“Um…” How the fuck was I supposed to explain that? He’d been terrorizing visitors for nearly forty years, though. He’dshoutedat me when I first arrived. Certainly, he was aware that he was a local urban legend.
“Well, I mean, you were the last lookout up here before me, right? You’re sort of known for that?”
“Was I? How long has it been since I… Since?”
“That was 1986. It’s 2025. Thirty-nine years.”
Emotion flashed across his face. Shock, pain, and something else. He sucked in a breath and faced the fire again. “Oh.”
It was quiet for a long time, the air heavy and aching. I wondered if I shouldn’t be there to witness this private moment of grief for lost time, if I should step out onto the deck to give him space.
He hadn’t asked me to leave, though. He hadn’t disappeared.
Maybe he just needed someone to sit with him. I had, when the neurologist strode into my hospital room and changed my life. Dad sat with me without saying a word after she’d left, and it’d helped more than I’d ever be able to tell him.
So I sat with Charlie, and no matter what came next, or what else I found out about him, at least I’d given him this moment of humanity.
“I don’t remember most of it,” he whispered after a while. “The passing time. It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long. It was just…cold. Very cold.” He scooted the chair closer to the fire and held out his hands as if to warm them. “I tried to talk to a few others who came, but they couldn’t see me or hear me. And then more came all at once, and they were too loud, so I threw things around until they left. I’m sorry for yelling at you. I didn’t think you’d know I was there. I wasn’t trying to frighten you. I justdidn’t want you to close my window. I didn’t want it to be dark in here again.”
I tried to imagine that—desperately wanting to communicate with someone, anyone, only to go unheard and unseen. What would it feel like to be trapped in the dark for decades?
“I’m sorry,” I said, with feeling. No one deserved that.
“Do you talk to dead people a lot? Are you like a, what do they call those, a psychic? Or a medium?” he asked.
I snorted. “Definitely not. I was firmly in the camp that ghosts were for the beaded curtain people. Having a bit of an identity crisis over it, actually. You scared me to death when I first saw you.”
He raised an eyebrow, and I realized how badly I’d just put my foot in my mouth.
“Shit.Not todeath, obviously. I mean, I considered that I had died and made you up, but then the pilots spoke to me like normal, so I figured I wasn’t actually splattered all over the ground outside.”
His eyebrows were practically in his hairline by now, and a small smile appeared on his face.
“Fuck. I didn’t mean to make that sound insensitive. I don’t know how you, ya know,went out, but I’m sure it was with more dignity than that. And if it wasn’t, that’s fine, too. It’s all fine. Or, notfine,but?—”
“I didn’t jump off the deck,” he said with a laugh.
He waslaughing.
I sighed. “Oh, thank fuck. You’d be the fourth person I said something off-putting to in a week, and I don’t have another recovery in me.”
He chuckled before his face turned serious again. “Do you know… Did my parents get to bury me? That was important to Mom. She’d drag us all out to clean up the family graves every year and put out new flowers.”
He wiped at his face. Did ghosts cry? Or was it a reflex to brush away tears that would never fall again?
“No one knows what happened to you,” I answered quietly. Peripherally, I was aware of the bear spray sitting on the bed next to me. Would it be effective against a ghost if he grew angry and attacked me? Or would it pass right through him?
Focus.
“You disappeared. They never found you,” I finished.
Fresh shock and then horror marred his face. Irrationally, I preferred it when he smiled. “Never? What do you mean,never? I was… Wait…” he cast around as if to solve a puzzle I couldn’t see.
“But I was here. Right here,” he said, waving his arms around the cabin. “How could they have missed me? I met with someone earlier that day, that police officer who hiked out to talk to me, then I went to bed, and…”
He shook his head and stood, pacing the length of the lookout and wringing his hands together. “I wasright there!”he shouted, pointing at the bed I now slept in.
Fucking hell. I scrambled up and leaned back against the desk to avoid running into him.
