A Haunting of Words

by Brian Paone et al.

  She pointed at the symbol. “It’s a repeat.” She smiled and placed the cylinder in position. “On sheet music. When you see it, you repeat the whole thing all over again.”

  The new cylinder spun. Even the young Turners held their breath. A ship’s horn blared and Ma’s startled jump made the children laugh. A golden trombone played and a man sang:

  They built her big, and they made a guarantee,

  Big cheers for her un-sinka-bility …

  Pa crossed his arms over his chest as the chorus rang out:

  Oh Titanic, sunk is she,

  Poor Titanic at the bottom of the sea.

  And he wrenched the cylinder from the machine before it could finish.

  The children held hands and circled, the catchy tune easy to sing. “Oh Titanic, sunk is she …”

  But the older Turners and friends brooded, speaking over each other: “The Titanic? The unsinkable ship?” “She only set sail days ago.” “Who writes such a thing?”

  “Bunk. Pure bunk.” Albert took the cylinder from his father. “We’ve heard it wrong.” He positioned the cylinder to play again. “It can’t possibly be about the Titanic.”

  The cylinder turned and a jaunty tune jingled, music entirely different from the trombones of the Titanic ditty. This song called one of them by name, bade him a foreboding farewell.

  “It’s singing about Benji.” Pearl’s voice rose in pitch, her words rushed, crammed together in disbelief. One hand hovered over her mouth, the other pointed at the phonograph. “Benji?” She gaped at her fiancé, then each of her family nearby. “You hear it, don’t you? This is, it’s—”

  “Bunk.” Pa Turner flung the cylinder across the room where it remained as guests departed and the family tucked in for the night.

  In her bed, Pearl tossed and turned, her ears insisting music played downstairs. A voice taunted, Bye-bye, Benji, boy. She trembled. The trombones moaned. From beneath her door, the song stuttered. Buh-buh-buh, bye-bye, Benji.

  Edison’s eyes peeked over and over the footboard of her bed.

  Max, his arm in a cast and sling, sat on the floor surrounded by tools and tiny parts. Jack squatted nearby, reaching as his father requested them.

  “Still no stove?” Fiona hung her tote bag on the stair post, slid her shoes off, and stepped over a blue cylinder near her husband’s knee.

  “I’ve almost got it.” Hunched over the contraption, Max tightened a screw.

  Fiona settled onto the floor beside them.

  He straightened his back, patting her socked foot. “Tomorrow. The stove is tomorrow’s project.”

  Jack held up a black wax cylinder. “Dad bought a punk rock song, and they sent us the instructions.”

  Fiona pursed her lips, and Max tapped the black cylinder. “This cost less than an Edison phonograph at the antique mall. Way less.”

  She leaned closer. The pine box only had two sides and, across the open top, a rod between two pine blocks and a rubber tube. It looked nothing close to an Edison Amberola.

  Max placed the new black cylinder, not on the rod, but on two rails in the box. He took a deep breath. “It’s been bouncing everywhere, but I think this is it.”

  Jack wobbled closer and showed his mother the hole he’d cut in the bottom of a cone-shaped measuring cup. He fitted it to the end of the tube while Max pushed a button on a motor small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. The cylinder began to spin. Jack beamed, nodded at his father, and from the cone came the sounds of a crowd mumbling, then humming, and the clatter of mugs on a pub sideboard.

  No instruments, just a man’s Cockney English accent singing a tale about his father’s grave getting moved for a new town sewer. The song ended with the voices joining in harmony to draw out the word grave.

  Max laughed as his wife and son exchanged looks.

  Jack dropped the cone. “That’s it? That’s punk rock?”

  “Well, they’re steampunk.” Max adjusted his sling and switched the black cylinder for the moldy blue one. “Here’s the real mystery. The lone blue Amberol.” He nodded at Jack to refit the cone and tube.

  The cylinder spun and assailed them with a swooshing sound, the swirling of a brush or broom that refused to keep time with the static click of each rotation. Fiona grimaced. Jack gritted his teeth, stretching his arm with the cone as far from his ears as he could reach. Horns and clarinets played a merry, if crackling, opening. A man’s voice warbled, rolling his Rs, proclaiming his love for an Irish gal named Meg.

