‘So, Professor Griffith,’ I began, oh so idly, ‘about what you said in there, about different cultures having ghost stories …’
‘Ah yes.’ He perched on the arm of the wicker settee, looking pleased at the opportunity to continue his lecture, and apparently finding nothing odd in my bringing it up again. ‘The idea of some tangible psychic impression on a physical location is quite common.’
I sat on the cushioned chair, taking the weight off my leg. ‘What do you mean, “psychic impression”?’
He finished his sip of tea and answered in the same academic tone. ‘Some people think of ghosts in the traditional restless-spirit way. Souls who can’t move on because of unfinished business.’
‘Like Hamlet’s ghost,’ I said. A fitting reference, since some people think Hamlet was just imagining his father’s spirit as a precursor to going bananas.
But Professor Griffith nodded. ‘Yes. But another theory to explain people’s experiences is that people or events might leave a stamp on a place. Perhaps it’s a big thing that happened once – like the scene of a past murder that always feels cold. Or something routine that happened for years – like reports of sentries who still walk castle battlements.’
‘So, hypothetically speaking’ – I kept my tone light– ‘have you ever thought you’d seen a ghost?’
He shrugged affably. ‘Hasn’t everyone had some inexplicable experience? A feeling of being watched; a glimpse of something in the corner of one’s eye, gone as soon as you turn?’
My heart gave a jolt of recognition, which I tried to keep out of my face. ‘But no one has ever proved anything.’
‘That depends on your level of proof,’ said the professor. ‘Ghost hunters point to all kinds of things as evidence. Blurry streaks on photos, static on recordings, changes in temperature or electrical fields—’
‘Changes in temperature?’ The question shot out, spurred by my memory of the chill out on the lawn, and the lingering cold at the top of the stairs.
But the professor merely nodded, still taking my interest as academic. ‘Temperature changes are a measurable event that paranormal investigators look for. But most reported experiences are subjective. How do you record a feeling?’
I chewed my lip, choosing my words carefully. ‘Seriously, Professor. Do you believe any of this stuff ? Isn’t it kind of crazy?’
He chuckled, so I must have hit the right note. ‘I do not discount people’s experiences. Though I would look for a natural explanation before a paranormal one.’ Smiling, he gave a ‘what the hell’ shrug. ‘However, I allow that just because something hasn’t been proven to my satisfaction doesn’t mean that it couldn’t exist.’
In other words, yes and no. The professor was well educated, and seemed reasonable and functional. ‘Open-minded but critical’ sounded like a good approach. I didn’t want to believe in ghosts, but I didn’t want to believe I was nuts, either.
Gigi was done eating, and came trotting out of her open crate, expecting praise for finishing her breakfast. It was a timely interruption. Bending to give the dog due worship hid my face while I processed what had been said.
The professor finished his tea and stood. ‘I’d best get on with my day. If I’m not done with my next chapter when Rhys gets back, he’ll know it was because I was lecturing again.’
I glanced up, with a tentative smile. ‘I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble. But I appreciate you chatting with me.’
‘Any time. Those ghost-hunter shows are a guilty pleasure of mine – as a cultural anthropologist, I’m interested in the folklore aspect.’ He grimaced sheepishly. ‘And as you’ve probably noticed, I do love to share my obsessions.’
I picked up Gigi, then realized I had an opening to pry about more than supernatural theories. It didn’t seem quite fair – not least because Professor Griffith was such a nice guy – but I felt at such a disadvantage, I could reconcile a little cheating.
‘You’re pretty lucky, though,’ I said, striking as casual a tone as I could, ‘that Rhys took a break from school to help with your research.’
The professor nodded, but his answer was coloured with regret. ‘I am lucky, though I wish he hadn’t put his own thesis on hold to do it. Still, I can understand his wanting to take a break after what happened.’
My conscience stabbed at me, because that was too easy. But not so much that I didn’t ask the obvious question. ‘What happened?’
