by Ron C. Nieto
“This shelf,” she said, pointing at one in particular. “You’ll find the binders coded by year and paper.”
“And the papers are whole?” Keith asked.
“Yes.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”
She nodded and left. I looked around for a chair to toss my bag and jacket, but there was nothing so I just piled it in a corner, hoping that it was dust free. Keith did the same thing.
“We should probably split the search,” Keith suggested.
“That’s a good idea. Let’s try the first decades, see if we can find something about their arrival or something.”
I took a 1901. He pulled 1911 free. We started to pore over the faded print and frail papers. Since they were local journals, the news you could find was much more picturesque than anything in a national tirade. Actually, I think it was more picturesque than the current local papers. Balls, marriages, someone destroying someone else’s flowerbeds…
The only good news about the uninteresting reports was the certainty that the arrival of the English family wouldn’t have gone unnoticed.
The letters started to dance in front of my eyes after two hours and three bindings. My eyes were bloodshot and I started to think that this archive would swallow us whole, never allowing us to see the light of day again. But then, Keith’s voice broke the silence.
“There’s something here. A party to introduce their daughter to society.”
I snapped my eyes to his. “What’s her name?”
“Helen,” he smirked. “But at least we know the family existed.” He scanned the brief article for a moment longer. “Check year 1907.”
I put down my binding and struggled to free the correct year. “Any idea about the month?”
“Nope. That’s too much to ask.”
So he kept working his way forward for any relevant mention and I started to study the papers for the beginning of the story.
I was nearly reaching the end of the year when it glared at me out of the page, a huge title in bold with a picture and two columns of narrow print.
“Earls of Derbyshire to move to Chesterfield,” I read aloud. “Jeremy Nightray and his wife, Lady Caroline, have chosen to exchange their ancestral manor for the quieter life in the United States of America. It is an honor for Chesterfield to welcome them into our mist.”
Keith crouched behind me to read over my shoulder. The article went on to describe the sumptuous house the family would move to and to explain the assets they’d left behind, including a seat in the House of Lords. Very standard, polite fawning.
But the end of the article made me smile. The reporter, obviously intent on giving every juicy bit of gossip she could gather about the newcomers, added that “perhaps the reasons for abandoning their Mother Country were less clear than a cursory glance would suggest. Sources in England spoke of a family curse that the current Lord Nightray would be intent on escaping.”
Bingo.
We weren’t looking for a curse, but really, how different could it be from a haunting?
It was better than nothing.
The current Lord Nightray, Sir Jeremy, might have darker reasons to move his household out of the Mother Country. Ten years ago, when he married the Lady Caroline, he called on the Church of England to perform an exorcism on his land—rumor has it that the Manor has been haunted by the ghost of his great-aunt, Lady Beatrice Nightray.
We believe that the British clergy failed in this instance, as they must have failed in 1850 and 1867, when the one requesting the service was Sir Jeremy’s grandfather and brother of the so-called ghost, George Nightray. Instead of asking for another service, though, Sir Jeremy would have taken matters into his own hands by abandoning the lands haunted by the ghost.
Regardless of the existence of Beatrice Nightray’s ghost, we do have to admit that the circumstances surrounding her death were never explained to the public. We’ve only been able to learn that she died on the lake that marks the border between the Nightray and Stafford properties, and some of the most outraged theories claim that it was a suicide. But why was she there? Why was she alone? Was it truly a suicide?
The icing on the tale comes with the mysterious, sudden death of the Stafford heir, Andrew. Those who are romantics at heart believe that he was in love with Beatrice, whom he’d have met through his best friend – who was none other than George. Upon her death, he’d have followed out of sadness and a broken heart.
“There, we have our ghost,” I said.
“Or our demon.” Keith nodded to the text. “There are exorcisms, after all.”
I shrugged, more uncomfortable than I cared to be. “They failed. That could explain it.”
“We still don’t know much about the ghost. What it did or how to get rid of it.”
“No, but there must be something else. There’s supposed to be lots of scandal, remember?”
“I guess. From this moment onward, then?”
I nodded, trying to convey a sense of purpose that I was far from feeling, and we went back to work.
I lost track of the time that passed before the next title screamed at my wavering vision.
“Mr. Randall died from unknown causes two weeks after his wedding to Helen Nightray,” I read. “Randall had been twenty-five. He’d been healthy and robust and on his way to inheriting part of his father’s firm as a marriage gift. He had faded after the wedding, the paper says. He’d lost interest in everything—his new wife, his new business, his social life—and exhaustion had claimed him.”
“Or perhaps,” the last lines read, “it had been madness claiming his life. The only thing able to rouse Mr. Randall from his stupor had been his violin. His obsession grew to the point where the Notary Public had been forced to declare him incapable a mere two days before his death, when Mr. Randall had tried to throw the service out of his house, declaring that their clatter didn’t allow him to hear the music. Witnesses swore that Mr. Randall had been playing a tune when he died.”
