by A. C. Wise
The Ghost Sequences
A. C. WISE
THE GHOST SEQUENCES
Copyright © 2021 by A.C. Wise
Cover art copyright © 2021 by Olga Beliaeva, based on the photograph “Morning Tea” by Serge N. Kozintsev
Cover design © Vince Haig
Interior design and layout by Michael Kelly
Proof-reader: Carolyn Macdonell-Kelly
First Edition
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-988964-33-1
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons—living, dead, or undead—is entirely coincidental.
Undertow Publications. Pickering, ON Canada
Publication history appears at the back of this book.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Even though they’ll never know it—to Ray Bradbury, for making me fall in love with short stories again, and to Alvin Schwartz, for all the scary stories to tell in the dark.
Contents
How the Trick is Done
The Stories We Tell About Ghosts
The Last Sailing of the “Henry Charles Morgan” in Six Pieces of Scrimshaw (1841)
Harvest Song, Gathering Song
The Secret of Flight
Crossing
How to Host a Haunted House Murder Mystery Party
In the End, It Always Turns Out the Same
Exhalation #10
Excerpts From a Film (1942-1987)
Lesser Creek: A Love Story, A Ghost Story
I Dress My Lover in Yellow
The Nag Bride
Tekeli-li, They Cry
The Men From Narrow Houses
The Ghost Sequences
Publication History
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by A.C. Wise
How the Trick is Done
The Magician Takes a Bow
How many people can say they were there the night the trick went wrong and the Magician died on stage? Certainly, that first morning on the strip—dazed gamblers blinking in the rising light, the ambulance come and gone, with the smell of gunpowder lingering in the air—everyone claimed they knew someone who heard the Magician’s Assistant scream, saw the spray of blood, saw a man rush on stage and faint dead away.
Of course very few people making the claim, then or now, are telling the truth. Vegas is a city of illusion, and everyone likes feeling they’re in on the secret, understand how the trick is done, but very few do.
The end came for the Magician, fittingly, during the Bullet-Catch-Death-Cheat, the trick that made him famous. A real gun is fired by a willing audience member. The Magician dies. The Magician reappears alive and at back of the theater. Presto, abracadabra, ta-da.
There are small variations. Sometimes the Magician’s Assistant fires the gun, if the audience is squeamish, or especially drunk. She revels in these brief moments in the spotlight, dreaming of being a magician herself some day. Sometimes the Magician reappears in the balcony, waving, and sometimes by the exit doors. Once he reappeared as a vendor selling popcorn, his satin-lapelled jacket smelling of butter and heat and salt. Once, he came back as a waiter and spilled a drink on an audience member who was confidently whispering that they knew exactly how he pulled it off.
Just because Houdini flashed bullets in his smile years before the Magician was born, people think they have it nailed down. Variations on tricks of every kind are a grand tradition in the magic world, and everyone knows none of it is real. The world is rational; it obeys certain rules. They hold this truth like a shield against the swoop in their bellies every time the Magician falls and gets back up again. None would dare admit out loud that deep down, a tiny part of them desperately wants to believe.
Here’s the secret, and it’s a simple one: dying is easy. All the Magician has to do is stand with teeth clenched, muscles tight, breath slowed, and wait. The real work is left to his Resurrectionist girlfriend, Angie, standing just off stage, night after night, doing the impossible, upsetting the natural order of the world. Her timing is always impeccable, her focus a razor’s edge. Her entire will is trained on holding the bullet in place, coaxing the Magician’s blood to flow and forbidding his heart from simply quitting out of shock. Death can be very startling, after all.
There is pain, of course, but by the time he died for good, it had become a habit for the Magician, and besides, the applause made it worthwhile. He never once allowed himself to think about the thousand huge and tiny things that had to go right for the trick to work, or that only one thing had to go wrong.
After all, the Resurrectionist pulled it off night after night—how hard could it be? Inside the wash of the spotlight, he couldn’t see her grit her teeth, how she sweated in the shadows while he flashed his smile and took his bows. Everything always went off, just like magic, and he always managed to vanish by the time her raging headache set in, forcing her to lie in a dark room with a cold cloth over her eyes.
But she never complained. The money was good, and much like dying had become a habit for the Magician, the Magician had become a habit for her.
Maybe they could have gone on like that forever if it hadn’t been for the Magician’s Assistant. Not the one who fired the gun, but the first one. Meg, who died and came back as a ghost.
*
The Assistant Takes Flight
Meg was young when she was the Magician’s Assistant, but everyone was back then. She was also in love with the Magician, but everyone was that back then, too. Even Rory, the Magician’s longtime stage manager, who was perhaps the most in love of all.
Rory thought of Meg as a little sister, and Meg thought of Rory as a dear friend, but neither of them ever spoke of their feelings for the Magician aloud. They worked side by side every day, believing themselves alone in their singular orbits of longing, both ashamed to have fallen so far and so hard for so long.
