Phantom Heart

by Kelly Creagh

  And there. Straight ahead, I spotted them.

  The graves. Three total.

  I actually held my breath as I approached the two that stood right next to one another, one half sunken in the waist-high weeds.

  WILLIAM THEOPHILUS DRAPER read the first stone, right below the epitaph of BELOVED FATHER AND HUSBAND and above the dates listed as February 18, 1859–December 21, 1903.

  CHERISHED WIFE AND MOTHER was the predictable epitaph for the second, half-sunken gravestone—Lillian Angelique Draper’s.

  I frowned at her grave. At the worn dates. They couldn’t say what I thought they did.

  Approaching the stone, I crouched and brushed away the layer of clinging dirt. Then I traced the mossy numbers with a finger.

  Born March 25, 1865. Died December 21, 1903.

  Almost against my will, I glanced to the right. To the third grave.

  This one was for PRECIOUS DAUGHTER, Myriam Elaine Draper.

  Again, though, the listed dates had me pausing. Or date.

  She had also died on December 21, 1903.

  Since she’d been born August 29, 1891, she would have only been twelve. Same approximate age as the girl from the photo. Her parents. Their ages would match the photo I’d found, too.

  Though there was no way to be sure—not without further research—I could only presume that whatever had killed one of them had killed them all.

  In that instant, the force of the tragedy bowled into me.

  Could the home’s reputation owe to the fact that the family somehow died inside the house or on the grounds? Perhaps there’d been a gas leak or carriage accident.

  Of course, they must have been together. To have all died on the same day . . .

  Except. What about the other figure from the photos? The blotted-out young man?

  A shudder of soundless movement near one of the trees caused me to start and stand.

  I walked toward the movement and spotted the source.

  Another moth.

  The creature, as large as the one I’d found yesterday, trundled over the trunk of the tree.

  Crunching over twigs, leaves, and uneven ground, I made my way to the maple. Peering into the tree’s branches, I searched for more of the beasts.

  I found a second moth only when I looked down again.

  This one, a little smaller than the one Charlie had chased in the front yard, sat perched on the edge of another stone.

  Another gravestone.

  I dropped once more into a crouch.

  The moth flitted aside as I cleared the leaves, grass, and muck that had camouflaged the stone.

  “No,” I whispered at the name that had been carved there more than one hundred years ago. A name that could not really be there. “There’s no way.”

  And there shouldn’t have been.

  Because that name. Its presence there suggested the impossible.

  That other things, things that weren’t supposed to exist at all, had really been there, too.

  EIGHT

  Zedok

  Tick, tock, tick, tock went the mantel clock. My father’s clock. Doing its normal job of wearing through my sanity.

  Pacing in the parlor on my side of Moldavia—a frozen-in-time version full of finery, decorated in my mother’s good taste, and furnished by my father’s bottomless wealth—I tried to ignore its ticking, the only sound that disrupted the midnight silence of the house.

  Always, its doleful, monotone song served as the only music I knew. The sole accompaniment to the soundless nocturne my existence had become.

  I could compose, yes. Requiems, concertos, waltzes, and anything in between. I could inscribe entire cantatas—an opera, should I so wish. And composing occupied me so thoroughly that, for the time I could remain absorbed in the task, it held the power to lift my mind out of my wretchedness. Which was why I coveted the hours that, until the Armands’ arrival, I could spend in unencumbered labor on the other side of the house.

  Yet, no matter where I composed it, I could render to my music no real life. Not without a heart.

  My latest effort, a simple ballad, sat abandoned and unfinished in the attic of the Armands’ side of the house. Too distracted by the memory of my encounter with Stephanie that morning she had entered the parlor to collect Charlie, pausing at my piano to harken to her secret music, I’d stopped mid-note and left the pages where they lay atop my father’s old desk—a place well out of Charlie’s reach.

  I could have returned to the work. The quiet was such that I might have been able to stay enveloped in my labors until just before dawn, when Moldavia’s new tenants again awoke to traipse through my family’s manor with more racket than a traveling carnival.

  Though how could I have hoped to focus on music after last night’s tête-à-tête with Stephanie?

  Since our interlude, I’d had difficulty placing my thoughts on anything else.

  Most disturbingly, I found myself inexplicably desirous of another conversation with her.

  For that reason more than any other, I had resolved to stay well out of her dreams this night. I had, after all, accomplished what I’d sought to. I’d planted the seed that would soon grant me greater influence in her waking life. Why engage with her a second time?

  No doubt my interest in speaking with her stemmed from the fact that inaction had never been a comfortable choice for me. Especially in situations where time insisted on working against me. But then, I assured myself, no move at all on my part was still, in this instance, a move. Because Erik’s absence from her dreams tonight—was there any better way to encourage her to seek the answers out for herself? And she would go digging. As smart as she was? As determined as she could be?

  Would she hate Erik after she learned what he had done?

  Of course, how could she not.

  Abruptly, I halted my pacing. Scowling beneath my mask, I glanced to the piano, yearning, as always, to play.

  My inability to produce so much as two complementary notes was one of the crueler twists of the curse.

