Hours later, Ophelia found the day had come and gone as she’d meandered through the city streets. She’d decided Genevieve must have found a carriage home shortly after their fight, and thought it’d be good to give the two of them a little space before she followed. Unfortunately, she had not anticipated losing herself so completely in her thoughts, and it was now a much later hour than she’d like to have to walk all the way home. But they were in no position for her to spend any excess on a second carriage.
“They’re opening the gates tomorrow night,” a voice suddenly spoke from her right. “I heard the last competition had the most casualties in the last two decades. Twenty-seven reported deaths. It’s a bad omen.”
Ophelia turned to find that two young men had stopped only a few feet away, lingering before a newspaper stand at the entrance of a barbershop, their heads together over the gazette.
“Only twenty-seven? I thought there were almost a hundred who entered?” one of them said.
The other man shrugged. “Most contestants tap out before they die. The smart ones do anyway.”
His companion scoffed. “The smart ones don’t enter in the first place.”
The first man nodded in agreement as he dropped a cigarette to the ground and smashed it with his boot, leaving a small smudge on the brick beneath. They closed the paper and threw it back atop the stack before hurrying up the street.
Ophelia strode over to the stand of newspapers, unfolding the top one and rifling through the pages until she found the article of interest.
October 23: Phantasma, the Devil’s Manor, arrives in New Orleans
She scanned the thick black print of the paragraphs beneath.
The competition’s insidious reputation continues to terrorize the continent, leaving a trail of blood in its wake. A place where nightmares roam free, but the dream of winning a magical prize keeps participants rolling in.
Ophelia tucked the paper beneath her arm and took off for home. It couldn’t be true. The Devil’s Manor was just a rumor, a source of entertainment to fuel a media frenzy and sell more papers. But the conversation between Mr. Mouton and Mr. Lafitte in the car suddenly made sense. And it would serve Ophelia right for how she’d treated Genevieve to have to walk home in the dark, alone, well into the hour that Devils came out to play. Just as an insidious, Devil-riddled attraction came to town.
She picked up her pace as she headed home. The streets were lined with houses painted in hues of white and pink and green, each at least two stories high with bay windows and wraparound porches that featured brightly colored doors. She always knew she would stay in Grimm Manor, but sometimes she imagined herself in a pastel green house in the city, close enough to the French Quarter that she could walk to the cafés every morning and the bookstore every afternoon. But her mother was gone, and that dream was now buried six feet under as well.
Why can’t you see that you’re holding yourself back trying to fit into a mold Mother made for you?
She shook Genevieve’s words from her mind.
Everything is going to be okay, she told herself.
Keeping her focus on steadying her breathing as she headed down the main road out of the inner city, she knew she couldn’t let her fixations overrun her mind out here, alone in the dark. She counted out the minutes in her head, knowing there should only be about thirty-six more until she made it back to Grimm Manor’s front gate. Before she made it even five more minutes down the road, however, she caught a ghostly blue flash out the corner of her eye.
Ophelia stopped in her tracks. This was about where the old cathedral should be, but she couldn’t make out its shape through the sudden fog. Her heart thundered in her chest as she broke her mother’s first rule—she squinted into the dark. She couldn’t see the Apparition, but she knew it was there from the light vibration in the air that made the flesh on her arms pebble ever so slightly.
She approached the gates, searching for the telltale flash of blue, her heeled boots crunching on the oak leaves and acorns littering the ground. She leaned her hands against the bars of the gates and found herself pitching forward when they split open with a rusty creak. She righted herself quickly, brushing her hands off on her skirt as she slipped through the crack she’d opened between the parting iron.
“Hello?” Ophelia whispered. She practically heard her mother’s scolding voice in the back of her mind. If she wasn’t supposed to look at the dark, she certainly wasn’t supposed to talk to it either.
But there was no Apparition in sight. She turned to leave. Odd. She had sworn there’d been a—
“Can you see me?” a small, squeaky voice asked.
Ophelia glanced around in the direction of the voice, but nothing was there. Her mother classified Ghosts on the Other Side into four categories: Ghouls, Apparitions, Poltergeists, and Phantoms. As the list went on, the abilities of the beings became stronger and more unpredictable. Ophelia knew that any being who was slightly transparent was just an ordinary Apparition—a deceased soul that had yet to cross over. All the other beings were more solid, possessing the ability to change their appearances in various ways, unlike regular Apparitions—who could only appear as they did when they were laid to rest. Still, all should be visible. To her at least.
“I can’t see you, but I can hear you,” Ophelia answered back, tone cautious.
“Are you here to entertain me?”
“No,” Ophelia answered, breath hitching on the word as the energy in the air shifted. Where previously she had sensed it as a light vibration, the energy now settled over her skin as a warm, heavy static.
Is this some sort of trap?
Ophelia stumbled back toward the gates.
“Why not?” the voice pouted. “I’m bored. We can play games.”
Ophelia opened her mouth to decline again when the locket around her throat suddenly began its unusual pulses. The sound of footsteps approached from somewhere in the distance.
“You shouldn’t be here,” a new, much deeper voice drawled out from the fog now.
“Uh-oh,” the first Apparition whispered before their energy disappeared an instant later.
Ophelia swallowed. Like the other Apparition, she couldn’t see this new stranger, but she could feel them. And they felt much different.
The closer they got, the further the static spread across her skin, caressing every bare inch, making goosebumps perk up on her forearms and legs. And when… other things… began to perk up from the unnerving warmth as well, she blushed furiously and rushed to wrap her arms over her chest.
“Have you gotten lost?” the second stranger asked, a touch of humor in their tone.
