The Ghost Sequences

by A. C. Wise

  There is no guarantee, of course, that the viewer will turn left through the doorway. As a result, the thing inside the paintings is constantly retreating and approaching, drawing nearer and running away, depending on the sequence in which the works are viewed. The room, however, is a closed circuit; there is no escape. The thing in the paintings must circle endlessly, trapped beneath layers of red, always searching for a way out.

  *

  Studio Session #1 - Ghost Stories

  “Family meeting!” Abby calls, her little joke as she enters the shared studio space where their artists’ collective of four works and lives.

  She deposits grocery bags on the counter as the others emerge: Lettie paint-spattered, Georgina smelling faintly of developing chemicals, and Kathryn twisting a spare bit of copper wire around her left hand.

  “What are we going to do about this?” Abby slaps a bright yellow flyer on the counter beside the bags.

  Lettie picks it up, and Georgina and Kathryn read over her shoulder. The skin around Lettie’s nails is as stained as her clothes, a myriad of different colors.

  “Gallery Oban.” Kathryn looks up. “Is that the one on Prince Street?”

  “No entry fee for submissions.” Abby grins. “The winner gets a three month exhibition.”

  “I haven’t finished anything new in months.” Lettie’s thumb drifts to her mouth, teeth working a ragged edge of skin. Kathryn gently pushes Lettie’s arm back to her side, but not before she leaves a smear of paint behind.

  “And no one wants to buy the crap I’m producing,” Georgina says as she unpacks the grocery bags, laying out packages of instant ramen, and setting water on to boil.

  “Then this is the perfect thing to push us out of our ruts,” Abby says. “We could even work on a central theme, each in our own medium.”

  “Do you have a theme in mind?” Georgina asks.

  “Nope.” Abby grins. “We’ll brainstorm tonight. This should help.”

  She retrieves a bottle of cheap wine from the last grocery bag and hunts for a corkscrew. Georgina dishes ramen into four bowls. As she hands the over last bowl over, the power flickers and goes out.

  “Shit.”

  “Think Mr. Nanas forgot to pay the electric bill? Or maybe the rain is really to blame?” Abby strikes a pose, doing her best Tim Curry from Rocky Horror Picture Show.

  “I’ll get candles.” Kathryn leaves her bowl on the counter while Lettie sits with hers cupped between her hands, steam rising around her face.

  “We should tell ghost stories,” Kathryn says. The last candle lit, she joins the others around a low coffee table they rescued from the trash. “That’s what my sisters and I used to do when the power would go out.”

  “Oh.” Abby sits up straighter. “That’s perfect. Ghost stories. That can be our exhibition theme!”

  Lettie, Kathryn, and Georgina exchange a look, and Abby throws up her hands, flopping back against the futon.

  “We’re artists! Our whole job is to make the unseen visible.”

  “Actually, I might have an idea.” Georgina taps her spoon against her lips. “You know Morgan Paige?”

  “The director?” Lettie sets her bowl aside, sitting on her hands to keep from gnawing at her skin. Georgina nods.

  “Most people think Cherry Lane was his first movie, but there’s an earlier one that was never released. He made it right out of film school with a couple of friends. It’s practically a student film, but…” Georgina shrugs. She looks around and, seeing no wandering attention, continues.

  “It’s called The Woods. It’s about a group of high school kids who try to create their own version of the Suicide Woods in Japan by driving one of their classmates to kill themselves. They’re testing the idea that they can create a haunting through a single traumatic event that spreads until it effects the whole school. It’s supposed to be an examination of depression, apathy, and mental illness.” Georgina reaches for the wine and refills their glasses.

  “Anyway, that’s not the weird part. You know the woods over by Muirfield Farm?”

  Nods all around, and Lettie shifts in her seat.

  “That’s where Paige and his friends shot most of the film. On their last day of shooting, something went wrong with the camera and while Paige was trying to fix it, he saw something on the film that shouldn’t have been there.”

