by R. R. Banks
**
Bitsy
“Do you really have to talk like that about him, Granddaddy?”
I had kept my mouth shut while Roman was still in the house, but as soon as he left I couldn’t keep quiet any longer. I was tired of the way that my grandfather looked at Roman, especially with everything that Roman was doing for him, for us. We had agreed not to tell Granddaddy about the plan, but that just made it worse every time he gave him the scathing look that said that he didn’t want Roman around, or said the underhanded comments that were never directly about Roman, but eight paces short of subtle.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” he said, getting up from the chair where he had draped himself and heading back into the kitchen.
I noticed he had completely dropped his ancient mummy walk and was having no trouble at all leaning over into the refrigerator and rooting around searching for his bottle of root beer. I didn’t know which bothered me more, the thought of his body and mind weakening as he got older and him not being able to do the things that always meant so much to him even if he tried, or the thought of him just sitting by and allowing it to happen because he gave up. I felt like I had seen a glimpse of that just then as he dragged himself out of the kitchen. It was as though he could turn his motivation on and off, and may eventually just turn it off completely and let the rest of his life drain away.
I pulled a casserole that I had made a few days before out of the freezer and put it in the oven before going up to take a shower. By the time I got out, the house was full of the warm, delicious smell of the casserole and I could hear Granddaddy in the kitchen chopping vegetables for a salad. They were some of the last of the crop that we harvested from our garden and just the sound of the knife against the cutting board made my throat feel tight and my nose sting with impending tears. I couldn’t bear the thought that that might be my last harvest, the last time that we would pull vegetables from the plants and compare them to see which of us could find the most perfect, the biggest, and the strangest looking. It was another of the parts of growing up that made the farm so precious to me.
We sat down at the table, filling out plates in silence. Finally, Granddaddy looked at me.
“I don’t know how you just expect me to stay quiet and be nice to that man.”
And so, the conversation resumes an hour and a half after it started.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Do you really want me to answer that?”
“You always taught me to be nice to people, especially when they are a guest in your home. What makes him different?”
“I’ll remind you kindly that it’s not my choice to have him as a guest.”
“You made that very clear.”
“What is it that you expect of me, young lady? I know I taught you that you’re supposed to be nice, but that was before I met him. I didn’t know that I would ever have to look into the eyes of a grown man who took the innocence of my only granddaughter, then left her to raise his child on her own.”
I felt myself recoil from the sheer number of issues I had with what he had just said.
“I am an adult,” I insisted. “What happened between Roman and me was my choice. He didn’t take advantage of me. And he didn’t leave me to raise his child. Lorelei is my daughter and I decided to come back here to raise her because I thought that she deserved the home that I had when I was growing up. I wanted you to know her, and for her to grow up on the farm.”
“You came back here because you were ashamed.”
The words stung so much I couldn’t even bring myself to speak. I stared at my grandfather, feeling like I was looking at someone I didn’t even know. Finally, I pushed back from the table and scooped Lorelei from her highchair into my arms. Without even glancing back at my grandfather, I stomped up the stairs to get ready for Roman to come.
Lorelei was already getting tired when I got into my room and I gave her a fast bath before putting her in her pajamas and settling her into her crib. Her sleepy little eyes looked up at me for a few seconds and I smiled, wanting the last thing that she saw before slipping off to sleep to be my smile. I rested my hand on her belly, rocking her gently in the way that had soothed her since she was born. When her eyes drifted closed, her long eyelashes curling on her cheeks, I leaned down and kissed her.
“I am not ashamed of you,” I whispered. “I could never be ashamed of you.”
I hesitated before walking out of the room. Part of me didn’t want to leave her. Granddaddy’s words had cut into me in a way that I didn’t even know if I could explain and I didn’t want to leave her with him. She was sleeping so peacefully, though, that I didn’t want to disturb her, to let my bitterness affect her the way that I had always promised I wouldn’t.
I made sure her monitor was on and closed the door most of the way before going into my room to finish getting ready. By the time that I walked down the stairs Roman was standing at the bottom. He carried a black bag over his shoulder and was dressed far more casually than I had ever seen him, trading in his tailored slacks for dark jeans and what I would have sworn was a black sweatshirt if I didn’t have the deeply held belief that Roman would burst into flames if confronted with something so common as a sweatshirt. At least with him dressed that way I didn’t feel that the fight with Granddaddy had left me throwing on my own pair of tight jeans and dark sweater rather than putting any effort into it.
Silver linings.
“Are you ready to go?” he asked.
“Where’s my grandfather?”
The boyish grin on his face faded slightly.
“He’s not coming with us, is he? You didn’t tell him?”
“No, I didn’t tell him,” I reassured him, “and he’s definitely not going. You saw how he was walking around here. Do you really think he’d voluntarily go into an abandoned house where someone died?”
I decided not to mention the fact that he had totally been faking it.
“After he let me in, he just kind of walked away. He didn’t mutter anything under his breath as he went, though, so I’m going to chalk that up to progress.”
