Henry & Eva and the Castle on the Cliff

by Andrea Portes

  And that’s when we see it.

  Or rather them.

  The five ghosts from the cemetery.

  They’re here. And they seem to have made themselves at home.

  19

  IT IS A fine tableau gathered in front of the far wall of our bedroom. Five spiritual beings are standing, sitting, leaning, and even lounging, all with their eyes trained directly on us.

  I open my mouth and fill my lungs with air. I am about to scream when—

  “Well, thank goodness! We thought you’d never arrive!”

  This comes out of the transparent mouth of a rather pale, plump female figure. Said figure is wearing an ornate tiara and a bejeweled ball gown, and holding a rather large, elaborate feather fan.

  Henry and I turn to each other.

  “Pinch me,” Henry asks.

  “What? Why?”

  “Eva, please. Just pinch me.”

  “Fine.” I pinch him extra hard.

  “Ow!” Henry rubs his arm. Then he stares across the room. “Still there.”

  “Now, now, kids, quit it! We don’t have time to lollygag around! Time’s a-wasting!”

  At this, Henry and I turn to what can only be described as a dusty, gritty, suspendered yokel in knee-high boots, wearing a broad hat, holding a gold mining pan.

  “Howdy! Name’s Beaumont! Beaumont Eugene Billings. But you can call me Beau. Heck, you’re kin. Blood kin, at that!”

  “Blood . . . kin . . . ?” The words sound themselves out in Henry’s mouth, not sure where they’re supposed to be.

  “Darn tootin’! Why, who do you think built this house? And with what gold? Me, that’s who! Don’t be scared. Just because I glow a little does not mean I bite.”

  And now I recognize him. This is the bathroom ghost. The one I saw in the mirror behind me the other night. I’d swear my teeth on it.

  “Wait a minute. I know you—”

  “You know all of us, darling. Or you should,” the woman in the long dress declares. “This is your great-great-great-great-grandfather, Beaumont Eugene Billings. The gold miner. And I’m his wife, Plum. And these two, over here”—she gestures to two extremely sophisticated gentlemen, in tuxedos and top hats, both of them sipping martinis with their noses high in the air—“are our sons, August and Sturdevant.”

  “Quite, quite.” They nod, raising their glasses in an imaginary toast. As they drink, the liquid basically just pours through them, onto the floorboards.

  “And this here’s my granddaughter, Maxine. Don’t mind her, she’s depressed.”

  She gestures to the 1920s flapper, languidly lounging in the corner in a thousand-tassled dress, like someone straight out of The Great Gatsby. She wears a jeweled headdress around her short, black, bobbed hair, and holds out a long, lean cigarette holder. The smoke rises up, through her translucent body, to the rafters above.

  “Why shouldn’t I be depressed? We’re dead, after all.” Her voice is like a droll lullaby.

  “Oh, dagnabbit! What did I make all this money for if my brood is just gonna sit around like a bunch of ninnies!” the gold miner, Beau, exclaims. “Buck up, children, we have work to do!”

  Plum rolls her eyes, then returns her gaze to us. “Don’t worry, kids. We are here for a reason, one other than to bicker like schoolchildren.” She pauses. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” Henry mutters. The two of us stand there, still trying to convince ourselves this isn’t a dream.

  “Henry? Is this really happening?” I whisper under my breath. “Are there ghosts here . . . speaking to us?”

  But before he can answer, Plum begins.

  “Beaumont, my love, come on now. Explain.”

  The plump ghost nods to Beaumont, who now also happens to be smoking a corncob pipe. The billowing smoke fills up his transparent body and then goes directly through him, up to the ceiling. There sure is a lot of smoking going on around here. Times have changed.

  “Heck. Why me, Plum?”

  “Because you’ve always had a knack for explaining things. You’re a storyteller. That’s what the townsfolk used to say.” She turns to us. “A real whippersnapper!”

  As if on cue, Beaumont and his corncob pipe step forward in all their dusty glory.

  “What my dear wife, Plum, is trying to tell you is that we here are your relatives. Your ancestors, if you will. There is not a being in this room with whom you, you little scamps, do not share blood.”

