The Ghost in Apartment 2R

by Denis Markell

  I promise to text if anything happens before school tomorrow.

  I walk Nat to Haddad’s. She usually stays there and does homework in the back until her dad finishes work and then goes home with him. We pass all the other Middle Eastern stores, the hookah bar, the clothing store with the hijabs in the window, the bakery with lots of pastries.

  Most of these stores are packed with men and women speaking Arabic, families shopping for the foods from their home countries, the places they left when they came here looking for a new life, just like my Jewish great-grandparents.

  “When’s your next guest?” Nat asks.

  I bite my lip. I sure don’t want another visit. “I think it’s next week. Two girls from Japan. I don’t think they speak a lot of English.”

  “So you shouldn’t have to worry until then, right? I mean, since you’ve started having guests, the weird things only seem to happen when they’re there.”

  I think about this. “Yeah…I mean, maybe. I guess it depends whether all the other stuff from before—like the camera—or during—like the picture frame—can be explained some other way.”

  Nat tries to look encouraging. “Probably. And I bet there’s an explanation for all this. We just haven’t thought of it yet.”

  “Like on Scooby-Doo,” I say. “Somebody’s trying to scare me and then we’ll trap the monster and pull the mask off.”

  Nat laughs. “It’ll turn out to be your landlord, who’s trying to sell the building.”

  “That’s too predictable,” I say. “What about Mrs. Sarah Delano Cabot? She found out there’s a fortune’s worth of diamonds buried in the walls. So she set the whole thing up.”

  We’ve arrived at Haddad’s. Of course Sammy is deep in conversation with some old customer who’s rolling her eyes in ecstasy tasting a sample of whatever cheese or olive or other delicacy he’s given her.

  Nat squeezes my hand. I guess she wants me to not be afraid. “Yeah, Danny, no. I just think at the end of all this we’ll feel foolish that we thought for a minute that room was really haunted.”

  I desperately want to believe her.

  I go home, burdened with the two heavy books Nat gave me to read and the thoughts filling my head. Of course she’s right. But the thing bothering me is that sure, there seems to be an explanation for each of the weird things that happened, but no one explanation for all of them, and for all of them happening in the same couple of weeks. Each event has its own logical explanation, but why so many?

  After dinner—during which Mom went on and on about how excited she was to have Japanese tourists staying with us, and wondering what they would want for breakfast, and my dad wearily suggesting that maybe they already figured out what they want to do on their own, and my mom testily answering that maybe they won’t know everything and we could at least have authentic bagels for them—I think I’ve gotten a little off track. Sorry. After dinner, I went to my room and took out the smaller of the two books.

  It was an anthology called The Best Ghost Stories Ever. I hate titles like that. They sound like those commercials on the TV shows my grandma watches that promise to seal any leak or the microwave gizmo that will bring back the “just cooked” flavor to any leftover. I wanted there to be a sentence after the first story that said “But wait! There’s more!”

  So I read the stories, and take my word for it, they were not the scariest ghost stories ever. I mean, they were well written and everything, but not anywhere near as creepy as what was happening to me. Or even what Sammy or Joe or Old Man Baublitz told us.

  First off, if you’re going to spend the night in a spooky old abandoned house (is there any other kind?) where someone was murdered years ago, what do you think is going to happen? Or if you take some jewel or mummy’s hand from a tomb or crypt, are you really surprised when someone from “beyond the grave” comes and wants it back?

  A whole lot of stories were about people doing something terrible like committing murder or cheating someone, and then the person they killed or wronged comes back and haunts them—or maybe it’s just their own guilty conscience that drives them nuts and makes them imagine things.

  That got me thinking. Have I done anything terrible to someone who died? I tried to remember. The only thing I could think of was when I got mad at Adam Scheinman in third grade and deliberately hit him in the head while we were playing dodgeball.

  But Adam Scheinman didn’t die (although he acted like he was going to—jeez, he should have won an award for that performance). He just never forgave me. I saw him at a bar mitzvah last year and he told me he still can’t hear well out of his right ear. I told him I didn’t even hit his ear, it was his forehead. I guess he heard that fine because he made some crack about my wearing sneakers to a bar mitzvah because I couldn’t afford dress shoes. Which was total garbage, but I let it go because I am a better person than he is.

  Okay, really? I only let it go because I am a head taller than him now (he’s really short) and it would look bad if I hit him.

  I seriously couldn’t think of another person I had wronged. I’m just a kid, after all. Who would haunt me?

  Then there was a story about people renovating houses and disturbing the spirits of the dead people who used to live there.

  I sat up. Wait. We did renovate Jake’s room. I mean, we didn’t take out a wall and find someone’s bones or anything, but we did paint it and put new furniture in it. Maybe some spirit doesn’t like Ikea?

  I yawned and put the book down. That was enough for one night. Actually, it made me less and less convinced that something was really going on. The more stories I read, the more it seemed unlikely that there were supernatural happenings. It had to be my disappointment pushing me to see things that weren’t there.

  I headed to the bathroom for a shower, happy that I could lock the door and chill out in peace, knowing that I’d be left alone for at least a day or two before our guests arrived.

