by Ellen Datlow
“The ghost thing felt like a scam when I heard about it the other day,” he said. “I guess now I’m a believer.”
“Some say a murderer,” I whispered.
“I hope you know better than that, Raph. Certain people see me as the villain who hated Raphael Marks for being so much more talented and beautiful than I was. So I pushed you over the edge and watched you die.”
“That was my take at the time.”
“It’s on record from when the cops found me that I was vomiting and crying my heart out at my closest friend having slipped out of my grasp.”
“I would shed tears for you if only I had tears,” I said.
“They arrested me for trespassing and defacing property. Not for murder or assault of any kind. Please tell me you know it was an accident. All anyone talked about was your art. No one knew I invented the devil/angel logos we used on every graffiti design We Dis created.”
I remembered the logos as something we had done together but that wasn’t why I was there.
As Graham Keel spoke he pulled on a very nice velvet jacket. Then he said, “It’s been fascinating talking to you. But I’ve got to be home.”
His audacity reminded me of old times. I glanced at a photo on his desk of two teenagers who had the misfortune of looking like their father. “I’m coming with you,” I said. “I’d love to meet your family.”
He was shocked by the very idea. But that night, run though he did, Graham Keel discovered that I would be with him everywhere he went unless he did a few things for me.
Over the next couple of weeks he used his connections, his skills, to do what I wanted. More than once he told me the pressure I used was killing him. I didn’t say (because it might give him ideas) that the last thing I’d want was to create a ghost like him in my town.
We Dis
Thirty years ago he and I stood amid the rack and ruin of the West Side Highway and the catastrophe that was the Hudson shore.
We had looked up at the Levanal Building, fifteen stories of black cement. The place exuded evil. It was said they specialized in smuggling weaponry for third-world cartels. All we could think of was how our graffiti tag We Dis would look on that top floor.
One day that summer we somehow managed to look enough like delivery guys to invade the building and access the roof. We took turns, as always. One would hang over the front of the roof spray-painting our smiling devil/tearful angel graffiti and our slogan.
The other would hold on to the painter.
Across the way Denny had managed to climb up onto an abandoned elevated railroad. He had his camera out.
I was just finishing the words:
SATAN LIVES HERE
WE DIS/KNOWS THIS
Then the hands that held me slipped away. And I fell screaming and smashed face-first onto the cement.
At our recent reunion I had promised Graham Keel I would never bother him again if we could duplicate the Icarus event with a few variations.
He didn’t trust me, nor I him. But he had the sometimes amazing ability of the Living to organize.
When I saw the Levanal Building again it looked the same as ever. But its name had been changed and its surroundings were transformed. The abandoned railway was now an elevated scenic park. There was a promenade along the river. The glittering glass museum I’d been in was a neighbor.
What’s more, the Levanal’s current ownership was anxious to be connected with the arts. Graham Keel managed to make sure they never quite grasped the history of what was about to be enacted on their premises.
I was going to duplicate my famous fall. Except this time I would do it as a ghost. If I understood this city as I believed I did, my reenacting that moment and walking away from it would mean that by tomorrow morning nobody would be talking about anything else.
I stood on the edge of the roof, saw the crowd looking up from the railroad park down below. In the mix I spotted more than a few of my own kind. They shimmered in the evening sunset—that light when we’re easiest to see. I knew almost nothing about them and felt I had no time to learn.
Graham Keel came near me and whispered, “I never had a brother. We could have been brothers. But all you did was push me aside, ignore me in public. When you got in the Double/Annual I didn’t even get mentioned. That’s all I could think of that last time. . . .”
“Bygones,” I said and stepped off the roof. With luck, I’d never see him again.
I held out my arms without fear as my weightless body slowly fell and the Living ones below, with their cameras and binoculars, caught sight of the flickering in the twilight that was me. I came down lightly, feet first, on the ground. There were gasps and applause along the railroad park. People knew they were seeing something they previously never imagined. There would be different ideas as to what it meant.
Denny had let it be known that this event was connected to his Icarus 1987 photo. He wrote that it would capture the ghost of the late artist Raphael Marks. That brought attention, which was good. It also raised arguments about the existence of ghosts. Those arguments had seemed to involve Denny and his photos more than they did me. That was bothersome.
As I touched down, Denny was looking up into the air. Others were pointing. I moved out of the building’s shadow. And against the sun setting over New Jersey, I saw, in black silhouette, a woman with long flowing hair and dressed in 1890s fashion, floating against the evening sky. Denny stared at this apparition and only glanced my way when she disappeared.
People were talking, some were yelling. There was no coincidence involved. The incredible specter had appeared at that moment to steal my glory.
I wondered who had arranged this and what Denny, or for that matter, Graham Keel, would tell the world. It would be their story. It felt like I’d just had a lesson of what happens when one like me puts his reliance on the world of the Living. Mistrust is never a bad idea and I had let myself forget that. I stood in full view of Denny and others among the Living as they called my name and tried in vain to catch sight of me.
As the sun went down over New Jersey, I saw more and more of my own kind. They flew above and sometimes right through me. The ghost kid on a bicycle was there. He may have been trailing me all through my recent visit.
