"What is it, darling?" he asks while he helps her up.
"A bat," Fornadad tells him. She brushes off her skirt.
"A simple bat." She points to the window and then adjusts her skirt. Mansta closes the window and then helps brush the dust off her skirt. He looks at her. Mansta opens his arms and hugs Fornadad. Fornadad sighs and leans against his chest. He kisses her forehead.
"No, no," Fornadad moans, "How can you kiss this face?"
"Because I can," Mansta says quietly.
"Come along. Down the stairs you go." They begin to walk down the stairs together.
"It could have been a vampire you know."
Mansta laughs, "I suppose it could have, but it wasn't."
As the couple reach the attic door and close it behind them, the Artist girl's ghost rushes back out into the open room with a look of proprietary rights and flourish. The child runs to the bassinet and Veda smiles. Suddenly the child points to the bassinet and wails a long, high-pitched howl, again.
"Dear, dear, hush.... Hush!" Veda scolds her. The child's ghost picks up the chewed baby clothing and cries. She did not see the bat exit from her hiding spot behind an old, plastic covered couch. Veda tries to quiet the child, and the Artist girl's ghost throws open the window and begins to sway and twirl to the crying.
Down in Mansta and Fornadad's room, Fornadad is smiling at last in a warm embrace receiving comforting words from Mansta, until that is, she begins to hear the howling, and again her mood turns sour as her attention is drawn back up into the attic. She pulls away from Mansta and glares.
"You didn't even shut the window, did you? You didn't! A bat, could have bitten me. And all you had to do was shut the window-"
Back up the attic stairs Mansta trudges. He shuts the window. Three ghosts of three generations hide in the corners, up against the wall, as quiet as possible, no time to hide behind furniture this time. They watch while he brushes the dust from the window sash off of his hands, sighs, and trudges back toward the stairs, then down and out the attic door. As it closes, three women ghosts cover their
mouths and giggle.
"Isn't he dreamy?" the artist's ghost asks as she saunters over to the window, nearly swooning, throwing back open the window sash.
"Yes, he is," Veda agrees then comforts the child and reminds her not to cry.
"There'll be another bat," she tells her.
"There's probably another somewhere, here, in the rafters." And then the child's ghost is quiet as she entertains herself going about the rafters looking for one.
The Quill Pen Killer
Chapter Eleven: Not Every Ghost Gives Up Its Girl
In the kitchen DeAngeliuson's Mansion, Mattressa, who has just put the evening meal away in Pyrex bowls and cellophane wrap, stands leaning against the counter, dipping a tea bag repeatedly into a steaming cup of water. She looks up from where her tired gaze has grown blurry around a tea bag when she hears a noise.
"Well, Dante's toe clips and she doesn't ride a bike!" Mattressa calls out, "Look who the cat dragged in! And you think you could have called?" she scolds him.
"Don't start with me," Jessica's father tells her.
"I've a terrible headache and a need for some serious sleep. I'll be in the closet if you need me."
"O, that kind of sleep. Goodness! Must've been a long night! Or was it a couple of nights? I'll tell Miss Jessica you're home. She's been more than a little worried about this. You know how she doesn't stop, worrying, mothering you - " She looks up from her tea steeping, and he has gone. She hears a door shut.
"Well! Beezlebub's britches and a darned, old sock. Go then. Just go on." She tinkles the spoon extra loud and quickly as she stirs in a bit of sweetener.
"Like that! Without saying a word. Raised in a bellfry, he must have been! Just like that. Well, knitty shiftys – his manners? - It's not like I do this for the tips, you know!" she yells after him, feeling disgraced. (By Mattressa’s vocabulary, it is easy to tell she has been worrying, and covering the worry by cleaning. The misfortunes of the head of household have left him simply unable to care – until after a ‘good’ hang, anyway.)
Upstairs, in a large closet, a closet as large a most people's bedroom, back in a dark, and shady corner, Jessica's Father lies, hanging, upside-down, his wings about him, long toes and toenails that curl and cling like claws around a cold, steel bar of the apparatus that he hangs from. By the time Mattressa finishes her tirade, Jessica's father has already fallen asleep.
