The Ghosts of Kerfol (15 page)

It doesn’t stop, though. Those holes keep coming.

Rabbits, maybe.

What’s more, when I look over at the tree where I’ve leashed Clio, I see she’s up on her haunches, barking. I worry she’ll choke herself, and I have the shit-poor feeling I’m missing something; something’s happening just out of earshot. I’m missing out on the soundtrack that’s there whether I like it or not, whether I hear it or not.

But the funny thing is, I do. Hear something. Things — around here. That, or the weirdness of being alone on a remote property, is making me remember old soundtracks from days past, when I could hear. A lifetime ago.

Either way, Clio’s not my digger, so I untie her, and the minute I do, she goes tearing back out toward the chapel. I follow, and sure enough, there’s the girl in the funny clothes, gathering berries like before, like she never left, her lovely lips stained red in a too-pale face. I don’t see Clio, but I know she’s out here somewhere, barking and making a to-do.

“Wait,” I call out, a little desperate, which makes me feel like I’m in school, in the hallway, trying to catch a girl’s eye while she preens at her locker, and I hate that feeling, hate being that kid with what feels like bread caught in my throat, words backing up. I don’t know why it should matter when everyone in my school is deaf like me. But there’s always something to feel wrong about.

She’s probably scared of me by now. Like a deer. Scared off. “Stay there,” I whisper, not wanting to startle her with my garbled words. I raise a finger.
Wait.
“Please.”

She looks as if she wants to speak, so I wait, and she says one word — I can only tell because her lips seem to exaggerate the word for my sake, the way kindly people sometimes try to overenunciate when they realize I’m deaf, until I take out my notepad and write down what it is I’m trying to say — her eyes downcast, trained on her raised apron front.

Hungry.

I could hit her with a stone, but I can’t reach her in any straightforward way. The bridge crossing is nailed over — and the boards rotted, probably — but I can circle back and cross at the ornamental bridge downstream. When I get back, digging into my pocket for notebook and pen, she stands looking for all the world as if she knows me. She reaches up and almost touches my unwashed hair. All of a sudden I feel shy and self-conscious. Dirty. Ugly. Because she isn’t. Not at all.

“Youen,” she says, tilting her head, and her wide gray eyes are sad and sort of tender, so I start blushing. Maybe she’s retarded or has amnesia, like in the movies. But I don’t think so. I don’t know what to think. I feel like I do when I drink too much coffee on a job with Da and start to shake a little and my head’s racing.

Youen.

I heard that.

I heard her say it.

I shake my head, struggling to keep the words back in my throat, not to pummel her with them, and scribble on a piece of paper.
My name’s Gavin. I’m deaf, and it’s hard for me to form words without yelling.

She looks confused, so I smile, and write,
I don’t want to yell at you. You look like you’ll run away again.

She looks blank and shakes her head again, smiling back at me.

I write,
Where do you come from?

Her white fingers trail lightly over my handwriting, not quite touching the page, and she shakes her head again, hard.

“You can’t read?”

She smiles at me with her eyes, and they slip past me.

I turn and see Clio barking behind me. She races forward and my girl retreats into the woods. Clio comes back wet and shivering.

“Jesus.” I coax her over and grab her collar, frayed red canvas with black-and-white musical notes, something Mum chose; it was as old as Clio, nearly. “Look what you’ve done now.” I drag Clio off into the house. We’re both breathing hard, and she’s pacing, sniffing the floor, bounding up the steps.

I have a key to the west wing, the formerly burned-out side, and since we came I’ve explored some in there, as anyone would. Sometimes I snoop under the dusty coverings or just sit and imagine the rooms as they were once. I do this a lot. We work on a fair number of historic properties, and I like the past, the legends and family histories. Even now, with Clio leaping frantically at one of the doors at the top of the staircase, I pause to scan a sign the historical society put up. About some seventeenth-century murder involving dogs.

Dogs, plural.