I looked at Roman, staring into his eyes as my grandfather’s words repeated through my mind. No one had said those words to me since I came back. I knew that there had been whispers. Plenty of the women around the Hollow had given me those looks and murmured the bigger I got, and then even more when Roman came. Of course, there had been the Ladies League horde that had all but called me a whore and showed me the stones they were polishing up for me. But my reactions to those people had been like the snap caps people liked to throw on the Fourth of July. They were fast and intense, but fizzled out fairly quickly, leaving only the smell of sulfur and a lingering ringing in my ears. What Granddaddy had said, though, affected me in a far worse way.
The other people had said that I should be ashamed because of what had happened. They made evaluations about me and put their own perspectives on how I should react to it. That infuriated me. I didn’t want to be told what I should feel about myself or my child, or that, somehow, if that wasn’t how I felt I was somehow wrong. With, Granddaddy though, he didn’t tell me that I should be ashamed, but that I was. He forced me to look at the choices I made and see the dark, bitter truth not just about myself, but about what I had done and the future that I planned. I felt angry when he said it, of course, but that anger was a thin layer. My reaction to him had been like sparklers, burning away slowly and painfully. When the fire disappeared, I knew that that thin layer was going to break and all of the disappointment and deep-seated pain that was beneath it would come bubbling out.
“Is something wrong?” Roman asked.
I shook my head.
“No,” I said.
Is there?
“Good. Let’s go.”
We started out of the house and were several yards away when I felt the darkness close around us. A chill went through me and I drew my arms tight around myself.
Well, that doesn’t bod
e well for the rest of the evening. We aren’t even out of eyesight of my house yet and I’m already freaked out.
The night sky seemed to have gotten the memo from Roman that tonight was all about the creepiness because the dark clouds of the earlier rainstorm had lingered, dulling the moonlight until we could barely see any of the illumination by the time we were far enough away from the house that I could only see its outline when I glanced over my shoulder at it. Though I had walked the path between my grandfather’s house and my mother’s house countless times throughout my life, the darkness had me feeling disoriented and I stumbled. Roman reached down and grabbed me by my arm before I could fall, setting me on my feet and holding me still until I was right again.
“Maybe it’s time to break out some of the supplies,” he said.
“Supplies?” I asked.
Beside me I felt him take the black bag off of his shoulder and pull it around in front of him so that he could dig through it. He took out a flashlight and handed it to me, taking out another before putting the bag back in place.
“Is this where you ran off to before dinner?” I asked. “To stock up?”
“You’d be surprised at how incredibly difficult it is to find anything in Whiskey Hollow after 6 PM.”
I laughed.
“No, I wouldn’t. You’re just lucky it’s Friday night. The stores were open late. Usually everything closes at 5.”
“Wow.” Roman flipped his flashlight in his hand then caught it. “Well, none of this stuff came from the Hollow. I found exactly one flashlight at the general store and I don’t think that they’ve manufactured the style in your lifetime. These required a drive up to town.”
“Well, aren’t you fancy.”
I turned on the flashlight in my hand and gave an involuntary shudder as the bare beam cut through the darkness ahead of us.
“I’ve always hated the way flashlights look in the dark,” I admitted.
“Why?” Roman asked as he turned his own light on and blasted through some of the shadows ahead of us.
“I don’t know. It’s like the little bit of light just makes me feel more vulnerable. Somehow it makes the darkness outside of those beams seem…darker.”
He stepped up closer to me.
“Don’t worry. I’m right here. There’s nothing out there that I’ll let get to you.”
Knock on wood. Cross my fingers and toes. Throw salt over my shoulder. Spit on my fingers. Burn some sage.
I had never considered myself a particularly superstitious person. Not since I had outgrown my nightlight when I was a little girl. Admittedly, there were a few times when I had watched too much late-night TV during October and started to question whether or not I believed in ghosts, and sometimes those riveting conversations with myself had devolved into debates over whether spirits were actually the cognizant, intelligent manifestations of individuals who were capable of understanding their presence and interacting with those around them or just impressions of lingering energy that could be felt but not engaged with by the living. But, I generally followed those conversations with sleeping for as long as I could and avoiding candy corn for a few days. Now as I was making my way through the eerie night toward the previously forbidden corner of the farm, I was starting to feel like all of that superstition and fear that hadn’t been around was suddenly rearing its head. I flailed at the feeling of something rushing toward me, thrashing at it with the flashlight and jumping closer to Roman.
So, fear of the dark, we meet again. You’ve chosen the perfect time to show back up, as I try to beat the living hell out of a moth.
“Are you going to be alright?” Roman asked, obviously trying to keep the laughter out of his voice.
“I’ll be fine.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Bitsy
I felt like I was breaking the rules as we moved past the last of the bare peach trees and started to approach the corner of the farm where I had never been allowed to visit. It was that feeling that I used to get when I would climb into the back of a pickup during high school and go for a milkshake after school rather than heading right home. There was a flutter of nervousness in my belly, but also a flicker of excitement. Of course, back then the worst that could be waiting for me was Granddaddy glaring at me over his evening reading of the Holler Holler. Now I felt like if something went wrong it was going to have much more grave consequences.
