by Ron C. Nieto
“He’s not here, is he?”
The huge black cat thumped its tail. It felt eerily similar to a “finally you get it!” statement. And then, mission accomplished, he licked his paw and started washing his face.
I turned around, took a deep breath, and broke into a run once more. I never stopped to consider that I was following directions given by a cat.
Cutting through some alleys that, in normal circumstances, I’d have gone through great pains to avoid, I managed to reach the sumptuous, rich neighborhood. The muscles in my legs were killing me and my lungs felt like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the air anymore, but I was there.
I collapsed on hands and knees on the driveway to the Nightray’s mansion, heaving great gulps of air and trying to hear something, anything, over the ringing in my ears.
There it is.
Faint, yes, but Keith’s guitar playing was impossible to mistake. I knew him too well.
With effort, I made my way beyond the weed-infested lawn. The front door stood open just a crack. Just enough to make me brave the treacherous steps of the porch. I pushed the door and it gave smoothly, as if it had been waiting for me.
Well, I guess it was waiting for someone all right.
CHAPTER 26
Keith hadn’t gone upstairs, thank God. I didn’t think the stairs would have held his weight if he’d tried. Instead, I found him in an empty room on the main floor. I figured it was right under the study room that we had moved and turned into our decor for Lady Windermere’s Fan. The idea sat sickly in the pit of my stomach, even as the vision of him sent a shiver down my spine.
There was a flashlight planted on the floor, giving the whole scene a surreal tinge. He stood in the middle of the room, the guitar plugged to his red rack, which was in turn, plugged into a set of portable computer-style speakers. The sound wasn’t as loud as it would be with an amp, but it was loud enough for whatever was happening there to happen.
The air was thick with the frantic music, and it flooded me with fear and sorrow and regret as soon as I entered the improvised concert hall. Something beyond the notes nagged at the back of my mind, telling me to turn around and leave this little bit of Hell, to forget that I ever saw it.
I took a step into the room.
“Keith?”
He didn’t answer, didn’t even acknowledge my presence. His head was bent, his eyes closed, and his fingers danced up and down the guitar’s neck with lightning speed. His shoulders hunched over from the tension, and his mouth was set in a rigid line that had nothing to do with the serene look that always shined through when he played his other music. His real music.
“Keith, what are you doing? You have to stop… Listen to me, you have to stop!”
I crossed the room to stand in front of him, to try to get his attention, but he was lost in his melody. It was as if the playing was the only thing that kept him going. I reached out to forcefully stop his hand, as I had done before.
He took a step back, avoiding me.
I barely had time to register that he was aware of my presence before I felt hers.
Keith and I were alone in the abandoned house, but I could feel Beatrice as if she stood right in front of me, right by his side. Her hate pressed in on me from all angles, mixed with a dark sense of glee, so intense that I took a step back before I could check myself.
The song evolved into a new movement, frantic and broken, the darkness that belonged to the ghost creeping in the shape of discordant notes here and there as it slowly conquered the whole song. Keith fell to his knees, depleted.
But he kept playing.
In spite of the sheen of sweat glistening on his skin and the grimace of pain in his lips, his fingers moved as deftly as they ever had and even faster.
Beatrice’s presence grew in intensity, making my hair stand on end and my breath hitch in my throat. I got a gloating feeling from her.
Understanding hit me like a wall of bricks, and I found myself screaming at thin air.
“Bitch! Let him go!”
She wasn’t just enjoying Keith’s torment. She was feeding off him, each note strengthening her soul and draining his.
She saw me connect the dots and laughter appeared in added layers below the frantic notes.
That was about as much as I could put up with.
I shattered.
Fear stopped being a factor as I charged forward. That time, Keith couldn’t dodge me. She screamed bloody murder when I closed my hand over his wrist, but I gritted my teeth and wrenched his hand away from the guitar.
At least, I tried.
Keith was stronger than I gave him credit for. He only faltered for a heartbeat before he resumed playing, playing, playing that cursed song.
And I was powerless to struggle with him, because the moment I touched his skin, fever-hot, clammy and papery thin, I saw her.
She hovered over us, her fine features and rich gown nearly swallowed in a maelstrom of emptiness and malice. Her mouth was still open in an ungodly screech and her hands, fingers curved into bony talons, shook with the desire to tear, to sunder, to destroy.
She hated me, and the violence of her feelings overflowed her writhing form, expanding and eating away at the song.
It wasn’t the petty, childish hate of Lena, but something brutal and murderous. Beatrice didn’t want to make me unhappy. She wanted to rip me to shreds, limb from limb, and to keep me alive while she did it to relish in my pain.
It was because of Keith. His soul—his heart—shone with the radiance of the sun through his music, and she thrived on his talent. He breathed life into her song in a way she’d not felt in a century, and she craved it—his spirit and his heart and his music. But he had given himself recklessly to me, and in doing so had brought my very existence to Beatrice’s attention.
I had kept him from playing, broken him out of her trance, and for that she would kill me if given half a chance.
A sob escaped my throat.
That’s what he had seen. That’s why he came here tonight. To keep her away from me.
