The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books)

by Marie O'Regan

  Her mother nods. “I called him.”

  Brianna gives an unladylike snigger. “What – like you think he’s gonna fix this?”

  Bill O’Shannon storms into the kitchen of his home purposefully, the same way he storms into the boardroom in the real estate firm of which he is president. He is a controlling man and it angers him to the core that his wife has had the nerve to call and demand that he come home, without even giving him a reasonable explanation. It can’t be one of the kids – she would have simply told him. What the hell could be so important that she would interrupt his Friday status meeting to—?

  And there, sitting with the rest of them around the table, he finally sees the reason Amber called him.

  Mara sits at the table and watches her family watch her, but she feels nothing. No love, no fear, certainly no comfort. The closest thing she’s felt to emotion was that fleeting desire to pick up Greepers, and that died with his nasty little growl – of all the things in her life, he had been the only one she’d always believed she could go to for comfort. But, like everything and everyone else, even he has failed her.

  “So,” her father asks her now, “you want to tell me how this happened?” He waits expectantly.

  She says nothing.

  “Mara, you can’t just waltz in here like this without some kind of explanation about—” For the first time, he hesitates. “About where you’ve been,” he finally finishes.

  “Why not?” Brianna cuts in. Her voice is high. “It’s what she always did before. Why should this be any different?”

  “Well, duh!” Andy snorts.

  “Shut up!” Brianna shouts. “I wasn’t talking to you!”

  “Like I need your permission,” he shoots back.

  Mara sees Brianna’s face flush, as it has countless times before. There is a difference though – the last eight months have made a subtle difference in her younger sister’s appearance, filled out her face and given it a hard edge that Mara doesn’t recall seeing before. Still, Mara sees a lot of hard edges in the faces of her family that may or may not have been there. Some she remembers, others she doesn’t – they might be new. Not surprisingly, there is no softness when they look at her.

  “You two keep your mouths closed,” her father says, and there is no mistaking the don’t fuck with me tone of his voice. “I want to know what the hell is going on.” He glares again at Mara. “How do I know you’re even my daughter? You might be some kind of imposter, or a con artist.”

  Mara still doesn’t say anything. She still doesn’t feel anything, and that surprises her. She remembers all the pain and the hurt and the humiliation – especially that – from before, and when she’d realized where she was, when she’d sort of come to herself, and found that she was going back home, she’d expected it to all come slamming back, as if she’d gone through some kind of cosmic rewinding machine and somewhere a supreme being had leaned over and pushed the play button. But it wasn’t the same, and if there is any kindness at all to be attributed to the universe and whatever powers it, it is that this time around they’ve left the emotional track off her life tape.

  “I don’t believe this,” Amber says suddenly. “What are we going to tell the neighbours? What are they going to think?” Her hands, so carefully manicured and creamed, flutter around her face like panicking humming birds. “What am I going to do about her now – Jesus, how do I get her back in school and back into a normal life? How do I explain her?” Her attractive face is pale and fragile, her expression crumpling beneath a problem too huge to cope with. “People will think we let her run off or something, that we lied about where she was and didn’t even care enough to hire a private investigator to find her. My God.” Her crystalline blue eyes fix on Mara. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want everyone to think we were bad parents, that I’m a bad mother.”

  It’s an interesting question and rather than answer her, Mara ponders it. Is this something she wants? To let the neighbours, friends and all the other relatives know how truly dysfunctional this family is, what abysmal parents she has, all the dark and dirty little secrets? To point fingers and condemn? And, oh, but they had some real, honest-to-God putrid pond scum hidden in O’Shannon daily diaries, didn’t they?

  But . . . no. She really doesn’t care. She doesn’t know why, but she doesn’t.