He hesitated, then gave an almost invisible shrug. ‘He doesn’t like to talk about it, but I don’t know why – there’s nothing shameful in it. He was on an externship between terms, in the mountains, when an abandoned slate mine collapsed.’
‘Oh my God.’ I had a vivid image of the groan of earth, and suffocating darkness. The stuff of real nightmares. Rhys had said something last night, about having to redirect your whole way of thinking. Had the poignancy in his voice been related to this? ‘Was anyone hurt?’
‘It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, considering. But some of Rhys’s fellow interns were injured. His friend was in a coma for some time. He’s having to learn to walk again.’
The guilt knife twisted, but not because of my prying. No wonder Rhys had no patience with me. I couldn’t dance professionally, but I could walk. The limp wasn’t even bad unless I was tired. It was a wonder he spoke to me at all.
Professor Griffith sighed, and reached out to pet Gigi’s soft ears. ‘Rhys feels somehow responsible. I haven’t figured out why. But he wouldn’t appreciate my talking about it.’
‘I’ll keep it to myself,’ I vowed, and meant it.
As he reentered the kitchen, I went to the screen door, planning to go out and round to the main stairs, to avoid incurring Paula’s puppy-in-the-kitchen wrath. I did linger a moment, watching as the professor greeted the women at the breakfast table, just to make sure he didn’t report back to them that I’d been asking suspicious questions about ghosts.
Whatever he said, it didn’t make them turn my way, and I was glad my instincts had been right. I liked Rhys’s dad, in a refreshingly uncomplicated way.
Which didn’t mean I could let down my guard.
Chapter 11
Paula looked up in surprise as I came into the kitchen with my sneakers on, ready for a trek. ‘Going somewhere?’
‘I thought I’d go to Old Cahawba.’ I’d meant to spend time with Dad’s book, but my thoughts were too muddled for me to enjoy it. I felt a need to move, to channel my spinning brain into physical action.
She stared at me with a growing frown of concern. ‘Are you sure, honey? That’s a mighty long walk, and you’re not exactly able-bodied.’
If I hadn’t been sure before, I was after that. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, hardly gritting my teeth at all.
Clara said more kindly, ‘Of course you will. You have your cell phone so you can call if you need us?’
I hadn’t thought about the phone since talking to John the night I’d arrived, but I slid my hand into my jeans pocket and found I’d grabbed it automatically. ‘I’m good.’
After another sigh from Paula and an admonition to be back for lunch, I snapped on Gigi’s leash and we set out down the great lawn towards the woods. The plume of her tail rode at a jaunty angle, and she showed no qualms at diving into nature.
At the forest’s edge I paused, because the route would take us in the direction of the wailing sound I’d heard three times now. Open-minded or not, I wasn’t keen to invite inexplicable experiences. But Gigi didn’t seem interested in anything but the trail.
Trekking through the dappled shade wasn’t much like striding down the streets of Manhattan. The looming pines and thick oaks made a sort of rustic palace, with a carpet of pine needles and tapestries of Spanish moss. To my right was the faint music of the river. Paula had warned me it ran too fast for safe swimming, but to the ear it was lazy and comforting.
We came to a fence, but there was a stile that made it easy to go over – if you weren’t encumbered by a wi
ggling dog and a fear of falling. I managed not to drop either of us and, with an unfamiliar feeling of pleasure, I continued down the path, idly imagining who had taken it before me. The trees showed no hint of an old road. This would be a shortcut for servants going into town, or for the boys of the house to run to meet their playmates. The girls would be forced to go by carriage, to preserve their dresses and dignity.
I wondered if the girl who’d lived in my room, back when the floral wallpaper and dainty furniture were new, had found that as annoying as I would have. Maybe it was sleeping on the antique mattress or using her washbasin and cupboard. Maybe it was Paula’s strictures, like those of an overzealous governess. In any case, like yesterday in the garden, I found myself wondering how I would feel in her shoes.
