The Ghost Road

by Charis Cotter

  The witch sat down beside me, watching. I felt her eyes were drilling into me, searching for something.

  Finally she spoke. “Where did you go?” she asked, as if she knew the answer already.

  “Go? Umm…What do you mean?”

  “Don’t trifle with me, girl. You and I know very well what just happened. You had a vision. You were somewhere else. Where?”

  I swallowed.

  “I…umm…I’m not sure. But I’ve been there before. A room that was burning. A man on the floor.”

  She shook her head. “Ireland,” she said softly. “Way back. At the beginning.”

  “The beginning?” I asked. “The beginning of what?”

  “The curse,” she answered. She sounded very tired. “I’ve seen it myself. And your mother saw it.” She slumped, like all the fight had gone out of her.

  “Every generation,” she said. “Every generation there’s a Finn who has the Sight. And every generation there’s a Barrett who has it. And we’re all cursed together.”

  “Barrett’s the name of the man on the floor,” I said. “The dead man.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Robert Barrett. My great-great-great-great-uncle. His brother Sean Barrett was the first Barrett to come to Newfoundland, back in the 1830s. A long time ago.” She sighed.

  “And the curse?” I asked. “It goes back to that time?”

  “Yes,” she said softly. She shook her head again.

  I drew closer to her. “Won’t you help me?” I asked. “Won’t you help me break the curse? Please tell me what happened.”

  She straightened up and glared at me.

  “Now why would I be doing that?” she said. “When the Finns have been the source of all the bad things that’ve ever happened to the Barretts? Why would I help you?”

  “Because you’re my grandmother,” I said, and as the words came out of my mouth, I realized they were true. This thin, angry woman was the only grandmother I’d ever had. Not a very nice one, as grannies go. But all I had. I reached out my hand and put it on her wrinkled one. She didn’t pull away.

  “There’s no time when a Barrett ever helped a Finn and it turned out for the best,” she said gruffly. “Look at George. Brought him nothing but pain and torment.”

  “He’s got Ruby. He loves her. That’s not torment.”

  She snorted. “That one. A wild rapscallion not fit for anything. And if you’d seen him when Molly died.” Her voice trembled. “He was heartbroken, snapped in two. He couldn’t cope with the child and he left her with Doll to bring up. As if she could care for a child, she never had one of her own—”

  I hadn’t heard this before. “Ruby was left with Aunt Doll?”

  “Until he married that Wendy, when the child was five,” said the witch. “Then he brought her into town to live with them again.” She lowered her voice, so I had to strain to hear it. “He wouldn’t leave her with his own mother, as he should have. He didn’t trust me with her.”

  Her voice broke and a tear rolled down her cheek. She brushed it away angrily.

  “I put it all back to Molly,” she said fiercely. “She didn’t want her child growing up with me. She must have made him promise that would never happen, because otherwise George would have brought her here. With me. Where she belonged.”

  She stood up and started clearing away the cookies and milk.

  “So no, I won’t be helping you, Ruth Finn. I won’t be helping anybody.”

  I watched her. She moved about the kitchen quickly, whisking dishes and cookies away till it was spotless again. Something about the way she worked reminded me of Aunt Doll in her kitchen. Nothing out of place. Everything accounted for and tidied away.

  I roused myself from the hypnotic daze I had been sinking into and said, “Can you at least tell me what happened with Molly and Meg? How did they keep it secret about Ruth and me? That we were twins?”

  She hung the dishcloth on a rack over the stove and came and sat down across the table from me. Her mouth tightened and she shook her head. “All right. I’ll tell you. But don’t blame me if you don’t like what I say.” She paused, and her eyes looked faraway, into the past.

