Chapter Three: Melanie

Yuri and the others filled Karol in on what happened in the basement, and a quick search of the house revealed nobody. The music room was as empty as ever, and Yuri still had that damn melody stuck in his head.

After dinner, the group settled in the living room. Outside, the rain had arrived and pelted the window. They had more lamps than needed to illuminate the room, but nobody complained about the extra brightness. The living room, with its comfy blue armchairs and floral-print sofa, was the coziest room in the house and when it was brightly lit, Yuri could almost forget what the rest of the building was like. Having the entire guild together in one room was comforting, too. This was their bastion against the house's oddities, and no matter what it threw at them, he knew they could face it all together.

"I talked to Pavel about the house," Karol said. "I mentioned how disorienting it was so he gave me floor plans, and he said he would send a mortician tomorrow to collect Melanie's body. Although, they might come the day after if it's still pouring rain. He found a picture of them, too." Karol reached into the papers on the coffee table and pulled out an old, faded picture.

It was the same couple from the portrait in the music room. Cyril wore his hair short and his ascot tight, while Melanie's dark locks were tied in an elaborate bun and her gown swept the floor. It was hard to imagine the beautiful girl in the picture as the decayed skeleton upstairs.

"You guys think Melanie is the ghost responsible for all this?"

"It would make sense," Yuri said.

Karol shuffled another paper out and unfolded it, revealing a blueprint of the house. "I asked Pavel about the weird door on the second floor. He doesn't know what to make of it. So, we looked for it on the blueprints to see what room it led to, and, well… see for yourself."

Yuri leaned forward resting an elbow on Repede since the dog was glued to his side. He scanned the diagram, trying to make sense of all the lines. After a minute, he said, "I can't find it."

"Me neither," Judith said.

"That's the thing." Karol shuffled his feet and stared at the blueprints warily. "It's not on there at all."

"Hold it, I found the hallway," Raven said. He jabbed his finger at a set of lines smack-dab in the middle of the building. "I recognize the layout of the halls around it. Here's the room we're staying in, and here is the corridor that intersects with it, and here is the corridor that's perpendicular to it, and here's the short connecting hall."

Yuri saw what Raven was pointing at, a section of corridors shaped like an H right in the middle of the house. "But that's where the door is." He pointed at the middle of the H. "There should be a room right here."

"Yeah," Karol said. "But there's not."

"Maybe they deviated from the floor plan when building the house," Yuri suggested, knowing it sounded desperate even as he said it. If this were the only weird thing, he wouldn't think anything of it, but coupled with a door shutting on its own, a phantom piano, weird noises in the night, and a ghostly presence holding Raven's hand, a mysterious room wasn't too big a leap.

"Hm…" Judith took the sheet and then the page showing the basement and laid it over top. After straightening the edges, she rested her finger on the centre, exactly where the mysterious door had been. "That's odd."

Yuri took a closer look to see what room her finger was in. Somehow, he wasn't the least bit surprised to discover her finger was right in the middle of the silver room, precisely where Cyril's body was found.

"That's weird all right," Raven said, rubbing his chin. "Could be a coincidence."

"I wouldn't bet on it," Yuri said.

"Me neither." Judith folded her arm and leaned back on the sofa. "Curiouser and curiouser."


By mid-morning, the rain hadn't let up. Repede was surly on dreary days at the best of times, but in the claustrophobic house he paced in tight circles and kept letting out sighs that turned into growls. The mortician wouldn't be coming today, so they'd have to spend another day with that creepy skeleton in the upstairs room. There was nothing they could do until the mortician arrived to take away Melanie's body, so they were lazing the day away in the living room. The house was chilly, and the living room fireplace sat empty. Rain thudded against the windows, begging for a fire to dispel the cold.

"We should build a fire," Yuri said out of the blue.

Karol looked over from the sofa. "That sounds like a good idea."

"There should be firewood in the cellar," Judith said. "I'll go get it as long as someone stays behind in case the door closes again."

"Don't worry about a thing! I'll protect ya, Judy darlin'," Raven said.

Yuri hopped up. "Karol, come with me and look for newspaper or something we can use as kindling."

