by Skylar Finn
“My landlord.”
“He seems mean.” That, apparently, was all she had to say on the matter.
“He’s not nice,” I agreed.
Riley wandered into the living room, picked the camera up from the desk, and switched it on. “Am I going to be on your show?” she asked, squinting through the viewfinder instead of using the big display on the back. “That would be cool.”
“If you want to.”
She focused the lens on me and looked over the top of the camera. “You look different through here.”
“How so?”
“You look sad. Watch.” Without warning, she snapped a picture of me. The flash drew colorful, lingering spots in my vision as Riley turned the camera around to show me the picture. “Look.”
There I was, slumped against the bedroom doorway, barefoot in Madame Lucia’s trademark kimono. The lighting was terrible, and the flash washed out the vibrant colors of the robe. A glare reflected off my eyes, and the halo of light from the bedroom backlit the photo with an eerie silver glow.
“You didn’t warn me.” I tried to delete the photo from the touchscreen, but Riley tugged the camera out of my grasp.
“Don’t trash it,” she said. “It’s a good reminder.”
“Of what?”
“Not to lie to yourself.”
I snatched the camera from her and flipped it around so she was the object in the lens. “Oh, yeah? Let’s see how you like it.” The flash went off again, and I lowered the camera to check Riley’s photo.
“Let me see,” she said, yanking me down to her height.
The girl in the picture stared right into the lens, perfectly centered in the frame. Rounded shoulders dwarfed by the Blondie shirt, limp colorless hair, and those clear, unblinking eyes. She didn’t smile or convey any emotion whatsoever.
“I look fine,” Riley declared.
“Enough photos.” I switched the camera from photography to video mode and turned it on Riley once again. “Want to get started?”
For the first time since she appeared in my room, she got nervous. She pulled the neck of the T-shirt up over her mouth and chin like a mask then put her black beanie low on her forehead so only her eyes were visible. So small and beady, she reminded me of a mischievous raccoon pilfering lost gold from a dumpster.
“Now?” she asked.
“We can do it tomorrow,” I offered, “but you have to promise to show up. Blondie shirt, remember?”
“No, no.” She sat in the desk chair, tucked her knees up to her chest, and pulled the shirt over her entire body. I winced as the fabric stretched taut over her bony knees. “We should start now. I’m ready.”
I sat on the couch across from the desk, steadied the camera, and pressed record. “Let’s start easy,” I said, not bothering with Madame Lucia’s accent. In the last ten minutes, I’d decided to take Jazmin’s advice and turn over a new leaf. If I could give my audience something authentic, they might forgive me for Madame Lucia’s shortcomings. “What’s your name?”
“Riley Watson,” she declared.
“Riley, where are we right now?”
“On the top floor of King and Queens Ski Lodge and Resort.”
“And what are we doing here?”
She tipped an invisible hat to acknowledge the repetition of her own question. “I think it’s better to ask what you’re doing here. Shouldn’t we both be in the shot?”
I hesitated. Other than the kimono and my braid, which was loose and wild after traipsing around the resort all day, I bore none of Madame Lucia’s signature looks. No false lashes or eyeshadow, or lip liner. Just a little mascara, tinted lip moisturizer, and pink cheeks from the sun and the wind. If I was rebooting Madame Lucia’s Parlour for the Dead and Departed, the process started now. With a deep breath, I set the camera on the arm of the sofa, checked that the frame was level, then joined Riley at the desk. She vacated the chair for me to sit on and perched on the desk instead, swinging her slippered feet to and fro. I found it difficult to look directly into the camera, a first for me. It was usually so easy to pander to the lens, but without Madame Lucia’s visage to hide behind, I was vulnerable and scared.
“Madame Lucia is here to fix me,” Riley announced to the camera.
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “But we are here to talk about what’s been happening to you ever since your mom died. Can you explain some of that?”
Riley kicked her feet against my chair, each thump more forceful than the last. “I hear voices. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember.”
“You heard them before your mom passed away?”
