Shattered Silence

by Ron C. Nieto

  She leaned against the balcony's railing and hissed down at me. “You can't destroy her, idiot.”

  “I won once. I can do it again.”

  “That wasn't winning! That was her messing everything up.” There was a certain shift in the way she spat the word “her” that made me realize that she no longer referred to Beatrice, but to Alice. “I told you it was her fault, didn't I?” she went on.

  “It isn't,” I said firmly. “The one pointing the ghost toward innocent people is you, not her.”

  “You don't know anything,” she said, laughing. A nervous edge crept into her giggles and for a moment, I thought she had gone mental too.

  Could it be fear?

  “So come down here and explain it to me,” I said, softly.

  At first, I thought she hadn't heard. Then I thought she would ignore me. But after a moment, she took a deep breath and patted down her tangled hair, whispering, “Okay. Okay, just... Wait there.”

  Then she disappeared back into her room.

  “Nice,” Alice told me.

  “I'm not sure I know what made her listen.”

  “Me neither, but that's the least of our problems. You think she'll really come out, right?”

  “Sure.” I knew she'd come. I didn't know whether she would be alone or accompanied by the suburb's guard or by her shotgun bearing, absent father. I wasn't inclined to trust her, but short of stooping to her level and starting a criminal record of our own—much more believable and tangible than hers, of course—I didn't know what option we had.

  Chapter 17

  The back door opened and out came Lena. She had put on a jacket and her messy hair was hidden beneath a beanie, her feet hastily shoved into expensive sneakers. The girl who came out to meet us in the dark, under the rose bushes marking the limits of her property, was a far cry from the one who sashayed her way through school every day and somehow this helped me relax.

  If she wasn't in Queen mode, perhaps she'd tell us something.

  “You wouldn't have found out if not for the stupid incident with Wyatt's car,” she said after a silent stare-down.

  In fact, it had taken much more than that for us to piece any semblance of a coherent story together, but it was better she didn't know that.

  “But we did,” I said instead. “We found out the story and your connection to Beatrice through Nightray blood.”

  “Yeah, I realized after your pathetic cornering attempt at school. But,” she said, smirking, “for all your talk about figuring out connections, you haven't discovered hers.”

  Her eyes were trained on me, and part of my brain registered that this was the reason she'd agreed to talk to us. She sensed a way to hurt us, and she took the plunge. The other part of me denied the information on autopilot, not even stopping to consider it.

  “Stop pulling her into your game,” I said, my voice too close to a growl. Lena's smirk widened and I felt Alice clutching my hand tighter, silently asking me to chill. “You tried to kill me. When that failed, you sent your fucking family ghost to haunt every talented person you could think of at school, and you still keep trying to lay the blame elsewhere?”

  “Who holds the blame?” Lena asked, unfazed and apparently enjoying herself. “The one who directs the ghost or the one who creates the ghost in the first place?”

  “Bullshit.” The air left my lungs and I could only breathe out the word.

  “Why do you think you survived, Keith?” she went on, her tone mocking. “Because you were special? Hah! You're just another craptastic imbecile strumming a guitar. There are thousands of people just like you. If you survived your precious song, it's because she was there.”

  “That doesn't make any sense,” I said, and it really didn't. Her words kept playing around in my head, but I couldn't make head or tails out of them. They were important, but the “why” escaped me.

  “Of course it does. Right, Alice?” she said, turning to her for the first time. Alice was holding onto my hand, her other palm resting against my chest, her eyes a blank mask over her emotions.

  “I'm not a Nightray,” she said, calmly.

  “Thankfully. I couldn't stand to be related to you... Stafford.”

  The name didn't bring any images at first. Then it dawned on me. It had been a while, but that name had come up fairly often when we tried to discover Beatrice's origins back before Christmas.

  Andrew Stafford. The original composer of the song that had allowed Beatrice's spirit to claim dozens of lives over the course of one hundred and fifty years.

