Candle in the Attic Window

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  Alice in Wonderland was familiar enough to me that I was wary of such doors. I peered inside and saw a bare lightbulb with a dangling chain. One tug on the chain sent light spreading over a small space that looked like a closet, but that featured stairs leading upward. At the top of the stairs (Of course I climbed those stairs, which groaned and seemed likely to give way before I did reach the top) there was another door, shorter. Through that door (for how could I not go on?), yet another door, and this one had me crawling through a small space that seemed more like a heating duct than it did storage. Surely, nothing was kept up here – but I was wrong.

  A small box sat at the far end of the space. I pulled it toward me, through the dust of ages, and pried up the small latch that kept the lid closed. Inside the box sat another box, and inside this box, a delicate ring. It was nothing complex, a loop of white gold or silver, holding one small diamond aloft in a simple filigree swirl. It seemed a thing a bride would wear.

  There came a shout from the lower part of the house and I jumped into motion, wriggling out of that small space, even as I jammed the ring box into my jeans pocket. I came down to find the bedroom quiet and dark. A glance out the windows showed me that, somehow, the day had flown. I closed the secret door and left Aunt’s room, but as I stepped into the hall, a terrible cold seized me.

  “Louisa! Mother!”

  There was no reply from them. I was shivering by the time I reached the stairs and pulled myself back before I slipped down them, for they were coated in ice. Long daggers of ice draped the banister and small bits of snow swirled in the air. I stood there for the longest time, thinking I was dreaming, but a sharp twist of the skin near my wrist seemed to prove I was awake.

  I picked my way down the staircase, only slipping once when I neared the bottom. I thumped down those last steps and entered a world that seemed unreal. Snow had drifted to the foot of the stairs and against every wall. The wind blew a gale from one end of the house to another, ice and snow tracing over every wall, window and door.

  It was the front door that was open, a mouth for the storm to howl through. I could not close it, for the snow had drifted in such a way to make it impossible. I cried out for my sister and mother, again –

  “Mädchen.”

  It was his voice, though, not theirs, that rose above the shriek of the storm. I turned, fully expecting him to be there, but I was still alone in the snowy house. All around me, the house moaned, like Aunt once had as the cold burrowed into her, down to her bones. Oddly, I wanted to soothe the house, make it better, but instead, I fled.

  Out into the storm, where that dismal voice hailed from. All through the blowing snow, the sculpted drifts, I stumbled half-blind, reaching frozen hands out to push brambles and branches back. I slipped on ice and staggered when the cold seeped into me; I could not feel my feet, but kept moving, not away from the house, but toward that voice.

  “Who are you?” I screamed the question, expecting no reply, but one came.

  The skeletal arms closed around me, nearly warm the way they had been in the windmill. Dream or awake? Awake, I told myself, over and over, as I turned in those arms and looked up at his face. And yes ….

  He had lips as would any human man, lips that tasted of wintergreen oil when they crossed mine, but his eyes were far gone and so, too, his nose. Yet, this did not bother me. It simply was. His hands were no longer those of a man but skeletal. Long, time-worn bones stroked over my cheek, my hair and curled around my throat. I thought I should scream, yet the touch was warm, rousing, and I leaned into it. Even when he bade me not to, even when he told me only I could stop him.

  “What do you want?” I whispered. Though my breath turned to frost between us, I still watched as it melted the snowflakes upon his rotting cheeks.

  He could not speak – I saw that now. As other parts of him had rotted, so, too, was his throat gone. There were no muscles that might make such sounds. He had never spoken my name, had never told me anything. Then who?

  Though his eyes were clouded over – perhaps they had once been blue – I saw some frantic horror still within them. He needed me to understand, but he could not speak. He needed me to know. He was wretched and terribly lonely. And Aunt had never married ….

  I shoved a hand into my pocket, barely feeling the scrape of cold denim over frozen skin, and pulled out the ring box. With shaking hands, I lifted the ring from its box and held it up, showing him how, even in the storm, it managed to gleam. That diamond was small but lovely, almost like my aunt.

