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

by Rasmussen, Jen

  The terror came after that, and the pain. But mostly the disappointment, the sting of unfairness as intense as only a child can feel it. He’d been so good, and so patient, and the wait for that puppy had been so long.

  I buried my head in Tom’s shoulder and cried. He didn’t hesitate before putting his arms around me. But then Tom was gone, almost knocking me over as he ran off yelling, “Gemma!”

  Gemma and Jeffrey. I tried to remember the last time I’d heard or seen either of them. Too long, I thought. Tom had left his knife on the ground, beside the black spot that a few seconds ago had been Roderick Turner. I grabbed it, then turned and ran after him.

  There was Jeffrey, and a lot of smoke. There was no sign of Gemma. But as we got closer I saw her on the ground beside the fire he’d conjured, pale as death, completely still. He was speaking over her. I ran faster. I didn’t know what incantation that was, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want him to get to the end of it.

  I caught up with Tom and yanked on his elbow to stop him. We were behind Jeffrey and he didn’t seem to have noticed us yet. “Make him stop talking,” I whispered. “Whatever else happens, you’ve got to interrupt the incantation.”

  Tom nodded and I offered him his knife. He considered it for a second, then shook his head. “You take that one and I’ll take the decoy,” he whispered back.

  “What decoy?”

  Tom didn’t answer, but as he moved forward, more carefully this time, I saw a perfect copy of his trench knife in his hand. I hung back. Tom deliberately (I assumed) let his foot fall too hard into a patch of mud, making a squelching sound that would alert Jeffrey to his presence. Without pausing in his incantation, Jeffrey turned and smiled. Tom jumped forward. Jeffrey avoided his stab and grabbed for him. He was still reciting. The two began to struggle.

  I heard Tom yell in pain, but I didn’t react. I just kept creeping toward them, staying out of sight of Jeffrey, waiting for the right moment. Tom pushed Jeffrey and flew above him. Jeffrey laughed (still that stupid nerdy laugh, even in the netherworld), and levitated a few inches off the ground. He was looking up at Tom. A very nice angle for me to come up behind him and stab him between the shoulder blades.

  “Hell won’t be empty for long, you fucker,” I whispered, and did just that.

  He went just like the others, more or less. What I believe is, that the mind of a fiend is beyond our capability to handle. Seeing it drove me to an edge of madness from which I almost couldn’t return. I saw his contempt for humans, which was mostly about our weakness, and his acute envy, which was mostly about our capacity for love. After that I had to look away, bury my head in my arms, and try to shield my mind from the horrors of his. There were dark things there, crawling things, cold things, so cold that no matter how much fire he raised, how many things he burned, Jeffrey could never warm them. I felt my mind cracking, opening, then spilling away.

  When Jeffrey was gone at last, I turned to see Tom on the ground, leaning over Gemma. I don’t know what Jeffrey was doing to her, but somehow he’d turned her back into a ghost, even there in the netherworld. There was no color about her, not even her clothes. I could see the mud of the swamp right through her.

  But she was solid enough to touch. Tom shook her. She didn’t respond. He picked her up and looked around, a bit wildly. We were alone in the swamp. He started walking, and I fell into step beside him.

  “We’ll take her back to her plot,” he said. “She’ll be strongest there.”

  I nodded. Surely we could heal her, here in this place where a will and a way were the same thing. For the first time in maybe ever, I wished Cyrus was there. He might know what to do better than we did. “Do you know what happened to Cyrus?”

  “No,” Tom said. “I saw him dispatch Harvey. He was like a warrior. I couldn’t believe how fast he was moving.”

  “He killed someone else too, while I was busy with Harvey. I didn’t see it but it must have been Drayne’s lackey. The last I saw Cyrus, he was chasing Megan.”

  “Which leaves only him and Megan unaccounted for,” said Tom. “Everyone else is... gone.”

