Last time on the Summoning, Chloe finds a mysterious crawlspace behind a locked door.
At this point, the book pauses to have Rae show off that she hid the flashlight in her cleavage, despite the fact they didn’t need to hide the flashlight at all. But at least this is our only holdup. Once Chloe gets her hands on it, she shines it into the passageway and sees a box.
I’d seen boxes like this in movies, and what lay inside was never good. Body parts were usually involved.
To recap: Chloe is in the hidden unlit crawlspace behind a locked door in the basement of a home for disturbed children following the directions of a ghost. But the only thing that worries her is that there’s a box.
But I had to know. The lid started coming off, then stopped. I jiggled it. One side came up, but the other caught. I slid my fingertips around the edge, trying to find what it was catching on. It was a piece of paper.
I tugged, and the paper ripped, leaving me with a corner. There was handwriting on it, but only fragments of words. I found the part of the paper still stuck in the box and pulled, prying the lid with my other hand. One sharp tug, and the paper came free . . . and so did the lid, flyingoff and landing in my lap. Before I could think about ! whether I wanted to look, Iwas looking, staring straight down into the box.
Well, that was less than thrilling. Unless the ripped paper is going to lead to the nurses discovering what they did, which you’d expect but this book really doesn’t seem to bother with expected setup, this entire leadup was just a waste of time, because god knows, a ripped corner of paper is not doing much on the suspense front.
“Property taxes.” I flipped through the other pages. “It’s just records of stuff they needed to keep. They put them into a fireproof box and stored it here. The door’s probably only locked so we don’t snoop.”
Who does that? Seriously, it’s already in a fireproof box. There’s already a locked closet for it to be in. This had damn well better be secret coded records of how much the parents pay out for each suicide.
Rae says the ghost must have meant something else, but neither of them find anything. Chloe complains it’s freezing and she wants to get going, Rae claims it’s not cold and that Chloe looks weird. I think we’re meant to assume that this is a sign of a ghost again, but Chloe never actually said ghosts have that effect on her. If anything, the easier explanation is just that she’s getting freaked out.
“Okay.” She handed me the flashlight. “Lead the way.”
The moment my fingers closed around the flashlight, the light started to dim. Within seconds, it was giving off only a faint yellowish glow.
So ghosts can mess with things in the real world?
It goes out entirely, but Rae’s matches to the rescue!
Then they heard mommy nurse at the top of the stairs asking if they’ve finished the laundry. Apparently this means they have enough time to both scramble out of the crawlspace and out of the closet without her noticing any delay in their response.
And that’s all for the chapter. They’re ridiculously short, aren’t they?
Well, I guess something did happen.
Chloe has some secondary power that gives her chills whenever she runs into something – it’s unclear in this context if it’s actually ghosts. It could be the ward keeping the ghost out. I referenced the possibility of hallowed ground earlier, which could explain why she had only a minor reaction in the closet but was getting worse after spending ten minutes in the dirt crawlspace, and it’d also explain why she’s so adverse to it – she keeps describing the air as stale and smelling terrible, when raw dirt shouldn’t be so awful.
And we know either there’s something important in the box or there’s something else they somehow missed in there. It doesn’t seem like either the crawlspace or the closet are large, so probably not another door to a different place. But maybe it’s a body buried under the dirt or something.