VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 21:29:53 12/20/11 Tue
Author: celtgirl
Subject: Here's one last snippet before Christmas, it's a continuation of the chapter containing the scary bit down below. I had to take a piece out because it contained a spoiler for the actual novel that will make it into print. >>>>
In reply to: celtgirl 's message, "Merry Christmas to all who visit here throughout the year!" on 21:24:25 12/20/11 Tue

Copyright 2011 Cindy Brandner

Casey set a mug of tea beside her and then sat down across from her, with his latest carving project, a wee gargoyle that she wanted for the lip of the bedroom window. “What’s botherin’ ye, Jewel? Was the scene today so bad?”

She smiled up at him, wearily. “How did you know?”

“Yer pale as a sheet an’ quiet as a ghost. I know ye’ve seen some terrible things in this job, but I’ve never seen ye look quite this upset about it.”

It was true, normally the camera did act as a barrier between her and the atrocity she was paid to record. But today, as she had already noted to Gerard, had been different.

“Do ye want to tell me about it?”

“He was young, barely past boyhood.” She picked up the mug of tea, cupping her free hand around the heat. She was freezing.

“He made ye think of Lawrence?”

“Yes, Lawrence. But also someone I knew a long time ago—her name was Jenny.”

Casey paused to pull the knife with a small steady stroke around the ear of the gargoyle. This one had a particularly fearsome face, and yet was quite endearing despite that.

“Tell me about her,” he said softly.

“I met her when I lived over Hugh’s bar. She was just a little bit of a thing, looked like a mouse, with that fine flyaway brown hair and a red-tipped nose. She was always cold, even when the streets were sweltering in the summer. Said she couldn’t remember ever really being warm in her entire life. She reminded me of the Dormouse in Alice, because she was always nodding off to sleep in the corner booth and then waking up mid-sentence from some dream conversation she had been having with herself.”

Speaking of her brought Jenny vividly to her mind, in a way she hadn’t in years. She had put Jenny’s memory away in a box, one that she didn’t open very often. Opening it now she found the pain of the memory distilled by time, but it still carried with it that terrible hollow feeling. The emptiness of never knowing what had happened to someone that you cared about.

She had grown up wealthy and to a certain extent sheltered, though her father had tried to make her aware of the dangers that existed in the world, particularly for women. But money did shelter one, cushioned one’s experience of the world, and allowed one to hide from the uglier realities that poor people faced daily.

Coming from that world and landing herself in a room over Hugh Mulligan’s bar, had been more than a slight shock to the system. Because the darkness of that other world was no longer hidden, it was out in the open and it had only been because Hugh had, for whatever reason, felt fatherly toward her, that she had not been swallowed whole by that darkness, because others had been, a few that she had known personally.

It had been a world of drifters and vagrants, some with money in their pockets, some without, and many who took it out of the hides of others in a variety of ways. There had been more than one man who had suggested going into business with her, and she had not been so naďve as to misunderstand what they meant. One man had been so persistent that Hugh had run him off with a shotgun. Hugh tolerated a certain level of criminality, but men who ran prostitutes weren’t one of those levels.

It was what alarmed her about Jamie’s disappearance from their lives, because she knew too well how a person could simply vanish from their life, leaving behind no more than smoke in their wake. Just a hint of what might have happened, but nothing tangible to grasp onto for those that loved them. And smoke eventually dissipates back into the air from which it came, leaving nothing behind at all, except heartache and years of not knowing. She knew this because of Jenny and that was what had bothered her so badly today about that young boy, with the pale hair and narrow face, it was because he reminded her of Jenny.

Jenny had been a prostitute that walked the street across from Hugh’s pub. Pamela had met her one day when Jenny threatened to cut her for treading on her turf. She had mistakenly thought her a child, though Jenny was older than she was self when they met. She was tiny, with mouse-coloured hair and small pointed face that made her look about twelve. Which, she later informed Pamela, appealed greatly to a certain kind of man. She adjusted her age up and down, according to the client. She had told Pamela once that she was actually twenty, but had been on the streets since she was thirteen.

They had become friends, partly because Jenny came in to Hugh’s for a hot meal once a day and endless cups of tea in the cold weather. Pamela brought her the food, usually something hearty that would last the girl through the chill of the afternoon and night, and would drink tea with her and listen to her talk.

Jenny’s birthday was in September, and one year Pamela had taken her out on the Long Island Rail, with a picnic in tow and blankets and anything else needed to stay the night. They had debarked in Montauk, a sleepy fishing village that had become a tourist mecca in summers, but was virtually deserted after Labour Day each year. They had trekked on foot down Deforest Road, right to the very end and then continued along a private road, that was little more than a narrow pathway, hacked out of the rhododendron bushes that had been planted long ago, on the estate.

The house sat apart from the rest of the summer houses, the furthest one out to the east, high upon a bluff, but sheltered by thick hedging. A rambling old Victorian with a long porch that wrapped around three sides and a view of the stormy Atlantic that was breathtaking.

It had been shut up for the winter, the family who owned it gone back to their lives in New York. It had the secretive look that summer houses always wore when the season was over, as if it had pulled in upon itself and would brood until May of the following year.

