Kiss Me Deadly: Tales of a Paranormal Romance

1. July

The first time Jo Ryan found the red door into Ash House, it was a hot, still day in the middle of July, the kind of day when nothing moved, not even the air.

She was with Ani and Deirdre, Ani’s girlfriend. They’d bought red slushies from the 7-Eleven on Chestnut Street and were sitting on the hill behind Ani’s grandmother’s barn, mixing the slushies with vodka. Deirdre had a clove, which she wasn’t smoking because it was creeping up on ninety degrees. All of them were sticky with red sugar and sweat.

“My dad wants me to get a job,” Ani said. “He said I could work for Mrs. Highsmith until school starts.”

“Cleaning houses?” Deirdre flicked ash into the grass. Matted and green, it was past Jo’s ankles. She dug her bare toes into the cool earth at the roots.

“What’s wrong with that?” Ani demanded. Ani and Deirdre loved to argue more than the old married couples who summered in Coffin Hollow to escape New York. Jo added another half inch of vodka to her slushie.

“It’s just so...” Deirdre sighed and stubbed out the clove. “God, Ani. Why don’t we just go live with my sister in New York? This town is like something out of a horror movie.”

Jo felt sweat drops creep down her back, in time with the buzzing insects in the field beyond. “It’s hotter in New York,” she said.

“See? I don’t want to sleep on your sister’s floor all summer,” Ani said. “Besides, New York is expensive, and I’m paying my own way after next year.”

Deirdre rolled her eyes. She was a summer girl, bringing the sweat and smoke of the city with her every June 20th since Ani and Jo were in sixth grade. She’d been the first one in black boots, the first one to cut the necks out of her brother’s T-shirts and wear them over a skirt from her old prep school. The first girl Ani ever kissed.

“I’m done with watching the cows fart,” Deirdre said. “Let’s go see if my brother has some pot.”

“You said you’d give me a ride to practice,” Ani said, when Deirdre stood up and brushed grass off her butt. “And that you’d talk to Thom about the shirt designs for the gig on Saturday. I hate how you get when you drive around baked.”

Deirdre was pretty, Jo supposed, but when her face got that way, all off-balance, like a toddler about to pitch a fit, she was a doll who’d come out of the mold wrong. “Shit,” was all she said, before she slumped back down.

Ani sucked more of her vodka cherry slushie through her straw. “What should we do?”

Jo looked down the valley. The field ended at a barbwire fence. Beyond that was overgrown, except for a slate roof poking through the trees. It vibrated in the sunlight, spreading an ache behind her eyes. Like a drop of quicksilver on green glass, the roof blurred her vision. The buzzing of the insects grew louder than PA feedback at one of their shows.

“We could go look around Ash House.” The words came into her mind like raindrops, spoke from her mouth like ripples. It wasn’t her idea, but it was in her brain like a seed.

“Yeah,” Deirdre said. “And when we’re done maybe we can tip over some cows and smash a mailbox. God, Jo. You are such a hillbilly sometimes.”

Ani gave Deirdre a hard punch on the shoulder. “Shut up. It’s not like we have anything better to do.”

“I gave you a better idea,” Deirdre said. “Go back to my house. At least my room has an AC.”

Jo stood up and pulled her boots back on. Deirdre and Ani kept arguing. All they did was argue and hook up, when Deirdre wasn’t baked or locked in her room, drawing her creepy pen-and-ink pictures. Bleeding women, vampires, men with raven heads, and children with fish tails. Deirdre’s drawings bothered Jo somewhere low in her stomach, like when her mother had been drinking back in Providence, and dating the guy who liked to open Jo’s door and look at her when he thought she was asleep.

“...And I’m not going to poke around that place and break my damn neck,” Deirdre’s voice rose. “Besides...” her voice slid into that mean, petty register that always reminded Jo of a blade going into something soft. “You know it’s haunted as shit, right? They hanged a guy in the front yard, vigilante style, old Wild West shit. Like, a hundred people have died in there, I bet.”

“That’s just kid stories,” Ani said. She’d had more of the red drink than anyone. Her plastic mini-mart cup was almost empty, and her words were slower than the heat.

“There’s nothin’ in there. Rats and spiders maybe.”

Deirdre’s eyes narrowed. “I dare you to go in. Put a mark on one of the upstairs windows.”

Ani looked sick. Ani hated spiders, had as long as Jo had known her.

“Forget it,” Ani said. “Let’s stay here. Jo and I have to get to practice soon anyway.”

Deirdre opened her mouth to say something else, shrill and nasty as a New York taxi, and Jo spoke instead. “I’ll do it.”

Deirdre stretched, her skinny arms flexing under her tattoos. She’d drawn them herself—an angel with black wings on one arm, a goat-legged satyr on the other, prone girls blond and brunette at their feet, the blood from their wounds running down her arms in dark red ink. “Well,” she said, “you may be a hillbilly, but at least you’re not a pussy.”

“Jo, this is stupid,” Ani muttered.

“Yeah, probably,” Jo said. She was walking down the hill, though, her boots sinking into the high grass. The barrier between Ani’s property and Ash House was a rusted fence, and she stepped on it to get over. It wasn’t like anyone was going to yell at her for letting the livestock out. Ash House had been abandoned for years, probably since the forties, which was when Ani’s grandmother had moved to the farm to marry Ani’s grandfather when he got back from France.

The house appeared and disappeared, peeping through the apple trees and scrub oaks.

The undergrowth wasn’t just grass. Blackberry vines scraped along Jo’s bare legs, drawing blood. Wild roses coated her with pollen and scent, petals sticking to her skin.

She’d look like hell when she came back out. Her Stiff Little Fingers shirt was damp all along the spine, and she peeled it off, going down to her bra. Hell, it was more than Deirdre wore, most summer days.

The orchard ended, fewer and fewer trees, and Jo was no longer walking through brush but a long-forgotten lawn, Queen Anne’s lace and daisies brushing the blood from her thighs.

Ash House was all at once no longer a mirage but solid, tall and black, nearly blotting out the relentless sun. Jo stopped, standing in the tall grass, and wiped sweat off the back of her neck with her shirt.

Ani and Deirdre were probably watching her. She’d be a tiny white figure in the green. The little girl lost. That is, if Deirdre hadn’t gotten bored and gone back to picking fights with Ani or taken her busted-ass Dodge Dart and gone home to smoke pot, which was how Deirdre’s temper tantrums usually ended.

Jo had liked it much better when only Ani would have been watching her from the top of the hill.

Ash House waited, while all around her the insects hummed, air vibrating with their song, sweat and dirt pressing against Jo’s skin.

All of the broken windows stared at her, the biggest insect of all, refracting a thousand tiny, shirtless Jos back into the wilderness beyond the panes.

She picked her way along a pitted path, bricks strewn across the lawn, some upright like tiny headstones, some buried in overgrown grass. Big, shaggy bushes that she guessed had once been topiary animals cluttered the lawn. She could still see a leg and a head, a tail. She’d come up on Ash House from the rear, and when she set foot on the sagging wraparound porch, boards cracked like rifle shots.

The back door was nailed over with plywood, a no trespassing sign turned to metal lace still attached to the center.

Jo picked her way along the side of the house. It was covered in dead leaves and spider webs, but she didn’t see any of the usual stuff—the beer bottles, food wrappers, used condoms—that usually drifted up around an old abandoned place. The town cemetery, most of which was disused and ancient, was littered with the stuff. Ani and Deirdre had hooked up on one of the cool, flat granite sarcophagi that sat above ground in the far corner, back by the woods.

The far edge of the same woods crowded Ash House, at this angle blocking her view of the hill. All she could see were twisted trunks, scrub, and glossy green leaves like beetle shells.

The front of Ash House looked down a winding drive. Once, it had been white abalone shell, but now weeds had erupted, turning it into a ribbon of wildflowers and green amid the vines and brush. A bridge at the foot of the drive forded the Acushket River, here just a narrow stream with steep banks and a current that could knock your legs out. The Acushket ran down and widened and powered mills to the south, but here it was just background to the insects and the whispering leaves.