That’s bad enough, but nothing compared to what happens next. Spooked good now and not caring if I attract or amuse distant neighbors, who are probably used to this and laughing over their bouillabaisse, I shout for Clio, then begin bounding up the stairs after her when I collide with something clammy. It feels a lot like the time I ran under Gran’s wash line as a boy, chasing a ball, and the wind slapped a bedsheet at me. The damp fabric molded to my face and chest, and I felt a sort of breathless panic. When you get unpeeled again and free, you feel a bit silly, but before that, before you know what it is and what it isn’t, there’s that bad suffocating feeling. It’s how I feel on that stairwell, not hurt or horrified, just
clung
to and confused. I turn and glimpse a tall figure, a gliding light, fleeing down the stairs, faint and shaped like a woman.

And then it’s gone. Just like that. And the world is black, and I’m shivering on the stairwell with Clio upstairs somewhere. The light is utterly gone — because the sun set when I wasn’t looking.

The cavernous house, which should be quiet, as all things are for me, is creaking and heaving down low, like a living thing, something large and sluggish waking up. I breathe deep, searching for stillness in my mind.

I can’t get out of here,
I think,
won’t get out of here, if I don’t make my mind lie down again.

“Clio!” I bark, and she bounds past me. We take the rest of the stairs in twos and threes, though I keep a good hold on the banister. We blow through the door and out toward the stables, where the truck’s parked.

She jumps right in, trembling the way only a dog can tremble, and I’m right after, but of course the truck won’t start. Ridiculous, sure, to think an engine will start at a time like this. I beat my head against the wheel as the trees in the orchard raise their shadowy arms in benediction against the last line of an overcast sunset.

I keep right on knocking my forehead against the steering wheel, trying to get back to sense, trying to get my wits about me, but I don’t. I can’t. I reach back and drag Clio close by the collar. It’s probably just the battery, in which case I’ll flag down a car from up the main road and get a jump.

The last dull glow beyond the trees is going, and I wonder where I left my flashlight, and how the hell I’m going to find my way up to the road without a moon. This place is nowhere and anything but silent. I can’t hear Clio whimpering, though I feel her throat vibrating against my leg. I knead her fur and murmur as best I can and don’t dare open the car door, for what I hear out there is madness. I’m getting that it’s the same scene, happening over and over, and that mostly I’m hearing it. A loop. The violin, loud and then fading. A rabble of dogs. A woman’s scream. Repeating, like the refrain in a song.

I’m hearing it.

And I’m sure as shit I don’t want a new verse to start.

Clio hears my soundtrack, too. I can tell. She’s sniffing and straining and cowering, and I train my gaze on that side of the house and spot a guy in a white shirt in the courtyard, and for no reason I can name, this gives me hope, though I can’t imagine why it should. Except that I’m an optimist. I let Clio out but hold her tight on the leash, though she strains. I call to the man and approach hesitantly.

Maybe it’s Erik,
I think,
or Den, back to check up on me or give me a scare.
But he looks younger, slender and tall, maybe some teenager checking out the house on a dare, and this is even more hopeful. He’s probably as spooked as I am. “Hey!” I warble, not worrying how loud. “Hey — where are you parked? I . . . need . . . a . . . jump.”

And then the man turns around. I get a good look at him — more funny clothes, breeches for threads and what-have-you — just as Clio rips the leash out of my hand and goes tearing between the geometric hedges like a rodeo horse careening around barrels. She leaps at him, leaps on him, through him, but the figure only turns solemnly back to the window, unfazed. The upstairs window.

Jesus H. Christ.

I begin to run for the wall. I scale it, whistling for Clio, crash through briars and thick wisteria vines, and I’m not looking at this point, believe me, but I’ve found that girl again. She’s standing by a stone bench, looking different from the other devilry around here and about as forlorn anyone can. She’s trying to say something, her mouth is moving, and it’s a beautiful mouth, and her hair’s falling loose and wild from a bonnet — I can’t believe I even know what that’s called, but I do; must be all the signs I’ve read in all these old houses — and I can see the white flesh above her dress where the dress pushes her breasts up, and the white throat, and she steps forward with an outstretched hand, and I can’t believe that I nearly let her take my hand, but then I think better of it and feel like reaching out instead to smooth the tears from her eyes, but she’s shaking her head, shaking and shaking it as if for all the world her heart will break, and I think of my mum, dead in heaven, and I think of this girl, dead but here, and I wonder what anyone could do to help her — I wish my mother could, or someone, because this girl is so obviously trying to help me, and weird as life is right now, I really want to put my arms around her until she calms down, or maybe doesn’t calm down, or else calms me down, and now I’m thinking I must be a freak with a death fetish or something, but she’s so pretty, so sad, and I sort of trust her when I see that Clio trusts her. What else is there to trust?

