by Cat Knight
Claire popped upright and twisted around. “What happened to her?”
“No! Do your work!” Lisa tapped her head admonishingly with the corner of the biscuit plate.
“Lisaaaa– Oh, come on. She’s right there, staring at me. The least you could do is tell me about her.”
“I don’t know… like a said, that painting gives me the creeps a bit. Even if it just of a girl.”
“She’s not just a girl.” Claire wheedled. “She your ancestor. I would love to hear about her. Besides, if you make her real for me, perhaps, her eyes won’t follow me like that.”
“Oh, all right. I’ll tell you what.” A set look had appeared at one corner of Lisa’s mouth, and slowly spread across her face. Claire knew she had won. Lisa set down the plate and mug and took a step back. “I’m going to go down and start making dinner. If you can write… let’s say… five hundred words before you come down to eat, then I’ll tell you all about her.”
“Five hundred words!” Claire stuck out her lower lip like a petulant child. “That’s, like, three times as much as I’ve already written.”
“Then you’d better get going.”
Chapter Three
Lisa was sitting on the kitchen counter with a bowl of spaghetti balanced precariously on her lap when Claire stumbled in with a dazed, confused look. She sank down at the kitchen table and stared at Lisa with what could only be described as abject shock.
Lisa began, “Are you–”
“I wrote two thousand words.”
Lisa almost spit out her spaghetti. “What? Claire, that’s amazing!”
“I know.” Claire rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing her mascara under them. “It was crazy. It’s like, I just started writing and suddenly there were eight pages, and I’m pretty sure they don’t even suck.”
“I knew you could do it!” Lisa jumped off the counter and pounced on Claire, hugging her so tightly she thought her eyes would pop out. “That calls for some celebration! Spaghetti and wine?”
“Yes please.”
Claire leaned back against the wall, contemplating, as Lisa banged cupboards open and shut, dumping pasta and sauce onto a plate, then uncorking – with some difficulty – a bottle of merlot that looked like it had been in the pantry for a few years. Maude, who had been lying on the kitchen table, flicking her fluffy tail back and forth and watching Lisa eat, hopped down and trotted over for Claire to pet her.
“So!” Lisa said, enthusiastically splashing merlot into a pair of wine glasses. “I knew you’d get some work done if you came here. The house seems to have that effect for some reason. What do you think?” Outside, the sun was just lowering beyond the horizon, and the trees were stained purple and red. Maybe it was the great landscape. Or maybe it was just sitting down and writing with no distractions. Or maybe it was because she wanted to hear about the girl with the fiddle, and she knew Lisa well enough to know that she wouldn’t hear a word about it until she had some work to show for her efforts.
Lisa slid a plate of spaghetti onto the table with a hummed fanfare, then joined Claire at it. Claire swirled her wine in her glass like a detective in an old movie swirling a gin and tonic. She waited while Lisa took a few bites of the spaghetti, and then, with a mischievous smile, she said, “OK, now I want to hear all about your very young great-great-great aunt.
“Right, darling. You asked for it. This is wild.” Lisa took a sip of her wine. “So, up until I was six, my grandfather and my great-grandfather lived here. Like, actually lived here full-time, instead of just coming up on the weekends and stuff like we do. But then when I was six, my great-grandfather died and my grandfather went a bit off the rails and moved to Majorca, and– anyway.
My great father told me stories about the girl with the fiddle. She was his great aunt, or something, and the stories were told to him by his parents that when she was a kid, she fell off the roof and died.”
Claire felt a little sick. She stared. “Lisa, what the hell? That’s not the kind of story that you should hold hostage when you’re trying to get your friend to write a dissertation.”
“No, no!” Lisa held up her hands, palms facing Claire, and shook her head. “That’s not the good part.”
“It better not be.”
“See, Eliza was amazing with the fiddle, apparently. Obviously, I never actually heard her play. But, the whole reason she fell off the roof was that she was up on it playing her fiddle. I guess she went out to play so she wouldn’t bother anyone, but then slipped and fell and died.
