Glimpse (23 page)

I looked at myself in the mirror. I felt like a child preparing for a really macabre game of make-believe.

I looked at the Normality List and snorted. ‘No more Glimpses’. What a joke that had turned out to be. If I’d known a few weeks ago even half the things I would be doing in my new home – visiting graveyards, Ouija boards, tying my heart in knots over a dead boy – I wouldn’t have needed Derek to call me loony; I’d have done it for him.

I sat on my bed sipping coffee in the dusk. I needed to be extra-sure tonight that Dad wouldn’t know I was gone. There could be no good explanation for being caught knee-deep in a hole at the crossroads in the middle of the night.

When my bedside clock read 1 a.m., I tucked my heart locket under my jumper, put my phone in my pocket, picked up my torch and my trainers, and snuck downstairs and into the darkness.

The moon was brighter tonight, the sky less cloudy, but the temperature had dropped. My breath misted in front of me as I scanned the line of trees for Zachary.

An arm lifted from the shadows in greeting. I smiled, despite the ball of nerves in my stomach, and waved back. But I didn’t go straight over, and I didn’t turn on my torch. Instead I crept towards the outbuildings to grab a spade. The second it was in my hand, I ran across the grass towards him.

He turned to watch me, his arms poised by his sides. ‘Elizabeth.’ His voice was low, with an undercurrent of energy that matched my own nervous excitement. ‘Are you certain you wish to do this?’

‘I am.’

He nodded, and took my hand like it had become the most natural thing in the world. It kind of had – his touch had become more solid to me every time we met, and was now almost as solid as a living person’s. I held tight, and we raced into the woods. As soon as the inn was behind us, I flicked on the torch. Small creatures scuttled out of the torch’s beam, ivy tugged at my trainers as we crashed through it, but the rest of the world felt deadly silent, frozen stiff in the night air.

The field on the other side was awash in moonlight. Furrows in the soil striped the bare earth with shadow. Compared to the time I’d been here with Zachary in daylight, it felt eerie and exposed, a parallel universe where nothing could be trusted. We kept close to the deeper shadows by the line of trees like night creatures, as we headed towards the road.

I stole sideways glances at Zachary. Moonlight was his natural setting, and he looked so vibrant and alive tonight that it was hard to get my head around what I was about to do.

I wondered how I would feel when I held a piece of his real, human body in my fingers. I was painfully aware of the way I’d started to feel around him – the fluttering in my stomach, the electricity of his touch. I wondered if I’d still feel like that after tonight, after his other-ness was driven home.

A big part of me hoped so. I’d never felt this way before. And I liked it. It made me want things that were nothing to do with my messed-up past. It made me look forward to my days and nights in a way I never had before. And it felt so natural, so normal.

Which, of course, was just typical of me. Nothing about this was the slightest bit normal. Feeling anything for Zachary could only end in misery. Even if he wasn’t a ghost, he was in love with someone else: that was the kind of line you couldn’t cross.

Zachary ran to the hedge that marked the boundary between the field and the road. I watched him run, caught myself, cursed my idiocy.

Seriously. I should have been feeling something appropriate to a horror film, not to a drama about doomed, unrequited love.

I shoved through the gap in the hedge. When I emerged onto the road, I didn’t look at Zachary, I just marched to the crossroads, my torchlight skittering over potholed concrete and long grass ahead.

‘Where do I dig?’

Zachary jogged to a spot on the verge at the corner of the crossroads. I shone the torchlight on him. His jaw was tight.

‘Here.’ He pointed to his feet.

I nodded, and a tsunami of adrenaline crashed in on me. I propped the torch on a rock so it pointed at the grass at his feet. I shuddered, only partly with cold.

‘Tell me if any cars come,’ I said.

I checked around me one last time, then took a deep breath and stabbed at the earth with the spade. The hardness of the soil vibrated up through my hands, jarring my shoulders. The spade only went a couple of inches below the grass.

I groaned. I’d guessed this was going to be hard work, but I hadn’t let myself consider how hard; it’s not like there was any other way to do this.

‘Lend me your muscles, Zachary.’ I stabbed again at the ground, heaving up a lump of grass.

‘I’d be doing this myself, if I could.’

