Post by Huntress on Sept 6, 2015 12:44:40 GMT -5
I wrote a thing. It's a thing related to the Town event and it's several times longer than I originally thought it'd be (clocks in at around 7300 words, whoot) but it's got illustrations as a compensation for having to read lots of WORDS. Prooobably won't write any other townfics so I won't make it a general storythread but if I happen to be proven hilariously wrong in the future, I can edit this behemoth into a spoilerbox.
Taggin' Liou and Coaster onnacounta using their characters and sticking them in pictures, because it's what I do.
My name is Elinor. I’m seventeen years old, live in a decently nice district of Melville with my boyfriend and work at the newspaper house. Until recently, my life was… pretty good, I guess?
That line doesn’t seem to mean anything any more. Life is good, they used to say. And it was. Why would we question the Council?
Mom says that I was never particularly good at questioning things. I say that questioning things too much got her killed, so you choose who wins out here, I guess.
Anyway.
My dad died when I was little. I vaguely remember him as this enormous smiling man who took up my entire field of vision and a piggy back ride made me feel like I was up in the skies, on the edge of the Wall itself. I was two years old when he was killed, my brother a few years older. Mom raised us more or less alone, there wasn’t much extended family in town, and so Dad turned into little more than a vague memory and a photo Mom kept on the kitchen counter. It’s a pretty old one, they’re both still young in this, Mom had long hair back then and looked very pretty. I told her that once, and she grunted and said that she’s not prepared to dig herself six feet under just yet.
Both I and my brother take after Dad, going by the photo: tall and fair, with blue eyes. Mom was also tall, but with black hair and brown eyes and altogether more… stocky, I guess? We lived in the old family home which technically belonged to Dad’s mom, my grandma, a tall and wiry-looking Wall-fearing woman who we didn’t see very often. Mom ran a flower shop – well, you wouldn’t want to tell her that. She had a talent of sorts, she could brew skills out of plants. Entirely useless skills, things like balancing a pencil on the tip of your nose or curling up your tongue. But the plants she used grew wonderfully big fragrant flowers and that put food on the table, much as Mom would’ve liked everyone to be falling over for the potions instead.
One time when I was a kid, after something other kids had said at school, I asked Mom if she was a witch. She made a grimace and said that she doesn’t like the title. I wasn’t entirely sure if that meant yes or no.
Kids at school also said other things.
“Mom,” I asked her once, “was Dad really in the Resistance?”
She was usually involved in some sort of potionwork when I came to her at work to talk, and in hindsight it was always amazing how any question of mine didn’t cause her to lose concentration. You’d think that counting drops from a vial would take a lot of focus, but I don’t remember her ever starting over in frustration or telling me to bugger off. She’d usually grunt, which was your cue that she’s heard you and will be just a second, and when the critical part of work was done, she’d answer.
“I don’t know,” she replied in due time. “He never told me either way, and trust me that he’ll be in for an earful when we meet up again in the afterlife. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, does it matter? He was a good man, and this I do know for certain.”
“Can you be good and in the Resistance?” I asked dubiously.
She snorted. “Take that as a life lesson, kiddo.”
Mom wasn’t an easy person to talk to: she’d poke at you with sneaky little questions and make you doubt what you thought you knew and when you poked back with sneaky questions of your own, she’d get a little twinkle in her eye that gave you the impression that she’s secretly happy with you. And she was very difficult to upset, which will drive a preteen up the wall. At one point, when we were the age when stupid things are cool and dangerous, we both tried to pick up smoking. Peer pressure, you know.
Bad idea.
Not for the reason you’d think, either. Nobody manufactured cigarettes in Melville, people grew their own tobacco when they could and used it for pipeweed or rolled their own smokes. Mom, who’d been smoking since Dad died, went ‘bwahaha’ when she saw our initial attempts to roll a proper cigarette.
We, of course, smoked in secret like everyone else – except everyone else hid so that their parents wouldn’t yell at them for smoking, we hid because when Mom found us, she’d say things like “Okay, this one’s fairly good, but the way it sags in the middle is just sad, uniform packing, remember?” That frankly sucked the fun out of it and we stopped soon after.
The older we grew, the more we started to notice and the farther outside we reached from the childhood home. My brother was planning to go into law and studied diligently. I, at fifteen, wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do, but at the time I didn’t really feel the pressure to decide: school was school, home was home, Mom would spend her days at the shop cooking up her potions and life was indeed good. I mean, yes, I’d get my heart broken by boys and Mom would be stupid and not understand anything and my bro was mean to me at times. But that was still before the fires and riots and the Resistance happened.
“Mom,” I asked her once, “are we poor?”
Mom, at work as usual, gave me a curious sideways look. We were at the greenhouse attached to the house where mom did any work she didn’t do in the shop. I rarely saw her at leisure, or rather, fidgeting with plants and potions was her leisure. She was one of those rare people who could combine work and hobbies and make money out of it.
“Do you think we are?” she parried.
“I don’t know, that’s the thing.”
Mom grinned in that infuriating know-it-all sort of way. “If you don’t know, then you’re not. Simple as that.”
“But,” I didn’t leave the question be, “look, this town is so small, and our school only has like, fifty people in it. And we have people like Cara, her sister works as a baker and they have no parents and are living off of… I don’t know what, the way Cara goes on about their life, but it doesn’t sound particularly nice. And then there’s Victoria, who just has everything. How can the difference be so steep?”
“If you start trying to live your life based on what other people have,” Mom pointed out, “there’s just no way you won’t be miserable.”
“So I’m supposed to focus on what they don’t have?” I parried. Mom grinned slightly.
“If you want to be horrible about it, be my guest, I guess.”
And then, only a few weeks later, a kid in our school disappeared. There were whispers of the Resistance, which had by then cropped up in a small, back-alley mutterings sort of way. But it was a rich kid whose dad worked in a powerful position in the City Hall, surely they wouldn’t dare?
Things were festering in Melville, and I, like everyone else, hoped that the Council would put a swift stop to it.
But a swift stop wouldn’t come, for whatever reason. For a few years, the Resistance loomed somewhere in the background as an unseen threat, sometimes forgotten, then reminding of themselves again, little bit of graffiti here, a few leaflets there. In that time, life went on: I moved in with my boyfriend after settling into an internship with the Harbinger, my brother roomed with a few friends in the outskirts so as to, as he put it, learn to live on his own because he’d be buggered if he’s staying on Mom’s neck after his little sister is out of the house. Mom took the news of the suddenly emptying nest with a cheerful “Goodie, I can finally strut around the place naked again” and for a fair few weeks after, we wouldn’t go near the house, just in case.
That was in June. In October, within one mere week, everything burned and the old life, whatever its flaws, was no more.
Then again, at least now I can say that the old life had flaws? Except that sounds like Mom’s sneaky reasoning.
It began with the graffiti, followed by a dead street urchin, and then someone shot Victoria.
Sure, I’d never liked the girl, but – shot, seriously. I went to see Mom that afternoon; I’d heard through the grapevine that she’d been interrogated on the matter because they’d talked at the street urchin’s funeral the day before. Newspaper people are horrible gossips, it’s part of the job.
In hindsight, I’m glad I did: life being what it is, we didn’t meet very often those days, I’d step into the shop maybe once every few weeks for a quick chat. But this time I went to see her, and that was the last time we ever talked… well, sort of.
“Oh, good,” Mom said when I stepped into the shop. “Be a good girl, sit down and let me give you a lecture about things you already know and I know you already know them but I’ll have to tell you anyway so that I myself can be at peace about it.”
“Oh goodie,” I said wearily. This should’ve been entirely expected.
“You can stick in as many ‘mooooooom’s as you like,” she offered generously.
“I can sum it up for you,” I suggested. “I will not meander around alone after dark, I will not stick my nose in shady business, go along with strangers, get myself shot or stabbed or otherwise horribly injured and I’ll wear long underwear because it’s getting cold out.”
Mom counted off points on her fingers. “Yeah, that about sums it up.”
“Even the underwear?”
“I never forget the underwear,” Mom said smugly – whether or not she actually was a witch, she definitely knew how to take credit when it was offered. “Tell your brother as well when you see him.”
I promised to have an extensive underwear-related conversation with my brother and asked how the interrogation went. She scoffed.
“Mark my word, something stupid will come of this,” she said. “They’re plenty eager to pin the blame on the first poor bugger who stutters during interrogation. Right now the thing to do is keep a low profile and hope for the best.”
