by Rumer Haven
She looked away as he seemed to process his next question, but James filled the void first.
“I don’t understand. Who are you talking about?”
“I told you. I don’t know.”
He licked his lips as he shook his head and turned to Rand.
Still, Rand didn’t look away from her. “Is she someone you’ve spoken to, uh, Fitz about?”
“Doctor Fitzgerald, you mean?” Margot appreciated Rand’s nondisclosure in using her counselor’s familiar nickname, but she looked at James point-blank. “James, I’ve been seeing a therapist here. Things have been happening that I don’t understand, and I—” she looked at Rand accusingly “—we thought I needed outside help.” She admitted that she’d just been to see the doctor, actually, right before running into James at the coffee shop.
“Okay,” was all he said as he glanced back and forth between her and Rand.
“And, yes,” she looked to Rand again, “I’ve talked to Fitz about her.” She watched his countenance deflate. “The cemetery, the journal…I think it all has something to do with her. And I’ve seen what Gwen has and think it does, too.”
There it was. She felt remarkably better and dreadful at once.
Rand turned his head to stare down the hall and, presumably, at his bedroom door. “You have, have you?” He seemed listless and didn’t look back at her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why do you think?” She turned to James, who still sat passively. “Why do you think I might not’ve said anything about seeing a ghost in this flat?”
“Shit. You serious?” James had clearly fallen out of his element. “Is this what that was about at lunch? ‘Being in good company’ and all that?”
Margot nodded once as she felt the world teeter underfoot. “‘All that’ and you saying you believed it, too.” In her peripheral vision, she saw Rand’s face swivel around to him as well.
James’s pink cheeks deepened. “I just said I was open to it, not that I’ve had experiences myself. So, what, you’re saying this place is haunted? Is that what you really think, Margot?”
Spasms twitched within her cheeks. Her throat constricted, and she had to inhale deeply to breathe. She just sat silently this way for a moment to get her air, and the men let her.
“It’s either…” she finally began, her respiration quickening as it had before, and she caught her breath to try again. “It’s either that or I’m…I—” she gasped and finished on each exhale “—am royally…fucked…up.”
Both men were at their feet to support her before she could fall from the chair.
“I d-don’t want to, to…” she managed to say in spurts as she hyperventilated, “go…th-through this any-mo-ho-ore…”
She felt James rub her back as Rand pried her fingers from the roots of her hair.
“Chloé? Hiya, this is Rand, Margot’s flatmate. Yeah, hi.”
He was following the instructions Margot had given once she’d calmed. As he stood speaking into her mobile, James comforted her in his arms on the floor, where she sat hugging her knees.
“Ah, yeah, well, she’s asked for you, you see.” The high pitch of Chloé’s voice dotted the airwaves in response. “Ah, well, yes and no. If you’re not busy, it might be—Oh. Mm-hm… Yeah, well, it’s just her, a mate of hers, and myself… Right… Sure. Yes, that’s correct. All right, cheers, bye.” He clicked off the phone. “She’s coming straight away. Is that what you want?”
Margot confirmed with an emphatic nod.
“A woman’s touch, maybe.” James shrugged.
Margot knit her brows. “I didn’t hear you give the address.”
“She knew it,” Rand assured, rather curtly. “Have you invited her over before, to study?”
“No, I’d ask you first if that was okay,” she groused, as his question sounded oddly territorial. “Maybe you should call back.”
“No, she knew it. She recited it to me.”
Margot huffed and shook her head.
She didn’t speak for the next half hour, communicating only through shakes of the head and grunts when the men offered her tea, a blanket, pillow, and a multitude of unnecessary things to demonstrate their joint ineptness in a time of crisis.
James held her tighter when she lurched in surprise at the severe sound of the door buzzer.
“Hello?” Rand answered immediately. “Right, come inside. Second floor.” He buzzed her in.
