Work Text:
Dear You,
I came all this way. I thought you might at least show up. It would have been the polite thing to do.
I’m standing on the edge. And that’s very literal. This place is- well, it isn’t. Red mud like something oozing from a wound, as if the gaping pit before me were made by some massive knife in a giant’s flesh. Staining the snowflakes with blood where they fall, but perfect, eternally fresh blood, that never browns or crusts over.
Probably you can see now why I got sent to the school counselor as a kid. A lot. Honestly, what did they expect? Kids are violent little bastards when they want to be. All that stuff about killing Barney-
I’m getting off-subject. Sorry. I do that too much.
You already know, though, don’t you? You know all my faults as well as I do.
There’s something down there. Leaning far over the lip of the hole, I can make it out, a semicircle of what looks like bricks. A…well? Wouldn’t a well go up to the surface? Another one next to it; why would there be two wells within six feet of each other? Maybe not.
A snapping sound behind me makes me jump. I turn, almost losing my balance, to see-
Nothing. One end of the ripped “CAUTION” tape whipping in the wind. Just me and the hill and the snow.
(I did some light breaking and entering to get here. Well, breaking tape and entering. I hope you don’t mind.)
God, I should have known it would go like this. Freezing into an icicle somewhere in England, standing over an empty, scarlet pit the size of a football field, with no more answers than when I started.
When I started. Do you remember?
I don’t. I remember being told. Mom used to repeat the story constantly, her Halloween edition of “kids say the darndest things.” Probably would have gone in an AskReddit thread about children being creepy, if Reddit had existed yet.
I was three, a Big Girl finally old enough for my own room. I do recall, dimly, my bed with its plastic safety rails being moved with much ceremony out of my parents’ little side alcove.
They told me I toddled in around 1 A.M.- clutching my favorite plush papillion, probably; wearing a Minnie Mouse nightie, probably- and asked why the man in my room wouldn’t stop singing.
“What man, sweetie?” Dad said blearily.
“The all-white man,” I’m told I replied.
Of such stuff, family legends are made. You can likely guess about the frenzied, fruitless search of my room that followed, and the reassurances that it was just a bad dream.
Not bad. I know that now, if I know nothing else. Never bad.
Mom actually went to the city archives a few days later. I think she almost expected something spine-chilling: a man murdered in my bedroom, maybe a musician or simply a working husband everyone always heard humming his favorite tune.
The house was built in 1994. We were the second set of owners, and the first family were all still alive and well. She might have been a bit disappointed, if you can believe it.
But it faded into an anecdote to embarrass me with before first dates, and life went on.
I never told them about seeing you again.
In dreams, you have color. I know it, even as I can never hold it for long after waking. You have dark hair, I think. Your eyes…like a word that’s right on the tip of my tongue. Infinitely infuriating, because I know it, I do, and if I could just stretch a bit further-
Only there’s nothing. Like this hole in the ground. Darkness I can’t penetrate.
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Your song started this whole goose-chase. For years, I thought I’d made it up. Pretty and unusual, probably to a tune I’d heard in a movie and mentally orphaned. I grew up humming it, so much that my whole family knows the words by now.
I wasn’t even looking for it. The old songbook was for a music history class, one I’d picked up last minute to fulfill a requirement somehow passed over for four years. Final semester of my final year. A few months later, and I might not be standing here now.
After finding the sentimental ballad I was researching, I began idly flipping pages. They were yellow with age, handwritten dots faded almost to nothing on the pre-printed lines of each staff. Books smell so sweet as they decay. Part of me has always liked that.
Then. There it was.
Below notes I couldn’t have interpreted with a gun to my head, the words I thought only I knew.
“May the wind blow kindly, in the sail…”
Spidery writing, barely legible, but it was enough.
The feeling isn’t like ice water down your back, or being stabbed, or anything else a sensational novelist might say.
(“Sensational novelist?” Right, Olivia. This would be why Boyfriend #3 and Girlfriend #2 used to call you pretentious.)