The roof of the porch was sky blue, paint peeling in long fingers, hanging almost down to Jo’s face like Spanish moss.

The door of Ash House was twice as wide as Jo, and it was red. Iron pulls looped through snarling gargoyle mouths in place of knobs.

The door stood open. Not much. Just enough to invite someone in.

Jo put a hand on the door, slid a foot over the threshold. There were dead leaves on the floor inside, and in advance of her footsteps, things scuttled into the shadows.

Before she could think too hard about it, she gave the door a hard shove and let it propel her inside. The hinges shrieked, echoed off the high ceiling, and then everything went silent.

The insects outside stopped humming. The things in the shadow stopped moving. The only sounds were Jo’s own heart and the Acushket, rushing through the iron pilings that held up the bridge, and on over the rocks.

Jo made it six steps into Ash House that day. She had decided to go up the sweeping front stairs, banisters like the winding river outside, carpet rotted like winter moss, and signal Ani and Deirdre from the round stained glass window that rose at the first landing. It was pink and green glass, light like underwater wavering through it, and it was remarkably intact. Like the rest of Ash House, nature had its way, but the local kids didn’t seem to know the place existed.

She walked the six steps, to the center of the entryway. The leaves crunched under her boots, hissing across the tile floor. There was a picture there, but it was too filthy to make out.

When she looked up, there was a shape in front of the window. Tall and thin, at first she took it for another shadow. Then she saw the eyes and the teeth, the dark jacket and tie, the white shirt with black space floating above it. The light bent where it shot through the shape, and hit the floor in front of Jo. The shape cast no shadow.

Jo didn’t distinctly remember running from Ash House, skipping the steps, and thrashing through the grass to the bridge. Deirdre and Ani eventually found her walking down Route 7. She wasn’t hot, even though the sun bounced off the asphalt and made everything shimmer. Jo couldn’t get warm until they’d dropped her off at home, and she’d watched the Dart’s tail lights disappear into the gathering twilight.

2. August

Jo woke up to music. It wasn’t music-box music, or the thump and hum of the world stuff or old-school jazz her mother usually played while she was in her studio. This was loud. Loud enough that it rattled the screen in her open bedroom window.

She rolled out of bed and peeked outside. The Ryan house was one of a pair on a dead-end street. There had been three houses, but the one on the far left had burned down in the 1970s, when Jo’s mom lived in the Ryan house with Grandpa Paul and Grandma Leigh. There was just a chimney now, and a vacant lot.

The three driveways were close together, three lines of shell and sand. In the neighbor’s driveway, a car was parked, stereo blasting.

It was easily the ugliest car Jo had ever seen—the color of a rotten pumpkin where it wasn’t just bubbled primer and rust, the bumper strapped on with plastic zip-ties, the windshield spattered with dead bugs.

Square and lopsided, like an aging pit bull, it crouched facing the street, daring anyone to get too close. She wondered where it had come from—if it ran, she’d be amazed. Unfortunately, there was nothing wrong with the radio.

Jo pulled on shorts and a tank top and walked outside barefoot. Her mom was locked in the back room with the air conditioner, which she needed to cool her computer system. She’d picked up some design work for some big animated movie coming out at Christmas, and she was working nonstop, drawing and rendering a pair of adorable space aliens so that they could be inhabited by the voices of celebrities.

“Hey!” Jo shouted. She could see a pair of legs, and part of a torso, ensconced in the car’s innards. It kind of looked like the car was eating them. “Hey!” she shouted again. She left her porch and crossed the driveway. The song was something old, that you’d hear on an 8-track. Old black water, keep on rolling.

Jo winced as a piece of shell bit into her foot, and thumped on the hood. “Hey!”

The body inside the car jerked upward, slamming his skull into the underside of the hood. “OW!”

Jo drew back. “Oh man,” she said. “Sorry about that.” She wasn’t entirely. The guy reached inside the window and turned down the stereo.

“I know you,” he said. “You’re Mel’s kid.”

Jo realized she knew him, too. “You’re the Powells’ son.”

He grabbed a rag and swiped at his hands, then picked up a beer from the shadow of the car and took a long pull. “Guilty.”

“How do you know my mom?” Jo said. She didn’t think Melanie Ryan, with her smart black clothes and wire-rimmed glasses and her four years of sobriety, would have anything to do with their next-door neighbors beyond yelling at Mrs. Powell to bring her crop of small, yappy dogs inside when it got late. She didn’t think she’d ever seen Mr. Powell. Maybe there wasn’t one.

“I trimmed her roses and did the lawn a few times last summer,” the guy said. Jo knew his name was something short, like something a tough guy in a black-and-white movie would be called.

The guy stuck out his hand. “Drew.”

“Jo,” said Jo. Drew’s hand left a long smear of grease on her palm, picking out all the flaws, all the calluses from playing bass with Ani, and the thin line where she’d cut her hand on a rusty lawn chair as a kid.

“So why’d you come over here?” Drew leaned against the car and finished off the beer. “You lonely?”

“What?” Jo’s voice rose a little more than she would have liked. “No! I mean ... the music. It woke me up.”

He actually smirked at her. “It’s eleven in the morning.”

Jo narrowed her eyes. “Night owl.”

“Fair enough,” said Drew Powell, and turned his music back up. Jo supposed she could try to go back to sleep until Ani came to get her for practice, but she’d woken up twisted in her sheets, sweating even though the day wasn’t humid.

She dreamed a lot, and in the dreams were things that sent her shooting into wakefulness. They were dark shapes standing in front of stained glass, things with dark faces whispering at her from piles of leaves. Thorns the size of her little finger wrapped around pale, naked thighs.

Jo went back to the screened part of the porch and pulled on a pair of sneakers. She got her cell phone and her army surplus pack, which was stuffed with her wallet and her lyrics notebook, a flashlight, and an umbrella. Melanie believed in being prepared, and it was easier to lug the stuff around then get chewed out.

She thought for a second and then went into the kitchen drawer and added Mel’s camping knife. Not a lame little Swiss Army knife like you could buy at a grocery store—Mel’s had a three-inch blade and attachments to open cans and saw through rope.

Grabbing a bottle of water, Jo was back out the door, ignoring Drew Powell even though he stopped working on his eyesore of a car again and stared at her.

It was at least three miles to Ani’s grandmother’s farm, and she was soaked by the time she got there, the water bottle depleted. Great plan, Jo, she thought. You’re going to die on the way back.

Ash House peered at her over the treetops again, and now its slate roof, gables sharp as razor blades, didn’t seem at all mysterious or inviting.

She circled the wilderness of the orchard, though, and repeated her walk up the drive. The red door still stood open. Her footprints were still in the tile of the front hall.

When she stepped into the house, the oppressive silence almost smothered her. She almost couldn’t make herself look up at the landing. A few panes were gone in the stained glass now, like someone had picked the petals off a flower. Pink glass crunched under her feet when she made herself go up the stairs, stand in the spot where she’d seen the shadow.

Nothing there. Nothing to spook her except a lot of cobwebs and a really, really dead bird that had clearly flown into the house some years ago and made its final resting place on the sill.

Jo blew out a puff of the stale house air and felt like the world’s biggest idiot. She’d actually been scared, standing down there in the entry. Known something was watching her, when it wasn’t anything except a reflection.

Letting light and shadow fool you wasn’t very punk rock. Jo wiped sweat off her face and watched it fall to the filthy floor.

Another set of footprints sat in the dust, next to the scuffs of her shoes. Precise, pointed toe and square heel. No scuffs. Standing still.

The sun snuffed out behind a high bank of anvil-shaped thunderheads, bloody pink through the lens of the window. A puff of wind blew the red door wide, hinges shrieking.

