Ghost in the Canteen (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 1)

by Rasmussen, Jen

  I felt a sense of security growing around me, of sanctuary and well-being. “That’s Dickens, isn’t it?” I asked.

  Tom ducked his head and nodded. “I used to repeat that line all the time. During the war.” He shrugged. “It felt almost like casting a spell to me then. Guess that’s why I thought of it now.”

  Gemma nodded at him, then turned to me expectantly.

  “I... did you want me to do something?” I asked. “But this isn’t my plot.”

  “No, but you’ve been made welcome here. You can make it a sanctuary for yourself. Add your will to Tom’s.”

  I looked up at the house, then back at them, then closed my eyes. When I was a little girl, I never felt so safe as I did during an autumn storm, snuggled up in my bed, knowing that nothing outside could get in. Other kids—not to mention our dog—were afraid of thunderstorms, but I loved them for that feeling of being under siege in a completely safe place. I imagined Tom’s house with a storm raging outside, all hell breaking loose, and me inside—us inside—beside a fire, watching as the rain and hail battered the window, but could not come in.

  Tom had his Dickens; I had my Brontë. Only one quote came to me, unwarranted and inappropriate. But it felt strong enough to work, and I supposed that was all that mattered. I walked a few feet away, until I was out of earshot. “I am strangely glad to get back again to you: and wherever you are is my home—my only home,” I whispered. And there you have it, proof that Charlotte Brontë is magic: I instantly felt exactly the way I did on those stormy nights as a kid. In some small way, Tom’s house had just become my home, too.

  Gemma and Tom must have felt it, the way I had when Tom recited his bit, because they both smiled at me when I walked back. Tom squeezed my shoulder.

  Then it was Gemma’s turn. She didn’t recite or sing or do a shamanistic dance or boil eye of newt in a cauldron. She didn’t do anything but stare at the house and take a few deep breaths. But by the time her blank face took on its more characteristic cheerful expression again, I felt like I was standing inside a force field. It wasn’t just a sense of security this time. It was security itself. Security so tangible, I thought if I strayed too far, I might bang my knee right up against it.

  We went inside. “I’m starving,” I said.

  “Only because you think you are,” said Tom.

  “Haven’t we talked about this? I—” I stopped short in Tom’s front hall and stared at myself in the ornate mirror that hung there. “Tom...” My pale, tired, physical face. “We talked about whether someone could kill me if my spirit side gave in to my physical side, but we didn’t think about whether I could kill them instead. Suppose I get good enough at this whole will thing to give in to my physical side on purpose?”

  Behind me in the mirror, Tom’s face lit with understanding. “Then you become more like the knife than like me.”

  Our reflections’ eyes met, and I smiled. “Then maybe I become exactly like the knife.”

  “You’re talking about using yourself as a weapon?” Gemma asked.

  I nodded. “Do you think it’s possible?”

  “I don’t have any experience with live people here, but it might be,” Gemma said.

  Tom gestured for us to follow him into the parlor. “But becoming fully physical would also make you vulnerable,” he said. “You might work like a weapon, but weapons might also work on you.”

  “It might be worth it,” I said.

  “Or it might not.” Tom poured himself a drink. “Can you kill a person with your bare hands?”

  “I took a kickboxing class once. Don’t I get a drink?”

  Tom raised his brows. “I’ve never known a woman to be interested in rye.”

  “You need to get out more.”

  He smiled at that. “You think so?”

  Gemma wrinkled her nose at our drinks and sat at the piano, absently playing, until we finished them. But as we went into the dining room she crooked her arm around my elbow. “Tell me about kickboxing. The phrase sounds intriguing.” I explained the basics to her, and she squealed with delight. “You must teach me this.”

  I nodded, but I was too distracted by the food to say more. The long table was set for three on one end, and the sideboard loaded up with roasted potatoes, buttered peas, whole mushrooms in wine sauce, a delicious smelling bread, gravy, cranberry relish, and a roast beef that could have fed thirty as comfortably as three. I stared at Tom.

