“I’m sorry,” I whispered, wondering if that was why he’d come back. Maybe he wanted May to know something. “What was he like?”
May sniffed back her tears as she picked up the rolling pin. She was attempting to teach me how to make pie crust. Baking wasn’t one of my strong suits, but with a tree full of apples growing ripe in the side yard, it just seemed wrong to let them go to waste.
“He was a good man,” she finally said. “He was the son every mother dreams of having. Strong, handsome, good hearted, loved animals. He never had a date because all the girls wanted to just be friends. They’d cry on his shoulder about the men who treated them badly, then go right back for more abuse.”
She shook her head. “I’ll never understand,” she added, then stopped abruptly, looking at me. “I’m sorry …”
I stared at the pie crust as she gently flipped it over the rolling pin, then spread it over the deep pie dish. How could I explain? I’d been explaining for months to people … and making excuses for years to myself.
“Sometimes … you believe what you’re told. That nobody else will ever want you. That you’re worthless. You believe it because you grow up hearing it over and over. Jason was a god in my eyes. He acted—he told me—he was doing me a favor by loving me. None of my mother’s string of boyfriends were role models, and I was so shy that nobody else ever asked me out. How could I avoid falling for a man who I thought could actually love me? Who promised to love me forever?”
I busied myself with the teakettle, then gave up and looked at her bleakly. “It ended the day after our honeymoon. And I was so embarrassed, I could never tell anyone just how bad our marriage was.”
May laid a gentle hand on my arm. “I know, child. I know. I understand.”
“Not all of us are strong,” I whispered, dropping several tea bags in the chintz pot. “Not all of us know how to be strong.”
After that, May came over a lot. She taught me how to bake. She strolled with me through the gardens and showed me which were weeds and which would blossom into flowers come spring. And always, always in the background, Galen hovered at the edge of my vision.
At night, I talked to him. Sometimes he showed himself, others not, but I always knew he was there. I’d tell him about my day while I folded laundry or brought out my paints or thumbed through the newspaper. And meanwhile, I did research on ghosts to find out just what I was dealing with.
But for all my research, I still couldn’t figure out what Galen wanted. He wouldn’t talk to me—I didn’t even know if he could—and he never ventured outside. If he wanted to resolve some lingering issue with his mother, he would have been falling all over himself to appear when she came over. All the books did was to confirm that some ghosts were benign, others weren’t, and that some might just be memories trapped in a space-time continuum.
But as the weeks wore on, I did know one thing for certain: I enjoyed his company. Galen was the perfect roommate—undemanding, quiet, and there every night. And he really listened to me—even though I didn’t know if he could actually hear me.
Eventually, I began to feel more than just friendship … enough to start undressing in front of the antique mirror where he appeared in my bedroom. On a morbid note, it occurred to me that I was probably standing right where he had when he’d died, but I pushed the thought away. And when he stared at me as I let my clothes drop to the ground, I made it worth the look.
HE HAD HER, and he knew he had her. Jason had been right—she was pliable. And before long, he’d have his freedom. The house had held him chained for years. But he always knew there was one way out. He didn’t dare show himself to his mother—she might offer herself and that would never do. He’d never be able to live with the guilt. But this girl … this woman … she would make it possible for him to slip out from behind the mirror. To walk into the light.
He had to win her trust, had to convince her that he was safe. And so he listened to her, night and day, and no one was the wiser.
Except for the cat.
Circe planted herself on Laurel’s lap or on the floor between them whenever he showed up. Whatever the case, he wasn’t afraid. There was no way she could expose him, even though she could see right through his smiles.
Gradually, Laurel began to let down her guard. Galen found himself mesmerized by the sight of her as she stood naked, caressing herself through the dark sultry nights. Autumn wore on and instead of growing more excited about his impending release, he began to dread the turn of the days.
Each night, he hesitated a little bit more. The sound of her voice, static-ridden though it might be, filled him with the urge to smile. Galen began to live for the evenings when they could spend time together.
