The Last to See Me

by M Dressler

  He’s right. How did he know that?

  “How did you know that?” Ellen asks.

  He doesn’t answer. “Is this Alice? On the nightstand?”

  A photo of her when she was young, with a fan in her hand and her long, thin hair streaming at her side.

  “I think so.”

  “Is it very like her?”

  “I don’t know. We never met. She looks like a character, doesn’t she?”

  It was one of Alice’s favorite games, all her life, to dress up in Chinese robes with coiling dragons all over them and walk around the house in embroidered slippers and pretend she was someone else.

  “She spent a lot of time in her studio.” Ellen leads Pratt on. “It’s the next room, here.”

  Her work tables and easels stand under the high gable. All of it bare now, though she used to spread out her sheets of watercolor paper everywhere and shuffle through her bottles and tins and poke a long brush into an oval of paint like an eye she was gouging out.

  Ellen stops at the windowsill. “You can see she got good light in here. And also that she liked to collect dead things. Sand dollars and starfish and sea glass. Do they mean anything, you think?”

  “Maybe, if there were some charge around them. But there isn’t any.”

  They pass through what was once the governess’s alcove, then reach the small, brass-hinged door that leads to the spiral staircase and up to the timbered tower that old Mrs. Lambry had blacksmithed and fitted with the widow’s walk. She wanted it, she told the workmen, to be higher than St. Clements Church, and as lofty as her grief. And the steps, those had to be metal, iron and hollow. When she stepped on each one, it must ring like a bell.

  Pratt and Ellen rise, going round and round, their shoes pounding and ringing with each step, until they find the smaller door at the top and open it and come out into the air and sun and the fog burning away and a view of the village in all directions.

  Pratt steps out and grips the iron railing. He stares down to the back lawn, where Mrs. Broyle used to have the rugs brought out for beating. And then, at the edge of Lambry’s Acre, where the lawn meets the headland before it tumbles down to the sea, he sees the house’s sagging water tower.

  “That’s original, too,” Ellen tells him, holding the railing with both hands. “It’s in bad shape and needs to be torn down or re-purposed. Thing is, to take anything down in Benito you have to go through code reviews and inspections, and Alice didn’t want to do that, and now the heirs don’t want to do that, so it’s just sitting there, basically an eyesore. The tank is empty. Everyone’s on town water now.”

  “If the tank is empty, I’ll want to get in it.”

  “No, I don’t think so, Mr. Pratt. It’s in terrible shape. See where some of the planks are falling off? Most of the ladder steps are gone, too.”

  “Then make another note, please. I’ll need a ladder.”

  “But—”

  “It’s a space.” He points to it. “It’s a shell. I told you. I’ll need to check it out. I’m not feeling much more around the house. Is there an attic?” He moves around the walk and scans the gabled roof.

  “So you might find this interesting. This house doesn’t have one, technically. The Lambrys were ultra-modern. For their time. Those gables distract from what’s really a low peak, there”—she points between the brick chimneys—“and underneath the sub-roof every corner used to be stuffed with wool batten to keep the cold and wet out. Now it’s all high-tech fiberfill, of course. But you still can’t squeeze even a hand in. Cutting edge at the turn of the century.”

  “And what about that oddity?” He looks down at the small, wooden-railed balcony off the second-floor gallery where more of Alice’s paintings hang.

  “That’s an old balcony that got left in place during the remodel twenty years ago. It’s older than the Glass Room. It used to be the main viewpoint toward the cove, before this widow’s walk and the Glass Room were built. Alice loved to add things, but she didn’t or wouldn’t tear anything off.”

  Because I told her not to. Let the balcony float, I whispered to her. It can float above the glass without falling in.

  Pratt leans over. “So that’s why it’s stuck there over the dome.”

  “What did you mean by you’re not feeling much around the house? Are you disappointed, Mr. Pratt?”

