Bottling His Ghosts (eBook)

S.H. Cooper (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
130 Seiten
Raw Dog Screaming Press (Verlag)
978-0-00-097190-6 (ISBN)

Infos

After a tragic accident leaves her widowed, Netta flees home to Daunderhead hoping for the space to process her grief. Instead, she finds her cousin, Thorn, once like a brother to her, swimming at the bottom of every bottle he can find. Her parents, unable to break him from his alcoholic stupor, have grown despondent and resigned to his fate; and her once beautiful childhood home has fallen into the grasp of nefarious ghosts whose goals remain unclear. Refusing to allow another tragedy to befall her family, Netta takes it upon herself to help her cousin and-hopefully-stop the hauntings.

Textauszug

Chapter Two

What followed was only fragments. Father called from his office or billiard room, my face cupped in his earnest grasp, so many questions, then I was being supported up the stairs, into a room, and Mother and Florence were moving around me, stripping me of my gown and loosening my stays. They positioned me as if I were a doll, gently turning me this way and that while Mother bathed my limbs with a sponge soaked in warm water and Florence unpinned my hair.

I observed their actions through a dream-like lens, neither helpful nor combative, hardly there at all except in body. Existence had become too heavy a burden and my senses had flown, leaving only a keening ring to fill my head.

The next I was aware, I was tucked into bed with Mother stroking my cheek, imploring me to sleep.

A baby’s cry carried distantly through the darkness.

I fought against its rousing qualities, threatening to return me to consciousness, but it persisted into a wail that I could not ignore.

In my sleep soaked mind, I initially believed it to be the product of a dream I’d yet to fully shake. It would not have been the first time I dreamt of the children denied to me, their plaintive cries taunting me while I tore through rooms both known to me and strange in search of them. I’d wake to a pillow damp with tears and a womb that ached with its emptiness.

This time, however, opening my eyes did not dispel the faint weeping.

I’d slept through whatever daylight had been left and sat up to a room pitched in black, though the dark held no secrets for me. I knew immediately the shape of the vanity, the writing table, the armoire angled in the corner. My room, arranged still to my liking as it had been on my wedding day, the last I had lived in it.

The only change came from that sound, not heard within Daunderhead’s walls for decades.

An infant.

I threw back my blankets and crawled to the edge of my bed, listening. When still the thin peal wafted through the house, I fell back on my heels, grasping the bodice of the nightgown Mother had changed me into. My heart pattered beneath the cotton, spurred by an unease that sank into my belly and spread with the chill of a winter’s fog.

I set one foot upon the floor, breath held to better hear the babe, followed by the other, and rose with quivering slowness. On the child wept, softer now, as if moving away from me across the ground floor. I urged it to fade completely, to prove itself a phantom constructed from my longing, but was granted no such reprieve.

I thought not to follow it, that I might bury myself once more beneath my covers and drown out its cries with my own, certain that entertaining such a manifestation would only serve to open myself up to more hurt. In effort to banish it, I clapped my hands over my ears and it did quell the sound, but in the ensuing, miserable silence, a second notion began to take hold, as irrational and desperate as I’d ever allowed myself: That it was Victor somehow come back to me, carrying with him our future, and they were looking for me.

It did not matter that it defied every ounce of reason I possessed, for love and loss ask not for fact, only faith, and my wounded spirit yearned so much for my husband that I could believe my desire alone was enough to recall him to my side.

What other explanation could there be, especially on the eve of my return?

So taken with this fantasy, I clamoured to my three panel privacy screen and reached for the dressing gown I’d always hung there, only for my fingertips to meet painted wood instead. In my urgency, I had reverted to habits that would of course be outdated since my going. I again clutched the collar of my nightgown. To leave the room in only my bed clothes would be unseemly, particularly if I came across Father. I could not! But neither could I stay. I circled in place, hoping to locate my trunk, but it had not been brought up yet, leaving me with no alternative to my present state of undress.

Finally, unable to withstand the now nearly imperceptible mewls and all that they could represent any longer, I swept the decorative quilt top from my bed and wrapped it around my shoulders as a makeshift shawl before hurrying from my room.

