Chapter Text
There is a house in the woods. The sort of house your eyes pass over without noticing. Webbed with ivy and hidden behind new, more interesting growth. That’s why Rose picks it—she needs a place to go unnoticed. To be alone, to shake loose her mistakes and start over.
Her mistakes, unfortunately, have no other choice. When Rose moves into the house in the woods, she brings with her a troubled Past and uncertain Future.
“I can’t see what will happen next,” Future says, overwhelmed. “There are too many possibilities.”
“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Past points out, sour and sad. “What possibilities could there be?”
Pulled along like the tides behind the moon, Past and Future scud cloudy through the overgrown brush of the yard and linger outside the door. Rose is inside already. They don’t need to see her or hear her to know.
“How filthy is it going to be in there?” Past asks, trepidatious; Future clucks her tongue.
“You’re not going to like it.”
Then a face glimmers through the closed door. “Yo, you coming in or what?”
That’s how they find Present.
***
Present, they learn, has always been there. She woke up there, firmly and decidedly dead, with no memory of her past at all. The house has stood empty all the time she’s haunted it.
She follows Rose like a shadow, fiercely curious about living, and interrogates Past and Future at every opportunity. They don’t know what to say to her. They don’t want to remember. Rose seems to sense them, fear them, even, in her periphery—but she doesn’t believe that they are here, tied to her, mittens linked through the sleeves of her coat. She doesn’t believe in ghosts; she thinks she is haunted by her own mind.
It doesn’t make any difference, in practice. Whether she glimpses them because they want her to badly enough, or because some dyspeptic trick of her living electrics places them in her eyeline. Rose is agitated, and quiet, and low. She makes do with bare survival, the passing of days like skimming pages in a book, while Past impotently frets and Future meditates and Present moves objects about to gauge her reactions.
Lonesomeness has made a trickster of Present, they find. She’s round and jolly and wild-dark-haired, a Cheshire flash of teeth in the mirror, a chortle that might have been creaking roof beams. A wind that whips in the cracks under windows and doors, mussing Rose’s dark curls and tugging at her clothes. Most of all, she plays little games, turning a robe around the other way on a hook, leaving a perfect maple leaf where a leaf has no business turning up. Affectionately she taps out meaningless rhythms on the plumbing, and shimmers with delight the rare times Past is game to echo them on the windows.
If Present is charming, Past is more classically spectral. A wisp, pulled taffy-long; skin white as a—well. The suggestion of a pointed nose, dark hair chopped short and silvered with intangibility, the faint whiff of Chanel No. 5. Most often she is a shuddering breath, the muffled, far-off sound of weeping. But if you see her at all, you will always see her eyes, moonless 3am highways frosted over with ice. They shine wetly, unblinking, in the dark.
She thinks Rose can feel her eyes. Sometimes glimpses them, in the shadows of the bedroom. Lingering by the foot of the bed that Past wishes was theirs.
Future is a shadow, blurred; too large for anything living. Though she’s still and quiet, her presence fills the room with pressure, a crackle, a coming storm. She is waiting. For what, even she can’t be certain.
***
They settle into an existence, the Past, the Present, the Future, and Rose. She doesn’t startle or second-guess herself when faced with Present’s foolery; she moves around the dark vague shape of Future unthinkingly, no longer notices the goosebumps when that skill fails her. She talks to Past, a little. She thinks she’s talking to herself, but Past clutches every word in covetous long fingers, gathers them up to her mouth as though the taste of them will sate her. Past weeps when Rose weeps—but the reverse is no longer true.
Rose plants an herb garden. Her hair was hickory brown when they first came here, glinting reddish in sunlight, but now it’s threaded through with silver too; sometimes, when she bends, her knees crackle like fireplace logs. Survival softens, achingly slowly, to something approaching a life.
Once a week she goes into the town five miles away, towing Past and Future regardless of their will. Present follows as far as she can, less than a mile, and waves until they’re out of sight.
“Poor thing,” Past fondly coos. “All this time and she’s still scared we might not come back.”