  There was a recognition in his eyes and maybe, just maybe, he had offered this ring dozens of years ago, so long ago that none could remember – but Aunt had remembered. Had shut the box away in a secret place that only another dreamer might find.

  I saw them then. He would take Aunt by the hand – his own not gloved, fingers twining warm and firm about hers – and lead her through the fog, up the hillock with its dew-wet grasses (faded to amber with the coming of autumn), and into the meadow beyond. The gate would unlatch, the sheep unseen, and they would make their slow and steady way toward the windmill, which rose in dark relief within the clouded air. The bare oak and apple trees made a fringe behind the old mill, only half there in the gloom; he pulled her through thorn bushes, which caught at her skirts and tried to hold her back.

  Aunt said no and forever regretted it. Forever.

  I held the ring between us, like a shared secret, and his milky eyes blinked. Did he gasp? Did he – Ah, Reader. The dead do smile.

  •••

  E. Catherine Tobler lives and writes in Colorado – strange how that works out. Among others, her fiction has appeared in Sci Fiction, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is an active member of SFWA and the senior editor at Shimmer Magazine. For more, visit http://www.ecatherine.com.

  In His Arms in the Attic

  By Alexis Brooks de Vita

  The first surprise was that the two hundred-year-old townhouse was still intact in the heart of the French Quarter, even after Hurricanes Katrina and Ike, and the rebuilding of New Orleans into an adult fantasy of itself.

  Ave Marie de la Croix pulled her antique 914 black Porsche over to the curb that dipped between the narrow-bricked sidewalk and the cobblestoned street. She shoved open the driver’s rusted door and unfolded long, lean, jean-clad legs to slide out and confront her childhood holiday playground.

  Then Ave had her second surprise.

  She thought she heard a voice, hushed and urgent, call her name: “Ah-vay!” She jerked her head up toward the townhouse’s second floor. And something slipped like a razor-edged knife between the wrought-iron balcony and the glass panes of the French doors.

  A bird as it flew overhead? A squatter scuttling back into hiding?

  Ave waited. Watched, barely breathing.

  But no bulky darkness shifted behind the dusty glass. No hesitant hand pushed aside tattered lace to peer down at her upturned face. Nothing moved again.

  Ave muttered, “Jumping at shadows.”

  She threw a cautious look back over her shoulder. No frustrated residents were out running errands, and no lost revelers wandered in search of bars or breast-baring college girls. Even with Mardi Gras night fast descending, this little side street remained empty and still.

  Her neighbours had probably all fled the seasonal festivities for suburban relatives’ homes. Ave would be alone in the townhouse tonight.

  She squared her shoulders. Tossed back her head and yanked out the hair-tie that held together a lopsided bun at the nape of her neck. Braids and dreadlocks cascaded down to her narrow waist.

  She had not driven all this way from San Francisco just to play the scared, little, big-eyed girl again. She was all grown up now.

  And ready to believe in ghosts. On the theory that, once you believed, there was nothing left to fear.

  Ave kicked shut the sports car’s door and strode across the cobbles and bricks. She jangled through
the ring of rusted keys she’d retrieved from a Bay Area safe deposit box until she found one with curled masking tape, faintly labeled: “Front Door.”

  She worked it into the lock. Grabbed the scratchy latch. Twisted and shoved.

  Hesitation seized her with the panic of a virgin who has changed her mind just seconds too late. No!

  And then came the rush of rotted air and the sweeping view through darkness to abandoned things huddled under stained sheets that always meant coming home.

  Only, this had never been her home. Ave had never been more than a holiday visitor here, puzzled by the grandmother and aunts she loved so much.

  Ave lifted a booted foot across the threshold. Eased her body behind it like a dancer poised at the edge of the stage.

  Surely, someone was here. She could feel someone. “Sheridan?” Ave called. She couldn’t resist the hope.

  But nothing stirred.

