The Ghosts of Kerfol

by Deborah Noyes

  “Like the baron’s, Susanna Cole’s murder was never solved,” Juliet was saying. “They found her floating in the moat the next morning — you’ll see when we walk around that it’s long since been drained. Police were baffled by strange holes and mounds that had appeared all over the grounds in the night, as if every rabbit in France had gone to work on the property.”

  Meg laughed along with the others, though she wasn’t sure what they were laughing at. Was that funny? Weird, yes, and probably false, but funny?

  “The necklace that had very likely strangled her was never found, though a boy in the village, a suspect, confessed to trying to steal the piece. Something frightened him badly before he could get out with it. In the end, there was little viable evidence, forensic or otherwise.” The wards of the estate had issued a reward for the necklace, Juliet explained, which as far as she knew was still on offer.

  In halting English, the Japanese man said that he would keep his eyes peeled. He enjoyed the phrase so much that everyone laughed.

  There was another, larger English-speaking group on the blanket beside theirs, so Juliet hovered between them awhile, trying to meet each tourist’s eyes without making anyone ill at ease. Another of her many talents. “So together with his grief and the need to conceal from the press that his murdered daughter was also pregnant,” Juliet said, her gaze sluicing over Nick like water, “Jack Cole had the embarrassment of the missing necklace, which he’d removed from a safe he was given access to in the master bedroom.”

  She glided away across the lawn again, all European grace and Chanel No. 5, to repeat her spiel in German. The name was pretentious — what parents in their right mind named their kid after a character in a play who stabs herself to death? But she spoke at least four languages, Meg had noted. Nick must have noticed, too. Juliet was not only good-looking; she was also polished and well bred. She was wearing stockings, for Christ’s sake, and classy Italian shoes on this swampy lawn, which was the only maintained thing about this spook house. And let’s not forget, she had the good sense and smarts to be working for an historical society in the first place, even if her job was telling sensationalized ghost stories to stupid tourists.

  Meg might have earned a scholarship to Berkeley, where she and Nick were both heading in the fall, but she’d felt worse than stupid this entire trip, as if her mind had wandered out of range. When you got right down to it, she’d rather be in Amsterdam, getting stoned, or drinking margaritas in Tijuana. She wasn’t ready for this. For college and couplehood and real life. Maybe it was Nick she (suddenly) wasn’t ready for. Clever, charming Nick, who’d recrafted her application essays and cover letters to get her accepted to not just any college, but the right one. A good one. So they could be together. Little adults, Ethan would say.

  Ethan, who was not skulking around the French countryside with a tour bus full of old ladies, but probably at a bullfight or drinking sherry in some tapas bar in Spain by now. No, not sherry. Beer. Bad, watery American beer, probably. Sherry would be too much like a grown-up. A little adult, yes, which was more and more what Meg felt like.

  Come to think of it, Nick hadn’t spoken to her in any language for almost twenty-four hours — a cold war she only half-remembered the origins of — and she was tired of trying to meet his eye, of how attentive he was to everyone but her.

  Was it just this feeling of being alone in a foreign land with no language, next-to-no money of her own, and Nick being a dick — all imperious and mature — that was bothering her? Nick the Dick, she might have joked back home, but not here. Not now, when a rift had ripped so splendidly between them — splendidly because underneath lived a pulse, surprising and shameful: freedom. It was not Ethan’s voice, though it had to be his favorite word. How long had it taken her to figure that out? A week in Europe? Six days? Did it surprise her? The last time she’d seen Nick’s twin, home in L.A. sophomore year, he was being shipped off to their father’s old boarding school in England. How do you get expelled from public school in California?

  Everyone stood to resume the tour as Juliet circulated a trash bag, but Meg hung back. That house was oppressive in a way she couldn’t explain, the way storm clouds are oppressive, but she was supposed to feel that way about it. That was the point, which made her feel manipulated, which annoyed her even more.

