by Louise Beech
July 2019
While Ginger showers, Chloe looks around the now crisp-white dressing room, ever anxious that something unexplained might happen. In place of the original, fading Dust poster is the new one, framed in gold and signed by both Ginger and John Marrs. Perhaps it will be sold when the show finishes. To distract herself from the thought of Ginger naked so close by, Chloe runs her hands over the sheer stockings on the back of a chair. She smells one of the scarves on a hook and frowns at a note on the mirror – dreading seeing the curious words she saw that other time – and then smiles in relief at the scrawl there: Get coffee and plasters.
There’s a newspaper on the side. Chloe reads the headline: ‘New Evidence in Morgan Miller Case Could Officially Reopen Investigation’. She skims the paragraphs and realises there’s nothing new here. Nothing that hasn’t been tweeted already. Inside, on the first page, is another headline, one that surprises her. ‘Ginger Swanson Parents To Divorce’. Is nothing sacred? How must Ginger feel? Chloe remembers that when they first met at the end of March, Ginger said she thought her dad might be leaving her mum.
A door creaks. Chloe jumps, heart in her throat. Just Ginger, white towel around her damp body, another wrapped around her hair. Steam from the shower cubicle follows her in wafts like it too can’t bear to let her go. She sees Chloe reading the article.
‘Bloody paps,’ she sighs.
‘Oh, Ginger, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s fine.’ She towels her hair in the mirror. ‘After all these years together, eh? I understand it, I do. My mum isn’t the easiest person to live with. Demanding, as you probably remember. But I’m still sad now it’s really happened. She wanted something like this for me – Dust, I mean – and now I feel like it came at a price. Like I have everything, and she’s lost everything.’
‘I doubt it had anything to do with you,’ says Chloe kindly. ‘Kids always blame themselves for their parents’ divorces, don’t they?’
‘I’m hardly a kid, am I?’
‘I feel like we are.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When we’re together.’ Chloe swallows the emotion down. ‘I feel sixteen again. I was so…’
‘What?’ asks Ginger.
‘Jealous of Ryan.’ The words hang there, full of shame, painfully honest.
‘Oh, he was nothing to me.’
‘You slept together.’
‘Did we? I hardly remember.’
Chloe watches Ginger fluff up her hair and then smooth some sort of product onto the ends. She watches as she leans closer to the mirror and rubs gloss onto her lips. If the lights filled with blood now, would she care? If a stuck door held them captive in here, would she fight it?
No. She never wants to leave. Let what should happen, happen.
Chloe approaches the mirror. Ginger looks up at her, lips slightly parted, a question in her eyes. Chloe feels brave. Remember how. Will it and it shall happen. Push. What does that mean? Where did those words come from? They seem familiar; send a thrill along her spine. So she does it; she pushes. Not with her finger. Not with her body. With her heart. And like a glass shifting across a Ouija board, Ginger moves. The question in her eyes dies, she stands, and she is the one to lean in and kiss Chloe.
As their mouths meet, Chloe is hit by two words that charge into her head.
Morgan Miller.
At exactly the same moment, Ginger whispers them into her mouth. ‘Morgan Miller.’
‘I think we got her.’
Chloe reluctantly breaks the union as it comes to her absolutely. Is it the physical connection with Ginger that provokes the memory and opens a door on a very clear image: the words I AM DUST being spelled out in capital letters on pieces of card?
‘What do you mean?’ asks Ginger.
‘On the Ouija board. Back then.’ Chloe doesn’t take her eyes off Ginger’s. ‘It just came to me. It’s being here, with you. I think she spoke to us. From the other side. What if she told us?’
‘Told us what?’ Ginger is breathing hard.
‘Who killed her.’
Ginger studies Chloe and is the first to lean in and kiss her again. She tentatively teases Chloe’s tongue, then pauses. ‘We could have the story of the decade. What if she told us who did it and we’ve forgotten? We need to … remember … to talk…’
‘We will.’ Chloe touches Ginger’s cheek. ‘Soon.’ She traces her tongue along Ginger’s neck, enjoying her soft sigh. ‘I always followed you.’
