The Midnight Lullaby

by Cheryl Low

  He pulled at the fabric caked in mud and plastered to itself in layers. The rain helped, washing his hands every time they lifted from the muddy flaps and finally rinsing off the items exposed. His stomach twisted, threatening to heave.

  A pair of women's black boots. They were well worn, the sole of one even had a little hole in it.

  Tears ran with the rain down his cheeks.

  He knew these shoes, didn't he? How many times had he bought a pair just like them for Emmeline?

  Someone stepped into the edge of his vision, and he forced his gaze to slide up, a cry choking in his throat when he saw her standing there—his Emmeline. His best friend. The love of his life. The rain cut through her, gray skin dewy in sweat and smeared in blood. The front of her dress stuck to her belly, holes glinting darkest with blood that bloomed outward into macabre flowers, saturating the thin fabric. The rain, here and now, did nothing to wash away the blood from long ago. Nothing could wash it away. Nothing could change what had been done.

  He counted the crimson flowers as they grew, appearing one after the other, clustered against her abdomen. Seven. Seven stab wounds.

  Her hands were broken, and her wrists bruised from the ropes. One side of her face swelled as he stared at her, an eye pressing closed while the other, vicious in that brilliant green, called for vengeance.

  He heard that call now—clear as a bell.

  She had been calling to him all these years with those eyes, with that look and the glimpses of silent, haunted misery. Because that was the true darkness of ghosts—not how the living imagined themselves to be haunted, but that the ghosts were the ones being chased and choked by regret, pain, and rage.

  Emmeline's broken lips pulled into the smallest of tired smiles he had ever witnessed, and his heart crumbled right there in his chest. She stared at the shoes in front of him like long-lost friends.

  And suddenly his ghost wasn't barefoot anymore.

  After nine years, she had found her shoes.

  Chapter Fifteen

  "Tell me," Benedict said to her as they stood in the rain.

  Emmeline stared. "I have been."

  He carried the boots back to the house. Maybe she couldn't say it with words. Was that why he had been seeing visions? He knew now, without a doubt, that Emmeline had ignited his mother's spirit into her current fury. He could feel that anger himself, coiling in his chest, twisting around his heart. He felt Emmeline in a way he never quite had before, but he was certain that it had always been there.

  The first days he ever saw her, crouched and sobbing in his bedroom upstairs, her eyes had burned that electric green. He had been terrified of her—of the ghastly appearance of her and all her wild emotions. Somehow, he had gotten used to them, put them aside as something normal for a ghost. But what did he know of ghosts? He only knew Emmeline and the stories of others.

  Elysium waited for him at the back door. His eyes flickered from the dirty, old boots hanging from Benedict's hand, back up to his face.

  "Why are her shoes here?" Benedict asked the first question he could get out, tears still in his eyes. He stepped out of the storm and into the house, and Elysium stepped back to give him space.

  "Whose?" Elysium asked, the word quiet as though he didn't even want to say it.

  Benedict smiled furiously and put the shoes down on the narrow table along the wall, puddling mud beside a vase of silk flowers. "Emmeline," he said her name to his brother for the first time.

  She came to stand beside them, hand hovering over her lost shoes with wonder.

  Elysium's eyes widened. "How do you know that name?"

  "How do you?" he growled.

  "Did someone say it to you? Have you communicated with Mother's spi—"

  "I don't communicate with spirits," Benedict cut him off. He had held on to that secret for so long. He had been sure he would keep the truth to himself until the day he died. "I only see one. I only hear one."

  Elysium gaped. "Benny…"

  "What happened? How did her shoes end up here? Where is the rest of her?" The last sentence came out strangled. He felt Emmeline then, her focus on them and her ghost at his side. Her anger was body heat now, soaking into his arm, spreading through his chest.

  "That's not possible. You can't see her. You can't. We put her to rest, Benny. We've never seen her—none of us. Mother would have—"

  "I see her." Tears rolled down his rain-soaked cheeks. "How can you not feel her, Elys?" His fingers twisted in the front of his own shirt, pushing hard against his chest. "I can feel her heart breaking. I can feel the knife."