A few days later, they hanged her.
The mass interrogations were nightmare enough. I was in a group of strangers, my boyfriend, brother and Mom in other groups. I tried not to look around for them too much, in case it looked suspicious or put them under suspicion. I tried to answer all questions as best and truthfully as I could. “You have nothing to fear if you’re innocent,” they told me.
And then they hanged Mom.
The executions were a haze; I think I might have been screaming, but I’m not entirely sure. I remember someone yelling “Mom! Mom! Mom!” over and over again, but they did hang a lot of people that day. Someone else’s mom was probably up there too.
She didn’t even look at me, or anyone for that matter. The odd thing is, she looked angry. The others were in tears or hysterics or just apathetic. Mom looked well and truly prepared to flip her lid. But she didn’t try anything and she hanged with the rest.
When the crowd dispersed and I sat there on the cold ground, staring at nothing in particular, any random spot on the ground, anything other than those bodies up there on the platform, my brother found me and helped me up.
“I’ll go ask them for her body,” he said grimly.
“What?” I squeaked, shaken out of my stupor. “You can’t! They hanged her as a criminal! Resistance! They’ll think you’re suspicious!”
“I’ll ask Missy,” the bro said, nodding at the small group of officials by the gallows. “We used to date.”
“She probably signed the warrant,” I hissed.
He sighed. “I have to try anyway.”
He tried and succeeded. We got the body, wrapped unceremoniously in burlap, and his mates came along to carry it. One of them suggested a man to hire to say a few words, and there we were, that very same evening, by the river, sending Mom off. The man we’d hired was nice: he hadn’t known Mom but he made it sweet and simple, with none the false hope about ‘meeting in a better world’.
We crowded in my brother’s communal flat that night and gave Mom a wake, or more specifically got ourselves well and properly hammered.
“D’you know,” my boyfriend slurred when it was already heading towards morning, “this whole thing stinks. Okay, maybe Ene was Resistanananca whatever. She was a great woman. Had really nice-“ he caught my eye, “personality. The thing is. They shouldna just up and hanged her.”
“Life,” said one of my bro’s mates, “is good, and dontcha forget it.” He ended the sentence with a few words I’m not going to repeat here.
“I wonder,” I grumbled, leaning against the bro’s sofa, sitting on the floor with my left foot in something worrisomely sticky, “I wonder how you join the Resi- the Re-sis-tann-ce.”
The guys stared at me.
“Yeah, dontcha even think about it,” said the bro.
“Well, how bad can they be?” I insisted, leaning my head back too far to be comfortable; the sofa’s seat was too low. Was this how Mom had felt on the very last moments? “They didn’t kill Mom. The Council did.”
“If, assuming Mom was in fact Resistance,” the bro pointed out, determined to argue the unpopular side because nobody else would, “she coulda been the one who shot whatsername, Victoria.”
“And good riddance,” I muttered nastily.
“There’s just been way too many,” expletive, “deaths,” another voice said. I couldn’t tell who, and it took my foggy brain a moment to realize that it was because the lights had gone out.
This was something, because electricity wasn’t supplied this late at night; we had four candles and a kerosene lamp. For one of them to be caught in a draft, okay, but all five, and the lamp under a glass for that matter?
We sobered up to a degree and scrambled to the window to look out. The entire town seemed to be pitch black. A power cut is one thing, there was barely any to go around at night save for the Island, but what exactly makes an entire town’s candles go out in closed rooms?
“Ooh, Mom is angry,” I muttered and started to giggle. Then I couldn’t stop. I laughed until I cried, and they put me down on the sofa and fixed me something nasty made of acorns that poorer folk use for coffee: actual coffee is very strictly rationed.
A few days later, there was plenty of fire to go around: the clocktower burned and riots followed in its wake. We waited it out in our little flat, hoping that the masses’ ire was turned against the Council and the Council alone; you never know what a mob decides to do. I was honestly very, very tempted to join the mob and smash a few windows for Mom, but I was already an orphan. Doing stupid things was not the way to go about it.
And then it was over. Or possibly just began, depending on how you looked. The final Resistance member surrendered, the Council was jailed together with her and Melville started over. It wasn’t easy: suddenly, nobody knew what was legal or what wasn’t. The infrastructure took a number of hits, power cuts became common because the generators were largely manned by hard labor, who were often political prisoners and all of their cases had to be reviewed as fast as possible. Businesses that’d catered exclusively to rich tastes or stayed afloat largely thanks to the Council went under. Paranoia ran rampant: there were talks of the Council having secretly worked together with the Resistance or the Resistance still being loose out there, a lot of shady people used the chance to get rid of a troublesome business partner and tried to write it off as Resistance work or Council hitman work, and in the background of all this, the guards were working round the clock while not being entirely sure who they were answering to.
The paranoia touched me as well: I still didn’t know if Mom had, in fact, been in the Resistance. The only one who might’ve shed some light was the surviving and admitted member, Miss Wrigley, but she was kept behind lock and key – the woman was in jail for equal parts punishment and protection. Nobody was allowed to see her or the Council, for fear of mob justice which would’ve undermined the new budding order, fragile and hopeful like a crystal flower.
I had nightmares and so took to having walks in the evening to clear my head in the crisp air of late fall. They became a way to think and overthink. It probably wasn’t very safe for me to be out alone at the time, but at the time I wasn’t really thinking about that.
A few weeks after the fall of the old regime, I wandered on the empty moonlit streets again, nothing much on my mind at the time, which was a blissful change from all the thinking as of late, and suddenly realized that I’d walked the familiar path and arrived at our old house.
I eyed its façade, feeling bittersweet. It was indeed an old house, in a respectable sort of neighborhood, looking much like all the other houses in the area, all windows dark and the house silent, standing in empty abandonment between its brightly lit neighbors on either side. When Mom died, it was roped off for investigations, but the sealing ribbons were gone now.
Something rustled in the neighbors’ bushes and I jumped, suddenly alert and aware of being out alone in dangerous times. It was a fairly long walk back to my flat from here and it had to be well past eleven at night by now. But this was my childhood home right in front of me and even though it was dark and empty, even though both of my parents had died and the place was frankly a bit creepy, I still knew every nook and cranny in it.
So I decided to get inside and spend that night in my old room, and then maybe clean the place up in the morning and decide what to do with it. There was probably paperwork to be done, and I wasn’t sure if the place actually belonged to Grandma or had been inherited to me and my brother, and that paperwork would be in the City Hall, and I’d also have to do something about Mom’s greenhouse, if all the plants weren’t dead already.
I went up to the front door, trying to remember where Mom usually hid the spare key. There was also a loose basement window behind the house, but I tried the door first anyway, just so that I wouldn’t have to feel stupid if it was in fact open.
It opened, and I was blinded by lights as the noise hit me like a hammer.
I stood at the door, gaping, as perky piano music washed over me, and blinked at the dozen bright lamps which most definitely hadn’t shown through the windows a second ago but there they were now and looking aside, I could see all downstairs windows casting bright rectangles onto the front lawn and someone was having a smoke next to the corner of the house in the frontyard who definitely hadn’t been there a second ago and the house was full of people who were all chatting noisily and it barely looked like our living room except it still did somehow and what was going on?
“Elinor!”
My head snapped sideways towards the corner where a small bar stood, one of those old-fashioned ones that one was expected to have in their house for guests when my grandparents were little. It looked to have a proper crowd around it now, and through the crowd a young woman in a red dress was elbowing her way towards me, what the hell this isn’t happening!
She was still recognizably Mom, except much younger, just about my age, with the long hair I remembered from the photo, dress and boots she probably wouldn’t have allowed me to wear, and disconcertingly much, much curvier than I remembered and what’s with these swinging hips, mothers aren’t supposed to look anything like that! a small but thoroughly outraged part of my brain thought.
She reached me and wrapped me in a hug and that’s when I broke down. It was the smell that did it. She still smelled like Mom, of tobacco and some sort of herbal things with a note of freshly cut grass.
“Eh, girlie,” I heard her voice sigh, still very much Mom’s voice, and through a curtain of tears I was vaguely aware of being herded onto a sofa which used to be next to the pot plants but now looked to be in the middle of the room what the heck. The devil in the red dress landed next to me and through my own sobs, I heard her stop someone who was hurrying past the sofa with “Ivan, do me a favor and find me some sort of a napkin or handkerchief or whatever-“ and then, after a quick rustle, “Oh for crying out loud, you’d had it on for ten minutes tops – eh, nevermind, thank you.” A big piece of cloth was stuck in my hands and I dutifully blew my nose.
