A Head Full of Ghosts

by Paul Tremblay

  Rachel looks at me quizzically. “Fingerprints?”

  I wave my hand around like I’m impatiently shooing away a fly. “Can I just read the report? Do you have time for that?”

  Rachel says, “I—I think so. It’s rather long.” She passes the thick manila envelope across the table.

  I don’t want to read the report right now. I don’t know why I asked to do so. Maybe I just wanted to see what her reaction would be. Sitting here in the coffee shop with her outlining her research findings, I’m getting the sense that she’s hiding something from me. I don’t know how that would be possible.

  She wasn’t there when it happened. And I was.

  I push the report back across the table to her and I say, “I remember my last day with my family. I remember our last day together. I do,” as though I’m trying to convince myself that I’m telling the truth. “I’m going to tell you about it as quickly as I can.”

  CHAPTER 25

  IT WAS SATURDAY afternoon. Six days until Christmas. I’d been promised that we were going to put up a Christmas tree, a real one, on that day. But Mom hadn’t gotten out of bed until super late and announced that we would get a tree on Sunday instead.

  I was mad, so mad I went and hid in my bedroom. I decided I wasn’t going to talk to anyone the rest of the day. I made signs instead. If Mom or Dad asked me something, I’d just hold up my sign with a simple message-answer. The signs were nothing fancy; I used lined notebook paper and a blue pen.

  I made the following signs: NO. GOOD. WHAT’S FOR DINNER? YES. I DON’T KNOW. READ IT. MILK. WATER. COOKIE? I’M FINE. WHEN ARE WE GETTING A TREE? I’LL TALK THEN. WHERE? CAN I GO OUTSIDE? PLAY SOCCER. I ALREADY READ. NOTHING. TV? TOO EARLY. IN MY ROOM. NO BATH. NO SHOWER. I’M NOT TIRED. I CAN HEAR YOU. PLEASE DON’T YELL. BIGFOOT IS STANDING OUTSIDE THE WINDOW!

  I lay on my bed, practice-answering imaginary questions with my signs, shuffling through my pile of papers looking for the intended responses. While I attempted to construct what I thought would be a logical, easy-to-remember card-cataloguing system, I heard an approaching clunking, and another piece of paper, this one folded in half, slid under my door and into my room. It was a note from Marjorie.

  Come into my room, now. I need to show you something. This is SO important! Like, life and death important, Miss Merry.

  Since returning home from the hospital, Marjorie had kept to herself and generally stayed out of trouble. She hadn’t liked trying to get around in her walking boot much, and going up and down the stairs was especially difficult, so Dad had put a new TV in her room. He’d hung it on the freshly plastered wall adjacent to her bed. Her TV stayed on almost constantly; a drone of voices at low volume echoed in the hallway until it was time for lights-out and Dad would go into her room and shut the TV off himself. Late at night there’d been occasional bouts of her talking or even whispering loudly to herself, her words and sentences always just out of reach. I don’t remember if Mom or Dad went into her room to try to comfort her or quiet her down, or if they stayed in their room, content to pretend what we were hearing was Marjorie’s television. Either way, the nocturnal outbursts were mild compared to what they used to be and they didn’t last very long. The next morning Marjorie would be as quiet as a painting all over again.

  I read Marjorie’s note three times. Despite everything that I’d gone through, that our whole family had gone through, I felt that old excitement, that familiar flutter in my stomach: Marjorie wanted to spend time with me. I don’t think I can ever fully explain the power she had over the eight-year-old me or the power she still has over me.

  I folded up the note and stuck it underneath my mattress. I ripped one more piece of paper out of the notebook and quickly made another sign: MORE STORIES?

  Her bedroom door was open and I peeked in. The TV was off and her computer was on, but she wasn’t at her desk or on her bed. Marjorie popped out from behind the door, said, “Quick!” and then grabbed my arm, pulled me in, and shut the door behind me.

  I nearly jumped out of my sneakers and yelped like a puppy accidentally getting her paw stepped on, but I didn’t drop my signs.

