The Ghost of Providence

Chapter One

Corbyn

Cannonballing into shallow waters could scare anyone, but to Corbyn, there really wasn’t anything quite as exhilarating — the water’s gentle, giddy grip against his blistered soles and sun-beat skin; the tiniest thrill of danger, wondering if he would land on some pointed rock or mushy riverbed; and the feel of his hair, knotted and sweat-slicked, as it came undone with each shake of his wet head afterward. Oh, that feels amazing, he shuddered in the water.

“Corbyn, you’re getting my clothes all wet!” His friend’s shrill complaint echoed from directly below the rock Corbyn dove from on the top-most crevice of riverbed that the season’s rains had failed to fill. The leftover land made for a cozy resting spot somewhere in the middle of a thinned forest, and it was there that the two young men set up for a well-needed break.

The spot was just a small plot of dried mud, with water to its front and bits of clipped and fringed cliffside to its back. Corbyn and his friend, Olivur, had been out prowling the forests south of Corbyn’s home in Brigham, hunting for whatever might fill their bellies since the cock’s first call. They had little to show for it but the grime accrued from long days under summer’s bleating sun. Just as they prepared to return, the two had discovered upon a small inlet of river’s edge that slipped quite deeply, and somewhat beautifully, through the woods they’d been slinking through.

It was transfixing.

The unreachable, twinkling balls of light loomed high in the night sky, enchanting the scene in bits as their shine tumbled through trees, of which lined the river on both sides and fell against the water’s gentle surface. They seemed to prance along the currents like tiny dancing diamonds forgotten by the world.

“Won’t you please get yer’ hoity-toity ass in the water, your grace,” Corbyn laughed with mock servility and a bow as he flourished a river branch with his dipped hand.

Olivur nodded, still working at his boot strings. “Okay, okay, I’m getting in — Hey! Let me take off my jacket before you keep splashing me! My Dad’ll knock me all up if it gets ruined hunting,” the friend exclaimed. Corbyn had shoved handfuls of water the mousy boy’s way while the boy spoke.

He waved Olivur’s complaint away with a hand. “Don’t you whine to me like that,” he chortled. “I know your dad used to hunt with mine, so there’s no point trying to give me the go around.” Corbyn rolled his eyes at the guilty silence. “Just tell me you don’t want to get your fancy coat wet so you can use it to impress some girl and I’ll stop,” he jibed with a chuckle, then ducked a ball of mud aimed for his head.

He dove further into the river’s murky waters to escape his friend’s joking onslaught, though he enjoyed Olivur’s current antics. They were a respite from the awkward quiet the boy liked to revel in.

Olivur was an odd kid. They’d met as boys often did at the urging of their fathers and he’d been a meek and soft-spoken child, unique for a boy of his parentage and very much a different breed from his sister.

The devil, Corbyn shuddered. It happened every time he thought of her, but he quickly got back to thought.

Olivur was a good kid, though he had his flaws. He was sheltered, innocently oval-eyed, and boyishly gullible, a luxury plain to the pampered youths of the hilltop, their wide eyes unmolested by the concept of struggle.

With all that in mind, Corbyn was glad to have known him. Though he felt bad that Olivur’s apparent dependence on him had earned the awkward boy an irksome nickname among some circles. They called him the poor man’s shadow. My Shadow, Corbyn grimaced.

He was just happy to see his friend grow into himself over the summer. The boy carried himself with a little more power and Corbyn appreciated the change.

Still wading below the river’s surface, Corbyn was drawn from his reverie by some sharp sounds from ashore which garbled through the currents like muffled mouths. They sent a shock of trepidation along his spine. The sounds he heard were voices, of course, but what worried him was the number. There was only supposed to be one.

Who's with Olivur?

A few more kicks through the water and Corbyn could finally make out the figure leading the inquiry. He sighed when it turned out to be just who he thought was.

Hugh Lightly, he mentally screamed into the water. Why’d it have to be Hugh ‘fucking’ Lightly?

Corbyn’s back went to sweats. Looking over to his friend, he could tell Olivur felt the same way. If there was any one person in this world that Hugh Lightly hated more than Olivur Harrowbird, they had yet to meet them.

Hugh Lightly was a boy - if you could even call him that - of sixteen years. Three more than the two friends. That doesn’t excuse how huge this fucker is though, Corbyn grimaced. Hugh was of the long, shaggy hair representative of thoroughbreds from the Gully and known to his peers as Huge Hughey for the horrid responsibility his bones bore in holding his massive frame together.

