| |
The dining room was alive with the sounds of laughter and clinking glasses. Chase, Tammy, Aaron, Christy, Sandra, Amanda, and Trish all sitting around the large oval mahogany dining table enjoying the seared salmon and roasted new potatoes, the deep coral of the fish looked like splotches of paint on the glossy white plates. Three bottles of wine sat open on the table, two of them were already empty and the third just opened.
“So, Amanda,” Trish began, sitting at the head of the table, a playful grin on her pixie face and the wine glass close to her lips, “when the three of you all knew each other, what kind of girl were you? Were you a popular girl?”
Amanda looked at her and laughed, her pale blonde hair dancing in the light as she threw her head back. “Yeah, yeah. I was. But I don’t think I was a mean girl.”
“And, Aaron, you weren’t popular, I mean, what gay kid is.” Trish said without question.
“No. No, I wasn’t.” Aaron took a sip of his wine and stared at Trish from his place at the opposite end of the table.
“So, then, we should ask you, Aaron, was Amanda a mean girl?” Sandra said to him, her ruby lips spread in a smile.
Aaron looked around the room, passing over Tammy to his left, followed by Sandra and Christy and the empty chair that had been placed in the corner after Andy said she had other plans, and then to Trish’s mischief grin and then to Amanda and Chase, who sat at his right and held tight to Aaron’s hand, which rested atop his thigh.
Amanda’s brown eyes caught his and he saw in them the sudden fear that perhaps he would say yes, that perhaps she had harmed him in middle school and had never realized it.
“No, Amanda was never a mean girl.”
It was true. She had always been nice to him. Even when the three of them would follow behind him around the school during gym, talking to him and trying to get him to acknowledge them.
She had hounded him, but she had never been mean when doing so. That was Bailey’s job, and sometimes even Chase’s. Amanda had always been the silent witness, going along with it because perhaps, in her own way, she had belonged to them just as much as he had.
“It’s still so crazy that you all somehow ended up here together,” Tammy said, her amber eyes wide and her head shaking slowly, visibly mystified by it. They all were.
“Oh, yeah, I’m totally tripping about it,” Chase said, his eyes wide and a smile on his face. The light of the candles and the chandelier overhead danced in his turquoise eyes like sunlight on the bay.
“Oh, for sure,” Amanda said with a nod. “It’s weird, but it’s also so familiar that it doesn’t feel disconcerting.”
Aaron sighed and leaned back in his chair, slipping his hand out of Chase’s grip and folding his arms across his chest, his black polo tightening around him. His dark eyes danced in the light with an incandescence that looked like a high resolution photo of a forest in the early morning dawn.
“I don’t understand any of it and I don’t want to know what’s behind it,” he finally said.
“That’s an odd way of putting it,” Sandra remarked. “Why do you think something is behind it?”
Aaron shrugged. “Because there’s always something behind it. For the three of us to be brought back together... the history between us.... The fucked—” he stopped himself. “It’s just too much to just be happenstance or whatever.”
“Well, what could be behind it? What could the Universe be up to, to bring you all together?” Trish asked.
Aaron looked at Christy who sat next to her girlfriend, not saying anything, just taking in the conversation and forming her thoughts into something concise and to the point which she would reveal in due time.
Chase, Aaron, and Amanda all looked at each other, and if they had been able to hear each other’s thoughts they would have heard Bailey’s name shouted at the same time, and his stoic face and black eyes would have flashed across their minds three times over.
It wasn’t the Universe. It was Bailey Nguyen and the thread of him that slipped through them all. It was like a barbed hook and the line of thread was spun from Bailey’s veins and central nervous system, tearing through the soft stomach tissue and causing unbearable pain as it tore through flesh and fat, and was ripped out through the other side, pulling that arterial line through so it could be threaded into the next person.
“It’s this place,” Christy said.
They all looked at her confused, with the exception of Trish and Chase, who had already heard this local folklore.
“What do you mean ‘this place’?” Tammy asked.
“Like, this house?” Sandra looked around the dining room uneasily.
Christy laughed and shook her head. “No. Here. Bellingham. This place attracts a lot of weird shit. A lot of dark shit.”
Sandra, Tammy, and Amanda laughed and Trish and Chase exchanged knowing grins. Aaron simply listened. His eyes were focused on Christy, watching the way her pale lips spoke and how her spring green eyes conveyed the certainty in the esoteric knowledge she was about to impart.
“You laugh, but I’m serious. I grew up here; this place is weird. A shit ton of hauntings, known and others personal, and that if you asked almost anyone here they would tell you that they’ve experienced it. We have the Blackmoore family here—the Blackmoores as in Blackmoore World Corp—and it’s been rumored forever that they’re witches, and then there’s the tavern....”
“The tavern?” Amanda asked, looking from Sandra to Tammy quizzically, and who both shook their heads in response.
“The Waterfront Tavern in downtown. Every serial killer from the Pacific Northwest or passing through have all ended up at this tavern. Most recently, the D.C. Sniper. It’s like this primal vortex of shit— of spiritual energy that has never been fully tamed.
“We joke that you shouldn’t drink the water because if you do you’ll never be able to leave or you’ll always end up coming back. But it’s true. It has this energy—this aura that lures you time and again.
“The job opportunities pretty much suck here, and there are a lot of people our age on assistance of some kind or another, but in other ways it totally thrives for those who can afford it. But still, people find themselves sucked back or they’ve never left and just struggle, yet they stay.
“It’s in the water. It’s in the earth—the trees—all of it. And whatever it is. Unfinished business that needs to be resolved, maybe....”
“Unfinished business... like a ghost?” Sandra asked her.
Christy shrugged. “Maybe. What are ghosts—apparitions—if not memories so strongly imprinted through heighted energy or emotion or tragedy, that it can either replay itself over and over again on a loop, or grow consciousness, power, and form to come back for us.
“We’ve all had memories so vivid, so impressionable that we can recall them so clearly, that for even a split-second we feel as if we are back there again. In that moment two realties—two moments in time—cross over one another like an eclipse.”
They were all silent for a few seconds, taking in all that she had just said to them.
“That was...” Chase began, shaking his head and chuckling nervously as he brought his glass of Malbec to his lips. “That was fucking deep.”
They all ripped apart the silence with their robust laughter, a little too boisterous, as if hoping to expel any eerie currents that may have passed between them all as they had listened to this dark tale.
Aaron, Chase, and Amanda glanced at each other from the corner of their eyes, and all three of their faces grew dark as Christy’s words rolled around in their heads. Chase and Aaron carrying the added terror of the very real Voice and Shape that had been reaching out for them since they first laid eyes on each other that rainy day on the sky bridge.
“Well,” Tammy began, throwing back the rest of her wine and dropping her white linen napkin on her empty plate. “I have to get to the library. I have a paper to write that I totally forgot to do.”
Aaron looked at her and pouted his bottom lip.
“Oh, no. Stay!”
Tammy sighed and shook her head. “I wish I could, but it’s due tomorrow and I’m a lazy fuck.”
They all laughed and watched as Tammy scooted her chair into the table and disappeared into the kitchen—plate and wine glass in hand—and the sound of it going into the sink was followed by the creaking of the floorboards as she made her way out of the kitchen and into the main hall, her footfalls waking the thick wood steps with each ascent.