But she seemed fine.
She stood at attention, watching me with wide eyes.
Her hands remained loose at her sides.
“You should run cold water over that,” I said, gesturing.
She remained still.
Had she gone into shock?
“Constance?” I prompted.
When I stepped forward, gently tugging her toward the sink, I saw her fingers were unharmed. I flipped her hands over, certain I’d somehow missed seeing the burns, but there was nothing, just pink, unmarred skin.
“Could you let go of me, please?” Her request was strained, taut.
“What?” I ran my fingers over hers, unable to understand what I was seeing.
“It’s harder to do this when you’re touching me.”
A strange dread prickled at the back of my neck. I could feel it work its way lower, skittering down my vertebrae like a long-legged spider, testing a strand of silk.
“Do what?” Each word fell from my lips like stone boulders and I was struck by the dreamy sensation that we were moving too slowly, caught in a moment of time gone wrong.
“Touch things,” she admitted. “Move things. Be here.”
My hand, clutched so tightly around hers, was suddenly empty. She’d disappeared, flickering from sight like a candle blown out by a draft.
My mouth fell open as I looked around, acknowledging I was the only one in the kitchen.
“Constance?” I asked, my voice carrying small and stupidly through the empty space.
She was gone.
“Constance?” I repeated, and I could hear a note of hysteria rising up, threatening to break me.
There was no response.
Of course there wasn’t.
Constance, Gerard’s Constance, was gone.
Gone, as if she’d never been there at all.
Gone, like the ghost she was.
A ghost.
Constance.
Constance was a ghost.
“How?” I asked aloud, feeling foolish. The room was empty. No one was going to answer. Least of all…
Constance.
Who was…
I shook my head.
This wasn’t right. This couldn’t be.
I’d worried she was a ghost the day I’d first seen her, standing in the parlor, drawn to that enormous confection of a dress. I’d thought she was a spirit until…
I’d grabbed her hand.
Or she’d grabbed mine.
Something.
There’d been something that day. Something that had assuaged my fears and convinced me she was real.
But I’d touched her tonight too. I’d seen her pick up the tin of poppy tea. I’d watched her pull down the canvas covers in the storage room.
Hadn’t I?
I rubbed at my forehead, trying to remember.
I hadn’t touched her. Not in the hallway. Once I’d realized she was Gerard’s mistress, my stomach had churned with disgust, holding me from her. But the tea…
The tea had fallen through her hands.
I remembered its metallic clank as it struck the counter.
And in the storage room, I’d been so preoccupied with pulling down as many drop cloths as quickly as I could. It had been a moment of such flurried, singular focus. I couldn’t deny it was possible I’d torn them all away myself…
I covered my mouth, stifling back the cry that wanted to rip free. My ribs ached from the strain of holding such pressure in.
Constance had been alive and well the day of my engagement.
But now she was a ghost.
Once alive. Now dead.
What had happened to her?
A sudden scream filled the air.
It wasn’t the teakettle. It wasn’t me. And the peacocks had fallen silent.
I trembled as the cries echoed off the tiled walls. The keening pitched flat, saturating the night with a pained anguish impossible to ignore. I didn’t want to see what caused such a sound. But I also couldn’t do nothing.
Holding my breath, I tiptoed from the kitchen, unsure of what horror I was about to stumble upon.
The corridor was empty.
Until it wasn’t.
Far down the hall, I caught sight of Constance. There was a wink of blue linen as she flickered in and out of sight, like the sun playing peekaboo on a cloudy day. There for a moment and gone the next, only to reappear farther away.
She was going somewhere, deeper into the house.
“Constance?” I murmured.
She didn’t turn, didn’t acknowledge that she’d heard me at all.
“Constance!” I hissed.
Still no response. She carried on, traveling down the hall with unknown purpose, disappearing every few seconds, only to flare back into sight.
I wanted to call after her, to cry and shout and scream, but Chauntilalie’s silence stopped me short. I wouldn’t learn anything if I woke up everyone in the manor. So I kept my mouth shut and followed after her.
Constance came to a fork in the hall, then took the left.
I hurried to catch up before I lost sight of her completely.
As I got closer, I became aware she was talking, her voice low and furtive, as if she didn’t want anyone to overhear her. I strained to make out her words.
“You must do something for them. They—” Her voice cut off as she disappeared again.
She came back farther away. “You said you could help me. You said you could help them.” Her words rose in pitch, growing tremulous and tinged with agitation.
“Constance?”
This time she paused and turned, looking down the hall, worry evident. But our eyes didn’t meet. It was as though she didn’t see me at all, as if it was suddenly I, not her, who was the ghost.
“I thought I heard something,” she murmured, her brown eyes scanning the darkened space. They fell briefly on me but flitted away again without acknowledgment. “I think someone’s following us.” She blinked out again, leaving me alone.
All around me, shadows seemed to press in, darker than before, cloaking me in their heavy murk. The silence stretched out like a line of silk ribbon, fibers pulling apart and fraying the tighter I held on. When Constance finally reappeared—this time coming up from behind me, turning the corner as she had just a moment before—I nearly shrieked aloud.
“You must do something for them. You said you could help me. You said you could help them.”
I frowned. Hadn’t she just said that?
“I thought I heard something.” Her eyes swept up and down the corridor, the expression on her face identical to before. “I think someone’s following us.”
Again, she disappeared, only to reappear once more, coming up from behind me. I watched her repeat this procession again. And again. And a third time. My head darted back and forth as if watching Camille’s twins playing a game of badminton on Highmoor’s lawn.
Constance seemed to be retracing the steps she’d carried out in life, over and over, as if caught in a swift current, unable to break free. As she started the loop once more, I stepped in front of her, trying to alter her route, but she walked straight through me. The hairs on my arms rose as goose bumps broke out all over my body.
It wasn’t a chill that made me shiver.
This was wrong.
She felt wrong, an entity thrown into the wrong time and place.
I wanted to help her but I was powerless to stop the cycle from playing out again and again.
“What happened next?” I whispered, rubbing my hands over my arms. I didn’t feel right. It was as though her wrongness had somehow imprinted itself upon me. “What are you trying to show me, Constance?”