Page 13 of Giving Up The Ghost
Maybe the ghost was a frustrated archivist.
Oscar was sleeping the sleep of the just, sprawled on the sofa with one sock on and one off, his shoes tucked neatly beneath the end table. A binder was open on his chest, his phone dangling in his hand where he’d no doubt been making notes or taking pictures. Maybe both, if I’d been rubbing off on him. Well, in a researcher sense. Not the other.
No pictures of that thank you very much.
“Oscar?” I tried. He snuffed and wiggled down further into the settee. “Oscar, I just saw a ghost.”
“Nice,” he mumbled into the arm of the sofa. “Take a picture.”
“Get right on it,” I murmured, unable to stop myself from pushing an errant curl back from his forehead. Even asleep, he looked tired. Dark circles pouched beneath his eyes, and his usually slightly amused mouth was slack, with no trace of humor or sly wit in evidence. The dark shadow of his beard was odd to see—he usually stayed clean-shaven, the sharp planes of his face vulpine when bare. With the morning’s bristles, he was no less handsome but looked older now, making me wonder if this is what hewouldlook like in a decade, maybe two. Slightly scruffy, hair a bit too long, eyes crinkling up at me in our kitchen, a hundred or more investigations behind us.
The binder on his chest slid as he wiggled again. I caught it before it hit the floor, glancing down to see the page open to a carefully presented list of birth and death dates for a long chain of Fellowes and their nearest relations. Some were marked with a small black dot beside the names. Intrigued, my research senses tingling, I moved to the chair across from the sofa and started reading. The names, I found, were marked to indicate a burial outside of hallowed ground. No reasons were given as to why, and the list appeared to be a personal accounting rather than something official. Some ancestor of Oscar’s had been keeping track of which family members were buried in consecrated ground and which were not. Taking a few pictures of the pages, I forged ahead, drawn in by this collection of family history that seemed, on the surface, rather nonsensical but began to reveal a pattern as I moved on to the second binder.
Someone—many someones, over the years—had been keeping track of the Fellowes’ presence in their communities as mediums or workers or whatever they were called by the people they lived amongst. Most of the stories didn’t seem to end well at all—I counted a handful of executions, more than one person being transported (usually for fraud but), and the ones who had had relatively peaceful lives still faced the possibility of being refused burial on church grounds (which might not have been that big a deal for some of them but who knew, at this point), which in and of itself provided a fascinating avenue for exploration.
I was ensconced in the records of the Fellowes clan in World War I era England and France. This collection had quite a few firsthand records from family members noting births, deaths, and even personal accounts of ‘visitations’ uncolored by sensationalist newspaper reporting of earlier eras. Someone had taken copious notes between 1914 and 1916, about the sightings of a headless lady in Aberdeen, and another had kept records of their ‘kit’ used when they hosted a séance.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Charlotte stood in the doorway holding a tray with two coffee cups, a small carafe, and a plate of pastries that looked very fancy with jewel-colored fruit and thick cream flourishes.
“Ah, I came down to find Oscar. I got distracted,” I admitted, aiming for sheepish. “This is fascinating stuff. Whoever’s been keeping these records is doing an amazing job.”
She set the tray down on the end table and snatched the binder from my hands. The probability of damaging the pages made me let go instantly, unwilling to chance a tear in any of the pages.
“It isn’tstuff! This is what Oscar’s been looking for! These are his answers! His history!” She shook the binder at me, dangerously close to my face. “You have no right to go peeking through private materials,” she sniped. “Give me that!” Charlotte sucked her teeth in disapproval as she snatched another binder from the table beside me. “Just because you have a fancy degree does not give you permission to run roughshod over this!”
“Hey!” Oscar lurched up from his cocoon, muzzy but feeling froggy. My heart gave a funny little twist and shimmy at the sight of him ready to leap to my defense from a dead sleep. He focused on me, his frown softening just a bit. “Are you okay, Julian? What’s going on?”
