Chapter 23
Chapter
Twenty-Three
MATTY
I’ve spent the past week trying to figure out how to take a picture of the dead and have them show up. Zephyr handed me a computer a few days ago—brand new in the box. Except that it was already set up with a handful of top-tier, expensive photo editing software.
I’m pretty sure this man is trying to make me swoon, yet he totally acts like he has no idea how it touches me. The thoughtfulness is far bigger than the price tag.
It didn’t take me long to see the pattern, either.
I mentioned how much I loved photography and missed my job.
The next thing I know, he’s handing me a top-of-the-line camera that he claims is last year’s model, and he’s only used once.
It was more about having the thing than his actually wanting it.
Then I said something about the editing software I used to use, and three days ago, he presented me with a computer, fully loaded, and running like a dream.
This time, he doesn’t tell me he already had this in his back pocket.
When I looked at him with teary eyes, he gave me this sweet fucking smile, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and shrugged.
“You need a computer to edit your photos. So I got you one.”
He says he isn’t going to be good at being a boyfriend, but he’s fucking wrong. Everything about him makes my heart dance and my breath catch.
I’ve messed around with the different editing programs for a while, but what I really want to know is how to take pictures of the dead.
However, I’ve learned that looking up ‘how to take pictures of the dead’ brings you to some very gory sites.
They’re not referencing taking pictures of ghosts, but dead bodies.
Yeah, not what I’m looking for.
I don’t call the dead ghosts or spirits. They get upset. They’re people. For whatever reason, they prefer to be called the dead, so that’s what I use, even though I don’t actually talk to them.
It’s been two days since I started conducting this search, and it’s coming up with stupid shit that I’m not looking for. I don’t want a mist or fog or an orb or shadows. I don’t want stick figures in an SLS camera. I don’t want a hot or cold signature in a FLIR. I want to take an actual picture.
Frustrated, I shut the screen and drop my forehead onto my forearm. There has to be a way. Since I halfheartedly tried to take a picture of Mrs. Callendale the other day and saw how disappointed she was that she didn’t show up in the picture, I’ve been dying to figure out how to do it.
I get it. If it were easy to take pictures of the dead, everyone would do it. There’d be no question about whether they exist, and these paranormal investigators would be out of jobs. Or hobbies, I suppose. There’d be undeniable, irrefutable proof.
Needless to say, none of that is what I’m looking for.
The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, and I inhale sharply. I know without looking that Jared has just walked into the room. There’s almost always a handful of dead milling about. Mrs. Callendale, of course. The others tend to rotate, depending on where I am.
Jared only comes around when he’s feeling particularly nasty. I don’t know who he was in life, and I don’t want to. But I feel the shift as soon as he sets foot into the room. The energy shifts. I feel the darkness creeping in around me. It gets heavier and heavier.
“You let my body rot!”
“They’re coming. They’ll come through the ground and take you with them.”
“They’ll know. They’ll always know.”
“They’ll see the blood on your hands.”
“The bodies are moving. They’ll follow you.”
I bring my hands to my ears and try desperately to block out the voices. Voices that are usually kind or uninterested turn dark. Their vibrations turn sinister. I feel them closing in around me, surrounding me in a tight ring that gets colder and colder.
All the while, Jared’s dark energy feels like a low, deep, menacing chuckle as he laughs at me.
I try to catch my breath and mentally tell them to go away.
I try to keep the fear down, but it crawls up my spine like claws digging in.
Refusing to let me go. Panic of dead bodies working their way through the ground like a poor zombie movie flickers through my head.
They chase me, trying to drag me with them.
One wraps a hand around my neck. One grips my hair and yanks hard. Pain streaks down my neck, and I cry. “No. No. Leave the bodies in the ground!”
“Matty?”
“No, no, no!” I cry. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill anyone. It wasn’t me.”
“Back off! Back the fuck up right now. Leave Matty alone.”
The darkness in the room pulls away like the sun is breaking through storm clouds. The pressure on my chest lifts, and I gasp, finally able to inhale.