  “They were always crafty, those two. Always whispering in corners. They wanted to go up to Toronto to go to nursing school, because apparently the one in St. John’s wasn’t good enough for them. And George was against it, because he couldn’t bear to be without Molly, but he had a good job with the power company and he wouldn’t leave it. And then, if you please, Molly broke up with him! Told him she wasn’t ready to settle down. He was devastated, and she and Meg went off to Toronto. I thought my prayers had been answered, but then after a while, back she comes with a baby, says that George is the father, and they get married. And meanwhile, Meg has a baby herself up in Ontario, and then a year later she’s married the father up there. Or what we thought was the father,” she added darkly. “And no one’s the wiser. Except for me.”

  She leaned toward me, her dark eyes boring into mine. “Because I have the Sight, my dear, just as you have, and I can see things that others don’t. And when I heard that Meg had a baby too, at the same time, I knew that they were twins and the curse would continue. Poor George didn’t have a clue. And I never said anything. What’s the good? But I knew. And then when Meg and Molly both dropped dead on the same day, I knew it was the curse, and the two babies would carry it on, the way it’s been carried on for a hundred and fifty years. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing.” She looked me, with grim satisfaction in the set of her jaw.

  “But my mother—Meg—told me we could break the curse,” I said without thinking.

  Her eyes sharpened. “What? What do you mean she told you?” She reached out her bony, wrinkled hand and gripped mine. It felt like a claw.

  “I saw her,” I said. “She’s come to me. She told me Ruby and I could break the curse.”

  “You saw her spirit?” asked the witch, squeezing my hand harder and peering into my eyes. “You saw her ghost?”

  “Yes. At first I thought I was dreaming, but—”

  The witch smiled. That same hard, mean smile I’d seen before. “No, it was her spirit. She’s back. Come to make my life a misery again, like she did when she was alive.” She let me go then and stood up. “No, you’ll get no help from me, Ruth Finn. Get out of my house now. I’ve had enough of you.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE LIE

  The rain was still falling. If you could call it falling. More like sitting motionless in the air, brushing against my face and hair like a damp curtain.

  I looked up the hill, but there was no sign of Ruby. I turned along the road and started walking back toward Aunt Doll’s house. I was full of what I’d seen and what the witch had said, and I felt a heaviness in the air, like everything in the world was weighing down on me.

  “Ruth!”

  I looked up. Ruby was running toward me.

  “Ruth, what happened? I was just about to come in and rescue you.” She was laughing, red-faced from the cold. Then she saw my face and stopped.

  “What happened? What did she do to you?”

  I shook my head. “I’ll tell you, but let’s go somewhere warm first.”

  Ruby took my hand. “You’re colder than I am. Come on!” and she started running toward home, pulling me along behind her.

  I didn’t feel like running, but it did warm me up, and after five minutes I was out of breath, begging her to slow down.

  When we got into the house, Aunt Doll waylaid us for lunch, and then we couldn’t talk until the dishes were washed and the floor was swept. Finally we escaped to our room.

  “Doesn’t she ever stop?” I asked Ruby. “The house is so clean, there’s not a speck anywhere, and still we have to sweep the floor.”

  Ruby shook her head. “Wendy’s just as bad. The house has got to be sparkling, all the time. And Wynken, Blynken and Nod are some dirty. I have to sweep every night after supper, and do dishes, and the b
oys don’t have to do a thing.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said.

  She shrugged. “No. It’s not. There’s women’s work and there’s men’s work, and in the house is women’s work. I’d rather do men’s work, cutting wood and mowing grass and shoveling snow, and helping Eldred fix things, but I always have to do the women’s work first.”

  “My dad’s always telling me girls are just as good as boys,” I said. “He says I can do whatever I want when I grow up.”

  “Yeah, but who does the dishes in your house?” asked Ruby. “Your dad or Awful Gwen?”

  “Dad, actually. If she cooks. Which she usually does because he’s not very good at it. And I always have to help.”

  “Well, maybe that works up in Ontario, but it doesn’t work here. The boys never have to help with dishes, or make beds or anything. But anyway, tell me about the witch. You looked as white as a ghost when I saw you on the road.”

  Ruby was sitting on her bed, her knees drawn up to her chin.

