[LJ Idol] SCI, "Rewrite"
Prompt: What's Missing?
Author's Notes: Fiction. I hope you enjoy.
Rewrite
The children taunted her in the schoolyard with whispers and cautious glances, pointing at her when they thought her back was turned. The braver ones stepped forward and told her directly: “The house you’re living in is haunted.”
Rebecca tried to ignore them; the big house stood high upon a hill, and she had been excited at first to have so much space for just herself and her grandfather, so much old history and older furniture covered with dust to excavate and uncover. And when she was introduced to her classmates, they all seemed to know everything about her arrival without being told and refused to speak more to her than a few words of unsolicited legend.
A girl with pigtails done up in ribbons leaned closer to her group of friends and whispered, “They say someone died in that house, long ago.”
Rebecca turned to look them straight in the eye and said, “They’re wrong.”
In the back of her mind, she couldn’t help but wonder if her classmates were right. She considered asking her grandfather, who believed that there was value in ancient stories and magic, but could think of nothing to say over dinner and instead pushed her food around on her plate with her fork.
After a week she grew tired of her classmates ignoring her. Her class all ate together, and she arrived early enough to sit in the middle of the long table, setting out her lunch and waiting for the inevitable question.
“Hey Becky, seen any ghosts yet?”
Rebecca leaned forward, glasses slipping further down her nose. “Yes. In fact, I saw one last night.”
The two seated on either side of her gasped as the entire table grew silent, straining to hear the words Rebecca spoke so matter-of-factly.
“I knew immediately what it was. I saw her-the ghost-tiptoeing down one hallway and I followed,” she began. “I saw her seated at the bench in the lounge for a second before she vanished completely.”
Lunchboxes sat unpacked, juice drinks remained unopened, bananas waited unpeeled in trembling hands. The girl next to Rebecca asked, “Was it the woman who died?”
She glanced up slyly. “Who else could it be? She had long white hair-everything about her was so white and pale. She died…of a broken heart,” Rebecca decided, knitting together the story as she told it, reveling in the way that everyone was focused entirely on her. Now that she had their attention, she would do anything to keep it.
“There’s an old piano in that room,” she continued, “but it’s always been out of tune.” She paused for dramatic effect, sweeping her eyes back and forth across the table, noticing how all thoughts of eating were forgotten over the validation of both fear and fable that they’d long believed held truth.
“This morning, I tested it and it was in perfect tune.”
More gasps and sighs, and when her grandfather came to pick her up after school she asked him about ghosts.
“Haunting implies that the spiritual presence is stuck or unsought,” he replied. “I would welcome a ghost into our house-fascinating creatures, wouldn’t you think?”
When she did her homework in the lounge, she kept one eye focused on the work and the other drawn towards the bench in the corner. When the sun had dropped from the sky, she left her door half-open so she could see into the hallway from her bed. When she was nearly asleep, she saw an odd light stretching around the door, and by the time she had rubbed her eyes to clear them, glasses propped obliquely on her face, she saw a woman standing there, wispy hair floating in a nonexistent breeze.
Shock paralyzed her, kept her from moving or doing more than voicing her most immediate thought. “Y-you’re real.”
The woman smiled and stretched out her hand, whispering, “Can you save me? Can you help me move on-”
When Rebecca woke, she couldn’t figure out if what she had seen was a dream or not. She tried to forget it, but the other children clamored around her in the schoolyard, demanding to know if the ghost had appeared again.
“I always knew there was something strange about that house,” the girl with the pigtails said. Rebecca couldn’t answer, considering whether the house had anything to do with it or not. She had told the story, after all-was it the story that had brought it to life?
“Tell us more,” they begged, and Rebecca conceded.
“She died of a broken heart,” she repeated, visualizing the story in her mind. “She had a lover, and he went off to war…he had promised to return to her, and she had promised to wait for him. He disappeared…and she still waits. She feels almost betrayed by it, but she cannot pass on until she finds him. She’s a ghost, yes, but she doesn’t haunt the house.” Rebecca remembered her grandfather’s words, and decided that she begrudged the ghost nothing, including lodging in the second floor lounge.
“That’s so romantic.” The girls sighed and clutched each other’s hands, while Rebecca trudged after them into their classroom. It was tragic, and it provided no happy ending, either for herself or for the ghost woman. She could not think of an end for the story.
Still, the others asked to be told more stories at lunchtime, and Rebecca made up more for them, telling about how the ghost had been fixing things around the house-straightening portraits, winding clocks-and stealing small trinkets that no one else would miss. It passed the time well enough, and Rebecca had resolved not to sleep that night to see if the ghost was real and would again return.
At dinner her grandfather made a comment that the shoelaces in his dress shoes had vanished. She had paused, spoon hovering above her soup bowl, and muttered that she had no idea where they could have gone.
“Well,” he said, “I’m sure they’ll turn up eventually.” She agreed mutely, nodding, her appetite vanished, and asked to be excused so she could work on her homework.
When she sat down at her desk, she realized that all of the pencils in the drawer were missing.
It was good that she was planning on staying awake, because anxiety would not let her sleep as she tossed and turned in bed, waiting for the ghost and hoping she never showed. The night was almost halfway over when the same pale specter materialized at her desk, pushing a pencil around on the flat surface; the sound was almost deafening in the silence.
“Hello.” Rebecca felt a greeting was better than gaping like she did the last time.
Once again, the ghost looked sadly back at her, whispering, “Can you save me? Can you help me move on?”
“Yes,” she answered. “How can I help you?”
“Find him, of course. Find the man who left me. I’ve waited for so long. So long-”
When Rebecca woke again, she was sure that it had not been a dream. The pencil was still there, for one, and she shivered as she slid out of bed to go pick it up. The wood was cold, much colder than she expected. Suddenly, she didn’t feel much like telling stories that day.
To her knowledge, they had all come true. All but one…
Still in her pajamas, she crept to the lounge. She noticed that the heavy curtains had been tied back with a pair of black knotted shoelaces; outside, rain misted against the windowpanes.
Rebecca moved to the piano and located middle C.
The note rang clear and true, and she tried the whole chord. It was in perfect tune.