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In 1976, the last timbers of Allerdale Hall collapsed into the clay with no witnesses.
In 1977, Annabel Jean Kingston was born, to considerably greater fanfare.
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Annie is good. Annie is kind. Annie is smart and strong, pretty and loved. All of this must be true, since Mommy and Daddy say so. They say it when she toddles into their room with the sun every morning, and when they tuck her in at night.
They do not hit her, ever.
Annie only cries when she’s held, as a baby. Only when she’s touched. After a year or so, though, she switches to the normal way. No-one remembers, later. Babies are strange, after all.
Annie is five when she hides on the stairs, up past her bedtime, and gives herself away by gasping at a cop show. When she’s put to bed, she asks Daddy, “Why was the blood the wrong red?”
Children are strange, after all.
Annie is six when she runs across the browning lawn, past the sprinkler where her brother sprints through the spray with his friends. She reaches Mommy’s legs and grabs hold. It’s July and too hot, but she’s never been pushed away. Mommy only sets the hose down and kneels, gently gripping her shoulders.
“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”
“The man,” Annie squeals against a coral polo shirt. She buries her face in Mommy’s shoulder. “The man won’t go away.”
“What man?” Brenda Kingston is thirty-four and doesn’t think of mystery as her eyes scan the small yard. Only of strangers in cars promising candy or puppies.
“Tyler!” she shouts. The boy in the He-Man swim trunks is ten and pauses mid-splash, letting his friend get in a Super-Soaker headshot. “Go inside, now.” He doesn’t question the urgency in her tone, but leads the others through the screen door.
She stands, an arm around her daughter’s shoulders. “Okay, Annie. Can you show me where the man is?”
Sniffling, the girl points at a wall of boxwoods that border the yard. “In the bushes.”
Leaves. Branches. No man. Only green, shining waxen in the hazy Virginia sunlight.
“There’s no-one there, honey.”
Annie only holds on tighter and cries, “The man!”
Glancing at the house, Brenda beckons towards the mesh of the door. It slides open, and the boys troop out again.
“Can you tell me what the man looks like?” she asks. Tilting back slightly pulls her knees away from the little face still pressed against them, and tear-stained blue eyes slowly meet hers.
“All- all white,” Annie gulps between sobs.
“White like us? Not like Aaron or Mrs. Liu, you mean?”
(Aaron Rodgers is eleven, and too busy giving Tyler a noogie to hear his name.)
Annie shakes her head. “All white,” she insists, indicating her own tie-dyed t-shirt and cornsilk pigtails. “Like paper. But black here, and floaty.” One finger touches her cheek, just below her eye.
If this disturbs Brenda, she gives no sign. Just gathers Annie up into her arms and turns her to face the hedge.
“See? No all-white man,” she says gently.
Annie stares at the empty space. For a moment, her lips quiver. She raises a small hand and waves solemnly.
“Bye,” she whispers.
They don’t talk about it at dinner. Or the next day. Or the day after that. In five years, she forgets.
Annie is eight and, sure, she’s good at piano, but all the cool girls on MTV play guitar. Mom and Dad have Words with Tyler about her after-school viewing habits.
Nonetheless, a small acoustic Gibson with a red bow is waiting under the tree on Christmas morning. Building calluses hurts, but at least she doesn’t have to sit on a stage in with all those eyes on only her anymore.
Or wear poofy recital dresses.
Annie is thirteen and, when her brother yanks her ponytail on his way downstairs for breakfast, she shouts words that get her grounded or a week.
He still hugs her when the first boy breaks her heart. She still punches the tenth classmate who spits slurs at him between locker banks in the hallway.
In the shadows of the dining room, somewhere behind and between the flow of years, a man in white smiles.
It’s light, their love. Uncomplicated. Easy as things ought to be, between a brother and sister.
Annie is twenty and kissing a girl behind a neon-flashing nightclub. That night, she sends Tyler an email- “Sorry, you’re not the only queer sibling. XO, A.”
Annie is twenty-two and dyes her mousy hair ink-black, admiring the contrast with her pale skin and icy eyes. For a week after, she slides on crimson fingerless gloves to hide palms stained dark.
(Like blood, she thinks. Very what’s-her-name, that Lady whatever from Shakespeare.)
Annie is twenty-seven and wakes, gasping, from a dream of a tiny mouth slipping from her breast and tiny legs going still in her arms.
A man and his daughters are missing, the news anchor says when she switches the TV on and grabs a pint of Rocky Road from the freezer. A black wave rises and crests in her mind, and suddenly she can hardly breathe for crying.
She resolves to never have children.
That lasts until Annabel- Annie now only to her parents, her brother, and the man who kisses her like he would steal her last breath –is thirty-two and standing before a sheet of one-way glass. That same man has a little girl in his arms, clinging like he’ll never let go. Her heart and the stinging in her eyes say yes even as her mind half-screams no.
Blonde hair in waves, brown eyes, and glasses. That’s funny, she muses, with no idea why.
She doesn’t believe in ghosts. Never did.
Her life shatters, melts, and reforms. New things mean triumph: Lily sat in a chair. Victoria slept through the night. The washer stopped making that noise, after she smacked it a few times.
It’s not her house. She still learns every crack and crevice of it. A weight softens it that their tiny apartment never had, full as it is of strangers’ furniture and décor. And soft has never been her thing, she thinks, but it’s somehow comforting. Like a feeling she hadn’t known she missed until now.
Like a warm wool blanket and a good fire on a cold winter’s night.
(She has never lived in a house with a fireplace before.)
Lucas is thirty-five and gone. Not dead, she thinks over and over. Knuckles white on the steering wheel. Not dead. People wake up from comas all the time. The prognosis was good. Streetlights roll golden beams of light through the car’s darkness as they pass. He’s not dead.
