Silent Song (Ghostly Rhapsody) (22 page)

“Why are you sneaking into the house of a poor old lady then, eh? Trying to give her a scare? To rob her of her meager possessions?”

She wasn’t poor, and her possessions couldn’t be very meager if she lived here, but I said nothing. I was still staring at the scissors.

“We wanted to ask a question, ma’am.” Keith’s grave voice was soothing, as if he were talking to a wild beast. I guessed it was an apt comparison.

“Uh.” The woman didn’t look convinced, but she lowered her scissors. “What kind of question? Don’t you see I’m busy here?”

“It won’t take long, promise. Would you know anything about the abandoned house?” He nodded toward the mansion and the woman’s eye narrowed.

“What have you got to do with them?”

“Them?” Keith looked puzzled, and it was my turn to sprout our alibi. “We’re just doing some research for school. On local history.”

“Hah! You could get a thick paper just with the scandals of those Nightrays.”

“Nightrays?” My mouth went dry. The name, then, had been correct.

“Are you deaf, girl? And what kind of preparation is that, if you don’t even know who used to live here?”

“We were hoping to find out. From the neighbors,” Keith supplied.

“You won’t find your answers, then,” the woman shrugged. “The last Nightrays died thirty years ago, a couple with no children. They didn’t socialize, and people aren’t very social here anyway.”

“But you said there was plenty of information. Did you mean the library?”

“Oh, yes, of course. The newspapers of the time had much to say, I’m sure. They always were kind of weird, those Nightrays,” she said, and by the way she looked at us, she thought we belonged right in the same sack.

“Thank you so much for your help, ma’am,” I said, and turned to go.

Keith lingered behind a few seconds longer. “Do you know anything of a Beatrice Nightray? Did she live here?” he asked.

The old woman pressed her lips in a thin line and shook her head. “Silly nursery tales, boy. Don’t listen to them.”

But I saw how she made the sign of the cross when Keith turned his back and came toward me.

She didn’t strike me as the kind of person who could be spooked by nursery tales.

***

That afternoon, I sat in front of my laptop, entrenched with a chocolate mug to chase away the shivers brought on by the downpour that had caught Keith and me on the way home from our lunch date. I would have preferred to be with him, but I wanted my parents to see that he wasn’t a bad influence, which meant being back in time to address Monday’s homework.

Once I was ensconced in my room, however, I couldn’t keep up my responsible enthusiasm. Keith and I had gone over what little we had learned while we ate and had agreed on staying Monday after class to go together to the library, which seemed to be the best possible solution.

Not really the only one, though.

I shut down my literature paper in progress and fired up Google.

It’s not going to take too long. I won’t really research. It’s just a quick peek. I’ll relax and focus on school stuff then.

That’s what I told myself.

I punched in the keywords “Nightray” and “Chesterfield” and waited for a deluge of information that never quite came. There were a few entries, but Google mostly believed I had mistyped my query. I shook my head and checked the ones that matched. Two were from sites offering to do a genealogic tree for me; another one was from the civil registry and the census. No Wikipedia entry.

I tried just “Nightray.” The results were similar, for the most part, except that most data came from the UK. Scrolling over, I checked dates and places. Birmingham, London, York… 1800s, 1700s, and even further back. But I had figured that it was a rich, old family if they’d owned the mansion as I had seen it, so the information wasn’t useful.

One last try: “Beatrice Nightray.” More government and genealogical pages surfaced, most of them because of the Nightray part of the query. I cast a quick glance to the computer’s clock. Dinner wouldn’t distract me for forty more minutes or so.

I really should be doing my homework.

I clicked for the next page of results anyway.

Nothing, nothing, nothing…

Wait.

I double-checked the link for the entry. It led to a blog, and the text didn’t sound like gibberish so it might even be a real match. I clicked and landed in a website called “Spookshire.” A quick overview showed it to be some kind of compilation of legends and ghost stories and macabre history.

Great, just great.

The post was titled “Beatrice Nightray”. No fanciful bylines to make her story more endearing. The body itself consisted of about ten lines or so of text and a picture, which couldn’t amount to much information. But the picture froze me.

It was black and white, old and scanned for some registry or other, but it was the mansion I’d been to. Except that it was in Derbyshire. And the footer said it had burned to the ground in the 1900s after the family moved out some years prior.

I fired up a new window and backtracked to my first search. First census entries were from the 1900s.

Okay. It’s perfectly normal. There was the big war coming up soon, and people emigrated. This is perfectly logical.

If I could only believe myself.

I headed back to the blog’s window. The contents weren’t nearly enough to satisfy me, but apparently Beatrice was the name of a ghost that haunted the lands of the destroyed house. She came out by night, yada yada, appeared in front of random people, yada yada, and generally complied with standard ghostly behavior.

As far as leads went, it wasn’t much. It turned my blood to ice, though, because of one measly word.

Ghost.

If the situation weren’t so bizarre to begin with, I’d laugh the whole post off and keep on looking for another explanation. As it were, I copied and pasted the contents, picture included, into a word document and then headed back to Google.

“Local ghosts Derbyshire,” I typed.

The list of links wasn’t huge, but it kept me scavenging until dinnertime. When Mom called me downstairs, I put the laptop to sleep and took a short break. Perhaps I’d get a fresh view when I came back.

I didn’t, but I did manage to fall asleep on the desk.

