Haunted (14 page)

“I'm their only child, you see,” he said. I buried my head in his shoulder. “That's why I want to make sure Tabby makes it.”

“You're incredible,” I said. And I meant it. I'd known him for less time than any other guy I'd ever kissed, but his spirit was golden to me. Shimmering like it could break through his skin. What a good and pure soul. I was so lucky to have met him. He couldn't resolve his own parents' sadness, so instead he turned to help mine.

“You are, too,” he said, giving me that slightly crooked, sexy smile. “I think we were meant to be together. We're like a posthumous Romeo and Juliet.”

I laughed. “Well, Juliet only
pretended
to be dead the first time,” I said. “And our families aren't fighting.”

“You're so literary,” he teased. “If you'd gone on to college, would you be an English major?”

I swallowed hard, all laughter gone. “Don't go down that road,” I said. “We can't think about what might have been.”

“ ‘Down that road.' That's funny,” he said.

“Crap! Sorry.”

He shrugged and ran a soft palm over my cheek. “We wouldn't have met if we weren't dead,” he said. “You'd still be in California, right? Your parents only moved to get a fresh start and try to create a new life where there were no bad memories?”

I nodded.

“So the universe . . . or the antiuniverse . . . brought us together.”

“Maybe we're also meant to take care of Madame Arnaud,” I said. “Like you said, maybe that's what we need to do to ‘graduate.' ”

We kissed until I didn't hear the TV anymore, until I would have done anything for him.

He rose up from me. “No,” I said, “Come back.”

He gave me a long, reluctant look. “We should be thinking of Tabby,” he said.

Ashamed, I nodded.

“We're so forgetful, like the way we couldn't ever seem to get back to that servant's chamber to fetch her diary,” he mused. “It has to do with . . .”

“With our major problem regarding living?” I prompted with a wry smile.

“Yeah. It's like part of us is asserting our right to ‘rest in peace,' but the other part knows we have to do something.”

It made sense. Bit by bit, we were learning more about our condition. Death was like an upper level class. I needed Bethany to help me study for it.

Mortality 101.

 

Channeling my intention, I instantly moved with just a thought into Tabby's room. I rushed to her crib: empty. I looked around quickly, my heart thudding in my chest: her toys were all put away, and she was not playing anywhere here.

I tried the living room.

She was there with Mom and Steven. She was sitting on the floor flipping pages of a board book, looking at the pictures.

Mom was in her robe, yawning, so it must be morning. Tabby had survived the night although I'd spent it on Miles's bed instead of protecting her.

But of course Madame Arnaud had left her alive. She wanted me to find someone else for her. My terrible task still lay ahead of me.

“Thank God, little sweetheart,” I said. “I'm sorry.” I bent down and kissed her, or the best I could do, on her forehead.

She stiffened.

Whoa
.

I did it again, and she batted at me as if I were a fly.

So I could affect her! She felt me! A rush of joy came over me, and the sneaking feeling that maybe there was a way out of all this. If she could feel me, I could get through to her.

When I'd tried to take her from Madame Arnaud's arms, there'd been so much commotion I hadn't registered any reaction from her, simply my own failure to lift her or hold her.

“Tabby, it's Phoebe,” I said. “Phoebe, Phoebe, Phoebe.”

She didn't see me. She didn't react. Still . . .

I kissed her again and saw her eyebrows momentarily flicker into a frown.

“Anne, what's this on Tabby's arm?” asked Steven.

Standing next to me, he had noticed the puncture wound.
Nice one, Steven!
I loved the look of concern on his face. What a good man.

“I told you about it,” Mom said. “I think there's an exposed nail in her crib. I thought you took care of it.”

“I did look at the crib,” said Steven. “But I didn't see
this
.”

He showed her the puncture wound, now with a vibrant yellow and blue bruise around it. Tabby must've pulled off the layers of Band-Aids that had previously covered it. I watched avidly as he ran his index finger over the injury. Tabby winced and pulled her arm away. “You think a nail caused this?”

“It's all I could think,” said Mom. “It's looking awful.”

“Is it from her last round of immunizations?”

“No, that was closer to her shoulder.”

