by Leo Hunt
“Holiday always leaves through this gate, right?” Elza asks.
“I mean . . . probably?”
“It was hard to get close to them,” Elza says, “and to be honest, they weren’t talking about anything interesting. Ash is hardly going to tell Holiday and her friends that she’s a necromancer or a demon host or whatever she might turn out to be. She was mainly telling them about the bands she’s seen in San Francisco. If she’s acting, she does an exceptionally good impression of a nice, brainless California girl.”
“So what are we doing here?”
“We’re about to head back up to school. I heard Holiday talking about this charity fashion show they’re rehearsing for. It seemed pretty clear that Ash was expected to stay and help out. They were discussing skinny jeans versus straight-legged jeans for like twenty minutes, I swear. . . . Anyway, they should all be in the main hall.”
“So . . . ?”
“If they’re there, it means we’ve got a few hours while Ash and Holiday aren’t at home. Then I think we should go to Holiday’s house and see what’s going on there.”
“How is that going to help?”
“I’d like to get a look at the current state of the Simmon household — preferably while Ashley Smith isn’t around. I mean, aren’t you worried about them? It’s a whole family. We could at least ask when they decided to have Ash stay, how long she’s with them, et cetera. I think it’s worth trying.”
I still sometimes have trouble believing I have a girlfriend who says stuff like et cetera in everyday conversations.
“She’ll know we went up there,” I say.
“She already knows that we know. We think.”
“All right. What if we don’t find anything, though?”
Elza shrugs. “Then we try something else. We talk to her?”
“Yeah, maybe.” Even though I suggested confronting Ash this morning, it now sounds like a pretty unlikely strategy. But we don’t have anything better. After another few minutes, we head back up the hill to Dunbarrow High. Most of the students are gone now, and there’s no sports practice on Tuesday. It used to be the night we all met in the park. I remember those days, when my biggest worry was getting there before Kirk hogged all the alcohol. We make our way around the side of the school and sneak through the shrubbery toward the row of windows that look into the main hall. I can hear some pop song playing from behind the glass. We press ourselves against the brickwork, peeking into the hall. The lunch tables have been packed away, and there’s a low wooden walkway protruding out into the room. Nobody’s doing any fashion stuff at the moment; they’re all laughing at some video on Holiday’s phone. Ash’s bright-white hair is clearly visible to Holiday’s left. There’s a big rack of clothes pushed up against one wall.
Watching them through the window, I still can’t get myself to see Ash as an evil being.
“Well,” Elza says quietly, “they’re there, all right. Now let’s make a call at Holiday’s place.”
I’ve only been to the Simmons’ house once before, for what turned out to be among the most memorable parties of my life. I still remember the way, up to a big mock-Tudor mansion at the top of Wight Hill, the kind of neighborhood where you can imagine the residents meeting to discuss fining someone for having a hedge above the height specified in the residents’ agreement. We walk up the gravel driveway to Holiday’s sunburn-pink front door, still in school uniform. Elza pushes the doorbell before either of us can think better of it.
Holiday and her mum both have this thing where they can make anyone feel easy and welcome, no matter how surprised or unhappy they actually are to see them. I feel like I could be wearing a ski mask and waving a gun in Mrs. Simmon’s face and she’d still give us the exact same smile.
“Luke? And Elza? How lovely to see you.”
“Hello, Mrs. Simmon,” Elza says, smiling back. “Are Holiday and Ashley here?”
“Oh, I’m afraid they’re out at the moment,” Mrs. Simmon says cheerily, although there’s a subtle change in her expression when Elza mentions Ash. “They’re still at school, rehearsing for Holiday’s show.”
“Oh, of course,” Elza says. “How silly of me.”
“I haven’t seen either of you in a long time,” says Mrs. Simmon. “Not since . . . Halloween, I think?”
There’s an awkward pause. My Host came to the Simmons’ house during the Halloween party, used everyone there as part of some kind of black-magic ritual that I still don’t understand, and brutally killed the family cat for good measure. Mrs. Simmon doesn’t know this is my fault, but I feel like she connects me with it in some hazy way.
