The Candle (Haunted Series Book 23) Read online

  The Candle

  A Haunted Series novel

  By Alexie Aaron

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ~

  Copyright 2018 – Diane L. Fitch writing as Alexie Aaron

  ALSO BY ALEXIE AARON

  HAUNTED SERIES

  in order

  The Hauntings of Cold Creek Hollow

  Ghostly Attachments

  Sand Trap

  PEEPs Lite: Eternal Maze 3.1

  PEEPs Lite: Homecoming 3.2

  Darker than Dark

  The Garden

  Puzzle

  Old Bones

  Things that Go Bump in the Night

  Something Old

  PEEPs Lite: Checking Out 9.1

  PEEPs Lite: Ice and Steel 9.2

  The Middle House: Return to Cold Creek Hollow

  Renovation

  Mind Fray

  The Siege

  NOLA

  Never Forget

  The Old House

  Restitution

  A Rose by Any Other Name

  The Long Game

  Given Enough Rope

  The Return

  Risen

  The Candle

  Coming soon: Book of Souls

  CID GARRETT P.I. SERIES

  Cid

  High Court

  Tiny Houses

  CIN FIN-LATHEN MYSTERIES

  Decomposing

  Death by Saxophone

  Discord

  The Wages of Cin

  Unforgivable Cin: An Opera in Three Acts

  To Mike, aka Quazar, and Jean Marie.

  and

  In my life, I have been privileged to have met the most incredible people. You may pass them in the street and not realize how special and amazing they are. They reach out when you stumble, laugh when you’re laughing at yourself, and most importantly, encourage you when you’re doubting yourself. This book is for them. You’re not invisible. I see you. Love, Alexie.

  Table of Contents

  Nightmare

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Glossary

  Alexie Aaron

  Nightmare

  The room seemed to press down on Mia. It was an uncomfortable but familiar feeling. She rolled over, her covers twisting around her legs. She grabbed her pillow and beat it into submission. Why couldn’t she get comfortable? The celebratory meal last evening was heavy, and yes, she had drunk more than she was used to. She lay on her back and felt eyes staring at her. Sometimes Mia’s husband, Ted, woke in the night and watched her sleep. It could be considered creepy in a way, but Mia knew he did it out of love and not malice. She turned her head and didn’t see his outline beside her. Reaching a hand out, she searched for his body.

  “Ted?” she asked, hoping he was in the en suite bathroom. She opened her eyes wider. The room looked different in the light of the crescent moon. The windows were in the wrong place. Mia sat up to see if she had twisted all the way around in bed. If so, this would answer her question as to why her husband had abandoned her in the night.

  Ted had mentioned, a time or two, that fighting her for covers was a losing battle. She usually had a death grip on them, and if given any resistance to her pulling the covers, she would kick out. Mia listened for the baby monitor to see if maybe Ted had gotten up to tend to Varden. There was no sound. There was no baby monitor.

  Mia sat up, blindly reaching for the light on the bedside table. It wasn’t there. The table wasn’t there. “What the hell?” she murmured as she flung her legs over the side of the bed, misjudging the distance to the floor, and landed in a heap beside the bed.

  A whisper of silk preceded the onslaught of cool pale hands running up and down her limbs, checking her for injury. A cool finger under her chin lifted her face to the misty face of a concerned young woman.

  Mia didn’t need the light to know who had come to her rescue. “Misty Mom?” she asked.

  Misty nodded. Her pale dead eyes searched Mia’s for confirmation of her well-being.

  “I’m alright,” Mia said, now convinced she was dreaming. “Where am I?” she asked.

  Misty frowned and put her cool hand on Mia’s forehead.

  “I’m not sick, just confused,” Mia said.

  “Bed,” Misty said, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “Yes, I must be dreaming. I’ll just go back to sleep. I’ve missed you, Misty,” Mia said, climbing back into bed. She laid back, letting her misty mother straighten her covers and tuck them in around her.

  “Sleep,” Misty Mom said, planting a cool kiss on Mia’s forehead.

  Mia closed her eyes, and although puzzled at the direction this dream was taking, she decided to play along. Soon she was fast asleep.

  Chapter One

  Sunlight streamed through the windows and into Mia’s eyes. She blinked away the fog from the night and reached for Ted. He wasn’t there.

  Her eyes closed as she yawned. Mia stretched before forcing herself awake. She opened her eyes, determined to greet the day. What she saw before her kept them and her mouth open in shock. She was in her childhood bedroom in the old brownstone. She looked upwards into the faded canopy before she glanced towards the windows where she knew Misty Mom waited.

  “K. Out of one dream and into another,” she acknowledged. She smiled at Misty before she sat up. Her stomach growled. Mia put her hand down as if she could stop the noise with the motion. She noticed something gone, actually somethings. “Where are my breasts?” she asked, patting her body down. “Come on, who’s the joker? Roumain, if you’re behind this…”

  The door opened, and Charles Cooper stuck his head in. “What’s all this noise? Your mother was up all night typing. She needs her rest,” he scolded.

