Skeleton Songs

One for Sorrow

I never knew Tate Langdon before he died.

I hadn’t known his name before gunshots started to ring across the school and fifteen people lay dead on the floor. He had been nobody, you see. It wasn’t until we were ushered out of Westfield by the police that I learned our attacker had been a teenage boy.

I didn’t know what he looked like, the type of person he was. All I knew was that his corpse was riddled with gunshot wounds after the SWAT team entered his house. My father had refused to talk to me about it when he came home, but my mom told me in whispers the next day.

There wasn’t a funeral service. There wasn’t an obituary. Tate Langdon had killed more than a dozen people and now he was gone. Poof! He was dead and dusted.

Just so you know:

Amir Stanley had set next to me I Calculus before his death. His notes were always neat and he would let me copy them when I missed class, help me study for a test. Amir liked writing in blue ink. I had borrowed one of his pens and now I would never be able to give it back. Tate had put a gun to his face and shot his jaw clean of his face before he could call anyone for help. Amir Stanley was the third student killed. No one remembers the second.

I didn’t go to his funeral or anyone else’s.

I moved spots when they reopened the school.

I never talked to anyone about being stuck in the bathroom while someone died outside. Not to you, not to anyone.

All I could think about was about Tate Langdon and his Murder House. It was beautiful. They had an iron wrought fence surrounding their slightly overgrown garden and a porte-cochere in front of the entrance with stained glass windows from a fairy tale dream. It was rundown, but the Murder House was one of the most beautiful homes I had ever seen in my life. Wasn’t that funny? I couldn’t sleep at night yet I kept driving by a murderer’s house. It was on the market by then.

I watched two little girls move in soon after with dolls and ribbons in their hair. Their mother looked tired. I wondered if she couldn’t sleep at night too. I wondered if she knew that people had died on the ground she stood on, that a teenage boy bled to death after being shot in one of her bedrooms.

I got out of my car and knocked on their door, the heavy wood hurting my knuckles. I pretended to be writing a research paper on the architecture of LA Victorian homes when a blonde woman opened the door. She introduced herself as the wife, but I already knew she wasn’t. The wife was a brunette.

I know what you’re thinking and I’m sorry, you know, but I suppose not as much as you.

You did give me his address after all.

Seven for a Secret Never to be Told

I didn’t realize that I was dead, at first.

You see, it felt the same way as being alive did: both vibrant and painful. It was a mess of sights and sensations, colors bursting in my vision like the Tiffany pane windows. I would have never found out if I hadn’t tried to leave the house after I felt the wound on my head. When I touched it, there was no blood on my hands. The head injury was simply there, just as my memories of getting hurt and dying weren’t.

I tried to talk to the children for a time, but the little girls couldn’t hear me. I tried and tried until I was left a sobbing mess on the floor.

And that was how Tate Langdon found me.

He didn’t look like a killer. Instead, he was towheaded with tortured brown eyes and dressed like Kurt Cobain. I had dug up his picture in the yearbook when you mentioned that you knew where he lived and he didn’t look a second older. I kept imagining his fingers dripping red with blood.

Tate didn’t say anything for a long time.

“You’re dead,” I said.

He shrugged. “So are you.”

“Did—was it you?” I swallowed slowly. “Where you the one who…?”

“No.”

I couldn’t think properly. His presence was unsettling and his voice was even worse. Tate had this wry smile on his face, but his eyes were cold.

“Why can’t I leave? I tried to and I couldn’t. Am I—am I stuck here?”

Tate leaned against the wall and he watched the little girls playing with a tea seat inside their bedroom. “No, we can’t leave. Once you die here you stay here for forever.”

“What about the people who died in the house before? In the sixties?” I asked. My hands were shaking and my entire vision was blurry with tears. I didn’t explain how I knew this and he didn’t ask.

I was tired and wary and scared, and here was Tate Langdon who had killed Amir and Kevin and the rest. I couldn’t be stuck here. I just couldn’t because that would be dumb and maybe this was all a hallucination? It couldn’t be joke. No one would ever joke around with something so morbid.

“They’re here,” he said with a nod. “They don’t show up most of the time, but they're around different parts of the house. The others, too.”

Tate was a killer, a killer, a killer…

And I something inside me burst open.

“This is your fault,” I muttered. “You killed them. Why did you do it? Why? I loved him and you just killed him anyway. You killed Kevin.”

Tate gripped my arm, but I pulled away.

“You’ll pay for what you did.”

His face was blank. It was an empty canvas and I wanted to throttle him because he didn’t even care.

The little girls laughed, the ribbons in their hair bouncing as they jumped on the bed. I watched them and felt my eyes dry. I was still shaking, but a cold fury was simmering in my core and threatening to spill. I wanted him to hurt. I want him to hurt so bad that he would forget his own name.

“You will.”

I always finished what I started.

Thirteen Beware it's the Devil Himself

Her name was Violet Harmon and Tate loved her.

I could tell by the way he went through all the trouble to hide his other activities from her. I could see it in his eyes, in the set of his jaw. He loved her and that was all I needed.

I watched them sometimes. He never looked my way but we both knew that he knew I was there. How would he explain to Little Violet that a ghost was watching them as they engaged in their misunderstood-teenager conversations? Tate was so stupid sometimes. He should have left her alone.

She might have made it out alive if he had.

Her father had a bag full of pills hidden in his study. He didn’t use them, but I imagined they came in handy every once in a while. Some patients needed to be... subdued more than others. There was a particular set that was the same size and color as those his daughter used to sleep. Poor thing, she was so tortured.

I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re thinking.

She did that all by herself.

After all, I didn’t push the pills down her throat. I’m not a savage. I quite simply just helped her gain the result she was looking for when she downed them all in her woes of sadness. Tate should have taken care of her better.

Look at him now, crying and wet like a dog.

I didn’t feel bad when I saw him wrap his tiny flower in his arms and drag her to the tub. This is what he had done to me, but even in this he was lucky.

“Now you’ll be together,” I told him. “Now you have the rest of eternity to earn her forgiveness once she realizes what you’ve done. What will you tell her then, Tate? I’m sorry?”

Tate was steadily silent as he rocked Violet Harmon back and forth. I leaned against the doorway and watched as his hands trembled. I could taste his despair. All that was left of me was bones and dust, but I knew he would taste my misery in his mouth one day.

“I hope you’re happy. I hope you find the happiness you have been so ardently searching for and feel your very marrow fill with joy. I want you to grasp it in your hands before you smother it in your hold, Tate Langdon.”

I smiled.

“Truly, I do.”