1939.

“Murderer…” 

The hollow, ethereal voice did not rouse Robert at first. He merely shifted in his bedsheets.

“Murderer…” 

The second time drew him toward waking, but his eyes were slow to open.

“Murderer…” 

When at last he was awake enough to realize that the voice was no dream, Robert’s eyes shot open to see, at the foot of his bed, a hooded figure with a single gloved hand pointed toward him and an unmistakably skeletal grin.

“Murderer…”

Terror took all words from Robert. Only a strangled shriek escaped his lips. He bolted toward his bedroom door but found the knob refusing to turn, no matter how he struggled and jerked. “Let me out!” he cried.

“Murderer…” The hooded figure drew closer.

If the knob would not give, then Robert could only use the hidden door that led to the secret passages of Finn Manor. Pressing a carved flower in the corner of its molding caused a wall panel to open, and he fled into that darkness, until suddenly he saw the same ghastly grin that he thought he left behind him.

“Murderer…” 

With a scream, Robert turned to push his way into the first room he could, the office of Josiah Finn. There, the idea struck him that he might find not only escape, but defense. From a drawer of his father’s massive mahogany Chippendale desk, he grabbed Josiah’s old revolver. After all, Robert did not believe in ghosts. This had to be some intruder terrorizing him, placing Robert within his rights to make a ghost of him indeed.

“Murderer…” 

Robert turned and fired, over and over, emptying all six shots into the thing that had followed him. And yet it remained standing, unaffected, unstruck by a single bullet.

“You cannot kill me again…” the figure said.

“Again?”

Closer and closer it drew. “You killed me, Robert… You killed me… You killed our father…”

“Our father?” It could not be. Only one person knew of Robert’s murderers, and that person knew them as a victim. “Will? Is that…” Could he even say it out loud? Would not speaking the words be surrendering to madness? “Is that you?”

“You killed me…” 

The ghost reached out to grasp him, and Robert’s whole body quaked in fear of its touch. Josiah’s pistol fell from his limp hand, and he fled into the hallway. 

The sound of his screams and the six gunshots had frightened the staff of Finn Manor out of sleep. He was greeted by a crowd of them rushing to see what was the matter.

“Mr. Caine?” said Miss Glenda. “What on earth is going on?”

But Robert had been reduced to a gibbering mess. “The ghost… the ghost…”

The maids and butlers exchanged glances with each other, wordlessly expressing doubt and fear for their new master’s sanity.

Miss Glenda continued, “A ghost, Robert? Where did you see a ghost?”

“In there!” He pointed inside the office, but all who turned to gaze within saw nothing. It seemed the ghost had vanished.

“You must have had a bad dream,” said Miss Glenda. “This has been such a hard time for all of us, with the loss of both the elder and younger Mister Finn.”

“No, Will was there! He was right there! But he can’t! He can’t be there. He’s dead. I killed him! I made sure he’s dead! I killed him!”

The looks of concern around Robert suddenly shifted to horror. A few hands clasped over jaws gone slack at his confession, and one maid whimpered as tears rose in her eyes.

“Robert?” said Miss Glenda. “Did you just say that you killed our Will?”

But before he could answer, Robert saw past her, at the end of the hall, through a window that caught no one’s attention but his, the sight of the ghost once more. The cloak fluttering around it had seemed colorless in the shadows but shone blood red under the moonlit sky as it floated nearly thirty feet above the ground. Again, he screamed and pushed himself past the crowd, who were too shocked to halt him. 

He fled down the hallway, down the stairs, down to the Finn garage. There, he grabbed a ring of keys from its hook and leaped into the first car he could, but its engine refused to start. Robert stomped on the pedals and tried again. Nothing. And then, in his rear-view mirror, he caught sight of the ghost there in the garage.

Robert scrambled his way into the car beside him. Once more, he turned the key without response. And still the ghost drew closer, moving with unhurried steps, one gloved hand outstretched to drag Robert down into the underworld.

“Get away from me!” Robert screamed, “You’re dead, Will! You’re dead!”

At last, Robert tried the Lincoln-Zephyr, a car painted the same scarlet shade as the ghost. This time the engine roared into life, and he shot out of the garage, down the driveway, nearly running over a night watchman in his flight. The guard at the front gate, seeing no sign of Robert slowing his approach, rushed to open the way to him just before he sped past. 

Too late, a call came from inside Finn Manor. “Don’t let Robert escape!” Miss Glenda cried into the phone. “He’s just confessed to Will’s murder!”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the guard replied. “He’s already run off.”

“Then phone the police!”

Robert whipped around the roads winding down the Elysian Hills at speeds that would have been dangerous even in daylight, but with every minute that passed his heartbeat became more steady and his breathing eased. Let Will’s ghost keep Finn Manor. Robert had made it. He was free. 

However, just as the 6th Avenue bridge came into view, Robert smelled something foul, a hint of burning, acrid, sulfurous. It stung his lungs, and he coughed, without relief. He continued coughing more and more as  thick smoke began filling the Zephyr, clouding his vision and assaulting his senses. 

When finally he could take no more, Robert slammed the brakes and the Zephyr came to a screeching, spinning halt right on the bridge. He fell out of the driver’s side door with fire in his lungs, nearly retching as he coughed out the foulness. He was on his hands and knees, in the middle of the bridge, hacking and wheezing, when a pair of red boots appeared before him, and Robert looked up to see the ghost staring down.

“This was where you did it… Where you murdered me…” The ghost grabbed Robert by the shoulders and pulled him close to face its empty, skeletal gaze. “Confess… Turn yourself in, Robert… Confess…”

Unable to break the deathly grip, Robert screamed with a force unlike anything that had come from his mouth before. Strangely, the ghost recoiled at that, releasing Robert and clutching its head in pain.

Robert took no time to figure out what that might mean. He began fleeing frantically toward the dark until, suddenly, the air in front of him exploded in a flash of light. He halted and, behind him, he heard the ghost speak again.

“You will face justice…You will confess your crimes to the police… You will tell them how you murdered our father… You will tell them how you murdered me…”

He turned to see the red-cloaked figure with arms outstretched, beckoning.  “Damn you, Will Singer!” Robert shouted, “Damn you to hell!”

He had tried to run. He had tried to fight. There was nowhere he could go, nowhere to escape his brother’s ghost. But he would never give that phantom the satisfaction of seeing him in handcuffs. “I’ll see you there soon.”

He sprinted toward the bridge’s railing. The ghost gave chase but couldn’t catch him in time. Robert flung himself over the same bridge where he had forced Will to take that fateful leap, into the same frigid darkness rushing to the sea.