The Ghost of Winn Peterson

41. Vicar

Swallowing the hard knot in his throat, Vicar looked up from Winn's journal and visibly shivered. Cold be damned, her revelations had given him an insurmountable sense of dread, much like the feeling of falling into a pit far too deep to ever crawl back out of. He looked down at the journal for a moment, eyes roving back against the names that Winn had scrawled in nervous haste. The names of his past family members were not things Vicar had either cared much about, nor taken much time to memorise, so the name Cartier was as foreign to him as it had been to Winn and her benevolent neighbour. Still, it was the name after, the name of the child, that interested him: Atticus. How often had she written of him, painted a picture so vivid of the kitchen boy in her journal?

Struck with a sudden urge, Vicar rose and padded across the halls until he came to the dark, staring walls where Gaston's room had been. There, lining the black wallpaper, were the faces he'd absently stared at his entire childhood. One painting, in particular, stood out; the bright auburn hair, the deep scowl, the sunken eyes. It was Atticus, wasn't it? My, what, great-great grandfather? Something far back, but close enough that Vicar could even see some of himself in those haunted eyes, or was it his brother he could see? Vicar hadn't looked in a mirror in quite a long while, he realised, but he was sure he and Gaston shared enough similarities that their resemblance to the other men in the family was striking. If this didn't look the very spitting image of the most recently dead Andrews man!

Vicar reached a finger up to the paint and rubbed a gentle finger over the dust, wondering how Atticus had gone from the heir of an estate, his future and inheritance hidden from him under the guise of being forced a servant, to a melancholy face on the wall. Surely, that was a sign of better times, if he'd been allowed a face with the rest of the family, but given the dark nature of his expression, Atticus' fate seemed far too ambiguous to be sure.

A thump sounded above him and he jumped, finger pressing too hard into the painting and leaving a dark indent in the dust. He stilled his trembling finger and mouthed an apology to the painting. You silly fool, he thought, until another noise rumbled the floor. Was it the stranger lurking in the house? There should have been no animals, no people above him. Only the attic he had spent the night in was higher up than the hall that Gaston's room glowered in (though there were several of the small attics scattered around the house, none of them were large enough to hold more than a lantern and a few books and nobody in the family ever remembered they were even there half the time).

Nervously convinced that if someone, good or bad, was in the house, they surely wouldn't be in the attic, Vicar made his way to the stairs, pausing only for a few trembling seconds before he ascended.

There was, he sighed in relief, nobody waiting for him. He settled on the chest where he'd found the fateful journal and put his head in his hands. As he rubbed at his face, he heard another sigh. He was the only one in here, wasn't he? There was a tense second before he raised his head, fully expecting the doctor to be grinning at him from the shadows, but what he saw instead wasn't really much better.

Arms wrapped around her sides as though keeping warm was Winnifred. She shimmered in the light of the snowy window, her skin rippling in its bluish hue. Vicar couldn't have been drunk now, he was completely sure of it, so why could he still see the ghost? Moving carefully (he didn't know if she could see him, but he didn't want to risk frightening her), Vicar crept forward, taking a few steps at a time until he stood in front of Winn. He reached a hand out and brushed it against her arm, watching as her skin broke apart like the dust on the painting of Atticus.

She heaved another sigh and lifted her swirling hand to wipe away an unseen tear. "I tried," she whispered, her voice breaking in her American accent. How strange it was, still, to hear it! She reminded Vicar of home across the sea, before all the fires and deaths. It was comforting accent, and came with all the pleasant memories of the library at Pendragon-Hall, all the chatter of students on their way to classes, making small talk about their lectures and their romantic fancies and letters from home.