A voice spoke into Jo’s left ear, very close and clear. “ Who are you? ”

Jo took a step, tangled her feet, and went down hard. The same hand Drew Powell had covered in grease twisted under her, sharp and hot as driving a nail through her palm.

When she looked up, she saw the shape. Saw it wasn’t a shape, but a figure. The weak, yellow stormlight spilling from outside passed through him, and dust motes danced from her fall, silvered as if they were falling through a projector light.

The figure stretched out his hand. “ Don’t be afraid. ”

Thunder cracked the heavens open. Rain cascaded from the sky, a thousand leaks sprouting in the ceiling of Ash House.

Jo managed to get up. She thought the figure might have reached for her, his hand drifting through the fabric of her tank top. His face, she noticed with that snapshot clarity that comes with panic, was very young, close to her age. Hair dark as ink swept back in a style at least seventy years out of date. Dapper suit and tie.

And dead. Dead, dead, dead.

Jo didn’t know how the thought came to her that the boy on the stairs was dead. Not a hallucination or heatstroke, but a departed. When it did come, though, she ran. Ran from the house through the wide open door, out into the thunderstorm that rolled from one side of the hollow to the other, into rain that was colder than putting ice cubes on bare skin. Ran until she couldn’t go any further, and collapsed under the Route 7 overpass, which was where Drew Powell found her after the rain stopped, when he came rattling along in his barely functioning ’71 Nova. He took her with him to buy belts and a new air filter and then drove her home.

He never asked what she was doing on the road in the first place.

3. September

Jo hadn’t intended to start her junior year with her arm in a sling, but at least it got her out of PE for a few weeks. By the time Drew had gotten her home that afternoon, her hand was twice its normal size, and she couldn’t bend her wrist without her eyes watering.

The doctor had diagnosed two broken fingers and a severe sprain. Jo told her mother she fell doing a stage dive. Mel muttered something about that Deirdre girl and bad influences, and drove her to the urgent care clinic in Pittsfield.

She didn’t tell Drew her “ghost story,” as Ani insisted on calling it. Jo would have argued that just because she saw a boy the light cut straight through, who appeared out of nowhere, that didn’t make the boy a ghost. Even if that ugly coffin-heavy word had dropped into her head when they “touched.” Dead.

At least it gave Ani something to talk about, and it was better than her endless chatter about Deirdre, who was back at her pretentious private art school in New York.

Ani should be the one in a private school, Jo thought. Ani was talented—the drawing, the guitar playing, singing, anything she turned her hands and voice to. Jo had never been jealous of it until Deirdre showed up. Before her, they were Ani and Jo—Jo got decent grades and wrote songs, Ani got detention and wrote the music.

During the free period that should have been PE, she wandered behind the outbuilding that housed the mowers and the thing that painted lines on the football field. Smokers went there, and occasionally you came upon a couple who just couldn’t hold it together until final bell.

She thought it would be deserted, and maybe she could nap in the sun. The dreams were worse and sleeping at home wasn’t happening that often.

She never should have gone back in that house. She saw it almost every night in her dreams—but not ruined, like it really was, but whole and inhabited, every window glowing with yellow lamplight. Apple trees thrashing in wind, shedding their ripe, red crop all over the ground. And the thorns, winding around and around her legs, blood running over her skin and slicking across her thighs.

Drew Powell leaned against the shed when she came around the corner. His hair was a little longer now, the high-and-tight he’d come home with mussed on top. Drew had been in military school all of last year. Jo figured that was a polite way of saying juvie—Drew didn’t look like structure and marching were his thing.

“Hey,” he said. He was smoking the end of a cigarette, holding it pinched tight between two fingers like James Dean.

Jo gave him a nod, crouched against the wall, and tilted her face into the sun.

“You didn’t tell me you broke your hand doing B&E,” Drew said. Jo cracked her eye open.

“It’s not B&E if the door’s open.”

Drew threw his cigarette down and stomped on it. “Why poke around that place? Nothing there.”

Jo bit her tongue. Oh, there was something there. Just not what Drew was thinking of. “It was a dare,” she said.

“Oh yeah?” Drew perked up, and he slid down to sit next to her. “You do that a lot? Truth or dare?”

Jo shook her head. She knew he was fishing for her to say something so he’d know whether she was a slut or not, whether the vintage Cure shirt and short imitation-leather skirt and ripped up tights meant she gave it up, or if she just wasn’t into American Eagle and pastels, like the rest of the girls at Hawthorn High. Drew Powell wasn’t the most subtle guy who’d ever hit on her.

“Just the one time,” she said. “And I broke my hand, so there you go.”

She stood up. She might as well go try and squint at her homework until next period. Besides, if faculty caught her out here with Drew, who clearly didn’t have an excuse to be wandering hither and yon and sparking up cigarettes, she’d get bounced to detention, and she could put off having that conversation with Mel forever.

“My brother went down there once,” Drew said. “He said it was pretty crazy inside.”

“He on a dare too?” Jo shouldered her bag. She’d thrown out her backpack—she couldn’t get the smell out, the musty, dirty graveyard smell of dry rot and small, dead animals it had picked up in Ash House. The new bag was made of recycled seat belts, and she’d let Ani spray-paint some designs on it.

“Nah, him and his buddies were drinking after graduation,” Drew said. “They got wasted and decided to go have a séance. There was a murder there, you know.”

“Sure,” Jo said, wondering if it was the same one Deirdre had been babbling about. But she didn’t ask. Being too interested would give Drew his in. “I should be going. I have calc seventh period.”

“Or we could go get some beer and ride out to the quarry,” Drew said. He suggested it the same way other guys would suggest soda and slices at O’Reilly’s Pizza Explosion. “I rebuilt the engine on the Nova. It’s smooth. And I cleaned it out some since I gave you that first ride.”

“No thanks,” Jo said. She felt as if she were in a PSA—say no to drugs, skipping school, and guys with blue eyes and Chevy Novas.

Drew shrugged. “Your loss.”

Jo left, because what could you say to that? She was going to study in the student lounge, but she went to the library instead, and spent the last thirty minutes of the period reading about Ephraim Day, who planted the ash trees that gave Ash House its name. His son Nicholas, and Nicholas’s intended bride, Abigail Worth, who drowned in the Acushket in 1902, on a perfectly clear and sunny day. A piece from the historical society, years later, suggested that the poor, desperate girl might have thrown herself into the current. But no one knew. Would never know.

It was a good story, but it wasn’t murder, and it wasn’t what made Jo go sprinting to the girl’s room with a wave of panicked nausea.

The picture of Nicholas Day was a picture of the boy on the stairs.

Jo guessed Ani was right. She had a ghost story. Even if she didn’t want it.

4. October

Jo and Ani used to tell ghost stories, when they were ten or eleven, mash-ups of stories told to them by Ani’s older siblings to make the girls leave the grown-ups alone, the weird kid superstitions that get passed around, and slasher movies they’d watched on cable when Mel thought they were asleep.

Their favorite was the Hookman—largely because it gave Jo a chance to recite, dramatically, “And there ... on the handle ... was a HOOK!” while their friends shrieked and hid in their sleeping bags.

Plus, it started with older kids making out, something Jo and Ani were deeply committed to researching.

The Hookman had been a real person, an escaped lunatic or, if Jo was telling the story, escaped serial killer who’d lost his hand to a combine harvester. That detail always got an “Ewwww.”

Nicholas Day wasn’t that kind of ghost. He was real. A ghost who’d showed himself to her, and talked to her, and left Jo with baggy blue crescents under her eyes from the dreams he sent swirling through her mind like luminescent fish on a current.

The trees around Ash House were all leafless, and she could see it clearly from the road. Spiny, black, skeletal porch rails like fingers trying to hold a bundle of sticks together.

In Jo’s new bag was a candle, a Ouija board, and a couple of the pumpkin cookies she’d baked with Ani, before Ani went to New York to spend Halloween with Deirdre. They were going to dress as two of the seven Greek muses, and walk in the Greenwich Village parade. Unsurprisingly, Deirdre was Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy.