‘Then why don’t you lead this time?’
Chloe takes Ginger to the small sofa and kisses her until she surrenders, falling back onto the gilded cushions. She goes with her, hypnotised. Their hair tangles together against gold; raven and blonde, yin and yang, light and shadow. Chloe unwraps the white towel and kisses the creamy flesh beneath. Ginger moans. Then she reaches to unbutton Chloe’s shirt.
‘No, let me make you happy.’ Chloe is thinking of her scars. Not ready to bare them yet. Afraid that it will end this glorious moment.
They kiss harder, hands hungry. Chloe’s fingers find the spot that has Ginger gasping and clawing at her arm; the trinkets on her silver charm bracelet crash, matching the rhythm. Then, while coaxing her to exquisite pleasure, Chloe kisses Ginger’s neck, chest, tummy – moving ever lower – and then gets lost between her thighs.
‘I love you … Jess … sorry … Ginger…’
‘It’s OK,’ she sighs. ‘Call me Jess.’
‘I love you; I always have.’
‘I know.’
Afterwards they lounge on the sofa. As if she’s shy now, Ginger pulls the towel back around her body and tidies her hair. Chloe studies her, drinking in the scent of her, enjoying being so close. She smiles at the tiny charms about her wrist; the musical note, the star, the witch’s hat, and the most special theatre mask. She wants to give her another charm. Perhaps one that symbolises Dust.
‘You’re mesmerising,’ says Ginger.
‘Am I?’
‘You are … Chloe?’ she asks tentatively.
‘Yes?’
‘Can I read your script?’
‘My…’
‘That beautiful, beautiful script. Let me read it. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I heard you performing on stage.’
Right then Chloe would have let her read her most private and intimate diary. ‘Yes. I’d love to know what you think. I can email you it tonight. Message me your address.’
‘I will do. Thank you for trusting me with it.’
Chloe doesn’t know what to say. What does it mean? Does Ginger like her the same way after all? Is there a chance for them? She wants to ask so many things but doesn’t want to scare her away. Ginger’s phone buzzes on the dressing table.
‘Sorry,’ she says, getting up. Chloe watches her frown at whoever is calling and then swipe the screen. ‘Yes, it’s me, I can’t talk now,’ she says quietly. ‘I suppose, yes. OK. Give me ten minutes.’ She hangs up and turns to Chloe. ‘Sorry, I have to meet a friend.’
‘No worries.’ Chloe gets up too, disappointed.
‘I might have time tomorrow during lunch to meet up if you’re free. Will you be in the building?’
No, but I can be, Chloe thinks. ‘Yes,’ she says.
‘We should talk more about the Ouija board. See if it jogs anything else.’
‘How have your nightmares been recently?’ Chloe asks her.
‘Still bad. Yours?’
Worse when I’ve seen you.
‘Yes, bad. We need to try and remember what Morgan Miller said to us, if she actually did speak to us. That sounds so insane said aloud, doesn’t it?’
Ginger nods. ‘No more insane than your effect on me just now.’
Chloe longs to kiss her again but feels shy now. ‘Well, I’ll let you get on,’ she says, going to the door. She hopes it might be lodged shut, but it opens easily.
‘Don’t forget, send me your script,’ Ginger calls after her.
‘I won’t.’
Later, long after midnight, Chloe reads through her pages, unsure, afraid of another person seeing them and tearing the words apart. But then she imagines Ginger and herself in the two female roles, learning to dance, having to rehearse together. And she emails it to the address Ginger has given in a Facebook message. She looks at the sent box for a while, almost willing it to bounce back.
Anxiety about having sent it keeps her awake. She reaches under her bed and gets the wooden box. At the bottom – beneath a history of mementoes – is the knife. She takes it out and touches the edge. An image emerges from the mists of her mind. The knife covered in blood. But not just from the tiny drop drawn by cutting. The blade is dripping with it. Onto a floor. Where? Where is the floor? Isn’t it familiar?