“I’m waiting for the good part, Lisa.”
“And after she fell,” Lisa ploughed on, “my great-grandfather said that he would hear Eliza playing the fiddle yet all the while she was begging to stop.” Lisa lowered her voice, to a whisper. “He said his father told him there was a curse and Eliza couldn’t rest because someone must play the fiddle.”
“Did your great grandfather ever play it himself.”
“He said he was too scared and he never touched it.”
“You’re bullshitting.”
“NO, I’m not” Lisa’s eyes were wide and she seemed perfectly serious. Claire swallowed.
“And when I was little and came to visit, when my parents were gone, we’d sit in the library together. He’d sit on the big old couch, and he would always stop me talking and whisper–” she lowered her voice and cupped her hand to her ear listening dramatically. “‘Lisa, do you hear that? That’s Eliza playing her fiddle.’”
“And… did you ever hear anything?”
“Well…” Lisa twisted her mouth to the side and shrugged. “I mean, I was just a kid, so I’d always say I did. I think sometimes I heard my parents playing the radio?”
“That’s weird.”
“Hell yes, it’s weird. My grandfather believed it too. He kept me from taking up the fiddle because of it. He kept telling me the curse ran in the family, he said that Eliza’s own great grandfather had father had owned that fiddle.”
“Well, if that’s true – why did the family keep the fiddle?”
“Because it’s just an old story really, and the fiddle has been handed down for at over 200 years. I don’t think anyone wants to be the one to part the family from it.” Lisa fell silent. “Honestly, I don’t know why. I guess, no-one ever believed the stories, and it’s an heirloom. It’s just a silly old tale, like the ones you tell around camp fires.
Claire twirled spaghetti around her fork, and was midway through putting it in her mouth when she stopped dead. “Lisa, do you hear that?”
“Ha, ha, very funny.”
“No, hang on.” She swallowed down her mouthful of spaghetti, then closed her eyes and strained her ears. “I think there’s someone outside.”
Lisa blinked, then slowly rose.
“You better not be screwing with me, Claire.”
“You know I wouldn’t.”
Lisa peered out the window, cupping her hand around her face to shade it. “I don’t see anyone.”
“I don’t know. It sounded like someone knocking.” Claire stood up too. “I’ll check the door.”
“I’m coming with you!”
Claire’s heart pounded in her ears, and she felt a little nauseous, but when she swung the front door open, she was met only with a blast of winter wind – no guests, and no ghosts.
“You freaked me out,” Lisa complained from behind her. “Come on, the spaghetti’s going to get cold.”
Claire laughed weakly. She shouldn’t have said anything. She’d been told since she was in primary school that she had an overactive imagination. But she had been sure that was a knocking noise…
She had just turned around to go back inside when she froze.
“Lisa,” she whispered, scared to speak too loudly in case she lost it, “do you hear a fiddle?”
Lisa froze too. She slowly spun around, eyes wide like dinner plates.
They listened in silence for what felt like a full minute. Claire was sure, she was sure,
that she could hear the very faintest trace of music playing at a distance. But it just wasn’t quite clear enough to say.
“Come in, Claire,” Lisa said. She wasn’t smiling.
Claire lowered her head and shut the door.
Chapter Four
It took some time, and two glasses of wine, before Lisa started smiling and joking again, and even after that, although Claire did her best to smile, it was hard.
“Hey, sorry for freaking you out,” Lisa said between sips of wine.
“And sorry for freaking you out.
“I’m pretty sure that, even if Eliza is a ghost, she’s a friendly one. I mean, she’s just a little girl with a fiddle, right?”
“Right,” Claire said weakly.
“And I’m her family, and you’re my friend, so why would she wish us any harm, right?”
“Right.”
“So, sorry for getting all dramatic.” Lisa finished her wine. “I guess I just kind of scared myself. I haven’t really spent a lot of time alone here, and I got kind of wild.”
“No worries.”
