Chapter 10
The words linger in Dani’s mind far longer than she wants them to, far longer than she thinks they linger with the others. No, that isn’t true – if Jamie had a ghost within her who had communicated such words, she would be thinking them over, too. And Owen….
Well, Dani isn’t sure about Owen. As much as she loves him – and she does love him, like a brother – she isn’t sure how comfortable she is with him trying to communicate with the creature within her. It’s like he’s trying to make nice with a bear while it is carrying another person’s face ripped between its teeth. But, then, even animals tend only to attack people when they feel threatened. She has not threatened the creature. And yet it did, once, attack her – thus the creature, being human, must act under different ideas than even a predatory animal – for it is only humans who hunt for sport. Not that she believes the creature was – or even is – hunting her.
It is all so complicated.
But she knows the lines, knows the reference, knows the double meaning – Romeo, believing Juliet to be dead, and killing himself to be with her; Juliet, still alive even while Romeo believes she is dead, unable to do anything about it; Romeo, describing Juliet and all of the ways she is still alive but believing them things that will be soon tarnished by her death.
Romeo speaks of Juliet’s beauty. That doesn’t sit well with Dani. She doesn’t want to think of the creature speaking of her beauty. It makes her uncomfortable.
Her beauty makes this vault a feasting presence full of light.
Dani thinks of it and shivers. Feasting. What does feasting mean? Is the creature feasting on her?
She can’t think of it right now. When Henry and the kids have left, maybe, but not while they’re here. She can’t think about the inherent dangers of housing that creature while they are here, cannot even speak of her, because she is beginning to feel that so doing is only drawing its attention to what is happening in the world outside of her cage.
Dani doesn’t like thinking of herself as a cage, but that is what she is, isn’t it?
A cage for a creature that wants to feast on her.
Dani shivers and pushes it out of her mind as much as she can.
You should have expected this, you think, standing at the edge of the path on your side of the gate. You should have expected this. The fact that you didn’t only speaks to your naïveté. A part of you believes that you have never considered yourself to be naïve, that you have believed the word applied to someone else you once might have known. It feels, sometimes, as though you are regaining memories, but that should not be possible. Living here—
She cannot give you back what you have forgotten, what has faded. You remember things that are familiar. That is all.
Your path no longer leads to the locked, rusted gate.
When you woke, you found that the stream which once bubbled merrily near your room had dried up as though it had never been there to begin with. No matter. You could cross the gate to the original source. It would be a pain, and you would have a hard time carrying any of it back with you – truly, the girl is doing herself more of a disservice than an actual service, because destroying your source only meant you would cross the gate more often into her territory – and then you had come to the end of your path and had to stop.
The stream isn’t truly gone, only grown and diverted to make a large moat between your path and the gate. And, of course, the gate has grown the way you expected it might – thicker, stone, steel, with its barbed wire now weaving through pikes crisscrossed at the very top. Intimidating to someone who isn’t already dead. Merely frustrating to someone like you.
It is as though she has forgotten that you lay beneath the waves in the center of a lake for decades without it bothering you in the slightest. A moat is just cute.
Dani feels the creature start at the nape of her neck, and her eyes widen. She presses her fingers at the spot and turns to meet Jamie’s eyes, unable to stop the expression of panic crossing her features. The creature moves up her head, down her forehead, and just as Dani moves to pinch the bridge of her nose in a last attempt at doing something that she knows – she knows, she knows – won’t work, Flora comes to her, takes her hands in her own smaller ones, and gestures for her to draw nearer to her level. Dani kneels to her, heart pounding, because the creature cannot – cannot – tuck her away right now. She won’t let it. She doesn’t exactly know how she will stop it, because she hasn’t been able to stop it before, but she knows that she will try. She has to. She has to.
Flora taps her finger on Dani’s forehead, just between her eyes, just where it becomes the slope of her nose. “You look afraid,” she says, her voice still as small as it had been the year before, and there’s a hint of childlike cheer to it that has usually been comforting before when it wasn’t somewhat unsettling.
Never creepy. Dani had never considered Flora to be creepy.
“Is it her?” Flora asks, meeting Dani’s eyes and searching them. “Is it the lady?”
Dani presses her lips together because she doesn’t want to admit it – not to the children, not right now – and her gaze flicks to Jamie once before she nods once. “She likes to wander,” Dani says in the smallest of whispers, hoping that Henry does not hear her, is not listening in on their conversation. “But don’t worry. I won’t let her hurt you.”
“Of course, you won’t.” Flora smiles and beckons to Miles. “We had a present for you, but I think I know something better that can help."
“Something better?” Dani echoes, head tilting ever so slightly to one side. “What do you mean?”