  Before Amber can demand an answer, Mara’s father steps close to her chair. His shadow towers over her, and it seems to her that it has always been this way, as far back as she can recall. She doesn’t think there was ever a time when she looked forward to seeing him at the end of the day or over the course of a weekend; he is like the fantasy king who wields a brutal sword of justice. The peasants always know their great ruler is looming somewhere, but would rather not cross his path. Is this the way fathers are in other families? Maybe in some of them. She doesn’t know.

  Bill’s face is grim as he stares down at her, doing his best, as he always has, to make her feel insignificant. His lips are drawn so tight that his words are almost difficult to understand. “We’ll have to start this all over again,” he says. He is looking at her, but talking to the others. “We’ll have to watch her constantly to make sure she doesn’t get back into the drugs and start running with her dope-addict friends. Make sure she isn’t sneaking out to go to parties in the middle of the night.” He shoots a glance at his wife and she cringes a little before he fixes his gaze on his daughter once more. “You know how she is. It better not interfere with my work like it did the last time. My work is very important, and this isn’t going to be a repeat. I damned well won’t stand for it.” He leans closer, and now he does speak directly to her. “Do you hear me, young lady?”

  Mara expects to feel something, anything, but she doesn’t. Certainly not fear, although she knows that is what her father wants most. It is an interesting thing, this . . . state she is in, this condition. It’s vaguely like being wrapped in a protective cocoon, insulated from anything and everything that might affect her. She can’t even smell the cinnamon mints that her father is always chewing because he thinks it makes his breath smell good. For that she might feel gratitude, if she could feel anything at all beyond the mild surprise at her current predicament. She always hated that smell.

  Something crashes against the floor and Mara’s head swivels until she locates the source of the sound – Brianna has slammed her books flat against the golden wood. Another lie, that wood – picked specifically by her mother to give the illusion of warmth, but Mara remembers how it felt against the skin of her cheek and knows there is nothing warm about a wooden kitchen floor at 3 a.m. on a winter morning.

  “Well, this is great,” Brianna says. “I can’t believe you’re going to let her waltz in here like it’s just another day in the life of anything normal. Just slide right back into the groove and make the rest of us have to fit our lives around it. Around her. Oh, and let’s not forget that disgusting little dog of hers – we should have put that damned thing to sleep back in December.” Her younger sister’s voice is full of the hatred she has built up for Mara over so many months, perhaps years. “Thank you for coming back and making me miserable all over again, Mara. I suppose you’ll want your room back now. And your clothes and stuff, too. I guess God, or what ever, sent you back to punish me because I was glad when you—”

  “Brianna!” Amber sits up straight for the first time since her husband came home. “You watch how you speak to your sister!”

  “I’m sorry.” If anything, her tone is even more venomous. “Am I being a little too honest here? In fact, am I the only one being honest?” She pushes herself to her feet and takes a step towards Mara. “You were always the one who got all the attention, weren’t you? Well, it’s my turn now, so why don’t you just fuck off and go away!”

  “Boy, I hear that,” Andy says before either of Mara’s parents can respond to Brianna’s fury. He is still on the floor and now he runs his fingers through his hair, something he has always done when he is fee
ling guilty. There was a time after her eleventh birthday when he did that a lot, but only Mara noticed. And only Mara knew why. “And don’t be thinking I’m gonna be driving you around like before, you know. I got stuff of my own to do now— I got a summer job and a girlfriend, a football scholarship to college. My coach says I’m good enough for the pros.”

  Mara considers this as she looks at him. He can’t meet her eyes, and she realizes what he’s doing – trying, in his own, inept way, to reassure her, to give her an unspoken promise that things will be different now, he won’t repeat the sins of his past, it was all nothing but a big, terrible mistake, one of those nasty and dark O’Shannon secrets. Andy looks left and right, up and down, but eventually he meets her eyes, and when he does, he is pinned, the once-proud predator frozen and knowing doom on some instinctive level within the sight of the hunter’s rifle.

  He begins to cry.

