by Mark Morris
“Maybe you’re part of it. Have you thought about that?” Sian says. She doesn’t know how she’s doing it but she’s moving quicker.
“Fuck off back to your girlfriend,” Carny says, turning on her.
“Maybe you’re here so that you can go back and make it right. Just by going back and altering one thing, the timeline will have shifted. You have one chance and you’re wasting it on him.” Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the man move away, fear stretching his face into a scream.
“He killed me. Would you let someone get away with that?”
“If I had the chance to live again, yes,” Sian says. “I’d replay it, change the ending.”
“I will replay it,” Carny snarls. “I’ll replay that cunt killer’s death, over and over as I die.”
“I’m afraid you won’t,” Henrik says, over Sian’s shoulder.
Carny looks around. His intended victim has gone. “You cost me my chance,” he says to Sian, his face twisting. “And you’ll pay.”
* * *
“A ghost can’t kill another ghost, can it?” Sian asks.
Henrik says nothing.
They, along with Marta, are walking round the airport in the early hours. Shops and check-ins are shut and the only noises are from the living snoring on beds made from suitcases. They’ll jump up soon and run to fidget in line as the place comes alive, but for now, there is calm across the airport.
“I mean, I don’t have to worry about him unless I find my living self?”
“Not necessarily. I think the best thing to do is to find your living self as quickly as possible,” he says. “And then stay away from this airport.”
“So there is a way,” Marta says. “But how, if we can’t even touch?”
“Few of the dead know about it. I don’t even know if it’s real. Don’t think I’m going to tell you, either, or anyone else, even though they beg me,” Henrik says. “I’m not having that as well on my conscience.” His voice is all pain and edges.
They walk on, not talking, past a family slumped over a bench. Their sped-up snoring sounds like pigs talking.
“Is there a way, though,” Marta says, her little finger an ache of an inch from mine,“that we can touch?”
We both look at him. He sighs. “Over time, just as you adjust to moving in a different dimension and affecting the living, you become stronger in this one. It’s not touching as you remember, but it’s as good.” He screws his face up and closes his eyes, as if pushing back a memory.
“You said that you didn’t want ‘that as well’ on your conscience,” Sian says. “Is that something to do with your wife? Your angel’s share?”
“What’s the angel’s share?” Marta asks.
“It’s the small percentage of alcohol that evaporates from the casks,” Henrik says.
“And you call your wife that because…?” Sian says.
“Because she got away. Because I wasn’t brave enough to follow. Now, please,” Henrik says. His eyes ghost with tears. “I’ve tried to help you. Leave me be. Stay away from Carny; get away from here. Anger is the only thing fuelling him and you’ve removed his method of revenge. He’ll be looking for another one. And I don’t know if I can hold him off.” He walks off, as quickly as Sian’s seen him walk.
“I shouldn’t have pushed him,” she says.
“We both did,” Marta replies.
* * *
Whenever they’re there, Carny taunts them. He stands close. Watching. His jaw works backwards and forwards as if chewing gum. “Enjoy yourselves while you can,” he says. “I’ll always be here.”
Henrik sidles over. He can’t look them in the eyes. He seems paler, even less substantial. “He knows,” he said. “He knows the method. He’s building up the strength but you must find your bodies.”
They avoid the Hollow after that, only going back to refresh memories. The more they know about themselves, the more likely they can find their living bodies as they roam slowly round the concourse, Carny following. They hear him whistling even when they can’t see him; can smell the cologne of beer, stale smoke and semen that follows him even in death.
Moving through the crowds, they search the faces of thousands of women, Marta looking for Sian and Sian Marta, as they know each other’s faces better than their own. And then, one day, Marta turns to Sian with a face of fighting micro-expressions.
“What is it?” Sian asks.
“You’re over there,” Marta says, pointing to Accessorize where a woman is buying a white woolly scarf.
“That’s me?” Sian says. She can’t connect with that woman but the memory of the scarf loops round her. It was warm and slightly scratchy, like fingernails at her neck.
“Go. Quickly,” Marta says, pushing her away. “And don’t come back.”
Sian walks up to the woman with brown hair and stout eyes. The woman opens her mouth and there is a moment of recognition and sadness before Sian opens her arms and walks into her own.
* * *
It takes time to find room inside Sian. Her ghost tries to snake into her thoughts but they’re taken up with her job of writing questions for TV quizzes and factoids for crackers, and her evenings are taken up with booze and near lovers. It’s hard to hold onto the Hollow and what happened there. The ghost in the living can feel the memories leave. She tries to get herself to write the words “Marta” and “Henrik” and “Carny” but they only appear in dreams. Soon, there isn’t much room between future and past Sian, only a thin space where a memory might be.
Sian carries certain things around with her, though. She has a fondness out of nowhere for a certain Irish blessing, a fear of being followed and an aversion to flying. It’s trains, buses and boats or she’s not going anywhere. Her friends don’t know why this change has taken place and neither does she, only that she’s going nowhere near Departures and there’s a hollow in her heart.
* * *
A day, a week, a year later, Sian’s sister, Yvonne, is flying back from New York for Christmas. “Pick me up, would you?” Yvonne said when she called. “It’ll cost a fortune in a taxi.”
