“Wow. These are—” I searched for the right word this time “—powerful.”
“Thank you, but I’m rarely satisfied with my work,” he replied dismissively.
“What artist ever is?”
He looked surprised, as if I’d just made the revelation of the century. Just then, a small animal scurried out of the underbrush, eyes glowing like lamps. As it ran past us and vanished into the night, Alex’s whole posture went rigid and he shifted into a defensive stance.
“Relax.” I laughed. “It’s just a possum.” His penetrating gaze flickered toward the woods.
“I am conscious of the hour,” he said abruptly. There was that dark look again, the one that had frightened me the first time. He backed away as if I was giving off some foul, overpowering odor. “You had better return to the house.”
“You’re not coming in?” I asked.
“No.”
Suddenly it felt like he couldn’t get away fast enough.
“Maybe we could hang out sometime?”
“Hang out?” he repeated. I couldn’t quite determine his tone. Was that contempt? Was it arrogance? Or was it just a plain old brush-off?
“Never mind…” I said awkwardly. “I guess I’ll see you around.”
“Perhaps,” he muttered and turned his back on me.
I stood there watching him walk away until the fog swallowed him up.
Even though I’d just met the guy, the flurry of emotions he’d stirred up was impossible to ignore. This hadn’t happened to me since the eighth grade, when I’d tried to work out whether a boy who was mean to me in class secretly liked me. This guy was more complex: charming and magnetic one moment, rude and dismissive the next. He was “trouble looking for a place to happen,” as my pop used to say. I’d known him all of five minutes, and already I was frustrated. Why had he rushed off? And why did I care so much? The last thing I needed in my life right now was drama. So, mysterious or not, Alexander Reade became a person to avoid during my stay at Grange Hall.
Back at the house, I ducked into the guest bathroom to straighten myself up before making an appearance in the dining room. I knew by the grandfather clock in the hall that it was well after seven, but Gran didn’t reprimand me for once. Rory was halfway through his dinner of something indeterminable. Was it a pie, a quiche, breakfast or dinner?
“What is that?”
“Toad in the hole with Yorkshire pudding,” Rory told me proudly.
“Wait, the toad goes where?” I asked as Gran handed me a plate. She held out a platter of roasted vegetables, which at least bore some resemblance to food I recognized.
“Did you have a nice walk?” she asked.
“Sorry, I’m late,” I said, assuming she was angling for an apology. “I lost track of the time.”
“That’s easy to do here. There’s no need to be sorry.”
“I met someone this afternoon.” I tried to drop this casually into the conversation as I scooped some vegetables onto my plate.
“Who was that, dear?” Gran replied absently.
“One of your guests. Young guy. Maybe, like, twenty-three.”
“There aren’t any young men staying here at the moment.”
“You know the one,” I persisted. “Tall, longish hair, dresses like he’s going on a fox hunt.”
“You must mean Joe,” Gran concluded. I got the sense she was only half listening. “But he’s not a guest. He’s a student who helps out here on weekends.”
“No,” I said adamantly. “This guy said his name is Alexander Reade.”
“Joe’s the best,” Rory piped up before Gran could answer. “He’s going to teach me to ride. You can learn, too, if you want, Chloe. There are four horses here.” He listed them by name, counting them out on his fingers. “Aries, Sable, Betsy and Cinnamon. Betsy’s my favorite.”
“That’s great, Rory.” I turned back to Gran. “Maybe he lives in town. He seemed to know you.”
“Possibly,” Gran said. “But Wistings is a small place. There’s no one named Reade here. At least…there hasn’t been for a very long time.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, this house originally belonged to a Reade family. They built it back in 1845. A young businessman and his wife, I believe. I have all the paperwork somewhere.”
“What was his name?” I swallowed back the growing lump in my throat.
“Christopher…Callum… Something like that. Are you really only going to eat vegetables?”
But I couldn’t eat another mouthful because the knot in my stomach was taking up all the room. I had a nagging suspicion about Alexander Reade, but I seriously prayed I was wrong. If I turned out to be right, then things were about to reach a whole new level of weird. Even for me.
CHAPTER SIX
That night I gave myself permission to think about my mom for the first time since the funeral. The most aching details flashed through my brain as I lay in my dainty bed, wrapped in three sweaters to keep out the chill. I thought about the way she used to hang everything in her closet inside out. It drove my order-loving dad crazy. I thought about the way she always smelled faintly like lavender. When I was sick, I would bury my face in her pillow and it never failed to make me feel better. I remembered her laugh, the freckle on her right hand, how absorbed she got working on one of her paintings and her uncanny ability to read minds, especially mine. Could she still do that now? I wondered. Maybe she was out there, reading my thoughts from beyond. Even though I couldn’t see her anymore, I knew my mom wasn’t just gone. People were too important to simply disappear. All their deepest, most complex thoughts and experiences, the love and passion they’d built up over the years…that lingered. I could feel it. If the ghosts had taught me one thing, it was that death wasn’t final. I didn’t know much about God, but I liked to picture my mom hanging out with him, shooting the breeze, drinking a gin and tonic.