Karol followed him from the room. Yuri wasn't sure where to start looking for old newspaper, but Cyril might have kept some in his bedroom so he headed upstairs. Even after spending a couple of days here, Yuri still got turned around up here. Whoever the architect had been, they certainly didn't make it easy to navigate.

"What was that?" Karol asked.

"Huh? I didn't say anything."

Karol stepped a little closer. "Y-you didn't?"

"No…" They stopped walking in the middle of the corridor. A flutter of sound reached out of the shadows, a whisper just soft enough he couldn't make it out. They seeped out of the shadowy recesses along the ceiling from the left and then the right. Concentrating to try to make it out just made his head hurt.

"Where is that coming from?" Karol's head spun, trying to pick out movement from the shadows. They didn't have any lights up here, but enough made it through the storm clouds and windows to save them from complete darkness.

There were words in the whispers, he just couldn't decipher them. It frustrated him, like when he was a kid and heard other children talking among themselves and all he could pick out was his name followed by giggles. He raised his voice and spoke to the walls. "Talking about someone behind their back is pretty low, you know."

"Yuri, don't make the ghosts mad at us!"

"Ha! If these ghosts were any threat they'd come out and face us instead of creeping around behind our backs. Come on, Karol." He strode forward, determined not to let Karol see how concerned he was about an enemy they couldn't see or fight.

Karol hurried to follow, tripping on Yuri's heels in an effort to stay close. The whispering continued, and then was joined by a low humming. Within seconds, Yuri realized the hum followed the same tune as the song on the piano, only slowed down. It came from behind, but Yuri wasn't going to give this stupid ghost the satisfaction of knowing he was nervous so he stubbornly ignored it.

Karol yelped and crashed into Yuri, nearly knocking him to the ground. Yuri stumbled and flung his hand to the wall for support. Tattered wallpaper ripped under his hand. "Karol!"

"Yuri, I saw someone!"

Yuri whirled around. "Where?"

"There!" His shaking finger pointed to the end of the hall. "I glanced over my shoulder and I saw someone walk past!"

"Alright, let's see this ghost face to face!"

"Are you sure we shouldn't get Raven and Judy first?"

Yuri was already running to the end of the hall, so Karol hurried to catch up in fear of being left alone. "No, we can't let it get away!" He rounded the corner and saw the trail of a dress flutter around a corner. Pounding feet stirred up dust from the carpet, making his throat itch and eyes water.

Around another corner. Yuri's heart leapt to his throat – a man! After another blink, he saw it was just a portrait. He couldn't see a dress anywhere, but a soft hum drifted down the hall. Yuri let his ears guide him further down the hall and around a corner just in time to see a woman's back walk straight through a door. Her navy skirt fluttered around her ankles while her white blouse was almost obscured by black, waist-length hair.

Yuri's breath caught in his throat and his knees locked when he saw her. Even after she disappeared into the room at the end of the corridor and all that remain was her hummed melody fading away, he couldn't bring himself to move. It was one thing to believe a woman's ghost haunted the building, and another to see her in person.

Karol shook so much Yuri could feel the vibrations against his side. "Y-y-you saw that too, right?"

"Yeah," Yuri whispered.

"We have to check out that room, don't we?"

Yuri looked down at Karol's white face. "If we both charge in, it might scare her off. It would probably be better if just one of us went. Stay there."

"O-o-ok."

He could barely hear her humming over the rain now. They were at the side of the house, where wide windows let in grey light and the bullets of rain hit the glass only inches away. At the door, he curled his fingers around the icy doorknob. The feel of a stare burned the back of his beck, but a check over his shoulder confirmed it was just Karol lurking by the window and watching with trepidation.

The door's hinges craved oil. Yuri stepped into a small room lined with bookshelves and found Melanie staring back at him. Already jumpy, his hand flew to his sword before realizing it was just a painting. The portrait was almost as tall as he was, showing Melanie, lovingly rendered in oil, smiling at the viewer. Wavy dark hair framed a heart-shaped face and her brown eyes invited him in. Her spectral form – because after glimpsing a young woman with long black hair, Yuri had little doubt their hypothesis was confirmed – was nowhere to be seen. Even her ethereal melody had gone silent.

