Echoes

by Ellen Datlow

  Little sis burst out of Kelly’s closet and crashed dramatically onto the chest at the end of her bed, and shouted, “Boo!”

  Kelly and I both were startled and we laughed, and if you’d asked me then I would’ve thought we would’ve been friends forever after instead of my never speaking to her again after that day.

  As our laughter died out and Kelly berated her sister for scaring her, I realized that little sis jumped out of a closet and not from behind a door to another room that had easy access to the rest of the apartment and the stairwell to the third floor.

  I said to little sis, “Aren’t you upstairs? I mean, that was you upstairs we heard walking around, right?”

  She shook her head and giggled, and then there were creaks and footstep tremors in the floor above us again. They were loud enough to shake dust from the walls and blow clouds in front of the sun outside.

  I asked, “Who’s upstairs?”

  Kelly looked at the ceiling and was expressionless. “No one is supposed to be up there. The third floor is empty. We’re going to rent it out in the fall. We’re home alone.”

  I made Come on and Really? and You’re not joking? noises, and then in my memory—which for this brief period of time is more like a dream than something that actually happened—the continuum skips forward to me following Kelly and her sister out into the hallway and to the stairwell to the third floor. Little sis led the way and Kelly was behind me. I kept asking questions (Is this a good idea? Are you sure you want to end the tour all the way up on the third floor?) and the questions turned to poorly veiled begging, my saying that I should probably get home, we ate dinner early in my house, Mom was a worrier, et cetera. All the while I flowed up the stairs and Kelly shushed me and told me to be quiet. The stairwell thinned and squeezed and curled up into a small landing, or a perch. An eave intruded into the headspace to the left of the third floor apartment’s door. The three of us sardined onto that precarious landing that felt like a cliff. There was no more discussion and little sis opened the door, deftly skittered aside, and like she had on the first floor, Kelly two-handed shoved me inside.

  This apartment was clearly smaller than the first two with the A-frame roof slanting the ceilings, intruding into the living space. I stepped into a small, gray kitchen that smelled musty from disuse. Directly across the room from me was a long, dark hallway. It was as though the ceilings and their symmetrical slants were constructed with the sole purpose of focusing my stare into this dark tunnel. There wasn’t a hallway like this in either of the other apartments; the third-floor layout was totally different, and the thought of wandering about with no idea of the floor plan and fearing that I would find whatever it was making the walking noises made me want to swallow my own tongue.

  Little sis ran ahead of me, giggling into the hallway and disappearing in the back end of the apartment. I still held out hope that maybe it was her, somehow, who was responsible for the walking noises, when I knew it wasn’t possible. I stood for a long time only a few steps deep into the kitchen, which grew darker, and watched as the hallway grew darker still, and then a stooped figure emerged from an unseen room and into the gloom of the hallway. The whole apartment creaked and shook with each step. It was the shadowy ghost of a man and he diffused into the hallway, filling it like smoke, and my skin became electric and I think I ran in place like a cartoon character might, sliding my feet back and forth on the linoleum.

  An old man emerged into the weak lighting of the kitchen, shuffling along with the help of a wooden, swollen-headed shillelagh. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt and tan pants, with a black belt knotted tightly around his waist. An asterisk of thin, white hair dotted the top of his head and the same unruly tuft sprouted out from under the collar of his T-shirt. His eyes were big and rheumy, like a bloodhound’s eyes, and he smirked at me, but before he could say anything, I screamed and ran through Kelly and out of the apartment.

  On the second step I heard him call out (his voice quite friendly and soothing), “Hey, what are all you silly kids up to?” and then I was around a corner, knocking into a wall and clutching on to the handrail, and maybe halfway down when I heard Kelly laughing, and then shouting, “Wait, Paul! Come meet my grandfather. Tour’s over!”