Worst of all was that he was born to a father who hated Olivur’s father and whose grandfather hated Olivur’s grandfather. The Lightlys were the lowest rung of Providence’s caste and rumors were that they’d grown restless with their place in it. People said that the Lightlys were angry at the island for its mysterious inescapability, upset with the Plats for all their platitudes and hollowed promises, but for some reason, they held a special place of hatred in their hearts for the Harrowbird family.

We aren’t going to get out of this, Corbyn accepted with a sigh.

Slogging through shallow water with mud-slick boots, stumbling doing so, and grumbling all the while, Hugh stepped away from his place below the treeline to approach Olivur, his posse of two in tow.

“Shit,” Corbyn exclaimed beneath his breath, kicking his legs along to reach the oncoming disaster before it happened.

“Answers me, Shadow! Eh?” Hugh leered, edging closer and closer to his friend. “You’s a far a’ways from ‘ome on the Plats, ya’ know. What’s ya’ doin’ out ‘ere?” He looked to the makeshift spears, impromptu campfire, and leathered bags Corbyn and Olivur had brought out with them to kill and store deer.

He grew an aggravated snarl across his chipped teeth. Jutting his massive thumb in Olivur’s direction, he roared, “You huntin’ out ‘ere? In our home? You filthy fuckin’ Harrowbird!”

Olivur cursed beneath his breath but only glared at the trio. He was without an excuse. Hugh was right about one part: Hunting near the Gully wasn’t against any written law, per se, but for Plats to do so for sport broke a taboo. The Gully was poor enough as it was, it didn’t need the well-off siphoning one of their main food sources as well.

Finally reaching cragged land, Corbyn moved to step in between the two parties and settle the dispute amicably. “Relax, Hugh. Olivur’s with me. We didn’t find any deer and, even if we had, it would have been for my Da’ to sort. It wouldn’t have been for sport. You know our family. We’re cousins.”

“Yer Da’ is Gully, yer right ‘bout that much. He grew up wit’ ma own Da’ and married ma aunt,” Hugh admitted, “But you went Plat when you decided to go to school inland wit’ this Harrowbird shit ‘stead a’ us,” Hugh growled, his drunken edge lilting his accent to a higher pitch and aggression than it already had, an accent Corbyn had worked hard to chip away at over the years. It had taken longer than he’d care to admit, but it was time well spent.

Now wondering how to go about extricating himself from where this was going, Corbyn narrowed his eyes and combed his wet hair back and out of sight. It had reached his nose for the first time over the summer and begun to take on a mind of its own: black, loose, and hostage to the wind.

Two on three, he thought, calculating the odds in his head. Well, two on four if you counted Hugh correctly, he frowned. These were odds he'd rather avoid.

Over to the side, Olivur had bound his fists so tightly together that blood had begun to seep through the cracks of his fingers, his nails bore holes through his palms. His entire body seemed to shake as if he were trying to prevent something from coming out.

“Just go, Hugh,” Olivur implored with a whisper, a single note louder than the sound of languid winds pulling down leaves and small branches from trees.

“Please,” he pleaded with a croak.

His friend seemed to be begging, but Corbyn felt he was grappling with something besides a fear of life. It seemed to him that his friend feared for what would happen...but it wasn’t what would happen to himself.

“Who the hell are you talking to, Shadow!?” the boy next to Hugh screeched. Ah, a follower, Corbyn intoned. He’d been having trouble placing a name to a face for the two extras but had just decided the matter wasn’t so important.

Anyone who hides behind another’s name can’t expect their own to be remembered.

Hugh Lightly on the other hand turned apprehensive under Olivur’s warning, which confused Corbyn. His drunken steps had halted a good two yards from the boy, their stumbling gait having sobered to a careful stutter.

“You done it ‘avent you?” he slurred out quietly, still inebriated but bearably so. A glare was coming to shape below his eyebrows. As if he hated Olivur more than he had but a moment ago, his jaw tightened around his plump cheeks and his face began to flush a deep red. “You’s officially a Harrowbird now, eh?”

Olivur struggled to raise his head and meet Hugh’s eyes, but when he did Corbyn saw in them something he didn’t recognize. While that timid, insecure gaze yet remained, there lay a flash of pride now, something that quite literally burned within him.

Where was this confidence coming from, Corbyn wondered, casting a confused glance to his friend of many years. He’d known his friend to have grown more secure over the summer, but he hadn’t expected it would extend to a moment such as this. Any time Olivur had ever had a run-in with Hugh before he’d been quaking in his luxury boots, but now - now, when the mammoth of a man was drunk, when there wasn’t any restraint in his eyes, and when they really might just die - his friend seemed to have grown a spine.

