The Loveliest Dead

by Ray Garton

  David turned on the porch light, but it was not bright enough to reach the boys. They fell silent as David clicked the flashlight on and sent the beam out toward them. They stood together between the slide and the swings. As bright as the beam was, it fell just short of reaching the boys, of revealing their faces.

  “Don’t worry, I don’t want to hurt you,” David said. “You’re not in trouble or anything. I just... I want to know... What are you doing out this late by yourselves? Huh? Where are your parents?” He went down the concrete steps of the porch and advanced toward them, hoping to bring them into the light. But the five boys backed away together slowly and avoided the beam. “Where are you from? Do you live around here?”

  David flinched when he heard a loud pop and the porch light went out behind him. “Dammit,” he muttered.

  “He’s coming!” one of them hissed.

  Another said, “Run!” and a third said, “Go!”

  “No, wait,” David said. He couldn’t see the figures in the dark anymore. He swung the light around the yard. They were gone. “How the hell—”

  David rounded the corner, went along the side of the house at a full run, and was in the front yard in seconds. The boys weren’t there, either. The gate was closed, and he had not heard it open.

  He decided to go all the way around the fence tomorrow and examine it. There had to be a hole in it somewhere—it was the only explanation for the boys’ almost instantaneous escape.

  I didn’t hear them running, David thought as he walked back down the side of the house and into the backyard. Why didn’t I bear them running?

  “Fuckin’ puppies,” a voice said. It was the moist, roughly whispered voice of a man who sounded like he seldom felt the need to talk very loud. “Looks like we got some renegades there. Gonna have to take care of ‘em.”

  David swept the flashlight in the direction of the voice, and the beam fell, for just a moment, on a man standing in the northwest corner of the backyard. The light stayed on just long enough for David to make out a pear-shaped man wearing a cowboy hat, a denim vest over a dirty white T-shirt, ratty old jeans, and cowboy boots. The vest was parted by the mound of his belly, which dangled sadly over the top of the sagging, beltless jeans. A melon slice of hairless, pale belly peeked out from beneath the strained T-shirt. The flashlight blinked out and David found himself in the cold, wet dark.

  After flicking the button a few times, David smacked the heavy metal flashlight into the palm of his left hand. He had replaced the batteries just before they moved. He could not understand why it had gone out. The cold drizzle still sent chills over his back, but he felt a new chill, this one at the back of his neck, unrelated to the cold.

  The sound of a match being lit just to his left was so close to David that he dropped the flashlight and took a quick step away from the sound. He turned to face the man, who remained in profile as he lit a cigar about two feet away, his cowboy hat tilted forward. He cupped a hand around the match’s flame, which sent a dance of orange and yellow over his face. It revealed a large, pitted nose and an enormous second chin rough with stubble.

  David felt his heartbeat in his throat. “Who are you? Where the hell did you come from?”

  “Them renegade puppies ... you gotta know how to handle ‘em.”

  David winced when he got a whiff of the cigar and stepped back again. He was not fond of cigar odor of any kind, but this one was especially foul. It smelled like a combination of moldy leaves and rotting meat.

  The man turned to face David. “You gotta know how to handle ‘em,” he said as he stepped forward once, twice.

  David tried to dodge him, to move out of the way, and almost tripped on the flashlight. The fat man stepped into him as if he were a phone booth. David fell into the weeds, but quickly propped himself up on one elbow.

  The cigar was no longer an odor, but a harsh, immediate taste inside his mouth, a burning in his lungs. It was vile ... awful... pretty bad ... an acquired taste.

  I’m dreaming, David thought as everything turned black.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Tuesday, 2:58 A.M.