  I wiped again at my mouth and thought of what I’d done to Helen, but I couldn’t hold it. The image glanced off my mind like a stone skipped across water. Good. Some things didn’t bear thinking about.

  I reached out and touched Gemma’s hand. As I’d expected, it was stony and cold. “Do you need help carrying her?”

  Tom shook his head. “It’s like holding air.”

  I kept my eyes on Gemma so as not to meet his and asked, “Why’d you come back?”

  “Well, you had my knife.”

  I managed a very small chuckle. “Fair enough.”

  We tried Gemma’s plot, but whatever Jeffrey had done to her seemed to have shaken her claim to it. The walls of her house were crumbling, all her beautiful things growing blurry at the edges. Her tea set sat on the table in her drawing room, those porcelain cups she loved so much full of cold tea, but they cracked and chipped before our eyes. Beside them was a plate of cookies gone furry with mold. The whole plot seemed stuck in an endless twilight, with still air that was neither hot nor cold, like the swamp.

  We went to Tom’s instead and tended to her in one of his spare beds for two days, during which we tried everything we could think of: food, water, conjured medicines, talking to her, telling her stories, holding her hands, begging her to come back. Nothing worked.

  My mouth never felt clean. I drank endless glasses of rye, conjured toothpaste and mouthwash, but none of it mattered. I tasted Helen’s blood constantly. At night I dreamed of tasting it, and that was worse, because in my dreams I didn’t mind it.

  I went out a few times, while Tom watched over Gemma, to try to find Cyrus. I never found any sign of him. His plot was falling apart, just like Gemma’s was, although given the usual state of his house it was less noticeable. I chanced a trip to Megan’s and found hers doing the same. Her cliff seemed to be breaking off, bit by bit, and tumbling into the sea.

  Gemma woke up on the third day. I thought the Biblical connotations of that would have annoyed Jeffrey, and the thought made me smile. Gemma’s ever-present humor, however, was gone.

  As far as I could tell, she came around on her own; I don’t think we helped her at all. We were both in the room, keeping our usual pointless vigil, when she took in a long, wheezing gasp and sat up. Her color had returned, but her face was flat, her eyes dead.

  “What happened?” she asked. Her voice had changed. It was lower, older.

  “Jeffrey—” Tom began.

  “No!” Gemma shouted. “Never mind.” She coughed and tried to smile, but it looked garish and cold. “Is there food?”

  “There will be by the time we get downstairs,” Tom assured her.

  While we had lunch we made small talk, about her plot, about the food we were eating, about how nice it would be in the netherworld now that some of its most unpleasant residents were gone. Outwardly, you might have thought Gemma was perking up. She said all the right things, responded to questions in all the right ways. But her smile was still wrong, and she never laughed.

  There was something in her eyes that was a little bit mad, like that time she’d gotten angry when I was talking about my family.

  When we were finished Tom said, “Let’s get back to your plot. We’ll help you, and between the three of us we’ll have it back in order in no time.”

  “No,” said Gemma.

  “No what?” Tom asked, but I could see in his eyes that he knew.

  “I’m going alone,” Gemma said, and stood up.

  “Gemma,” Tom began.

  She ignored him and turned to me instead. She gave me a long hug, but her body was stiff. “Goodbye, Lydia.”

  “Gemma,” Tom said again.

  “Walk me to the edge of your plot,” she said.

  I went with them as far as the front door, then gave them some privacy. As I watched them go I wondered if she’d ever recover, or if she’d been ch
anged (spoiled) forever. With the thought came the feeling of blood in my mouth, so real that I started to choke on it.

  Tom came back too short a time later, looking forlorn and worried.

  “What happened?” I asked. “What did she say?”

  “Very little, apart from goodbye.”

  Tom was understandably reluctant to leave the netherworld with Gemma in that state. She told him to go. She said she wanted to be alone. We stayed another day anyway, but she wouldn’t see him again. And I had to get home to my family.

