Ghostlight

by Sonia Gensler

  Julian was quiet for a moment.

  “Storytellers are artists,” he finally said, “and every artist has to take risks.” He held my gaze. “Trust me, it’s a super-cool film location. And you’re a local expert. I need you on this, Avery.”

  Grandma’s church had the skimpiest congregation I’d ever seen. Twelve people, and none of them younger than her. It was a very conservative church, too, which meant the women only opened their mouths during the hymns. Grandma sure liked to belt it out when it came time to sing, but she had a little trouble staying in tempo. I asked her once why the church didn’t have a piano, and Grandma said, “We only offer the fruit of our lips in praise, Avery May. There’s no need to add instruments to what Christ’s spirit made perfect.”

  I just happened to think a piano would keep everyone on track, not to mention liven things up a bit. She didn’t care to hear that, though.

  After the service, Grandma drove us home for kitchen-table Sunday school, seeing as Sycamore Road Church of Christ didn’t exactly cater to kids. When the lesson came to an end, Grandma said a long and meaningful prayer that stirred up a decent amount of spiritual feeling in me. Then, finally, it was time for lunch.

  Which was good, because I was starving. But it was bad, too, because I had to ask Grandma about Hilliard House without her popping a vein. It needed to come up naturally, as part of a casual conversation. That meant letting Blake in on it, too.

  I swallowed a bit of chili with corn bread and took a deep breath. “So…Grandma?”

  “Are you meaning to ask me a question, Avery May?”

  So much for natural.

  “Yes, ma’am.” I cleared my throat. “The other day when Julian Wayne and I were walking around the farm, he took an interest in that old Hilliard House. He wanted to know more about it, but I didn’t know its history.”

  Grandma considered me for a moment. “You didn’t take him near it, did you? You know I don’t want anyone messing with that house.”

  Blake chuckled. “How could we forget after the stunt Avery pulled?”

  Grandma’s hard gaze didn’t waver. “It’s not safe. And it looks like I finally have a buyer to take it off my hands. The last thing I need is kids running around breaking things.”

  “He just wanted to know if it was built before the Civil War.”

  Grandma settled back in her chair and looked thoughtful. “I’m pretty sure Hilliard House was built after the Civil War.” Her brow wrinkled. “There was a building in the same spot before that—a smaller frame house, I think, but it burned down.”

  “Did anyone die in the fire?” I asked.

  “That’s a gruesome question. I honestly don’t know.”

  “Grandma, why didn’t you and Grandpa live in Hilliard House?” Blake asked. “It’s on your property. Seems like you’d want to live in a big house like that, looking out over the river and all.”

  Grandma put down her half-eaten corn stick. “It wasn’t ours to live in.”

  Blake frowned. “Why not?”

  “That’s a long story.”

  “Can we hear it?” I prompted. “Please?”

  “May you hear it, Avery May.” She wiped her mouth. “The Hilliards have owned this land for a long time, but it didn’t pass down as a whole from the first Hilliard to his first son, and then on to that Hilliard’s first son. Instead, it was broken up into smaller bits, so that every son who wanted land got a parcel.”

  “What about the daughters?”

  Blake rolled his eyes. “Girls don’t inherit.”

  “That’s not exactly true,” said Grandma. “The girls just married men who had land of their own. Or they moved away, like your mother.” Grandma’s lips tightened. “Your grandpa’s great-grandfather Ephraim Hilliard settled the area. It was his son, whose name I don’t recall at the moment, who built that fancy brick house. His only surviving son, Joshua Hilliard, inherited the house. Your grandpa was his first cousin once removed, and they were neighbors.”

  “Why don’t we have more cousins?” Blake asked. “You’d think this area would be chopped up into a hundred tiny farm parcels after that many generations.”

  “You’re forgetting the wars, dear. Each one, from the Civil War to Vietnam, took at least one Hilliard boy, some of them not much older than you.”

  “So Joshua Hilliard was the last one to live in the brick house?” I asked.