It took a while until I calmed down properly and brushed my hair back, self-conscious of my undoubtedly puffy red eyes. Then I realized that the cloth I was holding was a man’s shirt.
“Don’t mind that,” Mom said dismissively. She was leaning against the back of the sofa next to me, halfway through a cigar.
“You died,” I said, feeling stupid for stating what should’ve been obvious – then again, when your dead mother shows up looking about your age and much hotter, not bitter at all, nothing’s really obvious any more. Quite the opposite.
“I noticed,” she said with a slight grin, and then, seeing how I was fiddling with the shirt, unsure what to do with it, “Hold on to that a minute longer, better to get it all over and done with on one shirt. Theo, get yourself over here.”
I stared at Dad, not the great huge mountain I remembered from childhood but a big man nonetheless and very alive-looking if I hadn’t known otherwise. He also looked pretty sheepish.
“I don’t really know if I properly count as your dad,” he volunteered, “seeing how I wasn’t there for the past what, fifteen years of your life? But I did see you grow up, if that means anything.”
This time I was the one who burst forward and hugged him – how two ghosts can be solid enough for that is anyone’s guess, but at the time I didn’t care.
“Clearly there’s a shirt curse on this house,” I heard Mom note while my tears soaked through Dad’s shirt. The chest in front of my face heaved as Dad gave an amused snerk and patted me awkwardly on the back.
“What is going on?” I asked, sitting back down once I’d pulled myself together. The crowd was still chattering around us and the man at the piano had started another perky tune. I remembered that piano, I’d tried to play it occasionally as a kid but it mostly stood unused, a relic of forgotten times. The pianist must’ve sensed that I was looking at him because he turned his head without breaking the tune and gave me a mischievous wink and a grin. I flushed; he was rather staggeringly handsome.
“Another look at my daughter and I’ll break your face,” Mom said offhand, still leaning next to me. She hadn’t raised her voice at all and the piano was across the crowded and noisy room but the pianist’s grin got a little wider as he glanced aside towards Mom, then he turned his back again and continued playing. “Well, I opened a pub. It seems to have taken off pretty nicely.”
“Yeah, I see that,” I croaked, looking around properly – this was indeed a crowded pub. “Is that oak paneling? How did you even remodel the place? And what are they all drinking, since when can you get ghost spirits? And how the heck do you look like that?”
For a second, it looked like Mom was going to latch onto the wide-open pun, then thought better of it. “The panels are an illusion, don’t poke at them too hard, the drinks are based on grandpa’s recipe, turns out some of the folks here used to trade with him so I already had clientele lined up, hah, who’d have thought, and I died as you aptly noted, so passage of time doesn’t apply to me any more. What brings you back here?”
“It is my home,” I pointed out a bit testily. “Was. Seriously, you turned it into a pub? What if I’d broken up with my boyfriend and needed to move back home?”
Mom scratched the back of her head. “Yeah, that’d be a bit awkward. You’d need to bunk with Victoria, unless you don’t mind sleeping in the bathtub.”
“What?” I followed her gaze to the other end of the room to a figure who looked familiar – wait, what! “Did you – you gave MY room to Victoria Sheridan?!”
“Well, it’s the small room,” Mom said matter-of-factly and stubbed the cigar into a nearby ashtray. They were on all tables but I somewhat suspected that most of them were for her. “I couldn’t very well room her with Cori, I’m not completely insane, no good could come of that. So Cori and Jensa got your brother’s big room and Ivan’s in the little utility room, we got it carpeted, not a small feat when you’re a ghost but it looks really rather neat now. The whole setup was rather like that puzzle with a wolf, a goat and a cabbage, but it altogether works out. Bit like a gypsy camp around here, but it’s not like we need sleep anyway, it’s only so that we can all get a little privacy when needed.”
I sat through the entire tirade in baffled silence, making only little bleating noises.
“So,” I finally managed, “what if Grandma wants to get the house back?”
“Well, then she’ll have to sleep in the tub.”
I gave up and buried my face in my hands. Mom probably figured that I needed a break to think or cry again and so didn’t say anything.
“Were you in the Resistance?” I finally asked through my hands.
“Ayep.”
I swung upright again and stared at her.
“Your dad was too, it turned out,” she added, looking infuriatingly not-guilty about it. I leaned back, my head swimming.
“So… when they hanged you for your crimes… they actually hanged you for your-“
“Like hell they did,” Mom said sharply. “Twelve people hanged that day, all of them innocent save for me. I was a crapshoot, kiddo. The old Council hanged a lot of people and they managed to stumble across two Resistance members while they were at it. Whoop-de-doo. If anyone else left their job this much up to chance, they’d be fired before the day is up.”
I listened to her story, the story of my mother who I thought I’d known at least decently well, and marveled silently at the idea. Our parents have lives before we're born and we'll never know them before we come along, so how can we ever truly suppose to know them? The tale unfolded before me, the tale of a young couple who met, fell in love, had kids, worked to feed the kids, watched the injustice happen to them and people around them every day and then Dad couldn’t take it any more and joined the Resistance. And was shot on the street.
They told Mom that she should be glad he died, because he was a criminal. She said nothing. She went back home and raised us, sent us out of the house and joined the Resistance in turn.
I tried to wrap my mind around the idea of Mom sneaking around at night, meeting with other criminals – no, not even criminals, tourism agents and bookshop keepers and lampmakers, discussing death and shooting people in the dark. My mom?
“But… you died,” I said when she was done, still stuck on that point. “I was at your execution. We retrieved your body. We gave you a burial.”
Mom’s eyes widened; she wasn’t easily moved, but this seemed to do it. “Did you? Well, I won’t say that you shouldn’t have bothered because funerals are for the living, not for the dead.” She shuffled over to give me a quick sidehug. “Look, this is going to make me sound callous, but yes, I died. You’ll want to get used to that. I mean, me being here right now, that’s going to mess with your head in the long run.” I stared into her ageless brown eyes, unsure if I was comprehending. “You just lost me, and you haven’t had time to make peace with it yet. So having me back like this can make you stop the grieving process and latch onto the idea that I’m not really gone, corporal solidity be buggered. Which is frankly just fooling yourself.”
“But,” I began, more or less seeing her point, “where would you go from here? I mean, you can’t die again, can you?”
“Well, we could move on someday,” Mom said, nodding at Dad who’d settled down in an armchair with a book. “Someplace beyond here, whatever that is. Don’t know. Not in the foreseeable future, I quite like what we have going here and I have a million ale recipes I’ll want to try out first. But if we do, you’ll lose us again, for real-real this time, and it’ll be all the harder for having fooled yourself into thinking you were able to skirt that for howevermany years.”
My mind raced. “But if you’re not planning to move on soon, then it might only really happen when I myself will have died of old age-“
“Bargaining,” Mom said smugly.
“Oh, will you stop it with the mother-knows-best all the time!” I burst. “You went and joined the Resistance! And then you killed people! And then you got yourself hanged! And left us behind! And what for? Did things actually-“ I stopped there, because things actually had changed, hadn’t they, and Mom was teetering dangerously on the brink of smug again. “The point is, those were terrible choices! Maybe not terrible for the greater good, the ends justify the means and blah-blah, but for me? Us? And all those dead people? And stop looking at me like you’re proud of me for chewing you out for being an idiot!”
Mom raised her hands. “Hey, this is the only face I have at my disposal right now.”
“Okay, so maybe things did look desperate,” I forged on, determined to ride out perfectly good anger as long as I could. “But. But! Dead people! Victoria! Cara’s sister! Sampson Thorpe! Well, you were dead by then, weren’t you – why did there have to be so many deaths that they blur together?” I’d had enough of a look around the room to notice more familiar faces, Coriander Nix and Thorpe among them, and granted, they didn’t look very much worse for wear for being dead but the point remained.
“Not to divert or anything,” Mom noted with a scowl, clearly jumping on a diversion, “but if you want to assign blame, Victoria was shot by Sebastian. Joan was the one who did Thorpe in. Cori,” she made an odd face, “let’s say she died of embarrassment.”
I could probably have caught a second wave of anger, but the tangle was a bit much to process at the time.
“I did shoot Sebs, though, if that makes you feel any better,” Mom suggested helpfully.
