Epic Readers, Ghost Wood Song is the haunting, eerie debut of our dreams (or maybe our nightmares?) and we can’t wait for you to read it. Ghost Wood Song is Sawkill Girls meets Beautiful Creatures, with a mysticism all its own.
In Erica Waters’ debut, the boundary between reality and nightmares is as thin as the veil between the living and the dead. Shady Grove inherited her father’s ability to call ghosts from the grave with his fiddle, but she also knows the fiddle’s tunes bring nothing but trouble and darkness.
But when her brother is accused of murder, she can’t let the dead keep their secrets. To clear his name, she’ll have to find her late father’s fiddle and make those ghosts sing…
With haunting family secrets (literally), a beautiful queer love triangle, and the perfect amount of creepiness, Ghost Wood Song is one you won’t want to miss. Start reading this sneak peek now!
I’m as restless as the ghosts today. The sigh of the trees makes my scalp prickle, my senses strain. There’s something waiting for me in the silences between the notes we play, like a vibration too low for human ears. It’s been out here in the woods for weeks, just out of my reach.
No one else notices. Sarah leans over her banjo, dark hair falling across her forehead, mouth set in concentration. The music that spins from her fingertips is bright as the sunshine that drifts across the pine needles. She looks soft in this light, her eyelashes downy as moth wings.
The wood behind her glows golden right up to the edge of Mama’s property, where the true forest begins. There, the sunlight loses its hold, fading to shadows. Those trees grow tall and close together, clotted with brambles and vines. That’s where the ghosts who spill out of Aunt Ena’s house like to linger, mingling their whispers with the wind. I can’t quite catch their words, but they tug at me, drawing my attention away from the music.
“Jesus, Shady,” Sarah says, her voice hacking through the song like a machete. Orlando slaps his hand over his guitar strings to mute the chord he fumbled. “You missed your cue again. Why didn’t you come in?” All her moth-wing softness has disappeared.
“Sorry,” I say, glancing at the fiddle in my lap. “There’s not much for me to do in this song.” I pull a loose thread from the fraying hem of my skirt, wrapping it around my finger.
That was the second time I forgot to come in. I’m distracted today, but the truth is, this song doesn’t mean anything to me. I want to learn to play bluegrass the way my daddy did—like it’s the breath in my lungs, the beat of my heart. And I never will if Sarah keeps picking all these folk-rock songs.
She pushes her short, messy hair back with an impatient hand, revealing her undercut and the cloud-shaped birthmark behind her ear. I’ve thought so many times about running my lips over just that spot. “The open mic’s in one week, Shady. We can play something else, but if we don’t decide on a song today, we won’t be ready in time.” There’s an edge to her voice like she’s been paired with a lazy classmate for a group project. “You know how badly I need to win this.”
“I’m sorry,” I say again, louder, taking up my fiddle to show I’m paying attention. I know I’m the one at fault, but the annoyance in her voice makes me glare back at her, all thoughts of lips on skin forgotten. “I want to win, too, you know.”
The prize is a free half day in a small recording studio, a chance to record a song with professional help and equipment. It sounds cool, but I mostly want to win to make Sarah happy. She thinks it would help her get into a good music school.
But we can’t even agree on what song we’re going to play for the open mic night. Sarah only wants to play newer, more popular folk-rock, Orlando flits from one style of music to another like a butterfly tasting flowers, and I can only really perform if we’re playing traditional folk and bluegrass. We’re like the leftovers from three different dishes someone’s trying to make into a casserole.
“We could do ‘Wagon Wheel’ instead. It has a strong fiddle part,” Sarah says.
“‘Wagon Wheel’?” I say, so surprised I flinch. The last time we played “Wagon Wheel” it was just Sarah and me, alone in her room. One minute we were playing and the next our lips were inches apart. Sarah pulled away before we could kiss, but it changed everything between us. We haven’t talked about it since. Maybe now she’s trying to remind me, to give me an opening?
Confusion passes over her face, followed quickly by a deep blush. She definitely didn’t mean to bring up the almost-kiss.
“‘Wagon Wheel’ is kind of overplayed,” I say, glancing away.
“It’s a crowd pleaser, though,” Orlando offers, oblivious to what just happened. He’s stretched out on his belly, wire-rimmed glasses sliding down his nose, which hovers about three inches from a mess of pill bugs he found under a rock. That’s always the danger of holding practice in the woods—Orlando will wander off after a grasshopper or get stuck watching the progress of an ant colony for hours on end. His whole absentminded-professor thing irritates Sarah, but you can’t blame a person for loving what they love. And Orlando loves bugs.
“Any other ideas?” Sarah asks.
“I’ve been working on ‘The Twa Sisters.’ Orlando likes that one too.”
“It’s too creepy and weird,” she says, shaking her head.
I shrug. She’s not wrong. “The Twa Sisters” is an old folk song about two sisters who fall in love with the same boy, so one drowns the other. When the drowned sister’s body washes up on the riverbank, a young fiddler finds it and shapes her bones into fiddle parts. Her rib cage becomes a fiddle, her finger bones its pegs. But the bone-made fiddle will only play one tune: Oh, the dreadful wind and rain.
