by Amy Lane
But they had been doing just that. For one thing, the kitchen was not that big—just a long, narrow strip attached to the back of the house as though tacked on as an afterthought. The floor was brick and the walls bare sheetrock. The table Tucker had eaten at was made of giant slabs of barrel-sanded, barely seasoned wood, with four-by-fours in the same condition screwed securely to the top and crossbars of two-by-fours for support.
The stove was a masterpiece—relatively modern, gas, clean as a pin—and the basic array of pots and pans was simple and high quality. The modest stainless-steel refrigerator was big enough for a family of six, but at present only stocked for one.
In a normal house, on a July afternoon, this kitchen would be about ninety degrees without air conditioning, but even as Tucker had stood over the stove, he’d felt no more than a faint warmth. As he leaned against the doorframe and watched some of the lingering spirits run toward the threshold in the fading light, he wondered when he would be able to go back to his apartment and pack all his stuff. He would need a lot more sweatshirts if he was moving in.
He watched as two women, dressed in the slim skirts, puffy-sleeved blouses, and straw hats of the turn of the century, walked toward him, holding hands. One had bright blond hair and a sort of faded, worried smile, while the other—fierce, freckled, redheaded—scowled at a phantom somewhere behind and beyond where Tucker was standing.
He watched them, fascinated, as they wandered in, their mouths moving in animated conversation, and he wondered what they were saying.
Closer, closer, the chill of their touch no more than a breeze off a mountaintop….
“BRIDGET, DO you think he’ll come?” the blond one asked timidly. She loved Bridget’s practicality, but Sophie lived her life in worry, and sometimes it was nice to have someone worry with her.
“Aye, I think ’e’ll come.” Bridget’s Irish brogue slapped Sophie raw.
“But… but we assumed he wouldn’t. You said he’d stay back east. That he didn’t care enough to—”
Bridget took a great breath and turned to her, cupping her cheek in the lamplight. “I was a fool, Sophie girl.” Her thumb, rough from laundry and sewing and the thousand tasks a day she did because Sophie had been forbidden from working for so long, scraped under Sophie’s cheek, and Sophie shuddered. “’E’ll come because ’e owns us, that one. I didn’t believe it, aye? And then….”
Sophie nodded, biting her lip, and both of their eyes fell upon a letter on the richly varnished desk. Sophie liked the desk—maple wood, the comforting red of it like Bridget’s hair—and it complemented the wallpaper, which was a confluence of giant fluffy chrysanthemums in blazing autumn colors. The bed was soft and the quilts warm upon it—autumn colors again, because whoever had decorated the place had possessed something of a gift. This room had been their haven, their sanctuary, their place to hide, and their home for the past three months, and Sophie dreamed of a home of her own where she could build such a room for her and Bridget.
The letter from Sophie’s brother sat unopened, like a grim granite reminder of reality in the middle of their happy golden dream.
“But maybe James will want us,” she said. “Don’t you think he’ll want us? He’s always loved me.”
Bridget’s pity was hard to stand. Sophie had so little to offer this relationship.
“He does love me!” Sophie declared. Breaking away from Bridget, she strode to the desk and opened the letter, ripping the paper in spite of the unused letter opener right next to the ungainly paperweight.
Her breath came more quickly as she read, her lungs straining against the stays of her skirt.
“Oh Bridget—Bridget, you’ll never believe—”
There was a sudden clatter, and a voice from downstairs called out, “Mrs. Conklin? Mrs. Conklin? You have a guest!”
Sophie let out a little moan, and her palms started to sweat. Oh no. She was going to—
“You will not be sick, Sophie girl!” Bridget snarled. “You let me handle this. I’m the dumb servant, and that’s all they know, you hear?”
At that moment there was a pounding up the stairs, and Sophie took a deep breath against her corset.
Her vision went black, and she fell limply to the clean wood floor.
