by Ellen Datlow
“He’s on it,” she said. “The mike’s barely picking him up. I don’t know why. He ought to be coming through loud and clear.”
Doctor Hood bent to listen more closely. But most of what Miranda could hear was just loud static hiss with the odd, formless surge of sound pushing up through it without actually breaking into clarity, like bad shortwave after midnight. And on that same soundtrack, the cameras kept firing, winding, firing again …
“Whoever’s there, he can see them,” Hood said.
… and still the video monitors showed an all-but-empty view of a suburban bedroom where Peter Lee, seen from above and behind, stood and faced a cleared space before a blank and newly decorated wall.
And yes, he seemed to be talking to someone that the cameras couldn’t see.
“The needles are dancing off the scale,” someone said, and then, “Oh, my God. I think they’re answering him.”
And someone else said, “She’s waking up.”
And then there was a real, honest-to-God, firsthand sound as a muffled cry was heard through the fabric of the house; the awakened Yvonne Lord had sat up in bed and was shouting out her husband’s name at the top of her voice.
Scientific discipline finally cracked. Everyone rose to their feet. Someone screamed and it sounded as if someone else in the next room was throwing up. In the turmoil, Doctor Hood pushed his way through the clutter of people and equipment and disappeared into the hallway. Miranda could see him on the monitor then, making his way up the stairs two at a time.
“Temperature up two degrees,” called a lone, conscientious voice, but no one else was paying any attention. At least one person was in tears. Everyone was talking at once and somebody was saying, over and over, I want to go, I want to go … .
Miranda followed her father.
When she reached the upper landing, she could still hear the racket going on downstairs, like a noisy party where the music suddenly stops. No one had tried to come after her.
The room lights were on. They were so bright, they hurt. Yvonne Lord was sitting up and crying uncontrollably, and her father was at the side of the bed with his arm around her shoulders. Peter Lee stood a few feet away, his features drained and shocked-looking, his stance a little unsteady. The cameras were silent now, their rolls of film all used up.
Miranda said, “What did you see?”
Peter Lee said, “It’s not what she thinks.”
“Did you interact with the manifestation?” Hood said. “Did he answer you?”
“He wasn’t aware of me. All he can see is her. He doesn’t even know he’s died, yet. The others answered for him.”
“What others?”
“I don’t know who they are. They’re trying to help him over.” He looked at Yvonne Lord. “But it’s her. She probably doesn’t even realize it, but in her heart, she can’t let him go. She’ll keep his spirit entangled here until she does. Which means that every night he’ll try to get back to her, and every night they’ll have to pull him away. He fights them. Sometimes she sees what’s happening. Whether she sees it or not, it still goes on.”
Miranda looked at her father. He was still holding Yvonne Lord, rocking her for comfort, but absently. He didn’t appear to be listening.
“You’ll see nothing on the film,” Peter Lee said, and wiped his dry lips with the back of a shaking hand. “It’s not like he’s haunting her. It’s more like she won’t stop haunting him.”
SHE DROVE HER father home. He sat beside her in the car and said almost nothing.
Yvonne Lord had gone to relatives, and a couple of the more iron-nerved of the graduate students had made the equipment secure in the house for the night. They’d done it on the condition that all the others wait right outside, and they worked with all the lights on. Angry neighbors tried to make a scene, but nobody would talk to them. The Close was silent now. The vehicles were gone and the house stood empty.
It was well after midnight when they turned into the quiet lane of big houses behind the cathedral. Someone was walking a dog, pausing under a streetlamp down at the far end while the animal stopped to sniff and pee, but that was the only life around.
She followed her father into the house. There was a vague sense of deja vu about the moment, and she knew why.
This was exactly the way that it had felt, coming back to the house from the hospital on the night that her mother had finally died.
She’d always had the guilty feeling that her mother’s death had never hit her as hard as it should. She’d rationalized this in various ways, telling herself that she’d channeled her own grief into concern for her father. But she wondered if instead she’d merely used him as a buffer, hiding behind him while he took the full brunt of the hurt.
Just as they’d done that night, he switched on lights and she went to make tea. Little rituals. Little comforts.
As she was swilling out the pot, she heard him in the dining room. She heard the sound of the piano lid being raised and then she heard him playing a halting scale on the keys.
Just a simple one. Do, re, me, fa …
And then a wrong note.
He didn’t try again. She heard him close the lid and then she heard him going upstairs. Slowly, as if in defeat.
She felt her heart lurch, momentarily overcome with a weight of love mixed with self-pity. He’d always been able to lessen her sorrows just by being there, but she felt that she could offer nothing that would lessen his. And she could no longer pretend or imagine that he’d be there forever. When he was gone for good, who would she hide behind then?
The night beyond the kitchen window was blacker than black. There was a blind, but they never drew it down. Her reflection looked back at her, a creature drawn with a neon wand in liquid crude. The water on the stove made a sound like a jetliner streaming ice vapor from its wings. It was as if all of her senses had edges. This was how she could remember feeling sometimes as a little girl, when she’d stayed up too long and too late but wouldn’t admit that she was tired.