  I took a nice hot shower, feeling all the craziness of the past few weeks wash off me.

  The bathroom filled with steam. After my shower I sat on the toilet seat with my feet up, my eyes closed, pretending I was at a spa, in a steam room.

  I usually sit in there until my folks yell at me to come out and go to bed. I opened my eyes and stared at the medicine cabinet.

  The mirror was all steamed up.

  But it was clear as anything.

  Someone had taken their finger and written a message on it.

  In spidery, old-fashioned letters was scrawled:

  Where is my little boy?

  Yes, of course I checked to make sure the door was locked. I guess someone could have used a credit card to pop the lock and come in without me hearing, but who? My parents? They can be pretty goofy, but there’s no way they’d do that.

  I was late for school today—having gotten very little sleep, of course. I have math first period and then science, so I can’t talk to Nat and Gus until lunchtime. As usual, Gus has homework to do that he should have finished last night, so he’s kind of distracted, and Nat doesn’t understand why I didn’t take a photo of the mirror.

  “I don’t bring my phone in the bathroom with me when I take a shower,” I explain. “And once I opened the door, the cold air made the steam go away. So the message got all runny.”

  Nat takes a bite of her falafel sandwich. It was made that morning, so it’s delicious, the crunchy falafel covered with the perfect amount of tangy white tahini sauce. Nat always brings one for me, because Sammy knows how much I love it and gives her extra. “Are you sure it said that?”

  “I know what I read,” I say. “What are you suggesting?”

  I make the mistake of waving my sandwich for emphasis near Gus. He leans in and takes a ginormous bite. He’s already had lunch, but that doesn’t seem to matter.

  Gus chews and swallows thoughtfully befo
re offering an opinion. “Sometimes you think you see things in steamy mirrors. Like once I swear I saw the words ‘fungus mania.’ ”

  “What does that even mean?” I ask.

  Gus shrugs and wipes his mouth on his sleeve. “You got me. What does ‘Where is my little boy?’ mean?”

  Nat closes her eyes. “I can’t even. Gus, sometimes…”

  Gus grins. “Let me guess, sometimes you dream about me.”

  “Only about killing you,” Nat says. “Can we concentrate on Danny’s ghost?”

  “So you really think it’s real?”

  Nat pulls out a notebook from her backpack. Naturally she took notes on the ghost stories she read, something I should have done. “I put them in different categories. It seems to me if there is someone, it’s a restless spirit that’s been disturbed.”

  “That’s what I thought!” I say excitedly. “Like maybe we threw something out from Danny’s room by mistake when we were fixing it up.”

  Nat nods. “So can you think of anything? Like an old doll or something?”

  I laugh. “Oh, right. Jake had an old doll lying around his room and our mom just threw it out.”

  “Look, we don’t even know it’s a ghost,” Gus says. “It could be a demon, right? I saw a video online about these demon hunters, and—”

  “Were they in Brooklyn?” I ask.

  “Um, I think they were like in eastern Europe somewhere,” Gus says.

  “I don’t want to hear about any eastern European demon-hunter garbage,” Nat snaps. “We’re in Brooklyn. I just have a feeling this is someone who was unhappy while they were alive.”

  “Like that German spy ghost?” I ask.

  We fall silent. That was a really creepy story.

  I remember something. “Oh, yeah. I finally heard from Katia. She says we can go by her workspace this afternoon.”

  The bells rings. Five minutes to get to our next class. We agree to meet outside as soon as school is over.

  It turns out Katia’s place is all the way down on Jay Street, closer to the water. It’s about a fifteen-minute walk from school. Like so much of Brooklyn, this area has gone through a lot of changes. In the old days, it was all warehouses, but once the ships stopped pulling in, a lot of the empty floors were rented by artists.

  Then someone had the bright idea to convert all the loft spaces and old warehouses into luxury buildings, and what used to be called “the waterfront” got a new name. They do that a lot around here. The areas called Red Hook and South Brooklyn had reputations for being unsafe, so some real estate big shots chopped off a part of that and called it Cobble Hill and it sounded a lot classier.

  Since this place is right under where the Manhattan Bridge hits Brooklyn, somebody decided on “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass” and shortened it to Dumbo. That’s what it’s been called pretty much since I’ve been alive.

  By now most of Dumbo has become expensive apartments and fancy boutiques and restaurants. But on the fringes, like where Katia has her studio, there are still some funky spaces that haven’t been totally converted yet.

  We get to the address, a big old building with doors covered in peeling rusty orange paint. The only things that look new are the names next to the buzzers. There are all sorts of small businesses, like a dress designer and an architecture firm, and people like Katia who share an office with other people.

  Katia buzzes us in and we enter the giant elevator, which slowly creaks its way up to the eighth floor. I assume the elevator goes back to the days when people had to move all sorts of things in and out to trucks waiting to deliver goods all over the city, or maybe even all over the country. Those days are long gone. There are no more goods to move.

  The elevator takes forever to settle, groaning and complaining like an old man getting comfortable on a couch, and finally the doors open.

  We’re greeted with a confusing set of hallways leading off in all directions. Nat peers at the various arrows pointing the way to different offices, and then we head down a long dusty corridor.

