Page 7 of The Folklore of Forever (Moonville #2)

Seven

I once knew a girl who gathered up death.

Into her basket of dreams it went.

She knew not that she plucked

the fate spelling her end,

for it looked

just like

a

friend.

Author unknown, As Evening Falls

“UV rays diminish their energy, which is why you tend to make stronger contact at night. They are sometimes more responsive if you’re dressed from their era. To most people, they’re invisible, but just about anybody has the potential to glimpse one if they’ve been awake for too long but their brain still feels sharp. Something about that particular state opens the mind up to seeing beyond our physical plane. Encounters usually get shrugged off as ‘seeing things,’ though.”

Morgan requires very little from a conversation partner, happy to chatter enough for the both of us. “Interesting.” I tap the tail of a classic Kit-Cat Klock on the stairway’s landing. Vintage to me, but modern by Davilla standards, this clock must have been a gift from a fellow trespasser. The minute hand ticks once, in response, before swinging back to its broken sentry at two thirty. Morgan removes it from the wall, sliding it into his backpack; in the clock’s place, he hangs a small painting of a sailboat.

When we reach the top, a long hallway is spackled blue with a shine like moonlight although such a thing is impossible, for it’s a new moon tonight. The air is warmer up here, thicker, as if holding its breath.

“A common misconception about ghosts,” Morgan goes on, “is that they mostly stick to old, historic sites. Lonely farmhouses. Abandoned prisons, psychiatric facilities, funeral homes. Not true! Ghosts can pop up anywhere, and they move freely, changing residences whenever they feel like it. Ghosts like comfort zones. The house they grew up in, or a movie theater they used to love visiting. Sites that brought them joy when they were alive. Disney World is a billion times more haunted than any morgue.”

“Then we probably won’t find anyone here,” I point out. “Does this seem like a comfort zone to you?”

“To somebody, yes, I think it was. Who knows what this place looked like, once upon a time? Based on multiple eyewitness accounts, there have to be some ghosts established in this house.”

The second floor holds three bedrooms and a bathroom. Bedroom number one is empty save for a glass bottle on the windowsill, half filled with loose dirt. The carpet has been partially torn up, revealing wood floors with scorch marks.

Bedroom number two contains a little girl’s tea table, but the two chairs accompanying it sit on the opposite side of the room, facing a cheval mirror with dark speckles across its surface like lichen. I step closer to the mirror. Morgan takes a miniature piano out of his bag and lifts its lid, and the charming little music box begins to play “Wiegenlied” by Johannes Brahms.

Years ago, I heard Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34, by Johannes Brahms and became besotted with the pianist, which only increased when I saw a picture of Johannes in his younger days. This is not the first time I’ve been swept away by somebody I’ve never met, not even knowing what they looked like or caring if they were already dust in a grave. After devouring a collection of short stories called The Barnum Museum by Steven Millhauser, and, in particular, the tale “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” I was half in love with the author. He was, at that time, a septuagenarian.

I look at Morgan as the notes of “Wiegenlied” tinkle around us like glass chimes, and he glows even rosier in my view.

I wait until he retreats from the room, investigating the bathroom across the hall, and touch my fingertips to the warped ones in the glass. Daring something to happen. For the expression in my reflection to change; to see the flickers of a sinister Victorian child in a white dress, moving closer with every blink. I wait, anticipating, and then—

A black blur streaks across the mirror, behind me. I whirl. “Was that you, Morgan?”

“Did you say something?” he calls from the bathroom.

My eyes sweep the corner where I saw the blur: with the angles of the room and the position of the doorway, there’s no chance it was the reflection of a bird flying past the window. The spookiest thing about this house, somehow, is that the windows are all so tiny, their placements random. Some are near the ceiling, others close to the floor. None of them are centered, and the size of them reminds me of a jail cell.

We’re in the dark, alone, in a creepy, isolated location. We’re primed for fear. Our imaginations are doing half the work, so all we need now is an external trigger: whether it be wind causing a door to creak, a mouse rustling papers, or a distant noise contorted by echoes.

Oh, how I adore a good scare.

The bathroom is my favorite room of the house so far. It’s got an oval stained-glass window, a rush of impossible moonlight tinting the clapboard walls and tile floor green. The bathtub isn’t claw-foot, sadly, but it does have rings of rust around the drain and a stain that vaguely resembles a handprint, minus the fingers. The seventies-floral shower curtain is cut in half, suspended two feet short of the tub. The sink has been wrenched out of the wall, exposing the dark hole of a long pipe, and a spider scuttling out.

A faint sigh expels from the pipe.

I stick my ear against it. “What are you doing?” Morgan asks, leaning in.

“Listen.” My eyes close. I count the beats: three, six, nine. “It’s as if the house is breathing .”

“Get away, it might be the house’s mouth.” He pauses. “Wait. Do you feel that? Come here.”

I join him. He passes his hand through midair, then jolts back. “It’s cold in that spot.”