The painting sat above a wooden desk, covered in scraps of paper. Yuri strolled closer and found a selection of quills and an open bottle of ink. Scraps of paper littered the desk, covered in doodles. A closer look showed that most of the doodles were attempts to recreate the portrait above – a carefully drawn eye or an experiment with the curve of her nose. The scraps with no drawings had words instead, the most prominent of which was 'Melanie' scribbled over and over. 'My love' and 'Always' made appearances as well. In the middle of the desk was a leather book. Yuri flipped it open and discovered it was a journal, and tiny, difficult to understand writing covered every page.

Battle-hardened instinct gave him one second of warning before a crash thundered through the room. The door slammed shut and a something solid smashed into his chest, knocking the breath out of him on his way to the floor. The whole room shook, and then a book case teetered and toppled to the ground.

An avalanche of books hit him seconds before the heavy wooden shelf crushed him. Thankfully, his head was caught in a space between shelves, but slats of wood crushed his collarbone, stomach, thighs, and shins. Book ridges painfully dug into his skin. Bangs came from the door and someone shouted his name – Karol, probably. Raps also came from the window, though, and he was pretty sure that wasn't Karol.

The shelf wasn't that heavy on its own. Struggling, he pulled his arms up to try pushing it off. He managed to get it an inch, and then a mighty force shoved it back down. It felt like someone had dropped a ton of weights on top, crushing the air out of him. He shivered and gasped for breath while the bookshelf got heavier and heavier.

Attempts to escape were useless because he was too pinned down. He could barely breathe, let alone move. His chest ached as he struggled for breath. He had all the air around his head he needed, but the crushing weight prevented him from expanding his lungs. Fury filled in for missing air. After everything he'd been through, he was going to get crushed to death by a bookshelf?! I don't want to go like this!

A disturbing thought forced its way into his mind: Tell me, Yuri. When was the last time you heard those very words? It would be fitting, really, to suffocate. An eye for an eye was the principle he used when deciding to act against Ragou and Cumore, and after what he'd done to the latter, a death by suffocation would be his just deserts.

Over the pounding of both the rain and the rush of blood in his ears, a voice filled the room. The words came slow, like they'd been dragged out over a great distance and echoed accordingly. A high-pitched voice, distorted but clearly still feminine, intoned, "GO…AWAY…"

As the wisps of words faded into the rain, the weight lightened and Yuri took a grateful gulp of air. The chill froze his throat. He swore he could feel the energy leave the room as he lay still and took deep breaths.

The door slammed again and he flinched, but then Karol yelled, "Yuri! Yuri, are you ok!?"

"Fine," he grunted. "Help me get this off."

Karol managed to lift the bookshelf enough so Yuri could wriggle out. Sore and winded, he sat on the floor and glared at the serene portrait of Melanie.

"Yeah, screw you, too."

"What happened?"

Yuri told him, and then got to his feet while rubbing his side. He was going to have some nasty bruises after this.

"She actually spoke to you?" Karol folded in on himself, looking around the room like he expected Melanie to burst out saying 'boo!'

"Yeah. Guess I should call myself lucky she decided to let me off with a warning." She could have killed him, he thought with a shudder. If the weight on that bookshelf had increased, he could have been crushed to death. "Grab that book on the desk and let's get out of here. A fire can wait."


They ended up finding old, dry paper in the study on the first floor. Raven built a fire and the group huddled around it in the main room. Now that Melanie had proven herself actually dangerous, no one was keen to go anywhere on their own. The warmth of the fire helped dispel the darkness that settled over the house, and its crackling made the drumming rain less noticeable.

Yuri stretched out on the sofa, nursing a steadily growing resentment toward Melanie as bruises settled into his bones. "Judy, can you read this?" He handed over the journal he'd found in the writing room. The writing was too cramped, too cursive, and too untidy for him to discern.

She leaned against the bricks of the mantle, the fire casting half her face in orange light. "I think so." She flipped through the yellowing pages and scanned one near the beginning. "This was clearly written by Cyril. Here he's talking about their wedding and how perfect it was. The next few pages are about their honeymoon, then moving into the house. He seems very happy."

"Skip ahead ta when Melanie died." Raven sat cross-legged on the other side of the mantle.

Judith flipped through pages. "I'm not sure exactly when – oh."

Karol, kneeled beside her, leaned over. "Did you find it?"

"There's only one line here. 'Today, the light of my life has gone out.' That's all he wrote."

