Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
MATTY
“Justine was such a beautiful, smart young lady. Oh, my lad, you would have loved her. She would have been so sweet on you, too. What a bonny couple you would have made,” Mrs. Callendale says.
I glare at her out of the corner of my eye. It’s not like she doesn’t know I’m gay. Then again, I’m not sure she understands that people generally aren’t attracted to all genders. She’s told me just as often that I’d have made such a handsome couple with the young master Colton.
She’s still going on about Justine, and I wonder if Justine died young. Did she end up growing up and marrying? I wonder if Mrs. Callendale died before these people she tells me about grew up. Maybe in her mind, they’ve only aged to a certain point, and they’re frozen in time.
I turn my attention down to the camera in my hands and continue to flick through the settings. It’s been so long since I’ve held a camera, never mind having taken a picture. I used to make my living in photography.
For a moment, I close my eyes as a pang of sadness grips my chest. I wonder what happened to all my contracts. The publications I used to photograph for. I was just getting my foot in the door with a modeling agency to open my portfolio to models. I’d had six months’ worth of appointments.
All before I simply vanished from life. I went on a short vacation one day and never came back. What did Liam tell everyone? Did he cancel my appointments? My contracts? Or did he play the distraught lover whose fiancé simply vanished?
For all intents and purposes, I suppose that’s what happened, right?
The camera in my hands is a familiar weight.
Muscle memory as I bring it up to my eye and peer through the scope.
I adjust the lens to focus on the fireplace, bringing it into view.
With the sunlight struggling to reach through the clouds, it looks like winter.
I snap the picture and pull the camera away so I can look at the screen.
Is it as good as it used to be? How has photography advanced in the last two and a half years? Have I been forgotten?
A flash of white streaks by, and I glance up in time to find a teenage girl ducking around the corner. She peeks out at me and places her finger over her lips just as Dorien, one of the creepiest fucking dead men, comes into view.
“Gabriella, my darling. Where have you gotten off to, dear?” he calls.
I’m careful not to look at Gabriella since I can feel Dorien’s eyes on me. Knowing I can see and hear them. Knowing I likely know exactly where Gabriella is. Which I do. She’s hiding just around the corner.
I’ve come to the conclusion that bad men in life remain bad in death.
I know nothing about Dorien outside of what Mrs. Callendale has said and the way the other dead avoid him, but I can gather just by the way the hairs on my body stand on end in his presence that he wasn’t a good person. He’s still not.
“Leave that young lady alone, ruffian,” Mrs. Callendale chides.
I almost tell him to take a hint. No means no.
Even in death. But I’ve never spoken directly to the dead.
They already don’t leave me alone. I feel like opening up a dialogue with them means they’ll haunt me for the rest of my damn life.
As it is, I still have hope that they’ll get bored with me since I refuse to speak to them and eventually fade away.
“Stay out of this, old hag,” Dorien growls.
The sound makes me shiver. He’s one of a handful that I avoid eye contact with at all costs.
Like the dark Jared, Dorien is one who can somehow change the vibration of the dead and turn them all into something like zombies, where they suddenly forget themselves and converge on me, terrorizing me about the bodies on the island.
The blood on my hands. The murders I’m concealing.
Swallowing, I keep my focus on my new camera.
I don’t know where Zeph got it from, but fuck, I haven’t been able to remove the smile from my face.
It’s not brand new, but it came in its box.
I think it might be last year’s model. I’m so excited to take pictures again once I get myself reacquainted with it.
Dorien’s footsteps even sound dark as he walks away, still calling to Gabriella.
The girl remains where she is. I can see just a peek of her dress.
Mrs. Callendale watches Dorien leave. I didn’t realize there were other dead in the room, but several more peer out from where they’d retreated when Dorien arrived.
Hmm. Little Madeline climbs out from under the couch and looks up at me.
I press my finger to my lips, telling her to be quiet.
Dorien rarely goes away when he thinks we’re hiding Gabriella.
She flashes me a smile as she gets to her feet.
That smile morphs her pretty, youthful face into what I relate to her death mask.
She burned in a fire, and her face is distorted because of it. No one knows where she died or why she showed up here. Mrs. Callendale says she has no relation to the families who lived on the island. Not to her knowledge, at any rate.
Madeline herself isn’t helpful. She says she remembers the water and tried to get to it as her house burned.
But she can’t point in a direction where she’d been.
Nothing looks familiar to her. Mrs. Callendale says that she was likely a lost soul because of her sudden death.
Her spirit was shoved from her body and went to the first safe space she could find.
Interesting that she chose a place where murder is the only part of an induction ceremony into an underground secret society that wears a cross between an exfoliating mask and a ghost mask.
Madeline scrambles to her feet. She touches her little hand on my knee and then darts out of the room in the opposite direction that Dorien went. Gabriella doesn’t move. Mrs. Callendale looks over the other dead in the room as they silently make their way out.
Then she turns to me and begins talking. I sigh. She’s not someone who needs encouragement. She’ll just talk and talk and talk.
I lift the camera in her direction and then pause. When I lower the camera so I’m not looking through the scope, I can see her clearly. But when I lift the camera so I’m looking through it, she’s not there. Wow. Talk about making a person feel like they’ve lost their fucking mind.
I snap several pictures, adjusting the focus between each. I wonder if I can capture even a hint of her. I’m not crazy. She’s here. They’re all here. I can see and hear them. Just because no one else can, doesn’t mean I’m fucking crazy!
