by E. E. Holmes
“Hey. It’s alright.”
“No it’s not,” she sobbed. “It’s not alright. It will never be alright!”
“Why not? It’s okay, I’ve already decided that I’ll take it.”
“You’ll…what?”
“I’ll take it. I want the apartment.”
Tanya shook her head violently. “No. No, I can’t let you. It’s… it’s haunted, okay? I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but I haven’t been able to rent this place out for longer than a month or so before the tenants leave. I sank all of my savings into this house, and now…”
“It’s okay. Tanya, look at me.” I grabbed her gently by the shoulders, shaking them slightly so that she raised her head and looked me in the eyes. “I know it’s haunted. I knew it before I walked in the door.”
Tanya blinked at me. “You did? How could you possibly have known that?”
“I can just tell. It’s one of my most interesting and annoying traits. And you don’t need to worry about renting this place to me. I’m telling you I can handle it. In fact, if I have some time here, I can probably get the spirit to leave.”
“Oh my God, do you really think so? I’ve tried everything! Three different priests, a psychic, and I even had a neo-pagan grad student teach me about cleansing and sage-burning. I was actually walking around with this smoking bunch of herbs, coughing my head off! But nothing worked. I’m completely at the end of my rope! You have no idea!”
“I do. I really do. Give me a month in this house. You’ll be ghost-free in no time.”
“This is so bizarre. I don’t even believe in ghosts. At least, I never have,” Tanya whispered, shaking her head.
“I know that most of the time when people say this, it’s bullshit—but I do know exactly how you feel,” I replied gently. “So what do you say? Do I get the apartment? Can we move in next week?”
Tanya still looked torn. “I guess so, but I just don’t understand why you’d want to live with a ghost!”
I smiled grimly as my new roommate shimmered into view in the corner, with her arms crossed and her eyes looking daggers at me.
“I know Tanya, it must seem strange to you. But actually, I’m not sure I know how to live without ghosts anymore.”
2
Moving Day
AS I HEAVED A BOX OF BOOKS ONTO MY BED, I came to an unassailable conclusion: My obsession with book hoarding was reason enough to never move ever again.
“I’ve never been so happy that I can’t participate in heavy lifting,” said a trilling voice. I turned just in time to see a slender male spirit, eternally seventeen years old, drift through my bedroom wall and float to rest on my bed like a feather. He caught my eye as he shook the specter of his stylishly shaggy black hair out of his face, and winked. “Being dead has to have some benefits.”
“Hey, Milo. I thought you were going to Hannah’s seminar.”
“I did, but she kicked me out. It was presentation day. Too boring. I was trying to liven things up a bit while Hannah was waiting for her turn, but she said she couldn’t ‘concentrate.’” Milo gave the last word air quotes, as though he had never heard of concentration before and remained unconvinced that Hannah hadn’t simply made it up.
“So what, I’m stuck with you now? I thought I’d at least be spared until I started unpacking my clothes. I know how you love a good fashion intervention.”
“Alas, your wardrobe has become far less fun to criticize since you got that big-girl job,” Milo said with a theatrical sigh. “Seriously, you’ve taken all the fun out of it!”
I threw a battered paperback copy of Sense and Sensibility at him, but of course it flew right through him and landed with a dull thud on the bed beneath him. “It’s taken all the fun out of it for me, too,” I said.
Adulthood had lost no time slapping me in the face upon graduation. I could’ve taken the more typical route of moving back home again, but I could hardly call my aunt Karen’s Boston brownstone “home,” since Hannah and I had only lived there for a couple of summers. Karen was my late mother’s twin sister, and she would gladly have welcomed us back; in fact, now that she was divorced from Noah, I think she’d actually been looking forward to having us knocking around the house for a while. But, “adult” or not, I was just as stubbornly independent as I had always been: I didn’t want to freeload. Plus, staying with Karen would’ve meant living with the Durupinen connection as well.
