After Always

by Barbara J. Hancock

  I wasn’t alone.

  I hadn’t been since I’d brought my hollow self to Stonebridge.

  …

  Later, Michael told me he’d followed the sound of the violin. He’d traced the haunting sound from far below in the music room where Mrs. B. had asked him to prep the repaired ceiling for the plasterers.

  …

  I played.

  In the pitch-black room, I brought the bow across the strings.

  Always before, I’d played by the light of a lamp. Now, there was only the moon through the casement window and the faint sliver of light beneath the door.

  I played, anyway, though I was terrified of the dark and what was in it.

  Not Tristan.

  Never him.

  He was long gone, after all.

  I played because I had no choice, the compulsion had me like a puppet by the strings, a puppet who cried and shivered and shook, a puppet who cringed away from the sound of hoarse breathing in the dark.

  “Yesssss,” a dry voice croaked from the shadows. “Yesssss.”

  My chattering teeth and fear-taut lips allowed frightened moans to escape and still my hands played on.

  A solid shape disengaged itself from amorphous gloom to move slowly across the moonlight glimmering through the glass.

  Horrible and familiar.

  It couldn’t be the scent of moldy fabric and stale salty sea rising around me. It couldn’t be a cold wet coat brushing the back of my pajama-clad legs.

  “No,” I moaned through lips soggy with tears.

  “I told you it was too late for that,” the dry voice whisked.

  This time too close, horribly close to my ear.

  Bony, moist fingers grasped my arms and pushed me forward. I jerked, unable to resist. The latch on the casement window clicked and the glass swung inward. Cool night air rushed into the dusty, closed-up room. I gagged when the breeze stirred the mold-polluted atmosphere.

  Then, to my horror, dry whispery lips pressed to the back of my neck against the wings of my butterfly tattoo.

  “N-n…no,” I said again, gibbering near hysteria.

  I didn’t know what held me and kissed me, but I knew who.

  “There were ancient island tribesmen that used tattoos to bind their lovers to them. Were you bound to your love, Lydia? For eternity?”

  As he spoke, his cracked lips brushed and tickled over my blue butterfly, and I recognized the touch I’d felt before. His kiss again and again. Marking me. Claiming me. Almost since the day I’d arrived.

  Not Tristan.

  Never Tristan.

  I’d been fooled by my grief. Tricked by my guilt. Trying to make myself desire what would never be. Tristan hadn’t cheated death’s grasp. And I hadn’t wanted forever with him. Not in any way, supernatural or otherwise.

  Now, I was in death’s grasp myself. Bone brushed against my skin where his hands held my arms. I smelled the mold from his hundred-year-old clothes and the decay of his impossible breath.

  “I failed to claim Abigail when you came to Stonebridge as a child. Her emptiness was tragic, but it was a transient thing, healed by time and her living daughter’s precious laughter. But you came again—with no laughter. So very hollow. So ready to be claimed.” His lips skittered across my skin.

  I remembered.

  I remembered it wasn’t just the endless playing of Chopin. There had been tears. I remembered my confusion. I had been working diligently on a big sister coloring book. One full of pictures showing a little girl the things she could expect from a new baby in the house—telling stories, singing songs, helping feed and clothe and rock baby to sleep.

  That coloring book had disappeared. It had been replaced with one full of ponies. Then, tears and Chopin and my father arriving to take us—not to the hospital to have a new baby—but home to the life of an only child in a quiet house with only soft music and mathematics for company.

  We’d never talked about the baby my mother must have miscarried during our visit to Stonebridge when I was three. We were a studious, silent family. I’d repressed the frightening memories. I’d learned to live with the idea of being alone…until Tristan came into my calm existence with electrifying fury and magic.

  We’d met at a magnet school for musically gifted students.

  He’d brought excitement into my life—and fear and pain, too. There had been nothing subdued or repressed about Tristan. He’d been the opposite of everything I’d known. I’d felt released until I’d ended up more trapped in silence, more afraid to speak. I was supposed to be “gifted.” Too smart to make such a serious mistake in judgment. I’d compromised my health, my safety, and my sense of self, and no matter how smart I’d been I hadn’t been smart enough to know how to come back from that.