  “Why don’t we make it Philip, Ellen. I have the feeling we’re going to be working together on this for a while. No, I’m not disappointed. I would say I’m … puzzled. There isn’t much to go on, yet.”

  “I’m actually kind of glad. I didn’t want the house to be infested.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “You do sound disappointed,” she says, wonderingly.

  “Because it’s my job to find what frightens people and lay it to rest.”

  She leans her elbow on the railing. “I don’t know. It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around what you do, Philip.” She looks out, and her bobbed hair blows toward the cliffs. “It must be a strange feeling. I mean, not just for you, but for the person you’re looking for, too. I try to imagine going along, you’re living, and then suddenly you’re dead, and then suddenly you find out, oh-oh, I’m not dead, but I’m not alive, either. And then you find out someone is trying to kill you all over again. I hope it never happens to me.”

  I hope not either, truly, little Ellen. It’s not for the faint of heart.

  “Then try hard not to become a ghost, Ellen.”

  “Okay, but how do I do that?”

  “Try to live a happy life.”

  “Or else live forever?”

  “No. Not that. Trust me. Forever’s a terrible, lonely place. You see it in their eyes.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’re the one making it lonely for them. Killing all their company.”

  He straightens in his coat at that jab, almost stiffening. Good on you, I nod at her, though she can’t see me. Not so faint of heart, after all.

  “What I do,” Pratt insists, “is bring peace to the living as well as to the dead.”

  It’s what they all say. It’s what they all tell themselves.

  “But what if the dead don’t want your peace?”

  “They do. Even if they don’t always know it.”

  “But how can you know?”

  I’ve wrapped myself, coldly, around the peak of the steeple, where I can’t feel them or what they are saying so much, resting my cheek against the point of the weathervane, turning it.

  “Because being a ghost is pure torture.”

  “You’re absolutely sure about that.”

  “I can make it clearer. If you really want me to.”

  In the shadow of the vane, his back to the cove, Pratt stretches his neck out, loosening it in the way I used to see the priest at St. Clements do when he was about to read the catechism.

  There was a time, Pratt tells Ellen, when he wasn’t considered one of the very best. In the years when he was a young practitioner and had to pick up work wherever he could, he agreed to do nearly any job. His assignments included dirty missions in settings older hunters didn’t stoop to, hauntings that were messy and tricky.

  In one case he took on, Pratt agreed to settle a haunt out in the gold country. The abandoned mine had been sitting empty for decades, but flush with cash the new owners had high hopes of sending down engineers with plans to go deeper and lay tunnels for fresh metals. But whenever the digging crews went below a thousand feet, the lights went out. Each time the engineers went down to take a look, they found the sheathing ripped away from the electrical lines. Gnawed. Shredded to pieces.

  Animals were considered as a possibility. Or local activists who didn’t approve of the mining company. Security around the perimeter was strengthened. And then the lights failed completely. The engineers went down and discovered what they thought were ruddy streaks of iron dripping from the walls. When they realized it wasn’t iron, they surfaced and refused to go back. There was only one specter that c
ould survive at such depths.

  Pratt took the job when no one else on the list of licensed hunters would. He made his way to the site and spent days studying his surroundings—the old cave openings, the ruins of the cabins that had housed the mine families, the bits of rusted and cast-off machinery. He spoke to the security chief and insisted he be allowed to go down into the shaft alone. Too many anxious, breathing bodies, Pratt explained, too much pulsing life in such close quarters, would make it harder to pinpoint the solution. He was given a hardhat with a headlamp and two sticks of phosphorescent light. Down the elevator he plummeted, down, down, and down, until he felt the pressure in his ears shifting. The creaking metal cage stopped at a thousand feet, and the door opened. He took a last gulp of air that still tasted of life above ground and waved one of his wands of light out in front of him, into the darkness.

  The floor slanted, pitted under his feet. To his left, he heard the sound of dripping water, or something else bleeding, and a rumbling in the earth, a tensing sound, like the moaning of something too heavy for whatever held it in place. The ceiling hung low. The smell of ancient creosote floated down, along with a cleaner, drier odor. Calcium.