All of this was before the Magician’s Resurrectionist girlfriend, before the Bullet-Catch-Death-Cheat was even a gleam in the Magician’s eye. Back then, before coming back from the dead to thunderous applause supplanted it all, the Magician sawed women in half, plucked cards from thin air, nicked watches from sleeves, and pulled one very grumpy rabbit out of a hat night after night. Off stage and on, the Magician called the rabbit Gus, even though that wasn’t his name, and assigned him motives and personality to make the audience laugh.
Whether it was the name or the hat, the rabbit only tolerated this for so long, and one fateful night, he bit the Magician hard enough to necessitate the tip of his left index finger being sewn back on. After the blood and the gauze, and the trip to the hospital, the Magician decided he was fed up too. He needed a new act, a new assistant, a fresh start.
He didn’t consult or warn Meg, but directed her to an all-night diner as she drove him back from the emergency room. Up until the moment the words “I’m done,” came from the Magician’s mouth, Meg harbored the hope that this trauma would allow him to finally see her, and that he’d invited her to the diner at 1:47 a.m. to c
onfess his love.
Instead, he broke her heart and put her out of a job in the same breath. And he didn’t even have the decency to pay for her half of the meal.
Meg stared at the Magician. The Magician fidgeted with his gauze, and looked at the door and the neon and the cooling desert outside.
“I’m sure you’ll land on your feet, kid,” he said.
Meg blinked. She dug in her purse for tissues and money for the meal. When she looked up, the Magician was gone. Vanished into thin air.
Meg dropped coins and bills on the table without counting. Colt-wobbly legs carried her into the night. The air seared her lungs, and tears frosted her lashes. All up and down the strip, everything blurred into a river of light.
The Magician’s Assistant—she wasn’t even that anymore. Just Meg, and her parents had drilled into her young that that wasn’t worth anything at all. Who was she, if she wasn’t with the Magician? What could she possibly be?
Lacking evidence to the contrary, she chose to believe her parents. On stage with the Magician, she could pretend the glitter on her costume was a little bit of his glory rubbed off on her. Alone, she was nothing at all, and her ridiculous costume was just sequins, falling in her wake as she hailed a cab.
The car stopped at a location she must have given, though she didn’t remember saying anything at all. The space between her shoulder blades itched. She climbed out. Wind tugged at her hair and she took a moment to breathe in awe at the lights illuminating the vast sweep of concrete, a marvel of engineering, a wonder of the new world.
Meg left her purse on the backseat. She slipped off her shoes. The itch between her shoulder blades grew. Feathers ached to push themselves out from inside her skin.
Instead of landing on her feet, Meg landed at the bottom of Hoover Dam. A 727 foot drop that should have been impossible with all the security, except that just for a moment, Meg borrowed a little bit of magic—real magic—for her own. As she jumped, feathers burst from her skin and all the sequins in her costume blazed like stars. For just one instant before she fell, the Magician’s Assistant flew.
*
The Stage Manager Brings White Roses
Rory remembered Meg, and it seemed he was the only one.
Before she hit the ground, before he left the diner and Meg sitting stunned in the booth behind him, the Magician had already forgotten her name. If he ever knew it at all. While Meg flew, capturing a moment of real magic without an audience or applause, the Magician was at a bar forgetting what he’d never remembered in the first place, and so Rory was the one who got the call. He sat on the floor, put his head in his hands, and sobbed.
Even though the Magician paid her a pittance, Meg brought Rory coffee and pastry at least once a week. He taught her how to knit. She taught him how to throw a fastball. She invited him to her tiny apartment, and introduced him to her guinea pigs, Laurel and Hardy. They watched old movies, both having a fondness for Vincent Price, William Powell, and Myrna Loy, and popcorn with too much salt. They laughed at stupid things, and cried at sad ones, and never let each other know of their mutual ache for the Magician.
Now that it was too late, Rory saw that of course he was like Meg, she was like him, and they were both fools. He brought a massive spray of white roses to her funeral. He laid them gently atop her cheap coffin, and his heart broke all over again. There were only five other people in the tiny chapel, and the Magician wasn’t one of them.
Rory hated him. Or, he meant to. Except when the Magician came to him three days later and told Rory he was putting together a new show and would Rory continue to stage manage him, Rory didn’t hesitate half as long as he should have before answering. His heart stuttered, his breath caught. The word no shaped itself on his lips, and the word yes emerged instead.
He betrayed Meg’s memory, and loathed himself for it, but he didn’t change his mind. The best Rory could do was press a single white rose in his handkerchief, and tuck it in a pocket over his heart, listening to it crackle as he followed the Magician to start again.
Every night, under the lights, the Magician smiled. His teeth dazzled with a rainbow of gel colors Rory directed his way. Every time the gun fired, Rory felt the kick of it reverberate inside him. His blood thundered. His stomach swooped. He ached with the Magician and felt his pain as he watched him fall.
