by Kelly Creagh
“Er. Well. That . . . would be mine.”
“You’re giving me your number?” I asked, because I couldn’t seem to help myself. But maybe to get a little more flirting, I first had to give some.
“N-no,” he said. “I mean, yeah. But . . . not because I want you to call me.”
“So, you don’t want me to call you.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Okay,” I said, flashing him a smile, one that made the worry creasing his brow lessen. “Then . . . maybe I will.”
With that, I let myself out of the car and jogged back up to the porch, where I offered one final wave before returning to the house that, whether it was truly haunted or not, was, for the first time, a house I was glad we’d moved into.
SIXTEEN
Zedok
Irate, I paced in the hallway between the girls’ rooms, pausing long enough with every pass to peer toward the banister overlooking the foyer, anticipating Stephanie’s return.
Already, ten minutes had elapsed since she’d exited alone with him. And that was four times longer than propriety would have ever permitted any young woman of my time to be left in the sole care of such a man.
And Mr. Armand. Where was he while his eldest daughter fraternized with some pompous and self-serving . . . mucksnipe.
With that interloping idiot. That meddlesome cur.
What gave him the right to spew such a slanderous mangling of facts?
At last, with a familiar whine, the front door swung open, prompting me to take two sharp steps to the banister, which I seized with both hands.
Alone once more, Stephanie entered the foyer, her ebony curls shining like coal in the glow of the chandelier as she shut the door softly behind her. She then drifted to stand just below the enormous light fixture . . . and me.
She held in her hands some bit of white paper, which she studied with barely subdued delight.
My grip tightened on the banister, and as she passed out of sight beneath, I resolved to speak with her again.
Tonight.
SEVENTEEN
Stephanie
“What were you thinking inviting him here?” asked a voice, his voice. “All things considered, that was quite possibly the worst thing you could have done.”
Encased on all sides by pure nothingness, I spun in place, searching the void for the source of the admonishment.
“Where are you?” I asked the darkness.
“Here,” came the same accented voice from behind me, and, whirling, I suddenly found myself facing him. He stood just a few feet away from me, even more beautiful than I remembered, one hand perched on the hilt of his rapier. He had on the same dark slacks, gray waistcoat, and black riding boots as last time. Now, though, he wore an ebony cloak. His black chin-length hair stirred in a breeze I didn’t feel.
“Where . . . where are we?” I asked next. This had to be another dream.
“If you’ll permit me,” he said as, with an absent wave of his hand, the blackness encircling us began to morph, filling in with the details of a stately room.
A lavish parlor, complete with pocket doors and a shining parquet floor, unfurled into being, the details devouring the nothing the way flame consumes paper. I gaped at him and then the parlor, which I recognized as ours. Except not the current version with its cracks, missing plaster, and dust. Instead, a far grander version of the room surrounded us, complete with a working fireplace accented by the same bird-painted tiles my father had mentioned at dinner.
I crossed to examine both the tiles and, positioned just above the crackling flames, the antlered figurehead of the stag my father had also described. Above the deer, on the mantel, ticked a small clock. One that marked the time as just after midnight. Which, if it was accurate, meant I must have only just fallen asleep.
“Please,” Erik said, “if you would take a seat. There’s tea if you like.”
I spun from the fireplace to note the sudden existence of a coffee table set with a beautiful silver tray. A filigreed teapot and matching cups kept company with a spread of pastel pastries and delicate finger sandwiches.
It all looked so real. And lacing the air? The faint scents of candlewax and lamp oil, burning firewood, lemon, lavender, and roses.
A moment more passed in which I had to convince myself I really was dreaming.
“Erik?” I asked him.
“Ah, you remembered my name,” he replied, his tone wry, sardonic.
“You,” I said then, almost in a whisper. “You’re . . . dead.”
The words prompted him to scowl at me, though he didn’t look any less gorgeous for it.
“And you, Miss Armand, are still standing. Tell me, shall I invite you to sit again, or is this a conversation for which you will insist upon being as unconventional as ever?”
He spoke like he knew me. Or . . . like he’d been observing me for a while. Something he’d alluded to in the last dream.
“I don’t even know what conversation it is we’re supposed to be having,” I said, taking my turn to be snappish while still reeling from the abruptness of his appearance.
“The young man,” he said with impatience. “We are discussing the young man.”
“Lucas?” I gestured toward the bay windows, which showed only the blackness of night.
“He must not be allowed to return,” Erik said. But I only half heard him, because there was still too much that needed to be cleared up.
“You’re not just a dream . . . are you?” I asked him, not certain yet if I wanted him to be real. Maybe not if the second version of the story Lucas had told us, the one in which Erik had killed his parents and sister, was true.
“I told you previously that I was not,” he said. His surliness. It couldn’t really be all because of Lucas . . .
“You also previously told me I should get out of my own house.” I folded my arms.
