by E. E. Holmes
“Karen!” the woman named Celeste said. “Welcome home!”
“Thank you, Celeste! I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be back,” Karen replied, squeezing Celeste’s hand affectionately. Then she turned to us. “Girls, come here! I want to introduce you!”
I crossed the entrance hall, my footsteps echoing resoundingly. Hannah followed half a pace behind me, like a shadow, her feet somehow much quieter than mine. Okay, so combat boots were clearly a poor footwear choice in a place like this. I grumbled inwardly about how gleeful Milo would be if I stopped wearing them. I’m sure he’d be convinced that it was his own fashion advice that had penetrated my resistance at last.
“Celeste Morgan, these are Elizabeth’s girls, Jess and Hannah,” Karen said, pointing each of us out in turn.
“A pleasure to meet you both,” Celeste said, shaking my hand. She then held her hand out to Hannah, but seemed to sense Hannah’s hesitancy almost at once, and turned the motion into a wave instead.
“Nice to meet you, too,” I answered for the two of us. Hannah nodded diffidently.
Up close, Celeste seemed to be about Karen’s age, with some gentle lines around her full-lipped mouth and wide, blue eyes. Here and there, a strand of silver glimmered in her hair, which fell in shining auburn tendrils past her shoulder blades.
“Celeste and I were Apprentices together. She serves on the Durupinen High Council and teaches here as well. Do you still teach History and Lore?” Karen asked her.
“Yes,” Celeste said with an apologetic expression. “I’m afraid I will be boring you both to tears three days a week.”
“I like history,” Hannah said quietly, speaking for the first time.
“I’m glad to hear it!” Celeste said. “At least I’ll have one pupil listening, and that’s something, isn’t it? Well, what do you think of the place?” She gestured grandly around us.
“It’s…unbelievable,” I managed.
Celeste gave a knowing smile. “It is overwhelming at first, but you’ll get used to it. We all do. Pretty soon you’ll be knocking around the old place just like you would at home.” She turned back to Karen. “And how was your journey? Uneventful, I hope?”
“It was fine, thanks,” Karen said. “And how’s everything here?”
There was something loaded about the question, about the hesitant way that Karen asked it. Celeste understood whatever it was, and her smile faltered a bit as she answered.
“Pretty calm. The Council met last night. I’ll tell you all about it once we get these ladies settled in their room. Also, I told Finvarra that I’d take you to see her when you arrived,” she said.
“I figured as much,” Karen said, with an expression rather like a kid caught sneaking in after curfew. “Where are they going to be sleeping?” she added, gesturing to us.
“The East Wing, first door after the tower, of course. Your old stomping grounds! Where did you suspect?”
Karen grimaced. “I thought perhaps, given recent events, we might have been…reassigned.”
Celeste took Karen’s hand again and gave it a friendly squeeze. “Not while I’m on the Council.” She handed Karen a large and ornate brass skeleton key, like the kind of thing that might open a pirate’s treasure chest or the wardrobe to Narnia.
“Thank you,” Karen said, then dropped her hand and pointed up the stairs. “Come on, girls, I’ll show you where your room is. You’ll be staying in the same room your mother and I used to stay in when we were here. Our family has been housed there for centuries. Pretty cool, huh?”
We mounted the huge staircase and walked along the balcony into a second floor corridor that seemed to go on forever. How could there possibly be this many doors in a single building? Each door had a gold plate engraved with the room number, but no indication as to what was behind it. Here and there, a symbol had been burned into the wood of the door, a sort of rune-like shape not unlike a closed eye.
“What’s with the creepy hieroglyphics?” I asked.
“Remember I told you about the wards around the buildings? Some of the individual rooms have them as well. Ghosts aren’t allowed into certain areas of the castle, including bedrooms and some ceremonial areas and offices. The wards keep them out as effectively as walls would keep you or me out.”
We twisted and turned down a dozen more hallways; a left, a right, another right, a short staircase, another left — this place was like a labyrinth. I gave up all hope of remembering the way back to the entrance hall and started to wonder if the ghosts we’d seen so far were people who’d died trying to find their way out.