  Elysium jerked back, shoulder hitting the wall. His head shook slowly, still trying to resist believing in what he himself could not see. "Benny… I think Mother has—"

  "It has nothing to do with her now!" Benedict yelled.

  "Ask him again," Emmeline pressed. "Ask him where I am. Where's my body?"

  "You really see her?" Elysium whispered, voice trembling in a way Benedict had never heard before.

  "Yes," he glanced to the side. Emmeline balled her hands into fists against her waist. "Who did it? Who killed her? Why?" He had so many questions—though none of them seemed to be the ones Emmeline cared about.

  A thunder of steps barreled down the staircase, Theodore chasing Hazel into the foyer down the hall. They spilled into their line of sight just as Theo caught his sister by the elbow and jerked her to a stop. "Lucy swears she's still here. We have to at least consider—"

  "No!" Hazel yelled. "It is just Gloria trying to torture us."

  "Why?" Theodore matched her volume. "Why would she do that?"

  "Because she was a crazy bitch—"

  "Why dig up the dead girl's shoes?" he hissed in a whisper, obviously not meant for Benedict to hear. So they knew about Emmeline, too? Had they all known? Was that why Lucy had been so quick to press Mother's ghost out of that maid? Was she worried about her giving away the secret?

  "What did you do?" Benedict heaved the words, turning his gaze to his brother across from him in the dark hall.

  Hazel and Theodore continued to argue in the foyer.

  Elysium swallowed hard; something caught in his throat, maybe? He reached for Benedict. Why? They had never been the hugging sort, and no firm handshake was going to fix this. "Nothing. We didn't do anything."

  "Liar," Emmeline hissed bitterly.

  "Liar," Benedict repeated, because it should be heard by more than just himself. All these years, Emmeline had been holding on to that rage. It had been spilling out here and there, and like a fool, he had assumed it was just a part of being a ghost. He had set aside her feelings as a dramatic consequence of lingering. He had ignored her broken heart, her broken body, and her need to have that fury heard.

  He grabbed the boots off the table and walked straight down the hall.

  Hazel and Theodore choked on their argument at the sight of him. Theodore reeled back when he spotted the old shoes from the pitiful little grave. Neither said anything to him, just stared. Benedict took the stairs two at a time, and before he reached the second floor, they were back to bickering over their fleeting options, Elysium's deep voice joining them in a conspiratorial whisper.

  Instead of going to his room to seek solitude or refuge like he had as a teen—the last time he had been in this house—he swung right at the intersection of halls and went straight for Lucy's room. For the first time in his life, he didn't knock.

  Her room had the same layout as his, a little parlor in the front leading through an archway into the bedroom with her own bathroom and closet. She jumped when the door slammed against the wall, leaping off the dark satin couch. Everything in her room was in mauve, wine red, and black, with a theme of skulls and Ouija board trinkets she had collected since she was a teen. She leaned Goth long before she left home to build a following of tarot readers and séance holders. She dropped her teacup when she saw the boots, fresh tears gathering in her already swollen eyes. "No. No."

  He thumped them down
on her coffee table. "Who did it?"

  "We're past that," Emmeline whispered, but he wasn't.

  Her hands, freshly bandaged, hovered in the air between her chest and her mouth—not sure where to go, he supposed. "No. I… No."

  "Lucy." He said her name firmly, and her gaze snapped from the shoes to him. "Tell me why we're all going to die in this house tonight."

  Some of her tears spilled over, but her mouth pulled into a desperate smile. "We did something terrible. Mother said it was okay. She said it wouldn't matter because it was for a good reason, and she…she…she…" Lucy got stuck on the word.

  "Me," Emmeline hissed at her, hovering over the other woman but going unseen. "Me. Me. Me."

  "She wouldn't be missed," Lucy hiccupped. "Mother said. It was for a good cause, and it would give her life purpose. Really... Really, we were saving her from a tragic life and—"

  "Saving her?" Benedict almost threw up, gagging on the words.

