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graceomeallain · 6 years ago

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The Lady in the Lighthouse (prompt 6a)

Alice jolted as she came to, choking and spluttering up the icy seawater threatening to invade her lungs. She dragged herself up the beach, away from the harsh wave that had just crashed over her head, and collapsed against the freezing sand, too sapped of energy to go further. She coughed again, drops of seawater and flecks of sand escaping as she did. The roar of the raging sea behind her was deafening, and the rain lashed her back. Her jacket was lost to the depths of the sea, along with her hat and one of her boots, and she was shivering violently.

Somewhere in her exhausted mind, she realised that if she allowed herself to lie here much longer, she would pass out again against the sand already leeching the last dregs of warmth from her bones, and almost certainly die. If she could just drag herself off this beach, perhaps she could find shelter, if only under a bush, until this furious tempest exhausted itself, and she could see if any of her crewmates had survived the ordeal.

She very much doubted they had. She alone could swim, and when it had become clear that the sea had more then defeated them, while every man on board clung to the rig or the rail, she had surrendered to it, diving over the side and praying she would make it to land, rather than going down with the ship. Though the storm clouds had blotted out the sun and darkened the sky so it seemed like night, that had only been early evening. Now it was truly the middle of the night, and alone and frozen with no way to warm herself, Alice didn't know if she would see the sunrise.

Feeling her eyes beginning to slip shut, she forced herself to her knees. A blast of wind nearly sent her sprawling back into the waves she had barely pulled herself clear of, but she kept her balance, and with a Herculean effort, made it to her feet. Her fingers were stiff and stinging with cold, and she stuffed them under her arms as she stumbled up the beach, blown from side to side by wrenching gusts of wind. About halfway up the beach, her bare foot descended on a razor sharp shard of glass, concealed in the sand, and she yelled out in pain, her cry drowned by the thunder. Her foot gave, and she dropped to her knees, tears of pain and desperation mingling with the rainwater pouring down her face.

Every fibre of her ached to give in, to lie down and sleep in the soft sand beneath her knees, and leave herself to the mercy of the tempest, but she knew that if she did, she would never wake up again. She had sacrificed too much and travelled too far to let herself die now, when she was finally on the same soil as the one she had come all this way to find. She reached for the ring on her left hand, that had remained steadfast on her finger when most of her belongings and attire had failed her, and twisted it a few times, reminding herself why she had done all this. She had to keep her promise.

As she knelt in the sand, steeling herself to get up again and carry on, a jagged, forked bolt of lightning cut across the sky, and for a fraction of a second, the world was bathed in eerie light. Before everything was plunged into darkness again, Alice caught sight of a lighthouse on the headland at the end of the beach. Ordinarily, it would have been no more than a couple of minutes running, but in her current state, it might as well have been a hundred miles. Still, it was the only shelter she could see; there was no guarantee she'd find anywhere warm on the other side of the sand dunes further up the beach.

On legs so heavy she wondered that she could even drag her feet along, Alice forced herself to limp onward across the beach, trailing blood in the sand behind her. When she reached the headland, she allowed herself a pause. The lighthouse stood on a low cliff, separated from the churning ocean by a swathe of rough black rock. From the beach, a lightly worn dirt track led up through drenched grass to the lighthouse. It would normally have been a stroll, no more than a five minute walk, but just like the walk down the beach, it seemed insurmountable.

In the end, she managed most of the hill on her hands and knees, barely even noticing anymore as the gritty track tore at her breeches and grazed the heels of her palms. When the lighthouse finally loomed over her, she lurched to her feet, collapsing against the door and hammering on it with her fist. She waited, huddled against the door in an attempt to retain what little was left of her body heat, and when no answer came, she knocked again. Then a third time, and a fourth, and a fifth, with increasingly shorter pauses as she began to realise nobody was coming.

When the fifth knock went unanswered, she slid down the door to sit with her back against it, and curled into a ball. She was utterly spent, with no energy left to go elsewhere. Her best chance would be to huddle in this doorframe until morning and hope she survived that long. It was a slim chance, but at least the doorway was marginally better than the beach. She began to twist the ring on her finger again, praying that Ben would forgive her if she didn't find her way back.

