by A. C. Wise
Once the ghost children realize he can see them, they start coming to him all the time. They press their hands against his skin, never blinking, never breathing, silently asking why. “Tell me how to help you,” he begs, but they cannot answer him.
At night, when he’s making soup from a paper packet, they hover around his stove. When he’s watching TV, they drape themselves over the top of the set. When he’s brushing his teeth, they crowd the mirror beside him. When he sleeps, they stand at the foot of his bed, and they are there again when he wakes in the morning.
“Please,” he says. “Please tell me how to help you.”
The ghosts’ voices have been stolen, so they show him instead. Old Man McGinty dreams about the school grounds. He dreams about a particular patch of trees, so far away at the edge of the property that it isn’t even visible from the school. There’s an old shed under the trees where a wheelbarrow and other unused equipment is stored. It’s a bad place. Nobody goes there. It’s just another one of those things that everyone knows.
*
Rooster is the dropout, the burnout, the one everyone knows will amount to nothing. They tell him so all the time. In turn, he tells them nothing. Not about the nightmares, or how he wakes screaming and shaking with a head full of memories that couldn’t possibly be his.
He’s a soldier in a far away country where the air thumps with mortar fire and helicopter blades, and all around him foliage burns. He knows the memories cannot be real. He’s only ever been a member of the Super Teen Detective Squad. They solve mysteries and unmask fake monsters, and nothing is dangerous or scary at all.
The four of them drive around in an old jalopy painted the blinding-bright color of the sun. He isn’t sure where it came from. Like the Squad itself, it’s always been there, a fifth member of their team. Except didn’t there used to be a dog? Rooster thinks so. At least he remembers burying his fingers and face in thick fur, holding on like he was drowning.
Rooster has never asked any other members of the Squad about the dog. The only thing they ever talk about is mysteries. Like the Squad isn’t just what they do, it’s everything they are. They’ve met other Teen Detectives in their time—the sheriff’s daughter who is a little bit psychic and her pudgy, brown-haired friend. The murder-solving twins. He’s always wondered which one of them is the evil one and if they’ll grow up to be a killer after all they’ve seen, if they even grow up at all. There have been others, a blur of faces over the years. Every time they encounter another team, he can’t help thinking “Aren’t they too young for this? Aren’t we all?”
The case he remembers the most clearly is the Civil War ghost haunting the old graveyard. Of course, he wasn’t really a ghost, though he was a soldier, only in a different war. He felt more at home among the dead, he told them when they unmasked him, but no one other than Rooster seemed to hear.
He wanted to hug the man, or hold his hand, but he was afraid to even look him in the eye. He wanted to say he could understand the appeal of wearing a mask, of being someone else for a while. He could understand wanting to hide. But he didn’t say anything at all, silently thinking about the days he wakes with a name in his mouth that tastes of mud, and cold beans, and rain. Which one is he? Is the soldier or the Teen Detective Rooster’s real disguise?
*
“It’s the ghost who killed them,” Old Man McGinty says. “Not the little ones, the big one. Except he wasn’t a ghost at the time. He was a man, and he worked at the school a long time ago.”
The ghosts showed him, the ones with the blue skin, sad eyes, and tiny hands. The ones who curl up on top of his refrigerator and slide in under his door. They showed him what happened to them, and he tries to tell everyone, but no one listens.
“Please,” he says. “Just let me show you, just let me explain.”
He digs in the dirt until it forms rinds under his nails and streaks his arms. He unearths skulls and cradles them in his hands. He kisses them, whispering lullabies as he weeps into the empty sockets of their eyes. They’re his ghosts. The ones who ride his bus. He knows them, he tries to say. But the parents who didn’t even notice their children were missing until he told them—the men who smell of scotch and expensive cologne, and the women who smell like chalkboards and wear skirts that brush their calves and pillbox hats on Sundays—click their tongues.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” they say. “And everyone knows what monsters look like anyway. They look like you.” Wrong. Sad. Old.