It’s like sinking. Settling. Falling, but not through space. Through something thick and enveloping. Falling into, not out of. With just a hint of unreality, because this kind of thing doesn’t happen. Not to normal people. Not under buzzing fluorescents in a college library, with cartoon dicks etched into the desk and someone’s cheap earbuds faintly blasting Sia nearby.
And yet. There was no mistaking those lyrics. The same precise hand had titled the piece simply, “Lullaby,” adding beneath, “Rowlings, 1783.” And, smaller in one upper corner, “Arr. 1890, by-” A blotchy ghost of a water stain had blurred the printed initials beyond recognition.
The dedication read, simply, “For T.”
As I stared at it, a picture flashed through my mind.
Cold too cold coal ran out gaslight flickering pen solid metal in my hand etched with decorative swirls I’d know anywhere space above space around marking the page against-
Against what? I tried to probe the image, but it slid through my mind’s fingers like water. The harder I grasped at it, the faster it faded.
My hands weren’t shaking, I told myself sternly as they raced across the keys of my laptop. Or if they were, it was from not having eaten since breakfast.
A few clicks in my student inbox, and there it was. My request for the book. Title, publication date, relevant notes.
Songbook, late 19th century. Handwritten.
I swore under my breath. Couldn’t they tell me anything useful?
Gift of Eleanor McMichael Saunders, 1970.
Whoever that was. God knew if she was even still alive.
After taking some photos on my phone, I set the book on a reshelving cart. Maybe it could become someone else’s weird mystery, too.
In spite of myself, I asked Max to play it for me. My roommate, as I know you know. They were cursing my name by the time they’d struggled through half the wild trills and ornate runs.
“What’s this all about?” they asked, switching off their dusty secondhand keyboard at last. “Did you finally run out of pretty people with massive emotional issues to try and save?”
I groaned and grabbed my toothbrush, stomping off to the bathroom with “Hey, how about a ‘thank you’?” echoing down the hall after me. Jabs at my dating life were nothing new, and they weren’t entirely wrong, after all. “Hero complex” was definitely a phrase my therapist had thrown around before.
It was the same tune, of course. The one I knew it would be. Underneath all the fancy additions, the backbone of my dreams.
You always come in dreams. I’ve only seen you waking twice.
(A white column in my room, vaguely humanoid, the day I was accepted at SUNY. A voice, mostly in my head, whispering, “…so proud of you.”)
I’ve never been afraid. Any reasonable person would be- an apparition haunting your dreams is very Nightmare on Elm Street. But you’re…You. You’ve always been with me. Why should I fear you?
Sometimes, for no good reason at all, I almost fear your absence.
The second time-
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Eleanor McMichael Saunders was not still alive. 1902-2001 a good long life, but not long enough to be of any help. I paid $10 on a seedy background check website to learn that, but my premium stalking subscription did net me another name: Edie Saunders. Eighty-five and apparently a big-time donor to the school. And, thank god, tech-savvy enough to use email.
She squinted at me over the coffee table in her living room, steam rising from two mugs of spicy-smelling tea between us. “The what?”
“The songbook,” I repeated, attempting my best earnest-young-scholar smile. They tell me I’m good at it. “Your mother donated it to the school in 1970. My friend in the development office mentioned you might have more information. I was looking through it, and I found-”
“I don’t know anything about that,” she said, waving my words away. “But you know, you look a lot like my grandmother when she was young.”
Perfect. Old lady tangent time. Not rolling my eyes was almost physically painful.
“Just a moment.” Leaning heavily on her cane, she lurched to her feet and shuffled across the room. She frowned at a corner shelf for a long moment before plucking a framed photo from a veritable army of black-and-white or sepia faces.
“Now, just look at that!” she said when she made it back to the table. I took the picture, because there seemed to be no other option.
I did not look like her grandmother. We were both blonde- or so I guessed, from the pale value of the gray-scale hair –and both wearing glasses, but there the similarities ended.
The woman in the photo had a delicate face, heart-shaped, and the faintest hint of a smile on her rosebud lips. A light mark on one cheek, maybe a scar, only served to add interest, not to disfigure. She held a chubby baby gently in her arms, and looked genuinely content.
