by Trisha Telep
The door of Ash House was twice as wide as Jo, and it was red. Iron pulls looped through snarling gargoyle mouths in place of knobs.
The door stood open. Not much. Just enough to invite someone in.
Jo put a hand on the door, slid a foot over the threshold. There were dead leaves on the floor inside, and in advance of her footsteps, things scuttled into the shadows.
Before she could think too hard about it, she gave the door a hard shove and let it propel her inside. The hinges shrieked, echoed off the high ceiling, and then everything went silent.
The insects outside stopped humming. The things in the shadow stopped moving. The only sounds were Jo’s own heart and the Acushket, rushing through the iron pilings that held up the bridge, and on over the rocks.
Jo made it six steps into Ash House that day. She had decided to go up the sweeping front stairs, banisters like the winding river outside, carpet rotted like winter moss, and signal Ani and Deirdre from the round stained glass window that rose at the first landing. It was pink and green glass, light like underwater wavering through it, and it was remarkably intact. Like the rest of Ash House, nature had its way, but the local kids didn’t seem to know the place existed.
She walked the six steps, to the center of the entryway. The leaves crunched under her boots, hissing across the tile floor. There was a picture there, but it was too filthy to make out.
When she looked up, there was a shape in front of the window. Tall and thin, at first she took it for another shadow. Then she saw the eyes and the teeth, the dark jacket and tie, the white shirt with black space floating above it. The light bent where it shot through the shape, and hit the floor in front of Jo. The shape cast no shadow.
Jo didn’t distinctly remember running from Ash House, skipping the steps, and thrashing through the grass to the bridge. Deirdre and Ani eventually found her walking down Route 7. She wasn’t hot, even though the sun bounced off the asphalt and made everything shimmer. Jo couldn’t get warm until they’d dropped her off at home, and she’d watched the Dart’s tail lights disappear into the gathering twilight.
2. August
Jo woke up to music. It wasn’t music-box music, or the thump and hum of the world stuff or old-school jazz her mother usually played while she was in her studio. This was loud. Loud enough that it rattled the screen in her open bedroom window.
She rolled out of bed and peeked outside. The Ryan house was one of a pair on a dead-end street. There had been three houses, but the one on the far left had burned down in the 1970s, when Jo’s mom lived in the Ryan house with Grandpa Paul and Grandma Leigh. There was just a chimney now, and a vacant lot.
The three driveways were close together, three lines of shell and sand. In the neighbor’s driveway, a car was parked, stereo blasting.
It was easily the ugliest car Jo had ever seen—the color of a rotten pumpkin where it wasn’t just bubbled primer and rust, the bumper strapped on with plastic zip-ties, the windshield spattered with dead bugs.
Square and lopsided, like an aging pit bull, it crouched facing the street, daring anyone to get too close. She wondered where it had come from—if it ran, she’d be amazed. Unfortunately, there was nothing wrong with the radio.
Jo pulled on shorts and a tank top and walked outside barefoot. Her mom was locked in the back room with the air conditioner, which she needed to cool her computer system. She’d picked up some design work for some big animated movie coming out at Christmas, and she was working nonstop, drawing and rendering a pair of adorable space aliens so that they could be inhabited by the voices of celebrities.
“Hey!” Jo shouted. She could see a pair of legs, and part of a torso, ensconced in the car’s innards. It kind of looked like the car was eating them. “Hey!” she shouted again. She left her porch and crossed the driveway. The song was something old, that you’d hear on an 8-track. Old black water, keep on rolling.
Jo winced as a piece of shell bit into her foot, and thumped on the hood. “Hey!”
The body inside the car jerked upward, slamming his skull into the underside of the hood. “OW!”
Jo drew back. “Oh man,” she said. “Sorry about that.” She wasn’t entirely. The guy reached inside the window and turned down the stereo.
“I know you,” he said. “You’re Mel’s kid.”
Jo realized she knew him, too. “You’re the Powells’ son.”
He grabbed a rag and swiped at his hands, then picked up a beer from the shadow of the car and took a long pull. “Guilty.”
“How do you know my mom?” Jo said. She didn’t think Melanie Ryan, with her smart black clothes and wire-rimmed glasses and her four years of sobriety, would have anything to do with their next-door neighbors beyond yelling at Mrs. Powell to bring her crop of small, yappy dogs inside when it got late. She didn’t think she’d ever seen Mr. Powell. Maybe there wasn’t one.
“I trimmed her roses and did the lawn a few times last summer,” the guy said. Jo knew his name was something short, like something a tough guy in a black-and-white movie would be called.
The guy stuck out his hand. “Drew.”
“Jo,” said Jo. Drew’s hand left a long smear of grease on her palm, picking out all the flaws, all the calluses from playing bass with Ani, and the thin line where she’d cut her hand on a rusty lawn chair as a kid.
