“Really, full confidence? You just called me an idiot less than a minute ago.”
“Yes, but you’re the only candidate I’ve got, so we might as well be optimistic. Figure out how to get home and when you go, take me with you. It’s as simple as that.”
“It is not that simple at all. Even if I did find a way out, I couldn’t take you back there. I was hired to stop you from haunting that house.”
He looked disgusted by that. “So give her her money back.”
“It’s not about the money!” And for that I got the raised-eyebrow-of-yeah-right.
“It’s like I told you the day I banished you,” I said. “I can understand why you’re mad, but this isn’t good for anyone.”
Tom gestured around at what still looked like a whole lot of nothing, just on less misty and less muddy ground. “And this is better?”
“Haven’t you gotten back at your brother’s family for long enough? He’s long gone, you know.”
It was impossible to tell whether the sound Tom made was another laugh, or a cough, or a sigh of exasperation. Maybe it was all three. “Mad about what? Get back at him for what?”
Well if he wasn’t clear on that point, I didn’t know how I was supposed to be. “The way I heard it, for killing you and stealing your fiancée.”
“He didn’t kill me.”
“Who did then? The fiancée?”
“Flora was tiny. She couldn’t have pushed Garm down those stairs.”
“Garm’s the Newfie, right? Why would anyone push a wooden dog down the stairs?”
“The wooden one was named after the real one, and nobody pushed anybody down the stairs.”
“Are you telling me you actually fell?”
Tom nodded. “Sometimes things are as they seem. I tripped, I fell, I died.”
“But then what were you mad about?”
“Who says I was mad?”
“Everyone. You scared Katie and her cousins. And several potential buyers. And a couple of real estate agents. You scared everyone.”
Tom shrugged. “Ghosts scare people, I suppose.”
“Yeah, but their stories start before you were a ghost. They said—”
“I know what they said,” he snapped. “What would you say if your father was accused of murdering his own brother?”
Before I could answer, he kept talking as if I had argued the point. “Fine, you’re right. I’ll concede that I was broody after the war.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and slowed his pace a little. “As we all were who were there, as anyone would have been. But I never laid a hand on Flora or anyone else.”
“Okay. But if it was just an accident and nobody was getting violent with anybody, why were you haunting the house?”
“Maisie.”
“Your niece?”
“My daughter.”
“But...” Maybe I really wasn’t that smart, to have taken that long to get it, but it finally clicked. “Ooooh. So Flora? Before you died?”
“I’d just gotten back.” Tom’s neck actually flushed red. “We were happy to see each other.”
“And then you died, and 1919 was not a good time for single girls to be pregnant. So your brother stepped up and married her, and claimed the baby as his own.”
“He loved Flora. Always did, even when she was engaged to me. He thought I didn’t know. But it was hard on him.” Tom sighed and waved one hand in a what-do-you-expect kind of way. “His brother dies, making him the sole heir to a sizable family fortune, and then he marries that brother’s fiancée less than a month later? The rumors were inevitable. But he never flinched. Even when he knew what people were saying about him, he chose to protect Flora’s reputation over his own.”
“And over yours.”
“Mine wasn’t important anymore, was it?”
“Maybe not for everyone. But it was important for Maisie.” Some scrubby bushes were dotting the landscape now, thorny and tangled and dark. There was a warm, thick breeze, not exactly refreshing, but still welcome after the stagnant air we’d come out of.
Tom took his hat off again and fidgeted with it as he spoke. “I was married before, did you know that?”
“No.” Katie had been pretty vague on the details of his life, no doubt because she didn’t know them herself. But I was surprised he was discussing them with me. He didn’t seem like the chatty type, and I was clearly not his favorite. I studied him as surreptitiously as I could. His shoulders were set and his jaw was hard, but his eyes looked almost eager. And then it occurred to me: how long he must have been dying to tell someone, anyone, that Maisie was his.
“My wife died,” he said. “Childbirth. She’d already lost three babies before that.”
I lost four. I knew it all too well, the crushing loss, the despair, the helplessness. But of course I didn’t say that out loud. Miscarriage and infertility weren’t subjects I talked about easily, let alone with strange, tightly wound men who had grudges against me. I only said, “I’m sorry.”
“Yes, as am I. My son died with her.” He looked down at his thumbs, turning the hat round and round, slowly. “And then Maisie was born, but I was dead. I watched her call Clarence Daddy until the day he died.”
I thought of Warren, of how badly I sometimes wished I was his mother for real. Then I added never being able to speak to him, watching him looking right through me while other parents cared for him. Then I multiplied it all by ninety-odd years. I gasped a little, like I really had been punched in the gut. “Torture. How could you put yourself through that?”
“I just wanted to be there. I wanted to watch her grow up.” He glanced at me and gave me a little one-sided smile. “If you want the whole truth, what I really wanted was for her to know who I was.”
“Did she ever see you?”
“Sure. But I was never able to summon a voice. She grew up thinking the worst of me.” His face got hard again, like maybe he’d just remembered who he was talking to. “But now it’s almost her time, and you’d better make sure I’m there when it happens.”
