Song of Oestend (11 page)

He’d walk out to the south pasture and sit in the sun. He loved the way the grass swayed in the wind, and the way the warm light seemed to caress the back of his neck as he bent over his work. He loved that sometimes there would be men in the field, herding or feeding or mending the fence or doing any number of chores Deacon assigned to them. Some of them would wave or stop to chat. Some of them ignored him. Either way, he didn’t mind. He missed lunch—
dinner
—most days, not because he meant to, but because he always seemed to be lost in whatever it was he was doing.

In the afternoons, as the men were returning from the fields, Aren would walk over to the main house. He never volunteered to help the men with their more strenuous chores, but he found that something as simple as offering to unsaddle and brush down the horses for them when they came home went a long way towards fostering friendship.

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After that, he and Deacon would eat ‘supper’, although Aren still couldn’t bring himself to use that word. Shortly after supper, Deacon always arrived at his door, and they’d sit in front of the fire.

And Deacon would talk.

Sometimes he told Aren about his day, or about the men, or about the cows, or about

how they didn’t have the right tools for the job they needed to do. Sometimes he talked about branding the cattle, or birthing a colt, or the fact that the irrigation ditch in the north pasture seemed to be running dry. He never said anything personal. It was never deep. But Aren began to realise how very, very lonely Deacon had been before Aren had arrived. He held himself apart—apart from the sons, apart from the hands, certainly apart from the women— and although he would never have put any of it into words, Aren knew Deacon was relieved and grateful to finally find
somebody
he did not have to hold at a distance. Sitting there by the fire, listening to Deacon talk, Aren realised he was the first friend Deacon had had in a very long time.

It made him feel good. It made him feel like his presence on the ranch truly served a purpose. Yes, he did the books. Yes, he helped care for the horses and occasionally mucked out their stalls. But if he’d turned his back on the ranch, simply walked away or been taken by the wraiths, those things would go on. They would be picked up by other people. Life on the ranch would carry on without a hitch.

But Aren knew beyond any doubt that Deacon would miss him, and Deacon was the

heart of the BarChi. Jeremiah ran the ranch in theory, and his sons helped, but it was Deacon who was truly the driving force behind the entire operation. He knew where everybody was at any given time. He knew where the cattle were and if any of them were sick and if and when they’d have to be moved. He knew the horses—this one spooked at rivers and that one liked to bite and the other was as stubborn as a mule. He kept track of which ones had been ridden each day so they’d not be used again the next. He knew every inch of the land, past the fences, into the places Aren had never been. He knew the roads—the one back to the McAllen Ranch, and the one that went past the BarChi, into the wild and on to the Austin place. He knew the sky and the clouds and could predict with startling accuracy when it would be clear or when it was going to rain. He was, in every way, the person who kept the ranch on its feet.

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And no matter what happened, no matter if things went right or wrong, he would be

there at the end of each day, standing on Aren’s porch, waiting for a chance to leave it all outside.

Of course, they only had an hour or two, then the sun would be falling in the sky and Deacon would have to leave in order to get back to the barn before dark. Aren would start his generator and climb the stairs to his bedroom. He would go to bed alone…

In the house.

His first couple of nights there he’d lain awake, wondering if anything would happen, but nothing had. After the third night, he stopped worrying. By the time he’d been there two weeks, he was beginning to wonder if the whole ‘haunted’ thing was a prank after all.

Of course, that was when the ghost decided to prove him wrong.

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He woke to the sound of knocking. He’d been deep in slumber, and he woke only

enough to register the sound.

Knocking.

On his door.

Must be Deacon.

That was as much as his sleep-addled brain managed. After all, Deacon was the only

person who
ever
knocked on his door.

He was on the top landing when it occurred to him he was naked. He stumbled back

into the room, grabbed his pants and made a clumsy effort to insert himself into them as he made his way down the stairs.

Still the knocking continued.

“I’m coming!” he yelled, and the knocking stopped.

He was halfway down when it dawned on him that it was the middle of the night. The

fire in his hearth had long since reduced to coals. It was full dark out. Nobody in their right mind should have been outside. The thought helped jump his brain into wakefulness. If somebody was knocking on his front door at this time of night, it meant something was very, very wrong.

He got his pants on and even got them buttoned. He had the door unlatched and was

about to open it when he realised he should look out through the window first, and when he did, his blood suddenly ran cold in his veins. His heart began to pound.

There was nobody outside.

He re-latched the door with shaking fingers, thinking of how close he’d come to

opening it.

Had he imagined the knocking? He’d been asleep. Maybe it had all been a dream?

He turned and leaned against the door and willed himself to think. It had to have been a dream. There was simply no other explanation.

Boom, boom, boom!

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Aren jumped at the noise. It no longer sounded like somebody knocking. It sounded

like somebody
pounding
with all their strength. And it wasn’t coming from the front door at all. It was coming from the back of the house. Was it possible somebody was at the back door?

Somehow, he didn’t think so.

Aren pushed himself away from the door. He made himself put one foot in front of the

other. He forced himself to walk down the short hallway to the back of the house.

He stepped into the small back room. He was struck immediately by the cold. It was

freezing in the pantry, far colder than anywhere else in the house. It was also pitch dark.

There were no windows in the room and no hint of light penetrated the blackness. It was the kind of dark that seemed to breathe on its own. Aren could feel it all around him, bearing down on him, cutting off his air and making it hard to breathe. The only thing that kept him from truly panicking at that moment was the fact that he was still in the doorway, hanging on to the wall. He felt certain if he’d taken even one step into the small room, he’d have lost his way back.

Boom, boom, boom!
The noise came again, louder than before.