I knew this was a moment of decision. I could flee or stand them down. And alive or dead, I was not going to leave this place again.
That night I caught flashes of my kind under the streetlights. Specters walked, floated, flew down the darkest streets, and I followed them. The faces were young and old, recent and historic. Some almost seemed to be among the living until I looked closely. Some clothes and bodies bore—like mine—the story of the wearer’s death.
As I looked at them, they stared at me. I heard it whispered that I had brought attention to our kind and some specters weren’t pleased with this.
We had gathered on a deserted side street leading onto the West Side Highway. Cars whizzed by, doubtless not seeing us. The side street was undergoing repairs; I could look into a dark pit and see a trench full of the dirt and clay that lay beneath the city. I thought of the graveyard at home and the ghosts I’d seen buried there.
I didn’t want to think that’s why I was here. So I told the crowd about how I’d been betrayed and murdered by the Living. They listened quietly and some nodded their understanding. But this is a tough town. And I’ve seen ghosts force other ghosts to give up their lives.
I told them how much I wanted to be among them, and privately hoped that this time, my existence in the city would not end anything like the way my first time had.
The Puppet Motel
Gemma Files
Sometimes, if we don’t watch out, we might slip inside a crack between moments and see that there’s an ebb and flow under everything we’ve been told is real, a current that moves the world—the invisible strings which pull us, spun from some source we’ll never trace. Sometimes we can be forced by circumstance to see that there’s a hand in the darkness, just visibl
e if we squint, outstretched towards us: upside-down and angled, palm and fingers curved to flutter enticingly, waving us on. The universal sign for come closer, my darling, come closer.
And sometimes, when things get particularly bad, we may suddenly find ourselves able to hear the steady hum under the world’s noise, an electrically charged tone far too light to be static, yet too faint to be a crackle; a thin bone whistle reaching through the walls, almost too faint to register. Rising and falling like the breath behind words you can almost make out, if we only try.
That outflung hand, beckoning us on; that unseen mouth, smiling. All the while telling us, without words, its voice the merest whisper in our singing blood: come here, love—my sweet one, my other, come. Don’t be afraid. Come here to me, to my call.
That tone—that beckoning—is one I’ve heard far more often than I’d like to admit, mainly because I just keep on hearing it, even though I don’t want to. It’s louder than you’d think, especially once you’re no longer able not to concentrate on it . . . so much so it makes it hard to sleep, or work, or dream. Sometimes, it gets so loud I’m afraid I might actually start wanting to answer.
If you ever hear that sound, or even suspect you’re about to, then my advice to you is simple.
Just. Fucking. Run.
• • •
Everything you can think of is true, somewhere, for someone—is now, or has been, or will be. And proof, for all our demands, has never been more than the very least of it.
For example—my father sometimes talked about this thing that happened to him when he was a kid, but only because I wouldn’t stop bothering him about it. How he took the wrong path at the campsite by the lake, walked straight off a cliff, a sharp downward slope. How he fell and fell, mainly through mud, till he hit the bottom and cracked his forearm on a rock, buried a hand’s-breadth deep. How he stayed down there for what seemed like hours, calling out weakly, hoping his family would hear. But it was Dominion Day, night already falling, fireworks going off. The campsite was a zoo. He couldn’t even tell if they’d noticed he was gone.
He lay there, staring up at the cliff’s rim, willing somebody to look over. Until, eventually . . . someone did.
So he started to yell, louder than ever before: Down here, here I am, please! Waved his good arm, pounded on the ground, tried to pivot himself around one-handed, to get the watcher’s attention. But the watcher just stood there, bent over slightly, as though it didn’t quite know what it was looking at. After which, slowly—very slowly—it stepped over the ridge and began a careful descent. And Dad was happy, ecstatic, up till the very moment the person finally got close enough for him to see it wasn’t really a person at all.
What was it, then? I’d ask; I don’t know, he’d reply, every time as baffled as the first. I don’t . . . I just don’t know.
(Its head was too long, too wide, and it moved—backward, he said. Too careful, like its feet were all wrong, like it had to think extra hard about where to step in order to avoid falling. Like it didn’t have toes.)
When it was close enough they could have touched, it leaned down. And when he saw its face he started to scream again, hard, scrabbling back like a crab and falling straight on his bad arm, the awful, gutting pain of it so sudden he blacked out.
He woke up in the hospital two days after, broken bones encased in plaster, mouth dry from painkillers and sedatives. The nurses said he had no other wounds, though when they gave him back his clothes, his underpants weren’t there. Had to be burned, they told him.
Why? I always asked; Because, was all he’d say. Except for one time, when he looked down and added, softly—
They told me they were full of blood.
• • •
Everyone has a story like my dad’s, I’ve since come to realize. The only surprising part, in hindsight, is that it took so comparatively long for mine to find me.
