Phantom Heart

by Kelly Creagh

  “Sounds about right,” huffed Dad with a laugh. “Victorians were a morbid bunch.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” agreed Lucas.

  “So,” I began, not finding the humor anywhere in this, “what was this Order supposed to be about?”

  “Well.” Lucas’s gaze bounced from me to Dad, as if he hoped my father would butt in and end the conversation before it could start. But Dad was too intrigued. Not because he believed in the paranormal but because here, finally, was someone willing to tell him just what he’d gotten himself into in terms of investments. “Supposedly, Erik, whose parents emigrated here from England when he was twelve, was the founder of the Order. Erik, it was said, had always harbored an interest in the occult, pseudoscience, locks, puzzles, and illusion. Stuff like cryptographs, magic, conjuring, and ciphers.”

  I pursed my lips in thought, intrigued on more levels than one. Lucas, it seemed, had told this story before. Maybe it was a campfire favorite. Or perhaps he kept a running case file on this place.

  “About this Erik,” I said, officially glad I had not yet told Lucas about the dream. “What did he look like?”

  “No one knows,” said Lucas. “There aren’t any surviving photos of him. Which, weirdly enough, fits with the curse. It was supposed to have obliterated all images of him. Because, as the story goes, he was unusually handsome.”

  “Oh yeah?” I muttered more to myself than to either of them.

  “Curse?” Dad asked. “No one’s said anything yet about a curse.”

  No one but Erik himself.

  “When Erik turned sixteen,” Lucas continued, his stare lingering on me in confusion before returning to my father, “he started meeting in secret with schoolmates. Sons of other wealthy socialites. It was said that they called themselves the Order of the Mothmen because Erik, who had an obsession with bugs, thought that moths were the ultimate masters of disguise. It’s rumored he resented both his looks and his station, since they contributed to so much of his life and future being written out and orchestrated for him. So as the Order began to grow, the members took to wearing masks during their meetings. In a way, I think wearing a mask allowed Erik to become something else, you know? Someone else. Someone more in control of his own fate.”

  “So you’re saying Erik is supposedly one of the ghosts haunting this place?” I asked.

  “Um,” Lucas said, “not exactly. The legend says that, when Erik was seventeen, he enrolled in university. His parents wanted him to study medicine. Erik agreed so long as he could continue his music studies as well. Apparently, he played the piano, the violin, and also sang really well. Like, at prodigy level. Anyway, during the following winter, after Erik turned eighteen, Erik’s family made a return visit to England without him. Erik held a secret masked ball here at his parents’ estate. A mummy-unwrapping party.”

  “A mummy what?” I asked.

  “At the time,” Lucas said, “there were a lot of amateur archeologists traveling to Egypt. Brits and Americans who were excavating near the pyramids and in the Valley of the Kings in Thebes.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “They gutted a lot of the tombs. Egypt is still trying to get their artifacts back.”

  Lucas nodded. “And mummies, of course, were everywhere. Abundant and considered to be worthless by the foreign excavators. That was, until high-society people started buying them and having them shipped to England and the States. From there, the mummies became the center of lavish parties.”

  “Don’t say it,” I muttered, my stomach giving a flip. “They unwrapped the mummies for fun.”

  “Pretty horrible, huh?”

  “Not to mention totally irreverent,” I added.

  “And this Erik kid held one of these parties here?” Dad asked.

  “Legend states,” replied Lucas, apparently throwing caution to the wind on the whole “the less you know” approach, “that the mummy the Mothmen had procured for their unwrapping party had been an ancient priest of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the afterlife. Supposedly, this priest had also been a mystic and magician. Basically, all those traits that the members of the Order of the Mothmen, and Erik specifically, sought to emulate.”

  “So they got that mummy on purpose?” I asked.

  Lucas shrugged. “It’s assumed so. Some also speculate that the party was less of a party and, well, more of a . . . ritual. And that Erik was attempting to siphon the mummy’s former powers into himself.”

  “So what happened at this twisted little soiree?” Dad said, eyes flicking in Charlie’s direction.

  “Nothing.” said Lucas. “That’s to say, the party itself went off without much evidence that the ritual—if there had been a ritual—had worked. Everyone went home. Leaving Erik here alone. That night, though, the story goes that the mummy, which had been laid out and unwrapped in the dining room, well . . . supposedly, he rose from the dead.”

  “Oh, nice,” I hissed, my throat suddenly tight, the food in my stomach churning.

  “As retribution, the mummy was said to have placed a curse on Erik,” said Lucas. “One that killed his entire family the very night they returned home from their trip to England. Right before Christmas. No one knows how it happened or even what happened. The servants just awoke that day to find Erik and his mother and father and younger sister, Myriam, all dead. All sitting around the same dining room table that the mummy had been unwrapped on.”

  “Quaint,” said Dad. “The realtor conveniently left out all of that. But I’m assuming now, since you know so much, that what you’ve been telling me is common knowledge?”

  “The stories vary,” Lucas said, like he was offering some small consolation. I was glad, though, that Lucas had picked up enough on Dad’s personality to know that his irritation rested with the people who’d sold him the house and not the messenger. “Most people have heard about the mummy-unwrapping party. As far as the Order of the Mothmen, though . . . Well, I wouldn’t say those details are widely known.”