Just as she was starting to drift into a sleep she was almost certain would be her last, she fell backwards onto hard stone. She opened her stinging, red rimmed eyes, and found herself staring up into another pair, strikingly green and illuminated by wobbling lamplight that cast shadows into the deep crevices around them. Alice scrambled to her feet as the door was shut behind her, and took in the wizened woman in front of her.

She was certain she'd never seen anyone so old in her life. The woman was hunched and gnarled, with wrinkles like valleys in her face, motley grey and white hair that looked like it hadn't seen the right end of a blade in years, and claw-like fingers that clutched the lantern in an unsteady grip. Unusually, she, like Alice, was wearing breeches and a shirt, and both looked like they'd seen more years on this earth than Alice had. Yet for all the marks time had etched into her, those green eyes were bright with intelligence, a young woman's eyes shining out of an ancient vessel, and Alice knew that this was not a senile old woman.

"My dear girl, what in God's name are you doing out on a night like this?" asked the woman.

Her voice was raspy, like blades screeching across each other, and its low pitch betrayed years, if not decades, of smoking the pipe that poked from her breast pocket, right next to a hip flask filled with a brown liquid. Her accent held faint traces of an Irish burr, but it was the accent of someone who had been away from their home country for many years.

"I was shipwrecked," Alice croaked out, bracing one hand on the wall to steady herself.

"Well, you must come in," said the woman, "come, come."

She held out her spare hand, and Alice hesitantly took it. It was rough and calloused, and the woman's fingers were bony but strong. She led Alice into the stairwell, and up an echoing stone spiral that seemed to go on forever until the lamp finally illuminated a heavy wooden door. The staircase continued upwards, but they didn't follow it. The old woman finally released Alice's hand to open the door, revealing a round room.

A large hearth was set into the wall, a pot hanging in it, and a threadbare armchair in front of it that looked like it might once have been red. The shrieking of the wind was still audible outside, and the rain assaulted the small windows, but no draughts crept in. This room was clearly the old woman's entire living space; a table was near the door, a single chair beside it, and across the room was a shelf of kitchen utensils, with a cupboard underneath it. Near the largest of the windows was a narrow bed, and a closet was pressed against the wall at the foot of it. On the opposite side of the room to the door, a curtain of worn and patched canvas, that wouldn't have looked out of place as a sail, obscured a small part of the room.

The old woman took a splint of wood from the table, and lit it from the lantern, then set the lantern down on the table and crossed to the hearth. She dropped the splint onto the logs stacked there, and pulled the flask from her pocket, uncorking it and tossing a dash of whatever was inside onto the hearth. A bright flame flared and caught, and the wood began to crackle. Alice was by the hearth in the time it took the woman to lift the flask to her lips and take a swig. She knelt next to it, holding her numb fingers as close as she dared to the sparking logs.

The feeling came back into her extremities painfully, like the pricking of a hundred needles against her skin, then like she'd stuck her hand directly into the fire, but anything was better than the deadly cold of the storm. The pain was just starting to abate when the woman returned and handed her a bundle of clothes, gesturing to the curtain.

"You'll catch your death in those clothes," she said, "I'll fix us something to eat, you get changed."

"Thank you."

Alice was loathe to leave her warm spot by the fire, but she knew the woman was right. She got to her feet, and her eyes went wide with horror as she saw a bloodstain on the rug beneath her, left by her foot.

"I'm so sorry," she said, looking down at it, "I didn't realise it was bleeding so heavily."

"Oh, don't worry, dear," said the woman, "you just get changed, I'll fix that up in no time. You can leave those wet things in the tub."

Alice nodded, and slipped behind the curtain. It felt like sailcloth, as well as looking like it, and it smelled like salt. Behind it was a tub that was currently drained, and Alice slowly changed out of her sodden clothes and into the mercifully dry breeches, socks and shirt the woman had given her, leaving a sock off her bleeding foot. The woman's hunch made her look smaller than she was - the clothes weren't a bad fit. She dropped her own clothes into the tub, and wrung out her straggly black hair over it, so it wasn't dripping.

When she emerged, the woman was poking at something in the pot over the fire, and she had pulled the wooden chair over to sit by the armchair. A knife sat on the chair, along with a bandage and a rag.

"Much better," said the woman as she looked at Alice's dry clothes, "come sit, let me take a look at your foot."

