by A. C. Wise
In my own admittedly biased opinion, Charlotte is a very moral and upstanding woman. I refuse to believe her the faithless type.)
Final diagnosis: Exhaustion. Odd pattern of bruising evident on patient’s skin determined to be symptom of collapse, not cause. Other physical signs bear out diagnosis—pallor, shading beneath eyes indicating lack of sleep; prominence of bones may indicate a loss of weight. Patient complained of nightmares. Calmative prescribed.
(I pray that will be the end of it.)
*
Appended Case Note: The enclosed documents were turned over to authorities by Kyle Walters, a librarian at St. Everild’s University, following his report of Ms. Wilton’s disappearance in January 2014. The painting described by Ms. Alam in her addition to Ms. Wilton’s notes was not among the effects in their shared residence following Ms. Wilton’s disappearance, nor was it reported as being present at the time of the initial investigation into Ms. Alam’s disappearance in November 2014.
Mr. Walters admitted to removing the documents from Ms. Wilton’s residence, but provided a sworn statement that nothing else had been removed or altered. Mr. Walters is being charged with interference in a police investigation, but at this time is not a suspect in either disappearance. Investigations are ongoing.
The Nag Bride
“Now it’s your turn to tell one.” Sophie swipes a piece of candy from Andrew’s pile.
He has more peanut butter cups, and they’re her favorite. When he doesn’t stop her, she takes a second one, giving him a mini Snickers in return.
Andrew thinks for a minute, then glances around as if afraid of being overheard. They’re alone at the edge of the small plot of corn, planted equidistant between his grandparents’ house and their barn, where their annual Halloween party spills music and laughter into the night.
“Have you ever heard of the Nag Bride?” Andrew licks his lips.
Something in the way he asks it draws a shiver up Sophie’s spine. Just the name is evocative, and she wonders—has she heard the story before? No, she would remember something like that. She shakes her head.
“It happened right here,” Andrew says, “a long time ago.”
He holds the flashlight under his chin. Shadows cut angles into his cheekbones and make the freckles spread across his nose look darker. His hair sticks up every which way like a scarecrow. Sophie grabs the flashlight from him, shining it into his eyes like a police interrogation.
“Just tell the story.”
Andrew squints and they tussle for a moment until he has the flashlight again. Sophie pulls her knees up, wrapping herself more tightly in her blanket. The corn rustles in a faint breeze; from this angle, sitting on the ground and looking up, the tops of the stalks scrape at the stars.
There’s an unzipped sleeping bag spread beneath them, and a thermos of hot chocolate to share. Everything feels perfect and for the moment, Sophie can pretend that she’s never been anywhere else. Andrew and his grandparents are her real family; she never has to cross back through the trees that divide their properties to the house that’s supposed to be her home.
“Everything around here was farmland back then.” Andrew gestures, taking in the house and the barn.
Despite herself, Sophie turns all the way around, and her gaze snags on the trees lining the border of the property. Even through their screening branches, the shape of her house is visible. It’s completely dark, her father likely slumped in front of a silent TV, her mother at a local bar.
She turns her attention deliberately back to Andrew—her best friend, her brother, even though they don’t technically share blood. Who cares what her parents are doing? After ghost stories, they can watch movies in Andrew’s grandparents’ living room, and if they get tired, Sophie can snug down in one of his grandparents’ many guest rooms. His grandmother has told Sophie she’s always welcome here, she’s always safe in their home.
“Okay,” Andrew says again. “So a farmer is working in his field and he sees a horse outside the fence. It’s a beautiful horse, and he thinks surely it must belong to someone, so he chases it. The horse goes into the woods, and he loses sight of it. The farmer is about to give up when he sees a beautiful woman sitting on the ground. Her hair is black and she has very dark eyes. Her feet are bare, and she’s rubbing at them like they hurt. He forgets all about the horse and takes the woman back to his home.
The woman doesn’t tell the farmer her name. She barely says anything at all, but the farmer doesn’t care. By the time they’re back at his house, he’s already in love with her.”
A flicker of shadow between the cornstalks catches Sophie’s attention, the light breaking weirdly. Her pulse jumps, and for a moment she’s certain there’s a tall woman watching them. When she looks again, the woman is gone. Maybe someone wandering away from the party.
“That night, the farmer hears someone moving around in his barn.”
“It’s not the same barn,” Sophie says automatically.
“I didn’t say it was.” Andrew’s tone is defensive and Sophie is weirdly relieved that he seems nervous too. There’s a delicious thrill to the thought that he’s scaring himself with his own story. It makes it feel more real. Like the Nag Bride has always been here, and he’s just telling something that’s true.
“There was another barn here before anyway, and stop interrupting.”
Sophie takes another piece of candy, even though her teeth are starting to ache and she’s full. Next month, she’ll turn twelve, and so will Andrew. This might be the last Halloween before they’re too old for piles of candy and ghost stories.
“The farmer takes his shotgun and goes to look in the barn. It’s dark, but he sees someone moving around so he fires his gun to scare them off. He doesn’t mean to hit the person, but as soon as he fires, he hears a woman scream. He runs to get a lantern and when it’s lit, he sees the black-haired woman on the ground. She’s bleeding and her legs are bent the wrong way. Instead of feet, she has hooves.”