“Is she up on her tetanus shot? We don't have to worry about that, do we?” he asked.

“Oh, she's covered. She had to get every shot possible to get on a transatlantic flight.”

They both looked at the wound, troubled . . . but not scared.

“Well, if this is the worst thing that happens to her, we'll be getting off pretty easily,” Steven said.

Mom looked at him levelly.
Oh, don't go there!
I thought. I could tell she was going to start thinking about me. I represented the worst thing that could happen to a child.

“Sorry,” he said. “Slip of the tongue.”

“That's fine,” she said, in a tone that was trying too hard to be bright.

“Tell them where it's from!” I said fiercely to Tabby.

“Lady drank,” Tabby offered up. I gasped, but I wasn't sure if she was following my dictate, or simply reacting to the attention Steven was paying the bruise.

“Lay dee drank?” Mom laughed, kind of forcedly. I could tell she was doing her best to steer her mind away from the darkness of me. “Do you mean
la-di-da
?”

“Lady drank,” Tabby repeated. “She use straw.”

“That's right,” Mom cooed delightedly. “We do use straws when we drink sometimes! Do you want a straw?”

“Okay,” said Tabby.

Mom said excitedly, “She's getting so talkative! And the odd things she remembers. Straws, for Pete's sake. I'll get her some next time we're out.”

“Could be a good way to transition away from sippy cups,” said Steven.

And that was it. On to a new topic. They hadn't made the connection that Tabby was explaining about her injury. Lady drank: if only they had listened better! But what person in their right mind would ever reach the conclusion that someone was putting a straw in their child's arm to drink her blood? They put ointment on Tabby's wound and covered it with a fresh Band-Aid, all the while talking about language development and how Tabby was making great strides.

“She's learning faster than—” Mom started to say, but then stopped. The only other toddler whose ability to talk she'd monitored was me, years ago.

I stayed with them for hours. My thoughts drifted to Miles, now that I was convinced Tabby was momentarily safe. Why had we been separated? I wished he was here right now, his chin rubbing against my temple as we together exulted over Tabby's ability to feel me.

I decided to try again. So Mom hadn't heard what Tabby was saying—the same way she didn't hear me, before or after my death—but maybe with different, simpler words it would work. I bent down to Tabby's level.

“It's me, Phoebe,” I said. I kissed her forehead, then each cheek in turn. I loved to see how she slightly winced. She was aware of me all right. “Phoebe. Phoebe loves you.”

I finally got something out of her after dozens of attempts.

“Phee,” she said.

 

I was in the library, a few feet from the lectern that held the book on the Arnaud family history.

“Hell yeah!” said Miles. He ran and threw his arms around me. I reveled in his embrace and pulled his head down for a huge, lingering kiss.

“Oh my God,” I said. There was no way to express the emotions he made me feel. He stepped back and held my face in both of his hands, looking at me as if I was the best thing he'd ever seen in his life. Or the best thing he'd ever seen in his death, I guess. There were those gold flecks in his eyes that I'd been longing to see again, buried deep in the blue of his irises. His jaw was covered with light stubble: did he have to ghost-shave here in our world? What determined how our bodies appeared when we didn't really have bodies?

We kissed again, and I paid attention to the drag of his whiskers on my skin. That felt real.

“I've been trying to bring you here for days!” he said.

“It's been days?” I frowned. “It didn't seem that long.”

“I don't know,” he said, frowning in turn. “Time is very . . . wiggly.”

“Whatever, I'm so happy to see you,” I said. “I missed you.”

“You have no idea,” he said. “I don't think I've ever wanted to see someone so much.”

I felt a quiver of sensation straight to my gut. For a moment, my head clouded and I felt like I couldn't even think. “How'd you bring me?” I managed to ask.

“I just thought about you in so focused a way that I think it eventually pulled you. I'm getting better at it. Just before you came, I literally felt a tug like . . . I don't know, like there was a rope embedded in my chest and you were pulling it.”

“I've felt that, too,” I said. “After I realized I had drowned, I tried to reach you, and it felt like that.”

He nodded. “That tug,” he said. “It's you, or it's me, or it's something else.”

“Right before you pulled me here, I got Tabby to say my name.”

