When had they gotten the baby?

Did I give birth? Paula wondered. Did I…bring a baby into this world?

I shouldn’t have.

Oh, God no…

She began running up the stairs. They went on and on. She never knew how many stairs there were in this building. She hadn’t realized the building was so high. How many floors were there? She just kept running up and up and up…

And always the crying, just a little ahead of her. Her baby…

Finally the stairs ended at a single door. She worried the door would be locked, but it wasn’t. She flung it open and bounded inside-

And there was Karen, sitting on the couch, bouncing the baby on her knee.

“He’s fine, he’s fine,” she kept saying, even though the baby was still crying.

“What is his name?” Paula asked.

Karen lifted her eyes to her.

“You mean to say,” she said coldly, “that you don’t know?”

“Please, may I hold him?”

Karen’s eyes turned colder. Her lips tightened, and she pulled the baby to her bosom. “No,” she spit. “He’s not for you.”

“He’s my baby! I gave birth to him! I gave birth to him for you!”

“So you could give him to that room!”

“No!”

Karen stood up. She was thrusting the baby at her now. “Go ahead then! Take him! Take him!”

Paula took a step backward. “No, not now…”

The baby had stopped crying.

She could see that the child in Karen’s arms was dead.

Dead and blue. Its head dangled as if its neck had been broken.

Paula screamed.

She sat up in bed, still screaming, her heart pounding in her ears. Even though she knew now it had all been dream, she screamed once more, just to release the last of the terror that had accumulated inside her.

As if one scream could do it.

She looked over at the clock. It read 2:02.

“Dear God,” she said, bringing her hands to her forehead. She sat there in her bed, breathing heavily.

And then she realized the nightmare wasn’t over.

The baby was crying again.

She looked off into the darkness. Was she still dreaming? Was she going to have to relive that horrible experience again?

She swung her feet out of bed. Bare skin touched hard wood. She padded across the floor, opening the door to the hallway. The crying continued. But closer than it had been before. It was here this time. Here in her apartment.

This was no dream.

She peered into the spare bedroom. Nothing. Out into the dining room. Just as it been in her dream, the moonlight sliced through the darkness in a pattern of stripes from the blinds. Paula steadied herself against a dining table chair. The crying was coming from the living room.

She wouldn’t go in there. She knew what she would find. A baby. A bloody baby with its neck broken. Dean had seen such a thing once. Years ago, when Linda was pregnant with the twins. He’d woken up very much like she had tonight and seen a dead baby in his living room.

The creature screamed harder, seeming frustrated and angry that Paula would not come through the door and look upon it. She turned and headed back to her bedroom. She got back into bed and pulled the sheet up to her chin. She would not give it the satisfaction of her fear. Not twice in one night.

It cried harder and harder, breaking her heart. Surely the baby meant her no harm. Surely it was just a terrified creature, trapped between this world and the next.

But it was part of that room. It came from that room. It was part of the curse that had killed her father.

Paula lay awake for a long time, listening to the crying from the living room, refusing to give in. Finally, at 3:15, the crying ceased. Still Paula lay there, not moving, not thinking. Only as the first pink light of morning began to slip into the room did she finally fall asleep.

Chapter Nine

It wasn’t until the pilot had lifted the plane off the short runway that Douglas, pressed back into his seat by the force of takeoff, turned to Carolyn beside him and asked, “So what the fuck goes on down in that room?”

Uncle Howie had arranged for his private plane to take them from the small landing strip outside Youngsport to the nearly as small airport in Hyannis, Massachusetts, about forty minutes away by air. There a driver would meet them and take them to see a man named Kip Hobart, who had apparently tried to end the curse ten years before-and failed.

Carolyn turned her eyes to Douglas as the little eight-seater plane rose up into the clouds. “I have no idea,” she admitted.

They hadn’t discussed what Mr. Young had told him until this very moment. After their breakfast encounter the day before, Carolyn hadn’t seen Douglas for the rest of the day. Disturbed by what he’d been told, the young man had hopped onto his motorcycle and zoomed off down the highway. Mr. Young fretted all day, worrying the “little hoodlum” as he called him, would crack up his bike. “He kept saying it wasn’t possible,” Mr. Young said. “But I could see all of it coming together in his head. The manner of his father’s death. The suicides of his mother and his aunt.” Douglas hadn’t returned until very late in the day. By then Carolyn was hunkered down in the study with all sorts of papers and reports. She had also spoken with Kip Hobart to arrange a meeting. She didn’t intrude when she noticed Douglas and his uncle sequestered in the parlor. In fact, she didn’t get a chance to speak to him until this very morning, when he’d announced he was going with her to talk with Kip. Mr. Young was agreeable.

But not until they were actually in the air did Douglas bring up the horrors he’d learned about his family.

“I want to say it’s all a bunch of superstitious hooey,” he said, closing his eyes. “But all those deaths…there’s no faking that.”

“No, there isn’t,” Carolyn agreed.

“And I saw her, you know.” Douglas opened his eyes and turned again to look at Carolyn. “I saw the woman. Beatrice. The servant girl who was killed in that room.”

“You did? When?”

“When I got here. She ran across the road, and I fell off my bike. Then she followed me up the cliff. I tried to tell myself she was just an illusion, but now it all makes sense.”

“How do you know it was Beatrice? Your uncle wouldn’t-or couldn’t-admit to me that Beatrice is the apparition that appears to family members.”

Douglas seemed puzzled. “He admitted it to me. When he told me about that ghost of a woman, I said I’d seen her-and he nodded and said, ‘That’s Beatrice.’”

“Odd that he was vague with me.” Carolyn glanced out of the window. They were high enough now that she had a grand view of the Maine coastline. “Did he tell you how she died in that room?”

“Yes.”

Carolyn was stunned. “He claimed to me that he didn’t know. Or at least-that he couldn’t say.” She looked at Douglas intently. “Tell me how she died.”

“She was murdered.” He was clearly uncomfortable speaking the words. “Impaled on the wall by an iron pitchfork.”

“The man…” Carolyn said.

“Yes,” Douglas said. “Family members have often reported seeing a vision of a man with a pitchfork.”

“It’s horrible,” Carolyn said, shuddering. “No wonder the room holds such bad energy. But why is your uncle withholding details from me and not from you? What possible reason could he have? It’s almost as if he wants to make it as hard as possible for me to find an answer to all this…almost as if he doesn’t want me to…”

Douglas looked at her with surprise. “Uncle Howie wants this horrible curse to end. He wouldn’t withhold any details unless there’s a reason. I’m sure of it. All the tragedy he’s seen…” He shook his head. “No, if he’s not telling you something, it’s because he can’t.”

Carolyn sighed. “Perhaps the curse will permit him only to tell outsiders so much.”

“Yes,” Douglas said. “It must be something like that.”

It might well be, Carolyn thought. But why did she feel that Howard Young had his own reasons to control the flow of information?