  One of Lettie’s hands creeps free, and she chews at the side of her thumb. A faint smear of red marks her lips, not matching any of the paint under her nails.

  “He sees a girl standing between the trees, barefoot, wearing strange clothes. She could just be some local kid, but Paige is convinced he’s caught a ghost on film. He freaks out and scraps the movie. Eventually, he takes the frames he has and buries them, and doesn’t make another movie for nearly five years. According to the rumors, the raw footage of The Woods is under the freeway overpass somewhere near Clover Street.”

  “No one’s ever found it?” Kathryn asks.

  Georgina shrugs.

  “Maybe if they ever do those repairs they’ve been promising for years….” She finishes her wine and shrugs. “Anyway, maybe I could do something with that for my part of the exhibition.”

  Abby stands.

  “I have a story, but give me a sec.”

  There’s a slyness to her expression as she disappears into her studio. She and Kathryn have spaces on the first floor, while Lettie and Georgina have studios on the half floor overlooking the common room. The whole building used to be industrial storage space, renovated during the city’s renaissance in an attempt to attract artists to the region and create the next big hipster neighborhood. Abby returns with a second bottle of wine.

  “You’ve been holding out on us.” Georgina nudges her as Abby opens the bottle and pours. Lettie covers her glass.

  “This is something that happened at my grandmother’s school when she was in tenth grade,” Abby says as she settles back down. “There was this group of popular girls. Everyone called them “the pack”, though not to their faces. Even the teachers were afraid of them.

  “Anyway, halfway through the school year, a new girl named Libby joins the class. She’s painfully shy. Her clothes are out of style, like maybe her family doesn’t have much money. Basically, she’s that kid that every class has, the one with victim written across their forehead.

  “The leader of the pack is a girl named Helen. One night when her parents are out of town, she invites Libby to join the pack for a sleepover. Libby’s never slept away from home before, but Helen won’t take no for an answer. All the other kids in the class know the pack is planning something, but they’re too scared to warn Libby in case Helen turns on them instead.”

  Abby takes a slow sip of her wine, reveling in the attention as she unwinds her tale.

  “Anyway, Helen finally convinces Libby. The night of the sleepover arrives and Libby pulls an old-fashioned nightgown with long sleeves and a skirt that almost touches the floor out of her overnight bag. As they’re all getting changed, Susannah catches a glimpse of bruises on Libby’s thighs and arms, just a quick flash before the nightgown covers everything. She tells Helen, but not the other girls.

  “After they’re all dressed for bed, Helen tells them how the woods behind her house are haunted, then she insists they play truth or dare. When her turn comes, Libby picks truth, and Helen asks, Who do you love more, your mother or your father? Libby’s eyes go wide, she looks scared and won’t answer, rubbing at her arms through the sleeves of her nightgown. If you won’t answer, then you have to do a dare, Helen says. The other girls start chanting dare, dare, dare, until Libby gives in.

  “I dare you to go into the woods behind the house and play the hanging game, Helen says. She grabs a pair of her mother’s silk stockings and drags Libby outside. The other girls stay inside and watch through the window as Helen makes Libby stand under one of the trees and wraps one leg of the stocking around her throat and the other around the lowest branch.

  “
Now close your eyes and count to one hundred, then you can come back inside, Helen says. Libby closes her eyes and starts counting aloud while Helen walks backward toward the house. When she gets to the door, Helen is planning to lock it behind her, and then she’ll make the rest of the pack hide. But before Helen can get to the house, Libby screams, and Helen freezes. Libby is thrashing, clawing at the stocking. By the time the other girls run out of the house, it’s too late. Libby isn’t breathing. It’s as if something pulled her into the tree and left her there to hang.”

  “That’s a horrible story,” Kathryn says.

  Abby opens her mouth to protest and at that exact moment, something hits one of the windows. The sound is like a gunshot, and Lettie jumps, knocking over her wine. Georgina scrambles up to get a towel. She hands it to Lettie, but Lettie only twists it into a rope between her hands. Then she speaks, staring straight ahead.