  I just about tumbled onto the second-floor landing with everyone else still upstairs calling after me. I was crying almost uncontrollably and I was seething, so angry at Kelly and her sister and myself. I don’t know why I was so angry. Sure they’d set me up, but it was harmless, and part of the whole ghost tour/haunted house idea. I know now they weren’t making fun of me, per se, and they weren’t being cruel. But back then, cruel was my default assumption setting. So I was filled with moral indignation and the kind of irrational anger that leads erstwhile good people to make terrible, petty decisions.

  I ran back into the second floor apartment and to Kelly’s bedroom. I took the drawing of her ghost off the bed, tucked it inside my T-shirt, ran back out of the apartment, and then down the stairs and out of the house and to my bike, and I pedaled home without ever once looking back. I didn’t ride my bike by Kelly’s house the rest of that summer.

  I can’t remember planning what I was going to do with her drawing. I might’ve initially intended to burn it with matches and a can of Mom’s hairspray (I was a bit of a firebug back then. . . .) or something similarly stupid and juvenile. But I didn’t burn it or crumple it up. I didn’t even fold it in half. Any creepiness/weirdness attributed to the drawing was swamped by my anger, and then my utter embarrassment at my lame response to her grandfather scaring me. I knew I totally blew it; Kelly and I could’ve been friends if I’d laughed and stayed and met her grandfather and maybe middle school and high school would’ve gone differently, wouldn’t have been as miserable.

  While on occasion I had nightmares of climbing all those steps in the Bishop house by myself, I don’t remember having any nightmares featuring the ghost in the drawing even though I was (and still am) a card-carrying scaredy-cat. I wasn’t afraid to keep the drawing in my room. I hid it on the bottom of my bureau’s top drawer along with a few of my favorite baseball cards. While I obsessively picked through the play-by-play of that afternoon in Kelly’s house and what she must’ve thought of me after, I never really focused on the drawing and would only ever look at it by accident, when the top drawer was all but empty of socks or underwear and I’d find that toothy grin peering up at me. Then one day toward the end of that summer the drawing was gone. It’s possible I threw it away without remembering doing so. (I mean, I don’t remember what happened to the baseball cards I kept in there either.) Maybe Mom found it when she was putting away my clean clothes and did something with it, which would explain how it got to be in her box of kid-stuff keepsakes, but Mom taking it and never saying anything to me about taking it seems off. Mom fawned over my grades and artwork. She would’ve made it a point to tell me how good the drawing was. Her taking the picture and putting it on the fridge? Yes, that would’ve happened. But her secreting it away for safekeeping? That wasn’t her.

  That summer melted away and seventh grade at Memorial Middle school was hell, as seventh grade is hell for everyone. The students were separated into three teams (Black, White, and Red) with four teachers in each team. The teams never mixed classes, so you might never see a friend on Black team if you were on Red team and vice versa. Kelly wasn’t on my team and I didn’t even pass her in the hallways at school until after a random lunch in early October. She stood with her back against a set of lockers by herself, arms folded. It wasn’t her locker as I didn’t see her there again the rest of the school year. Normally I walked the halls with my head down, a turtle sunk into his protective shell, but before disappearing into my next class, I looked up to find her staring at me. That look is the second of two looks from her that I’ll never forget, though I won’t ever be sure if I was reading or interpreting this look correctly. In her look I saw I can’t believe you did that, and there was a depthless sadness, one that was almost impossi
ble for me to face as it was a direct, honest response to my irrevocable act. Her look said that I’d stolen a piece of her, and even if I’d tried to give it back, it would still be gone forever. To my shame I didn’t say anything, didn’t tell her that I was sorry, and I regret not doing so to this day. There was something else in that look too. It was unreadable to me at the time, but now, sitting in my empty house with dread filling me like water in a glass, I think some of that sadness was for me. Some of it was pity and maybe even fear, like she knew what was going to happen to me tomorrow and for the rest of my tomorrows; there wouldn’t necessarily be a singular calamitous event, but a concatenation or summation of small defeats and horrors that would build daily and yearly and eventually overtake me, as it overtakes us all.

