Paper Ghosts_A Novel of Suspense

by Julia Heaberlin

  I’m gripping the plastic handle above my head, the one meant to help old ladies climbing in. My fingers itch to rip off the duct tape covering the clock so I can know the time. My backpack with the extra burner phones and my laptop are on the floor behind Carl, all of them turned off.

  But I’ve only got one working hand. I don’t want to lose my grip as Carl hits every pothole in the road like he’s aiming for them.

  No, it definitely wouldn’t be smart to piss off Carl at the moment by reaching around to get something. His driving is getting more erratic every minute. My dim hope—to fire up one of the extra burner phones and use a GPS app—is fading. There will be no cell towers able to filter through these soaring trees. No drones or satellites that are going to stretch their eyes and ears down here just for me.

  Nightmarish questions pelt my brain. Did he turn that junkyard ravine into his own private cemetery? Did he roll Rachel down its cliff, listen to her tumble through the brush to the bottom?

  Are my sister’s bones lying in rust? Are Nicole and Vickie and Violet keeping her company?

  “How far?” I ask, instead, friendly. As much as I want him to turn the truck around, I don’t. Rachel wouldn’t turn around.

  I wince as Carl slides the truck a little too far to the right, the paint shrieking off the passenger door as he scrapes a couple of trees.

  He seems not to care, just leans forward, peering out the windshield like he suddenly can’t see as well. The road appears to be shrinking. I can see twenty feet in front of us. Ten.

  “Just a couple seconds,” he says, suddenly confident, eyes on the odometer. “Right here.” He thumps jerkily on the brakes, sending Barfly yipping and scooting off the seat onto the floor.

  I flip sideways to protect my broken arm from colliding with the dashboard. Carl turns off the ignition, pitching us into utter darkness. Barfly lets out one sharp protest bark.

  “We’re here,” Carl announces.

  * * *

  —

  For seconds, we sit in silence. Then I recover. “You’re not driving anymore. That was it.” I reach in the glove compartment for the small flashlight stowed there.

  I’d accidentally, foolishly, left my Maglite in the other rental. My trainer would have given me hell for that. “Flip on the headlights so I can see where we are. Carl? Turn. On. The. Lights. And put the leash on Barfly if you’re getting out. He could take off and we’d never find him.”

  As long as I order Carl around, as long as I’m not so nice and rapidly assign tasks with no time for him to think, things will be fine.

  Carl mutters and maneuvers with Barfly, and I slide myself gingerly out of the truck. We’re parked in a very small, circular clearing. Carl stopped the truck inches before slamming into a tight line of trees.

  Carl said, We’re here. I expect some sort of dwelling. Instead, the smoky beams from the truck are fighting their way into dense woods, illuminating nothing.

  The road, if you can call it that, has quit. Carl is still inside the truck. I circle around, sweeping the flashlight on all sides, making sure I’m right. There is nothing but forest beyond our doily of dirt, with the single exit behind us. It’s going to take some maneuvering to back out.

  I hear the creak of the truck door opening on the other side and the steady stream of Barfly peeing. I hope it’s Barfly. When Carl emerges, he grins at the minuscule distance between the trees and the front of the truck he almost demolished. Measures it with his hands. I’m not amused. Driving out of here without headlights would be unthinkable.

  “What are you still standing there for?” Carl asks, testy. “We need to turn out the eyeballs on the truck so we can get going. We have a little bit of a walk.”

  He’s carrying a flashlight I’ve never seen before, an industrial, expensive one. His list of conditions pops into my head.

  Shovel. Flashlight. Rope. WD-40. Glad Press’n Seal.

  He got the flashlight, what else might he have purchased on that list in our time apart?

  I note that the left calf of his jeans is bulging more than the right one.

  Waterproof watch (resistant @ 300 meters). Did he get one of those? Is he leading me to a lake? There is no lake in Texas as deep as a skyscraper. I’ve done the math—300 meters is almost 1,000 feet. The only American lakes I know that deep are north. Very, very north. It doesn’t matter. I don’t plan to join Carl in water of any depth, no matter what he says he has stored there.

