Haunted

by Lynn Carthage

  Some say the past is like a groove in an old-time LP record. If the needle skips, you hear it again. But somehow Madame Arnaud’s legacy had embedded itself into every channel of that wax, softly behind the regular track.

  “I feel it,” I said.

  He reached out his arms and hugged me. His shaved jaw lightly scratched my temple.

  “I’ll help you,” he whispered into my ear. His voice had the deep rumble of someone far older, a man who’d smoked cigars all his life. I could sink into that voice, let it comfort me through nightmares, through all the nights I might sit up unable to sleep.

  “Thank you,” I said. I told him what I knew I had to tell someone. “She wants me to bring her a child from the village.”

  “Are you serious? How do you know that?” His eyes searched my face.

  “She wrote me more pages. She said she’d let Tabby go if I could bring her someone else. It’s taboo for her to drink her own family’s blood, but she’s starving.”

  He hugged me again, and I closed my eyes to inhale his particular fragrance of soap and cologne. He stepped back firmly, clearly reminded again of his girlfriend. “I don’t know what to say,” he said. “But you won’t have to secure a child for her if we get Tabby out of here.”

  He pointed at the thicket of ivy—somehow he had seen a gate handle in the profusion. It was another way out of the secret cemetery, and we found ourselves in the manor’s true backyard—the area stretching behind the main wing. Miles stopped short at the sight. I realized I was standing there with my mouth wide open like those antique portraits of Christmas carolers.

  This had once been a showcase of a garden—gardens, really—with lawns stretching gently downhill miles into the distance. There were pools with fountains in them, overcome with mold, and paving stones laid in curling, graceful pathways, and trees marking the grande allée. White statues, stationed periodically, held graceful poses. Farther off, a long, substantial canal held water.

  “It’s modeled on Versailles,” said Miles. “My parents took me last year. Madame Arnaud must’ve been trying to re-create it, with her own stamp.”

  We went down the somewhat-broken stairs to reach the lower terrace. I looked out into the distance—and my heart jolted.

  “What’s that?” I asked him, pointing to the small shape emerging from what looked to be a maze. Soon the shape was running; it was human. A toddler.

  “What’s he doing out here?” Miles asked.

  I felt the contradiction of wanting to protect an untended infant and feeling pure terror that something wasn’t right with it, that it was part of Madame Arnaud’s menagerie.

  “I wouldn’t call it ‘he,’ ” I said.

  It ran toward us in the clumsy way of young children. It had a young rooster’s fluff of black hair and still wore yesteryear’s blowsy boy’s tunic. When it was about forty yards away, it tumbled, and I gasped. It quickly rolled over and stood up again. Running straight toward us.

  “Uh …” I said. I had no idea what I feared: the toddler’s teeth, the unearthly howl that might emerge from its soft, milk-fed throat?

  As it got closer, I saw the look on its face. Not good.

  “Yeah, time to go,” Miles said.

  We bolted. I kept turning my head to see the fervent progress of the pale, nearly translucent, child. I had seen the infrastructure under its face, the network of tired, emptied veins, the panels of bone and muscle … and the desperate wanting that was in its eyes. It wanted something from us.

  As soon as we turned the corner to start down the adjoining wing, we slowed to a jog. There was no way the infant could pursue and catch us on its tiny, untried legs.

  “What the hell was that?” asked Miles.

  “You tell me.”

  We collapsed onto a stone bench covered with the circuitous scrollwork snails had left behind.

  “It was one of them,” I said. “One of Madame Arnaud’s victims.”

  “So he’s not at rest.”

  “Clearly!” I said. “The weird thing is, there were hundreds of tombstones for the kids. Why isn’t this place crawling with ghosts?”

  He didn’t answer, and I heard my sentence linger in the air. “Am I really talking about ghosts?” I asked. “This is seriously what we’re talking about?”