His eyebrows shot up in excitement, but he shook his head. “Brilliant. The one person who is open to the idea of you is also the one who has the least authority.”

“If I work on it, maybe I can coach her to say things,” I said. “Get a message through to Mom.”

“I'm sorry I pulled you away, then,” he said. “You've been a lot more effective than I have.”

“It's okay,” I said. “It's worth it to see you. And she's safe now, with Mom and Steven.”

“You look fantastic,” he said, reaching out to touch my hair. “Never seen you in a ponytail before.”

I almost couldn't bear the intensity of how his expression made me feel. I buried my face in his chest, needing to break the power of his gaze. His arms wrapped around me, and we stood there for a while just breathing together.

Our version of breathing, that is.

When I was calm enough to look at him again, his face looked thoughtful. The mood had shifted.

“Let's go,” I said. “Let's see if Eleanor's in her room.”

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Constables broke up a fight at the Boot and Brick Pub
yesterday, with Mr. Matthew Billcock suffering the brunt of
injuries. He was treated by Doctor Wood at his dispensary and
is in no serious danger. Billcock was set upon by Mr. Joseph
Taylor and Mr. Andrew Wright, and witnesses say he offered
up no fight, submitting to the beating. The dispute apparently
arose over Billcock's masonry work at the Arnaud Manor. He is
a sculptor, and his family, dating back to his great-grandfather,
has fashioned funerary monuments for the Arnaud dead
since the mid-1700s.

 

—Grenshire Argus
, April 4, 1833

S
he sat on her bed, looking out the window. One finger hovered an inch from the glass, tracing the legend
Poor Little Babes
. Dressed in a long black dress with an equally long white apron over the front, she also wore a cap that covered most of her hair. Her face was pretty in a sober, sad way.

As we approached, she whirled around, I think just as frightened by our entry into her secret room as by our modern clothes.

“Eleanor,” I said. “We need your help.”

She stood up with a shriek that made me cringe. She dashed between us, out the little door.

“Wait!” called Miles. “Wait! We're against Madame Arnaud! We want to stop her.”

She turned back around again, eyes blazing, to point her finger at me. “Looking the way she does?” she said defiantly. “I won't help you procure children.”

“I told you,” said Miles to me. “You look like Madame Arnaud.”

Given Eleanor's reaction, I guess maybe he was right. “It's a coincidence,” I said. “I'm not an Arnaud. But my sister is, and she's in danger.”

She hovered in the doorway, ready to bolt if this was a trick.

“My family moved in here. They're still living. My sister's only two. Madame Arnaud has already . . . she's already. . .” I couldn't say the words. I looked at Eleanor helplessly. Her face showed compassion. I mustered the breath to continue. “We know you were brave. We saw what you . . . wrote . . .”

She frowned.
Oh
. We hadn't considered the reality of telling her we'd read her diary. To us it had seemed like a historic artifact, with no personality attached to it anymore. She might bristle, though, that we'd gone through her things.

“You read my diary?” she asked. “But how? We can't touch things.”

She came back into the room and tried to pull her trunk back from the wall. Her hands went straight through it. Miles turned to me with narrowed eyes.

“I couldn't pull it back, either,” he said. “What's different about you, Phoebe?”

“I don't know!” I moved the trunk, opened the secret drawer, and retrieved her diary, rifling through the pages. I held it out to her and she couldn't take it. Her fingers, filmy and gray, passed through the red leather. Miles reached out a hand and his too went unfaltering through the volume as if it weren't there.

“You're special, miss,” said Eleanor.

“Please don't call me that. My name is Phoebe.” I hated the idea that she still felt part of the serving class, that she was somehow not on my level. “And this is Miles.”

She nodded at both of us and stopped herself just on the edge of giving a curtsey.

“We didn't mean to violate your privacy,” said Miles. “When we read it, we thought it was a hundreds-year-old volume that might help us understand how to defeat Madame Arnaud.”

“It
is
a hundreds-year-old volume,” she said, “and I forgive you for reading it. I haven't written in it for centuries. Please, sit.”

