Glimpse (17 page)

‘But is she dangerous?’ I asked.

‘Is she able to touch you?’

‘I’m not sure. She hasn’t tried. But no spirit has ever touched me as strongly as you.’ A thrill of embarrassment went through me at the memory of Zachary’s skin on mine, absurd though it was. He might be a ghost, but he was still handsome. I looked at the painting, rather than meeting his eye. ‘Why do you think we could do that?’

He considered. ‘Perhaps because you can see me so fully. It must be part of our connection.’

I nodded. That made sense. Meg had said she could touch spirits better as she got used to seeing them. And I saw no Glimpse as clearly as Zachary.

‘So where should I look for Bess?’ I asked. ‘Unless you know where her body is, I don’t know where else to check.’

He looked at me for a long moment, his gaze piercingly intense. ‘Put on your overcoat and follow me.’

I hesitated for a microsecond, then got my jacket and pumps. I slipped Dad’s phone into my pocket. ‘We’re not going back to the crossroads, are we?’

He pulled a humourless smile. ‘No. We’re staying nearby tonight.’

He walked to the door, and gestured for me to open it. I did; the light from my bedside lamp spilled into the corridor. I stepped into it on tiptoes, praying for the floorboards not to creak, and cast a glance towards Dad’s door. If he caught me now, dressed to go outside, I’d be in big trouble.

Zachary followed me into the corridor, ducking to fit under the low door frame. I pulled the door closed, plunging us into darkness.

‘Where are we going?’ I whispered.

‘Downstairs. Outside.’

I inched forwards, arms outstretched like a zombie, until I felt the wall. Trailing my hand along the wallpaper, I began to shuffle in the direction of the stairs.

Zachary’s gloved hand brushed the back of mine, soft as a whisper, making me jump. ‘Do you mind?’ His words were barely audible. ‘It’ll be swifter. I’m used to the dark.’

I nodded, and held my breath as he wrapped his hand around mine. His touch was light, both solid and not, but it felt even firmer than I’d remembered from Saturday. His leather glove was warm and soft, and I could feel the press of his fingertips against my palm. He led me forwards in the darkness, with confident strides.

‘Stairs,’ he whispered.

We went downwards more slowly, Zachary walking a few steps ahead of me. When we reached the bottom, he guided my hand to the front door handle and let go of me. I opened the door onto the night, letting in a rush of cold air. The night smelled damp; it must have rained while I was asleep. The tree blacked out the sky above us, but there were stars visible between its branches, and it wasn’t as dark as it had been indoors. When I turned, all I could see was Zachary’s tall, dark outline.

‘This way.’ He strode across the front of the inn, away from the outbuildings.

I followed, my feet crunching on the gravel, so loud compared to him. I tugged my coat around me, but my ankles were already freezing where they poked out of my long dress. We headed down the side of the inn and across the lawn. A chill dampness soaked through my pumps and reached between my toes.

All I could see ahead of us was blackness. I trusted there was a point to this venture, but what it was, I didn’t know. I remembered Dad’s phone, pulled it out of my pocket and pressed a button, illuminating a small patch of the path before us with a greenish light. A rabbit froze next to an overgrown rose bush, its eyes wide in the eerie glow before it darted away.

I knew from looking out of the window that the inn’s back garden was huge. But Zachary didn’t go far. He headed towards one of the near corners, and stopped beneath a gnarled tree.

‘Here,’ he whispered.

I shone the phone questioningly in his face. He squinted in the weak light and pointed beneath the tree.

I angled the phone down at the ground, my stomach fluttering sickly as though I’d swallowed a moth. At first all I saw was a tangle of bindweed and ivy. But then I spotted it – the top edge of a stone.

‘Oh,’ I breathed. I bent and tugged the worst of the weeds away. Rain coated my legs and the weeds tugged at the bottom of my dress, but I barely noticed.

Because there was Bess’s grave.

Her headstone was small, smaller than the ones in the churchyard, and the stone was dark and crumbling round the edges. The top right corner had fallen away completely. Its face was barely legible, the carved letters eroded by the years and covered with moss and lichen, but I could read enough to know what I was looking at.

‘Bess Richards,’ I read, mentally filling in the letters that were obscured. 1771. 1789.

