1
“Hey Bill.”
“Hey, Brad.”
Neither one thinks of something else to say so each man takes to comparing the other to the ghosts of their youth that survive in their faces.
Brad’s waist has bulged.
Bill’s baby face is gone.
They have both cut away the long wavy hair that dangled over their shoulders in the seventies.
Like Meathead on All in the Family, Tabitha would have said.
But she’s not here. They both feel that. Neither says the words. Between them, the gulf still spreads wide, ripped open by her death, and frozen into place by the twenty years that have since passed.
***
It’s late. Bill and Brad have met on the grounds of their former summer camp. They stand outside the abandoned Convent of the Sorrowful Heart. They’re watching the reflections of dead trees dance on the darkened glass of its windows. The trees’ bare branches reach for the moon, and waver in its monochromatic rays. An owl flies from the branches.
“What is that?” Bill asks, backing away from the convent, careful not to linger in his steps, and sink into the early spring mud.
Brad retreats too, zig-zagging his path. He’s calculating which trees could make the reflection in the convent’s top-floor windows.
But he can’t line up the trees. He can’t match the moon’s light in the sky above them with the window’s mirror moon.
He comes up close to the convent’s grayscale siding. Rot wafts off the wood where sheets of paint have peeled away.
Something moves in the deep black seas of the sidelights that line the front door.
Bill makes a noise. He looks to see if Brad has heard him, but he hasn’t. This Brad casts the same shadow as the Brad of their summer camps, long ago, Bill thinks, and the dysphoria of nostalgic time pricks at his thoughts.
“I don’t think those trees in the reflection are here anymore,” Brad says, ever-oblivious to sentiment, looking back to the line of pine trees, a two-minute run away, near the river, and the path that returns to where their summer camp had once been. “Those are white birch,” Brad points to the trees in the windows. “And those are pine,” he says and points to the trees behind them.
“Ghost trees?” Bill asks, hearing belief creep into his voice. “Maybe those stories were true, and the convent really is haunted,” he adds.
They stare at the white birch trees wavering in a breeze neither of them feels. “Ghost owl, ghost moon,” Bill says, pointing.
“Ghost Tabitha?” Brad asks, finally, and then regrets the callousness of the remark.
Bill makes the Sign of the Cross. “I hope not.”
“Do you really think she’ll be in there?” Brad asks, studying each of the sidelights along the door, how they form an upside-down U, like the round stern of the camp’s sailboat all those years ago, the one Tabitha took out into the river that night when she ran away, and the flash flood came.
“No,” Bill says, when Brad casts that look probing for an answer. “I can’t see her being in there.”
Of course, neither of them believes that. Or they wouldn’t have met here.
“Remember when they found her?” Brad asks, after they have both been staring at the shadows on the convent’s clapboards long enough that the moon’s light has shifted.
“She died right there,” Bill answers, pointing at the convent’s front porch even though the sidelights still hold his gaze. “She was still breathing when Father Flaherty pulled her out of the water.”
Neither man lingers too long in that memory.
“We should have told her, Bill. Maybe she wouldn’t have…” Bill adds, but stops, as much for Brad as for Tabitha’s ghost, if it still lingers in this awful place.
“She’d want us to keep our promise,” Brad reminds them both.
They stare at the front door of the convent, but neither of them moves any closer.
The branches of white birch trees no longer there sway in the windows above them.
“How have you been, Bill?” Brad asks.
“It still hurts, Brad.”
“Yes, it does,” Brad says.
“On the eve of the thirteenth of March, on the year we turn thirty-five, we go to where the first of us has died, and that person’s ghost will contact whoever among us is still living,” Bill recites the pact they made with Tabitha.
“Remember how she took a whole notebook to calculate how March 13th fell in the middle of our birthdays?” Brad adds.
Bill nods. “She even made up that song so we wouldn’t forget.”
The men chuckle, together, sharing an intimacy for the first time in decades.
“There’s no way I’m singing that, out here, right now,” Brad says. Bill doesn’t object.
“We’re here now, so we remembered, anyway,” Bill points out.
Brad’s already marching toward the door.
2
Brad hasn’t opened the door when Bill catches up. He’s studying the sidelights, running his fingers along their wood frames.
“See these?” he asks.
Bill focuses his eyes on the marks etched into the doorframe near the wavering shadow of the door’s handle, and not on the sidelights’ dark black glass and the convent beyond.
“Yeah.”
“Hobo marks,” Brad says. “They weren’t here when we were here for summer camp.”
“I wouldn’t remember,” Bill says. “She only brought me here once.”
Brad nods, but he’s distracted, studying the markings carved into the door. “See this one that looks like a pine tree?”
