The Ghost in the Big Brass Bed

by Bruce Coville

  “Put down the gun, little sister.”

  “Jimmy!” I cried in astonishment. “What are you doing here?”

  “Quiet!” snapped Ms. Bond. “Both of you. Jimmy, get out of here. Now!”

  “I can’t do that,” said Jimmy, stepping forward. “I can’t let you hurt Cornelius’s daughter.”

  “He killed our father!” Ms. Bond screamed. “What do you care anyway, you traitor?”

  “Our father killed himself,” Jimmy said. “And that should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t, was it? Oh, no, it wasn’t anywhere near the end.”

  Chris inched a little closer to me. “What the heck is going on here?” she whispered.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea,” I hissed back.

  Ms. Bond was facing Jimmy now, pointing the gun at the crazy old man I used to feed, the coot who had come to our rescue.

  He had no real weapon to fend her off, only a weathered two-by-four that he carried between his gnarled hands. He was so old and frail, I didn’t know if that would do him—or us—any good.

  “Jimmy, I swear I’ll shoot you, too,” Ms. Bond said. Her voice was trembling, but she raised her gun and pointed it directly at his chest.

  I gathered myself. I could feel Chris doing the same thing. We might be able to rush Ms. Bond while she was concentrating on Jimmy. But we hesitated. If we attacked, she might just fire wildly. She could hit any one of us before we managed to get the gun out of her hands.

  “Jimmy, you can leave here alive,” continued Ms. Bond. Her voice was low, pleading. “I don’t need to kill you. Even if you did tell what happened here, no one would believe it. You can’t hurt me. So turn around and go. Go, damn you!”

  “I can’t. This is my home. I have to protect it.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Ms. Bond. She was almost shrieking. “This isn’t your home.”

  “Yes, it is,” whispered Phoebe. “He lives in the basement when it gets too cold or wet outside. He’s been there off and on for years.”

  Boing! That explained the singing. Cross off the three-ghost theory; it was two ghosts and a nut.

  “Couldn’t you even give him a decent room?” Ms. Bond screamed, swinging the gun toward Phoebe.

  “I offered,” said Phoebe. “I offered, but …” Her voice trailed off, and she clutched at her chest.

  “Ms. Bond,” I said desperately, “she has to have her medicine. Let me get her medicine.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Carla …” gasped Phoebe. Her voice sounded raspy and strangled. She began to tip forward.

  Jimmy lunged at his sister. She fired the pistol. Jimmy fell, clutching his arm.

  “Cornelius!” he cried. “Cornelius, for the love of God, help me!”

  I shivered. They were the same words, the same cry, the same voice I had heard the night “Early Harvest” drew me in and told me its entire story. It was as if Jimmy’s younger self were calling across time.

  Cornelius Fletcher heard it, too. Not the daughter he had lost, but the man he had saved. Not his failure calling, but his success. This he could do. Suddenly the air of the room was filled with a great cry of rage as the ghost of Cornelius Fletcher appeared inside his home for the first time since his death. His angry spirit turned in a slow circle, taking in the scene. When he saw Phoebe, bent forward in her chair, clutching her heart, his mad eyes began to blaze.

  Ms. Bond’s face was white; her whole body shook with astonishment. “Go away!” she screamed. “You’re not real. Go away!”

  Cornelius didn’t move.

  She fired her pistol, once, twice, three times.

  Cornelius moved toward her, his face more terrible than anything I had ever seen. Ms. Bond spun toward me, then pointed the gun at me. “Go away, or the girl dies!”

  Before I had time to faint, a terrible shredding sound ripped through the room. Turning my head, I gasped as I saw a long strip of paper peel away from the wall. Faster than I can write this sentence, the paper flew across the room and wrapped itself around Carla Bond.

  I could see bright colors where the paper had been torn from the wall.

  I whooped in jubilation. I had been right!

  Rip! Rip! Rip!

  You could feel the power swirling around Cornelius as he used his ghostly abilities to strip the aging paper from the walls and bind it around Carla.

