Dark Souls

by Paula Morris

  The store’s doorbell chimed, and Miranda’s mother stuck her head outside.

  “Miranda! Lord Poole is here — you know, your father’s friend.”

  “Oh,” said Miranda, though she only vaguely recognized the name. The guy across the street caught her eye again, his expression even more intense, and then he stalked off down the street, his open coat billowing behind him like a cape.

  Miranda’s mother emerged from the shop, brandishing the keys and breathless with excitement. Miranda wasn’t sure if it was because they’d managed to find the right place, or because she’d just met a member of the British aristocracy. Lord Poole himself was smiling and snowy-haired, with a V-shaped beard, red cheeks, and wild silver eyebrows. He wore a waxy, dark green jacket and mud-splashed rain boots. He should have a gun cocked over his arm, Miranda thought, and a Labrador trotting at his heels.

  “I come into York so rarely these days,” he said, after Peggy finished her effusive introductions and Miranda had submitted to his iron-grip handshake. “I tend to keep to myself in the country. Very crowded here, isn’t it? Tourists, you know. Present company excepted, of course.”

  “I hoped Jeff would be here by now,” Peggy said, frowning. “I’m sure he and Rob are lost.”

  “Distracted, probably,” said Lord Poole. “York is an early modernist’s paradise.”

  “Miranda’s very interested in history as well,” Peggy told him.

  “Glad to hear it,” Lord Poole beamed. “Like father, like daughter — yes? You know, I have a very old book that may be of interest to you,” he added, patting the pockets of his jacket as though he were looking for it. “I’ll drop it off this weekend.”

  Miranda tried to smile, but she was starting to feel chilled to the bone, not to mention very tired. It was almost sixteen hours since they’d left home, and she hadn’t got much sleep on the plane. Her father should be the one standing here in the freezing street chatting with his BFF, Lord Poole. All Miranda wanted to do was find her bed and collapse on it.

  “That’s really very kind of you,” said Peggy, darting a fierce look at Miranda. Evidently, her mother didn’t think she was being polite enough. “Miranda is a little tired right now — the flight, you know …”

  “Of course, of course!” Lord Poole looked embarrassed. “Please, let me help you carry these bags upstairs. Miranda will have plenty of time to read up on all the local history and mystery. Lots of strange, dark secrets here.”

  “Really?” Peggy fumbled with the key.

  “Oh yes — a lot of old ghosts walking the streets of York, you know. This is the most haunted place on earth.”

  Miranda’s stomach clenched, as though she’d just been punched. She didn’t want to hear this. She really, really did not want to hear this.

  “Ghosts everywhere,” said Lord Poole, warming to the subject. “Viking pillagers and Roman soldiers, Catholic martyrs, plague victims, hanged highwaymen …”

  “Well!” said Peggy, her smile a little too bright. They were getting into the danger zone of Talking About Death, which tended to be off-limits these days in the Tennant household.

  “Haunted tours are very popular, I hear,” Lord Poole blithely continued. “Fun rather than factual, I think. Actors in costume leaping about in the snickelways.”

  “Snickelways?” Miranda was surprised to hear herself speak, because her throat was so dry.

  “Ah … alleys, I suppose you’d call them. Passages. York’s a labyrinth of secret places.”

  Secret places. Ghosts. Miranda couldn’t listen to anything else Lord Poole and her mother were saying. All she could hear was the agitated thudding of her own heart.

  Miranda had never told anyone about seeing ghosts — not the doctors, not her friends, not Rob, and certainly not her parents. She hadn’t told them about watching Jenna get up and walk away from the crushed car, and she hadn’t told them about the other ghosts she’d spotted since.

  Late in the summer, driving along a country road with her father, she’d seen a farmer with an ugly wound spread across his chest, leaning against the route marker at the crossroads. Miranda had cried out in horror before she realized that all her father could see was the cloudless blue sky and a hawk circling the field.