“No!”
“Suit yourself.”
“And what about Leslie Payton?” I demanded, still clinging to the tail-end of the would-be second wave.
Mom looked genuinely baffled. “Who the heck is Leslie Payton?”
“You know!” But I could already feel the anger subside, and a miserable feeling of helplessness settle in its wake. “Leslie. Two years ago. He disappeared from our school and word was it that the Resistance did him in.”
Mom scowled and bit her lip slowly, leaning back onto the sofa. “You did talk about that at the time, I think. I wasn’t even in the Resistance two years ago, but the others… at least one of them would’ve said something at some point. Wait… wait-wait, was that the rich kid? Dad in the City Hall?”
I nodded, and an odd cold little feeling began to gnaw at my lower spine. I could tell that Mom wasn’t lying about Leslie – she admitted everything else readily enough. But if that hadn’t been the Resistance-
“Well, there’s no place for intel like a pub,” Mom declared, hoisted herself up on her knees onto the sofa seat, looked around the crowded room and yelled, “Vicky!”
“Vicky?” I squeaked incredulously, as Victoria loped over to the sofa and regarded me with a curious look that was almost devoid of her usual sneer. She looked more or less as I remembered her, if a bit more… translucent. We’d never actually been exactly at odds, mostly we avoided crossing paths altogether. And somehow, here she was, doing whatever work needs doing at a pub, what the heck was the story here?
“Yeah?”
“Someone or other named Leslie Payton disappeared two years ago,” Mom prompted. “I know I haven’t heard anything relevant at Resistance meetings.”
A shadow seemed to cross over Victoria’s face.
“Okay, this is all hearsay, as usual,” she said, shifting her weight. I noticed that there was a frying pan lashed to her belt, however it was staying up. “But at the time, they were intent on making sure that the hearsay got heard. You know – among the right people. What happened was that Greg Payton was gathering a fair bit of power for someone who wasn’t even in the Council, and then he started talking about forming an opposition.”
Mom whistled through her teeth. “Yeah, that’d go over well. And that was Leslie’s dad?”
Victoria nodded and shot me a cautious side-eyed scowl. “I think that was a clocktower case.”
“Rather neat, isn’t it?” Mom remarked grimly, digging up a cigarette from hell-knows-where. I used to suspect that she hides them around the house for sport. “We have your son, if you want to see him again then you should cooperate.”
“And he… didn’t cooperate?” I whispered.
“Well, nobody saw Leslie again, did they?” Victoria noted rather harshly. “Payton didn’t last very long after that… went off the deep end, as it were.”
“Ten a penny, those stories,” Mom said grimly.
Something nagged at me in the back of my mind. “What did you mean by a clocktower case?”
Mom and Victoria exchanged a look that made them look oddly similar for a second, and then they told me a story. It was a patchy, confusing story, but it was the story that’d formed the final broadcast of Sampson Thorpe, except without the details I was now hearing. At one point I started up with “You set the-“ and was promptly hissed at from both sides.
In the end, I sat there with my head swimming. But in the confusing soup of my brain, something was wriggling to the surface.
“But,” I began, “people should know about this!”
Victoria bristled. “Don’t you even-!”
“No, no, not about the fire.” Suddenly I was sitting bolt upright as thoughts began to race. “The people. Those who’ve been interrogated in the clocktower. There’s bound to be a lot of those, right? If I find any who are willing to talk about it, I can write an exposé! No, a series of articles, even. Show that you actually can talk about this now, to encourage people to talk through their experiences and promote free speech in the city and this way I’ll finally have something journalistic to do, did you know that they mostly send me after tea at the Harbinger, bloody unbelievable, I could write awesome things for them, this can be my big breakthrough – wait, does that make me horrible?”
“I’d answer, but you seem to find my moral compass unreliable,” Mom noted with a grin, while Victoria seemed unsure whether or not to sneer.
“Do you know any names?” I demanded. “Those who’d been to the clocktower and come back and are still alive?”
They looked at each other again and then pieced together a few names for me – some from whispers in their respective circles, some from paperwork at the tower, as much as they could both remember at the time before everything went up in flames. It wasn’t much, but it would be a start. Some of these people might know of other people who’d been to the tower. And once the first article was out there, it might encourage others to come forward. It’d also do something towards quenching the pro-Council feelings that were still stirring in some parts of town. At least that’s what I could only hope.
The elated feeling of lofty plans subsided a bit and I sunk back into reality, if you could call my childhood home turned ghost pub a reality.
“I should go home,” I said quietly. “It’s getting way late.”
“Not bunking with Victoria, then?” Mom asked slyly and I smacked her with my notepad, glad to see that Victoria had already drifted off. “Seriously, though, if you don’t want to wait until the pub closes and the sofas free up, you can have our bed upstairs. We don’t sleep in it anyway, as being-a-ghost goes. But it’s dangerous to be out there at this hour.”
Frankly, the prospect of falling asleep and, even worse, waking up in a house where a ghost was literally residing in every room was not a tempting prospect, and I told her as much. This was not my world and it wouldn’t do to get used to the idea.
“As you wish,” she said, scowling. “In this case, I’m asking Arlie to walk you home with Pup. Also, here’s something I can’t strictly speaking force you to do but am strongly recommending: once you leave, you shouldn’t come back for another, say, six months. Get used to the idea of me being gone. Grieve. Maybe do something with that flower shop, I cleared it out of flowers, need them for potionwork and beer but the shop itself is pretty expensive property. And in half a year, you should be adjusted enough to the idea that you can take or leave my ghostly presence. Unless of course you die in the next six months,” she added after a thought, “please don’t, by the way, but if you do, these doors are open for you if you need a home.”
“And stay in the tub?” I asked, still smarting a bit over the fact that she’d given my room away, much less to Miss Fancypants.
“We’ll sort it out if it gets to that,” she said vaguely, “but that’s why you shouldn’t go getting yourself killed. These are dangerous times, kiddo. You have your entire life ahead of you and trust me when I say that it’s a situation to appreciate while you’re in it.”
She saw me out and I turned to look back one more time, half expecting her to be gone and the house to be dark, like the whole encounter had never happened. But she was there, framed by the ghostly lamps, smiling that familiar but eternally young smile. Over the coming weeks, before the ghost pub gained traction among the living and Mom resurfaced in public knowledge as the ghostly proprietress of the place, I’d get people carefully expressing their condolences for my loss – a sign of change in its own right, because only mere months before, it would’ve been unthinkable to console the daughter of a Resistance criminal – and I would always tell them that she’s gone to a better place. It was my own personal injoke.
I trudged down the walkway to the street and my heart skipped a beat when I saw a man there, leaning easily against the fencepost. In the dim light, it looked like my brother had showed up, and for a moment I wondered how that encounter was going to go down. Then I realized that it was, in fact, Dad. They didn’t look that similar on closer inspection, Dad was bulkier – I remembered that he’d worked as a blacksmith before death – while my bro was always the skinny type and kept his hair short because of trying to keep up a professional appearance for his law studies. But they had a similar enough posture, and Dad had after all been barely thirty at death. As I got closer, he smiled and nodded.
“Your mom is right, you know,” he said. “About the six month grieving period. Better to accept it now than put it off for the inevitable end.”
“I know, I know,” I said testily. You’d think that you can get out of your parents lecturing you when they die. You’d think wrong.
“That doesn’t apply to me, though,” Dad noted with a grin. “I died ages ago. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll swing by sometime – we have catching up to do, and I’d quite like to keep the occasional watchful eye out while times are still complicated.”
“Uh,” I said, baffled. “Yeah. That’d be… that’d be nice. You’ll get to meet my- well, if you’ve stayed around the house then you’ve seen my boyfriend, right?”
“Ahuh,” he said, face impassive. I remembered one time my boyfriend had seen the old photo of my parents on our kitchen counter and remarked that he should probably be glad that his girl’s big scary dad isn’t around any more. The big scary dad was now going to show up soon, probably through a wall.
“I’ll bring my own beer,” he added, “and I kind of can’t knock so it’s okay if I just float in whenever, right?”
The horror must’ve been clear on my face, because he roared with laughter, slapped me on the back – which I barely felt, whatever magic was holding the pub close to the living was faint here – and said that he’d try to make it on Thursday night around ten and I should avoid doing anything particularly private around that time. Then he turned around and on the moonlit street, I could see a small figure trotting towards us, followed by something bounding after it through the darkness.