Moving into Karen’s would essentially have amounted to living in the heart of our family legacy—a legacy that had taken me years to come to terms with, and which I only grudgingly now accepted. Until I was eighteen years old, I’d been kept completely in the dark about our family’s secret: Karen and my mother were Durupinen—they formed two halves of a Gateway that allowed spirits trapped in the living world to Cross to the spirit realm.
When my mother died a few years ago, I began—inexplicably—seeing ghosts. As these ghosts tore my freshman year to shreds, I learned about our family’s Durupinen heritage, which dated back countless centuries. I also learned that I had a twin sister; unbeknownst to Karen—or anybody else—my mother had split us up at birth to protect us. Hannah, who we later learned was the most powerful Durupinen in centuries, had spent her life in foster homes and mental health facilities; she had experienced spirit Visitations from an early age. When Karen and I discovered Hannah’s existence, we’d rescued her from a psychiatric home. Only then did we learn that my mother had passed her gift—if you wanted to call it that—on to both of us. This meant that Hannah and I either had to take on the role of becoming our clan’s new Gateway, or risk destabilizing the entire spirit world. No pressure, of course.
That surely would’ve been enough for anyone to deal with, but shit only got stranger and more dangerous from there. Hannah and I then had to move to Fairhaven Hall in England, the seat of the Durupinen’s Northern Clans, to learn how to manage our abilities. It was there, under a cloud of mistrust created by my mother’s having fled the Durupinen life—she had run away the moment she knew she was pregnant—that Hannah and I found out why my mother had split us up. We were the subjects of the Prophecy, a thousand-year-old presage that portended our causing the fall of the Durupinen and the rise of their enemies, the Necromancers. The Necromancers were essentially a rival sect almost as old as the Durupinen; they were hell-bent on reversing the Gateways and taking control of the spirit world for themselves.
In other words, we showed up to our first day of ghost school wearing name tags that said, “Hello, my name is Harbinger of the Apocalypse.” Again, no pressure, right?
Things went downhill fast from there—like betrayals and kidnapping and monsters downhill. I eventually took refuge with the Travelers, an obscure forest-dwelling Durupinen clan, where I learned the Prophecy had been misinterpreted by the Northern Clans for centuries. The Travelers taught me how to Walk—to straddle between the worlds of the living and the dead—and my Walking ultimately saved the Durupinen, and possibly the entire world, from the Necromancers. Then Hannah had saved me from being trapped forever in the world beyond the Gateway. But it was a close, close call on all fronts.
Even though Hannah and I had now gotten as far from the Durupinen mother ship as we reasonably could, we knew our lives would always, on some fundamental level, be controlled by our connection to the spirit world. And no matter what we wanted to do with our lives, our calling would always be there, keeping part of us planted firmly in the world of the dead.
And so, we faced the challenges of post-college life, but we did so while constantly looking over our shoulders for spirits. Not a day went by when we didn’t stop to investigate whether the woman waiting for the bus or the man keeping pace just a few feet behind us was, in fact, alive—or if they were manifesting spirits. Fun.
We moved to Salem so Hannah could start her master’s degree in social work at the local university. I subsisted on a collection of coffee shop and restaurant jobs while I waited to see if my art history degree was worth t
he paper it was printed on. Finally though, my resume-blanketing panned out, and after a grueling interview process I landed a part-time job at the Peabody Essex Museum, where I led tours, made arrangements for visiting classes, and shadowed the curator. The pay was terrible, but I adored being surrounded by art. Although, as Milo pointed out, my new work wardrobe left quite a bit to be desired: I now had to trade in my signature look for pleated pants and blazers.
“At least I’ve mostly stuck to black,” I said, gesturing to the row of work-approved attire now hanging neatly in my new closet.
“Yes, well, a leopard can’t change her fishnets…” Milo sang.
I laughed. Milo could be a consummate pain in the ass sometimes, but he was very funny. He was also our Spirit Guide—we likely wouldn’t even be alive now without him. When he died, he had somewhat-accidently Bound himself to Hannah; he had later pledged at our Initiation to serve as Spirit Guide to us and our Gateway.
