Undeath

by Lily Levi

  You were dead and now you’re not.

  His father repeated this phrase for hours in the roiling storm and Laurie, still only a boy, hadn’t known what to say.

  The ocean would kill them all.

  Only it hadn’t.

  They came home. Afterwards, his father had said nothing to him or Maman or anyone else ever again. The snows and ice had maddened him.

  And then one day, he was gone. Maman told him that he’d died and Laurie had believed her. What was there not to believe?

  Riley sighed at his feet.

  He dropped the cigarette into the dry dirt and tapped out the hot ash with the heel of his shoe. Bringing Maman back was not as he imagined it would be.

  He sidled back into the Duesenberg and drew his open palms along the wheel.

  Riley climbed over him and curled into the seat beside him.

  Maman did not want to live without Monsieur Marteaux, if she could be called alive at all. Still, he couldn’t let her die a second time, not before she told him where his father went.

  He recalled the empty tomb where his father should have been; the gray stone bed where he should have been; in the family plot where he should have been. But he was nowhere.

  Laurie leaned back into the leather seat. He would not have brought Maman back if it weren’t for his missing father. He hated that this was the truth, but it was. And Jolene, dare he think it?

  Yes.

  He’d brought her back to know it was possible. He’d admitted as much to himself, hadn’t he? He picked her up from her open grave in the warm forest and brought her back to be sure that Maman would be herself when brought back just the same, and not the monster he feared she would be.

  But it was all wrong.

  Maman was right. She should be dead – truly dead – and so should he. He’d lived his life and then he’d lived longer than anyone had any right to do.

  He reached over to the passenger seat and slid the tin box of photographs out from underneath. He always meant to set a lit match to them, throw from the ridge, bury them in the forest, or drop the weighted box into the middle of the bay, but he could never bring himself to do any of those things. He couldn’t let himself say goodbye to those heavy, beautiful feelings that they reminded him of.

  He’d thought they were gone forever, but Jolene had made him feel the first wonderful inklings of those same heavy feelings again, whether he liked it or not.

  He set the box in his lap with his hand on the lid and stared out into the dark sky. He didn’t need to open it. The hundreds of pieces of filmed paper were each their own permanent fixture in his heart and mind. If his memory warped them in any way, they seemed even clearer.

  He didn’t need to see her white-gloved hand, raised high in the air, waving goodbye to the England that she’d always loved. He didn’t need to see the black steel hull of the ship behind the wide-brimmed hat that obscured half of her face. How terribly excited she’d been to start anew with him, to travel across the Atlantic with him at her side, and to step foot into a land more fresh to her than any world could now seem to him.

  He’d lost her to the ice just like he’d lost his father. He didn’t want to lose Jolene, too, not now.

  Time slowed with her. The months no longer felt like the mere passing of hours. At last, he felt connected again and the feeling was too sweet to say goodbye to.

  The Duesenberg roared to life. He pulled slowly away from the cliff. He would apologize for anything and everything that he’d done, whatever it was. He would tell her everything if that would keep her. It was too soon to lose her.

  Chapter Thirty

  Jolene woke.

  It was still dark.

  She turned on her side and fumbled for the last of Laurie’s rolled cigarettes. She struck a match and lay back again. She’d made up her mind in that small moment of sleep. She was going home.

  Somewhere above her, something hollow slammed against the floor.

  She sat up in the bed with the cigarette still in her mouth and listened, but there was nothing.

  She settled back against the pillow and breathed out the hot smoke, heart still pounding.

  The crashing of glass set her upright again.

  It was the sound of a mirror breaking, or of a window, but it was too high up to be an intruder.

  She moved cautiously out from beneath the sheets and took several slow steps towards the door.

  She held her breath.

  A dry scream rattled the house from above and her heart jumped to a stop.

  Her mind raced forward. There was someone else in the house, someone who didn’t want to be there. What had Laurie done?

  Ignoring her shaking body, she moved away from the door and dropped to her knees in front of the bedside table. She opened the bottom drawer and pulled out the clothes that Laurie had found her in. Standing, she shrugged out from her robe and slipped on the cut off shorts, the dirty plaid shirt, and the scuffed sneakers.

  She struck a match and lit the gas lamp and then, without allowing herself the luxury of a second thought, she moved out from the room and into the dark hallway.

  She wrapped her arms around her body and listened to the intermittent banging from upstairs. She remembered the day Laurie had gone upstairs to check on the strange sounds. He’d told her it was a bird.

  The thundering of wood against wood didn’t stop until she reached the foot of the stairs.

  She strained to listen through the beating of her own heart.

  Tortured cries rattled through the house. They belonged to a woman.

  Jolene took the stairs up slower than she would’ve liked, but her body wouldn’t let her go any faster. Her legs had turned to putty.

  She needed a plan and there wasn’t one. All she knew was that there was another woman in the house and she couldn’t leave her there alone. They both had to get out before Laurie returned.

  What are you afraid of?

  She stopped at the top of the fourth floor to catch her breath.