The woman took the chair with the bandage, and when Alice sat in the armchair, held out a hand for Alice's foot. Sh lifted it, and the woman inspected it closely, bony fingers pressing hard against Alice's ankle.

"Hmm, painful that," she said, "you'll be alright, though, there's nothing lodged inside. This'll sting."

She opened her flask again, and tipped a little of the contents onto the rag. When she held it to Alice's foot, it burned against the wound, and Alice sucked in a sharp breath. After a few seconds, the woman removed it, and cut a length of the bandage. As she began expertly wrapping Alice's foot, a smell floated over from the pot above the fire that was nothing short of heavenly. When the woman finished, the tucked the bandage under itself to secure it, and stood up.

"There now," she said, "get a sock over that, I'll get us some stew."

She fetched two bowls and two spoons from the cupboard under the rack of kitchen utensils, and dished up a nondescript, dark coloured stew, handing one bowl to Alice. In reality, it was nothing particularly special, much akin to the things Alice had eaten every day on the long voyage from Port Royal, but she gulped it down faster than she'd ever eaten before, not realising until she took the first bite how starved she was.

Once she had eaten, warmer and fuller than she had been before, she began to think a little more coherently, and she realised she had yet to hear the name of the ancient woman currently packing away the bowls.

"What's your name?" she asked.

The woman looked over her shoulder with a curious expression on her face, as if she was surprised to be asked.

"Annie," she said, "yourself?"

"Alice."

"And how'd you come to be shipwrecked, Alice?" asked Annie, "your captain must have been soft in the head to sail through these waters. The storm clouds have been gathering since dawn, and it's a ship killer out there."

"He isn't," said Alice, then corrected herself, "he wasn't. We were set upon by pirates, and the only way to outrun them was into the storm."

Annie gave a rattling, mirthless laugh.

"Pirates? There hasn't been a real pirate from here to Boston in a lifetime."

Alice felt her temper flare a little at that; her entire crew had been driven to their deaths by pirates, and this old woman in her lighthouse was claiming they didn't exist.

"There are, they were flying the black flag!"

"Piracy was stamped out before you were a twinkle in your mam's eye," said Annie.

Already irritated, Alice felt a sudden wave of anger break over her.

"Why is there no light on upstairs? This is a lighthouse. We might have made a safe landing if we'd had a guide, why didn't you have the light on?"

"With the force of the wind? This bay's dangerous, dear. No helmsman alive could navigate his way into it with his sails furled and only the lighthouse for a guide, and with the wind as it is, no ship could have its sails out without having the masts ripped clean from the hull. It's precarious out there, but at least it's open water. There's always more of a chance than there would have been here - you would have run aground, sure as the sun'll rise tomorrow."

Alice blinked a few times. Annie was right, now she considered it, but how the old woman knew so much about seafaring was another thing to add to the list of mysteries.

"In any case, how was it you ended up on board a ship in the first place?" asked Annie, "you don't look like a sailor. Certainly don't sound like one."

"I was running away," said Alice, beginning to twist the ring on her finger unconsciously.

Annie gave her a knowing nod, and looked at her hand.

"From your husband?"

Alice shook her head immediately.

"No, nothing like that. I'm not married."

Annie sat down, raising an eyebrow. She'd rolled up her sleeves in the time she was away from the hearth, and her forearms were littered with old scars, remnants of slashes and burns. Alice couldn't fathom how this women had come to be here, or where she had come from.

"What's the ring for?"

"I'm engaged."

"Running to something, then."

Alice allowed herself a smile as she thought about how close she was to Ben. Within the week, she would be back in his arms, and it was a reassuring thought, even as she sat in this dark lighthouse with a woman who was becoming ever more of an enigma.

"Ben," she said, "when we lived in England, I fell in love with him, but my father disapproved, because he was poor. We moved to Charlestown, and I promised him I would come back. So I dressed as a man, and came on board a merchant ship."

It had been months since she'd last seen him, since she'd waved tearfully from the back of her father's carriage as he stood in the fields, doubled over and breathless and unable to keep pace any further. She didn't doubt for a second that he would still be there, with the money they had stashed to start a life away from her father and the trappings of the lifestyle he insisted on. The thought made her want to run out into the storm and all the way to him in one night.

