The Visitor (15 page)

“Build the cemetery, you mean?”

“No, dear. Rose killed herself.”

My hand jerked slightly, clattering the porcelain cup against the saucer. “How tragic, especially after all those other suicides.”

“You've no idea. I was the one who found her hanging in the tiny dark room, a key still clutched in her lifeless fingers. I'll never forget the way the blood dripped down her face like crimson teardrops.”

“There was blood?”

Nelda lifted her gaze to mine. “You see, before Rose died, she used that key to put out her eyes.”

Twenty-Eight

I
left the shop with more questions swirling in my head than when I had arrived. Nelda was so preoccupied with the viewer that she barely noticed my exit. I'd meant to ask about her insistence that I come see her before I agreed to the restoration, but after her grisly revelation about Rose, I hadn't felt like lingering.

My look-alike and namesake had lost touch with reality, put out her own eyes with a key and then hanged herself. Of course, Nelda had been little more than a child at the time and she may not have known all the facts. If someone had murdered Ezra Kroll and the colonists in cold blood, who was to say Rose hadn't met the same end?

But what if the ghosts
had
driven her insane? What if she'd killed herself to escape them?

What if the same fate awaited me someday?

I always assumed my destiny was a dark one. I had only to look at Papa. He'd withdrawn inside himself to escape from the ghosts, and he kept things from me about my past and my gift because he wanted to shelter me. His motives were selfless, but his secrets made me vulnerable. I could see that now. The rules had hobbled me as much as they had protected me. Instead of growing stronger and learning how to fight for my future, I'd spent most of my life sequestered behind cemetery walls, hiding and pretending.

That time was long gone. My eyes were open now and I could no longer deny the changes that were happening inside me any more than I could hide from the ghosts.

But I was tired of dwelling on the direness of it all. It was a beautiful May morning, cloudless and breezy. I didn't want to think about my gift or Rose's prophecy or the unbound power left behind by the dead. I wanted to shove every bad thought to the furthest corner of my mind and retreat into my work as I always had.

There would be time enough later to reflect on Rose Gray and Ezra Kroll and the cemetery she had built for him. Time enough to obsess over those keys on my nightstand and the motes in my eyes and the gruesome way in which Rose had met her end. But for now, for a little while longer, I would lose myself in the withering beauty of one of my forgotten graveyards.

And for most of the day, I was able to do exactly that in a little cemetery just outside Charleston. But on my journey to Trinity late that afternoon, the forbidden images crept back in. The possibility that a key I'd found on a headstone in Rosehill Cemetery nearly twenty years ago had turned up on my nightstand made me contemplate again the notion of predestination and how all the strange occurrences in my life were somehow connected.

The sun still hovered over the treetops when I pulled into the empty driveway. I knew from an earlier phone call that my mother was away for the day with my aunt. I'd started to go straight to the cemetery to look for Papa, but I'd wanted to spend a few minutes with Angus. He bounded across the yard to greet me as I climbed out of the car, but the moment I held out my hand to him, he stopped short, his lips curling back in a low growl.

His threatening behavior stunned me. He wouldn't have forgotten me in so short a time. I could only surmise that he had intuited the supernatural turmoil around me. Maybe he'd even sensed the unbound energy of death that I had unwittingly attracted.

Still in shock, I knelt and spoke to him in my softest voice. “It's me, Amelia. Don't you recognize me? You know I won't hurt you.”

His head came up and he stared at me for the longest time with those dark, soulful eyes. Then he took a cautious step closer as if he wanted to believe I was still the old Amelia. Almost immediately he halted with a snarl, his tail dropping and his hackles rising.

He looked to be on the verge of more serious aggression so I stood slowly and began to ease back to my car. “It's okay, Angus. It's okay, boy,” I soothed over and over.

He was getting ready to lunge. I could tell by his stance. If I made one wrong move, I had no doubt he'd be on me.

As I felt for the door handle, he rushed forward and then retreated, repeating the action until I was back inside my vehicle. Then he began to pace, teeth bared, body hunched low as I started the engine and drove away.

