Kiss Me Deadly: Tales of a Paranormal Romance

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,