“Ah, that’ll be Arlie,” Dad said. “And Pup. They’ll get you home safely.”
I looked at Arlie, and then at Pup.
“What… in the… hell?”
Taggin' Liou and Coaster onnacounta using their characters and sticking them in pictures, because it's what I do.
***
My name is Elinor. I’m seventeen years old, live in a decently nice district of Melville with my boyfriend and work at the newspaper house. Until recently, my life was… pretty good, I guess?
That line doesn’t seem to mean anything any more. Life is good, they used to say. And it was. Why would we question the Council?
Mom says that I was never particularly good at questioning things. I say that questioning things too much got her killed, so you choose who wins out here, I guess.
Anyway.
My dad died when I was little. I vaguely remember him as this enormous smiling man who took up my entire field of vision and a piggy back ride made me feel like I was up in the skies, on the edge of the Wall itself. I was two years old when he was killed, my brother a few years older. Mom raised us more or less alone, there wasn’t much extended family in town, and so Dad turned into little more than a vague memory and a photo Mom kept on the kitchen counter. It’s a pretty old one, they’re both still young in this, Mom had long hair back then and looked very pretty. I told her that once, and she grunted and said that she’s not prepared to dig herself six feet under just yet.
Both I and my brother take after Dad, going by the photo: tall and fair, with blue eyes. Mom was also tall, but with black hair and brown eyes and altogether more… stocky, I guess? We lived in the old family home which technically belonged to Dad’s mom, my grandma, a tall and wiry-looking Wall-fearing woman who we didn’t see very often. Mom ran a flower shop – well, you wouldn’t want to tell her that. She had a talent of sorts, she could brew skills out of plants. Entirely useless skills, things like balancing a pencil on the tip of your nose or curling up your tongue. But the plants she used grew wonderfully big fragrant flowers and that put food on the table, much as Mom would’ve liked everyone to be falling over for the potions instead.
One time when I was a kid, after something other kids had said at school, I asked Mom if she was a witch. She made a grimace and said that she doesn’t like the title. I wasn’t entirely sure if that meant yes or no.
Kids at school also said other things.
“Mom,” I asked her once, “was Dad really in the Resistance?”
She was usually involved in some sort of potionwork when I came to her at work to talk, and in hindsight it was always amazing how any question of mine didn’t cause her to lose concentration. You’d think that counting drops from a vial would take a lot of focus, but I don’t remember her ever starting over in frustration or telling me to bugger off. She’d usually grunt, which was your cue that she’s heard you and will be just a second, and when the critical part of work was done, she’d answer.
“I don’t know,” she replied in due time. “He never told me either way, and trust me that he’ll be in for an earful when we meet up again in the afterlife. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, does it matter? He was a good man, and this I do know for certain.”
“Can you be good and in the Resistance?” I asked dubiously.
She snorted. “Take that as a life lesson, kiddo.”
Mom wasn’t an easy person to talk to: she’d poke at you with sneaky little questions and make you doubt what you thought you knew and when you poked back with sneaky questions of your own, she’d get a little twinkle in her eye that gave you the impression that she’s secretly happy with you. And she was very difficult to upset, which will drive a preteen up the wall. At one point, when we were the age when stupid things are cool and dangerous, we both tried to pick up smoking. Peer pressure, you know.
Bad idea.
Not for the reason you’d think, either. Nobody manufactured cigarettes in Melville, people grew their own tobacco when they could and used it for pipeweed or rolled their own smokes. Mom, who’d been smoking since Dad died, went ‘bwahaha’ when she saw our initial attempts to roll a proper cigarette.
We, of course, smoked in secret like everyone else – except everyone else hid so that their parents wouldn’t yell at them for smoking, we hid because when Mom found us, she’d say things like “Okay, this one’s fairly good, but the way it sags in the middle is just sad, uniform packing, remember?” That frankly sucked the fun out of it and we stopped soon after.
The older we grew, the more we started to notice and the farther outside we reached from the childhood home. My brother was planning to go into law and studied diligently. I, at fifteen, wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do, but at the time I didn’t really feel the pressure to decide: school was school, home was home, Mom would spend her days at the shop cooking up her potions and life was indeed good. I mean, yes, I’d get my heart broken by boys and Mom would be stupid and not understand anything and my bro was mean to me at times. But that was still before the fires and riots and the Resistance happened.
“Mom,” I asked her once, “are we poor?”
Mom, at work as usual, gave me a curious sideways look. We were at the greenhouse attached to the house where mom did any work she didn’t do in the shop. I rarely saw her at leisure, or rather, fidgeting with plants and potions was her leisure. She was one of those rare people who could combine work and hobbies and make money out of it.
“Do you think we are?” she parried.
“I don’t know, that’s the thing.”
Mom grinned in that infuriating know-it-all sort of way. “If you don’t know, then you’re not. Simple as that.”
“But,” I didn’t leave the question be, “look, this town is so small, and our school only has like, fifty people in it. And we have people like Cara, her sister works as a baker and they have no parents and are living off of… I don’t know what, the way Cara goes on about their life, but it doesn’t sound particularly nice. And then there’s Victoria, who just has everything. How can the difference be so steep?”
“If you start trying to live your life based on what other people have,” Mom pointed out, “there’s just no way you won’t be miserable.”
“So I’m supposed to focus on what they don’t have?” I parried. Mom grinned slightly.
“If you want to be horrible about it, be my guest, I guess.”
And then, only a few weeks later, a kid in our school disappeared. There were whispers of the Resistance, which had by then cropped up in a small, back-alley mutterings sort of way. But it was a rich kid whose dad worked in a powerful position in the City Hall, surely they wouldn’t dare?
Things were festering in Melville, and I, like everyone else, hoped that the Council would put a swift stop to it.
But a swift stop wouldn’t come, for whatever reason. For a few years, the Resistance loomed somewhere in the background as an unseen threat, sometimes forgotten, then reminding of themselves again, little bit of graffiti here, a few leaflets there. In that time, life went on: I moved in with my boyfriend after settling into an internship with the Harbinger, my brother roomed with a few friends in the outskirts so as to, as he put it, learn to live on his own because he’d be buggered if he’s staying on Mom’s neck after his little sister is out of the house. Mom took the news of the suddenly emptying nest with a cheerful “Goodie, I can finally strut around the place naked again” and for a fair few weeks after, we wouldn’t go near the house, just in case.
That was in June. In October, within one mere week, everything burned and the old life, whatever its flaws, was no more.
Then again, at least now I can say that the old life had flaws? Except that sounds like Mom’s sneaky reasoning.
It began with the graffiti, followed by a dead street urchin, and then someone shot Victoria.
Sure, I’d never liked the girl, but – shot, seriously. I went to see Mom that afternoon; I’d heard through the grapevine that she’d been interrogated on the matter because they’d talked at the street urchin’s funeral the day before. Newspaper people are horrible gossips, it’s part of the job.
In hindsight, I’m glad I did: life being what it is, we didn’t meet very often those days, I’d step into the shop maybe once every few weeks for a quick chat. But this time I went to see her, and that was the last time we ever talked… well, sort of.
“Oh, good,” Mom said when I stepped into the shop. “Be a good girl, sit down and let me give you a lecture about things you already know and I know you already know them but I’ll have to tell you anyway so that I myself can be at peace about it.”
“Oh goodie,” I said wearily. This should’ve been entirely expected.
“You can stick in as many ‘mooooooom’s as you like,” she offered generously.
“I can sum it up for you,” I suggested. “I will not meander around alone after dark, I will not stick my nose in shady business, go along with strangers, get myself shot or stabbed or otherwise horribly injured and I’ll wear long underwear because it’s getting cold out.”
Mom counted off points on her fingers. “Yeah, that about sums it up.”
“Even the underwear?”
“I never forget the underwear,” Mom said smugly – whether or not she actually was a witch, she definitely knew how to take credit when it was offered. “Tell your brother as well when you see him.”
I promised to have an extensive underwear-related conversation with my brother and asked how the interrogation went. She scoffed.
“Mark my word, something stupid will come of this,” she said. “They’re plenty eager to pin the blame on the first poor bugger who stutters during interrogation. Right now the thing to do is keep a low profile and hope for the best.”
A few days later, they hanged her.