After all, how else would he know where to find the bodies? And there are so many rumors about him. He must be the one.
*
Greg is the rich one. Definitively rich, disgustingly rich, not just a little rich like Helen. He lives in a mansion, surrounded by grounds that have a whole team of people to take care of them. There is a tennis court, a swimming pool, and more water features than he’s ever cared to count.
Greg isn’t certain how his father made all his money. He thinks it might have something to do with weapons and a military coup in a far away country. All he knows is that his father is not a good man. His father was the first man who ever hurt him, but he wasn’t the last one.
There’s a place on the grounds where Greg never goes. It’s a little cabin, barely more than a shed really, where the groundskeeper used to live. There’s no groundskeeper now. The lawn and all the water features are maintained by a team who arrive once a week in a fleet of vans with neat green lettering on the side. Their logo is a broad-shouldered silhouette, standing under a tree.
Something happened in that cabin. But no matter how much he wants to forget, he still hears and smells and feels it, like jagged fragments lodged in his skull. He remembers screaming, his throat open and raw. The handles of the garden shears dry and splintery in his hands. The knowledge that once the terrible, ragged breathing stopped, no one would ever hurt him again.
He tried to tell his mother, then it was like someone came down out of the sky and scooped all the bad things out of the world like they’d never happened. Nobody said they were sorry, or that everything would be okay. There was never any body, no police ever came, then the cabin on the grounds was empty so maybe there was never a groundskeeper at all.
Just in case, though, he doesn’t go there anymore. Because maybe the rind of dirt he remembers under the groundskeeper’s nails was real. The calluses on his hand the first time they met. His father had just hired new staff, and he presented Greg to each of them like a trophy, not like a son. The groundskeeper is the only one who winked at him. “Don’t let Greg be a bother,” his father had said, like Greg was a troublesome lump of stone that might be run over with a lawnmower. “Oh don’t worry your head, Mr. B,” the groundskeeper had said. “I used to keep the grounds at the school. I love children.” And that’s when he winked. He leaned down so Greg would see, and his breath smelled like wintergreen.
There was a dog, too. A big one, with black and tan fur. It had a spiked collar and mean teeth. Greg remembers how one time it barked at him, and lunged against its chain. He was so scared he wet himself. The groundskeeper laughed; the dog belonged to him. But he told Greg not to worry, it would be their little secret. He wouldn’t tell anyone, especially not Greg’s father. Greg could even change his pants in the groundskeeper’s cabin so no one else would see, and then he would help Greg bury the old ones when he was done. The groundskeeper told Greg he was very good at burying things so no one would ever find them.
Eventually, Greg realized the dog probably wasn’t mean at all. It had been hurt too. But by then the damage was done. He’s been scared of dogs ever since.
There was another dog later. At least Greg thinks so, but he isn’t sure. He stole a bottle of liquor from his father and went driving in the sun-yellow jalopy. He’d driven too fast, top down, even though it was raining. The headlights made tunnels of light, then something jumped out in front of the car. Or maybe he’d already been veering for the side of the road, foot crushed down against the ped
al. Maybe whatever he hit saved him.
Once he’d stopped the car, shaking, afraid to look at the shape lying in the road, a man appeared. A boy, really, except he looked much older—his hair long, his beard scruffy, his clothes covered in mud. He shaved the beard later, and he turned into Rooster, but he had it the first time Greg met him, when he picked him up hitchhiking and they drove through the rain. Rooster had a guitar case and he smelled like incense. He looked like he’d been through a war, and he was crying.
The dark bundle still lay at the side of the road, all limbs bent and pointing the wrong way. Greg didn’t look at it as they pulled away, while Rooster couldn’t stop looking, staring in the rearview mirror like he was leaving his best friend behind. Or maybe Greg imagined that part. He was drunk and it was raining, after all.