  I would see her in passing the following year in eighth grade, but she walked by me like I wasn’t there (like most of the other kids did; I’m sorry if that sounds too woe-is-me, but it’s the truth). At the start of ninth grade she returned to school a totally transformed kid. She dressed in all black, dyed her hair black, and wore eyeliner and Dead Kennedys and Circle Jerks and Suicidal Tendencies T-shirts, and combat boots, and hung out with upperclassmen, and she was abrasive and smelled like cigarettes and weed. In our suburban town, only a handful of kids were into punk, so to most of us, even us losers who were picked on mercilessly by the jocks and popular kids or, worse, were totally ignored, the punks were scary and to be avoided at all costs. I remember wondering if the Michael Jackson and Duran Duran posters were still hanging in her room and I wondered if she still had that dream about her ghost and if she still thought that ghost was some part of her. Of course, I later became a punk when I went to college and I now irrationally wonder if punk was another piece of her that I stole and kept for myself.

  The summer after ninth grade Kelly and her family sold the house and moved away. I have no memory of where she moved to, or more accurately, I have no memory of being told (and then forgetting) where she moved. I find it difficult to believe that no one in our grade would’ve known to what town or state she moved. I must’ve known where she relocated to at one point, right?

  • • •

  The baseball game is still on and I’m on the couch with my laptop open and searching for Kelly Bishop on every social media platform I can think of, and I can’t find her, and I’m desperate to find her, and it’s less about knowing what has become of her (or who she became), but to see if she’s left behind any other parts of herself—even if only digital avatars.

  Next to my laptop is her drawing. That it survived all this time and ended up in my possession again somehow now feels like an inevitability.

  Here it is:

  I remembered it looking like the product of a young artist and being more creepy and affecting because of it. I remembered some of the branches at the top forming the letter K. I remembered the smile and the skin strips and the triangle arms as is.

  I didn’t remember the shadow beneath the hovering figure and I don’t like looking at that shadow and I wonder why I always peer so intently into those dark spaces. I didn’t remember how its head is turned away from its body and turned to face the viewers, as though the ghost was floating along stage left until we looked at it, until we saw it there. And then it sees us.

  I know it’s not supposed to be a doppelganger but I remember it looking like Kelly in some ineffable way, and now, thirty plus years later I think it looks like me, or that it somehow came from me. Even though it’s late and she’s in bed, I want to call Mom and ask her if she looked through the cardboard box one last time before leaving it here (I know she must’ve) and if she saw this drawing and recognized her son from all those years ago in it.

  I am glad Catherine and Izzy are not here. I keep saying that I am glad they are not here in my head. I say it aloud, too. They would’ve found the drawing before I did and I don’t know if they would’ve seen me or if they would’ve seen themselves.

  My reverie is shattered by a loud thud upstairs, like something heavy falling to the floor.

  There is applause and excited commentators chattering on my television, but I am still home alone and there is a loud thud upstairs.

  Its volume and the suddenness of its presence twitches my body, but then I’m careful to stand up slowly and purposefully from the couch. Worse than the incongruity of noise coming from a presumably vacant space is the emptiness the sound leaves behind, a void that must and will be filled.

  I again think of driving to the Cape or just driving, somewhere, anywhere. I shut the television off and I anticipate the sound of footsteps running out of the silence, or a rush of air and those triangle arms reaching out toward me and the shadow on the floor behind it.

  Everything in me is shaking. I call out in a voice no one is there to hear. I threaten calling 911. I tell the empty or not-empty house to leave me alone. I try to be rational and envision the noise being made by one of the shampoo bottles sliding off the slippery ledge in our shower, but instead I can only see the figure in my drawing, huddled upstairs, waiting. And it is now my drawing, even if it’s not.

  The ceiling above my head creaks ever so slightly. A settling of the wood. A response to subtle pressure.

  I imagine going upstairs and finding a menagerie of Kelly’s ghosts waiting for me: There is Greg with two g s tearing apart the hapless Rolph, and the desperately lonely Mrs. Black sitting in a chair patiently waiting, and the feckless shut-in Darcy Dearborn. Or will I find the ghost of a part of me that I never let go: a lost and outcast adult I always feared people (myself included) thought I’d become?

