The Visitor

by Amanda Stevens

  “Something’s happened,” I said.

  “What is it, Amelia?”

  I hugged my legs tightly, assembling my thoughts as the sky deepened and the bats came out.

  “Tell me, child,” Papa urged gently. He looked old and tired, the stoop of his shoulders even more pronounced than when I’d last seen him. In that moment I realized how fragile he and Mama both were these days. Time was slipping away and I couldn’t bear to think of a future when they would no longer be with me in the living world.

  I hadn’t allowed myself to imagine that time too often, but every once in a while, a thought crept in. Would they be able to move on or would they linger, drawn by the warmth and energy that had been lost to them in death?

  I banished the unwelcome image with a shudder as I turned to Papa. “I’m being visited by the ghost of a woman named Rose Gray. She’s been coming to me in my dreams for months, but now she’s manifested.” I paused, wondering how best to proceed. I was desperate for answers, but I also knew that pressing Papa too hard might send him back into the dark sanctuary of his own thoughts. I had to tread carefully. “I’ve seen a photograph of her. She looked very much like me. She even had my name. It can’t be a coincidence. Who was she, Papa?”

  “She was my mother.”

  I drew a harsh breath, though not from shock. Rose and I shared the same name, the same face. It wasn’t a leap to assume we shared the same bloodline. But to have it confirmed was more emotional than I would have expected. “I asked you so many times about my family. Why did you never tell me about her? You must have noticed how much I looked like her. You even gave me her name.”

  “Some things are best left in the past,” he said.

  “That’s not true!” I said angrily, and then immediately regretted my outburst because he was my papa after all. “You’ve always remained silent to protect me. I know that. But you can’t keep secrets from me any longer. It’s too dangerous.” I ran my hand aimlessly over the ground between us, idly plucking at the blades of grass where we had once searched for the key necklace. “Something is happening to me, Papa. I don’t just see the dead anymore. I sense things. Thoughts and emotions of the living. Sometimes I can even glimpse memories. What I’m becoming...” I trailed off, hardly daring to voice what had been preying on me for a very long time. “I think whatever is happening to me was set in motion at my birth. Grandmother Tilly was able to save me for a reason.”

  Papa stared straight ahead into the deepening twilight, refusing to look at me. Refusing to acknowledge my fear. But I wouldn’t be dissuaded so easily.

  “I believe I have a purpose. A calling. And it has something to do with Rose. Somehow our destinies our intertwined. That’s why I’m here. I have to know about her. I have to find out what happened to her so that I can protect myself.”

  He remained silent for the longest time, so motionless I was afraid he’d drifted off into his faraway place. But then he said wearily, “Much of her life remains a mystery to me. She left when I was just a boy.”

  “Why?”

  “To protect me from the ghosts.”

  My pulse quickened. “She was like us? A caulbearer?”

  “The Grays are caulbearers, but my mother was a Wysong and she had a special gift. A curse, some would call it. Like you, she had a light inside her that drew them.”

  I put a hand over my heart as if I could somehow quell the beacon inside my own chest. “What was she?” I asked in a near whisper. “What am I?”

  “I don’t know, child.”

  But I knew. I was a perfect storm. A Gray and a Wysong on Papa’s side. An Asher and a Pattershaw from my birth parents. I was the culmination of all their dark gifts and, on top of it all, I’d been born dead to a dead mother, giving me an even stronger connection to the other side. No wonder Papa didn’t know what to call me.

  A breeze blew through the trees, carrying the summer perfume of honeysuckle and rain. There was moisture in the air and the faintest crackle of electricity that foreshadowed a midnight storm. It was an odd, loaded moment. Dark and portentous. Where Papa had looked old and fragile before, now he seemed ageless as nightfall drew down upon us.

  “Do you know what happened to Rose?” I asked him.

  “She died. But she had been away for a long time by then.”

  “How old were you when she left?”

  “Nine or ten. I don’t rightly recall anymore.”

  “Did you already know about the ghosts?”

  “Yes. My first sighting was the ghost of a boy named Jimmy Tubbs. He’d been killed in a logging accident a week before I spotted him at the end of our lane.”

  “What did you do?” I asked, remembering my first sighting and how Papa had sat me down in this very cemetery and told me what I had to do to remain safe.

  “I ran across the yard to the porch where my mother sat peeling peaches. I told her I’d seen Jimmy standing at the end of our road staring up at our house as if he was contemplating paying us a visit. A part of me wanted her to scold me for making up stories, but instead she made me promise to never tell anyone about Jimmy, especially my father. If I saw the ghost again, I was not to look at him or speak to him. I was not to acknowledge him in any way.”

  “She gave you the rules,” I said.

  “After that, I saw other ghosts, mostly in the woods behind our house. My mother said they came because of her. It was dangerous for me to be around her now that I had come into the sight.”

  I tightened my arms around my legs, trying to ward off the growing chill of his words. “Go on,” I urged.

