📖 The Ghost of Emily - Chapter 27

In which the Wheels of Fortune Begin to Turn for our Troupe of Would-be Heroes.

Jake awoke feeling an odd coolness about his face. He stroked his chin and felt its coarse stubble. The lightness of his face, cleanness of his body, and the residual excitement he felt from the kiss with Olivia last night made him leap up out of bed, before Gus had even stirred. Jake put on his travel clothes and woke Gus, and the pair began to pack their things.

As Gus, Jake, Nimrod, Olivia and Marcus made their way out of the town hall and down to the grass a voice called out after them.

“Jake!” shouted Phil, pulling a loose jacket sleeve over one arm, while his bayonet-loaded rifle clanked on his other shoulder.

“Phil! Is that rifle loaded?!” Jake shouted, in horror, again.

Phil laughed. “No way, boss! I heard what you said yesterday. I’m being super careful!” He grinned as he pulled the jacket on with a jerk, and the rifle slid off his shoulder and smashed to the ground, the razor-sharp blade landing just next to his toes. He looked up at Jake sheepishly. “Oops.”

Jake sighed and reached into his pocket to pull out the bayonet’s sheath, which he had put there during the attack, and he tossed it to Phil.

“I’m not your boss. Be careful with that, okay?” Jake said, turning his back to follow Marcus. “So long, Phil,"

“Wait, Jake," Phil called. “I wanna come with you. I wanna help. I’ll watch your back, okay? I’ll help with the dog, with your boy, whatever you need.”

Marcus and Olivia had stopped with Gus and Nimrod a few paces ahead, waiting and listening. Jake stopped and looked at Phil. He thought of his mother, and the many people she took under her wing; the people who had helped him as a boy, as Phil might help Gus. Jake smiled and tilted his head to signal for Phil to come along.

Phil beamed as he jogged a few yards and caught up, taking up pace next to Jake.

“So, Phil, what do you know?”

“What do I… know?”

“What can you teach us? What are your best skills?”

“Oh...” Phil looked ashamed, “only old-world skills. Nothing that’d be much good now.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, cooking. And, a bit of electrical engineering. Nothing fancy now... the ghosts are way beyond me. I worked with batteries. My father used to work for WellsCell installing those new house systems in the city. He taught me a fair bit about it, but now… I guess that’s useless too.”

Marcus looked over his shoulder at Phil. He was grinning as he nodded at Jake.

Jake stopped at the edge of the yard and looked back at the towering town hall. The doors opened and a man stepped out slowly, his arm around a woman who was wrapped up in a large blanket. The man was kissing her cheek tenderly, and guiding her down the steps as he held her shaking body up. It was the woman that Jake had protected. The man was a former leech. Now a free man. And now a husband, reunited with his young wife, ready to start over, go their own way, or give themselves up to the storm, if they wished.

Jake and company walked a few hours to the motorhome, detouring only to collect the rest of their hidden weapons and ammunition from the house where they had lost Maisie.

Jake stepped through the front door slowly. He saw the puddle of candlewax on the table. The candle had melted to nothing, as he had slept, letting his daughter slip out into the night after the ghost of Emily. As Gus collected the arsenal, Jake knelt down silently in the lounge, and placed his cheek on the table in the place where the elephant had once rested. He closed his eyes, and saw Maisie’s face. He heard her voice echoing in his memory. The sound was distant. And then he stood, shouldered his rifle, and marched outside without looking back.

Once they reached the Winnebago and cleared it of its camouflage, they started it up, and drove through the forest until they came to an old abandoned highway. From there, they headed North-West.

---

They had been driving most of the day without incident when Gus called out in distress. “Marcus, stop the car… I feel…” he gasped, clutching at his mouth and scrambling towards the door as Marcus brought the vehicle to a halt.

Jake jumped out after him, and sat by his side as he vomited in the grass. Jake wondered if the packaged food they had been eating was upsetting him. Marcus stepped out of the motorhome to check on the boy, and offer some of his wisdom.

“It’s called motion sickness, Angus.”

“What’s that?” Gus asked, wiping his mouth as he sat back in the grass.

“You’ve never ridden in a motor vehicle before, have you?”

Gus shook his head.

“Well, you’ve had your eyes glued to those books the whole day. Some people get nauseous when they read in a moving car. It’s just one of those things. Maybe lay off the books for a while, at least til we park for the night.”

“Okay, thanks Marcus.” Gus stood slowly and brushed the grass seeds off his clothes.

“Alright, darling?” Jake asked, holding Gus’s chin and checking his face for any other signs of illness.

“I’m fine, Papa, let’s go.”

As Gus walked back towards the vehicle, he noticed something gleam in the late afternoon sun. It was an object buried in the overgrown foliage. Gus walked over to it and pulled the tufts of grass away, revealing a strange metal box with the numbers two, six, and three on it.

Jake stepped over to inspect it. “Gus, it’s a letterbox!” He stepped further down the roadside slope and began tugging at fallen tree branches and stomping on long grass shoots, until he had exposed the entrance to a long stony driveway; the first and only driveway they had seen along this outback road all day.

