Nothing But Blackened Teeth(4)

“Yeah. We do. Don’t worry about that.” Phillip palmed the back of his neck. “Well. Sort of. We have a permit allowing us to access the land here. The mansion’s sort of . . . collateral benefit.”

“Okay. So, we don’t have a name,” began Faiz, counting sins on his fingers. “We don’t actually have a permit to be here. But we have booze, food, sleeping bags, a youthful compulsion to do stupid shit—”

“And a hunger for a good ghost story,” said Talia. The late light did beautiful things to her skin, burnished her in gold. “What is the scoop on this mansion?”

“I don’t know,” Phillip said, the singsong timbre of his voice familiar, the sound of it like a coyote lying about where he’d left the sun. “But rumour has it that this was once supposed to be the site of a beautiful wedding. Unfortunately, the groom never showed up. He died along the way.”

“If you die,” said Talia, pinching a curd of Faiz’s waist between her fingers, “I’m gonna marry Phillip instead. Just so you know.”

Phillip smiled at the proclamation like he’d heard it ten times before from ten thousand other women, knew every syllable was meant, would already be true if it weren’t for fraternal bonds, and I was the only one who saw how Faiz’s answering smile wouldn’t climb to his eyes.

“I don’t think you’re allowed to marry your priest,” Faiz said, easy as anything. “But if you had to get a replacement, I’d rather you pick Cat.”

“Ugh,” I said. “Not my type.”

“I’d rather die an old maid. No offense,” said Talia.

“None taken.”

“Anyway,” said Phillip with a clearing of his throat. “The bride took her abandonment in stride and told her wedding guests to bury her in the foundation of the house.”

“Alive?” I whispered. I thought of a girl holding both hands to her mouth, swallowing air and then dirt, her hair and the hems of her wedding dress becoming heavier with every shovel’s worth of soil to come down.

“Alive,” said Phillip. “She said she had promised to wait for him and she would. She’d keep the house standing until his ghost finally came home.”

Silence placed itself to rest along the house and upon our tongues.

“And every year after that, they buried a new girl in the walls,” said Phillip.

“Why,” started Faiz, startling somehow at this revelation, “the fuck would they do that?”

“Because it gets lonely down in the dirt,” Phillip continued, while I held my tongue to the steeple of my mouth. “Why do you think there are so many stories of ghosts trying to get people to kill themselves? Because they miss having someone there, someone warm. It doesn’t matter how many corpses are lying in the soil with them. It’s not the same. The dead miss the sun. It’s dark down there.”

“That’s—” Talia walked a hand along Faiz’s arm, a gesture that said look, you have to understand that this belongs to me. Her eyes found mine, liquid and unkind. In that instant, I wanted badly to tell her again that the past was so sepulchered in poor choices, you couldn’t get Faiz and me back together for bourbon enough to brine New Orleans. But that wasn’t the point. “—That’s pretty fucking metal.”

“We’ll be fine. Freshly certified man of the cloth right here.” Phillip pounded his sternum with a fist, laughing, and Talia immediately kissed Faiz in answer. He took her knuckles to his mouth, grazed each of them with his lips in turn. I stared at the skins of woven straw thatching the floors, shuddered despite myself. I was abruptly dumbstruck by a profound curiosity.

How many dead and dismembered women laid folded in these walls and under these floors, in the rafters that ribbed the ceiling and along those broad steps, barely visible in the murk?

Tradition insists the offerings be buried alive, able to breathe and bargain through the process, their funerary garments debased by shit, piss, and whatever other fluids we extrude on the cusp of death. I couldn’t shake the idea of an eminently practical family, one that understood that bone won’t rot where wood might, ordering their workers to stack girls like bricks. Arms here, legs there, a vein of skulls wefted into the manor’s framing, insurance against a time when traditional architecture might fail. Might as well. They were here for the long haul. One day, these doors would open and wedding guests would pour through and there would be a marriage, come the cataclysm or modern civilization.

The house would wait forever until it happened.

One girl each year. Two hundred and six bones times a thousand years. More than enough calcium to keep this house standing until the stars ate themselves clean, picked the sinew from their own shining bones.

All for one girl as she waited and waited.

Alone in the dirt and the dark.

“Cat?”

I blinked free of my fugue, fingers clenched around my wrist. “I’m okay.”

“You sure?” Phillip cocked a worried look, hair haloed by a slant of owl-light. “You don’t look like you’re fine. Is it—”

“Leave it,” Faiz said softly. The joy’d gone out of his expression, replaced by concern, a twitch of protective anger that carried to his teeth, his lips peeling back. I wagged my head, smoothed out a smile. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. “Cat knows we’re here if she needs us.”