The Ghost of You Lingers, page 6
Darkness surrounded me, but I didn’t go back to Abaddon Cottage. I walked along the island’s perimeter path, with no particular destination in mind. The pavement curved, hugging the limestone rock formations closely. Every now and then, a cyclist whooshed by. As the pink dusk became twilight, then dark, cyclists stopped coming. On the other side of the path, the still lake waters were pitch black. The edge of the path could’ve been a cliff dropping into an endless void.
Ahead of me and around a bend, there was a small pocket of rocky beach. Inky water crept up to meet shiny dark stones that glistened with slick foam. A thin line of vegetation was all that separated the path where I walked from the small beach made of slippery stones. A feeling of dread came over me as I approached the little cove, but I wasn’t sure why.
I told myself I was done with the spooky stuff. Time to deal with actual problems instead of imaginary ones.
Jamming my hands in my pockets, I kept walking. The silence of the island was broken only by the whisper of water lapping at the rocks, endlessly grabbing at them like hands seeking something to hold on to.
I kept walking, feeling unsettled and angry for reasons I had a hard time pinpointing. I almost didn’t recognize Annabelle standing on the rocks.
“Marley? What are you doing out here?”
She turned to face me slowly. Her feet were visible—white and bare on the jagged stones. I was reminded of clouds but wasn’t sure why. She was wearing a long nightgown, the sort you might see on a BBC show. But the wind blew it across her figure, making the thin fabric hug her curves. Annabelle’s body was solid, more solid than I’d ever seen her before. She also seemed to shine brightly from within, like a halo of light covering her entire body. As she turned to face me, her body and shoulders moved separately—like they’d been disconnected at the neck.
I sped up, but she was still a good fifty feet ahead of me on the rocks.
There was something wrong with Annabelle’s eyes. They were too wide and too white.
“Marley!” I reached out, trying not to trip over my own suddenly-too-big feet.
Annabelle’s ghostly body was still, but she raised an arm stiffly, struggling under the weight of it. She was dripping wet. Water streamed down her face from drooping tendrils of hair. Instead of its usual white-blonde, in the strange light her hair was a dark, mottled gray. A gash of moonlight ripped through dark clouds and threw strange shadows on her ghastly, beautiful face.
“Marley, I’m—” I wasn’t sure what the end of that sentence would be. My walk turned into a jog as I sped up to reach her. I thought she couldn’t leave the house?
Annabelle opened her mouth as if to reply, but when her lips parted, a dark gush of black water streamed down her chin. Her eyes were wide in horror as inky liquid and seaweed spilled from the gaping maw of her mouth.
I broke into a run.
My footsteps slapped loudly against the pavement. But when I reached the rocks, Annabelle had vanished.
***
Abaddon Cottage was dark.
“Annabelle?”
Nothing.
“Yasmin?”
No response. Only silence and the creaking of a front door I would need to grease. I stepped into the hall, not carrying anything but conscious of my hands, like a sense memory of everything I’d dropped onto this very floor, including myself.
“Marley? Are you here?”
Silence.
I sniffed the air, searching for a hint of her presence: freshly brewed tea; the smell of old books; the bright, fishy tang that followed her from room to room. But there was nothing.
Telling myself I wasn’t searching for her but making sure the doors were locked, I went through every room on the main floor. The mugs in the sink were the same ones we’d used this morning. One with my coffee stains, one with remnants of Annabelle’s unconsumed tea. I went out to the backyard and peered into the garden, softly calling “Marley?” and feeling like an idiot. The bushes didn’t reply.
I told myself I wasn’t disappointed. I also told myself I wasn’t scared.
Listening at the door to the room Yasmin had taken, I was relieved to hear the soft sound of snoring from within.
Running up the rest of the stairs to my room, I closed the door gently and locked it. I tore off my clothes and threw myself down on the bed while my heart hammered. My body was taut, rigid with shock. With no sign of the ghost in the house and a growing sense of panic, I found myself staring at the ceiling, breathing hard. The house had become terrifying again now that the ghost who haunted it was gone.
