The Visitor

by Amanda Stevens

  I was a relative newcomer to Charleston, having been born and raised in the small town of Trinity, but my mother was a native Charlestonian. She and my aunt had grown up in a small house deep in the historic district, in the shadow of all the grand mansions. Theirs had been a childhood steeped in genteel tradition and seasoned by middle-class reality.

  As a child, I’d been captivated by the grace of their bearing and the charm of their Lowcountry accents. They were exotic creatures that bathed in rose water and dressed in crisp cotton. It was only when I grew older that I came to realize the effort that went into such elegant presentations. Like so many Southern women of a certain age, my mother and aunt’s upbringing had become their vocation.

  I was not my mother’s daughter by nature or nurture. On most days, I dressed in jeans and sneakers and rarely bothered with makeup. My face was tanned and freckled from working in the sun, my palms callused from the hard labor of a cemetery restorer. I possessed none of my mother’s or aunt’s polish, and sometimes when I looked at myself in the mirror, I wondered how someone like me had caught the eye of a man like Devlin.

  This was not a question born of self-deprecation or false modesty. I could acknowledge my attributes. I was well educated, well traveled and my profession kept me physically fit. I liked to think that my eyes were a standout, changing from blue to gray and sometimes green depending on my attire and surroundings. At the bottom of my irises were tiny elongated motes. When I was little, I’d discovered that if I squinted just so and used a bit of imagination as I peered into the mirror, those odd colorations gave my pupils the look of keyholes.

  But no matter the color of my eyes, no matter my education, profession or intellect, I would never be one of those golden women who glided so effortlessly through life. For me there would never be yacht club luncheons or white-gloved garden parties or harmless flirtations over frosty mint juleps. That was Devlin’s old world, and because of who I was and where I came from, I would never be welcome there. For all its charm and allure, Charleston remained an insular place, one of bloodlines and traditions, a city perpetually turned inward by its rivers and harbor. I was an Asher by birth, a legacy imbued with great wealth and corruption, but I was also a Gray. My papa’s people were simple mountainfolk, and it was from that branch of the family that I had inherited my dark gift. Caulbearers, we were sometimes called. Those of us born with a veil. It happened every generation or so.

  But as more of Papa’s secrets came to light, I was starting to suspect that my legacy ran far deeper than the ability to see spirits. I had been born dead to a dead mother. My grandmother Tilly had pulled me back from the other side by cutting away the veil of membrane covering my face and forcing air into my premature lungs, and now I sometimes felt that I belonged to neither world. I was a living ghost, a wanderer who had not yet found my purpose or place. But every new discovery, every broken rule brought me closer to my calling.

  If only I could peer through the keyholes of my eyes and know the future, perhaps I could somehow change my destiny. But how did one fight preordination? How did one combat fate?

  It was a question I pondered often in the dead of night as ghosts drifted past my window.

  * * *

  Back home and freshly showered, I carried my second cup of tea out to the garden, where I could watch the butterflies flit among the sweetspire. Somewhere down the street, a horn blared and I could hear the muffled roar of traffic on Rutledge as commuters headed to and from the Crosstown. But all was calm and quiet here in my little oasis. Or so I thought.

  I must have still been on edge from that ghostly visitation because the moment I spotted the open cellar door, my heart gave a painful jerk.

  Tamping down a premature panic, I crossed the yard to the steps, but before I could call down, an odor wafted up to me—the smell of musk, earth and more faintly, decay. Not the stench of active rot, but the fusty perfume of old death.

  Phantom fragrances were often attached to ghosts. Devlin’s dead daughter had smelled of jasmine, and the sightless apparition of dust and dried lavender.

  But this was not the scent of a ghost.

  A cloud passed over the sun and I shivered. When the sun came back out, a shadowy face stared up at me from the gloom of the cellar.

  Three

  “Amelia?”

  My heart stuttered for a fraction of a second as I tried to catch my breath. The shock of hearing my name on some odious creature’s lips stunned me. Then reason intervened and I realized the voice was a familiar one. A safe one.

  “Hey, I didn’t scare you, did I?” Macon Dawes called up.

  I could just make out his features in the dusky light. Tousled hair, tired eyes, slightly pointed chin. Not a demon, not some loathsome half being from an in-between world, but the pleasantly human visage of my upstairs neighbor.

  But that smell...

  I clutched the stair rail as I struggled to quiet my pounding heart. “I was a bit startled. I wasn’t expecting to find anyone in the cellar at this hour.”

  “Did the hammering wake you up?” He placed a foot on the bottom step as he continued to stare up at me. He wore black Chucks nearly identical to the ones I had on, torn jeans and an old plaid shirt thrown over a threadbare T-shirt. The ordinariness of his rumpled appearance comforted me. “Sorry about that. I should have realized all that banging would go straight up the walls to your place.”

  “I didn’t hear a thing,” I assured him. “I was just having some tea in the garden when I noticed the open door.”

  “Still, it wouldn’t kill me to mind my manners. I’m so used to my crazy schedule at the hospital I forget there are folks like you keeping normal hours out there in the real world.”

