Chapter 4
I left a little trail of blood on the floor as I walked down the hall. My head felt like it was stuffed full of straw with bits leaking out.
At least I wouldn’t get lost if I decided to make myself a midnight snack.
The ghost, Annabelle, handed me a cup of tea in a chipped yellow mug.
She smiled sweetly as she handed it over, her fingers not quite solid on the handle.
I took it, staring at the brown liquid in the cup.
Was all this actually happening? Or had I died under the chandelier and someone was pulling a prank on me in the afterlife?
Blood was still dripping onto my shoulder through my fingers.
“Let’s get that wound sorted, shall we?” Annabelle rushed past me to the hall closet.
As she did, her shoulder went right through my arm. I shivered as she went through me—it felt like all the nerves where my body met her spirit glitched for a moment, before returning to normal.
I sat at the kitchen table in the spot opposite to where Annabelle’s mug had caught my eye earlier.
She bustled back into the kitchen, carrying an old first aid kit and several towels.
Still feeling disconnected from everything happening to me, I half expected my own personal horror movie to begin and a swarm of bees to come swirling out of the kit.
But Annabelle set the kit on the table and pulled out a series of normal things: two hand mirrors, antiseptic, gauze, tape, and scissors. “Here we go,” she said, passing me a mirror and a pair of scissors. “Head wounds usually look worse than they are.”
She smiled reassuringly, but her words made me realize I hadn’t seen the back of her head since she appeared in the hallway. For all I knew, Annabelle had a matching head wound—one that had actually been deadly.
I said “Okay,” but the sounds that came out were mangled. Blocked by words I’d never screamed, still stuck in my throat.
She gestured for me to raise the mirror in my hand. Then she stood behind me holding another mirror so I could see the back of my head through it. “Can you see?”
The hand mirror had a handle with a delicate pattern in mother-of-pearl. It definitely belonged to an eighty-year-old woman. Or this old-fashioned ghost. The ghost in my kitchen. Shit . The room started to spin.
“Hold on, I—”
There was a faint pressure on my head, like a cool breeze but focused in one spot.
My scalp tingled. Cold pressure moved up and down the back of my head, sending little pings of electricity down my spine.
It was like an ice cube being slowly and gently pressed against the back of my head.
I breathed out slowly, feeling my panic subside.
When I felt steady again, I held up my mirror. I could see my own face and, behind me, the reflection of the back of my head in the other mirror. If I didn’t know Annabelle was there, I would say the other mirror was suspended in the air, with no one holding it up.
Annabelle chuckled. “I’m not much to look at in the mirror, I’m afraid.”
I turned to face her.
Behind me, clearly visible, was Annabelle: a beautiful woman with a sad smile on her face, clasping a mirror in one hand and reaching out to me with the other.
She’d been stroking my head. Her touch had felt like I was being petted by Frosty the Snowman.
But instead of being ridiculous, the moment held a sort of strange intimacy.
The ghost had saved my life and was caring for me even though we’d just met.
And she was dead. And I was an intruder in her house.
Yet I missed the tingly, cold sensation of her ghostly touch as soon as she stopped.
What the hell kind of ghost story was I in? I should’ve been afraid of her but I wasn’t. I was definitely losing my mind.
Annabelle put her hand back at her side. As she moved her arms, her lace sleeves swished, even though they weren’t made of a solid material. Her hands were delicate and looked like they would be soft—the opposite of my rough skin and thick, calloused fingertips.
“I can see you but can’t touch you? Is that it?” I reached out a hand tentatively, palm out.
Annabelle met my eyes and reached back. Her hand passed right through mine. As it did, a cold tingling sensation traveled all the way up my arm.
“Marley,” I whispered, staring at our hands. “Dead to begin with.”
Annabelle withdrew her hand.
“I can’t hurt you, Gibson,” she said. “But I can’t do much to help, either. Not directly, anyway.” Her expression was soft, but her eyes held a timeworn sorrow. “And my name isn’t Marley, it’s Annabelle Williams.”
