Chapter III
III
As they head down the block, Ezra digs a plaid scarf out of his coat pocket and loops it around his neck.
He catches Alice staring. “What? It’s cold.”
She frowns. “Is it?” She’s only wearing the black hoodie and jeans, but she doesn’t feel cold, realizes she hasn’t, not since she came to in the shower, icy water soaking through her clothes.
“Not to us, maybe,” says Ezra, nodding at a huddle of people across the road, shuffling, heads bent, against the wind, “but to them. ”
Alice shrugs. “I’m Scottish,” she says, “maybe we’re just more resilient.”
“Maybe, but the fact is, when Boston winter rolls around, they’ll notice if you’re going about with a thin sweatshirt and no hat. So it’s better to blend in.”
As he says it, he drags air into his lungs, exhales a thin plume of fog, rubs his hands together, as if trying to get warm.
A convincing pantomime. He’s clearly had a lot of practice, and even though he looks twenty, maybe twenty-five, there’s an ease to his stride, as if he’s had a long time to settle into his skin.
“How old are you?” she asks, wondering as soon as the words are out if it’s rude to ask, but Ezra doesn’t seem to mind.
“Older than I look and younger than I feel,” he says, “especially for being so long in the midnight soil.”
Alice frowns. “What’s that?”
“The midnight soil? Oh, just a turn of phrase.” He shoves his hands in his pockets and spins so that he’s walking backward, facing Alice as he recites the words from memory.
“Bury my bones in the midnight soil,
plant them shallow but water them deep,
and in my place will grow a feral rose,
soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.”
Something about the words makes Alice shiver, and yet, she finds herself turning them over and over in her mouth as Ezra falls in step beside her, hooking his arm through hers.
“For warmth,” he says, and she doesn’t pull away.
They walk side by side in silence for a while, Alice’s head spinning, and her heart a still weight in her chest, and every time she blinks, she sees Lottie, ghosted on the inside of her lids.
Lottie looking back, and smiling.
As if she knows exactly what she’s doing.
Exactly who she is.
Alice squeezes her eyes shut—
Until the image fades—
And the cold wind picks up in her ears—
And just like when she looked into the shining black surface, her mind goes somewhere else.
The air whistles around them, as if the night is full of ghosts.
Alice has always had a love-hate relationship with Halloween.
Most places take it to a foolish place, all shop costumes and cheap scares, but here in Hoxburn, the holiday holds on to a shade of its old witchy self.
A reminder that Scotland was a pagan place before it was a Christian one, a land that still rings in the changing of the seasons and the years with lanterns and bells and wooden effigies burning off the dark.
Sure, jack-o’-lanterns grin on porch steps, and paper ghosts sway from the trees, but there is a somber air to it, and even the children usually dress up not as astronauts or fairies, but ghouls and witches and ghosts, guising as spirits let loose for the night.
Alice is thirteen now, too old for all the candy and knocking on doors, but the night still has a power over her.
The wind is full of whoops and howls, and even though the only ghosts are kids in sheets, eerie eyes cut out of cotton, the air smells like woodsmoke and dying leaves, ripe with mischief, and magic, and more than a little menace, and if she were alone, it might get to her, but she’s not.
Catty’s there, one elbow hooked through hers as they march together down the moonlit road. Catty, like an anchor and a buoy all at once; like a bonfire, burning back the dark, so Alice feels only a pleasant thrill, a fun kind of fear, like watching a scary movie from the comfort of the couch.
They’re on the way to a party.
It’s at Catty’s secondary school, to be fair, but Alice still can’t believe Dad and El agreed.
She thinks it’s probably because they feel bad, that Catty’s been spending so much time at Granddad’s place over the pub instead of home, ever since baby Finn was born, while Catty says it’s because they’re too tired to care—which is true, they’re not even up for handing out sweets, just set a bucket on the step and a sign warning people not to knock or they will set a banshee loose.
It doesn’t really matter why.
The point is that Dad and El said yes.
(With instructions, of course, to be back before midnight, and a weighted look at Catty as they said it, as if Alice isn’t more than capable of keeping time.)
Someone’s smashed a jack-o’-lantern on the curb, and Catty kicks a piece that might once have been a nose, or eye, down the road.
They take turns punting it as they walk, the lump getting smaller and smaller as it skates along the concrete until it’s not worth kicking anymore, which is fine because they’re almost there.
