Laying a Ghost

by Jane Davitt

  After a moment John’s hand began to move too, tracing down the line of Nick’s spine and back up, his fingernails dragging languidly over Nick’s skin and finding places Nick hadn’t realized needed scratching. Nick arched his back so that John’s fingers could reach a spot just below his shoulder blade and made a contented sound.

  “Aye, that’s about how I feel,” John murmured.

  Nick smiled. There was something about John’s voice, his accent, that was comforting, and Nick didn’t think it was just that it reminded him of how his mother had sounded when he was small ‑‑ her accent had faded after years in the States until, by the time she’d gotten sick, it was barely noticeable. Maybe it was something specific about John, or maybe that was just a romantic fantasy. “God, I’m tired.”

  “Then go to sleep.” John paused and added thoughtfully, “Well, you’ll maybe want to brush your teeth first ...”

  “If you don’t like my breath you can bite me,” Nick grumbled good-naturedly, closing his eyes. He was bone tired and could tell that he’d be asleep in minutes if nothing stopped him, so he rolled over and pulled John’s arm around his waist. “Wake me up if you need anything.”

  He thought he heard John say something in reply, but the words got muddled in his head, and it didn’t really matter because John’s arm didn’t move away, and with that solid warmth behind him, Nick sighed and went from awake to asleep in the middle of it.

  Chapter Seven

  For all that he’d been tired himself, John had ended up going to bed earlier than usual, and that, combined with the fact that he was in a strange bed, meant that he was sleeping lightly. He and Nick had rolled apart at some point, shifting positions in their sleep, so that when John woke fully he was facing away from the center of the bed. It took him a little while to realize that the bed was empty and to backtrack his memories to the sound of the door creaking open which must have been what woke him.

  Rolling over to his side, he waited for Nick to come back from the bathroom, not awake enough to be thinking about more than snuggling up to him, but looking forward to that all the same because it wasn’t something he got the chance to do often ‑‑ ever ‑‑ and Nick fitted against his body like a cat, boneless and warm.

  The louder sound of the kitchen door slamming closed in the wind robbed John of more than his sleepy anticipation.

  He dressed with a speed that cost him a broken fingernail as he snatched impatiently at the zip on his jeans and ran down the stairs, heedless of the darkness.

  He’d seen where Nick was going through the bedroom window, and it wasn’t likely that there was anything lurking in the shadows that filled the house.

  No.

  They’d be over there. In the graveyard.

  Waiting.

  He paused for long enough to shove his feet into his boots, discarded by the kitchen door, and then followed Nick through the fitful moonlight, with the rush of the sea in the distance like the breath of the night in his ears.

  Nick didn’t seem to be in any hurry, which meant that John could tell that even at his own current pace he’d catch up to the man long before he reached the graveyard.

  No, it wasn’t Nick’s speed that concerned him. What worried him was the way Nick moved ‑‑ as if he were drugged. Or maybe as if he were one of those ghosts, himself. He never looked down, but he didn’t put a foot wrong, moving steadily with his head tilted a bit to one side every now and then, listening.

  The thought of what he might be listening to was another thing that concerned John. After a few more minutes, when he’d narrowed the distance between them, he called Nick’s name in a low voice, wanting to see the reaction, but there wasn’t one. John might as well not have been there. He wondered if Nick was even capable of hearing him. Was the man in some sort of trance? Was he awake?

  Less than a quarter of a mile from the graveyard, Nick stopped suddenly, his head shaking back and forth a bit.

  Hoping that Nick was shaking off whatever was making him act this way ‑‑ and John really didn’t want to let the words “controlling him” cross his mind, but they did ‑‑ John hurried forward, joining Nick just as he began to talk. The words were the same as before in that John was listening to one half of a conversation, and if Nick sounded bewildered, John felt completely lost.

  “Nick,” he said cautiously.

  “-- can’t understand you ‑‑ why did God want him back?”