“Yeah.”
“That means there’s danger here and to be ready to defend ourselves.”
“I don’t think we need a marking to tell us that. How did you learn about hobo marks?”
Brad ignores the question and looks around the porch. He pulls a pair of camping flashlights from his pockets.
The buttons slide easily, and the lights flash on.
“We go in,” Brad announces, his hand on the door.
3
Inside, the kindling strewn across the floor puts the thought in Bill’s head that maybe they should worry about living dangers rather than whatever demons might be holding Tabitha here.
Bundles of kindling lie everywhere, propped against the walls, in the fireplace, atop a black mass of upholstery Bill guesses was once a loveseat. Someone has started to pull out or stopped putting away its hide-a-bed mattress, which makes the whole thing look like a demon rising from hell, frozen in the cold beams of their flashlights.
“Hey…” Brad says, shining the flashlight deeper into the convent, into a hallway that swallows its light. “None of this kindling has been burnt. It’s just here. Like it was dropped.”
Bill notes that Brad’s whispering now. If he closes his eyes, he can almost imagine them as summer camp kids, following Tabitha as she explored the haunted mansion by the river.
The image fades when something scrapes against the siding outside. His mind is still sane enough to know that it’s just branches.
“Maybe they were planning to use the kindling later?” Bill says, lowering his voice to match Brad’s. “Or they’re still here?”
“There’s nothing alive here,” Brad answers and kicks at the couch, which sinks inward on itself like rotting sponges. “I think they left before they could start a fire. Maybe someone chased them out.”
Brad switches off his flashlight and pivots to face the picture window, which overlooks the front yard where both men just were.
“Hey, look at the window,” Brad says. “Turn off your light,” he adds, so Bill does.
They both face the window and the details of the yard outside fade back into focus.
“It’s just a yard,” Bill says. And dead and brown too, he thinks. It’s March. The beauty of winter has faded with the melting snow, but the green of spring hasn’t burst from the ground yet.
“That’s where we just were,” Brad points out. “But why are there so many trees?”
White birch trees fill the convent’s front yard. They glow bluish in the full moon’s dim light. A gust of wind rocks the trees, and the nearest branches slash at the siding outside, like fingers scraping a blackboard.
“Is that a rope?” Brad asks, moving closer to the window, his reflection growing larger and clearer.
Bill sees it too, the pale tan rope swinging amongst trees that shouldn’t be there. It’s long, hung from a branch above the convent’s roofline. Bill follows its length, along the trunk of the thickest white birch in the yard, past all the brown skirrs and scrapes that mark its bark.
A gust of wind rises and the rope swirls to life. It sways in the breeze.
“That wasn’t out there before…” Bill answers, but his words cut abruptly as they both see it.
A stiff body in a long black dress sways with the rope, hung around its neck, its head hanging limply to the side and resting on its shoulder. It wears a habit, with a white wimple fastened around the edges of its face. The white of the wimple matches the color of its skin.
“What the…” Brad says, moving closer to the window to look.
The body’s eyes open and find them in the window. The three stare at each other, wordlessly.
“Brad?”
Brad doesn’t turn, or break away his stare from the hanged nun, the legend of the haunted convent. “Tabitha said she saw it once. I didn’t believe her.”
“Brad.”
“What?” Brad doesn’t look away from the corpse hanging in the tree.
“Brad, look in the window.”
“I am.”
“No, at the reflection.”
Brad finds Bill’s eyes in their reflection, even as the dead nun continues to sway in their unfocused sight.
He sees what Bill sees.
In the window’s reflection, Tabitha stands in the hallway leading deeper into the convent. She’s still fifteen. She’s still wearing the bell bottoms and halter top she wore the day she drowned in the lake. She’s still barefoot, her toes muddy with the sediment of the riverbank.
The expression she wears is full-on adult, though. She’s seen things. Both men can see that in the dark rings circling her eyes.
“Holy fuck,” Bill says.
Brad turns back to the room, but she’s not there.
They only see Tabitha in the window’s reflection.
Brad waves at the ghost of their dead friend in the window.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Bill says. He’s trying to unroot his feet from the floor. He’s trying to run far from this place.
But then, in the window, Tabitha’s hand rises. Her arm and elbow slowly form a right angle. She waves. But the greeting doesn’t reach her eyes.
She just stares.
4
“Tabitha?” Brad says, stepping gingerly over the kindling, approaching her reflection in the window. He looks back twice to the dark mouth of the hallway, but they still can’t see her.
What else can’t they see?
“Tabitha?” Brad says. “You’re still fifteen.”
Her arm rises again, but this time, it doesn’t form a right angle.
She’s pointing at them, through them.
