by Trisha Telep
It was a good story, but it wasn’t murder, and it wasn’t what made Jo go sprinting to the girl’s room with a wave of panicked nausea.
The picture of Nicholas Day was a picture of the boy on the stairs.
Jo guessed Ani was right. She had a ghost story. Even if she didn’t want it.
4. October
Jo and Ani used to tell ghost stories, when they were ten or eleven, mash-ups of stories told to them by Ani’s older siblings to make the girls leave the grown-ups alone, the weird kid superstitions that get passed around, and slasher movies they’d watched on cable when Mel thought they were asleep.
Their favorite was the Hookman—largely because it gave Jo a chance to recite, dramatically, “And there ... on the handle ... was a HOOK!” while their friends shrieked and hid in their sleeping bags.
Plus, it started with older kids making out, something Jo and Ani were deeply committed to researching.
The Hookman had been a real person, an escaped lunatic or, if Jo was telling the story, escaped serial killer who’d lost his hand to a combine harvester. That detail always got an “Ewwww.”
Nicholas Day wasn’t that kind of ghost. He was real. A ghost who’d showed himself to her, and talked to her, and left Jo with baggy blue crescents under her eyes from the dreams he sent swirling through her mind like luminescent fish on a current.
The trees around Ash House were all leafless, and she could see it clearly from the road. Spiny, black, skeletal porch rails like fingers trying to hold a bundle of sticks together.
In Jo’s new bag was a candle, a Ouija board, and a couple of the pumpkin cookies she’d baked with Ani, before Ani went to New York to spend Halloween with Deirdre. They were going to dress as two of the seven Greek muses, and walk in the Greenwich Village parade. Unsurprisingly, Deirdre was Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy.
Hallow’s Eve was the day when the space between the living and the dead was smallest. Ani’s grandmother had told them that. The dead stood at arm’s length, just out of reach, unless you had the tools. Ani’s grandmother always had the best stories.
Jo considered, before she opened the red door, that maybe she didn’t want to talk to Nicholas Day.
But she had to. Had to see him. Had to make sure it was real, and that she wasn’t just crazy or totally sleep deprived in that unfun, Fight Club way.
She brushed aside the dead leaves on the foyer floor, and knelt. The tile was cold through her jeans, and she zipped her coat up to her chin.
One of Ani’s lighters had found its way into her bag, and she snapped it against the candle. It wasn’t anything special, just a scented pillar she’d lifted from her mother’s room. The candle guttered in the wind, and then the door slammed shut, gusts howling around the outside of Ash House.
Jo put the Ouija board on the floor in front of her, and the little plastic shoe-shaped thing on the board.
This wouldn’t work, she thought.
This couldn’t work.
If it were this easy, people would be talking to ghosts every day.
Still, she breathed in, the cold musty air of the closed-up house, and spoke. “Nicholas Day.”
The candle flickered and went out, smoke fleeing into the draft, twisting back on itself in the sliver of moon that came through the pink and green window.
“Shit!” Jo flicked the lighter once, twice, three times before she got a flame, and her shaking fingers knocked over the candle as she tried to light it.
It rolled away, and when it stopped it lay before a pair of black, pointed men’s shoes.
“ Yes? ” Nicholas Day said to her. “ What is it? ”
In the moonlight, he was nearly whole. Hair darker than black feathers swept back from a narrow forehead. Dark, straight brows topped dark, piercing eyes. A sharp chin tilted down at Jo, where she crouched, lighter cupped in her hands. She couldn’t have moved, not for anything in the world.
Nicholas Day put his hands in his pockets. Watching him move wasn’t like watching a person move. He flowed, from one point to the next, like ink suspended in water.
“ I saw you before. In the summertime, when the roses were blooming. ”
“Yeah,” Jo said. Her voice was no bigger than a breath. Her throat felt curiously itchy, as if seeing the ghost had compressed everything in her body, sight and breath, down into a single point. All she could see was Nicholas Day, the young face above the serious black old-fashioned suit. “That was me.”
“ Why did you come here? ” he asked.
Jo swallowed hard, over the lump in her throat. “It was a dare. Then, I wanted to see if I was crazy.”
“ You don’t seem mad to me,” Nicholas said. He crouched, on the same level as her. “ What’s your name? ”
“Jo,” she whispered. “Jo Ryan.”
“ Jo. ” Nicholas made a face, those stone white features rearranging themselves like living clay. “ Is that for Joanna or Josephine? ”
The lighter burned her hand, and Jo dropped it. The darkness wasn’t absolute, just creeping around the edges of the room. Nicholas was the brightest thing in it. “It’s Josephine,” she said.