Hallow’s Eve was the day when the space between the living and the dead was smallest. Ani’s grandmother had told them that. The dead stood at arm’s length, just out of reach, unless you had the tools. Ani’s grandmother always had the best stories.

Jo considered, before she opened the red door, that maybe she didn’t want to talk to Nicholas Day.

But she had to. Had to see him. Had to make sure it was real, and that she wasn’t just crazy or totally sleep deprived in that unfun, Fight Club way.

She brushed aside the dead leaves on the foyer floor, and knelt. The tile was cold through her jeans, and she zipped her coat up to her chin.

One of Ani’s lighters had found its way into her bag, and she snapped it against the candle. It wasn’t anything special, just a scented pillar she’d lifted from her mother’s room. The candle guttered in the wind, and then the door slammed shut, gusts howling around the outside of Ash House.

Jo put the Ouija board on the floor in front of her, and the little plastic shoe-shaped thing on the board.

This wouldn’t work, she thought.

This couldn’t work.

If it were this easy, people would be talking to ghosts every day.

Still, she breathed in, the cold musty air of the closed-up house, and spoke. “Nicholas Day.”

The candle flickered and went out, smoke fleeing into the draft, twisting back on itself in the sliver of moon that came through the pink and green window.

“Shit!” Jo flicked the lighter once, twice, three times before she got a flame, and her shaking fingers knocked over the candle as she tried to light it.

It rolled away, and when it stopped it lay before a pair of black, pointed men’s shoes.

“ Yes? ” Nicholas Day said to her. “ What is it? ”

In the moonlight, he was nearly whole. Hair darker than black feathers swept back from a narrow forehead. Dark, straight brows topped dark, piercing eyes. A sharp chin tilted down at Jo, where she crouched, lighter cupped in her hands. She couldn’t have moved, not for anything in the world.

Nicholas Day put his hands in his pockets. Watching him move wasn’t like watching a person move. He flowed, from one point to the next, like ink suspended in water.

“ I saw you before. In the summertime, when the roses were blooming. ”

“Yeah,” Jo said. Her voice was no bigger than a breath. Her throat felt curiously itchy, as if seeing the ghost had compressed everything in her body, sight and breath, down into a single point. All she could see was Nicholas Day, the young face above the serious black old-fashioned suit. “That was me.”

“ Why did you come here? ” he asked.

Jo swallowed hard, over the lump in her throat. “It was a dare. Then, I wanted to see if I was crazy.”

“ You don’t seem mad to me,” Nicholas said. He crouched, on the same level as her. “ What’s your name? ”

“Jo,” she whispered. “Jo Ryan.”

“ Jo. ” Nicholas made a face, those stone white features rearranging themselves like living clay. “ Is that for Joanna or Josephine? ”

The lighter burned her hand, and Jo dropped it. The darkness wasn’t absolute, just creeping around the edges of the room. Nicholas was the brightest thing in it. “It’s Josephine,” she said.

“ Then I shall call you Josephine,” Nicholas said. He stretched out a hand, sleeve pulling back to show a white cuff precise as a paper fold, a cufflink of black stone bordered in silver, and twin scars on his wrist, running the long way.

“Can I ... touch you?” Jo asked. This close, she could feel the cold coming off him. Not like the air outside, but a deep, glacial cold that breathed and drifted across her skin.

“ If you wish,” Nicholas said. “ If you believe I’m real. ”

Jo lifted her fingers, stopped before they met the tips of his. “But you’re not real. Are you?”

“ I’m real,” Nicholas said, and his flesh met hers. It felt like plunging her hand into ice, and velvet, and pins and needles. It didn’t feel like skin.

“ See, real,” Nicholas told her. “ Simply dead. ”

5. November

At the top of Ash House, there sat a cupola with just enough room for one girl and one ghost to share the space, along with half a dozen doves and drifting falls of cobwebs.

Below was snow, patchy, showing the dark ground beneath near the river. Jo blew on her fingers through her gloves, tapping them together to keep warm.

“I died in these clothes,” Nicholas said. “I wish I could change them. You’re so bright. Girls nowadays wear so many colors.”

Jo had come every day for a week. Slowly, Nicholas had showed her Ash House. She went through the red door, and she stayed until it was almost too dark to find her way back down the drive and across the bridge. She would have stayed longer if she could.

Nicholas was more solid now. She had a theory it had to do with her really seeing him, all the details of his face and his thin, elegant hands that drifted through the cobwebs hanging from the eaves, brothers in white, spidery and insubstantial.

The question came out before she had time to think about it. “How did you die?”

Nicholas smiled sadly. He didn’t look like anyone who’d be alive now, in the twenty-first century. He looked like something from an old movie or a faded portrait come to life. His eyes were even more striking in daylight, obsidian holes that saw everything and let nothing escape. “My love drowned in the river. It was after the new year. The ice was melting, and the current was swollen.”

He drew back the sleeve of his jacket, and then his shirt. “I used a razor. I couldn’t bear life without her.”

His voice, too, was no longer a powdery, echoey thing that bounced off the ceiling of the rooms below and scared the hell out of Jo when it whispered over her shoulder.

“That’s awful,” she said. Nicholas reached out, and a cold spot blossomed on her cheek.

“I’ve been alone for a long time. It wasn’t the escape I hoped it would be.”

“Are you like... stuck here?” Jo gestured around. “In Ash House? Or can you fly off anywhere you please?” It would be nice, she thought. No grades, no mother, no sleepless nights. No Ani asking her to read the latest text from Deirdre and analyze what it meant and no Drew sneering at her from across the parking lot where he sat on the hood of his stupid Nova.

“I’m bound to the place I died,” Nicholas said. “I think most of us are. The dead. I can only leave if...” He coughed, and looked away, to where an eighteen-wheeler rumbled past on Route 7.

“If what?” Jo said.

“It’s only a theory, you understand,” Nicholas said. “But if I were to have a living ... well, an escort. Someone who desired me to come home with them. I think I could go then. I could haunt a person and not a place.”

Haunt. Such an ugly word. A tombstone word. Jo shifted. Her feet were numb, and the rest of her was starting to freeze. The sun was an orange halo below the horizon.

“I have to go,” she said. “My mother has been getting on my ass about homework. And I have rehearsal tonight with the band. We’re playing in Lee at the end of the month. A real all-ages show. It’s a big deal.” For Ani, anyway. Lately, her bass felt like a rock in her fist, and her fingers could barely pluck the strings.

“Josephine.” Nicholas touched her again, closing his marble-ice fingers around her wrist. “Don’t go.”

“I should,” Jo sighed. “I’ll come by tomorrow, though. It’s Friday. I can stay later.” She could just lie to Ani, and her mother. She’d rather listen to Nicholas anyway. How many people had a person to tell them firsthand about life in 1902?

“Then let me give you a parting gift,” Nicholas said. He closed the space between them and pressed his lips against Jo’s. It was like kissing velvet and swallowing snowflakes caught on the tongue and it was her pulse throbbing in her ears and a million other things, until her lip pricked and she pulled away, feeling the crack and tasting the droplet of her own blood on her tongue. Her lips had gone chapped and numb.

Nicholas backed away. “I so wish it wasn’t this way, Josephine. For the first time in a really long time.”

“Me too,” Jo whispered. The sun was gone now, the sky silver as the tinge on Nicholas’s skin. She slipped through the trap door without saying anything else and started home. She crossed the bridge, listening to the water rush along under and over the cracks in the ice. River ice was rippled, in the shape of waves and current, and staring down in the twilight Jo could almost imagine a hundred faces staring back at her from under the ice. The burbling water turned to voices, the wind in the bare trees to screams.

She didn’t know why, but she was gripping the rail and leaning over, staring back at those frozen, open-mouthed ice women in the river. Trying to make out the voice that whispered, Black water, cold water, come on in.

