The Tenant of Wilde Hill (TWO)

The little girl peered around the corner, her long fingers gripping the door jam until her knuckles turned white from the stress. Her breath came out in shallow whispers of breath, her eyes scanning the long hallway for any sound or to catch a slight movement. Nothing but a flicker of the wind through a window that she was sure she had not left open caught her attention.
Carefully, as not to even disturb the dust that cast a gray cushion across the floor, she stepped away from the doorway and darted down the hall. Before crossing the stairwell to the window that looked across the grounds, the girl glanced down the stairs.
She screamed. A large pool of red splashed across the ground in front of her and tumbled down the stairs just like if something had been pushed and-
Rache blinked a few times and pleaded with her stomach to stop throwing butterflies around. She prepared herself to relax just as she had taught herself to do, closing her eyes for just a moment until she forced herself to move on and take control of herself.
She tiptoed to the window and glanced out, relieved to see the empty yard. In the dark the grounds looked far different, but that was when she loved it. The scent of damp leaves and dead. She shuddered.
“Who are you?”
She whipped around, prepared to scream as she expected a man, but at seeing that it was just a boy, she only stiffened. “If you do not leave now, I will scream.”
The boy looked a little scared at her towering figure, but only cowered slightly, glancing away. “Why would you do that?”
She had to hesitate, as she had no real reason to scream. She knew that the boy could not possibly do her more harm, as he was a small child, than bring others to see her. “People will think that you are crazy for seeing people here.”
“But you are here, and I do see you.”
Rache relaxed her face into the misty-eyed look that made most people scream and run away in fear of ghosts and started to coo to herself. “Oh-ah-ooooh…”
The boy jerked away, but did not run. “What are you doing?” He reached out and touched her and immediately she stopped to glare at him.
“I am a ghost. You cannot touch me.”
The boy, getting perturbed, sighed. “But you aren’t a ghost. I just touched you and my hand did not go through.”
Rache huffed, turning away, back towards the window. “Go away.”
“But w hat are you doing at my house?”
The girl turned back to look at him with a frown. “This is not your house. I live here.”
“But no one lives here. What would you eat?” The boy looked genuinely confused. He bit his lip nervously, seeming to be afraid to even really look at her.
“I have been hiding.” She glanced away from him, then back. “And I eat what I want to.”
“Why are you hiding? Why don’t you live in town?”
Rache closed her eyes, remembering town. “The men are too loud.”
The boy looked around. “What men?”
“They will come up the stairs.”
He glanced at the stairs, free from the white carpet that the townsfolk had said used to cover them. Hard wood would make it simple to hear someone walking, where carpet would muffle any noise.”There is no one in the house but Mr. Browning and I.”
“But the men…” Rache’s eyes jumped to the stairs and then away. She jerked away from the window and threw herself back where she had come from, pulling the hidden stairs with a string and running up them.
With quick thinking, the boy followed, but Rache drew the stairs up after her far too fast for him to come up. “Go away! You did not see me!”
The boy, Acton, was confused and upset that the girl, probably his only source of conversation as she was only person other than Mr. Browning in the house, disappeared. Girls, he realized, were as confusing as all the literature proclaimed they were.
With a heavy heart, he left the room, trailing a cloud of heavy gray dust behind him as he walked.