“Advice I still stand by,” came yet another acerbic reply. “And even more adamantly now. Because, by inviting that fool over here, you have hastened us all toward what I am certain shall be an unbearable outcome.”
Questions piled behind my lips. First thing first, though.
“So you were listening in?” I asked. “You heard what Lucas told us at dinner . . .”
“I did not murder my family, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said, the vehemence in his voice almost covering the barest of trembles. His eyes, filled with indignation—and pain—fastened on to me, until he severed our locked gazes by turning away. “Though I was . . . responsible for their deaths.”
Well. That was vague.
But maybe, with a little push for specifics . . .
“What about the rest of it?” I asked him, because obviously he had been listening in. “The curse.”
“I already informed you there was a curse,” he replied.
“Yeah,” I said, turning slowly in place, fascinated by the grandeur of the room. “But you didn’t tell me what the curse was. He did.”
“He knows nothing of the curse,” snapped Erik, though his words scarcely registered because, by then, I’d spotted the piano.
Black and shining, sleek and majestic, the instrument occupied the same corner as it did in our parlor. Far more beautiful than anything we’d ever owned, it struck me as something Mom would have gasped at the sight of, too.
I went to it, my shape silhouetted in its gleaming, polished surface.
The keys, not a one yellowed or chipped, shone white as snow.
White as the lilies that had covered my mother’s casket.
Unable to help myself, I slid onto the bench. And now here I was again, inside the shell of a memory. Though, this time, within the confines of a dream.
I put my fingers on the keyboard, hands taking up the familiar positions my mother’s always had, as if doing so could some
how summon her.
I pressed the white E key and then the black D-sharp, alternating between the two until moving to B, D, C, and onward, the notes falling together, becoming a melody. The pattern repeated itself again, and then again, varying slightly as I coaxed it along. It flowed through me and from the piano, building all the way to the place where it . . . stopped. Well, where I stopped.
A shadow fell over me, and I turned to find him standing at my left, his form backlit by the glow of the fireplace. His eyes, more penetrating even than before, bored into me.
“What are you doing?” he demanded, his voice even more intense than his gaze.
I retracted my fingers from the keys, curling them inward.
“Don’t,” he commanded.
“Don’t what?”
“ ‘Für Elise,’ ” he said, gesturing to the keyboard. “You cannot just cease in the middle . . . You must play the rest.”
“I don’t know the rest of it.”
His attention went from me to the piano, his expression crestfallen.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered, quick to slide out from the seat I should never have taken. “I never learned. We—”
I stopped myself there, the silence sweeping in to surround us once more, though uglier than before since it was now filled with everything I didn’t want to talk about.
“We?” he ventured. “You’re speaking of yourself . . . and your mother?”
My eyes narrowed at him. “How do you know about my mother?”
“It was merely a well-aimed guess.”
“A very well-aimed guess.”
He pressed his lips together in thought. Then he peered toward the fireplace, the light illuminating his too-handsome profile.
“Her absence,” he said finally, his focus returning to me after a beat. “It looms.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. Especially not when his words provided uncomfortable evidence that he really was able to listen in on us and possibly see us, too.
“We shan’t talk about her if you do not wish to,” he said. “Trust me when I say . . . I understand.”
I’d been ready to rail at him. To lash out. Suddenly, though, I couldn’t. Not when his words carried far more weight and sadness than needed to convince me what he’d said was true.
“Your family,” I said. “They’ve been gone a long time.”
“It feels that way,” he admitted. “But . . . only when it doesn’t.”
Those words resonated with me in a way no one else’s had.
Mom had been gone for six years now. Most of the time I remained acutely aware of the years that had passed. Sometimes, though, like lately, things got raw. Other times, in brief nanosecond moments of extreme excitement or disappointment, those instances when your first gut instinct was to run to the most important person in your life, I even still forgot she was gone.
“It’s like he said, then?” I asked. “The curse killed them and . . . you as well?”
“The curse is mine alone to bear,” he said with conviction. “And duly so. Though . . . it is true their deaths were a consequence.”
I tilted my head at him, reading him true for maybe the first time.
“But then . . . that would mean you’ve been here for over a century. You can’t have spent that whole time blaming yourself.”
He flinched, his expression pinching. Almost as if, just as he had done with me, I’d glimpsed—or rather, prodded—some hidden and too-tender facet of his pain.
“Yes,” he said after several long beats of silence, his words strained, his collected demeanor threatening to crack, “well . . . it was my fault.”
At this response, my heart issued for him an almost debilitating ache. Immediately, I fought the urge to apologize—right along with the impulse to keep prying.
Because now more than ever, I wanted to know what had happened to him—what had really happened.
Instead, I gave him the same moment to recover that he had granted me. Then, taking my cue from Lucas, I jumped to a new topic—or, at least, a previous one.