The path finally met a dirt road. I was either on park property or trespassing on someone’s land. I hadn’t bothered consulting a map. I knew from the Davis book that the old capital was at the junction of the rivers I’d seen from the balcony, and had headed in that direction.
Gigi and I continued along the road – both of us slowing down a bit – until we reached the decaying remains of a two-storey, columned box of a mansion that looked a little like it could be Bluestone Hill’s aged and shrunken poor relation. There was a sign on the splitrail fence in front of the house that indicated I had indeed reached Old Cahawba Archaeological Park.
According to the plaque, this had been the house of a prominent family during the town’s heyday. After the population largely decamped for Selma during the Reconstruction, the house was bought by one of the former slaves, who’d lived there until his death in the early nineteen hundreds.
It seemed like it would be weird to go back to a place where you were owned. But maybe it was awesome. I hoped the man filled the house with children and went to bed every night with a smile of smug contentment.
My musings seemed to blur my vision, and I grasped the fence, its wood smooth with age. For a moment I could see the ruin of the place, and on top of it, like a projection slide, was a freshly painted house with a manicured yard. When I blinked, it was gone, and I was again looking at a sagging roof and falling-down porch.
I rubbed my hand over my eyes. Maybe this hadn’t been such a great idea. I was tired, but didn’t want to acknowledge that Paula had been right. My leg was weak, and it had been a long walk. I’d been exhausted the night I arrived at Bluestone Hill, too. Maybe it was fatigue that allowed these impressions to sneak up on me, weave into my consciousness and seem too real.
Gigi pulled at her leash, eager to investigate the dilapidated place. I shuddered at the thought of rats, and walked on, tugging her along with me.
There weren’t many standing houses or even ruins; here or there was the rubble of foundation, the spar of a support beam, but mostly empty flat plots of land. ‘Ghost town’ seemed very appropriate. The trees looked like they grew around invisible shapes, the ground flattened under unseen weight. Here was proof that the impact of something on its environment could outlast its physical form.
But that was a house, not a person. Still, it made me consider what the professor had said, about impressions of the past. Was it possible that servants passing from kitchen to dining room, all day every day for at least a hundred years, could wear a pattern in the atmosphere of the house like wearing a path in a carpet?
My mental rambles were taking me to a dangerous place, one where I was making impossible things sound reasonable. Fortunately, I was distracted by the fact that my physical ramble had reached an asphalt road.
A street sign – definitely not a hundred and fifty years old – indicated I was at the corner of Capital and Oak, in the Old Cahawba Historical Site.
I turned onto Capital and headed towards the gleam of sunlight on the river. The trees opened up into a broad avenue, and I imagined it – deliberately this time – as a bustling street full of horses and buggies and men in tall hats.
Envisioning the place full of people made it less lonely; Gigi and I seemed to have the park to ourselves. I hadn’t felt odd in the woods or the side road. But walking the thoroughfare seemed peculiar, as if I was identifying a little too closely with my great-great-whatever, who would have shocked everyone if she’d walked the main street alone.
The street ended – finally – in a traffic circle, with a crumbling stone column in the centre. I picked my way across the grass surrounding the monument, and while Gigi sniffed the base, I read the inscription carved on the side:
CAHABA FIRST STATE CAPITAL
1818–1826
According to William S. Davis, Esq., my greattimes-six-grandfather had been a mover and a shaker in Cahawba/Cahaba. It seemed no one could decide whether there was a w or not. I looked back down the empty avenue, then turned in a slow circle, my eyes following a pitted dirt road that made a horseshoe around what must have once been the centre of town.
It was eerie, really, how a town substantial enough to be the capital could have disappeared so completely. Maybe that was the source of my unease as Gigi and I started walking across the flat, tree-dotted space between the monument and the river bluff. Across the field was a brick column, a forlorn remnant of some industrial space. This must have been the commercial district – at the end of the main street, near the river – the interstate of the eighteen hundreds.