“We will,” Future declares with ominous certainty. Past tries not to let it weigh on her. Future says most things with ominous certainty, and she’s grown very attached to Present.
They trail Rose through sleepy streets to the usual places: the bank, the grocer, the five and dime, the bakery, the gas station to replenish the little she used driving in. Necessities. The town is barely a blip on the map, and every shopkeeper knows her by name—a different name, a disguise, a small-town sound. Sharon. But they remember her, and greet her fondly.
Today they make an extra stop. There’s a new shop on the main street, one that brings all three of them up short. Marty’s Books & Records, the sign proclaims. They know Marty—or rather, they know of Marty. Drifted into town a month ago, said Kofi, the grocer, and convinced Vidalia to take him in! She is too good for him.
That boy is trouble, the grocer’s mother agrees.
Marty isn’t in evidence through the window, but Vidalia is. Rose likes Vidalia. She’s avoided making friends—for reasons Past and Future find both obvious and painful—but Vidalia could be one, if Rose allowed.
Rose goes inside, and her companions follow.
It is, predictably, a dim and cluttered room lined with packed bookshelves and bisected by bins of LPs and 45s. Future lingers just inside the door, surveying the landscape; Past watches Rose chat to Vidalia, then drifts along a bookcase dragging ethereal fingertips over the spines. Some of them shift, just slightly, at her touch. One is a pulp novel she and Rose read aloud to each other, years ago, when she was alive. This one she concentrates on, and it plaps onto the floor.
A young man she hadn’t even noticed, longhaired and suntanned and grungy, turns from the bin he was leafing through. He bends, reaches through her, Past hates that, and picks it up. A flush touches his cheeks, and he grins small and embarrassed. He tucks the book under his arm, and Past grimaces. Fumes as he checks his wallet, counts out the meager change inside, and takes his find to the counter.
That’s when he spots Rose.
Past watches him gape. Follows his eyes as they take in the inviting roundness of her, all pillowy curves perfect for resting a burning cheek upon. His flush deepens. Past knows that look. That feeling. She can still remember. She swipes an arm through him, fruitlessly; when her chill doesn’t cool his attention she crouches down at his feet, siphons all her energy into her fingertips.
“Uh...hi,” he says dumbly; Past hears the slide of the book across the counter.
“Hi,” Rose replies, cool, careful.
“Odd Girl Out, huh Greg?” Vidalia drawls. “There something you’re not telling me?”
The young man, Greg, sputters out awkward nonsense. Below the counter, Past painstakingly knots his shoelaces together.
“Oh, that’s a good one,” Rose says with a burst of warmth. “I read it a long time ago.”
With my girlfriend, she doesn’t say. Past ties the knots tighter, a hot coal of feeling rising up in her throat.
The dark-smoke column that is Future shifts. “Come here,” she calls gently. “Let’s go outside and get some air.”
“We don’t need air anymore,” Past spits back, but she’s collapsing, her concentration broken. All roiling vapor, she lets Future surround her, draw her out through the dingy picture window. If anyone hears her wailing, they’ll wonder what strange bird or owl is that? and get on about their day.
Future can see what happens, what will happen, through the shop window as they float in the street. As Past wrings herself dry of tears like a shirt through the mangle. Greg will count out money for the book, emptying his meagre wallet.
“I guess you’re coming over for dinner tonight too, huh?” Vidalia will drawl. “Sharon, this is Marty’s shiftless band buddy. He lives in a van.” Greg will grin without an ounce of shame.
“That’s me, free as a bird,” he’ll say, and hold the book up, and turn his grin on Rose. “Gotta take joy wherever you find it, right? Life’s too short to hold back.”
Rose will consider this, startled. She’ll rub her bicep; it will look like bashfulness, but she’s touching the long whitened scar. Then she’ll nod, a smile creeping like early dawn over her face. “I suppose...that’s true.”
Greg will wink, playing cool. “See you ladies around!” Then he’ll take a step, and trip, and fall flat on his face. Vidalia will laugh. Greg will laugh. Rose will laugh, and help him to his feet. “I just got a job at the gas station,” he will say. “Maybe I’ll see you there sometimes?”
