by Unknown
“When do you want to go?” I ask, because she isn’t offering any more information.
“Tomorrow. Before I have a chance to change my mind.”
“Okay.” I smile, to reassure. She’s facing her childhood demons. That’s worth encouraging, and I’m interested. I want to see this house.
She picks up the envelope again and looks at it. It’s empty. The handwriting is old-fashioned, and the name on it isn’t Barbara’s name. She doesn’t elaborate, and I don’t ask.
“This is good,” I say. I can’t really tell. All food tastes like cardboard to me.
“I’m going to go watch my shows.” She gets up and leaves me alone in the kitchen, patting my hand on her way past. I hear the television turn on. After poking at my food for a few more minutes, I put the rest of it down the sink, and go upstairs to my room.
Barbara wakes me up the next morning with coffee and a muffin, hurrying me so that we can head out to the car and leave. She’s packed a picnic basket, playing up the girls’-outing excuse for our excursion. I pull on a blouse and skirt, stumbling after her to the car and yawning. I slept last night, and I wanted to sleep longer. That’s probably good, at least better for me than staying up all night and drinking coffee to chase away the dreams.
She drives, and I stare out the window, watching the New England shoreline flickering in and out of view behind the trees.
It’s a little over an hour’s drive before we’re pulling in to the town of Prospect. Barbara leaves the car running, with me in it, and goes inside the hardware store to ask directions.
“Did they know anything?” I speak up, when she slides back in to the driver’s seat.
“Not really, but at least they knew directions to the road we need.”
We get lost and have to stop for directions again more than once, but eventually we find the old place. It’s abandoned now, and the long dirt drive is long-since overgrown. We park on the side of the road and walk up the drive, carrying our picnic basket between us.
“At least we don’t have to worry about current tenants,” Barbara points out, strolling through the tentative early-spring growth on the driveway.
“Just hobos.”
She tuts at my pessimism, and looks around. “It all looks so different. But it’s all the same, I guess. I remember trees, and long grass. There should be a clearing ahead, just around that bend.”
I don’t respond, feeling a stitch in my side from walking uphill, and I have to stop and catch my breath. Barbara waits for me to recover.
“Everything okay?”
I nod, hand on my stomach, eyes squeezed shut. “Fine.”
We resume walking.
The house is visible once we clear the trees. It’s set in the middle of a long, sloping meadow. It’s a rural fantasy, these wide-open meadows, the sunlight warm on the bare winter trees. The house at the center is a ruin, wooden boards weathered to black, windows broken and doors hanging open, persistently clinging to one hinge. It’s like a black spot in the meadow. It doesn’t look haunted, but I don’t really want to go inside.
“The lawns were larger, I think,” she says. “Maybe I’m remembering wrong.” She stands in the driveway, picnic basket in hand, and she looks young and small standing before the tall house.
“Should we go inside?”
She looks at me, then down at the picnic basket. “Are you hungry?”
It seems weird to eat before we go in, with our fears and premonitions about this probably-harmless house looming over us, but I also don’t think we’re going to want to have a pleasant picnic if we get spooked by the atmosphere inside. Either way, I’m glad the weather’s sunny and bright for our haunted-house expedition.
I shrug, and she looks back at the picnic basket, sighing and setting it down at her feet. “Let’s go inside.” Looking over at me one last time, she glances down at my belly. “Unless you need to rest?”
Shaking my head, I take a few steps toward the house. She follows, and I match my pace to hers. We walk up the front steps side-by-side.
The air on the porch is chilly, shaded by the house. I pull my coat closer, letting her be the one to step forward and turn the handle.
“We sold the house, before we left,” she says. “It must have fallen to ruin with some owner after that. I guess it’s been long enough.”
“Lends credence to your ghost theory,” I tease. “Maybe we’ll find the former owner hanging from a rafter in the attic.”
“Oh, don’t!” she complains, with a shudder, but then she smiles to show me that she appreciates my attempt to lighten the atmosphere.
