He laid his rifle across his knees and extended a hand, touched her midriff lightly. Oh, Christ, I wish I’d seen that bairn . . . No, no, that was the Newcastle man’s story, not theirs. The hand lay there, lightly, but with a warmth that seeped through her clothes and the layers of flesh and deep inside where something stirred and leaped, feebly but thrillingly. No, she thought, no, and looked down. It’s too soon. It can’t move yet. But it leaped again. She felt Patrick’s gaze heavy on her and raised her eyes to meet his. But he had disappeared. This time she saw a child’s face, a little boy’s, dark haired and with blue eyes full of rage and tears, the head sunk into the shoulders in despair, the dimple flattened out by a mouth tight with anger and grief. The buzzing at her ear grew more intense and became a hoarse whisper.
“I’ve nowhere else to go.”
She heard the words quite distinctly.
“Nowhere. Nowhere to go. Oh, that bairn . . . that bairn . . . Christ, I wish I’d seen it . . .”
She drew back and the fog parted for her. She was free to go now. She was out of the gate and down the street in seconds, at the steps in front of the hotel in minutes. Across the street the little square windows of Café Franz were golden with light. The piano was still thumping out the songs of war, and the men roaring the choruses the dead men, the nowhere men, used to sing “Keep the Home Fires Burning”. How they yearned for home, and fretted over their dead ones.
She hurried upstairs to the bedroom. She wasn’t surprised really to find it sweet with the scent of rowan blossom. Patrick, it was clear, though young, was determined to make an impression. She sat on the edge of the bed, her mind empty, unable to think or feel, at least not anything she wanted to think or feel. That was what uncertainty meant. Emptiness. Lack of direction or purpose. You sit and listen to an old song about faraway lads and home and then everything you thought or felt before seems trivial in the face of that desolation of endings. Sentimentality is what Gavin would call it, a feeling to be avoided as it rather got in the way of other things, but what those other things were she wasn’t quite sure any more, except that beginnings were more appealing than endings.
She stood up and crossed to the window, breathing in the fragrance of summer blossom and growth Patrick had brought to her all the way from that place of the dead, and the green shoots and the nesting birds. Down the street, the men were gathering outside Franz’s place, loudly calling their good-nights. The men in the anoraks and Aran sweaters mingled with the ones in khaki and puttees, laughing and backslapping and promising to meet tomorrow.
One soldier caught her eye. He was leaning against the wall in the circle of light from a street lamp, smoking a Woodbine. She knew it was a Woodbine because that’s what the family sent the boys. The tin hat was at a rakish angle, the rifle hung loosely from his hand. She knew who it was. He was looking up at her window, head tilted enquiringly. The men walked past him, unseeing. How annoyed they would be if they ever found out that he had been among them and that they had missed him! Gavin was standing near him, self-important, promising to let his companions read all the letters next day. “So moving,” he was saying. “They bring it all to life, make it real.”
Patrick flicked his cigarette butt into the gutter and hitched his rifle sling over his shoulder. She waved down at him and he smiled mischief at her from under his tin hat. Something inside her leaped like the sap in spring. As Patrick had written, in both life and death there was nothing to do but go forward, so forward it was. He moved off up the street, going to that somewhere or nowhere which she could not imagine. Gavin passed right by him on the pavement – they almost brushed shoulders. Neither of them looked at the other.
“Cheer-ho, Patrick,” she muttered. “I’ll be seeing you.”
From somewhere far off, she heard a boy’s silvery giggle.
What was she going to say to Gavin?
My Moira
Lilith Saintcrow
“This will make you see things, Georgie. Take it.”
Moira Staufford pressed the pendant into my cold palm, her fingers slippery with sweat. When she walked quickly away down Hagen Street her hair was a fall of copper-gold in late-autumn sunlight, her strides leggy as always but anxious as they had never been. I remembered braiding that hair on hungover mornings, holding it back while she heaved on drunken nights, and the familiar sharp bite of frustration in my chest made my eyes water.
