by Ellen Datlow
“Getting a bit of a mixed message here,” said Jules, but he smiled again. He knew his smile was one of his best features. Plenty of women had told him that his smile was what attracted them to him in the first place.
“Come with me. Into the house. Into the laundry room.”
“We could get a hotel room, there’s a place I like not—”
“No, we need to go here. Come on.”
She started for the door. Jules followed slowly. That niggling hint of memory was at him. Something bad had gone on in the house, in the laundry room. He felt it emotionally, even if he couldn’t remember.
“What? Why?”
“I’ll explain inside. Come on.”
“What about whoever lives here?”
“I’ve sorted it out with them. It’s still a student house. I paid them to go out for a while.”
The door was an inch ajar. Sam pushed it wide open, forging ahead, eager. Jules stopped on the front step. The sun had set now, and it was dark. Just as in his day, there was no overhead light in the hall, only a crappy low-wattage bulb in a faux candlestick parked halfway along. There were doors on both sides of the hall, but it was the one at the far end he looked at. The door to the laundry room.
“Come on,” said Sam. She reached back and took his hand, dragging him in. “Please.”
“We going to get some pillows on the way?” asked Jules. “Or you already sorted out something more comfortable?”
He thought he had it figured out now. It was kind of kinky to want to pick up exactly where they left off, but if that was what she wanted, he was prepared to overcome the weird kind of negative déjà vu he was experiencing.
Sam laughed though. A forced laugh, perhaps. She pulled on his hand, and he stumbled after her, all the way to the door.
“I don’t want to go in there,” said Jules suddenly, leaning back, pulling free. “I don’t really remember what happened the last time, but I know there was something—”
“Something!” exclaimed Sam. “Yes! That’s why I need you here. I have to know, I have to find out if it’s all in my head, or is it really something? What do you remember?”
Jules was silent. He started to back away, but Sam grabbed him, her hands around his neck and pulled him in, kissing him, desperately like they had ten years ago, and he felt himself responding, tightening his grasp, drawing her closer.
“You remember that?” she gasped. “You remember us fucking?”
Jules gulped and nodded. His hands were moving, caressing, almost without conscious direction, reenacting tactile memory from long ago.
“What else?”
“The cat noises,” said Jules slowly. “I mean, the fake . . . the mee-ow. You mee-owing.”
“It wasn’t me,” said Sam fiercely. “It wasn’t me! It was the girl, the girl with the dead cat!”
She pushed him away and spun about on the spot, throwing open the door to the laundry room. Jules tried to look away, almost hunching, raising his arms to cover his face, but he was too slow.
The laundry room had been repainted, and fairly recently, and there was now an LED light in the ceiling, making it far brighter than the hall. The room was all white now, save for a patch where the black mould was coming back. For a split second, Jules thought he did see a little girl, a little girl cradling a cat, the tail hanging slack between her arms. Then he saw it was just a pattern of mould. The room was damp, like it always had been. No paint could save it from that.
“Do you see her?” asked Sam. She was almost sobbing. She pointed at the stain. “Do you see her, and her damned dead cat?”
“No,” whispered Jules. He didn’t want her now, he didn’t want to be with her another second.
“You can’t hear her?”
“No.”
“Mee-ow! Mee-ow! All the time! She’s always there, her and the cat. Everywhere I went, there she was! I thought distance, get away, go the other side of the world, but no. She was there. Mee-ow! Mee-ow! Meditation held her off, but that stopped working. Running held her off, but that stopped working. What else could I do? What else could I do?”
“Hey, easy . . . ,” soothed Jules. He reluctantly gathered her in, but this time it was a sexless hug, him trying to give as little comfort as he could get away with, and her like a tree or a post, something dead and still and rigid. He thought he could see it now. She must have smoked a lot more than he thought, or taken other drugs, all the time in secret. Everyone knew now about dope and paranoia, and ice and so on. It all made sense, the message to Shirley, the talk of issues, this business with a girl and a cat. Of course she had always been the one who made the cat noises.