A murder of crows landed in the snow-heavy wild rosebushes on the bank, seemingly impervious to the thorns, and started cawing. Their cries blended with the wind and the water, and Jo felt her foot press against the rickety rungs of the bridge rail.

Black water, the voice soothed. Cold water, down deep below the current.

Jo wanted to stop, already felt like she was drowning as her lungs sucked in great gulps of frigid New England air. But she couldn’t move, in any direction but forward. Over the rail. The weight of her body could crack the ice. She’d go below it. Down into the black water.

A tunnel of light swept over her, and the sound of a snarling eight-cylinder engine cut out all others. “Jo?” Drew got out of the car and jogged toward her. “Jo!”

His hand on the back of her jacket was big and solid, and he yanked her off the rail. “What the hell are you doing all the way out here?” Drew panted. Jo looked back at the ice and the river.

The light was gone. The faces were only ice floes.

On the bank, the crows took flight, disappearing into the last vestiges of the sun.

“Come on,” Drew said, hand firmly on her back, guiding her. “I’m gonna drive you home.”

His car was warm, so warm that Jo’s hands and cheeks stung at the change. She huddled against the passenger door. She wanted to go back to Ash House, climb to the cupola, listen to Nicholas tell her stories until she could erase that horrible voice from her mind.

Crackly old rock blared at her instead, a cigarette-voiced singer and glassy, plinking guitar. I put a spell on you. Because you’re mine.

“You’re a weird chick,” Drew said. “Don’t take that the wrong way. I always figured your friend Ani for the freak, but you take it to another level.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Jo mumbled at him. Drew leaned over, in that businesslike way he did everything, and laid the back of his hand against her cheek. He smelled like cheap smokes and engine grease. Jo felt bile rise in her throat.

“Jesus,” Drew said. “You’re freezing.” He looked at the road, depressed the Nova’s lighter, lit a cigarette from a pack he’d shoved between the windshield and the dash, looked back at Jo. “Were you gonna off yourself?”

That pulled her out of her thoughts a little. “What?” Jo said.

“You were on the bridge,” Drew said. “This time of year, you’d be out in about thirty seconds in that water. Just sink right down. Like a stone. You gonna kill yourself, Jo?”

“Don’t be dramatic,” Jo sighed. “I thought I saw something under the ice.”

“Yeah?” Drew glanced at her, back at the tunnel before them that the Nova’s headlights cut along the wilderness at the edges of the road. “Like what?”

Jo leaned her head against the window. She could almost fall asleep with the radio and the close smell of Drew’s cigarette and the gentle vibration of the Nova beneath her. If it wasn’t for the dreams waiting for her when she did.

“Nothing you need to know about,” she said, and didn’t speak again until Drew dumped her at the foot of her driveway and unceremoniously peeled out again into the night, taillights winking out like small candles in a vast, black sky.

6. December

On Christmas Eve, Jo had the worst dream yet. Ani was on break visiting Deirdre, Drew had moved his work on his idiotmobile into the garage for the winter, and Jo had spent most of break at Ash House. She’d hidden a stash of granola bars, candles, and a Mylar running blanket in the kitchen, high up in a cabinet where animals couldn’t get at it.

Not that many animals came to Ash House. Nick said they didn’t like being around the dead. Jo had taken to looking up tidbits on microfiche at the library, or searching on Wikipedia, for things for them to talk about. Phonographs rather than radios, the elaborate yards-long dresses the girls wore, how Ash House had the first electric light in Coffin Hollow—anywhere in western Massachusetts, really, except the county seat.

When Nick wasn’t covering her hands, her neck, her arms, and every inch of skin she could stand to be exposed in slow, velvety kisses, that is.

He couldn’t be there enough to manage a try at her clothes, but he touched her hair, and he whispered poetry. He’d taken her down to the music room, where an ancient piano stood. It clanked like a carnival when Jo played it, but for Nick it was always in tune. He played what he said was Brahms and Beethoven and other slow, sad pieces, his sure fingers flowing up and down the ivory.

Nick was well-read, as young men of his generation were supposed to be. He knew Yeats, Blake, all of the old magical, apocalyptic poetry that Jo could imagine scribbled on sheets of vellum, strewn across a room lit by gaslight.

Mel had insisted they do Christmas dinner, even though neither of them had enjoyed it since before Mel had gone to AA and moved them to Coffin Hollow, when Jo was in middle school. Jo figured after five years, she should get a pass from candied yams and Mel freaking out over how long to cook a turkey, but Mel put her foot down.

“If I didn’t know you weren’t that damn stupid, I’d think you were on drugs,” she told Jo. “Now get your ass in that kitchen and pretend you like me for a couple of hours. It’s Christmas, dammit.”

Jo thought about detailing just how many times she’d smoked pot with Ani since the band started, and how many times at gigs older guys or club owners had offered her everything from LSD on fake postage stamps to what she could only assume was really good cocaine, from a little platinum vial that looked like a skull.

But she got her ass in the kitchen. She figured a woman Nick would like would at least know how to cook.

She should have been in a tryptophan coma, out for the count until Christmas morning, when Mel would have a mimosa with sparkling cider rather than champagne, and she’d have a hot chocolate and they’d exchange gifts before Mel went back to work. The production company she’d done the designs for had hired her as a full-time animator for their next summer blockbuster, and she was hard at work making cute, chubby dogs and gerbils sit up and talk.

But instead, she was back in the dream, and it was so real she could taste the smoke, see the thorns embedded in her calves and thighs, hear the wavering scream that rose from somewhere close by.

A girl stood on the bank of the Acushket, and Jo knew it was a dream because it was summer, river wild and blue as it flowed, banks choked with brambles and wild roses. Her dress was white, whiter than the foam that rode the top of the current, and it swirled in the wind, along with hair the color of fire.

Jo knew she herself was bare, standing in the wilderness while Ash House burned behind her. Thorny vines crawled up her legs, her arms, twisted around until she felt like her skin was burning too.

The girl looked back at Jo and said, “Drown.”

Jo woke up in the silver light of before dawn. Christmas morning, and there was no snow falling. Ice covered everything, and made it gleam like the entire world was frozen for good.

She got her boots, jeans, a jacket, and slipped outside. She’d lost weight, and everything flapped around her when the wind caught her clothes. The dream was hard to shake. It was as if she really were bleeding from the hundred wounds, slipping under the surface until she’d be pale and dead as Nicholas.

He was in the music room when she reached Ash House, playing the piano. He smiled when he saw her. “You came.”

Jo could touch him now, and he smoothed her sleep-tossed hair from her face before he put his lips on her forehead. She was so cold already she didn’t feel the change. “Did you have Christmas already?” he inquired. Jo shook her head.

“I had the most horrible dream. I was at the river and I...” She felt the flush prickle her cheeks with warm blood, and she looked at her boots. “I was naked and these thorns ... there was a girl.” She didn’t realize Nicholas was holding her hands until he pulled her close. “She wanted me to go into the river and drown.”

“Shh,” Nicholas said. “It will be all right.”

“I woke up and I...” Jo thought she must be crying, as a crystallized flake slid down her cheek. This close to Nicholas, vapor froze and fell out of the air. “I wanted you there,” she whispered.

“I wish that were possible, love,” Nicholas said. “I wish I could go home with you.”

Jo pulled back, hands on his chest. His jacket really was velvet, and she could feel the satin lapel now, the crisp linen of his shirt. He was almost there ... almost real. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Maybe if I gave you permission ... if we went together...”

Nicholas’s eyes narrowed. “You’d want that? You want to be with me?”

“I do,” Jo said. She put her head back against his chest. “I want to be with you.”

“Then come,” Nicholas said. “The worst that can happen is I’ll disappear, back to Ash House. I’ve been trapped here for so long anyway, it will hardly matter.”

Jo took off her glove, so she could feel his hand. “I need you, Nick,” she said.

He smiled down at her. “I know.”

