WHO: Hugh and Blaze WHEN: August 6 WHERE: Wolfe Farm, then the March House SUMMARY: Hugh wants to explore some March history on his day off. He enlists Blaze to help, first by having Blaze show him some photos and then by asking for a tour. Some talk of ghosts occurs. WARNINGS: Maybe a ghost story.
Blaze stood on his bed to reach the photobook on the shelf above the headboard. “This one is the March House grounds.” He handed it down to Hugh. “I’ve been taking pictures there since I was seven. You can see how it changes year-by-year.” Blaze shrugged. The pictures Blaze showed people were usually of events that they’d attended or missed. But Hugh had asked.
Hugh took the photograph from Blaze. He'd been out at the March House, of course, recently even, wandering around by himself not even that many days ago, but this wasn't how it looked currently - it must have been one from at least a few years ago. He wasn't even entirely certain how he'd ended up here, and yet, he had questions, and Blaze was willing to answer them, and to show him around, and while he knew some of the locations and had been there with Marce, this was different.
"When was this one taken?" he asked, flipping it over in case there was a date on the back. There was.
Blaze walked over and looked at it. “About five years ago, I think. Fall City and the ghosts are working hard to take the place back. But people interfere.”
"Marce believes there really are ghosts," Hugh turned the photo back over and stared at it. "She told me once, about… probably about five years ago now, actually."
Blaze nodded. He knew all about Marceline and the ghosts. “When I was a kid, before I met Marceline, there was this little girl I used to go play with,” Blaze said. “Her name was Allie. We’d play marbles all the time, or there was this one game with these little cereal disk things. She called them pogs. She had this secret stash of game stuff under this floorboard in the March house. Or she’d make games up or we’d do make-believe. Regular little kid stuff. I have all these really vivid memories of talking to her and playing with her.
But I have no memories of her ever being around when there were adults or other kids. And she’d get really mad any time that I talked about parents, because she said all of hers had abandoned her. She always wore the same outfit and she’d show up at school playground sometimes, but she wasn’t in my class. She never ate any of the food I’d bring her and she’d show up at really weird times.
People told me that she was imaginary. One day we got into a fight because I was moving away and I got really mad and I told her she was just imaginary anyway. And she looked at me, so upset. And I told her I was sorry and I didn’t mean it. But then she just looked sad. And she walked away. She stopped visiting me after that.”
With that told, Blaze didn’t know what else to say, so he shrugged. “That’s my ghost story.”
Hugh didn’t believe in ghosts exactly. Oh he said he did when he was with Marce sometimes, and he loved them as dramatic tools within stories, and he paid a sort of ‘it’s a game I don’t know if I believe in it really, but I don’t want bad luck’ sort of mind to theater superstitions, and sure he’d felt that sort of chill on the back of his neck at times in certain theaters. His view was that it was imagination, delicious and frothy, but nothing real, right? Just make-belief and your imagination wandering away with you.
But as Blaze talked, Hugh felt as if someone had poured cold water down his back. Marce had once told him Alice haunted things, had Blaze played with her ghost when he was a boy? In a thought it felt absurd, but…
“How old was she?”
“I asked her that once and she just said ‘Way older than you, but that’s okay. You’ll grow.” Blaze said. “And I was a little kid and she was cool, so I went with it. She looked around seven.”
Hugh didn’t say anything to that. Was there anything to say? “What’s the oldest picture you have?” He asked curiously. “When did you start taking pictures?”
“Really young,” Blaze said. “My dad would find a lot of different ways to keep me occupied when he couldn’t find a sitter. And even before that...we had this old camera that my mom would let me play with. When you’re that young, your parents are your whole universe, so you’re interested in what they do.” He shrugged. “So probably around three?” It seemed like forever.
“I shouldn’t show you those ones though,” he joked. “They’re pretty amateur.”
Hugh chuckled. “Not as amateur as I bet mine from that age would be.” He stared at the photo for a moment. “You want to go out there?” He looked back up at Blaze. “I mean I’d like to see some of those early photos but then…” he tapped the image. “Maybe a tour.”
“Sure,” Blaze said. It wasn’t the first time he’d been called upon to do a tour. “We could go to the March House and then the March Mill.” He grabbed his camera by the strap.
Hugh smiled, placing the photo to the side. Sometimes he wasn’t certain what he was looking for, but maybe he’d know when he found it.
He’d been to the house before, recently even, but not with Blaze. And although he knew other people went in, for some reason Hugh never had. Maybe he was too cautious, or maybe it had felt wrong on some other level. Something that couldn’t be held of explained or described - it just was. Today though didn’t hold that same feeling. Today, Hugh stared up at the facade as if it would give answers. Would he have come over to this house with Henry if he’d been a part of Henry’s life? Would he and Alice have played together. Would he have had memories of her?
He shook off the questions and turned to Blaze without a word. The head tilt a question in and of itself or maybe an invitation to lead the way.
“Up or down?” Blaze asked. AKA how much climbing did Hugh want to do?
"Which do you recommend?" Hugh didn't mind climbing up, if it was what Blaze thought they should do.
“I like up,” Blaze said. He led Hugh into the house the same way he and Eliza and Harrison had infiltrated earlier in the summer.
“Is there any room you’d like to look at first?”
Hugh nodded and followed Blaze wondering briefly about the overall integrity of the structure. The fire had been nearly 20 years ago, after all. If he started thinking about stuff like that, he'd just end up back at the apartment with questions still.
"I -" he caught at this. Alice's, was the main name that came to mind, but that felt morbid. "I'm just here for the tour," he shook his head. "Let's just go around."
Blaze nodded. The fire damage made it hard to tell which room was which, but Blaze had been there enough times and with enough people that he knew the layout of the house really well. Not all of them were ghosts.
“This was a playroom.” The room with the blown-window. The new entry. “I think a rocking chair used to be right here. There’s marks for it on the floor that you can see when you get it clean enough. And I know it wasn’t a rocking horse, because the burned rocking horse used to be on the other side. There’s that anchor point on the wall over there.” Blaze pointed, but it was hard to see with the burn damage. “She must have had a swing or something.”
It was bizarre to think of the house as having been lived in once, and yet at the same time he could almost see the people there. Old buildings had that effect sometimes, seeming to exist in more than one time even. You could imagine them as they might have been in their prime. This house had been large and probably beautiful. Older, Hugh suspected, than the stand-in house they were filming in at Henley Park.
“An indoor swing,” he mused. Hugh had grown up a long way from poor, but he’d never had an indoor swing that was anchored in the ceiling. The Marches had way more money. Not that it had done them much good.
"Maybe," Blaze shrugged. There were a lot of little details a person could speculate about. Once, this had been a really nice house, and a group of people had lived and breathed and made their lives there. The house was its own ghost in a way. Blaze didn’t doubt why people suspected it was haunted. There was a sadness in the air that crept into you.
“I keep thinking that if the film does well or the book stays so popular, they’re going to make it into a museum,” Blaze said. He had some really mixed feelings about that. Most of them were negative. Maybe it would bring closure to Alice March’s ghost, but Blaze didn’t like what the film was doing to the town. He looked around and it was like Fall City was getting swallowed up by a group of people who didn’t care about it. Who didn’t love it or value it the way that Blaze did.
In a few years, would he even recognize it anymore? Maybe whoever murdered Alice had murdered Fall City too.
“I’ll show you her room,” Blaze said. The secret stash. “Careful where you step.” He tested the board ahead of him with his foot before he moved forward. Blaze thought about warning about the ghosts too, but he knew he didn’t need to.