  The revelation hit me like a wall of bricks, and I could only imagine how Alice must have felt. She was better at dealing with it than I was, though, and the only hint that a cold bucket had been dumped on her was the slight stiffening of her shoulders and the lack of a sarcastic reply.

  “Nice,” she said at last. “I would believe you if you weren't known for, you know, being a lying, killing bastard.”

  Lena's eyes flashed with anger and she looked ready to pounce and start a girl fight, but she held herself in check.

  “Ask about it. The Andrew name runs in the family, after all. You might not bear the name any longer, but your grandmother did and you still have the blood. But what do I care what you believe? Either way, it'll be fun to see you floundering about.”

  And it probably would, for her. It would've been easy to dismiss the information as yet another attempt to plunge the knife, and I was ready to do just that until she brought up Alice's grandma. The reference brought to mind the image of a snow dome with London forever enveloped in a storm at its core, and an old, golden cord that now adorned the hand I held. Throughout I saw brilliant, intelligent green eyes and a hulking black form that, in his way, had tried to warn us. It was one of the puzzle pieces we had missed earlier and now it fell into place—but there were still holes, dark areas that needed light. If we truly wanted to fix anything, we'd have to learn the truth first—the reasons. We could not hope to understand what happened without knowing the reasoning behind it, and it had escalated way beyond the simple feeding of an evil ghost.

  “Why did you do it, Lena?” I asked. “Why are you still doing it for that matter?”

  “I thought you had all the answers,” she said, stiffening. “I think I heard something about being a murdering bastard?”

  I squeezed Alice's hand to keep her from biting the bait. There was a chance, however small, of finding answers at the bottom of this. If Lena wasn't willing to offer them, she would've left after delivering her mental bomb. The problem was that she was in the defensive and not a nice person to begin with, so getting those answers would take careful probing and tact.

  Social skills. My specialty, yay.

  “You're not a textbook example of a good person,” I began, “but there's a stretch from there to becoming a killer.”

  “You don't think me capable?” she said, jutting out her chin.

  “She probably enjoys it,” Alice muttered, hopefully too low for Lena to hear.

  “I think you have a set of priorities and running around feeding the angry ghost of your however-many-times-great grandma is not at the top of that list,” I said instead, louder. “So, there must be a reason.”

  She wavered. I could almost feel the indecision, the normal teenager peeking through the Bitch Queen mode and wondering if she should share.

  “You don't understand,” she said again. It was like a mantra for her it seemed.

  “You're right. I don't. I've no fucking idea what's going on. That's why I'm asking.” I took a deep breath and pressed on. “Why don't you explain it to us? If we understood, perhaps we could help fix it.”

  “You two messed everything up in the first place.” Her voice sounded small, thin.

  “You've told us that much, but if we don't know why the situation went to hell, then there's nothing keeping the whole disaster from happening again, right?”

  “It's not as if you care. You would
n't do anything differently.”

  She was right on both accounts. It was getting to a point where I just wanted to snap at her, send a measure of her characteristic vitriol right back at her, and leave her alone to deal with our supposed mess. But doing that, at this point, could have consequences we knew nothing about, so I swallowed the bitter words and, instead, kept up my unwavering polite façade of understanding and sympathy.

  “What can you lose?”

  She laughed at me, anything but amused. “Okay. I'll tell you. Alice let you break Beatrice's song! That's what I've been telling you all along. That it was Alice's fault. Now, Beatrice isn't just a psychotic ghost—she's also pissed. So, instead of having a useless guy no one cared about dead and a few years of peace, we now have a bunch of people going crazy while Beatrice spends all her energy trying to kill her brand-new arch nemesis. Everything's so much worse thanks to your lovely girlfriend.”

  That was too much information to process. And I wasn't even sure I wanted to understand the kind of danger it suggested.

  “She's trying to kill me now? But, if the song is broken, then how…?”