  Not only was I to be haunted by the fragments of my own splintered soul along with all the memories of this house, but I was also to be mocked by this pristine instrument that, though it shone with lacquered blackness, would produce for me no more music than its ruined twin. Miraculously, the piano, my piano—the version I considered to be the true version—still occupied the same space on the Armands’ side of the home.

  Despite whatever meaning it held for the Armands, though, the instrument would most certainly not be suffered to remain much longer. Another cause for concern, since the last man who had entered this house with the intention of removing my piano had left the premises . . . rather worse for wear.

  A similar fate awaited the Armands. How well I knew it was only a matter of time.

  If only Stephanie were not so . . .

  “Headstrong,” I mumbled, my voice muffled by my mask as I swung into a turn, retracing the steps I would momentarily turn to retrace again. “Contrary.”

  What else could I say of her?

  “That she is coarser than bramble,” came my dry reply—and almost through a laugh. “Forthright,” I added. “Yet obstinate and hard-nosed. Intelligence and beauty to spare, yes, but absolutely no refinement. What would my parents have said of her? I cannot even imagine. Myriam, on the other hand, would have been nothing short of entranced, I have no doubt.”

  What was I doing speaking out loud this way to no one? Though I sometimes conversed with my masks, those loosened shards of myself that paraded about me, through the house and over the grounds—ghosts of my own soul—I seldom uttered aloud my thoughts. Why do so when, too often, I had my masks to do that for me?

  Was I merely pronouncing for my own benefit my opinions of Stephanie as I settled upon them?

  “Not quite,” came a caustic vo
ice to my left—a voice I knew well. One that could hardly be counted as a voice at all.

  I froze at once. My gaze trained on the piano, I dared not look.

  Though it was not uncommon for me to be joined at any moment by one of my masks, it was quite unusual for him to appear so suddenly and without some heralding.

  And what was it that had lured him from his normal dwelling place of the cellar?

  Had Mr. Armand’s recent excursion there agitated him as I had feared it would?

  “You truly cannot guess what has beckoned me from below?” asked the mask, answering my thoughts, which were as much his as they were mine.

  My masks. These personified slivers of my soul. One or indeed twenty of them could be found—at any given time—milling about the magnificent mansion or its snow-covered grounds. Unlike me, however, the masks remained confined to this parallel, suspended-in-time version of the house. Thankfully for the Armands, my masks could not pass between both versions as I could. Also unlike me, the masks possessed no corporeal form under their masquerade garb.

  This mask, though—the one who called himself Wrath—was, with his crimson uniform, trailing cloak, and shining silver death’s head mask, perhaps the most arresting of them all.

  And the shard of my soul he represented—arguably the most heinous—fit too well with the image he presented.

  “Do you hazard a guess?” he asked, dark amusement backing his distorted baritone.

  I did not bother to answer. Because I did know—at least in part—what had caused his emergence from the cellar.

  In the past, my masks had each had their turn at me. Over the decades, I have worn their various guises and, in so doing, have become the aspect of myself they represented entirely.

  Control was what Wrath was after now. The control that, fortunately for the Armands, the mask I wore now—that of Languor—currently enjoyed.

  Alternately, however, that meant that I, on some level, must want Wrath to win control also. For, in the same way my thoughts were the masks’, so, too, were the actions and words of the masks my own.

  Wrath’s appearance portended all the disaster I hoped to circumvent. For it meant that he already had reason to want to take hold of me and, therefore, the fate of Moldavia’s occupants.

  “Leave me,” I snarled at the mask. “Take whatever it is you think you know and go sink back into your hole. Whatever plan you have to ensnare me, it won’t work.”

  “Fool. You are ensnared already.”

  “I told you to go,” I warned, a dangerous tremble starting in my form.

  “My eyes,” Wrath said, that awful voice slicing deeper the gash of my growing anxiety. “To look through them would show you the truth. Should you wish to see it.”

  “My wish, monster, is for you to return to your hell and thus leave me to mine.” I swung to face him. He sat upon the pale blue chaise near the parlor’s bay windows. A stag’s antlers crowned his hooded head. Dual pits of nothing watched me through the silver skull.

  “That is not your wish,” Wrath whispered, his words soft and supercilious, the collection of syllables akin to the guttering of flame.

  I squared my jaw. And regarded him in stubborn silence.

  For his presence alone told me he must be right.

  “Very well. What is it, then?” I dared to challenge him, my dread of his answer echoing through my chest, that empty space that had once housed both an intact soul and its beating vessel. “Speak, and say what it is we do wish.”

  Wrath did not answer. Instead, his nightmarish visage rose to a height that matched my own. Next, he placed a gloved hand over his mask and took it away to reveal a face of nothingness. With the slow and measured steps of a pallbearer, he approached me. I stood my ground in spite of my wariness.

  Stopping mere feet from me, he extended one crimson-clad arm and offered with his gloved and ring-lined hand his silver mask of irreverence, malice, and destruction.

  Did he think for one moment that I, knowing what he was, would willingly take it from him?

  Horror warred with my incomprehension, until my eyes fell to the shining metal of the proffered mask.

  Like a mirage, another face appeared in the skull’s mirrored surface. Quickly, the vision swam toward focus. And the face . . . it belonged to a girl.

