Everly's Walk: Part Eight

Now the townspeople whisper tales of curses to the tourists brave or strange enough to come by. They speak of Everly Carrigan, the best Carrigan by far, who fell for a Blythe-Cameron and then fell from her own walkway. It isn’t there anymore, that walkway, they say. It fell out in some storm, leaving poor old Alice trapped in that crumbling-away manor. Except that she had been a recluse anyway, probably knocked the bridge out herself.

They say that every Carrigan woman since Everly has met her death by falling from the Cliff. Araby never believed that, naturally. They warned her, the drunken captains and quiet scholarly types, that she should leave before her turn came. Not that they didn’t want a Carrigan about--most of them could hardly fathom how they’d function without Miss Araby and her lovely money--, but they’d rather have a removed last-Carrigan than a dead one. 

Araby laughed at them, the sound was white-feathered birds on the green sea breeze. Even if she did have wine red hair (far tamer than Everly’s) and a short temper, she’d never go jumping off a cliff. 

But then again, that was the summer before she met Augustus Crane.

The End

This thing had a life of its own when it came to posting it. I hope whoever bothered to read it enjoyed it. Leave a comment if you want.

Everly's Walk: Part Seven

Everly Carrigan met him again only once. And she was cold. Except when she wasn’t. There was fire as she screamed at him, made her throat raw with hurt and humiliation and rage. Caspian screamed back, of course, but by then both their hearts had accepted the breaking to come. She tried to fight him, but he stayed her hands. He tried to touch her, but she flinched away.

The parted ways as enemies up on the cliff tops where the wind clawed at Everly’s hair beneath the gray sky. Caspian walked one way. Everly walked another. She walked across the scrubby plains, a lone spot of scarlet in the gray and green. She walked to her lands and there she started to cry. Or maybe those were rainclouds on her face. It stormed often on the sea shore. 

She walked to where she saw her home in the distance. It was beautiful, finally complete. She pretended that she had not been harboring familial images in that setting as she walked on. The thought of that horrible Blythe-Cameron name inside a Carrigan house was rather ridiculous after all. She walked onto the narrow bridge to Carrigan’s Cliff, rain making the path slick. Thinking of the spiteful promise she had once made Caspian, she still tried not to stumble.

She walked on, but she never set another foot inside of Carrigan House. Everly Carrigan fell to her death from Everly’s Walkway that night in the rain. 

Except that’s not how the story goes: she leapt. 

Except no, actually, she sat down and slid off. 

But then, she never fell at all, simply ran away to a place where she would never have to hear the whisper-screamed longing in the voice of the green ocean. 

But who could know, as she was never heard from again? 

Except when the townspeople heard her ghost screaming and hollering up on Carrigan’s Cliff each night. No ghost can step foot on holy land, so if Everly was a ghost, that alone explained why she never tore down that horrid expansion that some distant relative--

Descendant? Some say that a boy showed up one year, bearing the Carrigan name and a peculiar penchant for merfolk paintings and stylish suits--

that her relative built on Carrigan Cliff.

And as for Caspian Blythe-Cameron--who would have loved the expansion as it housed an entire room dedicated to strange sculptures and art--, he never married that wretched French girl. He never finished his castle either; it wasn’t as fun without Everly around to dissapprove of it. In fact he stopped dropping his bread crumb trails, packed up his suits and went on holiday, finally disappearing a few months later on a hunt in some far dry land where there was no green sea. (It’s funny, but some say that the boy Carrigan who came years later spent many holidays in that land.)

All that can be said for the Carrigans and the Blythe-Camerons after that is that they left a lovely legacy (apart from a new, far more haunting name for Everly’s town), stories to be bought and sold as economy--since they’d built up their towns so poorly. Or perhaps it was the crumbling rock at war with the green sea that was poor in the first place.

Only one more part to go. Not that anyone is reading this anyway.

Everly's Walk: Part Three

Everly Carrigan built Carrigan House from the ground. Each stone set was there because she’d pointed, drawn, demanded, or placed it herself. Back then, she was known around and about for her wild hair. It was perhaps the only red thing on the entire coast. Until Caspian Blythe-Cameron showed up down the shore and ordered his townspeople to paint their cottages in lively colors (that would later fade to blinding white beneath the sun that somehow only shone on Blythe’s part of the coast) and to whitewash the stones and streets. 

Everly Carrigan hated that smug Caspian Blythe-Cameron with all of her red, beating heart. She would never order her townspeople to do something so foolish as paint, not when she’d already hauled most of them out by their ears and wallets and forced them to live the seaside life. Apart from the tug boat captains and crew (some of whom preferred to live elsewhere, though certainly not in Blythe-by-the-Sea), Everly’s townspeople tended to be business types, accountants and money-making people that Everly didn’t really think she needed in the first place.