What the fuck? What the actual fuck was that? And where is she now?
Willing myself to calm down, I tried to sleep, but my thoughts kept turning strange. Annabelle’s frightful face kept appearing behind my eyelids. Then the contour of her body as her thin nightgown whipped in the wind. As I wrestled with my mind, fear morphed into a forbidden sense of desire. The sheets were rough, but every time I moved, I felt them against my skin and it drove me just a little mad. I needed to feel something other than unsettling, bone-deep dread.
My fingers moved south and I took a deep breath in, trying to focus, when I sensed her. She smelled like lake water and tea. I opened my eyes. The room was empty.
But I wasn’t alone.
“I know you’re there,” I whispered.
Silence.
I arched my back, pressing into my fingers as I chased relief. The slick, wet sound was lewd in the silence of the room, but I didn’t stop.
A light flickered from the corner. I looked over at the antique wooden chair, covered with a threadbare quilt full of homespun yarn and memories. On it sat Annabelle, with her ankles crossed behind a chair leg, wearing her house slippers. Her hands clenched on her thighs, knuckles white. Her mouth was set in a line, flat as the horizon. There was no smile for her to hide behind.
She met my gaze. Her expression smoldered with an intensity I’d never seen before. The heavy atmosphere of the room was silent but for my leaping heart and the sound of my movements. My pulse thundered in my ears. I sped up, gasping as I came closer. The sheets grabbed at my skin as I writhed on them, but I didn’t look away from Annabelle’s intense scrutiny.
Finally, I came, feeling waves of blissful release. I must have closed my eyes because when I returned to my senses, the chair in the corner of the room was empty.
Chapter 8
Neither of us mentioned it the next morning. When Annabelle handed me my coffee, she did it with a sweet smile full of innocent, ghostly warmth. My cheeks warmed when my fingers brushed against her insubstantial ones around the cup. I looked away first, now unsure if I had really seen Annabelle as a ‘normal’ ghost on the rocks. I was also unsure if I should apologize for what I had done when I encountered her afterwards in my bedroom, especially since I wasn’t sorry it had happened.
We drank our morning beverages in a comfortable silence. Well, I drank and Annabelle watched, inhaling and sighing every now and then.
Was this what it was like to live with someone you actually liked?
The thought came, and instead of immediately reproaching myself for it, I entertained the idea. What would it be like to wake up, come downstairs, and have a coffee with someone who knew me? Someone who had seen all sides of me and still smiled like I was an important part of her world? The thought filled me with an exhilaration that bordered on panic.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs.
“Oh, Marley, that’s Yasmin, can you . . .”
Annabelle heaved a put-upon sigh, but before she disappeared, she gave me a cheeky wink.
Yasmin, on the other hand, pursed her lips and looked around the kitchen warily when she entered. Her long hair was braided, but so many strands escaped that the braid was barely intact. She was carrying a large book.
“Coffee or tea?” I got up to put the kettle on while my unknown-until-yesterday cousin sat at the table.
“Tea.”
“I should have known.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you look like you’re late for Harry Potter school, so of course you want tea.”
Today she was wearing a similar outfit to yesterday’s: swishy skirt and a blouse with long lace sleeves. I’d be damned if she managed to make it through the entire day without sweating through that shirt.
She sank down in Annabelle’s chair and put her elbows on the table. She looked tired. That made two of us.
I put a tea bag in a mug that said “Four out of five Great Lakes prefer Michigan,” feeling like an asshole. Yasmin ignored me and cracked open her gigantic tome.
“What’s that?” I asked. When the water boiled, I poured it in the mug and handed it to her, then sat down at the table.
Yasmin looked at me like I was a child playing a prank by pretending not to know the colors or the alphabet. “You’re kidding, right?”
