The Outcast Hours

by Mahvesh Murad

  Susan hadn’t wanted to die. That’s what Lucy saw, in the photograph of a parlor from a hundred years ago. Whatever happened to Susan Lennox was murder. There’s no proof in the pictures, but Lucy doesn’t question it; you know what you know.

  Stephen’s at one of those clinics that’s like a hotel, because they think his mental health needs some supervision. He’d been suspected of manslaughter, at first—Greg told her when it happened, husbands always look good for something like this—but he’d cried so hard when he talked about his wife, and everyone who had seen her that spring knew she’d looked a little depressed all along. That’s what Stephen Lennox is getting treated right now—his depression. He has two weeks left.

  But Lucy will never prove anything. Not the murder, not the ghost. Not where her ring came from. That house is conveniently ashes, and whatever ghosts are there now don’t mean anything to anyone living, except her. The coroner’s office didn’t think it was even worth sticking a shovel into a grave to see if Abigail Sutter was where the headstone advertised. Absolutely no one is going to help her look into Susan’s murder if she turns in the ring and rats Greg out.

  She drives by the house again. She combs through the ashes until a neighbor calls the cops on her, and then she has to explain to one of Greg’s cop friends that she was looking for any wallpaper that might have survived.

  “Don’t you think this is weird?” she asks, like it just occurred to her. “Like, do houses just burn down? This really seems like a murder.”

  He laughs.

  She sits two blocks outside the clinic gates in her car, waiting to run Stephen down when he gets out. She’s too far away, though; by the time she gets the car turned on she has a red light, and when she tries to run it anyway she gets sideswiped. Not badly, but enough that a cop comes. She remembers him from last year’s charity spaghetti dinner—he’d been one of the clowns for the kids. He talks the other driver down. Then he tells Lucy he’s called Greg, just so Greg knows.

  “You seem really shaken up lately,” he says. “Greg’s getting worried.” The ring pinches.

  “Thank you so much, I appreciate it,” she says. She throws her phone in the garbage at the car repair shop. She tells them she’ll be back in fifteen minutes, and heads for the only place in the world where no one will ask what she’s doing there.

  Abigail’s ghost wants vengeance for Susan; there’s nothing else that will sate her. Lucy understands. It’s just that she has nothing else to give.

  When the security guard at the graveyard finds her, just before the evening rounds, she’s slumped over the annual municipal grave, getting cold. Her ring finger is missing—looks like she’d cut it off. He doesn’t know why; not like there’s a ring.

  8. The dead have forfeited fear. They need not be reasoned or just. They aren’t beholden, which makes them a horror. If you could be as ruthless as you wanted about anything at all, would you? (Show your work.)

  Sometimes a home collapses under silence. Sometimes not. Once when Charles came home from a week of jury duty, Abigail came down the stairs just to walk back up to the house with her arm tucked into his. They hadn’t spoken again until after dinner, when he handed her a hair ribbon he’d bought and said, “Thought of you,” and that was all they said until it was time to turn in.

  She wore the ribbon all the time, a little glimpse of green against the red carpet in the parlor, and whenever he looked up from his paper he smiled like a fool.

  One winter he got pneumonia. As he recuperated into the spring, Abigail kept him in the parlor. “So I know where the sickness is,” she said, as she wiped his forehead and pressed a bowl of broth into his grip, and he covered her hands with his hands.

  When he was well enough to go up the stairs, he said, “Safe to catch it now, I can play nurse,” and she laughed.

  She stepped on a loose nail on the floor of the parlor one night. Water had gotten into the new lumber; the nail had rusted. She was dead in a week.

  The doctor called in a minister even though neither Charles nor Abigail were really church folk, and the minister brought a funeral director and a coffin they set up in the parlor, and they talked about funeral arrangements while Charles nodded calmly, as if he was actually going to let them take Abigail away from the house she loved so much.