She was beautiful.
I hated her.
It took me completely by surprise, a sudden aversion rising and cresting in my mind. This complete stranger made me want to smash the glass, to rip the picture into a million pieces. Nothing was wrong with it. Nothing was wrong with her. I didn’t even know her name. This was crazy.
A little too quickly, I handed the photo back. Edie Saunders frowned.
“Something the matter?”
“No!” My voice came out too loud. I cleared my throat. “No. Sorry. She looks lovely; that’s quite a compliment.”
The frown disappeared into a mass of smile lines. “She really was. A writer, too. Her books have been out of print for a long while, but I probably have some stashed somewhere if you’d like to read them.”
“No, thank you,” I said, feeling faintly desperate. “But Ms. Saunders, the songbook? I’m really curious to track down some of the copied pieces.”
Once again, her expression dulled slightly. I was losing her. “I’m afraid I really don’t know, dear,” she replied. “Mother donated so many things from the old estate; it’s impossible to keep track.”
Before I could say anything, she was up again, making her slow way back to the shelf. She carefully replaced the woman’s picture, considered a moment, then selected another.
This one turned out to be a color shot, much more recent. A younger Edie with some pale brown still streaking her frizzy hair smiled beside a woman with white curls and a lined face, but the straightest posture I’d ever seen. Both figures wore pastel polo shirts and tan slacks straight out of my own baby pictures. And behind them-
My throat constricted. The room seemed to fade, everything narrowing down to that glossy photograph. Something prickled at the corners of my eyes.
Reddish earth. Scrubby brown grass. A few twisted trees, low and leafless despite the women’s short-sleeved shirts and the bright sunlight. Behind, farther away, a house. “Mansion,” was more the word. Sharp-roofed towers seemed to stab at the sky, and the whole of the huge, dark mass was clearly covered in ornamentation that even grainy photo quality couldn’t smooth away.
Just like the woman with the baby, I had never seen it before. But the effect couldn’t have been more different.
I needed to be there. Now.
Swallowing hard, I dug my nails into my palms, fighting the urge to touch the photo, to grab it from her hands and…
And what?
No answer. A totally detached, pointless thought. Whatever the impulse had been, it slid away before I could even name it.
“Where is that?” I heard myself ask weakly.
“Allerdale Hall,” she said. It’s possible she wrinkled her nose- I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the barren landscape to see. “Mother and I went back in ’92. When she could still travel. Not a very fun place, as you can see. But it was hers, left by Grandma Edith. Of course, it completely fell to ruin that year, just after we visited.”
I was barely listening. Allerdale Hall. The songbook came from there. It was like some warped House That Jack Built. This is the mansion that held the book that gave me the song…
Except it was real. This was really happening. There were answers out there, somewhere.
That night- but you remember it, don’t you?
Half a dream, at least to start. A soft, cool touch on my forehead. Some faintly musky smell. The rustle of- wings? Many wings. Crackling. A distant, unearthly moaning noise.
“Wake. Please.”
No. I don’t want to. Come back to bed.
“You must.”
Slowly, I forced my leaden eyelids open. Leaden, not the first word I’d have normally used. But part of me that seemed to fall away as I woke up whispered, What else?
You weren’t smoke, this time, not a column of shifting white.
You were a man.
And I- why? Why would you be so cruel? –can’t remember a thing about you. I know I saw you clearly for the first time, but your face slips away whenever I try to recall it. All I know is that you looked sadder than I’ve ever seen anyone look before.
“We have to speak.” I remember that much. You let me keep your voice, your words. I think, now, that I’d recognize your voice anywhere.
I think somehow I already did.
You stood regarding me for a long moment. I regarded back. Some perverse part of me noted my holey high school softball t-shirt and leopard-patterned bedspread and wondered if they were really suitable for such an encounter.
You didn’t even seem to notice.
“Don’t go,” you said. “Don’t chase this. It’s not worth it. It cannot matter, now.”