  And sitting by the river once, watching the university team row, Miranda had suddenly felt an eerie, unseasonal cold that shivered up her body from her toes. The gray face of a woman, insubstantial as mist, stared at her from just below the water’s surface, one ghostly hand reaching up through the ripples. Miranda had screamed, leaping to her feet. The girls she was with — Bea and Cami, who were doing all they could to help her miss Jenna a little less — didn’t know what had upset her. They thought she’d been stung by a bee or that she’d spotted a snake slithering up onto the bank. They couldn’t see anything bobbing under the gentle waves of the river.

  Sometimes, Miranda wondered if she’d seen more ghosts and not even realized. But it wasn’t a subject she could exactly discuss. Bea and Cami and the other girls at school had been sweet, but sometimes Miranda saw them exchanging glances. Since the accident, they thought she was messed-up, fragile, kind of unhinged. If Miranda told them she could see ghosts, they would think she was a freak.

  So if York was even more haunted — “ghosts everywhere,” as Lord Poole had said — than Iowa, Miranda didn’t want to think about it. Not yet, anyway, until ghosts started showing up. This much she’d learned in the months since the accident: Ghosts were everywhere, whether Miranda wanted to see them or not.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Miranda — you have to wake up.”

  Someone was calling her name, and Miranda wanted whoever it was to be quiet. She didn’t want to be shaken, stirred, or moved in any way from the soft nest of her bed.

  “Wake up, you idiot.” The voice belonged to Rob. The hand that had just turned on the brightest light in the room probably belonged to Rob as well. “You’ve been asleep for three hours, and Mom says if you don’t get up you won’t —”

  “Sleep tonight — I know,” croaked Miranda. Her eyes were practically gummed shut, but the light was still too strong. She didn’t care if she couldn’t sleep tonight. All she wanted to do was sleep now.

  “It’s already tonight.” Rob sounded smug. “It’s dark outside. We’re going to dinner in an hour. Get up, Dormouse.”

  Dormouse was the name Rob used to call Miranda when they were little, because she was always curled up somewhere in the house reading a book, unwilling to play basketball with him on the driveway or join some frenetic game of tag.

  “Whatever,” she said, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. Rob was standing in the doorway, flicking the light switch on and off to annoy her. The room was small, with black rafters striping the low white ceiling. Rob’s tall frame filled the door. “You should be thanking me for taking the smaller room.”

  “You should be thanking me for bothering to wake you up in time,” said Rob. “You have total bed head and your face is all creased. You look like a fool, as usual.”

  He thumped away down the narrow hall before Miranda had a chance to throw her pillow at him. Rob was eighteen, two years older than she was. Bea and Cami and some of the other girls at school thought he was really cute, but they were wrong: He was just her goofy, vain, bossy older brother, who treated her as an occasional accomplice, servant, and general inferior being. Still, they looked so much alike that people often mistook them for twins.

  Miranda stood in front of the small mirror tacked none-too-securely to the bedroom wall. Peggy said Miranda’s hair was auburn, which meant it was something between red and brown, and everybody else thought it was dyed. Her eyes were brown and ordinary when they should have been green and exotic, but there wasn’t much she could do about that. Jenna used to tease her about her stilt legs and unnaturally white teeth — “Next to you I look like a midget with tooth jaundice,” she’d complain — when they were wasting time on the Internet deciding which celebrities they resembled. Mirand
a didn’t do that anymore. Sometimes it felt as though she didn’t do anything anymore.

  She’d never been someone who had tons of friends and a big social life. Not in Bloomington, Indiana, when she was a little kid, or in the suburbs of Chicago, where they’d lived for almost ten years before her parents got jobs at a new university and moved the family to Iowa. Sometimes she’d felt that she’d never fit in anywhere. Nobody else ever had classical music playing at their house every day. Nobody else had a cat called Bosworth — named for the battlefield where Richard III was killed, as Miranda had had to explain so many mortifying times. In seventh grade, her class had to write letters to some kids in Nigeria, talking about life in America, sports teams they liked, how they spent their free time. When they got to what their teacher called “hobbies and interests,” Miranda wrote that she liked reading and writing. “Those aren’t hobbies, freak,” said the mean girl who sat next to her. “They’re schoolwork. What is wrong with you?”

