‘Hereditary Apparitions’

Kate Jarvis

In her dream, Julia Morton has escaped. She wakes too soon, feverish hot and snared tight in the tangled sheets of her sickbed.

She wrenches up at a sharp angle, mucus in her throat, clogging and stopping and swallowing up her breath. She hacks at it, a drowning sensation overwhelming her, bringing instinctual, animal panic. Then Mother is there, patting her back, speaking in that insistent, matronly tone. The mucus dislodges, lands on her clean white sheets and stares up at her. A yellow stain.

Julia can breathe, but there’s no relief.

She slumps back, before Mother is folding her forward again, plumping her pillows, propping her up like a rag doll. Mother fusses around like a bluebottle, fetching clean water and damp cloths and a new sheet, and speaking to herself because they both know Julia is too exhausted to respond.

Julia settles back against her pillows, guilty for her disappointment at not being dead yet.

The excitement is soon over, giving way to the monotony of the patient’s chamber. Heavy curtains are drawn against the midday sun, too cheerful for any of the inmates to bear. Instead the room is lit by scattered lamps, casting a false, cold light and deepening the shadows in the far corner.

It’s the shadows Julia blames for her paranoia, her hallucinations.

Faces— no, eyes. Dark and crazed and always watching.

There are plenty of comforting excuses for the things she sees in the shadows. Her long illness. Her deteriorating vision. Her extensive catalogue of daily medications. Her general state of fear and fatigue.

It’s happening now, and Julia is trying very hard to ignore it.

It is a rattling breath behind her, so real she feels she could turn and see someone there. It is her most common hallucination. The invisible nursemaid, who watches over her even more relentlessly than Mother.

Julia closes her eyes, but that missing sense just makes the breathing louder. She holds her own breath for a few long seconds, but no. It’s not her. When her breath stops, the nursemaid’s goes on.

Finally, unable to resist any longer, she tilts her head— up, up, up.

Nothing.

Dreaming comes next. This one is worse than usual; it brings no release. A cautionary tale that hits too close. It gives a face and a body and a shrill, desperate voice to a name she’s been familiar with for most of her life. Her unconscious mind ought to be congratulated; Lord Morton really does resemble the portrait hanging in Father’s study. A lean man with the Morton looks. Dark, curling hair. Dark eyes. A stern, solid, aristocratic chin.

In her dream, Henry Morton is sicklier than his portrait lets on. The artist had been kind. He’s thin, not lean, and looks as if a strong breeze might blow him down. His face is sharper— haggard and shadowed and ashen. His dark hair sticks to the sweat on his brow, and is matted in the back, as if he’s been lying down a very long time.

In her dream, Henry Morton promises to tell her the truth, then tells her a ghost story.

A warning. A baton race stretching generations, centuries.

He tells her to listen, tells her to leave.

Julia wakes, blinking at the bright sunlight leaking in beneath her curtains.

Very deliberately, she does not look at the shadowy corner beside her wardrobe.

She tells herself it’s not the dream driving her out of doors that afternoon, when she asks the part-time nurse to wheel her out in the chair. Alyssa walks up from the village four days a week, to give Mother a rest and pretend to be Julia’s friend.

In the shade of a great oak , Julia watches the sprawling red brick-manor. She stays put until dusk has fallen, damp and dim, upon the lawn, watching the wide windows, as if she might glimpse something moving there that ought not to move.

When she is assisted back indoors, she tries to conceal the ridiculous panic nesting like wasps in her ribcage. She longs to stay out beneath the wide, cold sky, but says nothing; does not resist when Alyssa manoeuvres her back into bed, pulling the covers up high and fretting over the chill evening, the absurdity of having stayed out so long.

Eventually, Julia can keep her eyes open no longer. Fearful of dreams, she slips into darkness, hoping that whatever she sees will be forgotten by the time she wakes.

Morning comes quick, jolting her awake. Her skin prickles with the sense of eyes upon her, but Mother’s chair is vacant when she turns her head towards it . The quiet is heavy with suspense and she nearly bursts into tears when she realises she’s waiting for something.

Judging by the rapid beat of her pulse, she’s sure it has something to do with Lord Henry Morton.

She could ask to leave, if she thought it would do any good. She could ask to be moved to a little cottage down in the village, with a spare room for a live-in nurse. But she

won’t ask. Mother and Father would never allow it.

She can hear the breath behind her again. It sounds close, closer than it’s ever come before. Her ghosts are growing brave.

Late morning offers some reprieve from the sickroom.

Rain is pressing upon the windowpanes of the manor, prying its way in through absent roof tiles. It will keep them all inside today, like bugs in jars. Julia is nervous, noticeably so. She can’t help wondering what else is trapped inside with her.