  “Oh, well,” Dad muttered to himself. “The mummy is the least damaging part, isn’t it?”

  Lucas cringed.

  “What . . . happened after that?” I heard myself ask, picturing the gravestone in the backyard. The stone that listed Erik’s name.

  “The day before the bodies were to be buried,” Lucas said, “one of them went missing.”

  “Two guesses whose, right?” Dad laughed, his chair groaning as he sat back and folded his arms.

  “They never found him?” I asked.

  “There’s some thought that maybe there were body snatchers involved. It wasn’t uncommon back then. There were people known as Resurrection Men who dug up the bodies or stole them from morgues to sell to doctors and scientists. For someone as prominent as Erik to have been stolen, though, well, that would have been unusual.”

  “There are other versions of the story, you said?” This from Dad.

  “Well, yeah. Some speculate that it was the Order of the Mothmen who took Erik’s body and, in the practice of the ancient Egyptians, mummified him and entombed him in some unknown location. The thought is that they did so as a means of appeasing the spirit of the Egyptian priest they’d offended. Others say it was the mummy himself who took Erik’s body.”

  “To do what with?”

  I don’t know why I asked. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. Maybe it had been my scientific instincts that had insisted I overturn each rock that presented itself, regardless of what horrors I might find beneath.

  Lucas’s warm voice again washed through the quiet that had settled among us.

  “Going back to Egyptian myth, it’s important to know that Anubis was not only the god of the Egyptian afterlife and of embalming, but he was also the deity responsible for admitting souls to the afterlife.”

  “Kind of like an Egyptian grim reaper,” I said.

  “Yeah,�
�� Lucas replied. “In a sense. Only Anubis was responsible for performing the ceremony known as the Weighing of the Heart. To the ancient Egyptians, the heart was considered the seat of the soul, and Anubis was said to personally weigh each heart on a set of scales to determine whether to admit you to the afterlife. Some versions of the story state that, because Erik had removed his heart during the mummy-unwrapping party, the reanimated priest mummified Erik and removed his heart in turn, an action that then doomed Erik to walk the earth as a living corpse.”

  “I thought you said Erik wasn’t the one haunting the grounds,” I said.

  “I said it supposedly wasn’t Erik’s ghost,” Lucas clarified. “Since he doesn’t have a heart, he’s said to be stuck here. Along with the Egyptian priest. Both of them in . . . uh . . . tangible form.”

  “So we have zombies,” Dad grunt-laughed. “This keeps getting better and better. Buildings, I can fix. Reputations?” He shook his head. “Not so easy. And you know what’s really going to be fun? Trying to get contractors on site in the spring.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything,” mumbled Lucas.

  “Ah.” Dad waved a dismissive hand. “No. I’m glad you did. Better to know, right? In reality, I’ve got plenty of time to think of ways to debunk all the bull. All the same, though, you seem to know quite a bit about the woo-woo junk surrounding this house. You don’t believe in any of it, do you?”

  “N-no, sir,” Lucas said. Another lie? Hard to tell this time.

  “So what do you think happened?” By asking the question, I was kind of being a jerk. Because I’d perhaps already heard what Lucas believed. But this was the most sensible way to ask for the skeptic’s version of the tale.

  “Well, there are a lot of people in town who think Erik killed his family, faked his death, and ran off.”

  At this, my jaw dropped.

  “Hmm,” mused Dad. “Any reason for that belief beyond the thought that the kid was just a psychopath?”

  “A significant portion of the family fortune was never found.”

  “Ah,” Dad said, like Lucas had just told him the painfully obvious answer to a riddle.

  After that, conversation turned on a dime, speeding into the realm of Star Wars, rock and roll, and sports Hall of Famers.

  I tuned them out, my brain beta-waving through all that Lucas had revealed.

  If Zedok was real, and what Lucas had just explained him to be—a rightfully teed-off walking, talking dead guy—then wouldn’t I have seen him, too, and not just Charlie? It was doubtful as well that an Ancient Egyptian priest would be speaking English to my little sister. And Erik. If he truly had been evil—a psychopath, my father had called him—would he have warned me in a dream to leave?

  Stephen Hawking’s theories surrounding a multidimensional universe could allow for something like spirits—in some capacity—to exist.

  But reanimated mummies? Walking corpses?

  Not. Possible.

  * * *

  I WALKED LUCAS out to his car after dinner, wishing the whole trek that I’d grabbed my jacket instead of just a cardigan. While the late September days here could get up to seventy, the evenings had no interest in pretending like summer was still a thing.

  “Here,” Lucas said once we reached his car, a red Dodge Dart, and he opened the passenger’s side door for me. “Get in and I’ll turn on the heat.”

  I climbed in, huddling into the seat as he shut the door after me. Taking advantage of the time it took for him to round to the driver’s side, I scanned the immaculate dash and floorboards. Because you could tell a lot about a guy by the way he kept his car. He drove a stick shift instead of an automatic, too, which was hot in a James Bond–ish kind of way.