  When he turned on the tap in the bathroom, he forgot, for a few seconds, how to swallow. He forgot to dry his hands, and when he came back into the bedroom and took her hand, it slipped. He waited until he had some strength back in his wrists before he picked her up. Wouldn’t do to trip carrying your bride down the stairs.

  He buried her in the backyard, under the ivy, and carried the dirt back inside in sugar bags to weigh down the coffin.

  At night he’d listen to the wind in the branches and worry she would feel it, but the fear never lasted long. She had loved it here even when the branches fell. And it was just a grave.

  He knew where she really was; whenever he passed it he knew she was inside, working on something that pleased her, a flash of green against the carpet floor. All he had to do was not look, and she was still alive.

  9. Essay question: Are ghosts a function of time or of grief?

  10. What is the ghost story?

  a) Every story is a ghost story.

  b) Grief is smoke, and memory fails you. Better to think the dead come back.

  c) Cook your grandmother’s soup. Touch something for the last time. Lose the way to a place you lived. Forget the name of a person who loved you. The part of you that loves is a maker of ghosts.

  d) The ghost is sated, or it isn’t. The living prevail, or the grave finds room. Someone’s held to justice, or else ghosts; the dead leave warnings for the dead. The grave is safe, or someone is walking through a brand new house, pausing in the dining room as if there’s something in there she forgot. She won’t know why. She’ll take the house. The first night she’s alone, she’ll find a ring.

  (She was always the better of the two of them at climbing, and even now, a grown-up, and aware of the ridiculousness of herself, she almost raced up into the canopy. Escaping the ground: that’s how it felt. As if the deaths in the village had left its earth tainted.

  ‘Come on,’ she shouted to her brother, without looking. She could hear him wheezing below, hauling himself without her facility up the body of the tree.

  Here I am, she thought. The children would laugh. That, or they would be appalled or amazed at the sight of this woman, this mother, her legs wrapped around a bough, her body clinging to the swaying, uppermost part of the trunk. She reached the top at last and felt the whole tree bow. She parted the leaves and laughed in delight at the view while the wind pushed her hair.

  She watched the church tower, the cricket field, the barns and the ruin of the manor house. She heard her brother coming.

  ‘You could imagine nothing had been going on,’ she said, just loud enough for him to hear, but to herself, really.

  She registered the strange sounds of his ascent. A slow heave and violent crack. A slow heave and ugly breaking. Again, an impact, the splinter of wood, louder, again, again. She frowned and looked down.

  A few handholds below her he clung on. He looked at her with ferocious attention. He looked at her without malice but with absolute intent and she remembered his silence when the man and woman had died. She looked at him and knew that this was his last act, even before she saw a ladder of ruin below him. She saw that each branch of the old tree, each hand- and foothold, was broken, kicked and snapped where it met the trunk, leaving only a stump of splinters to which no one could cling.

  He gripped with his hands and stamped and stamped on the stick on which he stood and it broke off cleanly like all the others and he held himself by the strength of his arms as it fell, lengthily, all the way down. And he looked at her, and she was in the canopy with him, way above the roofs, and there was no way down.)

  The Collector

  Sally Partridge

  Bennie wouldn’t call hims
elf an old soul. Retro, maybe. Retro was okay. Retro was making a comeback in a big way. These days everyone was listening to Lazerhawk, wearing vintage Seiko digital watches and tweeting about Stranger Things. Retro was something Bennie felt comfortable with. He hated the phrase “safe space”, but in a literal, non-SJW way, those two words summed it up. Truth is he never really felt comfortable out in the world since leaving his parent’s home in the northern suburbs—the wrong side of the boerewors curtain, as the guys at work like to say. He had a good job as a security guard at an apartment complex in Century City. Apart from the occasional baiting, the other guys were all right. The residents were uptight though. You couldn’t just say hello to a pretty girl who walked through the gate anymore, even if you were just being polite. Even if you really just wanted to ask her out for a burger. Women didn’t want you to talk to them unless it was strictly business.

  Which way is Block C?

  Fourth building on your right.