  “The path’s right here.” Carl pulls aside a branch and directs the beam forward into a narrow opening. The ground slants. Carl intends for us to climb down. It could be a path. It is so plush with a rough carpet of leaves and dead pine needles, there’s no way to know.

  “Toss me the keys so I can turn off the lights,” I demand grimly.

  He does. He watches with interest as I trudge over to the driver’s door. He snickers a little off to his side, like he has a bet going on with Walt about whether I’m going to take off. I’m not sure Carl cares whether I do or not. I can almost hear the crunch of Walt’s boots myself. Fifty bucks or a handful of your gold says she’s done with us.

  The driver’s door is wide open. I step up on the running board and click off the truck lights. I rip the duct tape off the clock. 9:26. Four minutes until Family Feud.

  I grab whatever is left of the napkins on the dash and open the door to the back of the cab. The backpack is heavier than I remember. I can always dump stuff out along the way if it weighs me down too much. Still, it takes supreme effort to sling it over my good shoulder. I never trained with anything broken, just sprained. Broken would be a little sadistic, even for my trainer.

  Whoosh. Crack.

  The sound, swift and merciless, has traveled from the other side of the truck, where Carl was standing. Did he fall? Is someone else here? There’s no outcry from Carl. No more sound at all. I duck around the truck and beam my flashlight where I last saw Carl.

  A large branch is missing, leaving a gaping hole. I see a beam of light bouncing ahead in the woods. My own light catches the shadow of Carl’s lean form and a flash of metal. Crack. Carl is slashing through the forest using an extremely sharp object. A small sickle? A knife?

  Something pushes against my leg. I gasp, and Barfly lets out a howl that sends another, unseen animal skittering into the woods.

  “I’m so sorry, Barfly.” I’d forgotten about him. I’ve stepped on his foot. I flash my light and hold up his paw. Looks OK. He’s licking my hand.

  Barfly has been sitting patiently, waiting, his leash wrapped around a giant root jutting out of the ground. Carl giving me one more chance to give up? Or Carl trying to make my hike more difficult?

  He knows I can’t hold on to both Barfly’s leash and the flashlight.

  I’m already considering how well I’ll be able to maneuver an obstacle course of stones and roots with a backpack and my arm in a sling.

  I’m going to have to trust someone. It might as well be Barfly. I worry about his stitches, even though he seems to have forgotten they exist.

  I worry more about leaving him behind. What if I leash him to a tree or lock him in the truck with a window cracked and never make it back?

  “Stick with me, OK?” I whisper, as I unwrap his leash. “We can always turn around.” I don’t know whether I’m reassuring him or me.

  “You coming?” Carl calls out.

  Coming…coming…coming…

  The echo dances off the trees, almost musical.

  Did Carl ever call out Rachel’s name here?

  His flashlight glints like fire between the branches of the trees and then it’s gone, extinguished, out of sight, descending to God knows where.

  Whoosh. Crack.

  Whoosh. Crack.

  I step onto the path.

  I trained for this.

  58

  I shouldn’t have worried about losing Carl. First, he doesn’t appear to want to lose me. He even stopped so I could catch up.

  The object he’s
swinging at every plant in his way turns out to be a machete, the kind sported by outdoorsmen and maniacs.

  I’m staying a good fifteen yards behind him, not because I think he plans to use it on me but because I want time to duck if it flies out of his hand by accident. Barfly is trotting along a few feet in front of me, similarly wary.

  This does appear to be some sort of old trail. My flashlight has illuminated fading arrows painted on tree trunks—some orange, some white. For hunters? Amateur botanists? Boy Scouts? The Ku Klux Klan?

  Half the time, they point different directions, sometimes even up to the sky. As far as I can determine, Carl is ignoring them, walking purposefully, still following the map in his head.

  I comfort myself that dementia patients often easily remember the past and there is a good chance he knows where he’s going. I wonder if Carl’s darkroom is not a room with four walls but a whole damn forest.