  “What do you mean, Alice allowed me to break the song? I always believed she enabled me to finish it, but you are talking about a deeper link there.”

  “See? You still don't understand.” Lena rolled her eyes.

  “Because you keep dumping obscure lines and threats on us without explaining the damn story,” I snapped at last.

  Lena blinked, taken aback for a moment. My tone seemed to rattle her out of her tirade, and when she spoke again, she seemed almost normal. Not normal for Lena, but normal for a high school girl who's in way over her head and finally accepts she might be getting help.

  “I'll explain what I know,” she said. “Come inside, though. I'm freezing.”

  She turned and went back into her house. I traded a look with Alice, consulting the wisdom of following. Part of me feared it'd be a ruse to call the cops and have us arrested for B&E anyway—I didn't put it past Lena—but it was also our only lead.

  Holding hands, Alice and I crossed the backyard and ventured into Lena's house. She didn't bother to show us into the house proper and settled on a stool in the spacious, stainless-steel kitchen.

  “You know the basic story, right?” she asked. “At least, you managed to find out that much.”

  “We got Beatrice's story,” Alice said. “About how she died and became a ghost, haunting the man she was in love with to death. We just don't get our roles in all this.”

  Lena rolled her eyes. “If you think she was in love with Andrew, then you don't even know that part of the story.”

  “She wanted to marry him.”

  “So? Since when is love the only reason for a marriage? It's not even the best reason.”

  She believed her own words and that made me a little sad. Even with what was going on, or perhaps because of it, I could still look forward to Alice. I knew that whatever came, whatever life threw at us, we would be okay as long as we were together. People who thought the feeling of belonging to someone wasn't enough were lonely, broken souls.

  “Why don't you start at the beginning, then?” Alice asked.

  “If I must,” said Lena, sighing.

  When it became clear that she wasn't going to invite us to sit down or offer anything to drink, I grabbed a stool and brought it to the table. Alice perched on it without thinking, and I leaned my hip against it, resting and bracing myself while trying to remain alert. Lena ignored us and began to talk.

  “It doesn't matter how they die. Decent people don't make killer ghosts. Beatrice was never good, and I bet wouldn't have recognized an emotion like ‘love' if it came and slapped her. She just wanted what she couldn't have.” The portrait Lena painted was familiar in some ways—that kind of restless greed was kind of common among the better-off teens at school—but I refrained from commenting.

  “She couldn't get Andrew,” she went on, nodding toward Alice, “so she figured out a way to get his attention. Her stupid suicide was just the worst case of attention-grabbing ever.”

  “And then she came back,” I said.

  “No. Then she was brought back.”

  “What?” Alice and I asked in unison, our voices pitched an octave or two too high.

  “If everyone with a grudge could stick around this long, don't you think there would be more spirits around?” Lena asked with a “duh” look. She exaggerated it so much her brows climbed all the way to her hairline.

  “So you're saying,” Alice said, the cogs turning in her head as she spoke, “that Andrew wasn't haunted, but actually brought her back.”

  “Oh, he was haunted alright.” Lena snorted. “But only after his continuous mourning and bawling gave purchase to the friggin' ghost in the first place.”

  She actually said friggin'. A small chuckle almost escaped me at the worst time, but I managed to keep it down.

  “It's like this,” she said, oblivious. “A dead person has no business sticking around. They might linger, but eventually, they pass on. The problem is that focusing a lot of emotion and associating it to the memory of that person gives them a way to remember themselves, which in turn gives them a firmer grasp of the world.”

  “So Andrew exuded so much bad juju over his role in Beatrice's death that he actually allowed her to manifest.” Alice shivered against my side.

  “But wait,” I said. “If a great amount of grief and pain is enough to keep a spirit around and turn it into a ghost, everyone would return.”