Chloé scraped her feet on the mat and shook her umbrella out at the entrance. Rand helped her remove her trench and lamely commented on how he hadn’t realized it was raining again outside.
“Yes, it was sudden.” Without waiting for invitation, she stepped into the living room. Ignoring James, she kneeled to Margot’s level. “Are you all right?”
In answer, Margot’s eyes welled up at the sight of her sodden friend, here at once on her account.
“Nice to meet you, I’m James.” He freed an arm to extend to Chloé.
“Enchanté.” She looked back at Margot while addressing him. “James, I hate to send you boys into the rain, but would you mind taking Rand to the pub? Have a little male bonding?”
“I get it. You want female bonding. Hey, Rand, whaddya think? That okay?” He sounded relieved to have a changing of the guards.
Rand watched Margot skeptically. “If that’s all right with you.”
Margot adjusted her posture to detach from James’s lingering arm. Leaning closer to Chloé, she clasped her friend’s hand in response.
“Right,” Rand said. “Well, James, my local’s just round the corner. Some brilliant craft beer on draft.”
“Let’s do it,” James exhaled as he hoisted himself up. Grabbing his coat off the back of the kitchen stool, he offered Margot one last questioning glance while Rand looked at Chloé.
Margot closed her eyes. “It’s fine. You boys have fun.” She kept her lids down until she heard the door open and shut, then beseeched Chloé, “Tell me what is going on.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know you know. I don’t know how, but I know you know, Chloé.” She heard crumpling, then noticed Chloé’s fist tighten around the neck of a brown lunch sack. The paper pulled tautly around a stout cylindrical form. “What’s in there?”
“Herbs,” Chloé said. “Sea salt.”
“Is that for me?”
She nodded.
“Are you going to fix me a bath?”
Chloé nodded again.
Pause. “Are you going to join me?”
Another nod.
“Now?”
Nod.
“And then you’ll explain?”
Chloé nodded once more.
The candle that had accompanied Margot’s séance at the mirror found itself perched again in the bathroom, this time on the counter. Two additional tea lights stood watch at two corners of the tub. The triumvirate flickered disorienting shadows about the walls of the dark room.
Margot watched steam levitate off the rising water that Chloé drew for her. Removing a golf-ball-sized metal sphere and a plain mason jar from the paper bag, Chloé shook a quarter of the jar’s contents into the stream and reached down to tickle the salts into the water.
Next, she picked up the mesh ball—a tea strainer—and dangled it by its thin chain so Margot could see its dried captives.
“Sage,” Chloé said. “I bundle my own smudge sticks, and this is how I use the bits that break off.”
The two sat on the tub’s edge in silence until the water filled it more than halfway. Twisting the tap off, Chloé looked at Margot and gave a nod.
Margot stood and untied her bathrobe. She stood paralyzed a moment with the ends of the waist tie dangling on either side of her robe’s slim opening, which her hands clasped together at her chest and crotch. She looked at Chloé, then up at the bathroom door.
“Come now, don’t be so uncomfortable. We’re both women. Try to be more French,” Chloé kidded with a sly half-smile, rooted to where she sat.
&nbs
p; Margot released her hands and, curling her fingers around the terrycloth lapels at her breasts, she gradually peeled the robe from her shoulders and let it slip to the bath mat. Easing herself one foot at a time into the scalding water, she caught her breath and flinched until fully submersed.
Chloé dipped a washrag into the bathwater and swept it above Margot to let it dribble over her head, neck, and bent knees. She did this a few times before squeezing it out and wiping it over Margot’s shoulders.
“Your tattoo has healed nicely. The phoenix moves in the candlelight, as though it may take flight.” Chloé grinned peacefully as she wiped Margot down her back and across her clavicle.
Margot stared straight ahead and concentrated on the sound of the trickling water as the drops anointed her.