His rejection devastated me. Of all the beings that had come and gone in my life, Angus was my constant, my touchstone, as close to a soul mate as I would likely ever know. We understood each other because we both had the sight.

He had turned on me once before, but only because he'd been afflicted by the evil that resided in the woods and hollows around Asher Falls. Even then, he'd somehow managed to banish the influence and come to my rescue.

Now it was something inside me that threatened him. That repelled him.

Even after I'd glimpsed the darkness inside Micah Durant, even after I'd slipped into Devlin's memory, I hadn't wanted to accept the evolution of my gift, but it was hard to discount Angus's response to me. Suddenly, Darius Goodwine's words came back to haunt me.

You're not the same person as when we first met, nor will you be the same when our paths cross again.

* * *

Still shaken, I parked on the shoulder of the road and took a shortcut through the woods, emerging only a short distance from the entrance to the old section of Rosehill. The gate was unlocked, but I didn't go inside. Instead, I turned to stare down into that secluded glen where I'd found the skeleton key necklace all those years ago.

I'd once asked Papa why the people buried there hadn't been laid to rest on the other side of the wall, in consecrated ground. He had explained to me that in the old days, it had been customary to keep the bodies of criminals, suicides and other undesirables separated from the traditional burials. Not only were the remains exiled from hallowed ground, but they were also relegated to the northernmost part of the cemetery, where it was cold, dark and damp.

My gaze followed the dipping path into the copse. When I was a child, I hadn't minded the gloominess of that corner. I'd felt very sorry for the outcasts who were buried there and had taken it upon myself to visit each grave so that the dead would know that I'd been there. But Papa refused to linger. He'd always made quick work of his duties, seemingly anxious to be back out in the sunlight. He'd never forbidden me to play there, but I wondered if he'd known just how much time I'd spent inside that shadowy enclave, reading aloud to the dead and weaving daisy chains to adorn their headstones.

I could feel a tug toward that murky place now, but I told myself the attraction was nothing more than my own curiosity. I really wanted to believe that. As I hovered there clutching the straps of my backpack, it came to me that I was standing on the exact spot where the two pathways diverged. A crossroads. Straight ahead lay the safety of hallowed ground. To the left, a slanting stone trail into perpetual twilight. I had a choice of destinations. I wanted to believe that, too. But even as the notion of free will flitted through my head, I was already picking my way along the broken flagstones, guided by the melancholy fragrances of damp earth and dead leaves.

A breeze drifted through the crowding oaks, rippling the leaves and stirring long curtains of Spanish moss. Despite Papa's care, the years hadn't been kind to this part of the cemetery. I could see a handful of fallen stones while others had succumbed to the tenacious clutches of ivy roots and vandals. The crumbling markers were mostly rough fieldstones and simple slate tablets. No angels resided here. No saints marked my progress along the winding pathway.

Deeper and deeper I traveled, my footsteps silenced by moss. I hadn't been back that way in years and wondered if I would even recognize the headstone on which I'd found the key. But presently my gaze came to rest on a crumbling marker, and the flesh at my nape started to crawl. Time, weather and perhaps even a bolt of lightning had blackened the face of the stone so that the name was completely obscured. I had no idea who was buried in the sunken grave nor did it seem to matter.

I paused on the trail, gathering my courage before making my way through the dead leaves and underbrush to the back of the marker so as not to tread upon the grave. Pushing aside tendrils of ivy and brambles, I scratched away some of the lichen and then ran my hand lightly across the rough surface. I could feel a slight indentation in the stone and leaned down for a closer inspection. Perhaps it was the hazy light or the power of suggestion, but I fancied I could trace the outline of a shank, teeth and bow.

I removed the skeleton key from my backpack and placed it in the hollow. It was a perfect fit.

How many years had that key remained on the headstone, waiting for me to return? Why had it come back to me now? And how could it possibly be my salvation?

The wind picked up and the leaves started to quiver as the light faded. In the outside world, dusk hadn't yet fallen, but here in this forsaken corner, the veil had already thinned and the ghosts were getting restless.

