How I Got Married to the Ghost

A Dark Romance

Chapter One: The Bargain

The lawyer's office smelled like old paper and older money, and Adaeze Okonkwo had exactly $400 in her checking account and eleven days before the bank took her mother's house.

"Read it again," she said. "Slower this time."

Mr. Fenwick adjusted his glasses and did not read it slower. He read it the same way he had the first time, in the flat, bored voice of a man who had delivered strange news to desperate people more than once in his career.

"The estate of Edmund Ashworth Blackwood will pay the sum of two hundred thousand dollars to any woman who agrees to marry him, in a ceremony conducted at Blackwood Manor, and reside there for one year. The marriage need not be consummated. The bride will retain full ownership of the house and grounds upon completion of the year, regardless of subsequent events."

"Subsequent events," Adaeze repeated.

"Mr. Blackwood died eleven years ago," Fenwick said, as if this explained anything.

"So I'd be marrying a dead man."

"You'd be marrying his estate. There is a legal mechanism", he waved a hand, already tired of his own explanation, "it's unusual, but not unprecedented. Historically, there are cases of proxy marriage, marriage by will, marriage to preserve a bloodline's claim to property. The document is airtight. My firm has reviewed it for two decades, waiting for someone foolish enough, or desperate enough, to accept it."

Adaeze thought about her mother's house. She thought about the chemotherapy bills stacked in a drawer like a losing hand of cards. She thought about the particular quality of silence in a hospital room at three in the morning, and how much two hundred thousand dollars might buy against that silence.

"I'll do it," she said, before she could think better of it.

Fenwick did not look surprised. He looked, if anything, a little sad.

"There's one more condition," he said, sliding a second paper across the desk. "You'll be required to live in the manor alone. No staff live on the grounds after dark. The house has a reputation in the village. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that three women have accepted this arrangement before you. None of them completed the year."

"What happened to them?"

"Two left within a week. The third," he closed the folder with a small, final click, "her family stopped asking questions after a while. I'd advise you to do the same, should you have any of your own."

Blackwood Manor did not so much appear at the end of the drive as accumulate, the way a headache does a pressure behind the eyes that resolved, finally, into three stories of black stone and dead ivy, windows like closed eyes, a chimney that hadn't smoked in a decade. The taxi driver refused to pull past the gate. Adaeze walked the rest of the way with her single suitcase, and did not look back to see if he'd waited to make sure she got inside.

The housekeeper, a stooped woman named Mrs. Pruitt who arrived punctually at nine and departed punctually at five, showed her through the ground floor with the enthusiasm of someone conducting a hostage through their own kidnapping.

"The ceremony's tonight," Mrs. Pruitt said. "Reverend Aldous comes at eight. Don't be late; he doesn't like to be kept from his dinner."

"Tonight? I thought I'd have time to"

"The paperwork says thirty days from acceptance to ceremony has already elapsed while you were deciding, dear. Mr. Fenwick's letter sat in your mailbox for eleven days. Did you not notice the date?"

Adaeze had not noticed the date. She had noticed the number at the bottom of the page and nothing else, the way a drowning person notices the shape of the nearest floating thing and nothing about what it's attached to.

"What's he like?" she asked. "Blackwood. What happened to him?"

Mrs. Pruitt's hands stilled on the curtain she'd been straightening. "He fell," she said. "From the east tower. The night before his own wedding, eleven years ago, to a woman who was not you and is not relevant to your arrangement." She resumed straightening the curtain with unnecessary force. "That is the entire story, and I'd thank you not to go looking for more of it. Some houses keep their secrets better than others, and this one keeps them very well indeed."

She left at five, as promised, and did not offer to stay.

Adaeze had expected, in some vague way she hadn't examined closely, that "marrying a ghost" would mean marrying an idea, a legal fiction, a technicality, a signature added to a document by a proxy standing in an empty man's place. She had not expected Reverend Aldous, elderly and unbothered, to arrive at eight precisely and begin the ceremony in the manor's cold chapel as though the groom were only running a few minutes late.

She had not expected, in the words of this man, to feel the temperature of the room drop ten degrees in a single breath.

She had not expected to turn, expecting nothing, and find someone standing beside her.

He was tall in the way old portraits were tall, elongated, formal, dressed for a wedding a century out of fashion, dark hair falling across a face that was handsome in the specific, symmetrical way of someone who had never had the chance to grow old and unhandsome. He was not transparent. He was not glowing. He looked, if she was honest, entirely solid, entirely present, entirely like a man except that the candle flames nearest him bent away from him rather than toward, as though even fire found something in him it didn't want to touch.

"You're staring," he said. His voice had a strange quality to it, like a recording played in a room one size too large.

"You're dead," she said.

"Very observant. Shall we continue, or would you like to discuss my medical history first?" There was something sharp under the dry humor, something that didn't sound like a man amused so much as a man performing amusement because the alternative was worse.

Reverend Aldous, apparently unbothered by any of this, cleared his throat and repeated the question.

Adaeze looked at the man who was not entirely a man, standing in a chapel that smelled of dust and extinguished candles, and thought of her mother's hand, thin as paper, gripping hers in a hospital bed.

"I do," she said.

Something crossed Edmund Blackwood's face when she said it too fast to name, gone before she could ask herself what it meant. It might have been a triumph. It might have been grief. It occurred to her, far too late to do anything about it, that a dead man asking a desperate woman to marry him for money was not, on its own, an especially strange story, but that the way he'd looked at her in that half-second, like she was the answer to a question he hadn't asked yet, most certainly was.

"I do as well," he said, and the candles guttered as though something had exhaled.

Reverend Aldous pronounced them married, closed his book, and left without shaking anyone's hand.

Adaeze stood alone in the chapel with her husband, who was not entirely a man, in a house that kept its secrets very well indeed, and understood with the particular clarity that comes only after it is far too late to change your mind that she had just agreed to spend a year finding out why.

End of Chapter One