by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
She gave me the name of the hospital and told me where it was. I made my way there.
Everyone on the staff spoke English and it was easy enough for me to find the man. It just took a little bit of time and a little bit of explaining. I had been a witness to what happened. It had upset me greatly. I was concerned for him and wanted to see how he was doing.
“He hasn’t had any visitors,” a nurse who was on his floor told me. “It would be good for him to see someone. His face was badly cut and I don’t think he has any family.”
She led me down the hallway toward his room. For reasons I couldn’t quite understand I was frightened, as if I were on my way down a hallway in a movie where there was a monster waiting behind the door. The sterile 1960s hallway with its dying fluorescent lights did nothing to help me with that feeling. The hallway was long. The fluorescents gave it no more than a dull flickering light that bounced off the municipal green walls in a way that seemed almost deliberately grim. Our footsteps echoed in a silence broken only by someone listening to an angry speech on the small speaker of an old phone.
As we neared the door to the man’s room, the nurse said, “Wait here a moment,” and went in ahead of me.
I heard her say something in German. As I approached, I could see her in the doorway and behind her I could see a man in a hospital bed with bandages wrapped around half of his face in a diagonal, so that only his nose and one of his eyes showed through. The bandage cut across his cheek, leaving his mouth exposed.
She smiled at me as I came in. “I told him that he had a visitor. Don’t stay long, but it will be good for him to see somebody.”
“Can you translate for me?” I asked. She nodded and I began to speak and she translated into German.
“Do you remember me?” I asked. “I was in the park the other day. I was wondering how you were doing.” His eyes were glassy and wet. “Also, I wanted to ask you, you seemed to know the girl I was with.”
The nurse shot me an annoyed look. I was there with an ulterior motive and she did not approve. All the same, she translated.
I saw his eyes widen with recognition and then with fear. And then he raised an arm and pointed at me and tried to scream, but all he was able to manage was a low moaning sound that seemed to come from somewhere dark and far away.
The nurse looked back at him and then, hurriedly, at me. “I think it would be better if you go now,” she said. “If I had known that you’d come here to upset him with your questions, I never would have brought you in. What you did was not a kindness.”
—
For a few days after that, I didn’t go back to the park. I stayed in my room. I ate cereal and watched TV that I didn’t understand. Once, I heard laughter from the hallway and I wondered if it was Lee and her friends. I thought about the Foehn Girl, Karla, and about our time together. I closed my eyes and saw the way her scar divided her face. I saw myself licking that scar.
It took me three days before I turned on Friedrich’s computer. It was late at night when I googled “Foehn Geister.” It wasn’t exactly on Wikipedia, but it was there. On a site about German folktales and legends: Foehn Geister. The wind blew them from their graves. They came to take someone back with them. Someone who was ready to go. Often, they had a confederate, someone on our side. Someone who went looking for the lost, the ones who had given up. In a footnote I read that sociologists thought that the Geister and their variants found among the Etruscans and other pre-Roman peoples in the parts of what is now Italy where the siroccos blow and among the native American tribes in the parts of Southern California known for the Santa Ana winds had been a primitive explanation for the otherwise inexplicable event of suicide, a thing so far out of the norm of ancient peoples that it required supernatural causality.
I’m not sure what made me do what I did next. I think it was simply that I knew and it was time to show myself that I knew. I opened Friedrich’s search history. He hadn’t bothered to clear it. It was, of course, in German, but I could recognize dates. As I scrolled back in time, I found what I was looking for. The band that I had been on tour with wasn’t particularly famous, but they had a deal, were popular in Europe, could fill a midsized club. Friedrich had been on their website two days before we’d met on the train. He’d read their announcement about me leaving the band. He’d read it and he’d gone looking for me. Now I went deeper. I went deeper and I knew what I would find. There hadn’t been any photographs out in the apartment when I looked. But no one keeps photos out anymore, do they? They keep images on the hard drive. I looked and there, in his photos, I found them together. Friedrich and Karla. They were in the park, in the English Garden. Their arms were around each other. From all the debris around them on the ground, I could tell that it had been a Foehn day.
The next morning, I woke up to a banging sound. I moved through the apartment. The sound was coming from the window. An awning had come loose and was beating against the window. What had torn it loose was the wind. It was another Foehn day.
I dressed quickly and I went to the park. People were out, enjoying the warmth, if not the wind. There was no bad behavior yet, but the wind was growing stronger. Empty tables and chairs were blown over. At one point, I moved to pick up a table close to me that had been knocked down. I set it upright and turned to go back to my own table. As I looked up, I saw that the other people who had been here in the park were gone. There was no one else there. “I have lived here all my life,” she had said, “and still I am surprised when the people disappear. I do not know where they go.” I sat back down and waited in the now empty park. The wind continued to blow. It was warmer now.
I don’t know how long I had been sitting when she found me. She sat down across the table.
“So,” she said.
