The Nameless Ghost

Deidre Poe had talked to the graves of Stillwater Cemetery ever since she could speak, but it wasn’t until she was seven years old that someone responded.

“G’morning, Grandpa Mortimer,” Deidre said as routine. She danced through the tombstones, her footsteps lighter than the mist blanketing the graveyard. “G’morning Great-Uncle Ambrose, and Great-Great Aunt Guinevere, and First-Cousin-Once-Removed Margot, and—”

A derisive snicker sounded behind her. Deidre’s ears burned; her pale cheeks, already cherry-tinged from the cold, flushed even deeper.

At first, she’d thought it was that rude gravedigger Ma had hired. “You got no business bein' here,” he’d always say to Deidre, his ragged clothes thick with the scent of death. “You know damn well how your Ma feels ‘bout you chatterin' up the dead, Miss Poe.”

Deidre let out a frosty huff; her breath formed a cloud of hot annoyance. She spun around and flicked back her raven-hued braids. But instead of the gravedigger, Deidre came face to face with a boy.

He looked a bit older than Deidre, and wore pinstriped slacks and a tweed waistcoat. He sat against a gravestone, arms curled around his knees. Wispy bangs fell across his spectacles like a curtain of mist. He shot her a lopsided grin—it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“They’ll never respond, y’know,” the boy said. He picked at a pile of dead autumn leaves. His translucent fingers glistened like stained glass. “They’ve all crossed over already.”

Deidre crept closer to him. She knelt down and, with a tenderness beyond her age, reached out to touch his cheek. But to her absolute delight, she couldn’t. Her hand passed right through the boy’s face. A chill shot down her fingers as if he were made of clouds or morning mist, or the cold fog that always rolled in from Stillwater Lake. Deidre stepped back, clapping her hands together.

“You’re a ghost!” she said, laughing. “I’m talking to a real ghost!” The boy shrank into himself, but she was too enchanted to notice. Deidre puffed out her chest. “Julian said I’d only hear the ghosts when I got as old and gray as Grandpa Mortimer—oh, how wrong he was!”

“A shame that he was mistaken,” the boy muttered. “Even in death, I can’t get a moment’s peace.”

Deidre giggled and skipped around the boy’s tombstone. It was an arc of marble, with weeping willows carved into the side like stone waterfalls. An angel leaned against the grave, her wings furled protectively around the boy. Deidre couldn’t help but mirror the angel’s expression—upturned lips, sun-kissed cheeks, rounded eyes. But as she traced the grave’s inscription, Deidre’s smile faded.

There was no name. There were no dates. Only five words, forever engraved into stone.

Limbo awaits.

None shall escape.

Deidre traced each letter’s dips and curves. “Limbo,” she whispered. She tried to think back to her vocabulary lessons. Though her parents had hired several private tutors, none of them taught her such grim vocabulary. “Lim-bo.” Deidre let each letter roll past her lips. It sounded so harmless; it tasted like damnation. “I don’t know that word.”

“Most people don’t,” the boy hummed. “Not until it fills their lungs—not until they’re drowning in it.”

“How perfectly awful!” Deidre spun away from his gaze, her black dress flaring outward. “If I’d known conversations with ghosts were so bleak, I’d have never talked to you in the first place!”

She didn’t really mean it. Deidre was, in truth, embarrassed. Hot tears blurred her eyes, threatening to spill for a word she’d never even heard before. Limbo. How awful—how indescribably, mystifyingly awful.

Though his footsteps were soundless, the boy’s gentle laughter sounded behind her. “Forgive me,” he said. "I’d forgotten how soft-hearted the living are.” Cold fingers grazed Deidre’s shoulder. When she finally glanced around, the boy’s lips were quirked into an apologetic smile. “Could I make it up to you? I’d like to show you something—I promise it’s nothing quite so bleak.”

With one last sniffle, Deidre nodded. She’d spent her whole life trying to speak to the ghosts: she’d sooner bury herself than let one bitter inscription keep her from learning what this boy had to say.