  “You both kept me out all those years ago, but not this time. This time you begged me to come to you. Your pain made me stronger every day. You wanted me to use you to live.”

  “I called for Tristan, not for you,” I said. “But I’m not calling anymore.”

  Now, his push had propelled me onto the narrow widow’s walk where I’d played so many nights before. I still played, unable to stop, while he pushed and spoke and I cried.

  It was the music that saved me as it had saved my mother before.

  A crash sounded on the door that had shut me in the attic nook. And then another and another.

  “Lydia?” a familiar voice called, one so far removed from ghosts and ghouls that the hands holding me fell away.

  I propelled myself back from the ledge and back into the dark attic. Was my tormentor still in the shadows? Did he crouch waiting to pounce, or had I seen the flash of a twisted figure fling itself over the railing and disappear in a skittering crawl down the roof?

  The door burst open and Michael fell inside. His strong shoulder held down where he had used it to force against the stubborn swollen wood. He found me alone with bloody fingers and black mold on my arms and neck. The scent of decay only just faded away.

  It was only then that I recognized the song I’d been playing.

  Not “The Butterfly Lovers’ Concerto.”

  Chopin.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Can I go forward when my heart is here?”

  (Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 1)

  Michael picked me up like a child. I tried to remind myself about wildflowers and graves, but I was too shaken and his arms were too strong. I wasn’t supposed to trust him. But I did. He’d walked away from Jericho’s influence at the cliff. He’d come to help me now. Edges happen. With some people, you don’t have to fear them. I let him hold me. I let him carry me down the spiraling staircase then across shadowed hallways to the stairway to my room. I’d known he was muscled, but feeling those muscles cradling me close gave me a whole new appreciation for their worth.

  He didn’t set me down until we’d reached my tower room.

  And then it was a slow reluctant slide down his lean body as if he’d rather not let me go.

  The lamps weren’t lit. We stood in nothing but moonlight. The window bothered me. I feared movement. I feared a gruesome face. I could only see the vague outline of Michael’s face. Hard to imagine a time when I’d thought he might be plain. He wasn’t a beautiful man, but there was beauty in the wind-kissed angles of his cheek and jaw and in the softness of his lips. For a long time, I’d seen the almost-hidden beauty in his sculpted features and his amber eyes.

  “How did you get locked in the attic?” he asked.

  I backed away from him to turn on the nearest lamp. I had been so buffeted lately. I trusted Michael, but did I trust myself? Even my “soul mate” had deserted me when he’d hurt me. Even before his death, I’d known our forever wasn’t meant to be, but I hadn’t pushed back against his emotional demands. I hadn’t ended our relationship when I should have.

  “Strange things happen in this house, and it isn’t faulty wiring or mice. But it isn’t a ghost that carries wildflowers to Octavia’s painting. Gho
sts don’t leave footprints in dust,” I said.

  Michael stepped toward me. The light finally hit his eyes, turning them to warmed amber.

  “I’ve put flowers on her grave for years. My mother asked me to. She remembers the stories from when she was a girl. But I’ve never seen her painting. Mrs. Brighton told me it was somewhere in the house,” he said.

  So when he’d mentioned the painting it hadn’t been because he was obsessed by it.

  “There’s a mound of dead flowers in the room where her portrait hangs,” I said. I imagined the dead thing I’d encountered in the attic skulking through the halls of Stonebridge to “visit” his wife.

  Michael reached out a calloused hand to touch my face. I flinched. Not because I was afraid of him, but because I was afraid of the tenderness in his eyes.

  “I’ve got your back, Li. We’ll figure this out. We’ll fix it,” he said.

  Not…we’ll run away to join the stars in the sky.

  Not…we’ll get matching tattoos to freak out our parents and mask our doubts.

  Not Romeo and Juliet or Zhu and Shanbo.

  Just Lydia and Michael.

  With his hand on my face, ordinary didn’t feel ordinary at all.

  He dropped his hand down to my hand and twined his fingers with mine. He tugged me forward, back into his arms, and I went, blinded by stars.

