Wild Fell

by Wild Fell- A Ghost Story (retail) (epub)

  “Sure we can, Jamie. You know your mother and I have to go out tonight, but let’s go down to the creek now, before we have to get dressed, and look for Manitou. But remember something, Jamie,” he said. “If we don’t find him down there, that doesn’t mean he’s not there. It just means he’s found somewhere new to live, probably with others like him—a place that reminds him of his home. We all want to be at home, don’t we? Even turtles. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Daddy,” I said. “I understand.” Then I started to cry again.

  My father spent an hour with me at the creek looking for Manitou. He got down on his hands and knees with me and looked under rocks and ferns. Even when it started to rain, he kept looking, only taking my hand and telling me it was time to go back to the house when the rain began to sluice down to a degree that made it impossible to keep searching because we could no longer see. Then, hand in hand, we ducked our heads and ran back to the house as lightning flashed in the roiling sky overhead.

  Today, of course, I know my father had gone through the charade of looking for Manitou with me out of his love for me, for my peace of mind, because he understood my guilt about having taken the turtle out of its natural world only to meet such a brutal fate in ours. He knew we wouldn’t find Manitou, but he’d managed to convince me that we might, for at least one night sparing me the heartbreak of the truth.

  That night, I was in bed before the babysitter arrived. I hadn’t wanted supper, and my mother, again surprisingly, hadn’t tried to make me eat something. She’d let me go directly to bed. I’d stayed there until my parents came downstairs to kiss me goodnight before they left for the party.

  My mother said, “It’ll all feel better in the morning, Jamie, you’ll see.” She kissed my cheek and switched off the light. The scent of her perfume hung in the darkness after she’d left. I found it oddly comforting that night.

  The rain pounded against the roof of the house and ran down the windows in vertical rivers. A sudden flash of lightning from outside lit up the room like daylight. The empty terrarium on the table by the window was like a reproach, but it also comforted me to see it there, to imagine the beautiful little creature whose short life had been entrusted into my hands against its will.

  With my cheek lying against the soaking wet pillowcase, I eventually fell into a fitful sleep.

  What woke me was the insistent pressure of my bladder.

  The room was dark and silent except for the sound of the rain, which continued unabated. I pushed aside the covers and tiptoed past the covered mirror and opened my bedroom door. There was a light on upstairs and I heard the muffled sound of the television through the doors of my father’s den. I assumed the babysitter was up there watching it. Opening the door to the basement, where my bathroom was located, I hurried down the stairs. Once there, I relieved myself, remembering to flush the toilet and lower the seat when I was done. I switched off the light and turned to head back up the short flight of steps to my floor.

  On the stairs back up to my room, I suddenly stopped and stood completely still. I had not turned on my bedside light when I’d gone downstairs, but there was now a wavering yellow glow coming from inside my room. I blinked rapidly, and then squeezed my eyes shut. But when I opened them again, that quivering light still flickered.

  Taking the remaining steps to the landing, I paused in the doorway of my bedroom and peered inside.

  Beside my bed was the candle I’d hidden away from my mother’s prying eyes under my bed—Amanda’s candle. Someone had lit it. I smelled the dead plume of waxy candlewick smoke in the air. The sheet I had carefully tacked to the wall to cover the mirror had been torn away. It lay bunched on the floor. In the refraction from the candlelight in the mirror, I saw the dull glint of the two tacks on the rug.

  My first thought was that the babysitter was playing some sort of a trick, but almost before the thought was fully formed, I knew otherwise. The babysitter was upstairs, entirely oblivious to what was occurring just under the room where she sat watching television. I heard the loud theme music of some western or other, and the sound of gunshots coming from the television set. No, I knew who had lit the candle and I knew to what purpose.

  This had been the inevitable outcome all along. I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that if I tried to run upstairs to the light and security of the sane, adult world of babysitters and television and light, a world of concrete, impermeable borders, something horrible would happen—either to stop me from reaching that world, or in punishment for reaching it.