  I remembered when he’d first told me about Madame Arnaud and I’d been so skeptical. I felt myself blushing—but it wasn’t actually embarrassment, but something bigger, something tinged with queasiness and maybe even anger.

  Miles narrowed his eyes at me. “Maybe there are ghosts here, but we can’t see them. So why would that boy be any different?”

  I released the breath I didn’t know I was holding. Yes, we were seriously talking about ghosts.

  “I wonder how long the poor kid has waited for someone to come talk to him,” I said.

  “Poor kid? It looked like it wanted to kill us.”

  “Maybe that’s just because we’re not used to seeing desperation so severe. Think about it. Based on his clothing style, he must have been haunting the backyard for hundreds of years.”

  “You think he just wanted to talk to us?” Miles asked.

  I didn’t know how to answer. I watched the corner of the manor, wondering if we’d see the scrap of a child stagger around it, exhausted, but doggedly trying to catch up to us. And what would he say? Could he even talk yet?

  “Let’s keep going,” Miles said. We stood up and turned our backs to the possibility of interacting with the boy. We had another child to tend to: my sister.

  Sitting glued to Tabby’s side, I reflected that another day had passed without my showing proof to Mom and Steven. The pages in the den were gone: big surprise. And somehow we’d been deterred from returning to Eleanor’s chamber to get her diary, which would explain everything. Now it was nighttime and I was back on vigilance duty, watching my sister sleeping cluelessly in her crib.

  I was supposed to find a substitute, to keep Madame Arnaud from preying on Tabby. I could get Miles to take me in his car. I could look for the worst child, the bully at the school, the bastard who tortured animals. We could research it, find out which child was expendable. And then I’d …

  Jesus. I couldn’t even imagine it. Coaxing a child into the car for … my stomach lurched. I just wasn’t capable of it, even if it would save my sister’s life.

  All it would do was buy Tabby time. Because undoubtedly, once Madame Arnaud was hungry again, she’d threaten Tabby again. And I’d have to find another child. I’d be stuck in the pattern until Tabby was too old for Madame Arnaud to want her. Years would go by.

  I couldn’t do it.

  How many people, given the chance to save the life of a family member, would do whatever possible? They wouldn’t even question it. They would just do it.

  I’d never been more dangerous to the world than I was right now. I was walking on the thin crust of a lake covered in desultory ice. Below me, I could see the water rising up, ready to spring, willing to let that ice crack. The water wanted to welcome me into its cold and bracing arms.

  On her grade sheet, our psych teacher had said Bethany and I never talked about what happens to undiagnosed patients. What danger they pose to themselves and others.

  If this was all an out-of-control delusion, with an illusory Miles confirming it for me, what horrible deeds might I do, thinking I was doing the right thing?

  We had moved here to England because I did something wrong, after all.

  I’m a good person, I told myself. I might have made a mistake. But I’m a good person.

  I pulled my mind out of the morass of circular thinking and focused on the little girl in the room with me. I could guard my sister; I could watch her intensely. Now that I knew Madame Arnaud was alive, I realized she was someone I could actually fight. As long as I didn’t faint, that is.

  All I could do was hover over Tabby so closely I was able to memorize every inch of her skin. I’d never noticed that one mole over by her ear, nor ev
er peered in that ear to see the tiny passageway with its slightly yellow walls. I counted her teeth and looked at the pale blue veins visible through the part in her scant hair.

  Tabby woke from a nightmare, fussing, and Mom came back in for another lullaby. I felt like a voyeur during the tenderness of her song—the same one she’d sung to me basically until third grade. I know, embarrassing it went on so long, but honestly nothing else relaxed me so much as hearing that one brief song in my mom’s light soprano voice.

  But as her voice cracked over the phrase “and keep you safe, sweet child, till morn,” I fled. I ran back to my lime green room. Then I got confused.

  I forgot. I forgot danger, forgot everything. I sat on my bed and I can’t say where my mind went or what I was thinking. I bathed in nothingness. I couldn’t connect my body and my mind … almost like swimming with gravity releasing its hold … but in a completely disorienting way that left me devoid of emotion.