  John stepped around in front of Nick, staring into his face and seeing nothing to show that Nick even knew he was there.

  “I know.” Nick’s voice was gentle, reassuring. For some reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on, it made John’s stomach clench to hear it. “I know you did. But I don’t know what you want me to ‑‑ no!” John and Nick flinched at the same time. “No, don’t ... okay. Okay.”

  And Nick began to move forward again. He would have walked right through John if John hadn’t stepped out of his way quickly enough.

  Silent now, he walked beside Nick, following a path that existed only as an imaginary straight line, leading from the house to, he assumed, a particular gravestone. Stumbling through a tangle of bramble that Nick stepped over without pausing, John tried to work out where they were going. It wasn’t the new part of the graveyard, where the earth was still heaped high over two graves; Nick’s course would take him to the left of that.

  Nick had stopped speaking. John really didn’t like that. When Nick talked to the ghosts he faced them; when he was silent John didn’t know where they were.

  “Supposed to tell me if they’re behind me,” he muttered, feeling panic rise and choke him. Setting his teeth and walking just a little closer to Nick so that their sleeves brushed, he fought the urge to turn and look behind him, knowing that once he did that, his tenuous control would snap and he’d start to run, dragging Nick with him because there was no way that he was leaving him here.

  They were entering the graveyard itself when, all at once, as though whatever force had been controlling him had stopped, Nick stumbled. John caught him by the elbow and steadied him; Nick didn’t acknowledge his presence, but got his feet under him only to begin moving forward again. He was weaving now, going in one direction and then a slightly different one like someone holding a dowsing stick and trying to let it guide him.

  “There ... no, I know,” Nick muttered, heading for the area of the graveyard that housed the less recent graves. Not the oldest ones, but the ones from the past fifty years or so, John thought, straining his eyes to read them in the thin rays of moonlight.

  Nick dropped down onto his knees in front of a gravestone, reaching out to brace one hand on the top of it as if it were nothing more than a convenient piece of furniture. Maybe to him, John thought a bit hysterically, it was.

  “I don’t want to see ...” Nick whispered brokenly, shaking his head. “Please, I don’t ...”

  John moved around to squat beside him, peering at the markings on the headstone and then, when they proved impossible to read, reaching out and tracing the deep grooves of the letters with his finger. Pity and anger were rising within him, and a fierce protectiveness. No one should have to endure this ‑‑ the pain and guilt of a thousand tragic lives, inescapable and unwanted. It might be that the ghosts went on to something better afterwards, and John supposed the people who asked for Nick’s help were satisfied, but he didn’t care about them.

  He cared about Nick. Who didn’t want to see whatever horrors were being paraded in front of him ‑‑ and the graveyard held its share of bodies broken by the rocks and the sea, burned and twisted bodies ‑‑ and shouldn’t have to.

  By the time John had finished deciphering the first name, he was starting to sweat, cold prickles crawling over his skin.

  He knew whose grave Nick was kneeling before.

  He waited to trace out the first letter of the surname, just to be certain, and then turned his head. Nick was muttering to himself now, the sound merging with the soughing of the wind through the
trees that formed a windbreak around the graves.

  “God, no. Don’t. Don’t. Please.” Nick’s hands were over his face, but it was clear that didn’t prevent him seeing what he was seeing. His shoulders were shaking, his voice shattered. “Don’t. Oh God.” He was crying.

  It was cold, but John had better sense than to blame the fact that he was trembling on that. The sensation of something else other than the two of them was strong, terrifying, making his skin crawl. He almost fancied he could hear a voice that wasn’t Nick’s, a low moan of anguish rising and falling, and he rocked back onto his heels and put a hand on Nick’s arm.

  Nick didn’t give any indication of knowing he was there. The man lifted his face, tear-streaked. “I can’t!” he called, the words breaking. “It’s not ... I can’t give you what you want!”

  “What does she want?” John shook Nick’s arm. “Nick, it’s me, John. Wake up and tell me. What does your grandmother want of you?”