What horrible timing.

While Hugh battled with curious indecision, staring at Olivur but making no sudden movements, his posse held little of their leader’s restraint. One gave a small roar and charged Olivur, the other only steps behind. Though Hugh howled for the two to stop, his drunken compatriots hadn’t heard a thing. By the time Corbyn knew what was going on, the two boys were already upon his best friend. But there was something different about Olivur. He crouched and cowered behind his hands but the tremors that took his body before were gone. He lay still while the two boys attacked him. He showed no fear. His body lay as if in wait for something it knew would save him.

Hugh started toward the scene and yelled to his friends, “Get away from him. Now!” He moved to engage in the flurry with unexpectedly quick steps and an overhand fist aimed towards Olivur’s head. Slamming down with desperate fury, Hugh’s frightening paw was met with leathered hide and thin air, his hand having been caught in one of the hunting bags they had brought along.

“Good thing it was empty, right?” Corbyn smiled from the other side of the leathered bag, his eyes filled with that wild light of youth. He joked, “Though I hadn't expected to bag this kind of meat. It doesn’t seem all that appetizing.”

Hugh growled and moved to push him away, but Corbyn had been prepared for such and kicked his legs out, allowing the momentum to carry him back into the river he’d just come from, dragging the large man along for the ride.

He soon came to regret that decision.

Fighting a heavier opponent was hard. Fighting underwater with someone on top of you was difficult...but fighting in five-foot-deep water while a flailing giant was trying to smother you from above?

Now, that's a bitch.

Corbyn had hoped to swim away faster than Hugh could chase, but hadn’t accounted for the fact that the behemoth might actually be faster than he was in water. In hindsight, he shouldn’t have tried to outswim someone who worked and lived right on the coast. Even fumbling around, the giant caught him in no time. He was not making it easy for him either.

Perhaps it was the lager, maybe it was the desperation, or chances are he just couldn’t multitask - swimming and struggling at the same time was a hard thing to do being that drunk. Either way, Hugh was genuinely killing him. Corbyn was drowning and no amount of strain would make him strong enough to escape.

He looked around below the water’s surface, where the dreamy scape had turned to a hopeless battlefield, and finally found something of use to his situation. The branch he had been using for theatrics earlier was just within reach. He grabbed it and jammed the pointed end into his cousin-killer-to-be with as much force as he could muster. It punctured through skin and the giant bled into the water. The wound led to a momentary respite from his cousin’s grasp, as the ‘boy’ clutched at his side. He looked to the blood and looked back to the perpetrator.

Not happy, Corbyn nodded. Nope, he is not happy at all. He came to recall a particularly fitting idiom as Hugh lunged through the water and took him by the neck.

‘Don’t poke the bear’, they said.

I wish I’d listened.

The two struggled against each other in a furious redoubling. Hugh was vengeful. Corbyn was a mite terrified. The current dragged them along the river without emotional investment, slowly and gradually it took the two a small distance away from where they began.

Contrary to the river, however, Corbyn was feeling quite invested. He struggled under his cousin’s vice grip with such friction and yet it felt as if he were growing colder, not hotter. Everywhere Hugh touched him with his fingers felt as if he were grazing him with an icy wand and those grazed spots were turning stiff with freeze. It was a baffling sensation to Corbyn, who was feeling bitingly cold and desperate.

The futility of his struggles was a cause of fury. Why! Why! Why! He couldn’t understand. He was slowly dying and knew it, but no matter what he tried: it failed. Why! Why! Why! The same question whirled within him like a fire he thought he could feel…

And then he heard a voice.

It crawled around the drums of his ears and bit at his brain like some ghostly snake of yore.

“Calm down. Breathe.” It whispered there into his skull with a seething grate, one ancient and full.

Corbyn looked surprised but did as was instructed. In his mind he really had nothing to lose; so, he calmed down and breathed, in and out, slow and thorough. And with each breath, he felt the cold go. He found that the further he focused, the warmer he felt. It’s getting hotter, even, he thought. It really is.

His body was growing hot. Too hot, he worried. His body burned now. The heat was so vividly physical to him that he thought for a moment that he could actually transpose it to his skin. His hands, taut against Hugh’s chest, felt for a moment to burn across his palms. The sensation extending through his fingers and into the tips below his nails as they dug into the boy’s tattered shirt. The water was cold but Corbyn would swear by anything that he saw the smallest sizzle there along the boy’s clothes, something like paper over a lit candle. He believed it to be his imagination at first. But the faint sound of boiling water and the cover of thin steam across his drooping eyes made him question reality.