  I sat down on the edge of my bed and looked into the glass.

  “Amanda, come out. I know you lit the candle. I don’t know how, but it was you. Come out. Please? I’m sorry about before, but you scared me. Please, let’s make peace.”

  I begged you not to leave me alone, Jamie. I told you you’d be sorry if you did.

  “Amanda, did you hurt Manitou? Are you the one who opened the gate?”

  No. But maybe you really did leave it open. You know how you get when you’re gathering wool, Jamie. You’re a dreamer, aren’t you?

  “I did so lock the gate! I did. It was you! You did it! You killed Manitou by opening the gate!”

  Are you sure? How could I have done that?

  “You made the wasps come and they stung Terry Dodd. You made me beat up Prince! You can light candles when you want to! I know it was you!”

  Are you sure?

  “I didn’t do anything! My dad told me Manitou is in the greenbelt. He got away and now he’s living with the other turtles down there in the creek!”

  Your father is a liar, Jamie. Manitou isn’t in the greenbelt. Do you want to see what really happened to your precious turtle? I can show you.

  I whimpered, “My dad said . . .”

  Touch the glass, Jamie.

  Torn between my fear and a growing, dreadful fascination, I reached out and placed the tips of my fingers against the mirror.

  When I was three years old, I apparently cut an electrical cord with a pair of metal scissors. My mother told me the force of the electrical jolt threw me across the room and knocked me unconscious. The doctors said it was a miracle I hadn’t been killed. The steel blades of the scissors were melted away where they had wrapped themselves around the live wire. I didn’t remember it happening, but my mother had saved the scissors as a sort of souvenir. She’d shown me where the steel had dissolved in the crackling electricity.

  Had I remembered the event, I likely would recall it as having been like what happened when I touched the mirror. The current that threw me back on the bed wasn’t electrical but illusory.

  The mirror rippled and shimmered, then my room was flooded with warm afternoon light and the smell of fresh-cut grass.

  I was standing in the backyard between the two Dutch elm trees at the farthest edge of the property, near the fence. The back door opened and my mother came out of the house carrying a small clear plastic bag of raw meat. I waved to her but she didn’t seem to see me. As I watched, my mother opened the back gate and dropped a piece of the meat on the flagstones, then clapped her hands. Moments later, a large black dog padded into the yard. I recognized the dog at once: it belonged to a family that lived two streets over. It occasionally broke out of its fenced-in backyard and was known to be aggressive. A muzzle order had been imposed on the family by the city after it had attacked a smaller dog in the greenbelt the previous summer, but it was known to escape and roam. And here was my mother, feeding it. She continued to back into the yard, beckoning the dog with her hands. The dog, smelling the meat, followed her, cautiously at first, then with increased confidence. She hand-fed the dog another piece of meat.

  Then, when she was standing next to Manitou’s pen, my mother dumped the remainder of the meat into the pool of water where my turtle was bathing.

  The dog attacked the chicken wire in a fury of teeth and claws, pulling it apart as though it were made of wet l
eaves. Driven by the scent of cooked flesh, it pushed its nose through the wire until it located the pieces of meat my mother had dropped, then devoured them.

  The turtle’s terrified scrambling movements as it tried to get out of the dog’s way caught the animal’s attention. The dog picked Manitou up between its powerful jaws and shattered his shell. Flesh, bone and carapace pulped together with a horrible cracking sound, oozing between the dog’s teeth and out the side of its mouth as it chewed. As pieces of Manitou’s body dropped from its jaws to the grass, the dog leaned down and snatched them up, seeming to swallow them without even chewing.

  When there was nothing left of my turtle to devour, the dog licked its lips and wagged its tail at my mother as though begging for more meat.

  “Shoo!” my mother said, swatting it on its hindquarters. “Go on, get out of here! Shoo! Shoo! Go away! Git!” Startled, the dog backed away from my mother, then turned tail and cantered out of the yard. It looked back once, reproachfully, but she just made a sweeping motion with her arms and hissed, “Shoo! Shoo!” she said again. This time, the dog tucked its tail between its legs and bolted out of the yard.