*
“This isn’t right,” Greg says. Or that’s what he tries to say, but what comes out as Old Man McGinty weeps and clings to Greg’s shoes is, “I bet you thought you could get away with it, too. Meddling with those kids.” The real words, the ones he wants to say, stick in his throat. He smells wintergreen, and feels the splintery handles of garden shears gripped in his hand.
“Stop sniveling,” Helen says. “You’re pathetic. You’re not even a real monster.” Her teeth are very bright when she says it; her lipstick very red. It’s hard for Old Man McGinty to see her. He’s on the ground, looking up, and she’s haloed by the sun. It sets her hair on fire and casts her face in shadow. She doesn’t look human.
“I’m sorry,” Rooster whispers, but he isn’t sure anyone hears. He feels sorry for the old man, babbling about ghosts. Rooster knows a thing or two about ghosts. They are terrifying.
“Fuck you,” Tricia says. She screams it behind a locked jaw, so all that comes out is a moan.
She never asked for this. She never even wanted to be a Teen Detective. She had never touched alcohol in her life, but right now, she wants to drink and fuck and take drugs over and over again until she forgets everything, even her own name. She won’t be Tricia anymore. She’ll be Karen. She’ll be the kind of girl who smokes half a cigarette, then grinds the rest under her heel before lighting up another one. No one will ever think of her as the smart one again.
*
It’s all gone wrong, and he isn’t sure how. He only tried to help. Now there’s a rope around Old Man McGinty’s wrists, and the Super Teen Detective Squad is being congratulated on another job well done. Everyone who matters is happy; the monster has been revealed, justice has been done.
The ghosts watch Old Man McGinty with heart-broken eyes. The bodies he dug up are old. Theirs are still missing. But no one seems to have noticed except for him. They’ve already moved on. Sunnydale has a remarkably short memory, it seems.
The sun sets, the slate wiped clean, and the Super Teen Detective Squad go their separate ways. Old Man McGinty listens to gravel crunching under three pairs of feet, and two sets of wheels. And just before he’s led away, very far off in the distance, he thinks he hears a lonely dog howl.
Exhalation #10
It’s not a snufffilm, at least not the traditional kind. The single MiniDV cassette was recovered from the glove box of a crashed beige Ford Taurus. The car had passed through a metal guardrail and flipped at least once on its way down the incline on the other side. No body was found. The license plate had been removed, the VIN sanded away, no identifying information left behind.
The handwritten label on the cassette reads Exhalation #10. The film it contains is fifty-eight minutes long; fifty-eight minutes of a woman’s last breaths, and her death finally at the 56:19 mark.
Henry watches the whole thing.
The padded envelope the tape arrived in bears Paul’s handwriting, as does the tape’s label—a copy of the original, safely tucked away in an evidence locker. It’s no more than a half-hour drive between them; Paul could have delivered the tape in person, but Henry understands why he would not. Even knowing this tape is not the original, even touching it only to slip it into a machine for playback, Henry feels his fingers coated with an invisible residue of filth.
Expensive equipment surrounds him—sound-mixing boards, multiple screens and devices for playback, machines for converting from one format to another. Paul warned him about the tape over the phone, and still Henry wasn’t prepared.
During the entire fifty-eight minutes of play time, the woman’s body slumps against a concrete wall, barely conscious. She’s starved, one arm chained above her head to a thick pipe. The light is dim, the shadows thick. The angle of her head, lolled against her shoulder, hides her face. The camera watches for fifty-eight minutes, capturing faint, involuntary movements—her body too weak for anything else—until her breathing stops.
Henry looks it up: on average, it takes a person ten days to die without food or water. The number ten on the label implies there are nine other tapes, an hour recorded every day. Or are there other tapes capturing every possible moment to ensure her death ended up on film?
“Just listen,” Paul had told him. “Maybe you’ll hear something we missed.”
Henry’s ears are golden. That’s what his Sound Design professor at NYU said back in Henry’s college days. As a kid, Henry’s older brother, Lionel, had called it a superpower. By whatever name, what it means is that as Henry watches the tape, he can’t help hearing every hitch, every rasp. Every time the woman’s breath wants to stop, and every time her autonomic system forces one more gasp of air into her lungs.