I couldn’t help feeling abandoned by her, though. Even though I knew she hadn’t left by choice, the feeling lingered regardless. I didn’t know who to turn to anymore. Who would help me make sense of the world now? It wasn’t that my mom had had all the answers, but whenever life became overwhelming, talking to her always left me with a renewed sense of calm. She used to know what the problem was before I even told her. She could spot boy trouble a mile off. She knew if I’d had a fight with one of my friends or if I just had PMS and needed a sugar fix.
I couldn’t stop myself. I started thinking about all the things I’d never get to share with her now—graduating high school, leaving home for college, falling in love, having a family of my own. It was weird to think my kids would know their grandmother only from photographs or stories told around the dinner table. They were going to miss out on so much. I’d always imagined her being there for all the milestones in my life. But the reality was that she was never coming back, and that thought was paralyzing. Some realizations are too devastating for tears. The sadness that engulfed me then was like being caught up in a freak tidal wave. All I could do was stare at the patterned ceiling and wait for the turbulence to pass.
Finally it did, and I drifted into sleep…but only to dream about the ghosts from my childhood.
My parents thought it was cute the first time. Who didn’t want a kid with an active imagination, right? It was a different story when the visions started happening on an almost-daily basis. As the arty one in the family, my mom was a little more open-minded than my empiricist father. As an accountant, he could deal only in tangibles. I tried explaining to him my sense of a whole other world existing alongside our own, but my dad would never stand for talk like that. He always made a point of changing the subject or offering me a distraction in the form of ice cream or a trip to the park.
The first time it happened, I was barely six. I was on a stool in the
bathroom brushing my teeth, because that was the only way I could reach the faucet, when suddenly the lights flickered and dimmed like the bulb was about to bite the dust. In the mirror, I saw the old man standing right behind me. His body was wasted and withered, but it was his skin that frightened me the most. It had that waxy gray tinge that separated him from the living. His crumpled eyelids stayed shut but his mouth was contorted in a gruesome silent scream. My own shrieks brought my parents bursting into the room.
As if I’d passed some initiation rite, other ghosts then began to make an appearance. Eventually, I just got used to sharing the space with them. For the most part, they didn’t bother me. They just drifted silently in and out of doorways or moved objects around upstairs, sometimes making things rattle. It was only the twins I had a problem with. They liked to hang out in the attic, in their long nightgowns, hair loose and hanging down their backs. They couldn’t have been more than ten when they died. I knew they didn’t like me. They would stare me down as if I was the intruder. They liked to play games and annoy me by moving my things around the house and hiding them. I would walk into the playroom to find the rocking horse in full swing or all my dolls scattered across the floor, hair mussed and clothes dusty. I always knew when the twins had paid me a visit, because they left a smell like talcum powder behind. Their ash-streaked faces always left me wondering whether they’d died in a fire.
When all this started happening, it wasn’t unusual for Mom to catch me staring fixedly into space as we sat around the dinner table.
“What are you looking at, Chloe?” she’d ask.
“That man over there” came my equable reply. I remember my dad shifting uncomfortably in his seat. Even Rory, in his high chair, would pick up on the vibe and fall silent. My dad shook his head softly, discouraging Mom from further questions. But she had another strategy in mind.
“Which one this time?”
“The man with the tie and briefcase,” I said.
“And what’s he doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“He’s just watching.”
Dad let out an exasperated sigh.
“Honey, I think it might be time to seek professional advice,” he said finally.
The next thing I knew, I was sitting in a psychiatrist’s office opposite the silver-haired Dr. Gellman. I noticed he wasn’t wearing a white coat, which made me skeptical about his credentials. He gave me a box of crayons and asked me to draw some of the things I saw. I drew pictures for him, but my limited skills couldn’t convey much. In the end the consultations didn’t help. He ended up assuring my parents I’d grow out of it and suggested the best thing they could do was play along.
That was when Mom decided to take matters into her own hands.
“Maybe you should try asking them to leave,” she told me one day, when I was rattled by the flash appearance of a woman hanging over a barbed-wire fence.
“Asking them?” My six-year-old self frowned at my mother’s naïveté. How did she propose asking something to leave that didn’t even use a door to come in?
“It’s worth a try, right?”
“I guess,” I reluctantly agreed, not wanting to let her down.
“That’s my girl. You tell them they don’t belong here and they have to leave right now.”
I was dubious about such a simple solution but in the end it was the only thing that actually worked. It took a little while, and the ghosts resisted at first, but my willpower proved stronger than theirs. I looked at my mother with a new respect after that. But since she’d left us, the grief had eaten away at those walls I’d so carefully constructed in my mind, until there was nothing left and everything I’d been trying to keep out rushed back in with a vengeance.
* * *
I woke a few hours later, disoriented by unfamiliar surroundings until I remembered where I was. Caught in that haze between dreaming and wakefulness, I wasn’t sure what was real, but, by the moon still hanging in the sky like a pale sickle, I knew it had to be the early hours of morning.
