The Shadow’s Cast: Chapter 1

Here it is, hot off the editor’s table, the first chapter in my book “The Shadow’s Cast”.

With mysterious keys, impossible photos, and an ancestral ghost; Eva’s summer at the family mansion has all the hallmarks of being an adventure to be remembered. But the more she uncovers the worse off she is, until an accident sends her and her new friends hurtling into the past where they become part of the very mystery they attempted to uncover! Will they be able to stop the diabolic hauntings her mother suffered or become victims themselves? And just who is this man claiming to be a living radiance from before the dawn of time?

“How can everything I own take up so little space!” Eva complained to the vacant bedroom.

She dropped her last moving box, filled with the remnants of last year’s school projects, and wiped the sweat off her forehead before it could drip into her light blue eyes. It had taken days to pack it all. Her new room was twice the size, but the space wasn’t worth the move. Sure, living in the family mansion sounded great, until she realized it meant moving to Wyoming. Away from the safety of Seattle’s cloud cover into the desert blaze and open sky. The miserable drive away from everything she knew had made one thing clear. She was going to spend the summer of her seventh grade hiding from the sun. The Renaults were not tanners.

Plopping herself onto an ancient coverlet hiding an even older mattress, Eva stared morosely at the wooden ceiling. Nothing she had done could have prevented the move. Her parents had not even asked how she felt before putting it to her as decided. One day, the news of her great aunt’s death hit them like a charging bull, and the very next day, their move was on the calendar. Watching her dad cry simply had not given her any opening to complain. She cried, too. Her Great Aunt Margret had been the closest thing to a grandmother she had ever known. The thought of spending the next Christmas without her still put a lump in her throat. Eva had three weeks to resign herself to exile with what she felt was graceful maturity. Really, she had only complained a few times. Today. But that was hardly the point.

“Did you get everything out of the truck, Eva?” her mother’s voice came from outside.

Eva opened the second-story window and stuck out her head. Her mom was going over the last load from the moving truck. Eva could just see her dad near the trees that fringed the edge of the driveway. He was speakings with the last of the movers, his U.S. Marshals cap commanding their full attention more than anything else.

“What was that, Mom? I got all my stuff already!” Eva yelled down.

Marie Renault lifted a hand to pull her long auburn curls out of her face and cover her eyes from the sun as she looked up. “Good to hear, honey. Your dad is about to tell the driver to take off. Come help us get the rest inside, okay?” 

Her mother’s smile glinted brightly, showing a set of model teeth. Eva hoped she looked as beautiful as her mother when she had finished growing into herself. She already had her mother’s naturally bouncy ringlets, except Eva’s hair was raven black like her dad’s. Or at least that’s what they told her. He had been bald for as long as she could remember. Eva could not wait to leave her lean adolescent frame behind and get some of those curves her mother seemed to hoard for herself.

Avoiding a glance at the full-length mirror in the corner, Eva closed the window and headed down the creaky stairs. She navigated her way through the maze of boxes stacked high in the front room and to the entrance propped open with a granite rock. Bracing herself, Eva stepped out into the billowing heat.

She spent the next few hours helping her parents get all the boxes inside, stacking them wherever they could find space, and turning the maze into a full-blown labyrinth. They finished as just as evening rolled the sun behind the house. Too late to stop the sunburn Eva felt developing on her scalp, but at least the noon heat was dissipating. Eva flung herself onto the nearest couch, an ugly green monster of surprising comfort.

“Dad, what’s for dinner?” Eva asked, popping the top off her water bottle.

“Oh, just you wait, Eva. There’s a pizzeria in Cody. Your mother and I went there all the time when we were young,” Jean Renault said with bright eyes. “They have the best garlic bread in the whole state.”

“You mean Puccini’s?” her mom said, head appearing around an upturned mattress

“Where else?” 

“Puccini’s where we had our first date?”

“Do you know any other Puccini’s?”

Eva’s mother rolled her eyes. “Because Jean, Puccini’s closed years ago after the old man passed away. No surprise, Mr. Puccini drank like a fish. Don’t you remember Aunt Margret telling us?”

Seeing the look of defeat in his eyes, Eva jumped in. “It’s fine, Dad. I wasn’t feeling pizza anyway. Where else is good in Cody?”

Her parents shared a knowing smile and laughed.

“Home cooking it is. I will run to the store real quick,” said her dad.

“Good choice, Jean. And grab me some ibuprofen while you’re there. I feel another headache coming on and I have no idea where it’s packed.”

While waiting for her dad to get back, Eva started poking around the rest of the house. Her mom was in the front room, sorting through her boxes of art supplies, debating where to set up her new studio. Eva’s mother was a high school art teacher and had been readily accepted by her old high school when they found out she was moving to the area.  Eva inched her way behind a tower of boxes labeled ‘Christmas’, blocking her from her mother’s view. She didn’t want to get pulled into rummaging through boxes of paints and sketchbooks.