She got into a long shining black limousine and it pulled away from the curb, inserting itself into the morning traffic with easy grace.
A heavy, antique silver chain held the clawed pendant, its sinuous shape a cross between a lion and a snake. Its eyes looked like chips of diamond, but oddly dark, and the whole thing vibrated in my hand. I stood outside the coffee shop, watching the limo until it vanished. I hadn’t seen Moira since college, and I never saw her again.
At least, not alive.
It was all over the papers the next morning. Billionaire’s Wife Dead in Car Crash. Fiery fatality. Police investigating. Husband distraught, rushing back from a European trip. I stood in Harly, Withers & Chagg’s grey fluorescent-lit break room and stared at the newspaper, my throat dry as rock.
Moira’s picture from a charity luncheon grinned in full colour on the front page, right next to a blurred shot of twisted, smoking wreckage. Gooseflesh rose up all over me, nausea tightening my stomach into a ball. There, right below the vulnerable hollow of her collarbone – she never gained much weight – was a silver curve, the top edge of the pendant peeking up over a Chanel suit jacket worth more than I made in a month.
“Hey, Parkes. Can I get the Altman files from you?” Gene Withers, the junior partner, washed out and worn, tugged at his perfectly straight tie, a nervous tic that didn’t do him any good in the courtroom. Then again, law school would probably make a nervous wreck out of anyone. Which was why I was just a lowly paralegal. “Or is Ben still using them?”
“I’ll check.” My voice sounded funny, faint and faraway, a whooshing in my ears. But Gene didn’t seem to think so. He just poured himself a hasty cup of overcooked coffee and was gone, his wingtips squeaking a little.
I stood there under buzzing fluorescents, smelling Moira’s cedarwood perfume, my purse heavy on my shoulder. I hadn’t even set down my briefcase yet. My hands had turned slippery, and I scooped up the front section of the paper. I hid it in my briefcase like a criminal. Just like I’d hidden the pendant in my Chanel knockoff.
The day passed in a blur. Gracie and Emily invited me to lunch, and I think we gossiped, as always, about who was sleeping with whom and which lawyer was the worst to work for. Everyone agreed Chaggs was the worst, and Emily preened.
A smooth glass ball of calm had descended over me. So what if Moira was dead? There was nothing I could do. So what if she’d looked me up, told me she had to meet me, and given me what was probably an antique? I’d earned it, hadn’t I? I’d written every goddamn paper she ever turned in. I’d driven her home after every drunken party, tagged along whenever she needed the ballast of a plain-Jane friend, cosseted her and basked in her borrowed glow. I’d been the battery so she could shine, and what did it get me?
Two months before graduation she’d run off with some older guy. Probably the same billionaire she ended up with. She was always cut out for it, our Moira.
My Moira. Who left me adrift.
The trip home on the filthy dark subway was the usual, and the elevator in my building was still out of order. So it was four flights up in my heels, my back killing me, and five full minutes of fucking with the locks before I could get into my own little shoebox. I shut the door, flipped the locks, dropped my briefcase, and decided to go for a bath. I left a trail of clothes, banged my elbow on the bathroom door, flipped on the light, and screamed.
Moira’s ghost stood in the white glare of my tiled bathroom, a river of burn marks charring one side of her body and blood dripping scarlet over her bloated hands. She was livid-pale, her hair wet, smoke-crisped draggles, and comp
letely naked.
I hit my head on something as I fell, and blacked out for a few merciful seconds. But not nearly long enough. When I woke up, I found out just how much everything had changed.
Traffic whooshed outside. It had started to rain. I held the icepack to my temple. “This is just temporary insanity,” I told her. “Probably brought on by stress. You don’t exist.”
Her blue eyes had turned a murky grey, the whites yellowing and swelling like eggs. Her head lolled drunkenly, and the nakedness was distracting. A short but jagged appendectomy scar sliced up her abdomen, vanishing into the cracking, charred flesh gripping her whole side. I remembered driving her to the hospital through knee-high snow, the doctor swearing in wonderment, her being whisked away to surgery. I’d missed an exam and my grades took a hit, but Moira had pulled through.
