The Umbral Wake Page 12

  “Oh… right.” Dona blinked slowly and took a long breath that turned into a yawn. “Well, I’m fine now.” She paused, her eyes growing wide. “Is this some sort of intervention? Have you all been planning this?”

  She looked at Tom who shook his head slowly behind Victoria. Dona felt as if she was suddenly in stockinged feet on a floor made of clear broken glass, overly aware of every step and gesture. She used the silence to collect her thoughts as she considered what to say next.

  “I’m… I’m sorry I haven’t been myself,” she said, gauging the suspicion on Victoria’s face. “I appreciate that you’ve been so concerned, Vicky.”

  “Was it the jumper?” asked Victoria, her hands enfolding Dona’s. “Oh no! I knew I should have talked to you more about that. Such a terrible thing to see, that poor woman!”

  “No, it wasn’t that… well, maybe some of it.”

  “What then?”

  Now all eyes were on her, and Dona didn’t know what else to say but the truth. She took a deep breath, gathering her exhausted thoughts, wishing she could just go to bed.

  “Do you remember the twerp? The witch girl… Skyla.”

  Simply uttering the name sent a chilling effect across the room. Tom, who had only heard of the girl, crossed his arms, his square jaw set. Julian’s mouth fell open as he remembered the way Father Thomas had vanished over the girl’s disappearance, never to be seen again. He had also seen the girl and her mother in church that day of the stampede. He remembered the trampling all too well.

  But it was Victoria who was most affected by the news. With her mouth closed, Dona could see her tongue working over the false incisors, an eternal reminder of the only girl who had ever struck her. If you asked Victoria, the punch was completely unwarranted, but Dona knew better. She had been all too familiar with the harassing, the mocking. Victoria had pushed the girl to it, she was certain.

  Darkness passed over Victoria’s face, her eyes focused inward, her expression cold and calm. An instant later, she smiled that porcelain doll smile. “Of course I remember her.”

  “I think she might be living in Bollingbrook again.”

  The gasp from Julian was audible. Tom remained silent. Vicky’s smile faded.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Or maybe she never left,” said Dona. “I saw her… that night after the jumper. And I also saw her tonight.”

  She caught Tom and Julian exchanging a look. Vicky’s eyes remained fixed on her.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “In the Montegut house.”

  “What were you doing in there?” It was Tom who asked this time. “I never pegged you for breaking and entering.”

  “I saw her in the window. I just… let myself in to check. I… I had to know if I was going crazy before I told you all.”

  “And are you?” Tom asked.

  “No. I guess not.”

  She could almost feel Victoria’s thoughts as the girl stared at her. “She is living in the Montegut house then?”

  “No… well. I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?” asked Julian. “Is she there, or isn’t she?”

  “I… I saw her. I probably scared her away. She ran.” As she heard the words coming from her mouth, Dona wasn’t quite sure what she believed. It had to be a trick. There was no way she could bring herself to say that the twerp vanished into thin air.

  “Ran where?” asked Julian.

  “Just… away, okay?” She met their gazes one by one. “Look, I was scared. It all happened very fast.” She looked from face to face. “I’m not crazy.”

  “Nobody said you are,” Victoria said, her voice saccharin smooth. “I think we’ve all had a rough day. Maybe I should walk with you to the house, see for myself. I can tell you if you are crazy or not.”

  “We could all go,” said Tom, but Dona shook her head.

  “No. I just want to know if it’s really her. I want to talk to her. If all of us go in there she’ll never show herself again.” She saw the cold look in Vicky’s eye. “That means you too. I’m not after her anymore. In fact, I couldn’t care less. I only cared because you did… and you don’t anymore, right?”

  Victoria seemed to be staring at something else altogether. Dona could practically feel the gears grinding in her head. When she spoke, Victoria’s voice was flat. “No. No, of course not.”

  “Well, what I think you should do is this,” Tom said, stepping forward. “Write her a letter. Leave it on the bed in Melissa’s room. If it’s gone the next day, you’ll know it’s her, right?”