At the end of each day, they bid each other good night with hands pressed against the glass, touching through the veils. And Galen began to question his plan, because there was something in Laurel’s eyes that gave him pause, that made him think that maybe she really could love him. And no woman had ever fallen for him before.
HALLOWEEN.
I stood by the window, watching the sun slowly lower itself below the treeline. The season was turning, autumn had arrived. May was due over tomorrow, we were going huckleberry picking and she was going to teach me how to make jam. As I took a deep breath, a tangy chill settled into my lungs, and I felt incredibly sad. The smell of wood smoke and crackling leaves reminded me of some lurking sorrow. Just what it was—I didn’t know, but whatever it was, it hovered in the shadows.
I turned back to the bed. Circe was sitting there, staring at me with her brilliant green eyes. She let out a little chirp and I sat beside her, scratching her under the chin. Her eyes were closed—cat bliss—and I let out a long sigh, looking over at the mirror.
Galen was late tonight. He usually appeared an hour or so before I went to sleep and we spent the time together, quietly pressing hands through the mirror or I would read to him, wondering if he could hear me. Right now, I was reading to him from Tennyson and was set to read The Lady of Shalott next.
Circe suddenly hissed, her hackles rising as she stared at the mirror, poised for a fight. I slowly stood, wondering whether Galen was coming. Even though I knew she didn’t like him, she’d never acted like this before.
I slowly approached the mirror, and there he was, standing, his hand against the glass. He looked upset, and I leaned closer, bringing my hand up to the cool glass.
“Is something wrong?” I stared into his eyes, my hand against his. “What’s wrong?”
He stared at me, his gaze fastened on mine, as the clock chimed the hour. At the first stroke of midnight, the mirror began to melt as his hand closed over mine. Startled, I screamed, as Circe leaped into my other arm.
The looking glass vanished and I became Alice.
GALEN SHOOK HIS head, dazed. Had it really happened? Was he free from the mirror? Could he move on, out of the house, to whatever afterlife waited for him? And then memory hit. He let out sharp gasp.
No … no … please no. Don’t let it be true. His heart spoke before his mind and he turned toward the mirror, dreading what he knew he would see.
There, behind the glass, pounding against it, stood Laurel, Circe at her feet. Her body and the cat’s lay in front of the mirror, near him, both seizing.
I’m free suddenly became mingled with I just killed the best thing that ever happened to me.
Galen shook his head. “No … no … please …” It came out a whimper, lost in the silence of All Hallow’s night. It came out a scream from the back of his throat.
“Laurel! Laurel!” He tried to pound on the mirror but here he was spirit, unable to touch the glass except … except for one way. “Please, tell me I didn’t do this to you …”
And then he stopped. The clock was chiming the final strokes of midnight. He slammed his hand against the pane and motioned for Laurel to do the same. A look of terror in her eyes, she obeyed. As their hands met, he could feel her fingers sliding through the glass. Be
hind her, he caught a glimpse of Jason, watching them, seething.
“You can’t have her!” With all his strength, Galen yanked Laurel by the wrist and she tumbled out, back into her body, Circe following suit. And just as quickly, he was swept into the mirror, his spirit captured once more.
The clock fell silent. Midnight was over. The veils between the worlds had closed for another year and he was still trapped, but this time, it was his choice. He’d made the decision that his own captor chose not to make.
Galen turned as his cousin came up behind him. There would be no forgiveness. Jason had been whispering in his ear too long. Galen let out a single laugh and as the mists swirled, he grappled Jason, who slipped out of his grasp and faded from sight.
“You didn’t win,” Galen whispered. “You won’t ever win, because I’ll always watch out for her. As long as she lives in this house, I’ll be there to watch over her!”
I WOKE UP on the floor, aching and feeling bruised. What the hell had happened? As I rubbed my head, vague images drifted through my mind. Touching the glass, feeling Galen’s delight as he traded places with me …
But if that was true … then what was I doing sitting on the floor? Circe was sitting next to me, nosing me with her sandpaper tongue. I scratched her between the ears.
