Chapter Twenty-Two #2
“Nothing, really. Anyway, it sounds like Asher took it too far, but in a way it’s sweet, how protective he was of his sister. Still is, apparently, worrying about her reputation. By the way, you didn’t mention you had one of her paintings.”
Tariq finished off his drink. “It was a parting gift from Delilah. Probably so I would think of her every time I’m in my apartment.”
“And do you?”
“Nope. But maybe because it’s been sitting in the back of my closet.” He shrugged. “Ready to go? I’ll take you back to your place, check things out. Just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“Any ghosts dancing on the lawn.”
Part of her felt silly, but Harper was grateful when Tariq checked behind the shower curtain and in the closet. Just in case.
“I could stay the night, if you’d like,” he offered. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“I don’t have a couch.”
He gave her a crooked smile. “On the floor, then. I’m an old-school camper, remember? My old hunting days. Or, you could come stay the night at my place. I have a couch, like a normal person.”
“Well, you know me, I’ve never aspired to be normal.”
“No, not normal at all,” Tariq said with a sweet smile. He reached up and pushed a lock of hair off her cheek. Their gaze held for a long moment.
“Thank you, Tariq. But I’ll be fine. Really. I have pepper spray, remember? With a clever ninja carrying case, even.”
“All right,” he said with a quick nod. “Sleep well, and try not to sleepwalk.”
He paused, and for a moment she wondered if he might kiss her. But then he gave her a wink and said, “Don’t forget to lock the door behind me.”
He swiftly descended the stairs. Harper stood in her doorway and watched as he strode across the lawn, the light from the streetlamp illuminating his near-black hair and broad shoulders. Tariq certainly had grown up since graduate school.
But as he climbed into his car, she glanced into the darkness of the trees and saw a pair of glowing eyes. Again. Although it was a warm night, a shiver went up her spine before she turned away, firmly locking the door behind her.
Harper dreamed that she was in Boston, in 1861. She watched as a man dug in a cemetery in the dead of night, the blackness settling on his shoulders like a damp shroud. As if she could read his mind, his thoughts came to her:
It was always the darkest before the dawn, as his parents were wont to say. Until they died, writhing in their beds. Dawn never came for them. But his dear sister lived, still. How he yearned to see her face. Her eyes. She was the one he was doing this for. She was everything.
Thunk.
The shovel struck wood.
He smiled. His labored breath hung in clouds in front of him, the scent of his own sweat mingled with the briny air.
Happily, this was a recent burial. Not only was the earth already disturbed, making the digging easier and less noticeable, but the corpse was less likely to fall apart while being extricated, sloughing off skin and muscle in a horrifying puddle and making the body less useful.
“At least he’s not a stinker, this one,” whispered his helper, Ephraim. Ephraim had a real chip on his shoulder when it came to the “rich Harvard boys,” but he was paid twenty-five for each cadaver he supplied to the medical school. A handsome sum for a night’s work.
“What d’ya suppose that means, then?” Ephraim asked, gesturing to an inscription on the marble headstone:
“The wind is my breath,
the darkness my soul,
the earth my embrace.
Await my return.”
“Means just what it says, I suppose.”
“Sounds like the fella’s plannin’ on comin’ back.” Ephraim snorted and took a swig from his flask. He did not offer to share.
Together, they laid the corpse out on a blanket, stripped off the man’s clothes and personal items, dropped them back into the coffin, and then filled in the hole, carefully smoothing the ground to leave no sign that it had been disturbed anew.
Respecting the grave and returning the deceased’s possessions to the coffin was what distinguished a respectable body snatcher from a despicable grave robber.
He was not after riches, after all. He was after truth.
Harper awoke with a start and checked the time: It was only a little after three.
According to folklore, three a.m. was “the witching hour,” the in-between time, when the night met the morning, when the veil between the natural world and the supernatural world was thinnest, and spirits could most easily cross over.
Or so they said.
Had the graverobbing Soren Perles come to visit her in her dreams? Or had her imagination been stoked by Blanca and Jenny’s podcasts, and her own research, to the point that her mind created a “memory” for her?
She got up and checked the door, and the lawn. Happily, nothing else came to visit her during this particular witching hour.
Lying back down, now wide awake, she thought about the Perles family, and then her own.
Her mother, her little sister, Scout, and her father.
The summer her father was temporarily sober, and they rented an RV and took a family trip through the Adirondacks, to see the old resort that her father believed he should have inherited from his grandparents.
Scout and Harper played endless games of I spy in the back, enthralled by the idea of being in bed while the RV was in motion.
Finding license plates, mooing at cows. Her mother’s sweet voice leading them in song until her father lost his temper again and yelled, “For the love of God, stop that caterwauling.”
The time Scout came home from school, upset about a boy making fun of her, and Harper distracted her by styling her hair with a gel that glued her hair into spikes, after which Scout slathered garish makeup on Harper. The sisters laughed until they cried.
The way she and Scout would whistle in the dark, holding on a single note, waiting for the sound to repeat and come back to them because they had read it was the way to speak to the fairy folk.
The time Scout arrived at their mother’s funeral reeking of alcohol and vomited all over the funeral home bathroom. Another mess Harper felt compelled to clean up, sobbing and retching while she did so.
That dream about Soren Perles was decidedly creepy. But the ghosts that truly haunted Harper were nostalgia, melancholy, and regret.