  When he was finally done and silence descended on the room, we found ourselves staring in awe at something more terrible, more wonderful than I had ever imagined.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Over There

  An hour later my father stood in the center of Phoebe Watson’s parlor, turning and turning as he studied the Lost Masterpiece.

  “It’s magnificent,” he whispered, his eyes filling with tears. “So terrible, but so beautiful.”

  I knew what he meant.

  Cornelius Fletcher’s last painting was a vast mural, a picture that started in the parlor, then stretched to the hall, and then to the dining room, and on, until it covered every wall on the first floor of the house. It was a painting nearly unbearable in its sense of pain and betrayal and lost love.

  Now that painting surrounded a small mob of people. My dad was there, along with Norma Bliss. (It turned out that the two of them had had a date that night, a fact concerning which I was less than amused.) We also had half a dozen cops, a doctor, Jimmy, and Carla Bond. Byron was there, too—the cops had managed to locate the bar where he had gone with his friends. Stephen Bassett was also present, acting as Ms. Bond’s lawyer.

  The only one missing was Phoebe. She had taken her last breath during the battle between her father and Ms. Bond.

  An ambulance had come, and medics carried her away. But it was too late. I knew that for a certainty. Now I only wanted to go home and think. But first we had to answer questions from the police and almost everyone else in the room. That wasn’t all that bad—at least we got to hear some answers from Jimmy and Ms. Bond, too.

  By the time the session was over, the picture was pretty well filled in.

  “The picture was pretty well filled in”—a good phrase to use here, all things considered.

  That was one of the first questions I had to answer, of course—“How did you know where the picture was?”

  “To tell you the truth, it was more hunch than knowledge,” I said. “Mostly it came from the way little things began to fit together. When enough of them connected, everything seemed to make sense.”

  “What kinds of little things?” asked my father.

  “Actually, you gave me the first clue, even though I didn’t realize it at the time.”

  He looked blank.

  “Stripping wallpaper,” I said, and laughed. “You put the idea in my head that wallpaper covered up what had been on the wall before. Then there was the mural being painted at Seven Rays; it reminded me that artists don’t have to paint on canvas, that they can use a whole wall if they want. Then there were the ropes we found in the attic. Too many ropes for a simple hanging.”

  “He couldn’t have done it without me,” muttered Jimmy, staring at the painting. He was on the sofa. A blanket covered his dirty, ragged clothes, and he was sipping coffee from a cup Norma had brought him. “I hung him every day, so he could work.”

  As I looked around the room, I could imagine the scene. Cornelius Fletcher, his legs gone, half mad—or maybe completely crazy—consumed with the passion for creating his final masterpiece. But he couldn’t do it on his own. So he had his assistant, Jimmy, the boy he had saved in the war, help him. Jimmy rigged pulleys and ropes and scaffolds all around the house, and came in every day to strap Cornelius into a harness and pull the legless artist into the air, so he could hang there and work.

  I looked at the wall in front of me, with its terrible images of battle, images that overwhelmed even “Early Harvest.” I could imagine Cornelius hanging from a harness in front of it, desperately painting, feverish with inspiration.

  “Father hat
ed you for helping him,” Ms. Bond said bitterly.

  “Father didn’t know Cornelius had saved my life,” wheezed Jimmy. “He wouldn’t listen until it was too late.”

  The police kept trying to ask Ms. Bond questions. At first Mr. Bassett wouldn’t let her answer. But finally she snapped, “It doesn’t matter now. They might as well know.”

  Shrugging, Mr. Bassett sat back. I had the sense that he felt he had done his duty by counseling Ms. Bond to silence. Since he was her lawyer, he had to try to protect her. But that didn’t mean he had to like what she had tried to do. If she wanted to brush him off now, that was fine with Mr. Bassett.

  “After Alida died, Cornelius completely lost touch with reality,” said Carla. “It wasn’t long before his wife, Amanda, fled to live with her sister. Four years later, when Cornelius became ill, she returned to care for him, bringing Phoebe with her.

  “But Cornelius was dead before she arrived.