I scooched my chair closer and peered over her shoulder at the book. It was old and thick, with sections bound together and sewn into the spine with a kaleidoscope of colored thread. The worn cover had an intricate drawing of a tree that had faded over time. As Yasmin flipped through the pages, I saw a dizzying variety of handwriting and drawings, plus magical symbols that looked like they had been copied out of a video game. Some of the pages were lists of ingredients, complete with introductory text like you’d find on the internet.
“What’s that?” I pointed to a diagram that looked like a pentagram with a snake coming out of one of the points.
“You seriously don’t know? Don’t you have one of these?”
“A freaky old book full of fruitcake recipes and demon exorcism diagrams? No. I do not have a freaky old book full of fruitcake recipes and demon exorcism diagrams.”
Yasmin sighed. “There’s no fruitcake.” She chewed on the inside of her cheek for a moment. “Although I did find a recipe for scones from 1895 that rise better than Betty Crocker’s.”
She let me flip through the pages at random. Some of the entries were dated, but most weren’t. They were clearly written and drawn by several different people, but the handwriting was similar, with pretty loops and swooping lines. One of the pages was taken up by a giant circle with a series of symbols drawn inside it and three points of the perimeter marked and labeled. Underneath it was a paragraph written in text that was too small for my tired eyes to decipher.
“This shit is wild.”
Yasmin scoffed. “This ‘shit’ is my family legacy.”
“What do you mean?”
She gave me a cold look. “I’m not sure I should tell you. If you were really a Cartwright woman, you would already know.”
At that I rolled my eyes so hard it was almost painful. “Never been great at being either of those things. Whatever. Keep your secrets, see if I care.”
Yasmin angrily turned the pages until she found one with a family tree. It looked like the one a teacher had made me fill out as an assignment in elementary school. On it, I spied Agatha’s name, along with Yasmin’s, her mother Helena’s, and my mother’s. My original name, Veronica, was nowhere to be found.
“See? The women in our family are connected by our books, which hold the practices handed down through generations. We all have these. The fact that you don’t have one means you’re not really a part of this family.”
“Thanks.” She clearly intended that as an insult, but I smiled sweetly, flattered to be cut off from the family I never wanted.
I pointed to a page that showed women doing various things, including stirring a big black pot and reading out of a book to a crowd of anxious people. The only thing missing was a broomstick. And a stake to burn them at. “Your family are witches?”
“Duh! This is the family business. Even if your mother didn’t teach you anything, didn’t you figure that out when you got here?”
I sat back in my chair and crossed my arms. “It’s not like there was a cauldron sitting outside the front door, no. Besides, I don’t believe in that crap. Spells and spirits aren’t real. It’s all bullshit that bored housewives put on throw pillows and sell on Etsy. Or multilevel marketing schemes.”
Never mind that an actual, honest-to-god ghost saved my life.
“Believe it or not,” Yasmin said, “but I can’t believe you don’t know your own family tree.”
“I jumped off my family tree at the first opportunity,” I shot back. “They wanted me to be radically different than I am, so I left as soon as I could.” I turned the book over, revealing the cover with its worn, faded tree. I traced a finger down one of the branches until it ended. “The branch of my part of the family tree broke when my parents veered off the highway in a storm and wrapped their sedan around an actual fucking tree. No more branch, no more family. So, what do you want from me?”
“This house!”
“Well, you’re not going to get it!”
“Why not?” Yasmin threw up her hands and sat back in her own chair—Annabelle’s chair—and stared me down. “This house belongs to my mother. She made me come here as her representative, and I’m not leaving until I get an agreement from you that you’ll concede it.”
“That’s not going to happen. Also, she didn’t ‘make you come here.’ You’re an adult, you get to make your own choices.” I purposefully didn’t dwell on the fact that I had similar thoughts about being stuck on the island when I first arrived.
“That’s not the point. You have no connection to this house. You had no connection to Agatha; you didn’t even know her!”
“Did you?”
