Chapter One
The Power of Christ Compels You
I arrive in Caligo Harbor on a Friday afternoon, windswept and half-damp from the cramped boat ride over. The trees bleed orange and yellow with rot, and the wind carries the scent of their decay across the chopping Atlantic, its gradual fade from autumn into winter imminent. Cool, crisp air cuts at my skin, but not enough to ossify through marrow.
All I bring is a single suitcase and my cat. A week, I’ve told myself. A week to clear the house of her things, to get her affairs in order, and I would return to the vestige of a life I’ve managed to carve out for myself and pretend the island that decomposing house buried in the trees never existed. I’d sell it off to the highest bidder, or let the ocean take it back, whichever happened first.
As I enter the home I haven’t seen in half a decade, the ground below me shifts. It seems Caligo Harbor has welcomed me back. Like it knew I was returning home, as if such a thing exists for me. I searched for it in men and women, in lofty attempts at love and forced kinship, but no other siren song hums for my blood and bone quite like Caligo. The island’s isolation leaves me yearning for something I haven’t found. But she always unfurls herself, beckoning me back to the house along the rocks, surrounded by trees that kiss the shore. Nestled halfway between Boston and Portland, the island sinks deeper into the ocean each year in a slow, torturous death. Once a vibrant tourist venue in decades past, it’s lost its lustre as buildings erode from salt wind. Tides creep in closer each year, flooding the main road with swirling murky waters, and as they retreat, reclaim more of the island for itself.
In the years since I’ve left, the house has only fallen into more disrepair. The taste of the salt sea still lingers on my tongue from a childhood spent in a wuthering cedar shake home, three stories of creaking floorboards and an attic bedroom, the wind howled into each night.
A mouse scampers across the floor, wind clicking the door closed behind me as I’m swallowed into the belly of the house. Mud and wet sand stick to my boots, and I can hear the echo of Mom’s tutting at the mess in her entryway. Sunwashed wallpaper line the walls, fading in the traces of sun that burst through the windows, dull and peeling at the edges where it’s met years of repainted crown moulding. Dust accumulates on the collection of tchotchkes collected during trips to the Cape and New York. Silence cements me to the floorboards, reminding me that I am the final heartbeat of this house.
Traces of grief wait with cruel patience while the house I grew up in draws in its last pathetic breath—readying it for a death of its own. It manifests as a plague that settles into the crumbling stone foundation. Leaks from the ceilings and drench the moisture-stained walls. Curls the wallpaper and warps the floorboards and hails me a cab back to its front fucking door.
Poe, my snub-nosed cat, meows from her carrier, her claws scratching at the mesh.
“Oh, sorry, girl,” I mutter, reaching down to unzip the flap.
She bustles out, quick to disappear behind a piece of furniture in the front parlor. I know I won’t see much of her for another few hours, or at least until she’s heard the pop of a wet food can.
My feet drag up two flights of stairs to the attic, settling into my old bedroom, the walls now a bleached shade of neon green, far from the bright, putrid color it once was. Wispy sheer curtains billow with a chill through a cracked-open window. It takes most of my strength to push the rail shut, the sash lock fastening with a groan. I pause and wonder how long it’s been since Mom has been up here. Weeks, months, years?
Nothing seems out of place—my high school diploma still hangs crooked, collecting dust on the wall, surrounded by old Polaroids and photobooth strips of the friends who had all moved on from me, some of their names long forgotten in yearbooks and old letters. The bed is neatly made, and I can smell the damp musty duvet from where I stand across the room. Black mold has sprouted in the corner of the ceiling where rain would sometimes drip in during a storm, and a plastic beach pail still sits there, filled with dirty rainwater.
The room feels like a mausoleum—cold, hollow, barren—despite being full of everything I’ve left behind. It feels less like a museum of myself and more like a shrine of what I’ve spent a childhood trying to convince everyone I was.
Normal. Sane. Kind. Obidient.
