Texas Gothic by Rosemary Clement-Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

head seemed to float and spin away from the rest of me. It was a horrible helpless feeling, like passing out in slow motion. My fingers went slack, and the phone tumbled from my grip. If Aunt Hyacinth was still there, I couldn’t hear her over the buzzing in my ears. But even if I could call out to her, how could she help me from China?
    The door slammed open, crashing against the wall and rattling the picture frames to the floor. Through the empty doorway, a torrent of wind poured into the room, raging like an invisible animal. It pulled at my hair and flung papers and books from the desk and whipped the drapes like Fourth of July streamers in a sudden summer storm.
    Lila jumped up with a woof of recognition. The ropes of ice around my chest thawed, and warm air rushed into my aching lungs—warm and scented with sage and mesquite, dusty denim, and a whiff of violet. The spectral blue light and the shape within it vanished, blown out like a candle in a gale.
    The cyclone whisked out the way it had come, slamming the door behind it, an emphatic period on the ghostly tirade.For a long moment, I sat staring numbly into the dark. The awful paralysis had drained away, but shock and bewilderment held me still. Then the rest of the dogs scrambled to their feet, letting loose a cacophony of barking sufficient to …
    Well, to raise the dead.
    The clamor bounced around my skull, knocking my tumbling thoughts into even more of a mess.
Telephone
, I remembered first.
Aunt Hyacinth
.
    I searched through the tangle of blankets and twelve dog paws, fumbling the receiver to my ear when I found it. “Aunt Hyacinth? Are you still there?”
    Nothing but a dial tone.
    The door banged open again, and I gave a shriek that might have, under other circumstances, been overreaction but wasn’t because there’d just been a freaking
ghost
in my room.
    At
least
one ghost, plus whatever that was that had swept through and driven it away—Uncle Burt?—which had seemed almost benign next to the deathly cold
thing
at the foot of my bed.
    The foot of my bed, ohmigod
. My racing brain revved that single thought through my head, pushing out everything else.
    “Amy! What’s going on?”
    Phin stared at me from the doorway, her pajamas rumpled, her hair sticking out in all directions. The hall light fell across the bed, and I caught a glimpse of myself in the bureau mirror: huddled in the safety of my dogs and blankets, the snarl of my dark red hair stark against the bloodless pallor of my skin, my freckles standing out like raisins inoatmeal. And my eyes—huge and wild and world-tilted-on-its-axis terrified.
    No wonder Phin stared like she’d never seen me before. She flipped on the overhead light and goggled at the mess. “Holy moly! This looks like
my
room. What happened?”
    “There was a ghost. Right there!” I pointed. The dogs jumped off the bed and circled the room, whining at the tension.
    Phin frowned in confusion. “A ghost? You mean Uncle Burt?”
    “Not Uncle Burt,” I said. “I’m not scared of Uncle Burt.” I kicked off the covers and went to the spot where the light and cold had coalesced. But not too close. “It was right there. Like a column of blue-white light, and a figure in the center.”
    It seemed like there should be a burn or a mark or something, the way the image was singed into my retinas. When I blinked, I could still see the glow, and I shuddered.
    Phin hung back in the doorway, as if she were afraid of contaminating a crime scene. “A ghost shouldn’t have been able to get in here.”
    “I know.” I rubbed at the gooseflesh on my arms. My tank top and boxer shorts were meant for sleeping under a hundred and fifty pounds of dog, not for dealing with ghosts.
    “But it did.”
    “But it
shouldn’t
have,” she insisted.
    “I know!” Though I didn’t really, not until I
looked
at her—her features set and tense, her skin drawn tight into an anxious mask. She was genuinely shaken, and clinging to what she