by Ron C. Nieto
“Not possible.” I stood there, frozen, gaping as if I had never seen an abandoned house before. “I was here just a couple of months ago.”
Keith shook his head and shifted his weight. “This doesn’t happen in a couple of months. No one has been taking care of this place for years.”
“But it was this house! I recognize it. Except, the lawn was manicured and there were flower beds and it was lived in!”
“Perhaps we got the wrong house. Maybe this is just something that looks similar,” he said, dubiously.
Holding his hand like a lucky charm, I pulled him along toward the main entrance. The abandonment we had seen from the street became only more apparent, and I realized that some windows had been shuttered with rough planks. I didn’t want to risk climbing the porch, but I circled around, trying to find a service door or anything that would allow a glimpse inside.
“Alice,” Keith said, pulling me back against his chest. “Listen, there’s no one here. There hasn’t been for at least twenty years. Are you sure this is the address? You said yourself that most of the mansions look the same.”
I rummaged in my bag, allowing him to hold me close while I did. On the one hand, it was cold. And on the other, I felt better in his arms. There was something disquieting about the property, and while I couldn’t rationally expect him to be much of a shield, his determination to keep me safe was enough to make me feel secure.
I pulled out my cell and speed-dialed Anna, holding it between our heads so that he could hear her side of the conversation as well. She picked up on the third tone, and she was giggling when she did.
I didn’t really want to ask why.
“Hey, Anna? Got a question, super quick.”
“Alice! What’s up, girl? I hope you’re celebrating our opening weekend success!”
“Yeah, I am,” I said, looking uncomfortably to Keith. “About that. Could you please confirm the address we went to get the decor?”
“Do you really expect me to remember?”
“Anna, it’s kind of important.” Keith’s hand gave a gentle squeeze to my hip, and I noticed I had been fidgeting with the zipper of his jacket.
God, I must be more nervous than I cared to admit.
Taking a deep breath, I went on, “The mansion where you and Dave and I went to pick out the decorations. I need you to tell me that address again.”
“Alice, I don’t know.” There was whispering on the other end, and then Anna sighed dramatically. “But Dave still has it stored in his phone. He’s texting you now. Happy?”
“Yeah. Thanks, Anna.”
I hung up and then we stared for a few seconds at the screen, until Dave’s text arrived with a bleep. My fingers shook when I checked out the contents, and then I felt numb.
There it was, all the evidence we needed glaring back at us.
“We came here. It was this house. We did,” I mumbled and hoped that if I kept repeating the words, they’d make sense.
“I believe you,” Keith interrupted me and I turned to look at him. He had a faraway look, his eyes transfixed beyond the old walls.
Was he a little bit paler?
“Coming here was a mistake,” I said, pulling him back along the lawn and toward the street, away from the house. He took a heartbeat to budge and in that instant, the mansion loomed like the most ominous portent in the world.
“No, it was our only lead. It’s still the only thing we have.”
“It’s nothing now.”
“Slow down,” he said, planting his feet and making me stumble. “Let’s ask the neighbors. They might know who it belonged to.”
I didn’t want to ask. I wanted to run and never look back. I think my expression betrayed my thoughts, because he reached out to brush the hair behind my ear.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I can’t let it go. I need to understand what’s happening to me.”
Right. Whatever was going on, it was hurting him. Badly. I’d not leave him alone with that, and I’d not ask him to just grit his teeth and endure. Pulling my wits around me, I steeled myself.
“You’re right. Let’s ask around. Most everyone here is old money. They must know the gossip if nothing else.”
We trudged on to the mansion right in front, holding hands with such desperation that both our knuckles were white. I rang the bell and a young girl opened the door. I tried not to let my disappointment show. She couldn’t have known the inhabitants from the abandoned mansion, but she might have heard something.
“Hi,” I said, giving her a big, fake smile. “I’m sorry, but could we please take a moment of your time?” Without giving her the time to say no, I pressed on. “It’s about the house in front of this one.”
She looked confused. “What interest could you possibly have in the house?”
“History project,” Keith mumbled. “Local history.”
Appeased by the excuse, she nodded. “Well, I’m sure there’s nothing to help you in that house. I don’t know anything about it. I’d have heard if it was important, you know?”
Uh, sure.
“Ah… are you sure? Is there nothing you can recall? The name of the owners, perhaps?”
“It hasn’t had an owner since forever. It just sits there, waiting to fall. I tell you, nothing interesting. You should research something else.”
Okay, no answers here.
“Thanks for your help, ma’am,” Keith said, and we turned back toward the street. I felt her eyes boring into our backs the whole time.
It was creepy, but I guess we were a bit weird ourselves.
Next, we tried both the adjacent houses, with similar success. The woman on the left claimed to know nothing, and on the right we were chased by a huge dog even before we could approach the main door. It was getting past lunchtime, and the clouds in the sky were so dark that it was almost as if it was night already, but we couldn’t give up yet.
