by A. C. Wise
But even unused, Sophie’s father had retained his skill and Sophie has no doubt these drawings are his. Long-fingered hands and long-toed feet, a woman’s face, the skin flayed on one side to show the delicate bones of a horse’s skull. A woman’s hand splayed, the tips of each finger anchored with nails to a horseshoe.
At the very bottom of the page there are words: This is how the Nag Bride is wed.
The horseshoes had been in place the night she’d thought she’d seen him running across the lawn. Andrew’s grandmother had pointed them out to her. But maybe when she’d seen him he had been intending to steal them, while the Halloween party was going on, but misjudged the time—gotten distracted, gotten drunk—and arrived too late. Or had he come for something else? Come looking for the Nag Bride, and seeing Sophie at the window had scared him away?
Maybe he’d returned later, stolen the shoes and buried them here. Or maybe someone else had. There’s so much Sophie doesn’t know.
What Sophie does know is that Halloween night was the last time she had ever seen her father. At least alive. And she’s spent years telling herself she didn’t really see him, that she didn’t know anything strange was going on. That it isn’t her fault.
During Sophie’s final year of college, her father had finally come home. He’d killed her mother, then he’d killed himself. He’d used a nail gun.
Andrew’s grandmother had been the one to call Sophie and tell her, and Sophie and Andrew had driven all through the night, back to his grandparents’ house, back home. Her father had been gone for eleven years. She’d almost convinced herself she would never see or hear from him again. Then she’d had to identify his body and her mother’s in the morgue.
The nails had been removed, but the puncture wounds remained. Sophie couldn’t help imagining how it had been. Her mother never bothered to change the locks; her father would have been able to walk right in. He would have been able to sit down in the dark and pour himself a drink and wait for her. Bang, bang, bang.
Sophie pictured her mother lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood, struggling to breathe. She’d imagined her mother reaching toward her father, maybe to beg for mercy, or maybe in a last futile attempt to hurt him.
He’d put just enough nails into her to make sure her death would be slow. Sophie imagined her father pouring himself a second drink—with her mother’s hand still reaching for him, always caught in that moment, but never touching him—finishing that one, then putting the nail gun to his own head. Bang.
It’s all part of the same story. Her story. And the moments she hasn’t been living it, those are the unreal moments. In the morgue, Sophie had realized that even after her father left, part of her had always been waiting for him to return. She’d felt him hanging over their lives, a ghost haunting them, because the circle hadn’t been closed. There’d been too much left undone.
Sophie buries her face in her hands, not caring about the dirt. Then she pulls her hands away, smearing her skin, and wraps the horseshoes and the paper into one of the black plastic garbage bags, and tucks the whole bundle under her shirt. She runs across the lawn, and creeps back inside, listening for Andrew, holding her breath and hoping the boards don’t creak.
The horseshoes press against her skin. Sweat gathers against the crinkling plastic, slick and uncomfortable. Sophie’s heart beats in the roof of her mouth as she buries the horseshoes and the paper at the bottom of her suitcase, and shoves the suitcase all the way under the bed.
Will they still be there in the morning? Or like her father’s silver lighter, will they disappear?
A gift from a friend.
A courting gift.
The Nag Bride needs a groom.
Did the Nag Bride take the lighter back from Sophie’s room?
Will she take the horseshoes as well?
She’s already been here.
She left marigolds behind.
A courting gift.
She needs a groom.
The cycle, the story, never ended. It’s begun again.
*
Image 1: A postcard showing two horses behind a split-rail fence. A gentleman in a suit stands on the other side of the fence, one arm leaning on the top rail. A legend across the bottom of the cardstock reads Simpson Horse Farm.
Image 2: A man in a dark suit stands next to a woman in a wedding dress with an empire waist. Behind them, the wooden wall of a barn, nailed with a horseshoe, is visible. The man’s hair is neatly parted and he sports a moustache. The woman’s hair is dark and long. The woman appears to have moved partway through the image’s exposure; her face is a long, oval blur. In faded ink along the bottom of the photograph is written: Mr. and Mrs. Edward Simpson, September 1932.
