It's August and the air is warm, but the yew bushes grow high, high above the house—their toxic branches shielding me. They keep me cool when I would otherwise be burning up. The ivy creeps up the bricks in search of the light. I hear an old church bell in the distance—ever providing...I feel so alone, despite my husband's now empty glass that clinks with ice cubes and his voice speaking low into the phone in his office. The void remains, despite my daughter's exertion in the living room as she twirls in a unitard and t-shirt with the colorful dance video on the TV—her mostly eaten bowl of Cheerios abandoned on the coffee table.
And even though God blessed or cursed me with a mind to entertain ghosts and other spirits, I am not, nor was I ever, part of their lives. When authors and journalists call the house, they always ask for my husband. When he's invited to do a late night talk show interview, he has had to insist that I be invited to join him. And yes, he does look gallant doing this, but I know that the real reason he insists on my coming is to buffer his temper and to make him feel safer to speak candidly.
Whenever our daughter's teachers call the house and wonder why Judy isn't socializing with the other kids at school, they ask my husband if I'm well enough to teach my own daughter how to be a cheerful young socialite...They wonder aloud to Ed if I should "stop running around with the ghouls and ghost-nonsense and stay home more with Judy." I can only be what I am, and what I am is a quiet and unassuming junior partner—and the projected societal gap only grows wider between my family and I as I grow older...
I flip through a gardening magazine at the kitchen table aimlessly. The photos are beautiful, but I can't seem to focus on anything in the glossy pages beyond the colors and textures of the plants.
It has been too long since I've seen her. I imagine her all alone in her catacombs, barely lit by a small, desperately glowing lantern. Why hasn't she come?
I feel my skin crawling—flashes of dark objects, her lithe silhouette and the smell of crackling herbaceous smoke fills my senses. I shiver inwardly, my moist palms resting on a page about darkness-loving plants, and I can hear the sound of condensation making dull thuds against a dirt floor...and her voice growing in me, long and full, like the Mother-In-Laws-Tongue.
I am in her life—and not as an afterthought. When her dark eyes search mine, I don't feel a hollow emptiness as others might. I feel myself in her gaze. I feel seen and understood, and certainly not underestimated.
My stomach turns like the early industrial water mill down the road from my house—my insides creak like old wood under a heavy weight.
When I look at her face, I am exposed and tumbling out towards her like a drunken river...and that forward inertia makes me squirm and I want to run...but I can't.
"MOM!!?!?" Judy screams from the living room and my body snaps towards her frantic cry like elastic.
"Honey?! What's going on out there?!" I hear my husband stumbling loudly around his desk behind the door. Isla Kastner, or some misty version of her, stands in my living room. Her face is expressionless as her eyes flit from my shocked daughter's face to mine.
"It's okay, Ed! We're okay," I call out to my husband quickly. I can't look away from the imposing frame of The Occultist as her image fades away. I pull Judy close to me, stroking her hair and reassuring her.
"It's okay, sweetheart. I know...I know..." My voice is as soothing as I can make it sound. I hug the small girl to my waist as she sniffles back her tears, and I encourage her to go into her room for a while. She does, and I make my way silently to our occult museum room. I don't turn on the lights.
"Where are you?" I whisper to the empty room, reaching out to the spectre that was so near only moments ago. A scintillating darkness warbles just a foot or so in front of me. Standing at over 6 feet tall with boots on, I have to look up steeply to meet her eyes. I take a small step back, surprised and slightly irritated.
"You can't show up like that. You can't. You nearly scared the life out of my daughter!" I bite the words up at her, trying to keep my composure.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Warren. That was not my intention at all." She looks down into my eyes coolly and almost smiles. I bristle.
"Don't call me that," I furrow my brows slightly at her, warningly.
"It's your name," she answers back, matter-of-factly.
"Yes, but it sounds patronizing when you say it." I look away from her finally. The glass Annabelle case is dimly lit behind her. The tall shelves feel like they're closing in around me. I take a deep breath, and when I look back at her, she is smiling a small, thin-lipped smile at me. I take another unconscious step back.
"What do you want, Isla?" I ask, quietly. She takes a step towards me, closing the scant distance between us effortlessly with her long stride. I feel my cheeks warm and the blood thrum loudly through my body.
"I would have thought it was obvious," she replies, tipping her head and her voice with a mischievous lilt.
"What makes you so confident to—" I begin in indignation, but her smooth voice cuts across mine with its sharp stillness.