  Ave pulled herself together with a little mental slap. Of course that was not the way to invoke a spirit.

  Ave flung out a hand and patted the wall to her right in search of a light switch. Felt an old-fashioned knob at the end of a long, wire-covering tube. Turned it.

  No lights flickered on. The electric company hadn’t come through.

  I should have brought a flashlight from the car, Ave scolded herself. But she suspected that if she went back to the Porsche now, she would leap into it and drive straight to Canal Street to search for a hotel room. Mardi Gras Night, there won’t be one. So, she’d end up fleeing the Crescent City all the way back to the Golden Gate Bridge.

  “And what will you do there?” Ave challenged herself out loud, just to hear a voice. “Jump off of it into the Bay?”

  If she hadn’t jumped or overdosed during her zombie-state in the blighted seasons following Sheridan’s death, there was no point doing it now. Just see this through, Ave urged herself.

  Maybe he will come. Perhaps he is already here.

  Watching her. Counting on her to bring them together again.

  Ave crossed the dust-coated hardwood floor to the closest lump of furniture hidden under dust covers. Grabbed a handful of cloth and yanked.

  And screamed as a spiky clump hurtled across the toe of her boot, squeaking and trailing a bald tail an inch above the floor.

  Ave was back on the street and had already grabbed open the Porsche’s resistant door before she got hold of herself. “Just a rat,” she panted and, “What did you expect?” she chided herself. “No one’s been in that house since the honeymoon.”

  And with the accidental resurrection of that blessed, fairytale memory, she bent her face into her grimy hands and let belated tears of loss and despair gush free.

  It felt good to cry. She sank against the Porsche’s side, her curved back pressed against Sheridan’s gaudily stenciled “914”, and sobbed.

  Flashes of memory: Sheridan openmouthed like a child as they cruised the French Quarter’s narrow streets. Sheridan emerging from his gleaming Porsche, laughing and shaking his head with disbelief at the sight of her inheritance, this dilapidated mansion.

  Sheridan coaxing her up the curved stairs, a candelabra in one hand and her wrist in the other. “Come on, babygirl. Aren’t you even curious to see if the old stories are true?”

  They had been married in San Francisco on a long-ago Valentine’s Day before they rushed their honeymoon Gulf-ward. Sheridan so wanted to celebrate his first Mardi Gras in New Orleans: to revel in the streets and stack his neck with gaudy beads flung from masqueraders floating by in the night air.

  Wanted to get into the townhouse attic by midnight and see if the ghostly Mardi Gras ball was only a spinsters’ story told to a gullible Creole child. As if, in this sunken city where history and myth trembled at the edge of the encroaching sea – holding back the final devastation – magic still lived.

  The two newlyweds never made it into the attic. Ave thundered down the steps and out onto the street, cursing Sheridan’s insensitivity every step of the way.

  He’d come after her. When he caught up with her among the revelers groping her rear end and waving strings of bright beads to tempt her to share her body, she slapped him. “That’s my childhood you’re making fun of, Sheridan! It’s not funny. And I don’t want to see whatever comes into the attic at midnight!”

  Sheridan had laughed off his shock, kissed her, and swept her up into his arms to carry her back to the townhouse. Watching all this, the revelers cheered.

  They’d spent the night out on the balcony. It was his idea. They’d told each other favourite childhood memories, and made love in a sleeping bag against a backdrop of fanning fireworks and the drunken laughter of merrymakers.

  “Oh, Sheridan.” Now, as the sobs eased, Ave dabbed at the muddy paste her tears made as they mingled with the dirt she’d gotten on her hands when she pulled off the first dust cover. “Tonight I’ll make it into that attic for you, my love. Be there for me, too, Sheridan.” She pulled herself to her feet.

  Ave looked toward the wide-open townhouse door. The ring of keys glinted in the dark parlour where she’d dropped them when she’d fled.

  No way could she go back in there now. But she’d go get some candles, see if she couldn’t put in a call to the electric company, and maybe the gas and water people, while she was at it. Go do some groceries, as the locals called shopping, maybe find a few of Sheridan’s favourites. Then she’d be back.

