The Ghost in the Glass House (17 page)

C
LARE SLIPPED OUT OF
her room to return to the glass house a few hours after the last guest left. By that time, the country darkness was so deep that it was hard to see her own feet. The ground was invisible except for the occasional sheen of dew. With each step she took, the house on the hill behind her seemed to lurch like a ship on rough water.

Worst of all, the memory of the presence that had followed her down the stairs clung to her so strongly that she wasn't sure if it was a memory or if the presence itself had returned. The sense that it might have joined her again came with the same terror as before, but now there was a strange comfort to it as well. Whoever it was, she was not alone in the dark.

In the glade, the shadows were so thick that she couldn't see the lock on the glass house. She opened it by sense of touch. Inside, at least, the furniture had been put back where it belonged.

Before her eyes could pick the books from the buffet, find the chandelier on the ceiling, and untangle everything from the shadows of the vines, Jack pressed her to him in a full embrace. He caught her hair in his unseen hands and cupped her face to kiss it. She bowed her head against his next kiss with the sense that if she didn't, it might carry her across some unseen boundary into a new country she could never leave.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

Clare hadn't known, when she'd pushed her covers aside, whether she was going to the glass house to demand an apology or to give one. She'd spent the remainder of the party deep in regions of the garden she knew were filled with mist for Jack, half furious at him for his outburst, half guilty that she'd abandoned him. But in the quiet of her room, both the accusations and the excuses faded into a simple ache to see him.

“I have something for you,” Jack told her. His arms released her. Then his voice came from the divan. “Over here.”

She followed him over, and sank down on the divan. When she searched the glass house for him by day, it seemed mockingly empty. But darkness had the opposite effect. Now it felt like he might be part of every shadow.

With the faintest scrape, the shallow drawer of the low table shuttled open. A thread rose from it, like a snake answering a flute. It took her a moment to recognize the chain of a necklace. As she did, the chain lifted free of the drawer, drawing a pearl in the shape of a tear. It swung before her like a hypnotist's pendulum.

Then it dropped into her upturned palms.

“It's beautiful,” Clare whispered. “Where did you get it?”

“Outside,” Jack said. “Someone left it in the grass.”

“Tonight?” Clare asked. “We should give it back.”

“No,” Jack said. “I've had it longer than that.”

The pearl twitched at the end of its chain.

“Put it on,” he said.

Clare fastened the chain around her neck. When she ducked her chin, she could see the faint glimmer of the pearl against the tiny pleats that trimmed her bodice.

“I tried to come up the hill after you,” Jack said. “I went farther than I've ever been.”

“What happened?” Clare asked.

“The mist got darker,” Jack said. “But then it started to fade, like I'd come to the end of it.”

Clare's heart quickened. “What did you see?”

“I was afraid,” Jack said. “So I came back.”

Clare didn't realize she had been holding her breath until it burst out of her in a rush of frustration. “But what if it's wonderful?” she asked.

Up at the big house, a light came on. Clare froze, waiting for it to go off again. Instead another one lit up. Suddenly, all the windows were ablaze, not just in the upper story, but the ground floor as well.

Clare leapt to her feet. “They know I'm gone.”

“They won't find you here,” Jack said.

“I have to go,” she told him.

Jack caught her hand as she slipped out the door, and trailed her until they reached the boundary of the mist between the lilacs.

“Good night,” he said.

Clare ran on a few steps, then turned and ran back. Jack's arms circled her. She buried her face in his neck. “I'll be back,” she promised, her voice high with childish tears.

“I know,” Jack said.

Then she struck through the side yard, planning her story as the dew collected on her slippers. She hadn't been able to sleep. She'd thought a walk might help. She didn't want to bother anyone else, so she let herself out.

But as she came around the front of the house, she glanced through one of the windows, into the parlor. Bridget's mother sat beside the unlit fireplace on a gaily striped chair, her face pale. Even stranger, Bridget's father stood beside her, his hand on her chair. His eyes were full of dread, like a boy surprised in the middle of a daydream by a teacher's question.

