Phantom Heart Read online

  “Your drawings. Shall I assume they are all of me?” I asked, and, this time, she nodded.

  In response, I tore the papers into shreds and flung the scraps toward the room.

  “There,” I growled as I swung to face her again. “Now do you understand?”

  Charlie scurried to put the piano bench between us.

  “You’re a bad man!” She gripped the bench, the fury in her voice scarcely contained.

  “Yes,” I hissed back at her. “I am.”

  Her body shaking, she actually chucked the two halves of her broken crayon my way.

  The pieces bounced off me and tapped against the floor. I threw my cloak back, causing her to yelp and, like a frightened mouse, take refuge beneath the piano’s drop cloth.

  The toe of one shoe still poked out from beneath, though, its smallness inciting me to once again check myself. For her terror did not serve my purpose. Not so much as her influence did. And, at this juncture, I needed more of the latter than I did the former.

  “I suppose you do understand,” I muttered, more to myself. “In your own way.”

  “I’m not scared of you.”

  I curled one hand tight enough to cause the leather of my glove to creak. Then I released the clench, tucked my hands behind my back, and resolved to begin again. Why terrify Charlie outright when she herself could not bring about my goal of an empty house?

  Things were not going as planned, though. Nearly a week had passed and no matter what proof her younger sister supplied, Stephanie refused to buy into even the possibility of my existence.

  “I don’t need you to be frightened of me,” I told her.

  “Good!” Again, this came from behind the cloth. “ ’Cause I’m not.”

  “Then you won’t be averse to helping me.”

  “Stephanie’s going to make you get lost.”

  “That I am lost already is the issue at hand,” I said, pacing while I addressed the piano.

  “Are you going to hurt us?”

  I frowned, the question burning through the lingering scraps of my anger.

  “It is not my wish to,” I admitted. “And that is why you, your father, and your sister must go.”

  Charlie lifted the fabric, one eye peering out at me. “How did you get torn up?”

  How to answer her? How to make a child understand when I still, even after all this time, did not fully grasp the particulars myself?

  “Is your face torn up, too?” she pressed. “Is that why you wear a mask?”

  The lights flickered, the bulb of a nearby work lamp dying with a soft pop. I sneered behind the mask that obscured the whole of my countenance, papery lips peeling back.

  “Yesterday,” I said in an effort to steer both of us back on course, “you accompanied your father into the basement. You are not to go down there again. By yourself or otherwise. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Why? Will you hurt Daddy? Or Stephanie? If they go down there?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. Because, truly, I did not.

  “W-what are you?”

  I crossed to the piano and flipped up a portion of the sheet to reveal both the huddled girl and one corner of the instrument’s keyboard, aged and broken.

  Once, my hands, like a pair of lovely spiders, had climbed over these very keys, coaxing such sounds from their hidden strings. And the music I had played—how it had filled the house that, on this side, lay in ruins around me. How it had filled the soul that lay in ruins on the other.

  And this version of the piano. The real and true version. Did I gravitate to and guard it the way I did because we two were so alike? Too damaged to issue forth anything but the discordancy with which our hollow bodies had become wracked?

  “I’m no longer certain of what I am,” I murmured.

  “Charlie!” called Stephanie, her feet pounding down the stairs. “Charlie?”

  Her courage bolstered by the approach of her sister, Charlie darted from her hiding place, shoes pattering over the scattered and torn music I could not have played anyway.

  “Charlie!” cried Stephanie when her sister stopped just short of colliding with her. Simultaneously, she took in the scene. “Oh my gosh. What happened in here?”

  Charlie peered from Stephanie to me and back again, still holding on to the hope that her sister might, at any moment, perceive my presence.

  It was a hope we shared, if for different reasons.

  “I—I was coloring,” answered Charlie.

  “I see that. But why did you rip your papers up and throw them everywhere? That’s not nice.”

  “I didn’t do that.”

  “Let me guess,” came Stephanie’s dry reply. “Zedok came in here and ripped up your drawings.”

  “And then threw them,” Charlie said.

  “Oh yeah?” sighed Stephanie, bending to gather the bits of paper into a stack. “Why would he do that?”

  “I got in trouble,” Charlie whispered. “For coloring.”

  “What?” Stephanie crossed to the crayons. “You’re not in trouble. Just c’mon. Help me pick these up.”

  As the two set to work tidying up—Charlie keeping a watchful glare on me all the while—my gaze slid from the girls to the piano’s keyboard, where I laid two fingers.

  “Listen,” Stephanie prattled while she returned the crayons to their designated tin. “I’ve got to get to school early to finish my homework, so Dad’s going to drop you off. But I’ll pick you up later, okay?”

  When I pressed the chord, Charlie jumped, startled by the dissonant sound.

  Stephanie, however, displayed no reaction whatsoever. Rising then, she approached the piano. She hesitated, though, after taking hold of the dustcover, her free hand falling to the naked keys. She did not press them. Instead, she trailed her fingers over the keys that remained—and over the sockets of those that did not.

  I checked the girl’s features to find upon them an expression I could not help but recognize.