“Well, no. My mom said she always meant to bring me here, but she never did.”
“Aha!” I pumped my arm in the air, not actually sure what I had won but glad to see her angrily sticking her chin out. Arguing with Yasmin was annoying but also a little exhilarating. It felt like I could do it all day. “What would you do with the house, anyway?”
“I wouldn’t sell it, that’s for sure!” Yasmin crossed her arms angrily. “Agatha mentored my mother, and they built their spiritual bond in this house. It’s meaningful to this family, and the fact that you don’t know that means you don’t deserve it.”
“I don’t even really want the house!” I heard the whine in my own voice too late to do anything about it. Like it or not, I was also an adult, older than Yasmin by a decade.
Then I shut my mouth and glanced around, hoping that Annabelle hadn’t heard me say I didn’t want the house. It was true, I didn’t want the responsibility of owning a disaster house on a 1950s American fantasy island. But if I was being truly honest with myself, I liked being with her.
It didn’t matter, though. It’s not like I was going to stay here. This was a temporary reprieve from my usual life, which consisted of getting through the day so that I could play the night away, losing myself in the cacophony of a sound system and the smell of an audience sweating through leather. Punk music, the queer scene of the city, and being alone—that was my life, not this.
I took in a surreptitious breath, waiting for the smell that usually accompanied Annabelle, but I couldn’t feel her. I hadn’t offended my ghost, at least not yet.
“Then give the house back,” Yasmin said, smiling as if the answer was really that simple.
“Give me two mil.”
“No way in hell are you getting two mil for this house. Have you even been on Zillow?”
“Two and a half.”
She huffed, then turned her head, not dignifying me with a response. I stared at her until she relented, unable to let me have the last word. “Even getting featured on HouseTok would not net you that much for this house the way it is.” Yasmin folded her hands and looked at the table, taking a deep breath. “Gibson, you need to be realistic about this—”
Her tirade was interrupted by someone pounding loudly on the door. The doorbell must’ve given up the ghost. So to speak.
“Hold that thought.” As I left Yasmin to answer the frantic knocking at the door, I felt a sense of déjà vu. This time it was for an actual memory of mine—it was the third time in as many days that I’d said “hold that thought” to an unexpected person to go open the front door to my “new” house. I shook myself and opened the door.
An old man barged inside as soon as it was open wide enough to admit him.
“Where’re yer boxes!” he bellowed into the hallway.
“Excuse me?”
“Fuse boxes! We haven’t got all day.” The pile-of-rags man from the bar the other night wandered into the living room and set a filthy toolbox on the bloodstained sofa. It was a metal square that looked as old as Annabelle.
A young man nervously stepped over the threshold after him. He was tall and broad, with sandy hair that flopped over his eyes in a way that made him look like he belonged on a TV show for teens. “Excuse us,” he said, “we’re the Switchfinder Army?”
“Is that a question?” I shut the door behind him and put my fists on my hips.
“Um, no.” The young man radiated a nervous, harmless energy. Like a puppy or a third grader on a field trip. “We’re the electricians? I’m Nate.”
“Fuse boxes!” the older man shouted. “Oh, never mind, I’ll find ’em myself.” He stomped off through the hallway to the kitchen, grumbling the entire way.
Meanwhile, Yasmin passed him in the hallway, carrying her tea and looking confused. She stopped short when she saw me and the hunky assistant.
To Nate, I said, “I’m Gibson, this is Yasmin. Ignore her scowl and let me know if you need anything. If you need to destroy the house, start with the room upstairs with the rose wallpaper.” I smiled sweetly at my cousin. Or whatever she was.
She gave me a withering look, but it didn’t last long. Her eyes kept drifting toward Nate. She stood awkwardly next to him and said, “Um, do you want tea?”
Nate looked equally as awkward, putting his hands in his pockets, then removing them and folding them across his chest. He shook his head. “No, no, I couldn’t take your tea.”