They walked from the music room and down the grand hall and into the entry. The red door stood open, and Jo tightened her hand on his. If they could just cross the threshold ... If Nick was with her, the dreams would stop. She knew they’d stop.

“You look so beautiful,” Nick whispered. “You’re so delicate, Josephine.” He brushed his free hand down her cheek. “Promise me you won’t ever forget,” he said. “Even if I vanish into vapor. Promise me, Josephine, that you will never forget me.”

Jo watched her breath turn to steam as the cold of outside crept across the threshold. “Never,” she said.

She stepped across the threshold, and Nicholas held her hand. They walked down the drive, across the bridge with the river ice below cracking like gunshots, and down Route 7. They walked home, into Jo’s house, past the Christmas tree and the gifts, past Mel’s call of “Jo? Jo, where the hell have you been?,” and into her room.

Nick pulled her to him, pressed her lips to his, and for the first time he began to feel warm against Jo’s skin. She dropped her jacket, her gloves, the flannel shirt she’d pulled over her tank top. She tangled her hands in Nick’s hair, felt water clinging there. Her fingers traced the scars on his arm. She could feel the scars for the first time.

His hands traveled under the hem of her shirt, raising gooseflesh on her abdomen. His lips caressed her ear. “Josephine...”

“Jo!” Mel shouted. “Ani is here! Get downstairs!”

Ani ... That broke Jo away from Nick’s ardent caress. “I have to...” She fought a giggle at his comical pout. “I have to go. That’s my best friend.”

“I’ll come,” Nick said. “She can’t see me. Nor your mother.”

“I’ll just be a minute,” Jo said, and slipped out, hoping she wasn’t flushed or disheveled. She remembered to kick off her boots before Mel got even more pissed off about her tracking mud and ice everywhere.

“Ani?” she said, at the sight of her friend standing in the foyer. Her hair was bright candy-apple red, shorn in a pixie cut. “Wow. Hey.”

“Hey,” Ani said. “Deirdre and I broke up. I wish I could light that bitch’s Dodge Dart on fire, but instead I’m here, and I’m going to drown my sorrows in Christmas cookies and pie. Yes, it’s ten a.m. Don’t you judge me.”

“It’s good to see you,” Jo said carefully. She didn’t have time to listen to the no-doubt epic tale of Deirdre and Ani, no more to be. Nick was waiting.

“So, join me?” Ani said. She looked Jo up and down as she descended the stairs, and her eyes widened. “Jesus, Jo. You look like shit.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Jo snapped. She was beautiful. She was thin and delicate, and she was the best she’d ever been.

“I mean, you look like you’re living in a POW camp,” Ani said. “Oh shit, are you anorexic? How did I not notice this?” She grabbed Jo’s hands. “I know I’ve been a shit friend lately, dude. I was really messed up over Deirdre, and I’m really sorry. But this...” She looked down at their twined fingers. “Jo, you’re freezing.”

“It’s cold,” Jo said. Ani’s eyes widened again, all pupil.

“No, it isn’t,” she said. “I’m sweating bullets, and this isn’t even my warm coat.” She pulled off her vintage army jacket and scarf, and pulled Jo’s face into her hands. “This isn’t some cheerleader eating disorder. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Jo,” Mel said, and there was a snap in her voice like a switch. “I need you to take this extra pie over to the Powells’. I’d do it, but I have an emergency conference call with L.A. in about two minutes.”

Her mother was in sweats and slippers, hair pulled back in a messy bun. She held out the pie to Jo. “When you get back, maybe you’d like to tell me where you were.”

“Not particularly,” Jo said, snatching the dish and her coat. Ani followed her, running to keep up.

“ What is going on? You and your mom are like the only functional parent/child relationship I know of.”

“Ani, just leave me alone!” Jo shouted. “You’re so incredibly nosy it drives me insane!”

Ani drew up, like someone had hit her in the face. “Oh, eat me,” she said. “You haven’t been normal since the summer. I don’t know if it’s drugs or some secret boyfriend or what, but you’re being an utter dick. You used to be my best friend, Jo, and I need you, so piss off with your dysfunction. I’m going home.”

She left. Jo wanted to run back upstairs, cradle herself in Nick’s arms, have him kiss the top of her head and say everything was fine, fine, just fine, love. Instead she stomped up the Powells’ steps and jabbed at the doorbell. After what seemed like an hour, Drew opened the door.

“Well, happy freaking holidays,” he said, looking her over. “That a pie?”

Jo shoved it at him. “It’s from my mom.”

“Nice,” he said. “My mom has been listening to Perry Como all morning. I’m about seven seconds from getting my dad’s shotgun out of the safe and killing either her CD player or myself. Care to join me?”

“I have to get home...” Jo started, but then Mrs. Powell was at the door, taking the pie, cooing thanks, ushering her in. She was wearing a Patriots sweatshirt and perfect makeup, a sprig of fake holly in her helmet-like hairdo. The diametric opposite of Mel.

“So, Jo, your mother tells me you’re quite a student,” she trilled, cutting into the pie. She tapped a cigarette out of the pack with her other hand—the same brand Drew smoked, Jo noticed—and paused to light it, flicking ash into a tray shaped like a sleeping cat. “Maybe you could tutor my son here sometime, so he doesn’t end up in vo-tech and covered in grease for the rest of his life.”

“Jesus Christ, Mom,” Drew complained. Mrs. Powell swatted him on the head.

“None of that. Your mother tells me you’re very interested in history, Jo. What are you studying now?”

Jo wanted to turn around and run. She could feel Nick calling to her, the feel and smell and chill of him tugging at her, wanted more than anything to feel him against her whole body, pressing into her like the thorns in her dream.

“Ash House,” she lied. “The history of Ash House. It’s an independent study project.”

“Ash House.” Mrs. Powell shivered and tapped ash off her cigarette. “That place gives me the creeps. I lost a girlfriend there in high school, you know.”

“Here we go,” Drew muttered. “This is a really long story, FYI, Jo.”

“Hush, boy,” she said, waving a hand at him. “There were six of us, and we got to playing truth or dare, and she and I were to walk across the bridge on the rail.”

“I have to...” Jo tried. Her stomach was boiling, the acid eating at her insides, even though she hadn’t eaten anything since a few bites of Mel’s turkey the night before.

“We fell in, probably because we were drunk off our kettles on cheap bourbon,” said Mrs. Powell. “Judy ... Judy Templeton, that was her name... she hit her head and drowned. At least that’s what the coroner said.”

Jo smelled a sweetish scent rolling off of Drew’s mother, and realized for the first time that if she wasn’t drunk, she was doing a good job getting there.

“When I was in the water,” Mrs. Powell continued, “I felt as if something ... something was almost, pulling me down. Not a root or a rock, but something strong, like ... well, like a hand. And I heard this voice while I was under the water. Whispering about black water, drowning. Anyway.” She shivered again. “Grim old place. ’Course, we were only there because of what happened to that girl back in ’58.”

Pins made of ice pricked Jo up and down her spine. “What girl?”

“You know.” Mrs. Powell waved a hand. “Effie Walker. Kids called her Pepper, on account of she had this fabulous red hair...”

“ Mother,” Drew sighed. “Wrong holiday for this shit.”

“Relax, dear, I won’t embarrass you in front of your cute little friend much longer,” Mrs. Powell said. Drew mimed shooting himself in the head behind his mother’s back.

“What about her?” Jo said, voice coming out loud and high.

“She had a fella,” Mrs. Powell said. “Real mysterious. Theory is he got her knocked up, dumped her, or something like that. Anyway, she walked into the Acushket down at Ash House with rocks in her pockets, even though nobody ever saw her with the boy and her sister and mother swore she wasn’t in a family way. Just decided one day to up and end it. That bend in the river’s had a lot of accidents. They need to put up a guardrail there.”