I blinked as it clicked in place. Oh, God. In a rush, I went back to previous papers and started leafing through them, my hunch morphing into cold dread with each piece of apparently unrelated news.
Fran Beckenridge, brilliant attorney… Jeremy Nightray’s associate.
The acclaimed operetta singer, Diane Garnett… Caroline Nightray says she’s devastated after losing her most steadfast friend.
Harrison Linwood cannot perform at the christening of little Conway Nightray due to his health condition.
All of them died. All of them under unusual circumstances. The papers were hazy on the details, but they mentioned mental instability before death.
“Keith, we’re looking for the wrong thing.”
He lifted his tired gaze from a musty volume and just stared at me. I explained, “The Nightrays aren’t the important part. Nothing happened with them.”
“I don’t understand…”
“It’s their relationships. It’s not them, but whoever got entangled with them. Those are the ones who… died.”
He was by my side in a moment, scanning the article.
My blood ran cold. At some point, I realized, I had reached out to grasp Keith’s hand, and I was holding onto him for dear life. I searched his face and found his gaze glued to the page. With visible effort, he shook his head and snorted softly, a poor attempt at a laugh.
“But I haven’t married anyone. And I’m definitely not friends with members of a dead family.”
“But you hear the song anyway. That must mean that you’ve been in contact with them somehow. That you’ve…” I trailed off and the papers fell from my limp hands. “Their stuff,” I breathed. “You’ve been in contact with their stuff.”
Keith’s eyes widened as his train of thought caught up with me. “The theater set. Where I got the idea for the damn song in the first place.”
“Exactly.”
He looked away and ran his hand through this hair, pushing the long strands out of his eyes. I s
aw his fingers tremble and he kept his gaze averted.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. What do the dead people have in common then? Attorney, heir, singer, player… I can see where the player and I fit. I could even get the whole operetta thing. But, the rest?”
I didn’t know the other people. They were just names in fading ink, without faces. For me, they were empty figures. Keith was beside me though, kneeling amid the dust and the papers, and I knew with sick certainty why she’d want him.
“Talent. That must be the common thing.”
He shook his head and I pressed on, “Keith, you can’t see yourself, but you’re radiant. You’ve this… touch, this vision. And you’ve the power to share it and to move others. The rest must’ve been like that—brilliant, unique, passionate in their own fields. Like the sun to Beatrice’s cold afterlife.” I stopped my babbling when I realized that Keith didn’t share my burst of energy. He looked slumped, pale and haggard under the artificial light.
“Like a sun going nova,” he said, startling me.
“What?”
“That’s how this is going to end. I sat in a dead girl’s chair, played a song she liked, and now I’m going to explode like fireworks to keep her entertained.”
“It’s not going to end like that,” I said, forcefully.
“I’m going to lose my mind. Sometimes I wonder if I haven’t already.” He looked away, swallowing. “I… the song was playing yesterday, inside their house. It was like a string quartet at a ball. I know it wasn’t real, but I heard every note all the same. I thought I saw her, for a moment. But I didn’t. The window was shuttered. There was nothing to see.”
I grabbed his face, forcing him to look at me. “I’m not letting you go. We’ll find a way. We know what we’re facing, so we’re better prepared than Randall and anyone else. And we have each other. You’re not going anywhere.”
“What if the alternative is worse?”
I frowned. “Nothing could be worse.”
“She’s wretched stuff, Alice.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” His fingers wrapped around my wrist, caressing the skin with his thumb. “It might be nothing. Perhaps my mind playing tricks, my dreams trying to cope. But something tells me that I really saw her, heard her.”
“In the mansion?”
“In my house. Last night. Or somewhere else entirely. I just can’t tell anymore. But she was there, listening while the song was played on a piano. I know it was a man playing, and he was good. Better than I could hope to be. And she was… happy.” His thumb stilled and his fingers tightened their grip, and it almost hurt. I bit back my complaint, though, because his eyes were hollow and haunted, and I needed to know what he was talking about.
When he spoke again, his voice was a broken whisper.
“And she was dead.”
Someone cleared her throat behind me and I jumped out of my skin, half-expecting to face the bloodthirsty phantom of Beatrice. Instead, I found the librarian. She looked perplexed and disgusted at the number of binders lying about us.
Not murderous at all, I tried to tell my rapid beating heart.
“It’s closing time,” she said after a moment.
Crap. We needed more. But somehow, I knew she wouldn’t bend the rules if I told her that a century-old ghost was trying to kill my boyfriend and that research might save his life, so I just smiled and tugged Keith to his feet.
“Time really flew by,” I said with a smile while we picked up our stuff. “We’ll be back tomorrow for more; thank you very much.”
She nodded and walked behind us to the door, as if she didn’t trust us to go out. She locked up behind our backs and I turned to face Keith. He looked more serene. Whatever made him talk to me about his dream, vision or whatever, it was gone. I had to bring it back.
“What… else did you see?” I asked as soon as we’d gotten away from the most populated streets in town. Our neighborhood was quiet, and I needed to talk to him before he dropped me off at home.