We went back to the side of the street where the ruined house sat. We tried the neighbor to the left, on a whim, and found that the front lawn was so covered in rose bushes that getting to the door was like sorting through a labyrinth.
I was starting to hate the neighborhood.
“Do you think we’ll get someone to answer?” I asked while picking my way among the flowers and the spines.
“I hope we won’t get another dog. I don’t think we could outrun it in here.”
I chuckled, but a gray, metallic flash in front of my nose cut my mirth abruptly.
It was a pair of cutting scissors, the huge kind used by gardeners to shape their bushes. I gulped, and in a moment Keith was shoving himself in front of me, standing in the weapon’s way.
Except that the other end of the blade was attached to an old, crinkly hand, and the beady eyes of the white-haired woman peering up at us barely reached Keith’s shoulder.
“I don’t need a dog to keep truants out of my property!” the old lady exclaimed, and I believed her.
“We’re no truants, ma’am.” If Keith said so. I didn’t really understand the word, but I took it to be an insult of some kind.
“Why are you sneaking into the house of a poor old lady then, eh? Trying to give her a scare? To rob her of her meager possessions?”
She wasn’t poor, and her possessions couldn’t be very meager if she lived here, but I said nothing. I was still staring at the scissors.
“We wanted to ask a question, ma’am.” Keith’s grave voice was soothing, as if he were talking to a wild beast. I guessed it was an apt comparison.
“Uh.” The woman didn’t look convinced, but she lowered her scissors. “What kind of question? Don’t you see I’m busy here?”
“It won’t take long, promise. Would you know anything about the abandoned house?” He nodded toward the mansion and the woman’s eye narrowed.
“What have you got to do with them?”
“Them?” Keith looked puzzled, and it was my turn to sprout our alibi. “We’re just doing some research for school. On lo
cal history.”
“Hah! You could get a thick paper just with the scandals of those Nightrays.”
“Nightrays?” My mouth went dry. The name, then, had been correct.
“Are you deaf, girl? And what kind of preparation is that, if you don’t even know who used to live here?”
“We were hoping to find out. From the neighbors,” Keith supplied.
“You won’t find your answers, then,” the woman shrugged. “The last Nightrays died thirty years ago, a couple with no children. They didn’t socialize, and people aren’t very social here anyway.”
“But you said there was plenty of information. Did you mean the library?”
“Oh, yes, of course. The newspapers of the time had much to say, I’m sure. They always were kind of weird, those Nightrays,” she said, and by the way she looked at us, she thought we belonged right in the same sack.
“Thank you so much for your help, ma’am,” I said, and turned to go.
Keith lingered behind a few seconds longer. “Do you know anything of a Beatrice Nightray? Did she live here?” he asked.
The old woman pressed her lips in a thin line and shook her head. “Silly nursery tales, boy. Don’t listen to them.”
But I saw how she made the sign of the cross when Keith turned his back and came toward me.
She didn’t strike me as the kind of person who could be spooked by nursery tales.
***
That afternoon, I sat in front of my laptop, entrenched with a chocolate mug to chase away the shivers brought on by the downpour that had caught Keith and me on the way home from our lunch date. I would have preferred to be with him, but I wanted my parents to see that he wasn’t a bad influence, which meant being back in time to address Monday’s homework.
Once I was ensconced in my room, however, I couldn’t keep up my responsible enthusiasm. Keith and I had gone over what little we had learned while we ate and had agreed on staying Monday after class to go together to the library, which seemed to be the best possible solution.
Not really the only one, though.
I shut down my literature paper in progress and fired up Google.
It’s not going to take too long. I won’t really research. It’s just a quick peek. I’ll relax and focus on school stuff then.
That’s what I told myself.
I punched in the keywords “Nightray” and “Chesterfield” and waited for a deluge of information that never quite came. There were a few entries, but Google mostly believed I had mistyped my query. I shook my head and checked the ones that matched. Two were from sites offering to do a genealogic tree for me; another one was from the civil registry and the census. No Wikipedia entry.
I tried just “Nightray.” The results were similar, for the most part, except that most data came from the UK. Scrolling over, I checked dates and places. Birmingham, London, York… 1800s, 1700s, and even further back. But I had figured that it was a rich, old family if they’d owned the mansion as I had seen it, so the information wasn’t useful.
One last try: “Beatrice Nightray.” More government and genealogical pages surfaced, most of them because of the Nightray part of the query. I cast a quick glance to the computer’s clock. Dinner wouldn’t distract me for forty more minutes or so.
I really should be doing my homework.
I clicked for the next page of results anyway.
Nothing, nothing, nothing…
Wait.
I double-checked the link for the entry. It led to a blog, and the text didn’t sound like gibberish so it might even be a real match. I clicked and landed in a website called “Spookshire.” A quick overview showed it to be some kind of compilation of legends and ghost stories and macabre history.
Great, just great.
The post was titled “Beatrice Nightray”. No fanciful bylines to make her story more endearing. The body itself consisted of about ten lines or so of text and a picture, which couldn’t amount to much information. But the picture froze me.