  “One day my father came home and found a note from her. She wrote that she was tired of living in the mountains and wanted to go back to her own people. He was livid at her betrayal, but I knew the truth. She left to protect me.”

  “Did you ever see her again?”

  “Only once, the summer I turned twelve. I’d just come in from doing the evening chores when I overheard Pa and his new wife talking about her. I thought it peculiar because we never spoke of my mother. They forbade it. I was never allowed to even mention her name. But I heard them say that someone had seen her down here in South Carolina. They said she’d taken up with some man that she’d known before she married my father.”

  Ezra Kroll, I thought. “What did you do?”

  “The next morning, I packed a change of clothing and what little money I’d saved up and hitchhiked down the mountain. It was just getting on dusk when I finally came upon her house.”

  He paused for a breath, and in the ensuing hush, I could hear the cicadas. Their abrasive serenade filled me with dread. Overhead, night birds circled and swooped and outside the safety net of hallowed ground, the veil to the dead world thinned.

  “What happened then, Papa?”

  “The ghosts came. Dozens of them swarming her house like a horde of locusts. I never saw anything like it.”

  Resting my chin on my knees, I thought of those ghost voices I’d heard in the hospital morgue. The invisible bodies pressing in on me through the walls. After all these years, I only now had an inkling of my destiny. A nebulous understanding of just what my gift entailed and what I might have to do to protect the people I loved.

  “Did you see your mother?” I asked Papa.

  “Not until daybreak. When the sun came up and the ghosts disappeared, I left the woods and went up to knock on her door. I barely recognized the woman who answered. She’d aged far beyond her years. Her hair had gone gray and she was frail. So slight a puff of wind could have blown her away.”

  “Was she alone?”

  “Yes. I’d heard in town there’d been some tragedy. A lot of people had died, and I thought maybe that explained the ghosts.”

  I shivered thinking of all those entities seeking my great-grandmother’s help, needing retribution before
they could finally move on. And I wondered again why I was being summoned to Kroll Cemetery. “Did she recognize you?”

  “She seemed leery of me at first, but then she brought me inside, fixed me some breakfast and sat with me while I ate. After that we took a walk in the woods.”

  “How long did you stay with her?”

  “Just for the day. When the sun went down, she sent me away and made me promise not to come back. I was never to return even after she was gone.”

  “After she was gone? Why?”

  “She wouldn’t say. But I had the sense she was afraid of something.”

  Afraid of something or someone? I wondered. By that time, Rose must have had her suspicions about what had happened at Kroll Colony.

  “Sometime later, I received a package from a girl who had known her,” Papa said. “My mother had taken ill and died. The girl’s family had seen to the burial. She’d put together some remembrances—photographs, trinkets and such that she thought I might like to have. She even included a picture of my mother’s grave.”

  “Who was this girl?”

  “She never gave me her name.”

  I wondered if it was Nelda Toombs. She and Rose had been so close it seemed only natural that she would have reached out to Rose’s son. “You never went back to visit her grave?”

  “I made her a promise that day. Keeping my word was the last thing I could do for her.”

  “You...never saw her after that?”

  “Her ghost, you mean? She never came to me. She must have been waiting for you.”

  “But why?”

  “You’re like her. You share her gift.” He turned to me in the deepening twilight. “But a ghost is a ghost, child. Even my mother’s ghost.”

  “I know, Papa.”

  I understood only too well his trepidation because helping Rose’s ghost meant facing both known and unknown dangers. In order to solve the mystery of Kroll Cemetery, I would have to use facets of my gift that I was only now discovering. Tapping into the unbound power of death would set me on a course from which I feared there would be no return.

  But did I really have a choice? What did I have to look forward to if I didn’t help her? Swarms of ghosts? Insanity?

  “Was there a key in the package the girl sent to you?” I asked Papa.

  “A key? No, why?”

  “Did Rose ever tell you about a key? It would have been special to her, I think.”

  Papa looked at me strangely. “Where did you get this notion?”

  “From Rose’s ghost. She told me to find a key. It’s my only salvation, she said.”

  “She told you?”

  “Not in words, not aloud, but I could hear her in my mind.”

  Papa suddenly seemed overcome with emotion. He wiped a hand across his eyes as he stared out over the angels.

  I laid a gentle hand on his arm. “Papa, Rose had all the headstones in the cemetery where she was buried engraved with key symbols. All except for her own. You don’t have any idea what those keys meant to her?”

  “A key represents knowledge,” he said vaguely.

  “Yes, but I think there’s more to it than that. I think she used those keys to leave a message or a riddle. It makes me wonder if...” I could still feel the weight of the skeleton key in my pocket. “When I was little, before the ghosts came, I found a key here in this cemetery. I told you that my aunt had given it to me, but I really found it on a headstone. I returned it the next day and tried to forget about it, but now I can’t help wondering if Rose left that key for me to find.”

  Papa said softly, “She’d been dead a long time by then. Decades.”

  “We both know she could have still found a way.”

  His eyes closed briefly. “Why did you lie to me about that key?”