It was as if the river had come to her, had filled up Jo’s ears with rushing water. She couldn’t hear what Drew was saying, nor the smarmy carols pouring from the Powells’ stereo. Couldn’t think of anything but the dream, the girl with flaming hair at the river’s edge. Thorns in her skin. Ice filling up her lungs as she stared into the black current.

Her stomach twisted, and the next thing Jo knew, she was staring into the face of Effie Walker. Her hair had been carefully curled once, but now it hung lank against her cheeks, and her makeup ran down her face in rivulets. She wasn’t the only one. Judy Templeton, cutoff shorts and platform sandals and a ripped-up Journey shirt, sodden and clinging to her petite body. Both of them, sunken-cheeked and hollow-eyed, starved white fingers reaching for something they could never catch hold of.

And Abigail Worth, who leaned down and whispered in Jo’s ear in the language of black water.

You set him free. Do you even realize what you’ve done?

Jo couldn’t speak, couldn’t even breathe. She could feel again, and her joints ached. Her bones pushed against her skin, and she wasn’t cold now but burning up, and if there had been anything in her stomach, she would have spewed up on Drew’s scuffed leather army boots.

“I’ll get her home,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Outside, staring up at her lit window, Jo clutched at Drew. “I can’t go home.”

He stopped in the driveway, didn’t argue with her. “Where can you go?”

A shadow flicked in front of Jo’s curtains, the size of a tall thin spirit. Watching her. “Ani’s,” she said, thinking of the only place she could. “Take me to Ani’s.”

Drew backed the Nova out of the garage while she shivered. She could feel Nick’s eyes on her.

You set him free.

Not just his intended had died at Ash House, been consumed by the river. He’d lied. He’d lied to her, and she’d walked him across the threshold, set him free. To do what?

Jo jumped into the passenger side of the car, slamming and locking the door, as if it would do some good. She caught her face in the door mirror and almost vomited again. Her eyes were sunk into her skull, and her hair was dull and tangled. Her cheekbones stuck out like razor blades, and her lips were chapped. She could see every vein under the skin.

“You okay?” Drew asked. Jo managed a nod, curling her knees up to her chest.

“For now. Just drive.”

Drew drove and got her to Ani’s grandmother’s place in record time. Ani’s dad was an EMT, and he’d drawn the dubious honor of being the one to patch up family scrapes and drunken bar brawls on Christmas Day.

“Jo?” Ani dashed out of the house wearing nothing but a thermal shirt she’d cut the collar out of and jeans hastily stuffed into boots.

“You know what’s wrong with her?” Drew said. “Because I sure as hell don’t.”

Jo knew she was going to fall over soon, but Ani was there, and Drew, and they held her up. “Jesus,” Ani said. “I knew she was thin, but she’s ... Christ, she’s bones. ”

“Listen,” Drew said. “I gotta get back, before my mom finds the rest of the holiday cheer and drunk-dials my dad up at the state pen. I’d just as soon not have that conversation.”

His voice was a radio broadcast from some far-off country, fading in and out on waves of static and whispers from the ether.

“I ... I’m sorry,” Jo tried. “I’m sorry, Ani...”

“Shit, man,” Ani said. “Don’t worry about that now. Just come inside with me, okay?”

Ani helped her inside, and while Ani’s grandmother made her hot tea, she told Ani the truth. “I think he’s ... he’s evil,” Jo said quietly. “Abigail said ... And now I let him out....”

Ani’s grandmother sat at the table with them. “Now you’ve got to fix it.”

Jo looked up at her. Everything blurred and gently vibrated around the edges. She half wondered if she was still dreaming. “You don’t think I’m crazy?”

“Seen stranger things in my life,” Ani’s grandmother said. “Hauntings and worse. What you’re callin’ evil is ghost sickness. When the dead get under your skin, bleeding your life so they can cling to theirs for another minute or two. Makes you sick, makes you hungry, makes you do anything to keep them.”

“Makes you dream,” Jo murmured. She’d ignored the warnings. Abigail and the others had tried to tell her, with the dreams. Tried to tell her that she’d pine and eventually die for Nicholas Day, by her own hand or his, just as they had.

“Dream, ayuh,” Ani’s grandmother agreed. She reached under her plaid shirt, unhooked a silver necklace, a simple flat disc stamped with a symbol made of straight lines. “This should keep him off you for now, but the question remains, missy—what are you gonna do about your ghost?”

Jo accepted the necklace. When it slipped against her skin, the spot the silver touched warmed, just a little. Her vision cleared, too, and all at once she was simply massively tired. “I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said honestly.

“You better figure that out sooner rather than later,” Ani’s grandmother told her. “He already made three girls so sick and sad they joined him in that house forever. Don’t you go down that path.”

“No,” Jo said, pressing the silver down into her skin with her palm. “I won’t.” She thought of Nick’s touch, of his taste, and even though she knew he was only ashes in her mouth, she still craved him. “I’ll try,” Jo amended.

Ani took her up to the guestroom, and she really slept for the first time in months. She woke at the creak of the rocking chair in the corner of her attic room, saw the black-shod foot pushing back and forth across worn board, scritch-scritch. Creak-creak.

“You said you’d never leave,” Nicholas told her. Jo gasped, grabbing at the necklace. Nick flickered, like he was a faulty TV channel.

“What do you think you’re doing with that, Josephine?”

Jo found her voice, though it was small as the puff of air her breath made in the suddenly frozen air. “Stopping you.”

“Abigail thought she could stop me,” Nick said. “She loved me, but her head was mixed up. She ran from me. She cut her legs on the wild roses on the riverbank. I held her, until she stopped moving. Her hair was so beautiful under the water.”

“They hung you,” Jo said. “In your own front yard. You didn’t kill yourself.”

Nick nodded, steepling his fingers, and then he was up, pressing her into the mattress, hands on her bare arms. “They all loved me, Josephine, but I never loved any of them as much as I love you.” Lips against her forehead, searing with the black mark of frostbite. “And I’m never letting you go,” Nick whispered against her ear. “I’m going to haunt you until the day you die, Josephine Ryan. Be it sooner, or later. Die soon enough, and you can join me on this cold dark road. We can run on forever, like the river.”

He vanished like smoke in a howling wind, and Jo was left shivering, until she kicked back the blankets and fumbled for her shoes. She went to wake up Ani. Nicholas wouldn’t stop. Wouldn’t stop when he’d killed Abigail, wouldn’t stop when he’d tormented Effie into drowning or pulled Judy down to be beside him forever.

Jo knew what she had to do.

The lights were out when Ani pulled into Jo’s dead-end street, both her mother’s and the Powells’. Ani touched her wrist. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah,” Jo murmured. Ani couldn’t be a part of what had to happen next. Jo didn’t want her to become one of the staring girls, the girls by the river.

She waved until Ani pulled away, but instead of going inside, she went into the garage and filled up her bag until it was almost too heavy to shoulder. Snow started, light crystalline flakes falling from the sky, turning the road silver as she walked.

By the time Jo reached the junction of Route 7, a full-blown blizzard swirled around her, wind turning the road into a tunnel of ice and snow.

Ash House rose out of the snow, crouched above the river like a sleeping thing, waiting for spring to wake up and be hungry again.

Ani’s grandmother had told them that the dead were bound to the place or thing they’d held most dear in life. Her. And Ash House. The scene of all Nicholas’s sins.

Jo pushed open the red door. She listened to the wind howl around the eaves, as if it would like to tear off the roof. She stripped off her gloves and closed her hand around the necklace. It wasn’t cold, but warm from her skin just under her coat.

She jerked, and the chain broke. It was seconds, mere heartbeats, until Nicholas appeared before her.

“I told you,” he said. “I’m yours now, Josephine. I’ll follow you no matter where you go. No matter where you try to hide.” His hand trailed over her cheek, left a cold teardrop. “I’ll find you. I’m glad you know that now.”

“I do know,” Jo said. “But look where we are.” She kicked over the gas can Mel kept in the garage for emergencies—for storms, like this one. It spilled across the floor, melting the snow in its path, soaking through the rotten wood and tile.

