by E. E. Holmes
“What are you doing back there in the middle of the summer?”
“Didn’t you read the email I sent you? Never mind, stupid question, you never check your email. I’m here for summer sessions!” she said. Her face lit up with the kind of glee only rigorous academia could ignite in her. “They were offering some science intensives for the pre-med track, so I signed up!”
“You signed up to do extra bio labs in the middle of your summer vacation,” I said. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of the absurd, yet obvious.
“Of course! It seemed like a great opportunity to get ahead with my requirements, especially if I’m going to pick up that economics minor I was thinking about.”
“Tia, don’t you want a break? You know, to relax a little bit before the fall semester?”
Tia’s forehead wrinkled as she considered this apparently foreign concept. “Oh. Well, there’s a week off between the end of this session and the start of regular classes in the fall. So that will be a break.”
“Right. Because one week off is enough of a break for anyone.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Nope. Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Yes, you are. Well, you might be interested to know that the classes aren’t the only reason I decided to stay,” Tia said, dropping her eyes to her mug and grinning shiftily.
I perked up. “Okay, I’ll bite. What other reason could you possibly need to do more school work? You know, other than the fact that you’re an academic masochist?”
I watched as a pink flush crept up her neck and stained her cheeks. “Sam. He’s here, too, for orientation leader and RA trainings.”
I tutted, shaking my head. “Tia Vezga, you sly, sly dog —using school work as an excuse to get some nookie.” Tia’s head shot up and her mouth dropped open in horror. “I am not getting — “
“I know, I know,” I laughed. “Here in jolly old England we call that a joke. So, you and Sam Lang, huh? And how are things going?”
“Really, really well,” Tia said, pinker with every syllable. “He’s taking me to Bellini’s for dinner tonight, actually. He’ll be here soon.”
“That’s great!” I’d suggested that restaurant to him ages ago, knowing that Tia had always wanted to eat there. There was hope for that boy after all. “And what are we wearing? Come on, give us a little spin.”
Tia rolled her eyes, but stood up, backed away from the camera, and executed a slow twirl. She was wearing a very simple blue sweater with a straight black pencil skirt.
“Are you sure that’s decent? I can see your ankles.”
“Oh, shut up,” she said, and sat back down.
“Just kidding, just kidding. You look adorable,” I said, which was true, even if her outfit was better suited to a job interview than a romantic candlelit dinner for two.
“I just hope everything works out. I mean, I know I said I wasn’t at St. Matt’s to date, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find some time to have a social life, right?”
“Yes! You aren’t going to get any argument from me, Tia. I think you need to find a healthy balance of work and play.” I infused the last word with just enough innuendo to make her blush again. If we’d been in the same room, she definitely would have thrown something at me.
“He’s got a lot going on, and he knows how important my classes are to me. That’s why I feel like this can work,” she went on, unable to vent her annoyance at me.
“He’s no slacker himself,” I pointed out. “What does he have, a 3.7?”
“3.8,” Tia said, a faint note of pride in her voice, as though she had somehow been partially responsible for Sam’s enviable GPA.
“Exactly. Plus he’s got a million other things to keep him from distracting you too much. He’s got all of his RA stuff going on, not to mention the fact that Pierce will probably work him to death, and —”
“Not this semester,” Tia said.
“What do you mean, not this semester?”
“I mean Sam isn’t working for Pierce this semester, not while he’s on sabbatical.”
“Not while who’s on sabbatical?”
Tia looked at me like I was crazy. “Pierce. He’s on sabbatical this semester. Didn’t he tell you that when you went to see him? I just assumed he must have.”
It was like she’d suddenly started speaking conversational ancient Greek. “What are you talking about?”
She frowned at me like I was the one no longer making sense. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about how there is no way Pierce is on sabbatical this semester,” I said. “When I went to say goodbye to him, we talked all about his new class he was supposed to be teaching. He was really excited about it; he showed me his syllabus and everything.” A strange panicked flutter was starting in my stomach.
“Maybe the class is starting in the spring?”
“No, it was definitely a fall class. He was talking about a curriculum tie-in with Halloween.”
“Oh,” Tia said, frowning. “Hmm. Maybe something came up? Like a ghost hunting opportunity or something?”
“Yeah, I guess …” I began, but the fluttering grew stronger, and I couldn’t convince myself even to finish the sentence. “No, I really don’t think so, Tia. Sabbaticals take a long time to plan. I can’t believe Pierce would take one just when St. Matt’s is offering him more classes. He’s always complaining how they don’t take him seriously. Why would he take off right when was about to get some validation?”
“I guess that is pretty weird,” Tia said, tapping her thumbs thoughtfully against the rim of her mug.
“Did Sam talk to Pierce in person?”
“No. He was really confused about it, actually; he was just telling me about it a few days ago. He said that he went up to Pierce’s office to talk about a work schedule, and there was a sign on the door saying that Professor Pierce would be unavailable for the fall semester, and to direct all inquiries to Professor Borkowicz. He’s the head of Pierce’s department. Sam went to see Borkowicz, and he told Sam that Pierce was on sabbatical.”
