The Ghosts of Kerfol (13 page)

“Are you scared?” she asked his back, the beautiful, lean curve of that back.
Why do I love you best when you’re walking away from me?

He turned and smiled at her, and the smile hurt like a fall on the ice, like the palms of your hands skidding across the ice. Meg had been a champion skater once. She had played with dolls. She had dreamed of coming to France. She had known Nick. She had always known Nick, it seemed.

“Of course I’m scared, you idiot.”

She smiled back at him.

“Is that what you really want?” he accused. “We’re supposed to be having fun, you know. Will that make this trip fun for you?”

She nodded eagerly, feeling a wave of guilt, for maybe she just wanted to compare notes with Ethan later, wanted something daring to show for herself, something stupid and reckless that would impress him. Why did it matter now, impressing Ethan, when it never had before? What had changed?

“And you’ll stop sulking?”

She nodded, subdued now, solemn. Did he know? Did Nick know? He had to know. Why else the long morning’s silence? The sun was low. The stones of that dismal house cupped each creeping shadow.

“I will. I promise.”

He smiled and leaned into her, and she spoke softly into the clean-smelling linen of his shirt, and for the moment, just a moment, Meg was grateful. “I just know you’ve always wanted to do it in a haunted house.” She reached around and flicked his nose. “Haven’t you?”

When the van parked, Meg let Nick thank Juliet on behalf of them both. She had nothing to say to someone like that. Even, “Thank you . . . Good-bye,” seemed too tiring. They didn’t check back at the hostel. It was their last night in Brittany, and they had nothing to lose. Nick called to have them hold their bags until the next day; they’d fetch them and head directly to the train station.

They had the taxi set them down at dusk at a nearby crossroads. No point drawing attention to themselves. They’d just reached the entrance to Kerfol when the sun vanished like something hurtling down a well. The dark took Meg’s breath. She reached absently for Nick’s hand, and they dragged their feet until their eyes adjusted, proud when it happened, as if it initiated them into some secret club: We Who See in Darkness. There was a thin, fogged moon, but the night was overcast.

They hurried. Laughing. Nervy. Meg tried not to imagine the creatures out there in the dark. Were there bears in Brittany? Wolves? What? She should have paid attention more during the tour.

The night was windless, soundless.

Meg found a brick-size rock and began to smash at the rusty lock on the rear servants’ door.

“What about alarms?” Nick stood back, wary. He winced at the noise, so fierce in the silence.

“We’ll find out, but I doubt it. Look around.” She shrugged. “There’s no money to fix anything. Isn’t that why all these old noble families are renting their places out for tours anyway?”

The lock snapped and spun a moment, swinging to a stop. And now the stillness felt accusatory.

Inside the building, Meg could barely breathe for the excitement of it all: the hollow chill of the rooms, the humped shadowy shapes that she knew were sheets, the shifting and squeaking of their rubber soles. The occasional far-off music that today had sounded like radio now seemed to be issuing from the attic, and she was too terrified to wonder, too excited to stand still. A kind of restless energy burned through her. All she could think to do, to calm her nerves and make the next eight hours — which she had insisted upon — bearable, to salvage them and find her strength, was to seize Nick’s hand and draw him up the stairs.

She knew the big room at the top, the baron’s chamber, had a bed in it still, though perhaps no top mattress or bedclothes. At least they could lie down; he could lay her down and kiss her fear away, and they could be young again. They did, and he did, and it was as sweet as it had been in a long time, not stormy and rough, as it sometimes was these days with one or the other of them withholding or punishing or playing indifferent, and she slept sweetly in Nick’s arms, dear Nick, familiar Nick, who hardly said a word but let her have this night as if it were the last gift he could give her.

The sound of some animal in the night woke them. Just a brief yip, almost a bark. “A fox, maybe,” whispered Nick. They lay a long time in the silence, poised for more, but as the silence wore on, they drifted off again, too groggy and edgy to speak of it, to break the protective spell of sleep.

But then Meg heard it again, intruding into a restless dream. A single, mournful yowl. She sat up in bed, aware now as she hadn’t been before of the dusty smell of the top sheet, shaking Nick.

“Go look?”

He snorted. “Yeah, sure. I’ll just mosey out and get my throat cut like every idiotic white boy in every slasher movie ever made. Thank you, no.”