He shook his head. “Nothing. It wasn’t important. It wasn’t even clear.”
The feeling twisted in my gut, ugly and painful. I knew he was lying. He had started talking about his dream for a reason, but he was closing off with each step we took away from the library.
My house came up as we rounded a corner and I tried to hide my desperation.
“We’ll fix this. Together. But you have to tell me everything so I can help.”
He sneaked a glance to my front door. The light was on inside, in the sitting room, and TV images reflected against the windowpanes. No movement indicated that we were being watched, so he wrapped his arms around me, turning his head to kiss my temple.
“Everything will be okay. Don’t worry.” He took a step back, letting me go. “Love you,” he mouthed.
I didn’t understand. Something had changed since that moment in the library, but I didn’t know what and I didn’t know why. I could only feel him slipping through my fingers like river sand.
God, no. Don’t let this be good-bye.
He walked backwards, his pale, sunken features smiling softly until the dark swallowed him. I wanted to go after him, but I was frozen in place. By the time I could think of following, he was already gone.
CHAPTER 25
The tears didn’t let me see anything at all as I flew to my room and collapsed on the bed. I wanted to sleep and forget, but of course I couldn’t. I couldn’t even cry myself into numbness, because after a while, the tears dried in my lashes, without falling, and I was left staring at the darkness of the ceiling.
And thinking. Every moment of the past couple of months played through my mind in slow motion.
There was the old thrill when I snuck up to his window to listen to his sad soulful music; the elation when he joined our theater project and then the fear when I felt exposed; his acceptance, as if I hadn’t been the creepiest psycho girl in the block; his courage, standing up for someone who wasn’t even his friend at the time; his tenderness, his soft smiles and sweet kisses, more chaste and innocent than any and yet burning me from the inside out like no one else had ever managed.
The words, whispered across my lips like the wings of a butterfly. I love you.
His words were engraved in my mind. I could hear every undertone, every inflection of his deep, beautiful voice.
An idea started to swell in the back of my mind as I reminisced. Fear gripped me as I recalled random moments of conversation from the past couple of days, and I jerked upright on the bed, my thoughts swirling out of control.
Now we know how this is going to end.
What if the alternative is worse?
She’s wretched.
I love you.
“What if the alternative is worse?” I mumbled in the darkness of my room.
Everything will be okay. I love you.
I gasped.
“You knew, didn’t you, Keith? You knew what she was and what she wanted. And you almost told me.”
The emptiness of the night didn’t answer my accusations. The silence made them loom, sinisterly, like the end of the world.
The end of my world.
I had to be wrong. He wouldn’t have meant it like that. He couldn’t be thinking such a thing. Every rational bone in my body told me to cool down and stop the drama queen act. My brain tried to tell me that I was jumping to conclusions.
I yanked my trainers on anyway because I couldn’t shake the feeling of good-bye.
***
The house was silent and dark when I slipped out of my bedroom. I’d seen plenty of movies about sneaking out, but I still didn’t know whether I could do it.
I’ll try anyway.
The stairs didn’t creak when I tiptoed down. Briefly, I considered going out the back door, to conform with the cliché, but I dismissed the idea just as quickly. The hinges in the screen door would screech like crazy if I tried it. Dad had meant to oil them forever, but he kept forgetting.
The front door would have to do.
The bolt turned with an ominous crack, and I winced and listened for a long minute. No lights came up. I didn’t hear movement upstairs.
Good.
Letting out the breath I didn’t know I had been holding, I opened the door, closed it behind me and started running.
I was still wearing my school clothes, since the whole moping around hadn’t left me time to change. It was a tight skinny jeans and tight wool sweater ensemble, complete with dipping neckline and super long sleeves, and it wasn’t the best outfit to be racing around in at one in the morning. I couldn’t care less. I bolted ahead anyway, out of the best part of the neighborhood and onto Keith’s street.
By the time I reached his driveway, a knife twisted in my side and my breath came in short, ragged breaths. His window was dark, but what did I expect?
After knocking a few times on his windowpane without getting an answer, I tried to compose myself and put together some excuse for my presence as I mounted the stairs to the porch.
His father is so going to hate me. Everything started after Keith began to see me.
“Meow.”
I jumped when I heard the mewl right beside me. Sparrow sat comfortably in front of the door and fixed me with his huge eyes. The cat’s voice was matter-of-fact, if that were even possible.
“Hey there, kitty,” I whispered, swallowing thickly.
The cat didn’t say anything. He just moved the tip of his tail, tapping it lazily against the floor, and kept sitting there, as if he were standing guard.
And I must have been more freaked out than I cared to admit, because I could have sworn that there was a certain disapproval in the tilt of those whiskers.
“Why are you outside? Keith’s playing again?” I knew I was being ridiculous, but I couldn’t reach out to ring the bell with Sparrow in my path. Not without standing way too close to him. So I talked in hushed tones and hoped that he’d move.
Or that I’d work up the courage to ring anyway.
“Meow.” He held my nervous stare with an unimpressed, cool one and I felt a knot tightening in my stomach.
