by Paula Guran
Rain shimmered on the windows. The roof had a leak, an insistent drip coming from the south transept. The pew was hard enough to numb her back and behind. And yet she did sleep, fitfully, for a few hours, while the storm battered the moor and drowned the graves in the churchyard.
Until she sensed movement. Her eyelids fluttered open, her chapped lips peeled apart. The angle of the sun, the shadows, had changed. The vicar squinted at her from the end of the pew, bent almost double with his hands clasped behind him. He beamed at the sight of her stirring.
“Reverend.” Anne licked her lips and rubbed her eyes. The blanket fell from her shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she said, tugging it back. “I couldn’t find you, and I was so cold. I took this. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Nay, ’tis nowt.” His ears were so overgrown with age, so soft and cartilaginous, that they waggled when he shook his head. He sucked at his own lips in such a way as to imply several missing teeth. “It’s good to have company. It’s been twenty year since anyone new’s come by.”
“You waved to me yesterday. I was standing by the memorial.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding blandly. He didn’t remember her in the slightest. “Well, you can stay as long as you like. What’s your name?”
“It’s . . . Keene,” replied Anne. “Missus Keene.”
He worked his gums, wet bottom lip protruding thoughtfully. “You don’t sound right sure. Newly married, eh?”
“Yes. The day before yesterday.” Anne sighed, buried herself deeper into the blanket. “I’m afraid we’ve made a terrible mess of things.”
“Oh?” The vicar chuckled. “What’s troubling you, then, Missus Keene?”
Anne looked at her wedding band. For the first time since she’d put it on, she’d completely forgotten about it. “He’s a drunk. The war’s left him with some sort of shell shock. And I—I—”
“Go on, lass, spit it out.”
“Well, I see things, people, that aren’t there.”
The vicar raised his brows at this. His eyes emerged from the crumpled folds of his face, startlingly blue.
“I didn’t want to tell him, but I don’t see how it can be avoided now I’ve made such a spectacle of myself.” Anne showed him her palms, grazed during her fall. He tutted sympathetically. “My God, he’ll be so ashamed of me,” she whispered, the details of her flight coming back to her: the mad scramble through the mud, the shrieking, the bewildered staff. Her heart thumped against her ribs. “What will I do? I can’t go home.”
“You’re seeing apparitions?” He came closer, turning one waxy ear her way. “Tell the good reverend all about it, lass.”
So she told him about the hanging men in the orchards of Penshaw, the shadows that drifted formlessly in the churchyard, the bleeding woman she’d sometimes seen slumped on the bench outside the greengrocer’s. And then in London, where her madness became difficult to hide: the crawling man in the alleyway, his fingertips blackened with plague. The one who stepped off the Embankment into the Thames. The burnt child. And then the man caught beneath the train, the cries for help that had tricked her into investigating the bowels of Rannings, and what she’d found there.
The vicar made an inquisitive audience. Unlike the numerous doctors to whom she’d described her visions, he pushed for more detail, more description, and yet his questions never felt prying. By the time she finished, he’d taken a seat beside her, brooding like a particularly ugly gargoyle. “I’ve heard of the doctor afore but it’s worse than I thought. Summat must be done for them poor souls.” He cocked his fluffy head. “Tell me, when was you born?”
Anne groped for a reply. The question had caught her off guard. “The third of F—”
“The time, lass, the time.”
She frowned. “Oh, I don’t know. My father always says he delivered me on the dinner table. Supper, I suppose you’d call it. Why?”
“Vespers,” the vicar said to himself. His eyes popped out again like blue winkles emerging from their shells. He leaned in conspiratorially, his bulbous, arthritic hands clasping his knees. “Nah then, have you ever heard of chime children?”
Anne gave him a tired, indulgent smile. “No, I haven’t.”
“Chime children are what’s born when the bells toll. They can do owt—commune with God’s creations, heal the sick, even pierce the veil of Heaven. Folk up here say they’re born at midnight, and folk down your way might say morning or evening, but it’s the bells what matter.” He pointed up to the tower where the transept and nave intersected, where presumably a bell now hung, silent. “I’ll bet the bells was ringing out when you came into this world. Powerful thing, bell-metal. . . . You still with me, lass? You look right flayt.”
Anne was on her feet, hugging the blanket tight. “There’s no such thing as ghosts, Reverend,” she said coldly. “My delusions are caused by stress, and in the last two days I have estranged myself from my only family and married a man I barely know. Our minds are extremely susceptible to suggestion. We all learned about the Black Death and the Great Fire of London in school. I was told of Rannings’ history, the asylum. I’ve read anatomy books. I’ve heard my father perform amputations. All I had to do was fill in the blanks.”
“What about the scratches in the wall? You said they felt real.”
“Everything I see feels real, Reverend, but there must be a rational explanation.”
The vicar smiled at her as if she were a marvel and spread his arms. “If you wanted rational, why seek shelter in a church?”
She had no answer to that. “But this bell nonsense—it sounds so pagan. It’s hardly appropriate for a vicar.”
“The Bible tells us God created the world, so I say chime children are His work. Nowt can exist that He did not intend, Missus Keene.”