Aren slowly back-tracked to the living room. It was dark there, too, but not so dark that he couldn’t find the lantern on the table. He used one of his few matches to light it and turned the wick up as high as it would go.

Light flooded the familiar space and, as the darkness abated, Aren took a deep breath, willing his heart to stop pounding inside his chest.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom!

He picked up the lantern and walked back down the hall into the back room. The

pantry was still freezing. Aren swore he could see his breath. The light helped, but even its comforting glow seemed to waver and dim in the oppressive darkness.

The pounding continued.

It was
not
coming from the back door.

Now that he could see, it took only a second for Aren to determine the real source of the noise—the cellar. He reached down with a shaking hand and grabbed the edge of the rug. He slowly pulled it away from the cellar door. The symbol Deacon had painted was still there.

The paint hadn’t faded or chipped.

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The pounding came again, and the cellar door shook with the impact. The hinges

rattled. Aren backed up fast, running into the wall behind him.

There was
something
in the cellar, just as Olsa had suspected. Aren wondered what he would see if he opened the door—a person, or a ghost, or something else? Not that he had any intention of doing such a thing. The pounding continued.

“Who’s there?” Aren called. His voice was shaking and his heart was pounding, and he

wasn’t sure if he expected an answer or not, but he asked anyway.

The pounding stopped. Aren’s heart laboured on. He could have sworn that whatever it

was behind the cellar door, it was listening. It was waiting. “Are you there?” Aren asked.

A piercing shriek shattered the silence. Aren’s lantern sputtered. The temperature

seemed to plummet.

Aren ran.

He wanted to leave. He wanted to get out of the house, and he knew suddenly why the

foreman had run out into the night. But somewhere underneath his terror, the rational part of his brain stopped him from opening the front door. He bolted up the stairs and into his bedroom as fast as he could go, slamming the door behind him. He nearly dropped his lamp, and he thought how disastrous it would be if it shattered on the floor, igniting the fuel. He’d have to choose between being inside a burning house or being outside with the wraiths.

He forced himself to breathe. He forced himself to slow down. His hands shook as he

put the lamp down on his bedside table. He pushed his dresser in front of his bedroom door.

Downstairs, the shrieking went on.

He climbed onto his bed, but he couldn’t make himself lie down. Instead, he sat

huddled against the headboard with his arms around his knees and his eyes on the door. He wondered what in the world he would do if it moved.

Eventually, the shrieking seemed to wind down. Eventually, whatever was in the cellar lapsed instead into tears. Even all the way upstairs, Aren could hear the bitter, wrenching sobs of whatever was on the other side of the door.

There was no way for him to judge the passage of time. There was no window in the

bedroom. He hadn’t carried his pocket watch in weeks. He didn’t need it on the ranch, where life was dictated by bells and the sun. He didn’t know where it was, and he had no intention SONG OF OESTEND

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of getting out of bed to look for it. He stayed where he was, huddled against his headboard.

After some indeterminable amount of time, the crying stopped, and Aren sighed in relief.

All the fear and the tension and the adrenaline drained away, leaving him limp and

exhausted. He was finally drifting off to sleep with his head on his knees when the pounding started again.

Aren started awake, terror welling up again inside his chest. He wanted to cry. He

curled into a ball, fighting back the fear and the rage inside him. He wasn’t sure he could handle it if the thing in the basement started shrieking again.

“Aren?” he heard a voice call.

Deacon!

It wasn’t the ghost at all. Aren almost sobbed with relief. He dragged himself off the bed, wincing at the cramps in his back and neck from spending so many hours huddled in such a tense, awkward position. He struggled to push his dresser from in front of the door.

“Aren?” Deacon called again, and Aren could tell from his voice he was getting

worried.

“I’m coming,” he called.

He remembered the last time he’d said that, when the knocking had first started. How

many hours ago? Was it morning now? It had to be, if Deacon was on his front porch.

He opened the door to his bedroom. He could tell immediately it was daytime. Sunlight filtered through the window in his studio and the one by the front door. He stumbled down the stairs, and after fumbling for far too long, he managed to get the door open.

“You all right?” Deacon asked. “You missed breakfast.”

Aren wondered how he’d missed the morning bell. “I did?” he asked. But his voice

came out all wrong. It was much closer to a squeak than normal.

Deacon’s eyebrows went down, his eyes suddenly suspicious. “Something happened

last night, didn’t it?” he asked. “I told you this house wasn’t fit to live in!”

Despite everything that had happened, despite the terror he’d felt mere hours before, the idea of losing the house kicked Aren into gear. He thought about his studio, and his privacy, and his own privy. He thought about evenings spent with Deacon in front of the fire. Standing there in the bright light of day, Aren suddenly couldn’t quite remember how SONG OF OESTEND

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afraid he’d been. The sun was warm, the wind blew his hair, reviving him, blowing his mental cobwebs away.

He loved the house. He didn’t care how bad it was at night. He’d bolt himself in his

room every night, if that’s what he had to do.

He smoothed down his hair. He stood up straight. He did his absolute best to look like somebody who hadn’t spent the last several hours huddled into a ball on his bed trying not to cry.

He made himself smile.

“I’m fine,” he said to Deacon. “I guess I just slept late.”

He could tell Deacon didn’t believe him. Deacon waited for him to dress, and as they

walked across the clearing to the main house, the big cowboy kept looking at him sideways.

“You look like shit,” Deacon said.

“Thanks for telling me.”

“You sure everything’s all right?”

“Of course,” Aren said, although deep in his coat pockets, his hands were still shaking.

“I told you that house ain’t fit to live in.”