  “Shh. Sorry, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. Is Dad home? Did he see you come in?” Marjorie loomed over me and I wondered if she’d gotten taller and I’d gotten shorter somehow. She wore purple pajama pants and a black hooded sweatshirt. She had on one fuzzy blue bunny slipper, the one with the floppy ears that threatened to trip her at any moment.

  I didn’t know where Dad was. I assumed he was down in the basement doing whatever it was he did when he was down there. I hadn’t been in the basement since the last time with Marjorie.

  I held up my I DON’T KNOW sign.

  “Not talking?”

  Pleased and vindicated that my Marjorie understood me right away, I shuffled through the deck, and then held up YES.

  Marjorie smiled. “That’s fine, monkey. We can work with this, I think, yeah. Hey, do you remember my story about the growing things? Do you remember the two sisters in the cabin, and the father who killed their mother and buried her in the basement?”

  I held up YES, and nodded my head hard enough that it could’ve fallen off.

  “I told you that story as a warning. Okay? Something that could actually happen.”

  I looked for an appropriate sign to use, but didn’t have one. I sighed. I wanted to say “I know. You’ve told me that a thousand times.” I thought about showing her my BIGFOOT IS STANDING OUTSIDE THE WINDOW! sign to try to make her laugh, but it didn’t feel like the right time.

  “I’m not fooling around now. I need you to read some more stories. I need you to think really hard about them. And I need you to understand.” Marjorie looked all around the room as though making sure that no one else was watching us. “They’re not good stories, but they’re important stories, and I promise, they’re true stories. All of them are true. They actually happened, okay?”

  She led me to her desk and the computer. She called up the browser, went into her bookmarks folder, and clicked on one of the links. At the top of the webpage, white capital letters BBC were block-outlined in red.

  Marjorie said, “Here. Read this story.”

  It was about a man who, after being laid off by his longtime employer, shot his wife and his two kids. Then he burned himself up along with their house.

  I held up my MORE STORIES? sign because I knew that was what she wanted.

  “Yes. There are more. So many more. Read this one.”

  This was about another man. His wife had just divorced him. He had been in contact with a protest group called Fathers 4 Justice. On Father’s Day, he connected a hose to his Land Rover’s tailpipe and ran it through the back window. He parked in the middle of an empty field and he and his two children died because of carbon monoxide poisoning.

  “Read.”

  I read about another man who’d poisoned himself and his children after his wife had left him. And then I read about another man who’d jumped off a bridge with his kids in his arms. And then I read about another man who drove into a lake with his kids locked in his car and strapped into their car seats.

  There were more and more and more. Marjorie clicked to a new link whenever I looked away from the screen and up at her. There were so many I stopped reading and just pretended to read. I didn’t have to read everything though; the stories were there in the bold headlines and pictures of the fathers and their wives and their smiling children (always smiling) and their houses and apartments and cars and backyards strung with yellow police tape. And I remember thinking that all these stories started off sounding like the old fairy tales Mom and Dad used to tell me, and instead of witches putting kids in ovens and evil queens conjuring poisoned apples, the fathers and husbands were the monsters doing the unspeakable things to their families, and these stories all ended without anyone saving anybody. No one was saved. I couldn’t believe there were so many stories like that and that people would choose to read them.

  I turn
ed away from the computer. It was too much, way too much. I crumpled up the MORE STORIES? sign and dropped it to floor. I flipped over my I’M FINE sign and wrote WHY?

  She spun me around and put her hands on the arms of the desk chair, caging me in. Her face was only inches from mine, and it looked as big as the moon. She calmly launched into a long, rambling spiel, the gist of which was about how she’d read these stories after finding something called the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice. After conducting a decade-long study, the journal had outlined the types of men most likely to murder their families. These men all blamed the breakdown of their once-ideal family on something outside their control, something outside themselves. Some blamed their family’s problems on their lack of economic success and/or his not being the breadwinner for the family (I remember when she said “breadwinner” that I pictured Dad winning a giant loaf of bread in some sort of carnival-like contest). Many fathers blamed their wives for pitting their own children against them. Some men believed the entire family itself was to blame because they didn’t act the right way; they weren’t following his traditional religious values and customs. And there were the men who thought that they were actually saving or protecting the family from some outside threat or force.