“We’ve been busy studying, haven’t we, Luke?” Elza says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Big year.”
“It’s such a stressful time for you all,” Mrs. Simmon says. “I bet you can’t wait until it’s all over. I know you’ll both do fine.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“So, Mrs. Simmon, we’re very sorry to be a bother,” Elza says, winding some hair around her right hand, “but Holiday borrowed a DVD from me about a month ago. She said she’d give it back to me if I came by this evening, but maybe she forgot she wouldn’t be here? So I was thinking, since we already walked over, maybe we could just go up to her room and get it?”
This story makes no sense at all, because Holiday never speaks to us and surely never speaks about us, and why would it be so important that we get the DVD right here and now? Holiday could bring it to school tomorrow. I fully expect Mrs. Simmon to raise some or all of these objections, but instead she just smiles even wider and says, “Of course!” and lets us into the house. Despite her leather jacket and combat boots and smoky bomb-blast of hair, which make her look like she’s starring in a public service announcement about the Dangers Of Sniffing Glue, Elza has an incredibly winning way with adults. They just seem to trust her.
“Thanks so much,” Elza says as we walk through the kitchen. “We need it for class, you see?”
Last time I was here, there were people standing motionless in every room and a circle of murderous ghosts waiting for me outside. I still shudder when I catch a glimpse of the garden through the kitchen windows. I remember the demon’s hand reaching out, clutching that dark red rope of light that joined my body with the corpse of the cat . . .
“Luke?”
Mrs. Simmon is staring at me with alarm. I force a smile.
“Sorry,” I say. “Just my mind wandering.”
“So how long is Ash staying with you?” Elza asks.
Mrs. Simmon frowns.
“You know, I’m not exactly certain. But she is a lovely girl.”
Elza frowns as well.
“I thought she said it was a month?” I say.
“Oh, of course,” Mrs. Simmon says, almost gratefully. “A month! She’s here for a month.”
“What made you sign up with the Goodman Foundation to be her hosts?” Elza asks.
“Oh, you know. It’s empowering for young women to get out into the world. She’s a lovely girl. So polite. I think it was Holiday’s idea originally. They started talking online somewhere. She’s very fond of Ashley.”
“Ash is just so . . .” Elza searches for a word. “Vivacious.”
“Oh, she is.” Mrs. Simmon smiles. “Ashley is a regular little hummingbird. She’s a lovely girl.”
“Well, it’s really great of you to be her hosts,” I say.
Nobody says anything for a moment. Mrs. Simmon’s smile is unwavering.
“Would you mind if we . . . ?” Elza begins, and for a horrible moment, I think Mrs. Simmon is going to escort us up to Holiday’s room herself — denying us the time to search for anything — but she just nods and tells us to find her if we need any help.
They’ve replaced the carpeting in the hall where Alice poured wine on Elza. I wonder if Holiday got in trouble over that, or if the mass amnesia and brutal cat slaying made some spilled wine irrelevant. Probably the latter. We leave Mrs. Simmon smiling to
herself in the downstairs hallway and press on up the stairs, across the landing, through the white-painted door with a golden H nailed to it.
“What was that?” Elza hisses the moment the door closes. “Did you see that? She didn’t even know how long Ash is supposed to be here! ‘She’s a lovely girl.’ Just kept saying it! It made my skin crawl.”
“It was really weird. She barely seemed to know who you were even talking about.”
Elza glares around Holiday’s room. “I think we can take about ten minutes in here before it starts to seem suspicious. I’m imagining the white suitcase full of white clothes belongs to Ash?”
“Be kind of a surprise if it doesn’t.”