Hands on me make me flinch at first, but then Darwin pulls me into his chest and holds me tightly.
“Get out. I swear to fucking hell, if you keep doing this, I’m going to sage the fuck out of this place.
I’ll bring in demonologists, witch doctors, psychic mediums, priests—I’ll bring every fucking person in here to banish you all if you don’t leave Matty the fuck alone. Try me.”
The dead move around uncomfortably. I feel them coming out of the trance they’re in, shaking it off. Fear and frustration at Darwin have them telling him off.
“It’s not our fault.”
“I don’t want to hurt Matty.”
“Please don’t make me leave here. This is my home.”
If I weren’t so upset, I’d try to soothe the tension in the room.
But I don’t. It wasn’t until I moved up here that I truly put the connection together—that this isn’t something the dead do on their own.
I already knew that it only happened when Jared or a handful of others were there.
I didn’t understand that it was because of them and that the others were just as much victims as I was.
A shiver makes my entire body shake for a moment, and then I relax. Darwin’s hand moves through my curls as he holds me. He doesn’t speak. Not to me and not to the dead. Maybe he figured out that they’d stopped.
“Thanks,” I whisper.
“Matty, you need to put some boundaries in place with the ghosts,” Darwin says gently.
“It’s not their fault,” I say quietly, and the desperate chatter to beg Darwin not to banish them quiets.
“How is it not their fault?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know, but it’s not. There are dark ones here. Bad people. They control the dead. They do bad things.”
Darwin sighs. “Maybe we do need to bring in a psychic medium,” he muses.
I shake my head again. “No. There are secrets. There are bodies. If one of the dark ones comes and makes the dead… dark… they’ll say the secrets. They don’t have a choice.”
Darwin frowns. “We’ll talk about our options then. For right now, you need to learn how to put some boundaries in place.”
“How?” I ask, my fingers digging into his back when his grip loosens to let me go. His hold tightens around me once more.
“In the same way that I make them back off. Tell them. Put some force into your voice. Don’t give them room to interpret what you’re telling them any differently.”
“I wish you could feel it,” I whisper. “Not because I want you to feel it, but so you understand what I feel when that happens. It’s not so easy to remember that I can talk at all when they surround me like that.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Darwin promises. His hand tightens in my hair and coaxes me to lift my head so I can look at him. He’s back to wearing his contacts, and while I love an uninterrupted view of his face, I really love his glasses too. He’s beautiful either way. “Are you okay?”
How can I not be when he’s here to rescue me as often as he is? I nod. “Thank you for chasing them away again.”
“I hate seeing you like that. It breaks my heart. I hate not being able to physically make them back off. I’d bury them in the damn pits if I could.”
“My body is already in a pit,” Lester says.
I glance in his direction, eyes wide. Fuck. I didn’t know that.
“What just happened?” Darwin asks.
“Lester said his body is in a pit,” I answer.
Darwin looks in the direction I am. Lester is leaning against the wall, staring at me in that chilly way of his. Darwin looks between me and where I’m watching until I look at Darwin again.
“Who’s Lester?”
I shake my head, very aware of how I sound when I talk about the dead. “One of them.”
Darwin’s fingers on my jaw make my breath stutter for a second. “Is he one of the ones who bothers you?”
“Not this time.”
His lips press softly to mine, and I can’t stop myself from wrapping my arms around his neck and turning his soft kiss into something deep and consuming. I’m a starving man. I crave affection. I’m so hungry for touch from someone who wants me.
Darwin wants me. I can tell by the way his arms around my waist pull me closer. Conversation is forgotten as we kiss. He tastes of chocolate and cherries. Chocolate-covered cherries? Was he eating a sweet snack? He always tastes good.
After a while, our kissing slows until just our foreheads rest together, and we share the same oxygen. I sigh.
“What were you working on in here before the ghosts became bullies?” he asks.
“I’m not a bully, young man!” Mrs. Callendale insists, sounding very contrite.