The ground was slightly uneven, but that wasn’t what made me pause as I reached the centre of the horseshoe road. It was cooler than the shade could account for. More than cool. Chilly. The humid morning had turned clammy, as if the sun were obscured by more than the towering oaks with their draping of moss.
Great. The power of suggestion was not my friend. The professor had mentioned cold and now my imagination ran away with me in every draughty, shady place. Get it together, Sylvie.
I pushed forward just to prove that I wasn’t affected, that I didn’t believe this was anything other than a breeze from the river. Gigi had to pick up her feet as we trekked through grass and pine needles. She didn’t look happy about it.
As I got closer I realized that the brick remnant wasn’t a column, but a chimney. Stubbornness gave way to curiosity – a chimney without a house? – and I would have gone on, but Gigi sat down and refused to move. At the end of the leash, I stopped too, listening to Gigi’s electric-motor growl, and the sudden sound of my heartbeat in my own ears.
The soft, subliminal rush of the river disappeared, and the sunshine seemed to dim, as if we’d stepped through a curtain. The chill I’d tried to ignore rushed in, moving with the currents of air to stroke my skin like fingers. The cold crawled up my legs and spread through my body, and I shuddered with a despairing ache.
Sorrow and hopelessness pressed in on me like a funeral crowd. I gasped, and my stomach cramped at a fetid smell. In that instant, I did believe I was mad, because no one in their right mind would imagine such thorough wretchedness.
Then came a completely pedestrian sound – the honk of a car horn. Gigi barked and ran for the dirt horseshoe road. The six-pound jolt was minor, but enough to shake me back into motion. The gripping strangeness fell away as I stumbled after the dog into the welcome sunshine.
There were picnic tables by the river bluff, on the other side of the dirt road. Numb and bewildered, but fully myself again, I walked to one, limping hard, and sat down. Gigi leaped into my lap. With a trembling hand, I wiped a line of sweat from my lip, and looked at the spot I’d just crossed.
What the hell was that? The moment had the intensity of a plunge into an icy, dark well, but there was nothing to mark it. No evocative old ruin, no shadow at a window, no military relics in an old man’s study. Where could it have come from but my own mind?
There was no denying – though my returning reason floundered desperately in the attempt – that the echoes could have come from my psyche. The days when the pills were too tempting, when I could barely make myself get out of bed. The days when I didn’t. There weren’t many; I didn’t like to admit there were any. I wanted to bel
ieve I’d never been that weak. But the cold had flooded me with those memories. I would swear I had felt grasping hands dragging me back to that painful, bleak time.
But what had prompted it? Yes, my leg hurt, but what else was new. Since coming to Alabama, I’d felt more connected to the world than I had in a long time. I didn’t feel back to normal, because without dance I didn’t know what normal was. But I didn’t feel crazy. Even in those moments when there was no other explanation for what I was sensing.
Gigi gave a warning bark, and I heard the sound of an engine a moment later. A pickup truck bounced towards us, around the bend of the dirt road.
The disorienting fear of the past few moments solidified into something more specific. I was alone out here. Alone and at the mercy of faulty senses. My pulse trip-hammered in my neck as I scooped up Gigi and stood.
‘Hey there, little lady.’ The truck stopped beside us and a twinkling-eyed Santa Claus of a man hung a sunburned elbow out the window as he greeted me. He didn’t look much like an axe murderer, and I was relieved to see the logo of the park stitched on the front of his polo shirt. ‘You doing OK?’
‘Yes,’ I said warily. Did I look like I was about to do a header into the river? Anxiety and confusion sat on me like elephants on a circus trainer, but the cold and despair were gone.
Santa seemed to find my suspicion amusing. ‘You’re limping quite a bit, and I was worried you might have twisted your ankle on the grass. It can be uneven after the spring rains.’
‘Oh!’ Relief drained some of the tension from my shoulders. ‘No. I just— It’s an old injury. And I’ve been walking a while. I didn’t realize this place was so big.’
‘Lordy! Where did you walk from?’