  “When I was eleven years old, my big sister and I came home from school and found my mother sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor. She’d smashed some of our plates, and she was putting the pieces in her mouth one by one.” Lettie takes a breath, and Abby leans forward slightly. Kathryn and Georgina go still, staring at Lettie who continues to look straight ahead. “We screamed for her to stop, but it was like she couldn’t hear us. My sister grabbed her wrists, and then hit her to make her stop. When my mother finally looked at us, it was like she didn’t know who we were.”

  “Lettie.” Kathryn touches her arm. Lettie blinks, and slowly turns her head. The candlelight plays tricks with her eyes, turning them to glass.

  Kathryn’s hand slides from Lettie’s arm as though pushed away.

  “Honey, you don’t….” Kathryn starts, but Lettie ignores her. Georgina frowns, and Abby scoots forward so she’s sitting on the edge of her chair, but she doesn’t reach for Lettie or her restless hands.

  “As long as I can remember, my mother thought she was haunted. She would go on binges of eating, trying to fill herself up so there was no room for ghosts inside her skin. But other times she refused to eat at all, nearly starving herself and begging the ghosts to take her.”

  Lettie looks at each of them in turn, still twisting the towel in her hands.

  “On my sixteenth birthday, I came home from school and found my mother and my sister dead. My mother was lying on her bed. There were clothes scattered on the floor, a lamp knocked over, like there’d been a fight. There were empty pill bottles with the labels peeled off. My mother’s hands...it looked like someone had bitten her. They were all bloody and there were teeth marks on her skin. I screamed for Ellie, but she didn’t come. Then I found her in my mother’s bathroom. She was lying in the bathtub with her clothes on. It looked like maybe she’d hit her head. There was blood around her mouth. I don’t know if my mother killed her, or...I don’t know.”

  Lettie wraps her arms around knees, hugging them to her chest. She rocks slightly, then puts her head down, her voice muffled when she speaks.

  “My sister is starving, and she wants to come home.”

  *

  Interlude #1 - A Room with One Door

  There was a game my sister and I used to play when we were little. When our mother was having one of her bad days, we’d go into the crawlspace under the basement stairs. It was just big enough for us on our hands and knees, or sitting down, and there was only one way in so it felt safe.

  The game was called Brick by Brick. There was a deck of cards, each with a picture of a different room. In the real rules, we were supposed to play against each other, but Ellie and I always changed it so we took turns drawing cards and building the house together. We were born only eleven months apart, so really we were more like twins than sisters.

  In the game, there were little plastic figurines that came with the cards—red, yellow, green, and blue for the people, and white for the ghost, or the monster. The idea was to move through the house as fast as possible, so the monster wouldn’t catch you. The trick was, if you built a secret passageway, or a hidden staircase to get through the house faster, the monster could use it too.

  Sometimes Ellie would make up stories about the house while we played. She’d tell me about all the things in the rooms, and the lives the little plastic versions of us lived there. The monster was in her stories, too, but there it was nice and it wasn’t trying to hurt us at all.

  The little plastic figures got lost at some point, but I still have the cards. On nights when I can’t sleep, I take the deck out and arrange the cards different ways. If I close my eyes just a little bit while I’m doing it, I can almost see Ellie moving around inside the card house. If I manage to get the sequence of cards just right, she’ll be able to find her way out and come home. The trick is, what if the monster finds the way out first?

  *

  Black and White

  The second room in the gallery contains a series of black and white photographs by Georgina Rush. One grouping is labeled The Tomb, the other, The Woods. The Tomb photographs depict a spot beneath a highway overpass—graffiti, empty bottles, a half-finished meal in a Styrofoam container. Even so, there’s something mystical about the images. They suggest a sacred site, an archeological dig. Something is buried here, and the artist is documenting its unearthing.