“When we first moved to Bly, when our parents were still alive, I saw my first ghost,” Flora confides, as matter of fact as she can be. “His face was faded almost like your lady’s, and I was quite terrified of him. I was perfectly horrid to him, running away from him. But Uncle Henry told me,” and here she pauses for the slightest of moments, turning towards her uncle and giving him a slight smile, “that he used to see an imaginary friend at Bly, too. Now I know that my ghost and yours aren’t imaginary, and I don’t think his was quite either, but he still gave me quite good advice.” She waits for Dani to meet her eyes, and when she did, her smile is gone, replaced with the most serious look she can give her. “Are you listening?”
“Of course.” Dani’s brow furrows. “Of course, I’m listening. Why wouldn’t I be listening?”
“Because you keep looking over to Owen and Jamie, and if you were listening, you wouldn’t be doing that.” Miles hasn’t said much while Flora explains, but this is fully him. He stuffs his hands in his pockets, and Dani knows it’s because he is older, but it looks so much like he did when it wasn’t…when it wasn’t him but was really Peter. The man may be gone now, but his influence still remains.
“I’m – I’m sorry. I’ll quit doing that. It’s rude, isn’t it?”
“It’s quite rude, Miss Clayton. But I forgive you.” Flora looks over to Jamie and grins at her, waggling her fingers in her direction. “She is very pretty. And she keeps looking over to you, too, so I suppose it is perfectly reasonable for you to look at her, too.” She is still smiling when she turns back to Dani. “I think the two of you are perfectly splendid.”
It seems to Dani that Flora has picked up some of Rebecca Jessel’s mannerisms as surely as Miles picked up some of Peter Quint’s. To be fair, she never met the two of them while they were alive to know that – only picked up on it, only heard about it from Jamie, from Owen, from Hannah, who she is picking up mannerisms from—
Flora presses her finger to Dani’s forehead again and meets her eyes just as solemn as she can. “You must give her a face and a story,” she says, just as serious as Dani has ever heard her before. “Your lady in the lake is just as human as we are, only dead and having forgotten herself. She doesn’t even remember her name.”
“Flora.” Dani kneels a little closer and whispers, “She killed people. She almost killed me. She almost killed Henry. She almost killed you.”
“I know,” Flora says, just as prim and proper as she always has been. “But I don’t think she means to. When she picked me up, I was scared, but thinking it over later, I think….” She presses her lips together and looks down as though considering before finally saying, “I think she was trying to be quite like my mom. She’s not my mom, but I think she wanted to be. I think she thought she was. I don’t think she knew I would die.” Her brow furrows, and she meets Dani’s eyes again. “Whatever the case, you must give her a face and a story. Then she won’t be quite as scary as she is now.”
Dani wants to tell Flora that her situation with the little ghost boy was quite a bit different from her own situation with the lady in the lake, but she doesn’t want to quell the young girl’s endless optimism and boundless attempt at understanding. She thinks it’s possible that Flora would try to make even Peter Quint seem better, if she could, and Dani had heard enough about him from Jamie to believe that there is very little good to be said about that man, if anything good could be said about him at all.
So instead of trying to convince Flora otherwise, Dani just takes her hands in her own and gives her a little nod. “If you think I should give her a face and a story, then I will try, but I can’t promise either of them will be very good.” She takes Flora over to the coffee table and pulls out a piece of paper. “I think if I were to give her a face, it would look something like this.” She draws a quick little face – two glaring eyes and a toothy mouth pulled back in a fearsome yell.
Flora laughs, covering her lips with the back of her hand, and then gestures to Dani’s pen. “May I?”
Dani nods and hands the pen over.
“I think, if I were to give her a face, it would look quite like this.” Flora’s face is a little bit better drawn, but in the end, it is still just as simple as Dani’s – but with two eyes and lips turned down in a sad frown than the gruesome Halloween slasher look Dani had given her. “I don’t think she is very happy.”
“I don’t think—” Dani winces again, pinching the bridge of her nose, and shakes her head. It doesn’t do any good; she can still feel the creature just behind her eyes, keeping track of them. “I don’t think she is very happy either. I’m not sure I can fix that, though.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to fix her,” Flora says, looking up at Dani. “I think she just wants someone to be there with her.”
Dani feels something grow tight in her chest, and she’s not sure whether that’s a reaction from the creature herself or if it’s from her own slight panic at the idea. She doesn’t want to be with the creature. She wants to be with Jamie. But she’s certain that’s not what Flora means.
“That’s what Peter wanted, at first.” Miles’s voice is low, and he doesn’t meet Dani’s eyes. “He didn’t want to be alone. But that wasn’t enough. He wanted off of Bly. He wanted a new body. He wanted—” He swallows and stops as his sister reaches over and touches his arm gently.