The next day, he talks to Ickabod.
"The Pacific is a nightmare! But the Atlantic's not so bad," he tells him.
"You can catch a good head wind and coast much of the way. Permutations, basically. Good to be in Europe, but Bub, I am exhausted. Anyway, I think he'll buy it. The statue... prepare for the shipping. It's really for the better... don't cry... Ickabod?..." He holds the phone out and rolls his eyes. Jessica walks into the room.
"Well, if it isn't the dawn of the dead. Where have you been?"
Jessica's father, still holding the phone out, answers the question with a question of his own, "More importantly, darling, how are you?
"Unloved, verbally assaulted, attacked, chased down, thrown up into a bellfry and without my parent," she laments.
"All since I've been gone?" her father asks.
"And more! But you don't care, do you? You didn't even call."
Jessica's father, forgetting Ickabod is still on the line, expressing his emotion about the loss of his beloved art piece, and really opening up, acknowledges his daughter and really does feel quite bad about it.
"I know," he says.
"Sorry."
"You didn't pick me up. From school that day."
"How did you get home?" he asks.
"Mattressa."
"Much of a wait?"
"Only two hours... in the rain."
"Please come over here," he holds out his arms, and puts the phone down. He gives her a big hug.
"I thought about you every minute... does that make it any better?"
"Slightly," she says, "But, no."
"Ice cream?"
Jessica scoffs, "Ha! How's 10,000 sound? Fair?"
"Dollars?"
"Is that the highest going currency?" She asks. He nods his head.
"Yes, dollars, then," she says.
"Pack your things. You can go with me this time. Civilly, like regular people... I've booked us tickets, back to Spain."
"Ewwee!!" she screams. She hugs him again.
"Where are we staying? A villa..."
"A hotel," he says.
"Ewwee!! Yay! What should I pack?"
"Clothes," her father says.
"Just hurry." Jessica runs out with a little jump through the doorway, over the threshold of the door. Her father picks up the phone.
"Sorry. I completely forgot. I'm back," her father says.
"And yes, I suppose I am carrying on," Ickabod pauses, his first pause, to take a deep breath, "but thank you, baleful friend, for hearing me out. I do feel better having told you all that."
"Glad to have helped. We'll see you then?"
"Yes," Ickabod says slowly.
The statue of the ancient vampire's artist gone frightful victim of his blood-thirst is sized and crated that day from Ickabod's, and is, later that night, picked up, lowered onto a dolly and wheeled away, while Ickabod sips tea and is consoled by Gretchen, his house maid. Jessica and her father, at the same time the St. of Nostramadeus is being wheeled into the night, step into a cab, 8 a.m., in Spain and are driven off to await their 'package' at the pick up sight.
"Jess, one thing I didn't tell you," her father says, "we've brought over the Saint statue. We're resting it here. Leaving it behind. I didn't want to leave, again, without you, but I thought I'd mention, you know... that doesn't bother you does it?"
Jessica say, quietly, "No. Not at all, actually. I'm sure it will be okay." She pats his arm reassuringly and gives a little 'I-can-do-it' of a smile.
"Bat's my girl," her father tells her.
By afternoon, there, the statue is unloaded, and then uncrated, in the middle of a gazebo in the garden of Mansta and Fornadad's home. The attic ghost of the artist girl, doesn't even see it. She is busy in the attic, sewing a spider's nest egg sac into the hem of one of Mansta's wife's dresses. She pricks her finger and sits up, eyes wide.
Caught in the act, Veda, interrupts her. "What are you doing, there, girl?" Which only makes the ghost girl madder.
"I hope these spiders bite her," the ghost girl mumbles.
And Veda just walks away, tsk-tsking and cluck-clucking her with her what-once-was a tongue. While a workman is out in the gazebo, bent down, to secure the base of the statue to the ground, a single drop of blood, drops from the fingertip of the statue - as if it had been pricked - onto the workman's skin where his backside is exposed, his shirt riding up, hunched over, while his pants have slipped down - due to the weight of his tool belt. The workman reaches back, with his hand, to the spot where the warm moisture has touched his cool skin and sits up. He looks at his fingertips.