  Fiona smiled. “Of all the songs.” She hurried to the stairs and called for Meg. “Come down and hear this.”

  Jack caught his dad’s attention and pulled a face, but his father half shrugged. “We sang it to her when she was a baby.”

  His son rolled his eyes as Meg hopped down the last stair to the finale of happy horns and clarinets.

  “I’ll play it again.”

  Max reset the cylinder and frowned when, through the sweeping static, piano notes pounded. He stared at Fiona with wide eyes as a woman’s voice sang a nursery rhyme with flair. “Little Jack Horner …”

  Fiona kneeled at the contraption. “It’s not the same cylinder.”

  Max Fielding held up the black cylinder. “We’ve only got two.” He pointed at the spinning blue Amberol. “And that’s the only blue one.”

  “What’s wrong?” Meg crossed her arms.

  “That’s my name.” Jack turned the horn toward his face, as if he could watch the lyrics exit. “How’d you do that, Dad?”

  Fiona’s eyes grew wider as she scanned the room. “You didn’t order any extras? Was there a freebie in the box?”

  She scavenged through the packing peanuts in the cardboard box as the woman repeated the rhyme. “Little Jack Horner… ”

  Fiona took the handmade machine, pulled the tube and horn from Jack’s hands, and dropped it into the box with a thud. Before Max and the kids could protest, she carried it out the back door and tossed it into the yard.

  No one dared to retrieve it.

  Pearl charged at Benji in the Turner’s foyer, her face almost bumping his. “Look.” She pressed a newspaper into his chest. “The Titanic. It sank.” Pearl swooned and he gripped her arms. “The unsinkable ship sank. And that, that thing knew.”

  Benji guided her to the parlor, to a velvet chaise, and shook the wrinkles from the paper where the headline confirmed her ramblings: New Titanic Sinks. 1800 Persons, Watery Graves.

  Pearl clutched his pant leg. “It’s a jinx. A jinx.” She bit her lip. “You can’t, you can’t leave with Grover.”

  Ma Turner hustled into the parlor but pulled back into the doorway as Benji took Pearl’s chin in his hand. “We’re not going in a boat, honey bunch.”

  She twisted her hands into her skirt, pulling and wringing at the delicate chiffon.

  He cupped her hands with his. “I’m tagging along. Grover will enlist and I’ll come right back home to you.”

  “The second song said you’d wreck, Benji.” She squeezed his hands. “It’s a jinx.”

  “No such thing.” Ma entered and stroked her daughter’s shoulder. “It’s just a silly song, dear. No one’s going to wreck.”

  Meg rustled her bedsheets, kicking her comforter to the floor. The muffled voices of her parents tapered off before midnight, the television in her brother’s room silent for more than an hour. She pressed her eyes closed and tried to count sheep. One, two, three, four.

  “It’s a long, long way…” Someone wailing for home. The voice too manly to be Jack, too warbled to be her father.

  Meg’s eyes shot open. Downstairs, something rolled across the floor. Not heavy like a bowling ball, but lighter, like a rolling pin. The song stopped and her heart pounded so loud in her ears she wasn’t certain if the rolling, rolling sound continued.

  She crept to the top of the stairs and listened. Something rolled. Crouching behind the rail and spindles, she tiptoed to the last step and cowered behind the large newel post. Moonlight cast a large
bright rectangle from the window to the side of the staircase.

  With the rhythm of a wheel, a faded blue cylinder trundled, trundled into the light, and with each rotation across the floor, a man’s voice crooned a different tune. No more words of a long trip to Tipperary.

  Meg froze; the air chilled. The man called out, called out for Meg. Two, three, four times.

  In the Turner’s ballroom, the children pulled at Pearl’s arms, tugged at her skirt, and dragged her into ring-around-the-rosy to distract her while she waited for Benji and Grover’s return.

  “Sit here.” Young Nellie Turner forced her big sister into a chair, the narrow back topped with pointed finials—a starburst carving.

  Little Tommy, arms behind his back, pressed into her kneecaps. “Promise you won’t tell Pa?”

  Pearl held her palm in the air, pointed her index finger, and crisscrossed over her heart. “Cross my heart.” She tilted her head. “Now, what have you got there?”