  Jenna was the first real best friend Miranda had ever had — someone who didn’t think there was anything wrong with her. Someone who didn’t think she was too nerdy or too quiet or too tall. Jenna got her out of the house and made her go to parties, and once she’d even talked Miranda into a double date. Miranda’s guy-for-the-night was on the school debate team and — according to Jenna — a genius. “Dude, he is your only intellectual equal in this school,” Jenna had promised. “And he could totally be the younger brother of Daniel Craig — you know, if Daniel Craig had brown hair and was tall and came from Norwegian-American farming stock.”

  The guy from the debate team might have been tall and brainy, but during dinner he talked on and on, in a loud voice, about which colleges he was considering and how they’d be lucky to have him, and when he kissed Miranda good night, it felt as though a baby was slobbering on her cheek. Even Jenna, who always tried to give everything a positive spin, had to agree that the evening was a disappointment: Her date knew nothing about Jenna’s obsessions — Archie comics, New Wave music (strictly 1979–1984), and soccer. “I can’t believe he’s never even heard of David Beckham,” she muttered to Miranda on the way out of the restaurant. “From now on, we’re only dating Europeans.”

  Unfortunately, there were no Europeans at their school, only Americans. But then someone knew someone else who was hosting a Spanish exchange student, and Jenna managed to wrangle a party invitation. The party was way out of town, at a farmhouse, so Jenna sweet-talked Rob into driving her and Miranda. The Spanish student, a cute guy named Alejandro, knew all about soccer, and he told Jenna that if she came to visit him in Spain, he’d take her to see Barcelona play Real Madrid. “Tonight,” Jenna announced when they climbed back into the car, “was the Best. Night. Ever. I demand to be in control of the radio on the way home.”

  That was the night of the accident.

  Miranda shook her head, turning away from the mirror. If she kept thinking about Jenna, and what happened at that crossroads deep in the cornfields, then she was going to feel sad and guilty and angry all over again.

  At least Rob seemed to be in better spirits these days, she thought, tying her hair into a loose ponytail. For months, he’d moped around the house, too preoccupied to even bother to tease her. Though he could be a tiny bit grateful to her now for taking the smaller room. When she stretched, her arms practically brushed the rafters, and there was hardly anywhere to stand: The bed, a nightstand, and her suitcase, sprawled open on the floor, took up all the space. The one bare piece of wall was consumed by a clanking radiator and the mirror.

  Rob had a better view as well: His room overlooked the market with its canopied stands, the backs of the big stores on Parliament Street, even a church spire. In Miranda’s room, the two dormer windows overlooked the street, but it was impossible to see much apart from the house opposite, the scruffy one with boarded-up windows.

  Miranda pulled back the flimsy white curtains. Rob was right: It was very dark outside, even though her cell phone — no good for calls or texts over here, but useful as a clock — said it was just after five P.M. People were still shopping and sightseeing below — Miranda could hear them, though she’d only be able to see them if she opened the latticed window and leaned out. It was too cold for that, she decided. She wished they didn’t have to go out tonight to eat.

  The crumbling house across the street looked almost close enough to touch. Its sole unboarded window faced into Miranda’s room, but its attic was in total darkness.

  Miranda caught her breath; it was beginning to snow. Soft white flakes fell onto the sill and down into the street. Snow wasn’t exactly a novelty — they got a ton of it in Iowa, deposited in intense blasts every winter. But watching it fall onto the eaves of these gingerbread houses made the snow seem like something out of a fairy tale. It was only a light dusting, the kind that would be gone by the morning, she knew. Still, it was pretty.

  In the attic across the street, a light flickered. A tiny light — the stub of a candle, Miranda could see now, sitting in some kind of dish and placed just inside the window. The rest of the attic was still dark, the candle illuminating nothing but the snowflakes as they hit the pane and dissolved into smears of sugary ice.