Whatever it was, it didn’t last long. The last moment Corbyn remembered was the jarring paradox of being both severely hot and cold, his own yelp, the startled cry of another, and the sudden but welcome escape of a fading consciousness. The diamonds who were joyously dancing underwater moments ago, now gave way to the sight of a black marching band as his eyelids slowly closed over the sight of spotted starlight in the river.

Thank you, ghost, he thought just before it all went out.

***

When Corbyn awoke he did so with a start and sputter, coughing up lungfuls of filth as his head bobbed above water. I’m alive. He could tell that much. All questions of his mortality answered with the agony of cold he currently endured because only life could be so painful.

He sneezed and shivered. His head felt to him like ground-meat, but the harshest torment came from his hands. Inspecting them closer, he found them caked in cuts, blistered, and boiled, moving them to wade above water proved a painful task.

What the hell happened?

Shaking the blur from his vision, Corbyn struggled to swim back until he met a depth he could reach the bottom at and hopped the rest, moving quickly for worry of his friend. When he could finally see the resting spot through the dark, his feet had already met the grit of earth once again. His eyes, however, bobbled in disbelief.

Standing above two bloodied bodies right where Corbyn had left him was his best friend, Olivur. He was staring at what he’d done with shaking legs.

What had he done?

The sound of splashing water attracted both of their attention to Hugh’s arrival on land and Olivur to his own. The eyes his wavering friend cast his way were a complicated jumble. Guilt was plain to see, but there was triumph there as well. Corbyn thought so but he wasn’t sure if it was for what his friend had done...or how he had done them. I for one didn’t understand either.

Hugh scowled and spat towards Olivur, contempt heavy on his lips having seen the shape of his two friends. Seeming to have sobered considerably, he cursed with perfect annunciation. “Damn, Harrowbirds.”

Registering the rebuke, the pride disappeared from Olivur’s eyes, and the boy was left with only his guilt. He lowered his head and apologized. “I’m sorry.”

Hugh’s scowl deepened. “I don’t care fer yer apology! Are they alive or not?” He yelled, gesturing to his friends on the ground.

Olivur nodded, his face still directed to the dirt.

“Then go! I’ll take care of ‘em.”

Olivur nodded once again and turned to leave, but not before turning once more to Corbyn, perhaps to try and explain things. Explain what though, Corbyn may never know. Olivur closed his mouth tight and slunk away before he could get an answer from the boy.

“Stay away from that kid, Corb.”

Corbyn furrowed his brows at Hugh. The lug-of-a-man had busied himself with hoisting his unconscious friends, one over each shoulder, and yet still had the time to harass his own. “Why?” he contended with a frown. “Because he’s rich and you’re not? You want me to stay away from my friend because you are jealous?” He had grown frustrated with how Hugh incessantly harangued Olivur as if it were rightful and just. He was ready to snap.

Hugh paused to look at him thoughtfully, unsure of how to go about his words but appearing compelled to say them. “I don’ hate him ‘cause a that. I don’ really even hate him,” he admitted with a shrug. “I hate his family.”

“Why?” Corbyn wondered aloud given the unique opportunity. It was rare that Hugh would explain anything. So rare that most people weren’t sure whether he was solitary or plain dim.

Hugh clenched his nostrils, having no free hands to do so with. “‘Cause of what they done to mine.”

Corbyn shook his head in disbelief. “Why would they mess with your family?”

“The same reason they’ll mess with you,” the giant said with surety.

The response levied an irritation from Corbyn. “They wouldn’t do anything to me,” he defended, his voice slowly rising at Hugh’s accusations.

“Not yet,” Hugh corrected with a snort. “But then again. They don’t know what you are yet.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This, Corbyn!” Whatever line Hugh had been toeing around with the conversation had frustrated the boy enough to make him howl and pull his shirt down. “This is what I’m talking about!”

Corbyn looked to Hugh’s open shirt and saw what the boy had been referring to with a slack jaw. He hadn’t noticed it before but Hugh’s chest was burned a degree bordering third. Just like his own hands, the boy’s skin was blister-pocked.

“How did you get that?” Corbyn asked, well and truly dumbfounded.

Pulling his shirt back up, Hugh exhaled and looked away. “Just...stay away from the Harrowbirds, Corbyn. They’re bad news.”

Like Olivur, Hugh left him alone in the dark, neither boy explaining the strange events that would come to pervade Corbyn’s life forevermore.

***

When he returned home it was well into the night. Shadows darker than the moonlit roads of Brigham Street stretched hauntingly between buildings and through gabled roofs, peppering the commercial district with a dash of noir, and sheltering all sorts of ghosts and ghouls within their eerie confines.