"You love this Ben, then?"

"Very much," Alice said honestly.

Annie's eyes turned wistful, and she gave a slight smile, reaching up to finger a ring on a chain around her neck that Alice hadn't noticed before. The chain it hung on was weathered and tarnished, like everything else in the room, but the ring was clearly gold, and it still shone in the firelight.

"I loved a man, once," she said, "before even your father was born, probably."

"What was his name?"

"Jack. When I was young, I was married, but I wasn't in love. But as soon as we met, I knew we were cut from the same cloth, Jack and I. He swept me off my feet, and I ran away with him. We went places and did things you couldn't begin to imagine."

"What happened to him?"

"He died young."

Her tone was wistful, and Alice's heart broke for her. The story reminded her of Ben, and her breath caught in her throat at the very thought of what it would be like to lose him young.

"I'm sorry."

"It's alright. I imagine I'll find him again soon, on the other side."

There was a faraway look in her eyes as she looked out of the rain spattered window to the roiling, black sea, and Alice was even more curious than she'd been before.

"How did you come to own this lighthouse?"

"Well, not many people are drawn to the life of a lighthouse keeper, dear. The old man was getting married, he gave it over for free."

"But you're drawn to it?"

Another rasping, almost bitter laugh.

"Not at all."

She didn't elaborate, and Alice sensed she wouldn't even if asked. There was a long pause filled by the crackling of the fire and the storm outside, then Annie got to her feet.

"You must be exhausted, dear," she said, "there's a chest behind the curtain, on the other side of the tub, there should be a blanket in there for you. Tomorrow morning, I'll see you're on your way to your Ben."

She had lit a candle while Alice was eating, and she handed it to her now.

"Thank you."

Alice got up and ducked past the sailcloth again, moving around the tub. Two chests sat in the corner there. One was a plain wooden box, like a shipping crate, but the other was more intricate, iron bound with a keyhole. The thick layer of dust coating it made it impossible to tell what colour it actually was, and told Alice beyond any doubt that Annie had meant the other crate, but the sailcloth fully obscured her actions, and curiosity got the better of her. Wedging her fingernails into the crack where the chest shut so as not to disturb the dust, she lifted the lid just enough for the light of the candle sitting next to her to catch the trigger of a pistol inside.

Alice's chest tightened, and her mind began to race. She was young and strong where Annie was old and wizened, but there was clearly more to Annie than met the eye, and they had only just met. She was an old woman living alone. Perhaps the pistol was for her own protection, but Alice was uneasy all the same. Perhaps she shouldn't trust her. A bellow of thunder from beyond the walls reminded her that she had little choice.

Quick footsteps warned her of Annie's approach, and she hurriedly shut the chest, just in time for Annie's head to appear around the sailcloth.

"The one on the right, dear," she said.

"Thanks," said Alice, "I was about to ask."

Annie left again, and Alice waited for her racing heart to return to normal, then opened the crate and pulled out a blanket, shaking it to reveal any insects. Nothing undesirable fell from it, so she shut the crate again, and came back out to find Annie getting into bed, boots abandoned.

"Sorry there's only the armchair, dear," she said, "there was a time I'd have offered, but I'm afraid I'm too old to sleep anywhere but a bed these days."

"That's okay," said Alice, "thank you again for letting me stay."

"No trouble at all," said Annie, "goodnight, dear."

Annie settled down in the armchair and pulled the blanket up to her chin, watching the flames in the hearth flicker and die to embers. She was bone tired, but she couldn't fall asleep. Every time her eyes began to drift shut, on the edge of falling into the sleep of the dead, something pulled her back from the precipice, and she was jolted into full wakefulness again, no less exhausted than she had been before.

Eventually, she realised it was Annie. The armchair faced away from the bed. She had no way of turning it without looking suspicious, and no way of falling asleep until she knew exactly who she would be sleeping with her back to. She had to know what was in that chest. Once the resolution had been made, she found it easier to stay fully alert. She waited for several minutes, the steady pattern of Annie's breathing slow and constant. After minutes of that, she was certain the old woman was asleep.

