by Rumer Haven
“Don’t give yourself so much credit,” she chided with an elbow to his ribs.
He laughed. “Okay. Well, bye…honey.” The hesitation sounded as if he’d thrown in the old endearment like an afterthought. Maybe because he was out of practice using it—and for her, specifically—but Margot could tell he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to anymore. The corners of his lips still held up a smile but twitched slightly as his eyes wandered over her face and momentarily flickered to Rand. “I’ll give you a call later. Before I leave. Bye, honey,” he said again, with a sad sort of finality. With a tight grin, he glanced back and forth between her and Rand once more and nodded.
Margot knew not to expect her phone to ring that soon. That James would give her the space he had before so she’d have a fighting chance to move on. Putting on a brave face like his, she smiled and said as casually as she could, “Good luck getting your work done. See ya.”
They went in for another hug, holding each other closely this time.
“Cheers, mate,” Rand chimed in once they separated, and he shook James’s hand. “Nice to finally meet you, and thanks for breakfast. Cheers.”
“Yeah, thanks for the drinks last night and letting me crash, man.”
As James started for the Tube entrance and glanced back with a departing smile, Margot flashed him one last wave before turning on her heel to walk the opposite way with Rand.
After rounding the block, he wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “He’s a good man.”
“He is,” she said, accepting the unspoken apology. And he’ll make someone so happy. She wanted someone to make him happy, too. Just not me.
Once on Rand’s street, they passed the series of identical columned entrances until chancing on the only one with a Chloé planted on its doorstep.
“Ah, hello.” Rand greeted her with a stiff cheek-to-cheek kiss when she stood.
“Hey,” Margot managed, making no motion to greet in kind.
Chloé looked at Rand first. “I am so sorry if I’m interrupting your afternoon. I can leave.”
“Well, we’re just getting back. It was a short night for us all, so I thought I might rest. What say you, Margot?”
She appreciated his lifeline but said, “Um, I’m fine. I can do whatever.”
“I was thinking we could go for a walk?” Chloé asked.
“Maybe a short one. I could probably use a nap, too.”
“Sure, a short walk. Then I leave you be.”
Up at the door, Margot gave Rand a hug goodbye. While she held him, she leaned back to take in his concerned face, his eyes that seemed to study hers. Without overthinking it, she leaned back in to peck him softly right beside his lips. “Thank you,” she whispered. “For everything.”
“I’ll see you soon,” he murmured back, raising his brows on the last word. He then turned away from her to unlock the door, but not before throwing a quick, suppressed grin at Chloé.
He must realize she upset me last night, Margot thought as she watched him step inside and close the door after himself. She slumped back down the steps to the sidewalk. “Anywhere in particular you want to go?”
“Wherever you wish.”
Margot motioned in a direction.
After a minute of silent walking, Chloé spoke first. “Margot, I am so, so very sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you and would never wish to insult you.”
Dropping her head and shoulders, Margot exhaled heavily. “I’d be ridiculous to accept that apology.”
Chloé sighed, too. “I don’t know what else to—”
“Because it’s not necessary. You were only trying to help, doing exactly what I asked.”
“Yes, but it’s not easy confronting the truth. Even if you believe it’s possible, to have it confirmed is terrifying.”
“True, but what have we confirmed?”
Eventually, she steered Chloé through an immense archway. The women stuck to a main path that bisected the acreage of stone.
“There’s someone I’d like you to meet,” Margot said after a time.
A couple of minutes later, the two stood over a grave.
“Chloé, meet Charlotte. Charlotte, Chloé.” Margot affected the grace of the perfect hostess.
“So this is her.”
“I don’t even have to explain it to you, do I?”
“Well, perhaps a little. But I feel the larger connection.”
“Of course you do. You have ‘clear vision,’ as I recall. Or as you’d say in French, ‘clairvoyante’?”
Chloé grinned toward the ground.
