October Darlings

by Wendolyn Baird

  “Yeah, listen to her so I don’t get a messed-up face,” Ellis urges.

  Sabrina hops up onto the counter and pointedly ignores them. “It’s bragging rights at this point, but it started as a dumb confession. I broke my arm last year scaling a gate, so every time someone asked me how I broke it, I kind of had to tell them what I was doing.”

  “You broke your arm?”

  “Yeah,” she grins at me. Behind her, Eden chuckles as she leans over Ellis, who is noticeably tense.

  “George was with me,” Sabrina goes on. “Oh, you should have seen his face! My arm hurt like hell, but I guess it looked even worse. He nearly fainted before hollering for Miranda to bring the car around. I’d break it again just to get a picture of his expression.”

  “You are seriously deranged.”

  “And you talk to ghosts. I think that makes us even.”

  “Sabrina!” I hiss at her. Forget whatever reputation I generated the night of the drive-in, having my secret out there is going to make it a million times worse!

  “Chill, Nix,” Eden murmurs. She threads a ring through Ellis’ eyebrow and talks as she works, completely ignoring the hiss he lets out and the way his hands curl into fists. “Honesty is the best policy for me, but I don’t share what I know unless it’s cool with you. Besides, I’ve known what your aunt could do for years, why would you be any different?”

  “You know about Delia?”

  “I mean, most people do.” She shrugs and drops the used needle into a plastic box. “The best way to get rid of a haunting is to get the spirit to move on, right? Who better to do that than a clairvoyant? You got to have a little magic to do the trick.”

  I gawk at Eden as Sabrina takes her turn, and my words of defense are slow to come. “Delia doesn’t practice magic; I honestly don’t even think she believes it could exist.”

  “Really? That’s funny, seeing how everyone I’ve talked to thinks you’re a witch.” Eden laughs and checks Sabrina’s jewelry over in her hand.

  “Is that what y’all meant the night of the drive-in?” I ask. My voice comes out shrill, and out of the corner of my eye, I can see that my cheeks are bright red in the mirror. “People think I’m a witch?”

  “Not like in a Salem witch trials way, but you know, that you’re special,” Sabrina pipes up. “And you are, so what’s the harm?”

  “Sabrina, you heard my aunt. There’s a difference between ghosts and magic, being a Nix doesn’t make me a witch. I bought that shirt as a joke.”

  “Doesn’t it though?” Eden argues. “Even if your aunt doesn’t practice any spells, your whole house is crawling with evidence that somebody obviously did.”

  “What are you talking about?” I flush even brighter, and a buzzing noise fills my ears.

  “I’ve seen the yard going to Sabrina’s. All that sage and lavender? I don’t think it’s there by coincidence.”

  THREE WEEKS AND SEVERAL restless nights later, and I’m no closer to ridding myself of the nightmares and fears that follow me. I don’t even have physical proof of my horrors, because both the blood and the rotting mess of papers had disappeared by the time, I gathered the courage to go back in the garage. If it weren’t for the fact that others saw them too, I’d swear I was losing my mind.

  The moonlight peeking through my window is disrupted by clouds of bats billowing across the sky. In my bare feet, the ever-present cold winds up my ankles, and I breathe in deep, allowing my body to relax against the feeling of being watched. I know this presence; she’s been my constant shadow ever since the night in the woods.

  “What is it?” I ask Marlowe as she slips into the room behind me.

  Younger than most of the ghosts that haunt the halls, my however-many-times-removed cousin, smiles at me sadly. I think we’re the same age, if you count the age she died as how old she is. If there’s one subject I won’t ask of my relatives though, it’s how they passed. Still, there’s something more persistent about the discomfort I feel when she’s around versus any of the others, and I don’t think it’s just her age. She looks different somehow, and I can’t figure out why.

  Of course, she doesn’t respond, or maybe she does, but I still can’t hear them. Delia says that’s something that ought to change soon. I’m not sure if I want it to. As I continue to stare at her, Marlowe pulls at the necklace around her neck, twisting it so harshly, it would cut off circulation to her fingers, if she had any. Her solemn face is creased with worry, and it’s as unnerving as ever to see my features reflected in a dead girl’s eyes.