“Are you joking? With the dollar as it is? And it’s not as if you’re not making money.”
“You sound like Dad.”
“Ouch.”
So she is picking her sister up at the airport. She couldn’t find a good enough reason why she shouldn’t, and it wasn’t as if she was going to Departures.
Sian sits, scarf on to counteract the draught of the automatic doors, hands around a huge coffee. She went for the gingerbread latte. It’s Christmas, after all. She looks up, and a man is staring at her. He isn’t tall but he’s got broad shoulders. A chill that has nothing to do with the draught flows down her spine as if she’s being unzipped. She pulls the scarf tighter around her.
He moves slowly closer. The cup slips between her fingers, sending hot coffee everywhere as she realises—she can see through him. Other people move around him without seeing or acknowledging him but he is coming for her. She knows that. She doesn’t know how she knows, but she does.
She scrambles up, kicking the chair away and stumbles out of the café, looking back to see where he was, but he’s closer. And there’s something familiar about him. About his sneer.
She runs up to the information desk, out of breath. “Help me, please, I’m being followed. I think I’m in danger.”
“Slow down there, madam,” the smooth-skinned, groomed woman behind the desk says. “Who is it that is chasing you?”
Sian points to the man walking slowly towards her.
The woman, whose name badge says Rhiannon, smiles at her, eyes as cold as the River Liffey. “There’s no one there, madam.” Her pencilled eyebrows flick reverse Vs.
Sian turns away. The man is there, inches from her. She can smell him—a blend of whiskey, tobacco and decay. “I told Henrik he was weak and I told you you’d pay,” he says. His hands reach for her.
“No,” says another voice.
A young woman
is standing behind him. Her hands are on his neck, her sinews straining, her eyes closed. She squeezes, pulling him back, away from Sian.
“How are you doing this?” he spits out, each word a struggle.
“Henrik,” the girl says. “Said he had to do something to make up for it all.”
Sian’s heart contracts and expands as if breathing. “I know you,” she says.
“You do,” says Marta. “And I know you.”
The man, Carny, collapses to the floor, holding his throat. He is pulsing, like a faulty light bulb.
“We don’t have much time.” Marta’s pulsing too.
Sian walks towards her.
“No, we can’t,” Marta says, backing away, but Sian is quicker. Their fingers touch and their lips kiss and for one moment she is held.
“Hurry back,” Marta says.
Sian opens her eyes. Marta and Carny have gone and she is in the middle of a stream of people, alive and dead, and she is totally alone.
* * *
As soon as she gets home, Sian writes it down. All of it. Not on a computer, but on paper she can hold to her and read when the memories fade, and when the ink fades she writes it out again. She writes facts for crackers and quizzes for idiots but knows she knows little. Sometimes she sits in the Hollow, watching the terminally slow Styx of the dead, waiting for what is stalking her. She doesn’t know how long she’s got. Maybe Marta will be there in some way. Maybe she’s here already. May she hold her in the Hollow. May she hold her in the hollow of her hand.
THE SALTER COLLECTION
by Brian Lillie
“When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly intertwined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?”
—Seneca
Alice led Mr. Caul and his ever-present cart through the various stacks and vaults and twisting hallways of the Special Collections wing in silence. They passed a few bleary-eyed grad students and Terry from the third floor, busy pulling yellowed survey maps from a huge drawer in the McIntyre Collection. Terry rolled her eyes comically when she saw whom Alice was escorting.
Everyone who worked at the library had at least one Mr. Caul story. The little weirdo always wore a black three-piece suit and black tennis shoes, eyes scrunched up beneath a fault-lined brow as if perpetually tasting something rancid. He was infamous for never looking at anyone when he deigned to speak, and for having the social graces of an insect. For all of Caul’s annoying traits, though, he was also well known for being able to fix just about anything, which is why Alice had called him.
When they reached the Salter Collection, Alice swiped her card, punched in the key code, and ushered Caul into the dark hallway beyond. A moment after he and his cart disappeared in musty blackness, the automatic lights kicked in with a crotchety splutter, revealing the face of a red-cheeked huntsman surrounded by pine trees, gazing intensely from his frame across from the entrance. Alice had been working at the library for close to three years, and yet the painting always startled her, no matter how many times she had accessed the collection.
Hello, Mr. Salter.
Alice pointed to the left, down the circular marble hallway crowded with inset bookcases and shelves stacked with a surfeit of neatly labeled boxes. Near the door was an open crate with the latest batch of papers that had come over from the Salter estate the week before, which Alice was slowly making her way through. “The listening room is—”
“I know which one it is.”
Alice glanced at her watch as she held the listening room door open. She couldn’t believe it wasn’t even eight-thirty. She was going to need a triple cappuccino from the atrium café after this.
Caul gasped. You would think he had just walked into a real crime scene, with blood splashed onto the walls, but it looked exactly like Alice had found it twenty minutes earlier: an empty room with white plaster walls, two oak tables, four oak chairs, and a basket of outdated headphones on a shelf. The only thing out of the ordinary was a small brown tube lying on the floor, obviously cracked down its middle.