Holiday’s room is much as I remember it: a neat desk, a bookshelf, a large wall chart with a study schedule highlighted in twelve different colors. Four-poster bed draped with lights, an entire wall plastered with photos of Holiday and Alice and the other popular girls, all standing in those weird posing lines that girls do. Holiday smiles confidently from the center of a thousand different pictures. It’s a whole galaxy of frozen smiles. I suppose if things had turned out differently, it would’ve been me standing next to her in these photos, rather than Mark.
Elza’s staring intently at the desk.
“Did you find something?” I ask.
“No,” she says, looking away. “Not at all.”
She was looking at a framed photo of two girls on the beach, young, maybe eight years old. One of them is blond, the other red-haired and scowling.
“Is that . . .” I begin.
“Yeah, it’s me and her,” Elza says. “This was so long ago!”
“I always forget you used to be friends.”
“I always forget, too. I was sure she had.”
“You don’t look very happy,” I say.
“Second day of a summer in Devon. I was already sunburned. The redhead’s curse.”
“You used to go on vacation together?”
“Yes. I mean our mums used to be pretty close, too. . . . Anyway, that’s over. We’re different people now. I mean, this is so type A!” Elza glances over the rest of the desk with disgust. “Look, she arranges her pencils in order of length . . . and the books are, like, color coded by spine!”
Elza’s room looks like a missile strike leveled a library and then someone came and sprinkled tea mugs over the rubble.
The new addition to Holiday’s room is a single camp bed, which is unfolded to the right of her four-poster. It’s neatly made with white sheets and pillows. There’s a white suitcase, which is full of neatly packed white clothes. We rifle through them, growing more and more frustrated. There’s an unworn pair of white Converse, two identical white sundresses, a pair of white-framed sunglasses that won’t be getting much use in Dunbarrow. A white cardigan, white gloves, a white silk scarf. White jeans, both skinny and straight. White T-shirts, six of them, still wrapped in plastic. White bras, white underwear. Some packs of spearmint gum.
“Who is this person?” Elza asks in despair. “Who has a suitcase like this? She can’t be human.”
Ash is somehow even more of a mystery than before. I don’t know what we expected to find, but this wasn’t it.
“No occult books?” Elza asks. “No jewelry? Like, a potential sigil or something?”
“Nothing,” I say.
“She’s going to know we went through this,” Elza says. “I can’t fold it all up again.”
“I didn’t think we were worried about that,” I say. I put my hands inside the Converse, first the left and then the right, but there’s nothing hidden in them. I cast my eyes around Holiday’s room, but I can’t see anything else that might belong to Ash.
“She could be anyone,” Elza says to herself. “Ashley Smith could literally be anyone. Do we know she’s even American?”
“It’s an impressive accent if it’s fake.”
“I can’t believe this.” She sighs.
“What did you think we’d find? A little notebook titled My Plan to Kill Luke and Elza — Please Don’t Read?”
“Don’t be such a jerk,” Elza snaps, waving one of Ash’s bras around to emphasize her point. “You came up with precisely nothing —”
“What are you doing?”
We both freeze and turn sharply to look at the door, the picture of guilt.
A boy is leaning against the doorframe. He’s wearing tracksuit bottoms and a football shirt. He looks about twelve years old. I realize it’s Holiday’s brother. I remember her talking about him, what seems like a thousand years ago. How she was worried he’d started smoking.
“We’re friends of Holiday’s,” I say.
“Never seen you before,” he says.
“We just came by to get a DVD?” Elza says, letting Ash’s bra fall to the ground.
“Which one?” he asks.
“Er . . .” I grab the nearest case from Holiday’s shelf. “This one. It’s mine.”
Holiday’s brother sniggers.
I’m holding a Best of Hannah Montana DVD. Why does Holiday even have this?
“Lame,” he says. Then, “What are you doing with Ash’s stuff?”
“We thought the DVD might be in there,” Elza says. “But it wasn’t.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“We’re going to leave now,” I say firmly.
We walk toward Holiday’s brother, and for a moment I think he’s going to block the way and start shouting for his mum or something, but he lets us pass by.
“Are you friends with Ash?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “Do you like her?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t think so.”
