by Steve Vernon
I watched Charlie creep onto the porch. I could hear the boards creaking as he crept, and I carefully counted each board as it creaked, one, crrreeeeakkkk, two, crrrrreeeeeaaaakkkk, three, crreeeeaaaakkkk.
He tapped the outside of the window sill. I knew the paint would have that awful chalky feeling paint gets after standing too long in the sun; that chalky loose feeling like your skin gets after you’ve had yourself a really bad sunburn.
“Here kitty, kitty, kitty...,” he began.
The cat patted the window with one ineffectual paw. It was just so cute and so stupid looking that we all had to giggle.
Charlie giggled too.
“Kitty, kitty,” he spluttered through the giggles.
The cat reared its paw back.
“Oh my God it’s popped its claw,” Charlie comically yelled back to us, still giggling. “Now it’s going to kill me.”
Kids always say kill when they have no real idea of what death really is. I knew what death was, because of my Mom and Riley. I also knew there was no way a kid like Charlie or Jeremy would ever know what death really meant, until they had to live through it.
“Maybe he likes you,” Jeremy shouted. “Do you smell like cat food?”
Charlie looked back and grinned.
As he looked back we really could see the cat popping its claws out further, because we could see the claws, even from where we crouched in the hedges so far away. We could see the cat’s paw, suddenly as big as Mr. Thornton’s coal shovel; we could even see the shadow of the paw falling across Charlie’s cheekbone. I was reminded of my Dad’s fly swatter hand hanging suspended over a mindlessly hand washing fly.
I was about to scream when, before the breath was even in my lungs, the cat slammed its paw against the screen. The screen made a sound like a big steel guitar being slammed by an open palm as the cat shot its claws out like the tentacles of a hydra plant, shooting out like that squirt of medicine old Doc Hawcomber used to shoot out of his hypodermic needle before giving it to you in the arm.
Then the cat had hold of Charlie, catching hold of him and hauling him straight through the screen just as slick as April flood water sliding through the gullet of an iron sluice gate. Then there was blood all over, blood that slowly soaked into the shakes and shutters and screening of the house. We watched it soak in and I thought how it should have made some sort of noisy sucking sound, like the sound that bath water makes when it runs down the drain, but it didn’t make any kind of sound at all. It was as silent as the sun drying paint, and maybe that made it all the more scarier, and then the cat began daintily lapping at what was left of Charlie.
Old Mr. Chizmar would have known what to call what was left of Charlie. He would have called it ground chuck, like a bad joke, only nobody was laughing. Then that cat looked up in midlap, and stared right across the barren front yard, out to where I was crouching with my friends in the wicked thorn hedge. I heard a sound in my head and it was bigger than I bet you.
It was even bigger than chicken.
And then all at once I wanted to go up to that porch, to see just what had happened to Charlie, for no particular reason at all, just because I’d heard that sound somewhere back in my head. And as I headed towards the porch I wondered how many of the other kids had also heard that sound. How many of them were following me up to the porch.
I had a feeling it was all of them.
Only something got in my way, like an invisible knee high push, shoving me back towards the safety of the hedge, and all those kids who were following me turned back as well.
I shook my head, like I’d fallen off my bike, and then I realized what I’d been about to do. I’d been about to walk right up on to that porch, right up to that screen window and let that cat grab hold of me and yank me straight through the screening, just like Charlie.
Then I heard something else.
We all heard it.
We heard barking.
All of us swear we heard barking, like it was coming from a long way off, from out of a cave, or a well hole, or a sewer pipe.
And I kept feeling that herding motion at my knees, like I was being shepherded to safety. The cat just sat there in the window, glaring and hissing as the barking grew louder and I shuddered to think of what might have happened had I walked on up to that porch.
And then I realized who’d saved me.
It was my imaginary figment dog Riley.
Somehow, he was there.
And he was fighting for me.
“Get him Riley,” I shouted. “Get that damned old cat.”
Another time the other kids might have looked around nervously to see if any adults were listening to hear one of us swear, but this time when I swore it was like when Charlie talked about owl guts, and they all took up the chant like it was some kind of crazy skipping game.
“Get him Riley, get that damned old cat.”
All of us stood in the hedges like soldiers in a trench, shouting like our words were hand grenades and bullets, but it was the barking that was doing all the real kind of damage. The barking got so loud it sounded like a big old timber truck barreling down on us, and then the cat’s eyes abruptly widened, and it screeched as if somebody had thrown a bucket of cold scrub water on its back, and then it just plain disappeared.
Jeremy swears he saw that cat jump down from the window sill in to the house, but I know better than that. I think Jeremy is only kidding himself, so that someday he’ll stop peeing the bed at night when he dreams about what happened to his best friend Charlie.
The cat just up and disappeared, like it was some kind of a ghost.
Or maybe something worse.