“So why’d you come over here?” Drew leaned against the car and finished off the beer. “You lonely?”
“What?” Jo’s voice rose a little more than she would have liked. “No! I mean ... the music. It woke me up.”
He actually smirked at her. “It’s eleven in the morning.”
Jo narrowed her eyes. “Night owl.”
“Fair enough,” said Drew Powell, and turned his music back up. Jo supposed she could try to go back to sleep until Ani came to get her for practice, but she’d woken up twisted in her sheets, sweating even though the day wasn’t humid.
She dreamed a lot, and in the dreams were things that sent her shooting into wakefulness. They were dark shapes standing in front of stained glass, things with dark faces whispering at her from piles of leaves. Thorns the size of her little finger wrapped around pale, naked thighs.
Jo went back to the screened part of the porch and pulled on a pair of sneakers. She got her cell phone and her army surplus pack, which was stuffed with her wallet and her lyrics notebook, a flashlight, and an umbrella. Melanie believed in being prepared, and it was easier to lug the stuff around then get chewed out.
She thought for a second and then went into the kitchen drawer and added Mel’s camping knife. Not a lame little Swiss Army knife like you could buy at a grocery store—Mel’s had a three-inch blade and attachments to open cans and saw through rope.
Grabbing a bottle of water, Jo was back out the door, ignoring Drew Powell even though he stopped working on his eyesore of a car again and stared at her.
It was at least three miles to Ani’s grandmother’s farm, and she was soaked by the time she got there, the water bottle depleted. Great plan, Jo, she thought. You’re going to die on the way back.
Ash House peered at her over the treetops again, and now its slate roof, gables sharp as razor blades, didn’t seem at all mysterious or inviting.
She circled the wilderness of the orchard, though, and repeated her walk up the drive. The red door still stood open. Her footprints were still in the tile of the front hall.
When she stepped into the house, the oppressive silence almost smothered her. She almost couldn’t make herself look up at the landing. A few panes were gone in the stained glass now, like someone had picked the petals off a flower. Pink glass crunched under her feet when she made herself go up the stairs, stand in the spot where she’d seen the shadow.
Nothing there. Nothing to spook her except a lot of cobwebs and a really, really dead bird that had clearly flown into the house some years ago and made its final resting place on the sill.
Jo blew out a puff of the stale house air and felt like
the world’s biggest idiot. She’d actually been scared, standing down there in the entry. Known something was watching her, when it wasn’t anything except a reflection.
Letting light and shadow fool you wasn’t very punk rock. Jo wiped sweat off her face and watched it fall to the filthy floor.
Another set of footprints sat in the dust, next to the scuffs of her shoes. Precise, pointed toe and square heel. No scuffs. Standing still.
The sun snuffed out behind a high bank of anvil-shaped thunderheads, bloody pink through the lens of the window. A puff of wind blew the red door wide, hinges shrieking.
A voice spoke into Jo’s left ear, very close and clear. “ Who are you? ”
Jo took a step, tangled her feet, and went down hard. The same hand Drew Powell had covered in grease twisted under her, sharp and hot as driving a nail through her palm.
When she looked up, she saw the shape. Saw it wasn’t a shape, but a figure. The weak, yellow stormlight spilling from outside passed through him, and dust motes danced from her fall, silvered as if they were falling through a projector light.
The figure stretched out his hand. “ Don’t be afraid. ”
Thunder cracked the heavens open. Rain cascaded from the sky, a thousand leaks sprouting in the ceiling of Ash House.
Jo managed to get up. She thought the figure might have reached for her, his hand drifting through the fabric of her tank top. His face, she noticed with that snapshot clarity that comes with panic, was very young, close to her age. Hair dark as ink swept back in a style at least seventy years out of date. Dapper suit and tie.
And dead. Dead, dead, dead.
Jo didn’t know how the thought came to her that the boy on the stairs was dead. Not a hallucination or heatstroke, but a departed. When it did come, though, she ran. Ran from the house through the wide open door, out into the thunderstorm that rolled from one side of the hollow to the other, into rain that was colder than putting ice cubes on bare skin. Ran until she couldn’t go any further, and collapsed under the Route 7 overpass, which was where Drew Powell found her after the rain stopped, when he came rattling along in his barely functioning ’71 Nova. He took her with him to buy belts and a new air filter and then drove her home.
He never asked what she was doing on the road in the first place.
3. September
Jo hadn’t intended to start her junior year with her arm in a sling, but at least it got her out of PE for a few weeks. By the time Drew had gotten her home that afternoon, her hand was twice its normal size, and she couldn’t bend her wrist without her eyes watering.
