Page 100 of If I Stopped Haunting You

Neil knew the way well, his feet following a familiar path to the door. If there was one place Georgina would be, it was in there.

He and Penelope stopped outside the door. Though he knew what was needed of him, it was something else to confront a ghost willingly. All this time, he’d tried to find the clues, creeping around the castle when he saw things and heard things. But now he was voluntarily entering a room that he knew was haunted. Again. After the concussion and the black eye he could feel setting in, he should have known better, but it seemed he hadn’t learned anything at all.

“So,” Penelope started, motioning toward the door. “More ghost encounters on your wish list?”

“Not particularly.”

“Do we go in together? Or just you?”

“Together. We need to do this together.”

She must have liked the sound of that, because she smiled up at him before nodding. “Okay, together.”

Neil squeezed her fingers. He breathed in deeply through his nose, then let the breath out slowly. This was it, the end. The finale. He’d waited days for this, days of sleepless nights and heart-wrenching truths. He squinted down at Penelope, at the dark hair tucked behind her ear, at the set of her jaw as she stared ahead.There was no way their story would end here, outside this room. They still had so much to do together, so many things to say.

Their firsts had only just begun.

“Are we going in?” she asked, peering up at him.

With a sigh, he turned the knob and pushed.

The room was not as he’d seen it before. Life had been bled out of the space, light replaced with dark, joy replaced with shadows. Black, syrupy liquid seeped from the corners and the floorboards, oozing from every crack and crevice. It reeked of death, stale and sweet and terribly wrong.

The door slammed shut behind them, making Neil and Penelope jump. He laughed it off, running his free hand through his hair to hide how nervous he was. Okay, terrified. Neil Storm wasterrified. Which, in all frankness, he had every right to be.

“It’s fine, we’re fine,” he said, tightening his grip on Penelope’s hand.

“Your grip tells me otherwise,” she gasped, flexing her hand in his.

“Sorry,” he said, loosening his hold.

The bed was bare, just an empty canopy bed with shreds of old fabric dripping from the top. The doors from the wardrobe on the farthest wall had been chopped into pieces at one point or another, and the markings looked strikingly like those of an axe.

The mirror on the wall adjacent to the bed was cracked, hanging crookedly. Neil tried desperately not to focus on their reflections. He’d seen enough horror movies and read enough horror stories to know that was never a good idea.

Aside from the furniture, the room was empty but for the littered leaves and torn, blackened fabric clinging to the sticky substance that seemed to bubble up from the floor with each step.

Gripping Penelope’s fingers, Neil carefully pulled her across the room, tiptoeing around the black liquid. They crossed to the small writing desk he’d seen Georgina stationed at. It was not abeautiful thing, simply a useful thing, the wood weathered and worn from years of abandonment.

Neil ran a finger along it. He held his finger up to examine—no dust to be found—and frowned.

“That’s weird,” he said.

“This is where she wrote all those letters,” she mused. Penelope closed her eyes, leaning into the desk. Despite everything in Neil telling him to run, he could watch her all day. “I can picture her seated here, looking out over the grounds, thinking of Archie.”

So, Penelope Skinner was a romantic. Neil should have known. He had the strange urge to reach out and wrap his arms around her, to capture her mouth with his. Something about her made him come alive, particularly in a room so devoid of life.

Neil skimmed a hand up her arm, his fingers brushing her elbow. Penelope pivoted to smile up at him but froze, her eyes going to the bed frame behind him. It reminded him of those moments in the hall, hands clasped over Penelope’s eyes as the door creaked open and Georgina floated out.

Penelope opened her mouth to scream, her voice not quite working as she let out a raspy squeak and staggered back a step, pointing past him.

“She’s behind me, isn’t she?” he asked, resigned.

“N-no. She—she’sunderyou.”

If there were words worse than he’d imagined, those were them.

Neil hadn’t wanted to look down. Hell, if he had the choice, he would have much rather stood there with the knowledge that a ghost crept beneath him than train his eyes on the thing. But his curiosity strained, and even knowing what lay beneath, he couldn’t stop his eyes from straying.