She looked around at the empty park. At the litter blowing and the chairs and tables that had been turned over by the wind. There were some people coming back now. They were far away across the park, but I could see that they were wearing Bavarian shorts. “Do you want to stay here until there is another fight, or can we go back to the hotel now?” The scar across her face seemed redder than I remembered it being, as if it were something new.
The wind was blowing hard as we walked back to the hotel. Newspapers blew up into our faces. Leaves and small branches. We went quickly inside. The lobby was empty. We didn’t speak to each other. We just got into the elevator.
This time, when it reached the nineteenth floor, the elevator stopped. The doors opened. I could see the empty clinic facing me, and beyond it, the balcony with its low railing. The doors to the balcony were open and the wind had blown the clinic doors open wide as well. Curtains on either side of the balcony doors blew in the wind.
“Come,” Karla Engel said. “It’s a short walk and then you will be free.”
“Where should I be?”
The man was old, standing at the corner of the park with one hand resting on the brickwork of the low wall, running his fingers along the mortar in an action that was almost gentle, almost a caress. Channing, arms aching from the shopping he carried, stopped. The man looked at him, his face collecting shadows from the metalwork atop the wall, old railings recycled from some dismantled Victorian park and made new and good, and said again, “Where should I be?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Where am I? Where should I be?”
“Why, you’re in the sparkling city of Gentholme!” said Channing, automatically falling into the singsong speech of the salespeople and parroting the advert that had been playing repeatedly in the sales office and behind all the presentations he and Miranda had attended. It had been the opposite of subliminal he had thought at the time, something that created memory and desire not by subtle, unseen pressures, but by battery and insistence. “The first city to be built this century, with homes for one hundred thousand people and road and rail commuter links to every major destination nearby, where safety and sustainability are the watchwords of the future!” Channing smiled to
show the man that he was joking, but the man’s expression did not change.
“Where should I be?”
Channing put his bags down, balancing them so that they didn’t tip, making sure that the bottle of champagne he’d bought for him and Miranda to share that evening was safe, and went closer to the man. In the light from the streetlamps, new blue LED ones that faked a hard, brittle moonlight, the man looked weary, confused. He was wearing a long overcoat, thin and stained down its front, and his jowls were written with two or three days’ growth of bristle. His shoulders were slumped within his coat, twin slopes down which Channing could imagine rainwater dripping despite the clear skies and good temperatures.
“Are you lost?” asked Channing.
“I don’t know,” said the man. He looked at the wall, his hand still running along its bricks. “I don’t know where I should be.”
“Where do you live? Can I call someone for you?”
“I was somewhere and now I’m here and I don’t know where I am. Can they tell me where I should be?”
“Who?”
The man didn’t answer. Instead, he raised his face to the approaching night, peering at the top of the newly black railings. He looked careworn, miserable, his hand now lifting from the brick and clasping one of the metal posts, knuckles white in the dusk. Channing looked around, wondering if the man had wandered off from family and gotten lost, but saw no one. Now the man had pushed an arm through the railings, had wrapped it around the bars as though to anchor himself, and tears were spilling down his face. Was the man from a nursing home?
Channing remembered what he had heard at one of the sales pitches. Hadn’t someone asked about care for the elderly? Yes, yes, they had, and one of the young architects had answered, talking about hospitals and doctors’ offices, but that wasn’t it, was it? In the end, one of the older marketing men had stepped forward and spoken in smooth undulations about the second wave of sales, that the first was being aimed at young families but that there was space in the design plans already set aside for state-of-the-art long-term-care facilities.
So where had the old man, now with both arms wrapped through the metal and pressing himself up against it, come from? Channing took out his cell but saw that it had no signal; Gentholme’s infrastructure was still a little patchy, despite the assurances that it would be fully functional by the time people started to move in. He walked back to his bags, stepping out into the road in the hope that he’d see people scouring the street for a lost relative, but nothing moved in Gentholme’s distant spaces. He looked at his phone screen again but its signal bars were still empty. The man groaned, once, low and ragged.
“Do you want to come with me?” asked Channing, but the man ignored him. Channing reached out a hand, and now the man looked at him, flinching back, fear in his eyes.
“No,” he said, a tiny froth of saliva forming at the corner of his mouth. “Where should I be?”
“I don’t know,” said Channing, dropping his hand. The man was obviously upset, frightened of either Channing or of the things he could see that Channing could not, of loneliness and of not finding his place. “I’ll go and call someone to come and see if he can help you, okay?”
Still no signal on his phone, so Channing picked up his bags of shopping and stepped out into the road again. It wasn’t late but no traffic moved on the roads and there were no public phone booths nearby; they were a lost thing now, he supposed, curios that may still exist in the streets of the older cities but not here. He glanced around but the houses here were dark, shells without life inside them yet, waiting to be filled with the playing children and smiling parents the new city’s brochures had advertised. He walked several yards down the road, still looking around, and then glanced back at the park. The shadows had crept across the grass and were now wrapping themselves through the wrought-iron fenceposts and slipping down the wall to approach the sidewalk and the street beyond.