“I’m not a bully, either,” Madeline says quietly.
I don’t repeat either of them. They’re not bullies. Not of their own volition. But sometimes I wonder if maybe they can fight the dark ones more than they do. It doesn’t feel like they fight them at all.
“I was trying to take a picture of little Madeline,” I answer and glance in Madeline’s direction.
She looks up at me and smiles. She’s sitting on the floor, her frilly dress spread out around her. There’s nothing in her hands, but it looks like she’s maybe playing with a doll.
“Having any luck?”
I sigh. “No. There aren’t any helpful hints online either. There are instructions on how to take good photographs of corpses—like there is such a thing!—or paranormal investigation equipment and tips. Nothing that I’m actually looking for.”
“Hmm. Do you ever take night pictures?”
I shrug one shoulder. “Not really. It takes a different set of skills than I had used previously. In a way, more patience.”
“My understanding of night photography is prolonged exposure, right? Because you need to gather more light.”
“Right. Which is why I don’t have the patience. You also have to sit completely still, or it gets blurry.”
Darwin nods. “What if you used the same principles? What if you need prolonged exposure to give the ghosts time to appear?”
I tilt my head to the side as I think about it. “You think that’ll work?”
“I have no idea.” He laughs. “I don’t know a lot about photography, and as you’ve pointed out, what’s online isn’t useful. But you can see them. Right?”
I glance at Madeline again. My eyes flicker to Mrs. Callendale and then Lester, standing in the doorway. “Yes.”
“You see them solidly?”
“Uh… no. They’re transparent, but not like… not how they’re often depicted. They’re not just white figures that we can see through. They’re not misty or insubstantial. They’re here as they would be in life, but they’re not solid, I guess.”
“This isn’t meant to be offensive. I promise it’s just curiosity. Do they walk through walls?”
Madeline giggles, and I smile. “Kind of. Mostly, no. They walk down the hall and through open doors. They go through closed doors when necessary, but usually, they go through open doors and follow the same paths we do.”
“We open the doors, lad,” Mrs. Callendale says, frowning in disapproval. “Curious that you can’t see that we do.”
“Mrs. Callendale says they open the doors so… maybe that’s something on their, um, plane?
The only time they tend to walk through walls is when a wall hadn’t been there when they were alive.
Like, Mrs. Callendale lived here a hundred years ago, and some of the walls to make bathrooms weren’t there when she lived here, so they don’t exist to her. ”
Mrs. Callendale nods, though she looks sad about it. I’m not sure if she’s sad about the renovations or that she can’t necessarily tell when there’s a new wall.
“Curious.”
“That’s why when people say that they see the recurring march of civil war soldiers walk through walls and their feet are deep within the earth, what they’re seeing is actually the path they took when they lived.
The world around them has changed. Not where they marched.
It’s still there. It’s just six feet lower than where modern-day ground level is,” I tell him. “Mrs. Callendale explained that.”
“Because we’ve built on top of what had once been their roads,” Darwin says. I smile because his interest is genuine.
“Yes. Exactly. The soldiers who march the same route aren’t actually there.
Their memories are. They’re called residual energy.
Because it’s a time of such high emotion and trauma.
There are some spirits like that here, too—residual.
Just carrying through the same things, day in and day out, because that’s how they lived their lives. In repetition.”
“Interesting.”
“Mostly, they’re in the kitchen—the residual dead. But there are some that still clean up the rooms, humming to themselves.”
“Do the ones who die in the wells die over and over again?” Darwin asks.
I shiver at his question and glance at Mrs. Callendale.
“No, dear. We do not allow those people to stay. They didn’t belong here in life, and they don’t belong here in death.
” She looks at Lester, and I get the impression that he was once a member of the boat club at the very least. Maybe not No Face, but certainly the boat club. Was his death an accident or a murder?
There’s no question that both Lester and Mrs. Callendale know what I’m thinking, but neither answers my unasked questions.
“No,” I tell Darwin. “They’re not allowed to stay.”