  David found himself stacking boxes in the basement. His flashlight was working and he was putting the last box on the stack when he became conscious of his surroundings. As this happened, he was overwhelmed by the stomach-lurching sensation of something spiritually viscous extracting itself from his mind, from his soul. It left dribbling gobbets of itself behind as it ripped away from him like an overstrained membrane, and David’s mind flashed with unspeakable images of children, someone’s little boys, naked and sprawled. The images were bad enough, but there was something else, something unthinkable—they stirred deep in his gut the clinging ghost of a hungry, ugly desire, and David dropped the flashlight, fell to his hands and knees, and retched. He vomited to get rid of it, to get it out of him, and hoped it came up with the bile that foamed in the dirt.

  The splintered old high chair with its six leather straps fell flat on the dirt floor inches in front of him, and he cried out. He grabbed up the flashlight and clambered to his feet. He passed the beam all around the basement.

  Why was I stacking boxes? he thought. Was I putting something away? What am I doing down here?

  He realized he was down in the basement in the middle of the night—if it was still night; he had no idea what time it was—after ... what? What had he been doing?

  On his way up the stairs, he realized he had been walking in his sleep and dreaming. He hadn’t done that since he was a kid. He shuffled down the hall with his eyes barely open, so tired he could feel himself nodding off as he walked. He left his sweats in a heap on the floor. He was so exhausted, he did not hear himself mutter under his breath as he got into bed, “Fuckin’ puppies.”

  “It was like he was hungover,” Jenna said. “I didn’t think he was going to make it to work on time, I was really worried. I mean, it’s his first day, you know?”

  At the wheel of the Durango, Kimberly asked, “Did he do a little celebrating last night or something?”

  “Oh, no. David’s not a big drinker, and neither am I. In fact, we haven’t had any beer or liquor in the house since we moved in. Even before that, back, in our apartment in Redding. David was just really exhausted this morning. He said he didn’t sleep well last night. Said he had a weird dream about digging around down in the basement. Probably just worried about the new job.”

  Jenna had called Ada Brodky and asked if she would come to her house for a sitting that day. “I’ll provide the transportation, Mrs. Brodky,” Jenna had said.

  “It’s not Mrs. I never married. I didn’t see the point. You can call me Ada.”

  When they drove up to her trailer, Ada did not wait for them to get out of the Durango. She came out of the trailer wearing a long gray wool coat and carrying a dark green suitcase. A long, freshly lit cigarette poked from the corner of her mouth.

  “I hope she didn’t think I asked her to move in with us,”Jenna said.

  “Harry’s gonna flip when he smells smoke in here,” Kimberly said.

  “Why don’t you tell her to put it out?”

  “I’m not sure she can. That’s all right—let’s just crack the windows and hope for the best.”

  Jenna got out of the SUV and greeted Ada, asked if she could help with the bag.

  “Just put this in the back,” Ada said as she handed the suitcase over to Jenna.

  It was light and Jenna put it in the backseat, then got in with it, giving Ada the front seat.

  “No offense,” Ada said as Kimberly drove away from the trailer, “but I’ve always hated these damned things.”

  “What things?” Kimberly said as she pulled open the empty, pristine ashtray.

  “These buses, or SUVs, or whatever you call ‘em. They’re so hard to get into and out of, and they’re so damned big. I used to drive a little Volvo, and I’d hate to be on the road with these things. But I stopped driving a long time ago. I couldn’t take the pressure no more. T
oo many cars, too many people. I take the bus everywhere now. A cab once in a while, on special occasions.”

  “Well, we have three kids,” Kimberly said.

  “Ah, kids. There’s something I’m not sorry I never had.”

  Ada kept talking, but Jenna tuned her out. David was at work, Miles at school, but she wondered how she was going to explain Ada and a sitting—whatever that was— to her mother.

  By the time they got back to the house, Ada had complained about everything from the winter’s effects on her joints to the quality of television news coverage. Jenna went into the house ahead of them to find Martha. The breakfast nook was empty, so she went to Martha’s bedroom. The door was closed. “Mom?” she said. She opened the door a crack and looked in.