“Oh, of course—Jamie left for college. Yes, you’ll definitely see me there,” Rose will answer.
The possibilities race away from this moment in branching veins; they flash through Future’s consciousness before the Greg in front of her has even finished counting out his money.
She folds her presence firmer around Past, coaxes her away down the street. The most likely scenarios, the glitter far downriver of what is to come, will be the same whether Past can see it happen or not.
***
“What’s up with her?” Present asks when they drift back inside her radius. Curled in the soft center of Future’s ominous shape, Past is a stretched-thin candle wisp, almost entirely intangible.
“She exhausted herself,” Future explains. “Rose was flirting.”
“Rose doesn’t flirt,” Present says, surprised. The vague shape of her hair waves around her like water, touches Past gently.
“Past tied his shoelaces together.”
Present snorts. “You tell ‘im, P.”
Past, unable to speak, rides cradled listlessly between them the rest of the way home.
***
Rose picks bright green-smelling herbs and glossy ripe tomatoes from the late summer remains of her garden. Hums little songs into the sauce she makes, serenades the noodles boiling in the pot, layers a tune in alongside the ricotta.
She eats an extra serving of the lasagna, when it’s done. “Take joy wherever you find it,” she murmurs as she dishes it onto her plate. “Right?” She’s unearthed a dusty bottle of wine, and pours herself a glass. An unlit candle sits in the center of the table. She doesn’t bother trying to light it—Present always blows them out, and Rose has accepted this as evidence of an unsolvable draft—but she looks at it as though it’s glowing.
She has a second glass of wine, and sleeps hard. Past watches her, soggy-eyed, refreshed by the nighttime and the shadows and the moon. Present and Future watch her too. Something is different in the house in the woods; a strange eddy in the ley of their energy, of Rose’s energy. She is living, and that has always been attractive, mesmerizing as a cozy crackling fire, but tonight they feel her pulling at them, tangling them in the net of her life force. It hasn’t happened this way, not once, since—
Present, of course, has never felt this pull before; she doesn’t know how to resist, and tumbles headfirst into Rose’s dreamscape.
It looks like the house, but oddly bigger, imperceptibly moving, stretching out behind the bed like a dolly zoom. The edges are deep shadows, but Rose, at the center, is bathed in warm yellow light. She sits up. Her hair, braided back for sleep, slips forward over her shoulder. “I...know you. Don’t I?”
“Uh...kinda?” Present says, baffled; when she looks down at herself she’s more solid than she’s ever been, purply-blue like a reflection in deep water. “I...I haunt your house.”
Rose absorbs this with surprising aplomb. “Oh. You’re the one who moves things around?”
That startles a laugh out of her. “Yeah.”
“I’ve heard you laughing,” Rose says, almost dreamily. “That makes sense. Oh no, did I invade your space?”
“I mean, yeah, but I was pretty bored before, so.”
“Were you all alone? This was…a family property, but I know it was empty for years before I moved in.”
“I’ve always been alone here,” Present says, though it sticks tacky in her mouth like a lie. “Do you know anything about who was here before it was empty? I...I can’t remember.”
“I think it belonged to a cousin of my mother’s,” Rose replies, hesitant. She swings her legs around off the side of the bed, digs her toes into the rug. “I’m not sure how it got passed to my mother. But I don’t think she even remembers it exists.”
Present drifts closer. With Rose sitting down, they’re almost eye to eye. “So...I might be your cousin?”
“Maybe,” Rose agrees with a tiny smile.
Present’s hair blows out around her in a joyful swirl of wind. “Can you ask her? Maybe find out my name? Or, or a picture? Or anything, I’d take anything!”
Rose blanches. “Ask my mother? No. No, I’m so sorry. My family doesn’t know I’m here, and I want to keep it that way.”
At once the wind dies down. Present’s hair settles. Her shoulders curl smaller. The room taffy-stretches again. “That’s what Past always says.”
“Is that...another ghost?”
Present nods as the distance between them yawns wider. “Short hair, giant eyes, beaky nose—”
“What?” Rose freezes. Stops breathing, even, like the question took the last of her air. She looks as if she’s been slapped.