  When that German guy at the hostel mentioned Kerfol the day before, it had sounded fun in a Halloween-hayride sort of way, though she scoffed when Nick fished the listing from his Road Less Taken guidebook. This trip had made her cruel. But maybe she’d been right to resist coming. She sensed it right away, how hollow and bleak Kerfol was; the avenue in had seemed a gray tunnel leading further into their silence.

  She had wanted to tell him something Friday night in that quiet vineyard row under the moon, and he had wanted to ask. The wanting hung between them like a blade, and for every glass of wine Nick refused, Meg had two. By the time he was ready to talk, she could barely stand up and was crooning about moonlight and screaming some Patti Smith song. Maybe he’d laughed at her, with her, and maybe he hadn’t. That part of the night was lost. Erased. Meg didn’t even know how they got back to the hostel and into those colorless, cold sheets, though she did remember reeling at the edge of their narrow cot-bed with Nick’s arm limp over her collarbone, vomit pressing up from some fathomless emptiness inside her.

  I have to ask, he had said. I have to ask you something.

  “Don’t speak,” she’d roared back, playfully holding a palm up in front of Nick’s face. Because she had something to say. Something unspeakable. It would change everything for him. For her, it already had.

  So she’d been nervous, drunk too much wine, though she never drank. Nick thought it was stupid the way kids their age got loaded as if that were an end in itself. The strong vineyard wine had gone straight to her head, and they’d headed back to the hostel with her wobbling and lurching, colliding with his crisp white shirt. The bone in her nose bending on his collarbone, that smooth rise she loved to trace with her fingers, her stinging nose and the sudden smell of him, a woody soap smell, taming all her complaints. Taming her. How did he keep his shirts so crisp on the road in hostels and rented rooms? He put up with uncertainty for her sake, but before you knew it, he’d have his degree and a network to the perfect position at a socially conscious nonprofit that would also pay. Wasn’t that the plan?

  There was always a plan.

  He would have let her kiss him, Meg knew, even in that state. Even reeking and senseless. He had dignity and grand intentions — more than any guy she’d ever known, and she’d known a few — but she could still disable all that with a simple, catlike rise and press of breast against his shoulder blade. She brought it out in him, the worst, and that was the best part of her power, the only reason she could hold her head up in his company. Nick was too good for her, and she knew it, and how could she forgive that?

  Sometimes, young as they were, they seemed like some old couple on a park bench, chained ankle to ankle by habit. On the other hand, she hoped never to be as free as Ethan. As carefree.

  Juliet led them inside and into what she called the west wing, her voice echoing under high ceilings. The checkered wood floors had been recently waxed and reflected a phantom procession in bright tourist clothes. The great hall, as Juliet called it, was full of furniture draped in dusty cloth, and Meg sighed in the face of more relics. This trip was as much Nick’s graduation present to her as his parents’ to him, since she had no money to pay for it, but whose idea was this ruin rising out of the ground like a stone ogre? And these dusty cloths? Wasn’t this trip supposed to be about beginnings? Why didn’t they just end the cold war, shove and shriek and end up a tangle of tongue and raw hairline? Nick had it in him to do that. Never mind his bad-boy twin — Nick had his own dark side, his own wildness, Meg knew, but it was bleak and private, like the moors near where he and Ethan had grown up in the north of England.

  Nick hated to show this side, admit to it even,
but Meg knew it was there. She knew how to access it. It was what attracted him to her, despite their obvious incompatibility where most everything else was concerned. They had a good raw, physical attraction, but only when she pushed him. Pushed him.

  Juliet’s voice droned on, but Meg had focused on the music. Somebody was playing a radio far off, either some historian up in another wing of the house or some neighbor out in the countryside. She imagined a carload of lanky Breton boys heading home from the beach with tans and a cooler in the backseat. How did she get invited on that field trip?

  With a dramatic sweep of her arm, Juliet pulled a sheet off a large gilt-framed painting, and Meg snapped to. Susanna Cole. There was the necklace Juliet kept talking about, though no flapper hairstyle. No beads. And what about the pout you’d expect from a poor little rich girl in exile? The one in the picture looked like she’d lived centuries ago, not as recently as 1926. Meg thought to ask this question, but refrained when she noticed Nick’s shoulder touching the tour guide’s. He was drawn in, standing close to see what she unveiled next.