  My mother walked over to the gate and made to close it, but appeared to change her mind. It remained open. She looked back over at the ruins of Manitou’s outdoor pen and smiled, a trifle grimly but with no visible remorse. My mother wiped her hands on her apron. Flecks of greasy steak came away on the white starched cotton. Then she went back into the house and shut the back door, the screen door banging behind her.

  Your mother killed Manitou, Jamie. Now you know.

  I tried to see Amanda’s dim shape in the candlelit glass, but my head pulsed with soaring agony, and black stars exploded every time I tried to focus. “That’s not what happened! Mymother didn’t kill Manitou! You’re making me see that! That’s not what happened! That’s not real!”

  Are you sure, Jamie? You know your mother hates you, don’t you? And she hates your father. I think we should punish her for killing Manitou. I think it would hurt terribly to get eaten alive by a dog, don’t you?

  In that moment, for the first time since she appeared to me, I was aware that Amanda didn’t sound like a little girl at all. She never had, really. All this time she had fooled me, but now she sounded like a grownup woman pretending to be a little girl. I had never really known with whom I had been conversing. And without knowing how, I knew she could make me see things that weren’t real. Or were they real?

  I screamed at her, “What are you? Who are you?”

  I told you. I’m just a little girl.

  “No, you’re not a little girl! You’re not even real!”

  Of course I am, Jamie. I am real. You know who I am. I know you recognize me. Look harder into the mirror and tell me what you see.

  “Liar! Liar! You killed Manitou, not my mother! You hurt people by magic! You’re bad! You made the gate open and you made the dog come and eat Manitou! I want you to go away!”

  Are you sure?

  “Yes! Now go away!”

  You know what I think, Jamie? I think we should hurt your mother next. And then, when we’re finished with your mother, we should punish your father for lying to you about Manitou being in the creek with the other turtles. He’s not, you know. The dog that ate him has already shit him out on somebody’s lawn.

  “GO AWAY, AMANDA!”

  I reached for the bedside lamp and swung it as hard as I could against the mirror. The glass shattered with a silvery, wintery resonance that I heard in my brain as well as in my ears—one that I felt, as well. Underlying the cold din of breaking glass, I felt rather than heard the shriek of undulant, malignant rage. It thundered through me, as cold as I’d imagined the lake in my nightmare to be.

  But before it did, I felt my larynx flex unbidden and my lips formed Amanda’s words one last time before sound and time and memory evaporated into the air above my head and tattered away to nothing but the mirror frame and shattered glass.

  I will always find you, Jamie.

  When the babysitter rushed into my room, white-faced and in panic at the noise, she found me standing beside my bed holding my bedside lamp in my hand.

  I didn’t know what in the world it was doing there, or why my feet were bleeding, or how the floor was littered with broken shards of glass. I glanced dumbly at the mirror, then back at the lamp. She gently took the lamp from my hands and laid it on my nightstand.

  “What happened, Jamie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did you break the mirror?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Were you dreaming?”

  I rubbed my eyes. “I don’t know. I guess.” My feet were beginning to hurt from the glass I’d stepped in. The sole of my left foot was bleeding. “I want my dad.” Then I started to cry.

  When I was forty, decades after my parents had divorced, the year my father was diagnosed with mid-stage Alzheimer’s and had begun to visibly deteriorate—still three years away from the events at Wild Fell—he asked me if I remembered the boy who had stolen my bike in the summer of 1970, the one who had been attacked by a swarm of wasps the next day and who had succumbed to the venom from thousands of stings three days later, dying in agony at the age of twelve.

  I’d stared at my father blankly and told him, No, I don’t remember anything like that happening that year, or ever. And it was true: I had no such memory.

