Jill Manor: Part III

True love does not fail to occupy space in one’s heart; it merely builds a cage in their mind. We only realize we are trapped when the keeper vanishes with freedom’s key and we are left with monsters in the shadows. Our memories keeping watch in spaces we swore someone else stood.

The final night at Jill Manor began without light or laughter. It did not creep through the trees like a lynx, nor did it ravage the dirt like a torrential summer storm. It simply arrived in quiet, suffocating stillness. Upheaving all that was lost, all that would never be.

The decimating winds that normally battered the manor had given way to nights heavy fog. It pressed on the cracked and broken windowpanes like a desperate, immobile hand, petrifyingly close to stealing whatever soul, or life inhabited the confines.

The remnants of a fire choked itself to white, charcoal ash. Smoldering embers of pink and red cast the dining parlor in glowing skeletal shadows of bones that never were. The room was bare, incomplete, forgotten.

Catherine Wilke stood by the dark expanse of a tired, broken window. The whipping winds lulling around aimlessly as they passed her spirit. She dressed in her finest knitted cloak, the lace of her parting gown, delicate and frayed hung to her curves in the moons light.

He, her Thomas, watched helplessly from the darkest corner of what was once their favorite room. He ached with the familiar pining, a desperate urge to reach out and touch her, to grab her and hold her close. To stitch the gap that so feverishly parted them in death.

It had been years, dozens of them, since she last let her eyes fall upon his ghostly shadows. His reflection was no more, but the faint traces of his outline glowed bright in midnights hazy gaze. She turned her head, just slightly as she took him in. Letting the remembrance of his familiarity wash over her one last time.

She had no anger, no fear, not a hint of anything left for him, just the terrifying, resolute look of peace.

“You think you have me, you think your love holds me, keeps me, even after all this time,” she whispered. Her voice barely audible over the deafening silence.

“You think because I am still here, pacing these god-awful grounds that I am here, with you. But I am not, I have been gone for a long, long time, lost, misplaced, besotted. What we were, what we could have been is no matter, no more.”

His ghostly frame stepped forward, his muddied boots scrapping the cobblestones gently. His fingers brushing the ice from her shoulders as he tried so desperately to hold her there, to root her with him, to this place they had called home.

“You were mine, always, my love,” he choked. The words hanging in his throat as though the darkness of the moment might steal his voice forever. “The same ways I was yours.”

His words didn’t matter.

She simply looked at his fingers, ghostly bones that longingly touched a love that could never be.

His words, his touch, his heart—belonged to a stranger, belonged to a woman who was no more.

“My love, my dear, dear, dearest heart, we belonged only to our own loneliness, our own selfish wants and needs and desires. Never for the greater good,” she whispered, “never to each other.”

Catherine Wilke turned back towards the darkened window, her eyes set to the northern cliffs as she unlatched the decrepit lock, freeing it from its splintery housing.

The thick fog rolled in to the room, nearly invisible. The taste of damp earth, salty waves and fresh grass bit at her tongue the way it did when she was still alive. It called to her, beckoning her forth.

The room, their favorite, disappeared from view behind her, the lulling fog growing brighter with each passing foot as it blinded the both of them.

When Thomas Wilke reached out again through the mist for her fingers, her hand, her shoulder, her arm— she was no more. His hands touched nothing but bitter, empty air. No pulse pushed back from the rolling fog before him.

She had not run, she hadn’t looked back for him, she hadn’t waited. She simply walked into the vast empty abyss, her ghostly steps falling silent.

He ran to the edge, sauntering dangerously close to falling in behind her, and paused. Screaming her name to the void, but no noise echoed back. The fog clamped a tone of silence on his tongue as though her name was never his.

Not a trace of her existence remained in his world.

She vanished as completely as one could in death.

Cold and cruelly with no remorse.

The house behind him sat even quieter than before, the air strangely heavy and damp. Resonating the echo of his heart as he felt it hammer in his own ghostly hell. When he stepped back to Jill-Manor, the stone floors did not squeal, they did not mumble against his own muffled paces, they settled into a perfectly chilling bout of dreadful stillness. A quiet so resound that even the dead would be disturbed. The cracked mirror above the fireplace didn’t show the blank reflections of his spirit, they didn’t capture the empty room. They let light into a place where she no longer lived. A place her presence never existed. A symphony never constructed.

He reached to touch his own outline, shadowed and hazy, only to realize he had been talking to himself all along. She had never been a living memory waiting to fade, she was the beautifully quiet dread of unknown deceit. She was the void he had run from so long ago.

Collapsing against what was left of her body, he finally understood the ghost he had spent a lifetime trying to banish was the only true part of him still left alive. As the last of the fire burned in the hearth, he smiled into the dark, welcoming it, realizing the cold hand he held wasn’t a memory at all, but the very madness he had become.