Just like always. Even though the infection should have killed her.
“You were the only person I could think of.” It was Moira’s voice, certainly . . . but flat and uninflected, a straight line on a heart monitor. “That might help me.”
The pendant lay on my secondhand mahogany coffee table, its chain spilling away, a river of brightness. Ice crackled as I shifted the pack against my aching head. “Head trauma. No, stress. Work’s been really bad lately.”
“You’re probably angry. I would be too. I just dropped you for years, and now this. I’m sorry.” Her usual apology, meaningless. The blood dripped, coating her hands, bright red gloves. Pearls of smoky water clung to her high firm pallid breasts. The tiny scars from silicone implants were purple-livid, and stippling ran down her back, her buttocks cupped with bruised darkness.
That’s where the blood settled, because she was on her back for a while. The thought sent a hot bolt of sourness through me, and I leaned forward, dropping my head. That just made it hurt more. I moaned.
“I look bad, too.” She made a short tsking noise. “All that money spent on maintenance, but once you go over and you can’t rest, you start looking like Frankenstein. I’m sorry, Georgie. You were the only choice.”
The apologies, again. She must need something. “Shut. Up.” I peered at her under one barely opened eyelid. “Am I insane? I’ve gone round the bend. Loony-bin time.”
“Nope.” One corner of her mouth twitched. It was a ghost of her famous smile, back when she’d been the redheaded college party terror. “You’re sane, you’ve accepted the Seal. You’re seeing my ghost, babydoll. I can’t pass on without your help.”
“Great,” I moaned again. “I should just take your word for it? Tautology, Staufford.”
“It’s Hannigan now. Or maybe I can take my maiden name back. This qualifies as a divorce.” Those clouding eyes fixed on me, and a spark of red lit in their depths. “He killed me, Georgie. My cheating, lying sorcerer of a husband. He wanted the Seal.”
“Which is that thing on the table.” I eyed its innocent silver gleam, balefully, and wished for a nice big jigger of Scotch.
“Right.”
“Sorcerer?” This time I eyed Moira’s ghost. The blood dripping from her hands and the water dripping from everywhere else vanished in midair with little popping crackles, a slow steady sound like a loose, sizzling faucet. She, however, stayed nice and solid. Or apparently solid. I didn’t want to touch her and find out either way.
Thank God I couldn’t smell her, too.
A short, very characteristic Moira nod. Water splatted dully from her lank, crisped hair. Her eyebrows were singed, and soot clung to her cheeks. “Right.”
“Right.” I hauled myself to my cold, bare, shivering feet. “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, kiddo.”
If only it was that easy.
I gave up trying to sleep and switched the light on. She hadn’t moved. Still standing there next to my bedroom window, dripping blood that vanished in midair and staring at me with those clouded, accusing eyes.
She could always outwait me. I’d found that out the hard way.
So I went ahead and admitted defeat. “Fine. What am I supposed to do?”
A slow, twitching grin, her purpling lips pulling back from shocking-white teeth. “First things first. Put it on.”
“Bring me my purse, then.” I pulled down the hem of my tank top.
A roll of those discoloured eyes. “Don’t be stupid. I’m a ghost, I can’t carry your shit.”
Which was what I’d wanted to know. “Just checking.” So of course I had to get out of my nice warm bed, pad out into the living room, and fish in my purse until I found the pendant. I worked the chain over my sloppy dishwater-brown ponytail. The metal was ice-cold for a brief second before warming, almost obscenely, against me. The pendant fluttered a little, caressing the skin over my breastbone, and the world rippled a little. “Whoa!”
“That’s what I thought when I put it on.” Moira smiled, another faint echo of her old devil-may-care grin. “Gramma Staufford’s probably rolling in her grave that I didn’t spawn a little girl to give it to and ruin her life.”
You mean, just like you’re ruining mine? But I didn’t say it. It was no use. She wouldn’t see it that way. Moira never did. “So you could see ghosts?”
