Shadows of Shadows - 1. Family Matters

“Makayla! I can’t hear you!”

Susan watched the reception bars on her phone flicker, and the image on the screen, the beautiful brown face of her girlfriend, decayed into a grotesque, garbled caricature. The lips gave forth shards of futile utterance, the feeble phone barely making itself heard over the wind driven rain slapping the windows and lashing the old house’s steel roof.

“Cutting … connect … Sus…” the distorted Makayla tried, but with a sad chime, FaceTime hung up. Suddenly alone, Susan dared not take her eyes off the blackening screen. The house was alive with moans and creaks, the sudden storm doing its best to shiver place to splinters, as countless storms had tried over the past century. What she might see if she looked around, she didn’t know, but if ever a curse was going to come over the cottage, this was the night for it.

The brilliant blue of a lightning bolt filled every window, painting a spectrally silver mask of her pale round face and blonde hair in the phone’s glass screen. When it faded it took every other light with it. No power! Susan set the phone on the sofa beside her and double palmed her face, breathing steadily, listening attentively to identify the sounds as -- hopefully -- natural.

The whispering rustles were only the ancient bowing trees and their whipping limbs. The slaps were the sheets of rain on window panes, and the low groans only the lament of the long suffering timbers.Then there was a rattle of dishes in the sink -- clack -- clink -- clatter -- the ringing china and glass in the sink lifted its voice. Who was there? The spirits had finally come. Who was still living here? Who was in the kitchen? The storm itself quelled itself and held its breath, but the next flash of lightning brought a snap like a gunshot. Susan’s scream was washed away by the earthshaking thunderclap.

Susan was suddenly shamed. Grandpa would have laughed his head off to hear her, glad to see the fruits of the haunted house stories he’d sown in her mind. Grandma would have scolded and sighed and gotten to work. The snapping could only mean one thing. No one was here but Susan, now, and the evil task fell to her.

Gathering her courage, she rose and tiptoed into the kitchen, dark, but alive with a childhood full of memories. The flash from her phone played across the old dining room table of half a dozen Thanksgivings, and as many more Christmases. Over the cabinets and the old stove, and then to the floor by the sink, where the wretched gray corpse of the recently late mouse in the clutches of a mousetrap stared up expectantly.

The mouse in the disrack. It had gotten her once or twice when she was a kid. The lights flickered back on, and Suan switched off her flashlight. “Fuck!” she exclaimed, relieved that Grandma wasn't here to upbraid her for swearing away the stress of the rodent's demise. “Now I’m really going to have ghosts!”

***

COVID had come in March, scrambling the end of Susan Lewis’s junior year at UMass. Classes petered out and deadlines evaporated as the college drank the Pandemic’s weird cocktail of dread and ennui. Then the call came. Grandma Rachel had been hospitalized in Richmond, Virginia, suffering from a melanoma that had come for the left side of her face, after the right had been ravaged before Susan was born. In a couple of days though, she became acutely ill in her hospital bed, and COVID finally took her in mid April.

Mom, Dad, and Mom’s brother Steve made the pilgrimage to Virginia, Susan’s family coming from Boston and Uncle Steve from Washington. They came together in the unimaginably tiny waterfront village of Sharps to bury the old matriarch at a sparsely attended graveside funeral, the church being locked up for the foreseeable. A handful of ancient natives and recent retiree “come-heres”, who all knew Susan, even if she couldn’t place their names, offered socially-distant condolences. The old widow, aged 85 at the end, was a pillar of the tiny community, and her century old two story house a shrine to her memory.

As the gray heads disappeared into their quarantines, that house became the subject of a grave conversation between Mom and Uncle Steve. An estate sale was out of the question, for now at least. No agent was going to put his name on a gathering inside a stuffy house. In a couple of months, maybe, things would get better, but what until then? The place couldn’t be just left empty, and there was a lifetime of clutter to sort outThey all had to go back home to work, except …

Susan silently shouldered the familial duty. She was actually glad to. While the adults -- the older adults, Susan had to remind herself -- bandied out selling, demolishing or converting the place into a vacation rental. Susan knew she wasn’t only the caretaker. The walls were soaked with the laughter and joy of scores of summers and holidays in the village, resounding with the many moods of her volcanic grandfather, and her grandmother’s patient, hard-working love and generosity. Susan had an additional job: preparing the house’s soul either fortis future, or easing it into a peaceful death.

