Page 14 of The Prestley Ghost
“You’re not planning to throw stones at us or set the house on fire or possess us in our sleep, so yes.”
“That’s…kind of you.”
“I read your book. Part of it, anyway.”
“My—oh. Oliver bought multiple copies; he might’ve been the only one who did. He gave them to people. Including the former rector, I suppose. I’m surprised he kept it.”
“Don’t anger the local landlords by throwing out their son’s lover’s poetry, I suppose.”
“Cynical, but no doubt true.” Alex looked away, though: out at the rain. “I wish I’d been better at it. At anything, really.”
“Is that what you need to finish? Being a poet?”
“If I say yes, would you try to republish my work and give me some sort of literary reputation? No.”
“You can touch things,” Charles said. His backside was cold. His toes were cold. “You can sit on…things. You touched my hand. You could still write, couldn’t you? Ghosts can. Spirit writing.”
“I’ve not tried, but probably. It did take me some time to learn, though. And by some time I mean years. It takes a degree of focus, being more solid. Effort. It’s tiring.” This time Alex did look at him. “I appreciate your trying to help. Is there something I can do for you? Don’t say the answer’s terrible poetry.”
“It’s not terrible. You’re not terrible. Some of those lines—not all of them, right, but the bit about the moonlight, about the wine and loneliness even in pleasure, because you know there’s something missing, something wrong inside—” He made himself stop. The rain bounced and dripped from the arch above, narrowly missing his boots. Alex kept looking at him, and all that soft golden understanding was so right and too much andso painful, and Charles wanted to be seen by him.
He said, “You said it took you years to figure out…how to come back.”
“Oh. No. Well…years to be any sort of coherent. I was awake almost instantly. Genuine shock, I think. I didn’t believe it, at first. I knew myself and I knew I was alive—how could I not be? But I was looking at my own body.”
“But youdidfigure it out.”
Alex put a hand on his knee, under the shared huddle of their church doorway. The hand was very cold, but it had weight, presence, existence.
Charles said, “I went back. To the spot where—to where our parents died. Not right away. Not until I knew John would—would live. But I tried. I tried to talk to them.”
Alex’s hand tightened. He did not interrupt.
“I’ve always…some ghosts can make themselves heard. To anyone. I’ve always seen them, heard them, even if they weren’t trying. A gift. I thought—if anyone could come back, our parents could. They knew so much. They knew about spirits and hauntings. They loved us. And so I thought…of course I’d be able to hear them. They’d talk to me. And maybe they’d be angry, maybe they’d blame me—as they should—but I could beg for forgiveness, and they could go on, and it would work.”
“But they weren’t there.” This time Alex actually put an arm around him, awkward due to respective sizes and solidity, not to mention the tiny shelter. It worked, though. “Were they?”
“No. Never. I tried twice—I did try. Everything I knew. There was no presence, no residual energy, nothing. They were just…gone.”
“Not everyone stays,” Alex said. His eyes were golden-brown and full of emotion, so close. His hair, indistinct at the floating tips, was gold and silver, a wash of waves over stone beyond. “I should know, being here. I don’t know why, though.”
“Neither do I.”
“And you never got to…ask for forgiveness. Unresolved.” Alex hesitated, not out of doubt but about gentleness; it was in his face, that poet’s empathy. “Do you want to tell me?”
“John should hate me. He doesn’t, because he’s John. But he should.”
“Well, I’ve known you for a far shorter time, but I’m fairly sure I’m not inclined to hate you, if it helps.”
Charles nearly laughed, found himself trembling with emotions, leaned into Alex’s cold support, and discovered himself talking, abruptly. Words spilling out. All of it.
Himself admitting that he did have the gift, that confirmation of everything their parents had pursued and studied and written about for years. Studies, tests, exploring his abilities. Travels across the breadth of England in search of more and more interesting manifestations for him to handle. More and more dangerous, because by God the Hayward family would help people, if they could.
He whispered, “I was the one who heard about the drowned man, at Twin Mills. I said I could handle it. They were thrilled.”
And the night, the terror, the grief—the graves, two of them together, James and Eliza, buried while the sun shone as sharp as a scythe. The way John had had to learn to walk again, agonizingly, when Charles himself had been all but unscathed, and it wasn’t fair, it would never be fair. It wasn’t right.
He said so, and then said it again, and somewhere along the way he was crying, not much but tangled into the words; and Alex just let him talk and held onto him, there in the rain in a doorway, Charles’s umbrella a crumpled wet dark heap upon old stone beside them.