Clare's mother stood with her back to the window, in her blue robe.

Clare climbed the stairs to the porch. The front door swung open without a sound. She crossed the empty hall to the parlor door.

As she did, Tilda swept in from the dining room. She wore a white wrapper and her long silver hair fell in waves down her neck. For some reason, she carried a pair of unlit lanterns.

Her brows drew together at the sight of Clare, but before Tilda could say anything, Clare pushed open the parlor door and ducked in.

All three adults turned, but their faces seemed to fall when they recognized her. Her mother gathered her up in an embrace so tight it hurt to breathe.

“Sweetheart,” she said. “We were just trying to decide whether to wake you.”

Tilda stepped in, lanterns aloft. “I found two of them,” she said.

No one knew she had left the house, Clare realized. Nobody had even noticed that her slippers were soaked through.

Clare's mother drew her over by the fireplace, to Bridget's mother. Despite the late hour, Bridget's mother looked more awake than Clare had ever seen her. When Clare met her eyes, they welled with tears.

Clare looked at her own mother for explanation.

“Clare,” her mother said. “Bridget is gone.”

Clare felt the prick of fear, but it was tempered by caution. If Bridget had snuck out on her own, Clare didn't want to be the one to give her away.

“Did you ask Teddy?” she said.

Bridget's father cleared his throat. “Teddy isn't feeling well,” he said.

Clare had seen Teddy climb the hill at the end of the night: under his own power, but unmistakably impaired. She wasn't surprised they hadn't been able to wake him when they found Bridget gone.

“They thought she might have come here to see you,” Clare's mother told her.

Clare shook her head. “No.”

“Please,” Bridget's mother said. Her gaze was so direct that Clare felt as if she weren't just looking into her eyes, but into whatever was left behind after a person died. “Do you have any idea where she could be?”

F
OR THE FIRST MOMENT
Clare stood on the dark beach, she had the weird sense that she'd finally found a desert. The glint of dim waves became the hints of distant hills, and the low roar of the surf blotted out all other sounds into a false silence. The cave, the bluff, and the homes above were lost under moonlit dunes.

Then her lantern caught the gleam of a channel in the damp sand and she was back on shore.

Clare's mother, Bridget's father, and Bridget's mother had all followed her down the switchback path, across the beach, to the rocks. But when Clare kicked off her shoes at the water's edge, they stopped. The tide was in. The rocks at the cave's mouth were slick with the dark water that surged around it.

“I can't see anything,” Bridget's mother said.

“You stay here,” Bridget's father ordered. “I'll go.”

Clare's mother put her arm around Bridget's mother's waist. A quick, knowing look passed between Clare's mother and Bridget's father.

Clare stalked off barefoot toward the rocks.

Bridget's father caught up to her, his feet bare, the cuffs of his linen trousers rolled up. “I can go first,” he offered.

“You don't know where it is,” Clare told him, and climbed out on the first rock.

Behind her, Bridget's father's lamp amplified her shadow into a giant on the cliff. Her own lantern gave out faint cries as it swung in her hand. She leapt from the first rock to the next with the courage of pride. But as soon as she had gone too far to turn back, she stiffened with fear. The next rock was barely visible in the dark. The surface she could see was wet and slick. And even if she reached it, there was nothing there to catch hold of, just the rock after it glinting beyond another span of angry water.

Her mind reeled back to the presence that had followed her out of the house, in the dark. Now, despite the fear it stirred in her, she missed it.

“Are you here?” she whispered, lower than the wash of the waves.

The cliff, the rocks, the silver horizon: nothing changed. But suddenly the other ghost was with her again, this time far too strong to be mistaken for a memory. She felt the same rush of love and her own familiar fear. But this fear left no room for any others. Every one of them fell away before it. The noise of the waves no longer drowned her thoughts. The next rock was only a step away. And so was the one after it.