Finally, Karen rounded one last corner and came to a halt. “Here we go!” She fumbled in her pocket for the key Celeste had given her and inserted it into the old-fashioned lock. It twisted with a whining screech, clicked loudly, and the door swung heavily forward.
The room was large and high-ceilinged, with richly paneled walls and a stone fireplace. Two four-poster beds stood against the far wall with a large, mullioned window between them. They were hung with pale gold silk drapes and made up with matching gold bedspreads. In front of the fireplace, the wide planked floors were spread with an ornate but threadbare Persian rug and two wide and cozy-looking purple armchairs. Two antique mahogany desks with matching chairs stood against the wall opposite the beds, and a tall bookcase took up most of the remaining space in the wall beside the door. A tapestry hung above the fireplace. It depicted a huntress astride a rearing white unicorn, bow drawn, in pursuit of a creature that seemed to be half jungle cat, half bird of prey.
Hannah hovered in the doorway, taking it all in, but I followed Karen into the room, crossing to the window and peering out onto the grounds below. We had a view of the gardens we’d spotted on our approach to Fairhaven. As I watched, a ghost flitted from pathway to pathway, fluid as a shadow, but bright as a star.
I turned to Karen and pointed back over my shoulder at the window. “So is this where we let our excessively long hair down to receive visitors?”
She laughed out loud and tossed me the key. “I know, the whole thing is pretty surreal. I remember feeling the same way when we first came here. I know it doesn’t look like it, but you’ve got all the modern amenities here.”
I looked around a little more carefully and saw that she was right. There were outlets along the baseboards, and even, absurdly, an ethernet port. The fireplace was spotlessly clean, with logs piled decoratively in a brass stand, but no sign that it was ever actually used. And despite how much more appropriately candles and torches would have fit the decor, there were several polished silver reading lamps, and the chandelier above our heads was fitted with light bulbs, not dripping wax tapers. I turned to Hannah, still framed in the doorway.
“What do you think, roomie?” I asked.
She stepped over the threshold, a most peculiar expression on her face, like a child submerged in water for the first time. She stood there, eyes closed for a moment, and took a deep, cleansing breath. Then she opened her eyes and her face broke into the biggest, most radiant smile I’d ever seen on it. It was absolutely transformative, as though years of hardship had, just for a moment, been lifted off of her.
“I can’t feel them. Any of them!” she said, her voice a gush of wonder. “It’s wonderful!” Her whole body seemed to relax, and she fairly skipped into the room and over to the beds and, with a little hop, flung herself onto the right one, moving her arms up and down in great arcs, as though she were making snow angels in the down of the comforter. “Can I have this bed?”
Karen and I looked at each other, stunned but delighted to see Hannah so happy. “Of course you can,” I said, bounding across the room to land with a plop on the other bed and, just because we’d never had the chance as kids, flinging one of my many pillows playfully at her head. She caught it, still grinning that wonderful, light-hearted grin so foreign to her features.
Just behind Karen, two of the Caomhnóir appeared silently in the doorway, wheeling two brass luggage cart
s, like you might see in a Ritz Carlton lobby, full of our suitcases and bags. Karen thanked them, but they did not acknowledge her, merely sliding out of the room again.
“Why don’t you girls get unpacked and take a rest. I’m going to go see Finvarra. When I get back, I’ll show you around a little bit, and then we can head down to the dining room. They’ll be serving lunch in a couple of hours, and you’ll be able to meet some of the other Apprentices,” she said.
“Sounds good,” I said.
Karen closed the door behind her, and I rolled onto my elbow to look at Hannah. She was gazing wistfully into the folds of her canopy.
“Are you happy we came?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she breathed, still looking up, as though she were stargazing. “I mean, I’m still nervous about what it’s going to be like, but not like I was. Before you found me, every time I went somewhere new, I was always so scared. It wasn’t just starting over with new doctors or patients, or a new foster family. It was never knowing who else would be there, and what they would want from me, you know?”
