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Authors: Moïra Fowley-Doyle

The Accident Season (7 page)

BOOK: The Accident Season
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Bea looks disappointed. Then she sits up straighter. “Let’s go to her house,” she says.

“To her
house
?”

“Why not? If Alice is right and she’s just sick at home, we can take her some cookies and a box of chamomile tea and see how she’s doing.”

I think about the tiny Elsie like a voodoo doll on the mousetrap and I say softly, “I don’t know . . .”

“Come on, Cara,” says Bea. “Let’s just drop by to see if she’s okay and to invite her to our party. Maybe she’ll be happy to have visitors.”

I look out across the river to where the trees rustle. I think about the photos I printed out and all the questions I have. I turn to Bea and grin. “Okay,” I say, and she holds out her hand for the notebook with Elsie’s address on it. “Let’s go find Elsie.”

7

W
hen we get to the address, even Bea won’t believe it.

“There must have been a mistake.”

We took the river road away from town in the opposite direction to where we live, past housing developments and vacation homes, past fields filled with sheep and cows and horses, past big modern houses like Bea’s and smaller cottages like the one my mother’s friend Gracie bought and renovated a few years ago. The last house we passed was maybe five minutes ago, and the next is far away up ahead, around a bend in the road and hidden by trees. To either side of us there are only fields.

We stand there staring at the house from the road. It’s grand, like a manor house in a period film. It has big bay windows and a porch supported by pillars. But the windows are cracked and broken and the porch sags. Ivy has grown in
through the cracks in the window frames and is slowly breaking down the walls.

“I saw you take down the address.”

Bea shakes her head. “I must’ve read it wrong.”

This isn’t Elsie’s house. This isn’t anybody’s house, or at least it hasn’t been for a very long time. We’ve followed the river all the way and we’ve lost it; it streams in under the garden before us and comes out the other side. The garden is enormous. The gates to the driveway are tall and wrought-iron, all curlicues like haunted houses in horror films. The whole house looks like it’s haunted.

“Why would she give this as her address?”

I shrug. “Maybe her parents are gangsters and she doesn’t want them to be found. Or maybe there’s a house with the same number on a different road on the other side of town that looks the same. The name, I mean.”

“Maybe.” Bea reaches out and rattles the gates. They’re padlocked shut.

I take off my gloves and touch the gates myself. The metal is startlingly cold. I try to judge the distance, then I take off my backpack and throw it over the gates. Bea shouts a laugh. She swings her satchel after my bag and we both grab hold of the gates and climb. I’m encumbered by multiple sweaters and a coat, but it’s Bea’s tights that get caught in the iron vines and swirls. We help each other over carefully.

“Climbing down’s a lot harder,” Bea observes when we’ve reached the ground on the other side.

I do a quick check: All my clothes—and, most importantly, my skin—are intact. “You know,” I say to Bea a bit breathlessly, “for someone who’s so afraid of accidents, I sure do a lot of stupid stuff.” Bea laughs and hugs me, and we both jump up and down inside the hug for a bit before pulling apart and considering the house in front of us.

It’s as if Bea senses my momentary hesitation. “Well,” she says, “we’ve come this far.” She firmly takes my hand and we march up to the front door like we belong there.

We huddle in under the dilapidated porch roof until I gather my courage and grasp the heavy doorknocker. Bea holds her breath. I raise the knocker and clack it back down loudly. The sound echoes dully through the house. I move aside and give Bea a turn. Unsurprisingly, nobody comes to the door.

That’s when the magic happens. Or maybe it isn’t magic. Maybe it’s only that the door was never closed, or that somebody else broke in before us, but it doesn’t matter. I wish at the door, I wish hard; I whisper, “Please be open, please open, open,” and Bea takes up the chant so that we are both repeating, “
Open open open,
” and I reach out and take the door handle in my non-gloved hand and it turns as if it’s inviting us in. The door swings open.

The hall is dark because of the thick layer of dust on the
windows. It filters the light from outside, which was already gray to begin with, into a shadowy gloom. The windows not coated with dust are broken and a slight wind whistles mournfully through the house, lifts up the last shreds of wallpaper, rustles the mouse droppings, the carpet hairs, the cracks in the doors, stirs up the ghosts.

“Can you feel it?” Bea whispers.

My eyes are wide. I nod my head, just once. I can feel it. We take a couple of tentative steps farther into the entrance hall and stare up and up, standing in the middle and gazing through the staircase to the ceiling upstairs. I tilt my head back and close my eyes, and I can hear a faint whispering all around me. Bea moves forward, through the hall and down some steps into what used to be the kitchen, and she drops onto her hands and knees and presses her ear to the floor.