  Marjorie stopped and backed away from the chair.

  I held up my new WHY? sign again.

  She said, “Don’t you get it? Everything I’ve said and you’ve read, they describe what’s going on with Dad. He’s going to do something like that to us, to all of us.”

  I carefully picked through my signs and held up NO.

  Marjorie said, “I know you love him and I love him too, I do. And I know it’s hard to believe, but there’s something wrong with him. He’s sick. It’s so obvious. Haven’t you figured it out yet? He’s why I put us through everything, Merry. I knew he was getting sick, so at first I faked that I was sick so that someone would figure out that Dad was the one who needed help.”

  Marjorie knelt down in front of my chair and the hard plastic boot on her right foot clunked on the floor. She folded her hands over one of my knees and rested her chin there so I had to look down at her. I shook my head and held up my NO sign. She told me that all of her sessions with Dr. Hamilton were really about Dad and what she thought he was going to do to all of us. I tried holding up my NO sign again but I accidentally held up the GOOD sign. She told me that she tried telling Mom but Mom wouldn’t listen to any of it, so Marjorie pretended to be beyond sick, to be possessed in order to make Mom finally listen and pay attention. I held up more signs, random signs, anything to get her to stop talking. Marjorie told me that when the unexpected opportunity of the TV show happened, she thought for sure that everyone would see who was really sick and who needed to be saved, only it didn’t work that way. During the exorcism, she was so frightened and confused by what they did and tried to do to her, she wanted out, wanted literally to jump out of the family and out of the whole situation. So she jumped.

  She continued to talk and I was crying, and I tried to cover my face with my signs. I was so tired of her filling my head with her stories, filling my head with her ghosts. I found a pen in her desk drawer and tried to write “I don’t believe you,” before she took the pen out of my hand.

  Marjorie said, “Merry. Stop. Listen. Forget everything else I just said. I have proof about Dad. I’ll take you down to the basement later if you want, so you can see for yourself.” She stopped talking, pulled my hands away from the signs and held them, trapped them in hers.

  She said, “He’s created this big, weird shrine down there with drop cloths hanging on either side of the big metal cross that the show let him keep. Remember that ugly thing? He’s got other pictures down there too, leaning against the foundation walls, and I guess they’re religious, or you know, show some scenes from the Bible, but they’re awful, terrible, scary-looking scenes, with some bearded guys in robes holding knives and sheep bleating and screaming, and, I don’t know, just weird stuff like that. He set up a little altar too, using an old wooden bench. Listen. I found a small glass jar with a metal cap sitting on top of the bench. Right out in the open and everything.” Marjorie paused, looked around again, and dropped her voice into a whisper. “That small glass jar, it’s full to the top with a—a white substance or powder. And it’s . . . What’s the word? Granular. So, you know, it looks like a cross between sugar and flour. You know what sugar and flour look like, right?”

  I nodded.

  Marjorie stood up and turned my chair around slowly so I was again facing the computer. A picture of someone else’s dead father was still there, and he leered at me. Marjorie clicked onto the search engine, typed in the phrase “potassium cyanide,” clicked images, and then the screen was full of pictures of jars and bags of white powder. She said, “This is the stuff. He’s got this stuff downstairs. It’s poison, Merry. He’s going to poison us all. And soon.”

  I sat and stared at the screen. I didn’t know what to think anymore. So I let Marjorie think for me.