  Excuse, where do I pay for parking?

  At the gate, Ma’am.

  Hey, Bennie, there’s a homeless guy sleeping in the visitor’s parking bay. Won’t you sort it out?

  Sure, Dr Moodley.

  He stopped talking to the residents after a while, in case he said the wrong thing about the Jews or working mothers, even though at school everyone always said what was on their mind and it was okay to laugh when someone made fun of the Chinese. Things were better when people weren’t so easily offended. The last straw was when Jackie at the complex laundromat reported him to his supervisor for being inappropriate towards her. All he said was that she looked good. She’d lost some weight. Women liked it when you noticed things like that, or so he thought. His ma always lost her temper when no-one commented on how well her diet was going. Turns out both Bennie and his ma were wrong about women. So now he’d nod, say as little as possible, smile, but not in a way that could be misinterpreted. It wasn’t so much a fine line as an invisible one. Well, he certainly couldn’t see it.

  When his shift ended he kept to himself. He liked to play old-school games on Steam. Games like Neon Drive. It made him realise how much he missed the eighties. Rewatching Blade Runner and The Terminator made him feel a whole lot better about his life. No-one really understood that. It was like taking a trip to the past, where all the heroes were tough guys and the women liked them for it. Bennie was a tough guy. But these days women didn’t want saving. He didn’t understand the world anymore. Collecting memorabilia was a natural progression. DVDs, movie posters, figurines. Predator and Terminator action figures were easy to come by online. Car boot sales and comic book conventions were a great place to find old He-Man collectables. He even found a life-size Gizmo at a hospice charity shop that gurgled when you pressed its belly. He liked his little slice of the past. His ‘safe space’—everything arranged in such a way so he could always be reminded of his childhood wherever he looked. That’s why he liked working nights at Century City. Driving to work down that lit-up, palm-lined stretch at night felt like he was going back to a better place. It calmed him down. Made him forget the present. He liked the way the lights of the petrol station reflected off the glass buildings, bathing everything in neon. It was like starring in his own movie.

  Working nights meant he slept late, but he always got up early on Saturday mornings to hit Milnerton Market. He dressed meticulously in his black jeans and hi-tops, his logo t-shirt stretched over his muscled arms. Unlike the hipster and artisan markets in the city centre and the gentrified parts of Salt River, the people that set up their stalls on the dusty stretch of lot between the fish factories and the train tracks were from a different time. It was a place far removed from postcard perfect Cape Town, where Table Mountain looked the other way and giant cement dolosse jutted out at odd angles, obscuring the sea view. These people had no idea the value of what they were selling. They just needed the money. It was where he found the best figurines. Bennie liked to amble with his hands in his jeans pockets, past the faded beach umbrellas, plastic tables and yawning car boots, just looking. Most of it was junk. Plastic kitchen sets and scratched vinyl records, stolen car radios and Mad Magazines without front covers. But there were a few diamonds hidden amongst the coal.

  Towards the end of a dusty row, near an oxbow of kombis selling boerewors rolls and slap chips, he spotted a wooden table covered with plastic Tupperware containers heaped with toys. A tiny woman in her fifties with the manic eyes of someone on too many over-the-counter pills smiled as he approached. “Hello,” she said, “looking for something for your kids? I have a garage-full of toys, you know. My daughter’s too old now you see. She’s a journalist in Johannesburg. Married to her job, ha ha. No hope for grandchildren, so why not sell the lot I said.” She wrung her graying ponytail as she spoke.

  Bennie nodded politely and let her finish. He picked up a pink My Little Pony with green hair and four-leaf clovers on the rump that was in pretty good shape. Right time period too. Some collectors could get as much as one hundred dollars for one of these on eBay, if it was rare enough. He turned the pony over a couple of times, admiring the care that went into the colouring and the detailed artwork, the kind you didn’t see much of anymore. Vintage Hasbro. He held it under his nose. It even smelled like the eighties, like the inflatable plastic pools of his childhood. He felt himself relaxing, his mind already blurring everything else out so that it was an effort to pull himself back into the present. “Got any more of these?”