“ Then I shall call you Josephine,” Nicholas said. He stretched out a hand, sleeve pulling back to show a white cuff precise as a paper fold, a cufflink of black stone bordered in silver, and twin scars on his wrist, running the long way.
“Can I ... touch you?” Jo asked. This close, she could feel the cold coming off him. Not like the air outside, but a deep, glacial cold that breathed and drifted across her skin.
“ If you wish,” Nicholas said. “ If you believe I’m real. ”
Jo lifted her fingers, stopped before they met the tips of his. “But you’re not real. Are you?”
“ I’m real,” Nicholas said, and his flesh met hers. It felt like plunging her hand into ice, and velvet, and pins and needles. It didn’t feel like skin.
“ See, real,” Nicholas told her. “ Simply dead. ”
5. November
At the top of Ash House, there sat a cupola with just enough room for one girl and one ghost to share the space, along with half a dozen doves and drifting falls of cobwebs.
Below was snow, patchy, showing the dark ground beneath near the river. Jo blew on her fingers through her gloves, tapping them together to keep warm.
“I died in these clothes,” Nicholas said. “I wish I could change them. You’re so bright. Girls nowadays wear so many colors.”
Jo had come every day for a week. Slowly, Nicholas had showed her Ash House. She went through the red door, and she stayed until it was almost too dark to find her way back down the drive and across the bridge. She would have stayed longer if she could.
Nicholas was more solid now. She had a theory it had to do with her really seeing him, all the details of his face and his thin, elegant hands that drifted through the cobwebs hanging from the eaves, brothers in white, spidery and insubstantial.
The question came out before she had time to think about it. “How did you die?”
Nicholas smiled sadly. He didn’t look like anyone who’d be alive now, in the twenty-first century. He looked like something from an old movie or a faded portrait come to life. His eyes were even more striking in daylight, obsidian holes that saw everything and let nothing escape. “My love drowned in the river. It was after the new year. The ice was melting, and the current was swollen.”
He drew back the sleeve of his jacket, and then his shirt. “I used a razor. I couldn’t bear life without her.”
His voice, too, was no longer a powdery, echoey thing that bounced off the ceiling of the rooms below and scared the hell out of Jo when it whispered over her shoulder.
“That’s awful,” she said. Nicholas reached out, and a cold spot blossomed on her cheek.
“I’ve been alone for a long time. It wasn’t the escape I hoped it would be.”
“Are you like... stuck here?” Jo gestured around. “In Ash House? Or can you fly off anywhere you please?” It would be ni
ce, she thought. No grades, no mother, no sleepless nights. No Ani asking her to read the latest text from Deirdre and analyze what it meant and no Drew sneering at her from across the parking lot where he sat on the hood of his stupid Nova.
“I’m bound to the place I died,” Nicholas said. “I think most of us are. The dead. I can only leave if...” He coughed, and looked away, to where an eighteen-wheeler rumbled past on Route 7.
“If what?” Jo said.
“It’s only a theory, you understand,” Nicholas said. “But if I were to have a living ... well, an escort. Someone who desired me to come home with them. I think I could go then. I could haunt a person and not a place.”
Haunt. Such an ugly word. A tombstone word. Jo shifted. Her feet were numb, and the rest of her was starting to freeze. The sun was an orange halo below the horizon.
“I have to go,” she said. “My mother has been getting on my ass about homework. And I have rehearsal tonight with the band. We’re playing in Lee at the end of the month. A real all-ages show. It’s a big deal.” For Ani, anyway. Lately, her bass felt like a rock in her fist, and her fingers could barely pluck the strings.
“Josephine.” Nicholas touched her again, closing his marble-ice fingers around her wrist. “Don’t go.”
“I should,” Jo sighed. “I’ll come by tomorrow, though. It’s Friday. I can stay later.” She could just lie to Ani, and her mother. She’d rather listen to Nicholas anyway. How many people had a person to tell them firsthand about life in 1902?
“Then let me give you a parting gift,” Nicholas said. He closed the space between them and pressed his lips against Jo’s. It was like kissing velvet and swallowing snowflakes caught on the tongue and it was her pulse throbbing in her ears and a million other things, until her lip pricked and she pulled away, feeling the crack and tasting the droplet of her own blood on her tongue. Her lips had gone chapped and numb.
Nicholas backed away. “I so wish it wasn’t this way, Josephine. For the first time in a really long time.”
“Me too,” Jo whispered. The sun was gone now, the sky silver as the tinge on Nicholas’s skin. She slipped through the trap door without saying anything else and started home. She crossed the bridge, listening to the water rush along under and over the cracks in the ice. River ice was rippled, in the shape of waves and current, and staring down in the twilight Jo could almost imagine a hundred faces staring back at her from under the ice. The burbling water turned to voices, the wind in the bare trees to screams.