  Lucy lunged at him, kicking her forgotten teacup on the floor and fumbling to latch onto his hand with her tender, gauze-gloved ones. "I swear, Benny! She was no one. A broken family and a dark future!"

  "My broken family!" Emmeline screamed. "My future!"

  He tore his hand from his sister's hold and staggered back. "You were part of it? You killed her?"

  Lucy choked on a sob. "We needed a sacrifice, Benny! It wasn't killing. We were just moving her on to the next life. It was a mercy. She would have had a hard life."

  Emmeline screamed, and Benedict winced, hands flying to his ears.

  Lucy cried harder, probably thinking that he was trying not to hear her excuses. "It had to be done! We were saving you!" she pleaded.

  The tall windows in her bedroom that overlooked the front of the house rattled in their frames.

  Lucy whirled around, eyes bulging, but she wouldn't see anything, would she? This wasn't Mother shaking the room with her wrathful screams. This was Emmeline. His Emmeline.

  The windows cracked, and with the pitch of that cry only he could hear, they burst, spraying glass inside rather than out.

  Lucy screamed and twisted away from the explosion, panting for air. Her arms trembled, bent up to shield the sides of her face. "It really is her, isn't it? She really is still here?" she whispered.

  Benedict staggered back, struggling to catch his breath in the wake of Emmeline's flash of anger. "Yes. She's always been with me."

  Lucy let out a string of mad laughs tangled with cries. "We thought we sent her on. We didn't know… It was supposed to give you her sight so that you could see the spirit world like the rest of us. We made her a ghost so that you could see like a ghost, but it was only supposed to keep her sight. Not her." She sank to her knees, clutching at her head. "Not her."

  Benedict backed out of the room, shoulder hitting the doorframe.

  Emmeline bent over Lucy, her hands balled against her bloody skirt and jaw dropping open wide to let loose another furious scream right in Lucy's face, but she didn't see. She didn't even hear it. But she felt the tremble of the room. She gasped when the glass shards lifted off the floor, making gentle sounds in the air before flinging at her in a vicious rush.

  A part of him thought to save her. She was his sister, after all. But she had done this, hadn't she? She had purchased this pain. Wasn't it right that she knelt before it now?

  He turned, groping at the doorknob. Emmeline's scream was too much; it pressed at his skull and rang against his eardrums. His stomach lurched, his whole body pushing forward as though to outrun the return of his last meal. He all but fell out the door, the rug seeming to slide under his shoes.

  Benedict squeezed his eyes shut and breathed, trying not to vomit. Sweat clung to his skin, clothes still wet from the storm outside.

  He realized too late that the screaming had stopped. He couldn't even hear Lucy crying.

  He straightened slowly, blinking against the sudden darkness. Thick candles flickered along the wall. No. It couldn't be night already.

  Shadows moved in the room, voices far away and growing closer. This wasn't the hallway or any bedroom he was familiar with. The shadows took shape, silhouettes slipping out to become people gathering around a table without chairs.

  He shivered, cold despite the summer heat he had been bathed in only seconds ago. He recognized this room from a keyhole.

  "Are you certain?" Elysium asked, and it sounded like the hundredth time, his voice tight and a little angry.

  Benedict blinked at his brother, his hair a little longer and his clothes not quite as fitted. He was younger, maybe the same age as Benedict. He remembered when his hair had been that length. He had cut it not long after Benedict moved out of the house to go to school.

  "Enough," Gloria snapped at him. "If you don't want to do it, then take her home."

  Elysium cringed, fists pressed to his thighs but no longer arguing.

  Benedict stared, stepping closer as his mother took a deep drag from her cigarette.

  The dark room filled with shadows taking shape. Luis hovered close to their mother's side, and Hazel whispered to Uncle Vernon. Theodore had his arms crossed firmly against his chest. He wasn't as well dressed as the man he would become, hair a mess and sweater hanging on his thin frame. Lucy, like the rest of them, was younger, but much the same as always. She chewed her lower lip, the way she did when nervous. They all looked guilty; the weight of it sapping their youth right before his eyes.