When Mother’s attempts to soothe do no good, she passes her along to Father in the study. It’s uncomfortably warm, all four walls insulated with heavy, leather-bound tomes.

Father is looking over the ancestry documents when Mother parks the chair up alongside the desk. He looks up at them as though he’d forgotten they existed. Julia paws gently at a few pages, feigning interest. The last thing she wants is to stumble across anything involving Lord Henry. Naturally, his name jumps out at her on the closest document.

A scanned letter, penned in 1841 by Sylvia Morton, the mother of dream-hopping Lord Henry. It tells, in a clipped, cursory manner, of her son’s passing. His heart had stopped in the night. He had been found in the morning. It had been a solace to know that his death had been peaceful. After a short, painful life, even his mother had evidently felt it a relief when he was gone and they were, all of them, free.

Father has not noticed Julia’s hands shaking. She looks away, folding her hands in her lap.

This is how Father copes. She can almost sympathise. It must be difficult, living with a daughter condemned to such sickness by his own bad genes. His only child, too. Julia watches him, and he makes admirable attempts to include her. She doesn’t understand it, personally. Her

family history is not something she has ever wanted to look at too closely. It’s too much like looking into the future.

Lord Henry had been a healthy child. So had she. Lord Henry had fallen abruptly ill in early adolescence. So had she. Lord Henry had never truly recovered from that first episode, and with each repeat, he had only become worse, only grown weaker, less capable of convalescence. She’d been just the same. Against her will, her gaze returns to Sylvia Morton’s letter. It’s too soon to say, but she feels it likely that their deaths will be one and the same, too.

‘Here,’ Father says, holding a small red book out to her. He’d caught her looking and, as usual, he’d misunderstood. She takes it automatically, turning it over in her hands. There is no title, no author. There’s ice in her veins when she flips to the inside cover and reads, ‘Property of Lord Henry Morton’, written in smooth, faded ink. A journal. She nearly drops it.

Her hands are shaking again. She returns them to her lap, the book with them. Its blank red cover stares back at her, like a warning twice given.

It is hours later when she finds the strength to read. She skips to the final entry, and soon wishes she hadn’t.

I feel eyes on my back, on my face, Lord Henry writes, his hand becoming increasingly unsteady. I wake and feel those eyes— invisible eyes. They come too close. I lie in my bed all day long. My strength has abandoned me, I cannot even stand. My legs will not hold me. I only wait. Wait for it to happen. I lie here and I feel those eyes and I feel it coming closer and closer and closer and clos—

A blot of ink, then nothing. Clos, orphaned in the middle of the page, with only blank, pocked parchment to follow.

Chilled to her bones despite the stifling heat of her weighted blankets, Julia feels her skin prickle. Tears sting in her eyes. She can hear that rattling breath, so close.

In the morning, Julia is worse. Mother coddles and Alyssa fusses, but this is all so normal that the finality does not appear to either of them. They are used to the up and down and up again.

Julia is used to it, too, but this time feels different.

The end is creeping up onto her bed, filling her lungs and stiffening her bones, as if rigor mortis is impatient to begin. Crypt fever burns her brow, even as it freezes her fingers and toes.

Closer and closer and closer and clos—

She falls asleep, her medications too strong to resist, and later wakes to an almost empty room. Mother is gone, Alyssa gone too. Father has not visited yet. It is something so abundantly Other that stands at the foot of her bed.

Even as it horrifies, it is familiar. This presence has long been known to her, despite never having seen it. She’s felt its eyes. She’s heard its breath.

Nightmare made tangible, flickering between transparency and solidity, watching her with a pair of dark Morton eyes, set deep into its wasted, chalk-white face. It is just the kind of face she would have envisioned for her invisible nursemaid, if she’d ever been brave enough to consider.

Julia cannot move, cannot even flinch, as the creature reaches a hand towards her.

It comes closer, closer, closer, until— very abruptly, it is over. Julia feels something like a pinch, like a twisting pain in her side, and then she notices that she is not where she’d been a moment ago. She is outside of herself now, watching as another spirit flickers behind her closed eyelids.

The grandfather clock on the landing is striking one o’clock and Julia’s mother is coming up the stairs to check on her daughter, who has been dead since thirty-six minutes past twelve. The body is cooling rapidly beneath the sheets, and the eyes are closed, as though her final moments had been

peaceful. As though she had slipped away in the midst of a sweet dream.

A spirit did leave the manor at thirty-six minutes past twelve. It drifted up through her ribcage like vapour, but it was not Julia Morton.

In the deep shadow between the wardrobe and the wall, Julia Morton rocks back and forth in her own arms, a strange coldness spreading from the place where her heart used to beat. Her mind drifts further every day and, while she still can, she wonders how long she will be able to resist the frenzied, rising desire to push someone from their body and take it for herself.