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There is a ghost in Hemlocke House.
Ivory has seen it. She thinks she may be the only one who can. People do not usually take her seriously, on any matter really, but in this she finds herself particularly alone.
Serapter will humour her when she asks if he saw that figure dusting at the other end of the hallway, sure, but even with her limited understanding of hidden meaning, she can tell he doesn’t really believe her. One of the other maids called her crazy when they thought she wasn’t in the room. She hasn’t brought it up to anyone since.
There is, still, a ghost.
The ghost is Mysticat.
Ivory did not know Mysticat for longer than a day. They spoke once, while Ivory was still being trained for her role; she told Serapter where the spare dusters were in the morning. Ivory does not know anything about her, other than her face, and the whispered-echo of her voice, and the afterimage of her bloody corpse smashed across the staircase.
“No,” is the main thing she has heard Mysticat say in the last few weeks. Whenever she passes the balcony that Mysticat fell from, she hears it - the same “No,” muttered, like she didn’t even have time to gather breath before she toppled, much less let out a cry for help. (She did, though. Ivory remembers this much. There were two screams.)
The quietness of it makes her feel more comfortable, somehow. Like she has that in common with Mysticat.
She has a lot of things in common with Mysticat, really. Mysticat was Mr Pyroscythe’s personal servant before Ivory was, and she was just as pale, and she looks at Ivory with those same dead eyes that Ivory sees looking back at herself in every mirror or reflective surface she’s assigned to polish.
(The dead eyes are a late addition, she thinks. She could not say for certain whether Mysticat already looked that sad when she was still alive. There does not seem to be much point in wondering.)
When Mysticat is not saying “No,” caught eternally unawares, she sometimes says other things as well. One time, Ivory was in the kitchen, having Mr Pyroscythe’s black coffee prepared, and she heard Mysticat muttering about how he always says he wants his coffee black these days, but she remembers him sneaking the sugar cubes out of the pot when he was a teenager. Struck by a misplaced sense of spontaneity, she added half a teaspoon of sugar to his coffee that day. He did not bring it up.
For this reason, Ivory has decided that Mysticat is a good ghost.
Mysticat appears when Ivory is making Mr Pyroscythe’s bed, and the image of her paw pulls ineffectually through the corner of the sheet, reminding Ivory to smooth it flat. Mysticat appears when Ivory is waiting for everyone to leave the showers, and she fusses with an apron that is soaked with splotchy blood, reminding Ivory to go for her laundry while the room is empty. Mysticat appears when Ivory is playing the piano in the basement, and she makes direct eye contact with Ivory, and it sends a physical shiver of a chill through her and sets her fingers trembling against the keys.
Although Ivory is not very good at talking, when she addresses Mysticat, it feels pretty much the same as talking to the air, which is to say it’s easier.
“Do you want something? From me?”
Mysticat’s neck lolls, just a little from this angle. You can see it better from the side. Better is a strong word for a broken neck.
“There must be a reason you’re here.”
She doesn’t look like she has any more answers than Ivory does. Still, it doesn’t hurt to ask. She has nothing to lose; her reputation has remained at zero with most of the cohort anyway.
“Is there something I can give you? Something I can do?”
Mysticat does not open her mouth. Ivory thinks she hears that little, breathless “No,” anyway.
She tries asking Mr Pyroscythe instead. “What was Miss Mysticat like?”
“Oh, uh,” Mr Pyroscythe seems distressed, a startled deer in her path, “she was… She was great. I knew her for a long time, y’know. Like, she wasn’t my first maid, but she was certainly here to watch me grow. She had a real sense for knowing when you needed something, I guess - whether that was an extra cup of coffee, or a shoulder to lean on, or… Anything.”
“Oh,” says Ivory.
“I wish I’d been able to come and help when she needed someone,” he says to the floor. “But I guess you can’t predict that kind of thing.”
“Mm.”
“Wh-why’d you ask?”
He brings his head up to face her. His eyes are pale, so frosty blue that they hardly seem to have colour at all, like it’s just the whites of his eyes and a pricked black pupil. Ivory thinks of bright cyan and sunny gold, paired with the blare of bloodstained red on white. “I - I don’t know, sir. I’m sorry.”
“Hey,” he tells her, “nothing to apologise for. It’s… We’re all still trying to make sense of it, I think. Even though you didn’t know her, you can still feel like you need closure.”
“Okay.”
She did not think she needed closure. She did not know Mysticat, does not remember what her neck looked like when it was still on straight any more. Mysticat is dead, and Ivory has replaced her, so seamlessly that you’d hardly even know there was a change if you were only looking for a mop of white cleaning up Mr Pyroscythe’s mess.
Perhaps it is those seams that are trapping her. Mysticat has had her stitches ripped out, her memory extracted from Hemlocke House, and a new girl cover the hole she left there appliqué. Perhaps it is those loose ends, untied, that somehow bind her.
Her skirts sweep across the corridors and it sounds like the sweep of a chalk brush, effacing the woman she supplants.