Daddy taught me “The Twa Sisters” during one of his low times, when his songs all turned dark and drear, as far from the bright notes of bluegrass as a person can get with a fiddle in hand. You’d think he was the one who killed the fair sister from the song, the way his voice got so husky-sad, the way his fiddle cried.
Only tune that the fiddle would play was
Oh, the dreadful wind and rain
I’ve been practicing it for weeks, but I still can’t play it like he did, as if the song’s story is my own. My notes come out sweet and bright, no matter how I try to deepen and darken them. But I can’t seem to leave this song alone, like it’s the only one my fiddle wants to play.
I’d never say it out loud, and even admitting it to myself gives me chills, but if I could have a fiddle made of my daddy’s bones, I’d take it. I’d take it and play it and learn all the secrets he kept, all the sorrows he bore inside his breast. I think that’s what made his music so good.
“I don’t get why you’re so opposed to playing new music,” Sarah says as if she’s reading my thoughts.
“And I don’t get why you’re so opposed to playing good music,” I shoot back, heat spreading across my cheeks.
Sarah’s lips part for a retort, but then she closes her mouth, looks down at her lap. She puts on such a tough front, but underneath all that sarcasm and bossiness there’s this tender, easily bruised Sarah she tries so hard to hide. And my barb cut right through.
Before I can apologize, she snatches up her banjo and stalks off through the woods, her boots kicking up pine needles. Orlando groans and gets up to follow her, leaving me with only the trees for company. I wish I could make her understand what playing the fiddle means to me—what it used to mean, what it can’t ever mean again.
I know that music could be my ticket out of here, out of Mama’s crowded trailer, out of Goodwill clothes and food that comes in cans and boxes. It could be an escape from all the memories that never leave me be. But that’s not why I play the fiddle. My family history—everything we’ve lost, all our ghosts and all our griefs—those feel like the truest part of me, the beating heart of my music. Playing Sarah’s way is like taking an ax to my deepest, most secret roots.
Bright, soft banjo notes begin to drift through the trees. Sarah’s playing a Gillian Welch song, the one about Elvis. Orlando starts singing along, his voice rich and sweet as molasses.
Their music floods me with longing, making me think of ninth grade, when the three of us met. Sarah had just transferred from another county, and Orlando had moved to Briar Springs from Miami the summer before. We were close friends within a few weeks and started playing music together soon after. Orlando was happy to discover that the bluegrass Sarah and I liked reminded him a little of the guajira music—Cuban country—he’d grown up playing with his grandfather and uncles. He taught us a few Cuban songs, and we taught him bluegrass and folk. Music is what made us friends, but now it feels like it’s pulling us apart. If we could play together again like we used to, when it was just for fun, when we laughed through half the songs we played—
I grab my fiddle and follow their notes like bread crumbs through the trees.
They both look up, startled, when I reach the small clearing where they sit. “That’s the one,” I say, pushing down all my doubts. “We’ll play that for the open mic night.”
I linger in the woods after Sarah and Orlando head home. The sun has gone down, and the woods are hushed, shadows spilling like ink through the trees. The air is cool and sweet with the smells of early spring.
I raise my fiddle and breathe into the quiet, my eyes closed in concentration. A great horned owl hoots gently somewhere nearby, like a chiding mother telling me to get on with it. Daddy always said twilight was good for ghost raising because it’s an in-between time, when the barrier between worlds seems to grow thin as tissue paper and the ghosts are at their lonesomest. This fiddle can’t so much as poke a hole in that tissue paper, but it’s the only one I’ve got now.
Daddy’s fiddle drew ghosts like hummingbirds to nectar. Mine only reminds me of everything I’m not, everything I’ll never be.
My bow slices across the strings, sending a wail into the blue hush and startling the owl, who erupts in a flurry of shocked feathers from a branch high above my head, hooting her displeasure.
I play “The Twa Sisters” over and over again, trying to imagine myself as the drowned sister, watching the world turn to brown river water. Then I play it as the fiddler who finds the body and strings the girl’s long, yellow hair into a fiddle bow. But the song comes out the same—sad and sweet, quiet and calm as the river that washed up her bones.
Finally, I let the song fade, its last notes disappearing into the skinny pines. Night settles in around me, the air close and clammy. Cicadas take up where my fiddle left off, and small animals rustle in the brush. The trees sigh and sigh and sigh. This forest feels like an ear that’s always listening but never hears what it’s hoping to. Maybe it misses Daddy’s fiddle same as I do. Maybe it’s waiting, like I am too, for a voice of its own.
I turn to put my fiddle in its case, when, like a belated echo, a snatch of music comes back to me from the trees, deep and pure and full of grief, the dark twin of my bow’s last arc. A shiver runs up my spine, spreading chill bumps over my arms. Every muscle in my body tenses, waiting for another note.
“Shady,” Mama yells from the trailer, making me jump. “It’s dinnertime.” The door slams, and I shake myself.
I put my fiddle in its case and turn for home, back through the hungry, darkening woods, back toward Mama’s trailer, to the life we made inside the emptiness Daddy’s death left behind.