"Huh, blood. Didn't feel anything," he says. "Hey, Manny!" he calls out to Mansta, "have a look at my back. You see anything? Did I scratch myself or something?"
Mansta looks. "Uh, no. I don't see anything," he says.
The workman does not spend much time worrying though. He is always cutting himself here, or scraping himself there. "Huh," he says and decides to wrap things up, get off to another job and then out to the pub.
"Looks pretty secure, don't ya think?" he says, wiggling the base to prove that it does not move.
"Yes," Mansta tells him, "I'd say we're done here."
Out the window of his wife's bathroom, a horrendous scream is let out. She has, once again, washed her face and applied her new cream, and now, the bubbles are worse than ever. Mansta hurries the workman out and away from the property.
"Have a nice day," he says quickly and waves as the workman's truck with the remnants of crating pulls out of drive and down the lane. Then he checks over his shoulder, spying the upstairs window, to where the screams are coming from. In the attic, the artist girl ghost disappears from the attic and then reappears behind Mansta's wife in the bathroom. She is there but a second and then is out the attic widow flying frantically.
Veda who can tell the girl with whom she shares the attic is concocting vengence and up to no good paces in circles, worrying, "O this is bad," she says, "O this is bad!" The child ghost begins to cry and wail at the sound of the wife's scream. And Fornadad, in the bathroom, again turns her attention toward the attic above (some kind of sound has reached her ears), and feels compelled, one more time, to stomp up the attic stairs. Convinced that the sound of the wailing is due to her husband's ineptitude at shutting the attic window - which she has asked him two or three times, now – she takes it upon herself to make certain the window is shut, and remains shut. A sudden hush falls upon the ghosts of the attic, as Fornadad enters the room. Pressed against the wall and hiding behind the furniture, Veda and the child ghost listen as Mansta's wife discovers her red, silk dress on the floor.
"What the devil!" the wife asks and wonders aloud,
"How did that get up here?" She picks the dress up off the floor and stares at it a moment. "Mansta?" she thinks, but "No-" Veda covers her mouth almost letting out a laugh, knowing the wife has falsely accused him of wearing her dress when she is not around.
"Noooo!!!" the wife wails. She throws the dress down, marches over to the open window and shuts it with a slam! Then she marches down the stairs, snapping up the dress at the last minute in her tightly held hand. Veda abandons her cane and swishes, quickly, to the window - immediately opening it back up. She giggles.
"O if Marsala could've only seen that," Veda says of the artist girl's ghost.
"Where is she?" the child's ghost asks.
"In a tizzy," Veda tells her.
"Something's returned. Something she loved, I presume... Or hated... or worse yet... both! That's the kind that'll really get ya. Pure love doesn't hurt like that when it's gone. No, it's the vindictive types that twist your insides. You’ve got to remember that," she says to the child's ghost, "No," she continues, "Marsala will need a shoulder to cry on, later, up here, I imagine."
"Why do I have to remember that? That twist your insides, Veda... why?" the child's ghost asks. Veda looks at her and then feels silly. The child is a ghost. She won't have to remember.
"O, I'm sorry dear. I didn't mean to say that, did I? No, child, no. I'm sorry."
Outside the artist girl's ghost from the attic stands in the gazebo structure gazing at the statue like, well the only way to say it, really, is like she's seen a ghost. A vision from her past, and a past from another world, she might like to have forgotten, even then.
"Why... why, it can't be..." the artist girl's ghost steps goes closer - the statue. She tries to touch it, her hand goes right through its hand.
"You found me," she tells it - the image - her image. She tries to run her hand along the folds of the skirt, so exquisitely sculpted in the marble that they ripple (to the eye) like soft folds of fabric in a skirt.
"Like it was yesterday," the ghost girl whispers.
Out front, at the end of the drive to the house, at this same minute, Mansta shakes hands with Jessica's father and the taxi cab pulls away. Jessica lifts her bag.