  The Woods depict rows of trees on the far side of an empty field. Rather than a wild forest, these trees are planned and planted, and Rush achieves a stunning effect with the light coming between the trunks. Despite the regularity of the rows, there is something uncanny about the trees. The spaces between them are full of waiting. One cannot help feeling the woods, and perhaps the photographs themselves, are haunted.

  In the center of the gallery there is a pedestal holding a laptop with files that visitors are encouraged to explore. These are raw, unprocessed images, outtakes from the exhibition. The one incongruity is a video file titled “Overlapping Voices (Abby’s Possession).” The film appears to be shot in the studio shared by the four artists. It’s unclear how it fits with the photographs on the wall, however it’s possible the film is another outtake, a dress rehearsal for the performance piece Abby Farris had planned for the show.

  *

  Studio Session #2 - The Ghost in the Machine

  There’s a tapping sound so soft Kathryn barely hears it. When it finally registers, her first irrational thought is that there’s someone in the walls. Then she realizes the sound is at her studio door and opens it to see Lettie’s face, just a slice between the door and the frame. There’s darkness under her eyes, like she hasn’t been sleeping, and the rest of her skin is paler by comparison.

  “Sorry, can I come in?”

  Kathryn opens the door wider before Lettie even finishes, and Lettie steps inside, glancing over her shoulder.

  “Sorry, I just….” She rubs her arms. When Kathryn closes the door, Lettie relaxes visibly, then offers a self-deprecating smile and shrugs. “You know how it is when you get in your own head sometimes.”

  “Sure.” Kathryn gestures to her work table.

  The frame for her piece is mostly complete. Wires trail across the table’s surface like a mat of tangled hair.

  “I was actually just finishing up this part. Wanna see if it works?”

  Kathryn clears space around the machine, bits and scraps she ended up not using. Most of the parts were bought at the local hardware store, but the crown jewel she found on eBay—a Ouija board in good condition, but showing signs of use, which is exactly what she wanted. The letters are a bit faded, and the felt pads on the planchette’s feet have worn away. The board sits in the center of a frame, and a thin metal arm runs from the planchette to the frame, hinged to allow a full range of motion. It can reach every letter and number on the board, along with Yes, No, and Goodbye.

  “Wait.” Lettie touches Kathryn’s wrist as she reaches for the power switch.

  A bandage wraps Lettie’s thumb, the edges dirty and peeling. There’s a dark red stain along one side, fading to brown.

  “Can it r
eally talk to ghosts?” The way Lettie says it, almost hopeful, gives Kathryn pause.

  She lowers her hand. As a kid, she wanted so badly to see a ghost. All those stories she and her sisters told, gathered around a flashlight under sheets strung over chairs—if she could just see one of those ghosts for real it would make her special. But what she sees in Lettie’s eyes is completely different. Raw need. Loss. The room goes colder, air dropping out and goose-bumps rising on Kathryn’s skin.

  “We don’t have to.” Kathryn fights the urge to rub at her arms the way Lettie did. This whole thing was a terrible mistake. “It can wait until some other time.”

  “No, I want to see.”

  The chill goose-prickling her arms crawls up the back of Kathryn’s neck. There’s someone standing in the corner. Someone just behind her. If she turns to look, it won’t be there. The corner will be empty. But if she doesn’t look, the thing will continue to stand there. Not breathing, not moving. Just watching her. Always.

  Lettie stands beside her at the table, close enough that their arms almost touch. Yet Kathryn is filled with the sudden, irrational feeling that Lettie is also standing behind her in the corner of the room. A shadow moves in the hallway, just visible through the crack in the door even though Kathryn is certain she closed the door after Lettie entered. Her heart thumps, and she bites down on her lip. A moment later Georgina peers through the gap.

  “We heard voices. Is your piece finished? Can we see?”

  Kathryn nods, her throat dry. Georgina pushes the door wide, and Abby follows her inside. The studio feels crowded with all of them there. Lettie moves around the table holding the machine like she’s sleepwalking and flicks the switch that turns on Kathryn’s machine.