Following Keith into her family manor, unprepared and not knowing the first thing about ghosts, I had given her the perfect opening to claim him and take her rage out on me in one fell swoop. Her shadowy body twitched and dove, swirling around us like death itself, and I fell to my knees at Keith’s side.
But she didn’t take the plunge. She howled in anger and didn’t attack.
There was one thing standing between us, and it was the one thing she craved more than my blood: Keith’s soul.
And it was being shredded to pieces in her fury, even as he was freely giving it up.
The truth glared at me from his fluttering pulse at the base of his neck, from his shaky breathing, from the cold of the grave that started to spread through his translucent skin. It screamed at me in his music, the notes from the cursed minuet faster and darker than ever, but tinged with undertones of tenderness that couldn’t possibly belong to Beatrice, with whispers of resignation and love and pleas for forgiveness.
It was a part of the song no one had played yet, I realized as I shut out the blood-curdling form of Beatrice and focused on his face, on his tense features, his pressed lips.
No one had played her song this long before she claimed them, and the delight she found in the fact kept her at bay, the lighter nuances inside her melody of death and despair acting as a shield for me. She writhed in bliss while she absorbed the sound, taking chunk after chunk of Keith’s very essence with every note.
“Don’t leave.” I found the words spilling from my lips of their own accord, my voice cracking with tears I hadn’t realized I was spilling.
Keith struggled to lift his head when he heard my voice. I caught a glimpse of his vibrant blue eyes behind the black and silver strands of his hair. His lips tugged into a smile, so tense that they twisted into a grimace of determination and pain.
I can’t let him go.
Beatrice’s presence flared behind us, furious,
as if she had sensed my determination.
I ignored her as I took Keith’s face in my hands, holding him steady as I bent down to kiss him.
Pain wrecked through me. I hadn’t felt anything remotely like it before. I burned and shivered and drowned and exploded all at once, and the mansion and my awareness of it washed off my brain.
It felt like Beatrice’s clawed hands were strumming the strings that made up my being, and I could only begin to understand the torture Keith was undergoing while he played his own elegy to save my life.
I was being plucked, but he was being torn.
I knew because I was there, with him, being part of him. I could see the minuet as a luminous trail wound through with vile darkness.
Suddenly, I could also see the man who had written it. His name had been Andrew, and he had been the ghost’s first victim. He had unwittingly given her the way to claim countless souls over the years. He had let her take his life with a few simple, soft-spoken words.
If you don’t love me, I’ll die, she had said.
Beatrice had been shrouded in darkness even while she was alive. She had wanted Andrew, his passion and his talent and his heart, just as she wanted Keith now, many decades later. She had manipulated him, played master puppeteer with everyone around him, coaxed him and tempted him. And through every scene, unfolding in front of my eyes as if through silver mist, I saw Andrew escape her traps, fly ever higher, free and unbound as he was meant to be.
Then she had died a tragic death. It had not been a murder, or an accident, or anything unjust that made her stay around for vengeance.
It had been the last plot, hatched to obtain the one thing her money, position, and power had failed to deliver.
If you don’t love me, I’ll die.
And she had. She’d died in a gruesome way, tingeing the water of the lake standing between their manors with the pink and russet shades of her final game.
Andrew, poor Andrew, had been ensnared. The stakes had been too high and his hand not good enough. The guilt had eaten away at his gentle heart, and in the end, he’d given her what she wanted—everything she’d pursued in life, poured into a minuet written for her death.
At first, it had been plagued with the sweetness of youth and the lament that it had gone to waste, and her ghost had watched intently as more and more notes were added, as rage and despair and hope and fear slowly broke the artist’s mind as the song changed, transcended any definition of movements and pieces and music, and became part of Beatrice herself.
The piece was never finished. Andrew’s mind lost, his soul departed not long afterwards. But the damage was done. As Beatrice pursued new whims, those who had her attention would hear it again and again, until they met the same end as its creator.
In some cases, her new victims were weak and shallow and could barely play a few notes before losing their spark. Others were like radiant suns, burning bright and adding whole new bars to her cursed melody before they sputtered and died. Like Keith.
She consumed them all, and there was nothing I could do to stop her.
She’ll have him. He’s already slipped too far from me. She screamed for me to give him up, to let him go because he’s already hers…
But then, suddenly, the piercing pain became bearable.
The vibrating waves of agony still ran up and down my spine, but the edges were duller, something I could think around, feel around.
And I felt Keith’s sharp intake of breath against my lips.
My hand slid from his cheek to his neck and I found his pulse under my fingertips, growing steadier and stronger with each beat.
He kept playing, and the shaky notes were firm and sharp in their eternal crescendo.
She lies.
I could stop her, and that was why she hated me so much. Because he had chosen. He had told me, so many times, in so many words, with so many gestures big and small. Even his being there, on his knees, giving her what she wanted, even that was only another way for him to say it.
He loved me.
He was mine.
And I am not giving him away.
Tilting my head awkwardly, with the guitar still between us and his body still hunched over in exhaustion, I deepened the kiss. I buried my hand in his dyed hair, held on to his shoulder, feeling the shift of muscle as his fingers kept pulling notes from the neck of the guitar. I drew him to me, and I gave back everything I received and more, so much more.