  “He was. I married your grandpa in 1960. Joshua Hilliard was around sixty-one at that time, already widowed and living alone in the house.” She frowned. “He was a shut-in.”

  “Why?”

  A shadow passed over Grandma’s face, and for a moment I feared she might close down the whole conversation. But after letting out a heavy sigh, she continued.

  “If you must know, Joshua Hilliard was a troubled man. He’d outlived his wife and daughter, and I reckon that’s enough to make anyone maudlin.”

  “He’s not still alive, though, right?”

  “Good grief, Avery,” Blake said. “He’d be, like, a hundred and fifty years old by now.”

  Grandma smiled. “Not quite. He died…I think it was around 1985.” She looked past me toward the living room. “In his last years your grandpa collected all the old family photographs and organized them in albums. You might take a look at them.”

  “I’d like that.” Actually, the idea of looking at black-and-white photos of frowning people in fusty clothes didn’t exactly light my fire, but maybe it would help Julian with his film. “So nobody’s lived in that house since? Even Grandpa didn’t want it?”

  “Your grandpa and I were happy here. And I never liked that house anyway.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Old Joshua Hilliard wasn’t just maudlin. There was a darkness to him.” She paused to scrape the last bite from her bowl. “Any more questions, my dear?”

  I thought for a moment. “What does ‘maudlin’ mean?”

  Blake leaned toward me. “It means feeling sorry for yourself. Which ought to sound familiar, since that’s how you’ve been acting since we got here.”

  “Enough.” Grandma settled her spoon in the empty bowl. “If you two clear the table, I’ll bring in the watermelon. And, Blake, later on you can help Avery in the kitchen by drying the dishes.”

  It lifted my heart to see Blake getting punished for once. Too bad I didn’t have much space in which to gloat about it while we were actually doing the dishes. It was hard to savor my triumph when he was standing next to me not saying anything. Turns out silence can actually be kind of loud and distracting.

  So I passed the time by making a mental list of all his recent crimes against me. Things like telling me to walk behind him whenever we were in public, just in case some cute girl might mistake me for his girlfriend. Or not watching our favorite cartoon channel anymore because it was for “little kids.”

  Then there was the eye roll. That was a crime against Mom and Grandma, too. If any of us showed enthusiasm for anything—even important things—Blake gave us the eye roll. Sometimes it was big and dramatic, other times it was just a flicker, but it always burned me up. Just thinking about it was enough to make me want to break a plate.

  “Come on, Avery, you’re splashing me on purpose!”

  I gave him a sidelong glance. His shirt was pretty damp, but I wasn’t about to apologize.

  “By the way, I remember something about Hilliard House,” Blake said.

  I rinsed a bowl and set it on the counter, even though his hand was outstretched to take it.

  He sighed. “It came to me while you and Grandma were talking. It happened before you got yourself in trouble.”

  I set another bowl on the counter, willing my mask of boredom not to crack.

  “We went over there together,” he continued. “I was almost ten, so you must have been around seven years old. You wanted to go inside.”

  The mask cracked, and I turned to him. “I did?”

  He grinned. “Yeah, you were fearless. The cella
r door was open, and off you went crawling into the dark to find the steps up to the main floor.”

  “I don’t remember that at all.”

  He dried a bowl and stacked it with the others. “It’s been a long time. But you’ve always been weird about that house. First you were all obsessed, but after that walloping from Grandma, you stopped talking about it. Like you’d forgotten. Your face would go all blank when I mentioned it.”

  “Seriously?”

  He nodded. “Sometime after that, when I thought you were with Grandma, I walked out there. As soon as I stepped on the porch, I heard something.” He took another bowl from me, but this time he set it on the counter.

  “Well…what’d you hear?” I prodded.

  Blake made a display of side-eyeing the dishes, pans, and crusty Crock-Pot still waiting to be washed. “I’ll tell you if you wash and dry the rest of this stuff.”

  My face flushed hot, and I could feel a vein start to throb at my temple. “You are the king of jerks.”