She shifted the blanket back and tentatively set her feet down on the floor. She crept across the room, treading gingerly so her socks didn't hiss across the stone, and slipped behind the sailcloth curtain. She knelt down beside the chest again, and glanced up at the small window above it. The moon was still hidden behind the walls of clouds, but the odd flash of lightning illuminated the world outside, so she lifted the chest onto the stone window ledge, and eased it open.

Even in the low light, the items on top were easy to make out. Three knives - not kitchen knives, but the sort sailors wore at their belts for working in the rig and fighting - and a pistol. She checked, and found it unloaded. Every rational part of her told her that that ought to be the end of it. Annie was no threat, and she should go to bed, but her curiosity overwhelmed her instinct towards self preservation all of a sudden.

She removed the weapons painstakingly carefully to look underneath. A large, leather pouch sat on one side of the chest, shut with a drawstring, and reaching inside, Alice's fingers traced over scores of coins she knew by shape to be gold. What was someone with this much gold doing in a lighthouse with furniture as old as she was?

Alice pushed it aside, not daring to lift it for fear of the clink of coins being moved, and reached for what remained - a compass, a necklace of shells and two folded sheets of paper so fragile that Alice thought they might break when she picked them up. She set the shells and compass down by the pistol, and unfolded the first sheet of paper. Holding it close to the icy glass of the window, she could see the imposing word stamped at the top of it. WANTED.

Underneath the word was a picture drawn by a sketch artist of two people from the shoulders up. On the left, a man with sharp features, a jagged scar across his face and a necklace of shells around his neck, and on the right, a woman with long hair, harsh faced but beautiful, and implacably familiar.

Alice held it closer to the window still, and brought her face nearer, squinting at the writing underneath to see it in the dim light. Wanted for the crimes of high seas piracy, robbery, murder and treason against the crown, Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny. Alice looked at the woman again, and saw a face she recognised, as it had been before time had worked its evils.

Everything came together at once, and it was all Alice could do not to recoil from the poster. That unravelled Annie's mystery all at once. Alice was under the roof of a cutthroat pirate masquerading as a sweet old lady, and the urge to run out into the night was as strong as a riptide. But it wasn't quite strong enough to overcome her desperation to know the whole story. She replaced the poster, and unfolded the last sheet of paper.

It was a letter, written in the large, scrawling hand of someone clearly unused to writing. Trying to put the killer in the next room out of her mind, Alice held it to the window and began to decipher the messy scrawl.

Annie, it read, I'm writing this as I sit in the hold. Even though you're one of the fiercest fighters I've ever been lucky enough to know, I know you can't match up to England's whole navy, so I don't know if we'll ever get the chance to talk again. I tried to wait for you to come below when the soldiers arrived, but the crew barricaded us down here anyway. I pray they let you live to stand trial, and that I can slip you this note somewhere between here and Charlestown. I'll try and slip my necklace, too, as a memento - I don't think it'll go well with the rope round my neck, do you? Love, I'm for the noose, but you don't have to be. Plead your belly at your trial, and they'll have to wait to kill you. I know you, and I know you'll be brilliant enough to find a way to escape in that time, just like you were brilliant enough to find a way to run away with me, once. You have years left to live, and so many places to go and things to do. I will see you again, one day, I don't doubt it for a second. When I do, I expect to hear stories of a life fully lived. In the meantime, know that I love you, and I'm so sorry it had to end like this. Yours, always, Jack.

Alice folded the letter again, horrified by the tears that sprung to her eyes. The woman separated from her by only a sailcloth was a pirate, the most depraved of monsters, the villain in the stories Alice had been told as a child. Her husband was cut from the same cloth, she had said it herself. And yet here in this letter was not a monster, but a man, heart and soul spilled over the page for the woman who had kept it for decades, and who still wore her wedding ring around her neck. The sincerity in the scratchy letter in front of her was almost enough to move Alice to tears, and a wave of shame washed over her for the revulsion she'd felt when she realised Annie was a pirate, for assuming the woman who had taken her in from the storm to be a monster.

She tucked the papers away again, and replaced the necklace and weapons, careful to arrange them as they had been before. Once everything was as it had been, she set the chest back in its original spot on the floor. She padded back out from behind the sailcloth and into the room beyond. As soon as she was out, a heavy dread spread across her shoulders, and she froze. Unable to place anything wrong, she let out a long breath, and shook herself. It was just guilt. Nerves assuaged, she collapsed into the armchair, and all but passed out.