There was a bit more barking after that, and then from out of nowhere, directly in front of the front porch window, a high arc of yellow fluid sprinkled out from midair, landing with a satisfying sizzle-hiss on the front porch floor boards, like spit hitting a hot fry pan. And then I saw those porch floor boards trying to soak that yellow fluid up. Only they couldn’t. I saw them hacking it back out, like a cat might hack up a fur ball, only it couldn’t lose the tattletale stain. The territory had been firmly staked out.
“Piss on you,” I hissed. “Piss on you in pussycat hell.”
*
I told my Dad this story last week, just before he took his long walk up the side of Carpenter’s Hill with his bouquet of quiet red roses.
It had taken me more than two months to finally work up the nerve to tell him.
By then the whole town had finished searching for little Charlie Roundbert, and had decided that he’d probably wandered off somewhere and was eaten by a wild creature, or way laid by a wandering tramp.
I told my Dad, knowing full well that he likely wouldn’t believe a word of it, but he only listened quietly and repeated his warning about the swamp behind the school.
I guess he didn’t figure I needed any warning about the Funnel House.
Then he stepped outside and closed the door and walked up the hill to where my Mom slept, and after that I found out that he’d walked the rest of the way up Carpenter’s Hill to where the old Funnel House stood.
He brought his camera, and while he was up there he emptied a whole roll of film.
Two weeks later, after the film came back to Lalonde’s Drugstore, my Dad showed it to me.
The cat was in the window, like I had expected it to be, but sitting on the porch, right where someone or something would be able to keep careful watch on the cat was a well chewed rubber ball.
And beside the ball lay a single sun dried blood red rose.
Did you like that last one? I guess I ought to warn you that I was raised by my grandparents, which means I grew up in the oldest of old schools. In dog years I am about two hundred and twenty-three years old, give or take a decade. And being raised in the oldest of old school fashion I put a whole lot of stock into what a Dad is supposed to be to his kids – which brings us to this next story. I wrote this story for a Canadian anthology of thirteen college and un
iversity-originated ghost stories entitled Campus Chills (2009) If any of you readers are alumni of Dalhousie University you might recognize the ghost story that this tale is based on. The editor was a gentleman by the name of Mark Leslie Lefebvre, and the book was printed on the Espresso Book Machine and it doesn’t smell a thing like coffee.
Actually, it smells a little like aftershave.
Old Spice Love Knot
College is no big deal.
Don’t let anyone tell you any different. College is nothing more than a safety net that you jump into from grade twelve. For some of us that safety net became a kind of spider web that you either wove into a cocoon or a burial shroud.
That’s just how it goes with some folks. Some people like to tiptoe up on life. They sneak at it, with tiny little baby steps, creeping up on the future as if they were afraid that something was about to pounce and grab hold of them from out of the lurking shadows. You start with your basic bachelor degree and then you step up to your Master’s degree – just to be safe. Follow that with a PhD because you want to be sure you’d done everything just right.
College was comfortable, like your bed in the morning.
Sometimes you just didn’t want to get out of it.
For those who were very careful or very lucky you never had to leave school at all. You could grow from being a student and get a job with the college administration or possibly even become a professor. That’s what college was all about. There was always that hopeful chance of maybe getting a degree and getting a real job and maybe one day growing up.
The bait was everywhere.
You saw it in the eyes of professors and deans and guidance councilors.
Why don’t you stay and learn?
Why don’t you stay and pay our wages?
Why don’t you stay and validate our existence?
Why don’t you stay and maybe one day we might even let you replace us?
My Dad would have called it chumming the waters.
Of course there were other ways to do this thing. Some of us got bored and quit. Some of us got failed and then quit. Some of us found people with a future and got married and quit.
It happens.
You might find it hard to believe this sort of thing goes on in the 21st century. Well too bad. It happens whether you want to believe it or not. Basically, your average human student is no dumber or smarter than ever before. All of these degrees are nothing more than an expensive set of initials to hang behind your name while you were waiting to get done. It’s like you were some kind of fish, deciding on which particular fish hook you were going to bite down on.
I don’t really know what I was doing here but I did know that there were an awful lot of fish hooks to choose from.
Some of us get pregnant and married.
Some of us get married and pregnant.
And some of us just get pregnant because we’re basically stupid.
Which is right where I came into the picture.
*
I met William on the first week of school.
You know how it goes. All of the older students lead the new kids on a tour of the campus trying to decide if we were going to make it or not. There were stupid games and stupid tricks and they told us a lot of stupid old stories. They told us all of the history and the folklore, as if they were trying to make us think we were really capable of thinking. I mean, come on, who do you think you’re fooling? I’m just here for the piece of paper my Dad worked so hard on a fishing boat to pay for.
Nothing more, nothing less.
“This is Shirreff Hall,” the tour guide told us. He was a caretaker or something, I guess. He looked like he might have been actually hot at one time in his life, say maybe about a hundred years ago or so.