  Martha was asleep on her neatly made bed beneath an afghan she had crocheted. Her clock radio was playing softly and the overhead light was on.

  Everybody’s trying to run our electric bill through the roof, Jenna thought as she turned off the light and silently pulled the door closed. She joined Kimberly and Ada in the living room. A slowly shifting cloud of smoke engulfed the top half of Ada’s body.

  “Where do you want to do this?” Jenna asked.

  “Don’t matter,” Ada said. “If he’s in the house, he’ll hear me. You got something like a card table I could use to set up?”

  Jenna hurried upstairs. The unused bedroom where they had hoped to keep only their books and the computer had become, like Martha’s bedroom, a catchall for things that did not yet have a place or needed to be unpacked. The card table was in there, folded up and leaning against some still-unpacked boxes of books. Clutching the edge with both hands, she hurried back downstairs, wondering what else a sitting might involve. To make room, Jenna and Kimberly carried the coffee table into the dining room and put it up against the north wall. Then Jenna set the card table up in the center of the living room.

  Ada had her suitcase open on the couch and was bent over it. “There’s all kindsa ways to communicate with the spirits. Some are better than others, but my favorite is always the board.”

  “The board?” Kimberly said. There was a slight note of alarm in her voice.

  The cloud of smoke followed Ada from the suitcase to the card table, where she set an eighteen-and-a-half -by fourteen-inch rectangular board of quarter-inch-thick maple. A sun with a smiling face had been carved in the top left corner, a somber-profiled crescent moon in the top right. The signs of the zodiac were carved along the bottom. Across the center of the ornate board, two rows of the letters of the alphabet arced above the numbers zero through nine in a straight row, all carefully painted on. The word “Yes” had been painted next to the sun, and beside the moon, “No.” At the bottom was the word “Good-bye.” The Ouija board had been heavily varnished and was yellowed with age. The teardrop-shaped planchette was also of varnished maple, one-eighth of an inch thick, with three tiny felt-tipped legs beneath it.

  Kimberly looked at Jenna with an expression of shock and... was that fear in her eyes? It softened quickly but did not quite go away.

  “What’s wrong?” Jenna said.

  Kimberly smiled and shook her head, shrugged a shoulder. “When I was growing up, we were always told to stay away from these things.”

  Jenna frowned. “Really? Why?”

  “You raised a Christian?” Ada asked.

  Kimberly nodded. “Seventh-Day Adventist. When I was a kid, we were taught that they were evil and dangerous things, these boards, and that tampering with them could ... well, it could completely ruin your life. I’ve never seen one before. It just... well...” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It just gave me the creeps, that’s all. I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “That’s common among Christians,” Ada said. “I was raised Presbyterian, myself. Horror stories are told about the board. They scare the livin’ crap outta their kids about ‘em. Which I think is good, by the way, even though most of the stories are complete crap. People should stay away from the board, it’s not something you futz around with if you don’t know what you’re doing. It can be dangerous.”

  “Wait,” Jenna said. “So you’re saying that this board you just brought into my house is ... potentially dangerous?”

  “Don’t worry, honey. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I know what I’m doing. Haven’t lost a client yet.” Ada took off her coat and tossed it onto the couch. Beneath it, she wore a black-and-white floral-print pantsuit. “We’ll need three chairs at the table, positioned so we can hold hands.”

  Jenna got three old dented-up beige metal folding chairs from a cluttered narrow closet in the dining room, where she had found them the first day in the house. After setting up the chairs, she turned to Kimberly, who still stared warily at the Ouija board.

  “Are you sure you’re okay with this?” Jenna asked.

  Kimberly smiled. “Yeah. But she’s right. I heard horror stories about Ouija boards being evil. Really scary stuff.”

  “The board itself ain’t evil,” Ada said as she sat down at the table. “This one was made by my great-grandpa for my great-grandma. I come from a long line of mediums. Do you have an ashtray?”