  In the dark, he pointed his headlamp to the floor and saw his own reflection in a wide, standing puddle. Then he saw something else in it. Refracted. Upside down. The face behind him and to one side. He turned and shone all of his light on the waiting child, suspended like a knob from the glistening rock.

  “Do you want me to go on, Ellen?”

  No. Tell him no, Ellen.

  “I don’t know. Do I?”

  “Do you still want to know what it’s like to be alone forever?”

  A boy. It was impossible to tell with certainty, but it was probably a boy. Its body was black as tar. Its sinews smelled of earth, woven with rags. It looked more like the matted root of a living thing than a thing that had lived itself.

  Pratt had done his homework, of course. He’d read about life in the shanties where the mining families had once lived, and how young boys, in the latter part of a cruel century, had been sent down into the mines and crouched in niches in the walls so they could grease the wheels of the ore-cars as they passed. Untold numbers of children had died in such holes when tunnels collapsed and the air stopped flowing and they couldn’t be reached.

  This rotting child, if it was one of those, went on swinging upside down, its eyes lightless.

  It was always a grim, difficult matter, putting down children. They hadn’t lived long enough to become finished human beings. So they hadn’t lived long enough to become finished ghosts, either. They fell to pieces if you went at them too quickly; they disappeared. Then, too, a child was often difficult to pin with its own anger, because when you tapped into its rage it was often only a fit, a confused tantrum, aiming at everything and nothing. What was left was guesswork.

  A shot in the dark: Pratt asked the ghost if it wanted a bit of fun. If that was why all the lights were out.

  Its torn mouth spread into a smile that broke its jaw loose from its skull. Poor creature. Pratt understood the trick. The child was trying hard to be terrifying. Like all children, living and dead, it confused the horrible and the fearful. But the smile was also a hint. Like all ghosts, the boy offered clues without meaning to. That’s what lonely ghosts in eternity do.

  No. That’s what Pratt thinks a lonely ghost does.

  He asked it to play a question-and-answer game.

  Are you here all alone?

  Yes.

  Were you left here by others?

  Yes.

  Was it an accident?

  The jaw swung. The skeleton of an arm pointed.

  Something hit you? In the face? Something crushed you?

  The hollow eyes turned gold.

  And now Pratt had to do the thing that no one wants to do to a child. Be cruel to it. He had to, because he needed to get it to hold its blazing anger still, all while reminding himself that this boy in front of him wasn’t a child at all, not any human thing, only a vessel for rage. Only an empty space filled with howling.

  That is what Pratt believes our lasting is.

  But you know, Pratt said to it, it was all your fault.

  The ghost froze.

  You must have been a very bad boy. Children who are bad, who are wicked, get exactly what they deserve.

  The ghost contracted and let out a scream that filled the tunnel, shaking it, and pounded its head on a boulder, until Pratt could come so close to it he could see the tattered knit cap woven into the boy’s skull. And now his job was to change his tune and act as though he was sorry, he was very, very sorry, and croon as though he cared, as though he brought kindness with him as well as punishment. Pratt opened his mouth to say the words, It’s all right, son, and at that moment he felt a shock, and every light on his body went out.

  “I can stop now if you want, Ellen.”

  No, I think and hold to the weathervane. Go on. I dare you.

  “No.” Ellen swallows. “You can’t leave it like that. You said you give them peace.”

  I cling to the vane like a mast in a storm while Pratt looks up at the scudding clouds in the blue sky. Hold fast, Emma Rose Finnis, I will myself. Keep close, and learn all that you can about this man, and how he does it, and why.

  In the blackness, he fumbled for the radio he’d been given, but it was dead. He reached blindly in the direction of the elevator, only to hear it close and ascend with a long shriek. Children. Always the cleverest with machines and devices.

  He said to the boy in the dark, I’m glad you closed the door. Because I’m never going to leave you, now.