‘Just tell me you’re not buried six feet under.’

‘With that, luck is on your side.’ He paced at the edge of the torchlight, his gaze on the road. ‘And I am no longer in one piece. I was interred without a coffin. The soil has been disturbed by farm vehicles multiple times. If luck remains with us, there should be a piece of . . . of . . . a piece near the surface. I feel it.’

‘What does it feel like?’ I heaved up a chunk of earth and rocks and tossed it aside. I was sweating already, despite the chill.

‘There’s no easy way to explain. I can only liken it to being near a fire. I can feel the hottest parts and the cooler areas and where there’s no heat at all. Yet it isn’t heat. It resembles no feeling I knew when I was alive.’

He paused to watch me. ‘Place your foot on the spade as you push it into the earth, then pull back on the handle to break it up.’ He stood behind me, watching me dig, so close he could have reached around me and taken the spade handle. He obviously wanted to.

I was hyper-conscious of his proximity. I wanted to lean back into him. It would have been so nice to rest my back against his chest, or lean my head onto his shoulder. I was scared I might actually do it, the way you do things in dreams you’d never dare to in real life, so I held my body rigid as I dug, aware of my every movement, careful not to touch him even accidentally. The space between us had its own force field.

Zachary sighed, his breath stirring the wisps of hair by my ear, sending shivers down my spine. ‘I hate that I can’t help you.’

He moved away and crouched by the growing pile of soil at the edge of the torchlight. I inhaled deeply, finally able to breathe again. Zachary examined the pebbles and bits of broken pottery I dug up with the earth, but I was sure I felt his eyes on me just as much. My face burned like his gaze was hot. I hoped he’d think it was just from exertion.

I spotted something white and angular among the soil and rocks, and pulled it free. ‘Look. Is it yours?’

Zachary leaned closer, eyes alert, but shook his head. ‘I don’t feel anything from it. Many criminals were buried here. We’re near farmland, there might be animal bones too.’

I nodded, and returned to digging. I tried to put all my focus into my hands on the spade handle, my feet sliding in the crumbling soil.

The night fell silent. The only sounds were the pant of my breath, the crunch of the spade in the stony soil and the occasional hoot or bark of a night animal. The hole grew, inch by slow inch. My face and hands felt both cold and too hot. Sweat stuck my plait to the back of my neck.

A couple of times, Zachary saw car lights in the distance, and I raced to turn off the torch and crouch in the bushes. Both times were false alarms – no cars passed us by, and I returned to digging.

Then . . .

‘There,’ Zachary half-shouted.

I dropped the spade. I followed where he pointed and grabbed the shard sticking out of the soil. I wiped the dirt off it. It wasn’t a whole bone, but it was certainly bone. ‘Is this yours?’ I asked.

He brought his hand close to mine. ‘It’s mine,’ he said.

I scraped the bulk of the soil back into the hole, after pocketing the bone. It was small, but it was a burning weight. I picked up the torch and turned away from the crossroads. Neither of us spoke until we made it back through the hedge.

‘Are you all right?’ Zachary asked when we got into the field, his voice low with concern.

I nodded, and flashed him a small smile. ‘I’m fine. I should be asking you if you’re okay. You’re the one who just saw your . . .’ I hesitated over the word ‘grave’.

He shrugged. ‘I’ve had enough years to get used to the idea of having a body that isn’t this one.’ He glanced down at himself.

He smiled at me in the moonlight.

The torchlight bounced through the furrows in the soil ahead of us.

After a minute, he said, ‘I’d like to speak with you again about your mother.’

I looked up at him, surprised by the twist in the conversation.

He kicked at the clods of earth as he walked, though no soil sprayed from his feet like it did from mine. ‘That was the deal we made,’ he said, responding to my surprise. ‘You help me, and I tell you what I know. I don’t like being so in your debt.’

I pulled my locket from my sweater and held it, though my fingers were caked with grime. I wasn’t prepared for this right now, but there was no way I’d say no. ‘Okay,’ I said.

‘First, a question.’ I felt his eyes on me. ‘You said before that you have no memory of your mother. Why is that?’

I glanced up at the starry sky. ‘I was in a car accident when I was ten, on the road outside the inn. A deer ran out in front of our car, and Dad swerved into a tree. My mum died. I sustained a trauma to my head, lost my memory and started to see things other people couldn’t.’