  Privately I’d wondered, at the time, if the disease had already taken hold to the point that he was not only forgetting what had happened, but was also beginning to imagine things happening that never had. But of course I never said anything to him about those suspicions. I knew that what was coming for him was crueller than anything I could imagine in my worst nightmares, and I couldn’t bring myself to add to his terror by verbalizing my own fears about the long, dark tunnel of loss into which he was descending, taking me with him, and away from him, at the same time.

  As for the little girl in the mirror, I would have no memory of her for more than thirty years, until I bought the house called Wild Fell on Blackmore Island.

  Chapter Two

  NURSE JACKSON HELPS ME SAY GOODBYE TO MY FATHER

  “We must have moths,” Nurse Jackson said. “Moths, if you can believe it.”

  She frowned, as though the incidence of the moths might somehow be perceived as a denigration of her nursing abilities, or worse, the quality of her care for her patients, in this case, my father. Nurse Jackson—whose first name was Ardelia—touched my father’s cardigan, fingering two small holes in the maroon cashmere sleeve. “Just look at his sweater. I never noticed this before.” She laid a light hand on my father’s arm and smiled with the beatitude I’d come to think of as her special gift, not just to her patients but also the universe. “Peter, what happened here? Your lovely sweater.” She turned to me and said, “You bought this sweater for him, didn’t you, Jamie? From Brooks Brothers. In New York.”

  I nodded, my throat suddenly full. My suitcases were stacked just outside the doorway to his room. Their presence struck me like a reproach. But if it was one, I was reproaching myself. I was the one leaving him here in this place where the scrupulous standards of cleanliness of which the MacNeil Institute was justifiably proud couldn’t entirely eradicate the perpetual scent of sour urine and pre-made industrial hospital food. The rooms were painted in warm colours in a valiant attempt to offset the sense of loneliness and gloom that permeated the place.

  “He told me once,” she said kindly. “He said you gave it to him for Christmas.”

  “That’s right, I did. Five years ago. Before . . . well, before this.”

  She nodded sympathetically, but not with excess sympathy. Ardelia Jackson believed in the value of living and loving in the present, as she never tired of telling relatives of her patients. She never proselytized, nor did she hector. But she was an adamant advocate for her patients. Nurse
Jackson said she tried to see everything as a stage of life to be embraced. When I’d broken down in front of her once and wept openly for the loss of my father as I had known him, she reminded me that he was still in there and that he still felt—and needed—my love.

  More than anything else, I needed to hear that, and, even more, believe it. When Ardelia Jackson said it, I believed it.

  I pointed to the window, where three small white moths fluttered in the sunlight in front of the glass, obviously confused and trying to escape. “Aha! There are your culprits.” I walked over to the window and made to kill them with my hands, but Nurse Jackson laid her hand on my arm to stop me. She reached out and unlatched the window and the moths fluttered out of the room, vanishing around the edge of the building into the morning sunlight.

  “Jamie, your father would hate that. He’s gentle about things like that. Even things like killing insects. He may not notice much most of the time, but he always seems to notice everything that has to do with any living thing. To him, they’re all God’s creatures. He told me that, too.”

  “He’s always been like that,” I said. “He’s always been gentle. You’ve been good to him, Ardelia. I can’t tell you how much that’s meant to me.”

  She winked. “I’m not supposed to have favourite patients, but I can’t help myself. Peter is special. He’s a wonderful gentleman. He always reminds me of my dad. Dad was sweet like Peter is now.”

  Nurse Jackson had told me one evening that her own father had lost his battle with Alzheimer’s when she was a still a little girl. It gave her an affinity, she said, for sons and daughters of fathers suffering from the disease. Her nursing career, which was as much a vocation as a career, was a direct result of watching her mother endure his loss.

  My father stared opaquely out the window at the three moths still circling in quivering, mindless flight.

  The world in which he now spent most of his days and nights seemed to at least be a peaceful one, for which I tried to be grateful, even if “gratitude” to the merciless illness that had taken us away from each other—not quickly, as death would, but in excruciating increments of days, weeks, and months—was a hard go.