The doctor had diagnosed two broken fingers and a severe sprain. Jo told her mother she fell doing a stage dive. Mel muttered something about that Deirdre girl and bad influences, and drove her to the urgent care clinic in Pittsfield.
She didn’t tell Drew her “ghost story,” as Ani insisted on calling it. Jo would have argued that just because she saw a boy the light cut straight through, who appeared out of nowhere, that didn’t make the boy a ghost. Even if that ugly coffin-heavy word had dropped into her head when they “touched.” Dead.
At least it gave Ani something to talk about, and it was better than her endless chatter about Deirdre, who was back at her pretentious private art school in New York.
Ani should be the one in a private school, Jo thought. Ani was talented—the drawing, the guitar playing, singing, anything she turned her hands and voice to. Jo had never been jealous of it until Deirdre showed up. Before her, they were Ani and Jo—Jo got decent grades and wrote songs, Ani got detention and wrote the music.
During the free period that should have been PE, she wandered behind the outbuilding that housed the mowers and the thing that painted lines on the football field. Smokers went there, and occasionally you came upon a couple who just couldn’t hold it together until final bell.
She thought it would be deserted, and maybe she could nap in the sun. The dreams were worse and sleeping at home wasn’t happening that often.
She never should have gone back in that house. She saw it almost every night in her dreams—but not ruined, like it really was, but whole and inhabited, every window glowing with yellow lamplight. Apple trees thrashing in wind, shedding their ripe, red crop all over the ground. And the thorns, winding around and around her legs, blood running over her skin and slicking across her thighs.
Drew Powell leaned against the shed when she came around the corner. His hair was a little longer now, the high-and-tight he’d come home with mussed on top. Drew had been in military school all of last year. Jo figured that was a polite way of saying juvie—Drew didn’t look like structure and marching were his thing.
“Hey,” he said. He was smoking the end of a cigarette, holding it pinched tight between two fingers like James Dean.
Jo gave him a nod, crouched against the wall, and tilted her face into the sun.
“You didn’t tell me you broke your hand doing B&E,” Drew said. Jo cracked her eye open.
“It’s not B&E if the door’s open.”
Drew threw his cigarette down and stomped on it. “Why poke around that place? Nothing there.”
Jo bit her tongue. Oh, there was something there. Just not what Drew was thinking of. “It was a dare,” she said.
“Oh yeah?” Drew perked up, and he slid down to sit next to her. “You do that a lot? Truth or dare?”
Jo shook her head. She knew he was fishing for her to say something so he’d know whether she was a slut or not, whether the vintage Cure shirt and short imitation-leather skirt and ripped up tights meant she gave it up, or if she just wasn’t into American Eagle and pastels, like the rest of the girls at Hawthorn High. Drew Powell wasn’t the most subtle guy who’d ever hit on her.
“Just the one time,” she said. “And I broke my hand, so there you go.”
She stood up. She might as well go try and squint at her homework until next period. Besides, if faculty caught her out here with Drew, who clearly didn’t have an excuse to be wandering hither and yon and sparking up cigarettes, she’d get bounced to detention, and she could put off having that conversation with Mel forever.
“My brother went down there once,” Drew said. “He said it was pretty crazy inside.”
“He on a dare too?” Jo shouldered her bag. She’d thrown out her backpack—she couldn’t get the smell out, the musty, dirty graveyard smell of dry rot and small, dead animals it had picked up in Ash House. The new bag was made of recycled seat belts, and she’d let Ani spray-paint some designs on it.
“Nah, him and his buddies were drinking after graduation,” Drew said. “They got wasted and decided to go have a séance. There was a murder there, you know.”
“Sure,” Jo said, wondering if it was the same one Deirdre had been babbling about. But she didn’t ask. Being too interested would give Drew his in. “I should be going. I have calc seventh period.”
“Or we could go get some beer and ride out to the quarry,” Drew said. He suggested it the same way other guys would suggest soda and slices at O’Reilly’s Pizza Explosion. “I rebuilt the engine on the Nova. It’s smooth. And I cleaned it out some since I gave you that first ride.”
“No thanks,” Jo said. She felt as if she were in a PSA—say no to drugs, skipping school, and guys with blue eyes and Chevy Novas.
Drew shrugged. “Your loss.”
Jo left, because what could you say to that? She was going to study in the student lounge, but she went to the library instead, and spent the last thirty minutes of the period reading about Ephraim Day, who planted the ash trees that gave Ash House its name. His son Nicholas, and Nicholas’s intended bride, Abigail Worth, who drowned in the Acushket in 1902, on a perfectly clear and sunny day. A piece from the historical society, years later, suggested that the poor, desperate girl might have thrown herself into the current. But no one knew. Would never know.