  It feels like we’ve walked two city blocks before we finally arrive at Katia’s place. There are stickers on the door, some of rock bands from the eighties that my parents still listen to, some of anime and manga.

  The door opens and Katia welcomes us in. “Okay, Ghostbusters, let’s get to work!”

  Katia shares the space with two other photographers. One of them is there, a tall older guy with swept-back hair. He’s got a light set up on a table and is carefully positioning a bracelet on a black velvet backing.

  “He takes all the pictures for one of the big jewelry store’s ads,” Katia informs us.

  “I always wondered how they made them look so good,” Gus marvels as we watch the guy positioning like half a dozen different lights at different heights, and keep running back to his camera to check on how it looks. He smiles.

  “Yeah, this is why they pay me the big bucks,” he says.

  Katia pulls us away. “He’s one of the best. I couldn’t do that all day, but he loves it.”

  The third photographer apparently does weddings. We pass her area, and there are giant photos of happy couples, all looking pretty much the same and posing with the Brooklyn Bridge behind them, the same place you see in car ads whenever there’s a car displayed with the Manhattan skyline in the background. I’ve been down here on weekends in the summer and I swear there’s literally a line of brides and grooms waiting their turn to get their photos taken.

  “Do you ever do weddings?” Nat asks Katia.

  Katia laughs. “Me? Not a chance. Those brides are killers. If you miss one picture, they scream you’ve ruined their wedding.”

  “That’s true,” Gus muses. “I remember my cousin Clara. The photographer didn’t get a picture of her sister and her with their grandmother. And she always brings it up whenever she shows her pictures. And that was like ten years ago.”

  “Yeah, totally,” says Katia.

  We get to her area. It’s messy but cool. She has posters up of bands she’s photographed, and some headshots of actors. I don’t recognize any of them.

  Katia sweeps an arm up and points to the wall near the window. “My pet project,” she announces.

  The wall is plastered with enormous portraits of dogs of all sizes lit like movie stars. They look very glamorous. And also really funny.

  “Pet project, I get it!” Gus says. “Are these the dogs you walk?”

  “Some of them,” Katia replies. “And some are just dogs I like. You can see pretty much every kind of dog in Brooklyn.”

  Nat goes up to the photos and examines them. “They’re beautiful.”

  Katia gives a little smile. “Thanks. I’m hoping to get a gallery interested in them someday.” She brightens. “Hey! Maybe if there is a ghost I can use it for publicity!”

  She turns to her computer. It’s like my dad’s, with a giant monitor. She clicks a few keys and the finder comes up.

  Katia peers at the screen. “Let’s see….I photographed your place in late August, right? Here you are.”

  She clicks the mouse and a series of pictures of our apartment comes up. She scrolls through the various shots. There are photos of the outside of the building and our hallway, the views from our windows, our kitchen, and the bedroom.

  “These are the ones I sent to your mom,” she announces. “I need to find the originals, before I removed the face.”

  I shiver a little when she says that.

  Katia clicks on another folder. These appear to be the photos she’s looking for. She nods in satisfaction. “Bingo!” She clicks on one image and opens it.

  It’s Jake’s bedroom, clean and in guest-ready shape.

  Even at this size, it’s clear there’s something in the window.

  I can feel Nat and Gus holding their breath as K
atia zooms in.

  A face fills the screen. It’s hard to see much, though, because it seems to be glowing.

  “Wait, I can make it better,” Katia says as she fiddles with a few sliders in the software, changing the contrast and sharpness so that the features become clearer.

  And then we see it.

  A long, narrow face, black hair parted in the middle. Sad dark eyes, and a long curved nose. A mouth set in what looks like a permanent expression of grief. She wears a black dress with a white lace collar.

  A shiver goes through me as the face stares back at us from the past.

  “Who are you?” Nat asks in barely a whisper.

  “And where is your little boy?” I wonder out loud.

  As we leave Katia’s, the sun is already going down, creating broad dark shadows between the tall buildings we pass.

  With the Manhattan Bridge looming over us, and the cobblestoned streets under our feet, this part of Dumbo feels particularly eerie. The warehouse interiors may be converted into luxury apartments filled with rich tenants, but the outsides are untouched, so it’s easy to feel pulled back to the days of horse-drawn carriages and ships carrying cargo into the ports. Maybe all of Brooklyn is filled with ghosts: shades of great ships still pulling into the navy yard, old mom-and-pop stores haunting the shiny new chain stores that replaced them.

  I half expect to see a sad-eyed girl in a lace collar pop out from around a corner, but there are just groups of tourists heading to the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge or maybe to one of the gourmet bakeries. It’s a relief to be brought back to the present.

  I realize none of us has spoken since we got on the old elevator to leave. On the way down, the rusty moans and shrieks sure seemed a whole lot creepier.

  Finally, Nat turns to me. “So…what’s our next step? I mean, assuming the girl in the window is the one who’s been bothering you.”

  “Oh, you think?” Gus asks. “Or maybe it’s a coincidence. Maybe she was the window washer…because you know window washers tend to wear lace collars.”