“Did he give Sam any details? Did he tell him where Pierce went or what he was working on?”
“No, nothing like that at all. He just apologized for the scheduling confusion and asked Sam if he’d like to be reassigned until Pierce got back. Then he shunted Sam over to one of the psychology professors. Sam was kind of upset about it; he really liked working for Pierce. He said it was much more interesting than any other lab work he’d ever done.” Tia scrutinized me like I was a particularly tricky homework question. “What’s going on, Jess? Do you think something’s wrong?”
“Not…wrong exactly,” I said, although I wasn’t sure that was strictly true. “Just…off. I can’t understand why Pierce would suddenly take off like that. He must have had some kind of emergency or… ”
My mind began to spin with half-formed fears. Did Pierce know too much? Had he revealed information to the wrong person, said the wrong thing? Would he actually be stupid enough to try to find out more about where I was or what I was doing, even after all of my warnings about secrecy? Part of me said no, but then again, nothing had ever sparked as fanatical a gleam in his eye as that mystical half-shrouded word: Durupinen. I made up my mind at once.
“Tia, I need you to do me a favor.”
“Anything, Jess, you know that,” Tia said.
“I need you to help me find out where Pierce is. I know that you don’t really know him, but I just…I have a bad feeling about this. I need to know why he’s suddenly dropped off the grid. It might be nothing, but I’m going to worry about it until I know. I’d do it myself, but I’m stuck here, so my options are limited.”
Tia bit her lip, but nodded. “Okay. I’ll look into it. I’m sure Sam will help me, if I ask him.”
I grinned. “Aww, sleuthing dates. How romantic!”
Tia rolled her eyes. “Yes, nothing says romance like stalking a missing person.” She caught the look on my f
ace and backtracked at once. “I didn’t mean that. I’m sure he’s not missing, Jess. There’s bound to be a perfectly logical explanation for him being gone. We’ll figure it out.”
“Thanks, Tia, you’re the best,” I said, that nervous flutter in my stomach calming slightly. “I’m lucky to have my own personal Sherlock Holmes for a best friend.”
“Elementary, my dear Ballard,” Tia said, in a pathetic impersonation of a British accent.
We chatted a little while longer, mostly about what was going on with Tia, since my life was now classified information, and said goodbye, Tia promising to get in touch again as soon as she had some information on Pierce. I knew she would find out what was going on, and in some ways that made me feel better. In other ways, it made me terrified about what she might uncover. In the meantime, determined to do what I could, I drafted a casual email to Pierce, asking him how he was and what he was up to. I kept the tone light and joking, just in case I was overreacting. Then I hit send and tried not to spend every waking minute of the rest of the night checking to see if he’d responded yet.
7
THE CALLER
NO RESPONSE FROM PIERCE WAS WAITING FOR ME the next morning when I rushed to my computer, my heart leaping at each unread message only to discover it was spam. I tried to tell myself that I was being paranoid—if he was really on sabbatical, he could be anywhere in the world, probably holed up in some ancient haunted ruin in the middle of the Peruvian jungle somewhere. Twelve hours without a reply was hardly a reason to call out the National Guard —or, in this case, Scotland Yard. I resisted the urge to lug the computer around with me all day and forced my brain to concentrate on everything Fairhaven Hall still had to throw at me. It was pretty easy to get distracted.
Our first class Tuesday morning was Introduction to Ancient Celtic Languages, which Mackie explained was necessary for understanding and pronouncing all of the different instructions and “castings” we had to perform as a part of our duties. Indeed, every page of the Book of Téigh Anonn was crammed with words I could neither comprehend nor pronounce.
“You are here at Fairhaven Hall because each of your clans hails from somewhere in the British Isles,” our instructor Agnes explained. “The castings and incantations you must learn have been passed down to you in the ancient languages of your ancestors. We will be dealing primarily in Gaelic for the purposes of pronunciation, but you will find an antiquated mixture of old Celtic languages have survived in the words you must learn in order to perform your duties. This includes elements of Irish and Scottish Gaelic as well as the various branches of Common Brittonic, both living and dead languages.”
“You know, they’re real fond of saying that none of this is magic, but they use a fair few magic words, don’t they?” Savvy muttered to me across the aisle. “I mean, ‘castings?’ ‘Incantations?’ Sounds like some bloody hocus pocus to me.”
“You’ve got a valid point,” I told her.
I didn’t understand another word Agnes said for the rest of the class. In the interest of total immersion, she began speaking in an ancient form of Irish Gaelic, pointing to items in the room and encouraging us to repeat after her. I couldn’t force my mouth to make the right sounds; I’d never heard a language like it, full of odd clusters of consonants and strange cadences, so that the language felt as foreign as though it were from a different planet rather than a different country. We all struggled through with the exception of Peyton and one or two others who, in their Durupinen upbringing, had obviously been exposed to the language. It was only with extreme difficulty that I restrained myself from rolling my eyes when Peyton made a point of raising her hand several times so that she could show off her pronunciation with long and complicated sentences. By the time the bells began their clanging, my head felt like it was clanging also.
“Our next class isn’t until after lunch,” I said with a sigh of relief as Hannah and I left Agnes’ classroom. “Do you want to want to go take a walk or something?”