A thought crossed her mind, and made her skin prickle.
She went through into the dining room and gently, so as not to announce it with a sound, lifted the lid on the piano. As she settled onto the stool, she inhaled the deep scent of lavender and it was as if she felt her heart flood.
Delicately, walking her hand up the keyboard, she played a chromatic scale. Then triads in various keys. Then a melodic and a harmonic minor. Though she played them softly, they broke the silence like pistol shots. These were the patterns of notes underlying the vocal exercises that her mother had taught her to warm up with. How many times must they have been heard in this room?
Not often, of late. But once, long ago …
But nothing.
It wasn’t working.
The notes were just notes. They brought no sense of presence. Not beyond anything she might be imagining, anyway. For a moment, she’d thought that it might have been within reach, but already she could feel the magic leaking away.
Until she heard her father’s voice upstairs.
They were alone in the house. But that wasn’t how it sounded.
She couldn’t hear words, just the low rumble of his speech. She held her breath, the better to hear. Held it for so long that she was getting light-headed. Although she couldn’t be sure of exactly what was being said, it sounded like some kind of a question, or perhaps an entreaty. Was he on the phone? Could it be something as stupid and obvious as that?
But in the moment that Miranda finally let go of her breath and exhaled, she could almost have sworn that she heard a woman’s voice replying.
Her head snapped up and she looked at the ceiling, as if by sheer intensity of will she might be able to look right through it and on into the rooms above. She could have cursed herself for her timing. She listened even harder, but now she heard nothing.
If there had been a response, it had been a brief one. One word, two words, no more. Maybe just an echo in her head. Maybe just the bl
ood pounding in her brain.
She wanted to run upstairs. But her finger was still holding down the last key on the piano. Even though the note had long faded, the action was not yet closed.
Close it, and the moment would be over.
Which it was anyway, as she heard the heavy tread of her father descending the stairs.
SHE FOUND HIM in the kitchen, finishing what she’d started. Steam from the kettle had fogged the kitchen window. His back was to her and as he sensed her, he turned his head to look over his shoulder.
Something was different.
Miranda said, “Was it her?”
He winked at her and smiled, as fathers do at their little girls when life’s in order and much as it should be, and returned to his task.
He didn’t acknowledge her again.
Back in the dining room, she lowered the lid on the piano. What had originally been an even dusting of talc had become well messed-up. Any apparition that now cared to leave its mark would have to take its chances at passing unseen.
Miranda paused, staring at something she hadn’t noticed before. Had her father done this? She was certain it hadn’t been her.
Scrawled in the powder, lightly drawn with an idle fingertip, all but faded and blurred, there were two words.
Release me.
Nothing else.
Miranda leaned forward, her face only inches from the lid. She could see every trace, contor, and swirl of the letters, every grain of the powder. The grains on the lacquer like stars in empty space. She took a deep breath, pursed her lips, and blew. Not hard like someone trying to blow out a flame, but gently, steadily, like someone cooling an angry patch of skin.
As she blew, the words faded. After only a few seconds, they were all but gone. And when they really were gone, gone for good, she sat back and felt a peace like nothing she’d ever experienced before.
From the kitchen, she heard her father call her name.
Nothing here was anything that she could explain.
“Coming, Dad,” she said.
Knowing that, for this moment at least, all was well.
AFTERWORD
My favorite ghost story … doesn’t actually have a ghost in it, but H. G. Wells’s “The Door in the Wall” is a powerful and universal tale about what it is to be haunted. That unreachable garden of childhood, those lost playmates who still wait for us, somewhere … if only we could remember that road we once took, the place where we turned.
DANIEL ABRAHAM is a native of New Mexico, born in Albuquerque in the last months of the 1960s. While he’s spent brief periods living on both coasts, he has found himself well suited to the high desert. He graduated from the University of New Mexico with a B.S. in biology (magna cum laude) and was accepted into Phi Beta Kappa, both of which embarrass him slightly. He went on to a brief and soul-destroying career in retail sales before taking a job as technical support at a local ISP.
He has been selling short fiction steadily since 1998 and has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and Realms of Fantasy as well as several anthologies, including Vanishing Acts. This is his first horror story, and was initially named “Henrietta Pfeffer-nus and the Amicable Divorce” because it seemed a sufficiently perverse title. With Henrietta’s reduced presence in the actual writing, the title was shortened. It is also the first story he’s sold that he’s unlikely to tell his grandmother about. He thinks it might unease her.
AN AMICABLE DIVORCE
DANIEL ABRAHAM
“SOMETHING’S GETTING IN the house,” his ex-wife said, her velvet Southern drawl pressed flat by the cell phone. “I don’t know what to do.”
“How do you mean?”
“Little things keep moving around. Like I went to bed last night and I swear the remote was by the chair where I always put it, but in the morning, it was on the floor.”
“Ah.”