  Finally we agreed it was time. I sat on the floor in the study, beside the statue of Garm, while Tom took one last walk around his plot. I scratched the Newfie’s wooden ruff and thought about how this whole thing had started, with him attacking me.

  “But we’re friends now, aren’t we buddy?” I was answered by the sound of a dog’s tail, thumping against the floor in the hallway.

  I found Tom by his fish pond. The sun was setting, and he had a halo of light around him. It made him look almost like... a ghost.

  “Are you ready?” I asked.

  Without turning, he shook his head. “No.”

  I assumed he was talking about Gemma. “There’s no more you can do for her.”

  “It’s not about her.”

  “Then what is it?”

  He turned to face me then. “I have nothing to go back to now. Maisie’s gone.” I looked away, but he squeezed my hand. “You were right about one thing at least. I was there for my own sake as much as hers.”

  “So what are you saying? Now you want to stay here?” Why did I feel hurt by the idea of his choosing the netherworld? I felt abandoned. Because what? I’d buy Grandma Maisie’s house and me and my ghost would live there happily ever after?

  “I want us to stay here,” Tom said.

  Oh. Well. That was different. I gaped at him. He grabbed my hand. “Before you answer, come with me.” He walked me into the house, into the study, and stopped in front of one of the bookshelves.

  My throat felt like it was closing. When the bookshelf got blurry, I blinked back tears until it came back into focus.

  It was filled entirely with copies of Jane Eyre.

  Tom was watching me closely, nervously. I tried to say something, but only a little gurgle came out. He pulled me closer. “Gemma’s right about this place,” he said. “We can have any kind of life we want here.”

  “It’s a prison.”

  “All worlds are prisons. Was I any more free there than I am here? Were you?”

  I had plenty of wise-ass comments to choose from, but I didn’t get a chance. He put his hands on either side of my face. Oh dear. I should have guessed he’d be a face grabber. He was exactly the type. With the face grabber, it can go one of two ways: romantic and swoon-worthy, or sloppy and repulsive. There is no middle ground. Whatever else that kiss is, it’s not going to be mediocre.

  This one went in the right direction. And finally, I couldn’t taste Helen’s blood at all. In that moment, Tom was Mr. Rochester and Mr. Darcy and Sir Gawain and Robin Hood. In that moment he was perfect.

  But in the next moment I remembered he was dead.

  As if reading my thoughts he whispered, “I don’t have to be dead. Not here.”

  But when it came down to it, that was only a technicality. Dead meant unmoving, dead meant unchanging, and the only difference between here and there was that here, I would be dead too.

  The question was, did I really mind?

  “We could build a life here, where we can both be solid,” he said.

  So there it was: my options for male companionship were my gay brother’s widower, who by the way was cheating on me, and a dead guy. Guinevere thought she had it hard.

  You have no idea how close I came to saying yes. But I’d been motionless and changeless long enough, not living my own life. I’d substituted it for Nat’s, I guess because I thought his was more worthy of being lived out. It was time to have a life of my own. And as pleasant as staying with Tom might be, limbo is not life. We both had some moving on to do, I thought. And I told him so.

  “I can’t stay here, Tom. And neither can you. Much as I’d like to think you’re just head over heels for me and that’s what this is, we both know better.”

  He crossed his arms. “What do you mean?”

  My resolve wavered again, but I made myself say it. “You’re using me as an excuse to stall, just like you were using Maisie.” Now he was scowling, so I hurried on before our last conversation ended in a way I’d always regret. “I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be mean, and I don’t want to fight with you, but you need to face this. You’ve spent the better part of a century afraid of whatever is next.” I shrugged. “It’s time for the whatever.”

  He opened his mouth, no doubt to argue. Then he closed it, no doubt because he couldn’t. Then he nodded.

  Which was when I started to cry. I guess I was kind of hoping he’d talk me out of all that and convince us both that we were in love, and that hiding in the netherworld forever was a great idea.

  But he didn’t, and it was time to go.