It’s all in my head, Corbyn’s troubled mind justified to itself. You’re just being paranoid.

He had walked the street he lived on as many times as he’d gone outside, but the quiet that welcomed him that night felt spooky. The various mom-and-pop shops along the road of Brigham displayed their shuttered blinds in ‘closed’ fashion, and even the taverns had locked up and lay abandoned for the night, last call having been hours ago. Corbyn wasn’t sure what he was afraid of in particular, but he had plenty of reason to be scared.

What if a vengeful ghost persuades me to kill my Da'..? Stranger things have happened.

Frightened, Corbyn continued to tiptoe across the cobbled stone as quietly as he could, until his feet reached the front door of one of the middling buildings of the district. Its yellow paint was bright even in the dark.

He let out a sigh of relief as he took in the familiar sight, tears of relief misting the corners of his eyes. Oh, it’s so good to be home.

A resounding boom induced a frightful, cracked yelp from Corbyn’s pubescent lungs as the door he’d been staring at swung outside and nearly cracked his head. “You want to tell me where you’ve been, Corbyn.” Glaring from beyond the frame, his long and dark hair resembling tendriled shadows extending from his eyes of a much lighter brown, stood his father. “You know what time it is, I presume?”

He was a man of unnecessary eloquence for his station in life. A cobbler that spoke like a Plat was an odd juxtaposition, but one that fit the man nonetheless.

Corbyn gave a meek nod beneath his father's scowl, doing his best to present an image of faultless innocence. The man’s scrutiny was invasive, however; it stripped away his facade, settling onto matters quicker than he was prepared for.

“What happened to your hands?” Forgetting all about his tardiness, his father swept him into the fire-lit home of warm colors with a hurried hand. He ushered him around workstations and the occasional odds-and-ends of loose inventory, through several open-architecture walls, until he was put onto a seat in his father’s office, where the man quickly busied himself with pulling and placing bandage-wraps and ointment out and on top of his wood-trimmed desk with heavy emphasis.

“You’re going to tell me what happened. Now.” Though even-spoken, behind the horn-rimmed glasses that framed his father’s face, raged a man that would brook a deceit of no kind. An unneeded addition, as the idea hadn’t even touched Corbyn’s mind before he was relaying the day’s events to the only man he knew who could help him understand them.

He was lucky in that the smartest person he knew also happened to be the person he trusted most in this world.

When he had recanted the affair in its entirety, his father had long since ceased his treatment. He had placed himself across the desk and in his own seat, a solemn curve had taken shape below the man’s nose, a thoughtful vacancy above, his fingers tip-tapping along the leathered bounds of a book Corbyn hadn’t seen before.

Huh, he thought with a frown. I thought I’d read all of them.

He was of course referring to the many tomes his father kept around, scattered here and there, and acquired from who-knows-where. They weren’t from around here, Corbyn knew that much for sure.

Each one more wonderful than the last, their pages bled with information Corbyn had never known. Never thought to know. They were why he felt so much brighter than his peers, and why they felt the same way.

What did it say? ‘The Ghost of — he had trouble reading the reflective orange script under warm light but accomplished it with a finely-tuned degree of squint.

“The Ghost of Providence,” he read aloud. “What’s that?”

With a flurry, his father snapped from his trance and slapped a hand over the book’s bridge, hiding the title from further view. Seemingly thinking better of it though, he released his vice from its binding.

“I don’t know,” his father sighed with a heavy breath. “A friend gave it to me when I asked for his help. It might help explain some things.”

“Help with what? Wait, who?” Corbyn asked incredulously. He couldn’t picture someone who could offer his father any worthwhile help.

A rich chuckle escaped his father’s mouth as the man observed his disbelief in amusement. “I asked a friend about a problem I was dealing with - am dealing with,” he corrected, casting Corbyn a look before adding the one phrase he knew would change the boy’s mind about the person in question. He did so with slow measure and emphasized each word. “Actually, he’s the one who gives me those books you like to read. Would you like to meet him?”

“What! I wanna meet him!” Corbyn shouted excitedly. He seemed to have forgotten the rest of the night for a brief moment.

His father nodded and smiled at his exuberance. “I was actually going to find him tomorrow for some answers, myself, but..,” he trailed off for build-up. “I guess I could take you with me.”

“Yes!” Corbyn pumped his fist before turning a curious glance his father’s way. “What’s his name?”

“His name?” his father thought with a thorough scratch of a scruffy cheek. “Well, I suppose it’s Vendor Pice.”