It’s the dagger.
Who said that?
You called it a dagger…
Chloe drops the knife. No, the dagger. Ryan’s dagger. For Macbeth. How could she have forgotten all this time where it really came from? Has the intimacy with Ginger earlier freed something? She sees herself in the youth theatre, stealing it from a cupboard. Sees herself cutting that first time, angry, jealous. All these years, self-harming with that dagger.
You always knew, whispers that voice.
‘I didn’t,’ she says aloud.
Eventually Chloe falls into a restless sleep where dreams of kissing Ginger are cruelly invaded by nightmares of bloody daggers and dead birds and unreadable words on a mirror.
38
The Game
2005
When Chloe silenced the house telephone in the hallway, she began to wonder if she really was some sort of witch. It started ringing again the night after the last Ouija board session, over and over and over. Eventually – when no one else stirred – Chloe dragged herself downstairs and stood in front of it, exhausted and afraid. She glared at it. And she pushed.
And the phone stopped.
She wondered if she had imagined the ringing earlier. Was she really the magic girl Grandma Rosa had called her? Was there such a thing? Were she, Jess, and Ryan just willing the glass to move when they used the Ouija board? Was it some sort of mass hallucination?
Standing in the shadowy hallway, shivering despite the August night, Chloe wondered if she had pushed Ryan away from Jess that time; if she hadmade him get up and walk away from the Ouija board two nights ago; if she had pushed against the spirits and forced the glass to ‘Goodbye’?
She realised that throughout her life she had often known things. Known that some small event would happen before it did. Known what result she would get in a test. She had always put it down to coincidence. But Grandma Rosa had had it, this curious knack of knowing things she shouldn’t have.
Chloe went back up to bed then but couldn’t sleep. She thought about the dagger in the wooden box. About cutting. She had cut again earlier that night. After doing so, she felt wildly powerful, and then at peace. For a while. Now she was agitated. She hadn’t heard from Jess and was too embarrassed to contact her.
Had she ruined everything by kissing her?
Chloe had relived it over and over – the warmth, the teasing, the thrill – until the shame of Jess’s reaction flooded in, ruining the fantasy. She had loved it being just the two of them, speaking to Morgan Miller, candles flickering, no Ryan. The next rehearsal was in two nights and Chloe wondered if Jess would come. She knew she would stay afterwards, with or without Jess or Ryan. She had to speak to Morgan Miller. Had to try and find out who the killer was, and what she meant about knowing everything when the dust settles.
*
Two days later, before leaving for rehearsals, Chloe called goodbye to her mum and dad, and touched the tiny, silver theatre-mask charm in her pocket. Aunt Bess had sent some pocket money to spend ‘during the school holidays’ the day before, and Chloe had gone straight to the jewellery shop nearby. Part of her had known when she opened the pink envelope that thirty pounds exactly would be inside. Which had come first though – knowing about it or asking for it in her head? Because she had done. She had chanted the desire, over and over, as though casting a spell.
Thirty pounds, thirty pounds, thirty pounds.
Chloe’s bus was late, and when she got to the theatre Mr Hayes was reminding them that they had just two weeks until the show. ‘Since nothing else has gone missing,’ he said with sarcasm, sweeping an arm over the piles of costumes scattered about the stage, ‘we will crack on with our cardboard dagger and hope for the best!’
Jess and Ryan sat to the side, away from the pews, near a boarded-up window. Chloe was shocked by Ryan’s appearance; was it the dim light in here? No. His usually luscious locks looked like they needed a good wash, and he had deep lines etched below his eyes as though drawn with charcoal pen. She tried to catch Jess’s eye to gauge if she still wanted to be friends but couldn’t.
