The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books)

you could tell them that. You could’ve told them any time. I’m not!”

“Wait a damned minute.” Silent until now, shocked, Bill O’Shannon finally finds his voice. He strides across the kitchen and pulls his teenaged son to his feet, then grasps the front of the boy’s jersey with both hands like a man about to shake an enemy. “What are you saying, Andy? What . . . what did you do?”

“I made her have sex with me when she was eleven!” Andy screams into his father’s face. “For months and months and months! And I took pictures of it and swore I’d tell everyone at school she was a slut if she told anyone!”

“Oh my God,” Amber O’Shannon whimpers. “Oh. My. God.”

William O’Shannon throws his son across the kitchen like he is tossing away something he no longer wants.

Then he turns and walks to one of the kitchen chairs, where he sits down with all the grace of an improperly strung marionette. A very heavy one.

Andy has landed in a heap against the front of the refrigerator. He picks himself up, then wipes his bleeding mouth on his sleeve. He studies the blood but doesn’t see it, then goes back and sits in the same place he’d been before his ugly confession.

“Pervert,” Brianna suddenly hisses. “You’re so lucky you never tried that shit with me.” Before anyone realizes what she’s going to do, she reaches over and gives Mara a stinging, loud slap across her bare left arm. “You’re an idiot, you know that? Why couldn’t you open your mouth? Oh, no – instead you held it all inside and let it drive you crazy.”

Mara glances down and sees Brianna’s hand print clearly against her skin. It’s OK, because it didn’t hurt. She still has that sensation of insulation, or maybe it’s something stronger, an unseen force field. This is a good thing, because she thinks there is more coming.

“All these years,” Amber says softly. “I thought she was over it. I thought the parties and the drugs were a school thing, she was running with the wrong crowd, and if we could wait it out, she’d get better. She’d . . . forget.” Somehow over the last fifteen minutes Mara’s mother has grown deep purple shadows beneath her eyes. “But she didn’t get over it, did she? Not ever. All that stuff, every pill and joint and needle, it was her trying to get away from the memory of what Andy did. It was just her trying to escape.”

Andy sits up suddenly. “Wait – you knew? Mom, you knew and you didn’t do anything?” His voice is rising, climbing back towards the scream it had been before Bill threw him. “Why? Why didn’t you put a stop to it?”

“Because I thought this . . . this dirty little problem of yours would just go away!” Amber’s voice is shrill, painful. “Sometimes teenaged boys do things they shouldn’t, but it all gets better – I thought that’s what this was!”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Bill says hoarsely. “My son rapes my daughter and my wife knows it’s happening and doesn’t do anything about it? What—”

“Oh, like you would have done anything if we’d have told you,” Brianna sneers. “Mr I Can’t Be Bothered With Anything But Money And Work.”

Bill O’Shannon stumbles to his feet, not noticing when his chair tumbles backwards. “Are you saying that you knew, too?” He has gone from shock to rage, just that quick.

But thirteen-year-old Brianna will not be cowed. “Yes, I knew!” she shrieks. “I wasn’t sure what it was, but I knew!” Mara watches as her little sister’s finger jabs in her direction. “Were you deaf? Didn’t you hear her when she cried every night? Before and after, like clockwork – you could hear her through the door to her room. And you didn’t do anything!”

“So you’re what?” Andy asks bitterly. “Little Miss Holier Than Thou? You’re better than all of us?”

Brianna whirls. “Me? Oh, sure, I’m great. Just put me in Mom’s corner, where we sit and wish it would all go away. Where we wished she would go away.”

Now no one can look at her; no one can say anything else. Through all of it – their confessions, their anger at her, their self-hatred – Mara has felt nothing, thanks to the insulating layer of . . . something around her. Now she finally knows what that something is.

It is the secret shame of her family.

There is guilt here, lots of it, but it is not hers. Yes, it was her own hand that tied off the vein and held the needle, her own decision to try a score from an unknown dealer, a guy too new to the street trade to know he should cut his junk a few more times before passing it down to the high-school crowd. But what she did that night in mid-December was a consequence not a cause, the result of a family so corrupted by selfishness that no one but she felt enough pain to search for a way to avoid it.

Mara still doesn’t know why she has come back, or where she has been since the night she died right here on this supposedly “warm” kitchen floor. She doesn’t recall wanting to come back, and she certainly never had any desire to bring out the dreadful truth that had been her true existence – it simply doesn’t matter to her any more. Whatever the reason, now her being here is done . . . for the second time. And when the compulsion to leave takes her, she doesn’t fight it.

She rises and feels their gazes on her, but she has no desire to say goodbye. She takes one step, then two, and something tickles her ankle. When she looks down, she sees Greepers; the old dog sniffs at her ankle then gives it an affectionate lick before looking up at her and wagging his tail.

Mara reaches down and picks him up.

He is as soft and warm as she remembers, wonderfully so, and he wiggles with joy and tries to lick her face. She has one quick moment of confusion as she realizes that even though she is holding him, she can still see his body on the floor, eyes open and chest still, small and silent next to the chair on which she had been sitting.

She glances at each member of her family in turn. Her mother is pallid, crying quietly; for the first time that Mara can ever remember, she looks at her daughter with something close to longing. Her father seems to have shrunk on his chair, a man broken by the hideous truth of what has transpired, unseen and unstopped, in his own home. Her brother and sister stare first at her and the soft bundle of fur in her arms, then at the cooling corpse of the family pet. Their expressions are tight with self-recrimination and remorse.

But Mara doesn’t care.

She hugs Greepers close and walks out of the kitchen, going down the steps and into the utility room.

It is filled with white light, and somewhere at the end of that light she knows she and Greepers will find a long-awaited peace.

Let Loose

Mary Cholmondeley

The dead abide with us! Though stark and cold

Earth seems to grip them, they are with us still.

Some years ago I took up architecture, and made a tour through Holland, studying the buildings of that interesting country. I was not then aware that it is not enough to take up art. Art must take you up, too. I never doubted but that my passing enthusiasm for her would be returned. When I discovered that she was a stern mistress, who did not immediately respond to my attentions, I naturally transferred them to another shrine. There are other things in the world besides art. I am now a landscape gardener.

But at the time of which I write, I was engaged in a violent flirtation with architecture. I had one companion on this expedition, who has since become one of the leading architects of the day. He was a thin, determined- looking man with a screwed-up face and heavy jaw, slow of speech, and absorbed in his work to a degree which I quickly found tiresome. He was possessed of a certain quiet power of overcoming obstacles which I have rarely seen equalled. He has since become my brother-in-law, so I ought to know; for my parents did not like him much and opposed the marriage, and my sister did not like him at all, and refused him over and over again; but, nevertheless, he eventually married her.