  “I’m sorry, Mara. Jesus, God, I am so sorry.” Tears course from the corners of his eyes and flow over his cheekbones and strong jaw, that chiselled look the girls began to notice in his sophomore year in high school. “I should never have done that to you, I didn’t mean to, I don’t even know why I did it and then I couldn’t stop—”

  He goes on and on, babbling and blubbering, and now, of all the times since she walked into this house, Mara thinks she should feel something, she should.

  Across the kitchen, her brother is wailing, unable to stop himself from releasing the poisonous guilt bottled inside for the last four years. “You should’ve told on me, you should’ve exposed me for what I was, I should’ve been punished!” He sobs again, and he isn’t just running his hands through his hair any more, he’s actually pulling on it. “Everyone thinks I’m such a nice guy . . . I’m not a nice guy, you could tell them that. You could’ve told them any time. I’m not!”

  “Wait a damned minute.” Silent until now, shocked, Bill O’Shannon finally finds his voice. He strides across the kitchen and pulls his teenaged son to his feet, then grasps the front of the boy’s jersey with both hands like a man about to shake an enemy. “What are you saying, Andy? What . . . what did you do?”

  “I made her have sex with me when she was eleven!” Andy screams into his father’s face. “For months and months and months! And I took pictures of it and swore I’d tell everyone at school she was a slut if she told anyone!”

  “Oh my God,” Amber O’Shannon whimpers. “Oh. My. God.”

  William O’Shannon throws his son across the kitchen like he is tossing away something he no longer wants.

  Then he turns and walks to one of the kitchen chairs, where he sits down with all the grace of an improperly strung marionette. A very heavy one.

  Andy has landed in a heap against the front of the refrigerator. He picks himself up, then wipes his bleeding mouth on his sleeve. He studies the blood but doesn’t see it, then goes back and sits in the same place he’d been before his ugly confession.

  “Pervert,” Brianna suddenly hisses. “You’re so lucky you never tried that shit with me.” Before anyone realizes what she’s going to do, she reaches over and gives Mara a stinging, loud slap across her bare left arm. “You’re an idiot, you know that? Why couldn’t you open your mouth? Oh, no – instead you held it all inside and let it drive you crazy.”

  Mara glances down and sees Brianna’s hand print clearly against her skin. It’s OK, because it didn’t hurt. She still has that sensation of insulation, or maybe it’s something stronger, an unseen force field. This is a good thing, because she thinks there is more coming.

  “All these years,” Amber says softly. “I thought she was over it. I thought the parties and the drugs were a school thing, she was running with the wrong crowd, and if we could wait it out, she’d get better. She’d . . . forget.” Somehow over the last fifteen minutes Mara’s mother has grown deep purple shadows beneath her eyes. “But she didn’t get over it, did she? Not ever. All that stuff, every pill and joint and needle, it was her trying to get away from the memory of what Andy did. It was just her trying to escape.”

  Andy sits up suddenly. “Wait – you knew? Mom, you knew and you didn’t do anything?” His voice is rising, climbing back towards the scream it had been before Bill threw him. “Why? Why didn’t you put a stop to it?”

  “Because I thought this . . . this dirty little problem of yours would just go away!” Amber’s voice is shrill, painful. “Sometimes teenaged boys do things they shouldn’t, but it all gets better – I thought that’s what this was!”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Bill says hoarsely. “My son rapes my daughter and my wife knows it’s happening and doesn’t do anything about it? What—”

  “Oh, like you would have done anything if we’d have told you,” Brianna sneers. “Mr I Can’t Be Bothered With Anything But Money And Work.”

  Bill O’Shannon stumbles to his feet, not noticing when his chair tumbles backwards. “Are you saying that you knew, too?” He has gone from shock to rage, just that quick.

  But thirteen-year-old Brianna will not be cowed. “Yes, I knew!” she shrieks. “I wasn’t sure what it was, but I knew!” Mara watches as her little sister’s finger jabs in her direction. “Were you deaf? Didn’t you hear her when she cried every night? Before and after, like clockwork – you could hear her through the door to her room. And you didn’t do anything!”