Later down the line, when the tug boat industry wobbled, many of those business types left, but a whole crowd of artists and writers and historians and scientists had been drawn out by Everly’s lovely library and legendary wit, intermingling silently with the crowd so that no one saw them come and no one expected them to go. 

(These people even brought with them the famous Carrigan Coastal Circus, a magnificent tent in brilliant colors that sat on the water. Beneath it one could find all manner of wares, entertainment, and even a rather rare and delicate carousel. This was in the prime days of Everly’s Walk, of course, after Everly had died but far before Alice and Araby were born.)

Everly herself, though she never missed a detail, was far too preoccupied with building her home and thwarting that dastardly Caspian Blythe-Cameron to care overmuch that some new people had snuck into their midst. Besides, these people tended to be the only ones of actual interest for Everly to talk to. Apart from Caspian. He was irritatingly quirky.

So irritatingly quirky, in fact, that Everly fell in love with him. Not before he fell in love with her though, she was quick to point out. 

It started out quietly enough, a not-quite-built-house call to judge with his twinkling eyes, an unfortunate run in at the home of some mutually-hired contractor types, perhaps a verbal sparring match over dinner on the edge of Carrigan Cliff--it would have been rude not to invite him to dinner after she’d yelled at him all day. 

Then there were the letters. Nothing more than insults wrapped in romanticisms, they told themselves. But it was true when Caspian said he loved her hair and her hands. Everly had wonderful hands, simply made for pointing and gesticulating.

And it was true when she said she didn’t hate his suits. That it had actually been a lie when she’d shouted that after him down her drive. She also said that she liked his sarcasm, his smirk, his wandering hands. But those were, of course, lies designed to outwit the enemy.

Everly spent a beautiful day with that enemy in the place where the circus tent would be built. He’d forced--literally forced, she would never go quietly--Everly to take a day from building and planning and business-ing. She’d never have admitted that it felt nice to have his steadying hands on her waste as she rode the carousel horse. (Caspian had brought one of his prized carousels from France where he kept them at his mother’s house. It was pink and gold and mint and horrible. Only that was wrong because it was beautiful.) Except she did admit it, in a whisper, with a look from beneath heavy lashes. She didn’t need steadying, naturally; she was an accomplished rider. Caspian knew this because he’d watched her gallop across the scrubby plains on the cliff tops. He’d hated the way the wind sought to unclothe her, flung her curls to the sky, of course. He’d been annoyed by the way she was so sure and confident, so gentle and kind to the beast.

So no, she didn’t need steadying. Except when she did, when she was tipsy on star champagne drunk at dinner in a town where no one knew that she and Caspian hated each other and so they’d probably thought them a couple, and she teetered down the way to her house. The walkway was a narrow, stone bridge that held Carrigan Cliff--which was really more a tower of rock--to the mainland, barely wide enough for a carriage to cross. 

When Caspian Blythe-Cameron told her that he’d hate to see her fall from that death trap, it was true. But only in as much as it was a slight to her poor planning of where to live. Nothing more. Because she annoyed him.

And she swore that she would fall, if only to bother him then. Because he was too quirky and sweet and smart for her to like.

Comment and critiques are welcome.

Everly's Walk: Part One

Part 1

Carrigan House was a crumbling old manor, perched on the edged of a cliff. Or it used to be. Rather, the cliff was perched under it. And then it wasn’t. Chunks of gray stone slipped from their precarious positions and plummeted to the green sea below, and parts of Carrigan House, that once stately mansion, went with them. Over time, the green sea collected enough souvenirs from Carrigan Cliff that a little island began to grow below, bathed in sea foam. 

The right wing of Carrigan House fell into the sea directly, when the first of the cliff began to go. Alice Carrigan, even then an old lady, had always said that the right wing was for those with no spine. That was probably because the right wing was the new wing, built on top of an old graveyard. To Alice Carrigan, the destruction of a graveyard was no fault, it was the cowardice of living on something so safe as hallowed ground that got to her. And all those modern conveniences as well.

The smallest dining room, remaining guest rooms, and half the ballroom fell away with the rest of the straggling cliff pieces. Alice Carrigan, who was fond of cliff diving, went with that batch as well. She left a message making it clear that she would be back when she recovered her home from the sea’s greedy, green fingers and not a moment sooner. Her granddaughter, Araby Carrigan, thought that her grandmother could simply not bear to watch her library tumble into the ocean with the rest of her life, and so she made it watch her leave instead.

They dragged the corpse of Alice Carrigan from the deep, mint pools of shallow water near the rocks that marked the edge of Carrigan Cliff. Araby could see it all from where she stood in the half-destroyed ballroom, wind wrecking her scarlet hair and howling along the jagged marble edges of the fallen-away floor. She refused to look as they removed the body, but still she caught glimpses of the limp, white-clad form, dripping and dead and covered in stony sand. She’d never seen Alice Carrigan look so frail or so free.

The beginning of my new short story, still under editing.