Story Series | Chapter Six

Chapter Six | Now

The next few hours dance by in a bokeh film reel, and after meandering a few blocks down the inky-black Seine, Jay hails a taxi that’s willing to stow Audrey’s bike in the back and they enjoy a bumpy ride back to Montmartre, still talking spiritedly to each other. Audrey can’t remember the last time she kept a conversation going for this long and shushes her ever-hovering anxiety that she’ll soon run out of things to talk about. She feels like she could just as easily say nothing to this guy, for hours and hours, and still be content. 

Jay carefully hauls Audrey’s bike and all her new treasures out of the van and she pays the driver. 

“Home again, home again,” he says, wheeling the bike to the front gate while Audrey unlocks it. Next door, the cabaret reverberates with muted songs and cheers. Audrey ushers him into her darkening courtyard. 

“So, there’s not much to see out here yet, but I want to plant a garden and get some sort of patio set,” she explains, gesturing here and there, and he nods as he follows her to the front door. They stop at the door and Audrey unlocks it. But before twisting the knob, she glances at Jay; he’s staring up at the house, and in the twilight its silhouette is perfectly reflected in his large eyes. There’s something like wariness on his face.

“It seems to give people the heebie-jeebies,” Audrey says with a resigned sigh. 

Jay blinks hard and shakes his head, embarrassed. “No, I think it’s cool. How old did you say it is?”

“I think somewhere near a hundred and fifty years?” Audrey opens the door, steps inside to turn on the light, then peers back out, beckoning him inside. He rolls her bike over the threshold. She takes it from him and leans it against the exposed brick wall next to the front door. 

“Wow,” she hears him say. 

Audey shuts and locks the door and turns to look at her guest. He’s standing a few paces away, gawking in all directions with his hands in his pockets. 

“This looks, like, not abandoned at all,” he says, whirling around to stare wide-eyed at her. “I can’t believe you just moved in. It feels so homey.” 

Audrey grins. She wonders if he’s just trying to compensate for his brief apprehension out in the courtyard, but the childish wonder in his eyes as he continues to do a 360-degree scan of the space assures her he really does like it.

“I’m sorry about the smell though,” Audrey says, sniffing the air and disappointed to discover that despite leaving the windows open all day, it still smells musty. “My first night here I made the mistake of turning on the furnace because it was weirdly cold in here. But the furnace reeked, so I turned it off and now it’s both stinky and cold.”

Jay laughs. “I barely noticed. But hey, if you’re cold — is that fireplace in commission?”

Since they’re both feeling brave enough for it, they decide to try and make a fire in the hearth. Audrey opts not to mention the recent kitchen-sink inferno, but has no reason to worry — even drunk, Jay knows how to build a fire with the wanest of supplies. After collecting a pile of twigs from the very dead foliage in the courtyard and breaking down a bunch of the empty cardboard boxes, he’s managed to summon a modest blaze in the old grate. 

“And now, ma’am, if you’ll point me in the direction of your modem…”

Audrey points to the box that was delivered this morning. “Enjoy. I’ll grab us drinks. Pinot grigio okay?”

“Very okay.” 

Audrey steps up into the kitchen and opens the cupboard to find her most prized wine-drinking goblets. 

“So, they said you had to install this yourself?” Jay asks over his shoulder. 

“Yeah,” Audrey says, uncorking one of the bottles she bought the other night. “They said this address is only eligible for self-install. And I said fuck you.” 

“You did not.”

“No, I did not.”

“Well, that’s really weird,” Jay says. “I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t just do the thing for you.”

“Yeah, well.” Audrey picks up the tray she’s prepared — two full glasses and some charcuterie — and traipses over to where he’s tinkering with the modem. “Oh, look at you. Are you done already?”

“Almost,” he says. 

She places the tray on the ottoman and nestles in beside him, watching him work.

“There,” he says after a moment. “Should be good now. You can set up your WiFi on your phone, on that app…”

“Great.”  

Jay adjusts his position, turning to face her. 

“Wine by the fire,” he says, nodding, impressed, looking from the plate to the fire and then to her. His eyes widen suddenly, staring somewhere over her shoulder — Audrey feels a zap of terror — What the fuck is behind me? — but then his face splits in a juvenile grin. 

“Is that a gramophone?” he asks, like he doesn’t believe what he’s seeing. 

“Oh,” Audrey breathes, twisting to peer at the old machine behind her. She forgot she’d perched it on a table by the fireplace. “Yep, that is a gramophone. Emphasis on the grandma.” 

Jay is already scrambling over to it. “Look at this thing.” 

“It was my dad’s. It’s older than Moses, but it works. Records do tend to skip more than they usually would, but I like it for the aesthetic alone, to tell you the truth.”

“Well, it does fit with the charm of your 150-year-old house.” Jay bends over the crates of records collected at its base and sifts through her music collection for a few minutes, voicing his praise every three records or so. Soon, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska starts to seep quietly out of the old machine. 

“Very nice,” she says as he settles back down on the carpet across from her, his back against the ottoman and hers against the chair, their legs splayed. 