“Yes, it can,” I replied. “I have to know.”
Too calm. “Calm” and “talking to a ghost” didn’t go together. But like I said, I could never be afraid of you.
(Why did I think “ghost?” You’ve never told me exactly what you are.)
“Olivia.” Not the first time you’d said my name. But the first time you’d said it like that. Reverent, almost. Half-wondering. “Aren’t you happy?”
Happy. Am I?
Mom and Dad, carrying me from the car to the house when I feel asleep on the way back from Coney Island. Birthday parties. Acing tests and hitting home runs. Carting sheets and books up the dorm stairs. Books, so many books- poetry, like the scribbles I jotted down on napkins in the dining hall. Analyzing Keats with a mug of tea beside me as rain pattered against the window. Nights out with Max and our other friends, tipsy and glittering under streetlights. Kissing beautiful boys and bold girls.
School. Home. The basics, like clothes and food and a roof overhead. Lucky, certainly.
(Light pouring through some opening above, making a soft cloud of white glow against the wood underneath. Snow, I think. I- the image deserts me.)
I’ve written twenty-six poems about home. And that’s just since I started keeping track.
“Yes,” I said after a long moment. “But I have to know.”
You looked at me for what feels like forever, expression unreadable. Finally,
“Will the day ever come when you listen to me?”
The response came without thought or hesitation. “When you stop trying to leave me.”
I had no clue what that meant. I still don’t. But it clearly had meaning to you, because you stepped closer and touched my cheek.
Soft. Smooth. Cold, but solid. My eyes slipped closed. I didn’t want you to move ever again. I’d have sat there until Armageddon to keep that moment from ending.
“I never,” that low, warm voice said quietly, “wanted to leave you.”
Sleep brought corridors lined with bristling arches, and running after something that always stayed just out of reach.
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Once I had a name, the rest was easy. “Allerdale Hall Ruin” was marked as a tourist attraction on Google, somewhere in the boonies of Cumbria, England. Plenty of photos showed urban explorer types posing next to an enormous wrought-iron gate, with letters that read ”AL E DA E H .” There were no photos with the house itself. But that hardly mattered.
The night I booked my flights, Max sat on their bed with their knees hugged to their chest and watched me.
“Liv, are you sure this is a good idea?” they finally asked. “Shouldn’t you maybe wait until after graduation?”
“Not going to graduation,” I said absently. CCV, expiration date, and- done. Two tickets, a week apart. Now to AirBNB.
“Okay, much as I feel that, you’re still freaking me out a little.” They reached into the sleeve of Chips Ahoy nestled in a pile of comforter, grabbed two, and stuffed them in their mouth.
I made a face. “How can you eat those? Chocolate that’s under 70% barely even counts as chocolate.”
Max rolled their eyes. “They’re delicious, you’re full of yourself, and stop trying to change the subject.”
“Max, what’s the point of graduation if I’m finishing a semester early?” Click. Click. Click. There went the vast majority of the money I'd saved from years of tutoring bored high schoolers. “Besides, after this, I’ll need to find a job as soon as possible. There’s only so long a girl can stand living with her parents.”
They slid off the bed and padded over to stand beside my chair. “God knows nobody can ever argue with you, Liv. You're going to do what you're going to do But this is just too weird. Spending all your money to go to England for a week because…you found a strange book in the library?”
I looked up, finally, at my best friend’s furrowed brow and anxious eyes. And all I could say, all I’ve ever been able to say from the start of this madness, was “I have to know.”
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Most of the flight I slept. You were there. You know. The dreams all blur together. Fingers carding through my hair, the gentle tug running farther down my back than it should. A kiss on my forehead. More whispers.
“I’m sorry,” I think you said. “I tried.”
Whatever I replied was lost as a strange, rhythmic thumping rose in my ears, drowning you out, too.
Heathrow was a blur. The Tube, the train station. Sleeping had helped; I was able to make the last train going my way without incident. As with all the other preparations- changing money, adjusting my cell plan –this was preamble. This didn’t matter.