  “Yes, that’s a great idea,” said Vicky.

  “What should I tell her?”

  “Tell her whatever is on your mind,” Tom continued. “Even if it is only your imagination, it wouldn’t hurt to get it down on paper anyway. My mother used to do a similar exercise with her sister. Did wonders for her temper.” He and Julian exchanged a knowing grin.

  After a long while, Dona smiled. “I’ll do it. Thank you, Tom.” Then, almost forgetting their roles, she stood and gave him a peck on the lips.

  “I’ll see you home,” said Vicky.

  “That’s all right,” said Dona. “I think I’m going to rest here a bit first.”

  “I just thought—”

  “Really Vicky, it’s okay.”

  A chill ran through the room. Dona continued. “I haven’t seen my fiancé and he’s clearly worried about me. Let me just stay here a while longer, okay, Vicky? I promise we’ll look at patterns together in the morning.”

  Air seemed to fog behind Victoria as she left the house, pulling the hood of her cloak up over her head.

  Julian closed he door behind her and leaned against it. “Well that aged me about five years.”

  “Good,” said Tom. “That means we can finally move into our own place.”

  Julian made a face. He turned to Dona, staring out the side window into the night.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I completely forgot about my plans with her. If I had just gone there and seen her she wouldn’t have—”

  “It’s fine,” said Tom, placing a hand on her shoulder. “She knows anyway, I’m sure.”

  She turned to look at him. “Really?”

  Both boys nodded. Tom said, “At the very least, she suspects. If she hasn’t said anything now, I doubt she will.”

  “That’s a first,” said Jules.

  “Yes, well, it isn’t like we can lie our way out of it with her.” He turned to Dona, taking her by the shoulders. “I meant what I said about that letter. Do it for yourself. Write what you’re feeling. Leave it there and then forget about it. Check back in a few days and if there is a reply, you’ll know you aren’t crazy. If it’s still there, I guarantee that you’ll feel better anyway.”

  “What if it’s gone and there is no reply?”

  “Then check Vicky’s pockets,” said Julian.

  Dona nodded after a moment. “Okay, I’ll try it.”

  Tom hugged her. After, she looked up at him. “This is really to placate Victoria isn’t it? So she won’t tell?”

  Tom and Julian exchanged a glance. Tom looked back at her and smiled. “It couldn’t hurt, right?”

  Later, as she sat at Julian’s work desk, Dona found the letter surprisingly easy to compose. She wrote frankly, honestly, and with little of the bravado she might have found herself using in person. Thirty minutes and three drafts later, she was sealing it inside an envelope with Skyla’s name written on the front. A half hour after that, Dona found herself sneaking back into the Montegut estate.

  I’m like some common thief, only one that leaves things instead of taking them now. This is insane, she thought, holding the letter in her hand.

  Dona looked at the note once before laying it on the bed. She took a step back, turning to look out the grimy window. Those tracks were still there in the dust, leading to the closet where they ended at a wall.

  She found herself unable to decide if she want
ed this to be real or not. If the twerp was somehow hiding in the Montegut house it would mean that at least she wasn’t crazy, but looking at the way the footsteps vanished into solid wall raised more unsettling questions.

  Giving the room one last look, she turned and left. She still had to meet Vicky in the morning, if only to placate her friend. It was the sort of dance she was used to doing these days. Only when she was halfway down the stairs did she hear what sounded like wind and footsteps. Ghosts or not, Dona could no longer stop her feet from fleeing the darkened manor. She would check on the note sometime during daylight when the ghosts of her memory no longer haunted her.

  Chapter 17

  In-Between

  SKYLA WAITED IN the shadows until it seemed safe enough. Time moved differently there, and when she looked away from the bedroom for only a moment, hours seemed to pass. She noticed that the claw marks on the wall had grown, though barely. It reminded her of a plant unfurling its leaves in the morning—too slow to observe directly, but you knew it was happening.