Turning down the hallway, Eva shivered. It was the first feeling of cold she’d had since crossing the state line. On the wall that went under the main stairs was an undersized door. It was old. She supposed everything in the house was old, but somehow the door seemed more so. The once-white paint was aged and coming away like the other cabinets and doors, yet yellower with large peels. The wood was cracked and misshapen like the walls, yet seemed to have deeper, darker cracks with more bulbous contortions. She could not narrow down why, but the door felt wrong. The hair on her arms stood up with a static charge. 

Inexplicably, Eva felt certain this door was the oldest thing in Renault Mansion. It was as if the house was built to hold it, not the other way around. Yet if the door had given her chills, it was the lock that kept her from backing away. It wasn’t a padlock or a combination lock like the lockers at school. It wasn’t like the locks on the house either. Instead, this lock was–in a word–elegant, a tarnished box of brass and silver covered with strange and fantastical etchings, set solidly against both door and wall.

The longer Eva stared at it, the less she could be sure as to which side the lock was affixed. Was the door holding the wall closed, or was it the other way around? Finally, Eva shuffled a stack of boxes to the side to get a better look. She gasped. Hanging on a silver chain was an equally elegant old-fashioned key, with silver twisting around it. It was etched and formed with coiling silver while its notches were thick and curled. There could be no doubt this key went to the lock. Eva pulled it and found there was more than ample slack in the chain to insert it comfortably. 

She did not know what was behind this door, but her blood pulsed excitedly as she moved closer. Holding her breath, Eva turned the key. It moved smoothly, but she couldn’t feel any corresponding click. Instead, the key twisted in endless circles, seeking and failing to find something to catch onto.

“Evalyn Lillian Renault! What are you doing?!” screeched her mother.

Eva jumped back, falling against a stack of boxes. The corners stabbed into her back. The momentum sent her tumbling over them, her hair sticking and ripping against the loose packing tape.

“Ouch!” Eva cried out, trying to disentangle herself. “What was that for?”

Ignoring Eva’s words completely, Mrs. Renault shouted, “Stay away from that door, Eva! Do you hear me? You must never open that door!”

“Jeez, Mom, calm down. I was just . . .”

“Don’t tell me to calm down! Rule one, Eva. Rule one! What was it?” she demanded.

Eva gulped. How had she forgotten the conversation in the car? They had barely left Seattle when her mother had gone over the ‘Rules of Renault Mansion.’ Most of them had been basic rules: Don’t ride the banisters, don’t jump on the old furniture, or play on the balconies (Renault Mansion had three). Most of them hadn’t worried her. She was twelve, after all, practically an adult. She wasn’t going to do anything stupid. There had been three Rules, though. The main three her mother had drilled into her until she could recite them back.

Looking away from her mother’s anger, Eva stammered, “R-rule One: Don’t open the door under the stairs. It leads to the crawlspace.”

“And?”

Eva gulped again. She wanted to get up off the floor but was too scared to move. Her mother was a force of nature. 

“And the crawl space is dangerous.”

“Exactly. So why on earth is the very first thing you do when out of my sight exactly that?”

Eva didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t thought the door from the rule had been this door. It was barely more significant than a cabinet. But she knew she wasn’t going to argue her way out of anything. Instead, she said in a small voice, “Sorry, Mom. I-I won’t do it again.”

“What are the other rules, Eva? Say them now.”

“But Mom . . .”

“No ‘buts,’ young lady. Now.”

Eva got up out of the boxes and said sulkily, “Rule two; Don’t go into the national forest past where I can see the house because it’s dangerous. And Rule three is: Don’t go into the attic. It’s dangerous, too.”

“Right. Now, go unload the kitchen boxes you’ve smashed. If your father is going to cook when he gets back, then we are going to need those things unpacked.”

“But I was going to start decorating my room!” Eva said indignantly.

“Then don’t break the rules. Now get to it. I still have a lot of sorting to do.”

Whatever joy Eva had been mustering in her new circumstances ebbed as she started hefting through boxes of cast iron. Her mother had always been the stricter of her parents, but she rarely exploded like that. In fact, the only other time Eva had seen it was when her dad had decided to move them to the mansion. Her parents never fought, at least where she could see. But that night Eva had heard shouting through their locked bedroom door. And now her mom was yelling at her, too.

Eva had done her best to make it easier on them after that, but it wasn’t going well. How could her mother get so angry when she hadn’t even known what door it was? It was so unfair. If only her mom would stop treating her like a child, she might get the chance to prove she wasn’t one anymore. Even among her friends, Eva was always the leader. She naturally took charge. She was perfectly capable of deciding what was and wasn’t dangerous.

That night Eva slept fitfully. Dreams of spinning keys and shadows interrupted her rest as much as the unfamiliar squeaks and groans of Renault Mansion in the midnight winds.