“What else could I do,” mumbled Sam into his shoulder. “Ten years. It’s been ten years.”
He turned her round and walked her outside, shutting the door behind them, already thinking where he could drop her off or get rid of her. As the door clicked shut, Sam shuddered violently, and for a moment he thought she was going to go into convulsions and he put one hand on his phone, ready to call for an ambulance. What made-up name could he use for himself?
But Sam steadied, stepping back from him to take several deep, gasping breaths. She looked up at Jules’s face and then to each side, eyes darting to and fro. She looked across the road, and behind her, twisting and turning as if searching for something and not finding it. Then she suddenly burst into tears again, but not the utterly destroyed sobbing she’d displayed back in the room. This was something else, and her face was filled with what Jules could only identify as unexpected joy. That was tempered a moment later as she looked directly at him again, but he couldn’t say what expression passed across her face. Sorrow perhaps, but not for herself.
Before he could stop her, she kissed him again, hard on the lips, whispered, “I’m sorry. So sorry!” and she sped off along the street, displaying that effortless running style as she accelerated, sprinting into the night.
Jules shook his head and went across to his car. He’d been lucky, he thought to himself. Dodged several bullets, all with the potential to totally fuck up his good life. His happy, contented life, he reminded himself. Next time some past girlfriend called him up or he ran into one, he’d be pleasantly distant. Unobtainable. Unreachable.
He got in the car, started it up, and glanced in the mirror.
“Mee-ow,” said the girl in the back seat, trying to wake the cat she held so tightly, the cat who could never wake.
“Mee-ow.”
A girl in a faded blue pinafore, her skin shrunken back to the bones of her skull, her eyes shrivelled, a body starved to death long, long ago, and the cat a bunch of fur and bones and one permanently glazed eye, the other just a mummified socket, and one ear was stuck up like a cardboard price tag and the other a gaping, dry wound.
“Mee-ow.”
“Mee-ow”
“Mee-ow.”
Jasper Dodd’s Handbook of Spirits and Manifestations
Nathan Ballingrud
We live in a haunted world, Mama told him once. A wise boy will come to know the spirits, and distinguish the good from the wicked.
A dutiful son, Jasper sought to catalogue the spirits he knew in a handbook. First and foremost there was the Holy Spirit, which is the one Mama used to talk to in the angels’ tongue. That spirit made her shake and shudder, even let her handle the serpents so that they might know their subservience to mankind. After she lit out, he asked his father if she’d gone home to God. His father just fixed him with that flat ugly look he sometimes got, so he didn’t ask again. She might come back one day, or she might not. He only hoped that wherever she was, the serpents retained their lesson.
Next there was the spirit of his baby sister, Lily, who died when she was five years old and who lived now at the bottom of the dry well. Though her grave was ten miles up the road at the Jubilee Church, it did not seem strange to him that she lived in the well. He knew that ghosts must travel dark roads invisible to a mortal eye, and that she simply traded one underground
home for another, closer to her family. Jasper never heard her speak except when he was dreaming, and whatever she told him then were things he could not bring back with him into the daylit world. He would wake up with the sound of her voice still in his brain, and the smell of the sweet, cold place she lived now lingering in his nose—but the words themselves were gone. He didn’t tell anybody about that, but he made careful note of it in his handbook.
There were the wicked spirits his father kept trapped in honey jars down in the root cellar. Each jar held a slip of paper with one of his father’s sins written upon it, which is what had lured the spirits into their confinement. Jasper would sometimes visit the cellar with a cigarette lighter held aloft, the shelved jars reflecting that shivering light like rows of haunted orange lamps.
Other spirits walked the woods at night. These were wild spirits, feral and hungry, scraping his window with tree branches and scuttling under the trailer with heavy, lumbering movements. Normally they would not keep him awake for long. He was ten years old, wise to their tricks, and satisfied with the protections of his home. Mama claimed it was the Lord’s grace that kept the aggressions of the spirit world at bay, and what few slipped through were trapped in the baited honey jars his father placed by the door. Jasper reckoned that was mostly true, but he kept up with his handbook just the same.