  She blinked and Dona was gone. The letter sat alone on Melissa’s bed. Biting her lip, Skyla ducked into the room, snatched the note and ducked back through.

  Pale blue eyes followed her through the shadows as she moved, cradling the camera. She could feel time stretching her skin, abrading it, scrubbing it back and forth like a rough sponge. If she was right, and she thought she might be, this lens might be from the lab, a vestige of another pair of goggles, scavenged and sold. It might be able to capture the scars that even now continued to spread.

  But time was against her. She felt a crack as the camera buckled. She pulled it closer to her chest, trying to shield it inside whatever space kept her intact as she traveled. Faces moved past her, hands reaching out to grab at her ankles, missing as she danced by them.

  Have to get somewhere safe, she thought.

  She found herself in a garden, a pocket of thin reality. A woman sat on a bench, staring at the wall. Around her feet, flowers bloomed in reds and whites. Skyla looked behind her and saw a long corridor of forest, ending at a large portcullis.

  “Hi, mom.”

  The woman turned slowly, looked at her with no recognition. Skyla frowned.

  “I’m just passing through and I thought of you.”

  “Well you should tell them to hurry or they’ll be late for church. I still haven’t seen Billy.”

  “I will, Mom,” she said, turning to find a way out. She was close to Rhinewall if this was correct.

  “And don’t take my picture. My hair isn’t done.”

  “I won’t, Mom.”

  She felt the camera shudder again and looked down to see a large crack across the top.

  “Shit.”

  “Don’t swear!” Lynn yelled. “What did I tell you about language? The Reverend hates when we swear.”

  Skyla froze. “Have you seen him?”

  Lynn just laughed. “Oh, nobody can see him anymore, Rhia. He’s traveling the world, stopping evil. I told Billy that when the Reverend gets back, we’ll all go with him. We won’t miss the train this time.”

  Skyla sighed. “Okay. I gotta go.”

  Lynn turned away from her and the world swayed again, the shadows shifting in random directions, a storm of light and dark. Skyla jumped through the moving hallways as something went thump behind her. She hugged the camera even tighter and felt it crumple.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  The worst part was that she hadn’t even asked Gil’s permission. She was asleep last she checked. But now…

  She fell out of the closet, landing hard on the floor. Wood splintered under the weight of her chest and she cringed, turning her head towards the empty tripod and the girl standing beside it.

  Gil was in her housecoat, her arms crossed. In the darkness her face looked resigned and tired.

  “I would have let you take it if you would have just asked,” she said. She held Skyla in a stony gaze as the girl picked herself up off the floor.

  Skyla stood as bits of paneling fell to the floor. “I just thought…”

  “That it was so important whatever you needed to do, that I would understand?”

  Skyla didn’t look at her. “It is important.”

  “Look at my camera.” Gil threw her hands up in the air. “What were you going to do? Hope I’d just develop the slides for you? No questions asked? Because that’s what I do right? I support you while you go search for a cause.”

  “It’s not a cause,” Skyla started, but her voice trailed off.

  “Oh, I know,” said Gil, her eggshell eye glowing silver in the moonlight. “You’ve got important things to do with your goggles. When was the last time you tried not wearing them?”

  Skyla held her tongue. She honestly couldn’t remember.

  Gil walked up to her and took the crumpled camera, its bellows hanging limply from a mass of shattered wood. “Jesus. What did you do to this?”

  “I just… I didn’t think… because it wasn’t alive.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Gil asked, curiosity overlapping her anger. She studied the wood parts, dried and gray, weathered as though they had been sitting on a deck for a hundred years. The metal parts had a thin patina of rust that wasn’t there before. “It’s aged.”

  “Maybe because the wood,” Skyla said. “It was alive… maybe it just decays faster.”

  “Well great.” Gil pulled it away from her. “Let’s see if you broke the slides too. It better be important.”

  “It is.”

  “Then I guess that makes it okay to steal my things?” Gil glared at her.

