The Guest House Hauntings Boxset by Hazel Holmes (novel books to read txt) 📕

body and her senses and her soul. It would drive her mad, willing her to return to the house, where she would find peace. And in that peace, her death would grant Iris’s family their freedom.

72

Sarah kept her eyes shut tight. She focused all of her attention on the mansion, on being inside. She took slow, deep breaths, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth.

After a minute, her mind calmed, and she heard the chatter of the forest to her left. The wind blew quickly across the surface of her ears, whistling as it passed. The muscles along her arms and shoulders relaxed. Her palms no longer stung from the cold of the ground.

Sarah envisioned the room she had been in before. She detailed the paintings on the wall, the yellow bedspread, and the crocheted lilies on the pillows on the bed. She suddenly felt warmer, and she knew she was getting close.

She recreated the floorboards, the wood stiff and warm against her skin. Candlelight flickered against the thin skin of her closed eyelids, the flames wiggling back and forth and shifting the shadows along the room.

A quick tug at her waist and Sarah gasped, but when she opened her eyes, she was no longer outside. She’d done it. She’d projected herself into the house.

She smiled, pushing herself off the floor, and glanced around at the room. It was exactly how it had been before, every detail. She paused, waiting for the redhead to return, but after a few moments in the room alone, Sarah knew that she wasn’t going to come.

But then as Sarah stepped toward the door, ready to press through the walls, she realized that there was something different.

The candles. The last time she had been transported into the house, it had been daylight outside, which meant… what? She was in a different time period? The redhead had told her that all of the souls were stuck in the time during which they had been killed, so they only saw the house as it had been when they lived.

So since it was night outside, this couldn’t have been the redhead’s version of the house. But if it wasn’t hers, then whose was it?

Sarah stepped into the hallway, finding more candles lit along the hall, though the light did little to improve the dreary nature of the surroundings. And just as Sarah was about to head down the hall to the staircase, she stopped herself.

The chair she’d seen in the hallway was no longer vibrant and new. The green and gold had faded, and the tear was visible down the middle of the seat. She reached out her hand, tracing her fingertip over the cut, hovering just above the cloth so her hand didn’t pass through it.

Sarah frowned and then examined the rest of the hall, noticing details she remembered from working here. If the first time she had projected herself was among the company of one of the dead, then she must have been a part of their world. But since she had projected alone this time, that meant that she was in her version of the house.

Unsure of how much time she had, Sarah hurried toward the stairs, rocketing up toward the fifth floor, remembering the orb that the redhead had told her was hidden in the house. And after Iris’s lecture to never go on the fifth floor, Sarah was betting that was where it was hidden.

Sarah reached the top of the stairs quickly, then glided through the door and toward the last room on the left where she again passed through, smiling at her own efficiency.

The room was just how she remembered it, and she started her search. While she scoured the room, she found that the only downside to her projection powers were her inability to pick anything up. If a picture or letter or object was face down, she couldn’t turn it over.

But after searching the room top to bottom, Sarah found nothing.

She checked every other room on the floor, peering through every wall and door. She checked closets and bathrooms. She poked her head through cabinets and chests and drawers. And after her methodical, grid-like check of the fifth floor, she was still empty-handed.

Sarah descended to the fourth floor to begin her search of the rest of the house. She passed through the rooms, looking for anything orb like, but finding nothing of the like aside from a few marbles in bowls.

She passed through room after room after room, and then finally stopped, gasping and covering her mouth from the noise.

Iris sat asleep in a chair near her vanity. Void of any make-up, she looked incredibly frail.

Circling the room, Sarah eventually made it to the vanity where Iris slept, and behind her Sarah saw the opened letter. She leaned closer, examining the letter beneath the candlelight that still flickered nearby.

When she finished, Sarah looked back at the old woman and frowned. “So you did come back to try and save your family.” But then Sarah remembered about what happened to Kegan’s parents, how they died. So what did the old woman do? Just save herself? The thought angered her.

What kind of a mother saved herself over her own children? But Sarah knew the answer to that question. She had experienced it repeatedly in the foster system. Women collecting children for the check, for tax deductions, to fill some void in their life.

In all of Sarah’s experiences with foster mothers, Sarah never felt like she was there to be helped. It always felt like she was there to help the women. And despite her efforts, Sarah failed every single time.

Knowing that the old woman couldn’t hear her, Sarah leaned close to Iris’s ear, her lips just a breath away from touching Iris’s skin.

“I want you to know that you deserve everything that happens to you,” Sarah said. “For all the people you hurt, and tried to hurt, just to save your own skin.”

But when Sarah leaned back,