When was a key not a key? It wasn’t so much a metaphorical question as it was a metaphysical one, like the tree falling with no one to hear it. A key with nothing to open has no purpose. Josh felt it rattle against Boone’s tobacco tin in his pocket. Through the narrow window he caught a glimpse of that eerie blue-white flickering light as it swelled. He hesitated, caught in indecision, frozen between throwing the door open and running, or shrinking back into the shadows of the shed and pulling the old blanket up over his head and hoping the wraith bride just passed him by.
That hesitation took the choice out of his hands.
Josh saw her through the cobwebbed glass, heart-stoppingly beautiful, and utterly terrifying as she ghosted across the foxtails, dandelion clocks, and seed potatoes toward the shed. He scuffed back a step away from the glass, his foot fetching up against a discarded flower box and making it scrape across the wooden floor with what—given as he was trying to be church-mouse silent—sounded to him like enough of a racket to raise the dead. Josh fervently prayed she hadn’t heard it. Mind racing, he ducked away from the window. How had she followed him here? How had she known this was where he would run to when he hadn’t known himself? Or, more pertinently, perhaps, more bitterly, certainly: How had he been stupid enough to allow himself to be cornered here with nowhere to run?
The air felt peculiar. It was as if it was heavy with energy. Charged.
He risked a careful step back toward Boone’s makeshift chair, transferring his weight from one foot to another very, very carefully so the old boards beneath them didn’t protest, and then another, putting him out of direct line of sight through the window. He could hear her out there, moving through the allotment. He could hear the rustle of her long white dress through the high foxtails and the whisper of the long grasses in her wake. And he could hear something else, too, even if he couldn’t understand what: a burst of static, like a radio that had fallen off-station, a cackle of white noise as it tried to retune, and somewhere inside that, the ghosts of voices that couldn’t quite come through.
The shed was filled with an array of makeshift weapons if worst came to worst, but he wasn’t sure he could fight the woman. Could a rusty old sickle cut her? He didn’t want to ever find out the answer. That didn’t stop him from taking down the sickle. It didn’t have a particularly good edge on it, but given that the last thing he wanted to do was swing it the lack of cutting edge really wasn’t a deal breaker.
The diffuse blue light filled the window, casting shadows across the workbench and tools inside the shed as it created a stark new geography for the place that consisted of black shadows and sharp angles. He caught a glimpse of her blond bob through the glass as she crossed the window.
The static crackled again.
It was at the door.
The eerie light crept beneath it, seeming to edge closer and closer to his feet, reaching out for him.
Josh tried to shuffle back another step, but there was nowhere to go.
The handle rattled.
Josh could half-hear the voices trapped inside it as another burst of static filled the night.
His grip tightened on the sickle’s wooden grip.
The handle turned.
The door groaned open an inch.
Two.
The wraith bride’s weird luminescence spilled into the shed.
The light touched every corner of the interior.
There was nowhere to hide as she opened the door.
Myrna Shepherd stood in the doorway, the folds of her white dress coiling around her, her chest flushed, rising and falling shallowly, breath coming fast. Her eyes were smoky hollows. She opened her mouth and another burst of white noise and ghost voices crackled out of her. He heard words in there, they were faint, coming from a long way away—another time, another place—and they made no sense to him: “Gimme a whiskey sour…”
“What do you want from me?”
“Gimme a whiskey sour…”
Josh didn’t know what to say to that. “I don’t have any,” Josh said, feeling stupid and terrified at the same time. It was beyond surreal, facing a movie icon in the doorway of his grandfather’s allotment shed, listening to her ask for a drink, and knowing what she really wanted was to shred his soul. His free hand closed around the key in his pocket. All he could think was that he couldn’t let her have it.
“C’mon baby, you don’t want to disappoint a lady, do you?”
“I can’t give you what I don’t have,” Josh took his hand out of his pocket and held up both the sickle and the empty hand to show Shepherd he wasn’t holding out on her.
“You don’t want to disappoint a lady…”
She crossed the threshold.
Just a single step.
And then she stopped, tilting her head as though listening to something—a sound so far away or pitched so high—he couldn’t hear. Her face twitched. Her head straightened. Those smoky eyes of hers bore into him. Her nostrils flared. And then her entire face flickered and for the silence between his hammering heartbeats she wasn’t there.
And then she was.
Another burst of static filled with words, an old movie line, he realized hearing the echo of that famous statement of hers: “Loneliness is good for the soul.” And, good to her word, the thing that was Myrna Shepherd backed away from the door, leaving Josh Raines to stand there and stare at the open doorway and wonder what had just happened and how the hell he was still alive.
He didn’t move for a full five minutes, but the light had long since faded. Whatever she was, she wasn’t coming back. He didn’t know what had stopped her, but whatever the reason it had saved his life, so he wasn’t about to start arguing with it.
He dropped the sickle on the old workbench and sank down onto Boone’s tea chest seat, exhausted as the flood of adrenaline left his body. He was shaking so hard the key in his pocket rattled against the tobacco tin as though to remind him it was still there.
When is a key not a key? He riddled himself again; only he did know what it opened, just not where it opened it. It opened the door to Boone’s secret place. He even knew what was inside it—or at least thought he did. It couldn’t be far away; he knew that, too. The old man hadn’t traveled much in his last days. So in point of fact he knew a lot more than he had even a few hours ago. And he wasn’t fumbling in the dark. Boone had left him Isaiah’s confession for a reason, hadn’t he? It had to be a clue, didn’t it?
But there were no addresses in that old letter, were there?