by A. C. Wise
At seventeen, she was murdered. Her killer cut out her eyes, and replaced them with smooth stones. He stitched up her lips with black thread, and left her in the shallowest part of the creek where the water barely covered her.
The stories say her killer was a drifter, or the devil himself. They say he confessed the same day the murder was done, screaming it all over the town square. When everyone came to see what all the fuss was about, he wept, inconsolable.
He cut her eyes out, because she wouldn’t stop looking at him. He sewed her lips shut, because she wouldn’t stop whispering his name. They hanged him just the same.
All of these stories are true. Every one of them is a lie.
The girls of Lesser Creek leave flowers for the hungry ghost at the water’s edge, and burn candles in her nameless name. The boys bring pretty toys, and line them up all in a row. The old women bake oat cakes, sweetened with blood, and the old men mumble prayers. Each brings their hopes and fears, and such desperate love.
No matter what they bring, the ghost is hungry still.
*
The second murder comes late July. In-between, there are a string of assaults, a petty theft, one count of grand larceny, and a host of undocumented sins.
The boy follows the hoof-paw-shoe-hewn path through the branches to cross the shallow water near every day. He can do that, no matter what the stories say. The wavelets glitter bright, wash sweat and grime from his skin. His toes grip slick stones, and he never falls.
He makes another mark on the boulder’s side. They multiply like rabbits, like flies. They turn the grey stone dense and arcane. There is power here not found in the other graffiti. And the stone itself is rife with meaning, too—stolen kisses, secrets trysts. Oaths are sworn here, fated for breaking. It is all his doing. Or so the oath-breakers and kiss-stealers say. He drove them to it; it’s what devils are for.
He has a tally of at least a dozen-dozen, and it is only July. The girl’s space is empty.
He watches her, sometimes, courting her soul slow, taking her time. She is hungry; the boy sees it in her eyes. But sometimes she smiles.
And when she does, he realizes his belly is empty, too.
The marks on the stone don’t fill him like they should.
Once upon a time, he was a musician. Once upon a time, he was good at cards. He was driven out of town, beaten with a stick, hung at midnight. His heart has burned countless times. He has tricked and been tricked, loved the wrong man and the wrong woman. It is always the same in the end.
Once upon a time, he walked the rails. Once upon a time, a canvas strap bit his shoulder, soaking sweat, gaining dirt. Walking, he ran. He trusted wrong, sleeping in open box cars, warming his hands by vagrant fires. He gave too much of himself away. He swapped stories, and accidentally told the truth.
He found himself dead, spit dirt from a shallow grave, and walked again.
He jumps on stumps, and has a quick hand. Dice and cards always fall his way.
Even though the marks crowding the stone aren’t as triumphant as they should be, the boy makes another one, and drops the sharp stone. The creek vanishes it, a card up a magician’s sleeve.
This is what the boy and the girl both know, even when they made their deal: It isn’t fair. They have been given roles to play—ghost and devil, hungry to the very end.
The summer ticks past, far too slow.
*
There’s a story they tell about the time the devil came to Lesser Creek. The townspeople chased him all along the rails. They caught him, and killed him, cut off his head and buried it upside down. They drove a spike through the ground to make sure he couldn’t pick it up again.
But will-o-wisps still drift under the trestle bridge in the dead-black of night, the devil’s own lanterns, leading the damned to the water’s edge. And if you walk along the ties at midnight and count thirteen from the moment you pass under the bridge, you’ll hear the devil breathing behind you. If you take one step back, you’ll find the twelfth tie missing and he will reach up and drag you down to hell.
The first time the devil came to Lesser Creek, he was just a boy, no more than seventeen. He committed a crime, or maybe folks just didn’t like the way he looked at them. Maybe the summer was too hot, and tempers were too short.
Even though he looked just like an ordinary boy, they pulled up rail spikes, and nailed them right back down through his feet and his hands. When they came back after three days, the body was gone.
No one brings flowers or blood-sweetened cakes to the old rail line. When old women pass, they spit, and old men still drive an iron spike between the twelfth and thirteenth ties on moonless nights to this very day.
It is a lonely place.
When the devil came to Lesser Creek the second time, he made a deal with a drifter who dared to skim stones along the steel rails just to hear them sing. If the man brought the devil twenty souls by summer’s end, his own would be spared, no matter how he sinned.
It was a mass-murder summer. A fire and brimstone summer. Preachers thundered through the churches of Lesser Creek, damnation heavy on their tongues. The air clotted thick; wasps drowned in sweat, humming between the pews and banging their heads against the stained glass. Birds fell from trees, hearts baked within the delicate cages of their bones.
All the fans stopped turning. Ice cream sizzled before it could touch the cone. Soda went flat in every fountain. Cold water forgot to flow, except in the creek where no one dared go. Wives beat their husbands; fathers cursed their daughters. Boys burst into tears for no reason, and kicked their dogs.
And the drifter came, and the drifter went, and bodies piled like leaves in his wake. No one could ever say if it he did the killing, or not. But every man, woman, and child in town swore up and down they heard laughter echoing along the train tracks, and it was the devil’s very own.
