The Visitor. Amanda Stevens

have still been on edge from that ghostly visitation because the moment I spotted the open cellar door, my heart gave a painful jerk.

      Tamping down a premature panic, I crossed the yard to the steps, but before I could call down, an odor wafted up to me—the smell of musk, earth and more faintly, decay. Not the stench of active rot, but the fusty perfume of old death.

      Phantom fragrances were often attached to ghosts. Devlin’s dead daughter had smelled of jasmine, and the sightless apparition of dust and dried lavender.

      But this was not the scent of a ghost.

      A cloud passed over the sun and I shivered. When the sun came back out, a shadowy face stared up at me from the gloom of the cellar.

Three

      “Amelia?”

      My heart stuttered for a fraction of a second as I tried to catch my breath. The shock of hearing my name on some odious creature’s lips stunned me. Then reason intervened and I realized the voice was a familiar one. A safe one.

      “Hey, I didn’t scare you, did I?” Macon Dawes called up.

      I could just make out his features in the dusky light. Tousled hair, tired eyes, slightly pointed chin. Not a demon, not some loathsome half being from an in-between world, but the pleasantly human visage of my upstairs neighbor.

      But that smell...

      I clutched the stair rail as I struggled to quiet my pounding heart. “I was a bit startled. I wasn’t expecting to find anyone in the cellar at this hour.”

      “Did the hammering wake you up?” He placed a foot on the bottom step as he continued to stare up at me. He wore black Chucks nearly identical to the ones I had on, torn jeans and an old plaid shirt thrown over a threadbare T-shirt. The ordinariness of his rumpled appearance comforted me. “Sorry about that. I should have realized all that banging would go straight up the walls to your place.”

      “I didn’t hear a thing,” I assured him. “I was just having some tea in the garden when I noticed the open door.”

      “Still, it wouldn’t kill me to mind my manners. I’m so used to my crazy schedule at the hospital I forget there are folks like you keeping normal hours out there in the real world.”

      “No harm done.” I went down a step or two. Now that my pulse had settled, I was genuinely curious. Macon was a student at the nearby Medical University of South Carolina, so I’d grown used to his coming and going at all hours. But so much early-morning activity was unusual even for him. “What are you building down there?”

      “Building? Nothing. Just reinforcing some of the shelving so we can have a little more storage space.” He motioned toward the depths of the cellar. “Have you been down here lately? This place is a firetrap. You wouldn’t believe all the useless crap I’ve come across. Cartons of old textbooks and magazines, trunks of moth-eaten clothing and something that looks suspiciously like a mummified bat.”

      I descended another step. “What’s that smell?”

      He wrinkled his nose. “You should have gotten a whiff earlier before I aired out the place. I think something’s nesting down here.”

      “Nesting?” I asked in alarm. “Like what?”

      “Rats, maybe. Or possums. And did I mention the spiders?” He ran fingers through his hair with an exaggerated shudder.

      “Do you need a hand?” I asked with little enthusiasm because the mention of spiders gave me pause. I’d had a mild case of arachnophobia since childhood and despite my years of prowling through web-shrouded tombs and infested mausoleums, I’d never quite managed to conquer my aversion.

      “Thanks, but if you’ll make sure all your belongings are marked, I’ll take care of the rest.”

      “I don’t have much. Just a few boxes that were left behind when I moved in. I’ll come down and take a look, though.”

      I started down the steps, reluctant to leave the sunlight in the garden for the dimness of the basement. The house had been built on the site of the chapel of an orphanage that had burned to the ground at the turn of the last century. The cellar was the only thing that remained of the original structure, and sometimes when I went down there, I had an uncomfortable feeling that something lay hidden and waiting behind those brick walls. Something other than spiders and rodents.

      The house had always provided a shield from the ghosts—a safe haven—but sometimes I wondered if the cellar might be a back door through the protective firewall of hallowed ground. The only spirit to ever breach my inner sanctum had been the ghost of Devlin’s daughter. Somehow she’d found a way inside my house, and if she could do it, how long before I experienced another intrusion?

      I continued downward, my footsteps echoing eerily in the dank stillness. A second stairway at the back of the cellar led to the kitchen, but the door had been boarded up during one of the renovations. Once upon a time, that fortified passage had made me feel safer inside the house, but now I wondered if my peace of mind had ever been anything more than an illusion.

      Funny how the same sealed door could make one feel secure on one side and trapped on the other. As I reached the bottom of the steps, I became overly aware of that single exit. Claustrophobia pressed in on me. For an archaeologist turned cemetery restorer, I tended to have a lot of inconvenient hang-ups.

      “What’s that noise?” I cocked my head with a frown.

      Macon paused. “I don’t hear anything.”

      “Listen. It’s an odd drone. Sort of like an electrical hum.”

      He lifted his gaze to the bare lightbulb. “Faulty wiring would be my guess. I doubt this place has had a proper inspection in years. Like I said, a regular firetrap.”

      Rubbing my arms, I glanced around warily. Macon was right. Something had been crawling around the cellar, shredding old books and forgotten clothing while leaving behind the faint but animalistic odor of musk and decay. “I’ve never liked coming down here,” I said. “This place gives me the creeps.”

      “Says the woman who restores old graveyards for a living.” Macon blew dust from a box, then lifted the lid to peer inside. “Junk, junk and more junk.” As he swung the carton off the shelf, something dislodged and tumbled to the floor—a card with two nearly identical photographs mounted side by side.

      As I bent to pick up the curiosity, I felt a tug of recognition even though I’d never seen the man that gazed up at me from the dual images, let alone the two diminutive girls that stood in front of him. They were older than their size would suggest, in their midteens perhaps.

      Judging by the odd attire, the photos had been taken long before I was born. The man was shirtless beneath old-fashioned bib overalls while the girls were draped in dark cloaks that covered their frail bodies from neck to ankle.

      Something about the incongruity of those heavy cloaks, about the way they stood back-to-back with their faces turned toward the camera gave me an inexplicable chill.

      I handed the card to Macon. “Look at this.”

      He moved over to the natural light in the doorway for a closer examination. “It’s a stereogram,” he said after a moment. “If you look at it through a viewer, the photographs merge into one 3-D image.”

      “I’ve played around with photography. Double exposure and things like that, but I don’t know much about stereoscopy. The card seems quite old.”

      “I’m sure it is. These things were popular as far back as the nineteenth century. I had an uncle who collected them. I wonder if there’s a stereoscope around here somewhere. Where did you find it?”

      “On the floor. I think it must have been wedged between the shelves. You probably nudged it loose when you moved the box.”

      I waited patiently