Image 3 & 4: A survey map dated 1929 showing the plot of land occupied by Simpson Horse Farm. 30 acres, surrounded on three sides by trees, and bordered on the fourth by the township road. A survey map dated 1989 showing the same land. A 6-acre plot where the original farmhouse and barn stood, surrounded by a suburban neighborhood made up of several single-family homes.
Image 5: The farmhouse at Simpson Horse Farms, surrounded by trees. A flaw in processing the image resulted in a smudge appearing between two of the trees. It vaguely resembles the figure of a woman, and has been used as evidence by those who claim the property is haunted.
—Napierville Historical Society Archives, Gift of Everett Moseley 1968.10.29.1-5
*
“Find anything good?” Sophie asks.
She’s sore from moving piles and despite scrubbing her hands and face, she still feels dusty.
“Take a look.” Andrew points to a stack of photo albums on the kitchen table. “I only skimmed the first one.”
Sophie opens the album to a picture of Andrew’s grandparents when they were young, standing on the house’s front porch.
“They look so young!” Sophie exclaims, and Andrew comes to peer over her shoulder.
“That must be right after they bought the house. Sometime in the mid-70s?”
“I’d say so.” Sophie points at the wide collar on Andrew’s grandfather’s shirt, grinning.
There’s no real chronology to the album, the recent and distant past jumbled together. She finds Andrew’s father and aunt as children. Andrew as a baby. Various family gatherings. She pauses on a picture of her and Andrew the year they went as robots for Halloween in costumes made from cardboard boxes covered in tinfoil.
“We were such dorks.”
She hears Andrew open then close the fridge door behind her. For a moment, everything feels normal. She can almost believe Andrew’s grandmother is just in the other room, sitting in her favorite chair, watching one of her nature programs. Andrew’s grandfather will walk through the front door at any moment eager to show off his latest treasure.
“Geez, we were never that young, were we?” Andrew carries plates with chips and sandwiches to the table. He reaches back to the counter, and hands Sophie a beer, before sipping from a sweating bottle of his own.
Sophie freezes, her own bottle partway to her lips before her brain catches up.
“Andrew.” She points to his bottle.
Realization spread across his face, confusion replaced by alarm as he sets the bottle down on the counter and backs a step away.
“Oh shit. I just opened the fridge, they were there, and I grabbed one without even realizing.”
Just over two years ago, Andrew had called Sophie in the middle of the night, his voice shaking across the distance between them. He’d been crying. He hadn’t been able to tell her what was wrong, only that he needed her. She hadn’t hesitated, taking two subways and walking the remaining damp chilly blocks to his apartment. She’d found him in the bathroom, his entire body curled inward, the arch of his spine pressed to the wall between the toilet and the tub.
“I can’t...I don’t remember. Soph. I don’t remember.”
One eye had been bruised, a cut healing on his brow. She’d knelt beside him, wrapped her ar
ms around him, and let him sob. They’d stayed like that on the bathroom floor the rest of the night, Andrew alternately shaking and crying, and in fits and starts, when he could stop his teeth chattering, he’d told her how bad it had gotten. Blackouts. Lost time. Skipping meals to drink on an empty stomach so the alcohol would affect him faster.
Sophie had noticed him losing weight, but told herself it was all the running he did. She’d noticed the sallow complexion of his skin, the bruised quality around his eyes, so much like her mother’s, and told herself he simply wasn’t getting enough sleep. They talked, but not every day, saw each other regularly, but not as often as they used to.
Sophie gave these things to herself as excuses—why she hadn’t seen it earlier, why she hadn’t insisted Andrew get help. She’d told herself she couldn’t help Andrew until he was ready to help himself. She told herself Andrew was an adult, he could make his own choices, and if he needed her, he’d let her know. She’d looked the other way, like she had with her parents, and she’d almost lost him.