  Young Mabel snuck behind Tommy and snatched his hidden treasure. “You promise?”

  Pearl sighed as Tommy stomped on Mabel’s toe. “Hope to die,” she reassured them.

  Mabel and Nellie skipped to a corner of the room and placed something on the floor. They waited. And then, with no one having touched it, it rolled. They pointed as it meandered from the dark corner, and the rolling pushed forth a melody of faint trumpets.

  Tommy climbed into Pearl’s lap as the bright blue cylinder rolled closer. A man sang as if his nose were pinched in a clothespin. He wailed about Benji and his demise. Pearl glared and kicked it.

  With Tommy on her lap, her foot didn’t land as hard as she’d intended, but enough that the cylinder rolled back to her sisters. But this time, a woman screamed with every roll, and her shriek pierced the air until the cylinder rocked to a rickety, restful stop.

  The old blue cylinder sat in the middle of the living room floor. In their rock concert T-shirts, softened from years of washing machine cycles, the Fieldings circled the Amberol.

  Max cradled the sling on his arm. “Could you have been”—he tapped the cylinder with his toe—“sleepwalking?”

  Meg shook her head.

  Fiona strode to the window, a window which years ago would have been entry to the Turner’s ballroom. She peered into the night, into the dead space of foundation scraps behind the house. She shot a long stare at Jack, who frowned and waved his arms to fend off her silent accusation.

  Max tapped the cylinder again. It rocked like a warped paper towel tube. “Maybe an animal sniffed around the backyard and jiggled the phonograph?”

  In the kitchen, he rifled through drawers and retrieved a flashlight. Fiona opened the back door and they stepped outside.

  From inside, Jack and Meg watched their parents amble over concrete and uneven ground, the beam of the flashlight bobbing. Something in the room rustled. The cylinder rolled, a crackling static announcing its journey. They turned, wide-eyed, as the cylinder wheeled over the floor.

  Accompanied by the swoosh of a brushing broom, it moved closer, closer, and stopped at their feet. Jack reached for it. The cylinder rolled from his grasp and stopped. Meg gulped and lifted her hand. The cylinder darted backward. There was no mistaking it for a breeze or uneven floor.

  As it whirled across the room, a scream escalated. They pressed their hands to their ears as the cylinder rotated, each spin driving the scream into the pitch of a siren.

  Albert hitched a carriage to two of their best horses and raced Ma to the hospital to sit at Grover’s bedside. Pa’s heart squeezed tight in his chest as they left. He couldn’t shake the tune rattling around his head. Buh-buh-buh, bye-bye, Benji.

  He lit the fireplace in the parlor, fixed his attention on the wood crackling in the flames, and tried to stave off the chill of spring and grief. Pearl rested her head on Pa’s shoulder, her face pink and pinched. She wadded one of his cotton handkerchiefs.

  “Everything turned sour after we got that Edison Amberola.” She sniffled. “Benji loved the piano.”

  “Now, Pearl.” Pa took a deep breath. “The Amberola didn’t make things go bad.” Soft music drifted from the ballroom. “It didn’t write the songs. It just plays the music.”

  “It’s that one blue Amberol.” She wiped her eye. The music grew louder. “The one that’s not an Edison.” She scowled, looking over her shoulder. “It doesn’t just play the music. It twists the songs.”

  Pearl dropped the handkerchief and strode to the ballroom. Pa followed. A tenor sang about his home in Tipperary, sang with a tempo teetering between a march and a pub drinking song. Pearl bumped the Amberola, skipping the singer into a repeat of his long way home. She wrenched the cylinder free and, before she could toss it, Pa saved it.

  “That one’s an Edison.”

  He sucked air through his teeth and tucked it beside the other watchful eyes in the phonograph cabinet.

  A voice boomed, “I have just been shot.”

  Pearl gasped and Pa slammed the cabinet. Teddy Roosevelt. They knew his voice from town hall—the speeches heard from the phonograph that convinced Pa to buy his own.

  Roosevelt continued, “But it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”

  With hands on her hips, Pearl scanned the room. From the corner, the thirteenth Amberol rolled, reciting a speech they had yet to hear. Pearl seized it, pinched the rim between two fingertips, and carried it to the parlor.