“Thank you, no,” she mimicked, snidely. “There’s that noise again.”

“Feral dogs,” Nick offered. “They probably live out behind the chapel and the orchards. I saw woods and fields back there. I’ll bet they smelled the trash from our lunch today. I didn’t see Juliet put it in the van, did you? Maybe there’s a Dumpster out back or something.”

Meg sat up, shivering, and put on her clothes, then burrowed back under the sheet with Nick.

The memory came so suddenly, and it was so present and unbearable, that she winced. She nuzzled his shoulder to feel his clean scent, but Nick climbed out of bed. He was walking toward the window and away. Now he was looking out as the memory surged over her like storm water over stones, like wrath. Did she imagine she could forget it, or spare Nick? Life didn’t work that way.

He stood in the faint gray light of the window as the sound grew louder — there had to be a dozen or more dogs out there now, baying and barking — and it was the bleakest sound in the world, what made people in the Dark Ages fear the Big Bad Wolf, the sound of carnage past or carnage to come. “Do you see them out there?”

Nick’s silence terrified her.

“Nick? Answer me —”

He only hushed her, drawing the ancient curtain closed but peering through a crack.

“What
is
it?”

“There’s a man out there, too.”

“Jesus Christ. You’re messing with me.
Nick.
” She paused but couldn’t bear the silence. “What man? Quit moving it!”

Nick was still fussing with the curtain, drawing attention to them.

“What
man
?” She threw a pillow to stop him from advertising, but he lifted the other arm to block it.

“I almost thought for a minute that it was Ethan.”

Was he joking? “I guess I deserve it since this was my stupid idea.” Was that supposed to be a joke? “But you
are
messing with me, right?”

“He’s wearing a costume or something. Ethan would do that. He likes drama, doesn’t he?”

Nick looked back at her, and she was glad he couldn’t see her eyes. Couldn’t read her face.

“I thought maybe it’s some local kid playing a prank, but it
could
be my brother. Couldn’t it?” Nick let the curtain fall. He came and knelt by her. “Did you tell him we’d be here, and this is some trick to screw with poor Nick? Because I’m all set with that.”

She shook her head, desperately. “Of course not!”

“I don’t like this stuff, and you both know it.”

Both?
“So why’d you bring us here in the first place?”

Oblivious to the stranger outside, the baying dogs, the terror that had stopped her blood and cast everything into perspective — terrible, jagged, real — he snarled, “
I
brought us here? Me?”

“It was your idea to come,” she insisted. “The first time.”
Nick,
please. “Stop looking at me like that —”

“Like what?”

“Like that —”

He grabbed her chin and held it hard, painfully. “Is that Ethan out there screwing with me?”

No.
She shook her head, mostly to get out of his grasp. “No, Nick.”

He slumped and laid his cheek on the bed beside her, like someone too tired to move, and now his voice sounded muffled, far away. “Maybe you wish it was, though, Megs? Maybe you’d rather be here with Ethan —”

She kicked off the sheet, stood up, and pushed past him to the window. The dogs, wherever they were, had fallen quiet. “This isn’t the time,” she reminded him, drawing the curtain aside a hair. An inch. Enough to see what Nick had seen, the figure of a dark-haired young man in tights and short pants and a white, puffy movie-pirate shirt. A costume. He was tall and lean like Ethan (and Nick). But not like. It was too dark to really see his face, but he stood so still, and looked up so attentively, that she shuddered. She almost pitied him. What did he want? Whatever it was, he wanted it bad. What was
he
seeing?

“Nick —”

But Nick wasn’t there. Not on the bed or beside it or anywhere. She called his name as if he were her child and she’d lost him in the mall, then stood with a hand over her mouth, regretting it. Ridiculous. She noticed a candleholder with a crooked stump on it, snatched it off the mantle, and dug in the pocket of her jeans for matches. Ethan had given her the matches, too. She fumbled, feeling the broken cigarette, the tobacco on her fingers, but no matches.

At last she found them, struck and struck again. The candle flared up blue, then settled into a white flame with a blue center, like a narcissus. Is that the flower? Jesus. She was thinking about flowers. Flowers made her think about funerals. Meg winced at the new, leaping shadows.