  He took off his hat and shrugged. “You said you were hungry.”

  We filled our plates and sat, and Tom passed around a bottle of wine. As I watched Gemma delicately cut her beef with a silver knife, I started feeling a little self-conscious. My jeans and t-shirt were stained in places and generally a rumpled mess. I could only imagine what my hair looked like. And however long I’d been in the netherworld, I was sure it was longer than I normally went between showers. I certainly didn’t look like I belonged in a formal dining room with Gemma, in the same blue dress she’d been wearing when I met her, or Tom, in his ever-present suit (which despite his having been through the same mud as me, still looked clean and freshly pressed).

  “Are you wearing the same clothes you died in, is that how it works?” I asked.

  “Not exactly.” Tom gestured at his hat, which he’d left on the sideboard. “I doubt that stayed on while I fell down all those stairs. I think we’re just dressed how we remember ourselves.”

  Gemma laughed and took a small sip of wine. “You are, maybe. That’s what you were wearing while you were haunting?”

  “Yes,” said Tom. “You?”

  “I was wearing an old dress with frayed sleeves and a muddy hem.” Gemma scowled. “I changed as soon as I got here and learned how.”

  We talked and laughed and ate for what felt like hours. Gemma was full of hilarious stories about all the times she’d scared her former lover and his son into impotence. I kept my head down during the racier bits, sure I would blush or, worse, giggle like a fifth-grader if I made eye contact with Tom. But when he opened a second bottle of wine, these concerns became less important. Apparently the same principle applied to drinking as anything else: if you expected to get drunk, you did.

  Gemma finished with the tale of the son and his third wife, thirty years his junior, who had affairs with the gardener and the neighbor’s son as soon as she figured out that the air would grow frigid and things—heavy ones—would start flying all over the room any time she tried to have sex with her husband. It hadn’t been all that appealing a prospect in the first place, and certainly not worth risking life and limb for. “She kept a separate bedroom until he died,” Gemma said. “And that was the end of that family.”

  “But what about after that?” I asked.

  The impish joy faded from Gemma’s face. She looked down into her wine glass, then took the last swallow before she answered. “She sold the estate and moved to some tropical island with her attorney. The family who bought it wasn’t related. I had no grudge against them.” She twisted her napkin between her fingers. “But when you’ve gone so many years being angry, when you’ve got so much to be angry about...” She shrugged.

  “You haunted them anyway,” I said.

  “Not the same way. I left them to their business in the bedroom. Mostly. But I hated them. They had a little daughter. I was carrying a child when I died, I mentioned that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I couldn’t stand it. The happy family. Everything I should have had and didn’t get, all because he...” Gemma sighed. “Well, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how ghosts can be. I didn’t hurt anybody, at least not in any way they couldn’t recover from. But I... sometimes I came close. Sometimes I couldn’t stop myself.” She glanced at Tom. “I deserved to be banished. It was the right thing to do.”

  “Well I didn’t.” Tom refilled his own glass, then hers, then topped off mine. “I wasn’t hurting anyone.”

  I avoided his eyes and said to Gemma, “Maybe you did deserve to be banished. Probabl
y you did. But I’m not sure the person who has the canteen gets to make that judgment. What gives me the right to force people to move on?”

  “What gave me the right to refuse to?” Gemma returned. She gave Tom a fond smile. “Thomas doesn’t like it here, so he’s made you feel guilty. And I don’t doubt you made a mistake with him. But most of the people here deserve to be.”

  “For your information, I said almost that exact thing to Lydia not long ago,” Tom said. “I’m not on a crusade to get everyone out.”

  “Just yourself,” Gemma said.

  “You could come too, if you like.”

  She laughed. “I’ve told you. I can’t imagine a single reason to leave here.”

  Tom sighed. “And I can’t imagine a single reason to stay.”