If the dark looks at you, don’t look back. But she couldn’t help herself. Something was compelling her to stay in place.
“No?” she whispered.
“You sound very sure about that,” the stranger quipped as they came even closer.
She squinted into the dark once more, trying to take another step forward, but it was as if there was an invisible wall in front of her, pushing her back.
“What the Hell…?” she wondered aloud.
“There are wards on these grounds,” the deep voice explained. “Your trespassing seems to have awoken them. You cannot enter further unless you are granted permission.”
“Like a Vampire?” she joked, though there was an edge of seriousness to her words.
She swore she could hear the smile in the stranger’s voice as they questioned, “Who were you speaking to before?”
“I thought I had seen a Ghost…”
There was a whisper of breath suddenly next to her right ear. “Boo.”
Ophelia jumped as she felt the stranger’s energy now pressing along the front of her body, making her flush even deeper.
Glaring at the empty space before her, she muttered, “Ghosts are such a nuisance.”
“Who are you?” they asked as if she hadn’t spoken, tone more serious than before. “You look so familiar…”
Ophelia sighed. She supposed she ought to start getting used to the Ghosts of New Orleans saying that to her now that her eyes nearly made her Tessie Grimm’s doppelganger.
“Well, I can’t see you,” she told them. “So I’m unable to help with any insight on the familiarity front.”
“Too bad,” they said. “You’re really missing out on my extraordinarily handsome face.”
She resisted the urge to laugh. “I’ll have to take your word for it.”
Something brushed gently across her cheek then. “Angel…”
Her brow furrowed. “Oh, no, I’m not a—”
“What’s your name?” they interrupted, demanded, with a new desperation.
Ophelia didn’t know why, but she wanted to answer them, to tell her name to someone—or maybe something—new. Someone paying attention to her, making her heart race just as she liked to fantasize about. But she didn’t dare answer. This wasn’t a fantasy. No, this was very real. And she knew in certain places, to certain kinds of beings, names held too much power to freely give them away.
“What’s your name?” she countered.
“Ah, good girl.” Something in their tone seemed disappointed despite the praise. “You seem far cleverer than the tourists who’ve tried to sneak in here. Yet you’re out in the dark, all alone. Don’t you know what happens in the dark?”
“The dark is for people who are too cowardly to face their actions in the light,” she automatically responded. It had been something her mother often said.
For a long moment, the stranger was silent, chirping crickets the only sound in the night. Ophelia might have started to wonder whether they had left, if not for the unmistakable warmth still engulfing her. And she knew she must be losing her mind for thinking that warmth felt… nice. For wanting to linger there just a little longer, to not be utterly, hopelessly, alone.
“You should hurry and find wherever you belong,” they finally said, a hint of warning in their tone. “This isn’t a place you want to be.”
“Then why are you here?” she asked. “And who are you? Why can’t I see you?”
“None of those are the right questions.”
She narrowed her eyes at the empty space in front of her. “What is?”
The stranger’s breath was next to her ear as they whispered, “How does one escape from here?”
She swore her heart was going to burst from her chest at those words, but she still didn’t heed the warning bells in her mind, feet staying firmly in place. She was too intrigued. The touch she’d felt on her chin a moment ago now trailed along her jawline and down the side of her neck, to the crook of her shoulder, and she shivered.
“What do you mean, escape?” she rasped.
“I thought you knew where you were?” the voice questioned.
“Isn’t this the old cathedral—” she began, but before she could finish her sentence, the realization hit her. There was a quiet laugh from the stranger as she finally peeled herself away and scrambled to wedge herself back out of the gates.
The wards. The missing church. The crowd they’d passed earlier in the motorcar. The whispered rumors. The news article.
She stepped backward until her eyes could finally make out the image through the fog as if her realization had pulled back a veil covering her eyes.
A calamitous, Gothic estate.
The wrought-iron gates that stood at the start of the driveway were at least twenty feet tall. The bars were woven with metal vines spiked with thorns and embellished with onyx roses. Above the left gate, the letters “PHAN” were written in metal, a “T” sat in the middle where the two doors parted, and “ASMA” was written out above the right gate.
Phantasma.
The Devil’s Manor. A place often spoken about in whispered rumors and haunting cautionary tales in the dark.
Beyond the gates, which had been too crowded by nosey tourists before, sat the most expansive mansion Ophelia had ever seen. It was something out of the Gothic fantasy novels she’d read by candlelight in Grimm Manor’s library, with menacing black spires that pierced the sky like needles, and east and west wings so long she didn’t see how someone could live there without getting lost. The entire exterior was obsidian, so dark that even the live oaks that lined the grounds out front seemed to be leeched of color.
“Go home,” the stranger advised. “A house of Devils is no place for an angel like you.”
The way they continued to call her angel made her think they were teasing her.
And maybe she should have just heeded their warning and walked away. Maybe she should have been a lot more terrified than she was. But all she could think about was that, for now, she wasn’t alone, and she wanted to linger in that feeling for as long as she could.
“Are you stuck here?” she asked.
No answer. She’d take that as a yes.
“Is there some way I can help you?” She swore the heat emitting from the stranger turned up tenfold.
Their next words were slow, deliberate. “Do you really care to know?”
“I did ask,” she stated. “It’s my job. To help Apparitions, I mean.”
“And what if helping me would cause you harm?” the stranger posed. “Would you still be willing to assist me then?”
She stood there for another moment, debating, before her feet made the decision for her. Teasing or not, the stranger had been right—she needed to go. To put as much distance between herself and this place as she possibly could.
As she trailed away, she heard one last sultry whisper.
“A heart and a key would set me free,” it said. “But you should hope we do not meet again, angel.”