She woke stiff but refreshed, a shaft of pale sunlight falling across her face, and uncurled out of the armchair. Through the window, she could sea a calm sea, exhausted by the rage of the previous night. The roaring of the wind was gone, and the world was silent. She was halfway to the window when her heart stopped, and she realised what had put such a feeling of dread in her the previous night, when her instincts had known more than her. The rhythm of Annie's breathing that she had listened so carefully to had stopped.

Alice whirled and ran to the old woman's bed, needing to be sure she was alright. Annie was lying on her back, eyes closed and wrinkled face peaceful. For all the world, she could have been asleep, but she was preternaturally still. Alice held a finger under her nose and felt nothing.

"Annie." No response. "Annie." She shook the old woman's shoulder, but Annie was a deadweight. "Annie, wake up."

She shook her again, felt for breath, and felt for a pulse, but after a few desperate minutes, it was clear that there was no life left in the woman in on the bed in front of her. Her heart must have given out. Alice sat down heavily on the side of the bed, stunned. She had seemed in the best of health the previous evening, but then again, she was almost unbelievably old.

Alice sat there for several minutes, floundering in her mind. She couldn't just leave Annie there, but she also couldn't stay long enough to arrange any kind of funeral; her father would have sent people to stop her as soon as he realised she was gone. He had to know where she'd be headed, and they would be only days behind. She had to reach Ben before they did. There had to be a town nearby, she realised eventually. They had been shipwrecked off the coast of Cornwall, and the surrounding area was littered with little villages. She would stop in the nearest town on her way north, and let the local priest know. She could pay him out of Annie's stash of gold coins to ensure she was given a proper funeral.

Resolved on a plan, she decided she had to be on her way. She cast about the room, and her eyes fell on her lone boot. She certainly couldn't travel all the way to Ben in one boot, and though it made her uneasy to wear a dead woman's shoes, she was forced to don Annie's. She returned to the room behind the sailcloth and opened the chest, taking the pouch of gold coins. The lid was half shut when she stopped and reached back inside, retrieving the necklace of shells and the compass.

She stopped by Annie's bed once more before she left, pushing back a long curtain of salt and pepper hair so she could reach behind her neck, trying not to grimace at the cold skin under her fingers. She fastened the shells around Annie's neck, then tucked the compass into her deep breast pocket, beside the pipe and flask.

"To help you find him," she said quietly, "on the other side."

With that, she turned and left behind the room, and the lighthouse, and the strangest acquaintance she'd ever met, or ever would again.

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jjongieee · 6 years ago

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Chords and Loved Ones

Prompt: 03. Horror/Thriller/Paranormal/Mystery

Clem tied her dark hair into a braid, leaving it to dangle freely behind her head. All she cared about was being able to play her guitar for the time in two weeks. The weekend had arrived, she finished her homework early, and she finally made it home to her small home in the afternoon. She had plenty of time to strum out a few chords without disturbing her neighbors.

She hummed, walking through the small kitchen to grab her old, yet absolutely lovely dark blue guitar from the living room. Clem sat down on the sole wooden chair she had bought a month ago and began to play. She only knew a few songs, a blend of old rock and alternative, but she had fun bobbing her head like she would at a concert.

Glancing down at her fingers, Clem carefully pulled at the strings, trying to shape as many chords as she could before she ran out. A few more choruses and she felt finished, satisfied that she did her best to her sole audience of one - her small empty house. She stood up to stretch, letting the strap slid down her shoulder.

Hopefully, the next time she had the time to play was a lot sooner, but that depended on her college professors. Clem sighed, lifting off the guitar a little reluctantly. She knew better than to mess around for too long though. Last time she had calluses for days on all four of her playing fingers.

Standing the instrument back up, Clem spun around, wondering what she could do now. The smartest idea would be to dust the three rooms she called home. She yawned, baring her teeth in some mock growl at the dirty space, then shuffled off to the closet around the corner.

With each step, she heard a muffled sound, almost as if someone were hitting the walls with a hand or limb. The noise reminded her of an echo, which she wanted to believe at first, yet when she decided to pause mid-movement, another thump still rang through her ears.

“Is someone there?” Clem asked, squinting through her dirty glasses. Maybe a neighbor was simply knocking on her front door?