“Is that how you knew Rand’s address?”
“Mm,” Chloé grunted in what Margot took as a yes.
“So, am I right about this?” Margot continued. “This is her?”
Chloé shook her head. “I don’t know.” With a modest laugh, she added, “My vision is perhaps not so clear.”
“But you do see something, right?”
“With this place, yes. There’s a link here that binds you and…” Chloé’s gaze held transfixed in the way Margot had seen during class, except rather than zoning at nothing, she clearly stared at the tombstone.
“What is it?”
“Out of curiosity,” Chloé said, still looking at the stone, “when is your birthday, Margot?”
“Funny you should ask. Same as hers. Does that mean anything? Something you’re seeing right now?”
Chloé nodded with her empty stare.
“Well?” Margot asked.
“Her death date.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s today.”
Margot paid attention to the day and month for the first time with an incredulous laugh. “Well, the anniversary of it is. Go fucking figure.”
With no explanation, Chloé said, “I wonder if you might walk with me a little further.”
Dizzy and tired, Margot sat mutely through most of the Tube ride. They had connected to the Northern Line several stops ago, and a nod from Chloé cued her to alight at the next one.
Once at street level, Margot followed Chloé onto a brick walkway.
“Here,” Chloé motioned, and she ducked her head into a small entrance.
In unpopulated dimness, Margot couldn’t determine into what sort of venue she’d just stepped, only that it reeked of marijuana and fruity shisha tobacco. Chloé displayed familiarity with a low-purring silhouette that soon vanished in the shadows; she beckoned Margot to follow.
Feeling her way down a confining stairwell, Margot heard the creaking in front of her eventually stop, and a series of clicks revealed an opening bathed in a beam of artificial light.
“Merci,” she heard Chloé whisper before sounding two swift lip-smacks, presumably on the cheeks of the shadow—a being of flesh-and-blood that brushed Margot’s arm on his way back upstairs as he bid her a raspy “Enjoy your exploration.”
Chloé’s cool hand eased into Margot’s sweaty palm to guide her. Late-day sunlight filtered through iron grills overhead to supplement the flashlight.
“What is this place?”
“They call it the Catacombs,” Chloé said, “though no one is buried here.” A few carefully traversed yards later, she resumed, “We’re now under the market, inside old stables for horses that once towed barges along the canal. Some aboveground have been converted, but these down here aren’t for public access.”
Margot didn’t question the connection that granted Chloé this privilege; somehow the more she came to know about her, the less she wished she did.
In the dank crumble of the subterranean ruins, they wound their way down different passages, avoiding flooded ones. Passing beneath another gray brick archway off the corridor, Chloé stopped inside the musty, darkened nook. Though the intensity of the marijuana and tobacco lingered in Margot’s nostrils, a sweet-and-sour scent tickled at their edges, too, and she noticed a couple of dusty wine bottles when Chloé clanked into them in setting down the flashlight.
“You’re not going to booze me u
p on Amontillado and wall me up in here, are you?” Margot let out a nervous laugh when Chloé narrowed her eyes, apparently missing the Edgar Allan Poe reference as Margot felt ever more the Fortunado fool.
She half expected Chloé to pull a trowel from her purse when she made a move to unsnap the clutch. Instead, Chloé removed two smaller items from it and placed one in each of Margot’s palms. Margot’s left hand twitched automatically around the small form of its hard, cool treasure, and she uncurled her fingers, bracing to see Grandma Grace’s brooch lying there.
But it was Chloé’s pocket watch, the polished silver almost burning Margot’s hand with its frost. She let it drop to the grainy floor.
“Sorry,” she said as she quickly bent to retrieve it, then stood again to dust it off with her T-shirt. She held it there cushioned in the cotton fabric and noticed the central flourishes of its engraved design formed a monogram: VPA. Popping open the cover to inspect the watch face, she saw the second hand wasn’t ticking. “Oh no, did I break it?”
