didn’t move like a real person would have moved. Had she been an actual person, dealing with bones, and muscle groups, even a simple gesture like a turn of the head would have looked a certain way, followed a certain pattern. When she did it, it was more like stop animation, in one frame she’s looking at me, in the next, she’s looking out of the window. Nothing in between. Like a poorly animated cartoon that lacks fluidity.
I followed her gaze. The window. Seth had fallen out of the window. Was there a relationship? Did I need to be worried? At the very least, I made a mental note to stay as far the heck away from that window as I could. I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t running screaming from the room.
Maybe because, like I’ve already said, it wasn’t the first time that I had ever seen a ghost.
“Your friend is hurt,” Elaine said. She had this wispy, sing-song kind of voice, melodic in a way, like her every word was a lyric to a tune being sung for other children. It could almost be hypnotic, if it wasn’t so haunting.
“Seth isn’t my friend.” She shrugged, again in that stop-motion way of hers. I had to know. “Did you do that to him?”
She giggled. “No. He jumped. But he did have help.”
“Help?”
Again she looked at me. As I stared back into those eyes, I realized how unnatural they looked. The part that should have been white was black, and where her pupils should be, there seemed to be a void, as though nothing were there at all, just a hole into the bowels of the universe. Like I was looking far and long down a deep glass tunnel with no end. But hadn’t those eyes appeared normal last time I saw her? Surely I would have noticed those eyes.
“What do you mean he had help?” I repeated.
“There’s something you need to do,” Elaine said. I wondered briefly if the entire conversation was going to go this way; I ask a question, she makes a random statement that has nothing to do with what I asked. It was maddening. After a few more minutes of this I might jump out of my window too.
“You mean like a favor?”
“He is the one riling them up. And he needs to be settled.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
“I need you to find something for me.”
“Give me one good reason as to why I would want to do you any favors.”
“You must go down to the well. At the south side of it, about a foot down, you’ll find it.”
“Find what?”
“You must settle him.”
“Settle who?”
“Time is your enemy. Act swiftly.”
I really thought I was about to throw something through a wall. I clenched my fists. “Would you give me a single straight answer? Just one? Who needs to be settled? What is this thing you want me to find? What do I do with it if I decide to find it at all? Why should I help you?”
“He’s only going to get worse,” she said, hopping up off the bed and landing on the floor. Let me tell you how surreal it was to watch that happen. Certain things would have happened if a regular person were to jump off of a bed; he would have ruffled the covers, the mattress would have creaked as it bounced back into its natural shape, his feet would have made a thud against the floor.
There was none of that with Elaine. The mattress did not move. It was if she had not really been sitting on it at all, but merely hovering just over it. Which may have been the case. Nor did her black loafers make any kind of noise on the floor. I might have wondered if she was really there at all. Did her ghostly body have any physical, solid characteristics? It didn’t seem to have any. But then, where did her voice come from? Didn’t you need physical vocal chords to produce sound from your throat? Did her voice even come from her throat? If not, where? Come to think of it, the worst part was probably that I was even bothering to speculate on the physiology of a ghost.
Of course, the frame-by-frame way she moved, which I’ve already mentioned, was still freaking me out.
What she did next didn’t help matters at all. She took off running, straight at the wall. Except right at the point where a real person would have broken his nose from the collision, she vanished through it, and that was it. I was left standing there, utterly alone, and immediately trying to rationalize my experience. Stress? Trauma? Fear? Could one of those emotions have conjured up a hallucination?
Nope. That was something adults and fools did, to try to “rationalize” every single experience that didn’t line up with their pre-conceived notions of the world.
I knew what I was dealing with.
And I knew what she (or it) wanted me to do.
The real question was, did I want to play along?
3
At breakfast, I asked if Esau had heard anything about Seth. He tore his eyes away from the newspaper that rested on the table and looked directly at me, cocking one eyebrow. His slightly puzzled expression almost made me wonder if, since just the night before, he had forgotten who Seth was.
