“How’s Jeff?” Ethan asked.
“He’s asleep on the couch. He hasn’t been feeling well today.” She omitted the fact that he hadn’t been sleeping in the bed for a while, as it was none of Ethan’s business. “I don’t think it’s anything serious. Maybe a cold.” She paused. “You look good, Ethan.”
“Thanks. So do you.” His brown eyes gazed at her with an intensity she always found unnerving.
“It’s a real nice place. You should come for a visit.” It was more of an uncertain question than anything. A space filler. She realized too late that by putting it out there, she was only inviting more discomfort into her life.
“You like it there?”
“Um… yeah. I mean, like every new place, it has its problems. I suppose I—
we
—just need to get used to its quirks and kinks.”
“How is Jeff dealing with the time off from work?”
“He’s keeping himself busy. There’s an old well that comes with the place. He’s cleaning it out. I can only imagine what he’s going to find once he gets to the bottom. People throw all kinds of things in wells.”
“And you? How are you keeping busy?”
She felt the jibe. Even though Jeff and Ethan hadn’t talked for a while, Ethan had to have heard of her indiscretion.
“I’ve made friends with the actress who lives on top of the hill. Lana Pruitt.”
“Lana Pruitt is your neighbor?” His eyes widened and his voice pitched.
Chloe grinned. “She is. She used to own the cottage as well.”
“What’s she like?” Chloe saw Ethan relax a little. His shoulders eased.
“Distant… and sad.” And familiar. “She’s had quite the horror story of her own since she quit acting in them. When Jeff and I first met her, I thought she was a little batty. Now I think she’s just lonely.”
Ethan tensed up once again. “Is that Jeff?” he asked, peering past Chloe.
Chloe had heard no sign of Jeff rising from the couch. No extra creaks from the aching floor. She looked behind her and saw nothing. Just the empty kitchen doorway and the darkness of the front room.
“I don’t think he’s up.”
When she looked back around, Ethan seemed stricken. “No,” he said. “No. It wasn’t him at all.”
“What’s wrong?” She knew true concern when she saw it. It was akin to terror. Like a radiating blight that started in your core and spread outward.
“Nothing. I just thought I saw… nothing.” That look. That accusatory look.
“Ethan, there are things… I see things—”
“Listen, I’ll try and get up there to see you soon, Chloe. Okay? I’ll try to get up there very soon. I think something—”
But he was cut off midsentence. The power hiccupped and the image on the computer screen blipped into black. Chloe sat in the darkness as silent and still as she could. She listened to her own breathing and the winds outside. She closed her eyes tightly. There it was, the fiddle, making the hairs on her neck bristle as if someone were blowing directly on them.
Slowly, she turned in her seat and looked into the front room. There was nothing. The faint light from the window was now all that could be seen. Yet there was movement in the shadows. She heard it but could not see it clearly. She frantically searched in front of her. Her breaths quickened.
Then at last she saw it. A form. A shoulder betraying position, silhouetted near the window. She wanted to scream, but all she could etch out was a broken “Jeff.” She tried to calm herself. She listened harder for a frozen moment.
The floor creaked. It snapped.
Chloe jumped from her seat, intending to dash for the bedroom. Her nightgown caught on the chair and pulled it to the floor, knocking her on the back of the knee as it fell. She collapsed with a scream.
When the commotion had ended, her hand was resting on a foot. The recognition of the feel of flesh sent her into a panic. She recoiled immediately and crawled back into a corner shouting her husband’s name in desperate pleas.
“It’s me!” he said through the barrage of cries. “It’s me. Chloe! What the hell’s wrong with you?”
She could just make out his face as her eyes adjusted. It was cast in strips of twilight blue.
“I hate it here, Jeff,” she said. “I hate this goddamn place we’re in.”
***
When Chloe disappeared from the computer screen, Ethan sat bewildered. She wouldn’t have just quit the chat, would she? The feelings between them were never warm, but neither did they warrant being rude.