  She was listening. To . . . music.

  The fact that she could hear it and I could not provoked within me a soundless echo of envy. The emotion fled as quickly as it had come, though, replaced by a more horrible sense of curiosity. Horrible because, unlike envy, curiosity was something I knew better than to entertain.

  And yet, from this near a distance, a dullard could not have missed the pain that briefly knitted Stephanie’s brow.

  I glanced back to Charlie, as if she might provide me with some clue to its source.

  But then Stephanie severed the moment by tossing the piano’s dustcover back into place.

  “Let’s get you some breakfast,” she said to Charlie, turning away from the instrument, and from me. “You’re looking a little pale.”

  With that, Stephanie took her sister’s hand and led her from the parlor with Charlie watching me until they both vanished.

  And then abruptly, I was no longer the only hidden thing present in this parlor. This house.

  Just now. What music had resounded through Stephanie’s memory?

  Whose music?

  Dangerous questions I had no business pondering. Especially when a certain vow made to a certain nuisance obliged me to remain out of the affairs of any living person I encountered.

  Regardless of what Stephanie had heard, my only concern should be that she had not heard me.

  Perhaps, though, after this latest interaction, Charlie would say something that would begin to change that.

  For today, I would have to use my invisibility and my silence to my advantage and plan a subtle yet less deniable strike to augment my efforts.

  For how much larger did shadows loom when you were not watching them lengthen? When you’d convinced yourself they were not even there?

  Large enough to swallow you whole before you were ever aware n
ight had fallen.

  A truth I wagered no one in the world understood better than I.

  THREE

  Stephanie

  This guy. This. Guy.

  I glanced up from the calculus that, thanks to Charlie, I hadn’t finished last night.

  It should have been easy enough to knock out, if only I hadn’t, somewhere along the way, managed to pick up a super-distracting shadow.

  He sat two tables away in the otherwise empty school library, his face half hidden behind a thick novel. He hadn’t turned a single page.

  Occasionally, I would catch his eyes flicking my way, the lenses of his black, thick-rimmed glasses reflecting the fluorescents overhead, making it impossible to read his expression.

  Hipster Glasses, I’d taken to calling him, had made his first appearance yesterday—same bat time, same bat channel. For that reason, I might not have been so paranoid. Thing was, he had also made his second and third appearance yesterday, too.

  At lunch, he’d twice passed my table, gripping his tray and slow-walking by, like he couldn’t figure out how to get to wherever he usually sat. Then, after last bell, I’d found him leaning against a row of lockers near mine, pretending to read that same book.

  This morning marked the end of this peripheral hovering being coincidental. And I wanted to tell him I knew where he could find a friend as creepy as him, but that it would require him to come over to my house and, apparently, stay the night in Charlie’s closet.

  Standing, I shoved my book and notepad into my messenger bag. If I confronted him now, that would leave him the weekend to think about what an unsubtle weirdo he was. It would also guarantee that, except for today, I wouldn’t have to awkwardly run into him again.

  Hipster Glasses stiffened as I approached, his suspender-clad shoulders going rigid.

  I guess he was hoping I would stroll on by. When I stopped to stand to one side of his table, his eyes flicked to mine, visible for the first time through those lenses.

  Wow, they were blue.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Uh . . .” He blinked at me, his dark, floppy-in-the-front, vintage, college-contour haircut trying (not unsuccessfully) to be retro-cool. “Hhhhey.”

  The way he drew out the “h” annoyed me, because it suggested that I was the one behaving oddly here.

  “I don’t date,” I said. “I don’t do homework for hire. I don’t do or sell drugs, either. And I don’t like being monitored.”

  His face went crimson, which was exactly the reaction I’d been going for. It forced him out of hiding and dismantled any potential excuses or explanations he might have gone for.

  “I’m not monitoring you.” He snapped his book shut, eyes darting, perhaps searching for the librarian or anyone else who might overhear our conversation.

  “Really,” I said, my tone as deadpan as my stare. “You haven’t been following me?”

  “Following you, yes,” he said, smart enough, apparently, to recognize the corner he’d been backed into. “ ‘Monitoring’ suggests I’ve conducted surveillance on you. Recorded and reviewed data. There’s a difference.”

  He was schooling me on vocab?

  “You do know how stratospherically creepy you’re being, don’t you?”

  “Yes!” he shouted at the book. I could tell he was genuinely angry at himself and not me. Not only had a deeper and more scarlet crawl begun to work its way up from the collar of his white button-down shirt but, from this close, I could actually feel the heat of mortification radiating off his inflamed skin.

  Well done, Stephanie. You have appropriately cowed Clark Kent’s lurker second cousin.

  “You know—” I began, but he cut me off.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk to you without weirding you out,” he said, shooting straight out of his seat to stand up. Up, up, and away.

  I swallowed hard, tilting my head back to take in his height, half expecting his nose to start bleeding.

  “Mission unaccomplished,” I said, resisting the fierce urge to step back from him. Which would be giving him a win. And since when did standing up make someone kind of maybe hot?

