, but Tess didn’t hear that, either.