"I heard you calling out for me. I felt you reaching and recoiling and your desire and your loneliness...your pity. Have you forgotten how easy it is to step inside of my mind—how easy it is for me to...? It's pathetic really, how easily I'll run to you," she finishes with a confounded expression, gently shaking her head.
"I haven't forgotten. It's not easy...and should I thank you for the backhanded compliment?" I quip back at her. Though it is in my nature to maintain a polite composure, her subtle expressions infuriate me—because what hides underneath that subtlety is too explosive and too intense for my soft human instincts to endure without coming undone.
"Lorraine. You wanted me here," she states plainly. Isla reaches a pale hand out to touch mine, but I fold my hands across my chest before she can make contact.
"I was...confused," I look away from her again. A cursed rosary slides against the edge of the wooden shelving it lays on with a 'tick, tick, tick', then clatters abruptly to the floor. My breath hitches in my throat and I turn suddenly to exit the room. Just as suddenly, I feel a warm hand completely wrapped around my bicep and it's pulling me away from the door. I squeak back a scream—and when I wheel around to face the spot I've run from, there's only Isla in the room with me. Only Isla. I didn't think I'd actually be able to feel her in this form. And her hand...her hand is so warm. I blink at her, surprised.
"I didn't know if that would work, either." She arches one thin brow at me quickly and looks down at her hand that clutches my arm. I feel her grip loosen and her lithe fingers sliding away from me—down the length of my arm. I turn fully around now to face her, my chest heaving at the sight of her long sinewy throat and the silver broach with a small sword embossed in the center. My much smaller hand, by comparison, closes around hers before she can pull it from my skin. I coax both of my hands around hers and look up into her face. An electrical storm clatters between us and I feel one solitary tear roll down my cheek.
"Your hands are cold..." she speaks so quietly, it's almost a whisper. She swallows hard. I feel myself tremble.
I fall through her impossibly dark eyes—I see her sitting on the edge of a bed with a wrought iron frame, I see her long fingers paging through a leather-bound book, I see her standing near a small porthole window looking up at a bird in a tree, I see her licking her pale lips, I see her unbuttoning her high collared shirt...
I gasp and my head swims. I feel another warm hand touch my waist bracingly. Visions of my own life flash before me—I'm sitting at my vanity mirror in a nightgown with Ed sleeping naked behind me, I'm looking into a graveyard full of restless spirits, I'm sipping tea in the kitchen alone, I'm holding my rosary-wrapped hand out to a door, I'm cradling a twisting body and appear to be shouting something.
I stumble into Isla as the veil lifts from my eyes, and I don't pull away from her as she offers the support of her surprisingly strong arms. I lean into the rough fabric of her long, tailored tunic and sigh into the warmth of her body. She doesn't ask me if I'm okay. She doesn't tell me to come back to the physical world. She doesn't wonder where I am...She knows. And she's there with me.
My arms find their way around her slender body and I embrace her to me. I can feel her pause, tentatively; her arms hang open around me—frozen like a marble statue. Then, I feel the rapid rise and fall of her chest as she struggles with herself for a moment.
"I did want you here," I whisper into her clothes, breathing in the smell of burnt offerings and earth. Her arms enfold me slowly. I feel her hand stroke my unpinned hair softly, and I shudder out a breath into her. Adrenaline shakes me from the core with a frigid-hot grip, and a bead of sweat rolls down my spine. What have I done?
Her long fingers run a track up and down my spine in a feather-light tickle. I bite my lip, becoming all too aware of her long silence—and my nervousness heightens my senses.
In my mind's eye, I see her touch her face with closed eyes, I see the back of her head and her bare arms reach up to unpin her hair...long, voluminous black waves tumble around her naked shoulders. Her hands are covered in fresh blood, I see a knife twisted deep into her naked, muscled abdomen...blood pours into the crease of her thighs and I can hear her struggle to breathe—
"Isla. Please, no—Isla!" I clutch the back of her black tunic, trying to wrench myself from the liminal space and willing my physical eyes to focus. The blood runs backward towards the wound. The knife disappears. Her hands find my cheeks and they're free of blood. My hands climb up her body like ivy—My heart reverberates softly in my breast, pressing against her like an old church bell. She guides my face up to look at hers and she even hunches slightly for me.
"I wanted to see you, too. I'm right here, Lorraine. Remember that." Her words and her lips fall into mine with a rumble, like a train on a track or a throbbing beat of footfall above us, and I swoon. And then she disappears.