  Because God knew that, if it depended uniquely on my negative feelings, my mother would still be around. I hadn't even thought of letting go of her loss, and I didn't think I could even if I tried. My father was as bad if not worse, so why wasn't she around if this theory were true?

  Lena shrugged and waved a hand in dismissal. “They do, or they don't. That's their choice, really. In any case, they clearly don't see a point in sticking around and killing those who cry for them. That's psycho-only turf, and not many people cry for the death of those.”

  “Alright, I get it,” Alice said. “So how does that link to us?”

  “Andrew's bad juju, as you call it, couldn't last forever. It takes a lot of effort to keep a ghost tied to this world,” Lena explained. “Eventually, it had to find other people who would feed it or it would fade away.”

  “The song was the way to feed because it was plagued with all the emotions that helped her manifest in the first place,” Alice said.

  “Exactly. It was her anchor.”

  “Wait, wait,” I broke in. “If she doesn't feed, she fades? What the hell, why can't we just starve her? It's pretty clear she can't use the song anymore, so it's only a matter of time, right?”

  Lena clenched her fists, her knuckles turning white, and her face, which had relaxed while discussing the ghost topic as if it were the weather, betrayed fear and anxiety again. I could almost see her walls coming up again, but she forced the words out through clenched teeth.

  “I can't do that because nothing runs deeper than blood.” I got the feeling she wasn't talking about being a loving, dutiful family member unwilling to go against her own. “If I don't give her the tether she needs, she'll get me.”

  Chapter 18

  “That's...” I floundered for words. Cruel? Evil? Macabre? “That's ridiculous. You're the last one. If she takes you, she'll be left with nothing. She can't outlive you.”

  She barked a laugh. “Do you really expect her to be reasonable? Come on. You've met her.”

  “Could she get someone else to find prey for her if she took you?” Alice asked, coming out of her shocked silence.

  “Possibly. She's not able to stay anywhere for long without feeding, but if she kills me, her ring could find its way to another victim. Perhaps whoever got it after me wouldn't be an appetizing lunch, but at this point? She's too hungry and too furious to bother calculating her chances.”

  “
We're starting to move too fast here,” I said, feeling the onset of a headache. “What ring are we talking about again?”

  Lena pulled out a necklace that held a small, delicate gold band. It was worn by time and constant use, the surface smooth where I'm sure there had once been a pretty, engraved design, but it began to ring alarm bells in my head.

  “Couldn't she change her focus or whatever to a different item?” I asked cautiously.

  “There are no more items. Everything else that held any relevance to her is gone.”

  “It isn't,” Alice said. “When Keith and I... met her before, she was using the Nightray decor. You must know that, right?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I think you don't know the full story either, Lena.” Alice allowed herself a small smirk.

  “The night Alice helped me finish the song,” I explained, “we were at the old Nightray manor here in town. All the furniture we used for the set and all the props in the Lady Windermere's Fan came out of that house... except suddenly it was a ruin instead of our sponsor's house. You have to know that much.”

  Lena frowned. “I know there's a Nightray trust. I got the manager to talk to Mr. Hedford and suggest the play, so I could suggest your soundtrack in turn. What else is there to know?”

  “I went to the old manor to pick up the furniture, Lena,” Alice said. “There was a perfectly manicured lawn and a rich house... and a charming couple that died some forty years ago. Who else do you think gave us the décor?”

  “What? I told the trust manager to send the stuff to the school, but it was supposed to be harmless.”

  “We didn't know about you or about this stuff you've just told us. So we thought that the furniture was what Beatrice was tied to, and she had used it to sneak onto the set and pick Keith,” Alice explained.

  “That doesn't make any sense. I would've known if there were more ways for her to just… poach whoever she wanted.”

  “We're not saying she did it alone,” I said. “But we are pretty sure there are more items, Lena. The day after the song was over, there was a portrait missing—her portrait. And a vase had shattered right where it used to be propped on set. That's why we thought that the link had been dissolved and she had been destroyed.”