  When Ave returned, she drove the Porsche through the narrow alleyway behind the townhouse to its carport. The walk through the alleyway around to the front door, lugging four bags of food and cleaning supplies with a flashlight, normalized her re-entry. The flashlight’s beam swept ahead of Ave and sent vermin skittering out of sight to the edges of the dark parlour.

  “Uh,” she groaned. She’d be anxious to get into the attic by midnight and, if no one was there, get out of here.

  Could she bear to think that no one would be there?

  That Sheridan was gone? Grief does things to your mind. How many times had Ave heard this from her university’s counselor, her aunts and girlfriends, in the blisteringly lonely months since Sheridan’s death?

  “I just have to try,” she said aloud, a habit these days. “Sheridan believed in ghosts.” Which led to that unspeakable hope: Maybe his belief can bring him back.

  It was worth a try. What did Ave have to lose? Sheridan will try to come back to me. If anywhere, here. He will know I need him. He will know I stayed alive just to come here for him.

  She would go into his arms once more. This thin thread had tied her to life. Because the worst thing about death was that it came without giving fair warning, one last chance to fill up your soul with enough love to last as long as you had to keep going.

  A winter ago, Ave had prepared a lecture on war-and-water literature for her university students as she tossed together a soup and salad for Sheridan, on his way home from a Deans’ meeting. But Sheridan flung aside his trenchcoat and briefcase to gather in his arms a rape/murder victim in an alleyway and was shot along with the fleeing culprit by the arriving police officers.

  Struggling to hold onto life at the hospital, he’d weakened so alarmingly before she even got there that just kissing his cracked lips seemed a cruel imposition. As she waited and watched the emergency team work on him, Ave never doubted for a moment that he would revive.

  But the doctor pulled up the sheet to cover Sheridan’s face. He looked up as Ave started to scream and shouted for help, tugging her out past the curtains of the emergency room.

  She fought all the way, shrieking Sheridan’s name. But he was gone. And her first coherent thought, struggling up out of layers of shock and sedatives, had been that they would never make love again.

  Not easy to say to her aunts when they came to her loft apartment with plates of steaming greens, spicy cornbread, and savory dirty rice. “Eat, Ave Marie. You’re not in the grave yet, no matter how badly you wish to be.” Not easy to explain to friends who asked her to a
party, a club, a blind dinner date. “Maybe it’s time for you to meet someone new, girl.”

  I’m not through with Sheridan. I have to hear his voice. Tell him I love him. Feel his arms around me again. If another man touches me, I’ll kill him. I’ll die. I need to make love with Sheridan. Maybe then she could finally say goodbye.

  Sheridan would have understood exactly how she felt. And if he came to the Mardi Gras ghostly ball ....

  By now, Ave had snatched off dust covers all the way from the front door through the dining hallway and up to the kitchen. They littered the floor behind her, waiting to be gathered up and dumped into a washing machine.

  And there was just such a machine where she remembered it in the corner of the kitchen: frontload, European-style.

  Ave deposited her load of candles and cleaning utensils and a handy camping lantern on the kitchen worktable, and went back for the dust covers. She jammed them into the washing machine and took a deep breath before she snatched open the broom closet.

  Shushed sounds of brittle things scuttling out of her way.

  Ave stood her ground. She shone her light bravely around inside the cramped storage space, driving hideous creatures before her, back into the darkness. Only brooms and a dustpan, a bucket, and a collection of string and sponge mops remained.

  The water and gas companies had done better than the electric people. Soon, Ave had mopped a disinfectant trail throughout the downstairs rooms that was guaranteed to send vermin staggering back into the city’s sewage system.

  Nothing scampered at the edges of the darkness now, she thought with satisfaction as she dumped the muck into the gutter outside. She really should finally close the front door when she went back into the pine-scented townhouse. Close herself in with her ghost.

  The latch clicked loudly in the silence.