The mass interrogations were nightmare enough. I was in a group of strangers, my boyfriend, brother and Mom in other groups. I tried not to look around for them too much, in case it looked suspicious or put them under suspicion. I tried to answer all questions as best and truthfully as I could. “You have nothing to fear if you’re innocent,” they told me.
And then they hanged Mom.
The executions were a haze; I think I might have been screaming, but I’m not entirely sure. I remember someone yelling “Mom! Mom! Mom!” over and over again, but they did hang a lot of people that day. Someone else’s mom was probably up there too.
She didn’t even look at me, or anyone for that matter. The odd thing is, she looked angry. The others were in tears or hysterics or just apathetic. Mom looked well and truly prepared to flip her lid. But she didn’t try anything and she hanged with the rest.
When the crowd dispersed and I sat there on the cold ground, staring at nothing in particular, any random spot on the ground, anything other than those bodies up there on the platform, my brother found me and helped me up.
“I’ll go ask them for her body,” he said grimly.
“What?” I squeaked, shaken out of my stupor. “You can’t! They hanged her as a criminal! Resistance! They’ll think you’re suspicious!”
“I’ll ask Missy,” the bro said, nodding at the small group of officials by the gallows. “We used to date.”
“She probably signed the warrant,” I hissed.
He sighed. “I have to try anyway.”
He tried and succeeded. We got the body, wrapped unceremoniously in burlap, and his mates came along to carry it. One of them suggested a man to hire to say a few words, and there we were, that very same evening, by the river, sending Mom off. The man we’d hired was nice: he hadn’t known Mom but he made it sweet and simple, with none the false hope about ‘meeting in a better world’.
We crowded in my brother’s communal flat that night and gave Mom a wake, or more specifically got ourselves well and properly hammered.
“D’you know,” my boyfriend slurred when it was already heading towards morning, “this whole thing stinks. Okay, maybe Ene was Resistanananca whatever. She was a great woman. Had really nice-“ he caught my eye, “personality. The thing is. They shouldna just up and hanged her.”
“Life,” said one of my bro’s mates, “is good, and dontcha forget it.” He ended the sentence with a few words I’m not going to repeat here.
“I wonder,” I grumbled, leaning against the bro’s sofa, sitting on the floor with my left foot in something worrisomely sticky, “I wonder how you join the Resi- the Re-sis-tann-ce.”
The guys stared at me.
“Yeah, dontcha even think about it,” said the bro.
“Well, how bad can they be?” I insisted, leaning my head back too far to be comfortable; the sofa’s seat was too low. Was this how Mom had felt on the very last moments? “They didn’t kill Mom. The Council did.”
“If, assuming Mom was in fact Resistance,” the bro pointed out, determined to argue the unpopular side because nobody else would, “she coulda been the one who shot whatsername, Victoria.”
“And good riddance,” I muttered nastily.
“There’s just been way too many,” expletive, “deaths,” another voice said. I couldn’t tell who, and it took my foggy brain a moment to realize that it was because the lights had gone out.
This was something, because electricity wasn’t supplied this late at night; we had four candles and a kerosene lamp. For one of them to be caught in a draft, okay, but all five, and the lamp under a glass for that matter?
We sobered up to a degree and scrambled to the window to look out. The entire town seemed to be pitch black. A power cut is one thing, there was barely any to go around at night save for the Island, but what exactly makes an entire town’s candles go out in closed rooms?
“Ooh, Mom is angry,” I muttered and started to giggle. Then I couldn’t stop. I laughed until I cried, and they put me down on the sofa and fixed me something nasty made of acorns that poorer folk use for coffee: actual coffee is very strictly rationed.
A few days later, there was plenty of fire to go around: the clocktower burned and riots followed in its wake. We waited it out in our little flat, hoping that the masses’ ire was turned against the Council and the Council alone; you never know what a mob decides to do. I was honestly very, very tempted to join the mob and smash a few windows for Mom, but I was already an orphan. Doing stupid things was not the way to go about it.
And then it was over. Or possibly just began, depending on how you looked. The final Resistance member surrendered, the Council was jailed together with her and Melville started over. It wasn’t easy: suddenly, nobody knew what was legal or what wasn’t. The infrastructure took a number of hits, power cuts became common because the generators were largely manned by hard labor, who were often political prisoners and all of their cases had to be reviewed as fast as possible. Businesses that’d catered exclusively to rich tastes or stayed afloat largely thanks to the Council went under. Paranoia ran rampant: there were talks of the Council having secretly worked together with the Resistance or the Resistance still being loose out there, a lot of shady people used the chance to get rid of a troublesome business partner and tried to write it off as Resistance work or Council hitman work, and in the background of all this, the guards were working round the clock while not being entirely sure who they were answering to.
The paranoia touched me as well: I still didn’t know if Mom had, in fact, been in the Resistance. The only one who might’ve shed some light was the surviving and admitted member, Miss Wrigley, but she was kept behind lock and key – the woman was in jail for equal parts punishment and protection. Nobody was allowed to see her or the Council, for fear of mob justice which would’ve undermined the new budding order, fragile and hopeful like a crystal flower.
I had nightmares and so took to having walks in the evening to clear my head in the crisp air of late fall. They became a way to think and overthink. It probably wasn’t very safe for me to be out alone at the time, but at the time I wasn’t really thinking about that.
A few weeks after the fall of the old regime, I wandered on the empty moonlit streets again, nothing much on my mind at the time, which was a blissful change from all the thinking as of late, and suddenly realized that I’d walked the familiar path and arrived at our old house.
I eyed its façade, feeling bittersweet. It was indeed an old house, in a respectable sort of neighborhood, looking much like all the other houses in the area, all windows dark and the house silent, standing in empty abandonment between its brightly lit neighbors on either side. When Mom died, it was roped off for investigations, but the sealing ribbons were gone now.
Something rustled in the neighbors’ bushes and I jumped, suddenly alert and aware of being out alone in dangerous times. It was a fairly long walk back to my flat from here and it had to be well past eleven at night by now. But this was my childhood home right in front of me and even though it was dark and empty, even though both of my parents had died and the place was frankly a bit creepy, I still knew every nook and cranny in it.
So I decided to get inside and spend that night in my old room, and then maybe clean the place up in the morning and decide what to do with it. There was probably paperwork to be done, and I wasn’t sure if the place actually belonged to Grandma or had been inherited to me and my brother, and that paperwork would be in the City Hall, and I’d also have to do something about Mom’s greenhouse, if all the plants weren’t dead already.
I went up to the front door, trying to remember where Mom usually hid the spare key. There was also a loose basement window behind the house, but I tried the door first anyway, just so that I wouldn’t have to feel stupid if it was in fact open.
It opened, and I was blinded by lights as the noise hit me like a hammer.
I stood at the door, gaping, as perky piano music washed over me, and blinked at the dozen bright lamps which most definitely hadn’t shown through the windows a second ago but there they were now and looking aside, I could see all downstairs windows casting bright rectangles onto the front lawn and someone was having a smoke next to the corner of the house in the frontyard who definitely hadn’t been there a second ago and the house was full of people who were all chatting noisily and it barely looked like our living room except it still did somehow and what was going on?
“Elinor!”
My head snapped sideways towards the corner where a small bar stood, one of those old-fashioned ones that one was expected to have in their house for guests when my grandparents were little. It looked to have a proper crowd around it now, and through the crowd a young woman in a red dress was elbowing her way towards me, what the hell this isn’t happening!
She was still recognizably Mom, except much younger, just about my age, with the long hair I remembered from the photo, dress and boots she probably wouldn’t have allowed me to wear, and disconcertingly much, much curvier than I remembered and what’s with these swinging hips, mothers aren’t supposed to look anything like that! a small but thoroughly outraged part of my brain thought.
She reached me and wrapped me in a hug and that’s when I broke down. It was the smell that did it. She still smelled like Mom, of tobacco and some sort of herbal things with a note of freshly cut grass.
“Eh, girlie,” I heard her voice sigh, still very much Mom’s voice, and through a curtain of tears I was vaguely aware of being herded onto a sofa which used to be next to the pot plants but now looked to be in the middle of the room what the heck. The devil in the red dress landed next to me and through my own sobs, I heard her stop someone who was hurrying past the sofa with “Ivan, do me a favor and find me some sort of a napkin or handkerchief or whatever-“ and then, after a quick rustle, “Oh for crying out loud, you’d had it on for ten minutes tops – eh, nevermind, thank you.” A big piece of cloth was stuck in my hands and I dutifully blew my nose.
