Ghost

by Louise Welsh

  “I can’t,” Diment blubbered, holding the axe. “Jesus, George, I can’t, I can’t, I –…”

  The machine was an abattoir now. The folder spat out pieces of shirt sleeve, scraps of flesh, a finger. Stanner gave a huge, whooping scream and Diment swung the axe up and brought it down in the laundry’s shadowy lightlessness. Twice. Again.

  Stanner fell away, unconscious and blue, blood jetting from the stump just below the shoulder. The mangler sucked what was left into itself… and shut down.

  Weeping, Diment pulled his belt out of its loops and began to make a tourniquet.

  *

  Hunton was talking on the phone with Roger Martin, the inspector. Jackson watched him while he patiently rolled a ball back and forth for three-year-old Patty Hunton to chase.

  “He pulled all the fuses?” Hunton was asking. “And the off button just didn’t function, huh?… Has the ironer been shut down?… Good. Great. Huh?… No, not official.” Hunton frowned, then looked sideways at Jackson. “Are you still reminded of that refrigerator, Roger?… Yes. Me too, Goodbye.”

  He hung up and looked at Jackson. “Let’s go see the girl, Mark.”

  *

  She had her own apartment (the hesitant yet proprietary way she showed them in after Hunton had flashed his buzzer made him suspect that she hadn’t had it long), and she sat uncomfortably across from them in the carefully decorated, postage-stamp living room.

  “I’m Officer Hunton and this is my associate, Mr Jackson. It’s about the accident at the laundry.” He felt hugely uncomfortable with this dark, shyly pretty girl.

  “Awful,” Sherry Ouelette murmured. “It’s the only place I’ve ever worked. Mr Gartley is my uncle. I liked it because it let me have this place and my own friends. But now… it’s so spooky.”

  “The State Board of Safety has shut the ironer down pending a full investigation,” Hunton said. “Did you know that?”

  “Sure,” She sighed restlessly. “I don’t know what I’m going to do –…”

  “Miss Ouelette,” Jackson interrupted, “you had an accident with the ironer, didn’t you? Cut your hand on a clamp, I believe?”

  “Yes, I cut my finger.” Suddenly her face clouded. “That was the first thing.” She looked at them woefully. “Sometimes I feel like the girls don’t like me so much any more… as if I were to blame.”

  “I have to ask you a hard question,” Jackson said slowly. “A question you won’t like. It seems absurdly personal and off the subject, but I can only tell you it is not. Your answers won’t ever be marked down in a file or record.”

  She looked frightened. “D-did I do something?”

  Jackson smiled and shook his head; she melted. Thank God for Mark, Hunton thought.

  “I’ll add this, though: the answer may help you keep your nice little flat here, get your job back, and make things at the laundry the way they were before.”

  “I’d answer anything to have that,” she said.

  “Sherry, are you a virgin?”

  She looked utterly flabbergasted, utterly shocked, as if a priest had given communion and then slapped her. Then she lifted her head, made a gesture at her neat efficiency apartment, as if asking them how they could believe it might be a place of assignation.

  “I’m saving myself for my husband,” she said simply.

  Hunton and Jackson looked calmly at each other, and in that tick of a second, Hunton knew that it was all true: a devil had taken over the inanimate steel and cogs and gears of the mangler and had turned it into something with its own life.

  “Thank you,” Jackson said quietly.

  *

  “What now?” Hunton asked bleakly as they rode back. “Find a priest to exorcise it?”

  Jackson snorted. “You’d go a far piece to find one that wouldn’t hand you a few tracts to read while he phoned the booby hatch. It has to be our play, Johnny.”

  “Can we do it?”

  “Maybe. The problem is this: We know something is in the mangler. We don’t know what.” Hunton felt cold, as if touched by a fleshless finger. “There are a great many demons. Is the one we’re dealing with in the circle of Bubastis or Pan? Baal? Or the Christian deity we call Satan? We don’t know. If the demon had been deliberately cast, we would have a better chance. But this seems to be a case of random possession.”

  Jackson ran his fingers through his hair. “The blood of a virgin, yes. But that narrows it down hardly at all. We have to be sure, very sure.”

