Still, no one looked askance. If anything, the words lit something in their expression, the last light of the day etching their faces in rough shadows. Talia held my gaze, her eyes cold black water.
“Luckily,” Phillip, and stretched like a dog, long and lazy, completely unselfconscious. Scratched behind his ear, a smile crooking his lips. “This isn’t Matsue Castle.”
Faiz patted Talia’s arm. “Nah, not even Phillip could rent out a place like that.”
Phillip tried on abashment, complete with an honest-to-god aw-shucks toe scuffing, but it didn’t work. At this point, he’d been homecoming king, class valedictorian, debate captain, chess wunderkind, every type of impressive a boy could hope to be, king of kings in a palace of princes. Even when they try, guys like him can’t do self-effacing.
But they can be good sports.
“This is better.” I rolled my luggage up against a pillar, slouched carefully against the wood. Despite everything, I was warming to their enthusiasm, partially because it was so much easier to just go along with it, less lonely too. Media’s all about the gospel of the lone wolf, but the truth is we’re all just sheep.
“But what is this exactly?” said Faiz, ever meticulous when love was a mandrel in his deliberations. His fingers bangled Talia’s wrist and his smile creased from worry.
“Well.” Phillip gutted the word, unstrung it over twenty seconds. “My guy wouldn’t give me a name. He said he didn’t want anything on record in case—”
“Could have just told you over the phone,” said Faiz.
Phillip tapped the side of a finger to his temple. “Didn’t want it to be a ‘he said, they said’ thing either. He was a stickler for the rules.”
“I guess it is cultural,” said Faiz, full of knowing. His mother was Japanese, small-framed and smileless. “Makes sense.”
“We have a permit for this, though. Right?” said Talia, a wobble in her gilded prep-school inflections.
“Yeah. We do. Don’t worry about that.” Phillip palmed the back of his neck. “Well. Sort of. We have a permit allowing us to access the land here. The mansion’s sort of . . . collateral benefit.”
“Okay. So, we don’t have a name,” began Faiz, counting sins on his fingers. “We don’t actually have a permit to be here. But we have booze, food, sleeping bags, a youthful compulsion to do stupid shit—”
“And a hunger for a good ghost story,” said Talia. The late light did beautiful things to her skin, burnished her in gold. “What is the scoop on this mansion?”
“I don’t know,” Phillip said, the singsong timbre of his voice familiar, the sound of it like a coyote lying about where he’d left the sun. “But rumour has it that this was once supposed to be the site of a beautiful wedding. Unfortunately, the groom never showed up. He died along the way.”
“If you die,” said Talia, pinching a curd of Faiz’s waist between her fingers, “I’m gonna marry Phillip instead. Just so you know.”
Phillip smiled at the proclamation like he’d heard it ten times before from ten thousand other women, knew every syllable was meant, would already be true if it weren’t for fraternal bonds, and I was the only one who saw how Faiz’s answering smile wouldn’t climb to his eyes.
“I don’t think you’re allowed to marry your priest,” Faiz said, easy as anything. “But if you had to get a replacement, I’d rather you pick Cat.”
“Ugh,” I said. “Not my type.”
“I’d rather die an old maid. No offense,” said Talia.
“None taken.”
“Anyway,” said Phillip with a clearing of his throat. “The bride took her abandonment in stride and told her wedding guests to bury her in the foundation of the house.”
“Alive?” I whispered. I thought of a girl holding both hands to her mouth, swallowing air and then dirt, her hair and the hems of her wedding dress becoming heavier with every shovel’s worth of soil to come down.
“Alive,” said Phillip. “She said she had promised to wait for him and she would. She’d keep the house standing until his ghost finally came home.”
Silence placed itself to rest along the house and upon our tongues.
“And every year after that, they buried a new girl in the walls,” said Phillip.
“Why,” started Faiz, startling somehow at this revelation, “the fuck would they do that?”