  “Curators have tried to identify the artist with no luck. The painting was damaged when they found it in the attic back around the turn of the last century. Layered over. They had to scrape down and restore the image underneath.” She reached out. “You can still see a bit of the red paint here. And here.”

  After they’d all had a good ponder, Juliet covered the painting again and led them up a staircase, turning back to Nick. “A minor or at least unknown artist, and the same one . . .”

  The group followed into a small anteroom. “. . . who did the handsome drawing of Anne de Barrigan hanging over that desk.”

  Nick peered up at the faded color sketch in a simple frame.

  “She looks sad,” he whispered when Meg arrived by him.

  She felt her eyes tear up involuntarily. It was the first real thing he’d said to her all day, apart from where to, and how much, and what time. Maybe he wasn’t addressing her at all, but the group, himself, the air. For the rest of the tour, Meg hardly registered anything except that she was tired and her head hurt and she wanted a cup of coffee, nothing fancy. Just comforting. Dunkin’ Donuts.

  They lingered in the baron’s chamber, which had French doors overlooking a courtyard. While the others tuned in to the spiel, Meg looked out at the sun playing off cracked urns and overgrown roses and longed to be out there with her face raised to the sun. What she most wanted was a cigarette. But Nick would kill her if he knew she’d taken one from Ethan before they all went their separate ways at the hostel that morning. Whenever she had a moment to herself, she fished out the bent cigarette to breathe the sweet smell of tobacco, and it reminded her, and made her ashamed again, and she stowed it away once more in her backpack.

  The baron’s room was large, imposing, dark in the corners, so she kept by those French doors and watched butterflies inspect the half-restored garden in the courtyard. She studied the orchards beyond, fruit trees with their distorted limbs.

  Finally it was time to go.

  They had pondered the last ancient object, heard the last bloody spook tale, clutched tight the last waxy banister. The last old lady had ducked out under the servants’ exit at the rear of the house, and Juliet had eased the door closed on its rusty hinges and snapped the decayed lock into place. They were allowed to stand in the sun and contemplate the grounds from the rear of the estate — the stables and abandoned dovecote, the distant chapel.

  Nick stood alone by a trellis that was sinking into the earth and swallowed in vines. Meg walked over, took a breath for courage, and hugged him from behind, hugged him in that nervous, goofy way she used to when they first met back in the seventh grade and she had to hold him still, had to have that subtle, restless energy in her arms without the responsibility of facing it head on.

  “We should come back,” she told the nape of his neck, a challenge, a plea. “At night. When no one’s here. Really get off the beaten path. . . .”

  When he didn’t reply, she whispered suggestively, “I’m bored, Nick.”

  “We should catch up,” he said. The others had followed in single file across and alongside the moat circling the building.

  “Are you scared?” she asked his back, the beautiful, lean curve of that back. Why do I love you best when you’re walking away from me?

  He turned and smiled at her, and the smile hurt like a fall on the ice, like the palms of your hands skidding across the ice. Meg had been a champion skater once. She had played with dolls. She had dreamed of coming to France. She had known Nick. She had always known Nick, it seemed.

  “Of course I’m scared, you idiot.”

  She smiled back at him.

  “Is that what you really want?” he accused. “We’re supposed to be having fun, you know. Will that make this trip fun for you?”

  She nodded eagerly, feeling a wave of guilt, for maybe she just wanted to compare notes with Ethan later, wanted something daring to show for herself, something stupid and reckless that would impress him. Why did it matter now, impressing Ethan, when it never had before? What had changed?

  “And you’ll stop sulking?”

  She nodded, subdued now, solemn. Did he know? Did Nick know? He had to know. Why else the long morning’s silence? The sun was low. The stones of that dismal house cupped each creeping shadow.

  “I will. I promise.”

  He smiled and leaned into her, and she spoke softly into the clean-smelling linen of his shirt, and for the moment, just a moment, Meg was grateful. “I just know you’ve always wanted to do it in a haunted house.” She reached around and flicked his nose. “Haven’t you?”