  “Dad?” Mia asked to confirm the identity of the much younger version of her father.

  “Since when are you calling me Dad? I thought you said Charles was more appropriate?” he asked, annoyed.

  “Sorry, Father,” Mia said. “I’m just a little off script.”

  “Well, there’s cereal downstairs. Get dressed and get outside. It’s going to be a beautiful day. Enjoy your school holiday while you can. I don’t know why Big Bear Lake decided to have their spring break this early. I think all the Chicago schools are in session. It’s damn inconvenient.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mia said.

  He shut the door, and Mia p
ulled the covers off and slid out of bed. Her room didn’t have any mirrors in it. Aside from the large bed that dominated the room, there was only a chest of drawers and a desk with hard wooden chair. Mia’s feet connected with a worn Turkish carpet. She moved slowly, not sure what other surprises awaited her in this dream. “I suppose this is somebody’s idea of a Mia version of It’s a Wonderful Life. “Can we just cut to the end where I confess that I truly appreciate all those around me and vow to be a better citizen of the world?”

  No one answered her. She looked over at Misty, and she was fussing with Mia’s bedcovers just like she did when Mia was a child. Mia never made her bed. Misty had always done it for her. The only time Mia had anything to do with her sheets was when Charles insisted she wash her bedding or when the sweat smell got too much for her. This usually happened when Charles forgot he had a daughter. This happened a lot.

  Mia opened the door and walked to the bathroom. It was where Mia remembered it to be. She entered the large bathroom that had been put in when Mia was a small child. Her godfather Ralph had kicked up a fuss when he discovered that his goddaughter had to run down the stairs to use the bathroom in the kitchen. He feared the tyke falling down the stairs in the middle of the night. It’s not that the Coopers didn’t have the funds to put in a bathroom upstairs; it just never occurred to them.

  Mia turned on the light and took a step back as she confronted her image in the large mirror. Staring back at her was a child - more precisely, a young teenager. Mia touched her face and ran her hands over her flat tiny body and winced. “Damn, this dream is getting creepy. This is exactly how I remember me. I must be…” Mia paused and calculated the absence of pimples, budding breasts, the size of her feet, and came up with, “I’m twelve effin’ years old!” She groaned. Nothing good ever happened to her when she was twelve. “You missed the boat on this try at an attitude-enhancing dream,” she announced, hoping the culprit would call it a day and return Mia to her waking world of being a wife and mother.

  She looked at the toilet, and although she knew the perils of peeing in a dream, the urge was too great. “I’m going to pee the bed,” she said. “Well, at least I’ll wake up.” Mia walked over and sat down. She peed and didn’t wake up.

  A light tap on the door reminded her that she had promised to be quiet.

  “Sorry,” she whispered.

  “Take a shower. You stink,” Charles whispered back. “I’m going for the paper.”

  “K.”

  “What?”

  “Alright,” Mia hissed, remembering her father hated Mia’s shorthand for okay. He didn’t even like okay; he felt there were better words to use.

  “Maybe this is a dream about language skills…” Mia said, turning on the shower. She dropped her pajamas on the floor. “That should have been my first clue something was up. I don’t wear pajamas.” The pink flannel set was worn at the elbows and had a mismatched button sewn on the shirt. “I remember when Misty did that…” Mia said, stepping in and pulling the shower curtain closed. The water was warm but never really got hot, and if the dream ran true to her memories, she had five minutes tops to get washed before the warm water disappeared entirely.

  She heard the door open and heard the drop of towels she had forgotten to bring in with her from the linen cupboard. Mia started sweating. She had forgotten how much Misty did for her. No one probing Mia’s mind would have picked up on these little details. If she was dreaming, it had to be directed by her twelve-year-old mind.

  Mia finished quickly and wrapped one of the towels around her long white hair and the other around her tomboy body. She couldn’t look at herself in the mirror anymore because the fog from the unventilated bathroom obscured it. Mia walked back to her room and stopped, seeing Misty standing there with a hairbrush in her hand.

  “I didn’t even brush my own hair. Who was I, Princess Peach? K, times up. Wakeup, Mia. Come on, girl, wake up!”

  Nothing. She was still in her room. Mia dressed quickly in her traditional Saturday outfit of jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. She put on a matching pair of darned socks and the Skechers tennis shoes Ralph had deemed too worn for school. While she dressed, she looked at Misty Mom. It would be another two years before Mia would release her by burning down the house. The ghost was starting to show small signs of the insanity that happens when a ghost has had enough of being trapped inside the house they died in. Misty twisted her hands when still. She had a hunted look to her eyes when she wasn’t engaging with Mia.

  “How can I help you? I mean, why didn’t I help you sooner?” Mia corrected herself, her voice too low for the ghost to understand what she was saying. Misty pulled out the desk chair, and Mia sat down while Misty brushed the tangles out of her waist-length hair.

  The dream was wearing on her. She wanted to wake up to the chaos that was her world. She missed arguing with Brian over the breakfast table and cuddling with Varden. How do people wake themselves… “Ouch!” she said after Misty’s brush got caught up in a nest of knots. Pain. She would pinch herself. “Ouch!” she said again, this time for her assault on her arm. Misty Mom gave up and handed Mia the brush.