Bill’s studying their reflection. He sees it first. “We’re still kids,” he says. “In the window.”
“Fuck,” Brad says, “just like that day.”
“Just like that day.”
“That’s how I still remember you.”
Brad ignores him.
Tabitha turns around. Her dark hair sways over her shoulders.
“Where’s she going?” Bill asks.
Tabitha points down her hallway, which swallows the light just like the one in their world, behind them.
“She wants us to go deeper,” Brad says.
5
No one has left any kindling beyond the front room, but the hardwood floors glow frost-white in the twin beams of their flashlights. They look at each other. Their youth, again, is gone.
Tabitha is gone too, presumably following the same hallway in whatever parallel world exists in the windows of this place.
Everything’s been ripped from this hallway’s plaster walls.
Small holes torn larger reveal where things once hung. Shards of glass lie along the shiny wainscoting that still lines the walls.
“Jesus Christ,” Bill says with a heaving breath.
Brad looks up from a kaleidoscope of glass piled along the wall and sees it.
A sacred heart of Jesus picture still hangs, but only because someone’s slammed roofing nails into the studs behind the plaster.
“Look at the glass,” Bill says next.
So Brad does.
He un-focuses his eyes. He tries not to see the orbs of the dead-cold white light their flashlights create. He sees what Bill sees.
Tabitha.
The walls behind Tabitha look smooth, painted, adorned with frames holding devotionals to obscure saints. The wainscoting gleams there too. But she’s not facing that wall behind her, she’s facing them.
She’s pointing at the floor.
They aim their flashlights.
“Can’t she talk?” Bill asks.
“Can you talk?” They ask her.
Tabitha’s mouth opens, wider and wider. Bill and Brad watch younger versions of their faces go white in the reflection.
She cranes her head back until it nearly rests on her neck.
She balls her fists and screams, her head swinging to and fro, as if she’s headless one moment and staring at them the next.
But, there’s no sound. They can’t hear her.
“Where do we go?” Brad asks Tabitha.
She points to the shards of glass along the wall.
Hundreds of Bills, Brads, and Tabithas line the floor of the hallway, each trapped in their own jagged world of glass.
Every reflection of Tabitha points deeper down the hallway.
The darkness ahead swallows the beams of their flashlights. Ten feet beyond their steps, they are blind.
“Take a shard of glass,” Brad tells Bill. “That way, we won’t lose her again.”
Bill chooses his shard and the sharp itch of a new cut tears at his finger as he picks it up. Tabitha stares back from the reflection.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Bill tells the reflection, and Brad, two steps ahead of him. The color of Brad’s flannel shirt is as far ahead as Bill can see.
“I’m not sure I’m ready to see whatever this is either,” Brad says.
Brad turns a corner in the hallway, and Bill walks alone. His flashlight finds a narrow stairway leading to the convent’s cellar. He finds Tabitha in the shard of glass cutting into his palm. Drops of blood soak into the soft denim of his Levi’s jeans.
“Do you ever think about how we should have told her?” Bill asks, “Before she found out?”
“Of course I do,” Brad says. He sounds far away, but he can’t be more than a half-flight of stairs below Bill. “But it was different then.”
Bill follows the stairs around a bend, and sees Brad again, the top of his balding head reflecting in the cold light of the flashlight’s beam.
There’s nothing else to say, so Bill keeps descending. He steps onto the soft, cold dirt of the cellar floor.
Brad angles his flashlight until he can see Tabitha’s reflection again. Bill watches her over his shoulder.
They follow Tabitha’s finger. She’s pointing to the wall at their left.
An old wardrobe leans against the wall, its back foot splintering and failing. It’s the scratching that makes Bill jump.
“What was that?” Brad asks before Bill can form a word.
“It came from the wardrobe.”
They each look at their own shard of glass. Tabitha motions them toward the wardrobe.
The scratching grows louder.
“Mice?” Bill asks.
“With big claws?” Brad adds.
They pick the cobwebs from their heads and shoulders and stand in front of the wardrobe. It’s dark wood – walnut, and stands taller than either of them. Each of its doors carries a cross, an ornate crucifix, hand-carved.
The door rattles. Bill forgets to finish studying its ancient hinges. His legs shiver as the scratching grows louder. He pictures reaching through the murk of the convent’s cellar, turning the wardrobe’s cold, damp handle, and opening the heavy door, on its old hinges. A hoard of zombies would launch from its depths, their limpid flesh sliding against his, until their sharp, broken teeth find his neck. Warm, sticky blood would soak the collar of his shirt as reality spins into blackness, and he’s trapped here forever.
Like Tabitha.
“Bill!” Brad is shaking his arm, and the vision clears. “Hold this and hit whatever comes out.”