Anne buried her face into the musk of the scratchy blanket and exhaled. Her tongue pulsed against her bottom teeth. A part of her willed it to be true: It explained so much about where and in what state her visions appeared. She had never been a morbid child, had suffered no early grief, so there seemed no reason for her illness to fixate on churchyards, on pain and terror.
She lifted her head and gazed at the ceiling, the roosting pigeon. How could she be sure this wasn’t simply another delusion? But then the vicar was here, wasn’t he? She wasn’t alone?
“Can it be true?” She gazed at him. “I’m not mad?”
“You’ve no control over what you see or when.” He lifted a finger. “Intrusions is still intrusions, sane or no. You must find a way to bear them.”
“But I’ve seen others, other people who aren’t suffering. The girl I saw today, she looked fine. Does that mean even she’s . . . dead?”
“Maybe, maybe not.” The vicar shrugged, resting his hands on his gut. “Some folk leave impressions, not just where they died, but where they made a difference.” He looked around his church with such serene pride that Anne found herself looking as well. At the crooked pews, the broken memorial slabs. A candelabrum knocked to the floor, draped in cobwebs, and a bare altar. A leaking roof. A pigeon and its excrement. A vicar who, despite his unwashed appearance and gummy mouth, was strangely odorless.
Anne felt sick. She went to the front door and pushed it open, but the rain was thick and driving sideways, pulping the shrubs. The path to the churchyard gate was underwater, and she could barely make out the war memorial twenty feet away. She would easily get turned around in this, without the sight of Rannings to guide her back. Thunder growled, and between the dark clouds, lightning flickered.
The vicar walked through her and out into the storm, unaffected by the rain. He stooped especially low to read one gravestone and then another, until he found what he was looking for. “Aye, here’s me.”
Anne’s skin tingled. “Please don’t walk through me again, Reverend.” But she held the blanket over her head, trusting the stiff weave to keep out the worst of the rain, and plunged barefoot into the churchyard to read the stone.
Rev. Jonah Rolfe
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28 June 1771 – 5 December 1855
“Fifty year,” the vicar said. “I poured my heart and soul into this parish for fifty year. I were happy here, lass, right happy I were. You should’ve seen it in its prime.” A frown, a return to the present moment. “I remember you now. Yesterday means nowt to me, but I do remember you.” His voice was fading. Anne stepped closer, protecting him from rain he could not feel. “Help them poor souls up at the house, if you can. They’ll want to talk—that’s why they come to you. Our bell will make it easier. Purest bell-metal an earl can buy.”
“Good luck, lass.”
And then he was gone.
* * *
“Who’re you talking to?” asks Martha.
“A ghost,” I say—a ghost who’s already gone, her eyes the last of her to fade. I can’t be sure she even heard me.
Martha moves behind the wall. I imagine her pressing her ear to the hole. “What?”
“Never mind.” I rub the back of my head where the matron struck me and my fingers come away wet and dark. A headache forms there, as if a gentle press was all it needed. I ease back down beside the hole and we link fingers again.
“Can you find things, too?” she whispers. “Is that why you’re here?”
“I seem to be much better at losing them. . . . Why, what can you find?”
“Owt,” Martha replies, and there’s a note of quiet pride in her voice. “When I were little, folk used to say I must’ve stolen things, to know where to find ’em. They chased us out of town. Where we live now is better. Now folk pay me, sometimes, to help find stuff.”
I smile, understanding her pride. As children, any coins Benjamin and I could contribute to our families were precious, whether they’d been earned honestly or lifted out of a loose purse. Every coin meant our mothers could afford to put one less neighbor’s shirt through the backbreaking mangle, make one less matchbox when we’d all gone to bed. Our fathers could come home from the docks one hour earlier, live one more day before their bodies gave out. It’s why the damage to Benjamin’s leg was such a blow. But I also smile because her gift gives me hope.
“Listen, Martha, does it work for people, what you can do?”
She’s quiet for a moment. Perhaps the doctor’s asked her the same thing, and now she regrets saying as much to me. “Sometimes.”
I give her finger a little squeeze. “You see, I came to find my friend. He’s here somewhere, locked up, just like us. Have you heard anyone crying out?”
“I think so,” she whispers back. “They’re somewhere dark, somewhere . . . down there.” I can barely hear her as she draws away from the wall, a dowsing rod for Benjamin. Then she yanks on my finger and says, her voice pitched high with sudden panic, “Please don’t leave me here! I know you didn’t come for me, but I wanna go home, too.”
I soothe her as best I can, pressing her poor exposed nail beds to my lips. Guilt stings my eyes. I came for Benjamin and Benjamin alone, but I don’t have the heart to abandon this child. I’m not a monster. Will Missus Walchop ever forgive me, if I’m forced to choose? This girl can die and Benjamin cannot—is that what I must tell his mother, what I must tell myself, in leaving Benjamin to his torture?
The peal of a faraway bell ripples through me. I look up to the window.
Fog slithers in like water. “What’s that?”
“It’s coming from the church at Haxby,” says Martha. “It must be midnight.”
“Chime hours,” I breathe.