When she starts backing away toward the avenue — at least I think it’s toward the avenue; it’s too dark to tell; toward the trees anyway — I go that way, too. But in a minute I sense that I’ve lost Clio, and those other dogs are yipping and yapping up on the lawn again. The girl turns back to look for me, and I give her a fleeting look that says,
Stay there,
though by now I know better, and I race after Clio.

When I get back out from under the dark trees and into the shade lighter of the sloping lawn, there’s my damn mutt, digging. But in a different spot from earlier, when she turned out not to be the digger at all.

I can’t see the man in the garden anymore. Clio’s leash and glossy black fur are speckled with burrs, and one paw’s swiping at something buried there — carefully, urgently. A clot of earth falls and breaks over the object, and then she’s digging again to save her life, and to me the earth smells good and familiar because I’m a gardener, but now that man is upstairs in the window and I’m freaking out all over again.

JesusMaryandJoseph.

Another man, older and mean-looking, dressed in red like some kind of king without a crown and thoughtfully fingering his beard.

This place is crawling.

I get hold of Clio’s leash and pull, but she won’t have it; she snaps at me. She has her paw back on that hidden something, has almost eased it out of the earth like a favorite bone, and I see a piece of rotten fabric of some kind, wrapped around something glinting, something snared and shining-white even in this moonless place, this night that I now believe will never end, though it’s barely begun.

The air smells like rain. I snatch up Clio’s prize and slap her snout when she lunges. She relents, and I tug her to the gates. We enter the avenue and begin to run.

Those soldierly rows of trees are barely visible. Nothing is visible, really, though my eyes have adjusted a bit, and I seem to sense him before I see him. We’re feet away when I make him out, the old man from the house, a ghastly, powerful-looking old king riding toward me on a monstrous huge horse that takes up the roadway. It’s so dark that I can hardly make them out, but I hear the hooves on the gravel just in time. Clio’s already ripped free again and we both veer into the trees, and it’s a labyrinth, dark as pitch, and there are shapes sweeping past, weaving around us like gentle waves, waves Clio’s size and smaller and one a good deal larger, though I barely make them out, snapping and yipping playfully — I hear that, too, remarkably, though I can’t hear Clio breathing feet away — at my sweet dumb dog, who picks up speed as if to outdo them.

And there’s the girl, a gleam in the wood, gesturing to us, and Clio runs toward her and so do I because I’ve lost my bearings, and Clio leaps over some brambles and lands . . . in the road.

The road.

But wait.

I look for the girl, and she’s back there in the woods, smiling.

What a smile. When I’m an old guy playing poker in my wheelchair, I’ll think of that smile and wonder. It’s good to have a thing like that, like her — that you can’t explain away. I smile back, the ripples settle, and my mind is like still water again. I push through the brush and scale that low stone wall Clio sailed right over, and step out into the road.

The lights of the village look to be a mile or so away as the crow flies. But I know better than to blunder through a bog. Clio does, too, so we find our pace with the windy heath beside. We stride toward the crossroads, where we’ll find the road to those lights. White lights and red, coming and going lights, streetlights, pretty lights everywhere blurred by the sudden rain. A hard rain that instantly soaks my clothes and beads on Clio’s glossy fur.

When I think to grope Clio’s prize out of my pocket, the rain washes stinking scraps of fabric away, and I’m left holding the richest object I’ve ever seen, a pale blue pendant set in a soil-and-silver rope of diamonds.

I want to jump up and down in the fast-forming puddles. Call Da. Tell him we’ve finally hit the jackpot. But he’ll only make me turn it in. There’ll be fuss and paperwork.

Meanwhile, I have this crazy idea of going back for her, as if she were just some ordinary girl, just my high-school sweetheart in distress. I imagine leading her out of the dark wood by the hand, kissing her in the rain, presenting her with Clio’s shiny find to watch how gems rest against that white, white throat. Sadness settles over me instead. I turn the piece over in my hands, and it’s sharp. It’s heavy. It’s a glorified dog collar — a pretty noose — not something I’d weight Clio with, much less a girl who shines so well on her own.