Awake and Dreaming - Kit Pearson [1]
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
ISBN-13: 978-0-14-305637-9
ISBN-10: 0-14-305637-9
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For
Marit and Charlotte Mitchell,
Anne Barringer
and
Will Pearson,
who all contributed
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
JOHN KEATS
PROLOGUE
T he ghost was restless.
All day she’d watched the visitors to the cemetery—joggers, bundled-up families pushing strollers, couples having earnest conversations. Many of the visitors were on Sunday walks but others had come to visit the graves of relatives. Beside the ghost a family stood around a grassy plot, shivering in the chilly air. They spoke in solemn voices and left some flowers in a tin.
“They’ll be wilted in a day,” muttered the ghost.
She watched a young man trim a holly bush in front of a marble tablet. He came every Sunday to visit his mother’s grave. A growing shrub lasts, the ghost thought approvingly.
No one had ever left anything on her grave—not a single flower. On this dank January day her plot looked especially dreary, blanketed with the dead leaves that had lain there all winter.
The ghost strode along the path overlooking the sea, then sat on a step of the war memorial to watch the sun set. All the Sunday visitors had left. Crows circled the empty cemetery, reclaiming it with jeering cries. The wind rose and bare tree branches scraped against one another. Below the ghost, across the road, tumultuous waves flung pebbles on the shore. The full moon seemed to sway in the sky like a lantern.
The ghost smiled. It’s a spooky night, she thought. A good setting for a ghost story … She always felt less lonely when she was by herself, away from people who reminded her that she was no longer one of them.
Finally it was late enough to go into the house.
SHE NEVER VISITED her former home until its inhabitants were asleep. She’d never had any evidence that people could see her; but maybe they’d hear her or somehow sense her presence if she were there in the daytime. And she didn’t want to frighten anyone; she knew she hadn’t been left here for that.
Her house wasn’t far away—just across the street. The ghost melted into the wood of the door and passed through to the other side. Pausing in the hall, she listened to the hum of the refrigerator and the gurgle of the aquarium. Everyone—all the children and their parents—seemed to be asleep.
Then the family dog ambled out from the kitchen. But he was used to her nightly visits; he thumped his tail and went sleepily back to his cushion.
The ghost went into a room lined with books. The familiar space comforted her—she’d known it all her life. Of course this house didn’t belong to her any more. It hadn’t for forty years. But she had been born here; this was where she had suffered and triumphed and dreamed.
She scanned the bookshelves and picked out a Trollope novel she’d never got around to reading. Settling into an armchair, she sighed with relief as the book drew her in.
She didn’t look up until just before