  He didn’t quote poetry.

  He didn’t play violin.

  But his taste and touch and the heat of his trembling body rivaled music and Shakespeare.

  …

  The next morning I ran up the stairs before I had a chance to doubt my nerve. I found the deserted hallway where I’d heard the baby cry as I’d left it, but not nearly as randomly found as I’d first thought. I’d been physically sweeping, but it had been the fog of time and repression I’d been trying to dust away.

  This had been where my mother and I had lived that summer. The hush of expectation had been my own expectation of what we’d planned and prepared for that had never been.

  I opened my bedroom door first, finally remembering the fitful sleeps I’d had there while my mother cried or played piano or wandered the halls of Stonebridge.

  Her bedroom was next door. I looked at it as well, remembered that she hadn’t slept in it at all.

  I left the doors open. I even pulled off some of the gray sheets in an impetuous rush of revelation that ended in swirling clouds of dust in the pale morning light. I rushed through the particle-filled air to the nursery.

  Mrs. Brighton had prepared it in case the baby had arrived during our visit. But instead of a birth, we’d experienced a horrible loss instead. She’d locked the door after my mother’s miscarriage, but my mother had insisted on seeing it.

  I’d been frightened. Terribly frightened. My calm, quiet mother had sobbed on the floor. When she’d slept at all, it had been here, near the empty bassinet. Of course, it hadn’t been old enough to belong to Octavia Jericho. I’d been so afraid to recall my mother’s pain I hadn’t seen the more modern design of the furniture in the room.

  Mrs. Brighton had assured my father that she was caring for us and that we were fine. My mother even managed to be herself on the phone, a falsely calm self that erupted into Chopin and sobs when the call was over.

  I’d been three.

  Only three.

  But when I’d finally been given the phone to speak to my father, I’d put all of my confusion and terror into three simple words.

  “Come get me.”

  And he had.

  He had come.

  He had ignored the reassurances of Mrs. Brighton and my mother. I could only imagine, now, that they’d been under Jericho’s influence.

  Your mother rallied once she was home.

  I’m sure she had.

  But first had come the almost impossible task of prying her from Stonebridge. No wonder I’d repressed the memories. My father had had to physically drag her away. She’d wept hysterically at the empty bassinet, clinging and screaming.

  How much of that had been Octavia, too? Grieving for the baby she’d lost. Influencing and magnifying my mother’s pain until it was impossible to know where one stopped and the other began. Just as she’d shared her feelings for Jericho with me, mirroring and magnifying what I’d felt for Tristan.

  “Come get me.”

  I couldn’t call my parents back here. The danger was too great. Besides, I couldn’t run away again. I couldn’t leave Michael and Mrs. Brighton to fight Jericho and Octavia alone. Their passionately tragic tale would never come to an end on its own. They would continue to feed on others—the weak, the grieving.

  A baby’s cry echoed softly in the room. It wasn’t localized. It didn’t come from the empty bassinet. It seemed to float on the dust in the air. My God, had my mother heard that cry? She hadn’t wanted to leave. She’d come close to losing her mind. Octavia’s spirit wasn’t corrupt or evil like her husband’s, but it wasn’t harmless, either. It was made of grief and pain.

  I backed away from the baby bed. Octavia had asked if we heard her baby’s cry. Her baby had never lived, but in death, it cried. Forever.

  It was a cry for help, and it was one I intended to answer.

  …

  That night, we formulated our plans against soft cotton pillows. I showed Michael the book. I showed him the text about cleansing. I showed him Hannah’s notes. Fire. Saltwater. Bones. Blood.

  He held me whenever the shaking came back. His strong, warm arms only gave. He didn’t ask for anything in return. His touch told me it was okay to be afraid of monsters, and it was also okay to expect to be safe with him. I could brace myself for the coming battle while completely relaxing in Michael’s embrace.

  I trusted him, and it was precious because it was a completely new level of comfort. Our easy intimacy was warmer than anything I’d experienced before. He must have sensed how comfortable I was with him because after a while when the shaking hadn’t returned he reached to close the book. I didn’t argue. I let him take the book from my hands. I trembled then for better reasons. My breathing grew shallow and light and my heartbeat sounded in my ears.