Uncle Kyle gave it to him a few years ago. He was Mama’s brother, and she told him once that Kyle was what college folks called a “naturalist.” Kyle showed him his own notebooks whenever he came to visit, and they were always filled with wonderful things: drawings of different kinds of birds; squirrels and raccoons; varieties of trees and seeds and acorns. He even had a couple pages given over to the bees Jasper’s father kept out in his hives, which were not actually real hives at all but big white boxes, with racks you could slide out to get the honey. Each picture was accompanied by his uncle’s cursive writing—a style he’d learned in school, back when he was Jasper’s age.
“Don’t they teach you how to write cursive in school no more?” he asked. When Jasper shook his head, he spat in the dirt. “Well it don’t matter how the words look. It just matters that you put ’em down. You just write down the things you’re interested in. Draw a picture, and write a little bit about how they act. Add details like when you saw ’em, and how often, what kind of things they eat, stuff like that. You can learn a lot about something just by watching it, and paying attention to what it does when it thinks it’s by itself.” He removed one of his own filled notebooks from his backpack, and gave it over to Jasper so he could fan through the pages. “When you fill one up, it can serve as instruction to other people. Then you don’t call it a notebook no more, ’cause it’s graduated away from that. Then you call it a handbook. The best part happens when someone else uses what you wrote, and adds their own ideas to it. It’s like a conversation that happens over a distance of time.”
The notion electrified Jasper. There weren’t many people for him to talk to out here. He liked the idea of talking across time. “I want to make a handbook.”
“Now how come I thought you might say that?” Uncle Kyle fetched an unmarked book from his bag, peeling off the cellophane wrapper and passing it to the boy with a thoughtful smile. Jasper felt gravity in the gesture. He resisted the urge to hug his uncle.
“What are you gonna put into it?”
Jasper shrugged, although he was already thinking about Lily singing out from her cold, wet home. As much as he loved his uncle, he didn’t want to tell anybody about that. He already knew his handbook would be a rare, secret book—something unique in the world.
A few months later Jasper learned that Kyle had never gone to college at all, at least not beyond a brief stay at the local technical school, where he flunked out. This didn’t change Jasper’s opinion of the man, or of his instruction. By that time he’d already put the notebook to use.
After Mama left, Kyle stopped coming around as much. The relationship between him and Jasper’s dad, always shaky, took a darker turn. His uncle didn’t stay over anymore; he just talked to his dad on the front porch, usually asking questions. Jasper never got to hear what they said, but when his dad came back inside afterward, he was always angry.
Last night it all came to a head. Jasper awoke to the sound of a shout. He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling, waiting for more. He heard nothing at first. Then violence erupted somewhere beyond his door. It sounded like a full grown buck panicking inside the house. He crept out of bed and peered into the living room, where he saw Uncle Kyle and his own father struggling on the floor. His father’s hand gripped Kyle’s throat. Kyle’s face was purple, with rage or from lack of oxygen. He had one hand on his father’s wrist and the other pressed against the underside of his chin.
Jasper panicked. “Dad!”
His father turned his attention to his son, lips curled back from his teeth, murder pooled in his eyes. Uncle Kyle wrenched himself free and smashed his fist into his dad’s jaw, dropping him like a sack of mulch.
As Kyle rolled away, Jasper saw broken glass beneath him, dappling the back of his plaid shirt with blood. His father groaned, marshaling his senses. Uncle Kyle got to his feet and delivered a heavy kick to his ribs; the sound of bone snapping made Jasper jump. His uncle paused with his hands on his knees, face red and breath rattling. Then he kicked his father twice in the head.
Jasper loved his uncle perhaps more than any other person on this earth, with the exception of his mother, so when he attacked him he did it with a broken heart. He crashed into Uncle Kyle, who staggered back a step, and pounded his fists into him. He screamed with more fear than anger. Kyle shouted something, but it was lost in the frenzy, and it wasn’t until his uncle shoved him to the floor that Jasper was able to stop his assault, crying like some weak little brat on the glass-strewn carpet, next to his bell-rung father.