“You didn’t buy them?” The words are out before Sophie can stop them.
Andrew’s face crumples, going from frightened to hurt. She knows he didn’t buy the beer, of course he didn’t. Since that night, he’s been sober, worked hard and made the choice every day not to touch alcohol. Until now.
A courting gift.
Cold ticks its way up her spine.
Sophie gathers both their bottles and empties them in the sink. She opens the fridge, repeats the action with the remaining four bottles, flattens the cardboard carrier, and shoves it deep in the recycling bin.
“It’s fine. It’ll be fine.” She’s aware of speaking too rapidly, panic fluttering as she tries to push it down.
Andrew’s expression remains hurt, and a new fear strikes Sophie.
“I didn’t—” she says.
“I’m going out for a run.” Andrew pushes his chair back from the table.
She can’t tell if he believes her. Struck, unable to make her voice work, Sophie watches him retreat up the stairs. He must know she wouldn’t. She would never do anything to hurt him. And besides that, selfishly, she’s been avoiding going into town, even to the grocery store. Because she knows it’s only a matter of time before someone recognizes her, the whispers buzzing as they do in small towns—there she goes, Carl and Tina’s kid, daughter of a murder-suicide, so tragic, I wonder how far the apple falls from the tree….
She hears Andrew come back down the stairs.
“Need any company?”
He doesn’t answer. He’s wearing his earbuds, looking at his phone, and she tells herself that’s why he doesn’t respond. Sophie listens to the front door open and close.
Her body goes slack, not quite slumping, but letting the counter take her weight. If she’d told Andrew about the horseshoes, if she’d mentioned the Nag Bride, could she have stopped this from happening? Sophie rubs a hand over her face, still feeling imaginary grit on her skin from the barn.
After a moment, she returns to the kitchen table. She’s lost her appetite, but she’s still curious, and she picks up the next album from the stack Andrew brought down from the attic.
Instead of more jumbled family photos, there’s a newspaper clipping—a wedding announcement, but she doesn’t recognize the names—Mr. and Mrs. Everett Moseley, married in 1969.
Sophie recognizes the barn behind the couple though. It’s Andrew’s grandparents’ barn, only newer. Just behind the groom’s head, there’s a horseshoe nailed to the wall.
She flips to the next page. There are images copied from the archives of the Napierville Historical Society. When Sophie lifts the book for a closer look, loose pages tumble to the kitchen floor. She finds photocopied pages from a book of ghost stories and legends, mixed in with hand-written pages. She recognizes Andrew’s grandfather’s hand.
The Nag Bride, over and over again even if she isn’t named as such. Women murdered by their husbands. Women with nails driven through their hands. Women buried and digging their way out of the ground.
…said that every night she transformed into a black mare, stole men from their beds, and galloped them all over the countryside until their hearts stopped with fear.
…cursed the land with her dying breath.
The horse spoke with the voice of a woman and said…
…screamed, but it wasn’t a human sound…
…drove a spike of iron through her tongue…
Sophie’s hands shake, the pages rattling. She’s about to shove them back into the album, bury the album at the bottom of the pile when a name on one of the pages arrests her. Carl. Her father’s name.
The page is lined loose-leaf, torn from a notebook, torn again at the bottom so only half the writing remains. Sophie recognizes Andrew’s grandfather’s hand again, but sloppy, as if the words were written in haste, or in a panic.
Carl—
Nettie would kill me if she knew I’d taken these down, but you need them more than we do. Put them over all your doors. I don’t know how much you know, how much you think you know from what you’ve pieced together, but it’s important. Do it for Sophie and Tina. Do it for yourself. It’s not too late to—
Sophie stares at the ragged edge where the words end, breath rough in her throat, a stinging heat behind her eyes. Andrew’s grandfather had taken the horseshoes down. He’d tried to give them to her father, to protect him. To protect Sophie and her mother. It’s not too late, he’d written, but it had been.