Side by side, Deidre and the boy wove past chapels and crypts, past mausoleums made of stained glass that winked against dawn’s sunburst. They went deeper into the graveyard than Deidre had gone in years. He led her further still, down to the outskirts of Stillwater Cemetery where tombstones were far-scattered and long-forgotten.

Deidre’s heart shot into her throat when she saw the glint of black steel. “You’ve brought us to the gates!” she gasped.

The gates wrapped around the Poe manor, encircling their home and the family cemetery with tall bars and speared points sharp enough to slice through skin. Deidre knew this all too well: the scars on her arms were proof.

“Stillwater Lake is in the forest,” the boy said. “We’ll have to cross over.”

“No.” Deidre shook her head, her mouth drying up. “No, I can’t. Ma’s forbidden it.”

“As if that’s stopped you before.”

Deidre blushed and hid her arms behind her. Silently, the boy drifted through the gates. His misty body warped and wrapped around the steel, only to reform into something almost solid as he appeared on the other side. He watched her with gleaming eyes through the steel bars.

Deidre took a deep breath. She was seven years old now—much older, and certainly much stronger than she was the last time she’d tried escaping. Ma’s voice echoed in her mind: “Have you learned nothing from Julian?” she’d spat, dragging Deidre back into the manor. “My dearest Deidre, my foolish little girl…the world outside would break you.” Deidre stayed far, far away from the gates after that attempt.

And yet, as Deidre now stepped forward and grasped the crossbars, her heart fluttered like a crow’s wings. Let the world break her, she thought, if it meant she could spend more time with this boy who’d already departed from it.

Creeping ivy twined up the gates like snakes. Deidre nearly grabbed a strand, but paused when she noticed thorns. Though Julian’s face was but a hazy memory, his soft-spoken warning rang through Deidre’s mind. “The ivy’s got teeth,” he’d told her, poking at the sharp vines with a stick. “It’s hungry and it’s got teeth, and if it bites you, it won’t ever let go.”

Deidre hesitantly pulled out Julian’s black gloves, a pair of ratty old things that she never kept far out of reach. She forced them over her fingers. Grabbing the least hungry-looking vine she could find, she hauled herself up, higher and higher, until her face was red-hot and her breath came out in fast puffs. Grab, pull. Grab, pull. One foot over the top, then the other, and Deidre found herself balanced between two speared prongs.

Were the gates always so close to the ground? Deidre imagined it was one of the many privileges of turning seven years old: the world seemed to be shrinking around her with each passing year. But as she jumped off the gates and landed next to the boy, she felt as if she’d stepped into a world larger than life—larger than death, even. Thick pines towered over them, their trunks splattered with moss. A fog-cloaked path snaked into the forest. Deidre let out a breathy laugh; she tasted wild nettles and dew-soaked earth on her tongue.

“I’ve made it!” she said to the boy. “Did you see me up there, with the vines and all? I actually did it!”

“Not a single scratch on you, either.”

“Ma will be positively furious.”

He gave her a sharp look and said, “Do you want to turn back?” Deidre quickly shook her head, and he raised his chin. “Come on, then. The lake awaits.”

As the boy stepped forward, crows broke away from dead trees, and ear-piercing caws cut through the snap of branches. Their oily feathers glinted with each wing stroke until the flock was a black pinprick against the sky. When Deidre looked back, the boy had nearly disappeared into the fog. With one last giggle, she skipped after him, leaving the cemetery and the gates and the Poe family manor far, far behind.

* * *

Though she’d been speaking to the dead for years now, Deidre hadn’t a clue what ghosts actually looked like—she’d always imagined those sluggish spirits from her cartoons, with their yawning mouths and sleepy moans, drifting past the television screen or pausing mid-frame as if caught in a distant memory.

This boy was nothing like Deidre’s cartoons.

For one, he was surprisingly quick on his feet. Deidre could barely keep up as they weaved through gnarled pines, his body a blur of ever-shifting mist. He was so nimble that, every few steps, he’d disappear into the fog before Deidre caught a glimpse of round spectacles, or pale hands pushing past branches.