“Hey, baby, what happened? Did I pass out?” Maybe I was more tired than I thought.
She stared at me, unblinking, then walked over to the mirror. As she reached up to scratch it, she yowled. Startled, I fell forward, knocking the mirror to the floor. The glass broke into shards, and I leaped away to avoid getting cut. Circe raced off, her tail high in the air.
“It’s okay, baby. It’s okay—it’s just an old mirror.” But as I looked for the dustpan and broom, an odd feeling settled in my stomach. I looked back at the mirror. The nerves were gone.
I walked into the bedroom and swept up the glass. For a moment, I thought I saw Galen’s image in the broken shards, but then it vanished. Once my floor was free from glass slivers and the broken frame, I headed into the bathroom to brush my teeth. As I looked into the mirror, a mist formed on the other side and there he was. My beloved. I pressed my hand against the glass.
“Galen,” I whispered. “I wish there was a way we could touch.”
He gazed back sadly, and pressed his hand against the glass on the other side.
M. L. N. Hanover
New writer M. L. N. Hanover is the author of Unclean Spirits and Darker Angels, the first and second in the Black Sun’s Daughter sequence. An International Horror Guild Award winner, Hanover lives in the American Southwest.
In the hard-edged story that follows, Hanover shows us that not only can obsession persist through a lifetime, but it can perhaps sometimes last a little longer than that …
Hurt Me
There weren’t many three-bedroom houses that a single woman could afford. 1532 Lachmont Drive was an exception. Built in the 1930s from masonry block, it sat in the middle of a line of houses that had once been very similar to it. Decades of use and modification had added character: basement added in the 1950s, called “finished” only because the floor was concrete rather than dirt; garage tacked on to the north side that pressed its outer wall almost to the property line; artificial pond in the backyard that had held nothing but silt since the 1980s. The air smelled close and musty, the kitchen vent cover banged in the wind, and the air force base three miles to the north meant occasional jet noise loud enough to shake the earth. But the floors were hardwood, the windows recently replaced, and the interiors a uniform white that made the most of the hazy autumn light.
The Realtor watched the woman—Corrie Morales was her name—nervously. He didn’t like the way she homed in on the house’s subtle defects. Yes, there had been some water damage in the bathroom once. Yes, the plaster in the master bedroom was cracking, just a little. The washer/dryer in the basement seemed to please her, though. And the bathtub was an old iron claw-footed number, the enamel barely chipped, and she smiled as soon as she saw it.
She wasn’t the sort of client he usually aimed for. He was better with new families, either just-marrieds or first-kid types. With them, he could talk about building a life and how the house had room to grow in. A sewing room for the woman, an office for the man, though God knew these days it seemed to go the other direction as often as not. New families would come in, live for a few years, and trade up. Or traffic from the base—military people with enough money to build up equity and flip the house when they got reassigned rather than lose money by paying rent. He had a different set of patter for those, but he could work with them. New families and military folks. Let the other Realtors sell the big mansions in the foothills. Maybe he didn’t make as much on each sale, but there were places in his territory he’d sold three or four times in the last ten years.
This woman, though, was hard to read: in her late thirties and seeing the place by herself; no wedding ring. Her face had been pretty once, not too long ago. Might still be, if she wore her hair a little longer or pulled it back in a ponytail. Maybe she was a lesbian. Not that it mattered to him, as long as her money spent.
“It’s a good, solid house,” he said, nodding as a trick to make her nod along with him.
“It is,” she said. “The price seems low.”
“Motivated seller,” he said with a wink.
“By what?” She opened and closed the kitchen cabinets.
“Excuse me?”
“Motivated by what?” she said.
“Well, you know how it is,” he said, grinning. “Kids grow up, move on. Families change. A place maybe fits in one part of your life, and then you move on.”
