บททั้งหมดของ Whispers of the Devil: บทที่ 1 - บทที่ 10

LaylaAunt Penny could be mistaken for a child from a distance. The top of her silver hair barely reaches my sternum as she rests in her bed, and I’m not a tall woman, by any means. She’s definitely not the withered old crone I expected, not with her dainty, childlike features and huge, blue eyes. I’ve never even seen a picture of her before. In truth, I could count on one hand the number of times her name had been brought up in conversation. I’m not sure what I imagined her to look like. All I had to go off were stories about this place and this specific family line. But her brow isn’t perpetually pinched. Her nose isn’t long and gnarled and covered with warts. Her fingernails can’t scratch my eyes out, and I doubt she had a cauldron hidden somewhere in the house where she boiled potions. She doesn’t look like the witch my family made her out to be. It makes me sad, honestly, seeing her lying motionless in the massive four-poster bed. It swallows her tiny body whole, making her l

LaylaAunt Penny stares ahead, per usual, looking at everything and nothing all at once. I turn a page in the book I’ve been reading aloud to her the past four nights. She recently started a new blood pressure medication that’s supposed to make her feel drowsy, but so far, it’s having the opposite effect. The old woman has been staring into space until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning the past couple of nights, and I’m running out of ways to keep myself busy. “Don’t!” I say in an exaggerated tone, lifting my voice to imitate the dainty, elegant and high-bred young debutant, the book's heroine. “Please! You know we cannot go any further, Randall. You’ll ruin me!”I swear Aunt Penny’s mouth lifts into a ghost of a smile, her eyes softening and looking far more alive than they had only moments ago. I drop my voice as low as it can go and continue, “You called me a rake once, Juliette…. It’s high time I showed you just how rakish I can be….” I quickly scan the rest of the page and glance up

DaltonI catch the screaming night nurse by the wrist before she can flee back into the hallway. Her deep blue eyes shine like smooth sapphires, alight with fear. “Someone’s on edge,” I say, letting go of her wrist, hoping my touch is enough to tell her I’m real and not one of the many apparitions who haunt this hellhole.I can almost taste her fear. She gapes at me, looking me up and down. “Who the hell are you?”“Who are you?” I ask, sipping from the coffee Bailey so generously made before taking her leave this evening. “Who am I?” she says, stupidly–if I might add. “Uh, yeah?” I stare down at her, drinking her in. Bouncy, thick blonde hair that would probably touch her lower back if she didn’t keep it piled on the top of her head. Slim shoulders, narrow waist. A great rack I’d like to paint if I could ever get her naked. Her nipples are peaked under her white tank-top, and she isn’t wearing a bra, of course. These night nurses get comfortable, fast, especially when they think the

Dalton The cigar room on the second floor has been untouched since the early 1930s. The moth-eaten fabric that covers the furniture smells sharply of damp and mildew, and the once lively floral wallpaper is peeling from the walls, revealing horse-hair plaster beneath. I huff a breath as I look around, the darkened corners of the wide, square room beckoning to me. I ignore it, like usual, but that creeping sensation licking up my neck continually steals my attention as I lay out sheets of plastic across the mahogany floor and prepare to repair what wallpaper I can salvage. I’m not sure how I got into this line of work. My dad had been a contractor, and since it had just been me and him growing up, I spent a great deal of time following him from job site to job site, mingling with the various tradesmen and technicians he worked with day in and day out. He got a job in the Garden District in New Orleans–fixing up an old Greek Revival mansi

Layla “Uh, is this the address?” I look up, blinking to clear my blurry vision, and see that we’re idling at the rusted front gate to the Gregory Estate. “Yeah, this is it.”“I gotta be honest with you, ma’am. I don’t think my car is going to get down the driveway.” My driver’s not wrong. His sedan practically scrapes the ground as he pulls forward. The decaying concrete juts up in places, forced skyward by the relentless roots cutting through the cement. “It’s fine. I can walk.”“You sure? I could walk you down–”“Don’t worry about it,” I mumble, letting myself out of the car and shutting the door behind me. I take off my heels and rest my bare feet on the cool, solid ground. It feels good. The air is heavy with humidity, but a slight, chilled breeze clears my head enough for my gin-induced stupor to finally give way. “Thanks for the ride.”With that, I walk away, the Uber’s headlights fading be