  “No harm done.” I went down a step or two. Now that my pulse had settled, I was genuinely curious. Macon was a student at the nearby Medical University of South Carolina, so I’d grown used to his coming and going at all hours. But so much early-morning activity was unusual even for him. “What are you building down there?”

  “Building? Nothing. Just reinforcing some of the shelving so we can have a little more storage space.” He motioned toward the depths of the cellar. “Have you been down here lately? This place is a firetrap. You wouldn’t believe all the useless crap I’ve come across. Cartons of old textbooks and magazines, trunks of moth-eaten clothing and something that looks suspiciously like a mummified bat.”

  I descended another step. “What’s that smell?”

  He wrinkled his nose. “You should have gotten a whiff earlier before I aired out the place. I think something’s nesting down here.”

  “Nesting?” I asked in alarm. “Like what?”

  “Rats, maybe. Or possums. And did I mention the spiders?” He ran fingers through his hair with an exaggerated shudder.

  “Do you need a hand?” I asked with little enthusiasm because the mention of spiders gave me pause. I’d had a mild case of arachnophobia since childhood and despite my years of prowling through web-shrouded tombs and infested mausoleums, I’d never quite managed to conquer my aversion.

  “Thanks, but if you’ll make sure all your belongings are marked, I’ll take care of the rest.”

  “I don’t have much. Just a few boxes that were left behind when I moved in. I’ll come down and take a look, though.”

  I started down the steps, reluctant to leave the sunlight in the garden for the dimness of the basement. The house had been built on the site of the chapel of an orphanage that had burned to the ground at the turn of the last century. The cellar was the only thing that remained of the original structure, and sometimes when I went down there, I had an uncomfortable feeling that something lay hidden and waiting behind those brick walls. Something other than spiders and rodents.

  The house had always provided a shield from the ghosts—a safe haven—but sometimes I wondered
if the cellar might be a back door through the protective firewall of hallowed ground. The only spirit to ever breach my inner sanctum had been the ghost of Devlin’s daughter. Somehow she’d found a way inside my house, and if she could do it, how long before I experienced another intrusion?

  I continued downward, my footsteps echoing eerily in the dank stillness. A second stairway at the back of the cellar led to the kitchen, but the door had been boarded up during one of the renovations. Once upon a time, that fortified passage had made me feel safer inside the house, but now I wondered if my peace of mind had ever been anything more than an illusion.

  Funny how the same sealed door could make one feel secure on one side and trapped on the other. As I reached the bottom of the steps, I became overly aware of that single exit. Claustrophobia pressed in on me. For an archaeologist turned cemetery restorer, I tended to have a lot of inconvenient hang-ups.

  “What’s that noise?” I cocked my head with a frown.

  Macon paused. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Listen. It’s an odd drone. Sort of like an electrical hum.”

  He lifted his gaze to the bare lightbulb. “Faulty wiring would be my guess. I doubt this place has had a proper inspection in years. Like I said, a regular firetrap.”

  Rubbing my arms, I glanced around warily. Macon was right. Something had been crawling around the cellar, shredding old books and forgotten clothing while leaving behind the faint but animalistic odor of musk and decay. “I’ve never liked coming down here,” I said. “This place gives me the creeps.”

  “Says the woman who restores old graveyards for a living.” Macon blew dust from a box, then lifted the lid to peer inside. “Junk, junk and more junk.” As he swung the carton off the shelf, something dislodged and tumbled to the floor—a card with two nearly identical photographs mounted side by side.

  As I bent to pick up the curiosity, I felt a tug of recognition even though I’d never seen the man that gazed up at me from the dual images, let alone the two diminutive girls that stood in front of him. They were older than their size would suggest, in their midteens perhaps.

  Judging by the odd attire, the photos had been taken long before I was born. The man was shirtless beneath old-fashioned bib overalls while the girls were draped in dark cloaks that covered their frail bodies from neck to ankle.

  Something about the incongruity of those heavy cloaks, about the way they stood back-to-back with their faces turned toward the camera gave me an inexplicable chill.

  I handed the card to Macon. “Look at this.”

  He moved over to the natural light in the doorway for a closer examination. “It’s a stereogram,” he said after a moment. “If you look at it through a viewer, the photographs merge into one 3-D image.”

  “I’ve played around with photography. Double exposure and things like that, but I don’t know much about stereoscopy. The card seems quite old.”

  “I’m sure it is. These things were popular as far back as the nineteenth century. I had an uncle who collected them. I wonder if there’s a stereoscope around here somewhere. Where did you find it?”

  “On the floor. I think it must have been wedged between the shelves. You probably nudged it loose when you moved the box.”

  I waited patiently while he rummaged through the dusty items, a man on a mission. A few minutes later, he gave a triumphant “aha” and held up an interesting-looking apparatus mounted on a wooden handle. Taking the device back over to the stairs, he placed the card in the holder and raised the viewer to the light. “Wow, this is cool. The image is so clear it’s as if they’re standing right here in front of me.”

  He handed me the stereoscope and I lifted it to the light. My eyes took a moment to adjust and then the subjects leaped out at me, so much so that I was startled by the perception. As Macon said, they could have been standing directly in front of us, so sharp and uncanny the image. My gaze was magnetically drawn to each of those solemn faces dominated by dark, piercing eyes.