Nicholas smiled at her. Once so full of promise, now it was like a knife. “It doesn’t matter where we are, Jo. Just that we’re together.”

“It does, though,” Jo said. “You’re home, Nicholas. On the same soil you died.” She pulled out Drew’s lighter, which had found its way into her pocket when he left her at Ani’s. The wheel sparked on the first try. “They hanged you right out there,” Jo said. “On the oak tree in the yard. After you killed her. You said it yourself—you held her under and drowned her. The girl you loved. ”

“Doesn’t matter,” Nicholas said. “Everything I did was for love. It can be forgiven.” He touched her again, her hair, her cheek, her hand. “You can’t let me go, Josephine. You and I are together now. You can’t be free, even if you burn yourself up.”

“I’m not the one burning,” Jo said. She cocked her arm and tossed the lighter. She wasn’t ready for the noise as the gasoline ignited—all of the air sucked out of her lungs, and her ears popped as a column of orange flame erupted in the center of the floor. “I’m burning this. This house!” she shouted. “You know what you love, Nicholas? Yourself! And this goddamn house!”

Nicholas grabbed her by the wrists. “You’ll never leave me. You know it.”

Jo jerked away from him. She made it to the porch when he grabbed her again, by the hair, whipping her off her feet. They rolled over and over, down into the snow and the brambles beneath.

Nicholas was on her, ripping away her scarf and her coat, letting in the cold. Behind them, windows exploded in Ash House as the wind fed the fire.

Jo rolled away from his searching, claw like hands and stumbled toward the bridge. She had to get to the bridge. Cross the running stream, like in Ani’s grandmother’s stories. If she could just get over the bridge, she’d be all right. At least, she repeated that to herself as she stumbled through the blizzard, through the bracken, guided only by the roar of the fire and the heat on her back.

She didn’t get to the river. He found her again, through the swirling snow and screaming wind, in the half-daylight the blaze inside Ash House cast across the river.

Jo fell, and felt her ankle twist the wrong way. Her exposed skin was blue-white in the predawn, ice frosting it. Nicholas put his hands on her neck. “She ran from me too, Josephine. But she loved me, even as she denied me. And so do you. You’ll die for me. In the end, they all do.”

Jo met his eyes. He was solid now, solid as person. But he was cold. And his eyes were what they had always been—dead man’s eyes, staring a hole in her soul.

“I don’t...” Jo managed under his grasp. Nicholas’s face slackened.

“What?”

Jo reached out for an icy, frozen tangle of thorns near her face, as Nicholas pressed her into the wild rose bushes, covered over with snow and frost. She pricked her thumb, tangled the vines around her fingers, watched the blood run down her wrist. Clawed at Nicholas with her free hand. Saw the marks on his arm for what they were, not razor cuts but nail marks, the last grasp of a desperate, drowning girl who hadn’t seen him, really seen, until it was far too late.

She felt her blood run down, into the earth, soaking through the roots and stones and into the riverbed, born on the water, far far away from here, as the last of her air leaked out.

The girls came when Jo knew she was dying. Black stars sparkled at the edges of her vision. Nicholas filled up the rest. Her chest was heavy, a stone where her lungs should be. And the cold. The cold was inside her. Her bones were ice. Her blood was snowflakes.

The first, redheaded Effie, put a hand on Nicholas’s shoulder. “No more,” she said. Then Judy Templeton, and lastly, his own love, Abigail. She was still dripping wet, still bore the marks of Nicholas’s hands on her neck.

“You held me,” she said. “So tenderly. Under the black water. Until it filled me up. Until I became the water.” She turned his face to her, so their noses were nearly touching. “For that, I thank you. I live in the river, Nicholas. You ended me, but I live in the river, and it’s not a bad life.”

“I live in the fire,” Effie said. “I live in every sad soul who passes by on the bridge. I burn for every one of them.”

“I live in the rocks,” said Judy. “I’m the weight on your soul, Nicholas Day. The weight of everyone you took before their time.”

They looked down at Jo. “You’re not one of us,” said Abigail. “You are not the ice. You are not the wind or the cold.” Through her translucent form, Ash House gave a roar, a last death rattle as the roof caved in.

“Go,” Effie said. “Go back to the world. You brought him home.”

“Yes,” echoed Abigail. “And home is where his heart shall stay.”

“ No,” Nicholas screamed, as the three girls bore him up and away. “No, she took me away! I won’t go back!”

He turned his eyes on Jo. “Please, Josephine. Nobody can love you like me.”

Jo rubbed her bloody hand across her freed throat. “My name,” she rasped, a voice like ashes, not her own, “is not Josephine.”

Nicholas and the three moved backward, on a current of their own making, until they stood in the red door, framed by the fire. Things leaped and danced in the flames, screamed and wailed, until the wind gave one last push and the house collapsed on itself, eating its own innards in a jet of flame that shot into the silvering sky.

Jo stood, and watched, blood dropping into the snow, and she watched the spot where Nicholas had last stood. She watched until the Coffin Hollow volunteer fire department came crawling down Route 7 in the blizzard, and watched until an EMT—Ani’s father, as it turned out—brought her to the ambulance. She watched, but she never saw Nicholas Day or any of the girls again.

7. Epilogue—January

Jo never said a word, and no one ever asked her beyond a cursory question how Ash House had burned. Ani came and sat with her in the ER and asked if Jo could forgive her for telling her father her best friend was fixing to do something stupid.

Ani’s grandmother patted her bandaged hand when she came by to return the necklace. “You hold on to that, child. You’re going to need it more than I ever did.”

Jo asked why, and Ani’s grandmother sighed, and lit one of her rancid cigarettes. “You think just everyone goes around attracting the dead, honey? Ain’t so. You’ve got an eye that sees into that shadow place, and unless you want to be deviled all your days—you keep that thing on.”

They went back to school, where nobody questioned that Jo had cut her hand on a broken glass in her own home.

Drew Powell came up to her their second week back. “You have my lighter,” he said.

“Not anymore,” Jo said. “Trust me, it went to a good cause.”

He reached out and lifted the necklace from her clavicle with his finger. Jo realized this was the first time she and Drew had ever touched. “Interesting,” he said. Jo shrugged.

“It’s broken. The clasp.” She twisted the chain to show where she’d affixed the two ends with a paper clip.

“I could fix it for you,” Drew said. “And maybe you can tell me why my mom had a nervous breakdown the day after Christmas, and told me that her friend from high school forgave her for not getting her out of the river.”

“I couldn’t tell you,” Jo said. She wanted to pull away, but Drew’s eyes caught her, while he tilted his head.

“Can’t, or won’t?”

“Drew,” she said. “Some things are just better off staying buried.”

He considered for a second. “You want a ride home?”

Jo smiled. “Yeah. I’d like that.”

“Come on, then,” Drew said. He smiled back at her. Jo realized this was the first time she’d seen Drew Powell smile. His smile was crooked and half-mast, like a bend in a country road. Nothing like a knife.

January thaw turned the roads to mud while Drew took the turns too fast, throwing up a fantail of earth and ice. Birds chittered from the bare trees, and on Route 7, the Acushket burbled under the ice, whispering in the language of black water. Jo reached over, turned up the radio, and drowned them out.

Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain, with the rain in Shambala....

Drew didn’t slow down when they passed the bridge and the burned relic of Ash House, and Jo was glad. She nodded when Drew offered her a cigarette, and rolled down the window so she could put her hand out and feel the wind.

The trees would get green and the river ice would melt, and she and Ani would apply to all the same colleges and probably end up going to different ones. But not too far away. Spring would come. She’d spend time getting to know Drew Powell, whose eyes were gray and clear and hid nothing, and whose hands felt like nothing but warmth and calluses.

And soon, all along the banks of the river that had once hidden Nicholas Day’s terrible secret, the wild roses would bloom.