Ink and Bone(100)

The mouth of the tunnel was up ahead, Jones and Chuck lagging behind.

“Finley,” she heard Jones say faintly. “Don’t go in there alone.”

But she did, she had to. There was no time, no time at all. Even though she was blind heading into the dark, she heard sounds. Movement, breath, a distant calling, her own heartbeat banging out the uneven rhythm of exertion and fear.

“Mimi,” she called, reverting to the name she used as a child. “Mimi!”

The darkness, the tunnel seemed to grow and expand. Her hands touched the hard walls, the crown of her head skimming the ceiling, the wetness, the closeness all around her. Her breathing was labored and jagged. She felt the world wobble and tip, and it dropped her to her knees. And then she wasn’t in the tunnel anymore; she was back in the graveyard.


*

It was a beautiful day, Finley’s favorite kind. When the air was newly warm, and the sky was bright blue with high white clouds. The trees were lush with green, and the wildflowers a chaos all around. Eloise sat on the steps of the church, looking as Finley had never seen her. Once in an old photo album, Finley had found images of a beautiful woman with a dark pixie haircut and glittering black eyes. She had heavy lashes and high cheekbones, and she glowed. Her tiny frame was poured into a white lace shift, her tiny veil like a halo, pearl slippers, a bouquet of white roses.

“Mimi,” little Finley had asked. “Is that a princess?”

“No, sweetie,” Eloise had said with a laugh. “That’s your Mimi and your grandpa Alfie.”

“That’s you?” she said with childish carelessness. “But you’re so—”

“Young? Pretty? Not old and wrinkly,” said Eloise, laughing. Her grandmother was never a vain woman, never quick to be insulted.

“You’re still beautiful,” said Finley. She’d been raised by a very vain mother, so she knew how to dole out a compliment—quickly when need be.

“I was very young,” said Eloise. “In my twenties.”

“That’s not young!” said Finley. “That’s old!”

“You think so?” said Eloise, pretending surprise. “Well, I suppose it must seem that way to an eight-year-old.”

“You were so happy,” said Finley.

“I was,” said Eloise. “I loved your grandfather very much. So, so much.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s gone from this place,” she said. “But he’s all around us. In you, in your mommy and little Alfie, in my heart and dreams.”

“Do you still see him?”

“I do,” she said. “He seems to turn up whenever I need him most.”

Even at eight, Finley didn’t need that explained to her. “He has glittery eyes and such a nice smile. He looks just like our Alfie.”

“He does, doesn’t he?”

The Eloise who sat on the church steps looked like the girl in the picture, youthful and full of joy, everything ahead of her. The golden light that emanated off of her was warm, magnetic. Finley realized that she was lying on her belly on the ground among the gravestones.

Towering oaks shadowed the white church with its small steeple and bright red doors. A dappling light danced, sunlight fingering through the trees.

“It’s a lovely spot to rest, isn’t it?” said Eloise. “The Three Sisters deserve their place here, don’t you think?”

Finley pulled herself to her feet and basked in the warmth of the air. She looked down at her wet and blood-soaked clothes, which were suddenly dry. The parka she’d been wearing was gone. She walked over to her grandmother, and Eloise patted the spot beside her, looking at her with a loving smile.

“Just the grave markers will be enough,” said Eloise. “All they want is a remembrance. They just wanted to be known. All that youthful energy, combined with the injustice of their murders—it creates such chaos when trapped.”

Finley didn’t have a voice. Emotion was a ball of cotton in her chest.

“We hold on so tightly to it all,” said Eloise. “All those negative emotions. We just cling to them. Or maybe it’s that they cling to us.”

“Or a little of both,” managed Finley, her voice just a whisper.

“Yes,” said Eloise. “Like a haunting. Places cling, too.”

“He took them because they were ‘Dreamers,’ ” said Finley. “Like me and like you. All those girls were somewhere on the spectrum. Why did he want them?”

“Abel Crawley had his own agendas,” said Eloise darkly. “He was a pain giver, a misery maker. As a child, he was content to hurt animals. As he grew older, his appetites changed. Even his own wife Millie didn’t know what he was, or at least that’s what she told herself.”

Finley watched as Eloise deftly linked wildflowers into a chain—yellow, orange, violet, blue.

“But his daughter Penny knew what he was. She tried to kill him but killed herself instead trying to escape him. But Millie clung to her, blaming herself for not knowing what her husband did when she was gone working.”

The chain of flowers grew longer and longer in Eloise’s thin fingers.

“That clinging love kept poor Penny in these woods. And Abel brought the Dreamers, the ones who could see her—for his shattered wife and to fulfill his own dark needs. Abel Crawley is a bad, bad man.”