“Should I slow down for you?” the boy teased over his shoulder. His silver eyes twinkled like guiding stars.

Deidre flicked back her braids. “Over my dead body!”

The forest ground began to slope downward. The fog cooled against Deidre’s skin, and she tasted mud and minerals in the air. A loon's haunting call blended with a symphony of croaks and trills. Pines and ferns were replaced by huge cattails. They were so tall that their brown heads drooped downward. Deidre imagined the cattails were bowing for them as she and the boy stepped onto the stony shores of Stillwater Lake.

Deidre had visited Stillwater Lake once before, back when Ma wasn’t so obsessed with pointed gates. She was three years old back then. Her brother, Julian Poe, was scarcely older than she was now. Deidre remembered the croaking bullfrogs, all puffed up and glassy-eyed, and the silver-scaled fish that sent ripples through the water with each slap of their tails. She remembered Julian sitting on the wooden dock, a book balanced in his lap. Her brother had been kicking his feet back and forth, his shoes just shy of grazing the water. Ma was next to him; her dark curls danced in the lake’s breeze. She sat cross-legged and straight-backed, pointing to passages in his book, listening so intently as he read them aloud as if the lake and Deidre didn’t exist, as if Julian was the only thing that mattered.

Deidre hadn’t minded, though. She’d happily spent the day examining odd-looking stones, and wondering if the bullfrogs ever popped if they puffed up too much, and watching dead leaves drift aimlessly across the water. Even then, she’d wondered if anyone had drowned in the lake—if she could speak to their ghosts through the veil of fog, and ask them how it felt to die.

And now here Deidre was, balanced on the edge of the wooden dock over Stillwater Lake, staring off into the dark waters and misty pines as she stood beside the ghost of a boy.

“Do you remember,” Deidre began, “how it felt to die?”

The boy didn’t look at her. He stayed silent for a long, long moment. Deidre watched pink sunbeams play along the boy’s cheeks, a crude mimicry of the way light glazed against the fog. Deidre waited so long that she thought he’d never answer. When the boy finally nodded, his soft voice rose above the forest’s croaks and trills.

“I may not remember much of my life,” he said, “but I’ll never forget the one choice that was truly mine.”

Deidre frowned. “You chose to be a ghost?”

The boy let out a bitter laugh. “No one with a lick of sense would choose this.” He lowered himself to the dock and sat with his feet hanging over the edge. He bounced a stray rock across the lake. It was a blur of gray, one that left spiraling ripples in its path before it was finally swallowed by the water. “They all called me mad for staying behind, y’know,” he said. “The others crossed over the moment their memories began to fade—said they’d rather submerge themselves than wander about as a hollow echo.”

“The others…” Deidre felt sick as she watched thick fog roll lazily across the water. “So they’re gone for good? Grandpa Mortimer and Great-Uncle Ambrose and everyone else?”

“I haven’t a clue where the waters took them. All I know is that if one of us steps into Stillwater Lake,” the boy said, “we will never, ever step back out.”

Deidre swallowed down the tremble in her voice. “At least they stepped inside still knowing who they’d been.”

The two of them stood in silence as the sun rose above the pines. Deidre glanced down, past her boots and the dock and the sheet of lake-fog, and saw her reflection. She’d never thought of herself as young or, heaven forbid, childish. But the girl she saw in the lake—braids as thin as brittle twigs, face pale with nausea, lacy black dress clinging to her limbs—almost made Deidre feel small. Breakable.

Ma’s voice echoed in her mind: “The breakable are forgotten,” she’d said several years ago, back when she and Deidre took morning walks through the graveyard together. “Only excellence deserves to be engraved.”