“No, she can’t,” I replied, as I arranged my books carefully on the built-in shelves near my window. “Any word from our spectral roommate?”
“No, she still won’t materialize. I think you scared her off when you confronted her.”
“Maybe, but I’m sure she’s just regrouping. I felt fear, but she was angry, too. I don’t think it will be that easy to get rid of her.”
“Did you draw her?” Milo asked. “So I’ll know who I’m looking for?”
“Yeah,” I said, pulling my newest sketch pad off of the desk. I flipped it open to the right page before chucking it onto the bed for him to examine. “That’s her.”
“Oh, she looks delightful. Real Queen of the Dead,” Milo quipped, clearly amused by his own irony.
I had barely said good-bye to Tanya and shut the door to my car before the urge to draw the girl had overwhelmed me. That’s how it was these days; my lifelong love of sketching was morphing into a spirit-recording compulsion. Fiona had told me during one of our long phone conversations that this “compulsion” was a sign of my gift coming into sharper, more powerful focus.
“That’ll be the Muse coming out in you,” she had said, with definite satisfaction crackling in her voice. “When they refuse to show themselves, that’ll be when the urge will overpower you most. If your gift develops at all like mine, you may start waking up to some surprises in the morning.”
“Surprises?”
“Yeah, that’s right. As in, ‘Surprise! I built a fecking spirit sculpture out of paperclips and twine in my sleep.’”
Fiona wasn’t exactly exaggerating. I hadn’t sculpted anything out of office supplies yet, but sculpture was her preferred medium, not mine. But twice during my senior year I’d had to repaint the wall in my dorm room at St. Matthew’s after a nighttime Visitation turned into sleep-drawing, and once Tia had had to reprint a paper after I’d covered every page of it with portraits of a man who had a bullet hole in his forehead. Nowadays I often slept with a pen tied to my wrist and blank paper taped up on the walls around my bed. It was easier—and cheaper—than continually buying paint.
I looked over Milo’s shoulder and down at the drawing. The sketch had poured unbidden out of me the moment I’d put a trembling hand to the blank page. As I drew, with my hand moving at a supernatural speed, each new detail had become instantly familiar, despite my having only glimpsed at the girl for a few moments.
The girl’s livid face now glared back up at me from the sketchpad. Her eyes and lips were ringed with dark makeup, and the corner of her mouth was pulled up in a defiant sneer—like an entitled, rebellious teenager in her first mug shot. If I’d continued to draw beyond her shoulders, she surely would’ve been flipping me off.
“And Tanya has no idea who she is?” Milo asked.
“Nope,” I said. “She didn’t even know the spirit was a ‘she’ until I told her. Tanya has never seen her before, except as a shadow, or out of the corner of her eye.”
“Yes, we spirits do like to do things like that. Preserving our mystique is way up there on our list of priorities, for some reason,” Milo replied. “I still don’t know why you don’t just Ward the place and be done with it.”
I shook my head. Warding, which involved drawing runes around specified areas to keep spirits out, was effective, but wouldn’t really solve anything in the long run. “I’m waiting to see how hostile she is when the tenants here are onto her. I’d like to avoid Warding if I can. It will keep her out, sure, but we’ll never find out who she is or why she’s still hanging around if we just kick her out onto the street.”
“And we care who she is because…?” Milo’s voice trailed away. I threw him a dirty look and he put up his hands in surrender. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I just don’t like to share my spectral space. It bums me out.”
“Well, you can suck it up until we find out why she’s here and convince her to Cross,” I said firmly. I stepped back to admire my newly stocked shelves. “There. Done!”
“Only fifty thousand more boxes to go!” Milo said brightly.
I ignored this comment and continued. “We’ll be able to get rid of the spirit more quickly if we do our homework. I’ve already knocked on a few doors on the block and asked the neighbors if they recognized the sketch. Not a single person has seen her before. But now half of them do think I’m crazy. As usual.” I sighed. “What about you? Any luck with the dead neighbors?”