Uncle Kyle opened the door and the warm August night poured in, smelling of jasmine. His uncle reached for him. “Come on, Jasper. Let’s go.”
Jasper didn’t understand. He looked up from the floor, propped on his elbows, a strange, confused hope rising inside him.
His father pushed himself to his hands and knees. “Fuck you, Kyle.”
“Walter, you just stay down, you hear? Stay down.” He looked back at Jasper. “Come on, kid. Let’s get out of here. You shouldn’t be here.”
His father tried to stand. Something broken in his chest made him cry out and he slipped to his knees again, clutching his side. His eyes looked unfocused—a blind, questing intelligence coiled there, like some wrathful animal sniffing at the lip of its cave. His face was beginning to swell from the beating. “Kill you,” he said quietly. “Kill you.”
Uncle Kyle did not seem to take that lightly. “God damn it, Jasper, right now. Come on!”
“But, Dad . . .”
“Fuck that old man! He ain’t shit! Let’s go!”
His father, still on his hands and knees, head hanging between his shoulders, extended a bloody-knuckled hand in Jasper’s direction.
Jasper gave his uncle one last look—he would later wonder what expression he wore, what message he sent—then scuttled to his father’s side, letting the man put a heavy arm around his shoulder, bearing his weight for him as best he could. He heard the door close behind him, and a moment later the engine of his uncle’s old Chevy growled into life. The sound swelled and then receded as his uncle drove away from him forever.
Jasper tried to help his father to his feet, but he guessed it hurt him too much, because finally his father pushed him off and settled back onto his side, breathing heavily, his eyes closed.
“Dad? Should I call the ambulance?”
His father opened his eyes. “That faggot ain’t gonna send me to no doctor. Bring me my bottle.”
Jasper fetched the bottle of rye from the kitchen cabinet. He didn’t bother with a glass; his dad hadn’t used one at all since Mama left. In another half an hour his dad was passed out, bleeding and swelling
on the living room floor, and Uncle Kyle was probably fifty miles away. Jasper sat outside, wondering what time it was. The night was humid and thick. Trees pressed close, and he listened as, somewhere beyond his line of sight, something walked among them.
• • •
Jasper awoke with his sister’s voice fading in his head. His father had migrated to the couch. He was passed out drunk, the bottle empty on its side. Sunlight intruded through the slats on the window. The place stank of booze worse than usual. Jasper swept the broken glass from the night before onto a junk flyer he retrieved from a stack on the counter, and slid it into the trash can, where it sifted to the bottom like spilled dirt. Somewhere down the road he heard the bus grumbling by, and he imagined for a moment being on it, sitting with other kids his age who were probably thinking about normal things, like homework or hunting trips, or whatever it was normal kids thought about.
He’d stopped going to school a couple months ago, sometime after Mama had gone. Eventually the truancy officer came by, and he’d been sent to hide under his dad’s bed. He listened while his dad told the officer that his mama had taken him away, and he didn’t figure they’d ever come back.
“You know what address they’re at?” the officer said. “We got to transfer him out of here, otherwise he’s gonna be marked delinquent. I tell you, it’ll cause him trouble down the road.”
“I don’t know where she took him. The bitch lit out in the middle of the night. She’s got people in Mississippi. I guess maybe she took him there.”
“Well . . . can you have her get in touch with the school next time you talk to her? I just don’t want Jasper to get in trouble, is all. You know how the government is. Likes to stick its nose every damn where.”
“That’s the government’s problem. Let it go looking, it wants to find her so bad.”
Jasper heard the door shut, and he wriggled out of his hiding place. He peered through the window and watched the truancy officer climb into his car and drive away. As far as the school was concerned, Jasper no longer existed. He thought he should feel good about that, but in place of that feeling there was a peculiar absence. He spent the afternoon hitting his favorite spots in the woods, finally settling into the rusted cabin of a long-abandoned ’74 Gremlin, grappled by kudzu and shaded by red maple. He watched the sky through the maple branches and imagined himself traveling to locations beyond his father’s reckoning.