  I warned Tom that we’d come back through Brian’s house, where the switchel ring was, hundreds of miles away from the spot he was anchored to. “You’ll probably get pulled back right away, but I’ll have a fifteen hour drive,” I said. “Will I see you when I get back?”

  “I don’t know,” Tom said. “I don’t... I’ll see how it is. When I’m back there.”

  I nodded. I supposed he thought there was no point in drawing out the goodbye. He was right.

  I sent Tom through first, with blood and fire and his trench knife. His pocket watch would be lost to him forever. I hoped maybe Gemma would find it one day, and keep it as a souvenir.

  I was dazed when I came back, as I’d been the first time, but when I got my bearings the first thing I saw was the switchel ring on Brian’s floor, just a few inches away from where I was laying with my face against his soft oriental rug. It looked like it had fallen from the coffee table. There was no sign of Tom.

  But there was a sign of Brian, in the form of a high-pitched scream. He was standing there in his pajamas, looking haggard and on the edge of hysterics. “What day is it?” I asked without even saying hello first.

  “October thirtieth,” Brian said, then started asking questions, but I ignored him. My cell phone was right where I’d left it, in my purse on the floor beside the couch. I called home immediately.

  Charlie was delighted to hear that it was over. And if he was especially malicious in his satisfaction over Helen and Roderick’s fates, I couldn’t blame him. He’d had his share of stasis too, for the last five years. Maybe this would make it easier to get moving again.

  I only talked to Warren for a few seconds—Brian was on the edge of tears now—just long enough to tell him I’d be home for Halloween, like I promised, and that I loved him.

  Then I made Brian breakfast and told him his house wasn’t haunted anymore. He told me he was going to sell it anyway.

  After we ate (thank goodness he at least waited for that) he tried to give me what was left of my finger. “I can’t just throw it in the trash,” he argued. “What if someone finds it and thinks I killed someone and dismembered them?”

  “You’ve been living in a house of horrors for too long,” I said. “But I know where there’s some newly turned dirt you could bury it in, in a graveyard, where nobody will suspect a thing.”

  He didn’t miss my choice of pronouns. “What do you mean, I could bury it?”

  “Please, Brian. I know how gross and creepy it is, and that you’ve been through a lot already and that it’s a lot to ask. But please can you do this one last thing, for Nat if not for me? Because Nat’s little boy is waiting for me to take him trick-or-treating, and I have traveled really, really far to make sure I don’t disappoint him. But I’ve got to start driving now.”

  I was surprised by how quickly he agreed. The last I saw of him, he was walking off with a shove
l in his hand, Aristotle at his heels, and my severed finger in his pocket. And so Helen Turner got her piece of me after all.

  I spent a good part of the drive home thinking about her and Roderick. They’d taken my brother, my finger, and in that moment at Helen’s throat that would never bear more than a sideways glance, something else that I couldn’t define and didn’t care to dwell on. But remembering their last moments, I still cried.

  It was after midnight when I got back, technically Halloween. That was okay. I had all day to sleep, take a bath, even make dinner before the festivities began. But I had a stop to make first.

  The white For Sale sign was still on the lawn, bright in the moonlight. I got the spare key from under the fake rock in the garden and went inside, barely able to wait until I closed the door before I started calling for Tom.

  He was there. I couldn’t see him, but I could smell vanilla and tobacco.

  “I was afraid you’d be gone,” I whispered.

  “I tried to be,” his voice answered. And then he was there for real. “I couldn’t.”

  “Like, couldn’t bring yourself to, or actually couldn’t?”

  “Is there a difference?”

  “But you’ll be able to, right? I mean, Maisie is gone.”

  “Maisie is gone,” he agreed. “But—”

  “We said it was time.”

  “We did.” His voice was fading. I was surprised he’d lasted that long. It’s extraordinarily difficult for a ghost to summon a voice, and the guy had been through a lot lately. But he was able to stay solid long enough to take my hand. Then he was less and less there, until he wasn’t.