Inside, the house is a mess, floorboards layered with years of dust, leaves, and rat droppings. “Ugh.” I step past her, reaching for the light switch. It doesn’t work, and I feel foolish. My eyes will have to adjust to the dim light. There’s graffiti drawn liberally on the walls. Gang signs and lovers’ initials, decorated by the broken glass and cigarette butts left in the debris. “Gonzo was here,” I read, and smile at her. “See any ghosts yet?”
“You’re teasing me.”
“I’m creeped out.” Being obnoxious helps me feel less like the house is an evil entity bound to eat us both. I shrug my shoulders and step to her side, waiting. “Where to?”
“I’m not sure.” She starts down the hall, shoes going crunch-crunch in the layer of litter. “It seems so tame, now that I’m grown up and not supposed to believe in silly things like ghosts. It’s just a house. I never saw a ghost, nothing ever started levitating.”
“Do you feel like you’re being watched?”
She stops. The hairs go up on the back of my neck.
Barbara hugs herself, but obstinately continues forward. The light in the kitchen is a little brighter, but it’s still cold and dark, and the idea persists in my mind that this house never warms up. “It is silly, isn’t it?” she says, voice small.
“No, it’s not. I saw a ghost, and I believe you, even if you were a kid. But whether or not there really is anything about this house, the important thing is that you’re facing it.”
“You sound so confident.”
We share a smile. “It’s just a front,” I confide. “What do you think, will the house collapse if we go upstairs?”
Her smile dims a little, still frightened of her childhood ghosts. “Just one way to find out.”
Ignoring her objections, I go first to test the stairs. I’m glad she doesn’t say anything about my condition. The wood holds, and when I’m safely at the top, she follows after me.
I feel brazen, like nothing can harm me, and I’m just daring the ghosts to try. At the same time, I can feel fear settled like ice at the bottom of my heart. Denial is a powerful thing. I wait for Barbara, my blood pumping faster after climbing the stairs, and a draft wisps past me from an open window. I see something flutter, out of the corner of my eye, but when I turn to look, I’m not sure what it was that moved.
Don’t be ridiculous, I counsel myself.
“Anything?” Barbara reaches my side, huffing and puffing a bit.
“No.”
She opens one of the doors off the hall, and looks inside. The weathering is worse, the east-facing windows letting in the brunt of the rain, and half the floor is gone, boards rotted through.
“This was my room.”
I step into the doorway by her side, leaning against the frame and looking in. “Spacious,” I say. “My parents stuck me in the one-window back bedroom while I was growing up. The curse of being a younger child.”
“You’ve never told me anything about your family.”
That shuts me up quickly. She’s right. I haven’t. There’s a reason for that.
When I don’t reply, she looks back into the room. “It’s all so different. And probably condemned.”
“We’re breaking and entering in a condemned building. Feel like a criminal?”
She smiles at me and shuts the door to her former bedroom. “I’m ready to go.”
“You don�
��t want to…?” I gesture at some of the other, unopened doors. Shaking her head, she moves back to the stairs and starts down them. I follow, but I pause at the top of the stairs and look back down the second-floor hallway. It’s dark, even though most of the doors in the hall are hanging off their hinges to let in light. I stare into the dark hallway, as though I expect to see a ghost staring back at me. Nothing appears, but I’ve given myself the spooks, so I take the stairs a little too fast and follow her outside.
My speed makes her speed up, and we’re all but running down the porch steps and through the yard, until we’re out of the house’s shadow and we can stop, laughing at each other for our fear.
“Oh my god,” Barbara laughs, “we’re like ten-year-olds, sneaking into the local haunted house.”
“At noon, no less, because we’re afraid of the dark.” I laugh, looking back at the house. It sits there, patient, harmless, and I shake away the thought that the two upper windows look like eyes.
She picks up the picnic basket again, following my gaze. “What say we head back to the car and find some pleasant, non-haunted park to eat lunch?”