Deidre caught Ma telling Julian this, too. During his violin rehearsals, Deidre would watch through the staircase railings as Ma hissed it into Julian’s ear. His hand would tremble with each chord, his fingers red and bandaged. At family dinners, Grandpa Mortimer would be regaling them with a ghost story over glazed chicken and steaming pie. Ma watched each silent bite of pie that Julian took. Then she’d dig her blood-red fingernails into Julian’s arm, whisper something to him, and he’d dazzle the family by sharing his perfect exam scores or performing a violin solo.

The night before her family visited Stillwater Lake, Deidre had followed Julian to his room. Rows of music competition trophies and spelling bee medals were plastered against his walls. “You’ve never seen the lake before, have you?” Julian asked. When Deidre shook her head, her brother smiled. “I’ll let you borrow my gloves then. The fog’s chilly on the shoreline.”

“You’ve been to the shoreline?” Deidre asked him.

He nodded, a troubled look in his eyes. “Ma doesn’t let me go often, but when the fog is thin enough…” Julian leaned down to whisper into her ear. “I like to get real, real close to the edge of the dock. And sometimes, when I look into the water, I see someone else staring back at me.”

Deidre giggled, pushing him away. “Maybe you’re just seeing ghosts.”

“Maybe,” Julian whispered. “Maybe I am.”

As Deidre now stared down at her own reflection, at the fragile girl in the water, she finally understood what Julian had meant. She shifted her gaze, but her reflection was all alone. It was as if the ghost boy was invisible: not even the waters of Stillwater Lake gave notice to him. Deidre hugged herself, suddenly feeling very, very chilly. Better to be small and breakable, she thought, than trapped in nonexistence.

“You remember, then,” Deidre finally said to the boy. “How it happened? How you, y’know…” She trailed off, a cold weight growing heavier in her chest.

The boy let out a hollow chuckle. “Three years ago,” he said, “I drowned in Stillwater Lake. Got too close to the dock’s edge, I suppose.”

Deidre glanced down at him, watching the way his feet swung back and forth over the water. “That can’t be your only memory,” she said. “Maybe if you imagined your life hard enough—”

“Don’t you think I’ve tried?” the boy snapped. Deidre stepped back, a lump forming in her throat. “Don’t you think I’ve wondered if I had a mother or a father, or if I was a good son? If my life must have been so insignificant,” he choked out, “that I didn’t even deserve my name on my gravestone?”

Deidre fell silent. The boy’s shallow breathing blended with the sigh of lakewater against the shore.

She never found her brother’s name on any of Stillwater’s gravestones. It was like he'd been erased. Ma stripped Julian’s bedroom bare, tossing away his trophies. One night, Ma gathered all of Julian’s photos and held them over the fireplace, letting Julian’s monochrome face melt and drip away. Deidre’s nose still burned with the stench of charred paper.

Deidre took a deep breath. The smoke was replaced by the scent of lakewater. She lowered herself to the dock and sat beside the ghost boy. Deidre kicked her legs back and forth, letting the fog warp around her feet like melted wax.

“It’s not fair, is it?” she asked. “To be treated like a ghost by the people who should love you the most?”

The boy shook his head, and his face fell to his palms. “How can I cross over,” he said into his hands, “knowing that no one will remember me?”

Deidre sighed. She thought of Julian’s gray eyes, and remembered the way he winked at her after his cheesy jokes. She remembered sneaking into the graveyard with Julian and telling ghost stories all night, his laughter raw and unguarded and brighter than the stars. She remembered the scent of nutmeg in his clothes and his messy pumpkin-shaped cookies, and the soft touch of his hands when he hugged her goodnight.

Deidre tore her gaze away from the lake. “I’ll remember,” she said to the boy. Her ears buzzed with the sound of lakewater and dragonflies and Julian’s laughter. When the boy finally peered at her through his translucent fingers, Deidre smiled sadly at him. “I’ll remember you.”

The boy let his hands fall to his lap. With one last look into the water, he closed his eyes and rested his head against Deidre’s shoulder. Foamy waves licked at the stony shoreline, dancing back and forth below their feet. Stillwater Lake glistened like star-flecked gravestones under the rising sun.

The fog was finally starting to clear up.