“It’s not what I was hoping, all around. There’s a strange mood about the place… I have nightmares.”
“Nightmares. Yes. I’ve never set foot on the property myself, but it still invades my dreams, like a little demon at the end of my path. A troll under the bridge that asks too much. My husband fixed that little cottage up again after years of neglect, you know.”
“For your daughter.”
“Yes. I told him to just let the thing crumble to dust, but she really wanted it and he wanted to do it for her. He was desperate for the cottage to be put to use again. He didn’t want to rent it out to anyone either. He wanted it for Rebecca. It was their project. I wasn’t here often enough for my protests to mean much anyway.” She took a deep breath and stood up straight, deflecting memories. “He covered the well so she wouldn’t fall into it and fixed up the place. She played house there. He would sometimes sleep down there with her, even when I was back from a film shoot. Jealousy is a twisting thing when its cause is a family member.”
Chloe listened intently, only annoyed occasionally by the roar or touch of the wind. She was surprised Lana was opening herself so freely. Perhaps it was what the actress needed to do. Perhaps she had been waiting years for someone like Chloe to come along.
“Our daughter even had a friend. An imaginary one…” There was a note of question in her voice. “She called him the rascal. She said the cottage was his home first, but he would let her live there if she allowed him to do certain things…”
“What things?”
“I never found out. She died soon after.” Lana’s face became ugly for the first time since Chloe had met her. It dropped into a hideous frown, as if her whole face might melt away right there. But she stiffened her back once more and the ugliness left her. She was again the faded film star.
Suspicion was immediately cast on the husband in Chloe’s mind and the things fathers should never do with their daughters.
“I’ve had nightmares ever since.” Lana laughed with imposing self-judgment. “I had nightmares even before it all happened. I knew something was wrong. But I didn’t act…” She turned to face Chloe. “Sometimes you have to sacrifice a great deal to save something much smaller but of much greater worth. I never made that sacrifice.”
Chloe stared at her. It was as if the words the actress had said were in the air, staring Chloe down, saying
Pay attention now
.
“Let’s head inside,” Lana said. “You look like you’re freezing to death.”
***
Jeff lay in the fetal position on the couch. He was in a pair of blue sweatpants and a plain white T-shirt. Lounging clothes. Lazy clothes. Sick clothes. The soles of his socked feet were still white. He hadn’t felt well all day, like he was coming down with something. He felt he was on a ledge and about to fall over. Whichever way he fell would be bad. He wondered if this is how his father felt before he killed himself. Was this the disease? Would he only feel worse from here on out?
The TV fuzzed and jabbered in front of him. Again, he wasn’t really paying attention to it. What he did hear—a news program—warned of a snowstorm coming from the east. Snowstorms didn’t bother him. He had once led an adventure tour of thirteen through a range of treacherous snow-covered mountains without a single injury or accident occurring.
Jeff couldn’t remember the last time he was sick. It had to have been before his parents had their accident. He couldn’t afford to be sick after that. He had to take care of things, not only immediately after in terms of funeral and interment arrangements for his dad, but also working with the state in finding his mother proper care and taking care of Ethan in the longer term. The state was a draining and often heartless entity. But Jeff knew how to fight. Three years on the wrestling team had honed him. He made sure where Ethan lived and where their mother was cared for were within a few miles of each other.
He was eighteen when the accident happened, and somehow, quite improbably, had gained guardianship of Ethan, who was sixteen at the time. It helped that their parents were financially safe and intelligent. There was a nice savings, enough to help Ethan, when the time came, to head to college. The rest they could get through government grants. Jeff decided Ethan
had
to go to college.
Jeff, however, was not the college type. He hadn’t the time for it. When he’d left to go adventuring, he had no intention of being gone for two years. Then he met Chloe with the adventure tour outfit. Things started to seem different. Hopeful. He was no longer flailing. Chloe convinced her mother to give him a job and there were joint adventure trips to Spain, to Australia, to islands they had never heard of. But Chloe would never go anywhere too cold with him. She hated the cold seasons of the world, the frigid mountains and desolate, icy plains of the north.
Jeff turned over on his back but kept his head turned toward the television. He watched the picture fade in and out and listened for more warnings. He began to drift, his eyes closing and opening in fades and starts.
The dreams had been strange lately. So strange. Chloe had mentioned them as well when she was still attempting some sort of reconciliation.
Staring into the snowy reception, Jeff could just make out a face formed by the blizzard of dots and lines. He squinted harder and saw a young boy with large eyes. And the boy was smiling.
He giggled, and Jeff fell asleep.
***
When Chloe arrived back at the cottage, it was dark. She had, up until this point, avoided being outside at night, but having stayed too long at the big house, it was unavoidable that she would need to travel downhill in the dark cold. The cliff and sea were open and overwhelming to one side of her, the trees closed in and watching on the other. At least Chloe could feel
something
watching her, numerous shadow people under the trees. She thought of the fiddler but then pushed him back in her mind. She kept her eyes to the ground and hurried, arms folded, to the cottage. She calmed her nerves by recounting the films of Lana’s she had seen. Four that she could recall, and she was surprised it had even been that high. She did her best to remember their plots, their cast, anything. The walk home was in many ways a long prayer. A meditation.
When at last inside the cottage, she breathed, but it was not a sigh of relief, just the realization that the monsters inside were a change from the monsters out.
Jeff was asleep on the couch. He slept out by the TV more and more often lately. This was good and bad.
Good: The discomfort between them wasn’t carried into their bedroom as they lay beside one another and tried to get to sleep.