  “Can you at least nod so that I know whether or not it’s safe to go back to sleep?” My pulse is erratic and the ache in my head makes it hard to focus on her soft violet form.

  Slowly, Marlowe shakes her head from left to right. My blood runs cold, and goosebumps creep up my arms as I hug my blanket tighter around my shoulders. The flapping wings cascading over the house are menacing now, and the otherwise silent night fills my ears with a ringing I can barely think through.

  “Will you watch over me? Is it safe for me to leave my room at least?”

  The door remains open behind her translucent form, and she dips her chin with the slightest nod, but I swear the line between her eyebrows grows deeper. Turning away from the window goes against my every instinct as my exposed back opens me up to greater vulnerabilities. I shudder as I step her way, every inch closer to her dropping my temperature as if I were walking into a cooler.

  Outside my door, the top of the staircase cuts off into the dark like the edge of a cliff, and from the bottom of the steps comes a faint creaking of footsteps that shouldn’t exist. The soles of my feet stick against the wood, and I waver on the landing, holding my breath until stars burst in front of my eyes.

  Marlowe flies in front of my face, her shadowy eyes huge and urgent. The sound of something scraping against the glass of my bedroom window is growing louder, and as my ghostly cousin shoves at my side, I fall against Delia’s door and into her room.

  Catching myself at the dresser, I stumble forward, just as Marlowe slams the door shut behind me. Delia wakes with a start, her snarled hair dragging off the bedspread in the glow of the floodlights outside her window. Before either of us can say a word, Marlowe raises a finger to her lips, and turns towards the closed door.

  Without a word, Delia clambers out of bed, pressing her hand in mine and pulling me closer, towards the ghosts. The scraping from across the hall screeches in a pain inducing noise that cuts off abruptly. A foundation moving rumble shakes the floorboards and the sound of heavy steps thud across my room.

  Marlowe stares at Delia’s door, causing the lock to turn in place, but I can’t hear the sound over the approaching footsteps. It’s so much heavier than what a child should sound like. It must be the shadow figure again. Why show up as one or the other?

  Delia nods as we pass by Marlowe’s glowing form, and the door in the wall slides open above our heads. I jerk back, half hiding behind Delia, but she drags me along behind her. In the light from the floodlights outside her window, I can see the lines from her pillow etched into her skin, and the way light grey blends into her dark blonde hair. Following her movements, it’s like I’m watching myself from above, slipping back into the role of the child I once was.

  We’ve done this before, I’m sure of it.

  The wallpaper indents in on itself, creating small recesses that resemble the rungs of a ladder. One hand, then another, we climb up the wall until Delia is perched on the inside of the sliding door and beckoning me into the dark. The same place blood poured out the first time I saw a spirit.

  Chapter Twelve

  MY HANDS SHAKE AS I pull myself up near the ceiling, and Delia’s waiting arms hoist me into the narrow space. The door is rattling in its frame, and the photos are trembling on the walls. One last glance at the room below shows me our ghostly defender flickering in the dim light like a wisp about to be blown in a breeze.

  Crawling forward, the musty air is stifling, and I
shiver against the dust and cobwebs that brush against my knees and palms. Spare tubes of wrapping paper and piles of gift bags litter the corners of what appears to be a small closet, but as Delia slides the door shut behind us, I can’t be sure.

  My head spins with deja vü, and an ache spreads through my chest as I consider where my dreams left off. Delia turning on me, the hands of the shadow figure wrapping around my throat, and the faint cry of a child. But dreams are only dreams. Right?

  A rolling noise distracts me from the chill slipping through the cracks in the doorframe, and I stare wildly into the pitch dark, waiting for the shadows to come alive.

  “This way, darling,” she mutters as she moves, “I never thought in a million years we’d have to resort to this. I’m so sorry.”