Karol sat back down. "That's so sad."

It was sad that Melanie had died young, Yuri thought. That didn't mean he wasn't still mad at her for trying to kill him. "There's fifty years of memoirs in there. Can you find anything that would answer why he left her in bed, or why he died in such a specific place?"

"I'm looking. He didn't write every day, it seems. He did at first but I think he was too busy grieving to write every day. Let's see… 'I find myself thinking of my dear Melanie often. I see her everywhere in the faces of young woman, I hear her laugh in the giggling of maids. A delivery girl came yesterday who had just her nose and I found myself momentarily staring. I feel as if I should walk into the music room and see her seated at the piano, and it always comes as a shock when she's not there. The halls are empty without her voice to fill them. She was so full of life; how could all of that simply be gone? It seems preposterous to me that a life can exist and then so suddenly… not. Where did she go? The spirit that filled her heart cannot simply have vanished; I am sure of it.'" Judith lowered the book and her eyes flicked between the captive audience. "It seems like he really loved her."

"I'm going to assume she didn't throw bookshelves at people when she was alive," Yuri said. "Did she haunt him, too? Is there anything in there about her ghost?"

Judith flipped through more pages. "Let's see… oh, my."

"What did ya find?"

"This was written one week after Melanie died. 'I have been trying to figure out where to bury my beloved. I cannot think of a place where covering her in dirt would seem fitting, and no memorial would live up to her beauty. Perhaps, though, the reason no solution has felt appropriate is because my dear Melanie is not truly dead. Her soul was so bright, mere death could not snuff her out. She's still here, sleeping in bed as always, is she not? I can see her, I can run my fingers through her hair. She is as beautiful as always. My Melanie is still with me, and she always will be.'"

Judith flipped through the pages. The pounding rain seemed less noticeable now, Judith's voice the only thing Yuri focused on. He imagined Cyril running his fingers through the stringy hair of a rotting corpse and somehow seeing his beloved through the decomposing flesh.

"I don't know what to read next," Judith said, turning the old pages gently. "Every entry sound more insane than the last. He talks about the struggle of caring for a bedridden wife, how he takes care to keep the music room clean for her so she can play the piano again when her sickness passes, and how he had to fire servants for being rude to her."

"For pointing out she's a skeleton, no doubt," Yuri said.

"This is from about ten years ago. 'Today, Melanie played her song for me for the first time since she became bedridden. Oh, how my ears have longed to hear it! The power of her song filled the house, every note layering over the other in a symphony of a single instrument. Even after all these years, my heart grows with love for her every day.'" She turned a few more pages. "Here, several years later. 'I could not be happier. Melanie makes my life bliss. I do not know how to explain the phenomena that drove the last of my servants to quit. They claimed we were no longer alone in the house, and I said that was correct, because Melanie was with us. I think, perhaps, I will follow her advice soon.'"

Karol frowned. "Advice? That doesn't sound good."

Raven tapped his knee. "What does the final entry say? Does it give any indication of how he died?"

Karol looked across Judith at him. "I thought we knew how he died? Pavel said it was heart failure."

Yuri forced himself upright, sore muscles groaning. "That's just what they guessed because they didn't see any outward cause of injury or illness. What does it say, Judy?"

Judith flipped to the end. There was still several blank pages that Cyril never got around to filling. "The last entry is very short. It just says, 'There are days when I miss Melanie terribly. Today, the emptiness in my heart feels too great to bear. I know Melanie is with me, but… I am not with her. I want to be with her in every way, and as long as our worlds are divided, I fear that will not happen. I know what I must do – what I should have done so long ago, were I not afraid. I only hope she will still have me as an old man, when her beauty is as untarnished as ever.' That's all he wrote."

Raven nodded slowly. "Sounds ta me like he committed suicide."

Yuri's brow furrowed with thought. "Is there a way to induce a heart attack, though?"

Raven scratched his chin. "It might be possible. The right drugs oughta stop your heart. Not sure where he'd have gotten them, or why he chose to do it in the basement."

"Is there anything about the door?" Karol asked.

Judith skimmed through the pages, eyes darting back and forth. "Maybe buried deep in here. Nothing is popping out at me."

Yuri let out a sigh. "Looks like this is yet another addition to the 'really damn weird' category."