Our trailer always puts me in mind of a tin can with a firecracker that’s about to blow. Tonight’s no different. My stepdad, Jim, is laid out on the recliner with NASCAR cranked up loud enough to make you think you’re on the track yourself, inhaling burned-rubber fumes. Mama’s at the stove banging pots and pans and swearing under her breath, while my two-year-old sister, Honey, tugs at Mama’s Waffle House uniform. The smells of fried chicken, instant mashed potatoes, and canned spinach make my stomach turn.
“Shady, where’ve you been?” Mama asks when she catches sight of me standing at the counter that divides the kitchen from the living room.
“I was in the woods with Sarah and Orlando.” Honey wanders over, and I start to braid a section of her silky hair. My own hair’s so curly and thick you can’t run your fingers through it, so I love playing with Honey’s.
“They left an hour ago. You been out there by yourself playing that fiddle?” Mama wipes sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand.
I don’t answer, so she goes on muttering. “Just like your daddy, too busy playing that instrument to help me.”
Mama’s in a temper, but I know it’s not really about me. It never is. “I’ll help you, Mama. What do you need?” I say, touching her arm.
Her eyes soften. “Go tell Jesse to come in here for dinner.”
I cross back through the living room, but Jim doesn’t even see me, his eyes locked on the endlessly circling cars. His cell phone is ringing, but he ignores it.
I knock at Jesse’s door and then poke my head in. “Mama says come to dinner.”
My older brother sits on his bed, back against the headboard, with earbuds in, steadily texting. An awful, metallic-sounding music grates from the speakers.
“Jesse.”
“What?” he says, yanking one earbud out. He pushes a shock of light-brown hair from his eyes.
“Are you coming to dinner, or not? Mama’s in a bad mood, though, so you’d better get in there.”
Jesse sighs like I’ve come to lead him to his death.
“What’d you do now?” I ask.
“Why’s it gotta be something I did?”
“It’s always you. Can’t you find something better to do with your time? You could play with my band and me. It doesn’t have to be fiddle—you could learn mandolin or something. Daddy would be so disappointed that you—”
Jesse’s face goes hard before I can even finish the sentence.
“Fuck off.”
I step back and look away, my cheeks flushing with anger and embarrassment. I turn to leave, but Jesse’s voice stops me.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
I spin back to face him. “You did, though.” Sometimes I look at Jesse and don’t even recognize him anymore, but he’s still my brother, and I miss him. I miss the way we used to be, before he saw Daddy die right in front of him, before Mama moved another man into Daddy’s place.
“Yeah, I did, but I’m still sorry. I just don’t want to play music like that, okay?” Jesse’s voice softens. “Playing that sad song over and over again isn’t going to make him come back, you know. You’re only making it harder on yourself.”
His words sink like fishing weights in my stomach, landing cold and true. Is that what I’m hoping for, deep down, when I spend hours in the woods, playing for the unreachable ghosts? Is that why I can’t stop playing “The Twa Sisters”? These past few weeks it’s all I’ve wanted to do.
I shrug and change the subject. “Will you at least come see me play at the open mic next weekend?”
“Maybe,” he says, pushing me forward. “Now get out.”
When we trudge into the kitchen, Mama’s eyes snag on Jesse, but she doesn’t say anything. Jim’s glowering at the screen of his phone, which has started ringing again.
I go to the stove and make a big plate of food for Honey and me to share. That way, Mama won’t notice if I don’t eat any meat. She’s dead set against me becoming a vegetarian. Honey’s already at the table in her booster chair, and I squeeze past her to the seat between the microwave and window, well out of the fray.
“Jim, turn off that noise and come eat with us,” Mama says. “And answer your phone or turn it off.”
“Goddamned Frank hassling me about that missing lumber delivery.” Jim silences the phone, but keeps scowling at it. “Just bring me a plate in here, Shirley.”
“Do I look like your servant?” Mama asks, staring him down.
Writers are always going on about piercing blue eyes, but they must’ve never seen Mama’s brown ones when she’s mad. She’ll burn a hole through sheet metal.
Jim grunts and turns down the volume on the TV. He plunks himself into the chair next to Jesse, forcing his lanky legs under the table. “Why’s your mama in such a bad mood, boy?”
Jesse doesn’t say anything. He stares down at his plate, running his fingers over the condensation on his glass of sweet tea.
“The principal called,” Mama says, answering for Jesse. “He skipped school all week.” She turns to Jesse and levels that metal-burning stare on him. “You trying to get me jailed for truancy?”
“Maybe it’s time we pulled him out of school,” Jim says, rubbing the back of his permanently sunburned neck. “Let him make his own living. Might teach him a thing or two. He was never going to college nohow, so what’s he need to finish high school for?”
“My son is going to finish high school,” Mama says, her voice dangerous.
Mama dropped out of high school as a teenager and only went to get her GED after Jesse was born. You mention dropping out of school—even as a joke—and you’re in for a three-day lecture about how shameful it feels to go out in the world without an education. Jim ought to know better.