  “Get to the good part!” Plum elbows him.

  “Goshdarnit, lady. Gimme a chance!” Now Beaumont turns back to us. “As you can see, we are not here to harm you, although our spectral figures may seem to spell peril, diabolic intrigue, or even doom. Do not be afraaaaaaid!”

  He seems to relish this.

  “Quite right, quite right,” August and Sturdevant concur.

  Beaumont continues, “For we are here for one purpose, and one purpose only. To seek justice! More specifically, to seek justice for our kin. You see, it has come to our eternal attention that our great-great-great-grandson, one William Alexander Billings, and his lovely wife, Margo, have been the victims of foul play.”

  Henry and I stand motionless. We blink once. Twice.

  “As these are your most beloved parents and as you are our kin as well, it naturally falls to us to right this great wrong. That is why we are so passionate about the issue at hand! A-CHOO!”

  He sneezes. Somehow this sneeze leads to an even louder sneeze.

  “Aaaa-CHOOO!”

  “Gesundheit,” Plum blesses him.

  “Excuse me, urchins! My lungs never could stand this damp climate! Give me the Great Plains back in Nebraska, I say!” Beaumont says.

  “This is not happening,” I say out loud.

  “Quit getting sidetracked, Beaumont!” This interruption comes from Plum, who snaps her feathered fan.

  “Okay, like I said. We—me, August, Sturdevant, Maxine, and of course, my wife, Plum here, who has clearly deemed herself the communications expert—”

  Plum chuckles.

  “—we’ve come to represent the family,” Beaumont continues. “The Billingses! What do we seek, say you? Justice. Justice for our beloved kin, your dearly departed parents.”

  “Wait. What are you saying, even? If you exist at all? Which, honestly, right now . . . I’m not sure,” I burst out. Henry nudges me.

  Plum steps forward. “Dear children, what my articulate husband here is trying to tell you is that the death of your mother and father . . . it was no accident on the sea. No, no.”

  It seems like the floorboards beneath us are sinking. Slowly, slowly, the house seems to be dipping down into quicksand. The walls curving in on themselves. I grab Henry’s hand. He grabs mine back. Both of us, holding each other up.

  “Your folks. They were murdered.”

  20

  “I’M NOT SURE I understand,” Henry says. “If what you say is true . . . why aren’t our parents, or their spirits, here? Why can’t they tell us? Rather than you? No offense.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Maxine muses from the back.

  “Look, kiddos. Ghosting ain’t easy. In fact, it takes years, even decades, to master it. Why, it took me half a century!” Beaumont proclaims.

  “Quite right, quite right.” The top hats nod.

  “And what you’re seeing here, well, kids, this is the best we could do. It’s all we’ve got. No one else was yet up to the task! And we’ve been ghosts for a long time,” Plum admits. “For our first haunting, we did pretty well, wouldn’t you say? I mean, we certainly got your attention.”

  Plum looks around and the ghosts nod.

  “Must be hard to believe you’ve got so much kin in one room. Looking out for you.” She smiles kindly.

  And it is true. In this ridiculous room, surrounded by these five individual ghosts, there’s a feeling I never would have expected to find, in all my life.

  Love.

  “I don’t understand. The supernatural activity. The re
adings on my electromagnet-o-meter—” Henry is trying to piece it together. “That was . . . you?”

  Plum shakes her head. “Nooooooo . . . it was some of our . . .” She searches for the right words. “Newer members?”

  Henry gasps. Tears brim and threaten to spill out of his eyes.

  “I don’t get it,” I tell him.

  “See, that’s what we’re telling ya kids. Ghosting ain’t easy!” Beaumont adds.

  Wham! Someone might just as well have punched me in the gut. I get it now. Or I think I do. “Wait, so that thing . . . on the beach . . . that was—it w-w-was . . .” I’m stuttering now.

  Beaumont nods his head. “Trying to get through. It ain’t easy. No, sir.”

  Henry and I are clasping each other’s hands for dear life.

  The room spins. Dizzy.