“Sorry I don’t have a couch yet,” she says, as he hands her a wine glass. 

“Hey, at least you have a house.” 

“And you said you’re staying with your mom at the hotel until you both find apartments?”

“Correct.”

“Nice. What’s she doing tonight?”

“Oh, probably this, but with some long-lost friend,” Jay says, smiling into the fire. He pauses. “Or maybe a new one.” He shrugs and sips his wine. 

“I like her already. What does she do for a living?” Audrey asks, cocking her head. 

“She’s a writer.”

Audrey sputters in her glass of wine. Wiping her mouth, she exclaims, “My dad was a writer! What does she write?”

“Self-help books. Non-fiction.”

“Ah.”

“And your dad?”

“He was a horror novelist. Not quite the same thing.”

“Not quite, but damn. That’s pretty cool. Wait.” His eyes bulge. “Beaufille. Beau—Jonah Baufille?” 

Audrey just chuckles.

“Oh, my God. No way.” Jay shakes his head in amazement. “Your dad was Jonah Beaufille?”

“Yup.” She reaches behind her and grabs her dad’s autobiography from the side table where she left it this morning. She tosses it to him, and he examines it, wide-eyed. 

“Jesus Christ. I’ve read a few of his books. Midnight Hour had me terrified of basements for like, five years. And his movies…” He trails off, peering around the living room, his eyes alight with renewed wonder. Then he flashes her a crooked grin. “I mean, the money makes sense, then.”

Audrey lifts her glass in acknowledgement. 

“I think our fire needs something,” Jay says now, hoisting himself to his feet. “Any more boxes we can throw on there?”

Audrey nods at the diminished pile in the centre of the room. “Grab one. We’ll empty it and I’ll put it all away later.”

As Springsteen continues to croon, Jay picks up a random box and hauls it back over to their rug by the fire. 

“Which one is that?” Audrey asks curiously. Jay turns the box around to find the scribbled label. Upon finding it, he cackles. 

“What?” Audrey asks, laughing with him. “What is it?”

Jay turns the box so she can see the markered words: “DAD’S GHOST SHIT.”

“Oh, God,” Audrey says, rolling her eyes, but Jay is still snickering. 

“I mean, do you mind if we open ‘er up?” he asks. 

“Go ahead,” she says. “It’s just a bunch of toys.”

“Right, toys,” he says, pulling out a Ouija board and lifting his brow at her. 

“It is a toy!” 

Jay places the board on the floor and continues digging in the box. Audrey watches him, amused. 

“So, did your dad actually use this stuff?” Jay asks as he unearths what looks like a remote control. 

“I don’t think so,” Audrey says with a shrug. “He mainly had them in case he ever needed to reference them in his books.”

Jay is pointing the remote at the fire. “What is this thing?”

“It’s a — oh, what’s it called — a Safe Range EMF. It’s to detect electromagnetic fields, but some whackos use it to detect ghosts.”

“Cool,” Jay breathes, now pointing it at Audrey. 

“Picking up some special signals there, are you?” 

“Some.” He puts the gadget down next to the Ouija board and peers back into the box. “So, did your dad actually believe in ghosts?”

Audrey sighs. “I don’t think so.” 

“You don’t know for sure?”

“I mean, he started writing scary stories when he was a little kid,” Audrey says. “But I don’t think he ever considered ghosts were real until my mom died when I was a baby.”

Jericho’s eyes widen, and Audrey smiles. 

“Not like he ever saw her floating by his bedside or anything,” Audrey says. “Nothing like that. No, I think after that, he just always hoped that spirits lived on around us in some way. But he never saw any proof. At least not that he shared with me, and he told me everything.” She pauses, glancing into the shadows of the house he’d secretly purchased. 

“Almost everything?” Jericho offers, and Audrey looks at him again. She shrugs. 

“Almost everything,” she agrees. 

Jericho looks from the pile of ghost hunting gear to the now empty box. Then he picks it up and starts breaking it down while Audrey fills their glasses yet again. 

“You trying to get me drunk?”

“Are you not already?”

Jericho just smirks into the fire as he places the cardboard in the flames, which immediately liven up. Then he sits back, his arms wrapped around his folded legs, his large eyes flickering as he stares into the blaze.

“Well, I’m sure he would have wrung at least one freaktastic story out of this place,” Jericho says, the cheerfulness returning to his deep voice.

Audrey chuckles. “I was thinking that the other day.”

“Why don’t you take a stab at it?”

Audrey nearly snorts her wine. “What, writing? Yeah, sure.”

“Seriously!”

Audrey shakes her head, tries to smile, but just stares into the fireplace, watching “DAD’S GHOST SHIT” spark and furl into oblivion. 

“I could never write a manuscript. I don’t have the patience. Or the spelling skills. I couldn’t do what my dad did.” She stares down into her wine. 

“I know we just met,” she hears Jericho reply, “but you give me the impression that you could do anything you wanted to do.”

Audrey looks back up at Jay and meets his twinkling eyes. She wonders how many more times they’ll have to lock gazes before they start making out. 