Annabel is alone.
Only she’s not, she tells herself. Lily and Victoria are there, too. For all their strangeness and dependence, it helps. She tried to live alone once, after college, and it nearly drove her crazy. Like she might suddenly wake up invisible, with no eyes to see her, or inaudible if no ears could hear her voice.
Jean comes around in pantsuits and judgment, and how dare she, how dare she. Rage that shocks even Annabel herself rises to her lips and pushes past like venom. This is her house- it isn’t, though –and those are her girls. She never wanted them to be, but when little heads peek around the door-frame of the living room, she feels it as if they grew inside her own body.
They’re Hers. No-one can take them away.
Afterwards, she dishes ice cream into bowls and coaxes Lily into toasting by clinking their spoons together. Victoria even smiles, a little, when Annabel shows her how to breathe on the metal and stick it to her nose. This shouldn’t feel normal. But “should” and “shouldn’t” are increasingly blurry these days, like looking at the world through Victoria’s glasses.
(She tried it once. “That poor kid is almost blind,” she’d told Luke the next day, dragging the nail polish brush across her thumb to leave a coat of black behind.)
Annabel shouldn’t steal Dr. Dreyfuss’ computer. She shouldn’t go a-hunting in the files. She shouldn’t keep going when the word “asylum” squeezes the breath from her throat, and a story about a nun and a knitting needle washes phantom warmth over her hands. She shouldn’t be crying, not now, not over a woman who died more than a century ago and who’s caused her no end of terror.
She shouldn’t wear headphones with the girls out of sight.
Should have, would have, could have. Her eyes still slip closed in the hallway, the world going black as a clammy hand bent in the wrong places grips her back. The last thing she sees is Victoria, cowering against the wall, with a gray shape advancing on her.
Go back. You have to go back. A voice floats on moth’s wings through the fog. I’ve never known a warrior like you. The children need you. Keep them safe. You’ve always known how. But it’s the brush of lips on her forehead that finally wakes her, like a princess in a fairytale.
I love you, forever.
Annabel is alone in the echoing house, full of her and Luke and the girls and the doctor and a dozen other stories. All alone. And she thinks it might destroy her.
As she shoves her feet into her boots, shrugs on a jacket, and snatches the marked map and the box that rattles off the table, she thinks something else. She thinks, She has to pay.
(It fades in the dark and the rain, when weaving lanes and checking the map at red lights takes all her concentration. Like so many other things, she won’t remember it.)
And then.
Luke is there, close and real, and she thinks nothing has ever smelled as good as his skin. The woods, the night, the cold biting at her bones. The cliff.
“Edith!” she shouts. There’s time only to recall how she’s always mildly hated that name, before the world tilts sideways and her mind fills with white.
Snow is falling. The ground is clear. It’s the middle of the night. It’s morning, clouds drowning out the sun. At once she sees trees and steel bones jutting towards the sky; hears wind whistling and clanking around metal, and the soft whisper of a breeze through leaves. It’s red. Snow isn’t red. Snow is always red. How can it be red?
She has to find. To take. To destroy. The woods begin to slip away, still visible, but less real with every passing second. Her body feels wrong, clothing too soft and flexible and skimpy, head missing the weight of long hair. And something precious is lost, lost forever, leaving only an endless price of blood-
The cloth-wrapped bundle shifts in her arms. And the world snaps back into place.
Annabel is shaking as long arms jerk and twitch towards her, snatching the bones from her. The gray-blue figure retreats, but that doesn’t matter. Because she has Lily’s hand in hers, and Victoria’s, and she’s edging towards the base of the massive rock. Luke quietly wraps his arms around Lily; she shoots him a grateful look, and concentrates on gripping Victoria’s shoulders.
The ghost- Edith –is crying. A phantom weight rests, cradled, against Annabel’s chest, something small and curled. Lifeless. She tastes salt and bites her lip to keep from answering those unearthly wails in kind. That has never been her, weeping over a tiny corpse.
It is her, all the same. Impossible, but a feeling she can’t shake.
When Lily cries out, when it all comes crashing down, part of her begs to give in. When her body rises in the air and slams into the ground, knocked breathless, a sickening crunch from her arm and a burst of agony, it would certainly be easier. When the girls beg her to sleep, and the drain of what little energy she has left dots her vision with red, she wants nothing more than to obey.
She does not.
They’re Hers. No-one can take them away.
The pain fades. The night noises of the wood fade. There’s only her breath, and one hand in front of the other to drag herself along the ledge. Broken, beaten, but not bested.
“I won’t stop,” she whispers to herself between bouts of unconsciousness. Three words, but enough to pin the world on.
At last, all she can do is grasp that single strip of terry-cloth like a lifeline and hold on.
Annabel will never let go.
It’s almost enough.
She almost saves them.
Clutching Victoria to her and watching Lily ascend to the sky in a cocoon of solid shadow, she pleads until her voice gives out. Deep down, something inside her knows it’s pointless. That same something screams, voiceless and raw, of abandonment. She knew it would end this way; she knew she’d be left behind in the end. Who would ever choose her?
It’s not like that. It’s not like that all, and she barely has time to shove the thought away in disgust before-
Lily falls.
It might be her shouting, or Victoria, or Luke. None of them can tell, and it won’t matter afterwards as they hug each other close and weep.
When Victoria’s last reserve of tears and energy is spent, an hour later, she slumps against Annabel in the backseat of the car. Soon there will be the hospital, and then a lot of questions to answer in a very short period of time. And then…whatever comes next.
Annabel is almost thirty-three when she gently pushes golden hair back from Victoria’s forehead and hums a lullaby. She doesn’t know the words, or where she learned the tune. Maybe it’s always been there, echoing in her mind.
Fluttering, waiting to fly free.