The Haunting Read Online Free PDF

scrap of paper within its pages. Or perhaps he had underlined words in a type of code. But I could find nothing. Perhaps the page in which the bookmark rested had contained the clue I needed. But through my carelessness I had lost the bookmark and had no way of knowing on which page it had rested.
    In the waning light of the day I sat in Grandfather’s bedroom with my mother’s prayer book open in my hands and tried to pray for Grandfather’s soul, as was right and proper. But shadows grew deeper, and the house seemed to be filling with soft and secret sounds. I lit a lamp, then leaned back in the chair, hoping for a few moments of rest and peace. But as I glanced upward, the designs in the molding turned into tiny faces with mean mouths and hard eyes. Unable to look away, I glimpsed sharp teeth and tongues that curled and split like serpents’ tongues. A breeze lifted the curtains at the window, hissing frigid air into the room. The little eyes narrowed, and the. tongues waggled, whispering words I didn’t want to hear. A horrible sense of evil wrapped around me, twisting about my throat.
    I tried to breathe, but I was suffocating. I gasped. I panted. With all my strength I clutched the arms of the chair and thrust myself upward, yelling, choking, coughing.
    Whatever courage I had was completely gone. Aching with shame, I knew that I would be unable to do the proper thing and sit with Grandfather’s body. I couldn’t stay in this house alone another minute. I tore down the stairs and out through the back door with whispers twining around my legs and shadowy fingers plucking at my hair and arms.
    That night I slept in the barn.
    There was more in the diary about Graymoss and about Placide Blevins’s funeral and about Cousin Lydia Hartwell, who was a dumpling-shaped, humorless, elderly widow who unenthusiastically and out of duty, according to Charlotte, offered her a home.
    What has happened to Graymoss? In the daylight my home seems as warm and welcoming as it has always been. But at night strange, unearthly things happen. Freezing winds blow through the house, doorknobs rattle and turn, and voices hiss and whisper around me. They are saying something—some word repeated over and over—but I can’t make it out. I don’t want to. All this is not my imagination. Until Cousin Lydia arrived, I made the barn my sleeping quarters.
    The few workers who had stayed with our family thought I had become unsettled because of losing Grandfather. They didn’t believe me when I told them what I had seen and heard. At their urging, I arranged for Grandfather’s immediate burial in the family crypt, hoping that they were right in telling me that soon all the bad feelings in the house would be gone.
    That night I tried going to bed in the house again, but once more the eyes goggled at me and the mouths opened in whispers, ravings, and screams. I grabbed my quilt and, barefoot, ran to the barn.
    Amos, the tall, strapping fellow who grooms the horses and drives the carriage, told me that he would prove to me that what I heard and saw was only in my mind. I could stay in the barn that night, and he would sleep in the house.
    With all my heart I hoped he was right. But it didn’t surprise me when not long after nine o’clock Amos flung
the back door open and came tearing down the steps, yelling so loudly that some of the others came running.
    Amos shook as he talked and hung on to a fence rail for support. “Miss Charlotte is right! There’s somethin’ horrible inside that housed he cried.
    “Ghosts?” somebody asked.
    “Worse than ghosts,” Amos answered. “And there was a voice sayin’ somethin’.”
    “What did it say?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” Amos said. “I didn’t stay long enough to make it out.”
    Bill and Peter glanced at the house with interest. Peter took a step toward it.
    “Don’t you try goin’ in there, ’less you want your heart scared right out of your body,” Amos warned.
    But Bill