The hall was long and dark, made more precarious by my wobbling legs, turned nearly to gelatin by the discord raging within me. With one step, I would tell myself it could not be Victor, and most certainly not our offspring who had never existed, only for my next step to fall on impossible hope, that he had not died at all and the last three months had been the dream and this, being woken so while only visiting my parents, was real.

The life I was meant to be leading.

I made it to the top of the stairs and leaned heavily upon the bannister. A flickering strip of light stretched across the floor below, cast from the partially open parlour, and with it came not the cry, but a murmur. A man’s voice, though kept so low it was impossible to determine anything else about it. Still, my heart leapt. Surely, surely it had to be him! By God’s good will, he’d been returned to me! I stifled a weak inhale in my knuckles and lunged without grace, hand over hand upon the railing, down the staircase, and across the foyer to throw wide the doors with a jubilant declaration.

“Victor!”

But it was Father who whirled ‘round, startled both my entrance and the near miss of the doors swinging open at his back. As our eyes met, the sorry illusion I’d conjured fractured and fell to pieces, as did my heart all over again, and the final vestiges of denial I hadn’t realised I was clinging so tightly to slipped, at last, away.

Had I really expected to find my departed husband standing before the crackling hearth when I flung open the parlour? In the few euphoric, foolish breaths where hope had found a way to grow, perhaps. Now faced undeniably with the reality of my situation, it could only ever have been delusion. I was no wife, never a mother, only a silly, sad girl in her nightclothes and a quilt.

The reminder of my indecent dress made me hug the quilt closer against me and I averted my gaze, heavy with embarrassment and fresh sorrow, to the floor.

“Father,” I said, unsure how to even begin to explain myself.

“Is that Netta?”

That Father was in his dressing gown, an abnormality outside of his room save for times of illness, should have told me right away that something was amiss, but I’d hardly registered it. The fact he wasn’t alone had escaped me entirely. So when someone spoke from behind him, I jumped, surprised, and peered sharply over his shoulder.

A woman of my similar age was seated on the sofa beside Mother, likewise in her nightdress. Bundled in her arms was a baby, asleep now, though reddened cheeks proved hers had been the cries that had woken me. The sight of her came as a ray of sunlight through the shaded veil of my bereavement and I nearly wept again from the rush of joy.

“Birdie!” I stepped forward, modesty momentarily forgotten as I went to embrace her.

She untucked one of her arms from beneath the child, Tabitha, to return it with equal fervour. Though we lived in the same city, it was at opposite ends, and our opportunities to visit one another had been limited, especially following Victor’s tragedy. Unable to make or receive social calls during the early days of my full mourning, I had not spoken to her since before Tabitha’s birth. Seeing the little one now, so soon after my latest upset, created such a conflict of emotion in me that I could not bring myself to pay the customary compliments. I instead focused on Birdie herself. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask the same of you,” she said.

“Where’s Thorn?”

At the mention of her husband’s name, Birdie’s expression pickled into a sour line and she adjusted the swaddling around her daughter. Mother shifted uncomfortably beside her and I looked between them, concern tainting the delight their presence had brought me.

“Is everything alright?”

“We hadn’t wanted to trouble you with any of this,” Mother said reservedly. “You were already under such horrible strain.”

I sat tepidly on the other side of Birdie with a frown. “Any of what?”

“Your cousin is unwell,” she began, cut short by Father’s malcontent scoff.

“Unwell? He’s the source of all his own problems, Leonora.”

“Edmund,” Mother chastised him softly, sensitive to Birdie’s apparent unhappiness, but he pressed on.

“I told your brother-in-law that saddling him with that name would come as a curse, but punishment was his priority. Well, look where it’s got him now, the bloody sod!”

“Mind your language!”

After marriage to a labourer, I had grown accustomed, even comfortable, with most colourful turns of phrase, but even had that not been the case, my concern would not have been with my father’s word choice.

Thorn’s name had always been a source of vexation for my parents, that much did not surprise me. His mother had died upon the birthing bed and his father, made cruel by grief, had bestowed upon his newborn son a name that would never allow him to forget his supposed first deed. Forever would he be the thorn that robbed his mother of life.

Mother, sister to the deceased, had pleaded with him to reconsider, but my uncle refused. Moved by her compassion, Father then attempted to bribe him in return for a Christian...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.7.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 0-00-097190-1 / 0000971901
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-097190-6 / 9780000971906