Our stepdad usually keeps his thoughts to himself, at least when Mama’s around, but he’s like a dog with a bone tonight. Maybe because his boss, his brother Frank, has been riding him harder than usual at the construction company. But more and more, that’s just how it is between Jim and Jesse. Each one is an itch the other can’t stop scratching, and tonight Jesse’s a full-blown rash.
“You keep letting him run around, wasting his life, it don’t matter if he finishes high school,” Jim says. “He’ll be in prison anyway. That’s about all he’s good for.”
Jesse slams back his chair, knocking it against the wall. Honey jumps, her eyes going wide, but no one pays her any mind. Last time Jim and Jesse fought like this, Mama had to pull them apart before punches were thrown.
But Jesse only crosses his arms over his chest. “And what are you good for, Jim?”
“You got a roof over your head and clothes on your back, don’t you?” Jim picks a piece of chicken from his teeth.
“So I should be like you, and work a shitty job that barely pays me anything, and make my dead best friend’s kids live in a shitty trailer with a shitty stepdad they hate? You think this is what my dad wanted for us?” Jesse laughs, but it’s a hard, ugly sound.
“Don’t bring your daddy into this. This is about you and your attitude.” Jim shakes his head, going back to his dinner. He’s trying to seem calm and in control, but his hand tightens around his fork. His job is a sore spot for him. Back before him and Mama got together, his drinking and carrying on got so bad he made a name for himself in town. Nobody but his older brother would hire him, and it kills Jim to work for Frank—probably because everybody loves Frank and thinks Jim’s a piece of trash. I can’t say I disagree.
When he notices Jim’s grip on the fork, a venomous smile spreads across Jesse’s lips. He never misses a tell. “You know, Jim,” he starts to say, but Mama doesn’t miss anyone’s tells either. She cuts him off before he can get going.
“That’s enough, Jesse Ray. If you can’t be civil at the dinner table, you can go to your room. We didn’t work all day to listen to you be ungrateful.”
Anger flashes into Jesse’s eyes again. “He’s the one who—”
“Don’t talk back to your mama,” Jim says, smirking. He’s got Mama back on his side.
Jesse studies the two of them carefully, trying to push down his anger and get the upper hand. But when he speaks again, his voice is half strangled with hurt. “You can lecture me all you like, Mama, but I know what you two did, and I’m always going to know it.” He pushes off from the table, rattling the dishes, and stomps from the kitchen. “If you wanted me to be a better man, you should’ve married one,” he says before disappearing down the hallway.
Jim makes to follow Jesse to his room, but Mama puts her hand on his arm. “Leave it be, Jim. Leave it be.”
I know Jesse is referring to Mama and Jim’s relationship, but he’s wrong. I asked Mama when Jim moved in if there was something between her and Jim before Daddy died, and she said no, of course not. “Mama, why does Jesse still think—”
“You leave it be, too, Shady,” she snaps. “And cut up some of that chicken breast for your sister.” I curl my lip at the meat, but I know better than to argue.
Jim’s still stewing. “A man breaks his back all day and comes home to this nonsense,” he mutters, rising from the table. He takes his plate into the living room and turns the TV’s volume up again, filling the angry silence with the monotonous roar of race cars flying around and around and around in circles—a fitting soundtrack for our lives.
Mama stares down at her half-eaten meal, looking tired and sad and guilty. Honey’s playing with her food, thankfully oblivious to the rest of us now that the shouting has stopped. I force down a few more bites of watery potatoes, but I can’t stand to sit at this table any longer. “I’m going to go get some air,” I say.
“All right, baby,” Mama murmurs, not meeting my eyes.
I take a huge breath of the pine-scented night air once I get outside and plop down onto the steps, leaning my head back against the trailer’s door. But I can still hear the mechanical snarls from the TV, so I wander out to the dirt road that runs past our house, walking along the tree line, where shadows move like the darkness of dreams. I reach the end of our small road and walk for several minutes down the larger dirt road that bumps its way toward the highway.
With the dark pines at my back, I look out over the cow pasture on the other side, searching for the tree I’ve come to think of as mine. A blasted oak, twisted like a wrung-out rag, the bark smooth and pale, the limbs reaching up like an old woman’s knobby fingers. I guess most people would call it ugly, but I think it’s beautiful, even though it’s dead and barren and all alone. I like to think it’s going to outlast us all; that long after we’re gone it will still be standing there not caring it’s got no leaves and no acorns, that it can’t offer shelter the way other oak trees can. Despite what this tree has lost, it’s still standing, a gleam of white against the dark field. Whenever I see it, something in me reaches toward it, like we’re kin.
Daddy and I drove past it all the time when he was alive. He’d always start humming an old murder ballad he told me was called “The Old Oak Tree.” He would never sing the words for me, though I loved the sad, lilting melody of it.
Tonight, pale, distant stars shine overhead. The forest behind me sleeps, breathing silently, the pine trees’ top branches finally at rest. The atmosphere feels the way it did when Daddy played his fiddle—like all creation had gone still and quiet, waiting to see what the music would bring.
I wait with the trees and the ghosts, trembling in the warm spring air, my body tuned to a frequency that only sounds like white noise, empty static to my mind. No matter how hard I listen, the silence never resolves into melody.
