My phone rang again.
“You know you should answer,” Finn said, holding aside a branch of brambles to let the rest of us pass.
I tucked my phone back into my pocket. “I don’t want to worry her,” I said.
“She’ll be over at my place in minutes, checking with my mam. She’ll know you’ve run off.”
The vibrating of my phone set my teeth on edge.
Finn gave me a stern look. “And my mam will know I’ve done a runner too.”
“Fine. I’ll text her.”
Got your voicemail.
I wrote quickly, the light of my phone in the darkness under the trees blinding me.
Sorry I haven’t called. Still at Finn’s. Just need to figure some stuff out. I’ll see you tomorrow, k? Love you too.
I let myself imagine Rachel’s face when I returned home with Mandy. The shock, the awe, the disbelief. Even deep in the worst of their fights, my sisters could never seem to separate completely. Even when Rachel refused to open the door to her twin, they sent messages, they spoke on the phone. There was a mystery to their relationship, a complicated dance of affection and resentment I didn’t understand.
When I found Mandy, I would ask them. Armed with the stories of our family’s past, I would sit them down and make them look at what had split them, what had happened at our mother’s funeral to cause their sisterhood such distress.
* * *
—
The evening sun started to set in earnest, and I picked up the pace, the thought of Rachel finding out I was gone spurring me on. She would not accept stilted messages and vague excuses for long. In the distance, a bird cried. A sound so like a keen, a scream.
Finn and Ida hurried to keep up, huddled together on the small and winding roads. Overhanging trees dipped their branches above us, and tangled around them, slicing through the air, glinting, were long silvery gray hairs. Another bird’s cry broke the silence, but at this point I’m not sure any of us were certain it was a bird.
Nervously, Cale started to sing to fill the silence, old folk songs from our childhood, as if she somehow knew this was what she should do to still our fears. Her voice was clear and beautiful.
Another scream sounded, closer this time.
Finn raised his voice and sang along, full of false bravado. Ida chimed in with both a similarly feigned enthusiasm and the signature Rys tone-deaf ear. But Cale and Finn could have been a choir. High and low, bass and alto, Cale making up the harmonies like it was something she was born to do.
When another scream sounded, we all jumped, whipped around, sure it had come from close by.
“It’s a deer,” Finn said quickly, too loud in the quiet. “Or a fox. They sound like that sometimes. When they’re mating.”
“That’s true,” Ida breathed faintly. “Female foxes scream.”
But I knew it wasn’t a fox.
“Come on,” said Cale, touching the stone that hung around her neck. “We’re almost there.”
She motioned to us to leave the road. We hoisted our backpacks higher and hopped over a stone wall. In what was not quite a forest, we climbed hillocks and scrambled over fallen trees, tangles snatching at our clothes. Soon we were all but running.
Until Cale came to an abrupt stop. Just ahead, in a little clearing, there was a small stone cottage, long abandoned.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Finn said. “I can see the headlines now.” He stretched his hands in front of him. “Runaway Queer Kids Become Victims of Remote Cottage Chainsaw Killer, Surprising Absolutely No One.”
“I’m not queer,” Ida said. “Sorry.”
“Then chances are you’ll be the only one left alive.”
It was not so much a house as an empty shell. It was not so much abandoned as reclaimed by the land. There was no roof, only a carpet of grass and three walls covered in leaves and tangles of bushes, scrambling ivy and blackberry brambles. It was hard to tell where the overgrown garden stopped and the house began.
“This is it,” I said. “Ann Gorman’s cottage.” I turned to Cale. “Your great-great-great-great-aunt. Where my great-great-grandmother lived too. We have to go inside.”
“No way, Deena,” Finn said, serious now, all jokes forgotten. “It’s bad enough you talking about banshees and curses and shit. If a ghost is gonna live anywhere, it’s in that house right there.”
“Come on, Finn,” I said bracingly. “It isn’t even fully dark yet.”
Except it looked like midnight inside the ruins. Somehow the countryside seemed hushed suddenly. I started to wonder if maybe Finn was right.
Another scream sounded in the night. Finn’s fingers were a vise-like grip on my hand, but I could barely feel the blood flowing underneath my frozen skin.
Cale set her backpack down on the remains of the stone wall around the house and from it she took a bundle of white candles and a small velvet pouch full of stones.
Finn stared, mouth agape. “Candles?” he said, with a high-pitched edge to his voice I’d never heard before. “Seriously? This isn’t creepy enough without fucking candles?”
“Candles to see ghosts,” said Cale. She handed one to me and I held it like an altar boy about to lead a service. “Talismans so they can’t harm us.”
“Fuck,” said Finn. “This is not good.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts?” I asked him.
“Not during daylight, I don’t,” Finn said. “Not at school, like, or at home. Not when we’re watching some crappy horror film.”
Cale scratched a match to flame and my candle’s wick caught.
“But here?” Finn’s voice went up about an octave. “In some old ruined cottage at twilight in the middle of fucking Sligo with you looking all possessed or some shit? Yeah. Yeah, I fucking believe in ghosts.”
He continued to swear softly under his breath, but I was too preoccupied to really listen. There was something in this place. Maybe the banshees. Maybe something else. All around me, the air smelled like apples.
Cale set out her stones along the walls, as carefully as if they were glass, or eggshells. “These ghosts are tied to us,” she said. “To me, to Deena and Ida. This house is linked to the three of us. They’re the only ghosts we should meet tonight. I don’t think the banshees would come here. Their tangle of hair would snarl in the briars; their rags would rip on the thorns.”
Ida shivered. “You talking like some kind of fairy tale isn’t exactly helping.” She looked around, seemed to realize something. “But if this is Ann and Mary Ellen’s cottage,” she said, “then Mandy must have left another letter. The next part of the story.”