I shuddered.
Not the best choice of words.
I stayed close to Roman as we went, trying to convince myself that it was because it was just good common sense that if we were going to be walking through the dark we needed to stick together so that we could stay safer from any obstacles in our path or wild animals, and not because I hoped that if there were any ghosts around they would see Roman and be intimidated by him. We held our flashlights out in front of us as we walked, but I pulled mine further to the side each time the lights got close to one another. Finally, Roman looked down at me.
“Why do you keep doing that?” he asked.
“I thought that ghost hunters weren’t supposed to let their beams cross.”
He shook his head at me and laughed.
“That’s Ghostbusters, not ghost hunters. And proton packs, not flashlights. Seriously, have you never seen a movie?”
I glared up at him.
“Again. How old are you?”
We continued on toward the house, me letting our flashlight beams cross and play indiscriminately, until it finally came into view, dark and foreboding against the sky. I stopped still, feeling like I couldn’t get any closer. I didn’t understand how such a tiny house could look so terrifying. Roman reached down between us and I felt his hand wrap around mine. The squeeze of his grip made me feel more confident and I let him guide me the rest of the way toward the house.
“Look,” he whispered when we were within a few feet of the front porch.
He lifted his flashlight so the beam touched the front door and I gasped.
“It’s open,” I said.
Roman nodded.
“Let’s go find out who – or what – opened it.”
I fell into step behind him out of sheer terror. I didn’t want to go inside the house, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to be left standing by myself out in the open outside of the house. Besides, my curiosity was starting to take over and part of me was eager to find out just what happened in that house that was causing me to receive letters, apparently from beyond the grave.
Roman stepped up to the door and reached for it. Before his hand could touch the doorknob, however, the door swung shut, slamming in our faces. I cried out, quickly covering my mouth with my hand. Roman looked at me and pressed a finger over his lips to quiet me,
“Sorry,” I whispered.
He reached for the doorknob again, but it wouldn’t budge. He shook the knob and pressed against the door, but it stayed firmly shut.
“It’s locked,” he said. “Let’s try this way.”
We made our way across the shallow porch and stepped down off of the ragged side. Roman shined his light again, this time illuminating the cellar door.
“I don’t know if that’s safe,” I said. “That house hadn’t had anyone in it in decades. We have no idea if the structure has any integrity left.”
Or what might have moved into the cellar when Steven McAllister checked out.
“I think it’s worth a shot,” Roman said.
I nodded reluctantly and we walked toward the cellar door. He leaned down and moved the ancient latch out of the way, then grabbed the handle. The door opened easily beneath his hand, almost too easily, and a dusty, stale smell rose up toward us. We each took deep breaths and started down into the cellar. Our lights barely penetrated the darkness, but through the hazy beams I could see shelves lining the walls, bowing with age, but still holding up cans and jars of food. The sight sent a chill through me and I shuddered. There was something so eerie about seeing that food still sitting there, unopened, caught
forever in the moment of potential from when it was placed there with every intention of being eaten.
I started to express this to Roman, but he held up a hand.
“Shhh,” he said. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” I asked.
“Listen.” We both listened for a few seconds and he pointed up toward the ceiling. “That. Do you hear it? That music?”
I strained for the sound and heard delicate music coming toward us from some unseen room of the house as though someone had opened a music box. Roman looked at me, his eyebrows raised, and then started toward the door that led upstairs.
“Roman!” I hissed, but he didn’t stop.
I hurried to catch up with him, pressing against his back as he climbed the stairs and reached the door that would lead into the kitchen. As he opened it I heard a gasp and saw a flash of light move across the dark expanse ahead of us. Roman stepped into the room and I followed him.
“What was that?” he asked. He looked around, raising his voice. “Who are you? If you’re here, give us a sign.”
As soon as he said those words, I heard several footsteps in the room behind me. I squeezed my eyes closed, not wanting to turn around but knowing that I had to. I couldn’t see anything in the room and Roman’s hand touched my back, guiding me forward. We walked together across the kitchen and into the room I soon realized was the living room. Ahead of us I saw a sofa.
“Look,” I whispered. “There’s the sofa where they found Steven McAllister.”
Roman narrowed his eyes as if trying to see better in the darkness, then lifted his flashlight, letting the beam fall onto the sofa where it illuminated a freshly carved jack o’ lantern. I gasped, dropping my flashlight as I stumbled backwards. Right before my eyes, the jack o’ lantern suddenly illuminated, its ghastly features glowing in the darkness of the living room.
I screamed with all of the breath inside of me and took off running. Not even recognizing if Roman was behind me, I ran through the living room, across the kitchen, down the stairs, through the cellar, and back out into the night. Roman soon fell into step behind me and we ran together across the grounds, weaving through the orchard and along the pumpkin patch until we were back in my mother’s house. Roman slammed the door and locked it, then turned to me.