  Delia shifts her weight, dropping into nothingness, and pulling me along with her into a tunnel at the base of a corner. Air whooshes past my ears as I drop through the short space, landing heavily on my feet. Pain shoots through my ankles, as Delia switches on a camping lantern, and now I really am nestled between the walls of the house.

  The vibrations coursing through the other side of the insulation are faint, and I gawk at the busy wallpaper of the narrow room, barely processing what I'm seeing. I blink, and Marlowe appears in front of me, her waist cut off where she stands upright through the floor, meeting me at eye level as I curl up where I landed.

  “Can it hear us?” Delia directs her question at Marlowe and watching the two of them converse is like a punch in the gut. The thing that sets Marlowe apart isn’t that she’s younger or different; it’s that she died more recently than the rest. Based on her hair and perpetual outfit, Delia and Marlowe might have grown up together. Had she lived, they might even have been the same age.

  I swallow back the acid churning its way to my esophagus and stare at Marlowe’s intense expressions. Watching her talk is like tuning into a silent movie or going suddenly deaf, and being unable to read lips, I can only guess at the words falling out of Marlowe’s mouth. The only entity I have heard is the one that I wish I hadn’t.

  “Alright, darling, here’s the deal,” Delia turns to me, her gaze worn down and frantic. I’ve never seen her this shaken, and that alone sends tremors of panic through my core. “You need to stop blocking out the past because the more walls you put up around your abilities, the more at risk you put yourself.”

  “At risk from what? What’s out there? And why can’t you just tell me what’s going on or what I’ve forgotten?” My words slur together as my throat tightens and my limbs go numb.

  “I don’t know what it is, but I can’t lose you to it. We’re safe in here for now, we just need to wait it out. It can’t last once the sun rises.”

  I open my mouth to correct her, but as she glances over at Marlowe, my heart sinks with dread and I stay silent. The look they share is filled with such remorse and terror, I’m suddenly sure that Marlowe’s death was caused by the same thing stalking me now.

  Without another word, Delia crosses the narrow floorboards, and at the other end of our dismal refuge, she kneels to lift at the warped boards. Drawing objects out from the space beneath the floor, she murmurs half to me, and half to Marlowe, but her words are so jumbled, I can’t make out their meaning. Energies, mistakes, secrets she still can’t decipher, and some long-winded whisper I don’t understand.

  In her hands is the stack of photo albums from before, a heavy looking jewelry box, and a collection of drawings like the ones I’d found on my bed. As she spreads her findings out on the floor, I catch sight of pressed blossoms clinging to the edges of the faded papers.

  “I can’t tell you what you’ve blocked out because I don’t know. Not fully. It happened so fast, and then Elena was gone, and nothing made any sense! I couldn’t even find her!”

  “Wait, this has to do with my mom?” I cut her off, my gasps growing shallower with every inhalation. At my side, Frank clings tightly to my wrist, as if expecting to fall off.

  “It has to do with her death.” She wrings her hands and her voice is shaking nearly as much as her shoulders are. “Oh, Addie, darling, I should have told you everything the moment he came back, but I didn’t think this could happen again. It wasn’t supposed to happen again!”

  “What are you talking about? What does this have to do with my mom? Did the shadow get her too?” My panic is outweighed with the heavy dose of rage flooding me. All these years, I thought she chose to die. I never imagined I could be wrong.

  “Shadow?” Delia jerks back in alarm, glancing at Marlowe for reference. “What shadow? I’m talking about the little boy.”

  We’re on two different wavelengths, and my teeth are chattering so profusely, I’m rendered speechless. Surely, there can’t be two evil spirits after me, could there?

  With her eyebrows drawn tight and the ghost floating at our elbows, Delia chooses to flop open the photo albums and explain her frame of events. The first few pages are heavy sepia prints, and as we progress through the generations, the hairstyles and clothes get brighter as photography improves, but their faces hardly faze me. I know them all already.

  “Clairvoyants come and go, but there’s always at least one in a generation. We’re the bridge between the halves of our family.” She grasps my left hand, and I shift my other arm to keep her from paying too much attention to Frank. She still hasn’t noticed the missing door knocker and I’m not ready to share him with her. “It’s a precious thing, even if it’s hard to bear.”

