“The second time is always easier,” I say as I finish lighting the last candle. “The first time is overwhelming for the both of you. The second time you are more prepared and know what to expect.”
Iona nods, still not looking me in the eye. We both lower into our seats, and I hold out my hands. Determined, she sets the watch in my right hand, and lays her hand in my left.
I let my eyes slide closed, letting the darkness open in my chest. Probing, searching.
“Jack,” I say just once.
A shift in the air, a drop in temperature.
I open my eyes, and there he stands just to the right of Iona.
“Thanks for bringing me back,” he says, looking me in the eye.
“He’s here,” I tell Iona.
Her head immediately perks up, looking all around the room. Something the living always do when I open the gate. I nod my head to where Jack stands, and her eyes settle a little off to his right.
“I’m sorry I left so suddenly last time,” Jack says and I relay his words. “It got too difficult to stay.”
“It’s okay,” she says, a smile beginning to pull onto her lips. “I understand. Sully explained things.”
Jacks eyes flick up to mine, and there’s something difficult to read in them. There’s something about him that crawls under my skin, like a hundred starved beetles.
“So that’s what you do?” Jack asks me. “You act as a portal between the dead and the living.”
“Yes,” I respond.
Iona looks from Jack to me, confusion on her face.
“He’s just asking how this works,” I tell her, suddenly wanting to protect her from any more distress. Jacks presence and absence are doing enough of that on their own. I look back to Jack. “I can communicate, summon you through a personal object.” I nod to his watch in my hand. “And relay what you say to the living. She can’t see you, can’t hear you, herself.”
There’s a little flick of something that sparks in his eyes, but I can’t quite tell if it’s surprise or fear.
“Jack, I can’t stay here forever, so we have now, and Sully has agreed to open the gate once more after this,” Iona cuts in, as if she can feel the clock ticking. Which it is. “I just have some things I need to say. Some things I have to put out there between the two of us so maybe I can finally start to piece myself back together.”
“I didn’t mean to leave you broken, baby,” Jack says. He kneels at her side, his hand hovering just over her arm, but he hesitates. He doesn’t touch her.
“I know,” she says as her voice cracks and tears well up in her eyes. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“What do you need to say?” he asks.
I shift uncomfortably, Jack too close for comfort, even though I know he can’t touch me. I’m ready to send him back to limbo and we’ve only just begun.
“I need to get all of the plans I had for us out of my head,” Iona says, shifting her gaze to where I indicate. “Our engagement was only three weeks long and I know we didn’t have much time to talk about wedding and life details, but I’ve spent the last two months thinking about it all, over and over and over again.”
“Tell me, baby,” Jack says, scooting all the closer, and if he’s not careful, he’s going to fall right through her. “Tell me every single detail.”
She smiles, despite the tears that break out onto her cheeks. “I wanted to get married on May first,” she begins. “When all the flowers are out and the air is fresh and warm. I wanted to do it at the park in town, because that’s where so much of this started.”
“It’s perfect,” Jack says with a smile, nodding his head. “We could have even taken an unexpected dip in the fountain.”
Iona laughs, squeezing more tears out onto her cheeks. She nods. “And danced on the pavilion, even if there was no music.”
There’s some memory to that comment I don’t know about, just like another million details to their relationship.
“Any night you felt spontaneous,” Jack says, reaching out as if to caress her cheek. But he stops himself just in time.
She nods. “I picked out this dress from the shop on Third. I tried it on and everything, two weeks after…” She doesn’t say the word, and they rarely do. If they come to me, they haven’t gotten to the acceptance part of the grief cycle. “I would have bought it if I’d had the money.”
“I wish I could have seen you in it,” Jack says. “I know you looked spectacular.”
Iona bites her lower trembling lip. Her hand that rests in mine shakes terribly. She’s about five minutes away from crumbling to rubble.
“We would have gone to Spain for our honeymoon,” she continues painting the painful picture she can never make a reality. “I know how badly you’d always wanted to travel there.”
“Would you have let me run with the bulls?” Jacks asks with a smile.
“Not a chance,” she laughs. “But we would have done that hike you kept talking about.”
She’s quiet for a long moment, and Jack doesn’t say anything, either. Her eyes have fallen into her lap, a slow stream of tears tracing their way down her face. Jack just silently watches her, poised so close, yet so unable to connect.
“You know that little white house on Pine Street?” she finally says. She looks up, her eyes searching for his face, only she’ll never find it again.
“Yes,” he says.
“It went for sale two days before everything happened. I don’t know if you noticed. But I wanted to buy it. I wanted us to start a life there, so bad.”
I watch Iona as she speaks, and it’s so difficult. Seeing the way her lip trembles. The red splotches forming around her eyes. Feeling the quivers that rip through her hand. And I know she doesn’t deserve to feel the way she’s feeling. I look at Jack, and something just isn’t…
Just isn’t…
“Four kids,” she says with a smile. “Because three growing up was always such a way to start fights. Someone is always left out.”