As I always did when Hannah talked about her childhood, I had to choke back my anger and sadness for the nightmare her life had been. I resisted the urge to leap onto her bed and fling my arms around her, and contented myself instead with a nod and a “Yes.”
“There were some places the spirits were quiet and calm. It was like they noticed me, but they didn’t need me, so they mostly left me alone. But even then, they were always there. I could hear them all the time, like someone had left the TV on in the next room of my brain,” she said. “When I was little, I tried everything to block it out; I blasted music, I stuffed cotton balls in my ears, sometimes I would just scream for them to stop.” She tore her gaze from above her and turned to look ruefully at me. “That was before I understood that my hearing had nothing to do with it.”
“Jesus, Hannah,” I murmured. “How did you cope with it?”
“Not that well, obviously,” she said, with an oddly cheerful little laugh. “If I’d dealt with it well, they wouldn’t have stuck me in the psycho ward with the rest of the nutjobs.”
I swallowed a golf ball-sized lump in my throat. Hannah glanced over at me and that rare smile faltered. “Do I make you sad when I talk about this stuff? I can stop.”
I shook my head. “No. I mean, yes, it makes me sad that you had to go through all of that, and that I wasn’t there to help you. But I’m really, really glad that you talk to me about it. I would rather hear about it, honestly, as long as talking about it makes you feel better and not worse.”
Hannah’s smile twitched back into place. “This is the first place I’ve ever been where it is really and truly quiet in here,” she whispered, tapping a long slender finger against her temple. “And it’s wonderful. It makes me feel like I can deal with whatever else happens, as long as I can have this quiet sometimes.”
I relieved my own emotions with a joke. “Is this your subtle way of telling me to shut up and leave you alone?”
Hannah giggled. “No, you know that’s not what I mean.”
I peeled my reluctant limbs from the bed and jumped off of it. “Good, because I want to get unpacked before I completely pass out on this bed.”
It took us far less time than I would have expected to put everything away, especially given the excruciating amount of time it took to pack for the trip. At first we were puzzled as to where we would put our clothes; there were no dressers or drawers to be seen, but a little exploration on Hannah’s part revealed a large closet hidden behind one of the panels of the wall. Many of our belongings looked absurd in our grand new surroundings, especially the laptops, which, miracle of miracles, connected without a problem to the internet, although of course there was no Wi-Fi. I was really convinced, when I’d first seen the room, that we’d be communicating with the outside world via smoke signals and the occasional homing pigeon, but instead, it looked like we’d be skyping and tweeting like the rest of civilization. These days I clung like a drowning woman to any shred of normalcy that might keep me afloat.
Finally, we heaved our empty bags into the corner. Hannah collapsed, exhausted, into one of our armchairs, but I stayed on my feet.
“Do you want to go look around or something?” I asked.
“Aren’t you tired?” Hannah asked, incredulous. “I thought I might try to take a nap before lunch.”
“I’m exhausted,” I admitted. “But I’m afraid if I lay back down on that bed, I’ll sleep until next week, and I don’t want to miss anything. Let’s at least try to find the bathroom.”
“Okay,” Hannah agreed. “I was hoping to track down Milo anyway, and if he isn’t allowed to come in here, I’ll just have to —”
I never heard the end of her sentence. I had just opened the door and stepped into the hallway when the figure —small, pearly, and utterly desperate—attacked me like a bat out of hell.
3
AMBUSHED
I WAS TOO SHOCKED EVEN TO CRY OUT. With the force of a hurricane gale, the ghost knocked me clear off my feet and sent me tumbling painfully across the stone floor. Then she was on me, just a blur of skeletally thin arms and legs, scrabbling little fingers, and a tangle of long hair. Instinctively, I threw my arms up in front of my face to protect myself. But I realized almost at once, that though the sheer force of her presence had been enough to hurl me through the air, she could no more make direct contact with me than a captive animal on the other side of observation glass. Heart hammering, I lowered my arms and focused on the apparition’s face.