  Once inside, Lucas started the car, and music began pouring through the speakers—old, slow-swaying, big-bass music with some dude singing about asking a girl to dance with him, and a chorus of guys in the background with harmonized “doo-bee-doo”s and “wa-wa-wa-wa”s.

  I tilted my head at his radio, which, instead of switching off, Lucas turned down to a low, mood-setting buzz. Like this was 1952 and we’d just “parked” on Lover’s Lane.

  A moment later, he flicked a switch that sent lukewarm air rushing from the vents.

  “Your sister,” he said, killing the mood I guess he hadn’t been setting. “You know, I think she saw something in there today. Normally, I don’t like to jump to conclusions regarding the status of a site. But, given the history of the property and Charlie’s involvement, I think there’s enough here to warrant concern. This thing. You said she’s been talking to it?”

  Thing. It. His choice of words was not lost on me.

  Was this the moment to tell Lucas about my dream encounter with Erik? Or . . . was it better to wait?

  “Stephanie?”

  “Mm?”

  “Can I ask . . . where your mom is?”

  I flinched, blindsided by the question. Then again, we were dealing with ghosts here. How could I hold it against him when I’d also thought that Charlie’s invention of Zedok somehow tied back to the person Dad and I made it a point never to talk about?

  “She died,” I said. “And . . . Charlie never knew her.”

  I left it at that, confident that his powers of deduction would lead him to connect the dots.

  “I see,” he said. “I’m . . . really sorry.”

  God. We needed to change the subject. Because no matter how much time passed, the pain never eased. And I didn’t know Lucas well enough to cry in front of him.

  “What the heck are we listening to?” I asked him suddenly, waving a hand over the car’s stereo as the song switched to another just like it.

  “Oh, this?” he asked, graciously allowing the abrupt shift in topics. He offered a smirk and turned the volume up a few ticks. “Let’s see. This one is ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ by Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps.”

  “It sure is,” I muttered.

  “First recorded in 1956,” he went on. “And not to be confused with the 1945 hit ‘Be-Baba-Leba’ by Helen Humes, which is killer-diller. I’ve got it if you want to hear it.”

  Killer . . . diller?

  “Soooo,” I said while he dug for his phone. “I’m just going to ask outright. What is your deal with this stuff?”

  “Stuff?”

  “Yeah. You know. The . . .” I gestured to his radio. “And the . . .” I nodded to his pinstriped vest. Then tapped the side of my eye, indicating his glasses.

  “The music?” he asked, a bemused smile making those dimples reappear.

  “The music,” I said. Because, okay, we could start there.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I never said that.”

  “Exactly.” He held up a finger. “Because everyone likes music. And this music? Man, it just cooks.”

  A grin I couldn’t help broke onto my face. “That so.”

  Lucas nodded along, his knee bouncing, his eyes connected with mine, like he was waiting for me to hear the same thing he was hearing.

  “It’s . . . nice,” I allowed. Because this was all making me like him way faster than what I felt prepared for.

  “The swing-eighths just make it so danceable.”

  I blinked at him, curious. “By swing-eighths, do you mean, like . . . a quarter and eighth note triplet?”

  He paused in his jamming, brows lifting in happy surprise. “You read music?”

  My smile faltered, but I quickly recovered. It was too late, though. He’d noticed.

  “Used to,” I said. “You do, too?”

  “Actually no,” he replied, again accepting the spotlight as I swiveled it back his way. “I study the rhythms and the instruments. Because if you don’t get the music, you don’t really get anything, you know?”

  I didn’t know. And yet . . . I did.

 
“You’re a dancer?”

  “Isn’t everybody?”

  “No,” I said, again through a smile that snuck up on me. Something that happened often in his presence.

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “I never said I wasn’t.”

  He grinned at me, and my world seemed to shift and grow a little warmer, like the sun had finally come peeking through the dark clouds.

  “SPOoKy is doing lunch in the gym tomorrow,” he said. “To make up for tonight’s missed rehearsal. Sooo. You should stop by and I could show you a step or two . . . if you want.”

  Whoa. Talk about mixed signals. He was inviting me to hang out with him and his friends again, but during a time when he and Charlotte would presumably be dancing?

  “Maybe,” I offered. Because I didn’t want to spoil the moment by asking about her. I was enjoying his company too much. Along with the growing hunch that he might be into me as much as I was into him.

  A long patch of silence passed between us then while his stereo serenaded us.

  “Thanks, by the way,” I told him finally. “For coming out and assessing our zombie infestation.”

  He gave a soft laugh. “I’m really not sure how much I helped. Actually, I think I might have tripled your dad’s normal stress level.”

  “You helped,” I assured him. “At least I know to keep a closer eye on Charlie for the time being. I also know where I can report anything strange.”

  “Speaking of,” he said, reaching past me to the glove box, “I know we have to tiptoe around your dad about it, but if something else weird does happen, or you need anything . . .”

  He offered me a small white slip of paper.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s . . . my card,” he explained. “Or our card. As in SPOoKy’s.”

  “Your card?” I asked. Because who in high school had a card? “Whose number is this?”