Cackle(55)

And she does. She teaches me. We spend the day playing shuffleboard in the ballroom, taking breaks to drink raspberry lemonade and eat shortbread cookies.

I feel guilty for entertaining any suspicions about Sophie. I mean, she went out of her way to make a shuffleboard court for us to have a fun afternoon together. She baked cookies and made lemonade. She dropped everything to come over when I was upset; she cleaned my apartment and made sure that I was okay. She’s the most generous person I’ve ever met.

I look at her now, dancing around to Blackout-era Britney Spears, and all I feel is an overwhelming love for her.

How could anyone not love her? How could anyone fear her?

“All these songs are about sex,” Sophie says. “Why is society so obsessed with sex?”

I shrug.

“If this singer is truly seeking a partner, someone should tell her good conversation is much harder to have than good sex. That should be her primary concern.”

“Yeah, somehow I really don’t think it is.”

“I can’t help everyone,” she says. “Are you hungry? Do you want to make pizza?”

Half an hour later, I’m covered in flour and Sophie, in her black dress, is somehow not. Yet we’ve both participated in making the dough. Kneading side by side. Now it sits in a bowl covered by a damp cloth near the oven, and we’re chopping vegetables.

“Onions make me cry,” I tell Sophie.

“Not me,” she says. “But I don’t think I can have a proper cry anymore. I don’t think it’s physically possible.”

“You don’t cry?”

“I have,” she says. “I get sad. But emotions become . . . less and less over time. I feel things. And at times, I feel them intensely. But there’s a perspective that comes with age. It’s all fleeting. I savor the joy. The sadness, I let it pass. Crying takes a lot of effort. Not a lot of things inspire me to exert myself.”

“You want to chop the onion? I’ll trade for the broccoli.”

“Yes, darling,” she says. “Do you want artichokes? I think I have some down in the cellar.”

“Sure,” I say.

“I’ll get them.” She wipes her hands on a rag and pauses for a moment. “You shouldn’t go into the cellar.”

“Right, right,” I say, thinking it’s one of her cryptic jokes.

“No, pet,” she says, “I’m serious.”

“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”

“The ghosts are there now. Don’t worry. They can’t leave. And there weren’t that many. It’s not as if the place was crawling with them.”

“Okay.” How many ghosts does she consider not that many? I’m of the strong opinion that any number of ghosts is too many.

“They’re trapped down there, so, you know . . . best for you not to go.”

“Not a problem.”

“Great,” she says. She opens the door to the pantry, then leans down to open the cellar. There’s an outburst of moans. Eerie, ghastly bellows.

“Oh, shush,” I hear Sophie say. Then she lowers her voice and begins to speak a language I don’t understand. Maybe Latin? Whatever it is, it shuts them up. There’s no more moaning.

She emerges moments later, holding a jar of artichoke hearts.

“My second favorite type of heart to have on pizza,” she says.

This is a joke. I can tell because of the look she gives me after she says it.

“What am I going to do with you?” I ask.

“What kind of cheese do we want? Goat?”

We cook the pizza on a stone over crackling red flames in the fireplace. We eat it at the dining table. Sophie lights some candles, but the room is so huge that a few small candles don’t make much of a difference. It’s dark, and where it isn’t dark, shadows dart in and out of the space afforded to them by the candlelight.

“Is it cold in here?” she asks me.

“It’s a little cold.”

She stands up. As she walks over to the fireplaces, I hear her snap her fingers. There’s a loud pop, and suddenly a fire roars in the first fireplace. In the new light, I watch Sophie throw a yellowish powder into the second fireplace, and a fire appears there instantaneously. She snaps her fingers again as she comes toward me. She sits down next to me and takes another slice of pizza.

“Fancy,” I tell her, staring at the two big healthy fires.

Shapes emerge in the flames. On the left, a lion. On the right, a regal bird. They change. A wolf, a mouse.

“Ooh!”

The shapes swirl and disappear.

“Do you think you’ll stay over tonight, pet?” she asks, pouring me some wine.

“Sure,” I say.

“Really?”

I hesitate. On one hand, I know for a fact that this house is haunted and that one of the ghosts attempted to kill me. On the other, I don’t want to go home. I’m having a great time. It’d be a bummer to trek back through the woods to spend the night alone in my apartment, thinking about Sam and potentially being too sad to masturbate.

If Sophie says she trapped the ghosts in the basement, she trapped the ghosts in the basement. I heard them down there.

“We can stay up late,” she says. “We could play more shuffleboard, or watch a film, or read. I can make hot chocolate. I’ve got some cream I can whip.”