Slapping the rag aside, Chloé again picked the tea ball up by its chain and carefully lowered it into the flame of one of the tea lights. With a sizzle and pop, the herb’s angry embers glowed. She raised it away from the candle and swung it gently to quell the fire and make it smolder into smoke. Then, like a priestess swinging incense down the aisles of a temple, she gracefully circled the sage above Margot’s body.
Margot closed her eyes and inhaled what she expected to be a sweet essence but smelled more like pot. Feeling a bit dizzy after a while, she opened her eyes again to overcome it, wondering if Chloé might have mixed up her herbs.
Chloé narrowed her motions to a tighter circle around Margot’s head and ultimately hung the ball in front of her face and let it oscillate there in place, like a pendulum, as she whispered soft French somethings. When the smoke dissipated, she plunged the ball into the water and set it aside with the rag.
“Relax,” she cooed as she rolled a dry towel behind Margot’s neck and bid her to recline lower in the tub. Margot obeyed.
“What is this all about, Chloé?” she asked once settled. “You promised.”
Chloé lowered herself to the floor and rested an arm along the tub’s edge. She laid her head there, with her chin angled toward Margot, and extended her other arm down to dip her fingers into the bath. She stroked the silkened water as she had done before.
“Tell me, do you derive any pleasure from this?”
Margot swallowed. “It’s very relaxing.”
“Does it offer you any stimulation?”
Margot’s water-logged heel skidded against the bottom of the tub. “I feel a little light-headed. Tingling.”
Chloé’s finger stroked along Margot’s thigh, just once, just subtle enough to have been an accident. “Good.”
“Tell me,” Margot said.
Chloé swallowed this time. “I want to know if my cleansing is working.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m clean.”
“Not from dirt. Entity contamination.”
Margot’s other heel gave, and her foot thumped against the end of the tub. She tensed but didn’t otherwise move.
Chloé tilted her head upwards to prop her chin on her forearm. “I have reason to believe you have something attached to you. Someone.”
Margot’s breathing came out in heavy huffs again. She let Chloé continue.
“I wasn’t certain at first. I had drawn your image—”
“In class?”
“Yes.”
“In that black notebook.”
“Yes. My sketchbook. My grandfather taught me how to sketch caricatures. I had great fun with it as a child, drawing friends at festivals and classmates at school.”
“I’ve seen you. It’s a little intrusive, though, isn’t it? When you do it without people’s permission?”
“Perhaps. But I never meant anything by it until other things began to show up in my drawings.”
“How do you mean?”
“Mind waiting here a moment while I fetch my purse?”
Margot tensed again beneath the water, a captive audience but with someone to keep her company, apparently, in Chloé’s absence. Little comfort that brought.
Chloé soon returned, agitating the candle flames with her swift motion. She dried her hand, and, drawing folded sheets of sketch paper from her purse, she detached one and explained, “This was the first time I drew you.”
She held a candle to it so Margot could see a fair rendering of her features, other than a pronounced squiggle at the side of her face.
“What’s that, my hair?”
“It’s a profile.”
“Of someone sitting behind me?”
“Within you.”
“What?”
Chloé set the paper down and unfolded the next. “This was the second time I drew you, the day we were assigned as project partners.”
Margot blinked in the dim, moving light, trying to make out what she saw. Bold black strokes once again depicted a strong resemblance of her, sitting with the same slackened posture from the same angle. A notable difference, though, was a fainter set of extra limbs extending out from her torso, giving her a Hindu goddess quality.
“What are those? Arms?”
Chloé nodded. “I suspect it’s the essence of another presence occupying the same space as you. I see it around you all the time.” She paused for a few seconds. “I don’t think it was coincidence that we were paired in class. I needed a way to know you better, and fate delivered you to me.”
Margot gagged on the pungent air. She sat up abruptly and stood to step out of the tub, not caring whether she splashed Chloé’s sketches and hoping they’d disintegrate if so. Yanking on her bathrobe, she fastened it tightly around her as she ran up the stairs to flick the lights on.