“You think you’ll be able to talk to her when she dies,” I guessed. “Right in that space between this life and the next.”
His neck flushed red again, but he didn’t say anything.
“But Tom, where she is now, it must be ten miles from your house. It’s too far for you to go.”
He picked up his pace again, his strides stiff and his voice harsh. “It’s not really up to you to decide whether I get to try, is it?”
He had a point. One I was not yet ready to examine thoroughly. What gave me the right to do this? How many people like this have I put here, who I didn’t understand, who maybe didn’t deserve it? I pushed those questions away and said, “Okay then. I’ll try to figure out how to get both of us out of here. I’ll do what I can to get you back.”
Tom didn’t thank me, only nodded.
“For starters, how about telling me where we’re going now?” I looked around at the brown grass and weeds, and those scrubby bushes in clumps. “I hope it’s nicer than here.”
“For now we’ll just go to my plot.”
I was still looking ahead. I couldn’t see anything on the horizon. The sky was leaden gray and empty...
“Your plot?”
...in fact there was nothing at all above knee level...
“We all sort of have ter—” Tom was saying.
...which was why it was so strange that something dropped down out of nowhere and wrapped small, cold fingers around my throat.
FIVE
* * *
Whoever or whatever it was, its grip was iron. There was no question even of breathing, much less of screaming. Tom was still walking a little ahead of me, talking, while I flailed my arms and clawed at the cold hands. He kept going maybe half a dozen steps before he realized I wasn’t there anymore and turned around. By then my face and head were hot, as if the choking had trapped all my blood up there. All except my lips, which were inexplicably but intensely cold.
<
br /> Tom closed the distance between us fast, but not before I felt the thing scrambling further up my back. There was cold breath on my face, and then teeth. I whipped my head around to try to shake it off, but it was clamped onto my jaw. I got a glimpse of mottled gray flesh, a tiny dimpled cheek.
A small boy. And I was pretty sure I knew which small boy.
The good news was that the shift in concentration from strangling me to eating my face seemed to have loosened his grip on my neck. I threw back an elbow and knocked him off balance. For one terrible moment he was hanging on only by his teeth, and the revulsion I felt as part of my cheek was torn off was worse than the pain. Then he was gouging and scratching at my back as he fell. And then Tom was there, kicking him away.
My breath felt like nails scraping my throat, and what started as a scream of terror and loathing in equal measure came out as a croak. I could feel warm blood trickling from the chewed-up part of my face, down my neck and into the collar of my t-shirt.
Roderick Turner rolled away and got back on his feet. Or at least, the thing that had once been Roderick Turner. I saw to my horror that his fingers, although still skinny like a toddler’s, had elongated to almost the length of his forearm. I guessed that explained how a boy who had been just three could fit his hands around a grown woman’s neck. There were pointed claws at the ends of his fingers, dark brown and rotted-looking.
He squatted on his haunches and snarled. His teeth were the same shape and color as his nails. But then he hesitated. I hoped it was because he was remembering the last time we’d come face to face, and I’d kicked his ass through (into) the canteen. As it turned out, he was just waiting for reinforcements.
They arrived in the form of a soft, sweet laugh, and then out of nowhere—where were these people coming from, in this empty landscape?—Helen Turner was there, strolling up beside her son.
All the devils are here.
Unlike Roderick, she didn’t seem to have morphed into a monster since being banished. She looked like an angel with her gentle blue eyes and kindly smile. And so she was, by all accounts, when she was alive. Helen Turner was universally loved. There was nobody so ready to tend a sick neighbor, comfort a sad child, take in strays of all kinds.
Then she died, and turned murderous and pitiless and vengeful. Watching your husband carving up your little boy, just before turning his knife on you, will do that to a woman.
She turned her beatific smile on Tom. “So good to see you, Thomas.”
I looked at Tom, who was looking at Helen. His face showed no emotion whatsoever. Lydia, you fucking idiot. The gargoyle was on a shelf in his house. Roderick’s laugh was in his house. You knew he might be leading you into a trap. And you still followed this guy, what, because he has pretty eyes and a nice voice and a well rehearsed sob story? You fucking idiot. “You fucker,” I said. He still didn’t look at me.
Neither did Helen. Without so much as a glance in my direction, she said to Tom, “You’ve done us all a service by finding this person.” She lowered her voice on the word person, as though speaking of something scandalous. “Would you be so kind as to excuse us now? My baby and I have some business with her.” She tilted her head and lowered her eyes slightly, thanking him in advance for what she was sure would be his cooperation.
My stomach clenched the way it does when you know that no matter how much you’d rather be on your couch with a switchel-and-bourbon, a struggle is coming, maybe a life-and-death struggle, so you’d better prepare yourself for it. I stiffened my shoulders and set my bleeding jaw, ready for a blow, whatever direction it might come from, whoever might deliver it.
This reverie of dramatic resolve was interrupted by an unlikely sound: Tom, laughing. “Come on now, Helen. You know better than that.”
Helen laughed politely back. She had the look of a hostess at a dinner party who wanted to get the joke, wanted you to think you were funny. Confused, but fully prepared to find you delightful, if only you’d meet her halfway. “How so?”