She shrugged, tugging at her braid before approaching the hallway. A few rays of sunlight still peeked through the white-columned blinds. She could count the number of conversations she had with any of her neighbors with one hand. Why would someone want to talk to her right after hearing her play? She barely spent a few minutes on her guitar anyway.

She walked right up to the front of her home and decided to give herself a chance to catch her breath.

Clem waited for two beats, then swung the door open, for nothing to be standing near her. That was weird. Could she be hearing things? It had been a long week; she supposed the noise could just be from that.

Still, it didn’t explain the almost cold feeling that crept into her the moment the sounds started. Something was there. She couldn’t tell what, she couldn’t say, or even really think why she knew that, but a part of her deemed it true. Clem did not feel alone in her house, even if all the signs pointed to her holding an irrational belief.

The last time she had someone over, it ended in black clothes, tears, and rain, as much of a classic sad day as they came. Clem didn’t need to relive those memories anytime soon, even if the funeral was six months ago.

She turned back to look at the small, dark room. Her chair seemed a lot closer to her than it had before, but she could have mindlessly pushed it in her mad dash to actually play her precious guitar. Clem shook her head, tired from not only the last few weeks but also her idiotic brain.

Only she would try to bring up ghosts and make them possible during the afternoon, not even during the night. Clem scratched at her head, loosening up what she figured was quite a large amount of dandruff. She would find that disgusting later, but currently, she found it soothing, to feel the flecks start moving out from around her braid.

Then, she heard two more noises. The first, simply her stomach growling, which was fair as she hadn’t been able to eat much that morning. However, the next sound echoed the one that sent her opening the front door like a maniac. Clem sighed, wondering what could bring that back.

Clearly, she should forget about having a mostly quiet day to herself, in comparison to the absolute nightmare her house was being. One last time, she told herself, she would try to see what the noise could actually be.

“Hello?”

Clem frowned even while she talked, already finding herself insane for entertaining the thought of something being able to crawl into the room, all without her seeing. The creature had to be of a decent size to cause such a distinct thump, however, so she felt secure in that conclusion at least.

“Please just come out,” she nearly begged dread building within her as the seconds ticked by without a hair stirring around her. “I’m gonna get driven mad here.”

She hung her head at the lack of a reply. Calling out into the abyss her home seemed like a fine idea, but it made her feel even crazier. Clem rubbed at her temples. A headache was building by her forehead, which got her frustrated as she hated not being in what she called the optimal-thinking-situation, but her mind was already blown by the sheer audacity of whatever or whoever was pranking her like this.

A low rumbling not from her stomach caught her attention. If she didn’t know better, Clem would attribute that noise to laughter? It sounded exactly how her father used to chuckle at her antics, then give her advice on how to do improve upon on whatever she was doing. A small grin stretched across her face. It had been a bit since she really thought of him.

The simple thought of her father brought her to tears up until a few weeks ago, as she decided she would try to be able to link make to him with happier thoughts instead of those last few moments. Clem still missed him dearly, though. Since the funeral, she hadn’t seen much of her family at all, even less than when she first moved out of her parents’ place.

Clem opened her eyes that had somehow shut when she was deep in thought, to see a shocking image. The very image of her father, gray-faced as he had been in his coffin, floated in front of her. As in, his feet neatly curled above the cheap, dirty carpet underneath, and he was in the best suit his closet held.

“D-dad?” Her voice cracked, the word hovering in the air as if her father would disappear if she spoke too loudly. “Is that really you?”

A smile stretched across his discolored lips. “Hi, honey. Bet you weren’t expecting this.” A short laugh left him. Clem was stunned, her hand stretched out then frozen in place, unsure of what she should or even could do.

She debated on screaming or crying, or both at the same time. For now, she kept the conversation going, as if to try to convince herself that this could be real.

“How?” She choked out, waving a hand aimlessly towards him. Even the dark hair they shared had stayed in the carefully brushed style they buried him in. “I - we - saw you die. We had to bury you.”

His face grew dark, and he didn’t try meeting her eyes. “I’ve been dormant for a while, somehow still here.” Dad shrugged, looking far too casual for a dead man. “Suppose I’m meant to do something before I leave.”