*
The next time you see her, you know she is a ghost, because she kisses you. And girls like her don’t kiss you.
You are sitting side by side, hand in hand, by the creek, always by the creek. Her feet are next to yours, relaxed where yours are tense. Your footprints sink into the mud. Hers are ephemeral, and disappear.
You grip her hand too tight, and sweat gathers between your palms. Planted in the dirt, feet in the current, you look toward the rock snagging the center of the stream. Graffiti scores it. It is a magical, mystical thing; a totem centering all the summer days in danger of flying off the edge of the world.
How un-solid these liminal years of your life are. At any moment, at every moment, you are in danger of losing cohesion. The rock in the center of the stream is eternal. It says X was here, and that is real—tribal and shamanistic. Written in stone it can’t be denied. If you vanish, the rock will remain, a record of your being.
Here and now, she kisses you, and it grounds you, too. It is the culmination of a summer’s worth of desire. It is the inevitable consequence of bridges and fireworks and the muddy banks of creeks. It is the only outcome of frog-song and bug-drone, and all the other milestones of the season.
And she says, or doesn’t say, but you hear, “All I want is one little piece of your soul. It won’t hurt, not yet. You won’t even know it’s gone until much later. One day, you’ll wake up, not in love with me anymore, old, and looking back on your life, and wonder where that part of you went. It’ll sting for a moment, and you’ll move on. Is that so bad?”
Her fingers lace yours, and the whole time she looks at the water, not you.
She says, “I’ll fill you up with me, so you’ll never know anything is missing.”
She pauses so you think she regrets what comes next. It’s what you’ve always known was coming since you saw her on the bridge.
She is a hungry ghost.
Here and now, you love her for her pity. You pity her for her love. It isn’t fair. And so you forgive her, because you’ve been hungry, too.
She says, “Before you agree understand that if you give me that pi
ece of your soul, it’s mine forever. That’s how love works. It consumes you. The moment it ends, you can’t see past it to a day down the road when you won’t be split open and bleeding for the whole world to see. In the wound, you can’t see the scar, or even the scab. Memories and hindsight belong to the future. This is here, this is now.”
You know how this will end. You have always known how this will end.
You hold her hand, tighter than you’ve held anyone’s hand before, and you agree. You give her your soul.
The summer seems very short now. You have so little time.
*
A third murder rolls around mid August, but it holds no joy. The boy is winning by default. He longs for a reversal, a revolt, a turn of fortune. He longs for a trick to grab him by the tail.
He never asked for this, no more than she did. He is a ghost, and she is a devil. The woods have always been haunted, and so have they.
Vandalism. Arson. A near-murder that doesn’t quite take. He whispers temptation. He pours jealousy, hate, venom, all into willing ears. In the end, he’s powerless. So is she. They only take what the world gives them.
He makes another mark, drops the stone in the water. The creek chills him. He wades to shore, wishing the summer would end.
*
She tells you it is over.
She told you; she is telling you; she will always be telling you. And. It. Is.
Welts rise on your skin. Psychological, but so real.
Of course, it had to happen this way. Nobody loves you, ever loved you, ever will. And part of you knows, bitter, that you are being oh so dramatic, so you laugh. But you cry, too. She warned you, told you what she was doing as she did it, but you handed your soul over anyway, because you wanted it so goddamned bad.
Even though, deep down, you know, godfuckingdamnit, you will never be good enough to be loved. Someone else will always win, always be better than you. You will always be hungry, while everyone else is full.
So you walk the trestle bridge, where you can just see the water. You think about the summer, all the people who died, lied, cheated, and stole. The whole fucking town is going to shit, but what do you care? And what would they care if you jumped right now?
They probably wouldn’t even notice you’d gone.
But you don’t. You won’t. And you turn away.
And maybe someone looks back at the sound of something heavy never hitting the rails. And maybe they don’t. Because everyone knows these woods, that water, those trees, these rails, are haunted anyway.
*
She makes a mark on the stone, one shaky line. He stands on the shore, arms crossed, watching. He wants to smile, but it makes his cheeks hurt, as if the rock-hard bubblegum left splinters in his skin. His feet, planted in the mud, ache. He remembers running; she remembers drowning. In the end, it is the same.
In this moment, he loves her for her pity, and he pities her for her love. Could she, would she, ever pity him?
By the stone, she wants to weep, but she smiles, and it tastes of tears. She looks at him, standing in a slant of sunlight, watching her.
One soul, her tally.
He reaches for her, their fingers almost touching.
It is never enough.
His side of the stone is crowded; she has one single soul to her name. It is sweet, oh so sweet, but it won’t sustain her to winter’s end. His souls, crowded thick as they are, are candy-floss, melting on the tongue and never touching his belly.
They have played this game before, and no one ever wins.
She is sick to death of hunger and drowning. He is sick to death of treachery and spit-sealed deals. But they are what they have always been, and what they always will be.
These are the stories they tell you about hungry ghosts, and hungry devils. Every one of them is a lie, and all of them are true.