I smiled. “Nice to meet you, Marley Annabelle Williams.”
She returned my smile, then said, “Turn around, please. We need to assess your wound, though it appears to have stopped bleeding.” Annabelle murmured to herself as she scrutinized my head.
I felt her and saw glimpses of her in my peripheral vision as she peered at me. My face flushed as a strange, beautiful woman—ghost—tried to take care of me without touching me.
“You might need to trim your hair right behind your ear,” she said, clicking her tongue. “You have such beautiful hair.”
“Literally no one has ever said so, but thanks.” I felt around the bump starting to form on my head and took a bunch of hair in hand. “Here goes.”
I cut it as close to the skin as I could. “How does that look?”
“No brains falling out, so that’s a plus.”
“Good. Not sure I have any extra gray matter to spare.”
She chuckled. “You’ll have a sizable bump on your noggin, though. You should have the doctor look at it tomorrow. Hopefully, it won’t leave too much of a scar.”
Annabelle’s face was so close to mine. If she had been alive, her breath would’ve puffed on my ear, but instead, all I felt was a cold breeze.
I shivered again, but I wasn’t afraid. It was unnerving to be so close to someone who wasn’t really there.
But Annabelle smelled like the tea she’d just made, and her not-quite-there presence was almost comforting.
She opened the antiseptic bottle and dabbed a small amount of liquid on a gauze pad. She handed it to me and said, “Now, apply this to the wound, and let’s get some gauze on you.”
Annabelle held a mirror behind my head so I could see what I was doing.
Together, we awkwardly cleaned my head and applied a bandage with tape that would probably pull out the rest of my hair when I ripped it off.
She gave bad directions as I worked on the back of my own head, telling me, “Left! Up, no, up! More to the left! Do listen to me, dear, I can see the back of your head and you can’t. ”
When she was satisfied with my state, Annabelle packed up the first aid supplies and toyed with the zipper on the pouch. She stood close enough that I could have reached out and tried to touch her.
“Thanks, Marley,” I said. “Hope the ghost of my Christmas past is as nice as you are.”
“That’s kind of you, but it’s just me in this house. You’ll have to make do with only one ghost.” Her smile was brighter than all the lights of the stupid chandelier in the hallway put together. Like a lighthouse beacon with the power to break through the thickest fog.
I couldn’t handle so much cheerful beauty, so I glanced down; her legs had disappeared again. “You, uh, lost your legs.”
“Oh!” She flushed, her face becoming noticeably pinkish even though I could still see through it to the wall behind her. “Sorry. I forget, sometimes.”
“How does that work? Can you control how much of your body is solid?”
She glanced down at the end of her wide-legged trousers, now completely visible. Her feet were encased in fuzzy white slippers.
“Generally speaking, yes,” she said. “I can interact with the physical world just as you can. I can touch objects, as you’ve seen. But I do have some added... perks.”
“Walking through walls and shit?”
“Walking through walls and such, yes.”
I looked down at my hand, which had gone right through hers. “But you can’t touch me?”
“No. When I try to touch living beings, it’s like they’re water running through my hands. But otherwise, my body is solid when I choose to be solid.” Annabelle smiled, but it was perfunctory. Then she turned and took the first aid supplies back to the hall closet.
“Huh,” I said, astutely.
I wrapped my hands around my now-cold mug of tea, feeling strangely calm.
As if conversing with a ghost in a haunted house hundreds of miles away from normal life was no big deal.
Annabelle should have been terrifying—a spirit from beyond the grave haunting a creepy-as-fuck house.
But all the fear and all the frustration had drained out of me, leaving only exhaustion.
I still had no idea what kind of ghost story this was, but it could wait until morning.
Apparently, the dead woman in my house wasn’t going anywhere.
“I’ll make more tea,” she said instead of asking if I wanted any.
“For reals, how much tea is there in this house?”
She gave me a mischievous look that was flat-out adorable. “Loads.”
I really didn’t want more tea. I drank three cups anyway while Annabelle chatted at me about topics I wouldn’t for the life of me remember the next day.