“Could . . . couldn’t you play it?”
“I beg your pardon?” he asked, taken aback.
“ ‘Für Elise,’ ” I said. “Why don’t you play it for me?”
“I can’t,” he said, even more devastation underscoring his tone than before.
“Oh,” I muttered. “I guess he got that part wrong, too . . .”
“Which part?” Erik asked, distracted, a scowl touching his brow as he divided his attention between me and the piano, as if trying to figure out which of us was to blame for his confusion.
“Lucas. He said you could play.”
“I can play.” His hand curled into a fist. “I just cannot . . . play.”
“That’s not contradictory.”
He turned away from me to face the piano. “I could have played it. Once.”
“So, you were a musician?”
“I am a musician. I just . . .”
“Just what?”
“I just . . . Could you try again?” he said to the instrument. But, of course, he had been talking to me. “ ‘Für Elise.’ ”
“I told you, I don’t know—”
“Play what you know.”
“But I—”
“Please.”
He turned those eyes on me again. But, once more, it was his voice that pierced me.
That word. He’d uttered it as a genuine plea. And in that lone syllable, I again detected an all-too-familiar note of pain. The kind that, when it rings out, causes all similar surrounding chords to vibrate right along with it.
Not sure what I was doing, I reclaimed the seat on the bench.
“Stop,” he said before I’d played so much as the first two notes. “Andante. Slowly, but not too slowly.”
“I know what ‘andante’ means.” I shifted and started over.
“Softer,” he corrected.
Again, I stopped, and I might have gotten angry with him if he hadn’t swept his cloak back in order to take the seat next to me, the motion sending a waft of lavender my way.
“See here,” he said. “The opening notes. They are one entity, linked as they walk out of the dark together, born from the nothing, surprising and yet undeniable, like the first stirrings of love. Your fingers. They need only caress the keys. Let them fall as feathers. Like so.”
His right hand went to mine, his third and fourth fingers, cool and a little rough, overlaying my own. His words, combined with his touch, caused a thrill to rush through me and heat to rise in my cheeks. I held my breath as he pressed each of my fingers just the way he’d said, one after the other in the same pattern. He halted at once though when the music came out discordant, distorted, and wrong. The notes that themselves had, a moment ago, resonated with such beauty now clanged eerily, off-key and garbled.
Erik’s hand lifted instantly from mine. I kept my own where they were, unable to move, my skin still buzzing from our connection, my body humming from his nearness, my ears and mind shocked by the unnerving sound his influence had elicited from the instrument.
He drew his hand away from the keys, though his eyes remained fastened there, the momentary flash of brightness in him dimming.
“You see now what I mean,” he muttered.
And I did.
“It’s . . . part of the curse,” I guessed. “You can’t play anymore because you’re a ghost.”
“I am not a ghost,” he corrected darkly. “And neither, I must tell you, is he.”
“He,” I repeated. “You mean Zedok.”
He didn’t admonish me for saying the name this time. But he didn’t answer me, either.
“Who is he?” I pressed. “What is he?”
“Not what you think,” murmured Erik, “I can promise you that.
”
Another unenlightening answer. But did that mean Lucas’s story was wrong? Erik had said it was. Perhaps Zedok was a demon.
“He’s what’s keeping you here,” I said, lifting my hands from the keys and slowly placing them in my lap. “He—it,” I corrected, adopting Lucas’s label for the monster. “It’s keeping you prisoner.”
To this, Erik said nothing, just observed the piano with a stricken expression that echoed the one from before. But maybe he couldn’t tell me. Could the same thing preventing him from playing music also somehow prevent him from revealing the truth about the curse?
“Lucas said you were—”
“That boy,” he said, Lucas’s name apparently jolting him back into the moment. “It is imperative that you forbid him or any more of his ilk from entering the premises again.”
“Lucas came here to help. And if he knows something about what’s going on here, then I don’t see why—”
“Because!” he said, rising from the bench. “Bringing him here is akin to striking a match in a cellar full of powder kegs!”
I twisted to peer after him as he strode away, back toward the fireplace. He stopped there, a pillar of darkness in the gloom. But . . . there was light inside him, too. I’d felt it just now. When he’d talked about the music . . .
Pushing off from the bench, I started in his direction, stopping just short of him.
“Erik,” I said when he failed to say anything else, “I . . . I want to help you.”
And I did. Because if there was one thing I understood about him, it was the pain.
He glanced over his shoulder at me, his expression grave. “There is perhaps nothing you could have said to frighten me more.”
We stood apart like that for a long time. Like both of us had too much left that we wanted to say but no way of articulating it.
“The reason he is not to return,” Erik said at last as he again approached me, “is because I cannot guarantee it will not be the last thing he does.” He lifted his hand, his knuckles drifting close to my cheek. “Not when things are as they are. Not when I can scarcely protect you.”