“Yup,” she said matter-of-factly. “I didn’t notice them before. They were always in the background, quiet, like a fly buzzing around. Annoying, but not scary. I couldn’t understand them or anything.”
“Something changed?”
“They started talking to me,” Riley murmured. She picked up the bushel of sage she’d been playing with earlier, crumbling the dried leaves between her fingertips. “Right after they took Mom, I went inside the resort and heard them.”
“Who are they?” I urged. “What did they say?”
Dried sage drifted to the carpet as she dismantled the bushel. “I don’t know who they are, but the things they say—” A shudder shook its way out of her body, starting at her core and working to the top of her head. “It’s awful. And it’s getting worse.”
I dislodged the sage from her tireless fingers. “What are they saying, Riley?”
Her round eyes widened like miniature twin replicas of my crystal ball at home. “They tell me to do things,” she whispered. “Dangerous things. They threaten to make bad things happen.”
The hair on my arms rose. “What kinds of things?”
“To go into the old lodge.” We sat close enough that it took me a moment to realize she wasn’t looking at me as she spoke. Instead, she stared at a spot over my shoulder. “Where it all started.”
Please blink. How did she go so long without her eyes drying out?
“Where’s the old lodge?”
“Here.”
“Okay,” I said, lost. “What got started there?”
“They talk all at the same time,” Riley said. “I can’t always understand them.”
I patted her knee in an attempt to comfort her, but she jumped at my touch. “Let’s go back,” I tried. “My number one goal is to keep you safe. Do you remember any of the other bad things they told you to do?”
Riley finally blinked, and it was as if her soul returned to her body after a short vacation. She focused her gaze on mine. “They tell me to hurt my brother—”
She whipped her head around and stared into the kitchen. The desk lamp didn’t reach much farther than our set-up in the corner of the suite, so the cabinets and counters in the kitchen were dark. All I could see was a decorative vase—white with hand-painted violets—on the top shelf above the sink, visible because of its light color.
“Riley, what’s wrong?”
Slowly, Riley rotated to face me. “They’re visiting you tonight.”
The camera beeped, a warning to change the memory card, and I got up so hastily I knocked one of Riley’s knees against the other. When I turned the camera off, the absence of the red recording light shook Riley out of her reverie. She hopped off the desk, shaking her arms and legs loose after holding them so tightly against herself for such a long time.
“I should go, shouldn’t I?” she said.
“Probably.” I wanted her to leave, but I didn’t want to say that. “It’s late.”
She patted the top of the camera like it was a puppy who had learned to sit. “Are we going to talk tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s why I’m here, remember?”
“Okay.” She took her time getting to the door, first tucking the dismantled sage bundle into the pocket of her fleece before pulling it on over my shirt. The glow of the sconces in the hallway crept into the suite as she let h
erself out, but she paused in the doorway. “They’re not all bad,” she said. “The voices, I mean.”
If she meant it as a comfort, the sentiment failed. The air felt charged with static, tickling the base of my skull as if an army of spiders was crawling into my hairline. When the door drifted shut behind Riley, I yanked the pins out of my hair and combed the braid loose with my fingers, desperate to scratch the imaginary itch. It was all over, spreading from the top of my head to the base of my spine. I shook off Madame Lucia’s kimono too, as if everything Riley touched or looked at was infested with ticks. God, I’d never be able to wear my Blondie shirt again.
Despite a shower, the feeling persisted. I curled up in the center of the bed and tucked the duvet around me like a Bed, Bath, and Beyond force field, glad the mattress was so large. Like a little kid, I didn’t want to risk exposing a limb over the edge to lure whatever might lurk beneath out of its home. I turned off the small lamp on the side table, plunging the room into darkness. The suite faced the mountain, so there were no artificial lights to permeate the room, but the silver sheen of the moon cast crooked shadows through the balcony door. The wind creaked and scratched against the window panes.