He reaches for her; she takes his hand. His fingers pass right through hers, leaving her hungrier still. His sigh is the echo of a lonely train running the rails out of town; hers, cold water running over stones.
The season ticks over to fall. A leaf drifts down, caught by the current and swept away, and they look to the bridge just visible through the thinning trees. They know, they both know, next summer they will stand there and start all over again.
And they ache, hoping next time they will remember, next time, they’ll get it right.
I Dress My Lover in Yellow
Enclosed are the documents deemed most pertinent to the ongoing investigation into the disappearances of Rani Alam and Casey Wilton. In addition to one photocopied document are several hand-written copies of original documents from the Special Collections of St. Everild’s University Library. These documents have been compared to the originals, and have been found to be faithful and unaltered. The primary handwriting has been confirmed as that of Ms. Wilton. The interstitial and marginal notes on both the photocopy and the hand-written reproductions are confirmed as being written by Ms. Alam.
*
Excerpted from “The Phantom Masterpiece: Blaine Roderick’s Lost Painting”, Great Artists of New England, A. Jansen and Tucker Cummings, eds, University of St. Everild’s Press, 1984.
It is likely Blaine Roderick’s career as an artist would be largely unremembered today if it were not for one extraordinary painting or, rather, the lack of a painting.
Little is known about Blaine Roderick. His earliest surviving works date from 1869, just six years before his disappearance. These works consist primarily of commissioned portraits, along with the odd landscape, and are considered largely derivative of his contemporaries while lacking their best qualities. It is known Roderick supplemented his portrait work with irregular teaching stints, the last of which was his position at St. Everild’s University.
One painting falls completely outside the pattern established by the artist’s early works. This is Roderick’s famous (or infamous) lost masterpiece, “Mrs. Aimsbury in a Yellow Dress,” known colloquially as “I Dress My Lover in Yellow, I Dress My Lover in Ruin.”
By most accounts, “Yellow” is not only Roderick’s masterpiece, but far surpasses those contemporaries he is so often accused of imitating, though many claim the painting is elevated solely by the mystery surrounding it. Alas for history, judging the matter is impossible. All that remains of the work is the original frame and a handful of accounts written prior to its disappearance.
Even these primary descriptive sources are considered problematic among scholars, going beyond the subjective and ranging from extreme praise to outright condemnation. Their unreliability, in all cases deemed to be tainted by personal bias, has led many scholars to believe some accounts may be deliberately false.
Regardless, the majority of these accounts focus on the feelings evoked by the work, rather than its content, making them of questionable value to begin with. An example of one such account was penned by Giddeon Parson, one of Roderick’s aforementioned contemporaries. Parson calls “Yellow,” “a vile piece of filth fit for nothing but the fire, though I suspect even flame would disdain to touch it.”
A slightly more tempered account is offered by Vincent Calloway, a frequent contributor to the society pages of the Tarrysville Herald, who had occasion to see the work at a fundraiser to benefit the university:
Regardless of what one thinks of Blaine Roderick’s skill as a painter, the mastery of his brushwork, his use of light, and the startling effect of his palette cannot be called in to question here. However, one must question his powers of observation. As a personal friend of both Mrs. Aimsbury and her husband, Dean Howard Aimsbury, the portrait struck me as executed by someone who had never laid eyes on its subject. From whence did Roderick draw the wan coloring of Mrs. Aimsbury’s cheeks? Never have I known her features to be so sharply sunken. It is most unsettling; one can almost see the skull beneath the flesh.
If the effect is meant to be satirical, it misses the mark, and is furthermore an unwise choice for an unknown artist relying upon the Dean not on
ly for his commission, but his continued employment at the university. The less said about the lewd manner in which Roderick paints the dress slipping from Mrs. Aimsbury’s shoulder, the better.
Colorful descriptions aside, a few incontrovertible facts remain. The subject of the painting was Charlotte Aimsbury (nee Whitmore). The portrait, commissioned by Charlotte Aimsbury’s husband, Dean Howard Aimsbury, was full-length, oil on canvas, measuring 103 3/4 by 79 7/8 inches. That is where the certainty ends.
The supposed masterpiece either depicts Mrs. Aimsbury clothed in a formal yellow gown, partially clothed in the same, or nude, having just stepped out of the gown pooled at her feet. She either faces the viewer, stands in profile, or looks back over her shoulder. Her expression is one of fear, as though she intends to flee; surprise, as if the viewer has intruded upon her private chambers; or suggestive, as though the viewer is fully expected and welcome.
Most accounts describe the background as largely obscured, as though prematurely stained by a patina of smoke. Those descriptions that purport to be able to make it out chiefly describe indistinct figures, or a city shrouded by fog or blowing sand. However other accounts have the backdrop as nothing but a series of doors receding down a hallway, all closed save for one.
One account—most outlandish and therefore likely false—claims the backdrop depicts an abattoir. This description, as preposterous as it may be, has led some to speculate Roderick reused his canvas, painting Mrs. Aimsbury atop a wholly different scene meant to be a commentary upon the deplorable conditions faced by immigrant workers in America’s slaughterhouses.