  Marjorie talked so fast I could barely keep up with her. She whispered in my ear, filling me up with more stories. These were about Mom and Dad, stuff from before I was born, or when I was so little I couldn’t possibly remember. Some of the stories were nice. Some weren’t so nice. They were the early stories of our family. There were stories about our parents taking us to playgrounds and letting us sit in their laps on the swings and slides, about us all walking to the dairy farm to see the cows and goats. There were graphically detailed stories about them loudly fucking each other in their bedroom, and late at night on the living room couch and on the floor in front of the TV. There was a story about them drunkenly slapping each other in the face after a date-night gone bad, with Mom kicking out a window in the back door as the final blow, and how the following week they went away for two days of marriage counseling. There were stories about simple day-to-day stuff like Dad giving us horsey rides and being made to sing us songs at night before we went to sleep. There was a story about the time that Dad yanked Marjorie away from my crib because she was writing on my face with a marker and he accidentally pulled her arm out of her socket, and there was the time Mom started screaming wildly at two-year-old me because I wouldn’t uncover my ears for the eardrops I needed. Even though I didn’t remember any of it, I felt like I did. It felt like I was there and could see everything.

  Marjorie told her stories until the sun went down and her bedroom turned purple. Finally, she stopped and put a pen in my hand and flipped over one of my signs.

  She said, “Mom is getting sick too. You know she is. She’s breaking down and can’t handle it. I’ve seen her down in the basement with him, praying, saying, and doing weird things. We have to do something before it’s too late. We have to help them, have to save them. We’ll do it by saving ourselves first. If we don’t do anything, Dad will bury us all in the basement.”

  I wrote What do we do?

  Marjorie told me what we were going to do. And I made some new signs.

  I WALKED INTO THE KITCHEN with my WHAT’S FOR DINNER? sign held up in front of my chest.

  Mom sat by herself at the kitchen table. She smoked a cigarette and flipped through an entertainment magazine.

  She said, “What’s this?”

  I pointed at the sign.

  “Are you not talking because we didn’t get the tree?”

  Sign: YES.

  “What do you want for dinner then? Do you have that written down on a sign?”

  My next sign: SPAGHETTI.

  “We can do that.”

  Sign: OKAY.

  “Do I get a kiss?”

  Sign: OKAY.

  I WENT BACK UPSTAIRS. I still hadn’t seen Dad and assumed he was in the basement. I waited with Marjorie in her room. She let me keep one of her pens and a pocket-sized pad of paper, one with a glittery yellow cover, so I could write new signs more quickly. She also turned on her TV and let me watch SpongeBob. It was an episode that featured a pirate ghost that was b
ig and green and kind of scary.

  Partway through the show Marjorie dropped to all fours and stuck her arms under her bed. Her walking boot crashed heavily into the floor twice. She emerged with the glass jar of white powder that she’d told me about.

  Sign: IS THAT IT?

  “Yes.”

  Sign: YOU SAID IT WAS FULL? The jar was taller and skinner than I imagined, and it was only maybe a quarter full.

  Marjorie smiled. “Nothing gets by you at all, does it, Merry? It was full. I dumped most of it out.”

  I LET MARJORIE WALK DOWN the stairs first. Her boot sounded like a bowling ball rolling down the stairs.

  When we reached the foyer, Marjorie surprised me by putting the jar into my hands. This wasn’t part of the plan. I shook my head no and tried to give it back to her.

  She whispered, “This will only work if you do it. You heard me walking down the stairs, yeah? I’m just realizing now that she’ll hear me clomping around the kitchen if I do it. Don’t worry. I’ll distract her for you. It’ll be easy.”

  Marjorie put two hands in the middle of my back and pushed me away and into the living room. She limped into the dining room. The dining room table was covered in clean clothes as usual.

  Marjorie called out, “Hey, Mom? Can you help me find my purple PJ top? I can’t find it and I want to wear it tonight. It gets so cold in my room.”

  Mom walked out of the kitchen and said, “Wait, hold on a second. Don’t just go picking through all the piles. I killed myself folding everything!”

  I wasn’t going to do it. I wasn’t going to do anything. I was just going to stand there in the living room with the cold, glass jar in my hand and wait for someone to take it away from me. I swear, I don’t remember walking from the living room and into the kitchen and then next to the stove. But there I was.

  I don’t remember if I’d taken off the silver lid, or if Marjorie had done so for me. The blue gas flame of the burner was low. The sauce bubbled slowly. Mom and Marjorie bickered in the dining room. I poured white powder into the saucepan and quickly stirred until it disappeared into the red, until it looked as though I hadn’t added anything.