My gaze was still riveted on the headstone. As the chill of a manifestation settled over me, the key started to glow.

Twenty-Nine

“A
melia? What are you doing, child?”

At the sound of Papa's voice, I snatched the key from the headstone and stuffed it in my pocket, guilt niggling as I turned to face him. I'd brought the key into the cemetery, so I wasn't breaking any rules by taking it with me, but I had a bad feeling that Papa might consider my rationalization a matter of semantics.

“I was looking for you,” I told him. “I thought I heard you back here.”

“Come along. It's getting on dark and your mother will be back soon.”

He took my hand as we walked back toward the gate. I could feel the unwelcome weight of the key in my pocket and I felt the same fear and confusion I'd experienced on that long-ago twilight because I somehow knew my life was about to take another terrifying turn.

Papa must have sensed my distress. He clung to my hand until we got to the end of the path, and then he opened the gate and we both stepped through onto hallowed ground. We walked in silence through the monuments and markers until we reached the stone angels. I dropped to the ground and Papa lowered himself more tentatively. Drawing my knees to my chest, I watched the statues come alive in the fiery glow of a Carolina sunset.

When the dance was over and the sun had dipped beneath the horizon, Papa finally turned to me, his grizzled features taut with worry. “What's wrong? Why are you here?”

“Something's happened,” I said.

“What is it, Amelia?”

I hugged my legs tightly, assembling my thoughts as the sky deepened and the bats came out.

“Tell me, child,” Papa urged gently. He looked old and tired, the stoop of his shoulders even more pronounced than when I'd last seen him. In that moment I realized how fragile he and Mama both were these days. Time was slipping away and I couldn't bear to think of a future when they would no longer be with me in the living world.

I hadn't allowed myself to imagine that time too often, but every once in a while, a thought crept in. Would they be able to move on or would they linger, drawn by the warmth and energy that had been lost to them in death?

I banished the unwelcome image with a shudder as I turned to Papa. “I'm being visited by the ghost of a woman named Rose Gray. She's been coming to me in my dreams for months, but now she's manifested.” I paused, wondering how best to proceed. I was desperate for answers, but I also knew that pressing Papa too hard might send him back into the dark sanctuary of his own thoughts. I had to tread carefully. “I've seen a photograph of her. She looked very much like me. She even had my name. It can't be a coincidence. Who was she, Papa?”

“She was my mother.”

I drew a harsh breath, though not from shock. Rose and I shared the same name, the same face. It wasn't a leap to assume we shared the same bloodline. But to have it confirmed was more emotional than I would have expected. “I asked you so many times about my family. Why did you never tell me about her? You must have noticed how much I looked like her. You even gave me her name.”

“Some things are best left in the past,” he said.

“That's not true!” I said angrily, and then immediately regretted my outburst because he was my papa after all. “You've always remained silent to protect me. I know that. But you can't keep secrets from me any longer. It's too dangerous.” I ran my hand aimlessly over the ground between us, idly plucking at the blades of grass where we had once searched for the key necklace. “Something is happening to me, Papa. I don't just see the dead anymore. I sense things. Thoughts and emotions of the living. Sometimes I can even glimpse memories. What I'm becoming...” I trailed off, hardly daring to voice what had been preying on me for a very long time. “I think whatever is happening to me was set in motion at my birth. Grandmother Tilly was able to save me for a reason.”

Papa stared straight ahead into the deepening twilight, refusing to look at me. Refusing to acknowledge my fear. But I wouldn't be dissuaded so easily.

“I believe I have a purpose. A calling. And it has something to do with Rose. Somehow our destinies our intertwined. That's why I'm here. I have to know about her. I have to find out what happened to her so that I can protect myself.”

He remained silent for the longest time, so motionless I was afraid he'd drifted off into his faraway place. But then he said wearily, “Much of her life remains a mystery to me. She left when I was just a boy.”

“Why?”

“To protect me from the ghosts.”