TUCKER PULLED in a great gasp of air, his lungs burning as though he’d held his breath for hours. And again. And once more as he sagged against the doorframe, eyes gazing sightlessly into the darkness of the yard beyond.
“Tucker?” Angel sounded worried, as though he’d said the name more than once. “Tucker? Are you okay?”
Tucker took a few more breaths, the vision imparted by the two ghosts keeping him in a stranglehold until he could focus on at least one clear detail. “Chrysanthemums,” Tucker muttered weakly. “On the wallpaper. Where are they?”
“Up the west wing stairs, third door to the left.”
Tucker looked at him, eyebrows raised.
“I’ve been here a while. I know lots of things about the house.” Angel gathered his dignity about him, and Tucker blew out a breath as the last of the spots cleared from his eyes.
“It couldn’t have been the door next to mine,” he muttered, hauling through the kitchen and leaving his plate on the table and the pan in the sink. The vision was so fresh it didn’t matter that the women had probably been dead for nearly a century. He felt compelled to solve their mystery now. “It’s never ‘Oh Tucker, it’s on the ground floor, just past the stairs so it’s close to the kitchen,’ because that’s too fucking easy, isn’t it? It’s got to be a thousand light-years the fuck away!”
“Tucker, I wasn’t going to start with them. I don’t know much, but I know their story isn’t easy….”
He came out of the kitchen and turned right toward the entryway. There were two sets of stairs—the stairs from the east wing immediately to the right of the entryway and the stairs to the west wing, slightly behind the entrance to the kitchen. All Tucker really had to do was venture out the kitchen door and pull a U-turn before the dining room. Later it would occur to him that this could possibly be the least convenient layout for a kitchen and a dining room, but right now, he just had one goal in mind.
He wanted to see the Chrysanthemum Room.
“Top of the stairs, three doors down to the left,” he panted, while Angel whined behind him.
“No! No, you can’t! You don’t know what you’re doing yet. Let me research their objects first. C’mon, Tucker, I’ve only scratched the surface of the mysteries here, and there are some objects that are dangerous!”
But Tucker had seen it, had seen them, and they’d been vibrant and young and real. He’d felt Sophie’s fear and the roughness of Bridget’s hands on her cheeks and the crispness of starched linen against her skin. And the damned corset, of course, but all of it had made those women so desperately real to him. He wanted in their world, to know who they were to each other, to know what happened to them.
What had the letter contained? Who was the “he” they’d been so interested in? Who was their mysterious guest, and why would Sophie be so frightened that she’d actually swoon—with a little help from a skirt bound up to her ribs.
Tucker felt the same drive, the same pull he usually felt when he needed to go downtown and find someone to seduce into changing their life. The curiosity—Who will I meet now? What will they look like? What will they need from me?—and the thrill of discovery were some of the pleasures he allowed himself, some of the balms to soothe the ache of having no family, no friends, no job. The people he was destined to help made him less resentful of being karma’s bitch.
This thrill—and the promise of helping the long-deceased residents of this house—was even greater.
He had time to notice the threadbare carpet, the hardwood splintering under his feet, the peeling veneer of the doors and tarnished gold plating of the doorknobs before he spotted the door with a small plaque showing a painted chrysanthemum on the front.
He remembered to slow down and
use his shirt to turn the doorknob, and then he stepped on in.
Soul Voyeur
ANGEL HADN’T mentioned it. When he’d told Ruth, it had sort of freaked the poor old girl out.
He’d known her several years by then—she’d started to ask him how he knew when the spirits had passed on, how he knew their stories before she even told him, and he’d figured that since they’d worked as a team successfully for so long, she deserved to know.
She didn’t speak to him for a year.
He never talked about it again, and he tried to minimize the times it crept into their interactions from that moment on.
But he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to hide it from Tucker for very long at all.
For one thing, Tucker didn’t do what was asked of him—or even expected. Angel couldn’t coach him through his first ghost encounter; it had already happened.
Angel had seen it unfold clearly in his mind, like humans saw a movie projected against a wall.
