Asking for Trouble - Leslie Kelly [0]
Asking for Trouble
TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON
AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG
STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID
PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND
To my aunt, Harriet Day, who instilled in me
a love of reading and an appreciation for
great literature. Thanks for hiding my
Nancy Drew books and making me read
The Scarlet Letter and Brave New World in
fifth grade. You are an utter inspiration.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Coming Next Month
Prologue
Simon
ON NIGHTS LIKE THIS, Simon Lebeaux wondered if Seaton House truly was haunted.
The power had gone out again and the cold October wind roared through the cracks in the window moldings to extinguish any unattended candles. At least, he presumed it was the wind.
Though cracking with rage in the stormy sky overhead, the thunder couldn’t quite drown out the creaks of the old floorboards just above his head…as if someone were walking back and forth, up and down the second-floor corridor. Slowly, deliberately, with weary, fatalistic repetition.
Yet he was the only one in the place. And had been for months.
An hour ago, hearing loud banging coming from even farther above, he’d gone to the third floor to investigate. He’d found the previously locked doors to several of the former guest rooms mysteriously standing open. Inside them, each long unslept-in bed suddenly bore the rumpled indentation of a human form, as if several of the hotel’s long departed guests had just awakened from their deep, restless sleep.
The keys to those rooms remained undisturbed, locked away. Both before he’d gone upstairs, and after he’d come back.
“And the air,” he murmured. It tasted so strange—of cloves and citrus. Of secrets and age.
He was not a superstitious man. Yet in the three months he’d lived here—since inheriting the place from his uncle Roger and deciding it would provide the perfect location to recover from his injuries—he’d experienced things that made him wonder. Things that even made him doubt his own senses.
Objects moving from one spot to another. Scratches and whispery noises in the walls. Frigid air trickling in from nowhere as he prowled the house, unable to sleep, trying to walk off the pain. And those smells…
“It’s the headaches,” he muttered as he sat in his office that evening, working on his laptop for as long as its battery charge lasted. He’d become accustomed to the unreliable electrical service here on his stark, private mountain above the town of Trouble, Pennsylvania, and therefore had backups for his backups. Not only had he made sure he had extra battery packs, he’d even purchased a second computer. He always kept one fully charged in case he ran out of power during the small number of productive hours he managed to find each day. And so he would never run the risk of an unexpected power outage frying his hard drive—causing him to lose the few precious pages he’d been able to eke out since returning to work.
He could have used the generator out back, but on the two occasions he’d tried it, the thing had caused the lights in the old hotel to surge and ebb. On the first occasion, he’d been struck by the strange rhythm of it—a steady pulse—as though the building itself had a giant beating heart hidden somewhere in its depths.
Fanciful…ridiculous. In actuality, he was quite sure the wiring in the hundred-year-old mansion simply disliked such a modern intervention and chose to thwart it.
His own thoughts startled him. When, he wondered, had he begun to think of Seaton House as a living entity, capable of choice…of vengeance?
Lifting his fingers from his keys, he brought his hands to his face and rubbed wearily at his temples. Because his own pulse had suddenly begun to beat harder. A subtle increase in pressure instantly had him on alert. “No. Not tonight,” he said with a groan as he lifted the computer from his