“I’ve upset you.” Chloé looked up at Margot from the bottom of the steps, appearing even more diminutive. “Please, don’t be angry with me. I can’t help who I am.”
“And who are you, Chloé? This is ludicrous!”
“Well, what did you think was happening?”
“Friendship! I trusted you!”
“You can still trust me. You can trust that I’m helping you.”
“How? I’m not relaxed anymore, that’s for sure. I’m not ‘tingling’ anymore,” she spat. “That hypnosis you had me do. Was that some way to speak to the dead? Is that what all this witchcraft has been about? Why can’t you be honest with me?”
“I am only being honest with you! As though you didn’t suspect all this yourself. Look in my eyes and tell me you didn’t!”
Margot leveled her glare down the steps, taking full advantage of the domination her higher position granted her. “How did you know how to get here?”
“What?”
“You knew this address. How? I never told you.”
For the first time, Margot felt she had the upper hand on her friend, who never looked more disconcerted. Chloé’s mouth hovered open, but no voice came forth.
“Chloé. How did you find me?”
The woman’s erect composure gave way like a doll emptied of its stuffing. “I promised you I would explain.” Her large eyes swept the floor with their gaze. “But it’s too much at once.”
“What are you talking about? This is my life here!”
A jangle of keys at the door diverted Margot’s attention toward the other end of the hall. Chloé scrambled up the steps, purse in hand, and brushed past her.
“Hello, gentlemen!” Chloé greeted with a skip toward her trench coat.
“Good evening, milady!” James bowed with inebriated energy.
“Hiya.” Rand poked his head around the corner into Margot’s view as she ascended into the hallway. “Did we pop back too soon?”
“No, your timing’s perfect. Chloé was just leaving.”
“Salut, à bientôt!” Chloé chirped as she frolicked out the door, shutting it securely behind her.
Rand watched where she had breezed out, then looked past Margot to the bathroom door. She could smell burnt sage mingling with the humidity traveling into the hall, and when Rand finally looked at her, he eyed her down the length of her bathrobe to where she dripped water onto the carpet. “You
’re sure you’re all right?” he asked, frowning.
“Yes,” she said tersely. “I’m beat. Good night.” She strode past both men and ducked into her bedroom. She’d hoped to leave it at that, but a lingering sense of etiquette brought her back to the door. “James?”
“Yeah?” Raising his brows, he smiled and stepped toward the door as if intending to join her.
“When do you leave town?”
He stopped in his tracks, his grin weaker. “Oh…not ’til Tuesday.”
“Okay, then I’ll catch you sometime before then, all right? Sorry, I’m just really tired. Thanks for everything, though.”
He shoved his fists into his pockets and bobbed his head. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Will you?”
“Yeah, I’m crashing here.”
Over James’s shoulder, Margot saw Rand stare at the floor.
“Oh.” She retreated back within her room. “Cool,” she threw out politely before closing the door on him.
The church lights had since turned off, handing over total illumination to the pale moonlight. Margot squeezed her eyes tightly against it as she heard the sleeping computer hum to life on its own.
Chapter 16
Empty Wells
YELLOW BLED AGAINST the egg whites of their English Breakfasts. The unlikely trio of Rand, Margot, and James had crawled out of the flat unshowered to enjoy an early afternoon brunch before James would head into the office to prepare his Monday presentation. A pint apiece helped loosen their tongues amidst a tangible awkwardness, but Margot still said nothing about what had transpired with Chloé in the bath.
Back out into the gray day, they reached the intersection where James could catch the Tube. He gave Margot a chummy hug.
“I’ll call you, okay? I’ll see you before I go?” His gaze penetrated hers, and for a moment she expected him to swoop in and remove another eye snot. But he didn’t. For the first time, he looked at her the way she’d always wanted him to.
“Yeah.” Margot felt the familiar lump in her throat. “James, thank you again. I’m sorry you had to see me like this.”
“Never apologize. I feel responsible, at least in part.”