  “Phoebe was three at the time. Her mother brought her into the house, and when the little girl saw the mural and the ropes still hanging in front of it, she began to scream. Amanda swept Phoebe out of the house and had the entire first floor papered over before she would bring the child back.”

  “I did that for her,” interrupted Jimmy, tears streaming down his face. “It nearly killed me, but I covered his picture, and I promised I would never tell. It scared the little girl too much. Never did tell, either,” he added, sounding proud.

  “Phoebe saw the painting only once,” continued Ms. Bond. “But the impact was so extreme that the memory never left her. She pushed the experience to the back of her mind, where it haunted her dreams. She used to have nightmares about ropes and pulleys, though she didn’t know why. She told me about them, about how she would wake up in the middle of the night, trembling and covered with sweat, screaming, ‘The ropes, the ropes!’ She was sure there was more. Only she could never remember what the rest of the nightmare was about.

  “But I knew. Even though I had never seen it myself, I figured it out from her dreams. And I vowed I would own it someday—payment for what happened to my family.”

  “Your family?” Norma asked. “Seems to me it was Phoebe’s family that suffered.”

  Ms. Bond snorted. “My father was a suicide. My brother became a bum, and my mother lived on the dole while she tried to raise me singlehandedly through the Depression. Is that enough to qualify for family problems?

  “But I knew where there was something worth enough money to make up for all of it. Even though Jimmy never told, I figured it out. And all I had to do was buy this house. Only the witch wouldn’t sell. She clung to this old place that was ten times as big as she needed, clung to it in the memory of her sainted father.”

  Ms. Bond’s eyes were blazing. She spat on the floor.

  I thought about making some crack about civilized behavior, but realized that this was not the time. Sure, she had been going to blow me away a little while ago. But now I realized that I was watching a woman have a nervous breakdown right before my very eyes. It was, perhaps, the most frightening thing that happened in that long, frightening month.

  “I went to school—worked my way through, without help from anyone. Made a name interpreting the work of Cornelius Fletcher. And kept looking for my chance to get the house. I had it all set finally. Phoebe was broke, ready to sell. If she died, the house would go to Byron, and he had agreed to sell it to me.”

  Byron blushed. “Carla loaned me money to pay the hospital bills in return for a promise to sell,” he said. What a generous man; he had agreed to give up any inheritance he might have in order to help Phoebe.

  “It would have been two triumphs in one stroke,” Ms. Bond continued. “Once I unveiled Fletcher’s last work, I would have been able to write my own ticket in the art world. And the money! Oh, at last I would have the money I needed to live the way I deserved. A fortune! And it was all so close, until this brat opened her mouth.”

  That’s me—Big-Mouth of the Century.

  But I didn’t regret it. Even if things hadn’t worked out entirely the way I would have liked, given what had happened in Phoebe’s parlor before the police arrived, I couldn’t feel entirely bad about them either.

  Once Cornelius appeared, things had moved fast for a while. Ms. Bond, wrapped in at least a dozen layers of wallpaper, was out of the picture for the time being. But the action continued when Alida Fletcher appeared at the top of the stairs calling, “Daddy? Oh, Daddy, is that you?”

  I had felt my eyes fill with tears as her tiny figure came drifting down the stairs.

  “Oh, Daddy!” she whispered joyously.

  A cry seemed to split the room, the sound of a great heart breaking, as Cornelius Fletcher stepped forward and held out his arms to the daughter he had been unable to save, the child who had waited over sixty years for him to keep his promise to come back for her.

  “Poppa!” cried another voice—an old, weak voice.

  I turned and saw Phoebe start up from her wheelchair. “Poppa!” she cried again.

  Then she fell forward and lay still on the floor.

  For a moment no one moved. Utter silence, deep and mysterious, filled the room.

  Then a translucent form rose from Phoebe’s still body. “Poppa,” she whispered again.

  I blinked. Phoebe’s ghost was a little girl. Then suddenly it was a grown woman, then an old lady, and just as suddenly a little girl again.