He checked her status. All of her icons and avatars were gray or sleeping. She was offline. That much was certain. Most likely she had been thrown off. From what he gathered in the mass email he was sent before they had moved, Jeff and Chloe now lived up in the hills. Maybe things didn’t work as well up where there. Atmospheric conditions. Clouds and the like. Technology was amazing, but it couldn’t fix everything. There were some barriers it couldn’t break through. Not just yet.
Still, Ethan sat anxious and alert. His fingers danced over the keys on his computer. He was using the desktop in the living room. He never used his laptop for chatting. The laptop was strictly for school. He waited to see if Chloe’s icon might pop back up. Ethan needed a bit of reassurance. The last thing he had seen before the screen went black had frightened him, set the worry tight in him, like a stone tied around his gut.
If he had seen right, if it wasn’t a mirage from a mischievous webcam connection, there had been someone standing right behind Chloe. A figure in shadow. There was movement to it anyway. He’d assumed it was Jeff at first, but then…
But then…
Much too thin. Much too thin to be Jeff. Jeff had the athletic body of a man who did what he did: adventure sports. The rakish form standing behind Chloe was anything but fit. This led Ethan to one of two conclusions, both of which turned his stomach while inducing supreme rage:
Chloe was cheating on Jeff again, or
Jeff was much more ill than Ethan had suspected and that was indeed him behind Chloe, wasting away. This meant Chloe was lying to him for some reason.
Both of these options made Ethan want to pick up the phone and demand to know what was going on. He headed to the kitchen and downed a hefty gulp of Pepto-Bismol.
The more he thought about the form in the dark, the more the imagined face flipped from Jeff, then to some phantom lover, then to… to what? There was something familiar about that shadow, that particular figure. He had seen it before at the end of a dream hallway.
Ethan shivered. Yes. He would definitely make it up there to see Jeff very soon. He’d try to call before that. He did not like the thought of Chloe there alone with Jeff if indeed he was ill. Tomorrow he’d put in a request for a short leave at the high school where he taught history. They would be able to find a good substitute. The academic year had just started, but surely they would understand. After all, this was a matter of family.
***
From her window in the room she used for a library on the first floor of the house, Lana could not see through the trees to the cottage. If she were the type, she could simply climb the stairs to the telescope to perceive if they too were experiencing a power failure once again. She knew they were, of course, so that a trip up to the widow’s walk would only mean one thing: that she had concerns for another human being, namely Chloe.
Lana had candles at the ready for those occasions when the power went out. She never put them in storage. They were as much residents of the house as she, congregating in the halls and on the mantelpieces. The library was scattered with them, all of them tall, slender, and the same eggshell white. There were three near the sofa, one on the eastern windowsill, one by the door, and one—the largest one—at the center of the table where the large book of spells lay opened.
She had thought many times about “calling forth.” The tools for it were already laid out and had been for weeks. She had done a séance once before, alone, with only herself, the candles, and the big book. There had been a few rattling windows and flickering flames, but nothing else to indicate a presence. She believed it would work now, however. She believed in a couple of new things now. This time, she sat down with determination. The book was spread before her like a wide plain, the words like hills to climb over, line by line. The flames cast their shadows, and the actress squinted as she spoke:
“I call forth the spirit of… Rebecca Kinsar. My daughter Rebecca. Speak to me.”
Silence but for the wind outside.
Again, she called forth. Again, nothing. Lana furrowed her brow. She had so wanted this to work. The waiting, the listening was harder than anything she had ever done. As an actress, she had patience. Hours on film sets would give you that. But she was tired of waiting. Waiting for Michael to come back. Waiting for resolution. Hearing nothing but the wind and the
tick tick tick
of the stout clock on the mantel.
She slammed her open hand on the table as a mother would when exasperated with a child. “Come to me, Rebecca!”