When the rehearsal was done and the group dispersed, Chloe told Jess and Ryan they should hide in the toilets, so they didn’t have to break in. Ryan simply shrugged, no life in his eyes, and Chloe felt sure he wouldn’t even stay. Jess looked at him as though trying to decide what she should do. Both of them joined her in the toilets, though, and stood in different corners of the tiled space, quiet until the building was empty. Then Jess took something out of her bag; a cutting from a newspaper.
‘I saw this in my dad’s paper,’ she said, thrusting it at Chloe.
Chloe took it and read the headline. ‘Ouija Board Triggers Demonic Possession in Teens’.
‘It’s about these about kids using one and ending up possessed. Read it. I reckon we should really think about this before we go on with it tonight.’
Chloe skim-read the article. It said that during the First World War Ouija board use had peaked as people tried to contact dead soldiers. Now the game was on the rise again as teens discovered it and were becoming addicted. Three teens in London – Chloe paused at the word ‘three’ – had reportedly been possessed by a spirit. One of them had used the board to try and influence the outcome of an audition for a school play.
The words at the end were most interesting though.
Chloe whispered them aloud. ‘There is no scientific evidence that Ouija boards contact the spirit world, or that such a world even exists. The mysterious mechanism that powers the Ouija board is called the ideomotor effect and it’s basically your body talking to itself. Like the sudden feeling of jerking awake from sleep, it’s your brain signalling your body to move without your conscious awareness. In the case of a Ouija board, your brain unconsciously creates words when you ask the board questions. The muscles in your hands move the pointer to the answers that you unconsciously want to receive. In one Ouija board test, blindfolded participants spelled much more incoherent messages.’
Chloe looked at the other two.
‘It makes complete sense, I guess,’ she admitted. ‘But how do we account for the glass moving by itself?’
‘Could we have hallucinated it?’ wondered Jess. ‘I read about mass hallucination online. It’s a real thing.’
Ryan was surprisingly quiet, face still pale.
‘If it’s not real and it’s just us, then where’s the harm?’ Chloe realised just how much she wanted to talk to Morgan Miller. How desperate she was to play. It was addictive. She could feel its pull.
‘Come on then,’ said Ryan dully.
So they went into the empty theatre.
The sun was disappearing faster now it was August, and Chloe felt melancholy when she realised she would no longer see the dust dancing in its rays. Summer was dying and soon this would be over too – their final show and the Ouija board. She knew it.
She knew it.
Quietly, as Ryan went ahead, Jess said close to Chloe’s ear, breath warm, ‘I showed you that article because I’m worried about him. I was hoping we might stop…’
‘About Ryan? Why?’
‘He’s … he’s been behaving oddly.’
‘Oddly how?’
‘He gets up in h
is sleep and walks around.’ Jess paused and they watched him forage around in the cupboard.
Chloe realised Jess must have shared his bed to know he had been sleepwalking, and her heart ached at the thought; ached at the vision of them tangled up in his duvet. But at least Jess was talking to her.
‘He says all this weird stuff.’
‘Like what?’
Ryan looked directly at them then and Jess shook her head and joined him on the stage. Chloe followed. No. She did not. She may have gone last, but she did not follow. With hands that Chloe noticed were shaking, Ryan laid out the letters, as though for a game of cards. She suddenly felt sorry for him. He was not the boisterous and belligerent boy he had been, and that was sad. As annoying as that boy had been, she wanted him back.
‘Did you tell Ryan what happened with Morgan Miller last time?’ Chloe asked Jess as they sat in their usual circle.
‘Yes.’ Jess looked at him, as though checking his reaction, her face nervous.
‘She said she did a Ouija board too,’ explained Chloe. ‘With two other people. And one of them killed her. We need to find out who that was.’
Ryan barely looked bothered.
Then, once the candles were lit and dancing their eternal dance, he said, ‘I think it’s time.’
‘Time?’ Jess repeated.
‘To ask for what we really want, and then we can finish this once and for all.’
‘What we really want?’ Chloe felt nervous.
