Райли Сейгер - Home Before Dark - A Novel

I didn’t say much during the interview. I merely nodded or shook my head or acted shy by shrinking close to my mother. I think my only words during the entire segment were “I was scared,” even though I can’t remember being scared. I can’t remember anything about our twenty days at Baneberry Hall. What I do recall is colored by what’s in the Book. Instead of memories, I have excerpts. It’s like looking at a photograph of a photograph. The framing is off. The colors are dulled. The image is slightly dark.

Murky.

That’s the perfect word to describe our time at Baneberry Hall.

It should come as no surprise that many people doubt my father’s story. Yes, there are those like Wendy Davenport who think the Book is real. They believe—or want to believe—that our time at Baneberry Hall unfolded exactly the way my father described it. But thousands more adamantly think it was all a hoax.

I’ve seen all the websites and Reddit threads debunking the Book. I’ve read all the theories. Most of them surmise my parents quickly realized they’d bought more house than they could afford and needed an excuse to get out of it. Others suggest they were con artists who purposefully bought a house where something tragic happened in order to exploit it.

The theory I’m even less inclined to believe is that my parents, knowing they had a money pit on their hands, wanted some way to increase the house’s value when it came time to sell. Rather than spend a fortune on renovations, they decided to give Baneberry Hall something else—a reputation. It’s not that easy. Houses that have been deemed haunted decrease in value, either because prospective buyers are afraid to live there or because they just don’t want to deal with the notoriety.

I still don’t know the real reason we left so suddenly. My parents refused to tell me. Maybe they really were afraid to stay. Maybe they truly and completely feared for their lives. But I know it wasn’t because Baneberry Hall was haunted. The big reason, of course, being that there’s no such thing as ghosts.

Sure, plenty of people believe in them, but people will believe anything. That Santa Claus is real. That we didn’t land on the moon. That Michael Jackson is alive and well and dealing blackjack in Las Vegas.

I believe science, which has concluded that when we die, we die. Our souls don’t stay behind, lingering like stray cats until someone notices us. We don’t become shadow versions of ourselves. We don’t haunt .

My complete lack of memories about Baneberry Hall is another reason why I think the Book is bullshit. Wendy Davenport was right to assume an experience that terrifying would leave some dark mark on my memory. I think I would have remembered being hauled to the ceiling by an invisible force, as the Book claims. I would have remembered being choked so hard by something that it left handprints on my neck.

I would have remembered Mister Shadow.

That I don’t recall any of this means only one thing—none of it happened.

Yet the Book has followed me for most of my life. I have always been the freaky girl who once lived in a haunted house. In grade school, I was an outcast and therefore had to be avoided at all costs. In high school, I was still an outcast, only by then it was somehow cool, which made me the most reluctantly popular girl in my class. Then came college, when I thought things would change, as if being away from my parents would somehow extricate me from the Book. Instead, I was treated as a curiosity. Not shunned, exactly, but either befriended warily or studied from afar.

Dating sucked. Most boys wouldn’t come near me. The majority of those who did were House of Horrors fanboys more interested in Baneberry Hall than in me. If a potential boyfriend showed an ounce of excitement about meeting my father, I knew the score.

Now I treat any potential friend or lover with a hearty dose of skepticism. After one too many sleepovers spent having a Ouija board thrust at me or “dates” that ended at a cemetery with me being asked if I saw any ghosts among the graves, I can’t help but doubt people’s intentions. The majority of my friends have been around for ages. For the most part, they pretend the Book doesn’t exist. And if a few of them are curious about my family’s time in Baneberry Hall, they know enough not to ask me about it.

All these years later, my reputation still precedes me, even though I don’t think of myself as famous. I’m notorious. I get emails from strangers calling my dad a liar or saying they’ll pray for me or seeking ways to get rid of the ghost they’re certain is trapped in their cellar. Occasionally I’ll be contacted by a paranormal podcast or one of those ghost-hunter shows, asking for an interview. A horror convention recently invited me to do a meet-and-greet alongside one of the kids from the Amityville house. I declined. I hope the Amityville kid did as well.

Now here I am, tucked into a squeaky chair in a Beacon Hill law office, still reeling from emotional whiplash weeks after my father’s death. My current mood is one part prickliness (Thanks, Wendy Davenport.) and two parts grief. Across the desk, an estate attorney details the many ways in which my father continued to profit off the Book. Sales had continued at an agreeably modest pace, with an annual spike in the weeks leading up to Halloween. Hollywood had continued to call on a semiregular basis, most recently with an option that my father never bothered to tell me about to turn it into a TV series.

“Your father was very smart with his money,” Arthur Rosenfeld says.

His use of the past tense brings a kick of sadness. It’s another reminder that my father is truly gone and not just on an extended trip somewhere. Grief is tricky like that. It can lie low for hours, long enough for magical thinking to take hold. Then, when you’re good and vulnerable, it will leap out at you like a fun-house skeleton, and all the pain you thought was gone comes roaring back. Yesterday, it was hearing my father’s favorite band on the radio. Today, it’s being told that, as my father’s sole beneficiary, I’ll be receiving roughly four hundred thousand dollars.

The amount isn’t a surprise. My father told me this in the weeks preceding his death. An awkward but necessary conversation, made more uncomfortable by the fact that my mother chose not to seek a share of profits from the Book when they got divorced. My father begged her to change her mind, saying she deserved half of everything. My mother disagreed.

“I don’t want any part of it,” she would snap during one of their many arguments about the matter. “I never did, from the very beginning.”

So I get it all. The money. The rights to the Book. The infamy. Like my mother, I wonder if I’d be better off with none of it.

“Then there’s the matter of the house,” Arthur Rosenfeld says.

“What house? My father had an apartment.”

“Baneberry Hall, of course.”

Surprise jolts my body. The chair I’m in squeaks.

“My father owned Baneberry Hall?”

“He did,” the lawyer says.

“He bought it again? When?”

Arthur places his hand on his desk, his fingers steepled. “As far as I know, he never sold it.”

I remain motionless, stilled by shock, letting everything sink in. Baneberry Hall, the place that allegedly so terrified my family that we had no choice but to leave, has been in my father’s possession for the past twenty-five years.

I assume he either couldn’t get rid of it—possible, considering the house’s reputation—or didn’t want to sell it. Which could mean any number of things, none of which makes sense. All I know for certain is that my father never told me he still owned it.