It took a while until I calmed down properly and brushed my hair back, self-conscious of my undoubtedly puffy red eyes. Then I realized that the cloth I was holding was a man’s shirt.
“Don’t mind that,” Mom said dismissively. She was leaning against the back of the sofa next to me, halfway through a cigar.
“You died,” I said, feeling stupid for stating what should’ve been obvious – then again, when your dead mother shows up looking about your age and much hotter, not bitter at all, nothing’s really obvious any more. Quite the opposite.
“I noticed,” she said with a slight grin, and then, seeing how I was fiddling with the shirt, unsure what to do with it, “Hold on to that a minute longer, better to get it all over and done with on one shirt. Theo, get yourself over here.”
I stared at Dad, not the great huge mountain I remembered from childhood but a big man nonetheless and very alive-looking if I hadn’t known otherwise. He also looked pretty sheepish.
“I don’t really know if I properly count as your dad,” he volunteered, “seeing how I wasn’t there for the past what, fifteen years of your life? But I did see you grow up, if that means anything.”
This time I was the one who burst forward and hugged him – how two ghosts can be solid enough for that is anyone’s guess, but at the time I didn’t care.
“Clearly there’s a shirt curse on this house,” I heard Mom note while my tears soaked through Dad’s shirt. The chest in front of my face heaved as Dad gave an amused snerk and patted me awkwardly on the back.
“What is going on?” I asked, sitting back down once I’d pulled myself together. The crowd was still chattering around us and the man at the piano had started another perky tune. I remembered that piano, I’d tried to play it occasionally as a kid but it mostly stood unused, a relic of forgotten times. The pianist must’ve sensed that I was looking at him because he turned his head without breaking the tune and gave me a mischievous wink and a grin. I flushed; he was rather staggeringly handsome.
“Another look at my daughter and I’ll break your face,” Mom said offhand, still leaning next to me. She hadn’t raised her voice at all and the piano was across the crowded and noisy room but the pianist’s grin got a little wider as he glanced aside towards Mom, then he turned his back again and continued playing. “Well, I opened a pub. It seems to have taken off pretty nicely.”
“Yeah, I see that,” I croaked, looking around properly – this was indeed a crowded pub. “Is that oak paneling? How did you even remodel the place? And what are they all drinking, since when can you get ghost spirits? And how the heck do you look like that?”
For a second, it looked like Mom was going to latch onto the wide-open pun, then thought better of it. “The panels are an illusion, don’t poke at them too hard, the drinks are based on grandpa’s recipe, turns out some of the folks here used to trade with him so I already had clientele lined up, hah, who’d have thought, and I died as you aptly noted, so passage of time doesn’t apply to me any more. What brings you back here?”
“It is my home,” I pointed out a bit testily. “Was. Seriously, you turned it into a pub? What if I’d broken up with my boyfriend and needed to move back home?”
Mom scratched the back of her head. “Yeah, that’d be a bit awkward. You’d need to bunk with Victoria, unless you don’t mind sleeping in the bathtub.”
“What?” I followed her gaze to the other end of the room to a figure who looked familiar – wait, what! “Did you – you gave MY room to Victoria Sheridan?!”
“Well, it’s the small room,” Mom said matter-of-factly and stubbed the cigar into a nearby ashtray. They were on all tables but I somewhat suspected that most of them were for her. “I couldn’t very well room her with Cori, I’m not completely insane, no good could come of that. So Cori and Jensa got your brother’s big room and Ivan’s in the little utility room, we got it carpeted, not a small feat when you’re a ghost but it looks really rather neat now. The whole setup was rather like that puzzle with a wolf, a goat and a cabbage, but it altogether works out. Bit like a gypsy camp around here, but it’s not like we need sleep anyway, it’s only so that we can all get a little privacy when needed.”
I sat through the entire tirade in baffled silence, making only little bleating noises.
“So,” I finally managed, “what if Grandma wants to get the house back?”
“Well, then she’ll have to sleep in the tub.”
I gave up and buried my face in my hands. Mom probably figured that I needed a break to think or cry again and so didn’t say anything.
“Were you in the Resistance?” I finally asked through my hands.
“Ayep.”
I swung upright again and stared at her.
“Your dad was too, it turned out,” she added, looking infuriatingly not-guilty about it. I leaned back, my head swimming.
“So… when they hanged you for your crimes… they actually hanged you for your-“
“Like hell they did,” Mom said sharply. “Twelve people hanged that day, all of them innocent save for me. I was a crapshoot, kiddo. The old Council hanged a lot of people and they managed to stumble across two Resistance members while they were at it. Whoop-de-doo. If anyone else left their job this much up to chance, they’d be fired before the day is up.”
I listened to her story, the story of my mother who I thought I’d known at least decently well, and marveled silently at the idea. Our parents have lives before we're born and we'll never know them before we come along, so how can we ever truly suppose to know them? The tale unfolded before me, the tale of a young couple who met, fell in love, had kids, worked to feed the kids, watched the injustice happen to them and people around them every day and then Dad couldn’t take it any more and joined the Resistance. And was shot on the street.
They told Mom that she should be glad he died, because he was a criminal. She said nothing. She went back home and raised us, sent us out of the house and joined the Resistance in turn.
I tried to wrap my mind around the idea of Mom sneaking around at night, meeting with other criminals – no, not even criminals, tourism agents and bookshop keepers and lampmakers, discussing death and shooting people in the dark. My mom?
“But… you died,” I said when she was done, still stuck on that point. “I was at your execution. We retrieved your body. We gave you a burial.”
Mom’s eyes widened; she wasn’t easily moved, but this seemed to do it. “Did you? Well, I won’t say that you shouldn’t have bothered because funerals are for the living, not for the dead.” She shuffled over to give me a quick sidehug. “Look, this is going to make me sound callous, but yes, I died. You’ll want to get used to that. I mean, me being here right now, that’s going to mess with your head in the long run.” I stared into her ageless brown eyes, unsure if I was comprehending. “You just lost me, and you haven’t had time to make peace with it yet. So having me back like this can make you stop the grieving process and latch onto the idea that I’m not really gone, corporal solidity be buggered. Which is frankly just fooling yourself.”
“But,” I began, more or less seeing her point, “where would you go from here? I mean, you can’t die again, can you?”
“Well, we could move on someday,” Mom said, nodding at Dad who’d settled down in an armchair with a book. “Someplace beyond here, whatever that is. Don’t know. Not in the foreseeable future, I quite like what we have going here and I have a million ale recipes I’ll want to try out first. But if we do, you’ll lose us again, for real-real this time, and it’ll be all the harder for having fooled yourself into thinking you were able to skirt that for howevermany years.”
My mind raced. “But if you’re not planning to move on soon, then it might only really happen when I myself will have died of old age-“
“Bargaining,” Mom said smugly.
“Oh, will you stop it with the mother-knows-best all the time!” I burst. “You went and joined the Resistance! And then you killed people! And then you got yourself hanged! And left us behind! And what for? Did things actually-“ I stopped there, because things actually had changed, hadn’t they, and Mom was teetering dangerously on the brink of smug again. “The point is, those were terrible choices! Maybe not terrible for the greater good, the ends justify the means and blah-blah, but for me? Us? And all those dead people? And stop looking at me like you’re proud of me for chewing you out for being an idiot!”
Mom raised her hands. “Hey, this is the only face I have at my disposal right now.”
“Okay, so maybe things did look desperate,” I forged on, determined to ride out perfectly good anger as long as I could. “But. But! Dead people! Victoria! Cara’s sister! Sampson Thorpe! Well, you were dead by then, weren’t you – why did there have to be so many deaths that they blur together?” I’d had enough of a look around the room to notice more familiar faces, Coriander Nix and Thorpe among them, and granted, they didn’t look very much worse for wear for being dead but the point remained.
“Not to divert or anything,” Mom noted with a scowl, clearly jumping on a diversion, “but if you want to assign blame, Victoria was shot by Sebastian. Joan was the one who did Thorpe in. Cori,” she made an odd face, “let’s say she died of embarrassment.”
I could probably have caught a second wave of anger, but the tangle was a bit much to process at the time.
“I did shoot Sebs, though, if that makes you feel any better,” Mom suggested helpfully.
“No!”
“Suit yourself.”
“And what about Leslie Payton?” I demanded, still clinging to the tail-end of the would-be second wave.
Mom looked genuinely baffled. “Who the heck is Leslie Payton?”