A room in a larger town whose name I barely bothered to learn. Things were starting to run together a bit. Had I called home when I landed? I must have been eating; I wasn’t hungry. But buying anything, going out or cooking in the tiny flat’s even tinier kitchen…it was all a blank in my memory. Losing time was a bad thing, I knew. I couldn’t seem to care.
A rideshare to the village. I did finally check my phone, firing off a text in response to the dozen or so from Dad, Mom, Max, and a few assorted friends.
Phone died. Forgot Adapter. Here safe. Sorry!
Blatantly untrue, but it would shut them up.
The thought startled me. “Shut them up,” when my loved ones were concerned for my safety? Where had that come from?
Still, I couldn’t unthink it, or un-feel the flash of anger that the notification bubble had sparked.
Jet lag. Had to be. Even though I’d slept through the night and woken up at a reasonable hour, against all odds. Trans-Atlantic travel could clearly mess with your head more than I’d imagined.
I dropped off my single duffel in a stranger’s freezing and unexpectedly cat-filled bedroom, and wandered into the single, almost painfully twee tea shop on the main street to ask for directions.
To my surprise, I wasn’t the only American present.
“Jenny,” the tall woman standing by the window said, extending a hand. She flicked her long, nearly black ponytail over her shoulder. “Couldn’t help noticing the accent when you ordered. Where are you from?”
”New York,” I said absently. “Upstate. Listen, could you help me with some directions?”
She frowned slightly. “There’s not much around here that’s time-sensitive. Where are you trying to go?”
“Allerdale Hall.”
For a moment, she fell silent. Her pale blue- or were they green? –eyes seemed to be searching my face. Around us, the chatter of conversation and the clink of cups against saucers would have been a pleasant background hum if I weren’t growing increasingly impatient.
“Why do you want to go there?” she finally asked, in a voice so hushed I could barely hear it.
“I-”
Run.
Not a thought. A feeling. A need. Get away from here. Get away from her. Get to safety.
“It- it looked interesting online,” I forced out around the inexplicable rise of what felt like equal parts rage and panic.
Jenny paused- then shrugged. “Take the left fork once you get out of town. It’s signposted from there. The last bit’s unpaved, so I hope you don’t like those shoes.” A glance downward accompanied that comment, clearly finding my battered snow boots wanting. “You’re lucky it’s not supposed to get really bad out there until late afternoon.” She hesitated a moment, before finally scribbling something on a slip of paper with a pen she pulled from her purse. “Here’s my number. If you’re in dire straits, give me a call and I’ll come pick you up.”
“Thank you.” I turned to go, almost missing her parting shot.
“It’s about four hours on foot. Good thing you’re starting early.”
It might have been. It might have been four days, or four minutes. All I thought about, once I set foot on that road, was where it would lead me.
The gate was there, minus a few more letters, hanging off its hinges. And beyond-
The breath left my lungs in a rush.
Empty.
Gray clouds and rusty clay soil. Nothing in between.
Silly, stupid Ms. Saunders’ voice echoed in my mind. “–fell to ruin-“ Apparently that had been more honest than I’d thought.
A lump rose in my throat. God, what was there to cry for? A house I never saw, sunk in this wasteland before I was even born? Rotting walls that probably would have given me tetanus for my trouble, and nothing else? It was nothing to me, there was no way it could possibly matter.
The tears came anyway, stinging my already frozen cheeks in the icy wind.
And then, like a galaxy of stars falling around me, snowflakes.
So here I am. Standing at the edge of a bleeding gash in the earth, with nothing ahead but an awkward phone call, a long, cold wait and a defeated ride back to civilization. The last trace of Allerdale Hall. The end of this journey.
“Journeys end in lovers meeting.” Didn’t someone say that once? It hasn’t. You didn’t come. I’m alone here, with the wind and the snow and the ragged white puffs of my own breath. Whatever I might have found in this place is long since lost.
And over and over again in my mind, sweet and taunting, that same song. A voice I’d know anywhere, but don’t know at all.
Where, my lover, shall I come to thee?
Yours,
Me.