“Amen.” I follow her down the path, feeling reckless after our adventure, but still too frightened to want to hang around.
On the way back, I stumble, the thing in my gut sending a spike of pain through me. Barbara reaches out to steady me, instantly worried. “Are you okay?”
I put a hand over my belly, closing my eyes. “I’ll be fine.”
That night, I see my ghost again, the woman in the rain. I wonder if it has to be raining for her to appear, or if it’s just coincidence, since it rains so often here.
This time, I open the window and lean my head out. “Hey,” I call, barely above a whisper. She doesn’t hear me, and a few seconds later she vanishes in the fog. I shut the window, hair wet from the storm, and lean my face against the glass, eyes closed.
I still want to know what she’s looking for.
“What’s the story of the old lighthouse?” I ask Barbara the next day when we’re both at the shop.
“The lighthouse?” she repeats, looking up from an inventory list with a puzzled look. “Oh, the one up the coast to the north?”
“Yes. The old one. All rusted metal, now.”
“It’s just a lighthouse. Lots of them in New England. I guess it’s not scenic enough to make it into the little tourist books, but sometimes we get lighthouse-hunters up here asking about it.”
My lips quirk. “Lighthouse-hunters? You make them sound like Don Quixote.”
“No, these ones are just tourists. Like the antiquers and the honeymooners. They’re just another kind of tourist: the kind with a hobby for tracking down and snooping around old lighthouses.”
I sip my tea. “Who has the key?”
Her head swings around to look at me. “The key? You went there, didn’t you?”
“I admit it. I’m a latent lighthouse-hunter.”
She smiles, wry. “Why would you ask about the key?”
Isn’t that obvious? I try to make myself look as innocent as possible. “It was locked.”
“I think the Coast Guard has a division that’s responsible for lighthouses. That old place has been abandoned for so long, it’s probably fallen into their hands by now. You could start there, if you were really determined.”
“But even then, the government probably isn’t going to go about handing out keys to just any curiosity seeker who comes knocking.”
“Probably not.” She presses her hand to her mouth to hide her smile. “Why are you so interested?”
“I don’t know. I was never interested in historic sites before. I think I just like it because it’s abandoned.”
“It is a good mystery, I suppose.”
“I feel like I want to solve it, while I’m still here.”
Barbara’s gaze is puzzled, and a little worried. I won’t be here forever, and that’s the first time I’ve said anything that even hints at the truth. She wants to ask, but she leaves me my privacy. She’s good at that.
My next day off, I head back out to the lighthouse, but halfway there I realize that it’s high tide and the lighthouse is inaccessible. I’d have to go around, and scramble down the sheer rock face that backs up against the lighthouse – with another sheer rock drop below, if I lost my footing. I sit beneath a tree, in the rain, and watch the waves rolling in and out on the ocean.
The lighthouse and I are companions, staring out to sea together. I am a lighthouse, cold steel on the outside, hollow inside, and the light in my eyes has almost gone out. That’s why I feel so at home, sitting on the shore near the skeleton of my kin. The light in her eyes has been out for years.
I am shivering by the time I get home. My blood runs hot and cold in waves. Barbara puts me to bed and scolds me like a child.
When I wake up, I’m dizzy, and I collapse when I try to stand up. Barbara insists that I take the day off work. She worries over me before she leaves, and when I don’t answer the phone at lunch, she closes the shop and comes home to mother me.
She finds me in the bathroom, vomiting, and comes over to hold back my hair. That’s when she sees that I’ve been vomiting blood. She stops, in horror, and stares at me. When she collects herself, she puts me back to bed, and looks at me with worried eyes.
“I’m calling a doctor,” she says, in her no-nonsense voice.
“Doctors can’t help me,” I tell her, reaching out for her hand.
“But—”
“They tried.”
I see the comprehension dawn in her eyes. It shifts, from worry, to shock, then pity.
She understands that I’ve come here to die.