  “So you’re what?” Andy asks bitterly. “Little Miss Holier Than Thou? You’re better than all of us?”

  Brianna whirls. “Me? Oh, sure, I’m great. Just put me in Mom’s corner, where we sit and wish it would all go away. Where we wished she would go away.”

  Now no one can look at her; no one can say anything else. Through all of it – their confessions, their anger at her, their self-hatred – Mara has felt nothing, thanks to the insulating layer of . . . something around her. Now she finally knows what that something is.

  It is the secret shame of her family.

  There is guilt here, lots of it, but it is not hers. Yes, it was her own hand that tied off the vein and held the needle, her own decision to try a score from an unknown dealer, a guy too new to the street trade to know he should cut his junk a few more times before passing it down to the high-school crowd. But what she did that night in mid-December was a consequence not a cause, the result of a family so corrupted by selfishness that no one but she felt enough pain to search for a way to avoid it.

  Mara still doesn’t know why she has come back, or where she has been since the night she died right here on this supposedly “warm” kitchen floor. She doesn’t recall wanting to come back, and she certainly never had any desire to bring out the dreadful truth that had been her true existence – it simply doesn’t matter to her any more. Whatever the reason, now her being here is done . . . for the second time. And when the compulsion to leave takes her, she doesn’t fight it.

  She rises and feels their gazes on her, but she has no desire to say goodbye. She takes one step, then two, and something tickles her ankle. When she looks down, she sees Greepers; the old dog sniffs at her ankle then gives it an affectionate lick before looking up at her and wagging his tail.

  Mara reaches down and picks him up.

  He is as soft and warm as she remembers, wonderfully so, and he wiggles with joy and tries to lick her face. She has one quick moment of confusion as she realizes that even though she is holding him, she can still see his body on the floor, eyes open and chest still, small and silent next to the chair on which she had been sitting.

  She glances at each member of her family in turn. Her mother is pallid, crying quietly; for the first time that Mara can ever remember, she looks at her daughter with something close to longing. Her father seems to have shrunk on his chair, a man broken by the hideous truth of what has transpired, unseen and unstopped, in his own home. Her brother and sister stare first at her and the soft bundle of fur in her arms, then at the cooling corpse of the family pet. Their expressions are tight with self-recrimination and remors
e.

  But Mara doesn’t care.

  She hugs Greepers close and walks out of the kitchen, going down the steps and into the utility room.

  It is filled with white light, and somewhere at the end of that light she knows she and Greepers will find a long-awaited peace.

  Let Loose

  Mary Cholmondeley

  The dead abide with us! Though stark and cold

  Earth seems to grip them, they are with us still.

  Some years ago I took up architecture, and made a tour through Holland, studying the buildings of that interesting country. I was not then aware that it is not enough to take up art. Art must take you up, too. I never doubted but that my passing enthusiasm for her would be returned. When I discovered that she was a stern mistress, who did not immediately respond to my attentions, I naturally transferred them to another shrine. There are other things in the world besides art. I am now a landscape gardener.

  But at the time of which I write, I was engaged in a violent flirtation with architecture. I had one companion on this expedition, who has since become one of the leading architects of the day. He was a thin, determined-looking man with a screwed-up face and heavy jaw, slow of speech, and absorbed in his work to a degree which I quickly found tiresome. He was possessed of a certain quiet power of overcoming obstacles which I have rarely seen equalled. He has since become my brother-in-law, so I ought to know; for my parents did not like him much and opposed the marriage, and my sister did not like him at all, and refused him over and over again; but, nevertheless, he eventually married her.

  I have thought since that one of his reasons for choosing me as his travelling companion on this occasion was because he was getting up steam for what he subsequently termed “an alliance with my family”, but the idea never entered my head at the time. A more careless man as to dress I have rarely met, and yet, in all the heat of July in Holland, I noticed that he never appeared without a high, starched collar, which had not even fashion to commend it at that time.