Beatrice howled with fury, but she was outside our world. We kissed, and we were perfect, and she couldn’t harm us because this was what we had chosen, without restraints or reservations.
A note hovered and trembled in the air, fighting a last stand against silence, and then I felt Keith’s hands cupping my face and holding the back of my head and wiping away the tears and telling me “I love you” all over again.
We didn’t feel the need to surface back for air in a very long time, and when we did, resting our brows against one another, she was gone.
CHAPTER 27
Predawn found us walking hand in hand through my deserted street. In some recess of my mind, something said that the neighbors would let out their dogs soon and my parents would get up soon and that everything would be way smoother if no one spotted us, looking haggard like survivors from a shipwreck with stupid smiles glued to our faces.
It sounded suspiciously like the voice of reason.
I told it to jerk off. Everything I really cared for amounted to Keith’s warm hand in mine.
“I want you to come in,” I said when we stopped in my driveway. The words fell from my mouth without asking permission, and he laughed softly, his fingers reaching out to try and fix the mess my hair had become.
It must look hideous after tonight.
“I want to come in,” he said, his tone lingering.
“But it’s not a good idea, right?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “I’ve been worrying my father sick lately. I think that getting up to find me gone in the middle of the night might be a bit too much to put him through.”
I pictured Mr. Brannagh’s anxious face when he had called me the last time, when he had nearly lost his son and had reached out to me like he was grasping for straws. It would be cruel to make him worry, now that everything was solved.
“You’re right,” I sighed.
“What time do you leave for school?”
“What? Ah, a quarter to eight. Why?”
He smirked and leaned in for a quick peck. “Give me half an hour to drop the guitar and leave a note to the old man. I’ll be back for breakfast, if you still want me.”
My heart caught in my throat, but I forced myself to appear nonchalant, arching an eyebrow. “Thirty minutes? That’s way too much.” I squeezed his fingers. “You give me five.”
***
Keith’s window had seen me doing plenty of unseemly stuff. It seemed only fair that it’d witness my first breaking-and-entering ever. It didn’t quite count since the one helping me up was the rightful owner of the room I was climbing into, but the adrenaline of sneaking in left me shaking anyway.
His home had only one story, so when he had left earlier, he’d not needed to worry about creaky doors or being caught in the corridor. He’d only locked his room and slipped out the window. The both of us took the same way in, Keith carefully hauling guitar and backpack before himself and then giving me a hand.
The first rays of the sun were starting to crawl over the horizon and it cast his room in an eerie gray light that made it look much more personal than it had been the last time I’d seen it. He gathered me to his chest when I cleared the windowsill and I let him cradle me against his slight frame.
“You weren’t born a burglar,” he whispered in my ear after a moment of contented silence.
I might have whacked his arm for breaking the moment or might have said something incredibly cheesy in turn. Instead, a loud meow interrupted me, and I managed to only jerk a little at the sudden noise.
; Sparrow sat there, against our calves, and stared up with iridescent green eyes. I could have sworn that he was smiling.
“Hey, buddy,” I said, and the cat started to purr in satisfaction.
Keith shook his head. “My girl’s in my room, and she’s not scared of my cat. This must be what Heaven feels like.”
I did whack his arm then, but he only laughed at my indignant face.
“You’re going to wake your father!” I shushed.
“He’s going to be up in a few anyway,” he sighed. “I’d better get started on breakfast, make this look natural.” He gestured vaguely between us and unlocked the door, heading to the kitchen and calling back, “Instant cappuccino okay with you?”
“It’s not mocha, but it’ll have to do.” I grinned back. Before following him, though, I knelt down and scratched Sparrow’s ears on impulse.
“Thanks,” I told the cat. Then, with a wink, I headed down the corridor just as the alarm clock went off in Mr. Brannagh’s room.
When he found us, presumably following the smell of coffee and pancakes, he blinked bemused eyes at me, as if I might have been a figment of his imagination.
“Hey, Dad.” Keith smiled from the stove. “Alice came for breakfast.”
“Hi, Mr. Brannagh.” I waved and hoped he’d believe it.
“Hi, Alice. You’re quite an early riser, aren’t you?” he replied with a genuine smile.
I allowed myself to relax and went on. “Keith and I had a history project that’s been giving us some trouble, so I came over to talk about it before class.”
It was the truth, or at least, as much of it as we could afford to tell. I was done with lying.
“Keith, you hadn’t told me you were doing anything together.”
He shrugged, looking sheepish as he brought the plate over. “Yeah, well, it wasn’t that important when compared to the play.”
And with that, the questioning was over and we settled over breakfast. It was unnerving how easily I fell in with their routine.
Later on, it was even more unnerving to see how natural it was for me to enter the school building openly holding Keith’s hand, sharing our private smiles beneath the eyes of the crowd. Even though they all had heard about us, we still took them by surprise. Their gawking gazes followed us all the way to our lockers, and our steps were preceded by silence and followed by buzzing whispers.