“You know!” But I could already feel the anger subside, and a miserable feeling of helplessness settle in its wake. “Leslie. Two years ago. He disappeared from our school and word was it that the Resistance did him in.”
Mom scowled and bit her lip slowly, leaning back onto the sofa. “You did talk about that at the time, I think. I wasn’t even in the Resistance two years ago, but the others… at least one of them would’ve said something at some point. Wait… wait-wait, was that the rich kid? Dad in the City Hall?”
I nodded, and an odd cold little feeling began to gnaw at my lower spine. I could tell that Mom wasn’t lying about Leslie – she admitted everything else readily enough. But if that hadn’t been the Resistance-
“Well, there’s no place for intel like a pub,” Mom declared, hoisted herself up on her knees onto the sofa seat, looked around the crowded room and yelled, “Vicky!”
“Vicky?” I squeaked incredulously, as Victoria loped over to the sofa and regarded me with a curious look that was almost devoid of her usual sneer. She looked more or less as I remembered her, if a bit more… translucent. We’d never actually been exactly at odds, mostly we avoided crossing paths altogether. And somehow, here she was, doing whatever work needs doing at a pub, what the heck was the story here?
“Yeah?”
“Someone or other named Leslie Payton disappeared two years ago,” Mom prompted. “I know I haven’t heard anything relevant at Resistance meetings.”
A shadow seemed to cross over Victoria’s face.
“Okay, this is all hearsay, as usual,” she said, shifting her weight. I noticed that there was a frying pan lashed to her belt, however it was staying up. “But at the time, they were intent on making sure that the hearsay got heard. You know – among the right people. What happened was that Greg Payton was gathering a fair bit of power for someone who wasn’t even in the Council, and then he started talking about forming an opposition.”
Mom whistled through her teeth. “Yeah, that’d go over well. And that was Leslie’s dad?”
Victoria nodded and shot me a cautious side-eyed scowl. “I think that was a clocktower case.”
“Rather neat, isn’t it?” Mom remarked grimly, digging up a cigarette from hell-knows-where. I used to suspect that she hides them around the house for sport. “We have your son, if you want to see him again then you should cooperate.”
“And he… didn’t cooperate?” I whispered.
“Well, nobody saw Leslie again, did they?” Victoria noted rather harshly. “Payton didn’t last very long after that… went off the deep end, as it were.”
“Ten a penny, those stories,” Mom said grimly.
Something nagged at me in the back of my mind. “What did you mean by a clocktower case?”
Mom and Victoria exchanged a look that made them look oddly similar for a second, and then they told me a story. It was a patchy, confusing story, but it was the story that’d formed the final broadcast of Sampson Thorpe, except without the details I was now hearing. At one point I started up with “You set the-“ and was promptly hissed at from both sides.
In the end, I sat there with my head swimming. But in the confusing soup of my brain, something was wriggling to the surface.
“But,” I began, “people should know about this!”
Victoria bristled. “Don’t you even-!”
“No, no, not about the fire.” Suddenly I was sitting bolt upright as thoughts began to race. “The people. Those who’ve been interrogated in the clocktower. There’s bound to be a lot of those, right? If I find any who are willing to talk about it, I can write an exposé! No, a series of articles, even. Show that you actually can talk about this now, to encourage people to talk through their experiences and promote free speech in the city and this way I’ll finally have something journalistic to do, did you know that they mostly send me after tea at the Harbinger, bloody unbelievable, I could write awesome things for them, this can be my big breakthrough – wait, does that make me horrible?”
“I’d answer, but you seem to find my moral compass unreliable,” Mom noted with a grin, while Victoria seemed unsure whether or not to sneer.
“Do you know any names?” I demanded. “Those who’d been to the clocktower and come back and are still alive?”
They looked at each other again and then pieced together a few names for me – some from whispers in their respective circles, some from paperwork at the tower, as much as they could both remember at the time before everything went up in flames. It wasn’t much, but it would be a start. Some of these people might know of other people who’d been to the tower. And once the first article was out there, it might encourage others to come forward. It’d also do something towards quenching the pro-Council feelings that were still stirring in some parts of town. At least that’s what I could only hope.
The elated feeling of lofty plans subsided a bit and I sunk back into reality, if you could call my childhood home turned ghost pub a reality.
“I should go home,” I said quietly. “It’s getting way late.”
“Not bunking with Victoria, then?” Mom asked slyly and I smacked her with my notepad, glad to see that Victoria had already drifted off. “Seriously, though, if you don’t want to wait until the pub closes and the sofas free up, you can have our bed upstairs. We don’t sleep in it anyway, as being-a-ghost goes. But it’s dangerous to be out there at this hour.”
Frankly, the prospect of falling asleep and, even worse, waking up in a house where a ghost was literally residing in every room was not a tempting prospect, and I told her as much. This was not my world and it wouldn’t do to get used to the idea.
“As you wish,” she said, scowling. “In this case, I’m asking Arlie to walk you home with Pup. Also, here’s something I can’t strictly speaking force you to do but am strongly recommending: once you leave, you shouldn’t come back for another, say, six months. Get used to the idea of me being gone. Grieve. Maybe do something with that flower shop, I cleared it out of flowers, need them for potionwork and beer but the shop itself is pretty expensive property. And in half a year, you should be adjusted enough to the idea that you can take or leave my ghostly presence. Unless of course you die in the next six months,” she added after a thought, “please don’t, by the way, but if you do, these doors are open for you if you need a home.”
“And stay in the tub?” I asked, still smarting a bit over the fact that she’d given my room away, much less to Miss Fancypants.
“We’ll sort it out if it gets to that,” she said vaguely, “but that’s why you shouldn’t go getting yourself killed. These are dangerous times, kiddo. You have your entire life ahead of you and trust me when I say that it’s a situation to appreciate while you’re in it.”
She saw me out and I turned to look back one more time, half expecting her to be gone and the house to be dark, like the whole encounter had never happened. But she was there, framed by the ghostly lamps, smiling that familiar but eternally young smile. Over the coming weeks, before the ghost pub gained traction among the living and Mom resurfaced in public knowledge as the ghostly proprietress of the place, I’d get people carefully expressing their condolences for my loss – a sign of change in its own right, because only mere months before, it would’ve been unthinkable to console the daughter of a Resistance criminal – and I would always tell them that she’s gone to a better place. It was my own personal injoke.
I trudged down the walkway to the street and my heart skipped a beat when I saw a man there, leaning easily against the fencepost. In the dim light, it looked like my brother had showed up, and for a moment I wondered how that encounter was going to go down. Then I realized that it was, in fact, Dad. They didn’t look that similar on closer inspection, Dad was bulkier – I remembered that he’d worked as a blacksmith before death – while my bro was always the skinny type and kept his hair short because of trying to keep up a professional appearance for his law studies. But they had a similar enough posture, and Dad had after all been barely thirty at death. As I got closer, he smiled and nodded.
“Your mom is right, you know,” he said. “About the six month grieving period. Better to accept it now than put it off for the inevitable end.”
“I know, I know,” I said testily. You’d think that you can get out of your parents lecturing you when they die. You’d think wrong.
“That doesn’t apply to me, though,” Dad noted with a grin. “I died ages ago. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll swing by sometime – we have catching up to do, and I’d quite like to keep the occasional watchful eye out while times are still complicated.”
“Uh,” I said, baffled. “Yeah. That’d be… that’d be nice. You’ll get to meet my- well, if you’ve stayed around the house then you’ve seen my boyfriend, right?”
“Ahuh,” he said, face impassive. I remembered one time my boyfriend had seen the old photo of my parents on our kitchen counter and remarked that he should probably be glad that his girl’s big scary dad isn’t around any more. The big scary dad was now going to show up soon, probably through a wall.
“I’ll bring my own beer,” he added, “and I kind of can’t knock so it’s okay if I just float in whenever, right?”
The horror must’ve been clear on my face, because he roared with laughter, slapped me on the back – which I barely felt, whatever magic was holding the pub close to the living was faint here – and said that he’d try to make it on Thursday night around ten and I should avoid doing anything particularly private around that time. Then he turned around and on the moonlit street, I could see a small figure trotting towards us, followed by something bounding after it through the darkness.
“Ah, that’ll be Arlie,” Dad said. “And Pup. They’ll get you home safely.”
I looked at Arlie, and then at Pup.
“What… in the… hell?”
***