He had struggled to his feet, tangled in the afghan from the back of the sofa, and was picking his way around the stacks of binders towards me, sleep receding rapidly from his eyes. “It’s okay,” I promised. “Just… a misunderstanding.”
“There’s nothing to misunderstand,” Charlotte hissed. “This is not for you! Oscar, yourfriendhas no right to go through these things! He needs to leave if he cannot mind his own business!”
“Charlotte!” Oscar gasped in the same tone you’d hear from someone learning their puppy was actually a bear. “There’s no call for this. Julian?—”
“Oi!” Ezra, sleep-rumpled and froggy, swung into the room around the doorframe, a man on a mission. “What the hell are you doing? This isn’t even your house, you know. Oscar has more right to say who belongs here than you do, and far more right to what’s in those boxes!”
“Why don’t we all try to take a breath,” Oscar suggested, color high. He shot me a pleading glance and I was tempted to shake my head no, to refuse to step in because seriously, the woman was unhinged. But Oscar was on the verge of panic, and I couldn’t feed that.
“Let’s go out,” I suggested. “Head into the village for a bit. See the sights.” It was just past nine. Surely there’d be something open by now. “Maybe take a walk or a drive first? Y’all can give me the grand tour of the area.” I managed not to look at the binder she’d caught me reading. Several of the names on that burial list had been for this parish, from what I could gather, and Ihadbeen planning to look more into that on my own, but now was the perfect chance to go in person, get out from the what-the-fuck that was going on and put some distance not only between us and Charlotte but Oscar and Charlotte as well. “I’ve heard the view from St. Swithin’s is lovely in the early morning.”
Ezra made a face and opened his mouth to protest, but then his brain kicked into gear and caught up with what I was trying to do. “Yeah, right. Let me go get my shoes on and call Harrison back.”
Oscar nodded warily. “Sounds like a good idea. I need to get the cobwebs out of my head anyway. I’ll just pop up and shower. Won’t be but two shakes.”
That left me and Charlotte. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” she said, tone flat. Disappointed. “You’re ruining this for him. This is hislegacy. This is what he was born to do. WhatIwas born to do. He’s one of the only remainingtruemediums. The others…” She shook her head, sneering. Ezra calling her energyredandoilysuddenly made perfect sense: her anger, her venomous snarls, definitely set off all sorts of red alerts in my lizard brain, her demeanor shifting so easily between what she showed me and how she treated Oscar was slick as oil.“They’re desperate to be like him, to have his ability. Only I’m afforded that privilege. We share a root stock, Oscar and me. No amount of coddling, of cozying up to him, of placating his ridiculous fears will change that. He’s here to learn. Oscar Fellowes is here to learn fromme!”She struck her hand against her breast, just over her heart. “It ismewith the knowledge, yes? Not you.Not you. Oscar needsmyhelp. And between the two of us…” She drew in a sharp breath, an audible slamming of the brakes to stop her words. “Not for you,” she repeated, shaking her head. “This isours.”
Words—my armor and my usual weapon—failed me for the first time in years. Instead of a pithy remark or even a sharp warning, I managed to nod once, albeit curtly, and, gripping my stick so hard my hand hurt, I hurried out of the house and down the sparkling front steps.
I didn’t stop until I reached the privet bordering the lane, and by then my hip and leg were screaming at me to slow down or they’d force the issue. No bench or even a convenient stump in sight, I leaned against the wooden railing that ran behind the privet, nearly overcome by the shrub in places. “Jesus,” I muttered, closing my eyes.
“Oh, I’m afraid not. Just Denby Henderson!”
The cheerful voice startled me. I jerked, a spasm racing from my thigh to my mid-back, making me gasp as I stuck my head around the privet to see who was speaking to me. A smiling, round-faced older man dressed entirely in tweed, down to the fabric on his shoes, waved a cheery hello. “Sorry,” I managed. “I thought I was alone.”
“I thought so. I was going to say hello, then thought perhaps you’d prefer to be on your own, but I heard you start to pray and thought it’d be best to let you know I was here, in case things got very personal.”
“Oh, er. I wasn’t praying. Just… cursing?”