  “Hello?” she called. Her voice shook and she waited.

  The floral wallpaper peeled off from the shadowy walls on either side. Where the detail might’ve been charming at one time, it was now nothing short of horrific.

  She forced herself to walk forward. “Hello?”

  She wiped the nervous sweat from her forehead and paused, sensing open air the same way one feels the expanding of a dark cave after pushing through its narrow tunnels.

  The banging had stopped.

  Further down the hallway, she could just make out a small segment of the floral wallpaper that glowed with the faint touch of moonlight. The carpet below looked to be littered with pieces of something – cardboard, wood?

  She stepped cautiously forward. “Is someone there?” she said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  The gas lamp’s handle creaked at her side. Nearing the strange pile in the carpet, she saw that not only was it broken wood, but it had also been a piece of the door.

  Her old tennis shoes crunched against the broken wood. Without stepping too close, she peered through the destroyed door. Her heart thudded with an explosive fierceness.

  Shards of glass glittered in the carpet. The red drapes over the bed had been ripped down from their posts. The blankets and sheets twisted together and lay halfway on the floor. Heavy curtains hung haphazardly over the trellised window. Porcelain makeup containers and crystal bottles of perfume littered the carpet. The vanity mirror had been ripped from its stand and the figure of a woman stared at the empty wall where it had once been.

  Jolene swallowed and struggled for the words. Despite the cries, she realized that she hadn’t expected to find anyone at all.

  “Hello?’ she said, finding her voice. “Are you okay?”

  The woman turned to face her, but her eyes were hidden in the dark. Jolene saw that she was old, so old that there wasn’t an age for her. She knew her from somewhere, but her mind wouldn’t cooperate in finding the memory.

/>   Jolene tested the doorknob, though anyone could step straight through the door now if they wanted to.

  “I can help you out of here,” she said. “Laurie – the man, his house – he’s gone now, but we have to hurry.”

  The old woman laughed at her. “This is my house,” she said.

  Stung, Jolene took a step back.

  “You should be dead,” said the woman, taking a frail step forward. A glass container broke beneath her bare foot.

  Jolene recoiled with recognition. The woman with the black eyes, the decrepit monster from her nightmare. It wasn’t possible. She’d only dreamt it.

  “I should be dead,” said the woman, “but I don’t bleed, don’t you see?” She lifted her arms to show Jolene a mess of deep scratches, dry gulches in her skin. “I’m dead, don’t you see? But oh, my dear, you’re dead, too.”

  Slowly, as if in a daze, Jolene turned back into the darkness of the long hall. Nothing made sense. It wasn’t real. It was the nightmare all over again. She was still asleep. She hadn’t found the book. Laurie had never left her alone. She was still in the room on the second floor.

  She walked stiffly away from the broken door. Her heart thundered up into her ears so loudly that she couldn’t hear anything else the old woman said.

  The heavy sound of cracking wood echoed from back down the hallway. The woman, the monster, whatever she was, she was coming.

  Snapping back into herself, Jolene scrambled for the nearest door. They’d all been locked the first time she’d visited the fourth floor, all except for the small study. She didn’t know what she expected, but when the door’s handle turned, she wasted no time in putting her head down and slipping soundlessly into the room on the other side.

  With her eyes closed and heart racing, she pressed her back against the wood and waited for the old woman to call out for her, to scratch her gnarled fingers against the back of the door.

  Instead, she heard the scuffing of feet on the hallway carpet. They neared the door, seemed to pause for less than a heartbeat, and then continued down the hall and towards the stairs.

  Jolene waited until they were gone and then waited some more. She silently counted to one hundred as best she could, then let herself fumble with the knob, but there was no way to lock it from the inside.

  She turned away from the door, praying the old woman wouldn’t come back, and took in the massive room, glowing with cold moonlight.

  It took her some time to understand what she was looking at.

  Laurie’s gray eyes, lit by filtered moonlight through the high windows along the side of the wall, met hers a hundred times over.

  He was everywhere, Riley, too. He’d painted himself with the bloodhound hundreds and hundreds of times.

  The walls were filled with the image of his face, from floor to ceiling. Gold frames, black frames, silver frames. Some embossed and some not. Small canvases, no more than a foot on each side, hung neatly around portraits taller than she was.

  She found her hand fumbling again with the doorknob at her back, but there was no lock.

  She tiptoed cautiously away from the door.

  The floor was tiled with the same marble as the ballroom, only there were no leaves or dust to be found. A single red armchair and a short round table sat in the center of the room. A covered easel stood beside them.

  She paused and listened for the footsteps of the old woman, the monster from her nightmare, but there was only silence.

  It didn’t matter; she couldn’t bring herself to leave the room. She needed to wait until it was safe, but there was no way to know when that might be. The woman could be waiting for her and Laurie could come back at any moment.

  She steeled her nerves and stepped along the wall. Unable to help herself, she stopped in front of the biggest portrait of them all.

  It was taller and longer than she was. His face was such a perfect likeness that she had to blink several times to clear her own vision of him away from what was in front of her.