She sat on the floor while we sat on her small cot. I looked down at her head, bowed in its starched white cap. This wasn't right. Almost of one accord, Miles and I slid down to the floor next to her. It was worth it to see the look pass through her eyes.

“So, please tell us what you know,” Miles said.

“There's one thing I didn't write down in my diary,” said Eleanor. “Because I was, shall we say,
separated from my life
before I got the chance to chronicle my deed.”

She paused.

“I tried to kill Madame Arnaud. I stabbed her in her bed one night.”

Whoa
.

“Nice one,” murmured Miles.

I wanted to hug her. She'd taken action—and apparently died for the risk she took. “What happened?” I asked.

“I was her lady's maid and therefore entrusted with all kinds of duties in her bedchamber. I waited one night until she fell asleep, and then I stabbed her with my knife.” She looked at us with pale gray eyes. “I made sure she was dead. I stabbed hard. The mattress was ruined beneath her.”

I sucked in my breath. Madame Arnaud had written about this—the bed had been filled with swan feathers.

“But yet she lives,” she continued.

“When she awoke,” I said, “there was no blood. She only saw the knife and the cut mattress.”

“Aye,” she said. “There are magical forces that protect her. The house returned the blood to her.”

“The house?” exclaimed Miles.

I watched her face avidly. This was not a new idea to me, that the house was in collusion with Madame Arnaud. For a second, I saw how it might have happened, the mattress plumped with blood like a sponge, and how it would roll her over and drip into her half-open mouth, replenishing her.

“There are dark forces at work in the manor,” Eleanor said. “I used to talk quite a bit with the stable hand Austin, who thought it was built on a pagan site. His mother knew a lot of the lore, and he shared it with me. They still call this Auldkirk Lane?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Auldkirk means ‘old church.' ”

Miles nodded. “Of course. I'd noticed that but never thought about it before.”

“We think the manor was built on a pagan ritual site, and that Madame Arnaud's evil is somehow connected with the ancient powers here,” she said.

“Is Austin still around?” asked Miles.

She shook her head. “I've looked for hundreds of years. If he's here, I can't reach him.”

“What happened when you stabbed Madame Arnaud? I mean, what happened to
you
?” I asked.

“It looked like she had died, and I congratulated myself on such a tidy job. Why had no one tried to do it before, I thought, with myself so brave. I went to my bed; practically singing in the hallways, I was. We were all released!”

She straightened the lines of her apron. While Miles and I sat Indian style, casually, she was kneeling to protect her outfit.

“The next morning, I woke to hear the house at its customary business, and the girl who laid Madame Arnaud's fire chattering about some dream Madame Arnaud had told her about. She had lived through being stabbed. Not just stabbed: pinned to her mattress by my knife. I was in despair, and knew she would torture me for my treachery. So I left service immediately.”

“You did well,” I said earnestly. “I'm surprised you're still . . . here. You shouldn't be plagued by guilt like all the other servants are.”

“Oh, I'm plagued nonetheless,” said Eleanor. “And I'm not the only one. I had heard rumors throughout the years that madame had survived at least several other attempts on her life.”

“Stabbing didn't work,” said Miles. “What will?”

She gave us a very, very, very old smile. A smile that expressed the centuries she had spent wishing for something that just wasn't possible. “Nothing will.”

“I don't believe that,” said Miles.

“You're dead,” she said. “You can't hold a weapon. And you can't fight the house's power.”

“Phoebe holds things,” he pointed out.

“What else do you know about the original pagan site here?” I asked.

“Not much. It may have been a place of sacrifice, which makes sense because of spilled blood. Austin said there was once a powerful yew tree on the estate somewhere, the source of power.”

“You never found it?”

“No. I think it had been cut down by villagers who feared its strength.”

Miles whistled between his teeth. “I just thought of something,” he said. “She's essentially a vampire, right? Except still alive instead of undead? What if we used garlic or . . . what is it, a silver bullet?”

“A silver bullet is for werewolves. You're thinking of a wooden stake,” I said. “But I don't think she's a vampire.”

“I don't know this word,” said Eleanor. “But I believe Madame Arnaud tapped into the unholy properties of blood that can be unlocked for some. Have you heard of the medieval Hungarian woman Elizabeth Báthory?”

