Love Songs: The Wrong Note - A Collection of Short Stories

Creek

The house stood on a knoll in the middle of a luxurious carpet of emerald green rolling to the river's edge. Its whitewashed wooden columns, a poor relation to the classic marbles of Greece, provided a stark contrast to the dark façade of the sprawling mansion. The bricks of the house were very old, almost two centuries, with a lush blanket of ivy rooted to the masonry.

The leaves of the trailing vines were darkest green, so deep in color, they appeared ebony, a blackness not of rot or decay, but of abundant elements in the fecund earth, the bottom land on which its roots thrived. As if gathering further nourishment from the ancient clay, the leaves glistened against the brick, feasting on the blood and sweat of the enslaved hands that had formed each so long ago, remnants of men long dead who left behind their fingerprints in the hardened blocks of riverbank earth as solid evidence of their meager existence.

It was a home with a history, a house filled with ghosts.

Creek Brody had lived there all his life, discovering every nook and cranny, recognizing each sound of settling upon the weary foundation, every pipe rattle and window pane clatter. It wasn't exactly fear he experienced in the old house, just an uneasy feeling that someone or something was watching.

An icy breeze in a closed room, a fleeting glimpse of movement when he was certain he was alone, an unintelligible whisper that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand rigidly at attention – these occurrences happened almost every day.

But he never breathed a word to his family. They would certainly declare him unstable and put him away. His nieces and nephew. His own flesh.

Not his flesh.

His true flesh, anyway.

Those two females and that excuse for a male were throwbacks, related to the low-life scum that has a tendency to pop up in everyone's family tree, burls too sorry to grow into limbs, parasites looking to get their hands on all that was his.

But he'd outsmart them yet; he knew it, felt it in his bones. So he didn't waste his time worrying about the trio who by the accident of birth called him 'Uncle.' But the odd happenings, the unexplainable episodes, the 'instances' were another matter altogether.

It wasn't as if he was a stranger to them, for they'd been happening in this house since he was a little boy.

His earliest memories of contact with the spirit world revolved around his Aunt Muriel. She had married his Uncle Harry, bringing with her ironclad nuptials a fortune that made the very well-to-do Brody clan a bunch of paupers.

She marries late who marries for life, she was fond of saying, and though her choice of Harry Brody was questionable, no one could ever accuse her of not standing by him.

But in Aunt Muriel's case, she didn't even have to stand long enough for her feet to hurt. Married in her thirties and widowed before forty, Creek remembered his aunt as strong-willed and fiercely independent.

Yet, she was, like any mortal, a complicated web of contradictions. She was proud and proper, rigid in her beliefs of class and one's positions in it and a bit of an embarrassment all at the same time.

A sense of belonging was important to her, thus she prized good family ties. For Aunt Muriel, it wasn't the quality of time that mattered, but the quantity.

Time spent together was like any good investment; the hours in one's company mounted up, whether quarreling or miserable, like pennies. Pennies were pennies, but amassed in sufficient quantities, they were the essence of wealth.

He remembered his aunt and uncle spending whole summers with the family and weeks in the winters. Creek would never forget the day she arrived alone in her long black car.