And that was all. No ‘Forever in our hearts’, not even a ‘RIP’. The stone was hardly big enough to fit more on it than was already there.

Water dripped down my cheek. I wiped it away, expecting it to be rain, but it was warm against my fingertips. I licked my lips and tasted salt. Tears.

The phone’s light blinked out. I didn’t turn it back on. I crouched in the weeds in the darkness, waiting for the lump in my throat to ease. Black emotions clawed through my body, welling up from some deep place I hadn’t known existed, had no experience of.

She shouldn’t be here
, I wanted to tell Zachary. Nobody would ever know Bess’s grave was here. This wasn’t right. There was no one left alive to remember Ann, but at least people would read her name in the churchyard; maybe someone would wonder, now and then, who she was. But here, Bess – the real Bess, who was more than a girl in a poem – would be completely forgotten.

I stood and faced Zachary. I didn’t turn the phone on again, but my eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to be able to tell he looked solemn, his jaw more chiselled than a gravestone.

‘What’s she doing here?’

‘She isn’t here. Only her bones and her name on a stone. Bess died by her own hand; she wasn’t eligible for a churchyard burial. It could have been worse. She could have been buried at the crossroads like me, and have received no headstone at all.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Perhaps. But I’m glad of it. If she had been buried in the churchyard, we couldn’t have been together.’

‘Why?’

He pursed his thin lips together. ‘I have to remain near my body. I can only be at the inn because of its proximity to the crossroads. If Bess had been interred in the churchyard, she might never have been able to come back here.’

I frowned at him. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Bess and I tried countless times to leave. I can only travel as far as the entrance to the inn’s land. Bess could move further into the village, yet certainly not as far as the church.’

‘What happens if you try?’

‘There is a barrier, like a wall of glass. I can see beyond it, but I cannot pass through it. It was the same for Bess. That’s why I can’t comprehend how she departed. And it’s why I haven’t been able to leave to look for her myself.’

A new emotion choked my throat. ‘You haven’t been further than the inn in over two hundred years?’

‘No.’

I wiped the wetness off my cheeks. I’d been so excited to think the romance of the poem was real, but the reality of it was worse than anything I could imagine. Even while Bess had been with him, they’d been trapped like prisoners, for hundreds of years. And now Zachary was trapped here alone.

No, not all alone.

I frowned. ‘There must be a way for you to leave. Ann’s grave is at the churchyard, but she can be here. And I’ve seen her somewhere else in the village too.’

‘Elsewhere?’ His voice was sharp.

‘Yes, at an old lady’s house. How is that possible, if spirits have to stay near their bodies?’

‘I don’t know.’ He sounded baffled. ‘Ann boasted that she had a headstone in the churchyard, but I assumed her body must have been buried at the inn. There is no other way she could be here. Are you quite certain it was her you saw?’

‘Positive.’ My mind whirred. ‘Which means there must be a way for spirits to move around. Perhaps Bess knows something you don’t – some secret, or a trick of some sort – and that’s how she left.’

‘She would have surely told me.’

I said nothing. An owl hooted above us, mournful and low. I shivered, and looked back down at the shadows that shrouded Bess’s grave. I’ll find you, I promised her. And when I did, I would clear away these weeds and place fresh roses here instead.

I pictured the roses on my mother’s grave; guilt stabbed like a thorn. There must be something broken in my heart that I could feel this bad over a girl I had never met, yet feel nothing at my own mother’s graveside.

I looked at the ground and clenched my teeth before I could start crying again. ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

We walked back in darkness and silence, alone with our thoughts. Zachary must have sensed my change in mood, because without me asking, he guided me through the grounds with the barest touch on my arm.

We stopped at the inn’s front door.

Zachary stood in front of me, close enough for me to smell his leafy, earthy scent. His outline was a huge black negative in the night. ‘I apologize if I made you melancholy.’ His voice was low. ‘It wasn’t my intention.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s nothing you did. It’s nothing to do with you at all. I was thinking about something else.’

‘Do you want to speak with me about it?’

For a moment, I was tempted. If anyone could understand how very alone I felt sometimes, it would be him. But how could he understand a girl who looked at her mother’s grave and felt nothing? No one would be able to sympathize with that. And I was too ashamed to confess it to him. ‘You don’t want to hear my problems,’ I said.