Then Nick was in the doorway, looking gaunt and strange. He was holding up a hand mirror, a woman’s mirror with tarnished metalwork on the handle. “Look at yourself,” he ordered. “Look.” He crowded her back against the wall beside the glass doors, and the heavy curtain bumped her candle. The light wavered, and the candle fell, rolling out of view. It was dark again, and she couldn’t see his face.

“Look at
what
? I can’t see you, Nick. Don’t do that. Get
off
me.”

Though his body was weirdly rigid and apart, he’d laid his head on her shoulder. He was mouthing something against her shoulder, his cheek resting heavy against her shoulder bone. Only that cheek and his faint movements alerted her that he was there, that close, and she felt her own sadness welling up, rearing up like a sea monster from the dark.

“I tried to tell you —”

He was crying. She couldn’t stand that. It made her sick.

“Say it.”

“Nick,” she gasped. “You have to stop.” She wanted to hurt him.
Make it stop.
She shoved him back, and while his hands and arms and torso remained apart, stiff as a tree, his head stayed on her shoulder, attached to her like one of those wretched Siamese twins who have to eat and breathe and sleep and raise their children together because their flesh rules — helpless as a clamp, a trap.

“Say it—” He was a terrible, sobbing stranger and the person she knew best in the world. Well enough to know she couldn’t hold him, couldn’t make it better, though he might want her to, though she might want to. It was too late for that, and this made her angry. She pushed him again, hard this time, so he couldn’t use her as a crutch anymore, couldn’t lay his weight against her.

The dogs were at it again, near enough to the window to stop her heart, if she had a heart.
I have no heart.
He was somewhere else in the room now. She didn’t know where.

“Say what you did.”

“OK—” she began.

“Say it!”
Sayitsayitsayit.

“I did. I’ll say it. I did it with him, Nick.”

He groaned, wherever he was, as if it hurt to hear it though he already knew, had known as soon as it happened, had maybe always known she wasn’t good enough for him, not moral or mature enough.

“Go ahead. Get mad.”

Make it stop.

“Do it, for once. Get mad. I want that,” she wailed. “I want you to, Nick — you’ve earned it — but you might want to do it later, because there’s someone
out there.
” Did she care? Could it matter now? “There’s someone out there,” Meg repeated, in a small, pathetic voice.

She felt him lunge, and she sprang out of the way, scrabbling for the candle, which was still and miraculously burning down low by the wall, but so were the curtains. She yanked one half of them down and tried to wave the fire out; she waved to keep it between them, too, as if there weren’t enough between them already.

He stood up, and the knees of his khaki pants were black with something, stained. He lunged again, and in her panic she dropped the burning fabric, slipping in the same something — or was he pulling her down — slipping and scrabbling on a floor slick with blood, or another substance that smelled of salt and metal. Blood on his knees and palms, and they struggled, coughing, through the smoke toward the door, not together exactly but at once, and her own voice sounded wild as a bear. By the stairs Nick slipped again, and fell, thudding down in the dark.

She heard this, and then silence, and her fists clenched, and there were sirens. There was smoke.

Meg woke in a hospital. When her eyes opened, there was Nick, sitting in a chair beside her bed. No, not Nick.

While the two of them were still unconscious, one of the nurses had dialed the phone number scribbled on a train stub in Nick’s wallet — Ethan’s friend’s apartment in Barcelona — the only contact info she could find on either of them.

“He’s over there,” Ethan assured her, hooking his thumb. “Boy genius is awake behind the curtain. But he’s not speaking to me. He keeps rolling away like he has a stomachache. Might still be in pain, but Doc says he’ll be fine. It’s just a concussion and some bruises. The shoulder’s all popped in.” Ethan gave hers a little knuckle-punch. “You guys are in some deep shit with the law. Who knew he had it in him? But he’s fine.”

Neatly folded on a plastic chair beyond his curtained bed was Nick’s Oxford button-down, as crisp and clean as ever, apart from garish stripes of dirt from his fall down the staircase, like skid marks on a road. Bloodless.

“Right. Sorry to interrupt your holiday, big guy.”

He laughed, licking his lips, and it wasn’t a laugh she loved. It wasn’t Nick’s laugh, identical though they might seem. Identical in almost every way. “You oughta be sorry, kid. But as I say, he’ll be fine.”