Marian returns and sets two cups of coffee down, then whisks back to the kitchen to wait for the coffee maker to catch up.
Amanda, having distracted herself as long as she could with the pie, starts in on the ice cream, slowly scooping it into each bowl. Then she sits down again. She glances at me, and I see something of her mother’s expression on her face.
Talk, she’s telling me. Anything.
“I hear you’ve been in this house a long time,” I say to her father.
“That’s right. Amanda grew up here, but it became pretty lived-in even before she was born. Many many years ago, we lived on the coast.”
“I always wonder what makes people leave the beach for the small town life.”
He laughs. “Money, mostly. A young couple in their first tiny apartment is one thing. A family in a cramped, run down space, which is really what it was, it quite another.”
“That was a quaint little place, Mark,” Marian admonishes him, coming back with the other two coffee cups and setting them down on the table.
“Quaint is a real estate word for closet-sized,” he pronounces, then pointedly takes a bite of his pie. “Come on, you three, the ice cream has a small window of time before it turns from appropriately melted to an unappetizing foamy mess.”
Amanda laughs. “Dad’s always picky with the ice cream,” she tells me.
“When I was little I never ate anything melted,” he says. “Remember, Marian, when Amanda was four, I thought she was going to grow up to be as picky as I was.”
“God forbid,” Marian says, shaking her head.
After the dishes are loaded into the dishwasher, Amanda and I say good night to her parents and make the now well-worn trek back to the guest house. The umbrella is large, the older kind with the hook on the handle. The raindrops pelt against it tirelessly, sounding almost angry. We run across the path, splashing in unavoidable puddles that have filled up around it.
Inside, Amanda falls asleep quickly, apparently unaffected by the caffeine. For some reason, the coffee keeps me more awake than it has in the past. I sit up and look out the window. I remember Amanda mentioning that her parents had more acreage than they could ever use. Our bedroom window faces it: maybe a half square mile of forest. The outer layer is thin, and I can see into the trees easily up to a point. Most of the branches are weak, curved, thin. But beyond them lies a solid blackness, impenetrable. The longer I gaze into it, trying to see something, anything, in that blackness, the more it looks like a passage to another world. The clouded hallway...
I shiver, and Amanda stirs next to me. I don’t want to leave her, but the blackness is looking back at me now, and I don’t have a choice.
I push the covers down off my knees and get up. I fold them back up over Amanda, having the strange feeling that I won’t return.
But that’s crazy.
I pull my jeans back on and add my jacket. The collar turns up at first, like it always does, and I fold it back down. I feel like I’m underwater, and once familiar, incidental things are happening slowly. They’re suddenly magnified, like a dream.
I take Amanda’s keys from the dresser and go down the hallway, half-expecting to see any manner of spirits, ghouls... but there’s nothing except the quiet coziness of the country decor, dimmed in the blues of the night, but ordinary.
Outside is different.
I lock the door behind me and walk around the side of the house to the forest. The wind and rain pick up in both power and volume. I duck my head down against the weather and keep walking.
Around the corner, the blackness is waiting for me. I can hear something beneath the gales and downpour...but what? A soft sound, like a humming.
I follow the sound, into the trees, past the half-formed branches and into the blackness. The humming grows louder, as though whatever is doing it is happy that I came.
I reach the middle of the forest. I don’t know how I’m sure of that, but I am.
A soft glow appears ahead of me, and I approach it. A little girl sits on the ground, which is covered with carpet-like moss. She’s maybe seven, dressed in a blue Sunday picnic kind of outfit. Straw hat, little Mary Janes. Blonde hair.
She’s arranging some pebbles on the ground in front of her, into a circle around a little mushroom springing out of the ground. For a second, it seems she’s unaware of my presence, but then she looks up at me and smiles. It is a smile that has not yet known loss.
“Look!” she says, “a fairy ring!”
Then the image of her shifts and jumps as though someone is moving the projector and she’s just a recording, a small strip of film. She changes slightly, or is another girl entirely? Yes, I know this one, I’ve seen her before.
She, too, sits on the ground. Older than the first girl, but not by much. She looks at the fairy ring, then adds a ring of larger stones around it. Several scenes flash before me, and she’s older each time, until she disappears abruptly.\
Patricia’s sister.
There is a cracking sound, and the tree next to me splits down the middle. The air crackles with electricity, lighting up the entire clearing in a brief flash.
I can see them all around me suddenly, these shadows of people who haven’t been here in so long.
The ghosts have finally come.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Start from the beginning