“You must’ve seen her once or twice. Heard her at least, some days she never shuts up.”
Though she doesn’t seem to move, Rose’s hands are suddenly pressed tight over her mouth. Her eyes squeeze closed. She nods, twice, with agonizing slowness.
The not-bedroom heaves, bubbles sudden and ferocious like a boiling pot, and the force of it blasts Present back—
Then Past is curling around her, in the familiar nighttime dimness of the real, familiar bedroom.
“What happened? Are you all right?”
“Quit fussing at me,” Present blusters, shaken, and whisks herself away.
***
Past might chase after her, if she had a chance. If she had a choice. She’s not sure, but she might. It doesn’t matter—Rose doesn’t give her a choice. Rose’s sleeping mind, her living soul, whatever it is her companions are tethered to, yanks and drags Past under.
It’s the bedroom, but not the bedroom. It’s too big, too vague, too dark. Sinister.
Sitting rigid on the bed, Rose is staring at her. Covering her mouth as though she might be sick. “Pearl,” she rasps through her fingers.
Past full-body shudders. Her full body is here, almost tangible, and that’s a surprise. She drifts forward; stops short when Rose recoils.
“I thought...I was imagining you.”
Past wraps her arms around herself. “I know.”
“You’re actually haunting me,” Rose says, tremulous, and Past drops to her knees.
“Not on purpose!” she cries. “It just happened. I’m sorry.”
That seems to upset Rose even more; she curls inward, shaking her head; the room around them whirls dizzyingly, settles into a car, a moonlit road.
Rose white-knuckles the steering wheel. “Pearl,” she chokes out, and Past is in the passenger seat. The moon is bright. Too bright, two moons, moving, bearing down on them—
“Rose.” Past reels back, pressed into the seat. “Rose, this isn’t what happened.”
“Pearl,” she answers, a sob, and Past whirls on her, reaches for her, expects to reach through her but she doesn’t, she touches her, grips her arm, fingers over the long white scar.
“Rose! This isn’t what happened!”
The car, the world, spins around the centerpoint where they touch.
“Imagine if we ran away,” another Past says, cheeks tinged with an audacious blush.
“Pearl!” another Rose coos. “You’re so smart.”
“Me and Garnet, we could get you out of here, away from them. Please, Rose. I can’t watch you hurt anymore.”
The whirl of nighttime color around them settles again. The car. Tan leather interior. Future in the back seat, watching out the rear windshield. Past with her fingers in the wiring under the dash. A spark; a purr. Past crows in triumph, throws herself into the passenger side as Rose slides in after, and they take off, free, into the night.
They drive, and drive, and drive, and it seems to take no time at all. “You need a rest,” Past says, almost scolds. “Pull over and let me drive a while.”
They play musical chairs; Past behind the wheel, Future beside her. Rose stretches out on the wide back seat, and lets the road and the radio lull her to sleep.
“Everything’s going to be different,” Past says, eyes straight ahead. She’s a good driver. A careful driver. “For all three of us.”
Future tenses. Past doesn’t see it. Didn’t see it. The road is empty, and then a dark shape barrels over the hilltop ahead—their headlights aren’t on—she’s too slow. Milliseconds too slow.
Past expects pain. Remembers it. A last convulsion of breath; a last moment of mortal terror. A pull that rends her from her body and throws her from the car. Rose—trapped, bleeding, screaming for her.
It doesn’t happen. Instead something wobbles, something pops like the barometer dropping. Everything is silent. Past is in the bedroom, just Rose’s bedroom, the same as it’s always been, with the vague sensation of the carpet against the soles of her feet.
***
“Future,” says Past, and Future is There. She can’t be anything but looming; it doesn’t matter, for them. Past curls like smoke in her direction, imprecise and billowy. If they were alive she might be shivering. If they were alive she might hook her arm through Future’s and lean tipsily into her side. “I feel strange.”
“Tell me.”
“Dizzy. That’s silly. Ghosts don’t get dizzy. But something is different. I can feel my feet.”