The man was gone.
Gentholme was a thing waiting to be born.
Sometimes, as Channing walked its deserted streets, he imagined that he and Miranda and the few others who had also moved in before the city was completed were the first particles of blood moving sluggishly along its concrete veins, the first movements within an embryo that would, they hoped, develop into the city of Gentholme. The more they used the shops, with their half-stocked aisles, and visited the doctor or dentist with their gleaming new equipment and bland waiting-room magazines, the more they forced its development, the nubs of its fingers and toes expanding, its limbs stretching out, its brain crenellating and creating new thoughts and memories and ideas, the closer the city would be to emerging into the world.
The disadvantage of being part of the gestation, of course, was that most of the city’s limbs hadn’t had time to form yet, and what there was didn’t always function properly. When he got home after meeting the man, Channing hadn’t known quite what to do. It didn’t seem quite enough of an emergency to bother the police or health services with, although he was concerned about the man’s well-being if he was wandering the streets through the night, and eventually he had tried the local government’s after-hours number. His call had connected to an answering machine, so he had left a message explaining what had happened and his own contact details, but the next morning it didn’t seem like enough. The image of the man’s face, tears etching his cheeks and arms wrapped around the fence in a grip as tight as love itself, had invaded Channing’s sleep and populated it with fractured, confusing scenes of people walking away from him and ignoring his outstretched hands as some great black sea rolled in to submerge him. I should have done more, he thought, as he dressed and returned to the park, walking around its perimeter. But what?
There was nothing outside the park except streets of empty houses, so Channing found a gate, pushed it open, and entered. Inside, he found that the park was surprisingly large, a ramble of greenery set out like the spaces Channing remembered from his childhood. It was landscaped so that its grassed lawns rose and fell in gentle slopes and its paths meandered, crossing and recrossing between copses of trees that were small and thin, their trunks still protected by plastic tubes, and sports courts enclosed by high nets and with no sign of wear on their surfaces. At the park’s center, Channing found a large playground behind a waist-high metal fence, its swings and slides and jungle gyms oddly old-fashioned, and beyond this a bandstand. When he looked more closely, both the playground fence and the bandstand were adorned by small plaques that read “Equipment saved and refurbished by the Gentholme Community Trust.”
He wandered around the space the entire morning, looking for the old man, but the only person he saw was a small boy standing on the far side of the playground. The child was dressed in gray shorts and a blue sweater that looked as though it had a school logo on its breast and was holding a blue balloon that floated at his shoulder at the end of a piece of twine, and he watched Channing with wary eyes.
That afternoon, Channing called the town hall again. This time, he managed to speak to a person who told him that town services were being handled by an outreach group from the neighboring town until Gentholme’s infrastructure was completed, and that there was little she could do to help with the old man unless he actually presented himself to a hospital. She promised to pass on the details to the police, though, which made Channing feel a little better.
Miranda was working a long day the next day, so Channing took his lunch to the park rather than stay in the house. He ate sitting on one of the low hills, a thin scattering of trees to his back, looking down on the playground and bandstand. It was sunny, an Indian summer bathing Gentholme in tired but calm yellows and greens, the air smelling of grass and earth and dew, and Channing was happy. This move was right for him, for him and Miranda, a new start in a new town, a place they could leave their old lives behind and find something fresh. Miranda’s work wasn’t too far away, the new office being set up in the new city welcoming her, and Channing himself could run
his business anywhere there was electricity and an Internet connection.
He chewed, enjoying the taste of his food in the fresh air, and watched as gradually people arrived in the park.
They came from all directions, some walking in across the lawns, some emerging from behind the hills, some threading their way among the new trees. They all came to the bandstand and gathered in a group in front of the structure, and although he couldn’t see them clearly, Channing had the sense that they were older; it was something about the cut of their clothes, the speed of their movement, the rhythm of it. There were a surprisingly large number of them, perhaps thirty, more than he had seen together in Gentholme since that first publicity meeting. He’d seen no ads or flyers for a community concert, but that didn’t mean anything. Miranda always said he walked around with his head in another world. He sat forward, expectant.
Nothing happened.
No musicians came to the bandstand; there was simply the crowd gathered, watching the empty stage. Channing looked for some kind of PA system, volume set low enough that the people by the bandstand could hear it but Channing, up on the hill, could not. He stood, brushing his clothes and sending crumbs tumbling to the ground, and started down the slope.
Closer, he saw he was right; the crowd consisted mostly of older people, although there were one or two people his own age scattered through the mass. Everyone was staring at the empty stage.
“What’s happening?” he asked the nearest person, a woman in a faded floral dress and a long woolen coat, when he reached the lawn. “A concert?”
“I’m waiting,” said the woman.
“Waiting? For it to begin?”
“I don’t know,” said the woman, still staring at the stage. “I’m waiting. I don’t know what else to do.”
“Does anyone else know what’s happening?” asked Channing. It was warm, the sun prickling his scalp through his hair, making him logy and slow. “Surely someone must know.”
