The Ghost Sequences
Page 32
She climbs into the passenger seat as Abby unlocks the door of an ancient Dodge Pinto, the car she borrowed from her brother. The rubber floor mat is gritty under her soles. Light slides over them as Abby pulls away from the curb. Everything is sodium orange and bruise-colored, bloodied at the stoplights, drowned green for go. Abby looks at Lettie sidelong, like she’s testing Lettie, like she’s asking a question.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Lettie says.
The vents in the dashboard rattle, exhaling air smelling of burnt toast. Abby started this whole thing, but Lettie still doesn’t know if she believes. The story she told; Lettie suspects Abby made it up on the spot. Why would Abby’s grandmother admit to such a thing, because how else would she know about it unless she was one of the girls involved? And why would she tell her granddaughter about it if she did?
Depending on how Abby answers, Lettie will know whether Abby knows about the moon-colored glow surrounding her, whether she knows about the ghosts, or whether they’re just using her as a vessel to send a message.
“I’m building a suicide tree,” Abby says instead of answering her. “For the show.”
She turns off the main road where there are fewer streetlights and shadows stick to her skin.
“During my performances, I’ll stand under the suicide tree with a noose around my neck and invite ghosts to prove themselves by making me into one of them, if they can.”
Abby’s eyes cut right, looking for a reaction. Lettie watches the lights instead, the pattern of shadows. She has the strange impression that the car is moving backward in time. She’s heard everything Abby has to say somewhere else before. She watches through the windshield for the place where the glowing ribbon ends, the place it’s leading them.
“We’re here.” Lettie says it so suddenly Abby hits the brakes without engaging the clutch and the car stalls.
The Dodge’s headlights wash over browned grass, showing the expanse of a field. Beyond the field, trees stand like sentinels in eerily perfect rows. Abby’s mouth opens; Lettie smiles to herself. Her suspicion is confirmed; Abby doesn’t know where they are. She isn’t the one in control.
Abby recovers quickly, scrambling with her seatbelt, but Lettie is out of the car first, walking toward the trees. She looks over her shoulder. Abby is very small in the darkness, dwindling. Her mouth is a perfect circle, her eyes smudges of black. It’s time.
Abby is a house, waiting for a ghost, so Lettie slips inside, looking out through Abby’s eyes and watching herself walk across the field. Brown grass crackles under her bare feet.
Abby blinks, feeling like she’s waking up from a long dream, disoriented and unsure where she is. She doesn’t remember leaving the studio, but she’s outside and the trees ahead of her are unsettlingly familiar. Georgina’s photographs. And Lettie. Lettie is with her. Panic beats a tattoo against Abby’s skin.
She blinks again, and there’s something between the trees. Someone. There and then gone. Afterimages of Lettie trail behind her leaving luminescent footprints on the grass, except Abby can’t tell which direction they’re going. She has to catch up before it’s too late. She breaks into a run, tripping, and Lettie is even farther away by the time she gets her feet under her again.
This was a mistake. She came here to…. Why did she come? She wanted…. She honestly doesn’t know.
Something is terribly wrong. Something she can’t quite remember. Like a story someone told her a long time ago.
Lettie is almost at the trees. At the edge of the field, Lettie stops. Relief crashes through Abby. She bends over, hands on her knees, gulping deep breaths. She straightens just in time to see Lettie open her mouth, but before either of them can get out a word or a name, something dark surges from between the trees. It’s there and then it’s not, and Lettie isn’t there either. She’s gone. Pulled into the trees. Vanished.
Abby screams. She plunges forward. Trips again, biting her lip and tasting blood. She calls Lettie’s name and her voice echoes back to her, overlapping, a cacophony. There’s no answer but she keeps shouting, on her hands and knees at the edge of the field, calling Lettie’s name until her throat is raw.
*
Empty
The last room in the gallery is empty. The walls are freshly painted. The special lighting installed to cast shadows from an assemblage in the shape of a tree remains switched off. The room was originally intended to host a performance piece by Abby Farris, but now it is a space defined by absence.