  Pa followed, and when Pearl stood before the fireplace with the cylinder raised, he nodded and she hurled it into the flames

  Jack and Meg fled to the back door just as their parents reached the step, just as the shriek died. But they had heard it too. The door trembled on its hinges as Max and Fiona burst in, their mouths gaping as they gasped for air. Fiona huddled their children into a hug, and Max inched closer to the cylinder sitting in the other room. He stared at it for a moment, then picked it up. He turned it around, inspected the worn surface, and dropped it in the box with the pine board phonograph bits.

  “Throw it out.” Fiona wouldn’t let go of the kids. “I don’t even want it in the house.”

  Max took a deep breath. “I know it’s disturbing, but there’s got to be a scientific explanation. There’s got to be…”

  Jack touched his dad’s arm, the arm bound in a cast and sling. Max tried to smile, and the two of them walked out with the box of bits and the blue cylinder. Jack lit their path with the flashlight and pushed open the barn door.

  As his father searched for a spot to place the banished items, Jack piped up. “Wish I’d never found the thing.”

  Max turned to his son, trying to avoid looking into the beam of light. “Where, exactly, did you find it?”

  Jack swept the light across the space, lighting up graffiti painted on the wall.

  “It was in that hole.” He pointed and scuffed at the dirt floor. “The hole with the chicken bones.”

  Max frowned. As he moved closer, he recognized the graffiti. A music symbol. The repeat sign. And in the hole lay a small wooden carving. A woman in a blue dress with a golden halo, resting on a bed of brown bones and a skull with a tiny pointed beak.

  A spark ricocheted from the fire, and Pearl shook it free from her skirt. Balanced on the oak logs, the cylinder crackled, but the blue wax did not melt. Pa leaned closer, watching it glisten in the heat. The logs shifted and the cylinder rolled, rolled from the fire to the ashes under the grate, then to the ashes on the hearth.

  Pearl cried out, “Pa!” as it hopped from the hearth to the floor, and the familiar marching song began to play.

  Pa shuddered, grabbing the mantle to stop his fall.

  “It’s a long way to Tipperary …”

  The cylinder rolled, aflame as a log on the fire, trailing a line of hot embers for Pearl to chase and stomp.

  “It’s a long way to go… ”

  It rolled from the parlor and through the grand doorway. It rolled into the ballroom and nestled under the velvet drapes.

  Th
e tenor swelled into the chorus. “But my heart’s right there.”

  Flames climbed the fabric, licking at the ceiling.

  Pearl’s screams brought the young Turners running. Pa gathered his wits and a bucket of water from the kitchen and waved the older girls into an assembly line so they could drown the fire. Little Tommy scampered to fetch help from the neighbors while Pearl dragged a rug from the parlor and smothered the flames daring to spread from the ballroom.

  Soon, folks arrived pulling wagons of water, and even sand. Swifter than a team of horses, the new town firetruck veered up their dusty drive, the iron bell clanging and the siren stuck in an ear-piercing howl.

  Meg and Jack Fielding hadn’t slept in their parents’ room for years. But tonight, their mother didn’t want them out of her sight. Meg stretched between an overstuffed arm chair and a makeshift ottoman of two boxes and a throw pillow. Jack snuggled on the floor in a sleeping bag of robots and spaceships.

  When everyone seemed settled in, Max turned off the lamp and uttered in the most convincing voice he could muster, “Everything will make more sense after a good night’s sleep.”

  Crickets chirped outside and the occasional late night driver sent headlight beams across the wall.

  Meg tried to sleep, but a knock, knock, knocking kept stirring her awake. “Jack, could you stop it?”

  “Jack, please stop kicking the floor.” Fiona wondered if the family sleepover had been a bad idea.

  “It’s not me,” Jack whimpered.

  The knocking stopped, replaced by a rapid rattle and a thump, as if something had fallen down a tube or tumbled down the chimney flue.

  Fiona sat against the headboard and prodded Max. Jack cozied between them, and Meg crawled onto the end of their bed. They sat in the darkness and listened for silence, listened with breathless hope that the past had surrendered its relentless pursuit. But downstairs, something rolled across the floor.

  With the rhythm of a wheel, it trundled. And with each rotation, a woman’s scream pierced the air, until the cylinder rocked to a rickety stop.