  Is that another creak in the ceiling I heard?

  I listen harder, and maybe if I listen long enough I’ll hear a scream or a growl or my own voice, and it is as though the last thirty years of my life have passed like the blink of summer, and everything that has happened in between doesn’t matter. Memories and events and all the people in my life have been squeezed out, leaving only room for this distilled me on this narrowing staircase, and right now even Catherine and Izzy feel like made-up ghost stories. There is only that afternoon in Kelly’s place and now the impossibly older me alone in a house that’s become as strange, frightening, and unknowable as my future.

  As I slowly walk out of the TV room and up the stairs toward the suddenly-alive-with-sound second floor, I don’t know what I’m more afraid of: seeing the ghost I stole grinning in the dark or seeing myself.

  Linger Longer

  Vincent J. Masterson

  I. Arrivals

  It was their first vacation together, a log-cabin weekend with Michael’s old friends from grad school, and Lori was determined not to ruin it. This was more her fear than his, and she had overcompensated with eager questions—Where was this quad? Who’s Dupin? What’s absinthe?—her eyes wide and searching and wanting more. But somewhere between Tallahassee and the mountains of eastern Tennessee, Lori grew weary of Michael’s nostalgia. Her temper was tripped easily—by his voice, by the loose flapping of the Wrangler’s ragtop, by a stomach upset from too many filling-station snacks. Didn’t he know she never wanted to go? Why couldn’t he have left her at home with her TV and magazines, refilling her favorite blue mug with dark wine?

  She pressed her forehead to the cold window, thinking of the stupid questionnaire Dr. Ryerson had given her during a session earlier that week. I sometimes have strong feelings that do not seem like mine, score from 0 to 10. Focus instead on your breathing, she thought. Conjure tranquil images: pristine mountains, waterfalls, softly falling snow. Beside her, she could feel Michael coiling tightly. The last hour of Lori’s sulky shrugs and one-word answers had finally burned up the last of his good cheer. How many miles had they driven in that bitter and troublesome silence? She didn’t know. A phrase lifted in Lori’s mind, a father’s frequent advice to his inscrutably moody little girl: Please, honey, just try to have fun.

  She reached over and squeezed Michael’s knee.

  “I love you.” She winced to hear
herself. I love you? It was overblown and over-sudden and, worse, it wasn’t what she meant. What she meant was, I’m sorry, it’s just me, I’m trying to snap out of it. What it meant was, Can’t you just pretend I’m happy, or that you are?

  Michael squeezed her hand and sighed wearily. “Everything okay?” he said. His thumb played over a slick patch of skin left from the night Lori had once scalded herself with pasta water.

  “Fine,” she said, reclaiming her hand. She lit a cigarette and opened the window. March cold rushed in over the glass, blowing ash back on the houndstooth sweater she bought just for the trip.

  “Nerves,” Michael said. She couldn’t tell if it was a question or a diagnosis. She also wondered whether he was talking to her or to himself. (He had made a few too many self-deprecating jokes this week, comparing his high school teaching to Derek’s loftier professorship.) “You’re just nervous about meeting Derek and Mallory. That’s understandable.”

  “I’m sure that’s all it is,” she said. “You know me and new people. I’ll come around.”

  “Well, nothing to fret over. They’re great, you’ll love them, and I’m supremely confident they’ll love you, of course.”

  Lori could feel his easy, reassuring smile. She did her level best to return it.

  • • •

  They traded the lonely interstate for the mercantile busyness of Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg. Michael was in a hurry now, not even asking if she wanted to stop somewhere before heading to the cabin. They rode the rising contours of the land, towns falling behind and below, the streets narrowing, pavement fading to gravel that scaled a steepening grade. At some point Lori’s ears popped from the change in elevation, relieving a headache she didn’t know she’d had. The Wrangler pitched and swerved through a final turn, gravel rifling against the undercarriage. The Jeep lurched forward and came to a hard stop on paved driveway hidden in the wooded mountainside.