Bill takes a tarnished processional cross from Brad. It’s as tall as he is. And heavier.
“You’re going to open it?”
“It’s time we faced that day, Bill.”
Bill watches Brad’s hand close the distance to the wardrobe’s handle. The scratching quiets, as if awaiting release.
The handle turns with a creak as Brad forces it down. It clicks open like a crypt door. He races to force his flashlight on the opening as it grows.
The scratching starts again, cutting into the dry wood of the wardrobe like something frantically seeking escape. A guttural groan comes next, rising in the darkness. Glowing eyes, like green marbles, race along the bottom of the wardrobe, blinking in and from existence. Musk overwhelms Bill’s nose.
Bill screams. Brad reaches, but stops.
Dust quakes from the rafters above their heads, falling onto them like a silky veil.
“Racoons,” Brad says, turning back to the wardrobe.
Bill needs a few moments to process the words. He points his flashlight at the floor of the wardrobe with both hands, to steady his shaking.
He sees the hole where the raccoons have crept away. A pile of trash covers the floor of the wardrobe.
Habits like those their nun camp-masters wore hang from the rod. Dust erupts across them as Brad pushes them aside. A bible falls from the shelf overhead and cracks the wood of the wardrobe’s floor with a deafening thud.
Bill lets the processional cross crash into the dirt floor of the cellar. Somewhere, far above them on another floor of the convent, a rustle surges against the wood. It quiets and Bill steals a glance at Tabitha’s reflection in the shard of glass.
She stares back stoically.
He peers into the wardrobe with Brad. “Is that handwriting?” he asks, when his flashlight hits yellowed paper. Faint blue lines span the pages, shredded at their edges by animals and age.
Brad pulls a page from the floor of the wardrobe. It squeals as it’s unglued from the muck. “It’s her handwriting.”
“There’s more,” Bill says, and grabs more yellowed pages, spotted with age and watermarks. Faded blue ink still forms the swirls and swoops of her words.
“If I can stop running, I can hear my voice,” Brad is reading Tabitha’s words, from the scrap of paper he holds. “It’s telling me I was wrong. Beneath the distractions and din that hide the doubt I don’t want to face, I know I was wrong.”
Bill hears the words, but he’s reading too.
“Brad, despite all his kingly moves, cares about others. He cares about me,” Bill reads. “I know that now. And I’m sorry. For envying them their love. For running away.”
“She always called me kingly,” Brad says, and Bill nods at the memory. His hand lingers on Brad’s shoulder. It’s the first time they’ve touched since the funeral.
“Should we be reading these?” Brad asks. But he’s not asking Bill.
He moves a pile of scapulars that someone has hung on a hook inside the door.
Tabitha stares out from a mirror behind it. Bill and Brad see themselves as teenagers in the reflection with her.
“I should stop running away to this place,” Bill reads from the page he’s holding. “And hiding in this dead past.” He pauses and coughs back a sob. “I’ve got to go back and tell them that they should be together.”
Bill wipes at his eyes. “It’s dated the day they found her in the river,” he tells Brad. A sob erupts from his chest. “The day she died.”
Bill is still reading. “I accept Bill and Brad as they are, and they should know that,” Bill reads. “Gay or not. It was wrong to be mad at them when I found out.”
“Diary entries,” Brad says, sighing. “She wanted us to read her entries. To know.”
“I was wrong to hold their happiness against them, even if it made me feel like I was less important to them,” Bill reads. “I am happy they are together.”
Bill hands the paper to Brad.
Instead, Brad takes Bill’s hand and meets his eyes like it’s the first time, again.
“Hey,” Bill says, pointing to a window.
Brad looks. He sees it too.
Sunlight creeps and then races through the cellar window, lighting the space. Morning has come.
Within the wardrobe hangs the habits of the nuns who once ran the convent and summer camp of their youth. The mirror reflects the faces of two men nearing middle age. The stairs lead back to the ground floor of the Convent of the Sorrowful Heart and outside to their lives.
But now Bill remembers the curve of Brad’s cheek when he smiles. Brad remembers Bill’s empathy and nurturing compassion. They turn to leave.
“Wait,” Bill says, but when they turn back to look into the mirror again, Tabitha is gone.
Ryan Owen is a writer living among the glacial erratics and waist-high stone walls of central New England. Ryan resurrects antique typewriters and writes all first drafts from their glass-and-chrome keys. Ryan’s work has been published in Penumbric Speculative Fiction Mag, Merrimack Valley Magazine, and has been shared with writing groups across the US Northeast. Find Ryan at forgottennewengland.com, or on Bluesky, @iviesofinkribbons
Idle Ink 