My pulse quickened. “She was like us? A caulbearer?”

“The Grays are caulbearers, but my mother was a Wysong and she had a special gift. A curse, some would call it. Like you, she had a light inside her that drew them.”

I put a hand over my heart as if I could somehow quell the beacon inside my own chest. “What was she?” I asked in a near whisper. “What am I?”

“I don't know, child.”

But I knew. I was a perfect storm. A Gray and a Wysong on Papa's side. An Asher and a Pattershaw from my birth parents. I was the culmination of all their dark gifts and, on top of it all, I'd been born dead to a dead mother, giving me an even stronger connection to the other side. No wonder Papa didn't know what to call me.

A breeze blew through the trees, carrying the summer perfume of honeysuckle and rain. There was moisture in the air and the faintest crackle of electricity that foreshadowed a midnight storm. It was an odd, loaded moment. Dark and portentous. Where Papa had looked old and fragile before, now he seemed ageless as nightfall drew down upon us.

“Do you know what happened to Rose?” I asked him.

“She died. But she had been away for a long time by then.”

“How old were you when she left?”

“Nine or ten. I don't rightly recall anymore.”

“Did you already know about the ghosts?”

“Yes. My first sighting was the ghost of a boy named Jimmy Tubbs. He'd been killed in a logging accident a week before I spotted him at the end of our lane.”

“What did you do?” I asked, remembering my first sighting and how Papa had sat me down in this very cemetery and told me what I had to do to remain safe.

“I ran across the yard to the porch where my mother sat peeling peaches. I told her I'd seen Jimmy standing at the end of our road staring up at our house as if he was contemplating paying us a visit. A part of me wanted her to scold me for making up stories, but instead she made me promise to never tell anyone about Jimmy, especially my father. If I saw the ghost again, I was not to look at him or speak to him. I was not to acknowledge him in any way.”

“She gave you the rules,” I said.

“After that, I saw other ghosts, mostly in the woods behind our house. My mother said they came because of her. It was dangerous for me to be around her now that I had come into the sight.”

I tightened my arms around my legs, trying to ward off the growing chill of his words. “Go on,” I urged.

“One day my father came home and found a note from her. She wrote that she was tired of living in the mountains and wanted to go back to her own people. He was livid at her betrayal, but I knew the truth. She left to protect me.”

“Did you ever see her again?”

“Only once, the summer I turned twelve. I'd just come in from doing the evening chores when I overheard Pa and his new wife talking about her. I thought it peculiar because we never spoke of my mother. They forbade it. I was never allowed to even mention her name. But I heard them say that someone had seen her down here in South Carolina. They said she'd taken up with some man that she'd known before she married my father.”

Ezra Kroll, I thought. “What did you do?”

“The next morning, I packed a change of clothing and what little money I'd saved up and hitchhiked down the mountain. It was just getting on dusk when I finally came upon her house.”

He paused for a breath, and in the ensuing hush, I could hear the cicadas. Their abrasive serenade filled me with dread. Overhead, night birds circled and swooped and outside the safety net of hallowed ground, the veil to the dead world thinned.

“What happened then, Papa?”

“The ghosts came. Dozens of them swarming her house like a horde of locusts. I never saw anything like it.”

Resting my chin on my knees, I thought of those ghost voices I'd heard in the hospital morgue. The invisible bodies pressing in on me through the walls. After all these years, I only now had an inkling of my destiny. A nebulous understanding of just what my gift entailed and what I might have to do to protect the people I loved.

“Did you see your mother?” I asked Papa.

“Not until daybreak. When the sun came up and the ghosts disappeared, I left the woods and went up to knock on her door. I barely recognized the woman who answered. She'd aged far beyond her years. Her hair had gone gray and she was frail. So slight a puff of wind could have blown her away.”

“Was she alone?”

“Yes. I'd heard in town there'd been some tragedy. A lot of people had died, and I thought maybe that explained the ghosts.”