  “Yes! A carrier bag full, let me get them.” She disappeared under the table and popped up a minute later rustling a yellow Shoprite bag, bulging with plastic legs and snouts. She focused her wild eyes on him. “Is it for your daughter?” she asked.

  “Sure.” He glanced inside the bag and counted about twenty figures in the same condition, their cartoon eyes staring in every direction. Usually little kids brushed the curls out of the hair, leaving behind a matted, static clump. These had their shiny manes intact. In the memorabilia trade, they’d do well. He smiled to himself. “How much you want for these?” he asked.

  “Oh, you know, I don’t want to rip you off. A hundred? Tell you what. I’ll give you a discount since they’re so old. New toys cost so much nowadays, don’t they? How about we say fifty for the lot.”

  He kept his face expressionless. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  At home in his flat without palm trees or neon signs, he googled his new acquisitions. Yum Yum, with its scratch’n’sniff rump and candy cane motif, was worth 14 dollars. He searched each one meticulously on eBay. Twenty dollars. Ten dollars. Sixteen dollars. He had purchased them all for fifty rand. That wasn’t even the equivalent of four dollars. He was sitting on a potential fortune. Merriweather Rainbows went for around eight dollars. Barnacle Big Brother, ten. Posy, two. Mountain Boy Ice Crystal, one hundred dollars.

  “Jackpot,” said Bennie, leaning back in his wheeled office chair. He eyed the ponies arranged in a neat row in front of him. He liked the look of them on his desk, underneath his laminated Enter the Dragon poster. Pity to sell them really.

  Starglow was worth sixty dollars. He reached for the slightly translucent green pony covered in stars. The hair still retained its out-the-box curl, as if the previous owner hadn’t played with it at all. Maybe the girl had been more into books since she was a big-time journalist now. He could sell it for one hundred dollars. Easy. Hell, he might even keep it. He liked the smell.

  He spent the rest of the evening cleaning them meticulously, like an archaeologist unearthing a dinosaur skeleton from the dirt one brushstroke at a time. Mitch Murder played from his computer speakers, one of his latest retrowave discoveries. He’d finish off by photographing the ponies and updating his catalogue.

  The security office at the entrance to the complex overlooked a courtyard where Uber drivers waited for their passengers and pizza delivery men rested against their scooters, their faces illuminated by smartphone screens. The block was access controlled, so residents came in through their own ga
te via access card. Bennie’s job was to take down the details of the cars that pulled into the visitor’s entrance. He recognised the boyfriends and girlfriends, brothers and friends that left red-eyed or slurring hours later.

  It was a slow night. He watched a group of girls with feathered hair and animal print coats giggle and woo as they manoeuvred their heeled bare legs into the back of an Uber.

  His colleague, Wessel, elbowed him in the belly. “Tin Roof you reckon? Or Aces and Spades. Girls like that always end up at Aces and Spades.”

  Bennie made a neutral sound through his nose.

  It didn’t deter Wessel. “What you reckon? After work? See if we run into them?”

  Bennie managed a smile. “And what must I say when your wife calls?”

  “Tell her I fell off Tin Roof.” Wessel snorted with laughter.

  The rest of the guys lounging around the office joined in. Bennie didn’t mind too much. They knew not to push him too far. He shook his head and took a look outside. It was a clear night. He could make out the silhouettes of the palm trees against the tall pink apartment buildings. Hundreds of flatscreen TVs glowed in the high windows. He could tell by the sporadic vibrations in his pocket that his auctions were going well. He could already taste that bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label he planned to buy when the first proceeds came in. He felt a pang of pity at the thought of parting with them, but he shook the thought away. Trading memorabilia was a new venture. The idea had come to him while comparing prices online for a GI Joe action figure. He reckoned he could sell some items at a mark up to pay for the figures he really wanted. It seemed like good business sense.