Claire’s voice was soft, conversational, familiar. Ian lay back on the couch, crossing his ankles on one armrest. A headache pressed at the back of his eyes. He called them his Claire headaches and hadn’t mentioned them to her. When they hung up, it would go away or else intensify and add nausea to the pain.
“And sometimes at night, I hear scratching, like fingernails on the table.”
“Rats?”
“Oh Christ, I hope not. I was thinking that maybe there’s a neighborhood cat getting in Henrietta’s door.”
“Should nail it shut,” he said, the absent pronoun shaping it almost as an offer that he might do the work.
“I know. But I keep hoping she’ll come home. Whenever I pick up the hammer and nails, I think of her coming back after being locked in a basement somewhere or getting lost and finding her way home like they do in the movies, and then there she’d be, locked out of her own house, just crying and meowing, and what if I didn’t hear?”
“It’s been three weeks,” he said, trying to keep his voice gentle.
“I know,” she said. “I just keep hoping.”
The fact was that fat, irascible Henrietta hadn’t been his cat for months. In her disappearance, her death, something else irreversible had happened, and the time when he had been whole ratcheted one notch farther into the past.
He must have been quiet too long, because Claire spoke again, changing the subject.
“So, how are you? What’s happening?”
I want my son back, he thought, I want my wife back. And everything I touch turns to shit. But hey, thanks for asking. He swallowed and forced himself to smile, even though she couldn’t see it.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Work’s too busy, but better that than too slow. I can’t complain.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear that. I’m really glad that, with everything that happened … I mean … I’m glad this isn’t awkward.”
“I know what you mean.”
“I should probably …”
“Same time next week?”
“That’d be great.”
“Take care,” Ian said, waited the span of two breaths to see whether she would speak again, just the way he had when they had first met and couldn’t stand to be apart. The line clicked and went dead. He didn’t return the phone to his pocket. The dial pad glowed green, each number like the pupil of an animal looking at him from the dark. He punched out Little Dave’s number with his thumb.
“Dave here,” Little Dave said instead of hello.
“It’s Ian. I need to get drunk.”
“Must be Friday.”
“Pick me up?”
“Always do. It’s my sunny personality. An hour. Be downstairs.”
Ian killed the connection. The silence washed in. Sunset pulled out the shadows and reddened anything it touched—the day bleeding out. He could smell the faint pong of his own sweat, and his mouth was sticky and foul. Another week done, another weekend starting.
And Claire. She was probably sitting in the house that had been theirs, watching TV, talking on the phone. He imagined her the way she had been, before the world turned to ashes and shit. Her eyes almost closing when she laughed, the sound of her feet rubbing together when she was on the edge of sleep, the smell of her perfume on the pillows. The loneliness of his little apartment pressed him down.
He still had a picture of the three of them—husband, wife, and child—on his coffee table, though he’d gouged the eyes from Claire’s image with a penknife one night when he’d had too much to drink. He was ashamed of the petty vandalism now, but it was his only picture of the three of them, and he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of it.
The phone rang, startling him.
“Hello?”
“I thought I told you to be downstairs,” Little Dave said.
“Sorry,” he said. “On my way.”
Downtown glittered with bars and nightclubs, police cars and lowrid-ers, college kids scamming their way past the door with faked I.D.s and pert tits. Little Dave pretended to love it.
“I’m telling you,” Little Dave said, smoothing back his t
hinning hair. “Just like old times.”
“Just about.”
Little Dave parked on the fourth floor of a structure right by the river, clicked the security club over the steering wheel, and set the alarm while Ian leaned against the retaining wall and looked down into the slow, black water, wider than a highway. They fell into step as they walked toward the stairs and the street.
“You talked to her again, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. We’re trying to be in contact once a week.”
“Ian. Mon ami.”
“It’s just something we’re trying. You feel like Jake’s? Shoot some pool?”
Little Dave shrugged agreement. Two blocks down, they turned at the mouth of the alley, and the darkness swallowed them. The door to Jake’s was lit by its red neon sign and guarded by a nameless bouncer, large and impassive as a prison, his face and arm scarred by some ancient fire. Inside, a jukebox mindlessly spooled through hits from the Billboard college charts, and lamps squatted over pool tables. Ian considered the cues, looking for the one least bent, while Little Dave got a couple of beers from the bar.
“You should give yourselves more time,” Little Dave said.
“Hmm?”
“You and Claire. It’s too early to be looking at matching back up.”
“We aren’t. We talked about that.”
“Oh. Talked about it, did you? Well, that just clears it all up then,” Little Dave said, sarcasm in his tone. “Come on. I can smell a man on a jones like a fart in a car.”
“We’re just trying to maintain contact.”
“Whatever. All I’m saying is, losing a kid is tough, and she’s got to feel kind of responsible for it, you know? You shouldn’t push things, man. Take time. Let shit find its own space.”
Ian took the bottle of beer from Little Dave’s thick-fingered hand and drank. It tasted vile—cheap and bitter. He took another drink.
“We don’t talk about that.”
“You guys don’t talk about Austen?”
“No. I mean you and I don’t,” Ian said, his voice gone cold. “Rack’em.”