I shivered thinking of all those entities seeking my great-grandmother's help, needing retribution before they could finally move on. And I wondered again why I was being summoned to Kroll Cemetery. “Did she recognize you?”

“She seemed leery of me at first, but then she brought me inside, fixed me some breakfast and sat with me while I ate. After that we took a walk in the woods.”

“How long did you stay with her?”

“Just for the day. When the sun went down, she sent me away and made me promise not to come back. I was never to return even after she was gone.”

“After she was gone? Why?”

“She wouldn't say. But I had the sense she was afraid of something.”

Afraid of something or someone? I wondered. By that time, Rose must have had her suspicions about what had happened at Kroll Colony.

“Sometime later, I received a package from a girl who had known her,” Papa said. “My mother had taken ill and died. The girl's family had seen to the burial. She'd put together some remembrances—photographs, trinkets and such that she thought I might like to have. She even included a picture of my mother's grave.”

“Who was this girl?”

“She never gave me her name.”

I wondered if it was Nelda Toombs. She and Rose had been so close it seemed only natural that she would have reached out to Rose's son. “You never went back to visit her grave?”

“I made her a promise that day. Keeping my word was the last thing I could do for her.”

“You...never saw her after that?”

“Her ghost, you mean? She never came to me. She must have been waiting for you.”

“But why?”

“You're like her. You share her gift.” He turned to me in the deepening twilight. “But a ghost is a ghost, child. Even my mother's ghost.”

“I know, Papa.”

I understood only too well his trepidation because helping Rose's ghost meant facing both known and unknown dangers. In order to solve the mystery of Kroll Cemetery, I would have to use facets of my gift that I was only now discovering. Tapping into the unbound power of death would set me on a course from which I feared there would be no return.

But did I really have a choice? What did I have to look forward to if I didn't help her? Swarms of ghosts? Insanity?

“Was there a key in the package the girl sent to you?” I asked Papa.

“A key? No, why?”

“Did Rose ever tell you about a key? It would have been special to her, I think.”

Papa looked at me strangely. “Where did you get this notion?”

“From Rose's ghost. She told me to find a key. It's my only salvation, she said.”

“She
told
you?”

“Not in words, not aloud, but I could hear her in my mind.”

Papa suddenly seemed overcome with emotion. He wiped a hand across his eyes as he stared out over the angels.

I laid a gentle hand on his arm. “Papa, Rose had all the headstones in the cemetery where she was buried engraved with key symbols. All except for her own. You don't have any idea what those keys meant to her?”

“A key represents knowledge,” he said vaguely.

“Yes, but I think there's more to it than that. I think she used those keys to leave a message or a riddle. It makes me wonder if...” I could still feel the weight of the skeleton key in my pocket. “When I was little, before the ghosts came, I found a key here in this cemetery. I told you that my aunt had given it to me, but I really found it on a headstone. I returned it the next day and tried to forget about it, but now I can't help wondering if Rose left that key for me to find.”

Papa said softly, “She'd been dead a long time by then. Decades.”

“We both know she could have still found a way.”

His eyes closed briefly. “Why did you lie to me about that key?”

“I was afraid I'd done something very wrong. You said that I must never take or leave anything behind that could be misconstrued as an offering or invitation. But people leave flowers and mementos behind all the time in graveyards. That rule only applies to us, doesn't it? To
me
.” I clutched his arm. “Why, Papa?”

His voice lowered to a ragged whisper. “It invites them in.”

“Into the living world?”

“Into
you
.”

I drew a sharp breath. “You mean possession?”

I could see the rising moon in his eyes and it made me shiver. “Before my mother left, she taught me how to protect myself from the ghosts. Just as I taught you. She told me about the ravenous spirits that feed on human warmth and energy, about the restless ghosts that can't move on because of unfinished business. The day I went to see her, she told me about a different kind of entity, one that lingers in the living world for the sole purpose of creating chaos. Malcontents, she called them. Wraiths that prey on the weak and the innocent. They cajole and seduce and barter in order to find a conduit for their evil. Once they crawl inside you, child, the only way to rid yourself of them is death.”