She smiled as if he’d said something funny.
“I don’t know how it is, actually,” she said. “The seller moved out because she got tired of the place?”
The Realtor shrugged expansively, his mental gears whirring. The question felt like a trap. He wondered how much the woman had heard about the house. He couldn’t afford to get caught in an outright lie.
“Well, they were young,” he said. “Just got hitched, and they had all these ideas and plans. I don’t like selling to newlyweds. Especially young ones. Too young to know what they’re getting into. Better to go rent a few places, move around. Find out what you like, what you don’t like.”
“Bought it and didn’t like it?”
“Didn’t know quite what they were getting into,” he said.
The sudden weariness around the woman’s eyes was like a tell at a poker table. The Realtor felt himself relax. Divorced, this one. Maybe more than once. Alone now, and getting older. Maybe she was looking for someplace cheap, or maybe it was just the allure of new beginnings. That he was wrong in almost every detail didn’t keep him from playing that hand.
“My wife was just the same, God rest her,” he said. “When we were kids, she’d hop into any old project like she was killing snakes. Got in over her head. Hell, she probably wouldn’t have said yes to me if she’d thought it through. You get older, you know better. Don’t get in so many messes. They were good kids, just no judgment.”
She walked across the living room. It looked big, empty like this. Add a couch, a couple chairs, a coffee table, and it would get cramped fast. But right now, the woman walked across it like it was a field. Like she was that twenty-year-old girl with her new husband outside getting the baggage or off to work on the base. Like the world hadn’t cut her down a couple times.
He could smell the sale. He could taste it.
“Lot of rentals in the neighborhood,” she said, looking out the front window. He knew from her voice that her heart wasn’t in the dickering. “Hard to build up much of a community when you’re getting new neighbors all the time.”
“You see that with anything near the base,” he said, like they were talking about the weather. “People don’t have the money for a down payment. Or some just prefer renting.”
“I can’t rent anymore.”
“No?
”
“I smoke,” she said.
“That’s a problem these days. Unless you’ve got your own house, of course.”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The Realtor had to fight himself not to grin. Here we go.
“Wrap it up,” she said. “I’ll take it.”
MR. AND MRS. Kleinfeld had lived at 1530 Lachmont Drive for eight years, making them the longest-standing residents of the block. To them, the U-Haul that pulled up on Sunday morning was almost unremarkable. They ate their toast and jam, listened to the preacher on the radio, and watched the new neighbor start unloading boxes. She wore a pair of old blue jeans, a dark T-shirt with the logo of a long-canceled television show across the front, and a pale green bandana. When the breakfast was over, Mrs. Kleinfeld turned off the radio and cleaned the plates while Mr. Kleinfeld ambled out to the front yard.
“ ’Morning,” he said as the new woman stepped down from the back of the truck, a box of underpacked drinking glasses jingling in her hand.
“Hi,” she said with a grin.
“Moving day,” Mr. Kleinfeld said.
“It is,” she said.
“You need a hand with any of that?”
“I think I’m good. Thanks, though. If it turns out I do …?”
“Me and the missus are here all day,” he said. “Come over anytime. And welcome to the neighborhood.”
“Thanks.”
He nodded amiably and went back inside. Mrs. Kleinfeld was sitting at the computer, entering the week’s expenses. A trapped housefly was beating itself to death against the window, angry buzzing interrupted by hard taps.
“It’s happening again,” Mrs. Kleinfeld said.
“It is.”
IT TOOK HER the better part of the day to put together the basics. Just assembling the new bed had taken over an hour and left her wrist sore. The refrigerator wouldn’t be delivered until the next day. The back bedroom, now a staging area, was thigh-deep in packed one-thing-and-another. There was no phone service except her cell. The electricity wasn’t in her name yet. But by nightfall, there were clothes in the closet, towels in the bathroom, and her old leather couch in the living room by the television. She needed to take the U-Haul back, but it could wait for morning.
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