As I get ready for bed, I still feel restless and on edge—still caught up in that snatch of music I heard in the woods, the spirits’ watchfulness I felt in the trees. I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep, but I guess all of today’s fighting has worn me out. When I fall into bed at ten o’clock, I drift straight from thoughts of the shadowy, restive woods and into familiar dreams.
I’m lying in my little twin bed at the old house—my real home—with the window open to a rare fall breeze. My feet are cold, but I don’t want to close the window because I can hear Daddy’s fiddle playing from the woods. A low, mournful song I don’t recognize drifts in with the usual nighttime creatures’ music. It’s a sad song, but it comforts me, and my eyes grow heavy.
Just then, my bedroom door creaks open, startling me awake, but it’s probably one of the ghosts, nothing to worry about. I pull my quilt higher over my chest, until it’s under my nose. Then I hear heavy footsteps on the floorboards, nothing like the soft patter of the ghosts I’m used to. I turn my head toward the door, where a tall, shadowy figure stands, his features obscured by the hall light behind him.
My heart begins to race. “Daddy?” I say, but I know it’s not Daddy—his fiddle’s still crying in the pines. “Jesse?” I whisper, though the figure’s too tall to be my brother.
I already know who’s standing at my door.
The figure doesn’t speak. He makes his inky way into the room, drawing nearer and nearer to my bed, until he’s standing over me, gazing down into my face. I stare up at him as I have a dozen times before, unable to speak or move or even breathe. The figure has no face. He is darkness. He is nothing.
A hand reaches down toward my throat, and I know I should fight, know I should thrash and kick and bite, but my body won’t obey me. My limbs lie heavy, useless. Fingertips brush my throat, and finally I work up a scream from somewhere deep inside me. It rips from my mouth, cutting through the shadows in the room, making the dark figure draw back his hand.
I scream until I am no longer a girl, no longer flesh and blood, but only sound and terror hurtling through the night.
Warm fingers close over my arm and shake me. “Shady,” someone says. “Open your eyes.” And then I’m back in the trailer, in the room I share with Honey, staring into my brother’s face. Jesse’s eyes soften in relief when he sees I recognize him. I’m still paralyzed, but my eyes flit over the room, searching for a man made of shadows.
“You were screaming,” Jesse says. “I thought you were being murdered in your bed.”
“I was.” A warm tear rolls down my face. When I reach up to wipe it away, I realize I can move again. I sit up, feeling sick and dizzy. “Where’s Honey?” She’s not in the bed across from mine.
“She probably fell asleep in Mama’s room,” Jesse says. He studies me carefully. “Are you having the dreams again, like you did before . . . ?” He can’t bear to say “before Daddy died.”
“Everybody has nightmares,” I say. But that fear’s still sitting there on my chest, heavy as a body. It’s been four years since I’ve had to fight him off—the dark figure who held me down in the twilight space between dreams and waking, who slipped in and out of the shadows, from choking nightmare to screaming waking. He hasn’t visited me since Daddy died.
If he’s back now, will the other dreams come back too? The dead girl in my ceiling, the stinging wasps? A shudder runs through me, making me squeeze my eyes closed. And why now?
Why has he chosen to come back?
“Shady, are you all right?” Mama says from the doorway. I must have woken up the whole house with my screaming.
I find my voice again. “Just a bad dream. I’m fine. You can go to sleep.”
Jesse doesn’t speak to her. He gets up and heads back to his room. After murmuring good night, Mama goes too, leaving me alone with the memory of cool fingers on my neck, fiddle music in my ears, a secret I’m half afraid to admit to myself.
The shadow man’s back.
There’s still an expectant, uneasy feeling in my chest when I pull up at Aunt Ena’s the next morning, a Saturday.
The house where I grew up looks like it always has, like it probably always will. The white paint has peeled and turned the same grayish color as the heavy Spanish moss that drips from the massive oak trees in the front yard. The upstairs windows are dark with dirt, and even from my car, I can see the cobwebs. The grass is overgrown, and cracks vein the bricks of the front stoop like spreading kudzu vines.
You’d think the house was empty of the living if it weren’t for the pink azaleas rioting in the front yard, big and fierce enough to make even the oak trees look nervous. Flowers usually cheer up a place, but against the brightness of the azaleas, the house and the woods behind it look more ominous than ever. All shadows and whispers. It doesn’t help that the sky’s overcast, with big, dark thunderheads rolling in.
I head for the door, my arms loaded with bags. I’ve been doing Aunt Ena’s shopping on Saturday mornings since the first week I got my driver’s license. It’s not that she can’t go out; she just doesn’t like to. Crowds make her nervous. And so do open spaces. And fluorescent lights. The grocery store is her idea of hell. Mama says she’s always been like that, but it got worse after Daddy died.
Aunt Ena opens the door, still in her nightgown. “Mornin’, darlin’.” She smiles and stands back to let me in.
Aunt Ena looks so much like Daddy it makes my chest ache. She’s got his naturally fair skin, dark curly hair, and snub nose. Her eyes are blue, though, a rarity in our family.
“Your azaleas are going to overtake the house before long,” I say as I pass through the door. “What are you feeding them?”
