The Blackham Mansion Haunting (The Downwinders Book 4) Read Free Page B

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places to stage a séance was the Blackham mansion in Paragonah. The owner
shared their interest in the dead and had enough rooms to put up overnight
guests, which came in handy since their sessions would sometimes go all night.
It had an added bonus of being right next to a graveyard. Lorenzo and his
associates held dozens if not hundreds of séances there over the course of
several years.
    “Then, something goes wrong. The journal ends. The final
entry is about going to find a friend of his, a man named Jacob. After that,
nothing, just some drawings.”
    “So why did you go in?” Winn asked. “You were trying to
contact Lorenzo?”
    “I thought it was worth a shot,” Deem replied. “After
spending so much time with his journal, I was interested in what happened to
him. There’s no record of a gravesite for him, so I thought maybe he was still
at the house, haunting it. After going there, I have a strong sense that he’s present
in the house, somewhere. And then there’s the mirror.”
    “The mirror?” Carma asked.
    Deem pulled the journal from her backpack and opened it to a
particular page. She turned the book around and showed it to the others.
    “Oh, no!” Carma said.
    It was a drawing of an oval mirror, the kind that sat on top
of antique sideboards or dressers. It had roughly-drawn ornamentation
surrounding the frame, giving it a gilded appearance.
    “Why didn’t you tell me it had a mirror?” Carma moaned.
    “I didn’t know it mattered,” Deem replied.
    Carma lowered her head to her hand, rubbing the temples with
her long fingers as though she could massage a headache away. “So unaware of
treachery, so naive…” she muttered.
    “What?” Deem asked.
    “Something tried to contact you?” Carma said, still rubbing
the side of her forehead. “Through that drawing?”
    “No,” Deem replied. “But this exact mirror is in the house.”
She pulled the book back so that she could see it too, while still showing it
to the others. “I recognized this mark,” she said, pointing to a nick in the
bottom of the carved frame. “When I…”
    The book jumped in her hand, and the drawing of the mirror
suddenly shifted on the page, rising an inch until the top of the mirror had
become cut off.
    Startled, Deem dropped the book on the floor and it closed.
    “Fuck!” Winn said. “Did you see that, Carma?”
    She was still rubbing her temples. “No,” she replied, then
looked up. “Let me guess, something strange happened. With the mirror.”
    Deem looked up from the book, at Carma. “It shifted. On the
page.”
    “Uh huh,” Carma said, lowering her head back to her hand,
where she resumed the massage. “Well, what’s done is done. I should have been
more careful when you first brought it here.”
    “You were careful,” Deem said. “You wrapped it in a red scarf
and then burned the scarf in the BBQ pit, remember?”
    “Might be the only thing saving us now,” Carma replied.
    Deem looked at Winn, unsure of how to respond. Winn
interpreted it as a plea for help.
    “I’m guessing the scarf was designed to absorb something from
the book?” Winn asked. “And by burning it, you took something out of the book
and destroyed it?”
    “Hopefully,” Carma said, rising. “Maybe. Perhaps. No way to
know for sure.” She continued mumbling as she walked out of the room and down a
hallway deeper into the house.
    “She seems really put out!” David whispered to Deem. “Maybe
you shouldn’t have brought the book into the house at all!”
    “How’d I know?” Deem said. “She seemed fine about it after
she wrapped it in the scarf.”
    “I think she’s being a little overly dramatic,” Winn
whispered back. “She’s good at that.”
    Carma wandered back into the room. “I have a splitting
headache,” she said as she sat back down. “I took ten aspirin. I’m sure it’ll
be gone in a bit.”
    “Ten!” Winn said. “Carma! That’s way too many!”
    “Oh, did I say ten?” she