  For about half an hour, Barfly and I trudge behind Carl, while he slashes plant life and sings “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It floats back in bits and pieces. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

  We splash through a shallow, rocky stream.

  Glory, glory, hallelujah.

  I check Barfly’s wound. It’s holding up fine. All along the path, I’m attaching scraps of fast food napkins to the branches as markers, little white flags for me to follow on the way out.

  I’m feeling more optimistic now that we’re out of the truck. I’ve felt more certain than this that I was going to die, and for no reason other than a trainer did exactly what I paid him to.

  No more singing. Carl has halted in a clearing. Above us, there’s a jagged circular patch of dark gray sky like a kid cut a hole out of construction paper to help us see better.

  Directly ahead, a small house is settled among the trees.

  It’s dressed in worn green shingles and accessorized with black trim and shutters—an attempt at camouflage, maybe. A porch widens out, with a decrepit white swing. Two Mexican flowerpots sit in the front yard, cracked and depressed.

  If this place wasn’t buried in the woods and falling apart, if there weren’t dead girls to consider, I’d think nice people used to live here.

  * * *

  —

  The screeching of the hundreds of cicadas living in this hole on earth is so deafening I wonder if that’s why Carl still isn’t moving. If he’s confused and the noise is crowding all thought out of his head. I’m struggling to think myself.

  “Put the machete on the ground, Carl,” I say loudly when I’m three feet behind him. He grips it tighter. I repeat: “Drop it, Carl.”

  “Don’t need to drop it. I’m not going to sling it at you. Going to go sit down on the porch.”

  I start to argue. Then shut up. He advances toward the porch. I move in sync behind him. When he lands heavily on the swing, it groans, something near death. I expect it to crash to the ground, but it just sinks ominously with Carl’s weight, then holds. He switches off his flashlight and places it and the machete on the floor beneath the swing.

  He raises his hands in front of his chest, wiggles his fingers at me like sarcastic worms, then slides them behind his head, elbows out.

  “Good enough for you?” he demands. “Get that light out of my eyes. These damn cicadas are louder than a rock concert. That’s a fact. Loudest insects on earth. They can get over 115 decibels. Did you know that they pee out of the trees? We used to call it honey dew.”

  I’m beginning to wonder if Carl belongs to this house. Maybe he was standing there, assuring himself it was empty. Maybe he just needed to sit, and he found a creaky swing.

  “Homer wrote about cicadas in The Iliad,” Carl continues.

  “Is this our destination or are we just resting?” I pause. “Does someone live here?”

  I’m not sure he hears me. His chin has drooped against his chest. He’s pale in the meager light. His eyes are little cut slits. Barfly has settled his nose across his boots, the doggie sign that all is well. I flash the beam toward the ceiling hooks. The bolts appear surprisingly secure. Carl and his machete seem fairly secured for the moment, too.

  I kneel on the concrete floor, jerk the backpack off my shoulder, and dig around inside. I hold up a Neoprene water bottle and jiggle it. Half-full. I wish I’d grabbed the last bottle of water in the cooler. I was just so afraid of losing Carl in the woods. I take a long swig and consider his wilted form. I tap him on the knee. “Heads up, Carl. Have a drink.”

  While he’s guzzling, I try to figure out where we are. Estimating the time on the truck clock plus thirty minutes for the hike, this means Carl drove for about four more hours after I fell asleep again. My gut is, we’re still in Texas, and the landscape definitely confirms the Piney Woods.

  I now most emphatically know why this stretch of forest is noted for its Bigfoot sightings and historic hideouts for Civil War deserters. The bad news is that the Piney Woods overwhelms more than 20,000 square miles in Texas and I can’t Google the map in Carl’s head.

  I rove the light over the porch. “Are we here?” I ask again. No answer. The front door is latched tight. Up close, it’s newer than I expected, considering the condition of the shingles and the swing. It’s outfitted with a solid lock.

  The large picture frame window behind the swing is equally unyielding, double-layered with storm glass. No damage from forest critters or vandals. The inside window shade is an eyelid shut tighter than Carl’s.