  “Thank you,” Mia said, getting up. She pulled her hair back, twisting a scrunchie around it. Mia took a moment while she was at the desk to look inside the drawers. There she found a wad of cash, a library card, and six pieces of gum. Mia tucked the cash and gum into her pockets and got up.

  Misty was fading away.

  “Misty,” Mia said quickly. “Thank you for everything you did for me.”

  The ghost looked puzzled but appreciative before her lack of energy made her disappear.

  Mia left her room and tiptoed past her parents’ suite of rooms, where her mother’s steady breathing confirmed her father’s report that Amanda Cooper was indeed sleeping in. The acrid stale odor of cigarettes dominated that section of hall. There was no doubt Mia’s mother had been smoking in her bedroom. She always smoked, ignoring the warnings that cigarettes caused lung cancer. Amanda didn’t seem to care that it caused her husband’s and daughter’s eyes to water when the rooms weren’t ventilated by the cracking of a window. Amanda lived in Amanda world, a world where everything was for her benefit.

  Mia moved down the stairs, her heart pounding. The more she moved through her childhood house, the more she feared that, instead of a dream, she was really in 1998. “I’m Mia Martin. I’m thirty-two years old. I’m married to Ted Martin and have two little boys, Brian and Varden. I live…” Mia’s eyes opened wide. “That’s it. I just need to get back to the farmhouse. Where’s my keys?” Mia answered herself, “Somewhere in 2018, probably the hall table – no, we had to move them because of Brian. The office. I wonder if Charles took his car?” she asked, walking out the back door and over to the garage. She opened the door up and looked inside. No car. Not that she’d get away with driving it if this dream world kept to the rules.

  There, leaning against the lawn mower was her dented, reclaimed, light-blue Huffy bike. It had a vintage banana seat and long handlebars to compensate for the small wheels. Mia wasn’t tall enough for a touring bike. She had found this gem at the resale shop. It served her well until the other kids her age started calling it a baby’s bike. “Hey, Cooper, did you forget your training wheels?”

  She opened the garage door and pushed the bike out. She closed the door and got on. She cruised past the Gifford house, and when she saw the ghost of Edwin Gifford tending his flowers, she almost crashed the bike. Mia swerved back onto the verge of the road and stopped.

  “What’s the matter, Mia? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Edwin teased her.

  “Sorry, Mr. Gifford, I’m feeling a bit crazy today,” she said, trying to stop her hands from shaking.

  “Have you eaten yet?”

  “No. I really have to get to the… the Murphy place.”

  “Lord, girl, you don’t want to go there. It’s haunted.”

  Mia saw the twinkle in the man’s eyes and couldn’t help smiling.
/>
  “There, that’s better. Wait here,” he said conspiratorially. He disappeared for a moment, and when he manifested, he had a paper napkin in his hand which was wrapped around a large cinnamon roll. “The lady of the house won’t miss it. Now get, before I get accused of giving sweets to children.”

  “Yes, sir, thank you, Mr. Gifford,” Mia said, tucking the roll into her worn-but-sound bike basket.

  She rode away, and as she turned the corner, she looked back to see Edwin returning to his weeding. “I took for granted that he could move tangible things,” Mia said. “I wonder how he and Bea White are getting along now?”

  “Crazy Cooper’s talking to herself!” jeered a pimply-faced boy from the driveway where he and a few boys were playing basketball. Mia couldn’t remember the boy’s name. He was one of a dozen bullies that had made Mia’s life hell growing up. She didn’t say a word but continued to pump the pedals of the bike to get her out of the neighborhood as fast as she could.

  She cruised quickly through the town of Big Bear Lake. She instinctually avoided the cemetery by taking a parallel street which took her past the Bravermans’ house. She saw Tom in the yard with his mother Susan. She was tossing him a football. Tom was just a bit taller than Mia at this point. He raised a friendly hand, and Mia returned it as she rode by.

  Mia kept thinking about how she may have gotten into the situation she was in. If it wasn’t a dream and she hadn’t been kidnapped by Roumain, it meant that somehow she accidentlly ended up back in time. “The portals…” she said aloud. “Did Brian find the book with Ed’s opening words in it? No, it’s locked up. Plus, I’d still be an adult. I’m a kid. Who does this to a person? What did I do to the universe to deserve this!”

  The grade of the road became tougher. She found herself standing as she continued to pedal upwards away from the town and towards the hollow. The abandoned subdivision the 2018 Murphy farmhouse stood in, hadn’t yet gone beyond the planning stage in 1998. Instead of the network of paved roads and acre lots, there were just a few dirt and gravel roads to travel once she left the county road. She stopped her bike once she left the highway and rested. She took out the cinnamon roll and ate it, savoring the heat from the cinnamon and not really minding the raisins that the current owner of the Gifford house liked to use. They were more of a golden currant than a raisin. “Fancy raisins,” Mia said. “Fancy house, fancy raisins.”