Posters cover up the holes where my fist met drywall. The box with a half dozen blades pried from shaving razors remains wedged in the hidden spot between my mattress and headboard. All of the hidden relics of my youth remain, veneered behind that grotesque shade of green.
I move to the single framed photo that sits atop my dresser—of me and Dad, his arm wrapped tightly around my shoulders. Twin blue eyes and lopsided dimples, standing with our backs to the Atlantic. I wipe the dust from the glass, clearing his face but letting the dust gather over mine.
Desperate for a piece of him, I descend to the main level of the house for the one place I know I can still find him. My hand freezes on the doorknob to the basement. I haven’t been down there since Mom packed away his things and buried them like a secondary coffin. I thumb for the locket around my neck, the last and only remaining piece I have of him, to find my chest bare. It’s likely fallen off, tangled somewhere in my scarf and jacket.
Darkness stretches the length of the staircase, longer than the seventeen steps should have accounted for. It seems endless, dust clouds rising as the lightbulb at the bottom of the stairs hisses and pops to life on a pull chain. His boxes sit in the far corner by the furnace, slumped over and wilted with time and moisture. Half are molded, the others caked with dust. The rotten cardboard has been made habitable by the spiders and other pests of the household. In a way, it’s just another kind of tomb—soil and stone swapped for dust and concrete.
Just as I lift the flap of the topmost box, a shuffling rebounds behind me. I turn to see nothing but an elongated shadow. With nowhere to hide myself, I squeeze into the narrow gap behind the staircase as the shadow begins to take a human form. A low voice huffs, throat clearing as a body materializes under the lightbulb’s glow. A tall man shakes off an invisible dust from his black shirt and tidies a swath of dark curly hair before taking the first step onto the staircase. Our eyes catch between the spaces in the risers, his tan face paling.
“You can see me?” In the light, his eyes are an icy grey, a stark contrast to the dark of his skin.
I choke on words my brain can’t find. How has this man just appeared in front of me? “Of course I can see you.”
Pacified by my answer, he sidesteps the stairs and moves closer to me. I curl further into myself and away from him. He holds up his hands, palms facing forward—a peace offering. “You just startled me. I wasn’t expecting anyone else here.”
“I startled you? You’re in my goddamn house.”
He quirks a brow. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize—”
“How did you even get in?” I ask, as if I haven’t just seen him form in front of my very eyes.
The man offers a hand. “Where are my manners?” He begins. “I’m Grim.”
I screw a hand through the gap in the boards and let it fall into his. “Seph.”
“Short for anything?”
“Persephone.”
He snorts. “Don’t hear that every day.”
“Don’t hear Grim every day.”
He tenses, slipping his hand from mine. “It’s a family name.”
Quiet settles between us as Poe’s tip-tapping toes land on the steps. Grim reaches out a hand to swipe down her spine, and she trills with an arch of her spine.
“How long have you been hiding out here?” He asks, slinking alongside the staircase, inching closer to me. “I’ve never seen you when I’ve passed through before.”
I step out from where I’ve wedged myself, back into the belly of the basement. “What do you mean hiding out? This is my mother’s house.”
He grins, and it’s truly a stunning thing to behold, but I keep my wits. “I thought you said it was your house.”
“It is now. She’s dead.”
“Aren’t you?”
I scoff. “What?”
He wets his lips and looks between us like I’m missing the punchline to a very funny joke. “The only way you can see me is if you’re…”
I push past him and turn for the stairs, taking them two at a time to the main level. Turning right, I run in the direction of Mom’s bedroom. Flinging open the door, silently cursing her for never owning a gun, I see it. Above her bed, as it has hung since the day Pastor St. Perran saved her through the power of Jesus Christ, is a small wooden cross. Leaping onto the four-poster bedframe, I rip it from the wall just as Grim steps through the doorway.
Hurling it across the room with all my strength, it manages to hit him square in the forehead. “OW! What the hell?” He groans, rubbing at the blooming red spot.