  “Why?” Hunton asked bluntly. “Why not just get a bunch of exorcism formulas together and try them out?”

  Jackson’s face went cold. “This isn’t cops “n” robbers, Johnny. For Christ’s sake, don’t think it is. The rite of exorcism is horribly dangerous. It’s like controlled nuclear fission, in a way. We could make a mistake and destroy ourselves. The demon is caught in that piece of machinery. But give it a chance and –…”

  “It could get out?”

  “It would love to get out,” Jackson said grimly. “And it likes to kill.”

  *

  When Jackson came over the following evening, Hunton had sent his wife and daughter to a movie. They had the living room to themselves, and for this Hunton was relieved. He could still barely believe what he had become involved in.

  “I cancelled my classes,” Jackson said, “and spent the day with some of the most god-awful books you can imagine. This afternoon I fed over thirty recipes for calling demons into the tech computer. I’ve got a number of common elements. Surprisingly few.”

  He showed Hunton the list: blood of a virgin, graveyard dirt, hand of glory, bat’s blood, night moss, horse’s hoof, eye of toad.

  There were others, all marked secondary.

  “Horse’s hoof,” Hunton said thoughtfully. “Funny –…”

  “Very common. In fact –…”

  “Could these things – any of them – be interpreted loosely?” Hunton interrupted.

  “If lichens picked at night could be substituted for night moss, for instance?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s very likely,” Jackson said. “Magical formulas are often ambiguous and elastic. The black arts have always allowed plenty of room for creativity.”

  “Substitute Jell-O for horse’s hoof,” Hunton said. “Very popular in bag lunches. I noticed a little container of it sitting under the ironer’s sheet platform on the day the Frawley woman died. Gelatine is made from horses’ hooves.”

  Jackson nodded. “Anything else?”

  “Bat’s blood… well, it’s a big place. Lots of unlighted nooks and crannies. Bats seem likely, although I doubt if the management would admit to it. One could conceivably have been trapped in the mangler.”

  Jackson tipped his head back and knuckled bloodshot eyes. “It fits… it all fits.”

  “It does?”

  “Yes. We can safely rule out the hand of glory, I think. Certainly no one dropped a hand into the ironer before Mrs Frawley’s death, and belladonna is definitely not indigenous to the area.”

  “Graveyard dirt?”

  “What do you think?”

  “It would have to be a hell of a coincidence,” Hunton said. “Nearest cemetery is Pleasant Hill, and that’s five miles from the Blue Ribbon.”

  “Okay,” Jackson said. “I got the computer operator – who thought I was getting ready for Halloween – to run a positive breakdown of all the primary and secondary elements on the list. Every possible combination. I threw out some two dozen which were completely meaningless. The others fall into fairly clear-cut categories. The elements we’ve isolated are in one of those.”

  “What is it?”

  Jackson grinned. “An easy one. The mythos centres in South America with branches in the Caribbean. Related to voodoo. The literature I’ve got looks on the deities as strictly bush league, compared to some of the real heavies, like Saddath or He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named. The thing in that machine is going to slink away like the neighbourhood bully.”


  “How do we do it?”

  “Holy water and a smidgen of the Holy Eucharist ought to do it. And we can read some of the Leviticus to it. Strictly Christian white magic.”

  “You’re sure it’s not worse?”

  “Don’t see how it can be,” Jackson said pensively. “I don’t mind telling you I was worried about that hand of glory. That’s very black juju. Strong magic.”

  “Holy water wouldn’t stop it?”

  “A demon called up in conjunction with the hand of glory could eat a stack of Bibles for breakfast. We would be in bad trouble messing with something like that at all. Better to pull the goddamn thing apart.”

  “Well, are you completely sure –…”

  “No, but fairly sure. It all fits too well.”

  “When?”

  “The sooner, the better,” Jackson said. “How do we get in? Break a window?”

  Hunton smiled, reached into his pocket, and dangled a key in front of Jackson’s nose.

  “Where’d you get that? Gartley?”

  “No,” Hunton said. “From a state inspector named Martin.”