“She’s a lovely girl,” Elza says heavily. “Once you get to know her.”
I tuck Holiday’s DVD into my jacket and we leave, saying a hurried good-bye to Mrs. Simmon. Once we’re on the street, we start walking faster, looking around us, half expecting Ash to lunge out of the undergrowth at any moment. The sun is low in the sky, and the trees cast long shadows over the road. There aren’t any clouds. It looks like it’ll be a cold night.
I say good-bye to Elza in the center of Dunbarrow, and we head our separate ways. I walk back home, stolen DVD still in my coat. I don’t know what we were thinking. All we’ve done is confirm to Ash that we’re onto her. We don’t know who (or what) she is or what she wants.
About halfway up the hill, I get a call from Holiday’s phone. Who knew she still had my number? I don’t answer.
I eat dinner, play with Ham. But I just can’t get Ash out of my mind. I want to know who she is, what she’s doing. We could be in danger. I have to know. So at eleven o’clock, I decide to try something else.
The way it happens is this: I lie on my bed with the door closed. Sometimes it helps to have the radio playing, but not always. I lie on my bed and I look up at the ceiling. I look at the crack in my ceiling and think about not having a body. I look at the crack, a slender dark flaw running through an expanse of perfect white, and forget I have a body. I listen to my breath, to my blood flowing, to the shrill electrical noise that I’ve come to think of as my nerves singing, and I try to forget I have blood or flesh or bone. I try to hear the silence beyond all these noises.
And when I get it right, become part of that silence, I don’t have a body at all.
I’m floating up near the crack, about a finger’s length away from the plaster skin of the ceiling. I drift, turn over lazily, like I’m floating in warm salt water. Below, on my bed, my body’s eyes are closed. I’m sleeping. Or rather, I’m up here. It’s all a bit complicated.
In October, my Host cut my spirit loose from my body and possessed me, drove my body around instead. I managed to get it back from them, but it was a close thing. I’m doing fine, as far as my body is concerned, no adverse effects, but the moorings feel a bit looser now. It seems that after you’ve left it once, that makes it easier the next time.
The problem with watching people — one of the problems — i
s it’s hard to stay on them all the time. You have to sleep, have to eat, have to piss. Your foot goes dead; you have to lie in the mud; the neighbors call the police because you’ve been hanging around their cul-de-sac for six hours. Without a body, many of these issues disappear. The only people who’ll see me are the ones with second sight, and there aren’t many of them in Dunbarrow. Elza and me are the only ones I know of, although for the moment I’m going to assume Ash can see me as well. It’s not a perfect way to watch her, but if I stay out of her line of sight, I should be fine.
Anyway, I leave my body safely resting on my bed and fly out through the roof into the night sky. There’s a strong wind, silvery clouds rushing past the moon, but without my skin, I don’t feel a chill. Dunbarrow from above is a map of orange street lamps, the conical headlights of cars snaking through dark streets. I fly higher, almost touching the lowest clouds, until the town is just a smear of electric light against the dull shapes of the forests and moors. I float there for a moment, looking down at Dunbarrow, at Brackford to the south and Throgdown in the north; then I dive back down, wishing I could feel the wind in my hair as I fall like a hunting bird toward Wight Hill. You don’t see a lot of ghosts flying, maybe because they don’t accept that they’re dead. They’re missing out, anyway. It’s the best part.
I fly down Holiday’s road and come to a halt almost directly above her house. One problem I hadn’t thought about is the black-eyed woman. Assuming she does work with Ash somehow, I might dive into the house and come face-to-face with her, which is not something I want to risk. I don’t know if Ash herself could hurt me when I’m just a spirit, but that ghost definitely could. If she’s hanging around, this will be much more difficult.
I descend in slowly through the attic, homing in on the room where I can hear music. I drift across the landing and lower my head slowly through the floor. For a moment all I can see is the inside of the landing, a horrible blur of darkness; then my face breaks through the ceiling of the room below, and I’m looking down on them all.