Much like he’d seen the image he’d based his form on. Not too close—just close enough to inspire trust. Angel needed to inspire trust. He needed Tucker to talk to him. Not so much in order to accomplish the mission but to… to satisfy that thing, that thing inside him that had gotten him into this position in the first place.
The closest Angel could put voice to it was an itch. Fifty-five years ago, when Ruth Henderson had been young and carefree, the great-granddaughter of Seth and Gretchen Henderson, who had built Daisy Place, Angel had gotten an itch, and he’d been trapped here ever since.
Ruth had helped him—her natural talent had let her see the ghosts even before Angel had gotten caught in the trap that was Daisy Place. It wasn’t until Angel had become trapped there and had spoken to her that they’d developed the rapport that allowed them, as a team, to free the spirits. She’d been talkative once, and excited about her invisible friend, Angel. When he’d been there to hear the stories of the other spirits, they’d both felt the catharsis, the joy, of giving another being freedom.
Angel had been so confused—he really couldn’t remember how he’d become trapped, beyond the itch thing. And his own memories had been dark and filled with pain with no remembered source. But that joy, after Ruth had told the first story, that had been important. He’d seized on that. That was his purpose here; he’d been sure of it.
And he’d convinced Ruth that it was her purpose too.
Only then Angel had watched, helplessly, as Ruth’s youth, her spirit and joie de vivre, had shrunk in upon itself, had shriveled, leaving bitterness and loneliness in its place. He’d had no idea what to say to her, what to do for her. The work they were doing was vitally important. He could let her leave for brief sojourns, let her brothers and their families visit, but he could never say the words that would allow her to be free.
Three little words.
Let it be.
And the worst part, the most frustrating part, was in spite of his enforced stay here, in spite of working so hard to escape, to resume his full duties as he should wish to (what were those again?), that itch, that abominable itch, the thing that had so ensnared him in Daisy Place to begin with, was a constant irritation in the pit of what should have been his groin.
And the only time it went away, was even close to assuaged, was when he was watching the lives of the departed scroll across the memories of Ruth Henderson, and now, hopefully, her nephew Tucker.
Angel had watched, half-yearningly, half-despairingly, as Tucker had experienced his first vision. He loved this part. He did. He never understood the motivations—not the way Ruth had—but seeing the lives of the departed had been his movie, his novel, his long-running TV series, the one that broke his heart.
And then he’d seen what Tucker had seen, and if he’d known how, had possessed the mechanism in his heart or soul or form, he would have wept. There was a quality to Tucker’s visions that had been missing from Ruth’s. He’d witnessed human innovations in the last fifty-five years, had seen televisions go from black-and-white to color, from tubes to pixels, from standard definition to high definition.
This was the difference between a black-and-white, fifteen-inch screen and high-definition color in 3D with surround sound on a screen the size of the house.
Immersed as he had been inside Tucker’s mind as it lived through the simple conversation between a woman of privilege and her maid, he’d felt closer to those people than he ever had before. They’d lived for him, and for those breathless moments, that itch in his core had been soothed, and he’d been able to breathe as though he had a real chest, sucking real oxygen into pink and healthy lungs.
He wanted to enjoy this feeling, to revel in it. He wanted the time to savor what this could mean for his duties, but apparently Tucker wanted leave to tear into the walls and change the world before Angel could even understand it.
It was infuriating. And Tucker? Tucker was two steps ahead of him, with or without his pleas to just please, for the love of all that was holy, slow down.
“Wow,” Tucker breathed, doing a slow pivot of the room. “Angel, look at this place. It’s like they just packed and left. I swear, there’s hardly any dust.”
Angel blinked. “That usually means the ghosts are busy,” he said, hoping Tucker would listen. “Agitated ghosts are unhappy ones. This could be a not-great sort of place to deal with your first—”
“Look!” Tucker interrupted without even slowing down. “The desk. Did you see the desk?”
