The Exorcism of Winchester House by Douglas Wynne

Author:Douglas Wynne [Wynne, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

On his first night in Winchester House, Diego dreamed of his sister again.

L

He drives the boat up onto the beach, the hull scraping the sand, and leaps over the side into the water. The tide has receded in the time he and Julia were away, leaving a longer stretch of beach between the shoreline and the burning house. He runs, feet pounding the wet sand until they’re sliced on broken shells and thwacking through the tall grass, the blackened wreckage of his home towering above him, crackling and collapsing, scraps of burning fabric tumbling skyward on the plume.

The heat dries the sweat on his face and threatens to singe his hair. Diego screams Estella’s name. He circles the house, searching for her. But she is nowhere to be found. Only the gulls scream back. He falls to his knees in the sand, and stares up at the raging flames, the collapsing timbers. This is the moment when the neighbors came and tried to lead him away. When he broke free and burned his hands on the doorframe and they dragged him down the beach, kicking and screaming while the bucket brigade went to work dousing the flames. But no hands fall on his shoulders this time. In the nocturnal Hell where he relives that terrible day, there are no neighbors. He turns to look back at the beach and finds himself utterly alone. Even Julia has vanished from the little red boat like a wisp of smoke, a succubus swept away on the wind, bearing his seed to the infernal realm.

The sound of the blaze goes silent, like a door shut against a storm, and turning back to the house, he finds the smoldering skeleton of the only home he’s ever known, the sky behind the charred beams heavy with fog. This is how it looked the day after, when his father combed the wreckage. But one thing is different. One unbroken window remains upright in its frame, centered before him at eye level, where no window had ever been before.

It is not the same as the other windows of the house as he remembers them—thick, imperfect glass that distorted the view and added waves to the ocean even on the calmest days. He was fascinated by the optical tricks those windows played on his young eyes, sitting beside them and adjusting the effect by how close he held his nose to the glass and the slightest tilt of the angle of his sight. No, this pane of glass belongs in no fisherman’s shack. This is pure white Tiffany glass cut in the pattern of a spider’s web.

A shadow moves behind the frosted glass—the shape of a body, though he can see no legs between the blackened studs propping up the frame. It grows larger, a head and shoulders leaning in to scrutinize his shape through the opaque screen. Diego sits back on his heels and claws at the sand, afraid of the presence, but also transfixed, unable to stand and flee.

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