  He shrugged. “Whatever. It’s up to you.”

  I stared at him, not even caring that my rubber gloves were dripping all over the floor. I wished I could forget the whole conversation, because I really wanted to see him dry the rest of those dishes.

  But I wanted to know what he’d heard even more.

  “Fine. I’ll dry. Just tell me.”

  A slow smile spread across his face as he tossed the towel onto the counter. But when he turned back to me, the smile vanished.

  “I heard you,” he said. “I looked through the window and saw you sitting in a chair near the fireplace. You were talking to someone. I stared through that window really hard, looking all around that room to find who you were talking to.”

  I swallowed hard. “And?”

  “And nothing. There was no one there but you.”

  —

  That night I dreamed about Hilliard House.

  I was walking up the hill toward the porch, and the brick-lined path seemed to extend about three times longer than I remembered. The grass between the bricks was dark and curled like worms. When I finally reached the steps, I raised my head to look at the house. A curtain twitched at the far-left window. A light glowed softly behind it, revealing the shadowy outline of a hand.

  I woke to the shadows cast by my night-light. They stretched across the sloped attic walls, reaching out for me as if they were fingers, and the window air conditioner shuddered and wheezed like a creepy old chain-smoker. I fumbled at my bedside table until I finally switched on the lamp. At the bottom of the bed, Weasley lifted his head and mewed sleepily.

  “It’s okay, Wease. Go back to sleep.”

  I reached under the bed and pulled out the old coat box that lived there. It was dusty and more beat-up than I remembered, but I’d looked forward to opening it this summer…at least until Blake betrayed me.

  I lifted the lid to find Kingdom nestled inside—the maps we’d made, the family trees, the battle plans and treaties, the stories and artwork, all detailing the adventures of Kingdom’s inhabitants, from the mighty King Stanmore on his throne to the lowliest faun in his woodsy cottage. The pages were heavy in my lap, and they smelled like dust and kid sweat. But the stories and drawings chased the shadows away, and by the time I put the box back under the bed, I was ready to sleep.

  The next day I headed to Hollyhock Cottage right after lunch. Julian answered the door and waved me in. “Quick, let’s go upstairs.”

  “Jules,” said a voice from the kitchen. “Aren’t you going to offer Miss Avery something to drink? A snack, maybe?”

  Julian’s shoulders slumped. “Dad won’t leave me alone today,” he murmured. “Go on in. If we give him what he wants, maybe he’ll let us work.”

  The kitchen was warm and smelled like baking—sugar and vanilla. Curtis Wayne leaned on the counter near the sink, and he grinned when he saw me.

  “Hey there, Avery May.”

  Nobody called me that but Grandma. Not even Mom. It brought a strange pang to my chest.

  “Hi, Mr. Wayne.”

  “You want some iced tea? Lemonade? I made them myself.”

  Julian opened the fridge. “Dad, aren’t you supposed to be composing or something?”

  I glanced toward the living room and saw the guitar standing in exactly the same spot it had stood two days ago.

  “I need to unwind a bit before the muse will strike,” said Mr. Wayne. “And who’s the dad here, anyway?”

  I sort of wished I could freeze this moment and stare at Mr. Wayne without him knowing. It wasn’t that I had a crush on him or anything. I mean, he was old. Like, forty. It’s just…it was like looking at a cheetah in the zoo. Most dads I knew had bellies and gray hair and bags under their eyes. They were awkward around other people’s kids, almost to the point of looking fearful. Most of all they just seemed weighed down by life. But here was a man about Mom’s age standing in the kitchen in designer jeans, and not only did he look as sleek and relaxed as our cousin’s prize-winning Racking Horse, he was baking cookies and smiling about it.

  “What do you want, Avery?” Julian jerked his head out of the fridge. “Tea, lemonade, Michelob Ultra?”

  “Very funny.” Mr. Wayne quirked an eyebrow at me. “I trust you won’t tell your grandmother that Julian has taken to offering alcohol to minors.”

  “I know better,” I said. “She thinks drinking liquor is a sin. Her church uses grape juice for Communion.”

