What the Dead Want(16)

Hail to thee true body sprung from the Virgin Mary’s womb:

The same that on the cross was hung and bore for man the bitter doom.

Suffer us to taste of thee,

In our life’s last agony.

Gretchen put her hands on the keys and then pulled them away immediately. It felt like touching snow, and sent a shudder through her body. Like the mirror, the keys were ice-cold.

“Someone walk on your grave?” Esther chuckled, her dark eyes twinkling.

Gretchen looked up and smirked, then put her hands back on the keys, and this time, they felt fine. She must have imagined it. The house, the news of her mother having been there, must be getting to her.

Gretchen knew very few songs but enjoyed playing nonetheless. At Gramercy Arts, where she went to school, she’d had piano and drum lessons. The piano was, in fact, in tune, like Esther’d said, and she started playing a Nick Cave song, humming along to the quiet pretty melody, and singing a stanza or two sporadically. “I don’t believe in the existence of angels . . . ,” she sang, “but looking at you I wonder if that’s true. . . .”

It was a sad song that always made her happy. Esther leaned back in her chair to listen and Gretchen closed her eyes as she sang and felt herself drifting, her body heavy and light at the same time.

A cool draft blew in from behind her and she opened her eyes. There were two little girls sitting beside her, maybe six years old, wearing ragged white dresses that appeared to be made of the same tattered dingy material as the curtains. Gretchen gasped, took her hands from the keys as if they’d been burned. She looked back in terror at Esther—who was gazing placidly back at her as if nothing were wrong.

Gretchen blinked, closed her eyes, shook her head and then opened them again. They were still there. One of the girls smiled defiantly and turned her head to the side, like a contortionist in the circus, her vertebrae cracking. Then she leaned down and quickly, fiercely, like a snake striking, bit Gretchen above her hip. She could feel the child’s little teeth wrenching the soft skin at her waist, shocking, searing. The other little girl grabbed at Gretchen pleadingly with her tiny filthy hands. Then both of them laughed.

Gretchen gasped in pain and terror. She stood up, knocking the bench over, and suddenly she was falling backward, Aunt Esther catching her. Her glass shattered on the floor.

“There, it’s okay,” Esther said, “it’s okay. You fell asleep while you were playing.” She tried to look gentle and comforting but she just looked sheepish and drunk. “Looks like you can’t hold your gin fizz, can you, sweets?” There was a hard edge to her voice and it made Gretchen feel more frightened. She was trembling and couldn’t catch her breath. The sun had already gone down, there was nowhere for her to go now, and only spotty cell reception. The vision or dream or whatever it was had terrified her. And, it seemed to her now, the house smelled faintly of smoke.

Shaking, she sat and tried to collect her thoughts, looking around the room for the girls. But no. There were no little girls. Her side hurt where she had been bitten but she was too scared to look and see if there was a mark. Esther made no attempt to clean up the glass. She offered her another gin, but no water or food. Finally Gretchen managed to steady herself by looking through the camera and framing shots of the parlor: the south-facing window, the curio cabinet, the fragile wooden chairs.

She walked away from the piano while Esther poured herself another drink. Gretchen sat stunned, hungry and tired, staring at the empty space where the children had sat. Then she got back up and began pacing nervously. Anyone would want to leave after that, she told herself. Anyone. The fact that she was planning to stay there at all—stay in her own newly inherited mysterious house, which was full of nightmares and maybe even actual historical atrocities—was nothing short of a miracle; it was against her better judgment at the very least.

Something scraped across the floor in the other room and Gretchen jumped and looked at Esther, who gave her an impenetrable twinkling, gin-soaked look. Then she heard the sound of dozens of tiny feet running overhead. A veritable stampede of rats or raccoons. Esther ignored it completely, as if it hadn’t happened.

Why am I even doing this? Gretchen thought. Why am I here at all? Since her mother’s disappearance Gretchen had done very few things she didn’t like doing. She was good at walking away from anything that wore on her. Suddenly she felt a great longing for home. It was civilized back in the city and it had been a stupid decision to come here. The clutter alone could drive a person mad. She didn’t want another pipe dream about finding her mother; at the idea of connecting with that side of the family, of looking into her mother’s research, she could almost feel the well of disappointment building and waiting to overflow upon her when it turned out there was nothing to find. What kind of “clues” was Esther talking about?

She wanted to be back in her neat apartment on Eighty-Eighth and Park.

There were too many rooms and too much stuff in Esther’s house. Hundreds of years of families living and talking and loving and fighting and possessing things. She could understand why her mother would have liked it: the mystery, the idea of “haunted” objects—which she’d talked about often. She could understand why Esther would want to catalog the family history, but did they have to actually stay in this building to do all that? She looked again at her aunt Esther. The lady who was, even now, totally unflappable, a genuinely interesting person in her combat boots, highball glass in her hand—but she’d much rather hang out with her in Manhattan.