Instead of answering, she tips her head, eyes drawn toward my neck. “He left you the key, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“It will unlock everything you wanted to know.”
“And if I don’t want to know?”
“I’m your mother, Céleste. You can’t fool me. But promise me one thing.”
“What?”
The smile on her face fades for the sobering expression that stares back at me in her wide black eyes. “Don’t look away. No matter what you see. What you feel.”
“And if it’s too painful?”
“Pain is only the beginning.”
Not a breath later, her face morphs, twisting to a frightening distortion as a gut-wrenching scream flies past mutilated lips.
She lurches from the rocking chair, scrambling toward me on all fours.
Eyes squeezed shut, I brace for the attack.
Limbs pound against the hardwood.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Three. Two. One.
I snap awake.
Kicking myself backwards sends me flying into the couch behind me, just as before, my skull cracking against the unyielding wood.
The room sharpens into focus, still lit by the fire crackling beside me. Scanning the room shows nothing. No shadows. No ghostly female figure.
The tea still half full in the mug.
“Just a dream,” I mutter on a shaky breath, and rub my trembling hand across my brow. “Just another goddamn dream.”
From the side table, I reach for the bottle of pills I forgot to take before falling asleep and pop four of the bastards into my mouth. As I swallow past the dryness in my throat, I rest my forehead against the palm of my hand, focusing on taking long, deep breaths through my nose. These dreams are so vivid sometimes, sapping the energy right out of me. They feel so real, it’s hard to tell they aren’t, until I manage to snap out of them.
Reaching down inside my shirt, I lift the key out and stare at it, my brain searching the short album of snapshots for any moment I would’ve seen my father use it for something. All that returns in thought is blackness. A broken reel of moments that could be nothing more than past dreams. A void. One that begs to be cracked open and explored. This key could invariably provide countless answers, regardless of what Russ always said about snooping about.
I glance around the suffocating, lonely little cabin that, in just a couple weeks, will no longer be mine. I’ll be homeless and living on the streets. I could, I realise, take what’s left of the donated cash and head south. Back to Louisiana. Back home. A bit of frugality could buy me a few days there, maybe more, if I can hunt some dinners.
It’s possible there’s nothing there for me, and going would be a complete waste of time and money.
Or maybe this key unlocks more than I realize.
8
Céleste
Russ’s old truck chugs along highway 90 toward Terrebonne Parish. The interior still smells like him—like metal and cigarettes—and although I should be grossed out by that, it’s oddly comforting, having his memory along for the long drive down. In an effort to hang onto as much cash as possible, I’ve slept a couple times in the truck. One time was at a rest stop while passing through a short stretch of Missouri--an act that would’ve had Tammy, the overprotective motherly type, lecturing me until my eyes glazed over.
About the only thing I’ll miss in that northerly town is her and Roy. Having to say goodbye to them hit me with the same punch to the chest as watching the first shovel of dirt fall onto Russ’s casket.
In the last two weeks that I was able to keep a roof over my head, I managed to track down the old estate where I grew up, and learned that it’s basically been sitting abandoned for the last ten years. Two families passed through it in the early part of the decade, but never stayed longer than a couple months. Probably didn’t help that a few hundred yards behind the house is the Charpentier Cemetery, where generations of the Charpentier family had been buried over the course of a century. Although I remember playing there as a child, hiding behind the gravestones and talking to ‘friends’, even back then, it was a somewhat creepy place. One of the families even reported sightings of ghosts, while the other expressed a feeling of unrest inside the walls. They were the only two, as far as I read, and it’s gone unoccupied ever since.
Over time, the house began to sort of decompose, with neglect