The Ghost in the Glass House Read Online Free PDF Page B

few feet of the forest. Then she darted into the trees.
    She was surprised by the sudden chill under the canopy. The early-summer sun had warmed the broad lawn but not the green shadows of the forest. She was used to the manicured shade and well-behaved trees of city gardens, but here thick underbrush grew between the big trunks. She couldn’t take a single step without stopping to think where to put her foot next. And the place was haunted by sounds. Unseen creatures lurked in the brambles until she was almost upon them, then exploded, still invisible, through the brush. Startled birds swooped from their perches, cawing alarms. Before she reached the glass house she was as jumpy as a fawn, and when she finally caught sight of it, she lunged out of the woods like an animal breaking cover.
    On the mossy flagstone by the door, the fright began to drain from her. She pulled the key from her sash. It settled cleanly into the lock. She turned it, stepped inside, replaced the key at her waist, and pulled the door shut behind her.
    A book dropped to the floor with the unmistakable rattle of pages falling together.
    Clare caught her breath and scanned the room.
    A few dozen titles were stacked in crooked piles on the buffet, between the mismatched candelabras. But the sound hadn’t come from there.
    It had come from the center of the room, near the divan.
    The divan, sea-foam green, formed a half moon along with a pair of mulberry wing chairs that stood at opposite ends of a low table with a single shallow drawer. Clare slipped past the hulk of the piano and stepped by one of the wing chairs, into the ring. A book had fallen to the richly patterned rug beside the divan, face-down, its boards splayed, its gilt-edged pages curled.
    Instinctively, Clare bent down to pick it up and set it right. But before her outstretched hand touched the cover, the book rose from the rug, by the spine, until its boards and pages hung straight. Then it toppled over on its side.
    Clare straightened up.
    The book lay flat and still.
    Clare stared fiercely. She knew the power of her imagination. It had created angel after angel to stand guard outside lonely hotel rooms. It had invented whole civilizations in the darkness beyond the windows of speeding night trains. But until this moment, she had never had any trouble telling the difference between the products of her imagination and the actual world.
    Her mind called back the new memory of the falling book, to see if it worked differently than other memories. She remembered stepping through the door, the sudden sound, the book’s slow rise from the floor. Then she played it back again. But the memory was too fresh for this kind of treatment. Each time she tried to go over it, the ceiling of the glass house in her mind grew higher and higher until it towered several stories overhead. The furniture multiplied and divided. The imaginary book changed color in her mind from simple brown, to green, to red.
    Frustrated, Clare stooped to pick up the real book.
Hawthorne
was printed on the dull brown spine in gold letters. She flipped the cover open to the title page:
Mosses from an Old Manse
.
    Beside her, someone sighed.
    The sigh came from nearby, close enough that it sounded like the person who gave it could reach out and touch her. But no one stood where the sound had come from. And before her mind could work out this problem, she caught sight of Tilda not ten yards away, just beyond the glade, carrying an armful of peonies up to the big house as if they were a basket of unwashed laundry.
    Clare dropped to her knees. An instant later, she was spread-eagled on the rug, out of the old woman’s line of sight, the book under her belly.
    She lay like that, her forehead pressed into the rough carpet, until her heart stopped pounding. Then she lay there a while longer. She had just started to calculate whether Tilda had made it back up to the big house or not when a light hand touched her