Maybe it’s the wine, but she really wasn’t expecting this — to feel. Let alone to feel good. Not yet, not tonight. But really, she reasons with herself as Jay takes another sip of his drink, his eyes still on hers over the rim of his glass — she’s in Paris. If she’s going to experience anything on her first weekend here, it’s emotion.

She puts her glass down and crawls over to him. 

***

“Can’t say I’ve ever done that on a spiral staircase before,” Jay laughs breathlessly, accepting the joint Audrey just rolled and lit. 

“I doubt anyone ever has.”

It’s 3:00 a.m., and the two are lying naked on the sad, deflated plastic bed in the middle of her room.

“Sorry about your air mattress.” He hands her back the joint. 

“Oh, no,” Audrey replies. “I am sorry about my air mattress.”

They both chuckle. 

“Well, it put up a valiant fight,” he says, expelling smoke through his nostrils and closing his eyes in sleepy serenity. 

“It really did.”

“It just didn’t stand a chance after… after that thing you did…”

“And that way you did that… that other thing…”

There’s a second of silence before they both erupt in snorts of drunken laughter.

“Thanks for coming home with me tonight,” Audrey says, hoping she’s not being too sentimental about it but she also doesn’t really care. “I totally understand if you don’t want to stay here tonight, now that I’ll be sleeping on hardwood.”

“We could make a nest out of all these blankets,” he says, glancing around them. Audrey had unboxed a whole cloud’s worth of spare duvets and pillows in an attempt to compensate for her despairingly empty room. “I’m a master nest-builder, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, well, then,” Audrey says. He’s already sitting up, surveying his materials with his hand gripping his chin thoughtfully. “I’ll get out of your way and get us some waters. Do you want a spare toothbrush, too? I have a few unopened ones…”

“Amazing.”

Audrey puts out the joint in an old teacup, grinding it into the china a bit more aggressively than usual to ensure it’s fully extinguished (she doesn’t want the roach to spontaneously combust again, not tonight, thank you). Then she grunts to her feet and steps over to the door. “Be right back.”

Jay just nods, standing up with two duvets in his arms, a look of serious concentration on his face. 

Downstairs, Audrey steps up into the kitchen and fills a pitcher with water. While the tap runs, she looks past the sink and over at the living room area, at the remnants of their little fireside haven on the floor. Earlier, after about fifteen minutes of ravenously making out on the living room rug, the record had come to its quiet conclusion and their fire had reduced to a smoulder, so they took their time relocating to her slightly more comfortable “bed.” 

Audrey turns off the tap and turns to the fridge. Bending into the cool air, contemplating what colour Gatorade Jay might like, she suddenly feels goosebumps rise on the back of her neck. She pauses, a jolt of panic slicing through her post-sex contentment. But it’s just the fridge, she tells herself. Relax. 

But when she hears a creak behind her, she jumps, smacking her head on the freezer handle. Rubbing her smarting skull, she peers, narrow-eyed, over her shoulder. Again, it was just the house. Night noises. 

Back in the bedroom, Jay is sprawled comfortably over what is, Audrey must admit, an impressively constructed makeshift bed: layers of duvets surrounded by a circumference of pillows. 

“I’m amazed,” Audrey declares.

“As you should be.”

She places the water pitcher next to the bed with some glasses, then tosses two green Gatorades at him, which he fumbles to catch. 

“I took you for a green Gatorade kind of person.”

“That is actually an alarmingly good guess.”

“Also, there are granola bars and Advil somewhere near the head of the bed,” she says, bending over a box to try and unearth the spare toothbrush she’d promised him. “Please find them and consume them so you don’t die tomorrow. Would hate for you to pass away due to the influence of my alcoholism.” 

“Hey, I think we held up pretty well. At least better than you did last night.” 

“Ha, ha.” She tosses him the toothbrush, and he gets up to brush his teeth. When he’s done, Audrey steps into the bathroom to do the same. 

Humming, she brushes her teeth, then splashes some water on her face. But when she glances up at her reflection, she screams. 

“FUCK—”

Someone is standing behind her. 

Half-way through her scream, however, she realizes through the water dripping in her eyes that it’s just Jay. 

“—ING JESUS Christ,” she mutters, her scream swiftly dissolving into a relieved release of breath. She reaches for her towel and dabs her face dry, then turns to glower at him. But he’s not there. 

“Audrey?” his voice comes from the bedroom. “Is everything okay?”

Heart hammering, she turns to see, with another jump, that he’s scrambling towards her from the bed, looking alarmed. 

“What? What happened?” he asks, leaning on the doorjamb and peering around the bathroom warily. 

Audrey looks at him for a moment, then narrows her eyes and makes a rude noise. 

“Oh, good one,” she snaps, flicking off the bathroom light and walking past him into the bedroom. 

“What?” he asks again. 

She just rolls her eyes to meet his as she steps into the nest and crawls under the covers. “Sorry, but despite the scream, I really don’t scare that easy.”

Jay contemplates this for a moment, then shrugs sleepily. “All right.” Then he kneels next to her, kisses her earnestly, and buries himself in the covers next to her. Minutes later, they’re asleep in each other’s arms.