She didn’t know why, but she was gripping the rail and leaning over, staring back at those frozen, open-mouthed ice women in the river. Trying to make out the voice that whispered, Black water, cold water, come on in.
A murder of crows landed in the snow-heavy wild rosebushes on the bank, seemingly impervious to the thorns, and started cawing. Their cries blended with the wind and the water, and Jo felt her foot press against the rickety rungs of the bridge rail.
Black water, the voice soothed. Cold water, down deep below the current.
Jo wanted to stop, already felt like she was drowning as her lungs sucked in great gulps of frigid New England air. But she couldn’t move, in any direction but forward. Over the rail. The weight of her body could crack the ice. She’d go below it. Down into the black water.
A tunnel of light swept over her, and the sound of a snarling eight-cylinder engine cut out all others. “Jo?” Drew got out of the car and jogged toward her. “Jo!”
His hand on the back of her jacket was big and solid, and he yanked her off the rail. “What the hell are you doing all the way out here?” Drew panted. Jo looked back at the ice and the river.
The light was gone. The faces were only ice floes.
On the bank, the crows took flight, disappearing into the last vestiges of the sun.
“Come on,” Drew said, hand firmly on her back, guiding her. “I’m gonna drive you home.”
His car was warm, so warm that Jo’s hands and cheeks stung at the change. She huddled against the passenger door. She wanted to go back to Ash House, climb to the cupola, listen to Nicholas tell her stories until she could erase that horrible voice from her mind.
Crackly old rock blared at her instead, a cigarette-voiced singer and glassy, plinking guitar. I put a spell on you. Because you’re mine.
“You’re a weird chick,” Drew said. “Don’t take that the wrong way. I always figured your friend Ani for the freak, but you take it to another level.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Jo mumbled at him. Drew leaned over, in that businesslike way he did everything, and laid the back of his hand against her cheek. He smelled like cheap smokes and engine grease. Jo felt bile rise in her throat.
“Jesus,” Drew said. “You’re freezing.” He looked at the road, depressed the Nova’s lighter, lit a cigarette from a pack he’d shoved between the windshield and the dash, looked back at Jo. “Were you gonna off yourself?”
That pulled her out of her thoughts a little. “What?” Jo said.
“You were on the bridge,” Drew said. “This time of year, you’d be out in about thirty seconds in that water. Just sink right down. Like a stone. You gonna kill yourself, Jo?”
“Don’t be dramatic,” Jo sighed. “I thought I saw something under the ice.”
“Yeah?” Drew glanced at her, back at the tunnel before them that the Nova’s headlights cut along the wilderness at the edges of the road. “Like what?”
Jo leaned her head against the window. She could almost fall asleep with the radio and the close smell of Drew’s cigarette and the gentle vibration of the Nova beneath her. If it wasn’t for the dreams waiting for her when she did.
“Nothing you need to know about,” she said, and didn’t speak again until Drew dumped her at the foot of her driveway and unceremoniously peeled out again into the night, taillights winking out like small candles in a vast, black sky.
6. December
On Christmas Eve, Jo had the worst dream yet. Ani was on break visiting Deirdre, Drew had moved his work on his idiotmobile into the garage for the winter, and Jo had spent most of break at Ash House. She’d hidden a stash of granola bars, candles, and a Mylar running blanket in the kitchen, high up in a cabinet where animals couldn’t get at it.
Not that many animals came to Ash House. Nick said they didn’t like being around the dead. Jo had taken to looking up tidbits on microfiche at the library, or searching on Wikipedia, for things for them to talk about. Phonographs rather than radios, the elaborate yards-long dresses the girls wore, how Ash House had the first electric light in Coffin Hollow—anywhere in western Massachusetts, really, except the county seat.
When Nick wasn’t covering her hands, her neck, her arms, and every inch of skin she could stand to be exposed in slow, velvety kisses, that is.
He couldn’t be there enough to manage a try at her clothes, but he touched her hair, and he whispered poetry. He’d taken her down to the music room, where an ancient piano stood. It clanked like a carnival when Jo played it, but for Nick it was always in tune. He played what he said was Brahms and Beethoven and other slow, sad pieces, his sure fingers flowing up and down the ivory.
Nick was well-read, as young men of his generation were supposed to be. He knew Yeats, Blake, all of the old magical, apocalyptic poetry that Jo could imagine scribbled on sheets of vellum, strewn across a room lit by gaslight.