  The candle flickered and surged, its flame a long streak of liquid gold. That was when Miranda saw him — not move into place, exactly, or sit down, but just appear, as though he’d been there all along. A young guy, older than Rob but not by much, his pale skin luminous in the candlelight. His brown hair was short and thick, disheveled in a way that suggested he’d been running his hands through it. His dark eyes stared straight at her. He was looking at her and through her at the same time, and it was too late to lean away from the window, to close the curtains and pretend she hadn’t been peering into his room. It was a gaze that pinned her down, in a way that Miranda would think about over and over the next day and still not be able to explain.

  Through the blur of snowflakes, Miranda could see that his was an imperious face, with a long, thin nose and high cheekbones. Despite the pallor of his skin and the tired purple shadows under his eyes, he was beautiful. The most beautiful guy she’d ever seen. She didn’t know how else to describe him.

  That was a word Jenna used to use, talking about the guys she thought were supremely good-looking. “He’s just so beautiful,” she would say of a dead rock star like Jim Morrison, or someone alive but unobtainable like her favorite celebrity crush, David Beckham. None of the boys at their school were beautiful, of course. They might be cute, or hunky, but never beautiful.

  This guy in the window, Miranda thought, would impress Jenna, even. He was so beautiful, she couldn’t take her eyes off him. She didn’t even feel embarrassed when he stared right back at her. This was the second time today she’d been caught staring at a guy — what was up with that? She’d never behave like this back home. Around the boys at school, she always felt shy and dorky.

  “Dormouse — bathroom’s free!” Rob shouted from the hall. “Don’t take all night. Nobody here knows you, so it doesn’t matter if you look ugly.”

  “Okay!” she called nervously. She turned her head toward the door in case her brother came in and caught her staring at some random guy. But Rob didn’t come in, and when Miranda looked back outside, all she saw was a window smeared with snow. The light in the other attic had gone out. The dark-haired guy had moved away from the window. If it had been later at night, Miranda might have thought she’d dreamed the whole thing up.

  Lord Poole took them to dinner at a cozy place on nearby Fossgate because the streets were too slippery to walk far. Miranda skidded on the cobbles, not paying enough attention. She was preoccupied with the guy in the attic window, wondering if maybe she’d see him walking down the Shambles tomorrow. Would he speak to her? Would he even recognize her?

  Halfway down the street, a tiny stone bridge humped over a stagnant-looking canal that was, apparently, the river Foss.

  “Dammed by William the Conqueror,” Lord Poole explained w
hen they paused to peer at the narrow black ribbon of water.

  “Why?” asked Rob, pulling up the collar of his jacket. “Didn’t he like it?”

  Jeff and Lord Poole started laughing. Miranda rolled her eyes, though she doubted that Rob could see in the dark. “He means William the Conqueror built a dam.”

  “So the city’s walls wouldn’t need to go all the way around,” Lord Poole continued. “Part of it was protected by the river.”

  “Can we eat now?” asked Rob. He wasn’t interested in history the way Miranda was. She had no idea how he was planning to occupy himself while he was in York, but she hoped he wasn’t going to tag along with her everywhere, complaining when he couldn’t find an Apple store or moaning about the rain.

  By the end of the meal, the rest of her family looked as tired as Miranda had felt earlier that afternoon. Peggy kept taking her red-framed glasses off and rubbing the bridge of her nose. Because a non-family member was present, Peggy had slathered on more lipstick than she usually wore at home, Miranda noticed, a vivid pink imprint visible every time she tilted back her glass. She was excited about this trip to England: It was a great opportunity, a big break, getting to conduct the orchestra. And she was relieved, too, Miranda could tell — relieved that they were all together, on a family vacation, everyone pretending that everything was fine again.

  Her father was excited to be here, too, so absorbed in the conversation that he was oblivious to the fish-pie gravy dribbling onto his zip-up fleece. He was tall like Rob, and endearingly awkward with his knees and elbows, even though he was old, Miranda thought, and should be more together by now. Actually, they were a tall family — “You Americans are so strapping!” Lord Poole declared — and York seemed like some kind of quaint toy-town. They lumbered away from the restaurant that night like sleepy giants, walking under the twinkling Christmas lights, disoriented by everything Lord Poole was pointing out.