  Given that they were kneeling by the grave of a child who’d been born in the spring and never seen summer, it wasn’t hard to guess why Nick was distraught.

  “He died, Nick. Your uncle he would have been, but he died and no one knew ‑‑ no one wanted to know ‑‑”

  John knew a hundred tales about the people on the island, tales told in front of him while he was a child, adult voices dropping to whispers, meaningful glances and silences saying more than the words, tales embroidered and embellished until the plain weave of them was hidden. He knew many stories about his ancestors, so that people who’d been dust before his parents were born seemed real to him, not shadowy figures.

  And he knew the tale of the dead baby at Rossneath as well as Geordie the barman. Better. Geordie wasn’t kin to the Kelley’s, but the McIntyres were. Distant kin now, maybe, but once they’d been closer, and John knew the story.

  Memory took him back to the kitchen of his mother’s house, with him sitting on the sun-warmed step, an apple in his hand, and him trying to bite it with his two front teeth missing. His mother and Auntie Kate had been talking while his mother baked, the rhythmic thud of her rolling pin punctuating her words.

  “-- never was a baby more wanted. Never. Fair beside herself with joy was Kirsty after waiting four years and thinking she was barren, and the minister preaching at her about her wifely duty, the wicked old man, as if it was her fault that she wasn’t blessed ‑‑”

  “But it was a hard birth.”

  “Aye. Twenty hours and the baby breech ‑‑”

  He’d frowned over that, he remembered, because they’d paused and said no more, as if they both knew ‑‑

  “And he’d have been how old when he ‑‑?”

  “Six weeks, no more, and the tiniest scrap of a bairn, with blue eyes and the softest hair, all golden it was, all curls, my mother said.” John’s mother had smiled. “And mine all bald until they were eight months!”

  “They say she was never the same afterwards?”

  John’s mother had sniffed, sprinkling flour lavishly over the wooden table where she was working, so that it filled the air and made John’s nose tickle with a sneeze he held back because he wanted to know about this wee baby and if he made a sound they’d remember he was there.

  “She was fine to look at her, from all accounts. Never shed a tear. Just stared at everyone, with her hands tight around the Bible she wouldn’t put down, and said it was God’s will and he wanted her baby back. And the minister flinched every time she said it because her eyes were ‑‑ John! Have done making a mess there! Be off with you and play.”

  It’d been another ten years before John found out that most people believed Kirsty had killed her baby, smothering it as he lay in the apple wood cradle Nick’s grandfather had made. Believed it without proof, whispered it behind their hands ‑‑ watched and waited after Ian was born ...

  But Ian had survived, and twenty years later so had Fiona, and Kirsty had died without ever confessing to a sin that would surely have damned her in many eyes.

  “Nick ‑‑” John needed him to wake. Really needed it. He grabbed at Nick’s cold hand, gripping it tightly. “Will you not look at me? Please?”

  Nick gasped at the touch of skin on skin, so violently that it was as if he’d been denied air for some time. His eyes were wild, his hand tightening on John’s so that it hurt, not that John cared. “This is why they come to me. Because of this. It’s always this, things like this, and I ‑‑ God, I don’t want this.”

  Nick turned away from John, letting go of his hand and scrambling several feet to the left, digging at the earth with clawed fingers and sobbing.

  “He’s here!” Nick cried. He was staring at something John couldn’t see. “He’s been here all this time, and I can’t ... oh God. I can.” There was wonder in his voice, a horrified sort of wonder as he pressed both hands to the ground in a position that must have hurt his wrist although he gave no sign of it. “Please. Please, you have to ... it’s time. It’s time. No more of this, restless and ... please.”

  John moved closer, not touching Nick now because he wasn’t sure what he was doing and didn’t want to interfere.

  “Yes.” Nick sat back, his damp, earth-stained hand groping for John’s. “There. There he is. Go on. Go ahead.”