Something in Jack’s expression tells me that perhaps their future desire for kids might have differed.
Not that it matters now.
“But that would have had to wait for a few years,” she says, a playful smile perking on her face. “Because I wasn’t ready to give up being spontaneous. I just wanted to do it with you.”
“Always.” There’s a quiver in the air, just small, nearly imperceptible, but I know it’s going to grow quickly. Jack looks over his shoulder at me, and I know he can feel his time is short.
“Listen, baby,” he says, his words suddenly hurried. “I know this is hard for you. So hard. But I promise, I will never really leave you. You can never liberate yourself from me.”
She laughs at that, though the tears freely stream down her face now. She can hear the urgency in his words, and she knows time is short.
“We would have had a robust and exciting life together. Don’t let go of that dream.” Jack moves to sit on the arm of the chair, leaning in closer, his face only an inch from hers. “You know I adore you.” At his words, Iona’s eyes slide closed, as if fully absorbing them.
The air quakes, shifting and vibrating violently. Darkness creeps into every one of my limbs.
“I love you.”
And Jack disappears back into limbo.
Chapter Twenty-Three
IONA
Evening twilight casts Roselock in violent shades of red and gold. The sky is laced with random clouds, but it’s the most I’ve seen of the sky in a week.
I walk down the one road that leads to the church, my hands pushed deep into my coat pockets.
Back behind me, I can feel Sully’s presence, standing on the porch, feel his eyes watching me.
I need some space. Some air to breathe. Some room to stretch and feel once more that the world is real.
Because I feel like it keeps disconnecting. It’s become this small ball of pain and grief and obsession and not caring one bit.
I open my eyes as I walk
down the road.
Leaves not blown elsewhere from fall are pushed up against the steps of one house. A frozen puddle fills the left side of the road before another house. The trees moan on the edge of town where the wind pushes its way through them.
At the roundabout, I veer onto the road that cuts to the right instead of keeping straight where it leads back to the highway.
Be back before dark, Sully had said as I walked out the front doors.
I should question that. But I don’t.
Not a chance I will be out here after dark.
Half a mile down the road and I only see two more houses. One is tiny and hardly stands. Most of the siding has been ripped off from the wind. The other is built of stone and looks intact except for the broken windows. Behind it stands the remains of a barn.
I continue down the road another half mile, over the gravel that crunches beneath my boots.
The landscape has been growing flatter and flatter the farther I walk. The mist starts creeping in, so slowly I don’t even realize it’s there until it’s fairly thick.
So I don’t notice the trees that suddenly crop up when the road dissolves into a field.
Planted in perfect rows, stretching out at least two dozen deep, stand some variety of tree I don’t have a name for. Some of them seem to have since died, branches hanging to the ground, their trunks black and in various stages of decay.
But the trunk of every single one of them takes a sharp curve, right where it comes out of the ground. Like a reaper’s scythe. It rounds wide, and finally climbs up, stretching up to the sky, finally straight.
The sounds of nature grow quieter as I walk into the grove, checking over my shoulder in every direction. A twig snaps far off to my left, and for a moment, I’m about to loose a scream, when I turn to see a deer darting off into the distance.
Despite the non-threatening animal, my heart rate can’t seem to calm down. But my feet can’t seem to stop, either.
The colors fade from red to gold, slipping slowly to bluish gray.
The trees stretch on for at least half a mile before I can make out familiar oak and scrub in the distance.
But all of these crooked trees, bent, as if someone punched out their bases and they shaped like clay... They cocoon me into their nest.
My foot suddenly slips, and I nearly topple over, scrambling back and barely catching myself.
A hole rests just to the side of me, leaves and roots tangling into the walls of it, making it difficult to notice, at first. But it stretches four feet across, six feet long.
And six feet deep.
My hands shake as through the dark, I put what I’m seeing together.
Two skeletons, perfectly white and crisp and clean, lie together at the bottom of the grave. Their hands are clenched together, their heads tilted toward one another.
A small little gasp erupts from my throat and I scramble back from it, only to crash into something warm and solid.
A scream rips from me as I whip around, prepared to run from a bear or a moose or some other deadly wildlife.
But the only wildlife present is Sully and his mane.
“It’s okay,” he says, holding his hands up, and I realize I’ve got my fists raised. “It’s just me.”
“What are you doing?” I ask, not dropping them, the adrenaline still burning too hot through my veins. “Are…are you following me?”
His eyes dart to the grave and he nods. “It’s getting too dark. We need to get inside.”
“What?” I ask, looking around, trying to figure out which direction I came from. But I’m completely turned around. “Why are they there? Why aren’t they in the graveyard?”
I turn back, staring down at their skeletons. Clinging to one another so tenderly, so desperate to not be parted, even in death.
Sully grabs the back of my coat and pulls me in the opposite direction. I stumble, still staring at the grave, but follow him through the quickly darkening evening.