  “I second that,” I said, and raised my glass. I expected him to scowl at me, now that the conversation had turned to his being trapped, but he smiled and clinked his own glass against mine.

  That night, I was woken by a whisper in the dark. It was Gemma. Her white nightgown made her look like the ghost she was.

  I sat up, about to ask her what time it was, but that seemed too complicated a question. “Something wrong?”

  She picked up the extra blanket from the foot of the bed and wrapped it around her shoulders as she sat next to me. “Listen.”

  “I don’t hear—” I cut off my whisper, because I did hear something, but so faintly I wasn’t sure it was real. I held my breath and kept still. There it was again, and that time I was sure. It was the wailing cry of a small child.

  Normally when you hear that sound it tugs at you, and you want to find and comfort the poor thing making it. Especially if you’re a mom. But not this time. All I wanted to do was pull the covers over my head and hide. My heart raced, and all that beef and wine turned in my stomach. While on the surface it wasn’t any different than any other kid crying, sniffling in great gasps, crying back out more and more hoarsely, this sound had an undercurrent of malice and death. This sound was wrong.

  “Roderick.”

  Gemma nodded.

  My feet and hands were suddenly cold, and I moved a little closer to Gemma, who did the same. I glanced over at her pale face; I could just make out her wide eyes. She was scared too, and that made it even worse. I wouldn’t have thought Gemma capable of fear.

  “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here,” I whispered.

  Wind whistled outside, drowning out Roderick Turner’s cries, and then thunder growled and crashed. Lightning lit up the pale blue bedspread, the candle on the table, Gemma’s white feet poking out of the blanket, and then we were plunged into darkness again.

  Something started tapping on the window.

  “Please tell me that’s a branch,” I said. “Or at least a raven coming to tell me I’ll never see Lenore again.”

  Gemma didn’t laugh or tease me or ask who Lenore was. She only shook her head. This was bad.

  Something, or someone, began pounding on the front door. I let out a squeal before I could stop myself and shrank back against the headboard, shamelessly grabbing Gemma’s hand.

  The bedroom door swung open. I screamed outright then.

  “Are you all right in here?”

  “Fucksake, Tom, you almost gave me a heart attack.”

  Tom was carrying an old-fashioned oil lamp. His hair was standing up, like he’d been running his hands through it, but he was still wearing his suit. (Does he sleep in it? Not a good time to consider this.) He came around the far side of the bed to look out the window. Rain was lashing against the glass like claws trying to break it. Thunder boomed again, then Roderick’s cry came, deafeningly loud, this time more like the call of a predator than a human sound. Tom jumped back from the window and set the lamp down on the bedside table. I moved over to give him room. He didn’t stretch out beside me like Gemma, only sat on the edge, still watching the window.

  “Did you see anything out there?” I asked.

  Tom shook his head. “What do we do?”

  The banging on the door started up again. “We don’t go near the front door, for starters,” I said.

  “We ride out the storm,” Gemma said simply. And after that, there wasn’t much else to say.

  It should have been Tom’s weather, and he tried to take back control of it, but he couldn’t. None of us could do anything but sit and listen and concentrate, hands clasped, on the boundaries we’d put around the house. I was shaking, and eventually I stopped trying to hide it. An autumn storm. That had been my safe feeling, when I put my boundary up. Now the storm was here, and I wasn’t anywhere near sure that it couldn’t come in after all. Well get sure, Lydia, I scolded myself. That’s the whole point.

  The storm, the banging, the crying, the tapping. It went on and on. At one point we heard breaking glass somewhere, downstairs I thought. Nobody got up to investigate.

  But eventually, it ended. The sun started to rise, a sign that Tom was once again the master of his plot. As the light grew and the noise stopped, we all looked at each other, huddled together in our tight knot, and laughed the way you do when you’ve just had a close call and laughing is the only option besides having a breakdown.

  We congratulated one another. Our boundaries had held.

  But none of us said out loud what I’m sure we were all thinking: for how long?