"Let me just take you into the house, then, and show you where you can put your things," Mansta tells her. Jessica and her father follow Mansta into the house. Three crashes are heard from the room above the banister as they enter the house. The maid goes running.
"Actually," Mansta says blocking them from stepping much closer in than two steps from the doorway, as soon as he hears the crashes and sees the maid running for her life, "just set them here for now." He practically pulls the bags from their hands and tells them to go outside, for now, he'll
be right with them.
"Actually," he suggests, the sweat beginning to bead at the furrow just over his brow, "you can take a look at the statue - just arrive - outside, over there, in the gazebo."
Another crash is heard and the wince on Mansta's face, although he doesn't say it, says, "Please."
Jessica's father, although not one bit ruffled by the perils and helpless pleadings (though they may sometimes be loud) of the feminine version of mortals, he is rather uncomforted by the pleading look on Mansta's face, so he quickly takes his daughter by the hand, saying, "Come along, Jessica," and they vanish out the door and walk into the garden.
Mansta goes running up the stairs, to quell the storm before the sounds of his wife reach the ears of the guests from the house’s open window clear out into the garden. Jessica enters the gazebo first. The artistic girl's ghost, this very saint of this famous Statue of the Saint of Nostramadeus, acting quite upset and rather unsaintly, stomps into a corner and pouts. She is angry that Jessica has arrived. She had wished to be alone with her statue.
Her art piece, her masterpiece, if you will - and for the hub of Bub, even I, this author, would be feeling a little proprietary about this one, for she is the master of the master's piece, after all; but, there she goes, into a corner, reduced to a common spectator, behind another spectator, for horse heck's sake!
"I mean, a moment alone," she pouts, "with it, is not too much to ask!" Jessica's father walks up behind her.
"You won't ever see it again, I suppose, after today," he reassures her.
"We'll be leaving in the morning."
And then he looks at her, to judge her reaction, "How are you doing?" The artist's ghost creeps up behind Jessica and wraps her hands around Jessica's throat. Jessica's voice sounds rather smokey. Her face becomes rather pale.
"Not feeling so good, actually," Jessica rasps, "I'd like to sit down."
The artist's ghost lets go of her throat. Jessica clears it. She sits down on a bench outside the gazebo.
"There!" she acknowledges, "better." T
he artist's ghost steps closer to the statue and becoming a little less transparent. Outside the gazebo, Jessica's Father sits down on the bench near his daughter and looks around the garden of Mansta's home.
"If this is too much for you, we can go," he says.
"We can stay in a hotel... in the city."
"No, no, I'll be alright. Look, I'm feeling better."
Jessica says and smiles, hoping they can stay. They'd just arrived, after all, and the fresh air seems the better alternative to another stuffy cab ride, she thinks.
"Let's stay," she says and tries to read her father's reaction who is busily looking around the garden and over his shoulder more than just one time.
"Hmmm," he says, "I don't know." He listens.
"Do you hear someone?" he asks and then he stands up, and walks toward the statue.
The artist's ghost, a slight bit less transparent even than the moment before, says, out loud, but in a hushed tone, "I remember this. I remember when I showed you to him."
She whispers to the statue and, once again, tries to touch it.
She has become almost real looking by the time Jessica's Father enters the room. She scowls at him.
"What is She doing here?" the girl asks him.
"My daughter?" Jessica's father asks.
"We're returning... this. You? Yours, isn't it?" The artist girl's look and voice soften, almost to a coo,
"Yes," she says, "Yes, it is." She looks it fondly up and down. (Remember, an enchanter never takes a vacation.)
Jessica's father tells her, "It's stunning. Something you're proud of, and I can see why." He takes a step closer. The artist girl looks sweetly at him, "Thank you," and then she swirls around it, "actually, I am." But then, the dark side flares again, at Jessica, a jealousy of the closeness Jessica has felt, the attachment - its power over Jessica – the artist does not know but somehow senses.
"When's she leaving?" she asks, motioning toward his daughter sitting on the bench.
The Quill Pen Killer (Vampire DeAngeliuson Book 1) Page 12
