BEWARE OF BESS
Who, or what, was Bess? she wondered. More important, which sign was the one she was supposed to ignore? Isobel glanced over her shoulder toward the front room. She didn’t really feel like going back to ask grandpa-coughs-a-lot, and he did say to go upstairs.
Isobel grasped the tarnished brass knob and turned. The door squeaked open, revealing a long, narrow staircase that stretched steeply upward. Square shafts of white sunlight shone down from a window at the top, a million dust motes dancing in and out of the beams.
All right, she thought. If these were the stairs she was supposed to go up, then where was this Bess?
“Hello?”
Her voice sounded quiet and small in her own ears. She didn’t receive an answer, but she thought she could hear the shuffling of papers, so she mounted the stairs, leaving the door open behind her.
There was no banister leading up, so she held her arms out at either side and braced her hands along the dark wood-paneled walls. The stairs groaned and creaked underfoot, as though murmuring secrets about her.
She took one step after another, and as she drew closer to the top, an odd feeling began to creep over her. She felt it in her stomach first, a queasy sensation coupled with the slightest hint of vertigo. It made her skin prickle and the tiny hairs on her arms stand at attention. She drew to a halt on the steps and listened.
Crack!
Isobel yelped. Her knees buckled, and she dropped down to clutch the stairs.
Whipping her head around, she saw that someone had slammed the door shut.
10
Spirits of the Dead
“What are you doing?”
She knew that voice, languid and calm, with that faint hint of irritation. Isobel slowly turned her head until she found herself focusing on a pair of dusty black boots positioned at the top of the stairs, less than a foot from her nose. Tilting her head back, her eyes met with the cool greens of one Varen Nethers, the great-and-jaded.
He stared down at her, a Discman in one hand, spinning a CD, his other hand poised on the buzzing, squealing headphones draped around his neck.
“That crazy old guy slammed the door on me!”
He shot her an admonishing glare before turning away, moving into the room, which was small—tiny really, an attic, or so it had probably once been. His boots made hollow thumping sounds against the dried-out floorboards as he made his way toward a small, café-style table, which sat at the other end of the room, swamped with papers. In the center of the space, an ugly, threadbare, brown and orange throw rug lay stretched out on the floor, like the severed scalp of some balding monster. Aside from a few obligatory stacks of books in each corner of the room, there was nothing else.
The table sat beneath a window, the only other besides the one above the stairs. This window was smaller and round, and it overlooked the street.
“Bruce hates noise,” Varen said, “so I can’t picture him slamming any doors.”
Isobel pursed her lips. She watched him resume his seat at the table, setting the CD player aside before he began sifting through the mess of papers. She eyed the Discman, thinking that it was really old-school that he still carried one, that he didn’t have an iPod or some other MP3 player. She thought better about commenting on it, though.
Instead she folded her arms and said, “So you’re calling me a liar.”
“Did I say that?” he asked without looking up, and she couldn’t help but recall how these same words had been the first he’d ever spoken to her.
“Well, you insinuated it.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions.”
“Yeah, so then who slammed the door?”
“Bess,” he said, as though this were the logical conclusion for anyone to make.
“Who the heck is this Bess?” Isobel’s arms went up and landed at her sides in an exasperated flop. She hadn’t even met Bess, and already she was starting to despise her.
“The poltergeist.”
“The what?”
“Pol-ter-geist,” he said again, enunciating each syllable.
“You mean, like what?” Isobel scoffed. “A ghost?”
“Sort of.”
“You’re serious.”
His eyes lifted from the table to fix on her—seriously.
“Whatever,” she said, brushing off a patch of gray grit she’d spotted on the front of her jeans, dust that she’d probably picked up from those grimy stairs. It was evident that he was just trying to weird her out again. Probably.
Isobel ignored the goose bumps that prickled all the way up the back of her neck, like tiny spiders with electric legs. “So we’re working up here? I don’t get it. How do you know that guy?”