He’s right. “Ooooh. Fun.” I search the walls for a vent, a hole in the wall for air to blast through. I do find a hole in the ceiling, which is the likely culprit. Happiness dances through me to have found the source. I love an aha moment, pinning down the why and how .

“Bathroom on the second floor,” Morgan reports to his Dictaphone, “contains a cold spot about the height and width of an adult human. Corroborated by Zelda Tempest, paranormal expert.” He measures the temperature with a thermometer, numbers erratically rising and dipping, ranging from eighty-one degrees to sixty-four.

“I’m not a paranormal expert,” I insist. “And I think your thermometer isn’t working.”

He smiles as if I’ve made a joke. To his Dictaphone, he says, “I’m Morgan, and this is Zelda. We are not here to hurt you. We’re here to learn more about you, and if we can, we’d like to help you. Can you please tell us your name?” He holds the recorder out, toward the cold spot.

After a minute, he plays the recording of himself talking to the ghost, listening to the silence afterward. Disappointed, he replays it twice more as if the results will change.

“Sometimes you can see ghosts but can’t hear them,” he informs me. “Sometimes what they say comes after a twenty-minute delay. Or you don’t hear their voice until much later, after you’ve left.”

“Mm.” I want him to like me. I don’t want to question him, make him feel as if his beliefs are being attacked. And yet I cannot help saying, “So you’ve seen these ghosts yourself, I take it?”

“Well, no,” he admits. “This is just what I’ve heard.”

“Mm.”

His long-lashed eyes narrow. “It feels like I’m sharing all of my theories, but you’re not sharing yours.”

Dodging his gaze, I zoom the camera on the wallpaper border, but it just gets fuzzier. “I don’t have any theories.”

“I mean, you do. You wrote about ghosts in It Howls .” The fifth book in my series. “They weren’t main characters, but you did have ghosts in there. I assume you collected some info while learning about them.”

“Not really. I pulled from general knowledge: ghosts are remnants of dead souls, who sometimes moan and kill living people when the whim strikes. Where’d you get all your theories, anyway?”

“From Ash.”

I shake my head. “You put too much stock into what a child says.”

We check out the final bedroom on this floor, which replaces the bathroom as my favorite. A pipe organ with six keys missing. Books about farming, printed in the 1800s, strewn about. Some are still readable, but splotched with mold and, in one case, insect eggs. I scoop the books up in spite of Morgan’s grimace, explaining that I can clean them later. An Orange County almanac’s pages have melded together and hardened, dense as rock. A sewing machine sits on a table, its teeth still biting down in the cuff of trousers small enough to fit a young boy. I pick up an empty, discolored bottle of C. C. Parsons’ Household Ammonia.

“Let’s go back downstairs,” he suggests. “I read an article from the fifties about a teenage boy and his girlfriend who snuck out here. They said they heard a teakettle whistling in the kitchen, but the stove was off.”

“Moonville is certainly rich in stories,” I say, tracing the porcelain mane of a chipped rocking horse with one finger. “But what other types of stories do you like?” We have to have shared interests somewhere , if I dig enough. “Any nonfiction?”

“Right now, I’m reading True Tales of Ghosts .”

I force a smile. “What about books that don’t involve ghosts?”

Morgan thinks for a minute, then grins broadly. “A few months ago I finished a book that teaches about how to unlock the power of telepathy. Wanna borrow? You’ll love it. I haven’t been able to unlock my inner powers of telepathy yet, but with some more practice, who knows!”

Oh dear.

We go back downstairs. As my foot presses a step, it lets out a loud groan. So does the next, and the one after that. They grumble even louder under Morgan’s weight; we exchange mystified looks. “These weren’t noisy when we were going up.”

Another oddity: once back in the living room, we notice a curio cabinet we don’t remember seeing earlier.

“We probably saw it but didn’t really see it, because we’d just come into the house and were taking everything in at once,” I reason. “We weren’t paying attention.”

“Or.” His gaze travels, rapt on the piece of furniture. “It wasn’t here.”

I almost laugh. “A ghost cabinet?”

I’m only kidding, but he nods. “Sort of. This might be part of a flashback.” At my expression, he explains: “Memories that have attached to a particular space are called flashbacks. It’s a super common phenomenon in Moonville because of all the magic here. The apparitions in a flashback aren’t actually ghosts. Magic is attracted to people experiencing spikes of heightened emotion, which can be happy moments, frightening ones, angry ones. Magic records it, and the recording plays on a loop, stamped in the place where the memory was made. Since high-emotion events can include untimely deaths, when you hear wailing or screaming, you could be hearing somebody’s final minutes over and over. So, if this theory is correct, it isn’t necessarily that a location is being haunted by ghosts—it’s that the location itself is still replaying a memory, even though the people in them are long gone. You can tell a flashback from a ghost by the way they don’t see or hear you, or attempt to communicate.”