“It already was. Broken.”
“Since when?”
“For some time, I think. It hasn’t operated as long as I’ve had it.”
“But…” Those occasions when Margot had seen her check it… Wasn’t it to tell the time?
After a pregnant pause, Chloé said, “In your other hand is only my compact mirror, nothing special in itself. As you’ve learned, any reflective surface will do.”
“For what?”
“Contacting the owner of that watch.”
“Aren’t you its owner?”
“In some way, yes. You must understand, Margot, that the original owner had been hurt, and in scarring himself, he gave me this.” She pointed directly to the brown splotch on her arm that until now she’d seemed so intent not to showcase. “I don’t remember feeling pain, but, you see, he has the same-shaped mark in the same place on his own arm when I see him in larger mirrors than this one.”
Margot nearly dropped the compact this time, but she recovered and handed it back to Chloé for safety. Her stomach churned. “But weren’t you born with that? Hence ‘birthmark’?”
“I have had this since I was young, yes, but, according to my parents, not when I was born.” She proceeded to thumb the mark.
“So, can the dead do that to us? Hurt us, I mean?”
“Not intentionally.”
Margot thought of the faint birthmark on her forehead and extended her bare arms in the air to look them over as well. She scanned along to her inner left wrist, where she knew an elongated brown spot had recently appeared above her vein.
“They’re age spots, Chloé.”
“Age spots on a child?” She stared out toward the corridor. “The unusual thing is that when that man bounced me on his knee, the man I’d thought was my deceased grandfather, it was his father.”
“You’re grandfather’s father?”
“No, the boy’s. The one who came to own this watch. And it was as though I was him, and I still wonder if he is me when I enter his life this way.”
“Who?”
Chloé lifted her shoulders toward her ears then dropped them.
Margot believed the world above must have fragmented into tiny pixels and scattered away into oblivion for all she trusted in her own understanding of it anymore. “I’ve been looking to you this whole time for the answers, but you don’t have them, do you?”
Adult laughter and children’s cries echoed through the stagnant air along with the waterfall sound of cars in motion overhead, providing Margot small consolation that the world outside still remained intact.
“There are times I’m so certain,” Chloé said. “I can summon him whenever I open that compact—see him, feel him, be him. It’s a possession unlike I’ve ever heard of before, no matter how much I’ve researched, and there’s no one I know like me to ask for those answers.”
Margot took a couple of shallow breaths. “Esther.”
“Pardon?”
“I don’t know how, but she might have known.”
Alerted, Chloé stepped closer to lay a hand on Margot’s forearm. Trivial as it sounded in this context, Margot explained her sixth-grade experience—of the day her brooch had disappeared after Show-n-Tell and her classmate Esther told her Charlotte had it.
“I just assumed,” Margot said, “that it was another kid at school who’d stolen the brooch off Trisha or out of my backpack. It obviously never dawned on me that Charlotte could be dead.”
“And Esther actually said it was Charlotte? She said the name?”
“Yeah. And that her last name was some kind of bird. A pigeon, perhaps. You think she could do what you can?”
“It’s possible.”
“Then why wouldn’t she have just told me?”
Chloé raised her eyebrow.
“Easier said than done, huh?” Margot said.
“Huh,” Chloé repeated as she nodded, as if to say, Ya think? “Sometimes I can sense when a person will be readily receptive. But other times, so much skepticism is present, I have to tread lightly or not at all. Second chances are not often given.”
The way she hung her head filled Margot with heartache over the loneliness that must accompany such a gift.
“Besides,” Chloé said, “at such a young age, she might not have understood it herself. Or perhaps in telling you that much, she did want you to know, but in her time and in yours. Is there a reason she might not have had that chance?”
Though limited in old memory, Margot shared how her classmates had made fun of Esther for having imaginary friends. The poor girl had already been alienated beyond repair in childhood and lost any chances beyond age twenty.