“It’s the river,” she tells me. I kneel down beside her and listen, and the whispering gets louder. The river runs here, right under the floor of the kitchen.

“This is a witch’s house,” says Bea. “It’s full of ghosts.”

I think about what Toby whispered in the school corridor. “It’s your house, then,” I tell her. “You’re more witch than anyone I know.”

Bea’s teeth glow in the gloom of the kitchen when she grins. “Let me show you around, then.” She gets up off the floor and holds out her hand. Her palms are black with dirt.
Her skirt is no longer blue-green tartan—it’s dusty gray and flecked with rust from the iron gate, her tights are in tatters and her hair is wild and she’s never looked more beautiful. I think about Sam singing her ditties on the pier and feel the familiar pang of wishing I were—or maybe even just looked—a little more like Bea. But I quickly shake off the feeling and take my best friend’s hand and we explore the witchy house.

“Here’s the back kitchen,” says Bea in the pantry. “The river flows underneath us. We witches eat it for breakfast, because that’s where all the lost souls go to drown, and lost souls are the witches’ favorite meal.”

There are still cans and boxes stacked around the kitchen, food well past its expiration date, wall outlets oozing green metallic liquid from not having been used for so long. We walk through rooms like little girls lost in the woods.

“This is the ballroom,” Bea says when we reach the entrance hall again. “This is where the witches dance. Where we fly to the ceiling.” She points up at the roof above. “Where we waltz with the ghosts.”

The staircase is old and rotting. Wood gives slightly under our boots. We climb anyway.

“Once upon a time,” Bea says, “when the witches lived here, they enticed young virgins into their house with the promise of truths and stories.” Her hand is hot in mine. “And because the witches were so beautiful, in a fiery,
midnight way, the pretty virgins would always follow them.”

We climb and climb. The staircase creaks.

“The witches would lead them upstairs and let them choose objects from their witchy bedrooms, and they told them stories about those charms. And when the stories were done, the witches would take as payment three hairs from the virgins’ heads, because every witch knows there’s nothing more potent for powerful spells.”

My hand leaves a trail in the dust of the banister.

“But every once in a while,” Bea continues, “the prettiest virgins would find an object they weren’t supposed to touch, and that was the witch’s kiss. All witches keep their kisses in everyday objects, so that their hearts won’t break too often.”

I look across at her, only slightly afraid I’ll miss my step. Bea is focused on the stairs below us, slowly picking out a path around the rotten steps. “What happens when somebody finds the object?” I ask her.

We reach the landing.

“I don’t know,” Bea says. Her lips are red and wide. “I’m just telling you a story.”

Upstairs, there is a long landing lined with doors. We count five bedrooms, a small closet, and a huge bathroom. The bathroom is beautiful but covered in grime. Bea and I write our names with our fingers in the dirt of the claw-footed tub. Except for one, all the bedroom doors are open. The mess inside reminds me of Sam’s room. We ghost through
the four open rooms and consciously leave the closed double doors halfway down the landing for last. They are pale, once blue maybe, with paint peeling like lolling tongues to the carpet. They are intricately carved with the same vines and swirls and curlicues as the gates into the garden. Bea and I take a door handle each and swing into the master bedroom.

It’s empty. The other rooms were full and cluttered with the remnants of life: books and papers tattered and torn to dust, moth-eaten clothes, ripped sheets and feather-coughing pillows on the bed, knickknacks on the shelves. In one Bea whispered that dust is really made up of the skin of the dead. This room, though, is the deadest room of all.

Our footsteps echo despite the dust. The ceiling is high and the plaster around the light fixtures is carved with the same pattern as the bedroom doors. There is no bed. There are no wardrobes or bookshelves. There is only the peeling wallpaper, the wooden floorboards, the big bay windows with their heavy, half-rotted drapes shuttering out the light. I make my eyes wide, try to take everything in. When we step inside the room I notice that what I thought at first might be a pile of dirt in the middle is actually the remains of a fire pit, hollow and soot-blackened.

Bea’s face mirrors mine. We shuffle forward, trying to mute our steps by sliding across the floor. Ours are the only footprints on the carpet of dust.

“Whoever lit this fire did it a long time ago,” I say to Bea. All that’s left is the charred remains of logs and a huge scorch stain.