Every clang strikes me like a smith’s hammer. White dots blister my vision, expanding and joining together until I can’t see, and everything—the chill bleeding through my skirts, the vise of my stays; even Martha, noticing something’s wrong—comes to me as if from a great distance. I turn obligingly inward like I was taught, into the light.
An old bell appears above me, scabbed with turquoise verdigris. Below, pulling the rope, is the ghost. I watch the bell’s clapper connect with the rim. As the vibration stretches impossibly long, pinning us in a moment, our eyes meet. Her left eyelid distorts when she smiles.
“It’s you,” she says.
Suddenly she’s right here, or I’m there—space has ceased to matter—and she’s all loud, chromatic flesh. Blood springs from the fissures of her chapped lips, coloring them a shocking red and infusing her breath with iron. She’s reaching gently for my hand. Hers are as soft as a gentlewoman’s, until I turn them over and find her palms flecked with cuts. I close my callused fingers over hers.
“You were right, wise spirit,” I tell her. “I should’ve listened to your warning.”
Her brows draw together. “You know me?”
“Of course,” I say slowly. “You told me not to go to the house.”
This shakes her in a way I can’t understand. Do spirits not remember their own actions? But then something resolves. Her mouth presses into a straight, serious line. She breathes deeply, her exhalation quivering.
“All right. Is there something you wanted to tell me? Is there some message?”
Now it’s my turn to be shaken.
Chime folk are rare, and my gift is rarer still. Everything I know about spirits comes from hand-me-down talk, filtered through a dozen mouths. A woman from a village called Hale, some dozen miles from Liverpool’s docks, was said to see the dead, and the crux of her parting advice which finally found its way to me was this: Listen to them. Let them impart their wisdom or last words so they can rest.
They don’t ask us for messages.
“I don’t understand you, spirit,” I say, letting go of her hands. “It’s usually the other way around.”
“Is it?”
“Don’t you have a message for me? Another warning? I’ll heed you this time.” I step back and take her in, the thrill of making contact giving way to sober clarity. Her accent, her clothes, are alien. I can’t place her lack of corset, her narrow skirt, the lumpy spencer that extends down to her waist. Her hair, tawny as a barn owl’s hood, escapes from pins set above her ears. “When did you die?”
Her eyes widen. “I’m not dead! I’m . . . I’m on my honeymoon. Today is the twenty-second of October, 1938. I saw it on a newspaper someone was reading at breakfast.”
I find myself on the floor, such as it is in this place, knees bent inward like a child. 1938. An incomprehensible date. The future. I must be seeing the future. I’m snatching glimpses of people not yet born, tasting champagne made from grapes that are yet to grow. Suddenly, I understand why history hasn’t recorded the incidents I see—they haven’t come to pass. The spirits never speak to me because they don’t even know I’m there. But if this woman can see me. . . .
“Oh God, do I die here?” I cover my eyes. “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and she’s at my level, prizing my hands from my face. “All I know is that I’ve seen dreadful things all my life. I thought I was mad. I think I still am mad.” She laughs weakly. “But I saw you in the parlor at Rannings today, and on the moor. You were intact and . . . simply perfect. For the first time, I wasn’t scared.” She smiles again giddily, her left eyelid taut. “I’m not scared.”
I’m younger than she, but I feel a tug of responsibility. I palm her cheek and fix her with a steadying look. “There is nothing to fear from the dead. They may frighten you, they may come when you want to be alone, but they won’t harm you.” I draw our foreheads together. Benjamin did this for me, when my gift first manifested and I couldn’t sleep. It’s my dearest memory of him. Tears drip into our laps. I can’t tell which are mine.
“So,” I say, and we draw apart, “what else did you see in the house, besides me?” She describes as best she can the flayed boy. The girl in the cell, who can only be Martha, clawing her fingernails off trying to escape. As she speaks, I feel the resonance of the bell fading. Our time grows short. “Did you see a boy? Scrawny and tall, with a limp? He doesn’t heal completely—he might have other scars, too.”
“A
boy—?”
“In 1938, is there any record of him,” I push, “of us being held against our will?”
“I don’t know.” She hides her face in her hands. “After Rannings was sold, there was some talk of legal trouble, and I think the receptionist said the asylum was shut down about a hundred years ago, which would be—”
“Now,” I finish viciously. “Tell me, was the doctor tried? The missing children, the flayed boy—were they found?”
“No, no, I don’t know. . . .”
I close my eyes, holding my anger in. The doctor targets poor, hungry families, mothers like Benjamin’s, like Martha’s, who can’t afford to turn down money even at the expense of a child. He trusts that the world will turn without stopping for them. Sickeningly, he’s right: There will be no accounting for this in his lifetime.
“What is it now, the house?” I ask bitterly.
“It’s a hotel. A very expensive hotel.”
A hotel! I can’t help but laugh, but there’s no joy in it. “Mark me: Children have died here far from home, and they deserve justice. My friend, Benjamin, deserves justice. God knows what he’s been through. I don’t know the limits of his gift; perhaps the doctor has already found a way to break him.” I grip her arm and she flinches. “Avenge us. That is what the spirits want. That’s what I want, if I’m to die here.”