His voice was low. ‘I wouldn’t be so certain.’

I smiled, but with more pain than happiness. ‘I should go inside. Will you be here tomorrow night?’

‘I will. Goodnight, Elizabeth.’

‘Goodnight.’

He turned, and the darkness swallowed him whole.

I stood for a long moment, my hand on the door, letting my heart rate return to normal. Then I went inside, guiding my way up the stairs and along the upstairs hallway by the green light of Dad’s phone. The warm glow of my lamp spilled under my bedroom door, a beacon welcoming me back.

I opened my door, pulling off my coat as I did so. I didn’t register the tingling until the door had closed behind me.

I gasped and moved back up against the wall.

Ann.

‘Oh, Elizabeth,’ she sing-songed. Her voice was sweet, her brown ringlets bobbed around her shoulders as she smiled, yet I was horror-stricken. She knew my name.

Ann tapped across the floor towards me. Delicate brown shoes stuck out beneath the trim of a brown dress. Small hands folded in front of her. But the rest of her body up to her shoulders was empty air.

I pressed harder into the wall. But I stood my ground. ‘Stay away,’ I said.

Ann drifted to my side. ‘How amusing. Just what I was about to say to you.’ Her mouth stretched, showing small, childlike teeth. Her gaze swept over me from head to foot, her pretty face twisting in distaste. ‘I assume you’re enjoying being alive. So stop talking to him, Elizabeth.’

Then she tossed her curls, and vanished out of my bedroom through the wall.

*

I wait on the lawn. Everything’s quiet. The breeze ripples the grass, the rabbits chew. The day is bright with summer sun.

The screech of metal shatters the silence. I start to run. The air fills with black smoke from the car’s mangled body, which I see the moment I turn the corner. From somewhere inside it, I can already hear myself screaming.

Zip.

The door rips open.

‘Get out, get out, get out!’ my mother snarls. She rips at me with her fingernails.

But – and this is new now – I am not looking at my mother. For the first time, I see Ann’s face, peeking over my mother’s shoulder. Her glossy curls frame her expression, equal parts savage and sweet. She stares straight into the wreckage of the car, smiles at me. Then,

‘Get out.’ The voice that joins my mother’s is crystalline, childlike. And then they’re chanting together, a dreadful harmony of hatred. ‘Get out, get out, get out!’

I took a deep breath, adjusted my satchel on my shoulder, and pushed open Meg’s sagging garden gate.

I’d barely slept last night. Zachary had told me Ann couldn’t hurt me, and logic told me it was true, but he’d also said to stay away from her; and I couldn’t get her threat out of my head.
I assume you’re enjoying being alive.
The memory of her words made me tremble. Which was one reason I had walked home with Susie after school. Meg knew about Ann. And, psychic as she was, I hoped she knew far more – about Zachary, about my mother, about how I could master my power. Maybe she even knew where Bess was.

I didn’t want to talk to Meg again, but now, more than ever, I couldn’t afford to wait to find the answers to my questions.

I knocked on Meg’s door, and composed my face into calm determination.

After a long minute, Meg opened the door a crack. For a moment, she looked like just an old, harmless lady, but then she registered me and her expression blackened.

‘You again,’ she said. ‘I told you last time, I don’t have any more to say to you.’

She began to push the door closed; I caught it before she could. ‘Please, Mrs Sanders. I just have a few questions. It’s important.’

Meg frowned at me through the gap in the door.

‘You’re the only person alive who can help me,’ I said, truthfully. ‘And I need help.’

She gave a sigh of exasperation and stepped back. ‘I charge twenty quid a reading. And hurry up. I’m on a schedule.’

I exhaled – I hadn’t been sure she’d even let me in the door – and stepped into the house before she could change her mind. Meg shuffled back down the dim hallway ahead of me, one hand on the wall to steady herself, muttering irritably under her breath.

I followed her into the living room and perched on the edge of the sofa nearest the door. Meg eased herself into her armchair with a groan.

‘I hope you’re not expecting biscuits again. Well, girl? What do you want? Quick, now.’

I placed my hands on my knees, and started with the most conventional question I had. ‘I want to ask you about my mother.’