Aunt Ena wiggles her fingers mysteriously and then goes to get some cash from her purse. She always gives me ten bucks for my trouble, the only income I’ve got. I’d do it even without the money, though. I like spending time with Aunt Ena, and I know she’s lonely. Plus, I get to missing this old house something fierce if I stay away too long.
I help put the groceries away in the kitchen, and every drawer and cabinet I open sends a memory whooshing out. Daddy boiling a giant pot of peanuts. Jesse and me eating all the chocolate chip cookies while our parents slept. My homemade volcano shooting red froth up to the ceiling.
There are bad memories here too—waking up screaming from nightmares of the shadow man and, even awake, creeping around dark corners of the house, watching for him. I sat right here on the kitchen floor one night after a particularly scary dream, crying and shaking, until Jesse found me.
I try to push the memory from my mind and let the good things I remember take its place. Whatever Jesse might say to the contrary, I know we were happy here, even with the nightmares, even with the ghosts, though the ghosts are why Mama wanted to move out once Daddy was gone. They weren’t her people’s spirits. It’s one thing to live with the ghosts of your own blood, but other people’s—those can be hard to get along with if you don’t have the right temperament. They feel all wrong in the air, against your skin. They make your nerves jittery.
Mama could never stand it, and once Daddy was gone, she never slept another night under this roof. We spent a few weeks at her friend’s place, and then she used Daddy’s life insurance money to buy the trailer on the other side of the woods. She walked away from Daddy’s old family home without a backward glance. Jesse turned his back, too—he hasn’t set foot in this house since we moved.
“How’s your music coming along?” Aunt Ena asks, pouring a bag of dried black-eyed peas into a glass jar.
“It’s all right. It’s not like it used to be. I don’t think I’ll ever be as good as Daddy was.”
Silence drops and deepens around us. “How’s Sarah then?” she says, arching an eyebrow, trying to lighten the mood.
I haven’t told many people I’m bi, so I don’t know how Aunt Ena figured out about my crush on Sarah. Probably the ghosts whispered it to her. She’s always had a better ear for them than the rest of us.
I go to the fridge and pour myself a glass of orange juice to hide my embarrassment. “Sarah’s Sarah,” I say, but Aunt Ena’s not fooled.
“You ask her to prom yet?”
I laugh outright at the thought of Sarah in a prom dress. She’d probably show up in Converse and jeans. Maybe a tuxedo if I could talk her into it.
“Leave me alone,” I say, but I smile too.
“All right, all right. I’ll make you some French toast.” Aunt Ena makes better French toast than any restaurant ever could. She told me once it was her mama’s recipe, but she doesn’t like to talk about my grandmother, who died right before Aunt Ena started college.
What little bit I know about my grandparents was hard-won, wheedled out of Daddy when he was distracted, pulled like teeth from Aunt Ena’s mouth. Neither of them ever liked to talk about the past. Daddy would always say something like, “Don’t matter, Shady girl. What’s gone’s gone,” and then he’d go back to painting or hammering or planting. But I do know their mama was Irish and worked as a medium when she was young—helping folks get in contact with dead relatives and lovers.
Daddy got his ghost-raising magic from her, but the ghosts only came to him when he played his fiddle. That came from his mama, too, the instrument passed down through the family for generations.
My grandma stopped working as a medium after she married my grandpa. They settled here in Briar Springs, Florida, in the only house they could afford—a house no one else wanted, on account of it being haunted. Once my grandmother moved in, even more lost souls began to haunt the house and the woods that surround it, drawn to her just like they were to Daddy. I guess the ghosts have been coming ever since.
Our people mostly didn’t mind the ghosts, kin or not. Well, maybe Daddy’s father did, but poor people can’t be too choosy about where they live. I don’t know anything about my grandfather, except that Daddy didn’t seem to like him much. Maybe the ghosts rubbed him raw the way they did Mama.
Today the ghosts are quiet, listening to Aunt Ena and me chat at the table, Aunt Ena growing steadily more animated. She tells me about the books she’s been reading, the plants she’s been growing, her blue eyes bright as morning glories in early summer. The tight feeling in my chest starts to fade.
When the faint strains of a mournful fiddle start wafting down from the second floor, we both stop talking. Aunt Ena’s smile wavers and then goes out like a spent lightning bug.
“What is . . . ?” I stare at the ceiling, trying to catch the melody, all the hairs on my arms standing on end. “Oh my God, that’s ‘The Twa Sisters.’ I heard it in the woods last night, too,” I say, suddenly sure. “I didn’t imagine it.” The song is distant but unmistakable, and it doesn’t sound light and sweet like when I play it. The only person who ever played like that was Daddy.
When Aunt Ena’s eyes meet mine, I can tell she’s thinking the same thing. Her face has gone pale, her mouth a hard line. “It’s just an echo of the past. That’s all. Don’t mind it. It’s an echo. You know this old house is full of ’em.”
The music’s already gone.
“An echo,” I say, but I know she’s wrong. Tears stand in my eyes.
