When I was seven years old, I swore I saw a specter rise from her grave. My childish heart was arrested as the woman in white ascended, untouched by the soil that once held her. Her pale, alabaster skin, though probably once beautiful, bore the lackluster pallor of death. She hovered above her resting place, her stockinged feet barely scraping the sod beneath while her burial shift fluttered gently with the night breeze.
Her haunting black gaze fixed on me. For a moment, the apparition paused, as if unsure of my purpose beside her grave. But then she smiled, and seeming to forget me, she floated on by, hell-bent on heading to who knows where and to what purpose. She was soon lost in the fog that shrouded us.
The sun returned. I began to breathe again and then fell into a dead faint. At least, that’s how I remembered it.
“Are you daydreaming again about your imaginary ghost friend?” I opened my eyes. My older brother, Jimmy, stared down at me as I lay on the grass.
I pushed myself up onto my elbows, frowning. “It’s not a daydream if it happened, twit.”
“So you say.”
I picked up my Kindle and forced myself up. It had been lovely lying on the grass soaking up the sun, and if Jimmy hadn’t ruined the moment, I could have sunbathed for hours. I pushed past him and headed for my favorite tree. With his leg in a cast, there was no way he could bug me high in its limbs.
“No fair,” he groaned as I hoisted myself up on the lower branch and began to climb. I had scaled this one so often as a child I could do it blindfolded now.
“Blah, blah, blah.” My favorite spot in the tree branched out about ten feet above the ground. The branch was strong enough to support me, even now that I was twenty, and had a convenient cross branch I could rest my other leg on, making a sort of seat. I nestled into the trunk, planning to make an afternoon of it with my Kindle. I had a gothic novel to read, full of spirits, abbeys, boogeymen, and ghouls. My favorite.
“Don’t fall asleep up there,” Jimmy grumbled, wrinkling his nose in frustration. “You’ll be sorry if you do. These cast things really hurt.” He tapped on his own for good measure and then hobbled off.
Why was he making such a song and dance of it? After all, his cast was coming off today. Thank goodness for that. He’d done nothing but moan since he’d broken it playing ice hockey a few days ago. Dad, who was a skilled magical healer, had reset it with the Os Emantur Ligna incantation but insisted he wear the cast anyway to ensure the adhesion set. Jimmy looked none too impressed when the cast went on, but Dad’s word was law, and he knew better than to meddle with it. So what if he missed a couple of games? Better that than break the damned thing again.
As Jimmy passed the stone wall by the graveyard, I spotted a Prius on the other side of it, circling round toward our drive. The car belonged to our neighbor, Matthew Allen. I heard he’d found himself a wife at last, and curious to get a look at her, I climbed back down out of the tree.
Jimmy waved at them. I suppose he was as curious as me because cast or no cast, he picked up his pace to greet them. They must have noticed, because the Prius slowed, and the driver window slid down.
“Still wearing that thing?”
Matthew Allen was a thin man, with forever dirty fingernails and an unkempt ginger beard that made me want to grab a pair of scissors. He was rumored to be worth a small fortune, though I never saw him spend a penny of it. He had a large property separated from ours by the graveyard. Mom was thankful for that, because his own ran wild, and the weeds would have spilled into our garden were it not for the enchantments laid by the cleric that managed the cemetery. It wasn’t that Matt didn’t look after his place—no, he was what Mom called a tree hugger and lived off what he grew on the land. He said manicured lawns were pointless adornments. Personally, I thought they were pretty.
Jimmy glanced down at his cast and grinned. “Not for much longer. It’s coming off later today after Dad gets home.” He bent lower, trying to get a better look at the woman in the passenger seat. As he did so, I caught up and bowed my head to do the same.
“Hello,” I said.
Seeing where our attention lay, Matt turned to acknowledge the woman by his side.
“Well now, I’d like you both to meet the woman who captured my heart. This is Sylvia, my new bride. Sylvia, this is Jimmy and Catherine Morland, two of our neighbors.”
Sylvia leaned across her husband to get a better look at us outside his window. Unlike her husband, she had a ruddy complexion, and the seat belt strained to contain her. She was dressed from head to toe in black velvet and held her wand expectantly in her left hand.
“Hello,” she said, sweetly enough, but then words failed her, and she waited for us to continue the conversation.
“Hi,” I said. “Nice to meet you.” I ran out of things to say myself.
“I was thinking about popping over in a bit,” Matt said. “To introduce Sylvia to your mom and dad. Do you think they’d mind? I would like them to meet each other as soon as possible.”
“Not at all.” I forced a smile and kept my tone light. “I think they would love you to. Jimmy and I are just going in, so we can tell them you’re coming if you like. What time were you thinking of?”
“About four? Before dinner?”
“Yeah, I’m sure it’ll be all right. I’ll ask them to call you if it’s not.”
“Perfect. See you then.”
The Prius rolled off, the gravel drive making more noise than the car.
“That’s not the kind of woman I imagined he’d marry,” Jimmy remarked.
“Oh? Howzat?”
“I figured he’d bring home a beanpole tree hugger like himself. She looks as if she could snap him in two.”
“Opposites attract, maybe,” I suggested. “As long as she makes him happy.”
A wicked grin creased the corners of my brother’s mouth. “And maybe she has a handsome son who can carry you away. You’re always complaining there are no decent wizards around here to whisk you off your feet.”
“I do not!” I said, though I had to confess the thought had its charm. “Some of us have other things to think about besides the opposite sex. Anyway, you go and tell Mom they’re coming over. I want to finish my book.”