“Not all the time. Grams died right before midterms, remember? I went to the funeral and my mother had a cow because she couldn’t find the Seal. Turns out Grams had taken it off and mailed it to me. Chose me over Mom, and that was not a happy cupcake, let me tell you. I was always Grams’s favourite.” Moira moved a little, restlessly, the water on her rippling. “You can’t die while you’re wearing it. But if you have someone in mind, sometimes you can take it off and give it. As a gift. Don’t do that unless you’re ready to die, though. I’m serious.”
“Were you? Ready, I mean?” I touched the pendant gingerly, with one fingertip. Christ, how was I going to wear this all the time? It went with absolutely nothing.
“Dying was preferable to being married to Ryan.” A shiver went through her. She blurred like a television image, static bursting through her almost-solid outline. “He’s a sorcerer, Georgie. He kept experimenting. Trying to get it off me, trying to make it obey him. Seeing the dead is the least of its tricks.”
“So . . . he reached out all the way from Europe and gave you a car crash?” I grabbed the chenille throw off the back of the ratty old couch an ex-boyfriend had helped me haul home from Goodwill, and wrapped myself up. “Come on, Moira. Give the rest of it.”
“I keep telling you, he’s a sorcerer. Use that great big egg brain of yours, Parkes.” She half-turned, staring at the window for once instead of at me. “I helped him get filthy rich, too. The Seal only picks women. Or at least, that’s what Grams told me. Ryan was studying it for aeons. He figured out he couldn’t hold it, so when Grams died he waited until he knew who it had settled with and swooped down on me. Wined and dined me, and I was stupid enough to fall for it.”
“You always did like attention.” It was snide, yeah. But I figured I’d earned some snide.
She didn’t even register the hit. Just considered it, head cocked sideways and a bead of water trickling down one cheek. “I did, didn’t I? Anyway, he was pretty wealthy, but he wanted more. Lots more. He knew about how to use the Seal. Called it a Grand Talisman. There’s major and minor ones, all tumbling around the world, but the Seal is one of the big players. Gram said it was only for the dead, but there are plenty of . . . other uses. Anyway . . . first we got Ryan filthy stinking rich, then that wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t good enough. He wanted the Seal himself. Only he couldn’t get it off me, so . . . do you know what it’s like to have a sorcerer on you all the time?” A delicate little shudder. Her tone was still flat, uninflected, and completely eerie. “I wouldn’t let him divorce me for a trophy, and he wouldn’t divorce me anyway because I had the Seal and he wanted more. That’s the thing about sorcerers. Greedy fucks.”
It’s not just sorcerers, honey. I bet I can find a lawyer who’s worse. “You read entirely too much sci-fi growing up.”
How could I move? I barely had enough energy to tread water. “Neither did you.” I scrunched back into the couch, the blanket wrapped securely around me, and I was still freezing. It wasn’t an external thing – the cold was way down deep. The pendant warmed, reassuringly, and I forced my fingers away from it with an effort. “So, what is it you want me to do exactly, Moira? It’s late and I need my beauty z’s.”
“Go to bed and get them, then. Now we wait.” Her slow smile was all the more chilling because I recognized it. It was the same grin she used to use when contemplating a nasty prank to play on her helpless flavour-of-the-week boytoy. “Ryan will come to you. I’d bet my afterlife on it.”
The most disconcerting thing about taking a ghost to work was other people walking through her. Moira grimaced each time, rippling, and I flinched because the pendant would twitch against my skin. Like a little live thing.
Another disconcerting thing? The world was brighter. Literally. I blinked and squinted my way through that first day, and everyone from Emily to Gene to Anderson told me how nice I looked but asked me if there was something wrong, since my eyes kept watering. It took a little time to adjust. Plus, the pendant kept twitching. Like an insect, or a little animal settling into a new burrow. And it really did go with nothing in my closet, but nobody noticed it.
Their gazes just slid right over it.
Moira’s running commentary on my day was hysterical. Or it would’ve been, if I could have talked back.
The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) Page 30