Up ahead, the school’s lit with amber lights, orange balloons painted to look like pumpkins bobbing in the breeze. But instead of heading up the steps, Catty nudges Alice on, past the school and its chaperoned dance, shooting Alice a wicked grin, as if that was the plan all along.
“Where are we going?” she asks, trying to sound like the answer doesn’t matter, like the thrill isn’t turning to cold dread in her gut. Catty offers a cheeky look, made slyer by the feline whiskers slashed across her cheeks.
“To a party.”
Catty’s elbow is still hooked through hers, so Alice doesn’t have much choice; when Catty keeps walking, so does she, until the school’s nothing but a lump of light behind them, the sounds from the town’s center fading, too, and Hoxburn isn’t that big, and they’re running out of roads, and for an awful second, as they near Friar’s Way, Alice thinks they might be heading for the graveyard.
But Catty wouldn’t do that to her. Not ever, but especially not tonight.
Two years back, a boy in Catty’s class dared her to go in, on Halloween of course, and Alice can still remember the horrible creak of the old iron gate, the shape of her sister growing smaller between the graves.
Alice counted to seventy-two before Catty came back again, her eyes red with tears and black with rage.
“What’s the matter, Catty?” the boy had drawled. “You see a ghos—”
Only he never got to finish because as soon as she was through the gate, she split her knuckles on his face.
And on the walk home, blood tracing between their locked fingers, Alice didn’t ask Catty what she saw, if she saw anything, but she always wondered, still doesn’t know, if she was sad because she saw Mum’s spirit, there beside the grave, or sad because she didn’t.
And sure enough, they turn off before the graveyard, onto a narrow lane called Maple Cres, and Alice thinks how strange it is that they live in a town so small, and yet there are still roads she’s never really been down.
Soon new sounds start creeping in, music being played too loud over shitty speakers, and voices tangling with shouts and laughter, and then they reach the house where the party is.
The front door hangs open like a mouth, full of silver streamer teeth, the edges of the building traced with orange light, like there’s a fire burning somewhere beyond.
Alice tightens her grip on Catty’s arm, or tries, but she slips free, jogging up the steps.
Alice follows.
Inside, the music is more bass than sound, heavy as a pulse, the front room full of zombies and witches and devils, and she feels suddenly silly in her blue dress and white apron, dressed as that storybook Alice, curious and bold.
She would have been a witch but the other party, the one at the school, had a bookish theme, and Catty was supposed to be her Cheshire cat.
But with only the whiskers drawn on her face and a tail pinned to the hem of her jeans, her sister looks effortless amid the other costumes.
While Alice just looks like a kid, tagging along.
There’s an old slasher film playing on mute on the TV, and Alice watches a man with a saw silently prowling through the dark while Catty beelines for a table littered with open bottles.
The whole walk, something in her bag made a glassy thump every time it hit her hip, and now she knows why.
Catty produces a full bottle of gin, nicked from the pub, and adds it to the lot on the makeshift bar before pouring two cups of punch from a bowl ringed by empty bottles of vodka and rum and half dancing her way back to Alice.
“Where are we?” she shouts over the beat, and even though the song picks right then to get louder, she can see Catty shaping the name, tongue against the roof of her mouth.
“Derrick’s.”
Alice wants to roll her eyes. Derrick. Of course.
Catty met him at school (only met is the wrong word because in a town as small as Hoxburn, everyone is already tangled up) and Derrick is two years older and only one grade ahead, but he plays the drums in a friend’s band and has a tattoo of a compass in the center of his chest, and the one time he met Alice, he called her a wee lass nipping at her sister’s heels, so as far as Alice is concerned, he can go get fucked (which is a thing she heard her classmate Eddie say, and she likes the way it sounds, even in her head).
“Relax!” Catty mouths, handing her a plastic cup.
Alice takes a sip, only to discover it’s more water than whatever alcoholic punch Catty’s downing as she scans the crowd.
Stay here, she mouths, gesturing with her hands. I’ll be right back.
And then she and her empty cup are gone, ducking through a doorway into another room, obviously looking for Derrick.
Someone knocks into Alice, a guy with a face painted like a skull, made creepier by the fact he’s somehow stained his whole mouth black as well. Alice scrambles back, presses herself into the wall to get out of the way. Decides to stay there as a trio in hooded black cloaks drift by.