Riley Watson was weird. There was no other way to describe her. What kind of twelve-year-old dove into a philosophical debate about the point of life after her mother’s death? She was ahead of her class, that was for sure, but when it came to the voices she heard, I was sure Oliver had been exaggerating Riley’s eccentricities. The kid zoned out though, like she was no longer a member of this astral plane. Like she actually listened to the commands of the dead.
“Ridiculous,” I muttered into the pillow. “You’ve been doing this for five years, Lucia. If ghosts were real, you would have figured it out by now.”
But after several minutes of fuming in the cocoon of bed linens, willing myself to buck up and go to sleep, I stuck one hand out of the duvet to flip the light back on.
Right before dawn, something shattered in the kitchen. My eyes flew open. I was covered in sweat, overheated from sleeping under so many layers, but I didn’t move. Somehow, I already knew what had broken, but getting up to check would play into the stupid childhood fears I’d let into my head. I lay there, burning up, to listen. After the glass settled, nothing else made a sound, so I poked one foot out of the blanket, then the other. I wrapped the duvet around me like a cape as I slipped off the bed, as if its protection extended past the mattress. With the heavy fabric trailing after me, I peered into the kitchen.
The decorative vase lay on the floor, its pristine white porcelain and pretty flowers shattered in pieces across the kitchen. How it had fallen, I had no idea. Too close to the edge of the shelf maybe. I picked up the big pieces and threw them into the garbage, mourning the lost craftsmanship of the hand-painted pottery. As I examined a perfect swirl of violet paint, a jagged edge caught the inside of my palm, and blood sprayed across the floor.
I opened kitchen drawers at random, looking for something to wrap around the open wound. In one, beneath a leather-bound album, I found a couple of dishtowels. As I yanked them free, blood dripped on the worn album cover.
“Crap.”
After tying one towel around my palm to stem the bleeding, I used another to wipe off the album. The blood smeared, leaving a dark stain on the soft leather. I wet the towel and blotted, but it was no use.
“Well, sorry to whoever this belonged to,” I muttered, giving up on the stain removal. Carefully, I turned the front cover for a look inside. It was a scrapbook full of old pictures, the pages yellow and brittle. Most of the photos were faded beyond recognition. A few were torn right through. At the back of the album, a stack of slightly newer photos was stuffed haphazardly amongst the others, but every single one of them was charred and black, as if someone had rescued them from a fire pit. Curious, I rifled through them. Most of them appeared to be group shots of the same four people, but the faces were made unrecognizable by the damage. In one photo, a smooth stone archway with King and Queens’s crown logo was visible above the subjects, but I didn’t recall seeing the archway during my tour with Oliver yesterday. I closed the album and slipped it in the drawer where it belonged. If it had been there as long as I expected—forgotten by an ex-guest however many years ago—I wasn’t going to be the one to displace it.
Since there was no hope of returning to sleep and there were no first aid supplies in the suite’s bathroom, I got dressed for the day to head down to the lobby. I didn’t bother with any of Madame Lucia’s looks, not even the braid. I left my hair down for once, so the silvery strands rippled like a moonlit low tide across the fabric of my sandy-colored sweater. In the hallway, I held my bloodied hand above my head to stem the blood flow and pushed the call button. When the doors to the elevator opened and I went to step in, I bumped into a brunette woman in a red evening gown standing inside.
“Oh,” I said, startled by her presence. “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting anyone to be here. I thought I was the only guest at the resort.”
The woman smiled politely. “Not to worry. Going down?”
“Yes, the lobby, please.”
She pressed the button for me, eyeing the ruined towel as I re-wrapped it around my hand. “Oh, my. That doesn’t look good.”
“I had a run-in with a broken vase and a miscreant shard of glass,” I said. “And of course I couldn’t find a bandage. Do you happen to know if the resort has a first aid center?”
“It’s near the gift shop.”
“Great, thanks. Sorry about this. I know it’s kind of gross.”
The woman waved this aside. “I have a baby girl. With the amount of times I’ve cleaned up her misfiring bodily functions, a little bit of blood has no chance of disturbing me.”