  Broad shouldered with limbs almost too long for his body and this chic geek thing happening with his clothes, he looked as if, after tripping out of a 1940s newsroom, he’d tumbled into a taffy puller.

  “I’m not a stalker.” With this declaration, he shifted his weight to one Converse-clad foot, his big hands going to his tapered waist. My gaze lingered on his muscular, hair-dusted forearms, bare of the sleeves that he’d rolled to the elbows. Mm. Nice build, but . . . so, so no.

  “Okay,” I said. “So let’s start there. If you’re not a stalker, then why have you been following me?”

  “It’s not you,” he hurried to say. Probably because the librarian, Ms. Geary, had returned to her post behind the checkout counter, signaling that we were minutes from first bell. “I’m not interested in you. It’s . . . it’s your . . .”

  “My what?” I prompted.

  “It’s your house.”

  I squinted at him, unconvinced. “My house? Is that some weird euphemism for—”

  “No!”

  We both glanced to Ms. Geary, who glared bullet holes into Hipster Glasses. Turning back to me, he lowered his voice again. “You live in Moldavia.”

  “Romania?”

  “No.” He held up a hand, like I was trying his patience. “That’s what the house is called. Was called. Before . . . just—it’s haunted. Like . . . really haunted.”

  My glare dropped into a glower. One that dripped disdain. And skepticism.

  “You’re following me around because you think my house is haunted.”

  “I’m following you around because I know it is,” he said, those blues igniting with a strange hunger. “Surely I’m not the first one to tell you that.”

  Technically speaking, I had to grant him that. Sure, Charlie had said she’d seen some creeper in the closet. But once I’d had her tucked in with me, the witching hour had come and gone with no more mention of monsters or ghouls in the walls. We’d both slept. Soundly.

  And then there was the fact that I didn’t believe in ghosts. Or anything else that couldn’t be measured, documented, or, you know, proven.

  “You are the first one to mention it, actually,” I semi-lied. “Because I haven’t told anybody yet which house I moved into.”

  He went pale, the crimson hue draining from his face in an instant.

  “I . . . I keep up with the house,” he stammered. “It’s been empty for years. And no one ever stays there for more than a few months.”

  “Probably because it’s barely habitable,” I said.

  “It came cheap, didn’t it?”

  “We bought it ‘as is.’ Because it’s falling apart. That’s why we’re flipping it.”

  I frowned. Why I was telling him this?

  “Did you even check into the history before you bought the thing?” he asked, folding his arms.

  “What is it that you want?” I folded my own arms, mimicking his pose. This must have made him uncomfortable—more uncomfortable—because he dropped his arms.

  “I was just . . . curious,” he began. “I’ve never spoken to anyone who lived in that house before. I wanted to ask, I dunno, if you’d seen or experienced anything . . . abnormal.”

  “You’re abnormal. Does that count?”

  He looked toward the counter, where Ms. Geary busied herself with checking in items and pretending not to be listening in.

  Glancing down, he nodded at his shoes.

  I stifled a victory smirk, almost feeling sorry for him.

  “Actually,” I said, softening my tone, “there was something weird that happened the night we moved in.”

  Slowly, he lifted his eyes to mine, trying, I could tell, to gaug
e my level of sincerity.

  “I heard this voice coming through the wall. It was this . . . guy.”

  Though Hipster Glasses didn’t ask what the voice had said, that exact question swirled in his widening and too-serious scowl-stare.

  So I went in for the kill.

  “He said his name was Buddy Holly, and to tell you he wants his glasses back.”

  With that, I marched past him, shooting one last glance to Ms. Geary, who I swear smiled, though she never looked up.

  “Hey,” Glasses called to me. I stopped but didn’t turn around.

  “You know who Buddy Holly is?” he asked.

  Overhead, the bell rang.

  I glanced back at him from over one shoulder. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  “Well, you should give me your phone number,” he called, apparently no longer caring about what Ms. Geary had to think of any of this. “Just in case it turns out there is.”

  “Don’t you already know it?”

  I spun quickly so he wouldn’t see me grin and, with that, hurried into the crowded hall.

  FOUR

  Zedok

  The saw’s cry had ripped through the halls of my side of the house—a harpy feasting upon its still-living prey, gleeful in its viciousness.

  The man responsible for creating the infernal racket, Mr. Armand, stood in the center of the parlor, this version of which, with its cracked-plaster walls and pockmarked ceiling, scarcely resembled my own.

  A pair of safety glasses shielded the man’s eyes as he worked. Eyes that did not see me, though I stood just beneath the archway leading into the parlor, between the open pocket doors.

  I had watched Mr. Armand this way for over an hour. With such a horrid noise filling both versions of the house, what else was there to do but stew at him?

  If he felt my presence, he never let on.

  Not that I had expected him to. I had been in Mr. Armand’s dreams as well as Stephanie’s, and he had seen me no better than she had. Though since his work centered on uplifting the travesty this side of the house had become, I had indulged in the temptation to direct his mind’s eye toward images of the mansion as it had once been.