A couple of days after she’d been left alone, though, the philosophy had worn thin. It was profoundly lonely. Sorting through her grandparents' possessions was tedious, even with the occasional surprise, like the loaded revolver in an underwear drawer. She didn’t have much of her own, having only packed for five days. It was still a week before Makayla could bring her things from Massachusetts and keep her company. She had a small allowance for food and gas from the family, and maybe she could get a few bucks from running errands for the shut-ins, but her situation was still going to be straitened.

Susan committed the mouse to the dark cornfields behind the house, then returned to the sofa in the living room. She was definitely done with today after all that. She had turned in her last paper for school over her phone’s shaky hotspot, and bedtime was in the near future.

She had either been sleeping there or in the downstairs bedroom. Grandma’s bed upstairs was too pregnant with memories of playing rummy late into the night to allow for any hope of sleep beyond her grieving tears. Susan had brought a book and would probably fall asleep on the sofa reading it.

On the cover, a pair of women in nineteenth century dress gazed lustfully in each other’s eyes. Mom had devoured a steady diet of trashy Harlequin romance books, but of course Susan had to look elsewhere to feed her own appetite for bodice-rippers. Amazon had provided, and back in her dorm room, a milk crate was brimming with trashy gay romance. This one was fairly recent, the first in a new series. She wasn’t sure how she was going to introduce Makayla to the house when she arrived. Susan didn’t even know if she could bring herself to make love to Makayla on the downstairs bed. She was counting on this bit of light reading to keep her interest and her courage up for the big day.

Susan’s eyes sped down page one. She joined the heroine in the front pew of an English country church, then followed her to a flashback. At a sudden impulse, Susan read aloud:

“Lucy’s mouth was a bitter twist. ‘Does Harry know you love me?’

“‘Oh! How could I tell him’ Pris cried. ‘It’s too cruel of you to suggest it. He couldn’t possibly understand.’

“And then Pris had started to cry -- had buried her face in Lucy’s breast -- had tilted her face up and kissed Lucy desperately. But later, when the buttons were rebuttoned and the petticoats smoothed back down, Pris had only said: ‘Harry and I will be married from Winlock House on the twenty-eighth of March.” As if the past five minutes -- or the past five years -- had never happened at all."

Susan stopped short. Why was she tired suddenly? The bricks in the hearth wavered as the blinked, then:

“Hello?”

Susan almost screamed again, but then realized she had said it herself. She stopped herself from dogearing the book -- she’d only made it to page two, after all -- closed it, and shifted to her back on the sofa. It was going to be a sleep-with-the-lights-on kind of night.

***

Makayla lay sleeping on the hearth. Her long, toned, tan legs stretched out of tiny shorts, and her chest and arms extended up, naked. Her little black corn rows were exquisite. Susan tried to reach out from the, but Mom, Dad, and everyone else was in the way.

No problem, thought Susan, and picked up grandma’s gun. The hammer clicked and clicked and puffs of white powder covered the interlopers, making them fade away. “Nobody here, Makayla,” Susan sang over and over. “Nobody but us!”

The last intruder was a mystery woman, a lean redhead in grandma’s chair. Filled with fright, Susan pointed and pulled and pulled the trigger again and again, but it just clicked and clicked to no avail. The woman opened her mouth and gave tongue:

“Nobody but us!”

Susan snapped awake, fully alert under the still-burning lights. She forced herself to look around the room. Empty. She risked one last glance at grandma’s chair, still vacant.

The dream faded as Susan’s heartbeat slowed. “Fuck that,” she told the house. She picked up her book again, and still lying down held it up over her face to read. Susan only lasted a few minutes before sleep found her again.