  Skyla saw red. She stormed across the room, pulling the lenses up. The world looked strange without the goggles on now, like a paper film—flat, lacking real detail. But she wanted to make a point. She reached into the coat pocket and pulled out the coin. She brandished it at Gil.

  “Let’s talk about stealing for a moment. You’ve been using this, haven’t you?”

  Gil was defiant. She jutted her chin out at Skyla. “Wouldn’t you? We were starving! I almost had to start selling my books. And you casually walk around with a piece of saleable equipment on your head like it’s nothing. Where do you get the nerve?”

  Gil paused and took a step closer, peering at Skyla in the dim light. “God, look at your face…”

  Skyla said nothing, pulling the lenses down with a snap. The two girls stared at one another before Gil reached down and took her basket, yanking it into the air so hard the bottles and vials of chemicals clanged together.

  “I’ll develop these for you and then we’re done. I’ll be looking for a new place to live in the morning.”

  “Gil, don’t,” Skyla said with a gasp.

  “I am.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.” Gil stormed into the closet, her voice muffled from inside. “Do you know how long I’ve been working on that camera? And you just took it like it was yours to begin with. It’s like you have no sense of what anyone else is feeling but yourself.”

  “That’s not true!” Skyla cried out. (Somewhere in the house Connor echoed in a croak: True! True!) “Gil, I know everything about everyone!”

  But she was yelling at a door now. Through the wood, Skyla could hear the clinking of plates, the drip of liquid. She leaned against the door.

  “I see it all the time,” Skyla continued, hoping she was listening. “I can’t not see it anymore. It’s what drove my mother mad. It’s what is driving me mad. I see people’s past like a series of layers. I don’t even know what’s real anymore. The goggles are the only thing that help me make sense of anything.”

  Gil made a “Harumph” sound through the door. “Whatever you say…”

  “Gil… Something bad is happening to Bollingbrook.”

  Silence. Was she listening? Skyla wasn’t sure, but continued out of hope.

  “I’ve been there. There’s… that man, you saw in the picture… he’s… I don’t know. He’s out there,
Gil. And nobody knows where he is. Gil he’s behind the machine that killed your father. He’s behind so many terrible things and now I think he’s doing something more, but nobody can tell me.” Hot tears ran down her face, the frustration unbearable. “And I feel like I’m the only person who can do anything about it now. And if I don’t… I don’t know… Something will happen… something awful, Gil.”

  There was more dripping, a rhythmic churning of liquid. Swishing.

  Skyla continued. “I’ll do anything to make it up to you, Gil. I’ll get you the parts for a new camera. Anything you want.”

  The door opened and Skyla stepped back. Gil gave her a glance as she passed by. She placed the canister on the workbench, dumping the rest of the ruined camera into a bin. Opening the canister, she placed all five slides out onto the table.

  “Let’s see if you even knew what you were doing,” she said, switching on a light.

  Each slide was the same image, a blank wall, the plaster gray and featureless.

  “And you said that something was on this wall?” Gil said.

  “There was… still is…” Skyla said. “Maybe I didn’t adjust the lens right.”

  “Well these look normal to me.” Gil picked one up and froze, holding it before her face.

  “What?”

  She rotated it left then right, held it up for Skyla to see. She rotated it again. As the plate twisted before her, a blemish faded in and out, phantom scars that only appeared from a certain angle.

  “The man in the other picture was the same way,” said Gil. “I noticed after I picked them up.”

  “He’s real,” said Skyla.

  “Real and dead.”

  “No. I don’t think he is.” If he were dead he would have grabbed me. She shuddered.

  Gil looked up at her. “Then where is he, Skyla?”

  Skyla shook her head slowly. “I wish I knew.” She placed a hand in her pocket and pulled out the letter.

  “What’s that?”

  Skyla gave her a half smile. “It’s a letter.”

  Gil blinked. “From who?”

  “This girl I knew in school.”

  “I thought you didn’t have any friends.”