My heart races as I flick the settings so I can look at the pictures. I flip through them slowly, looking for a hint of Mrs. Callendale. She’d stopped talking when I lifted the camera, and now she hovers over my shoulder trying to catch a glimpse of the screen.
“Did it work?” she asks, her voice quiet. In her hushed tone, I hear vulnerability. I hear hope.
I wonder how frustrating it must be to not be able to see yourself.
No one else can see you either. I’d hate it.
It’s not just feeling invisible. It’s practically the equivalent of being someone’s invisible friend, but for most of their existence, the person who imagined them isn’t around to see or hear them.
I zoom in on some pictures, trying to find even a hint of Mrs. Callendale. Getting to the end of the pictures, I drop my shoulders in disappointment. “Nothing,” I whisper. She’s not there. Not a wisp. No fog. No shadow. No distortion of space. Nothing at all. I sigh.
“It’s okay, lad,” she says softly. I feel a cold chill on my shoulder where she rests her hand. “We pretend we’re secrets that very few people have the ability to know. It helps us feel… real.”
I look up at her, meeting her eyes. She gives me a sad smile.
“Hey.”
I jump at Liam’s voice, eyes widening as I twist to look at him.
“You okay?” Liam asks, concern marring his features as he looks at me. “What’s wrong?”
Taking a breath, I shake my head. The cold spot on my shoulder intensifies for just a second before disappearing, as if Mrs. Callendale squeezed my shoulder and then let go. “Nothing.”
He sits beside me on the couch. In the corner of my eye, I catch Gabriella slinking away.
Maybe I should suggest she go to the tower.
It’s one of the few places on the island where the dead didn’t seem to follow me that one time I went to keep Darwin company.
They only brought me so far and then pointed in the direction.
At the time, I didn’t think to ask why they didn’t come with me. But that meant I’d need to actually speak to them. That’s not something I do.
“You found your camera,” Liam says, smiling.
I shake my head. “Zeph gave it to me. I’m just getting to know it. Look.” I lean into his side to show him the screen and flick through the photos I tried to take of Mrs. Callendale.
He flicks through them and then glances at me. “I’m not sure what you’re taking a picture of. Some of them are weirdly blurry.”
“I was trying to take a picture of the dead people,” I say, shrugging.
Mrs. Callendale gives me an annoyed frown.
They don’t like being referred to as dead people.
It makes them feel dead. Which… they are.
I fail to see how the accuracy of my statement is inappropriate.
I’m not going to call them ghosts, which they equally hate.
They don’t like to acknowledge that they’re dead on a day-to-day basis unless they’re specifically talking about their death.
“He’s really good to you,” Liam notes.
I glance at him and think that now might be as good a time as any. Not that I’ve found a quiet, private moment to talk to Zephyr yet. He’s never alone. Maybe I’m just going to have to go with my gut right now, and my gut says he likes me the way I like him.
I feel very ‘thirteen-year-old with a first crush’ right now.
“So…” I set the camera down and turn my body so I’m partially in his lap and can see his face. “Can we talk about Zeph and Darwin for a minute?”
The corner of his mouth lifts a little. “Sure.”
“I like them.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean… I like them.”
Liam sighs. “I figured that out.”
“And I kind of want to see them too.”
He wasn’t expecting that. His eyebrows knit together as he looks at me. “Too,” he repeats.
“Yes. What were you expecting?”
Liam shakes his head without answering.
“He was thinking instead, lad,” Mrs. Callendale says. “That poor man. Assure him he has your heart and drop this nonsense.”
I sigh. “You thought I wanted to break up with you,” I accuse.
He stares into my eyes. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
“Stupid asshole,” I mutter and shove him roughly.
Liam grips my wrists and brings them into our laps. “Matty, they take care of you far better than I do. I’ve been here for several weeks, and you know what I’ve seen?”
“I’ve been too flirty? I’m a bad boyfriend?”
He rolls his eyes. “I’ve seen you laugh.
You smile all the time again. You have life in you.
Your skin has color, and you’re coming back from a very unhealthy weight loss.
And you haven’t once succumbed to your bullying ghosts.
Not once have you had a breakdown, Matty.
None of that is at all thanks to me. That’s all them.
They take care of you in a way I haven’t been able to.
So yeah… I guess I kind of thought you finally realized that I’m a shit person and found someone better. ”
In the two and a half years that I’ve been stuck in the tunnels of Dark Island, we haven’t once talked about this situation. I remember quite clearly as he fought and begged for my life as the others wanted me dead. Those are the rules, after all. You fail initiation, you die. You know too much.
Then there was the added threat of me ranting and raving madly about dead bodies and shit that I simply shouldn’t know.
Liam stayed with me for a month, and I could see just how much he hated himself a little more every single day. He blamed himself for forcing me into this situation. He was just as miserable as I was, except he didn’t have the ghosts attacking him the way I did.
“No, dummy,” I mutter and rest my head against him. “I love you. I don’t ever want to live without you. Ever. Nothing changes that.”
“You deserve better than I’ve given you,” he says, his fingers digging into my hair.
“You’re here now,” I tell him.
Liam sighs. “You know they don’t like me, right? How do you think this is going to go?”
“They don’t like the things they see. But they don’t understand, Liam.”
“They understand all there is to understand. I forced this on you, and now you’re paying the price.” The bitterness in his voice makes my heart ache.
I climb onto his lap and hug him tightly. This is going to require a longer conversation. One that I think might be long overdue. One that I think is going to hurt as much as it’s going to heal.