  I came down for breakfast a few hours later, feeling guilty as well as scared. How could I have spent an evening relaxing at Tom’s table, eating and laughing, while Charlie and Warren were back at home worried sick?

  Not Warren, I reminded myself. He won’t be worried. Charlie will have made up a reason for me to be gone. And they are home. Safe at home. A few days without you will be an inconvenience for Charlie, that’s all. It won’t actually hurt Warren. The memory of Roderick’s cries, the banging on the front door, turned over in my stomach along with the tea and toast Tom gave us. The only one who isn’t safe right now is you. So think about them, sure, but don’t let it distract you from doing what you need to do to get out of here.

  Easier said than done, but I did my best. Tom spent most of that next day cleaning up the mess Helen and Roderick had left behind, including restoring the blank pit to its proper state, which turned out to be a fish pond. He walked us around it afterward, and I agreed that it was beautiful, but I didn’t mention that if I came too close to the green-tinged water, I could still smell sulfur. Of course, that might have just been my imagination, but in this place that was irrelevant. I hoped he wasn’t going to serve carp at dinner.

  While he was working on his plot, Gemma was working with me, trying to teach me to start a fire with nothing but will to fuel it. By lunch I’d given up in frustration, and spent the afternoon learning the incantation backwards instead, while Gemma wandered the plot, reinforcing the boundaries. We regrouped in the parlor before dinner, where once again Gemma played the piano while Tom and I drank rye (straight for him, mixed with soda water for me—I wished I had switchel).

  On our way into the dining room I heard the thud of Garm jumping off his chair upstairs. I looked at the staircase, half expecting to see him on the landing, the perpetual canine question written in his wagging tail and big doggy smile: Are we eating something now?

  Garm wasn’t there of course, but I was suddenly struck by the simplicity of that staircase. Not particularly steep, its curve elegant and smooth, not sharp. Looking at it, I finally put it all together, Tom’s story, his apparent vices. “Tom,” I said. He came to stand beside me. “You’re a pretty graceful guy when you’re not flying.”

  He followed my gaze and, it seemed, my train of thought along with it. “Everyone slips sometimes.”

  “They do,” I agreed. “And sometimes it doesn’t take another person to push them.”

  He looked down at me, but he wasn’t frowning. His face was expressionless while he waited for me to finish.

  “You were drunk when you fell, weren’t you?”

  His eyes slid away from m
ine. He bent his head to rub the back of his neck. “It was difficult. When I got back.”

  I nodded, although he wasn’t looking at me to see it. Too many drinks, a fall. A scene most people have played out harmlessly at one time or another. But he loses everything, and with only himself to blame. No wonder he couldn’t accept it. I gestured at the rye in his hand, his second. “But you still drink.”

  Tom laughed at that. He was always laughing at things he didn’t actually find funny. “Well it can hardly hurt me anymore, can it?” He took a healthy swallow. “Surely you wouldn’t deny me the one perk of my situation.” He walked into the dining room without waiting for an answer, which was too bad. Because before he turned away he looked a little ashamed, and also annoyed, like he was just waiting for me to start lecturing. But I would have told him that no, I wouldn’t deny him that at all.

  He’d made us another feast, chicken this time. No fish.

  “What’s your plan from here, then?” Gemma asked once we’d all served ourselves and sat down.

  Tom looked at me. I started talking, stopped, swallowed my mouthful of potatoes. Then I said, “Well, to do the ritual we need three things: the incantation, our remnants, and the ability to set ourselves on fire without dying. I think I’ve got the incantation pretty much down.”

  “Already?” Tom asked.

  “I’ve always been good at that stuff. But I’m definitely nowhere near ready to play with fire yet. So I need to focus on that.”

  “And I’ve got to find my watch,” Tom said.

  “I’ll help.” Gemma took another slice of bread.

  I passed her the butter. “Which one of us?”

  “Both.”

  So there it was, a plan. Sort of. It lacked the specifics of how the hell we were going to manage all that, but still. At least we had goals.