  When the van parked, Meg let Nick thank Juliet on behalf of them both. She had nothing to say to someone like that. Even, “Thank you . . . Good-bye,” seemed too tiring. They didn’t check back at the hostel. It was their last night in Brittany, and they had nothing to lose. Nick called to have them hold their bags until the next day; they’d fetch them and head directly to the train station.

  They had the taxi set them down at dusk at a nearby crossroads. No point drawing attention to themselves. They’d just reached the entrance to Kerfol when the sun vanished like something hurtling down a well. The dark took Meg’s breath. She reached absently for Nick’s hand, and they dragged their feet until their eyes adjusted, proud when it happened, as if it initiated them into some secret club: We Who See in Darkness. There was a thin, fogged moon, but the night was overcast.

  They hurried. Laughing. Nervy. Meg tried not to imagine the creatures out there in the dark. Were there bears in Brittany? Wolves? What? She should have paid attention more during the tour.

  The night was windless, soundless.

  Meg found a brick-size rock and began to smash at the rusty lock on the rear servants’ door.

  “What about alarms?” Nick stood back, wary. He winced at the noise, so fierce in the silence.

  “We’ll find out, but I doubt it. Look around.” She shrugged. “There’s no money to fix anything. Isn’t that why all these old noble families are renting their places out for tours anyway?”

  The lock snapped and spun a moment, swinging to a stop. And now the stillness felt accusatory.

  Inside the building, Meg could barely breathe for the excitement of it all: the hollow chill of the rooms, the humped shadowy shapes that she knew were sheets, the shifting and squeaking of their rubber soles. The occasional far-off music that today had sounded like radio now seemed to be issuing from the attic, and she was too terrified to wonder, too excited to stand still. A kind of restless energy burned through her. All she could think to do, to calm her nerves and make the next eight hours — which she had insisted upon — bearable, to salvage them and find her strength, was to seize Nick’s hand and draw him up the stairs.

  She knew the big room at the top, the baron’s chamber, had a bed in it still, though perhaps no top mattress or bedclothes. At least they could lie down; he could lay her down and kiss her fear aw
ay, and they could be young again. They did, and he did, and it was as sweet as it had been in a long time, not stormy and rough, as it sometimes was these days with one or the other of them withholding or punishing or playing indifferent, and she slept sweetly in Nick’s arms, dear Nick, familiar Nick, who hardly said a word but let her have this night as if it were the last gift he could give her.

  The sound of some animal in the night woke them. Just a brief yip, almost a bark. “A fox, maybe,” whispered Nick. They lay a long time in the silence, poised for more, but as the silence wore on, they drifted off again, too groggy and edgy to speak of it, to break the protective spell of sleep.

  But then Meg heard it again, intruding into a restless dream. A single, mournful yowl. She sat up in bed, aware now as she hadn’t been before of the dusty smell of the top sheet, shaking Nick.

  “Go look?”

  He snorted. “Yeah, sure. I’ll just mosey out and get my throat cut like every idiotic white boy in every slasher movie ever made. Thank you, no.”

  “Thank you, no,” she mimicked, snidely. “There’s that noise again.”

  “Feral dogs,” Nick offered. “They probably live out behind the chapel and the orchards. I saw woods and fields back there. I’ll bet they smelled the trash from our lunch today. I didn’t see Juliet put it in the van, did you? Maybe there’s a Dumpster out back or something.”

  Meg sat up, shivering, and put on her clothes, then burrowed back under the sheet with Nick.

  The memory came so suddenly, and it was so present and unbearable, that she winced. She nuzzled his shoulder to feel his clean scent, but Nick climbed out of bed. He was walking toward the window and away. Now he was looking out as the memory surged over her like storm water over stones, like wrath. Did she imagine she could forget it, or spare Nick? Life didn’t work that way.

  He stood in the faint gray light of the window as the sound grew louder — there had to be a dozen or more dogs out there now, baying and barking — and it was the bleakest sound in the world, what made people in the Dark Ages fear the Big Bad Wolf, the sound of carnage past or carnage to come. “Do you see them out there?”