At last, there was the smallest of somethings. Not a noise, but a dangerous quiet. A quiet that might have existed before the world came into being. The hiss before the bang. Lana wondered if she had done something terribly wrong. She looked from one corner of the library to the other. The candle at the center of the table fizzled out as if pressed between two fingers. Lana watched its last embers fade before she noticed a form through the smoke directly opposite her.
She jumped from her chair, screaming. This was what she had wanted, but not how she had wanted it. There was her little girl, Rebecca, but not in the form she had known her in life. Instead, the child was the twisted, broken mess Michael had told her of one night, the heap of spoiled sweetness he had described in drunken disgust and regret.
“Where’s my little girl?” Lana shouted. She clutched at the back of the chair she now stood behind. “Why are you like this?”
The girl’s head, broken on its neck and lying to the side, let out a gurgling mess of sounds. Lana screamed once more, tears dripping down her face.
Rebecca breathed out, “He doesn’t want you there.”
“What?”
“You can’t ever go there, or he’ll come here. You can’t ever go there, Momma. Never.”
Lana quickly reached forward and slammed the book closed. “Leave!” she said. “I’m sorry, but please leave.”
The child receded into the dark as if she had never been there at all, and the deadly quiet left the room to a more acceptable silence. Lana collapsed to the floor and sobbed, rocking with intermittent screams.
The Woman & the Hill
The back door slammed shut. Jeff had risen early, most likely to work on his well project. Chloe heard him shuffling around in the front room as she lay in bed. It wasn’t until he went outside that she finally felt some relief. It was as if she had been holding her breath all night. Waiting. She felt the pressure in her chest dissipate in a rush.
She had been awake for a while now, long enough to see the daylight slink into the room. The dreams were not letting her be. They were of people she had never known. When she was able to see them clearly through the impressionistic folds of the dream, their faces were tired and scared. Last night she had dreamed of two young boys and a woman, apparently their mother. Yet she knew it was not a dream, but rather a memory. Old homes store them in their walls and floorboards.
There were so many things for Chloe to feel awkward about. She listed them in her head: the events of the night before, including the conversation with Ethan; the startling voice that both was and wasn’t Jeff; and her midnight admission to her husband that she wasn’t happy. She might have lain in her bed and stewed over these things all day if her cell phone hadn’t chimed.
The reception on Bad Luck Hill, like the power, was untrustworthy, but this morning it was at least fathomable. It was the chatty librarian, Mr. Craft. The archivist had been in, he told her, and had found what she had wanted. It was on a table, waiting for her.
“No trouble at all,” he said before she spoke a word.
She got dressed and left without telling Jeff where she was headed. There was really only one place she could go. To town. Where else but to town?
The cold season was headed in. The air was crisp and demanding. The temperature had dropped in the night and refused to climb again. A storm was coming and the cold was its regalia. Chloe wrapped up tight and looked across the waters as she drove into Wicker. The desolate seascape in the morning was the graveyard of ships and echoes. Shout forever and you’ll never be heard.
Books and old newspapers were spread out, as promised, on a solid oak table when she arrived at the library. There wasn’t much in the way of archival material on Bad Luck Hill, but Mr. Craft looked pleased with himself anyway. He stood at the door waiting, his hands pressed in a steeple.
“If there’s anything else you need,” he said, leaning in too closely as she sat down, “just let me know.” He left her on her own, though she could feel his eyes watching her constantly. He had laid the materials on a table close to the front desk, so she was always in his sight.
What information there was came in the form of birth certificates, land deeds, and death announcements. Nothing very odd or suspicious. The hill was initially under the ownership of the town’s namesake, a man named Alvus Wicker. He had kept it for quite a long time and had died at the age of one hundred and two. It had passed on through a few generations before slipping out of the Wicker hands completely in the early twentieth century, by which point, the big house was already close to two hundred years old and the cottage had been built as a home for the groundskeeper and his family.