She was a young girl, maybe eight or nine years old, with hollow cheeks, wide sunken eyes, and an expression of all-consuming terror. A white nightgown hung in tatters off her bony shoulders. Her mouth was opening and closing frantically, forming words or cries which, for some reason, I could not hear properly. Her voice was distant and warped, muffled and echoed into unintelligibility.
My fear drained away as quickly as it had flooded me. “What? What is it?” I asked her as she continued to struggle wildly at the invisible barrier between us. “Do you need help?”
The girl shook her head, tearing at her hair, a wild, feral thing.
“Hey! Get away from her!” Hannah cried, bursting out into the hallway and running toward us.
The ghost girl’s face snapped up and locked onto Hannah with an animal intensity. Then, with one last disappointed frown at me, she skittered across the floor like a crab and disappeared through the wall.
Hannah knelt beside me, panting. “What was that about? Are you okay?”
“I…yeah, I’m fine,” I said, staring at the spot on the wall where the girl had vanished.
“I don’t understand, I thought that kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen here. I thought the wards were supposed to protect us from hostile spirits!” she said, helping me to my feet.
“She wasn’t hostile,” I said, without consciously deciding to form the words. They escaped my lips as though someone else had thought them, and yet I knew absolutely that they were true.
Hannah raised her eyebrows. “What are you talking about? She just attacked you!”
“Yeah, I know, but it wasn’t like that. She was…” I groped through the tangle of emotions I’d just encountered and extracted the ones that didn’t belong to me. “She was scared, not angry.”
“Yeah, but still, she could have really hurt you,” Hannah continued. “We should tell Karen or Celeste or someone.”
“I…yeah, okay,” I said absently. I was running my fingers along the stones of the wall where the girl had vanished, as though a door might open there, so that I could follow her. A nagging worry about the girl took deep root in my mind.
“I’m sorry I didn’t warn you. I didn’t hear her coming. It must be all these wards, I can’t hear anyone in our room, but even once I came out into the hall, I couldn’t really hear her,” Hannah said.
“I couldn’t hear her either. She was trying really hard to communicate, but I couldn’t u
nderstand a word. I wonder why?”
“I’m getting really hungry,” Hannah said, in an obvious attempt to change the subject. “Do you want to wait here for Karen to come back, or should we try to find the dining room?”
I tore my eyes from the wall and tried to focus on her. “Sure, let’s go find some food.”
“Did you still want to find the bathroom?”
“Yeah, bathroom first.” I felt dazed. I shook my head a little to clear it, and started down the hallway.
The bathroom turned out to be just a couple of doors down from our room, but it took us nearly a half an hour to find the entrance hall again. When we finally did, it was much more crowded than when we’d arrived. Trunks, suitcases, and bags were stacked neatly along the walls, and knots of women and girls were congregated all around the room, embracing, shaking hands, and conversing together. I spotted Celeste with her clipboard near the base of the stairs, handing out keys and pointing out rooms to the newcomers.
“Well hello, again,” she said as we approached her. “All settled in?”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “Have you seen Karen?”
“I think she’s still up with Finvarra and some of the other Council members,” she said, gesturing vaguely over her shoulder.
“Okay. She said she would meet us back at the room, but we’re starving. Is there anywhere we can eat?”
“Of course!” Celeste said. “I’m sorry, I should have pointed it out to you as soon as you arrived. They’ve laid a luncheon for you all in the dining room, just over there. It’s very informal. You can go in and help yourselves to whatever you’d like.”
She pointed to one of the large arched doorways which had been closed when we’d arrived, but now stood open. I could see a few people already milling around inside, carrying plates and teacups.
“When Karen comes down, I’ll let her know where you’ve gotten to,” Celeste promised.
“Great, thanks,” I said, and turned to Hannah. “Shall we?”
“Okay.” She’d gotten quieter and quieter all the way down to the entrance hall, and now she had resumed her habitual imitation of a living shadow, half-hidden from the world behind my shoulder. I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile and walked through the door.