Bea is grinning, her teeth gleaming in the dim light. “What is this place?” She says it like an exclamation. “What happened here? Why have we never heard about this?” She laughs, and the music of it bounces around the walls.

I laugh along with her. “What a find.”

“What a find!”

That’s when I see the button. It’s big and red and nestled in amongst the blackened remains of the fire. I reach across the pile of old wood and pick it up. I rub it between two gloved fingers to make it shine. I show it to Bea. It’s the brightest thing in the room.

Bea touches the button with the tip of her finger. “Look,” she says. “It’s the witch’s kiss.”

And then her lips are on mine. She tastes like black-cat nights and chimney smoke and forever, and something sweet and redder, like a cherry inside of a flame. I’ve kissed Bea before, that soft lip-to-lip in spin the bottle when we’ve had too much red wine, but this is different, this is wilder. She’s kissing me like there’s something to prove, like there’s somebody watching, like she’s testing herself or maybe testing me. I break away from her, confused. The whole house sighs.

“Hear that?” Bea says breathlessly. “The house liked that.”

Then an idea lands in the palm of my hand like a big red button. “We should have the party here.”

Bea’s eyebrows disappear into her bangs. She grabs me by the shoulders and kisses me again, quickly and lightly, the way she usually does. “You’re brilliant! The ghost house presents the Black Cat and Whiskey Moon Masquerade Ball. It’s so perfect I could cry.”

I clap my hands and we both bounce on the balls of our feet. “I love it, I love it!” We chant it like we chanted to open the door, and the house creaks and groans around us.

“Oho,” Bea whistles. “Listen to that. This house is just aching for a bit of excitement. Some sexual energy.” She winks at me. “I get the feeling this house wants our party as much as we do.”

***

When I get home, Sam is in the kitchen eating Chinese takeout from a foil box while my mother makes tea for her and Alice.

“I got it on the way home,” Sam says. “Want some?”

The smell of curry sauce makes my mouth water. I sit up on the padded kitchen counter and steal Sam’s fork.

“Did you see Melanie’s hand?” Sam asks me. “How many accidents is that this season? We should be keeping count.” Alice huffs out her breath, but for once she doesn’t argue.

My mother holds out her heavily bandaged left hand. “I
feel like Sleeping Beauty,” she says. “I thought I’d banished all the X-Acto blades from the studio.”

I peek in under her bandage to see the stitches. What a strange way to force skin to heal, I think: You staple it together and wait until it knits itself whole.

“The others must think I’m the clumsiest woman on the planet,” my mother says. None of the other artists at her studio know about the accident season. Only Gracie, her best friend, has ever noticed the layers and padding that appear around us every October. But Gracie is a fairly no-nonsense type of person, so my mother never talks about it to her. She says she doesn’t think Gracie would believe her if she did. We have all become very good at hiding things from other people. We have all become a little too good at keeping secrets from friends.

My mother takes her hand back from me and I finish off the last of Sam’s curry.

“Did you not eat at Bea’s?” my mother asks. I texted after school to tell her I was going to Bea’s house. During the accident season she likes to know where we are at all times, and something tells me she wouldn’t be keen on the idea of me breaking into an abandoned house by the river.

“I did,” I lie. “But Sam offered, so it’d be rude to refuse.”

“Did you get through to Elsie?” Sam asks.

“Elsie?” my mother asks, turning around. “Who’s Elsie?”

“Just a girl from school.”

“She and Cara used to be friends,” Alice explains. “Just for a while, after Dad died.”

“We’re not really friends,” I say, as if to explain why my mother’s never heard of her. “Bea just wanted to call her.” I glance over at Sam, who shakes his head at me, ever so slightly. “To tell her what our English homework was for this week,” I lie easily.

“So did you tell her about the homework in the end?” Sam asks.

I glance up at my mother. She’s standing at the sink, rinsing out the teacups. Because her back is turned, I feel confident I can give Sam a significant look without her noticing. Sometimes it feels as though she has eyes in her sides. “No,” I say out loud. The memory of Bea’s kiss is like a ghost on my lips. “She wasn’t answering her phone. Bea and I just hung out and went for a walk by the river.” Technically, I think, that’s not even a lie.

My mother turns around and regards me wryly. “Sometimes I think you’re more in love with that river than you’ve ever been with a boy.”

I stare resolutely at the empty takeout box in front of me.

Sam punches me playfully on the arm. My bruises have faded, but it hurts a bit. “I didn’t think that river was your type,” he says.

BOOK: The Accident Season
12.1Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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