  To John’s utter astonishment, he felt something shift; not a click in his head so much as a sliding sensation, an unnatural settling of something foreign and wrong over his eyes at the same time the scent of lavender wafted over him. He held Nick’s hand tighter and looked up.

  Kirsty Kelley’s ghost ‑‑ and that’s what she was, there was no doubting it, despite the fact that she was much younger than the woman must have been when she died ‑‑ was floating just above the ground not eight feet away. She was transluscent, a white, swirling cloud with long hair that defied gravity just as she did herself. She opened her arms and embraced the smaller ghost that had joined her, and the mood of the graveyard around them changed, too, becoming somehow lighter, less frightening.

  “She was looking for her baby?” John murmured as Nick relaxed and let their linked hands come down to rest on his knee. “All this time ‑‑ God, the poor lady.”

  He couldn’t stop staring at her, his mind trying to make sense of what his eyes were seeing and failing, because every time he thought he’d captured a memory of what was before him, it slipped away, like water through his hands.

  Then Nick drew his hand away and it was just the two of them, kneeling on the dew-wet grass with the sky lightening in the east behind them.

  Nick’s breathing was wrong, but he cleared his throat and asked, “You saw them?”

  John nodded. “When you took my hand, I did, aye.” He glanced around. “She’s gone now, has she? Both of them? It feels ... different.” He took his own uneven breath. “I feel different. Christ, Nick, I can’t ‑‑ you do that all the time? I’m ‑‑ I can’t stop shaking ‑‑”

  He felt Nick’s hand clasp his again and it took all he had not to pull his hand away instinctively, but that would have hurt Nick, and John didn’t want to do that, ever. So he brought his other hand up to hold onto Nick and waited for the trembling to stop, burying his head in Nick’s shoulder until it did.

  “Shh.” Nick’s hand was comforting even though it was as cold as John’s own. His other hand stroked John’s hair, coming to resting at the back of John’s neck. “It’s okay.”

  When John didn’t do anything more than nod, the hand at the back of his neck squeezed reassuringly. It astounded John that Nick had anything left in him to give, and that thought made him lift his head and look at Nick.

  “I’m sorry.”

  John shook his head, not prepared to let Nick take on any more guilt, no matter how minor. “No. Don’t be. You didn’t ask me to come after you ‑‑ it was my choice. And seeing her wasn’t frightening. She looked content enough. It was what came before, when I couldn’t make you answer me, and I didn’t know what to do ‑‑” He sighed and sat back, still holding on
to Nick. “I shouldn’t have tried to wake you, maybe.”

  “I knew you were there,” Nick said seriously, watching him. “I could hear you. You were just ... I don’t know. You felt far away. Like she was real and you were the ghost.”

  “Well, I’m not.” John poked Nick in the ribs. “See? Real.” He shivered. “But I’m cold, and can we be going back to the house now?” He glanced around the graveyard. “No one else waiting to have you sort out their problems? Right then.” John stood up and stretched out his hand to Nick. “The first ferry off the island leaves at nine o’ clock. If you were on it, I wouldn’t blame you. It’s been one hell of a welcome that you’ve had.”

  Their hands clasped, and John pulled Nick to his feet, but Nick kept moving forward until they were touching, hip to hip. “I’m not leaving.” Nick spoke softly, but it wasn’t in the tone of voice John would have liked. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “Aye, you do,” John told him, trying to gauge Nick’s mood. “I’m thinking in some ways anywhere else would be better for you than this. Or do you think once you’ve laid every ghost on the island you’ll be left in peace?”

  It came out sounding a little more sarcastic than he’d intended, tiredness and reaction putting him on edge. He felt that since he’d shaken Nick’s hand in the shop he’d not had a peaceful moment, and in some ways it was too much of an alteration to the unvaried routine of his life. He needed time to adjust and it didn’t look as if he was going to get it.

  “Well ... actually, yeah. Or at least a little more peace than I’d find somewhere else.” Nick wrapped his arms around himself.