“Oh, Shady,” Aunt Ena says, reaching for my hand. I pull it out of her reach and wipe my eyes. “Did I ever tell you about the first time I saw one of the ghosts Daddy raised? He was playing ‘The Twa Sisters’ that night.”
“You shouldn’t think about it. The past’s the past.” God, she sounds so much like Daddy. Everyone in this family’s determined to forget.
But the memory crept in with the music, clawed and fanged. I close my eyes and let it rip me open.
I was six years old, upstairs in my bedroom. I was asleep and then I wasn’t. I was alone and then I wasn’t. From the room below came Daddy’s fiddle music, frenzied and wild as a hurricane night. A ghost stood over my bed, staring at me. The louder and faster Daddy’s music grew, the more real the ghost became until he looked hardly discernible from a living man. Gray hair, a face lined and hardened. His pants and shirt were made of the same rough, beige-colored material, like a work uniform, a long number stamped across the breast pocket. I was just working up the nerve to scream when he spoke.
“I won’t hurt you. I’m looking for someone,” he said, his voice a confused old man’s. The face that had seemed hard and sinister moments ago became soft, vulnerable.
“Who are you looking for?” I whispered.
His brow furrowed. “I don’t know.”
The fiddle music downstairs was building and building until I thought the room Daddy played in would explode. I saw the old man’s eyes fill slowly with recognition. He looked down at the floorboards. “I think I’m looking for him,” he said, pointing at the floor.
“Shady,” Aunt Ena says, pulling me from the memory. “This isn’t good for you, darlin’.” She takes the dirty dishes to the sink and turns on the tap.
“Do you think Daddy’s fiddle is really at the bottom of the lake?” I ask, trying to keep my voice even, despite the sharp stab of longing in my chest.
“Where else would it be?” she says, staring fixedly into the soapy, churning water.
I don’t answer because I’m picturing Daddy’s truck careening off the road, the fiddle sinking into the water. It happened four years ago, and even though I wasn’t there, I’ve pictured it so many times it feels like I was. The truck hitting the lake, sending up a spray of frothy, algae-scented water, his body slamming into the windshield, his blood turning the water red. He was bringing Jesse home from a friend’s house, and there was a deer in the road. Daddy died on impact and the fiddle was lost, but Jesse made it out alive.
Aunt Ena turns off the water and leans against the sink, settling her eyes on mine. There is pain and anger and a kind of tenderness in her face, a combination I see there whenever the fiddle comes up. “That fiddle’s at the bottom of the lake or broke up and carried off somewhere. Either way, it’s gone, just like your daddy.”
But what if it’s not gone? A thought that’s been tempting me for a while surfaces. What if I could find it and use it? I could raise his ghost; I could talk to him again. And with Daddy’s fiddle, I could make music worth hearing. I could be everything he meant me to be. Everything I want to be.
“If I could play Daddy’s fiddle, it’d be like having him back,” I say, but I keep my other ideas to myself.
Aunt Ena guesses my unspoken thoughts, as usual. “Maybe so, but the dead always stay dead,” she says gently. “We live with their ghosts, but that’s all. Wallowing in your grief will only draw evil. You need to focus on all the good things in your life, not the things you’ve lost.”
“I guess.” I rest my chin in my hands and stare at the cracked and faded linoleum floor. Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing these last few weeks, out in the woods playing my fiddle. Wallowing. Maybe that’s why the shadow man is back. But if I’m wallowing, Aunt Ena’s just as bad—living here alone, the last survivor of her family home, with only ghosts for company.
I leave after a few more awkward minutes, claiming homework. But when I reach the car, I turn and look back, lifting my eyes to the upstairs windows. I don’t know what I hope to see there—the dirty windows are empty, except for a few wasps climbing across the glass. Behind the house, the pine forest looms, deep and dark and waiting, always waiting.
The clouds grow heavier and darker as I drive home, and the sky dims like it’s twilight instead of early afternoon. When I pull into the driveway, Jim’s truck is gone, which I hope means he and Mama and Honey have gone off somewhere.
I climb out of the car and start toward the trailer, but then I hear the fiddle tune again, faint and faded as an old photograph. I stand still in the yard and listen. Only the wind in the trees.
But then a sharp, mournful wail slices through the air, familiar and dreadful at once. I move closer to the woods and listen again. Shadows settle over the golden pine needles, turning the woods dark. The atmosphere feels taut as a bowstring, the storm starting to roll in from across the fields.
And then the fiddle begins to play in earnest, the volume going up and down, swirling through the trees like it’s carried on the wind. It’s carrying my heart with it.
I walk to the boundary of our five acres and then go deeper into the woods, until the trees grow so close together I have to stop and squeeze through them. My hair catches in hanging vines, and thorns scrape against my skin, snagging my clothes.
The fiddle plays on and on, low and slightly mad, growing into a frenzy wilder than the wind that’s whipping through the trees. Rain drops out of the sky without preamble—fat, hard, stinging drops that would soak me to the skin if the trees weren’t so thick.
I think of the lyrics from “The Twa Sisters” again.