“The power of Christ compels you!” I screech, trying to remember the slightest modicum of religion that had been indoctrinated into me in Mrs. Elwood’s Sunday School classes.
Grim rolls his eyes, folding his arms across his broad chest. “Oh my God.”
I leap from the bed, nicking an old bible from the nightstand, and reach for a bottle of holy water Mom always swears is Pope-blessed—or so claimed the cashier from a souvenir shop at the Rome airport.
“Don’t make me use these!” I threaten, gesturing both the weathered book and the plastic bottle at him.
He has the audacity to look both entertained and daring as he steps forward, hands buried in the pockets of his slacks. “I mean you no harm, Seph. Not that I could harm you.”
Uncapping the bottle, I splash him with its contents. To my dismay, he does not immediately begin to sizzle and burn, but instead does something much worse: laugh.
In return, I throw whatever comes upon my path: an old copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul, a pair of fuzzy slippers, lacy toss pillows, a framed autographed portrait of Julie Andrews.
He growls, his amusement diminishing as quickly as it had come on. “That’s enough, Seph.” Grim’s gaze grows dark as holy water drips from the frame of curls haloing him and onto the sharp lines of his face. For extra protection, I slip rosary beads around my neck.
He groans, massaging his temples. “That’s not even how you use a rosary—”
“I don’t care,” I snap. Mom always warned me about demons. I didn’t think they were real, just her way of keeping me from dating. “What are you and why are you here?”
Wiping the water from his face with exaggerated care, he inches closer, moving languidly like a cat stalking its prey—calculated yet stagy. I can’t tell if he’s tepid over my next move, or if he’s just mocking me.
He presses his hand to his chest, face molding into something unsettlingly tender as silence stretches to tension between us. I recognize the look—the unsettled calm—it’s the way waves look just as they’re about to break at the shoreline. He closes the space between us, and I’m increasingly disgusted by the look on his face. It’s pensive, honest, perhaps even delicate. The mask of his bravado melts away, and left behind is a rawness that makes my skin crawl. It’s my least favorite look to receive—empathy.
“If you can see me, it means you’re dead,” he pauses for a moment, waiting for my reaction. When I don’t give him one, he continues. “Do you…not know that?”
I press my lips together. This guy is so full of shit. Seeing ghosts I can believe, but being dead, I can not. Turning away, I move toward my mother’s desk, looking over the last things she looked through: overdue bills, a calendar with today’s date circled on it. With Grim’s attention facing away, I slip a sharp letter opener up my sleeve and wander back to him.
The sun sets somewhere behind the Atlantic. It’s always been a beautiful thing to watch. It happens so quickly that to catch it at this perfect moment is a rare gift of Caligo. I take the moment and breathe it in. Grim turns to face me, releasing a heavy sigh.
“You can remove the weapon from your sleeve.” He offers up a fleshy palm to me.
Just as he does, I plunge the sharp end of the opener through his skin. Horror trickles through me when he does not bleed. Instead, he simply stands there, looking mildly inconvenienced as he inspects the instrument now wedged through the center of his palm. Our eyes meet for a flash, my mouth snapping quickly open then shut like a fish out of water. The faint squelch as he extracts it from the bloodless wound makes me gag.
“Would you like this back?” He offers.
Embarassed, I reach for it. “Yes, please.”
Before my fingers touch the metal, he’s wrapped his arms around me, turning me around and pressing my back into his chest, the tip of the opener now aimed warningly against my bare skin.
I stomp on his foot. “You dead piece of shit!”
When I shift to try and bite or scratch him, he thrusts the blade through my chest. It tickles—a featherlight brush against my insides. Not a single drop of blood collects at the wound. Grim releases me, and I stumble from his grasp. As I pull the at the hilt, I dry heave at the gurgling sound it makes while being wrenched free.
“Fuck,” I whine, staring down at the gaping hole in my chest cavity.
“Fuck, indeed.”