  Mr. Wayne nodded slowly. “I figured as much.”

  “I’ll just have lemonade, please.”

  “Take some cookies, too.” Mr. Wayne pulled a paper plate from the cabinet and scooped a couple of sugar cookies onto it.

  Once we got to his room, Julian pulled the folding chair next to his leather office chair. “Sorry about that. He’s really been hovering lately.”

  “He’s not so bad.”

  “He disappears for weeks on tour, and then he comes home and he’s all clingy to make up for it. It’s twice as bad here because this house is tiny and he’s waiting for the muse, or whatever. He’s probably baking a cake as we speak. Or making cucumber sandwiches. I bet your dad isn’t like that. Am I right?”

  I froze. All these years of having a prepared answer to the dad question and I completely locked up.

  “Avery?”

  “My dad,” I finally said, keeping my face still and sad, “is dead.”

  Julian choked on a bite of cookie. “Sorry,” he said, brushing crumbs off his mouth. “I had no idea.”

  “I don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Yeah, I get it.” He took a long swallow of lemonade and cleared his throat. “So, what did you learn about Hilliard House?”

  This was one thing I liked about boys—you could always count on them to change the subject if feelings came up. I told him everything Grandma had said, such as when the house was built, and how the last owner outlived his wife and daughter.

  Julian nodded. “An old recluse, huh? Anything else?”

  Oh, and I used to visit an imaginary friend in that house.

  “Not really,” was what I actually said.

  “Do you know how his wife and child died? Anything interesting about that?”

  “Grandma didn’t say. I don’t think she knows.”

  “We need to do more research, but Dad took my smartphone and there’s no Wi-Fi in this house.”

  “Why’d he take your phone?”

  Julian looked away. “Supposedly I spend too much time on the Internet. He said I had to take a break while we’re here. It’s lame, I know.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t get good reception up here anyway. Blake sure doesn’t. And if you need to do research, there’s a shelf of books on local history downstairs. Grandma always keeps stuff like that for tourists. But, Julian, I don’t see why it matters what happened to his family. Aren’t we just making up the story ourselves?”

  His eyes widened. “With a setting like this, I want to use as much of the local
lore as possible. It’ll add authenticity to our film, and that sort of thing is great for marketing.”

  “Marketing?”

  “Yeah, once it’s finished we could build a whole website around it, and the connection to local history might draw more traffic.”

  It had never occurred to me that anyone other than us might see this film. It’d just seemed like a good summer project for friends, something to pass the time, but Julian made it sound like a business opportunity.

  “If you can’t find what you need in those books, we could try the library,” I said. “It’s about thirty minutes away by car—I could ask Grandma to drive us.”

  “Nothing in walking distance?”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, everything’s pretty spread out around here.”

  Julian frowned. “What about that graveyard just down the road? You can learn a lot from gravestones, plus we could get some good footage for our film. Are all the Hilliards buried there?”

  “Just the dead ones.” I grinned. “And Grandma won’t mind us walking down there.”

  “Maybe we could do that Wednesday.”

  “Are we writing the script today?”

  He gave me a sidelong look. “You have a lot of work to do before we start that.”

  “Work? What kind of work?”

  “I want to take advantage of the creepy qualities of Hilliard House. Have you ever watched a scary movie?”

  I flinched. “Wait a minute…are we making a scary movie?”

  Julian leaned forward in his chair. “Did something bad happen to you at that house? Other than your grandmother taking a belt to you?”

  I thought of last night’s dream. The hand in the window.

  “All I know is that house creeps me out.”

  “This is just a movie, Avery. It’s no big deal. Just think of it as pretending.”

  I took a breath. “Okay.”

  “So…what scary movies have you watched?”

  I thought for a moment. “One time Blake and I watched this old movie called Excalibur. It was edited for TV, but there was still a lot of blood. Like, spears poking in people’s guts with blood spurting out, and crows eating the eyeballs out of a dead guy’s head. It was super gross.”