“Sure,” she said. “The sun is out for a change.”
Our first few days at Fairhaven had been cloudier and damper than we were used to, although the heat hung low and heavy like a wet, smothering blanket just like the humidity could do back home. But today was blessedly bright, and as we ambled along the cloisters on the north side of the castle, I thought I could gladly have made this weather last forever. The breeze that snatched at our hair and lifted it playfully around our faces was cool and fragrant. We dropped into the shade of a small but gnarled old tree covered in dangling, knobbly green fruit.
“Where’s Milo?” I asked.
“Oh, still exploring. He’s determined to make some dead friends to keep him entertained while we’re in class,” Hannah said. “He hasn’t had much luck so far.”
“What, no wisecracking, Vogue-reading ghosts wandering the halls of Fairhaven?”
“He’ll be lucky if he can track down a ghost that’s even heard of Vogue, let alone read it. Most of the spirits here have been dead for hundreds of years.”
We sat quietly for a few minutes, enjoying the sunshine. I pulled out my sketchbook, flipped it open, and started adding some detail to a recent drawing of the castle. The sun created a whole new world of shadows to play with.
I glanced up at Hannah. She was tracing a finger absentmindedly over the scars on her wrist, little dermal reminders of the ways she used to cope with the overwhelming reality of being herself.
“So, three classes down and one left to go. What do you think so far?” I asked her, lowering my eyes again so that she wouldn’t know I’d seen what she was doing.
“I think we have a lot to learn,” she said slowly, “but I’m really interested in learning it. All of this ghost stuff never felt like it had any rhyme or reason to it. It just sort of happened, and I had to deal with it when it did. It’s nice to know that there are actually guidelines.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It creates the illusion of control, doesn’t it?”
She smiled gently. “Exactly. But honestly, it does seem fascinating—all that clan history over hundreds of years, all recorded and documented. It’s like the most interesting genealogy ever.”
“Definitely more interesting than finding out your ancestors were sheepshearers or something.”
“I used to imagine all kinds of crazy family histories,” she said, pulling up little blades of grass and shredding them with the tips of her fingers, “to explain away what was happening to me. I didn’t know anything about my biological family, so it was easy to convince myself that there was a logical, genetic explanation for things. For about two years, starting when I was five, I told everyone that I came from a long line of serial killers, and the ghosts of all our past victims were haunting me, looking for revenge.” She giggled at the horrified look on my face. “I know, right? What a morbid little kid.”
“Well, you were surrounded by dead people,” I said, trying to keep the tone light to mask the sad little hollow her words had dug into the pit of my stomach, as they so often did. “Being morbid was probably a foregone conclusion.”
“I remember I used to watch their faces when I told them, waiting for the fear to appear. I always felt so satisfied when I saw it. I would think, ‘There. See? Now I’m not the only one who’s scared.’ It was just the macabre little way I invented to make myself feel better. Misery loves company, right? No wonder they institutionalized me.”
I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Hannah’s smile faded.
“That wasn’t me trying to spread the misery again. Sorry. You must think I’m so fucked up.”
It was such a shock to hear her swear that I couldn’t keep my own mouth shut. Maybe I just couldn’t stand to see her sitting there all alone under a thundercloud that dark. “When I was ten, we were driving from Houston to Albuquerque,” I said. “Mom pulled off the interstate and left me in the car while she ‘ran in’ to a bar for a quick drink. Three hours later I woke up and had to drag her out of the place. I mana
ged to get her into the passenger seat and then I drove. I drove the car the whole rest of the way to Albuquerque. I don’t even know how I knew how to drive; I must have just absorbed the information because we spent so much damn time driving to the next place we were going to live. Around two in the morning, I hit an animal — I think it was a coyote or something. I saw it dart out into the road and turn to look at me with glowing eyes before that awful thump. I was too scared to stop and see if it was alive, so I just kept going, sobbing my eyes out over the death of some random desert animal. I pulled over to the side of the road just as the sun came up. When Mom woke up, I told her she’d driven the whole way herself. She was too terrified to admit that she didn’t remember it, and even more terrified when she saw the blood on the front of the car. I just watched her staring at it, and I could have told her what had happened, or even just assured her that she hadn’t hit a hitchhiker, but I didn’t. I guess I just wanted her to be scared for a while, too.”
I chanced a glance up from my own hands. Hannah was staring at me, her face hovering somewhere on the border of an incredulous smile.
“Just thought you’d like to know that you haven’t cornered the market on fucked up. Although the two of us together might have.”
She started to laugh. Before I realized what I was doing, I had joined in. Before long we were both in hysterics, tears rolling down our cheeks, clutching our stomachs and begging each other to stop. It was equal parts cathartic and euphoric until we lapsed into silence.
“If you ever do want to know more about her,” I said, “just let me know. I can tell you a lot about her —what she was like, and all of that. Just so you could start to get to know her a little bit.”
Hannah didn’t answer at first. I felt the last warmth left behind by the laughter ebb away. “I don’t think I want to get to know her. Not right now, anyway. I’m still just so…I just don’t think I want to.”