  “He knows what we’re doing?”

  “I think he suspects. He told me a funny story a couple of weeks ago.”

  “About the mangler?”

  “No,” Hunton said. “About a refrigerator. Come on.”

  *

  Adelle Frawley was dead; sewed together by a patient undertaker, she lay in her coffin. Yet something of her spirit perhaps remained in the machine, and if it did, it cried out. She would have known, could have warned them. She had been prone to indigestion, and for this common ailment she had taken a common stomach tablet called E-Z Gel, purchasable over the counter of any drugstore for seventy-nine cents. The side panel holds a printed warning: People with glaucoma must not take E-Z Gel, because the active ingredient causes an aggravation of that condition. Unfortunately, Adelle Frawley did not have that condition. She might have remembered the day, shortly before Sherry Ouelette cut her hand, that she had dropped a full box of E-Z Gel tablets into the mangler by accident. But she was dead, unaware that the active ingredient which soothed her heartburn was a chemical derivative of belladonna, known quaintly in some European countries as the hand of glory.

  There was a sudden ghastly burping noise in the spectral silence of the Blue Ribbon Laundry – a bat fluttered madly for its hole in the insulation above the dryers where it had roosted, wrapping wings around its blind face.

  It was a noise almost like a chuckle.

  The mangler began to run with a sudden, lurching grind – belts hurrying through the darkness, cogs meeting and meshing and grinding, heavy pulverizing rollers rotating on and on.

  It was ready for them.

  *

  When Hunton pulled into the parking lot it was shortly after midnight and the moon was hidden behind a raft of moving clouds. He jammed on the brakes and switched off the lights in the same motion; Jackson’s forehead almost slammed against the padded dash.

  He switched off the ignition and the steady thump-hiss-thump became louder. “It’s the mangler,” he said slowly. “It’s the mangler. Running by itself. In the middle of the night.”

  They sat for a moment in silence, feeling the fear crawl up their legs.

  Hunton said, “All right. Let’s do it.”

  They got out and walked to the building, the sound of the mangler growing louder. As Hunton put the key into the lock of the service door, he thought that the machine did sound alive – as if it were breathing in great hot gasps and speaking to itself in hissing, sardonic whispers.

  “All of a sudden I’m glad I’m with a cop,” Jackson said. He shifted the brown bag he held from one arm to the other. Inside was a small jelly jar filled with holy water wrapped in waxed paper, and a Gideon Bible.

  They stepped inside and Hunton snapped up the light switches by the door. The fluorescents flickered into cold life. At the same instant the mangler shut off.

  A membrane of steam hung over its rollers. It waited for them in its new ominous silence.

  “God, it’s an ugly thing,” Jackson whispered.

  “Come on,” Hunton said. “Before we lose our nerve.”

  They walked over to it. The safety bar was in its down position over the belt which fed the machine.

  Hunton put out a hand. “Close enough, Mark. Give me the stuff and tell me what to do.”

  “But –…”

  “No argument.”

  Jackson handed him the bag and Hunton put it on the sheet table in front of the machine. He gave Jackson the Bible.

  “I’m going to read,” Jackson said. “When I point at you, sprinkle the holy water on the machine with your fingers. You say: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, get thee from this place, thou unclean. Got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “The second time I point, break the wafer and repeat the incantation again.”

  “How will we know if it’s working?”

  “You’ll know. The thing is apt to break every window in the place getting out. If it doesn’t work the first time, we keep doing it until it does.”

  “I’m scared green,” Hunton said.

  “As a matter of fact, so am I.”

  “If we’re wrong about the hand of glory –…”

  “We’re not,” Jackson said. “Here we go.”

  He began. His voice filled the empty laundry with spectral echoes. “Turnest not thou aside to idols, nor make molten gods for yourself. I am the Lord thy God…” The words fell like stones into a silence that had suddenly become filled with a creeping, tomblike cold. The mangler remained still and silent under the flourescents, and to Hunton it still seemed to grin.

  “…and the land will vomit you out for having defiled it, as it vomited out nations before you.” Jackson looked up, his face strained, and pointed.

