Page 27 of Giving Up The Ghost
“Sure,” I said, my head still throbbing dully behind my right eye. “Say, when did you learn English? School?”Say your mother taught you. Your mother taught you, and then you took courses in Lycée.
Her sharp look was honed to a keen edge. “So many questions about my language skills. I’m starting to think you are perhaps making fun of me, Oscar.”
Heat raced down my neck and up my throat, making me splotchy with embarrassment. “Oh. No! I promise it’s not that. I’m just a bit of a nosy beak,” I said with false bonhomie. “Ask Julian—I’m terrible about prying at a topic if it catches my interest. Like language. Julian is quite good at languages. Me, it takes just ages for me to really get the hang of them. Ezra’s fluent in Klingon,” I babbled. “He has plans to teach himself some Elvish dialect from Tolkien this year.”
“Hmm.” We stopped at the cellar door, and she motioned for me to wait as she dug a ring of keys from her trouser pocket. “This one,” she murmured and selected a bog-standard house key type and unlocked the door, stepping aside to let me go first.
I hesitated—seeing the darkened staircase, I couldn’t help but think of Julian’s accident, the mental images springing to life in Technicolor—but at an impatient noise from her, I took the steps carefully down into the cellar. The space flooded with light as soon as I stepped off the final riser, making me gasp.
“It’s a sensor,” Charlotte said, pointing to the tiny little box at the foot of the stairs. “There should be one at the top but…” She shrugged.
I had a peculiar feeling of disorientation. This was more my house than hers, legally and, well, in every other sense, but itfeltlike she was the homeowner here. She hurried down the steps behind me, forcing me to move further into the cellar to make room. “I don’t remember ever coming down here as a boy.”
“Truly?” She gave me an amused glance. “Some relative of ours—I think perhaps your grandfather—had the space finished out, converted from being an actual food storage cellar to this.” With a sweep of her hand, she triggered another sensor that turned on the rest of the lights, flooding the cellar with bright white illumination. I squinted, barely restraining myself from hissing in discomfort. “Ah, my apologies yet again. These were the lights that came with it, you know?”
I nodded, rubbing my forehead over my right eye. “It must’ve been Grandfather. He was always complaining regular bulbs weren’t bright enough. This seems like something he’d have put in.”
Charlotte gave my arm a pat before nudging me onward. “Come this way. These boxes, they’re too heavy for me to move upstairs. It took us quite some effort to get them down here, but it is worth it, I think. The temperature is more controlled here, for one.”
“Who’s us?”
“Hm?”
“You saidit took us quite some effort. Who is us?”
“Oh,” she gave me a vacant sort of smile then, a dismissive wave. “Nadine. She was able to help me for a few days before she had to go.”
I nodded slowly. “Of course. I should’ve realized that.”
“No matter. Now! The important things! Here!” She took my hand and led me to the first in a long row of archival boxes. There were a few trunks interspersed with the boxes and, at the far end, some plastic tubs with lids. “This is the oldest of the lot. It tookdecadesto track some of this down. But here.” Sinking gracefully to her knees, she tugged the box open and let out a longing-tinged sigh. “This is the oldest of the first-hand materials. The binders, they are amazing, yes? But this…” She stroked the sides of the box in an almost too-intimate way. I had the sensation of walking in on a couple’s passionate clench and going unnoticed. “This is special in ways the binders are not. Touched by their own hands. Imbued with their energy. I had hoped…” She trailed off, seemed to catch herself, and sighed again. “Come, come! You cannot see from over there.”
Gingerly, I lowered myself beside her. Inside the box were several small cloth bags, a stack of polished discs, and a wooden box embossed with what looked like a bird. “There is not much in this one,” she whispered. “But it is important. Vital to your understanding, I should think. These belonged to David Fellowes and his sister Elizabeth Fellowes Grimm. They were twins, like your Julian and his sister, no?”
“No. Yes, I mean. Yes.”
“That already made them unusual for their village. Twins were not as common there, it seems, and fraternal, male-female twins… they were treated with great superstition. It’s in this,” she added, reaching down beside the box and pulling out a slim, black version of the binders upstairs. “I’ve organized the boxes in order of age. This is the oldest and those,” she pointed to the plastic storage tubs,” are from your grandparents and parents.”
“My parents?” I sat back heavily on my heels, the dark pink and clear tubs stuffed with what looked like papers and fabric singing a siren song. “Where did you find things from them? Grandmere had everything stored away and never let me know where. The house we’d lived in was sold and…” Trailing off, I shook my head, eyes hot and stinging.
“Poor boy.” She sighed, reaching out to stroke my hair back from my reddened face. “Most of the things, they were here. Did you not know? She had them stored here, in this cellar. Keeping the memories at bay.” She made a face, brows drawn, and lips pursed. “Is that the right phrase? Keeping them away because they hurt too much? Locking them up tight?” She gripped her hand near her heart, squeezing it tight.
My voice was barely a whisper when I managed to muster the words a few moments later, working against the lump in my throat. “When I asked her, back when I was old enough to realize my upbringing was different, that I had no mum and dad like the other kids, she said all of their things were locked away and she could not get them for me. She made it sound like they’d been lost, like wherever they’d been taken was out of her reach and I’d assumed my mother’s family had taken everything. No, she let me assume that. She could’ve just told me.”
“But your mother’s family, they were not like us. They did not have the same abilities, no?”
I glanced up at Charlotte’s sympathetic, sad expression and felt nothing but relief at that moment. Relief that she knew—that she might get it in ways Julian wouldn’t, that Ezra wouldn’t. And guilt chased on relief’s heels.
“My mother’s family has—had? I don’t know who is still alive in the family—some abilities but nothing like my father’s side. My mother was an outlier, according to Grandmere. They weren’t happy she’d married my father, from what Grandmere said, but honestly, I don’t know if I can even trust that.” Emotion threatened to overwhelm me and leak out my eyes.Why hadn’t they reached out in all the years since she’d died? Did Grandmere keep me away from them? Did they truly abhor Mum and Dad’s marriage so much that I was easy to dismiss once they were dead?My chest ached, head throbbing with unshed tears. The Fellowes family was scattered all around me, centuries of history, but there was more to me than this, the thought whispered through me.Not all my answers are here.
Shit.
I gathered my wits before I absolutely lost it and just curled into a ball to melt down.One crisis at a time.Tearing my attention away from the plastic tubs, I focused on the open box before me. “Well. Tell me about this.”
“Oscar.” Charlotte’s hand pressed against my shoulder blades, rubbing in comforting, firm circles. “You were deprived of much of your history. And I am more than happy to give that back to you. I cannot promise you will love everything you find, but it will give you answers. And explain some things. Like,” she grabbed the slim black binder and opened it to one of the first pages. “These siblings? They were thought to have made a deal with some spirit, or perhaps death itself. Though here it is referred to as Death, like an actual being.”
Gingerly, I took the book from her and squinted to read some of the copied handwriting. “I should get Julian down here—he’s great at deciphering things like this. And he’d probably explode into glitter or something, seeing all of this. He’s working on a research project of sorts right now,” I began, but paused. Would he want her to know about it? Parts were so personal—his own evolving ability, his encounters with Reggie driving this forward… “Well. He’d find it fascinating and he’s an expert of sorts with things like this.”
Charlotte’s expression was frozen for a long moment until she seemed to reach some internal decision and nodded, her posture relaxing. “Let me go up and make sure they find all they need for breakfast, yes? I’ll tell Julian you’d like his help? That way you don’t have to stop looking through these,” she added with a smile.
