Page 3 of Rory

I’m not in trouble, am I? she’d asked the man.

No, honey. He’d smiled, but in a sad way. Everyone here just wants to help you.

Harper explained to him that she had been staying in the park to wait for her mother, who had left her there to play but had yet to come back. She told him that they liked to move around a lot, and had travelled all along the California coast. Harper had never been to school, but she’d learned how to read and do math by watching children’s programs on television. She knew what “neglected” meant, and assured him that when they were together Cheryl Ensley took very good care of her. She didn’t tell the orderly everything, because even at eight years old she knew there were things you didn’t tell the norms, even the nice ones.

A month after that a hiker had found Cheryl Ensley’s skeletal remains in the woods.

Harper hadn’t cried when her case worker told her about it. She’d then talked to the psychologist, but just made up a bunch of stuff that he told her was perfectly natural. The doctors—especially the head kind—always wanted to know what bad things did to her. She never showed how frightened she was to anyone, and when night came she stayed indoors. Her mother’s drunken warning sometimes made her have nightmares, but when she woke up she scrubbed the tears from her face and made herself think about dozens of puppies.

The monsters, they’ll hunt you down and eat you alive.

Fortunately, Cheryl Ensley had left Harper in a town that had some better options for kids in foster care. After staying briefly in the hospital she was placed in a group home run by a religious group. The people proved responsible and kind, and made sure Harper attended school and got the dental and medical treatment she needed. Even having to go to church three times a week, the next ten years of her life proved much better than it had ever been with Cheryl. She never went hungry or got cold, and she always had her own bed. The real problem was her condition, which had surfaced when she was nine.

You have what’s called an acoustic neuroma, the audiologist had typed out on the computer screen he’d had her read at fourteen. It’s a tumor that is growing on a nerve that helps you hear. You also have damage to your other ear from infections that were never properly treated when you were an infant. The two things combined are what make the ringing and buzzing sounds you hear. Eventually you’re going to become deaf.

Harper had already figured out by then that the ever-dwindling sounds of norm voices and the world around her would eventually go away altogether. She’d also taught herself how to ignore what she could hear, which wasn’t real but at times became so loud as to be excruciating. The sound of the world around her shrank down until it hovered only an inch from her ears, muffled by the buzzing, rushing, sometimes screeching phantom sounds of her tinnitus. At fifteen she’d lost the ability to hear music or voices on the telephone anymore, which had been horrible until she started remembering music she’d heard, and built a radio in her head that would play any song she wanted to hear at any time. Because she didn’t want the norms to know she was going deaf she refused to learn sign language or wear hearing aids.

We’ll get you into a program for the disabled, her foster mother had promised after learning Harper wasn’t a good candidate for a cochlear implant. They can teach you how to manage once you lose your hearing completely.

You should be open about your condition, her doctor had advised her. People will understand.

Harper didn’t bother to tell him that in her experience most norms didn’t understand. Because she sucked at lip-reading the other kids in her group home got tired of repeating themselves and stopped talking to her. Deafness had also isolated her at school because she couldn’t hear the teachers, participate in PE, or socialize properly with the other kids. They ended up putting her in Special Ed after the teachers complained about her not keeping up; she became an instant outcast because she didn’t share the special ed kids’ disabilities.

By her senior year she was on independent study and did her classwork in the school media center, the one place where everyone appreciated silence.

Being in the outside world was worse, as most norms thought she was rude for ignoring them. The few who figured out she couldn’t hear shouted at her, as if that would help. Some people treated her with suspicion, as if she might be faking it. Others reacted as if her deafness might be contagious, and one woman at church had shocked her by scolding her over it.

“This came on you as a punishment from God for something very bad that you did,” the dour-faced lady told her. “You should pray for forgiveness every morning and night.”

Not everyone behaved like an ass over her hearing loss. One of the boys in her group home had helped her get a part-time job at a noisy factory where they employed only the hearing-impaired. Her deaf co-workers had taught her a little sign language, although by then she’d realized the norms had no interest in learning it. She’d used the money she’d earned to buy a laptop and a cheap digital camera, and for fun made a spoof Halloween video about how ghosts never haunted their factory because the loud sounds scared them.

That amateurish video went viral a week later, and suddenly Harper had fans.

Now as she stepped out of the shower and dried off, she nixed the idea of using the Whitechapel video and the drowning pond exposé for Halloween. She wanted to do something genuinely spooky, which was what she’d experienced in the highlands. She’d never told anyone about her dreams, and had no plans to, but she had plenty other material. The problem now was she couldn’t gain access to the castle that had been moved from Scotland to Monterey.

“Unless I give the owner a very good reason to let me inside,” she told her reflection. The towering woman with the majestic curves and dripping wet red hair grinned back.

After dressing she grabbed her phone, got Renard Beaumont’s phone number and composed a text to him, taking care with her wording. She thanked him for considering her request for access, and informed him that she was still presenting a special feature on his medieval property for her five million subscribers. She assured him she’d make do with flying in a helicopter over the castle at night to take thermal readings, and dovetail that with what she had discovered in the highlands. She apologized in advance for the media attention it would draw versus what she’d originally planned, but she had to respect his wishes as the owner, of course.

“Fifteen minutes,” Harper predicted after she clicked send, and then went to make some microwave popcorn.

It took exactly fourteen minutes for Beaumont to text back. In terse, unfriendly terms he told her he would allow her a brief tour of the castle, during which he would also allow her to film the interior. His only condition was that she come to the castle tonight at eight pm as he was leaving on a moving trip first thing in the morning, and would be gone for months.

“Works for me, guy.” She chuckled as she replied with a quick acceptance, and then took down the etched stone and tossed it in the air. “How about we go visit your relatives tonight, Rocky?”

It landed on her palm with the back side up, and the pink crystal seemed to wink at her.

Harper texted Athena about her change of plans before she shouldered the backpack with her gear and headed out to the garage. She rarely drove, but like all hearing-impaired people she was legally permitted to do so in every state in the union. Behind the wheel she wore her most powerful hearing aids, which she’d had custom designed to resemble ear buds, and used full-view and spot mirrors to watch the traffic around her for the flash of first responder lights.

Since Monterey was the next town over, it took her only fifteen minutes to reach McKeran’s Castle. The full moon made like a gigantic disco ball as it cast silvery light over the enormous structure, turning the towers metallic and glitzing the stone walls. At the iron gates fitted with a huge letter B stood a good-looking man in a beautiful suit who was checking his watch. She parked on the side of the road and got out, watching his face as she approached him.

“Mr. Beaumont, thanks for coming to meet me,” Harper said. As soon as she took a breath she nearly gagged; the man smelled like the roadkill that a disturbed anti-fan had kept sending to her old PO box. Had he stepped on a dead squirrel or something? “I’m Harper Ensley from Fear-Faire.”

“Of course you are.” To her relief he spoke in a pitch her hearing aids picked up clearly. “I can give you an hour to film, but that’s it. I don’t have any security guards on duty this week so you’ll have to tour by yourself.” He thrust a pamphlet at her. “The passages you’re interested in are torch-lit. When you come out, press that button on the wall there to close the gates.”

She took the pamphlet and then watched in disbelief as he opened the gates and then walked away.

“Ah, okay. Thank you,” she called after him.