“I can’t see them.”
Past wriggles. “I can feel the carpet.” Her eyes take shape, mist-covered, lamps in a deep fog. They turn up to where Future’s eyes used to be. “She knows we’re here. Really knows.”
Future doesn’t know what to say to that. Doesn’t want to say that she’s seen this already, and the path forward from here is solidifying more and more each second.
“You should talk to her. I think she’ll hear you.” Her eyes drift toward the bed. “I think. She didn’t want to see me.”
“Past.”
The curly, smoky motion of her intensifies. “I ruined everything, why would she want to see me. I’m not trying to—”
“Stop. I’ll talk to her if you’ll stop working yourself up. Things are the way they are, we can’t change what’s already happened.”
Her eyes go out like blown candles. “I’m sorry.”
With a low rumble of thunder like a sigh, Future looms a fraction more gently. “Things are shifting. I can’t tell you much more. It’s been thirty years, Past. We need to let it happen.”
Past’s eyes slide open again, dim and small. “Talk to her.”
In the bed, curled like a child, Rose is still fitfully sleeping. Brow heavy with dreams; hands clenched like blossoms closed against the night.
Past’s eyes follow Future as she rumbles across the room, leans the shadow of herself across Rose’s pale face. “Rose,” she murmurs, and instantly the bright core, the aliveness in Rose reaches out, and pulls her in.
They’re in the car. The car. Rose’s sister’s car, the one they stole the night they ran away. Future is in the front passenger seat; the driver’s side is empty. Rose is curled in the back seat, just as she was curled in the bed, except her eyes are open. Wide and wet, her pupils down to pinpricks. “Garnet,” she says, a soft exhale, placing the final piece of the puzzle. “You too.”
“Me too.”
“All this time?”
“Yes.”
She has no response to that; just curls around herself, traces the scar on her arm with her fingertips. Then she tips her face down, hides it in the tan leather seat. “I trapped you. Both of you.”
“You didn’t mean to.”
“You were dead,” she whispers, “and I didn’t want you to be. I begged. I begged you both not to leave me alone.” She takes a slow, expansive breath. “I don’t...I don’t know how to go on from this.”
“I can tell you,” Future says. Rose looks up at her. At her; she has a body, vague and sheer, but visible. The way Rose remembers her. Young. “I can see some of what’s coming.”
“How?” Rose asks. Future shrugs.
“I’m dead.”
Rose almost laughs. She wriggles round more onto her side. “What can you see?”
“That young man, from the record shop.”
“But…” The slightest blush blooms on her cheeks. “Pearl.”
“She knows she can’t be with you anymore,” Future says. “It hurts her, but she knows. She’s always known.”
“It isn’t fair.” The mournful shape of her mouth compresses. “We should have had more time. I loved her. I would have married her, if I could have. Does she know that?”
Future’s head bobbles vaguely. “I’ll tell her. You can tell her if you want, when you wake up.”
“I’m asleep?” She looks around, as if she’s only now realizing that her Marigold’s stolen, totalled car no longer exists in the waking world. “Oh.”
“There’s joy coming for you, if you let him in,” Future tells her, gently. “Joy for us too. A child. A little boy, I think. But you have to be brave.”
Rose looks starstruck. “A baby? But I’m probably twice his age. And we only just met.”
Future shrugs again. “There are other possibilities, but that one has the strongest current.”
“I’ve been hiding a long time,” Rose sighs. She’s tracing the shape of the scar again.
“You don’t have to. You never had to. All you ever had to do was move forward, Rose.”
The dreamscape around them is growing vague, details falling away until the car is just blocks of color, with flat darkness beyond. Rose’s eyes are fixed on her. Pained. Cautiously hopeful. “Thank you,” she says, and the darkness wobbles. Future loses her footing; she can feel her footing. This must be what Past described.
Between one eyeblink and the next she finds herself standing once again in the dim bedroom. Rose’s face is slack, peaceful; Past is curled into a little cloud beside the bed.
“Come on,” Future says, scuffing the vaguest impression of her feet against the carpet fibers. “She’ll sleep easier now.”