‘Elizabeth, I remember the accident.’

I stopped walking. Zachary kept going for a second, then stopped when he realized I had. He looked back at me.

‘You remember?’

He walked back towards me. ‘Yes. I came to the inn, and it was in chaos.’ His eyes held mine, watching the effect his words were having on me. ‘The innkeeper and the staff were in shock and deep in mourning. Their emotions struck me, because they reflected mine – I had already lost Bess.’

His lips formed a thin, sympathetic line. ‘I deeply regret that you lost your mother, Elizabeth. Yet I am very glad you survived. I didn’t know, at the time, if you had. I simply knew that the girl I had seen at the inn never returned.’

I nodded. ‘Everyone tells me I’m nothing like how I was as a child. Do you think that’s true?’

He tilted his head to one side. ‘When I was seventeen, I’d been working the roads for a year and I’d killed my own brother. I was far removed from my childhood self too. You’ve lived through great trauma. You cannot escape its effects.’

I let the spade slip through my hand, and stabbed it into the hard soil by my foot. ‘I wish I could.’

‘No,’ he said with a smile, ‘you do not.’ He took my elbow, and we started walking again towards the dark trees. He let go of me after a few paces.

‘My life was a disaster,’ he said, ‘yet, Philip aside, I wouldn’t change a moment of it, because it brought me to the Highwayman Inn and to Bess. The years since Bess disappeared have been the most trying of my existence, alive or dead. I didn’t think any experience could be worse than losing Philip, but when Philip died, I at least had the small comfort of believing I would join him in death soon. When Bess went, I knew I was facing – perhaps am facing – an eternity without her. I wished many times my existence would end, but it didn’t. And now I’ve met you, and the possibilities in the future are blinding.’

I glanced up at him. His face shone with the moonlight and a vibrancy that was purely Zachary.

‘I believe it will be the same for you. You may not feel now that there’s a purpose to what you’ve been through, but somewhere along the road, you’ll reach a place you couldn’t have travelled to by any other route, and you’ll be grateful for it.’

‘I hope so.’

‘You don’t need to hope. Because it will happen.’

I looked at my feet as they moved across the soil, and allowed myself a moment to feel the slow hope that ran in my veins like honey. Maybe he was right. I’d wished many times I could scrub out the last seven years from my life, but if I had, I’d never have met Susie, I’d never be forming the bond I was starting to with Dad. And I’d never have met Zachary. Zachary who was perfect, who I could be my weird self with. Zachary who, for now, was all mine.

We continued through the woods in silence, Zachary staying by my side to take my hand when I had to pick my way through exposed roots or over a fallen branch. It wasn’t necessary – I was getting just as good at clambering around at night as him – but he had a good excuse for being old-fashioned, and I wasn’t going to turn down an opportunity to take his hand.

We stopped when the black outline of the inn loomed beyond the trees. I turned off the torch, and stifled a yawn. The caffeine was wearing off.

‘Meet me here on Saturday morning?’ I asked.

He nodded. Then he grinned, like he’d remembered all over again that a miracle was about to happen; that he was finally going to leave the inn.

‘I can scarcely wait,’ he said. He lifted my hand and kissed it, then he dipped his head to me and drew back into the darkness of the trees.

I turned to face the inn before he could see my silly grin. I headed across the grass towards the outbuildings, swinging the spade by my side as if it weighed nothing, as if I’d used it to make sandcastles, not dig up human bones.

I was so dreamily elated when I put the spade back on the pile of tools next to the door of the outbuildings, I barely winced at the scraping sound it made. When I stood up, I was just in time to see the net curtain at the window twitch.

I froze. I stared at the window. The curtain stayed still, but I hadn’t imagined the movement. I pictured Crowley or Scott, watching me. Goosebumps prickled my skin. I stepped backwards, breath shallow, senses on red alert. I had to get inside the inn.

Before I could move, an angry growl vibrated through the air. I turned towards the inn. Ann hurtled towards me, a blur of textile and white teeth.

I gasped, and bolted – away from the inn, away from the outbuildings, back over the grass, sending chaotic bursts of torchlight towards the woods.