Bad: She was alone in that bed… in that room… in this cottage.
The remote lay on the floor, Jeff’s hand dangling over it, the buttons just out of reach. The television light flashed, and mumbles of a weather forecast could be heard but vaguely. Chloe went around the room, turning off lights. She left the television on but set it to mute. She waited a minute before she turned for the bedroom. She needed to collect her courage first. The bedroom always seemed darker than the rest of the cottage. It enveloped and possessed.
“Why are you still here?” she chided herself.
A creak somewhere in the cottage made her quickly dash for the room and flick on the light. Thank God for electricity.
As she got herself dressed for bed, she thought of Lana. Of how they spent hours in the old library—or rather, the gathering of books in what Lana called the library—looking over old manuscripts. Chloe had never seen books as old as some of those Lana possessed. They had traveled through thousands of hands and most likely passed before millions of eyes, good, bad, and indifferent. The books Lana seemed to pause on the longest—those that gave Chloe the unholiest of chills—were the books on the occult. That included the large leather book that seemed to be the centerpiece of the entire collection.
“We’ll look through this someday, you and me,” Lana had said. “It was a gift to me from Rebecca. I think you would find it quite interesting. Useful, even.”
Chloe thought that was a strange statement for the actress to make. But then, Lana was not an average person. She was, at heart, an actress and made many such cryptic statements, whether she believed in them or not. They were lines. They all hung in the air, having nowhere else to go.
In bed, the lights off, Chloe steeled herself against her surroundings. The darkness here was still frightening, but she was beginning to get used to it, if not comfortable with it. Everything—every noise, whether creak or bump—was blamed on the winds up from the sea. Scratches were but the trees. Moans were Jeff asleep on the couch. She knew better, but at the moment, she could not
do
better. She would leave in the spring. That was the best she could do.
And the eyes? What of the watching she felt from the windows and the corners of the room? The shadow people. How did she explain that? She chose not to. She didn’t think about the watching. She found that if she emptied her mind, she could even get to sleep. She just needed to open herself up to the possibility of sleep. Let it come into her like she was a vessel.
It was a voice—not a fiddle—that made her rise this time. She was on the very edge of sleep, at that forgotten moment when one at last slips under sleep’s veil. That moment one cannot exactly remember when they awake the next morning. A high-pitched voice came from the front room.
“Will you do me a favor?”
More than mischief, it sounded malevolent. Like angled brows and wrenching hands.
Chloe sat up immediately, her confusion at its peak. Her heart pumped feverishly the ice-cold blood through her veins. She sat in the dark, wondering if perhaps she had imagined it all. If it were the remnants of a nightmare.
Please be a nightmare!
But then she heard the giggle.
She leapt to her feet and crept to the bedroom door. She peered out, but saw nothing. Her breath was quick and deep, and her heart shook her body with its beats. She was an anxious orchestra. The darkness swallowed the front room. She would have to inch out of the bedroom to see anything with even minor clarity. The electricity had gone out again sometime during the night, so the television was now off. She kept to the wall, slowly making her way closer to the front of the cottage. She realized too late that she had nothing to defend herself with if there was someone else in the house.
As she approached the couch, every footfall an echoing alarm, the natural light from outside let her see her husband’s chest rising and falling. She looked around the room, swallowing back her fear, and noticed nothing unusual.
At once, the television picture came back on, its white blur defining the room.
Then from Jeff’s own lips, she heard the voice that had woken her:
“She’s right there.”
It was the same menacing tone she had heard before, and she took a step back from it. She thought about waking Jeff up, literally shaking him as bad as he had shaken her. But she let him lie in his enigmatic dreams. She wasn’t certain she wanted to know what it was he was dreaming about. Still, she stood over him a moment longer, the hairs on her body rising and prickling. He said nothing more.
Chloe knew she wouldn’t get any sleep tonight. At least not until there was a bit of light in the sky. The power was on, so she went to the kitchen, turned on the light, and got online. There had to be someone she could chat with on one of the messenger services. Someone back home. She put on the headphones and mic. They buffered the nighttime creaks and groans of the kitchen.
“Someone. Anyone,” she pleaded.
The glow from the computer screen washed over her. She felt encased, almost as if it were a defense from the dark. From everything that wasn’t in the false light. Names appeared on her chat list. Most of their icons and avatars were gray and sleeping. Only a few of her acquaintances were on or even cared to talk. Ethan was there. His little yellow icon grinned at her next to his handle: Ethanlives4Bug.
She didn’t move. She waited, uncertain as to what to do. His response, even if it were negative, would be better than the silence that threatened to burst her eardrums.
As she sat there waiting to contact him, a box popped up on the screen telling her that Ethan wanted to chat with her via the webcam and asking if she would accept.
It’s now or never
, she thought and clicked Yes.
Instantly Ethan’s face appeared in a small window on the laptop’s screen. He looked much the same as he had the last time she had seen him two years ago. The same angular features and his hair was the same responsible length of black. He wore a white button-up shirt that gleamed in the computer light. Ethan was chatting in the dark. He looked at her pensively.
There was an awkward pause. A moment of recognition, of half smiles and forced pleasantries beneath which lay fields of questions.
“Chloe?” he said, his voice strained through the distance and the wires.
“Hello, Ethan.” She tried to sound pleased to see him. She was afraid her voice came off as nervous, though. “How is everything? Your husband? The baby?”
“They’re fine. We’re all fine.”
The mention of the baby brought things to the fore, but they both ignored the subject. The fragile floor might give way if they jumped too hard.