“You’re too smart a woman for it to have escaped your notice that she’s more useful alive and well and in possession of all her faculties.”
“Her faculties?” Helen clearly found the word amusing. But I was spared another discussion of how smart I wasn’t, because just then her awful monster of a son lost patience with all the talking, and decided he’d rather chew on human flesh some more instead. He leaped. I braced myself.
And then he was flying—not in a figurative sense, but actually flying—at my head.
The corner of my eye caught something else moving fast. In the next instant Roderick landed, and Tom was between us. His back blocked my view of whatever he did, but he must have done it hard, because Roderick shot away like a cue ball.
Helen had been coming at me, but she changed course when her son spun by her. She flew to Roderick, and Tom seized the opportunity to grab me and start running. I didn’t put up more than a token struggle. What he said to Helen was true: I was indeed more useful to him with my flesh intact instead of in Roderick’s disgusting little belly. So if he wanted to get me out of here, that was fine with me. I could deal with him later.
“They can fly?” I was stuck on this point, maybe because strange as it was, it was small enough for my mind to handle compared to everything else I had going on. “They can fly here?”
“Let’s hope I can too,” Tom said, and before I could even process those words, he scooped me up like a groom taking his bride across the threshold, and jumped into the air.
But Tom was no superhero. There was nothing graceful about his attempt at flight. It was really more like a combination of jumping and running with a dash of hovering. But what it lacked in finesse it made up for in speed. After a minute or so I heard an inhuman cry of frustration. Helen had been tending to Roderick rather than watching which direction we took off in, and by then we’d reached enough cover, first from those scrubby bushes and then from proper trees, to be out of her sight.
In the meanwhile my cheek (not the one that was bleeding, at least) was smashed against Tom’s shoulder while I awkwardly tried to hold on without seeming to hug him. He smelled like vanilla and tobacco, as I knew he would, and I was suddenly embarrassed. It felt wrong to know that. Wrong and kind of sneaky, like I’d read it in a gossip column.
Everything was pretty much a blur while Tom was whisking me along, but when he stopped and set me down, we were surrounded by towering evergreens, and standing on a carpet of their discarded needles. I thought I could even detect some weak sunlight peeking through the forest ceiling.
“Well, this is nicer,” I said.
Tom was bent over, hands on his knees, and breathing too heavily to respond. All that obvious exertion was enough to make a girl feel fat. After a few more seconds of huffing and puffing he said, “We’d better go on foot from here.” He shrugged a little sheepishly. “My flying’s not very good yet.”
“Go where?” I asked. “Won’t she find us?”
“Gemma’s plot. She’ll be looking for us at mine, and Gemma’s better at boundaries than I am anyway.”
“I have no idea what you just said.”
Tom started walking and gestured for me to follow. “For now all you really need to know is that I’m taking you to the safest place I know of, so we can make a plan.”
“Yeah? And how do I know you won’t change your mind again?” I fell in step behind him.
Tom looked over his shoulder and asked, “Change my mind about what?”
“About feeding me to that demon child.”
“Now I have no idea what you just said.”
“Oh come on. You led me straight to them.”
He stopped and scowled at me. “They sensed you. I told you it would happen.”
“What about the gargoyle?” This was met with a completely blank look, so I went on, “The gargoyle in your house. The one you dropped on my head.”
He barked out a laugh as he crossed his arms. “You mean the one that fell on
you because you backed into the shelf and knocked it over? That’s my fault?”
“Why did you have it?”
“I didn’t have it. That was Maisie’s.”
“You didn’t know Roderick killed my brother with a gargoyle?”
Tom didn’t seem to know what to do with that. He opened his mouth, closed it again, uncrossed his arms and put his hands in his pockets. Then he leaned forward slightly and said, “What?”
“Not a real gargoyle, obviously.”
“Lydia, I’m sorry about your brother. But you’ve completely lost me.” He started walking again. The trees were getting farther apart, and the ground was steadily rising.
I moved faster to keep up with him now that there was enough room for us to walk side by side. “Okay fine, what about Roderick laughing?”
“You’ll have to be more specific. I haven’t spent a lot of time with Roderick but in my brief experience he laughs a lot.”
“I heard him laughing. The day I banished you. When the portal opened and you went thr— into the canteen.”
He considered this. “Possible, I suppose. You’ll notice that we three are the only ones to have sensed you yet. That’s because we were there. They spend a lot of time in the swamp.”
“What for?”
“As far as I know, waiting for the canteen to open. To try to get to you.”
“Are you saying they did this somehow? They’ve been trying to pull me in?”
“I have no idea. I had the sense they were just trying to haunt you from here.” He glanced at me. “They’re pretty mad at you.”
“You don’t say.”
The ground was rocky now between tough grass and the occasional patch of wildflowers. Everything was quiet. It occurred to me that the only sign of wildlife since I landed was the insect sound in the swamp, and as far as I knew that hadn’t been accompanied by any actual insects. No birds in the sky, no chatter of squirrels, not even a spider or a beetle in the trees. Well duh, why would any of those things have ghosts? And why would anyone banish them if they did?
Ghost in the Canteen (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 1) Page 6