After curfew - after even Mr Pierce has gone to bed, which is saying something - Ivory finds herself back at the spot where Mysticat’s body was found. She is not there. Her blood has been cleaned from the carpet, the wood scrubbed, the windows opened to air out the miasma of death. Now all that remains is the same stuffiness that packs every hallway of Hemlocke House, and the memory of a woman that used to be… and, of course, a ghost.
“I am not you,” she tells the air.
“No,” says Mysticat.
“I did not ask to be treated as your replacement. I did not want to be an extension of you.”
“No,” says Mysticat again.
The grandfather clock in the hall strikes once. Ivory steps forward, and the apparition does not flicker. “I am Ivory. You are remembered. You are survived by your family. I am not trying to replace you.”
“No,” says Mysticat. Ivory steps forward one more time, and takes her hands, pulls them up between both of their chests.
“I just want you to rest.”
There is no flesh between her fingers, no substance. There is just a chill that sends a shiver all through her, and a mirror of her own dead eyes in the dim moonlight.
“Miss Mysticat, I need you to stop haunting me.” As if the problem will go away if she just asks politely. “The people who knew you are trying to move on. I would have already moved on if you were not here, still, watching me.”
She does not know a lot of ghost stories. Still, somehow, she gets the sense that the ghost only leaves before its time when you desperately want it to stay.
So maybe she needs to want Mysticat to stay?
“Then… tell me about yourself. Show me why I should be sad to lose you.”
Mysticat grabs Ivory’s hands tighter, sudden and strict like a python, and they are not at the site of her death any more. They are standing in the greenhouse. Ivory has never been inside before. She knows it exists, has walked past it at more reasonable times of day, but has not been given permission to enter. Ghosts, she supposes, do not need permission to go where they may.
The plants are closed up for the night, buds with petals tucked into each other’s embraces, and the glass of the roof allows the sheen of moonlight to shimmer more brightly off the edge of patent leaves and waxy berries. Mr Hemlocke must have paid a lot of money to import some of these plants, things that Ivory has never seen anything like.
Something moves at the edge of her vision, and she jolts to look. A spider running along the leaf of one of the larger plants, vanishing into the black. And, at the base of the stem it appeared from, a little paper tag driven into the soil of the pot. MYSTY.
“These are yours?”
“No,” says Mysticat.
“Just that one.”
She is silent. Mysticat only had one plant, but it is healthy, still. The gardeners must be keeping it fed and watered in her absence. She will live on in this way.
The plant is a pretty thing that Ivory has no name for. Long green stalks that end in spadelike leaves, with no clear signs of fruit or flowers.
Mysticat pulls at her hand again, and they are in pitch blackness.
Her eyes adjust, slowly. Must and heavy warmth and stale air. Wooden floorboards and a sloped ceiling. This is an attic room.
Boxes pile around them, but only one of them is open. Ivory steps through Mysticat to get a closer look, squinting through the dim. On top of the trunk, there is a picture in a frame. Four children crowd around Mr Hemlocke and a woman holding a baby. Their expressions are all sombre; definitely a photograph and not a portrait, then. Mr Hemlocke’s arm grips tight around a young Zam’s shoulder, like he needed to be wrangled for the shot.
A thin layer of dust has settled across the contents of the trunk, but not this photograph. The outlines of paws cut clear through the grime. Mysticat has picked this photo up, recently.
“You come here,” Ivory says, and it feels too loud against the weight of the attic’s atmosphere, “to look at this. The Hemlockes, when they were all alive.”
Mysticat, and Mrs Hemlocke. Death follows the women of this house. Ivory does not want to be next.
(She will kill before she is killed, if she has to.)
This time, on the other side of Mysticat’s absent figure, she has to spin Ivory around to reach for her hand again and pull her to wherever they’re going next. They come face to face again, eye to eye. Close. Ivory’s skirt shifts around her legs, buffeted by gentle wind, and it is cold, and they are on the roof of Hemlocke House.
“You used to come up here?”
Her expression has shifted. Mysticat looks less hollow and more… sad.
“Are you the one who told Serapter he could do this?”
“Has he been coming up here?”
Ivory startles. It takes her a second to even realise that this is Mysticat’s voice. “He brought me,” she says, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” says Mysticat. “I just wanted you to know who I was. Really.”
“I never wanted to replace you.”
“No,” says Mysticat, but it’s not that same breathy note of realization, and Ivory feels something lift from her shoulders.
“I think we might have been friends,” she starts, and only realises as she says it that the words ring into the empty night air.
She is alone.
There is no ghost in Hemlocke House. Not any more.
Now alone (she was always alone), it strikes her how cold it is, out on the roof in the middle of the night. She feels her way across the shingles to her window and knocks.
There’s a few seconds of silence. Then rustling. “Ivory?” comes Serapter’s bleary voice. “The hell are you doing out there?”
“I got locked out,” she says, instead of explaining. He already doesn’t believe her; she doesn’t need to make it worse.
“Okay, weirdo,” he replies, but helps her inside nonetheless.
Morning comes, and everything is the same, except a lack of extra figures in the corner of her eye. Which, Ivory assumes, will be the end of it. All that remains is a memory stuck to the back of her mind, and a habit of sprinkling an extra spoon of sugar into Mr Pyroscythe’s coffee, even though he says he wants it black.