Knowing that they would need to take refuge somewhere for the night soon, they drove down the long and winding forest road, crossing a trickling stream of water with no causeway or bridge, then ascending until the rough road turned to gravel and came to a small clearing in the forest.

“Just like the road to Shangri-La,” Marcus muttered.

“What’s that, Dad?” Olivia asked.

“Nothing… never mind.”

As they drew into the clearing, a zephyr of cool air blew into the slowing vehicle’s window, and Gus rushed to the front to stand between Olivia and Marcus, and to look out on the peculiar house at which they had arrived.

It was set into the side of a cliff that hung above a widened section of a stream. A small waterfall flowed over the rock and was pushing a timber wheel around and around. From the wheel, Gus could see a long steel pole extending horizontally into the house structure and he wondered for what purpose.

The front door was covered with creeping vines that were closing around the exterior of the building, as if many long-fingered hands were reaching up from the earth, trying to pull this mausoleum of human memory into the dirt.

They tugged at the vines until enough had snapped away to free the door from its captivity.

Inside, they found three dusty bedrooms, with fully made beds. The living room was lined wall-to-wall with bookshelves, filled with books of all kinds and colours, and in the corner was a strange box with an unusual pattern of black and white teeth jutting out in front of it.

“What is that?!” Gus pointed.

“That, Angus, is a piano. It makes music.”

Gus looked up at him in wonder. “What is music?”

Marcus sat down, lifted his hands to the piano keys, and began to play for the first time in over forty years.

Gus sat in awe and wonder, not knowing in any sense that Marcus was particularly good, having no musical frame of reference whatever, but knowing that the sounds emerging from the large box in front of him were the closest thing to real magic he had ever experienced.

For a time, he watched Marcus’s hands intently, following their every creeping walk, pivot and jolt, up and down the keyboard. But as the notes meandered around his head he felt himself lulled into a trance and, as gooseflesh covered his skin, he closed his eyes and saw behind his eyelids a vivid world of iridescent colour and fluid form that ebbed and rippled in concert with the music.

When Marcus finished playing, he took a deep breath and turned to Gus.

“Wow...” whispered Gus, staring incredulously as Olivia, Jake and Phil stared too, their inspection of the house paused so they could revel in the glory of the lost art as well.

“It’s been a while. That felt good," said Marcus, plainly.

“For me too," Gus smiled up at him, gently placing his hand on his arm, and squeezing. “What was that called?”

“It’s called La fille aux cheveux de lin, which means The Girl with the Flaxen Hair.”

“What does... flaxen mean?”

“It means yellow... blonde hair.”

“Like Mama’s hair. Or Maisie’s,” Gus said, lost in thought, not sad, but curious how the music was able to evoke such a feeling in him.

Gus followed his Papa to the kitchen, where they found a bowl filled with black matter. Gus puzzled at it.

“It was fruit once. It’s been sitting here a very long time.” Jake explained.

Beside it on the kitchen counter, Jake found a piece of paper with handwriting. “Marcus. What do you make of this?” he called out, and Marcus took the note and read aloud:

“To whomever is reading this,

This is my house, and now, if you want it, it is yours. I built this place when I was a young man, with my own hands. I put my heart and soul into it, and I made it the home for my wife, and our children. We wanted to be away from the world here, safe, and secluded.

But eventually, the world came to us, in the form of the machines, telling lies and stealing my children away in the night. When the children came back, they drove my beloved wife mad, and eventually she too joined them.

The world has gone insane. I’ve been alone here for two years, and they torment me. The ghosts of my family. They keep coming. Not growing a day older. Begging me to join them. But I know they aren’t real. I know the world is no longer real. I can’t bear it any more.

I cannot join them, but I cannot go on seeing them like this either. It’s time to put a stop to it all.

If you are alive, please stay alive, and please take this house and make it your fortress. Don’t let them break you like they’ve broken me.

Live on, and save humanity.

Please.”

They all stood in silence for a moment. Gus was troubled and moved by these words and this great gift.

“Olivia?” Jake called out, stepping into the hallway.

“Hey, you guys!” her voice called out from down the hall. “Check this out!”

They followed her voice, and found a stairwell into a basement that was cut into the rock of the cliff. Inside was a long square pole jutting through a hole in the timber and connecting to a grind wheel that was slowly, endlessly spinning. Next to the grind wheel was a box with a needle encased behind glass. The needle was wiggling in tiny movements from left to right. A large metal conduit extended out from the needle box and entered a steel cage. Inside the cage was an enormous pair of black boxes with printed labels on them.

“What does that say?” Gus pointed to the text.

Marcus did not look at the writing. “WellsCell Model D.”

“What is that?” asked Jake.

“That...” said Phil, who was standing in the corner with his hand on a large lever, “is a fully self-sustaining household electrical system.” He yanked the lever up, and the room began to hum as lights above them flickered on, revealing two more cages with the same contents, as well as countless crates and shelves of every kind of long-life food imaginable. Tins of meat and vegetables, jars of grains, smaller jars with seed crops for planting. “The waterfall outside turns the wheel; that’s what’s charging these batteries!”

“That,” mimicked Marcus, with dramatic pause, “is a metric shit-tonne of battery power.”