“Aw, how old is she?”
She beamed. “Eight months. Would you like to see a picture?”
“Sure! I love babies. Well, other people’s babies.”
The woman drew a real photo instead of a smartphone from her sequined gold clutch purse. The infant, with dark curls and radiant blue eyes, was adorable. “Her name is Odette,” she said. “She’s just learning to crawl, so I’m at my wit’s end with her. Thankfully, I just got her down for a nap, so I’m running down to the lobby for a quick coffee before she wakes up.”
“She’s the prettiest baby I’ve ever seen,” I said. Most babies reminded me of those little troll dolls with the wrinkly “old man or alien?” faces and untamed tufts of hair.
“I like to think so, but I’m quite biased,” the woman said. “I’m Stella, by the way. Have you been staying at the resort long…?”
“Lucia,” I offered. “I arrived yesterday. You?”
“I’m quite familiar with King and Queens,” Stella said, returning the picture of Odette to her clutch. “My husband is busy with work, so I’m watching the baby on my own.”
The elevator chimed as we reached the lobby.
“Let me know if you ever need a hand,” I said as I stepped out. “Like I said, I love babies. Are you coming?”
Stella lingered in the elevator. “You know, I’ve just remembered Odette hates waking up alone. I’ll get coffee some other time.”
I waved with my good hand. “See you around then.”
As she returned to the top floor, I headed for the gift shop. With no employees to man the counter, it was closed. Stranger, there was no sign of a first aid center nearby. Thankfully, I bumped into Trey.
“Hi, Miss Star.” He glanced at my hand and swallowed a gag. “Wow, that’s a lot of blood.”
“Making you queasy? Sorry.” I hid the wound behind my back. “Where’s first aid? Someone told me it was near the gift shop.”
“They were way off,” Trey said. “It’s by the lobby. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Trey, stomaching his horror, showed me into the clinic behind the front desk, where I rinsed and dressed the cut on my palm by myself. It was jagged and ugly, too large for a standard Band-Aid, so I wrapped it with gauze s
quares and medical tape instead.
“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” Trey asked as he organized the rest of the resort’s bandages and ointments.
I flexed my hand. The cut would have a hard time scabbing over considering its placement. “My line of work tends to lean toward hazardous. Ghosts like to throw things around.”
“Wait, you actually found one?”
Before I could fake an answer—or explain the vase’s kamikaze attempt that morning— Riley Watson appeared from the lobby, wearing a lurid neon-yellow ski jacket and black snow pants with silver reflective strips sewn in patches along the sides.
“Let’s go,” she ordered, ignoring Trey entirely.
I placed another strip of tape to secure the gauze strips. “Go where?”
“Skiing.”
“I don’t ski.”
“You’re going to learn today,” she said. “Come on, get your coat. Trey?”
The teenager knocked over a tub of cotton swabs. “Yes, Miss Watson?”
Riley fixed him with one of her trademark stares. Then she shrugged, turned, and said, “Nothing.”
Trey was affixed to the wall of the clinic, halfway through refilling the cotton swab tub. I patted him on the shoulder. “See you later, Trey.”
There was no arguing with Riley. She marched me through the resort like a prepubescent drill instructor. We returned briefly to my room to fetch my outerwear, ate a massive breakfast at the Eagle’s View, then headed to the rental shop so Riley could pick out a pair of skis for me. As I browsed through the different lengths and patterns, Riley scared off Parker—the other girl from the café yesterday who was running the rental shop today—and went to the “employees only” side of the counter.
“How much longer do I have to talk you out of this?” I asked Riley.
“About five minutes, but don’t bother.” The skis dwarfed her as she carried two pairs out of the storage room and dumped them on the counter. “Stop worrying. I’m sure you’ll be fine. You’ve skied before, right?”
“Twice,” I admitted. “Once with my mother, which was a disaster, and once with Jazmin. I fell on the bunny slope, and she had to carry me to our room.”