Only tune that the fiddle would play was
Oh, the dreadful wind and rain
And then the rest of my memory from Aunt Ena’s place comes back—what happened after Daddy’s fiddle brought the old man’s ghost to my room. It was the first time I ever saw a ghost with my own eyes, instead of just knowing it was there or feeling it brushing by. I was so little, but I wasn’t scared. I pushed the covers away and got out of bed, my feet cold on the bare floorboards. “Come on,” I said, holding out my hand to the man.
His hand felt like a winter chill but was solid enough to hold mine. Goose bumps trickled up my arm from where my skin met his, but I didn’t let go. I led him out of my bedroom and down the stairs, into the parlor where Daddy liked to play.
When we appeared in the doorway, a child of six in a pink nightgown and an old man with a lost expression, Daddy looked up, his eyes widening even as his left hand continued to hold down the fiddle strings and his right arm continued to draw the bow across them.
Once his mind took in what his eyes were seeing, he dropped the fiddle and leaped across the room, grabbing my empty hand to pull me away from the man, who cowered away, his solid form already beginning to wane.
“Why’d you come here? I didn’t call you here,” Daddy said to the ghost, angrier than I’d ever heard him. He glanced back at me as though to assure himself I was all in one piece.
The old man said, “I can’t . . . I can’t remember.” He was hardly a man now, more like a whirl of human-shaped wind.
“Go on home,” Daddy said, his voice low and shaking. “Go back to your rest.”
And then the man was nothing more than the kind of ghost I was used to—a breath, a memory.
Daddy turned back to me and swept me off my feet and clutched me to his chest like he’d just pulled me out of the ocean half drowned. He sat on a sofa and held me close, his breath in my hair. I pulled my head back to see his face and put one hand on his cheek, which was rough as sandpaper. A tear slipped down from one eye, wetting my hand. I wiped the next one away. “Why are you sad, Daddy?”
He turned his head to kiss the palm of my hand. He stared deep into my eyes, and it was like looking into a mirror, the same soft brown and long eyelashes. “Shady Grove,” he said, “I think it’s time I laid this here fiddle to sleep.”
Of course, that fiddle couldn’t be laid down. He took it up again less than a year later. He always took it back up. Maybe he’s still playing it, even though he’s dead. Maybe that’s what I’m hearing now.
The thought speeds my feet, but I run into a patch of trees so clotted with vines I can’t find a way through. I have to backtrack, looking for an opening, but the woods are so dim now it’s hard to see far ahead.
I find an opening and run, full out, until my chest heaves and I’m clutching a stitch in my side. But the fiddle music’s all around me now, swirling on the wind, whistling through the tops of the trees. If there’s a source, I’ll never find it.
Finally, breathless, I drop to my knees on the pine needles, my hair soaked and dripping, my skin marked with scratches. Lightning forks overhead, spreading shadows through the trees. They all look like hulking men.
Oh, the dreadful wind and rain
I lie back on the damp, earthy-smelling forest floor and let the rain pummel me. The thunder has ripped through the fiddle tune, leaving nothing more than half-formed notes fluttering in the treetops, the torn remnants of Daddy’s song.
It was Daddy. I don’t know how, but somehow, somehow it was him.
“Where are you?” I whisper.
The only response is a low, spine-tingling rattle. I turn my head toward the sound and open my eyes, every hair on my body standing up. The lightning flashes again, illuminating a pair of glittering black eyes and a coiled, sinuous body. Icy fear spreads through me.
A rattlesnake is curled at the base of a tree, its eyes trained on me. Even in the gloom, I can tell it’s a diamondback rattler, maybe five feet long. I haven’t seen one this big in years. My thoughts turn frantic. If it struck me, sending its poison racing toward my heart, where would my ghost end up? Would Daddy be there to meet me?
Or is he already here?
My breathing is loud and ragged, matched only by the beat of my heart. The snake’s tongue flicks out, as though tasting my fear on the air. It shakes its rattle again, a little louder this time.
Every magical kingdom has its monsters.
I should crawl away and run for all I’m worth, but some stubborn spirit has taken hold of me, and I remain where I am, staring into its cold, black eyes.
Thunder cracks so loud it shakes the ground and makes the trees shudder. The snake turns its head and begins to move away, its long body slithering soundlessly over the wet pine needles. I watch until it disappears into a gopher tortoise’s hole, its ominous rattle fading into quiet. My whole body feels like a held breath.
When I turn my face back to the treetops, a gust of wind rocks the highest branches, sending pine needles floating down to coat me with the rain. I get to my feet and walk slowly through the storm-whipped woods toward home.
I’ve lived with ghosts my whole life, but this is the first time I’ve ever felt haunted.
Another rumble of thunder vibrates through my body a few seconds before lightning scatters across the sky. I’m too tired to run, but I walk fast in the direction of the trailer. I hear Jesse’s voice before I see a break in the trees.
“Shady!” he yells from the trailer’s front door, his voice nearly drowned out by the wind and rain. He’s waiting by the front door when I reach it, a towel in his hands. “One of these days you’re going to get struck by lightning, you know.” His eyes are wide and worried.
“I’m fine,” I say. “I’m always fine.” My whole body trembles, but I feel as electric as the sky. I don’t know why, but Daddy’s out there in the woods, and he’s calling to me.
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