  “I was afraid I’d done something very wrong. You said that I must never take or leave anything behind that could be misconstrued as an offering or invitation. But people leave flowers and mementos behind all the time in graveyards. That rule only applies to us, doesn’t it? To me.” I clutched his arm. “Why, Papa?”

  His voice lowered to a ragged whisper. “It invites them in.”

  “Into the living world?”

  “Into you.”

  I drew a sharp breath. “You mean possession?”

  I could see the rising moon in his eyes and it made me shiver. “Before my mother left, she taught me how to protect myself from the ghosts. Just as I taught you. She told me about the ravenous spirits that feed on human warmth and energy, about the restless ghosts that can’t move on because of unfinished business. The day I went to see her, she told me about a different kind of entity, one that lingers in the living world for the sole purpose of creating chaos. Malcontents, she called them. Wraiths that prey on the weak and the innocent. They cajole and seduce and barter in order to find a conduit for their evil. Once they crawl inside you, child, the only way to rid yourself of them is death.”

  Thirty

  I sat in the grass, watching the bats as Papa gathered up his tools. It was pointless to try to continue our conversation because he’d already shut down, disappeared into that black space where no one could reach him.

  I didn’t mind so much at the moment because I needed time to process all that he’d told me. Not only about Rose, but about those entities that preyed upon the innocent. I couldn’t stop thinking about the key I’d taken from the headstone and how, after all these years, it had turned up again on my nightstand. Had I been preyed upon by one of those ghosts? Had I unwittingly been selected to be the conduit of a malcontent’s evil?

  Far better to believe that Rose had left that key for me to find, but as Papa had warned, aligning myself with my dead great-grandmother didn’t come without a price.

  I was so lost in thought that the tingle down my spine was the first warning I had that we were no longer alone. I glanced up to see Devlin walking toward us on the path. As I watched him approach, a barn owl swooped down over the graves and flew across the flagstones in front of him. He stopped short, but instead of following the winged predator with his gaze, he glanced over his shoulder. When he turned back around, I could see his face in the moonlight and the intensity of his expression startled me.

  As Devlin entered our realm of stone angels, Papa nodded a greeting before excusing himself and setting off toward the gate. I waited until he was out of sight before rising. I thought it odd that Devlin made no move to close the space between us. Perhaps not so odd, considering my conversation with Papa, that I keep my distance from him.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, in a voice I hardly recognized as my own.

  “You said you were coming to see your father today. I took a chance you’d still be here.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?” I asked anxiously.

  “Nothing’s wrong. I was on my way back from Columbia and had the urge to see you.”

  “Why were you in Columbia?”

  “I had business to attend to.” He slanted his head, studying me. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I’m just surprised to see you.”

  “Are you sure that’s all it is?”

  “Yes. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “I don’t know. All these questions are starting to feel a little like an interrogation.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “And I can’t help wondering why you’re still standing all the way over there.”

  “I could wonder the same about you.”

  He closed the distance between us. “Better?”

  “Yes,” I said on a breath.

  Weaving his fingers through my hair, he tilted my face, teasing open my lips with his. My mind still churned with everything Papa had told me, making me slow to respond.

  Se
nsing my reluctance, Devlin pulled back, his fingers still threaded in my hair as he searched my face. “It’s obvious I’ve come at a bad time. Maybe I should have called first.”

  “No.” My hand flitted to his chest. “It’s not you. I’m glad you’re here. You’ve no idea.”

  “But something is wrong,” he said. “I take it you spoke to your father about Rose.”

  I sighed. “I don’t want to talk about any of that right now.”

  “That bad?”

  “It’s complicated and unsettling and I’m all talked out. Right now I just want you to kiss me again.”

  He pulled me to him. “Not a problem.”

  “I want you to...” My eyes closed briefly. “Make me feel normal.”

  “Is normal how you usually feel when I kiss you?” he teased. “We’ll have to work on that.”

  He wrapped his arms around me then, lifting me so that I hovered over him. I stared down into his eyes for the longest time and then, cupping his face in my hands, I kissed him, with a hunger that startled us both. I could feel the heat of his skin through his clothing and where his hands clutched me to him, my own flesh burned. I wanted him, right then, right there. Nothing else mattered. Not Papa. Not Rose. Certainly not any of the Krolls. The night belonged to us now.

  Slowly, he slid me down his body until my feet touched earth once more. “Nothing normal about that kiss,” he murmured.

  “Come with me.” I took his hand and pulled him beyond the angels into the deeper shadows of the cemetery where we wouldn’t be disturbed by ghosts or humans. The statues and vines concealed us from prying eyes and hallowed ground would keep the door to the dead world firmly closed.

  “I wasn’t expecting this,” he said in that old-world drawl after I’d kissed him again with the same aggression.

  “Nor was I,” I said on a shiver. “But it’s that kind of night.”

  A bemused smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “There’s something different about you.” He picked a leaf from my hair and let it drift to the grass. “Your smile, your eyes. The way you kissed me just now. You seem...”