“Hmm? Oh, Seth. No, I’m afraid I haven’t heard a thing.”
Seth was a jerk. I get it. But I thought of him lying up in some hospital room, utterly alone, with no one to sit by him or watch over him. Had his parents been notified? Were they on their way back from Europe even now? Did he have any other family who might have been notified so as to go to him? Esau went back to reading the paper, and I caught his meaning by the way he flicked it, that he did not intend to discuss the matter any farther. I dropped it.
And just like that, it would seem, Seth had sailed right through that window and out of my story.
After breakfast, I went for a walk. The morning sun was subdued, and a gentle breeze ruffled my hair. The sky was a clear, baby blue, and the air had that crisp, new smell that it gets sometimes, as if all of nature had rebooted and was beginning again. I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going; part of me wanted to go walk out into the woods and never stop, to just keep going, and see where I came out.
Far off, I could see the well, beckoning to me, and I deliberately filtered against any thoughts of Elaine and what she had told me the night before. I was determined to go about my business. The problem was, I had no idea what that business was. The person I really wanted to talk to was Helen, the maid who had dropped a bombshell on me about my mother, and then disappeared without a trace. Where was she? What was the point of telling me about my mom, only to then hide herself away? I didn’t get it. I almost wished that I didn’t even have the information.
One thing was certain, though; Helen told me she had known my mother. So had my mom been to Drury Manor? Or did Helen know her from someplace else? I looked around the grounds, and tried to imagine my mom walking this same land, and it just didn’t compute. I couldn’t picture her in this setting.
I stopped short when every hair on my neck prickled at precisely the same instant.
I turned and looked toward the house. There it was again. That feeling that I had only felt once, the night I arrived, and never again since. That feeling that someone was watching me, someone malevolent, someone who hated me and wanted me harmed. I tried to take in as many of the windows with my eyes in as brief a span of time as I could, quickly scanning one side of the house to the other with my gaze.
There! In one of the windows near where my own room was. And then it was gone. For the briefest of instants, I thought I saw somebody looking back at me. A young boy, perhaps, but certainly not Trevor. But now, in the spot where I thought I saw him, there was nothing. Had he even been there? The impression I had was one of a dark haired child with pale, sickly features.
Just that quickly, the sensation passed, and I no longer felt that evil gaze on me. I stood there, chewing my lip, feeling a cold sweat on my forehead, wondering if this tied in to what the girl told me last night.
And there it was. As determined as I had been only a moment ago not to think about Elaine, in the end I guess it really wasn’t up to me. What shocked me the most was how, now that I had a night’s sleep to distance myself from the vision, I ha
d been so willing to disregard it. Like an adult would have done. Maybe I was becoming one. That was an even scarier thought.
I made up my mind. I wasn’t going to be anybody’s pawn. I wasn’t about to go digging holes because some ghost gave me some kind of mystical quest.
But, on the other hand, I couldn’t just sit back. I had to take action.
And I knew the first thing I had to do. I started walking back toward the house.
It was time to find Trevor, and make him tell me everything.
About the orphans. About their ghosts.
About all of it.
4
I found Trevor in the sitting room. It was the same room in which he first introduced himself on the night that I arrived at Drury Manor. He perched at the far end of a long sofa, a leather-bound book clutched in his hand. As soon as I entered, he scurried to hide the book, shoving it under his bottom. I approached him, unable to keep myself from smirking.
“Don’t hide your book on my account,” I said.
He exhaled and reached under himself. “Oh. It’s you. I thought maybe you were my dad.”
He showed me the book and I almost laughed.
“A Bible? Seriously? The way you looked all guilty, I thought you were looking at a skin mag or something.”
His face went red. “I think my dad would go easier on me if he caught me reading a skin mag than if he caught me reading a Bible.”
I dropped onto the sofa beside him, recalling again how comfortable it was. Everybody should have a