Jimmy nodded and limped back to the house.
I had been too young to remember Matt’s first wife, who, according to Mom, had run off to explore her spirituality, whatever that was supposed to mean. Whatever his troubles, he had always been nice to us, sharing some of his produce and regularly preparing a basket of something delicious for us at Halloween.
Jimmy had just reached the bottom of the lane when a black Ford truck pulled up close to him. The driver wound down his window and beckoned my brother over. I could just about see the man’s face. He was about our age, maybe a few years older than me, with brown hair. He looked all right. Not what I would call a looker but passable. I was too far away to hear what was said, but after leaning into the window, Jimmy straightened up and pointed toward the Allen house. The young man nodded, turned back into the road and drove off. I quickly forgot all about him.
The wall to the cemetery was low, and I had long legs, so I cleared it with ease. It was no coincidence I’d been dreaming about my first encounter with that ghost. She had made her appearance on my seventh birthday. After that initial meeting, whatever sensation had drawn me to that grave died, like it hadn’t happened at all. For years after that, I’d felt nothing at all, and like Jimmy thought, I’d begun to convince myself it had been nothing more than a fanciful dream of my seven-year-old self.
Then, just before my fourteenth birthday, I’d felt a strange sensation in my tummy, like a knot, calling me back to the cemetery, and to that grave. When I’d told Mom about it, she’d freaked out and grounded me for a month. Mad, she’d been. Like I’d told her I’d planned to murder someone or something. I’d never seen her go so berserk.
“I’m not gonna have a daughter of mine…” Mom caught herself in time.
“What?”
“Nothing. Stay in your room.”
It was the first time she’d ever locked me in anywhere. Perhaps I should have been scared, but I had been too focused on this strange new feeling inside me. It grew stronger by the minute, and although I was locked up, it was all I could do to stop myself from shimmying down the drainpipe outside my bedroom and answering the call. Mom would have skinned me alive if I’d tried it—so I fought the urge and stayed inside.
When she finally let me out, I wanted answers and stood in the doorway with my hands on my hips. “What’s going on?”
Mom checked me over, hair, teeth, limbs, and arms, like I was a prize goat. “Nothing. Don’t ask me about it again.” I knew her well enough to know the subject was closed.
Now another seven years had passed, and here I was again. I was feeling that same drawing sensation in my gut. This time, I shared that I felt it with no one. Mom had been looking at me funny lately, almost like she was half expecting something, but I’d kept my mouth shut and pretended nothing was happening. I didn’t want to be locked up again.
It wasn’t a bad feeling, quite the reverse. It was hard to describe, something like a calling, a calling that filled my entire soul with raw energy, and I welcomed it and wanted to nurture it. Back then, Mom had made it sound like it was something bad, something to be ashamed of, but I knew she was wrong. To me, it felt like the most natural thing in the world, and I wanted to see what would happen if I gave in to it.
Jimmy went inside, and I headed straight for the one grave, hidden behind the abandoned church, lying beneath the shade of the drooping branches of an ancient Yew tree. This little stretch was on unconsecrated ground. The final resting place for the damned and undesirable.
No one could see me here. Between the church and the tree, I was hidden from sight. The feeling, whatever it was, had been quietly calling to me for days, but now that I was here, the pulsing quickened, and a strange pull around my navel radiated throughout my entire body, like a thousand tingles that intensified the closer I stepped to the grave. I knelt before the stone of my great-great-great-and-then-some-grandmother and namesake and read the marking for the thousandth time.
Here lies Catherine Morland,
Hanged 1693.
May God forgive her.
Above the text, the stonemason had carved a circle of butterflies, which Dad had explained represented eternal life and resurrection, and had been etched secretly a few years after her death. I remember Mom scowling at me when he’d told me all this, but her disapproval had only made me more curious, so I’d looked her up. Although we lived in Misty Cedars, Pennsylvania, she’d been put to death around the time of the infamous Salem witch trials.
I put my hand out to the weathered stone. It felt rough to touch. The energy was most intense here, but I wasn’t afraid. If I had to choose one word to describe it, I’d have called it harmony. I closed my eyes to let the sensation run through me. Don’t ask me how, but I knew I wasn’t in danger. If anything, I felt more alive than ever.
Now wasn’t the moment. I knew this instinctively. It was no coincidence the first time had happened on my birthday, I was sure of it, but if it felt this good now, how great would it be in two days when I turned twenty-one?
“What are you doing?”
At the sound of Jimmy’s voice, I let go of the stone. I hadn’t heard him approach, yet he was right behind me, at the footstone of the grave. I noticed the cast was off his leg. It was the first time I’d seen him smiling in days.
“You know you’re not supposed to be here,” Jimmy said.
“We’re not kids anymore, Jimmy. They can’t tell us what we can and can’t do. Don’t be such a jellyfish.” I pushed myself up and brushed the sod off my jeans. “What do you want?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to show you my leg.”
“How does it feel?”
“Good as new,” Jimmy said, patting his thigh. “At least it does now that stupid cast is off.”
I nodded. “Um, you won’t tell them, I mean, where you found me?”
He chuckled but didn’t answer. “Come on. The Allens will be over in a bit, but Mom wants to know all about her now. She asked me, but I don’t know what to tell her, so she told me to come and get you.”
I laughed. “Boys.” I followed him back to the house.
Although we amused ourselves by talking silly nothings on the way, my focus remained at the grave and how those tingling sensations faded the farther I walked away from it. That had to mean something, right?