“Yes, I see the desk where the letter was,” Angel said, disconcerted enough to blurt out the truth—the one that had so frightened Ruth.
“Really? You can read the visions in my head?”
Oh no! Tucker had only just gotten there. “Yes! But how did you—”
“Well it only makes sense,” Tucker said, and Angel wanted to cry with the simplicity of that acceptance. Oh God—how much easier it would have been between Angel and Ruth if the older woman had been able to see that he wasn’t trying to intrude on her mind. The ghosts were projected into his consciousness, like movies on a screen.
“If we’re working together,” Tucker continued, “you’ve got to see too, and you need me for something. But the desk—do you see it?”
Delicate scroll-footed maple wood, almost sensual with the curved facades and the narrow little “ankles” that attached the feet.
“It’s beautiful,” Angel said softly, skating an incorporeal finger over the surface. He frowned. It should have been humming with voices, this desk. It had sat there during the most intimate revelations of more than a hundred years of visitors to Daisy Place. It should have been a quieter, softer version of the doorknobs.
“It’s silent,” he whispered, not feeling a single hum. “Tucker, open the drawers. Is there something in here? Coating the wood? Embedded in it?”
Tucker frowned and turned away from wondering at the wallpaper and reverently finger-petting the antique quilts.
“The desk?” He held his hand over the wood just as Angel was doing. “That’s odd. It’s giving off the same vibe as the quilts. Sort of like it’s absorbed more energy than it’s emanating.” He pulled out the lower drawer and then closed it, shrugging when it proved empty. The one in the middle had antique stationery in it, as did the one on the top right. The bottom left had a hole punch that revealed nothing more to Tucker than a bored child and a ruined bus ticket. And so on, right up to the top middle.
Tucker reached out to pull on it and then snatched his hand back, as though from a stove. “It’s burning,” he hissed. “Freakishly hot. Angel, can you feel that?”
Angel held out his own ghostly hand and let out a gasp. “There’s… oh dear. Tucker, there is power in this drawer. In this one in particular. You must take great pains to not touch the metal without my—”
Tucker was ripping off his shirt, and Angel paused in all the things.
Tucker Henderson had a beautiful mortal body. Long-muscled, lean. His ribs were maybe a little too prominent, but Tucker
probably expended energy at an amazing rate. He had a small spot of dark curly hair on his chest, vibrant against his pale skin, which was now flushed with pink, probably from his frantic journey through the house and up the stairs.
Angel had seen him naked—that morning, in that woman’s bed—but he hadn’t appreciated him, hadn’t been able to imagine the heat coming off his body, the faint smell of sweat and fabric softener, the tang of salt.
Hadn’t imagined the taste of Tucker’s skin.
Angel’s body—his incorporeal, imaginary construct of psychic energy—began to do uncomfortable and potentially embarrassing things. For a moment, the place where his chest should have been began to burn, and he reminded himself to breathe.
Then remembered that breathing was an illusion, and constructs of psychic energy shouldn’t need to process oxygen. He did it anyway, because there was something soothing about the repetition, and concentrated on watching as Tucker rattled the metal-fastened drawer until the lock gave.
The burst of psychic energy that crashed into them both knocked Tucker on his ass and sent Angel into a vertigo spin around the room. When he finally managed to pull himself together, so to speak, Tucker was struggling to his feet, panting.
“That was—” He caught his breath. “—really fucking unpleasant. Is the whole house like this?”
“I gave Ruth the easy ones,” Angel confessed, too rattled to dodge the question. “She… I felt bad for her.”
Tucker regarded him with unfriendly resignation. “Wonderful.”
“You’ve had a chance to live somewhere else besides Daisy Place,” Angel responded defensively. “She started doing this as a child!”
Tucker straightened from his half crouch over the drawer and ran his hands through his wild hair. “Poor Aunt Ruth,” he said grudgingly, and Angel sensed that beautiful empathy in him. The emotion was almost as compelling as Tucker’s bare chest.