CHAPTER 61

We all looked up as Stevie ran back into the room, grim-faced and carrying his laptop.

“Give me a minute.” He pulled a small table in front of his chair and set his computer on it, along with his phone and the recording equipment he’d been carrying around earlier. We waited as he fiddled with cords and spent several minutes transferring files. Satisfied, he leaned back and said, “Okay, listen to this.”

“What is it?” I wondered, annoyed at this new disruption.

“The whole time Nisa and I were upstairs, I was recording. I just now did a quick edit in my room—I cut a few spots where Nisa and I were talking and you couldn’t really hear anything else, but otherwise it’s intact. We can listen to whatever we all heard up there, and maybe figure out what it was.”

“You were ghost hunting!” Amanda said accusingly.

“No, I wasn’t,” Stevie retorted angrily. “I was recording ambient noises to use as sound design—I do it all the time. It’s cool because there are all these noises that are constantly going on around us but we just don’t notice them. Like when you’re in bed at night and all of a sudden you can’t fall asleep because you hear your heartbeat? It’s not that your heart has suddenly started beating—you’re just lying down with nothing else going on in your mind. I’ve done this at other places and it’s amazing what you hear—the wind, mice and beetles in the walls—”

“Stop.” Nisa held up her hand. “I don’t want to hear about the death beetles.”

“Okay, no deathwatch beetles. Like I said, I haven’t played this back yet, so I might have to adjust the levels. But here goes…”

He tapped his laptop. Peering at the screen, I saw only bar graphs and squiggles, those moving lines that indicate varying sounds and frequencies. After a moment, footsteps echoed from the computer’s speaker, then Stevie’s and Nisa’s recorded voices.

“Want to explore?”

“Oh yeah… Are you ghost hunting?”

Amanda gave him another glare but said nothing. There were more footsteps, then Stevie’s laughter followed by his explanation of the deathwatch beetles, which I found interesting but which made Nisa scrunch into her chair and cover her ears. A short while later, she gave him an odd look as the sound cut out for a microsecond.

“You cut—” she began, but at Stevie’s sharp look she slipped back down into her chair.

The recording continued, most of it banter.

“Whoever designed this place must have been drunk.”

“Or maybe the contractors were. Or both. No wonder Ainsley can’t sell it.”

Now and then Stevie tapped at the screen, adjusting frequency levels so that their voices and footsteps faded out.

And yes, now I could hear other sounds. Nothing strange or creepy, just ordinary noises. A creaking door, the whistle of wind outside. Stevie and Nisa arguing about the carving, their voices subdued and faint, like whining insects. Then more footsteps, the ambient sound levels dialed back so the footsteps sounded like echoes of his fingers on the keyboard. Then Nisa’s gasp.

“Do you feel that?”

A soft thump. I could see Stevie tense. “That’s me,” he said. “This is when we first entered the nursery. This is what we want to listen to.”

“Can you picture being a kid and trying to sleep up here? You wouldn’t. I wouldn’t.”

“No, me neither.”

“Plus it must be ninety degrees—but right by the door, it’s freezing.”

Their recorded back-and-forth continued, and then I heard my own voice.

“Stevie! Hey, I was looking for you!”

Another minute of chatter followed.

“Holly! We found the haunted room.”

“What room?”

“The nursery!”

“Get out. We have to get out.”

“What? Why?”

“Just go!”

Stevie held up a warning finger, and we listened for the thunderclap.

Only there was no thunderclap. No boom, no explosive sound of any sort. Stevie stared intently at his laptop as the recording played, until we heard my voice again, and Nisa’s.

“Was that thunder?”

“It felt like it came from inside this—”

I held my breath, waiting for the next explosion—but again, nothing. I looked around and saw Nisa burrowed deeply into her chair, like a child scared by a bedtime story. Amanda sat with her head tilted, intent but calm. Stevie pulled the laptop closer, putting in his headphones as he tapped at the keyboard. Onscreen, hair-thin lines rose and fell in a strange silent dance. After a minute, he looked at me.

“I’m trying to clean it up,” he explained. “There’s something there…”

The fine jagged lines grew thicker, as though drawn by Magic Marker. Their dance slowed, the loping rise and fall now a steady motion. It was like watching someone draw on an old-fashioned Etch A Sketch. Stevie’s mouth grew tight as his finger scrolled across the track pad. He no longer looked puzzled, but afraid.

“Listen,” he said, and removed his headphones.