The Haunting of Pitmon House Read Online Free

stupid.”
    “I don’t know if he hated it,” Eliza replied. “He just
wouldn’t talk about it. Or, at least, he said it was something we’d discuss
after I had children.”
    “Probably so you didn’t use it,” Rachel replied, “and he was
gonna tell you how to suppress it in your kids.”
    “Maybe.”
    “How’s Shane? Any word?”
    “Still sedated,” Eliza replied. “They said they’d call when
he became coherent enough to talk.”
    “That’s a shame,” Rachel replied. “Still, I think it might
have had something to do with House on the Rock.”
    “How?” Eliza asked, skeptical of the idea. “What do you suspect?”
    Rachel looked at her. “How much do you know about the River?
Really?”
    “Until today I’d never been in it,” Eliza replied. “So,
practically nothing.”
    “No one else has ever explained it to you? Someone other than
your dad? He should have, by the way.”
    “No.”
    “Do you ever feel things? Sense things, like we were talking
about last week?”
    “I sometimes feel like I know what someone is going to say,
just before they say it.”
    “Interesting. Different people have different experiences of the
River. Some people get good at certain aspects of it.”
    “You?” Eliza asked. “Is there something you’re good at?”
    Rachel looked down into the ice in her glass. “No,” she
replied, suddenly melancholy. “I’m not good at much.”
    “Listen,” Eliza said. “If there’s some aspect of this that
impacts Shane, I want to know.”
    Rachel looked back up. “Alright,” she said, regaining some
energy. “Well, you know the River is where you can see ghosts.”
    Eliza felt her body stiffen. “Ghosts?”
    “Shit, that’s right, you don’t know anything…” Rachel muttered.
“Well, yes, ghosts. Some of them. Not everyone who’s died, just the ones that
are hanging around.”
    A flood of childhood nightmares came crashing into Eliza’s
mind; fear of the dark, fear of the unknown. Words she thought she could hear
softly spoken in her room at night; the feeling of fingers at her feet, tugging
on the comforter. A wispy shadow that always lingered in the back room of the
library at middle school. The hands she thought she could see rising from the
grass-covered graves at Memorial Hill Cemetery. They had all been vivid
nightmares that plagued her, things she had learned to dismiss and hold at bay.
Rachel acknowledging ghosts as real — and as something accessible — released
all of these nightmares from the holding cell she’d sequestered them in.
    “Ghosts?” Eliza repeated. “You’re serious?”
    “As a heart attack,” Rachel replied. “Almost anyone who’s
gifted can see ghosts if they enter the River. It lets you look at all of the
unseen stuff that’s around us. Like how you could see what my lip balm was.”
    “Ghosts…” Eliza repeated, muttering, trying to accept it.
    “I used to spend a lot of time in the River, years ago,”
Rachel replied. “About ten years back, right around the time you came to work
at House on the Rock as a teenager, I gave it up. I decided to have nothing
more to do with it. I sold all my stuff, and I swore I’d never jump in again.”
    “I’m guessing that didn’t happen?”
    “Well, it did for a while,” Rachel replied, sticking a finger
into her glass to swirl the ice around. “I made it five, six years without
dabbling. Then parts of it came creeping back, like an old dog. I’m not as averse
to it as I was back then, but I don’t spend nearly as much time with it as I
used to.”
    “What do you mean you sold all your stuff?” Eliza asked.
    “Like the lip balm,” Rachel replied. “I used to have many
River objects. Just like that one, they looked one way in the normal world, and
like something else entirely in the River.”
    “What’s the point of that?” Eliza asked. “What are they,
trinkets? Like collectibles?”
    “Well, people collect them, yes, but they do it because each
object usually