Jenny, a true child of city streets, looked at her with grave suspicion.

“Why’d you bring me here?” she asked, shivering in the brisk wind that hit the headland with force.

“I thought it would be nice to get away from that world back there for a day, and because I used to live here.”

Jenny’s chin dropped, her mouth a round ‘o’ of shock. “You lived here—in that house?”

“I did, mostly in the summers, but we often spent Christmases here.” Those Christmases had been wonderful, holed up against the fury of a winter storm, snug inside with the fire and lots of food and books. She had read ‘The Pickwick Papers’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Cricket on the Hearth’ out here on various Christmases and they had lent their festive charms to her memories of this place. Her father had loved Christmas and had made it a wonderful time for her, a time that was inextricably linked to this old house.

When Pamela had lived here there had been a window just above the porch that had a loose hasp and she had used it more than once to regain entry into the house. Fortunately it had not been repaired in the intervening years. The ivy grew up around the house with such virulent proficiency, that they were able to use it as a ladder. They set up camp downstairs in the front room, where a fireplace dominated the long wall, and the floor to ceiling windows in front gave onto the ocean.

Someone else owned the house now, it had been just one more thing lost after her father died and all the money was gone. But it felt as though it were in some small part her own still, as if the girl she had left behind, still ran down to the shore, still strained toward the sea and fell asleep at night to the rhythm of the lighthouse beacon, which could just be glimpsed from her bedroom windows.

They waited until after dark to light a fire, the house was so far from any of its neighbours, that the little light the fire threw wouldn’t be seen and the dark would render the smoke from the chimney invisible.

They had eaten their picnic in the sand dunes that afternoon, and then walked the beach for hours. That night by the fire, they had eaten the leftovers, and had cupcakes with birthday candles ablaze. They told ghost stories as the night grew deeper, scaring themselves witless and then spoke of other things; girlish dreams and hopes and airy castles in the air, that even they were old enough to know would never be real.

They slept by the fire that night, rolled up in blankets, heads pillowed on their own jackets. In the morning, when Pamela woke, the blankets next to her were empty.

She found Jenny standing on the headland, watching the sun rise. Dawn edged out in a narrow line between sky and sea, a coppery blue spreading across the sea, white at its edges. The wind had gone to its rest, and the morning was still, held in an early autumn glass, with all its hues of crimson, gold and sharp-biting blue.

“Thank you—for this—” Jenny’s tiny, nailbitten hand had swept the area in front of her. “It’s beautiful, something to remember for the rest of my life.”

“You’re welcome.”

They stood for a long time that way, watching the sun come over the sea, setting it afire, stealing across the land and limning the trees in morning fire.

The perfect still was broken by a leaf whorling down in softly widening circles; scarlet with brown spots already heralding its imminent decay. The rising sun caught the edge of it, rendering it translucent just before Jenny caught it in her hand. She cupped it softly, gazing at it lying there fragile with its threading veins, in her pale palm.

“That’s what I am, that leaf, just drifting on the wind and waiting to land, but then when I land, someone will just crush me.”

She folded her narrow child’s fingers over the leaf, and then opened them back up and let the wind take the fragments, scattering them to the four winds.

“She disappeared a month later, just before Halloween. I never knew what happened to her. Hugh tried to comfort me by saying that girls in her profession often follow the sun, or change cities if things get too hot in the one they are in. He told me how nice Florida was in the winter, and that we should envy her while we slogged through another New York season. But I don’t think he believed it any more than I did.

"No one ever came looking for her. I went to the police and they told me the same that Hugh had, and even inferred that I was a fool for befriending a prostitute and was likely one myself. She was right, she was like that leaf and someone crushed her, just as she always expected. I just was so shocked at the time to realize someone could just disappear, almost in a puff of smoke, yet I know the truth was bloody and terrifying, most likely.”

“I’m sorry, darlin’.” Casey reached across the space between them to take her hand, and squeeze it. She squeezed back, grateful for his touch which always seemed to make the horrors of the world recede.

“Ye do attract the lost ones, don’t yet, Jewel?”

“What?”

“Well, that wee girl, Charlie back in Boston followed ye about like a pup on a lead, an’ then of course there’s myself.”

“I see your point with the first two, but you are hardly a lost soul, Casey Riordan. I think you have the strongest sense of self I’ve ever encountered in another person.”

“That may be or no, darlin’, but I was lost when ye found me. An’ if ye’d not taken me in, I’d still be followin’ ye about beggin’ ye to. Ah, yer laughin’ but it’s true, an’ I was lost- fresh out of prison with the neighbours spittin’ at my feet an’ makin’ the sign of the cross when I came too close.”

“I was as lost as you, man.”

Her eyes met his and he reached out a hand to cup her jaw, his thumb lightly stroking.

“Yer afraid the same will happen to Jamie, aren’t ye? That he’ll disappear an’ ye’ll never know what happened to him.”

“Yes. You and I both know all too well, Casey, how fragile life is.”

“Aye, Jewel,” his eyes were dark, distant with remembrance of all they had lost even in their own brief years together, “that we do.”

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

Post a message:
This forum requires an account to post.
[ Create Account ]
[ Login ]
[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.