He never would have agreed to watch the tape if he hadn’t been a little bit drunk and a little bit in love, which he’s been more or less since the day he met Paul in film school. Paul, whose eye for framing, for details, for the perfect shot is the equivalent of Henry’s golden ear. Paul, whose cop father was shot in the line of duty three months short of graduation, causing him to abandon his own moviemaking dreams and follow in his footsteps by becoming a cop as well.
Henry has always known better than to chase after straight boys, what he knows intellectually and logically has never been a defense against Paul. So when Paul called at his wit’s end and asked him to just listen to the tape, please, Henry agreed.
After fifty-six minutes and nineteen seconds, the woman dies. After another minute and forty-one seconds, the tape ends. Henry shuts down the screen and stops just short of pulling the plug from the wall.
*
“Jesus Christ, Paul, what did I just watch?”
A half-empty bottle sits at Henry’s elbow in his bedroom, his phone pressed to his ear. He locked the door of the editing suite behind him, but the movie continues, crawling beneath his skin.
“I know. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t ask if…I didn’t know what else to do.”
Henry catches the faint sound of Paul running his fingers through his hair, static hushing down the line. Or, at least, he imagines he hears the sound. Even after all this time he’s not always sure if what he thinks he hears is just in his head, or whether he really does have a “superpower.”
After watching the video of the dying woman, he’s even less sure. He watched the whole thing and didn’t hear anything to help Paul. But he can’t shake the feeling there is something there—a sound trapped on the edge of hearing, one he hasn’t heard yet. A sound that’s just waiting for Henry to watch the video again, which is the last thing in the world he wants to do.
“I’m sorry,” Paul says again. “It’s just…It’s like I hit a brick wall. I have no goddamn idea where this woman died, who she is, or who killed her. I couldn’t see anything on the tape, and you can hear things no one else can hear. You can tell which goddamn road a car is on just by the sound of the tires.”
In Paul’s voice—just barely ragged—is his fear, his frustration. His anger. Not at Henry, but at the world for allowing a woman to die that way. The ghost of the woman’s breath lingers in the whorls of Henry’s ears. Do the shadows, carving the woman up into distinct segments, stain Paul’s eyelids like bruises every time he blinks?
“I’ll try,” Henry says, because what else is there to say? Because it’s Paul. He will listen to the tape a hundred times if he has to. He’ll listen for the sounds that aren’t there—something in the cadence of the woman’s breathing, the whirr of an air duct he didn’t notice the first time, something that will give her location away.
“Thank you.” Paul’s words are weary, frayed, and Henry knows it won’t be a stray bullet for him, like the one that took his father. It’ll be a broken heart.
The drug overdoses, the traffic accidents, the little boy running into the street after his ball, the old man freezing to death in an alleyway with nowhere else to go. They will erode Paul, like water wearing down stone, until there’s nothing left.
Closer than Paul’s sorrow is the clink of glass on glass as Henry pours another drink. The bottle’s rim skips against the glass. Ice shifts with a sigh. He pictures Paul sitting on the edge of his bed, and it occurs to him too late that he didn’t bother to look at the clock before he called. He listens for Maddy in the background pretending to be asleep, rolling away and grinding her teeth in frustration at yet another of duty’s late-night calls.
Henry likes Maddy. He loves her, even. If Paul had to marry a woman, he’s glad Maddy was the one. From the first time Paul introduced them, Henry could see the places Paul and Maddy fit, the way their bodies gravitated to one another—hips bumping as they moved through the kitchen preparing dinner, fingers touching as they passed plates. They made sense in all the ways Paul and Henry did not, even though their own friendship had been instant, cemented when Paul came across Henry drunkenly trying to break into an ex-boyfriend’s apartment to get his camera back, and offered to boost him through the window.