  Hunton sprinkled holy water across the feeder belt.

  There was a sudden, gnashing scream of tortured metal. Smoke rose from the canvas belts where the holy water had touched and took on writhing, red-tinged shapes. The mangler suddenly jerked into life.

  “We’ve got it!” Jackson cried above the rising clamour. “It’s on the run!”

  He began to read again, his voice rising over the sound of the machinery. He pointed to Hunton again, and Hunton sprinkled some of the host. As he did so he was suddenly swept with a bone-freezing terror, a sudden vivid feeling that it had gone wrong, that the machine had called their bluff – and was the stronger.

  Jackson’s voice was still rising, approaching climax.

  Sparks began to jump across the arc between the main motor and the secondary; the smell of ozone filled the air, like the copper smell of hot blood. Now the main motor was smoking; the mangler was running at an insane, blurred speed; a finger touched to the central belt would have caused the whole body to be hauled in and turned to a bloody rag in the space of five seconds. The concrete beneath their feet trembled and thrummed.

  A main bearing blew with a searing flash of purple light, filling the chill air with the smell of thunderstorms, and still the mangler ran, faster and faster, belts and rollers and cogs moving at a speed that made them seem to blend and merge, change, melt, transmute –

  Hunton, who had been standing almost hypnotized, suddenly took a step backwards. “Get away!” he screamed over the blaring racket.

  “We’ve almost got it!” Jackson yelled back. “Why –…”

  There was a sudden indescribable ripping noise and a fissure in the concrete floor suddenly raced towards them and past, widening. Chips of ancient cement flew up in a starburst.

  Jackson looked at the mangler and screamed.

  It was trying to pull itself out of the concrete, like a dinosaur trying to escape a tar pit. And it wasn’t precisely an ironer any more. It was still changing, melting. The 550-volt cable fell, spitting blue fire, into the rollers and was chewed away. For a moment two fireballs glared at them like lambent eyes, eyes fil
led with a great and cold hunger.

  Another fault line tore open. The mangler leaned towards them, within an ace of being free of the concrete moorings that held it. It leered at them; the safety bar had slammed up and what Hunton saw was a gaping, hungry mouth filled with steam.

  They turned to run and another fissure opened at their feet. Behind them, a great screaming roar as the thing came free. Hunton leaped over, but Jackson stumbled and fell sprawling.

  Hunton turned to help and a huge, amorphous shadow fell over him, blocking the fluorescents.

  It stood over Jackson, who lay on his back, staring up in a silent rictus of terror – the perfect sacrifice. Hunton had only a confused impression of something black and moving that bulked to a tremendous height above them both, something with glaring electric eyes the size of footballs, an open mouth with a moving canvas tongue.

  He ran: Jackson’s dying scream followed him.

  *

  When Roger Martin finally got out of bed to answer the doorbell, he was still only a third awake; but when Hunton reeled in, shock slapped him fully into the world with a rough hand.

  Hunton’s eyes bulged madly from his head, and his hands were claws as he scratched at the front of Martin’s robe. There was a small oozing cut on his cheek and his face was splashed with dirty grey specks of powdered cement.

  His hair had gone dead white.

  “Help me… for Jesus’ sake, help me. Mark is dead. Jackson is dead.”

  “Slow down,” Martin said. “Come in the living room.”

  Hunton followed him, making a thick whining noise in this throat, like a dog.

  Martin poured him a two-ounce knock of Jim Beam and Hunton held the glass in both hands, downing the raw liquor in a choked gulp. The glass fell unheeded to the carpet and his hands, like wandering ghosts, sought Martin’s lapels again.

  “The mangler killed Mark Jackson. It… it… oh God, it might get out! We can’t let it get out! We can’t… we… oh –…” He began to scream, a crazy, whooping sound that rose and fell in jagged cycles.

  Martin tried to hand him another drink but Hunton knocked it aside. “We have to burn it,” he said. “Burn it before it can get out. Oh, what if it gets out? Oh Jesus, what if –…” His eyes suddenly flickered, glazed, rolled up to show the whites, and he fell to the carpet in a stonelike faint.