The back of Sophie’s neck prickles, and despite herself, she turns to look at the corn again. A woman stands between the stalks, and as much as she wants to tell herself it’s just a guest, deep down, Sophie knows the woman didn’t wander away from the party. She’s always been right where she is, and Andrew and Sophie are the ones intruding.
She opens her mouth to tell Andrew, but the woman puts a finger to her lips. Sophie’s heart flies into her throat. Blood drips from the woman’s hand, but even so, she smiles.
“The man ties the woman up and leaves her in the barn. The next morning, he comes back with a set of horseshoes and tells the woman he’s going to marry her.”
Sophie is still listening to Andrew’s story, but she can’t look away from the corn. She can’t look away from the woman, who shifts without moving, who suddenly seems closer and at the same time, farther away.
“Then the farmer holds the woman down and nails the horseshoes right through her hands and feet.
Dark, coarse hair blows across the woman’s face. Only it doesn’t look like hair at all. It looks like a horse’s mane. There’s something wrong with her face—it’s too long, her eyes too far apart. The woman points through the trees, towards Sophie’s house.
Her father is in the house, all alone. The woman’s dark eyes are a question, and Sophie should shake her head—no, no, no. But she doesn’t move.
Soph? Are you even listening?” Andrew pokes her arm.
She jumps.
“I saw—” Panic scrabbles at her.
The space between the cornstalks is empty, but something moves too fast between the trees.
“What?” Andrew’s eyes widen.
Sophie clenches her jaw so hard it aches. The Nag Bride isn’t real.
But a tiny part of Sophie, shoved deep down inside, wishes she were. A ghost to haunt them is exactly what her mother and father deserve.
“Never mind. I thought I saw something, but I was wrong.”
The lie tastes sugar-sharp, s
our underneath, like the Sour Patch candies in the dwindling piles between them. Her stomach swoops, hollow and full, and for a moment, Sophie thinks she might be sick.
It’s not too late. She can still run and find Andrew’s grandparents and tell them what she saw.
And that same, small buried-deep part of her makes itself known again. Her parents don’t deserve her help. More nights than not, an endless stream of people rotate in and out of Sophie’s house, her parents’ supposed friends, coming and going with bright eyes and mouths open in laughter. No one is ever turned away, no matter what time of day or night they show up, because her parents always have time for everyone, except her. They don’t even know or care where she is right now, wouldn’t know or care if something happened to her. Sophie clenches her jaw even harder, her molars grinding together.
“Are you sure?” Doubt edges Andrew’s voice.
“Really.” Sophie rises, and deliberately turns her back on the trees, determined not to see. “It’s getting cold. Let’s go inside.”
*
A man in his late 40s or early 50s and a woman anywhere from her early 20s to her mid-40s stand side by side on their wedding day. A barn stands behind them, a horseshoe nailed to its wall, visible just behind the groom’s shoulder. The man wears a dark suit, the woman a simple white shift dress. Her feet are bare. She holds a bouquet of marigolds. The woman’s hair is long and black. She wears a white veil. At the moment the photograph was taken, a gust of wind conspired to pick up both hair and veil and blow them across the woman’s face, hiding the lower half, obscuring her jaw.
Beneath the photo, the text reads: Mr. and Mrs. Everett Moseley, married September 5, 1969 in a private ceremony at Mr. Moseley’s home on Greenwood Avenue, the historic property originally occupied by Simpson Horse Farms.
—Napierville Gazette “About Town” September 7, 1969
*
“Are we really going to do this?” Sophie asks. “We don’t know anything about flipping houses.”
What she means is: How can we do this? How can we take the place we grew up in, strip it of everything we love, and sell it to strangers?
But she doesn’t say any of that aloud. This is as hard on Andrew as it is on her; he’s hurting too.
The house looks the same—white-painted boards and a covered porch stretched across the front, a peaked roof and gabled windows. It’s been just over a year since Sophie last visited, but without Andrew’s grandmother and grandfather here to welcome them home, it feels wrong.
“We’ll figure it out.” Andrew slings an arm around Sophie’s shoulder. “Between us, we’ve probably watched a thousand hours of HGTV shows. How hard can it be?”
“Sure.” She tries to match her tone to his, smiling for his sake. “A new coat of paint, plant these beds with some new flowers, and it’ll sell in no time.”
Marigolds—she pictures them—the beds awash with petals as bright as flame. And, I hate this, she thinks. I don’t want the house sold. I don’t want things to change.
When Andrew’s grandparents bought their condo in Florida, the intention was always to split their time between here and there. But Andrew’s grandmother had gotten sick, and they’d decided the warmer climate and one-floor living with no yard to keep up would be easier on both of them. The cancer had moved so, so fast, though, then Andrew’s grandfather had passed scarcely a month after her. They’d been high school sweethearts, married at seventeen; he simply couldn’t live without her.
Now the house belongs to Andrew and Sophie knows he doesn’t want it. He’d rather have his grandparents back, and Sophie agrees.