Come to think of it, he looked a little like my Dad. Not in a creepy way, you understand. More like he might have been able to sit down with my Dad in the old Digby Tavern, and the two of them would buy each other cold draught beer until the cows came home and sobered up.
“Was there a real sheriff?” somebody asked. “Like in the cowboy movies?”
“Those are westerns,” the guide said. “This is the east.”
Okay.
So now he totally reminded me of my Dad.
“The hall was named after Jennie Shirreff Eddy, a wealthy widow and a former nurse who funded the building of the original Dalhousie University female residence.”
What a dummy.
Even I knew that and all I had done was skim the college brochures on the bus ride down.
Some people never learn.
*
I remembered saying goodbye to Dad at Digby two days ago. It seemed as if a lifetime stretched between then and now. That’s corny when you say it that way, but its true none the less.
Dad hung onto my hand, squeezing his fist into a knot like he wasn’t going to ever let me go. He reached out his other hand and touched the Nova Scotia tartan neck tie that I was wearing. It was his neck tie and he had tried to tie it that morning, but he had fudged up the knot.
So I tied it for him around my own neck.
The tie smelled of the moth balls that he kept in the dresser drawer and replaced every year or so.
“You’re not getting this necktie back,” I said. “I’m taking it with me.”
He just grinned that Dad grin of his, twisting his face up like he was squeezing a handful of fresh tide-flat mud between his hairline, ears and chin.
“You tie it better, anyways,” he said.
“I would have made a hell of a fisherman,” I told him. “I can tie every knot on this planet.”
I wasn’t bragging, not by much.
“Mind your language, girl,” he said. “Who in the hell taught you how to speak like that?”
And then he let slip another wry grin and then he leaned in quick and kissed me hard on the cheek. He stank of fish, even two days off the boat. Freshly-caught fish and Old Spice aftershave, a smell that I’ll remember until the day that I die.
Which might be sooner than you might think.
“You’re too smart to be a fisherman,” Dad told me. “You go to school and make something of yourself.”
“I’ll always be a fisherman’s daughter,” I said.
“Well there’s hope for you yet,” he said.
I smiled and I kissed him back.
“Take care, girl.”
Just three words, and then he was nothing but a funny old scarecrow of a figure standing on the side of the road, waving goodbye to a bus; receding into a dot in the distance; and then he was gone.
*
Our guide walked us up to fourth floor of Shirreff Hall.
“They call this the bell tower,” he said. “Only it really is nothing more than an attic.”
Didn’t they have elevators in here? I might walk myself to death before second year.
“Nearly ninety years ago,” the guide went on. “A young girl by the name of Penelope worked as an upstairs maid, right here in Shirreff Hall. She was a drab, lonely girl with straight black hair that was smoked with a hide-and-go-seek sort of grey.”
Man, she sounded like a real winner.
I guess they hadn’t invented beauty parlours and makeover shows back then.
“She was almost a walking ghost,” the tour guide said. “You hardly ever heard her say boo.”
Oh my god, please spare me the pain and drop the refrigerator on my head before I have to die of interminable boredom. Just how lame can a story get without needing to wear a crutch and a leg cast?
“Her fate wasn’t all that unique,” the old guy went on. “There are lots of lonely people in this old world. Given time, even the loneliest seem to find someone.”
And then he threw us a look that was one part Freddy Krueger and one part dinosaur. He still reminded me a little of my Dad, but the creepiness was winning out over any sort of nostalgia.
“Too bad that Penelope happened to find the likes of Duncan,” he went on.
One of the other girls giggled. I wanted to giggle too, but I didn’t want to be rude. It was bad enough that this old guy was probably going to have a heart attack any minute now and fossilize to prehistoric memory long before he got to the end of his story.
“Who was Duncan?” one of the other girls asked.
That’s right, I thought.
Help old Granddad Moses Methuselah along, why don’t you?
“Duncan was a professor who was working at the College at the time. He wooed Penelope.”
“What’s wooed?” another girl asked. “Is that like a woody?”
Oh my god!
How stupid can you get? Hadn’t this girl ever heard of Jane Austen before?
A business major, for sure, I bet.
“He sweet talked her,” the old guy explained. “And when his teaching term was up he packed his bags and boarded the train leaving Penelope alone and pregnant.”
“Gross,” one of the girls said.
Stupid, was more like it, but I kept my feelings to myself. That was something that Dad had taught me. You kept your mouth shut no matter what you were thinking. It was better to hold your thoughts to yourself and deal with your problems without anyone else’s help.
“Did she tell anyone?” another girl asked.
“Who could she tell?” the old guide answered. “If anyone found out she’d be fired from her job, just that fast. No ladies, this poor girl had come to the end of her rope, right about there.”
That’s when he pointed up at the tattered end of rope that dangled from one of the roof beams.
“She tied that rope,” he said. “Into what she felt was her only possible answer.”
“She hung herself?” somebody asked.
“WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!”