  “An ashtray,” Jenna said. They’d found several filthy old ashtrays around the house—the first day, they’d opened all the windows to air out the odor of stale tobacco—and Jenna had washed them and put them in a kitchen cupboard. She got one and put it on the table by the Ouija board just in time to catch the skeletal finger of ash that dropped from Ada’s cigarette. The cloud of smoke settled over the table.

  Ada crushed the butt in the ashtray. “The board’s just a tool. Like a computer. And you don’t want somebody doesn’t know what he’s doin’ pokin’ around with it, is all.”

  Kimberly still did not take a seat at the card table. “I’ve always heard that once you use them ... they leave things behind.”

  “They can’t leave anything behind, honey, ‘cause they don’t come with anything attached. All they do is make it easier to communicate with what’s already here in the first place. The board gives the spirits something to focus their energies on.”

  For a moment, Jenna wondered what she was doing. She couldn’t believe someone had just said, “The board gives the spirits something to focus their energies on,” and she wasn’t at least rolling her eyes and smiling, trying to be polite enough not to laugh or ridicule. But she thought of that small figure standing at the end of the upstairs hallway, and of that same figure in the basement hugging a teddy bear.

  Mommy—

  Ada said, “The reason I only have to do this once or twice is most people watch me the first couple times, see how easy it is, and figure out they can do it themselves.”

  Jenna said, “But... I thought you just said people shouldn’t do it on their own.”

  “I said people shouldn’t operate a Ouija board unless they know what they’re doing. But anybody can talk to the dead.” She removed from a pocket a box of Marlboros and a zebra-print disposable butane lighter, lit up, then set them on the right corner of the table, the lighter on the box. “No secret to it, just talk, they’ll hear you if they want to. Whether or not they’re in the mood to listen, let alone reply, is what makes this a little like fishing. The difference is, a medium, which is what I am, can draw them out a lot easier and faster than most people. You can sit on your couch and talk to the ceiling all day long and maybe get nothing. I can get them to pay attention. It’s a gift. You either got it or you don’t.”

  Jenna said, “You do this for a living, Ada?”

  “Never for a living. I worked at the Payless pharmacy in Eureka for almost thirty years before I retired early. I did this for a little extra money, and because I could. I mean, it’s something I can do and not many other people seem to be so hot at, so why not help people out with it, huh? And make a little extra money? I mean, this is still America, right? Have they made it a crime to make a buck yet?”

  “What if—” Kimberly said, but she s
topped herself. She looked at Jenna, mouth open, as if she were not sure she wanted to continue.

  “What if what, honey?” Ada said.

  “What if they’re not... spirits?”

  “They tell me they’re spirits. Who am I to argue? What do I know? What else would they be? Now, you two sit down at the table.”

  Kimberly still hesitated.

  “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Jenna said. “If it bothers you, Kimberly, I don’t want you to do it.”

  Kimberly said, “Well, um ...” Her round cheeks became rosy with embarrassment.

  Ada looked up and said, “What I usually tell people like this at sittings is—give it a try, if you’re uncomfortable with it, just leave. Nothing bad is going to happen to you either way. Trust me, if I thought something bad was going to happen to you, I wouldn’t be sitting at the same table with you. I don’t hang around when I know bad things’re gonna happen—I’m just not that type, I don’t have it in me.”

  Jenna said, “But if you don’t want to, Kimberly—”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll give it a try. But you’ll understand if I don’t stick it out.”

  “Sure, honey,” Ada said. “You feel free. Now sit down.”

  Jenna sat on the right side of Ada, Kimberly on the left. Ada produced a spiral-bound notebook with the cover folded all the way back, a pen attached to the binding, and placed it in front of Kimberly. “We’ll hold hands for a while, but later, once things get started, you write down every letter the planchette points to.” She reached over and patted Kimberly’s hand. “Can you do that, hon? Because I’m gonna need Jenna to work on the board with both hands, okay?”