  “So . . . they. Our parents? They . . . can see us?”

  “Oh, yeah. Heck, yeah!”

  “Beaumont! No need to swear in front of the little ones!” Plum corrects him.

  “Yep, kiddos. They can see you. Sure as you can see us. They just can’t get to you. Not yet, anyway. Why do you think they sent us?” Beaumont asks.

  “Even I admit it’s quite moving,” Maxine purrs from the corner.

  “Indeed, indeed,” August and Sturdevant chime in.

  “Lookit, we’re running out of time now,” Plum interjects. “We’ll be back just as soon as we can, but, in the meantime, you know what to do.”

  Henry and I nod.

  “Wait. What? What do we do?”

  Plum, Beaumont, Maxine, August, and Sturdevant all look at each other. A moment of concurrence. Maxine gets up from her languid chaise lounge and floats over, right in front of us.

  “Why, darlings. You must avenge their death.”

  And with that, as if the last word was a charm, the lights dim down and the translucent figures seem to go with them, flickering in and out, down, down, fading into the darkness, finally . . . into the pitch black.

  I know Henry is standing next to me, still as a statue. Just as I know that when we turn on the light the room will once again be empty. But whether this is a charm, or a curse, or a dream, or even something I’m making up to save myself from blind despair—whether this is a last gasp before madness—I don’t know.

  What I do know is that I now live in a world where ghosts? Are an actual thing.

  1

  LIFT THE LEVER and that’s how you open the attic. The lever looks like a decorative Mesopotamian fertility figure on the wall, so it’s a little bit strange. But all you have to do is turn it slightly to the right and the trapdoor to the attic opens. You have to jump out of the way, though, because the stairs come immediately falling down from above and, as I learned the first time around, can bonk you on the head.

  Most people do not go into their attic. Or, if they do, it’s to collect a few antiques, photographs, knickknacks, old clothes, or yearbooks boxed up somewhere in the nether between stuff to be kept in the house, stuff to give away, stuff to throw away, and stuff nobody can even begin to figure out what to do with. There is usually an old dusty rug rolled up somewhere in the corner, maybe a collection of baseball cards, and, always, a greater collection of spiders.

  However, that is not what is happening here in this attic. No, indeed. Not in this house. When he was five, Henry took it upon himself to begin building his robot laboratory right here above our very own home. And, yes, there are robots. Little ones. Mostly the kind you can drive around with a remote control. There are, in addition, potions. Science experiments. Goop. Goop with electrodes. Goop with connecting currents. Three ant farms. Two snail hotels. One ladybug chalet. A rather vast collection of multicolor beetles, each encased in glass; an entire Lego universe consisting of the Spookyville, Ninjaland, and Minecraft worlds, and the Strawberry kingdom, which is the medieval section, ruled by Lightning Bolt, the king, and his second-in-command, Peter PotatoChip. There is, also, an entire corner dominated by a magnet experiment where Henry is trying to learn how to levitate objects of different weights with a varying magnetic current. So, as you can see, it’s pretty busy.

  Right now, Henry and I are secretly up here in the dark, under the pretense we are actually in our beds sleeping, to have an extremely important debate over what we just experienced.

  “It’s statistically impossible that we would both hallucinate the exact same thing, verbatim, both visually and physically,” Henry contends.

  “Totally. Also, did that really happen?!”

  “It’s easy enough to check the records, to account for the ancestral relations.”

  “I’m pretty sure I remember Dad talking about a relative from Iowa, who came to California with only a dream of mining for gold. Clearly, that must be Beaumont, his great-great-great-grandfather, who discovered gold during the 1849 Gold Rush and then built this house in the first place. You know, forty-niners and all that,” I recall.

  Henry nods. “They’re a funny little lot, aren’t they?”

  I smile back. “Yeah, I kind of like them. Especially Maxine. She’s glamorous in that flapper dress with all those silver tassels everywhere.”

  Henry and I stay silent for a moment, not wanting to say what we both are thinking.

  “So, do you think they’re right?” I ask.

  Henry hesitates and looks at his Lego kingdom. A blue Lego knight on a white horse is positioned, just about to charge the castle with a joust.