  “It was awful,” I said, plonking myself on my bed and stretching out. The homemade quilt felt warm and comforting beneath me, with its thick, brightly colored squares. Aunt Doll had told me her sister had made it. Daphne. Meg and Molly’s mother. My other grandmother. I wish I’d known her. She had to be nicer than the witch.

  “Did you find out anything?”

  “Oh yeah. Lots.” And I told her what had happened. Everything. How the witch was so mean, but then changed after I had the vision. How she seemed tired and old then, but soon went back to being witchy and horrible. How she told me about Molly breaking up with Uncle George, going to Toronto, having twins and leaving me behind with Meg.

  “Well, we knew all about that part from the letter,” said Ruby when I finished. She was lying on her bed by this time, gazing at the ceiling.

  “Yes. And what I really want to know I don’t think she can tell me.”

  “What?”

  “Where my dad came into the story. Because I always thought he was my dad. But he must have come along after I was born.”

  “Doesn’t he ever talk about Meg? How they met, stuff like that?”

  I shook my head miserably. “No. Never. He doesn’t like talking about her, so we never do. But I always believed he was my real dad.”

  “Maybe he adopted you when he married your mom,” said Ruby.

  “And when was he going to tell me?”

  “Maybe never. Some people don’t.”

  We lay there for a while, not saying anything. I thought about Dad in the airport, the last time I saw him, giving me the wildflower book and not wanting to say good-bye. My heart gave a little twist inside my chest. He was my dad, and he always would be. And even though he was married to Gwen now, he still loved me. I knew that. I sniffed.

  Ruby looked over at me and sat up. She reached over and squeezed my hand.

  “Never mind, Rue,” she said, unconsciously using my dad’s nickname for me. “It’ll be okay. You can ask him when he comes back. Maybe he had a good reason for not telling you.”

  I managed a small smile. “Maybe.”

  “Now, tell me about this vision you had,” she said.

  I smiled a little more. I knew she was changing the subject to try and cheer me up. And it was funny, that she thought that thinking about the curse and all those women in our family dying young would make me happier than thinking about missing my dad and wondering why he had lied to me all these years. And what was even funnier was that, in a way, she was right.

  I took a deep breath and tried to put my dad right out of my mind. In Greece, with Gwen. Far, far away. I thought of the witch’s kitchen, and how I felt the heat coming off her, and then how I slipped into the vision.

  “It was the same as the last time. I was in a kitchen. Everything was on fire and the body of the man was on the floor. But this time there were two women there, with babies.”

  “Did you hear the whispering?”

  “Yes. It was inside the fire, like the flames themselves, a kind of roaring saying ‘by fire, by fire,’ again and again.”

  Ruby shivered. “Then what happened?”

  “One of the women said, ‘There you lie, Robert Barrett, and may God forgive you for what you did to my sister,’ and then the other said, ‘Come, Eva, we need to be gone.’”

  “And Nan said it was from the beginning, when the curse began, in Ireland?”

  I nodded my head.

  “That horrible old woman,” said Ruby. “She knows. She knows! And she won’t tell us.”

  “We just have to find out for ourselves,” I said.

  “But how?”

  “Maybe we’ll find out when we go to Slippers Cove,” I replied.

  “Or maybe you’ll have another vision.”

  I was silent.

  “Ruth?”

  “I don’t want to,” I said softly. “It’s horrible, Ruby. Everything goes black and I’m dizzy, and I feel like I’m falling and don’t know where I am. Then all these awful things start happening. Fires. Dead people lying on the floor. That horrible voice. I don’t like it.”

  The bed creaked as Ruby came and sat down beside me. “It does sound bad.”

  “I thought the witch would help me. I thought she would help me make them go away.”

  “They won’t go away. Not if you have the Sight,” said Ruby. “That’s part of it. But maybe you won’t have them so much if we break the curse.”

  “I never had them before I came here,” I said.

  “Maybe coming here woke it up in you. Maybe it was just asleep all these years, waiting to come out when the time was right.”