  “I’m not sure how this will all turn out, but I’m positive I’ll be disappointed if I don’t kiss you right now while the house is quiet and there are no monsters between us,” Michael said.

  He was propped on one elbow beside me, but he didn’t lean down to press his lips to mine. As usual, he watched and waited for my reaction. I reached up to brush his wavy hair back from his face. My fingers shook, but not from fear. I was a little overwhelmed by how much I wanted the kiss he offered. What I felt for Michael was so much brighter than what I’d felt for Tristan. It had taken me a while to understand that bright could be consuming, too. Michael’s warmth wasn’t only an antidote to Tristan’s darkness. It was appealing all by itself.

  “I would be disappointed, too,” I confessed. I brought my other hand up and cupped his face between my palms. He smiled and I nudged him down to my eager lips, and I tasted his sunshine one last time before we tried to defeat Jericho.

  …

  It was horrible to walk through the midnight house even with Michael by my side. I remembered the stench of black mold and decay. I recalled the skittering of dry fingers on my flesh.

  I didn’t look in the west landing mirror when we passed it. I couldn’t. I was afraid I would see the two of us, dead, our skin hanging off our bones in shredded, blackened strips. I averted my eyes. I looked down at our clasped hands, whole and clean. I concentrated on Michael’s warmth and the strength of our fingers gripping each other.

  Octavia’s room was as I’d left it. So forgotten, so tragic. The silk continued its slow decay. Moths chewed quietly on the rugs and curtains. Billowing strands of cobweb danced when we opened the door.

  Michael and I walked the worn path through the dust to the painting on the wall. She hadn’t been completely forgotten. The monster who had used her life to fuel his still “honored” her memory
.

  It was very dark. I’d managed to find an old metal flashlight earlier that worked in spite of its obvious age. The weight of it in my hand felt solid, but its beam wavered, betraying my nerves. When Michael reached up to pull the portrait from the wall, his shadow lurched on the plaster ceiling above our heads.

  As old and deteriorated as the painting seemed to be, it wouldn’t tear from its frame. Michael was prepared, of course. He pulled out his multi-tool and flicked it with several deft twists until its knife was deployed.

  Michael sliced all around the edges of Octavia’s portrait. When he’d traced the entire painting, he flicked the tool back into its folded form and put it in his back pocket. Then, we caught the canvas as it fell into our arms.

  Finally, poor Octavia was rolled and resting. We carried her down to an empty guestroom that was kept in working order. There we lit a small fire to cremate Octavia’s remains. Yes. They were only paint and canvas, blood and ash, but leaving her hanging in that dusty room for eternity was wrong. I thought again of the unopened package from Tristan. Was it wrong to keep a memorial to something that had never been?

  My whole body was stiff in expectation. Michael continually glanced at the door behind us. The noise when it came was so soft and low it barely competed with the crackle of the fire devouring rotten canvas. It wasn’t Chopin. It was a wordless lullaby crooned rather than sung and the rhythmic creak, creak, creak of a cradle or chair. Octavia had never actually rocked her baby to sleep. But I almost imagined that was what she did now as the last of their mortal remains turned to smoke and floated to the ceiling. When the last bit of the painting curled and smoked away, the house was silent.

  Waiting.

  Watching.

  “Now for Jericho,” Michael said.

  I cringed, wishing he hadn’t said the name.

  …

  Jericho’s portrait was more of a challenge. We skirted the patched spot in the ceiling as if the ghost of the chandelier could still fall on our heads as we approached the massive frame. This time, he looked much less like Tristan to me. The expression was more shrewd. The mouth more cruel. The eyes an unnatural shade of green. The painting was much more garish than I remembered. Maybe it was what we’d learned about the blood or maybe it had been dark imagination that had caused it to appear the way it had appeared to me. I saw his cruel hands biting into Octavia’s vulnerable shoulders. How had I ever overlooked those fingers digging into her pale flesh?