  “Quite frankly, I don’t know what to think.”

  I nod. “But, seriously. Foul play? I mean, shouldn’t we at least investigate just to be sure?”

  Henry contemplates, his gaze still fixed on the little Lego knight.

  “Absolutely. We should investigate. In an unbiased and rational manner. Then, we should proceed with caution, weighing the evidence. Logically.”

  “You’re right. We should keep our emotions out of it.” I nod. Even though that’s impossible.

  “I believe we have to start somewhere. Let’s listen to the audio, shall we?”

  “Audio?”

  Henry is immediately bounding around the attic, gathering items from our foray out to the beach, presumably to investigate the great waterspout incident. He’s muttering to himself, which means the wheels are acutely in motion.

  “Backpack. Check. Electromagnet-o-meter. Check. Audio. Check. Digital enhancer. Check. Audio editor. Check. Audio diffuser. Check.”

  He is his own kind of whirling dervish now, zigging and zagging about the attic, collecting and connecting, scratching his head, reconfiguring and scratching again. There are a few zaps, zips, and even a little periodic smoke coming out of what can only be described as his command center over there in the corner, underneath the looming marble run.

  “Okay, so, Henry. What exactly are you doing?”

  “I, my dear sister, am digitally enhancing the mysterious sound from the sea in the general area of the waterspout and electromagnetic field. Remember? That scree of a sound we heard over the waves?”

  I nod. “Do you really think you’re going to find anything?”

  He shrugs. “At least if it’s nothing we’ll know it’s nothing.”

  As I watch Henry peering into the myriad switches, gears, wires, sensors, and lights of his home-fangled audio center, I can’t help but feel a moment of big-sisterly pride that of all the kid brothers in the world I happen to have the only one who may not be able to have a conversation featuring sports, reality shows, or poop humor, but can single-handedly create a DIY electronic analysis center to rival the equipment at the lab of probably the most advanced third-world country.

  2

  WELP, SOMEWHERE IN the middle of all the buzzing and whirring, Henry and I both fell asleep. I don’t blame us. We did start all this around midnight.

  I’m currently having a dream about diving off the Eiffel Tower into the magical Parisian evening, complete with a stray accordion in the distance. I fly peacefully, gliding over the gargoyles of Notre Dame, the ste
ps of Montmartre, and even through the arch of the Arc de Triomphe down the Champs-Élysées when the sound of a beautiful woman sings to me:

  “Evaaaa. ¡Evitaaa! Cielito lindoooo . . .”

  Now the singing turns to calling and I look up to see Marisol. Her straight black hair cascading down her shoulders in the dusty light.

  She’s poking her head through the attic trapdoor and, in my bleary, confused eyesight, looks just like two giant eyes with spiders for eyelashes.

  “¡Ay, mi vida! Why you up here in this creepy place with all these spiders, you are supposed to be sleeping in your clean little beds like two little angels and not here like stowaways on La Bestia!”

  Henry wakes up, rubbing his eyes. “¡Buenos días, Marisol! ¿Cómo estás, hoy?”

  “I am fine except for the fact that my two little precious angels are asleep on this dusty floor in the attic like vagabundos. I didn’t find you in your beds and I started breathing in and out, in and out, like running a marathon. You better not give me gray hairs or I will never forgive you!”

  But she is smiling, relieved she found us, and there’s nothing Marisol can say that wouldn’t come out to us like warm honey on sopaipillas. It’s like getting woken up by a buttercup. Or a marigold. Or a chuparosa. Something lovely and wild that grows in the desert.

  She summons us downstairs to do all the things responsible kids are supposed to do . . . little things like brush our teeth, take a shower, comb our hair, get dressed, and come down for breakfast. Today she is making chilaquiles, which means there is a rush to get to the table before Henry. Trust me. They’re addictive. He has no guilt about polishing them off before I even get there.

  But before we get down the attic stairs, Henry gives me a nudge.

  “Eva, psst,” he whispers. “I found something.”

  “What?”

  He smiles, giddy. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”