  Then I began to notice other oddities. A small wagon-like contraption in the background. A fenced enclosure beneath the front porch where a dog might have been penned. I could even see a grainy face in an upstairs window staring down at the trio.

  A familiar face.

  The image blurred as my fingers tightened around the polished handle. I couldn’t believe my own eyes. It must only be my imagination, some weird optical illusion because there was no reasonable explanation for what I saw. But I was a woman who lived among ghosts. My world didn’t operate on reason and logic.

  Taking a moment to steady myself, I brought the image back into focus. The girls disappeared and the man faded away until I saw only that face peering down from the upstairs window.

  The eyes, the nose, the mouth—the same understated features that stared back at me from the mirror.

  Four

  After sipping a cup of chamomile, my nerves began to settle, but I was by no means calm. I tried to convince myself I was overreacting, but what were the chances of that stereogram turning up in the cellar at the same time I was being visited by the sightless apparition?

  Macon hadn’t seemed to notice anything unusual in the image or my demeanor. A phone call had pulled him away before he could study the card further, and by the time he returned, he was anxious to get on with his work. I’d escaped upstairs with the viewer and stereogram and had taken both straight to my office, where they now sat on my desk until I could decide what to do with them.

  I wasn’t particularly worried about having either in my house. I’d never believed that possessions or even places could be haunted. People were haunted. However, ghosts could sometimes use objects to communicate, and I had to wonder if the stereogram was yet another message from the blind ghost.

  It was a big leap, and as I went about my business for the rest of the day, I reminded myself that now was not the time to let my imagination run wild. I had a bid to work up for Seven Gates Cemetery, my blog to update and a speech to write for the Oak Grove dedication ceremony. Until I had time to investigate, I would do well to put that card out of my mind.

  But no matter how hard I tried to concentrate, my attention kept straying. The stereogram kept calling. Whether it was a facet of my personality or the nature of my business, I couldn’t rest when a mystery needed solving.

  Succumbing to temptation, I inserted the card in the holder and brought it to my eyes, turning my chair to the natural light so that I could scrutinize the three-dimensional image for messages and clues. But the only thing that meant anything to me was the face in the upstairs window.

  At least now I could assume that my look-alike had once actually existed. She wasn’t a vision of my future self, but a ghost from the past. That revelation should have eased my mind, but the fact remained, she’d followed me through the veil for a reason. She’d warned me to find a key, but where was I to even look?

  Shivering, I set the stereo card aside and examined the viewer, noticing for the first time a small silver plate fastened to the underside. The inscription was so tiny I could just make it out: “To Mott, From Neddy. Together Forever.”

  In even smaller print at the very bottom of the metal tag was the name of a shop: Dowling Curiosities, Charleston.

  Given the age of the stereoscope and how long it had likely been stored in the basement, I hadn’t much hope that the shop would still be in business. To my surprise, however, a Google search yielded a King Street address. I’d undoubtedly passed it any number of times while strolling through the historic district. I diligently noted the information in my phone so that I could look for the place on my next walk.

  For the rest of the afternoon, I remained at my desk, alternately working on bids and studying the stereogram until hunger pains disrupted my concentration. Since Devlin would be spending the evening with his grandfather, I decided to w
alk down the street to a little place on Rutledge for an early dinner. To my surprise, however, he was sitting on the front porch waiting for me when I arrived home a little while later. As I approached the steps, a light breeze trailed a trace of his cologne, a dark, spicy scent with hints of warm vanilla and a dangerous note of absinthe. Sultry, seductive and a bit decadent for the daylight hours, but that was Devlin.

  The late-afternoon sunlight filtering down through the trees blinded me for a moment so that he became nothing more than a dark form imprinted upon my retinas. It almost seemed as if another shape hovered over him, but then I blinked and, like the mysterious stereogram, the two images merged into one.

  “I thought you were having dinner with your grandfather tonight,” I said in surprise.

  “I am. But I happened to be passing by your house and I had the urge to see you before I head out.” He paused to stare down at me for the longest moment. “Are you all right? You were scowling just now as you came through the garden.”

  “Was I? The sun was in my eyes.” I sidestepped out of the glare and as my vision adjusted, I was struck yet again by his devastating good looks. Despite the heat, he appeared as fresh as the proverbial daisy, his cotton shirt crisp, the line of his tailored pants still neatly creased. As I climbed the stairs, it occurred to me that I’d never sufficiently appreciated a well-fitting trouser until I met Devlin.

  When I got to the top step, he bent to kiss me. Normally, I would have gone willingly into his arms, drawn by that delectable scent and his innate allure, but I found myself strangely reticent, holding back my desire as I tried to resurrect defenses that had tumbled upon our first meeting.

  More and more I was coming to understand Papa’s withdrawal. Retreating behind the wall of his own troubled thoughts had been the only way he knew to protect himself and those around him from the ghosts.

  Devlin searched my face. “I don’t think it was the sun. Something’s wrong. I can see it in your eyes.”