  But the portrait remained the same. It was him in every way. The shallow creases at his eyes, the tilt of the vertical dent in his chin, and every mark of his face was perfect to life.

  He stared down at her. When she moved away, his gray eyes seemed to follow.

  She shivered beneath the gaze of the painting and of the others all around her.

  It was true. He was insane and deep down, she must’ve known this from the moment she’d woken up in the old house. She’d wanted to believe that he was only eccentric, but she’d been wrong.

  She moved to the covered easel. She took a fold of the white sheet in her hand and pulled.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The headlights lit up the inside of the covered carport. Laurie shut off the engine and listened to the wind play through the tangled ivy overhead.

  He thought he could sit there forever. His bones ached with the growing weight of time.

  He exited the car and took the long way around to the front of the house. He pushed his hands into his pockets and closed his eyes as he walked. He didn’t need to see where he was going to know where he’d end up.

  Riley followed.

  The cold waves lapped up against the shore beside him and he thought that he could almost feel the dark islands watching him from the middle of the bay.

  When Monsieur Marteaux told him that they were Peter Pan’s islands, he’d remembered feeling mildly flustered for such a small boy.

  “But Peter Pan is from England,” he’d said.

  His tutor smiled down at him. He remembered the smile more than anything else. It was full of an excited understanding that had confused him.

  “Yes,” he’d said. “You can be from anywhere and still be where you are.”

  Laurie stepped into the cool darkness of the entryway and unbuttoned his collar. Despite the weight of his heart, the night was not as dark as it could have been. Jolene was still beneath his roof and he could still protect her.

  He mounted the stairs and considered stopping by her room, but ultimately decided against it. He would give her the space she needed and let her come to him when she was ready. He would be there.

  He would always be there.

  Reluctantly, he drew himself up the tall corridor of stairs and Riley followed as she always sdid. He would see to Maman. She’d been terribly upset – furious – upon learning that Marteaux could not possibly be brought back. He’d work with her, though. He’d remind her of who he had been to her and that she’d once loved him just as much as he’d loved her.

  On the fourth floor, the warm air wavered. Riley darted forward into the shadows.

  Laurie followed and immediately saw that Maman’s door at the end of the hallway had been broken through. Moonlight spilled haphazardly into the shadows.

  Riley pawed at the gallery door.

  He steeled himself for what he would find inside of the gallery and silently prayed that Jolene was still safe in her room. Maman was upset and rightfully so. There was no telling what she would do.

  He wrapped his hand around the doorknob and turned it with a steeled slowness. He hadn’t locked it. He’d grown careless.

  The door opened wide enough for Riley to fit through and she scurried inside, nails on marble.

  Laurie stepped tentatively in after her. He knew the room well and his eyes had no trouble finding out-of-place things.

  He opened his mouth to say her name, to explain in a way that she might understand, to say anything at all, but the words simply would not come.

  Jolene stepped fully out from behind the curtain, holding the sharpened length of a broken picture frame. He could see how she shook with the gilded stake in her hand.

  “Stay back,” she whispered.

  His cherry wood easel sat exposed in the center of the room. The white sheet lay pooled on top of the marble floor. The portrait he’d begun on the first day he’d found her stood on full display.

  Her closed eyes, her darkened neck, her distraught hair, it w
as all there. He’d painted her perfectly and not a detail had been lost. It was the perfect portrait of a dead girl.

  “Jolene,” he said. But there was nothing to say.

  She shook her head at him.

  “Jolene,” he said again. “I found you. I painted you to watch for improvements, that was all. If I had a camera, I might’ve captured you differently. But painting…”

  He stepped forward and she stepped back.

  She raised the sharpened piece of wood at him. “What is all of this?” Her voice wavered with hot fear and derision. “Who the hell are you? I mean really, who are you?”

  He watched her watch him. “You know who I am,” he said as gently as he could. He didn’t want to frighten her any more than she already was.

  “You tried to kill me,” she said, lowering her voice. “And then you painted me and God knows what else you’ve done.”

  His heart doubled its speed at the dark accusation. “No, no,” he said, raising his hand to her. “I would never do that. I found you in the forest.” He took a long breath and grasped for the right words, but there were none. He let his hand fall.

  She switched her weight from one foot to the other. “Is that right? You just happened to find me?”

  “Jolene,” he said. “You were already dead.”

  The words chilled in the air between them.

  “No.” She stalked like a frightened cat down the side of the gallery. “You’re a liar.”

  You’re a liar. She wasn’t wrong.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, feeling how his heart broke with each step she took away from him and towards the door. “I’d never hurt you. You have to believe me.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she said, pointing the broken frame at him. “I don’t believe you. Who’s the woman here, in the house? You’re a liar. You told me there was no one else here. Who is she? Do you kidnap people? Is that what you do?”

  “You want to leave,” he said, watching her inch closer and closer to the door. “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. You don’t have to stay here.” He would take her into Neverpine or further than that, anywhere in the world she wanted to go, so long as he could keep her safe for as long she would let him.