“No,” I said.

“She bathed in the blood of virgin peasants to keep her skin fresh and youthful. She also, if the victim was beautiful, drank the blood.”

“Sounds familiar,” said Miles.

“She even began a young woman's academy to ensure a fresh crop of women,” said Eleanor. “She is blamed for the deaths of six hundred women.”

“But did she extend her life, like Madame Arnaud has?” I asked.

“Perhaps she might have, if she had continued her foul practice,” said Eleanor. “Her crimes were discovered and she was imprisoned like an anchorite in her own castle. She died four years later. Being away from the source of her power for that long a time could explain her death.”

Miles looked at me. “How long has it been since Madame Arnaud has entertained a young visitor?”

“Madame Arnaud drank from Tabby,” I reminded him. “She didn't drink everything, thank God, but she drank something.”

“Of course,” he apologized. “I'm sorry. How could I forget?” His hand on his thigh formed into a fist.

“It's okay,” I said. “There's so much going on.”

Eleanor looked thoughtful. “Madame Arnaud must be weak now from years of not feeding—until recently, of course. But she isn't helpless, not by a long stretch.

“Miss . . . I mean, Phoebe, you can touch and hold things?” asked Eleanor.

I cast my mind back, cataloging the things I'd been able to touch in the manor.

It wasn't that I had been paralyzed in trying to select a pen to undertake the automatic writing . . . it was that I had tried and not been able to. Much like trying to touch Tabby, I had attempted to pick up a pen and my fingers had drifted through it. I had somehow blocked that out because it didn't jive with my version of reality. But now I remembered: my hand sank through the pencils until it came to rest on the solid wood of the desk. I
could
touch the desk.

What was the rule here? I could put a hand on existing elements of the house, but not modern things or things my family had brought?

I hadn't been able to touch Steven's printer or the paper in its tray. If Madame Arnaud hadn't fanned the pages out for me so each was visible, I wouldn't have been able to read them. And when I'd tried to gather them up to show Mom and Steven . . . that's when I had suffered one of those time blips. My mind was rebelling from the confusion of not being able to touch them.

“I'll be right back,” I said to Miles and Eleanor.

I
focused,
just the way I'd once called Miles to me. I gave over all my intentions and suddenly I was where I wanted to be, back in Steven's den. I tried the pencil cup and printer again: untouchable. I walked back out into the hallway, constantly testing my ability to touch. Paintings on the wall, furniture, lamps: all these things had texture and weight for me. But Steven's briefcase? No.

I walked down the hall, skirting a few servants who gave me wide berth and curtseyed as they passed.

Tabitha's crib, which had been here from the manor's original nursery furnishings? Yes.

Her blanket from home? No.

I smiled to myself. I could touch things:
Arnaud
things. That could be very helpful in the fight. But the smile instantly dropped from my lips.

I was remembering the night I'd watched the shadow show in the nursery. Another horrible truth my mind had protected me from.

That night, like Eleanor, I had been brave. I had tried to pick up my sister, and my hands went straight through her. I'd tried to push Madame Arnaud away, and my hands were made of air.

“Please . . . leave her alone,” I'd pleaded.

Madame Arnaud had simply laughed. “I think not,” she'd said.

In that complete and utter helplessness I'd sunk to my knees and watched the shadows playing on the wall. I had
tried
.

I returned to the two in Eleanor's room.

“—and her eyes,” Eleanor was saying.

They both jumped when I reappeared. “What were you saying?” I asked.

“Nothing, miss,” Eleanor said. “What did you learn?”

I didn't correct her using the honorific “miss” for me this time, as I had the uncomfortable feeling they had been talking about me.

“I can touch things original to the house,” I said. “But not Madame Arnaud herself.”

“If you can use a weapon, all that matters is that the weapon touch her, right?” Miles asked.

“But I stabbed her clean through,” said Eleanor, “and all for naught.”

We sat there in silence.

What could we do? I knew elsewhere in the house, Madame Arnaud made her way through lavishly appointed rooms, with the gleam of gold everywhere, and filigreed sconces and heavy velvet festooning her windows. Like a spider fat with silk, she crept to her sofa and perched on a cushion.