She only slipped once, just outside the cave entrance, on the last rock. Her foot plunged under the water and she fell hard on her hip. But she made the mouth of the cave before she felt any pain.

When she got her footing on the ledge, she reached back to help Bridget's father up.

Inside the cave, he raised his lantern above their heads. It illuminated the rough arch of the ceiling, a few feet of the ledge, and the narrow glint of water that cut back into the dark.

The two of them stood side by side like a pair of tourists struck silent by the scope of a new cathedral.

“Bridget?” Bridget's father said. It wasn't a call or a command. His voice had a tone of wonder to it, as if he couldn't quite believe that the place was real, or that his daughter had any part in it. Her name shimmered for a moment before the plash of water on rock swallowed it up.

The other ghost, Clare could feel, had followed them into the cave. Or, she thought, it was already there.

Bridget's father began to advance along the ledge.

“Bridget,” he said again, his voice loud with the sound of a man trying to frighten something that frightened him.

The high, raw keen of an injured animal filled the cave so completely that it seemed as if it might be the voice of the darkness itself.

When it broke off, Bridget's father stood frozen. His eyes darted from rock to rock.

Clare brushed past him, ran down the ledge, and ducked through the cleft into the hidden room.

Her lantern was too weak to illuminate the whole dome of the giant chamber. The light only revealed a small ring in every direction: a hint of the wall behind her but not the one beyond, the fingers of rock that reached down, but not the ceiling itself. Something, she realized, like the mist that ringed Jack into the glass house.

“Hello?” she called.

She thought she heard a shuffle in the darkness, but then it went still.

As she pressed on into the cavern, the furniture emerged from what had been solid shadow. A cushion had fallen from the couch onto the rock. One of the chairs was turned akimbo, facing out into the dark.

“Bridget,” Clare said.

Another rustle. Clare raised the lamp and followed it. After a few steps, her light picked out the looming curve of the far wall. A few more steps, and one of the large formations on the ground came alive.

Clare threw the lamp up in self-defense.

Bridget's face rose from the rock. In the low light, with the pale wall behind her, her head seemed to move free from a body under its own strange power.

Then her dress took shape. It was the same one she had worn to the party, layers of eggshell voile and cotton lace. The ribbon at her waist was loose. The lace was damp and stained. Her dark curls hung around her face.

Clare knelt on the smooth rock and set her lantern between them. She held out her hand. Bridget stared at it and then back at Clare's face, as if she were trying to make out a sign in a new language.

Far behind them, Clare heard a footfall at the chamber entrance. Another pinpoint of light glowed on the other side of the room. “Bridget?” her father said, his voice awed and uncertain.

Bridget's eyes fastened on the approaching light.

“Over here,” Clare called.

The other lamp swung toward them through the dark. When Bridget's father caught sight of her, he fell to his knees on the stone.

Bridget held out her arms. Her father gathered her up and staggered to his feet. Bridget clung to him with the wordless tenacity of a child too young to speak.

Bridget's father carried her across the chamber, leaving Clare behind. But as his lantern dimmed with distance, she could feel again that she was not alone. The other ghost was here as well. There didn't seem to be any place she could go that it couldn't follow her.

Unnerved, Clare reached into her pocket for the wax key. Comfort washed through her as her fingers closed on the handle.

But as she traced down the stem, the stem ran out. It took her a moment to understand that it had snapped in half. And one more fumble to find that the thick teeth that fit the lock to the glass house had broken off.

B
RIDGET'S FATHER STOPPED BESIDE
her bed, Bridget still in his arms.

Outside Bridget's open window, the surf seemed to catch its breath, then sigh.

Bridget's mother turned on the lamp by Bridget's bed. She bent to pull off Bridget's ruined shoes.

When she'd dropped them to the floor, she started to unfasten the line of covered buttons at the back of Bridget's dress.

Bridget shook her head. Then she began to struggle in her father's arms. “Put me down,” she said.