  A soft, answering whimper.

  That’s right. We’ll stay down here together, forever now. You and me. Just the two of us. What’s your name, little man?

  A whimpering answer. Then sharp fingers, stroking Pratt’s hair. He felt but couldn’t see. He sensed rather than knew where the edge of the boy was, and the edge of his own body—it was as if he had become a ghost too and couldn’t distinguish between where he ended and the other began. So this is what it’s like to be nothing, he whispered to it. The darkness bristled with a tiny tremor of hope.

  No, I’ve changed my mind, Arthur. He had learned, with practice, that this was the best way to arouse their anger: to say the name, softly. And then betray that softness. Swiftly and unexpectedly. You are nothing to me. Arthur, listen to me. I’m leaving you.

  The ghost roared. He turned pure white. His rage flared like a torch in the dark. He showed himself. A boy in corduroy.

  “And then you gave it peace?”

  “I did.”

  “Did it … hurt?”

  “Of course not. You can’t think of it that way.” Pratt looks away from the sky. “It isn’t fleshly pain.”

  “I have absolutely no idea what that means. But I see what you mean about forever being a lonely place.” She wipes her hands as if they’ve suddenly gotten dirty. “Can we go down now? We can see about the water tower.”

  “If that’s what you really want.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you all right, Ellen?”

  “I’m fine. I think I understand you better now. I guess a few loose boards aren’t going to spook you, not if you’re used to offing kids.” She turns.

  He stares, his jaw a little open as she passes him. Another fine jab of truth, that was. And all at once, I’m feeling safer. Lighter. Pratt hangs back before following her down.

  I’m really beginning to like little Ellen, I think. I’m beginning to like her company very much.

  I float off and watch them from high above as they wander over the back lawn. If only I could have been there in that mine with that boy. I could have protected him, hovered over him just as I’m hovering over Ellen now. Little boy, I would have told him, be careful, don’t gnaw at the metal, the wires, so often. Only enough to make them wonder and keep back. But not enough to have them hunt you down. There’s nothing wrong with our little pastimes
and habits—forever is a long time, and we have to do something to keep our heads steady—but there are other ways to make the pain go away, get the aching to stop. And never say your name. Never, never let them get close to you, that way.

  I watch Pratt as he stares up at the great barrel of the wooden water tank, the cask that once held so much—and I think he looks a little less certain, glancing over at Ellen beside him. He can’t climb the legs of the tower, not today. I wonder if it’s making him feel, as Ellen leads him back to the front gate, a bit helpless. That’s a feeling that perhaps every creature on Earth should experience, not just some—though the high and mighty never do, not without a little help.

  6

  That’s it then, Ellen, for today.”

  She’s plainly surprised. “Really? Now what?”

  “Now I go to my hotel. And rest. And have a good meal.”

  “I hope you’ll like it. I’ve booked you the Main Street Hotel, the best we have. But—you really mean there isn’t anything more we’re doing today?”

  “I have a few things I need to mull over, first. Besides, don’t you have other things to tend to? Don’t you need to get home to your cat?”

  “I’d like to.”

  “So. We’ll go our separate ways for a little while.” He holds out his meaty hand, all business now, friendly and smiling, and she takes it. “But you’ll remember about the ladder for tomorrow morning.”

  “I’ll call Manoel Cristo, Alice’s handyman. If there’s anything else”—she pauses outside the groaning garden gate—“you have my number?”

  “And you have mine.”

  “And you can’t give me any sense of how long all this is going to take.”

  “Step by step, Ellen. Patience and care. Slowness.”

  Once Pratt has driven away, her shoulders sag a little in her rumpled suit. She drops into the driver’s seat of her own car, looking into the space he’s left behind. After a moment she stretches her mouth wide, as if she’s been carrying something heavy inside her jaw all day long, and needs to let it out. Her little skull makes a popping sound. She rubs her chin. Then she sighs and turns her key.