“The Lovers, as they’ve always been called,” Sully explains. His words fall flat, unable to travel far in the dense grove. “They’ve been there since before Roselock was founded, the trees too. The grave was filled in several times. But it was always re-exhumed by the next morning.”
“Who keeps digging them out?” I ask as a cold drop of fear slips down my spine.
“It’s Roselock,” Sully says as we break out of the grove and back onto the road. “There are a lot of questions with no answers here.”
My heart won’t calm down as we quickly walk down the road. So many questions are racing through my mind, but none of them slow down enough to form into words.
The abandoned nature of Roselock. The trail of pennies that runs all through town. The curse Sully’s family suffers from.
I come from the real world. Of work and families and mundane boring days. None of this makes sense to me. None of it feels real.
“How long has it been since anyone else lived here, Sully?” I finally find my words.
He looks over his shoulder back at me. He walks at a much faster pace than I do with his long legs. I scramble to catch up, afraid of being left behind as the light fails by the moment.
“Six years,” he says. He pushes his hands deep into the pockets of his coat. “Carl Henderson was the last of the old timers. He passed away, and then it was just me.”
We walk around the roundabout, past the dead trees that sit in the center of it. Just a few dozen yards until the safety of the church.
Some kind of yelping noise sounds from the trees. My hand instantly darts out, clinging to Sully’s arm. A second later, I swear I hear a laugh over the sound of the wind.
Sully’s hand engulfs mine, and he pulls the two of us forward at a faster pace.
The air grows colder, the wind picking up speed. Just five yards from the front steps, my feet catch something wet and slick, and I slip.
Sully grabs me before I go down, picking me up like I’m a rag doll. I look back over his shoulder, searching through the dark for what I slipped in.
Something dark saturates the ground, growing and spreading out from beneath the church.
A rush of air rises like a howling wolf. The stairs protest as Sully’s hulking form hauls the both of us up, yanking the door open, and slamming it behind us, locking it.
“Something…” I say, breathless, as he sets me back on my feet. “Something isn’t right in this town, Sully.” Sharp claws bite at the back of my eyes, threatening to make tears pool. “You shouldn’t be here. Why…why do you stay?”
Cast in candlelight, I pace, trying to make my mind process what started just outside those doors.
But as I round to retrace my steps, I still in horror.
Following up to me, the same shape and size as my boots, is a set of red footprints.
“Is that…” I gasp, my hands coming to my mouth. The dark red, smeared with mud.
“It is,” Sully says. He stands beside one of the arched windows, hands on his hips, his back turned to me. “It’ll be gone by morning.”
“Sully, that doesn’t make any sense,” I say, shaking my head. I sink onto a pew, violently attempting to remove my boots and the blood I can’t explain. “This whole town, it doesn’t make any sense. This place is dangerous. There is a reason no one lives here, anymore.”
“Yes, there is,” he says without turning back to me. “My family cursed the land.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
SULLY
“What is that supposed to mean?” Iona says.
I turn to see her sitting on a pew, her knees tucked up into her chest, looking so small and so shaken.
“I told you to be back inside before dark,” I say with annoyance and frustration. “You didn’t need to see that.”
I turn and head through the chapel, passing the organ and through the doors. The embers in the fireplace are just enough to not have to re-start a brand new fire. I stuff three logs inside, opening the air vent to give it oxygen and make it ro
ar.
“Please,” Iona says as she follows me in her socks. “Don’t do that to me, Sully. Don’t just brush me off. Don’t treat me like I’m just some fragile idiot. I can’t take any more of that.”
I turn to face her. She stands there, so small and so fragile and yes, a love struck idiot. But there’s a spark in her eyes, something determined and fierce.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say despite her surprising show of inner strength. “You’ll leave tomorrow and I told you, you’re never to think of Roselock again.”
“And how do you think that is possible?” she says as she takes three steps closer to me. “What I’ve seen here. You? How do you ever expect me to just never think of all of this again?”
Her eyes are so sincere and fierce.
I see something of myself reflected there. Something lonely and isolated.
“Please, just talk to me,” she begs, taking another step forward. She stands only a foot away. “I don’t have anyone else right now. No one has understood for so long. They…” she shakes her head. “I feel so isolated these days. Please, Sully,” she looks up at me. “Just talk to me like I’m a human being again.”
Something cracks in my chest when she says my name. Reaches out and holds a mirror to my own empty soul that’s been isolated for so long. Who hasn’t had another soul to talk to in ages.
“John Whitmore showed up in the valley in 1761,” I say without looking away from Iona. I don’t move. And neither does she. “He brought with him five other families and his wife and daughter, and their unborn son.”
The journals, detailing the entire story sit on a shelf in my bedroom. John’s handwriting is nearly illegible. But it tells a grim tale.
“He’d heard rumor there was coal in the mountains,” I continue the tale. Iona grabs my hand and leads the two of us to the kitchen. She starts digging through the pantry, pulling out seemingly random ingredients. “My ancestors have a long history in mining, so he was well prepared to begin his own. Had investments and financial backing to get started.”