Every night as the Magician allowed himself to be shot, Rory held his breath. He clenched his teeth. His muscles went tight with hope and dread wondering if this time the Magician might finally stay down so he could be free.
*
The Resurrectionist and the Ghost
Angie is the first person to see Meg when she comes back from the dead. The Resurrectionist sits in the Magician’s dressing room, applying concealer over the exhausted bags under her eyes. No one will see her in the wings, but that’s precisely why she does it. The makeup is a little thing she can do for herself and no one else.
It’s getting harder to hold everything together, to want to hold it together—tell the bullet to stop, to cease to be once it’s inside the Magician’s skin, and tell the Magician’s blood to go. She sleeps eighteen-hours a day, and it isn’t enough. Angie’s life has become an endless cycle—wake, eat, turn back death, applause that isn’t for her, sleep, repeat ad infinitum.
She smoothes the sponge around the corner of her left eye, and the ghost appears. Angie starts, and feels something like recognition.
“I’ve been waiting for you.” The words surprise Angie; she wonders what she means. A vague memory tugs at the back of her skull, of a night in a bar long ago, but before she can grab hold it fades away.
“Who are you?” the ghost asks.
“Who are you?” Angie counters.
“The Magician’s Assistant,” the ghost says.
“The Magician’s girlfriend.” The words leave a bitter, powdery, crushed aspirin taste on Angie’s tongue.
Angie laughs; it’s a brittle sound. How absurd, that they should define themselves solely in relation to the Magician. The ghost looks hurt until Angie speaks again.
“I’m Angie.”
“Meg.” The ghost gives her name reluctantly as if she isn’t entirely sure.
“So, you were the Magician’s Assistant,” Angie says.
Memory nags at her again, and all at once, the pieces click into place. When she and the Magician first met, he’d worn sorrow like a coat two sizes too large, but one he wasn’t even aware of wearing. Angie had sensed a hurt in him, and it had intrigued her, and now she knows—the hurt belonged to Meg all along.
There’s a certain flavor to it, tingeing the air. Even with the glass between them, Angie tastes it—like pancakes drowned in syrup, and coffee with too much cream.
Looking at Meg, Angie sees herself in the mirror. The Magician pulled a trick on both of them, sleight of hand. They should have been looking one direction, but he’d convinced them to look elsewhere as he vanished their names like a card up his sleeve, tucked them into a cabinet painted with stars so they emerged transformed—a dove, a bouquet of flowers, a Resurrectionist, a ghost. If Angie squints just right, there’s a blur framing Meg, a faint, smudgy glow sprouting from between her shoulder blades. It almost looks like wings, but when Angie blinks, it’s gone.
Well, shit, Angie thinks, but doesn’t say it aloud.
Behind Meg, sand blows. Or maybe it’s snow. The image flickers, like two stations coming in on the TV at the same time, back when that was still a thing.
“Can I come through?” Angie asks.
“Can you?” Meg’s eyes widen in surprise.
“I’m a Resurrectionist.” Angie’s mouth twists on the words, but she can’t think of a better way to explain. “Death and I have an understanding.”
Angie reaches through the glass. The mirror wavers, and Meg’s fingers close on Angie’s hand.
“Is there somewhere we can talk?” Angie asks.
Meg shrugs, embarrassed. This is her death, but it isn’t under her control.
“Over there?” Angie points to the neon shining through the storm.
Meg shudders, but her expression remains perfectly blank. She looks to Angie like a person actively forgetting the worst moment in their world.
As they walk, Angie learns that for Meg, sometimes death looks like a desert with a lomo camera filter applied. Sometimes it’s sand and sometimes snow, but it’s always littered with bleached cow bones and skulls. It’s a place where you’re always walking toward the horizon, carrying your best party shoes, but you never arrive. Mostly, though, Meg’s death looks like a diner at 1:47 a.m., right before your boss—the man you love—tells you you’re out of a job and a future and good luck on the way down.
Inside the diner, laminated menus decorate each booth. The wind ticks sand against the glass as Meg and Angie slide onto cracked red faux-leather banquettes. In the corner, a silent jukebox glows.
“I don’t mean to be indelicate, but you’ve been dead for a while. Why come back now?”
The air is scented with fry grease and coffee on the edge of burnt, old cooking smells trapped like ghosts.
“I don’t know,” Meg says. “I think something important is about to happen. Or it already happened. I can’t tell.”
She shreds her napkin into little squares, letting them fall like desert snow. Her nails are ragged, the skin around them chewed. This time when Angie squints, Meg goes translucent, and Angie sees her falling without end.
*
The Rabbit Returns
The first time Angie saw the Magician, he had gauze wrapped around his left index finger, spotted with dried blood. She’d just lost her job, or rather it had lost her. Donna, who sat in the next cubicle over, caught Angie uncurling the browned leaves of a plant, bringing them back from the brink of death to full glossy health. Angie’s boss called Angie into her office at noon, and by 1 p.m. Angie was installed at a bar, getting slowly drunk.