  "Get on with it," Gloria ordered.

  Elysium hesitated.

  Benedict couldn't remember ever seeing his brother hesitate when it came to commands from their mother. But, at last, he disappeared from the gathering of somber faces around that table.

  Benedict wanted to follow him, he tried to, but he couldn't seem to find the edges of the room, the scene became foggy beyond the table and no matter how he walked, he couldn't get far from it.

  A scream pierced the room, and he spun toward his family just in time to catch the grimaces of his siblings and cousins.

  Elysium returned, carrying Emmeline in his arms. She kicked and struggled as best she could with her wrist and ankles bound. She cried, clawing at his shoulder with broken fingers and begged him to let her go. His dark eyes fixed on the table; Elysium wouldn't look at her. He lifted her and put her on the surface. Their mother was quick to grab the tail of rope trailing Emmeline's wrists, dragging it back and flattening the girl out on the surface, tying her arms to the edge of the table over her head.

  She sobbed, struggling to drag in enough air to scream. Her heels kicked at the table, thunking again and again, her whole body spasming in terror.

  Benedict tried to push his way into the circle of his relatives, but he fell through them. "Stop!" he commanded, but they didn't hear him. He reached for her on the table, desperate to pick her up and run away, but his hands passed right through her and his heart sank low into his stomach. He gasped wildly for air, her sobs endless and his joining hers. He was the ghost now—trespassing on a scene of the living past.

  Uncle Vernon handed his mother that old, leather-bound notebook from the witch's house—the one he had seen as a boy and never again since. Mother had called it hokum, but she flipped it open now. She was rough with the pages as though offended by them even as she read the scribbles of spells and madness they had to offer.

  "Please, please let me go," Emmeline tried, her voice so raw that it didn't even sound like her anymore. "I won't tell. I just want to go home!" Her words pitched with terror, cracking in her throat.

  They ignored her—already a ghost to them.

  "We gather tonight to offer this vessel," his mother announced. "Carry her to the next world and leave the sight of spirits in our care. We will it."

  "We will it," the other six repeated.

  Benedict shuddered. Why?

  "Please!" Emmeline wailed.

  Lucy cried silently, and Theodore stared hard at the edge of the table.

  "Leave us the gifts of souls, the gifts
of this spirit, and bless them on our boy, Benedict."

  "Benedict," they repeated.

  Tears rolled hotly down his cheeks. He wanted to scream—the way Emmeline's ghost had screamed with waves of mind-shattering fury and pain, but it caught in his throat, strangling him.

  Somewhere far away, upstairs, the old clock chimed the first bells of midnight.

  They passed around a knife, and he watched, helpless against the past, as those closest to him took turns stabbing her. Seven wounds. One at a time. Her screams grew louder and louder until the last one came in a wheeze, her breath hitching in her lungs and that one eye, the one not swollen shut, bulging. She arched off the table, mouth open wide but getting no air, only gurgling up blood like a slow fountain.

  Benedict's legs gave out.

  She died.

  He heaved forward and vomited.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Benedict vomited violently, hurling up everything in his stomach and then heaving breathlessly. His vision blurred, and his throat burned, coated in stomach acid. He coughed and fell back, gasping for air and sobbing.

  A hand pressed against his shoulder, firm and real. "Benny?" Elysium asked, worry thick in his voice. "Are you okay? Where did you come from?"

  Benedict jerked away from him, shoving at his brother's chest. He needed space. He needed to catch his breath.

  Benedict let out a miserable groan. He was still in the same room, only the fog at the edges had receded to expose old stone walls and a dirt floor under his ass. He blinked up at them, his murderous family—or what was left of them, anyway.

  Hazel, Theodore, and Elysium had gathered around that table, the witch's journal laid out on it with a battery-powered lantern beside it, stretching light through the room. It smelled like a grave. How had he never realized they had a basement before? How had he never realized they were killers?

  "You murdered her," he said once he caught his breath, tears still blurring his vision, hanging on his bottom lashes.

  "Jesus," Theodore hissed. "She really is here…"