  As the spirit of Phoebe Fletcher Watson floated across the parlor it continued to shift back and forth between all the people she had been through her long lifetime. But it was as a little girl that she reached out and took her father’s hand. He drew her to him, and the three of them stood together—the mad artist, the child he had failed, and the child he had never met.

  I trembled with emotion. I don’t know what to call it: It wasn’t sorrow or joy. It was simply more feeling than I could possibly hold.

  Chris reached out and took my hand. I squeezed hard and hung on.

  “Cornelius!” cried Jimmy Potter, his voice for an instant young with joy and recognition. “Cornelius!”

  Cornelius Fletcher turned and nodded solemnly to the man he had twice saved, the man whose father had crippled him and cost him his child.

  Then he took each daughter by the hand. Together they circled the room, slowly examining the great painting.

  As I followed them with my eyes, they came to a place beside the door, and I realized that I had been wrong; Cornelius Fletcher’s painting was not complete.

  I remembered the despairing words of his final letter: “I cannot finish it.”

  Here was the spot that had defeated him. This was the place where the battle broke, where the death and the pain disappeared. It was the place where the artist had stopped, because he had reached the scene he could not paint—the scene of ending, of peace, of satisfaction.

  But now, at last, he was ready. Putting both hands forward, Cornelius Fletcher laid them on the wall.

  A sob tore from him, a final cry of surrender, and completion and acceptance. The colors of solace flowed beneath his fingers, and the empty place on the wall was soon filled with the image of a peaceful woodland under a clear blue sky—the place of peace beyond the battle.

  The Lost Masterpiece was finally finished.

  From somewhere past Cornelius’s sky I heard the sound of singing—voices soft at first, growing louder and more clear as they repeated the anthem of World War I, the promise we had made to a dying continent. Only now the words had a different meaning, a different promise.

  “‘Over there,’” sang the voices. “‘Over there …’”

  Taking his daughters’ hands again, Cornelius Fletcher stepped toward his painting.

  Wiping away my tears, I watched with joy as he led Phoebe and Alida to the place of peace he had finally been able to create.

  As the artist and his daughters stepped into the painting, the colors began to fade. Within moments the vision of peace had
disappeared, gone with Cornelius and his daughters.

  But I know it’s there, waiting beyond the battle.

  The place of peace.

  Over there.

  A Personal History by Bruce Coville

  I arrived in the world on May 16, 1950. Though I was born in the city of Syracuse, New York, I grew up as a country boy. This was because my family lived about twenty miles outside the city, and even three miles outside the little village of Phoenix, where I went to school from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

  Our house was around the corner from my grandparents’ dairy farm, where I spent a great deal of time playing when I was young, then helping with chores when I was older. Yep, I was a tractor-ridin’, hay-bale-haulin’, garden-weedin’ kid.

  I was also a reader.

  It started with my parents, who read to me (which is the best way to make a reader)—a gift for which I am eternally grateful. In particular it was my father reading me Tom Swift in the City of Gold that turned me on to “big” books. I was particularly a fan of the Doctor Dolittle books, and I can remember getting up ahead of everyone else in the family so that I could huddle in a chair and read The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle.

  I also read lots of things that people consider junk: Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and zillions of comic books. In regard to the comics, I had a great deal going for me. My uncle ran a country store just up the road, and one of the things he sold was coverless comic books. (The covers had been stripped off and sent back to the publishers for credit. After that, the coverless books were sent to little country stores, where they were sold for a nickel apiece.) I was allowed to borrow them in stacks of thirty, read them, buy the ones I wanted to keep, and put the rest back in the bins for someone else to buy. It was heaven for a ten-year-old!

  My only real regret from those years is the time I spent watching television, when I could have been reading instead. After all, the mind is a terrible thing to waste!

  The first time I can remember thinking that I would like to be a writer came in sixth grade, when our teacher, Mrs. Crandall, gave us an extended period of time to write a long story. I had been doing poorly at writing all year long because we always had to write on a topic Mrs. Crandall chose. But this time, when I was free to write whatever I wanted, I loved doing it.