The curio cabinet is old-fashioned, but so well-preserved that it looks brand-new, shelves stocked with medicine bottles, books, a sewing box, and porcelain horses.

Morgan takes a spool of blue thread from his backpack and rests it on a shelf.

A thump from another room has us turning our heads away from the cabinet. He and I raise our eyebrows at each other, trailing into a dining room. Unlike the rest of the house, this room is properly decayed. Wallpaper has sloughed off, revealing grayish plaster. Two low-backed chairs flank a fireplace, hearth thick with brick dust, an easel in front of it, on which sits a painting of a basset hound. Our footsteps sound much louder here than anywhere else. The shift in atmosphere from living room to dining room is arresting. It feels like something’s stopped . As if we were operating on a timer, the house alive and listening, until now, and now it is just a house.

See, this is the part I love—I don’t believe, but part of me wants to, and it’s spectacular to get carried away by my imagination. My imagination and I haven’t been the greatest of friends lately; it abandons me whenever the second-guessing starts up. Not good enough. Not original enough. Delete and start again.

Thump. The floor beneath my right shoe quivers.

“It’s coming from below,” I say, keeping my voice hushed.

“The basement.” He shines a flashlight at the dirty carpet, beige with a faded pink rose pattern, as if we’ll be able to see through to the other side. “That used to be Otto Davilla’s room, and where his body was found.”

“We have to go down there.”

Surprise spreads over his features. “You’re seriously up for it?”

I meet his gaze. It is the sweetest indulgence to admire his face for as long as I like, and all I want is for him to keep talking and talking so that I have an excuse to keep on looking and looking. He’s got the most beautiful eyes in creation, astonishingly dark. Morgan’s gaze is fossilized shark teeth, volcanic glass, the Dark Horse Nebula. It makes me think of the lightless void of black holes, and endlessness, floating through space like cosmic dust, like a fresh drop of ink being drunk into paper. The black widow’s long legs as she elegantly spins her web. When he walks into a shaft of light, a rainbow luster is added to the darkness, and I think then of Tahitian pearls. Alder leaf beetles. The common grackle bird, with its oil-slick feathers.

“Absolutely,” I say.

Morgan drops his backpack, flips it open. He pulls out a battery-operated traffic light, which I recognize, since I once purchased it for Aisling as a Christmas present.

“Why do you have that?”

“On loan.” He pats the yellow lens fondly. “This thing is more reliable than any EMF reader, any para light, any REM pod. It’s been sitting in your house, which is haunted, absorbing magic and supernatural energy. I call it the Surefire.”

I am beginning to suspect that Morgan is a few trees short of a forest. I am bewildered, but no less attracted to him. His eccentricity has a hook in me, rather—even though he is quite wrong, I am drawn in.

“Henriette Davilla,” he announces. “Are you here with—”

“Wait,” I interrupt. “Her name’s Henriette?”

“Yeah. I figured you knew that? You took so many Moonville facts and tweaked them to fit your books that I assumed you used the name Henriette specifically because of the Davillas.”

Come to think of it, I don’t remember why I picked that name. It’s possible that I subconsciously hoovered it from Moonville’s legends, like I did so many other things.

The red lens of the stoplight flickers, then winks out.

I jump back a step. Morgan’s lips press together, whitening. His upper lip is more pigmented than the lower, the slope of each line meeting in a slight lift at the corners, so that he looks perpetually amused even when his mouth is at rest.

“Is this Otto or Nate?” he asks the room.

The red lens flickers again, right as we hear another thump , louder this time. And much closer.

A door slams.

I turn sharply.

“Hello?” someone shouts. “Who else is here?”

Morgan and I sprint into the living room, where we find the last two people I would ever expect: Joan Finkel and Wanda Horowitz, two ladies who work at Our Little Secret, the local murder mystery dinner theater. Wanda’s doubled over, hands on knees, wheezing. Her flashlight rolls across the floor.

“You scared the poor old broad something bad,” Joan chastises us.

“You scared us, too.” My dress is sticking to my sweaty back. “What are you doing here?”

Joan rotates Wanda, who’s still wheezing, so that we can read the letters on the back of her shirt: Moonville Ghost Hunters Org, with a cartoon ghost holding a magnifying glass.

“I didn’t know there was a local chapter!” Morgan is euphoric. “Where do I sign up?”

Joan fetches Wanda’s flashlight. “You shouldn’t’ve come here without us. Places like this can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.” She juts a thumb at the door. “We’re clearing out—we were just down in the basement and heard the cops on our police scanner app. A concerned citizen said they saw a car driving backwards in this area, so we might have company soon. It is, ah, not quite legal to be here.”

“My EMF reader!” Wanda howls. “I left it in the basement.”

“I’ll help you find it,” I offer, just as Joan’s phone emits clicking noises, a voice rippling, “ White Buick Verano .”

Morgan swears. “That’s my car!”