The fever subsides within a day, but my body is slow to recover. My death is closer. I move from the bed to the seat by the window and back, carrying my layers of blankets around me. I feel like some kind of wild animal in quilted plaid, scurrying to hide with my house on my back. The ghost doesn’t return. I watch for her while I’m awake.
Barbara refuses to let me return to work for a week, despite my repeated complaints that I’m taking advantage of her generosity. When I’m well enough to dress and behave like a human again, she lets me accompany her to the shop, but she tries to prevent me from doing any labor.
She doesn’t speak about my condition any more than she did before, but the silence is different. Before, she assumed I was a young woman running away from an awkward situation with an unwanted child. Now, she doesn’t know what to assume. I’m dying, and I’m running away from the people I love, because I didn’t want them to see me die.
Instead, it will be Barbara who sees me dying.
Eventually, I’ll check myself into a hospice, and drain the last of my health insurance. I didn’t want to get attached to Barbara. I was supposed to be running away. But she’s still a stranger, and somehow that’s easier for me.
A month later, I try for the lighthouse again.
I leave after Barbara goes to the shop, and I write a note letting her know that I’ve gone for a walk. I hope she won’t worry if I get home late.
The day’s clear, and I feel strong. I hold my coat close against the cold and walk, step by step, as the lighthouse draws nearer, inch by inch. Though the sun is bright, the warmth is swept away by the cold wind off the ocean. The walk is further than I remember, and I stop twice to rest, when I’m too dizzy to continue. It’s already past noon when I arrive. I sit on the cold metal steps and close my eyes.
The sun is high, and I unbutton my coat, relaxing. My shoes go next, each with a sock stuffed into the heel. Going barefoot makes me feel young, innocent as a child, and I have no attachments, nothing to hold me back or to tie me to this world, this life, this dying body. I walk slowly around the lighthouse, flakes of rust rough under my feet, testing each step in case the metal dissolves as I step on it.
On the far side, I find a massive boulder. I’m not sure if it was there before, and I didn’t see it, or if it has been blown down the rock fa
ce by one of the storms since I was last here. The old metal of the lighthouse is bent where the rock impacted. It opened a gash in the wall, recently enough that the edges are barely touched by rust. I bend down and peek inside, but it’s too dark to see.
I think I can fit. For what it’s worth, my tetanus shots are recent. Crouching down, I wiggle myself sideways through the gap. The air inside is musty, and the floor under my feet is damp and slick. I close my eyes and breathe slowly, waiting for my vision to adjust. The opening in the metal that let me in lets in a little ambient light, and there’s a window high up on the wall with the glass still intact, reinforced by metal bars on the outside of the panes. It’s almost opaque with grime, but any light helps. The floor is thick with mud and moss, but there are no signs of bats or mice, like I would have expected. I realize that this part of the lighthouse must have been sealed for years before the rockfall tore it open. Animals couldn’t find a way in. Only the moss made it through cracks in the iron.
It’s impossible to tell if the stairs are stable, but at least they’re all intact. Squinting in the darkness, I make my way up. At the top of the first flight of stairs, I find a door. It’s unlocked, but the rust has snuck into the cracks, and I have to heave all my weight against it to break the seal.
The second floor is bright, because here the window is gone completely, and the rust has eaten through the wall in patches. I blink against the onslaught of light, and an indignant owl flaps away, its nest disturbed by my entrance. I tiptoe through the wreckage of this makeshift owlery, and up again, to the third floor and the tower above. The door to the tower is rusted, and I’ve almost given up before it groans and swings free, causing me to stumble.
At the top, the floor is covered in broken glass from the windows. I tip-toe carefully, and it’s some comfort that the glass is old and weathered, so the edges aren’t as sharp. The last door hangs open, waiting for me, and I walk outside onto the gallery. There’s less glass here, most of it blown away by storms, and on the windward side there’s no glass at all. I scoot down and sit on the edge, overlooking the sea, with my bare legs hanging over into space and my skirt rucked up around my knees.