The summer I first heard what I later came to call the “tone,” I’d stupidly agreed to manage two Airbnb sites for a friend of my then-boyfriend, Gavin—let’s call him Greg, a guy I barely knew in real life, though I was already more than familiar with the fact that if you ever made any sort of statement on Facebook which disagreed with popular nerd culture wisdom, he’d suddenly show up out of nowhere to “debate” it into the ground, whether you were actually prepared to argue the point with him or not. But I needed a job for a certain amount of time (June through August, just in time to go back to school), and he was offering one, so how bad could it possibly be? Never ask, that’s my policy . . . or always had been, previously.
Not anymore, in case you wondered.
Both sites were fairly close to where I lived back then, give or take. One was at 20 George Street, ten minutes’ walk away, the same condo this Greg and his wife Kim planned on moving into once his current contract managing I.T. for a Ssouth Korean insurance company ran out; the other was a twenty-minute streetcar ride down to King Street East and Bathurst, a brand-new apartment in a building that had just gone up the previous year. Of course, that was twenty minutes at best, when nothing went wrong, but how often does that happen? Rerouting, accidents, construction, shitty weather—everything and anything.
One time Greg booked check-ins at both sites within a half hour of each other, and I had to tell the guests at King to go wait in a nearby coffee shop until I could get there to let them in; while I was en route, a thunderstorm blew up so badly that the neighbourhood transformer was struck by lightning and all the power went off, forcing the coffee shop to shut down early. By the time I got there, I had a family of five from Buffalo, New York, standing angrily on the corner by a streetcar stop with no roof, soaked through. “Why didn’t you take a damn cab, moron?” the father demanded, to which I could only smile and shrug, trying to look as inoffensively apologetic/Canadian as possible.
In principle I knew I’d be reimbursed for any expenses incurred on the job, up to and including sudden taxi rides, but that assumed I had the cash on hand to lay out for said expenses in the first place, and much of the time I just didn’t. I was already living hand to mouth, bank account overdraft withdrawal to unexpected credit card charge—that was why I’d needed the job in the first place, for Christ’s sake.
I called the place on George Street the House of Flowered Sheets; I suspected Kim had picked out all the linens, which were universally covered in patterns made from peonies, roses, tulips, or geraniums. It was small but airy, the floors panelled in fake blonde wood, with large windows facing Front Street that let in as much light as possible and fixtures of chrome and white porcelain. It got hot sometimes, but the overall air was functional, welcoming—big closets, a high-plumped double bed, cosily archaic furniture, free Wi-Fi. The guard on the front desk nodded back when I nodded to him every time I used the electronic fob key to get in, and there were plenty of fake-friendly, nosy neighbours. This last part eventually turned out to be a bit of a drawback—but we’ll get to that later.
The unit on King Street East, on the other hand, I called the Puppet Motel, because it was creepy, like a Laurie Anderson song. Because it was different, squared. Because it made me feel . . . not myself. And honestly, after only a couple of visits, I couldn’t imagine how anybody could possibly want to live there after they’d seen it. Not even for a day, much less two or three.
Like I said, the building was new, a boxy modernist monstrosity arranged around what had to be the world’s saddest concrete-and-stone park, complete with fake Zen garden sandlot, which doubled as ineffective camouflage for the parking garage’s entrances. In a way, since the property had two addresses (the other was on Bathurst Street, allegedly more convenient for guests driving in from Toronto Pearson International Airport), each with its own front door/mailroom/security desk/elevator access setup, you could say the place really functioned as two separate buildings somehow shoehorned one inside the other. Greg’s apartment was on the mezzanine level, only accessible from either one specific elevator (off King) or one specific set o
f stairs (off Bathurst), and there was nothing else on that level except a garbage chute, a gym, and a mirroring apartment, seemingly unoccupied.
The Puppet Motel’s windows looked inward, down onto the courtyard, so light was limited at best, a situation not helped by the fact that the entire place had been decorated in vaguely differing shades of black and grey. The bathroom fixtures were all black marble, even the tub, while the bathroom itself was tiled with granite—grey shot with black, like they couldn’t decide what would pick up less light. It didn’t matter much, anyway, because the main fixture in there didn’t even work; the place was lit by vanity mirror fluorescents alone. Some sort of electrical short. Greg kept promising he’d get it fixed, but he never did, not even when guests routinely complained about it on Yelp. The ceilings, meanwhile, were so high that I had to climb on a teetering stool to replace the track-lighting bulbs whenever they blew, which was often. They’d go grey, then pop quietly—an implosion, as if the sound itself was being swallowed whole by that creeping pool of darkness lurking in every corner, poised to rush into any space the light no longer touched. I could feel it waiting at my back as I moved around, raising my neck-hairs, shortening my breath.
After the first day there, I realized just how easy it was to lose all track of time, hypnotized by the vacuum’s drone or the dryer’s atonal metallic hum; I’d gotten there at noon, done what I thought was a few loads, then glanced up to suddenly see the central shaft engulfed in shadow, with nothing outside the windows but oncoming night. From then on, I set my phone’s alarm for twenty minutes a pop, trusting its old-school rising beacon trill to snap me out of . . . well, whatever it was. Oddness, at best, a fugue of disconnection; at worst, a physical queasiness, like I’d stepped through some unseen mirror into a weird, dim world, a cracked reflection of normalcy. On some very basic level, it just seemed off.