Mostly. A week after the opening of “The Ghost Sequences,” a visitor brought something to the gallery owner’s attention. Along the baseboard near the door, there are words written in blue ballpoint pen, in lettering so small it is almost illegible. The words were not there on the day the exhibition opened. There are two sentences, which almost overlap, possibly written in two different hands, but it’s hard to tell. Rather than retouching the paint to cover the words, the gallery owner let them stand as though they were always meant to be part of the exhibition after all.
I’m sorry Lettie. Ellie I’m still building the house come home.
Publication History
“The Nag Bride” is original to this collection.
“How the Trick is Done” originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine #29, July 2019.
“The Stories We Tell About Ghosts” originally appeared in Looming Low Vol. 1 (Sam Cowan & Justin Steele, eds.) 2017.
“The Last Sailing of the Henry Charles Morgan in Six Pieces of Scrimshaw (1841)” originally appeared in The Dark #14, 2016.
“Harvest Song, Gathering Song” originally appeared in For Mortal Things Unsung (Alex Hofelich, ed.) 2017.
“The Secret of Flight” originally appeared in Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales (Ellen Datlow, ed.) 2017.
“Crossing” originally appeared in LampLight Magazine, Vol. 5, 2017.
“How to Host a Haunted House Murder Mystery Party” originally appeared in Bourbon Penn #12, 2016.
“In the End, It Always Turns Out the Same” originally appeared in The Dark #37, 2018.
“Exhalation #10” originally appeared in Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles (Ellen Datlow, ed.) 2020.
“Excerpts from a Film (1942-1987)” originally appeared in Tor.com, 2017.
“Lesser Creek: A Love Story, A Ghost Story” originally appeared in Clockwork Phoenix #4, 2013.
“I Dress My Lover in Yellow” originally appeared in The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction (Paula Guran, ed.) 2016.
“Tekeli-li, They Cry” originally appeared in Tomorrow’s Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Post Humanity (C. Dombrowski & Scott Gable, eds.) 2016.
“The Men From Narrow Houses” originally appeared in Liminal Stories #1, 2016.
“The Ghost Sequences” originally appeared in Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories (Ellen Datlow, ed.) 2019.
Acknowledgements
The collection you hold in your hands owes its existence to many people, and I am extremely grateful to them all. First and foremost, thank you to Michael Kelly for editing and publishing the collection and making it look incredible. Thank you to Olga Beliaeva and Serge N. Kozintsev for their art, and Vince Haig for his design work—I could not have asked for a more gorgeous cover! This collection certainly wouldn’t be here without all the editors who gave the reprinted stories their first homes. Mike Allen, Ellen Datlow, Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski, Paula Guran, Jacob Haddon, Alex Hofelich, Shannon Peavey and Kelly Sandoval, Erik Secker, Justin Steele and Sam Cowan, Lynne and Michael Thomas, and Sean Wallace and Silvia-Moreno Garcia—you are all wonderful! Thank you for all your hard work and everything you do for the genre. As always, thank you to all my critique buddies and con buddies for years of friendship and story-swapping. Even though the writing itself is usually a solitary pursuit, it’s nice knowing that I’m never really doing it alone. Thank you to my family, human and four-legged alike; I could not do any of this without you. Thank you to all the ghosts who i
nspired these stories and the ghost story writers and tellers too. And last, but absolutely not least, thank you, yes you, the person reading this right now; go do something amazing today.
About the Author
A.C. Wise is the author of two collections published by Lethe Press, and a novella published by Broken Eye Books. Her debut novel, Wendy, Darling was published by Titan Books in June 2021. Her work has won the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, as well as twice more being a finalist for the Sunburst Award, twice being a finalist for the Nebula Award, and being a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. In addition to her fiction, she contributes review columns to Apex Magazine and The Book Smugglers. Find her online at http://www.acwise.net
Also by A.C. Wise
The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again
The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories
Wendy, Darling