Midnight Showing by Megan Shepherd EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Megan Shepherd
- Language: English
- Genre:Ghost Thrillers
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
THE HUNDREDTH STAIR
© 1941 Sigil Pictures
FADE IN:
EXTERIOR—ROCKY SEA CLIFFS—DAY
CAMERA MOVES along rocky sea cliffs battered with sea spray. At the top of the
cliffs looms an aging Victorian house, connected to the beach by a staircase so
steep it could be mistaken for a ladder. CAMERA FOLLOWS a GIRL CHILD climbing the
stairs with a wicker basket of seashells.
CLOSE-UP on child-sized bloody footprints on the stairs.
THE DREAMS ALWAYS began with smoke.
Restless in a cramped hotel bed, in a hiccup of a town halfway down the
jagged Portuguese coastline, my sister stole the sheets and muttered sleeptalk beside me while I dreamed again of smoke. There was a shade of paint
called Vantablack that was rumored to be the darkest known pigment, but
this smoke was darker yet somehow, drinking in all light. The smoke
seeped out from under the hotel bed mattress, devouring the color from the
room until it had expunged the sunny yellow from the walls, leaving the
space grayscale, like an old movie. A dark promise snapped in the air like
lightning.
I sat up in bed, sunken-eyed, watching myself from outside my own
body. Another hotel room, another town. We’d been traveling so long they
all blended together. The smoke from under the bed slowly took shape as it
pulled itself into a pillar the size of a person, then inclined over me in
wormlike form. Immobile, I could only watch as it hovered, hovered,
hovered, and then crashed down into a thunderclap of black soot—
I jerked awake. For real this time.
Sitting up with a gasp—touching my face, assuring myself I was awake
—I checked for Kylie’s slumbering body next to mine. She was there. She
was safe. Her chest lifting and falling slowly, her lips silent now.
I sagged back against the pillows.
How long had it been now—two weeks? Since we’d boarded the plane
in Salt Lake City bound for Portugal, hungry to follow the trail of clues my
father had left behind, meager crumbs that might lead us to our family, to
answers. We hadn’t had much to go off: a thirty-year-old Lisbon return
address on an envelope and town names mentioned in his short stories.
Winemakers, he’d called the Acosta side of the family. Occultists. Artists.
As though being an artist was the worst thing a person could be.
The thing was, I was starting to believe he was right.
“Haven. Um, what the fuck?”
The sound of my sister’s voice pulled me out of the bottomless, strange
land of sleep. I blinked awake to find not a pillar of smoke inclined over
me, but Kylie, frowning.
She held out her hands and turned them front and back to show the dirt
that covered them.
I sat up, rubbing tired eyes. It took me a second to place where we were:
a hotel room in a town whose name I couldn’t recall. Morning sun reached
in from the window to paint light-lines on the bed. The walls were yellow
again. The curtains once more colorful. The room smelled like shampoo,
mothballs.
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