  I think that then I knew. But I pushed the thought away. Instead, I drifted, taking solace in the vacuum of sensation.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Born: a son Louis Arnaud, April 14, 1722, to Isabelle and

  Henri Arnaud. Henri along with several relatives moved here

  from France last year, and a manor house has been built for

  them on Auldkirk Lane.

  —Grenshire Argus birth announcement

  The breakfast table.

  I was sitting looking at Tabby’s toast. It didn’t interest me in the slightest. I had no hunger.

  “Today’s going to be one of the sad days,” Mom said. Steven froze with his coffee mug halfway to his lips. He set it down, stood up, and walked behind her chair, leaning over so his cheek rested on top of her head.

  Something was so intimate, so private about them that I turned my face away.

  “They’re all sad,” he murmured.

  “But today … it’s debilitating. I can’t watch Tabby. I just want to …”

  “You can stay in bed all day,” promised Steven. “I’ll watch her.”

  She reached up a hand and he held it, his thumb caressing back and forth. Mom gave a guttural moan and her mouth shaped into a soundless rectangle—an expression I’ve never seen before on her face. It was like she was somewhere far beyond sadness, that mere sobbing was not enough to express her profound grief.

  But when it did come, her sob was so catastrophic that I cried aloud myself in horror. What on earth had happened to Mom?

  Steven was crying, too, quiet tears running down his face and into her hair.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said. It was me. I did something. I buried my face in my hands.

  “It’s not your fault,” said Steven. “You have to let go of that.”

  “It is,” I said, muffled by my palms. I’d screwed up royally.

  I couldn’t handle seeing Mom so overcome; it just killed me. And Steven crying, too? That never happened.

  I felt so sick the bile rose in my throat. This was the kind of pain nothing would ever heal, like a knife was in my chest, puncturing my lungs, making me fight for every breath past its heavy silver heft.

  Misery settled into every cell of my body … nestling in with guilt. Together they rode my electrons and protons, terrible masters digging in the spurs.

  I’d done something wrong.

  What was it, though?

  Looking at my mother’s tortured face, I’d had enough. I had to figure this out, and now. I pushed past all the signals that told me to stop, that it was too hurtful to think about.

  I had to know. I had to know.

  Left arm, right arm, cleaving through the water with succinct splashes. Turn my head and breathe. Legs strong. Hips gently canting. All my bodily systems working in tandem.

  Pushing with everything I had, my lungs on fire. I can relax when it’s over, I was telling myself. Push through the pain. Pain is temporary, but a win is forever.

  The swim meet against Berkeley High.

  I remember this, I marveled. Their lead girl had posted better times earlier in the season, but I knew I could beat her. Every tenth of a second counts, I was coaching myself. Stretch those arms farther, grab as much pool as you can. Quick economical inhales every eighth stroke. My lungs were burning. Every muscle was burning.

  Then … the stars. The dizzy constellations behind my eyelids. There they were in all their bright and terrible splendor, a whole skyful taking over my vision. Too many to count, too many to comprehend.

  Almost there, I told myself. Fight it off.

  Couldn’t remember if I was close to the wall or not, praying for my fingers to touch the reassuring solidity of tiles. But all I felt was more water.

  I was laid out, exposed and helpless, to the starred universe inside myself.

  A mouthful of water.

  I sank without a fight.

  The water won, but I hadn’t even tried. Instead, I had been stargazing, watching the cosmos in the loneliest of nights.

  I couldn’t bear to attend the autopsy, but I did hover in and listen later when the coroner told Mom and Steven it was long QT syndrome. My fainting spells had been real, were caused by a genetic mutation.

  “If she hadn’t fainted in the pool, it still would have been fatal,” he told them. “It slows the heart.”

  Since there was water in my lungs, the true cause of my death was drowning, and that’s what he told them he’d put on the death certificate. He meant it to be reassuring that I would’ve died anyway.