  Stephanie.

  Tick, tock, tick, tock went the mantel clock, counting the seconds in which my fingers crept, of their own accord, toward the mask. Toward her.

  As they did, a low rattle entered my awareness.

  The house. It had begun to hum around us, causing the knickknacks to clatter on their surfaces, the legs of the furniture to tremble against the floor, and the strings of the dormant piano to unanimously elicit an ominous wail of warning.

  Terror for what I was doing, for what I’d nearly done, prompted me to rip the mask from Wrath’s grip and toss it to the hearth, where it dissolved to vapor before impact.

  At once, the tremoring of my world ceased. The piano’s voice died.

  At my side, Wrath’s looming figure undid itself, his crimson cloak and officer’s uniform unfurling to nothing, even while his low and unsettling laughter—always the last part of him to leave—echoed as fading thunder through the parlor.

  NINE

  Stephanie

  With a loud scrape of chair legs on linoleum, I dropped into the seat across from his, prompting all four people at the lunch table to look up in surprise.

  The petite, blonde, braid-wearing girl seated next to me fixed me with a scowl.

  Dead ahead, Hipster Glasses gaped with the highest degree of shock of anyone.

  I leaned forward over the table. “We need to talk.”

  “Uuhh.” He shot a glance to his cohorts, who consisted of Braid Girl; a Black guy with short dreadlocks, a yellow peanut M&M T-shirt, and a septum piercing; and a pale goth kid with silken shoulder-length black hair and an enormous silver cross looped around his neck. “I thought we already . . . talked.”

  Hipster Glasses shot Braids a more panicky glance.

  I sensed there might be a thing there. At the very least, he didn’t want her to know the details of our last conversation.

  “We need to talk again,” I clarified. Right when I’d been about to expound on why, though, Braids cut in.

  “Yeah—hi.” Pivoting toward me, she offered her hand. “I’m Charlotte.”

  “Stephanie.” I gave her hand a quick shake before turning my attention back to Hipster Glasses. Or rather, Lucas.

  “Oh, um, sorry,” said Lucas, sounding dazed. “I should introduce you. This is Patrick.” He pointed to the kid with the piercing. Patrick gave me a what’s-up chin lift, which I returned. “And that’s Wes. Alternately known as the Priest.”

  “A pleasure to make your abrupt and unexplained acquaintance,” Wes said, winking at me in a distinctly come-hither manner.

  “Uh . . . you too,” I murmured, and returned my attention to Lucas.

  “Listen,” I said, lowering my voice, “I need to know what you know about my house.”

  “You know,” came Charlotte’s voice from my left, “if you have an issue, you should really go through the website.”

  I frowned at her. She bit into her apple at me.

  I quirked a brow at Lucas. His eyes, widening, darted between me and Charlotte.

  “Website?”

  “Yeah, website.” Charlotte said, “As in a dot com address on the World Wide Web? There’s a form you’re supposed to fill out on our contact page if you want help. That way we can schedule accordingly. And keep our cases straight.”

  “Helps us weed out basket cases, too,” said Wes, making Patrick snicker.

  Okay. So I hadn’t exactly endeared myself to this group. I wasn’t trying to be invasive. But it had been Lucas I’d wanted to speak to. Apparently, a lunchtime conver
sation with him was a package deal.

  Lucas hadn’t been in the library that morning, and after our last interaction, I somehow doubted I’d find him milling around my locker again after final bell. I needed to talk to someone, though. Because Erik’s name showing up on that grave after the dream-visit? It couldn’t just be happenstance. Not only did all the moving parts defy coincidence and leap officially into the realm of the outright bizarre, they involved Charlie.

  “Cases?” I asked Lucas. “What kind of cases?”

  “We’re paranormal investigators,” explained Wes, his tone suggesting that this information was public knowledge.

  “You mean like ghost hunters?” I asked Lucas, whose face went as crimson as it had on Friday. Either he was embarrassed by this revelation or felt he would be as soon as his friends discovered how he and I had already met.

  “You are currently sitting with the entire SPOoKy team,” said Patrick.

  No kidding, I wanted to say, but managed to keep the comment in check.

  “Which is an acronym for the Scientific Paranormal Organization of Kentucky,” Wes clarified, plucking a pudding cup from the table. He gestured to me with it as if lifting a brandy snifter. “Though I feel you should know that I offered the single declining vote for adopting that particular moniker.”

  “Oh,” I said. Because “wow” seemed too snarky, and I was already in the red with these guys.

  “Yes,” Wes replied, “I much preferred Southern Masters of Otherworldly and Troubling Hauntings or, if you like, SMoOTH.”

  I nodded at that. Because what else could I do?

  At least now Lucas’s comment in the library about collecting “data” made more sense. And this news about his being a paranormal investigator supported his claim that his interest in me had, in fact, been about Moldavia.

  While all this made me feel better—about Lucas and my sort of having a crush on him—he seemed squirmier now than ever.

  “Yeah.” Lucas cleared his throat. “I should have told you that when we, uh, discussed things on Friday. Like I said, I just didn’t want to . . . weird you out.”