“But even if Esther really could communicate with spirits,” she said, “how would that explain how Charlotte had my pin? How could she possibly steal it? Do you think maybe it was moved by a poltergeist-type energy? It couldn’t have just vanished into thin air to wherever Charlotte was, could it? Is that how you got the watch?”
“There’s much about space and time we don’t understand. Though it’s not for lack of trying.” Chloé released her hand from Margot’s arm to lean against the brick wall. Staring off into the shadows, she sank to sit on the rubble. “Imaginary friends,” she whispered at first, then raised her voice to a soft yet more audible volume. “As though she interacted with them. Is this what would happen? When you would tease her?”
“Look, I’m not taking responsibility for the teasing. But, yes, we’d see her talking to herself sometimes.”
“Did she talk to Charlotte in front of you?”
“No, but I assumed she must’ve at some point to learn her name. Maybe not.”
Chloé fluttered off in a whispered monologue, most of which was unintelligible to Margot until she was eventually brought back into the fold.
“What I sometimes question is… It’s only that I can’t interact with them like this, you and me. And I can accept we’re not meant to, although you hear of those who can, as if they have conversations, and—”
“Well, maybe there are different levels of sensitivity. Or just like most of us aren’t aware of spirits, some spirits aren’t aware of us.” She thought back to the Ouija game and how Charlotte had refused to answer how or when she’d died. “Maybe they don’t even know they’re dead.”
“Yes, and consider for a moment why someone wouldn’t be aware they’re dead.”
“Because it happened suddenly, traumatically maybe? They didn’t have a chance to realize they were dying?”
Chloé appeared to mull this possibility over, yet her tone sounded less convinced. “Margot, this man I see in the mirror—”
“I thought it was a boy.”
“Yes, but he has grown as I’ve grown, into a man. At first I thought I could only see him as I would best understand him. That as a child, I could relate to another child better, so that was, perhaps, the aspect of his nature—his past—that presented itself to me. But now I have to wonder if this is a dead
spirit after all. What if he’s alive? Aging as I age?”
“Alive! Well, you’ve got his initials and know what he looks like. Could you try to find him?”
“It’s still not enough to go on. And he is of this place, I feel, but not of this time.”
Chloé’s heavy, resolved silence after that made Margot uneasy. Without asking for explanation, she sat next to her before her legs gave out. Milky drips of melted wax bubbled into visibility on the stone ground, and the spiced sweetness of the interior wafted up her nose again.
“I haven’t been overly troubled by this before,” Chloé finally said. “I’ve come to even accept it as a fact of my everyday life, thinking nothing more of the renderings I sketch because it’s nothing new to me anymore. I’ve cared less and less, have wanted so badly to care less.” Chloé looked over at Margot and reached to touch her jaw with an extended index finger. “But with you…”
She shifted her body closer and slid her fingers up and beyond Margot’s cheek to comb through her hair.
Margot blinked rapidly, her eyelids clicking through the slide reel of her thoughts. “You actually see that someone is attached to me, too, right?”
“Yes.” The stoicism of Chloé’s face didn’t break.
“But someone who’s died.”
“Or someone who’s alive—” Chloé inhaled “—but is going to die. Today.”
Margot’s focus on Chloé’s doe eyes crossed and blurred, readjusting to the distance that was decreasing between them. As the gentle caressing of her hair sent tickles down her torso, she found her friend was now nose to nose with her; their eyelashes nearly brushed against each other in a moment of humid hesitation.
“Try not to fear what you haven’t been able to see,” Chloé said.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to see,” Margot whispered back.
“Don’t try to see but feel.” Chloé’s voice trickled through Margot’s consciousness like a syrupy nectar.
Margot swallowed as Chloé kept stroking her hair. “What am I supposed to feel?”
“Feel her. Him. Me.”
Margot caught her breath in the still, close air. Her back clenched against the brick’s cold damp. “What are you saying?”