  I know it can’t be, but I feel like I’ve been here before.

  On this porch. In this forest.

  Two little girls in white, one a ghostly blur. The Marys. In the stories I made up on my closet floor, I gave them a hundred names.

  Something is traveling down my neck. I slap it away. A porch spider. The girls, playing, giggling, dancing a bird feather on my skin. Did they bring me here?

  I wonder if I’d tried hard enough to root out their fate. I’d never wanted to enter those two little girls as numbers in Carl’s dead column. It was fine for me, better even, if they existed only in his picture and I controlled their lives from my closet floor. Nothing bad happened in that forest.

  In Carl’s heyday, one well-known New York art critic speculated that the ghostly Mary in motion was superimposed. He said Carl was copying the disturbing feeling of a famous twins photo by Diane Arbus, two seven-year-old girls she pulled aside at a Christmas party.

  The father declared it the worst likeness of his daughters ever, a photo that turned out so creepy and iconic it was said to inspire Stanley Kubrick’s casting of twins in The Shining.

  The same critic similarly disparaged two other photographs in Carl’s book—the Mystery Lights in Marfa and the ghostly face swirling in fabric and algae in Galveston. He dismissed Carl as an illusionist, a trickster, not a documentarian. That was before anyone called him worse.

  Carl’s public response to that critic? “What’s everything but an illusion? Pity you—dying alone in a toilet-size New York apartment after eating bad pasta with one of your cat’s hairs in it.”

  I try to match Carl, the wit, the artist, with the one who brought me to this purgatory between hell and moonlight. The cicadas are still trilling. I turn to face the yard, dense with firefly glitter.

  When the swing moans, I jump. The moon is suddenly gone, like it has been shot out. My light clatters to the floor, a second shot, snuffed out the moment it hits. I whip around. Carl is standing in the shadows.

  “Did you know fireflies synchronize their flashing?” He’s extending his hand. “You’re jumpy. I’m just giving you the key.”

  I can’t make out the tiny object he is holding to confirm that. I step forward and connect my fingers with his anyway, a little bite of electricity. The piece of metal is warm and oily with his perspiration.

  I had thought it might be the little key to nothing he wears around his neck, the one that belonged to the girl in the desert. It is, in fact, a perfectly ordinary door key.

&nb
sp; It could belong to this house, to one of our old motel rooms, to the front door of Mrs. T’s. He could have picked it up in a nest of gravel in a parking lot while panning for gold.

  My arm is aching from inside the bone. I crave another pain pill. Or two or three.

  I yearn for running water and soap for the insane itch and burn that are beginning to trickle up my arms and ankles, the work of cunning insects and thorns along the dark trail.

  I want to drop backward, fall forever, and land on a place soft and endlessly deep. It is the opposite of how I thought I would feel while I stood on the precipice of answers.

  “Whose house is this, Carl?”

  “Mine now. Inherited from my aunt.” He picks up my flashlight from the floor and gives it a shake like an experienced magician. It cooperates, lighting up the swing’s splintered frame and the floor beneath. Barfly’s tail twitches under the swing, lightly tapping the machete’s serrated edge.

  “No electricity turned on inside,” Carl announces, holding out my flashlight politely. “You’re going to need this.”

  I stick the key in my pocket to grab the flashlight. My wrecked arm is a monster obstacle to even the simplest task.

  Carl is instantly, nimbly, pulling something else out of his pants. A small can. Pepper spray?

  “Why the hell do you keep jumping back?” he grumbles. “For sweet Christ’s sake, it’s WD-40. For the lock on the door.”

  I can see now that he’s telling the truth. He’s holding a mini-can, the familiar blue and yellow. He gives me wide berth on his way to the door. The hiss of spray fills the air.

  “All yours,” he says sarcastically, holding the screen door open.

  “You shot those little girls in these woods, right? The Marys? Their picture, I mean. You shot their picture.” I’m babbling. “Tell me what happened to them.”

  “Long dead,” he replies. “Go on in and see for yourself. I hope you don’t think less of me.”