The next day, I could have sworn I had a couple of letters tattooed on the side of my face from sleeping on the keyboard. My neck hurt like crazy and my mood was cranky to match. When Anna asked me about the weird phone call I’d made, I dismissed the comment with little more than a growl. I didn’t want to tell her the truth, but I couldn’t put an excuse together either because sleep deprivation was killing me.

My only consolation, if it could be called so, was that Keith was in the same shape—which probably fed the rumor mill about why we both were wearing identical zombie expressions, but I couldn’t care less at this point. We made an effort to keep conversation normal during lunch, but scurried away as soon as Dave and Anna became engrossed in their own discussion about the merits of advanced trig.

I guided Keith toward the lockers and looked guiltily at him. 

“Let’s skip,” I said.

He arched an eyebrow. “Don’t you have something important after lunch?”

“Not important enough.” My tone made him frown, flippancy replaced with worry

“What have you found out?” He kept his voice low.

“I’ll tell you on the way to the library.”

After we picked up our stuff and cleared the school building with as much nonchalance as we could muster, we walked a little way in silence before I dropped the bomb on him.

“I found a ghost story.”

He didn’t laugh at me. “What did it say?”

“That’s the frustrating part. There’s a ghost story about a Beatrice Nightray in a manor in Derbyshire, wherever that might be, but not many details.”

“Details you’re hoping to find in the library.” He didn’t phrase it as a question, but I nodded anyway.

“The stories are old, so perhaps they forgot to add them to Internet.”

“What are we going to do if we do find those details? Exorcise me?” Keith tried to keep his voice light, but worry and a hint of fear slipped a slight tremor into his voice.

“That’s for demons.”

“No turning my head around in full circle, then.”

“No.” I sighed. I didn’t say that it could be just as dangerous, from what it was doing to him. “We’ll worry about it later,” I said instead, giving him my bravest smile. “One step at a time.”

We arrived at the library and he stopped me before I could slip inside. He hugged me, his face buried against my shoulder, and I clung to him, ignoring the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” he whispered, his words tickling my ear. “Don’t forget that.”

He took a step back and I went right after him, refusing to let him go. “Keith, you’re scaring me. Is something wrong? Something else?” I amended quickly.

He just cupped my face, his fingers freezing in the cold, and kissed me. It tasted bittersweet, and a wave of fear made me clutch the back of his head, as if I could keep him anchored to me forever that way. He smiled against my lips and pulled back, just a hairsbreadth, just enough to whisper, “I love you.” His words brushed over my skin, followed closely by his lips. And he did it again. “I love you.” And again. “I love you.”

I wanted to cry and to laugh and, more than anything else, to keep kissing him until the rest of the world faded away.

But it was us, this perfect moment that would fade away if we didn’t find out the truth about Beatrice and the song. And it sounded like Keith was saying good-bye.

But I would never give him up.

***

We entered the library hand in hand, attracting more than a cursory glance from the librarian.

“Hi,” I said, walking over with a smile against her disapproving frown. “We wanted to check the journal archives and any other source you’d have for local history in the early 20th century.” Flashing her my student id card, I added, “It’s for a school project.”

“School project” worked like a charm. The kind of things adults believe when the words “school project” are thrown at them is astounding, as if it were an alternate, dangerous and infectious reality. The knee-jerk reaction suited us fine and the woman, a slim and elegant lady I’d not have pegged as a bookworm, took us to the periodicals section of the library.

It was dark, dank, and claustrophobic, with rows of steel shelves holding binders with dusty, discolored journals from days past. If we had to look through it all, it could take us the best part of the week.

“This shelf,” she said, pointing at one in particular. “You’ll find the binders coded by year and paper.”

“And the papers are whole?” Keith asked.

“Yes.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

She nodded and left. I looked around for a chair to toss my bag and jacket, but there was nothing so I just piled it in a corner, hoping that it was dust free. Keith did the same thing.

“We should probably split the search,” Keith suggested.

“That’s a good idea. Let’s try the first decades, see if we can find something about their arrival or something.”

I took a 1901. He pulled 1911 free. We started to pore over the faded print and frail papers. Since they were local journals, the news you could find was much more picturesque than anything in a national tirade. Actually, I think it was more picturesque than the current local papers. Balls, marriages, someone destroying someone else’s flowerbeds…

The only good news about the uninteresting reports was the certainty that the arrival of the English family wouldn’t have gone unnoticed.

The letters started to dance in front of my eyes after two hours and three bindings. My eyes were bloodshot and I started to think that this archive would swallow us whole, never allowing us to see the light of day again. But then, Keith’s voice broke the silence.

“There’s something here. A party to introduce their daughter to society.”

I snapped my eyes to his. “What’s her name?”

“Helen,” he smirked. “But at least we know the family existed.” He scanned the brief article for a moment longer. “Check year 1907.”

I put down my binding and struggled to free the correct year. “Any idea about the month?”

“Nope. That’s too much to ask.”

So he kept working his way forward for any relevant mention and I started to study the papers for the beginning of the story.

I was nearly reaching the end of the year when it glared at me out of the page, a huge title in bold with a picture and two columns of narrow print.

“Earls of Derbyshire to move to Chesterfield,” I read aloud. “Jeremy Nightray and his wife, Lady Caroline, have chosen to exchange their ancestral manor for the quieter life in the United States of America. It is an honor for Chesterfield to welcome them into our mist.”

Keith crouched behind me to read over my shoulder. The article went on to describe the sumptuous house the family would move to and to explain the assets they’d left behind, including a seat in the House of Lords. Very standard, polite fawning.