I sat up straighter as a strange odor hit me. Like fruit left out to rot in the sun, it was sweet and putrid at the same time. I got up and opened one of the casement windows, but instantly regretted it as all the warmth was sucked from the room. The wind that rushed in wrapped itself around me like icy tentacles, making me shiver from head to foot. Outside I could hear the branches of trees creaking in the wind as a soft drift of snow began to fall. I stood transfixed for a moment. Snow was not something a girl from California sees every day, so I reached out a hand and watched fragile flakes drift down to melt on my fingertips. Then I shut the window quickly and turned back to my room.
The fire had gone out, but the dying embers in the grate still cast a cozy glow, lighting up the Victorian wardrobe in the corner. It was the kind with carvings and beveled mirrors that locked with a copper key. It pretty much looked like a doorway to Narnia. I was just thinking how beautiful it was and how much my dad would appreciate it when one of the doors began to open.
My chest constricted and every muscle grew taut as I flicked on the lamp. Don’t panic, the voice in my head told me. I’d grown up in a house full of old things. They were often faulty and rattled of their own accord. The sour smell had grown stronger, and I realized where it was coming from. In bare feet I moved closer to the wardrobe, slowly reaching a hand toward the handle.
“Chloe, don’t!”
The voice came from behind me, but it was too late. I stood rooted to the spot as both doors flew open of their own volition. Even as my hand dropped like a stone, I knew there was something inside. And it was looking right at me.
The creature that stared out at me was barely recognizable, although I knew it must have been human once. Never in my life had I seen such a vision of decay. I didn’t know whether to gag or scream or both. I was looking at a face that I guessed had once belonged to a woman, but it was hard to determine gender now because her corpse was caked in mud. There was mud in the corners of her wild eyes, mud wedged between her teeth and matted in the ropelike tangles of her hair.
To make matters worse it looked like the tip of her nose had rotted away or been gnawed off by some animal. She was the epitome of despair, and yet there was something ferocious in her eyes. Now it was her long, bony fingers that reached out for me. Instinctively I kicked at the doors, managing to fling one shut. I whirled around to see a figure silhouetted against my window. It was Alex, standing arrow-straight in a long black coat. I could just make out the bold sweep of golden hair that accentuated his fine-featured profile. I let out a gasp as his crystal-blue eyes found mine in the darkness. He moved toward me in a blur.
“Stay back,” he commanded. I wasn’t sure what made him think I intended doing anything else. Nevertheless, I ducked behind him as he slowly peered inside the wardrobe. It was empty now.
My tongue had turned to sandpaper, and my whole body was coursing with adrenaline. I’d seen ghosts aplenty before, but there had been something different about this one. It had looked at me with loathing and hostility.
“Wh-who was that woman?” I stammered. “Why was she soaked…covered in mud? She was awful.” The memory of her alone was enough to make me shudder. She was the most gruesome thing I’d ever laid eyes on.
“She’s gone now,” Alex said. His voice was completely level, but the crease between his eyes betrayed his concern.
“Are you sure?”
He stood aside so that I could examine the wardrobe’s interior myself. He was right; it was now devoid of any malevolent presence.
“Try to calm yourself,” he advised. But that was easier said than done. My heart was racing like I’d just run a marathon. Alex looked as if he wanted to do or say something to make me feel better but didn’t know what. I sank down on the bed, sitting on my hands to keep them from shaki
ng.
“I’ve never seen anything like that. She felt really…dangerous. Do you have any idea who she was?”
“Perhaps we should get you some water,” he said, deftly avoiding answering the question.
Alex let his gaze wander out to the meadows beyond the house. I took him in from head to foot, only then realizing that he’d appeared in my room without coming through the door. Although his face was fresh and unmarred, it was far from carefree. He was weighed down by troubles beyond his years. I guessed I’d known the truth inherently since first laying eyes on him, but I hadn’t wanted to accept it. The question was on the tip of my tongue. There was no point pussyfooting around, so I just spat it out.
“You’re not real, are you?”
He turned to me with his usual equanimity. “Define real.”
“Alive,” I clarified, impatient for the answer.
“No.” He sighed. “But you already knew that.”
“Oh boy…” I leaned forward and pressed my forehead to my knees. “What the hell is happening here?”
“I’ve made you angry.” He lowered his eyes. “I apologize for the intrusion. I merely wanted to make sure you were safe.”
“Why wouldn’t I be safe? That…thing might have been creepy, but it can’t hurt me, right?”
“Not all creatures roaming this earth are as friendly as I am.”
“Are you trying to scare me?” I demanded. “Because that’s a dick move.”
“As in Richard?” He looked confused. “Who’s Richard? I don’t believe I’ve met him.”
“What?” I snapped. “No, dick as in… Never mind.”
He observed me carefully. He looked so solid right now it was hard not to see him as a living, breathing person.
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