  As I drifted away to process the news in private, like an animal buries itself in leaves to brood over an injury, I heard my mom ask, “If we’d sought medical advice and gotten her diagnosed …”

  She couldn’t continue, breaking down in tears. Steven finished the sentence for her. “If she’d been diagnosed, could she have lived?”

  The coroner said very gently, “You’ll need to talk to your doctor about that. This is a very rare syndrome and it would take an outside-the-box thinker to arrive at this diagnosis.” He paused for a long time. “But there are medications she could have taken to control the—”

  She didn’t let him finish. She screamed. She screamed one long, singular sound until every iota of breath had left her lungs.

  Her lungs empty.

  Mine full.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The mood was high and the music brilliant at the recent fête

  held at the Arnaud property in northern England. For many

  attendees it was quite a drive into the wild. However, the gasps

  upon arrival into the main hall made it clear that swaying in a

  carriage for hours on end was certainly worthwhile. Lanterns

  decorated the lavish grounds while flowers and rich

  adornments were found in every inch of the interior, a massive

  and luxurious manor decorated in the Continental style. After

  the bustle of a busy Season, it was a pleasure to stop at the

  Arnaud estate for one last hurrah before returning home.

  —From the London Social Whisper, August 14, 1801

  I had a job to do.

  I needed Miles’s help.

  My sweet friend Miles. I understood exactly now. I saw it all. I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to understand. I had to help him understand, too.

  But where was he? Every time I’d ever seen him, something threw us together. I had no idea what that force was or how to harness it. How would I find him again? Every time I witlessly landed in his car’s passenger seat, or joined him in the fast lane of the pool, I’d had nothing to do with it. It had just happened.

  Well, if there’s nowhere else to look, try inside yourself, I thought.

  Maybe I could call him to me by the sheer fervor of my desire to see him.

  I closed my eyes and called to him in my mind.

  “Miles, I need you, I need you. Please … come.”

  I felt a stirring in the air surrounding me.

&nb
sp; “Phoebe,” he said. I opened my eyes and he was there. We were in my lime bedroom. “Are you okay?” His voice held so much tenderness.

  “I’m okay,” I said. I paused. “I’m working on ‘okay,’ actually.”

  He smiled at me uncertainly.

  “Miles. Tell me what’s on the other side of the bridge,” I said.

  He looked at me, confused. “What bridge?”

  “The one we always drive over,” I said. “You never want to turn right.”

  He nodded, then shrugged. “There’s nothing on the other side.”

  “I think there is,” I said quietly. “What would we find if we turned the other direction?”

  We were in the car now. The motor sounded scratchy, small.

  “I’ve been trying to turn right,” he said in a tight voice.

  “Since when?”

  “Since I met you.”

  Whoa. I raised my eyebrows and took a closer look at him, hunched over the steering wheel, seemingly in agony.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been trying to take that goddamn, bleeding turn since I met you!” He thumped his palm on the steering wheel. We were on the bridge now, the water sparkling beneath us like tinsel.

  “Here it is, just slow down, just … Miles, you missed it!”

  He had turned left. I looked at my hands, folded in my lap. This was so cruel of me.

  “Do it over!” I insisted.

  We were back on the bridge.

  He decelerated, and actually began to turn the wheel to the right. But then he stopped the car completely.

  “What is wrong with me?” he asked. I pointed to the right, where the field of flowers invitingly wafted in the wind.

  “Turn right!” I said. I was firm. My eyes filled with tears, though, the minute he looked away.

  The car began moving again. I put my hand out to help steer, but underneath my palm the steering wheel was already moving to the right. He was doing it.

  The field was filled to tumult with towering foxglove and primrose. These flowers had caught the chance of a breeze that spread their seed, or bees that had made quick work of delivering pollen. Nothing was planned about this riotous spread of color, with oxeye daisies and pansies and wildflowers whose names I didn’t know.