It was this last detail that had elicited Caul’s response. He practically threw himself to the floor to get a closer look. “That’s how I found it,” said Alice. “I figured I shouldn’t handle it, so—”
“Quiet!” snapped Caul. He got up on his knees and pulled his cart closer, removing a pair of gloves and a small cardboard box from the jumble of its lower shelves.
“I’m going to need you to watch your tone,” said Alice, not able to contain herself.
Caul snorted. “Perhaps if you spent less time watching your ‘tone’ and more time safeguarding the items under your care, we wouldn’t need to have these unpleasant interactions.” He pulled on his gloves and carefully prodded one of the cracked areas on the cylinder with what looked like a crochet hook.
“I had nothing to do with this and do not appreciate the insinuation. I only ever open the cylinder collection for Professor Hastings and his students and they haven’t been up here in weeks.”
Caul stopped what he was doing and made actual eye contact with Alice from his spot on the floor, which was unnerving. “You are implying, then, that one of the antique cylinder recordings let itself out of its locked cabinet, somehow rolled into this room and then shattered itself on the floor?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying.”
Caul took a deep breath. “In any case, I would ask that you refrain from speaking for a few moments while I attempt to triage the damage here.”
Alice sighed, willing herself not to say any of the dozen things she wanted to at that moment. “I’ll be in the hall,” she said finally, turning on one heel and leaving before the bastard could respond.
She wasn’t just frustrated by the pompous gnome— it nagged at her that none of this should have happened, period. In order to even just look at one of the wax cylinders, somebody would have to present written permission from the musicology department and leave their driver’s license at her desk. Alice would then have to take that person back here personally, utilizing two different key cards and the combination to the correct cage. And to top it all off, Professor Hastings (who basically was the musicology department) always sent one of his grad students along to supervise anyone accessing the audio collection. There was just no feasible scenario for how someone could have gotten in without her knowing about it.
Not that it mattered, at all.
Sometimes, especially on mornings when she wasn’t caffeinated enough, being an archivist felt to Alice like living out a long prison sentence, with her crimes long forgotten and no release date in sight.
* * *
The automatic light in the audio media storage room flickered even more than the ones in the circular hallway, and for a moment Alice worried it would burn out—the perfect capper to a wonderful morning. Before she could stamp her foot in further frustration, the old fixture finally groaned to partial life, revealing the walk-in cages lining one side of the room and hints of their shadowy contents.
Different formats of audio recordings from Eaton Salter’s private collection took up the bulk of the cages—acetates from the first commercially available flat-disk dictation machine in one; two cages full of gramophone records and several original model gramophones in another; but the true jewel of the collection was housed in the cage farthest from the door—the wax cylinders.
Alice entered the combination and pulled the gate open, feeling the metallic shriek of the hinges in her teeth. She tugged the string light and looked for anything out of the ordinary. On her left were three shelves housing the cylinder players and recorders—an original Bell Labs Graphophone from the late 1880s, and three Edison models from around the turn of the century.
The rest of the cramped space was taken up by several antique cabinets, some stacked two high. Alice opened the first cabinet
and scanned its contents, squinting to read the small handwritten labels in the anaemic light. The three shelves within held a total of three dozen cardboard tubes on spindles, each containing a brown wax cylinder recording (some in better shape than others judging by the water stains and warping of a few of the cardboard jackets). This first cabinet was filled mostly with popular musical recordings of Salter’s day, including many from “George J. Gaskin and his Manhansett Quartette”.
All of the cylinders in the cabinet were accounted for. The same went for cabinets two through six—nothing out of place, no empty jackets or spindles. She opened the last cabinet, seven, and was immediately confronted by an empty spindle in the back of the second shelf, standing out like a missing tooth. Alice nodded to herself. We have our winner.
Alice traced her finger along the location map on the inside of the cabinet door until she found the culprit—the space for the missing cylinder was labelled White Hill Inventory, October 11, 1899 in Salter’s own blocky handwriting. She could not recall offhand what was recorded on that cylinder, even though she must have heard it during digitization. In some ways, it was a relief that the broken cylinder was one of these personal recordings. Any surviving wax was, of course, worth curating, but having heard several of the lumber magnate’s blustery monologues Alice didn’t think the world would miss one.
* * *
Mr. Caul was still in the listening room when Alice returned. He had moved his operation to one of the tables, where he was busy with a pair of tweezers and a lighted magnifier. “So, is it salvageable?” she asked, knowing full well that it was mostly impossible to repair a cylinder.
Caul turned in his seat, eyes wide. “This is a remarkable find.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look here—the cracked outside layer is hiding another recording underneath.”
“What?” Alice rushed over to the table. Caul had removed a good third of the damaged wax, laying each piece on a blue cotton pad at his elbow. Sure enough, revealed beneath this shell was another recording altogether, muddy gray and looking almost freshly cut.
“Amazing,” said Alice, forgetting her annoyance in the face of something truly interesting happening at the library. “They must have shaved this other cylinder down practically to its core to be able to fit it inside like that.”
