Secret Summers. Glynda Shaw

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СКАЧАТЬ hushed to listen. ”People going into it,” she said. ”People coming out of it. Stories about a mother who’s lost her child, wailing through the night like a banshee. Sometimes though, it’s the child, usually a little girl, looking for her mother. It’s told around where I live,” she gestured vaguely southward, ”a five-year-old haunts the area near the lighthouse.” Heads nodded. “Hotels nearby claim the mother or the little girl drops in now and again for a visit.

      “My aunt told me a story when I was still a teenager, maybe fifteen, twenty years ago. She said she was at a dinner party. She was helping to bring things from the kitchen to the table when another of the guests came in from the living room with a real puzzled look on her face. The guest said there was a black-haired woman in a long red dress standing in the middle of the room when she’d walked through. The woman looked lost or confused. The guest asked her if she was coming to eat. They’d sounded first call for food just about then. The black-haired woman just stood there, staring straight ahead. So the guest turned to go, and now she heard the sound of crying. When she looked back again, the woman wasn’t there anymore.

      “The hostess was in the kitchen,” our storyteller continued after a sip from her wineglass. ”And when my aunt told her what she’d just experienced, she said, ‘Well, she’s back.’ Aunt Jessie said that story still made her get the chills every time she thought about it. She said her friend, the hostess, told her that the black-haired lady, always in the long red dress, just showed up from time to time in the house, always looking for something, never speaking, I guess sort of like a member of the family. My house guests always have to talk!” the tie-dye blouse woman said with a snorty sort of laugh, breaking the tension of the moment, and most everyone else laughed too. I did but not very hard. Monique reached over and squeezed my hand.

      The Orb

      “Can we go hang around?” Monique inquired. ”I’ve got some stuff I want to show Ninian.”

      Her mom’s forehead creased, and for a moment she looked away, then said, “I’d just as soon you stayed near the house. It’s getting pretty dark you know.”

      Monique nodded. ”Sure. Come on, Nin.” She led the way across the yard through the remnants of the party, up a set of somewhat wiggly wooden steps into the laundry area, then through the kitchen, and on into what turned out to be her bedroom. I’d seen my sisters’ rooms, of course, and Monique’s was nothing like theirs. There wasn’t a doll or stuffed animal in sight, but there was a beautiful carved statue of a dolphin, done in—I was to find later—apple wood, mounted on a stand in one corner. A set of shelves held books of all sorts and descriptions. A table held a jumble of clothes and a few grooming items. The bed was inexpensively canopied with a framework made of some kind of pipe or tubing, hung with flowered, fabric shower curtains and old bedspreads. Near the window, however, was the most unique thing of all. This was a structure made of cardboard, tape and foil; it was dish-shaped and about two feet across. There was a complicated looking structure of boards, dowels, and wires that held the dish and allowed it to be aimed. There was a light bulb within the dish and an extension cord running from it to a wall socket. ”My searchlight,” Monique commented, following my gaze. ”That’s how I lighted you in last night. The road’s so dark.”

      “Wow!”

      “She couldn’t be our ghost,” Monique said. ”The little girl Allison was telling about. She’s supposed to be only five.” She said it like it was a foregone conclusion that we had a ghost, and why, I wondered, must it be our ghost?

      “Aunt Claire said there wasn’t a ghost,” I said.

      “No, she didn’t,” Monique countered. ”She just said you were safe, but you noticed how Mother Morland put the blessing of the Goddess on us?”

      “Don’t they do that for everybody?” I asked.

      “Not the way they were looking at you tonight.”

      “Hmmm,” I said. ”You ever notice how when grown-ups tell you you’re safe, that’s the time you want to watch out?”

      “Yeah.”

      “Well, if somebody really had disappeared,” I said after an uncomfortably long silence, “wouldn’t it make sense to tell us about it?”

      “Maybe,” Monique considered. ”That would make sense to us, but grown-ups think that if they don’t say anything to kids, it keeps us from worrying.” And that was certainly true (the thinking part, that is.)

      “I wonder though,” Monique said darkly, “if they’re right after all.”

      “Right about what, about us not worrying?”

      “No about not thinking. There are some things that shouldn’t be thought about, things that follow your thoughts and might get in somehow.” From the road running by Monique’s window and a long way off, the sound of a vehicle approached, low and rumbling. Monique made a move toward her foil and cardboard apparatus, then drew back with a slight shudder. “He was dark,” she stated.

      I nodded for I knew who she meant. Monique moved to close her drapes, then found a piece of paper and a stubby pencil.

      “’The key to things without,’” she said aloud, writing, “‘is that locked safe within.’ That means,” she said, “that the answer to who this guy is comes back to something we can find in ourselves!”

      Catching her enthusiasm, I said, “The thread may run all over the place. We might ask all sorts of people, follow this guy all over the countryside, but eventually it must lead back to where we started?”

      “Open hands, open minds,” she said then. ”If we ask the question enough ways we’ll eventually arrive at the answer.”

      “Gosh,” I said I can’t say I understand that, but …”

      “But still it’s true,” she dismissed my objection. ”Now what do we know about this person?”

      “So far,” I said, “we know that he’s a man, that he’s wearing dark clothes, and that we saw him on the beach.”

      “Maybe,” said Monique. ”Do we really know all of those things?”

      “What do you mean?” I asked.

      “Do we know he’s a man?”

      “Well, he sure looked like one to me,” I said.

      “Still,” she cautioned, “He may have been …” she let the sentence trail since neither of us wanted to put a name to it.

      “Okay,” I said, “we know he looks like a man. He’s dark looking. He was on the beach. He was looking in our direction.”

      She nodded. ”So why would he be looking at us? ‘The thread that runs, however far…’ The answer to who he is or maybe what he is must have something to do with us.”

      “Okay,” I conceded. ”What do we know about us?” As I said that, I suddenly wished I hadn’t.

      “Well,” Monique forged ahead, not noting my discomfiture. ”We’re young. We’re girls. We’re together. We live here, at least now. You’re new here though.”

      Of course, not all of this was true either, but Monique believed it to be. ”Haven’t СКАЧАТЬ