Thereisdamage to the ceiling: it bows in places, perhaps from gathered water. But there isn’t any dust, no paint leaves shedding from walls. Not a single spiderweb. It’s a surprisingly small room, compared to what it looked like from the outside of the house, with a boarded-up fireplace, a child’s sandal (judging by the style, it was left here sometime in the past fifteen years), a framed painting on the wall, a desk, and a McDonald’s Happy Meal toy still in its plastic. The air smells peculiarly like one of the walls in my living room. The wall back home, which currently has a television and armchair pushed against it, has always carried a scent of rose water and tobacco. Nobody in my family smokes tobacco, and neither did my grandmother.
“I’m not reallyintothe paranormal,” I tell him. “I only write about it.”
Morgan isn’t listening. “That’s the desk where they found the severed hand!” He turns, shining the light directly in my eyes. I wince, and he lowers it but is too wired to apologize. “It didn’t belong to any of the victims. Wasn’t a match for Frank’s description. They never figured out who it might have belonged to, but the weirdest part is that it smelled like sulfur and spontaneously combusted during forensic analysis.”
“Very weird,” I agree. “Two years you’ve been doing this, then? Two years ago is about the time you started renting my old desk at the shop.”
“Yeah. I mean, you’ve heard what Aisling says about ghosts. It’s impossible not to be intrigued.”
“You believe in ghosts because of Aisling?”
“I always thought…maybe. Maybe they’re real. But then I started listening to her stories, and now I’m a true believer.”
Key word:stories.
I try not to sigh, but it’s inescapable.
“Her information’s so specific, it has to come fromsomewhere,” he goes on. “Luna monitors what Ash gets up to online. She doesn’t watch any ghost hunting shows. So it’s like, how does she know any of this?”
Credit where credit is due: Ash can give a hell of a convincing speech. But still, I pity him for being so gullible.
Morgan thumbs through a book he’s brought along:The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained, and I am helpless to float over, skimming it with him. “You dog-ear your books,” I observe.
He flicks me a guilty look. “Yeah.”
“So do I.”
His face brightens. “You do?”
“I write in them, too. Little footnotes.”
“Yes.” He smacks the book against his palm. “Exactly. That’s what books are meant for! Love them, mark them. Fill up the margins.”
I have to hold myself steady, hand to the wall, so that I don’tfaint into a dead swoon. What I wouldn’t give to read this man’s margins.
He peruses drawers in the rolltop desk, which prove empty. Not a paper clip, not a dead cricket, not a mousetrap in sight. “I thought The Magick Happens was going to be my novel-writing muse,” he tells me, “but it turned out to be a gateway to something entirely different. I work for the newspaper, you know, but a couple years ago, I actually wanted to write books, too.”
“Really?”
He tests the first three steps of the staircase to see if they’ll hold his weight. They don’t even creak, so we forge our way up. The carpet is tan but probably used to be white. “I’d write three thousand words, then get a shiny new idea, and set it aside. Write three thousand words of the new idea, scrap them for another new idea. You get the picture. It was disappointing, because I’d been telling myself I was going to be a novelist—it seemed like the next step, for some reason. But I’m a short-stories kinda guy, it turns out. I like the challenge of limited length, and it keeps me from getting bored. Speaking of stories, what are you working on now? Are you gonna add to the Villamoon universe, or…?”
“What can you tell me about ghosts?” I blurt. “I haven’t done much research.” Intentionally. I’ve always worried that if I let myself fall down supernatural rabbit holes, I’d end up believing again. Most of the lore in my books comes from my own imagination.
As it happens, Morgan can tell me alotabout ghosts.
Seven
I once knew a girl who gathered up death.
Into her basket of dreams it went.
She knew not that she plucked
the fate spelling her end,
for it looked
just like