  I looked over at her. She had a dreamy look in her eyes. I had to smile.

  “Ruby, you’re enjoying this. It’s all a big fairy story to you, isn’t it?”

  She turned to me, grinning. “It is, isn’t it? What I always wanted—to be part of a fairy story.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  NAMES

  “A story?” I said. “Being part of a story would be okay. But not a nightmare.”

  “Who’s having nightmares?” asked Aunt Doll. She had come along the hall without us hearing her and was standing at the door.

  “Oh, nobody,” said Ruby quickly. “Ruth was just saying that sometimes she has nightmares. But not lately, right, Ruth?”

  “No,” I said, feeling hot and cold at the same time. I just wasn’t a good liar. I needed more practice.

  “Well, if you ever have a nightmare here,” said Aunt Doll kindly, “you just come and wake me up. I have them myself sometimes and I know how scary it can be.”

  “Thanks, Aunt Doll,” I said, feeling guilty.

  She looked over at the painting of the ship. “I just came up to check on the painting. I forgot to ask you about it this morning.” She started over toward it.

  “It’s fine,” said Ruby quickly, jumping across my bed and getting between Doll and the painting. “I fixed it. Just a loose wire.”

  “Oh. Well, you’re that handy,” said Aunt Doll, smiling down at her. “Just like my father. He could turn his hand to anything.” She looked up at the painting with a frown. “But it is strange, just the same.” She sighed, and sat down on my bed.

  “Why strange?” asked Ruby.

  “It’s all nonsense, and I should know better than to repeat it, but they used to say if a picture fell off a wall by its own accord, then someone was going to die.”

  Ruby and I exchanged looks. We knew that it hadn’t fallen by its own accord, but we weren’t going to say.

  “I’ll be getting as bad as Eldred soon, with his fairies and ghosts,” said Aunt Doll. “But when I was a little girl, if a picture had fallen off the wall, my mother would be off to the priest to get him to come and bless the house to try to ward off the bad luck.” She laughed. “My mother was a great one for the old stories, just like you, Ruby.”

  “Which one was she?” I asked.

  “Which what?” said Aunt Doll.

 
“Which…uh…which twin? I mean, wasn’t your mother a twin?”

  “Well, yes, she was. They run in the family. She and my Aunt Lucy were twins. Both as fair as the two of you.” She sighed. “Lily and Lucy. Long gone. They died when I was only nine.”

  “How come all the twins have names beginning with the same letter?” asked Ruby.

  “Oh, who knows? It’s certainly been a tradition ever since the first two, the ones they found in the root cellar—Fiona and Fenella. And I think there’s something in the cemetery about their mother and her sister, on that old stone that was put up after the flood, about all the people who died in Slippers Cove. Catriona and Caitlin, I think they were. Who knows, maybe it goes all the way back to Ireland. It’s an old custom, I believe, giving twins names with the same first letter. But we lost track of the twins in Slippers Cove, all those generations. My father said something about a Finn family Bible, when he was dying, but I’ve never seen one. He was rambling, not making a lot of sense. But that’s where all the names would be, if there was one.”

  Ruby and I stared at each other, electrified.

  “A family Bible?” repeated Ruby. “Would it list all the twins, back to Ireland?”

  “Maybe even before,” said Aunt Doll. “That’s the only record people had in the old days, of the births and deaths and marriages. But if there ever was one, it was probably swept away in the flood.” She shook her head, as if she didn’t want to think about that, and got to her feet.

  “I must get on,” she said. “I’m going down the shore to visit Ann Murphy, so I’ll be gone a couple of hours. I want you to put the macaroni and cheese in the oven at a quarter past four, Ruby.”

  “Okay,” said Ruby.

  Aunt Doll gave her a hard look. “Don’t forget!” She turned to me. “You see that she doesn’t, Ruth.”

  “I won’t,” protested Ruby. “I won’t forget.”

  “That’s what you always say and then you get caught up in something and dinner’s late.”

  “That was last year,” protested Ruby. “I’m older and wiser.”