Butterflies [On Hold]

Chapter Four

CHAPTER FOUR:

Frank sat down beside Marie on the couch in the sitting room, where she was trembling with shock. The room was cold and shadowy, the fire dead. The many portraits of people hanging on the dark walls were all staring down at her, their beady eyes apprehensive. Frank gently put a hand on her arm and sighed. She knew that this was not a dream or a nightmare, but a large part of her still hoped that it was. She couldn’t be a vampire. She just couldn’t.

‘What I’m about to tell you is going to make you think of the world in a completely different way. All of your beliefs are going to change, everything you think is simple will have so much more to it. All I need for you to do is believe me. You’re going to be shocked, and you’re probably going to keep denying it for at least a week, but you just have to try your best to believe me. Marie, you’re a ghost.’

Marie stared at him, waiting for him to burst out laughing at what was clearly a joke. But he just kept watching her, waiting for her to react to what he had just said. She didn’t understand, as if her brain had short-circuited and needed rebooting. Her eyes widened as she tried to find something to say, something rational. Frank wasn’t joking. His grey eyes under those dark eyebrows were locked on hers, and for a moment she trusted him. Not one doubt crossed her mind as she stared into those eyes. Marie actually believed him.

‘Your mother didn’t die in a fire, she died because … she was a witch … and sometimes when witches use too much magic, they grow weak and pass away. The night she died, you did too, without even realising it. The second-born child of a witch, which is you, becomes a ghost, while the first-born child, your brother, becomes a witch. It has happened before the creation of humans –’

Marie shook her head, the shock slowly melting away as the sane (or almost sane) part of her brain began to work again. ‘But ghosts aren’t real … and if they are, they’re spirits … They’re invisible … or see-through … and they float and they can’t touch anything … I’m not a ghost. My mom isn’t a … she couldn’t be –’

 It took Frank quite a while to convince Marie that this wasn’t all just one big joke. According to him, ghosts weren’t what fiction made them out to be. They weren’t the almost-transparent, floating spirits that needed to sort out some unfinished business before finding peace. They were the immortal second-born children of witches that looked exactly as they did when they ‘died’. Frank was one since his father died in 1554 when he was eighteen, Stephan was one since his mother died in 1843 when he was twenty-six, and Louise was one since 1041 when she was twenty.

Frank said that witches were around even before humans lived on the earth. Any child a witch has after the second-born is just a human, which is how all humans are the descendents of witches. Frank went on and on about how ghosts were real and how Marie was one of them now, too, but she could barely listen to him. She felt numb.

Why did her mom never tell them? Their mom was a witch, and now that she was dead, Alan was a witch and Marie was a ghost? Marie was going to live forever, she was frozen forever. Forever was too long to live. It wasn’t right.

She looked up at the handsome young man beside her, and then quickly switched her gaze to another portrait on the walls. Frank was eighteen when he became a ghost, so that meant he was four hundred and seventy-six. Holy crap. He wasn’t a handsome young man, he was a handsome ancient man. That meant he lived during the Renaissance! It was no wonder that they had so much antique furniture throughout the house – the furniture was probably brand-new whenever they actually bought it!

It was no wonder that Frank was so secluded and mysterious. He had almost half a millennium worth of knowledge, thoughts and experiences. He probably thought that her problems were trivial. He was probably sick of life, too. Marie couldn’t stand watching two or three dull days going by, never mind two or three dull centuries going by. How on earth did he cope?