“So, anyway.” Lisa blew upwards, displacing her curly brown hair. “I should let you get back to work. You’ve got a dissertation to write! I think I’m going to go hang out in the library. Just come on down next time you want a break. We can have more wine. I can’t leave an open bottle here while I’m gone, so we’d better finish it off!”
She laughed, and Claire laughed, and all thoughts of ghostly knocking and fiddles faded into the background. But as Claire sat in the study upstairs, now lit only by her computer screen and whatever moon light sneaked in from the night, her eyes kept wandering back to the picture of Eliza.
Death by falling off a roof. She shuddered. What a way to go. Hopefully she’d broken her neck and not suffered. But Claire was pretty sure that the odds were better that she’d broken both her legs and her spine and suffered some sort of internal haemorrhage and died horribly, gasping up her own blood, and oh God, Claire definitely shouldn’t have started thinking about that. She shivered. The office didn’t have any heat in it, and there had to be a draft. A small throw blanket was folded neatly on the armchair, and Claire wrapped it around her shoulders to keep the chill away. She stared at her screen, at the blinking cursor, at the point where she had left off.
Aguilar’s religious concerns appear thematically across her body of work. Specifically, her poems. HELLO
The words appeared on the screen. Yet, Claire smiled to herself as she backspaced the HELLO. She’d always had a bad habit of transcribing things that she heard when she wasn’t quite fully focussed. When Lisa had called her for dinner, she’d just kept typing, and…
Claire paused, finger hovering over the backspace key. The H stared back at her. Lisa hadn’t called her for supper.
She remembered now – she had finished her section giving background on Aguilar’s personal history, and she’d been just about to start writing about her poems. She’d hit the 500 words that Lisa had asked for, and she’d left that last sentence as a prompt so she wouldn’t forget what she was going to say next, and Lisa definitely hadn’t called Hello.
It was probably some autocorrecting thing. She’d probably brushed “HE” on her way out and her computer had decided to write HELLO. This was what she got for syncing it to her smartphone. Her dictionary was all messed up. Claire deleted the H. Slowly, thoughtfully, she typed, picking up the thread of her thought process.
Specifically, Aguilar’s poems address her disillusionment with her contemporaneous HELP ME
Claire’s throat closed. She had paused after contemporaneous, just for a moment, to choose the noun she would use to describe what Aguilar was disillusioned with, and the cursor just kept clicking along, and now she was staring at two short words that she hadn’t written.
Claire slammed the laptop shut. The room was ice cold. The blanket wasn’t doing anything. She grabbed her laptop and bolted downstairs.
Lisa was stretched on the couch in the library, reading the fashion magazine. She looked up when Claire burst in, and jumped to her feet.
“Claire, what’s wrong?”
“Some…” Claire’s mouth tasted like sawdust. “Something really weird just happened. Can I sit down here with you?”
“Sure, of course!” Lisa sank back down on the couch, leaving plenty of space beside her, and still staring at Claire, wide-eyed, searching her. “What happened? Are you okay?”
“Y– yeah…” It was a struggle for Claire to make her tongue work. She sat down next to Lisa and opened her laptop, gingerly, like she was afraid it was going to explode.
“Claire?”
HELP ME blinked at her, and as Claire watched, gripping the sides of her laptop with both hands, the cursor slowly ticked backwards, deleting one letter at a time.
“Lisa… look.”
Lisa was already looking.
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
The words had disappeared. Both women stared at the screen. Lisa had started to tremble slightly. Claire couldn’t breathe.
Something crashed in the kitchen. Lisa screamed, Claire instinctively threw her hands up, sending her laptop sliding off her lap and onto the floor, and in the kitchen, Maude yowled.
“Shit! What was that?” Lisa jumped up and dashed off, and Claire, after checking cursorily to make sure her laptop hadn’t broken, followed at a run.
Maude was hiding under the kitchen table, back bristled and tail bushy. A stain of merlot was creeping slowly across the tile from the smashed pieces of the wine bottle.
Lisa swore loudly, several times. She reached under the table and picked up Maude, who hissed and twisted in her arms.
