Provenance House — Elizabeth St. Clair

Was she a guest or a captive in this nightmare mansion from which no one ever left alive...?

The House Where Time Stood Still And Terror Was Everlasting...

The day lovely young Vivian paid her first visit to Provenance House she thought it an outdated and overdone Victorian horror. But that was before Kitty, the quaint little lady who lived there with her brother Calvin and their invalid Uncle Gideon showed Vivian the magic concealed upstairs--Amelia's room! Vivian scarcely understood what was happening as she crossed the threshold of this art nouveau fairyland. She only knew in her sudden bewilderment that she must wait there for Amelia to return, beautiful Amelia who looked so much like Vivian herself; lonely Amelia, last heiress of the Longeuville's, who drowned one tragic day in 1915, leaving her bereaved fiance Gideon all alone with the family treasure...

Vivian could not tell if it was hours, days, or months later when she awoke to the trap she had so easily fallen into. But when the evil spell was momentarily lifted, only the shadowy memory of a man met in the woods offered any hope of aid. So Vivian made her own desperate plans, little dreaming of the greater dangers she would face and the love she would find as she tried to free herself from a ghost that would not die...

A SCREAM IN THE NIGHT
told me that they had killed her. I knew that I would be their next victim. If I could not escape immediately, and so I wrapped myself in Amelia's furs and made my way out of that mansion of horror. Racing across the open ground of the park, I reached the line of trees forming the bordering of the woods. But pausing to rest, I heard their voices calling me, and, like a wild thing, I fled on into the woods and away from their evil.

I don't know when I started to feel the full brunt of the weather. But suddenly I realized that my toes were numb and my face had begun to freeze. My lungs felt as if they would burst, but I knew I could not stop to rest for I might never be able to start again. As I wandered away from my enemy, the cold and dark and forest had closed in, becoming my whole world, a world which held only death for a weary fugitive. I could see no landmarks looming in the uncharted woods. I was doomed as a sailor adrift among icebergs on a midnight sea, and at last I admitted it to myself--I could go no farther. I leaned against a large pine, content to wait as the weather did its work, and I sank down into a coldness beyond cold and a darkness deeper than the night...