  My heart beats out frenzied emotions I struggle to ignore, and I watch her with a flat face. I can’t bring myself to react. The more closely I let myself get involved, the worse this is going to hurt.

  “But sometimes, things go wrong. Some deaths are so twisted, there’s no recovering from, and I told you, energy draws in other energy. Not everything in this world can be explained, even by the dead.” She nods as Marlowe adds something I can't hear and reiterates for me. “Every Nix will eventually move on; we’re not meant to be cemented to this world; that’s important for you to remember. If someone’s hanging around, there’s a reason.”

  I nod, drawn in by the common knowledge that exists even in the most inane ghost stories Sabrina’s shared with me.

  “If a person is mangled enough, they can be consumed by something that was never meant to be part of this earth.”

  I shudder at her choice of words and work my voice into a raspy vestige of itself. “You mean like some sort of monster?” My thoughts flash back to Sabrina’s mention of werewolves and I’m not sure if I can handle any more revelations tonight.

  Delia purses her lips, and her hands shake the page of the book she’s cradling. “The worst kind there is, darling. As real as spirits are, there’s something darker out there that roams the earth too. Demons. And that’s what I really think we’re dealing with here.”

  Marlowe moves to her side, reaching out her hands as if to comfort Delia, but cringing silently as her arms turn to nothing the second she touches Delia’s shoulder.

  “The boy was preyed upon by something or another, but he’s no mere spirit anymore. We were told he was an ancient thing. Something that only came around every three generations or so, but when he came for us...” she trails off, her fingers tracing the laughing faces in the photo the book is open to. I recognize my dad in the middle, Delia at his side, and Marlowe, very much alive and happier than I’ve ever seen her in death.

  “We thought that was the end of it. Then you started talking about a friend I couldn’t see, and your great grandfather started leaving these at my desk.” She indicates the drawings, and unlike the comforting images I’d found on my bed, these depict Nix House, torn apart by hurricane strength winds.

  I shut my eyes against them, and again, the memory of a child’s hand tracing the tombstones resonates through my skull. If he was something evil, shouldn’t the gate have kept him out?

  Another bang courses through the wooden beams of the house, and I jump forward, clutching at
Delia’s hands. I thought The House kept things out too.

  “We’re safe in here,” she whispers again. "It’s what this room was meant for. It’s a refuge, it always has been.” This time, it sounds more like she’s trying to convince herself than me. Her hand shakes in mine, and fear hits me so hard, I nearly throw up. Instead, I shut my eyes and feel the waves of pure panic holding me in place.

  For the first time in my life, I can fully appreciate the phrase ‘die of fright’. Maybe it would be better to die this way; trapped in my own inability to run or fight. Better at least than being strangled or consumed by shadows. Better still than drowning. Drowning would be the worst fate.

  How could I forget something so threatening?

  Hands tracing grave markers flash behind my closed eyelids, and every stuttering heartbeat that shudders through my chest brings another headstone. My pink bracelet shining in the sun, dark against the pale wrist on my other side. Cold hands, and a chill trickling up my arms, so similar to the drafts that follow me around Nix House.

  I shake my head, clutching onto Delia as a clatter of heavy objects shatter against the outer wall. How many layers of insulation and wood separate us from that? And how?

  Ghosts are non-corporeal beings, that’s what Sabrina said. In other words, no bodies. No constraints when it comes to physical boundaries. So, what are the boundaries?

  There’s got to be a connection.

  “Who is the boy?” I stutter out.

  “We don’t know, the only thing we do is that he’s been around as long as anyone can remember.”

  “Can’t you ask one of the older, gh— relatives?”

  Delia twists her mouth at me, an odd combination of wistfulness and amusement. “Darling, they’re dead, not omniscient.”

  Marlowe shakes her head in the corner, the upper half of her body gently swaying from side to side, as though a light wind were trying to blow her away. She opens her mouth, and maybe she’s about to say something, but the second her eyes meet mine, she sighs and shuts her mouth once more. Try as they might, the dead can’t fully comfort the living.