“Mum’s going to kill me,” Lisa said, struggling to hold on to the cat. “God damnit. Claire, can you go get a broom and dustpan? There are some in the closet by the front door. Damnit, Maude!”
Maude yowled in protest. By the time that Claire got back with the broom, Maude was hanging limply under Lisa’s arm, mewling and whimpering softly while Lisa tried to pick out the biggest pieces of broken bottle from the pool of wine.
“I’ll grab a mop too.” Claire turned and quickly headed back for the door. She had just rounded the corner past the mirror when she heard a deafening CRASH behind her.
“Lisa!” She turned to run back to the kitchen and almost slammed headfirst into the kitchen door. It had slammed shut.
“Lisa? LISA!”
“I’m okay!” Lisa’s voice was faint behind the door. “It’s okay! Can you open it?”
Claire flung her whole weight on the door. It didn’t budge. “No!”
“It’s okay!” Lisa repeated. “I’ll come up the servants’ stairs and help. Just a second. Ouch, Maude!” Maude yowled. “Just a second! Wait right there!”
Claire strained her ears to listen for the door to the servants’ stairs. She couldn’t hear anything.
She tried to remember how the instructor had taught her to breathe in the one yoga class she’d ever attended. Right into the bottom of the diaphragm. Expand the ribs. Fill yourself up with air. She leaned against the door.
She could hear Lisa’s footsteps overhead. Claire closed her eyes and sighed with relief. So, Lisa had gotten through okay. Now, between the two of them, they’d have no problem with the door. Although Lisa was walking awfully slowly…
Chapter Five
The footsteps sounded very close. Claire opened her eyes.
Something white brushed through her field of vision. She rubbed her eyes, trying to catch the feather or bit of dust that had landed on her eyelashes. But there was nothing, and the white blur was gone.
“Claire?” Lisa rounded the corner. She was hugging Maude. She looked pale, but smiled – an only slightly wobbly smile. “Bloody Hell. Are you OK? You don’t look so good.”
Claire could only nod.
“You know what?” Lisa put down Maude, who curled into the corner. “I think we should clean up the wine and then go back into town. All-night c
offee shops are good for writing too. Coffee’s on me.”
“Thanks, Lisa.”
“No problem.” Lisa laughed – an only slightly forced laugh. “I didn’t think this house would creep me out so much. Honestly, I never would have suggested it if I thought…”
She trailed off, then threw her weight against the door. Between her and Claire, they managed to push it open.
“Um, Claire,” Lisa whispered, “there… there was wine on the floor, right?”
The tiles were sparkling clean. The bottle of merlot sat, unbroken, unblemished, on the counter.
Claire stared at the unbroken bottle of wine. There wasn’t a single spilled drop. She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them, then squeezed them shut again. Her stomach was a tangle, and her legs were jelly.
“You know what? Good!” Lisa let go of the door and it slammed shut, almost slamming Claire’s fingers. “This is great! Now there’s nothing to slow us down. Get your stuff. We’re leaving.”
Claire didn’t have to be told twice. She bolted upstairs and grabbed her bag. Lisa was at the door when she came running down the stairs, and the girls fled the house, clutching their bags, Maude tucked and yowling under Lisa’s arm.
“Get in!” Lisa threw her stuff into the back seat of the car, and Claire followed suit, only slightly more carefully on account of her laptop. By the time she was halfway into the front seat, Lisa’s key was in the ignition.
The car purred, then groaned, then made a weak sputtering noise.
Lisa turned the key again.
EHHHHWEEHHHHHWEHHHHH said the car. Then it was silent.
“Shit.” Lisa whispered. “Shit, shit, shit!” She tried the key again. This time, the car made no noise at all.
“Bloody Hell!” Lisa fumbled for her phone. “Of course. Of course! Five bloody years and now it decides to break down.”
Maude yowled and leapt off Lisa’s lap, over Claire, scrabbling at the window with her claws. Claire struggled to get her arms around her. Lisa was swearing and pounding at the screen of her phone with her finger.