It was black and white, old and scanned for some registry or other, but it was the mansion I’d been to. Except that it was in Derbyshire. And the footer said it had burned to the ground in the 1900s after the family moved out some years prior.
I fired up a new window and backtracked to my first search. First census entries were from the 1900s.
Okay. It’s perfectly normal. There was the big war coming up soon, and people emigrated. This is perfectly logical.
If I could only believe myself.
I headed back to the blog’s window. The contents weren’t nearly enough to satisfy me, but apparently Beatrice was the name of a ghost that haunted the lands of the destroyed house. She came out by night, yada yada, appeared in front of random people, yada yada, and generally complied with standard ghostly behavior.
As far as leads went, it wasn’t much. It turned my blood to ice, though, because of one measly word.
Ghost.
If the situation weren’t so bizarre to begin with, I’d laugh the whole post off and keep on looking for another explanation. As it were, I copied and pasted the contents, picture included, into a word document and then headed back to Google.
“Local ghosts Derbyshire,” I typed.
The list of links wasn’t huge, but it kept me scavenging until dinnertime. When Mom called me downstairs, I put the laptop to sleep and took a short break. Perhaps I’d get a fresh view when I came back.
I didn’t, but I did manage to fall asleep on the desk.
CHAPTER 24
The next day, I could have sworn I had a couple of letters tattooed on the side of my face from sleeping on the keyboard. My neck hurt like crazy and my mood was cranky to match. When Anna asked me about the weird phone call I’d made, I dismissed the comment with little more than a growl. I didn’t want to tell her the truth, but I couldn’t put an excuse together either because sleep deprivation was killing me.
My only consolation, if it could be called so, was that Keith was in the same shape—which probably fed the rumor mill about why we both were wearing identical zombie expressions, but I couldn’t care less at this point. We made an effort to keep conversation normal during lunch, but scurried away as soon as Dave and Anna became engrossed in their own discussion about the merits of advanced trig.
I guided Keith toward the lockers and looked guiltily at him.
“Let’s skip,” I said.
He arched an eyebrow. “Don’t you have something important after lunch?”
“Not important enough.” My tone made him frown, flippancy replaced with worry
“What have you found out?” He kept his voice low.
“I’ll tell you on the way to the library.”
After we picked up our stuff and cleared the school building with as much nonchalance as we could muster, we walked a little way in silence before I dropped the bomb on him.
“I found a ghost story.”
He didn’t laugh at me. “What did it say?”
“That’s the frustrating part. There’s a ghost story about a Beatrice Nightray in a manor in Derbyshire, wherever that might be, but not many details.”
“Details you’re hoping to find in the library.” He didn’t phrase it as a question, but I nodded anyway.
“The stories are old, so perhaps they forgot to add them to Internet.”
“What are we going to do if we do find those details? Exorcise me?” Keith tried to keep his voice light, but worry and a hint of fear slipped a slight tremor into his voice.
“That’s for demons.”
“No turning my head around in full circle, then.”
“No.” I sighed. I didn’t say that it could be just as dangerous, from what it was doing to him. “We’ll worry about it later,” I said instead, giving him my bravest smile. “One step at a time.”
We arrived at the library and he stopped me before I could slip inside. He hugged me, his face buried against my shoulder, and I clung to him, ignoring the sinking feeling in the pit
of my stomach.
“You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” he whispered, his words tickling my ear. “Don’t forget that.”
He took a step back and I went right after him, refusing to let him go. “Keith, you’re scaring me. Is something wrong? Something else?” I amended quickly.
He just cupped my face, his fingers freezing in the cold, and kissed me. It tasted bittersweet, and a wave of fear made me clutch the back of his head, as if I could keep him anchored to me forever that way. He smiled against my lips and pulled back, just a hairsbreadth, just enough to whisper, “I love you.” His words brushed over my skin, followed closely by his lips. And he did it again. “I love you.” And again. “I love you.”
I wanted to cry and to laugh and, more than anything else, to keep kissing him until the rest of the world faded away.
But it was us, this perfect moment that would fade away if we didn’t find out the truth about Beatrice and the song. And it sounded like Keith was saying good-bye.
But I would never give him up.
***
We entered the library hand in hand, attracting more than a cursory glance from the librarian.
“Hi,” I said, walking over with a smile against her disapproving frown. “We wanted to check the journal archives and any other source you’d have for local history in the early 20th century.” Flashing her my student id card, I added, “It’s for a school project.”
“School project” worked like a charm. The kind of things adults believe when the words “school project” are thrown at them is astounding, as if it were an alternate, dangerous and infectious reality. The knee-jerk reaction suited us fine and the woman, a slim and elegant lady I’d not have pegged as a bookworm, took us to the periodicals section of the library.
It was dark, dank, and claustrophobic, with rows of steel shelves holding binders with dusty, discolored journals from days past. If we had to look through it all, it could take us the best part of the week.
