Page 2 of Love At First Fright
Rosemary nodded and then asked, “Could you see ghosts too?”
“I could. That’s why I wanted to see you before I left. Not many people have this gift, so unless you tell a ghost you can see them, they won’t know. But lots of them have interesting stories, especially the really old ones. I got this jam recipe from an old pastry chef who lived over in Keller.” She grinned, and Rosemary grinned back.
Tilting their heads over the pot, they sniffed the almost buttery sweetness of the jam.
“One final touch to make it perfect,” her grandmother said, pulling a little brown glass jar out of a cupboard. “The trick to the perfect strawberry jam is a teaspoon of rosewater.”
The heady scent of roses wafted through the kitchen.
Rosemary felt it then, a swoop in the pit of her stomach followed by a soft absence. Despite the summer heat, the kitchen felt colder. Her nana was gone.
“Rosemary, what are you doing?” Her mother burst into the kitchen, hauling Rosemary off the stool she was standing on, switching off the gas. Her dad hovered in the doorway, aggressively swiping tears from his cheeks.
“What were you—Were you making jam?” Her mother looked at the pot and the pile of strawberry stems on the counter. She sniffed the air.
“Did you add rosewater to it?” She looked at her daughter, confusion and incredulity on her face.
“It was Nana’s secret recipe.”
At the mention of her mother, Rosemary’s mom crumpled and pulled her daughter to her.
“Sweetheart, I’m not angry about the jam. But there’s something I need to tell you, okay? Why don’t you come with me and we go sit on Nana’s garden swing for a bit?”
As they left the kitchen, Rosemary stole a glance over her shoulder at the empty kitchen behind her, the steam rising from the cooling pot of jam, and knew she had just inherited a strange, but exciting, secret.
—
The ghost Rosemary was watchingnow was much younger than her grandmother’s ghost had been, nineteen years ago. Unlike her grandmother’s ghost, this one was greying at the edges and had a semitranslucence to it. She’d clearly been around for a while.
She was wearing a chunky knit cardigan that looked distinctly ’80s to Rosemary’s eye, though she couldn’t be sure, and was reading a bodice-ripping Regency romance over the shoulder of another customer in the bookstore. Most ghosts had the ability to hold physical objects but tried to avoid spooking the living folks around them (although not always). Accidentally revealing yourself could end up with ghost-hunting television shows asking you to knock three times if you were present, when all you wanted was to be left in peace.
Rosemary would bet that when the store closed, this ghost would be here flipping through books all night. As afterlives went, it was a pretty sweet deal.
“I think we’ll open up the floor to questions now. Does anyone have anything they’d like to ask our terrifying trio here?” Max, bookseller extraordinaire and today’s panel moderator, asked the crowd seated in the horror section of Tickled Ink bookstore, snapping Rosemary back to reality. She sucked in a breath, quietly enough that it wouldn’t be picked up by themicrophone. She reminded herself that she’d prepared for this; she knew there would be a Q&A. Rosemary rattled through her mental Rolodex of possible questions—she would be fine. The rational part of her brain knew that she was just waiting for her anxiety to catch up. Another breath, slower exhale. She glanced at the clock. Probably less than ten minutes to go of the event, maybe nine. She could do nine minutes.
Max had asked Rosemary to be on the panel to—in their own words—“bring the conversation into the twenty-first century,” and she didn’t blame them.
Tickled Ink was her local indie bookstore in Brooklyn and was perhaps Rosemary’s favourite place on earth, aside from her writing beanbag chair. Thanks to Max, both the horror and romance sections—the two most important sections of a bookstore, if you asked Rosemary—were exceptionally well curated.
Her co-panellists, James Butler and David Marsh—two big names in the horror genre—had books coming out this month, only a few weeks from Halloween, and were adamant about doing an event at the popular bookstore. Max had only agreed to host if Rosemary would be on the panel, too, convinced that she would bring in new and returning customers, compared to James and David, whose audiences mostly consisted of middle-aged white men. The women in their books had a tendency to walk “boobily” down the stairs, or to fall into bodies of water whilst wearing nothing but a sheer nightgown. Rosemary hadn’t been sure if she was up to the panel, but her friends Immy and Dina convinced her in the end.
“I’d like to ask you all a bit about your writing process: Do you write every day? Do you work towards a word count?” an audience member asked.
James cleared his throat. “I like to start the day with a run, it really clears the mind. Then I write from ninea.m.untilonep.m., before stopping for lunch. On a good day I’ll write six thousand words.” He smiled smugly.
“For me, it’s a little different. As a lot of you know, I don’t follow a strict routine.” David chuckled, running a hand through his thinning grey hair. “I’m more of anideasman, so I wait until the ideas come to me and then I write like crazy until it’s all on the page. I don’t really go in for research beforehand.”
Rosemary knew he didn’t go in for research, as she’d read an early draft of his new book when his editor had asked her to provide a blurb. If you’re going to write a horror set during the 1870s buffalo massacre, you would think that you’d want to read up on the history of the period instead of just watching a few Civil War–era films. She hadn’t been able to provide any kind of quote that a publisher would have wanted to promote the book with.
Finally, it came to Rosemary’s turn to answer. Seven minutes or less. She could do this.
“Since I mostly write historical horror, with the occasional step into aquatic horror…” A small whoop from a fan in the audience, waving a copy ofJulia,the first novel she’d published, five years ago, a deep-sea horror based on the “Julia” sound recorded by the U.S. Navy in 1999.
“I need to do a lot of research to make sure I’m presenting the era in the most authentic way. Since most of my books deal with sensitive themes like racism, transphobia, and women’s hysteria, I like to find time to interview people who can help me make my characters as genuine as possible. Just last week, I had a phone call with a lovely academic archivist to discuss the strange obsession that the Victorians had with Egyptian mummies. One of the most fascinating things I learned from her was that they would have mummy unwrapping parties where they would place a mummified body on their dining room table andunwrap it like it was some kind of party game. The facts can be incredibly messed up, but it makes for fantastic horror writing fodder.” She laughed, before realising that she was going down a tangent again, and had better get back to the point. “So I start my mornings with research, and then in the afternoon I’ll write, as I’m very lucky that all you lovely people read enough of my books that I’m able to do this full-time. So thank you.”
A few more questions were asked by the audience, and then a round of applause filled Rosemary’s ears as the panel drew to a close. She thanked James and David for the wonderful chat, though her heart wasn’t in it. They shook her hand but wouldn’t really meet her eyes. A younger version of herself might have been hurt, but twenty-nine-year-old Rosemary was well used to this kind of behaviour from a certain demographic of horror authors by now.
When Rosemary had arrived earlier to sign stock for Max, she’d overheard James and David—who definitely hadn’t seen her come into the back room of the store—talking about her movie deal.