Clem chewed on her lip, debating on whether this made sense in the slightest. Her imagination could be acting up, especially by having to go back to this house every day after what happened. She figured it wouldn’t hurt to go along with a dream, as fantastical as this one started off as.

“Okay,” she humored him. “What would you possibly do now, then, past haunting your daughter and scaring her?”

“I didn’t mean to startle you, Clem, but I will admit I could have gone about this in a different way.” He grinned slightly. “I heard you playing, and I suddenly had the urge to speak with you, or to at least see you. I gathered up my strength and reached what I am right now.”

Her father moved as if to pace back and forth, but in his ghostly form, he simply drifted from one piece of furniture to another. She found it a bit hard to take him seriously after thinking of him as a grown-up balloon floating all over.

“An almost sentient figure?”

He nodded. “Or a shade, perhaps. Whatever you’d rather refer to me as.”

Clem quirked her mouth at his serious tone. For her dead father to affirm that he was a ghost-ish, and to want to make her comfortable discussing him, she really didn’t know how to feel currently.

One the one hand, it was brilliant to see Dad again, to see him talking and moving, and, well, maybe not truly breathing, but the sentiment made her feel nice. The flip side was that her father was partially back from the dead, had been this whole time, and seemed to be haunting her house.

Really not quite the quiet day she had been planning for herself. Whatever. She would just have to make do somehow.

“You liked my playing that much to risk giving your daughter the scare of her life?” That had been puzzling her, and popped back into her head now, during her mad dash of trying to understand what could be happening.

“I haven’t had much strength to really move around her, but the moment I heard your music, I felt bolded, empowered, so I sprang to action when I got the chance.” Her father smirked at her, reminiscent of all the times he would get her out of trouble from her mom.

Clem shook her head in bemusement. He never seemed to care about her playing while he was alive, yet the guitar got him out of his funk and back into her life. She should play it more often now more than ever if it truly drew her father away from the afterlife waiting for him.

“What do we do now, then?” She tapped a random beat on her leg, keeping pace with her racing thoughts. “It’s not like we can go out in public.” And, Clem still wasn’t quite convinced this wasn’t a dream, tears trapped in her eyes as she didn’t want to absolutely break down into crying.

Dad nodded, looking off at the plain, pale walls. “All I know is that I can barely move from here.” He gestured randomly with a hand, indicating what she assumed was the living room. “I tried leaving through the door a few days ago. Not four steps outside and I got colder than a ‘fridge. I’m surprised you didn’t hear me then.”

As a matter of fact, Clem did seem to recall hearing some noises that sounded close to gasps, but she wrote it off as her neighbors being busy with something. “Interesting,” she muttered instead.

Her father chuckled, looking like he had in old pictures, as carefree as a parent could be with their kid. Glancing at his smile, Clem shook her head, caught between memories and the apparent truth of ghosts. Or, she amended, at least the existence of this one specific ghost.

“I’ve missed you, sweetie.” A hand appeared a few feet away from her, oddly discolored, but normal besides that. She wished that she could grasp onto him, feel his pulse once more, hear his heartbeat. Clem couldn’t do any of that now, however. She needed to move on, even with his appearing as a near-shade in her own home.

She took a long breath, turning back to face him. A small grin crossed her face. “I’ve really missed you too.” Dad’s smile instantly grew, with something like relief shining in his brown eyes, just like her own.

Maybe this could be a good thing, Clem considered quietly. Maybe - she wouldn’t feel as alone anymore.

The next day carried on like a normal one, her falling out of bed, getting rushed in the bathroom, and barely grabbing a banana to eat on the way.

One key difference was the figure of her deceased father complaining that she needed to better her cooking skills and eat healthier meals. And that he waved goodbye when she ran out of the house.

Clem skipped from class to class, unknowingly drawing attention from her fellow students by her sudden change in heart. She carried herself with a certain lightness, like something in her heart had been filled and it changed how she viewed life.

All because a lonely adult pulled out her guitar to play. Clem would forever be grateful for the steps that brought her to see her father again.

She drove back home, the moon bright in the night sky. Unlocking her front door brought her a dark room, but that didn’t bother her quite as much as it did yesterday.

A gray figure hovered by her chair, a grin already on his face.

“Hi, Dad.”

With those two words, Clem felt an inexplicable sense of belonging and happiness.

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