Rationally, she knows Andrew can’t keep the house. They’re only living here for a while—just long enough to fix the place up and sell it. A last goodbye.
Sophie’s landlord upped her rent and her firm’s biggest graphic design client dropped their account. Andrew was laid off a month ago from the financial software company he’d been working for, a victim of across-the-board downsizing. So it makes sense—they’ll live in the house rent free while they clean it out and fix it up. Sophie will still work for the smaller clients in her portfolio from home, while Andrew continues job searching.
And then they’ll move on. Sophie will find a new apartment, and Andrew will reclaim the apartment he’s currently subletting to a grad student doing a three-month internship. At least that’s what Sophie assumes. She knows Andrew isn’t limiting his job search; he could end up moving across the country, but she’d rather not think about that. They’ve never lived more than a few miles apart. Even when they went to separate colleges, they were still only a short drive away from each other.
Ever since Andrew’s parents died and he came to live with his grandparents at three years old, they’ve been best friends, inseparable, together so often that by the time they got to high school people assumed they must be dating. But it had never been like that between them. They’d always been siblings by choice, and now, with Andrew’s grandparents gone, he is truly the only family Sophie has left in the world.
By old habit, she glances at the trees along the property line. Her parents’ house was razed about the same time Andrew’s grandparents moved away. There’s a new house there now, but Sophie feels the old one, like a tooth pulled, a rotten hole left behind.
“Come on.” Sophie pulls her gaze away deliberately. “I’m hungry. Let’s go make dinner.”
All her ghosts were buried under the rubble, scraped down to the bone. Not even the foundation of the old house remains. Looking at the new house sitting there—a lovely two-story, four bedroom home painted light blue—you’d never know an ugly brown fieldstone bungalow with a leaking roof used to sit there.
But Sophie knows.
They’re barely out of summer, September only just begun, but even so a breeze carrying the first glimpse of October blows across them as Andrew climbs the porch and unlocks the door. Behind him, Sophie can’t help but pause. Can’t help but look back one last time toward the trees where, for just an instant, a dark shape moves between the trunks, crossing from one property to the next with no one to stop her.
*
No one knows how the Nag Bride is born. But they know how she dies. Always with iron. Nails through her hands and feet, shod to weigh her down. To slow her when she would run. To break her and tame her and take her power away.
Her skin is made for bruising. Her form invites violence. Too strange. Inhuman.
She is wed. She is killed. She is born again.
The Nag Bride digs her way up out of the ground. Earth beneath her nails and between her teeth, grave flowers in her hands.
She is:
An ancient spirit, bent on protecting her land.
A haunting, doomed to repeat a violent end.
A temptress, drawing out the essential, evil nature of men.
Alone, afraid, in pain.
A curse.
A blessing.
*
Sophie wakes certain she is eleven years old again. Moonlight falls through the window, so bright it looks like there’s a second, elongated window on the floor. Peeling the covers back, she moves to the window, expecting to see again what she saw on Halloween night all those years ago. What she thought she saw.
The sky pearl grey, just before dawn, frost tipping the grass, and a figure running across the yard. At first, she’d been certain it was the woman from the corn, the ghost from Andrew’s story. The Nag Bride. But the figure had stopped, turned and looked up, as if feeling Sophie there. Her father.
She’d dropped straight down, ducking out of sight, and when she’d peeked again, he was gone. The lawn was empty and she could pretend she’d only imagined seeing him. She could pretend that the shadows around the barn door hadn’t shifted, that the door didn’t stand open when she knew Andrew’s grandfather would have shut it tight after the last party-goer left.
Sophie presses her hand to the glass now. Her father has been dead for almost five years. She will not see him running acr
oss the lawn, but nonetheless, her breath snags as she scans the dark. The barn door is open.
Her breath clouds the glass.
That night, almost sixteen years ago, she’d crept downstairs, just meaning to step onto the porch and check. She’d tried to go back to sleep first, and failed. What if her father really was out there? What if he stole something?
But when she’d reached the bottom of the stairs, Andrew’s grandmother sat at the kitchen table, and Sophie froze, as if she’d been the one caught stealing. But she waved Sophie over, pouring her a mug of coffee—more than half milk—to match her own. Sophie’s tongue had curled around her confession. Maybe she hadn’t seen her father. Maybe there was no reason for concern.
And if she had, what if Andrew’s grandmother blamed Sophie? What if she finally realized that Sophie came from bad seed, planted in bad soil, and figured the apple couldn’t fall far from the tree?
She’d lied, and told Andrew’s grandmother she’d had a bad dream.
“See those?” Andrew’s grandmother had patted Sophie’s hand, pointing to the space above the kitchen door, then through the hallway to the front door. Horseshoes had been nailed above each.
Sophie must have seen them a thousand times, but she’d never really noticed them and a faint static-electricity feeling, like a storm coming on, ran from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine.
“They’re protection,” Andrew’s grandmother had told her. “Most people think they’re for luck, but they’re old, old magic. As long as they’re there, nothing bad can get in, and you’ll always be safe in this house.”
Sophie remembers Andrew’s grandmother smiling. She remembers her glancing, consciously or not, in the direction of Sophie’s home.