Miles, perhaps, is the only one who truly understands how things can be with the creature. For all that Flora gave Rebecca Jessel permission, the other woman hadn’t been so greedy and needy as to fully take her the way Peter Quint had taken Miles. But in a way, Peter was worse than the creature is. Dani has been given moments – days, weeks, months, years, hopefully – that are truly, completely her own, even with it roaming about her skull. Peter had pushed Miles out of the way without a second thought in much the same way that Dani is afraid the creature will one day do to her.
But, then, the creature is worse than Peter. Should it take over and return to its former self, then people will die. Peter Quint would never have—
Peter Quint killed two people. Do not think about what he would or would not have done if he could have gotten away with it.
Dani takes Miles’s hand in hers and gives it a gentle squeeze. “It’s okay, Miles,” she says. “We don’t have to talk about it.”
Miles looks up then and gives her a little nod. He takes a deep breath, as though steadying himself. “We have something else for you,” he says, voice soft. “We thought, since it was Christmas, we should give you a present.” He glances over to Flora, unsure, meeting her eyes, and she gives him a little nod. “Owen said you had been reading a lot of Shakespeare. That’s true, isn’t it?”
It isn’t strictly speaking true. Dani has been reading a lot of things recently, taking so many different books out of the library and devouring them all when she hasn’t been too tired. Other than Romeo and Juliet, most of them haven’t been Shakespeare. And if they had heard that from Owen and not Jamie—
Dani swallows once and nods. It’s not true, but that’s the only way the creature has chosen to communicate with them. That’s probably what Owen meant.
Flora notices her face, and she frowns. “That wasn’t very nice of him, was it? He’s shared something he wasn’t meant to share.”
“It’s okay.” Dani cups Flora’s cheek. “I love Shakespeare. When I was in college, the class I took on him was one of my favorites.” She doesn’t continue to say how much she couldn’t have kept his complete works – they hadn’t covered all of them in school, first of all, and she needed the money to buy the next semester’s books. Even the ones she tried to keep had been sold – with the exception of Romeo and Juliet – to fund her trip overseas. She doesn’t completely regret it. “Why do you ask?”
Miles glances over to his sister again, as though asking permission, and when she nods again, he continues. “We found a set of him in our mother’s things, so we thought….” He glances over to Henry, who nods in understanding and leaves the house briefly. “We thought we would give them to you. Uncle Henry didn’t want them, and he says we’re too young to read them.”
Dani nods. It’s a slow thing, as though knowledgeable of its weight, and her lips press together in a little line. “Thank you,” she starts to say, and her eyes widen as Henry brings in a box of books bound in old, worn out leather. A part of her thinks that these books didn’t just belong to Flora and Miles’s mother, but it isn’t her place to question it. She stands up and walks over to the books, brushing her fingertips along them, and as she does, she feels the creature stretching out from that place just between her eyes, fingers growing taut beneath her own so that it can touch them as well. She feels that deep cinch of terror in the center of her chest, but the creature goes nowhere else and, after that brief touch, fades away entirely.
She isn’t sure what to make of that.
But as she looks over the old books, over the small penciled in writing next to some of the stanzas, over the underlines and circles and engagement with not just one but multiple sets of hands, she amends the conversation she thought she would need to have with the creature about writing in them – these are books meant to be interacted with, not to be protected.
When Dani looks up, she can see the children paying attention to her every movement – and out of the corner of her eye, she can see Owen watching as well. “Thank you,” she says again, better understanding the weight of what they are giving her. “I…I don’t know how to thank you enough. This means so so much to me. I can’t….”
Flora takes Dani’s hand in her own, much smaller one and gives it the same gentle squeeze that Dani had given to Miles only moments before. “You freed the ghosts,” she says, and she squeezes her hand again. “It’s the least we could do.”
Henry gives another little nod, and Dani knows that he could care less about the other ghosts. He only cares that Flora didn’t get dragged beneath the waves. They haven’t told him exactly what happened with Miles and Peter Quint – they haven’t thought it would be particularly wise – so for all Henry knows, Peter has still run off with his money somewhere. It’s easier than trying to explain, and Miles….
Miles hasn’t wanted to tell him.
Dani can feel it in Flora, though, that unspoken thing – she hadn’t just freed the ghosts, she’d freed Miles.
It’s the least we could do indeed.
She glances up and meets Jamie’s eyes, trying to see if the other woman has had any involvement in this little plan of theirs, and the slightest blush and downturn of her eyes, the way her hand moves to rub at the back of her neck, suggest that yes, she had some hand in this as well. So perhaps that weight doesn’t fall entirely on Owen’s shoulders. Perhaps it isn’t on him at all.
Still.
Dani feels the possibility of a conversation that might need to take place with him. She just doesn’t want to have it just yet. Perhaps not even on this visit. Perhaps not ever at all.