*
There’s a note from Andrew resting up against a white paper bag from the local bakery waiting for her in the kitchen. Sorry about yesterday. I just needed to get out of my head a bit. I know you didn’t buy that beer. I’m starting to think the house is haunted. He’d drawn a smiley face there, then added a postscript at the bottom of the page. Meeting Craig for breakfast and a run. Consider this a peace offering.
Sophie unfolds the bag and finds a chocolate croissant wrapped in bakery paper. Tension she didn’t realize she’d been holding slides from her shoulder, defenseless in the face of buttery pastry. She’d waited for Andrew to come home from his run for almost two hours before she couldn’t stand being in the house alone. She’d gone for a drive, and briefly considered driving all the way back to the city.
Don’t look. Pretend everything is fine. Never look back and maybe all the bad things will go away on their own.
His bedroom door had been closed when she’d returned, and she’d retreated to her own room, slinking down to the kitchen after a while to make herself a sandwich, and eventually going to bed with her stomach in knots.
The smiley face in his note, joking about ghosts, and the fact that he’s meeting Craig, his sponsor, eases at least some of Sophie’s worries. Maybe not everything is okay. Maybe nothing is okay, but she and Andrew, at least, are okay.
After breakfast, Sophie loses herself in work, shifting piles until her muscles ache, dust and dirt grinding themselves deep into her skin. She leaves her phone inside, plugged in on the bedside table in the guestroom, deliberately not keeping track of time. Even so, she’s surprised when she glances through the open barn door and sees the sun on the verge of setting. Only then does she realize it’s also gotten cold.
“Hey.” Andrew looks up from the stove as she enters. He’s stirring garlic and onions in a pan, and Sophie’s stomach rumbles.
“You really seemed to be in the zone and I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“That smells amazing. Your grandfather’s recipe?”
“Absolutely. He ruined me for the store-bought stuff.”
Andrew’s posture is relaxed, his smile easy. Sophie allows herself to sink into one of the kitchen chairs and watch him work. She should take a shower, but the thought of climbing the stairs is too much.
She notes the stack of albums has been moved, and she’s about the ask Andrew about the one with all the clippings, when something catches her eye. A single petal, plastered to the side of the dark blu
e ceramic bowl in the middle of the table. A marigold petal—orange gold and shading to deep red at the center, the color of heart-blood. All the flowers she found on their first morning in the house were orange and yellow.
“Let me show you what I did while I let this simmer.” Andrew’s voice jolts her and Sophie turns to face him. “You weren’t the only one who was busy today.”
He gestures, and Sophie rises automatically, following him into the front room. His laptop is set up on the coffee table, its screen mirrored on the TV—a large flatscreen Andrew’s grandparents purchased before they’d moved.
“I got all the cameras set up.”
Andrew drops onto the couch and Sophie watches as he cycles through views, front yard, back, an interior camera looking down the stairs at the front door. There’s even one set up to look out over the barn. He backs the feed up, and Sophie watches herself leave the barn and walk to the front door.
The trees sway in the background, at the edges of the screen and something pings at the back of Sophie’s mind. It was cold when she came back inside, but she doesn’t remember any wind. There’s a smudge between two of the trees, a space where the shadows jitter.
“Now we can see everything that goes on around here.”
“Can you go back a sec?”
She doesn’t look at him, eyes fixed on the screen as she backs it up and she watches herself walk backward into the barn, steps jerky and awkward, as if her legs are bent the wrong way.
“Everything okay?”
Sophie ignores him, leaning forward, squinting at the trees on the screen. They’re still; there’s nothing between them. Sophie shakes her head.
“Must be dust in my eyes from the barn.” She smiles, keeping her voice light.
Why doesn’t she just tell Andrew what she saw?