“Like an obedient Spirit Guide, I’ve been asking around. The old woman who haunts the brick house on the corner says she thinks our spirit moved in around ten years ago. At least, that’s the first time she noticed her. Our girl keeps to herself, doesn’t play well with others. She’s scared off the previous owner and at least a dozen tenants.”
“Okay. Well, it’s a start,” I said, shrugging.
“Hello? Jess?” A tentative voice called from the stairs. I felt my face split into a wide smile I could barely contain.
“Yeah, I’m up here!” I called back. I trotted out of the bedroom just in time to see Tia Vezga, breathless from climbing, stagger into the entry hall. She had two suitcases in one hand and a fishbowl tucked under her other arm.
Tia was my very best friend from college. Without her, I surely would’ve lost my mind when the spirits began revealing themselves to me my freshman year. She had never doubted me when I began talking about ghosts and hauntings, and—no matter how crazy I might’ve sounded—she had always treated me with her unique mix of intelligence, sweetness, and respect. She’d been quick to lend me her impressive investigative skills many a time, even when I had her researching some pretty far-fetched stuff, and it was she who had encouraged me to take David Pierce’s parapsychology course—a course which changed my life in more ways than one.
“Tia! You made it!” I slammed into her with a hug that perhaps more closely resembled a tackle, causing her bags to tumble to the floor.
“Ouch! Be careful of Sequins!” she gasped, handing me the fishbowl and returning my hug.
“Aww, Sequins! Behold! The world’s most tenacious betta fish!” I cried, tapping on the glass. Sequins was a carnival prize who had survived four years of college, four dorm rooms, and once, an exciting trip onto the bathroom floor while we cleaned his bowl. I couldn’t believe he was making yet another move with us; he was obviously magical, maybe even immortal.
“More tenacious than me,” Tia panted. I barely made it up the stairs! This is what I get for letting you pick the apartment, I guess. It’s bad enough that it’s haunted, but a third-floor walk-up? Really?”
“Yeah, but just look at it!” I said. “The fireplace, the wide pine floors, the exposed brick!”
“You sound like an HGTV special,” Tia laughed. “But you’re right, it’s beautiful.”
“You’ll love it, I promise,” I said, and flung my arm around her neck. “I’m so glad we’re roomies again!”
“Me too,” Tia said. “Where’s Hannah?”
“She’s got class, but she’ll be back soon. She can’t wait to see you. Let me
show you your room!”
I half dragged her through the living room. Tia tried to comment on the built-ins, but I pulled her into the corner bedroom, which overlooked the tiny back yard. “This is it. This is the one I picked for you.”
The room was almost perfectly square, with a tiny fireplace in the wall that it shared with the living room. A large wooden beam divided the room’s two high eaves into shadowy triangles overhead. A desk had been built into a small alcove, tucked away like a library carrel; several tall open shelves were built into the space above it, perfect for books and rows of labeled, neatly organized, binders—the very things that formed the basis of Tia’s happy, ordered existence.
“You were absolutely right,” she exclaimed gleefully. “This is perfect. I’m going to get so much work done in here!” In her excitement, she adopted the same tone that someone else might’ve used when talking about a dream vacation.
“Tia, I might be the one who sees spirits, but you are definitely the weird one,” I said affectionately.
She ignored the dig. She immediately sat herself at the desk and began examining its drawers and built-in cubbies. “Speaking of spirits, is this new one going to be a huge distraction? It’s going to be more important than ever to be able to study. If someone is going to be, I don’t know, knocking my books off the shelves all the time…”
I put up a hand to silence her. “I won’t let that happen. We’ll Ward your room if we have to. I would never jeopardize your medical career. I’m counting on you to save me when my body breaks down from insomnia and excessive caffeine consumption.”
“And how about Milo? Is he here?” Tia asked.
“Yes, and he’s excited to see you, so how about we Meld already!” Milo shouted from the doorway, even though he knew full well that Tia couldn’t hear him yet.
“Okay, okay,” I said, and turned to Tia. “Give me your wrist. Milo’s longing to be the center of attention again.”