GHOSTS: 2014 edition (THE GHOST STORIES OF NOEL HYND # 1)

by Noel Hynd

  “It’s all right,” he assured her. “You’re all right. You’re not hurt.”

  But in the back of his mind, many thoughts were in open revolt with each other. He struggled to make sense of what he had witnessed.

  “I believe you,” he said next. “I believe you. All right? I believe everything you’ve told me, okay? Now we’ll do something about it. I promise.”

  And as she fought to control herself, each of his promises posed a larger question.

  Yes, he believed her. But he had no idea what they would do. And deep in his own soul, he knew that things were not all right. And they would probably never be all right again in either of their lives.

  Part Two

  The Haunting

  You have seen, but you

  do not yet believe…

  —JOHN 6:36-37

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The sun had set into a pinkish orange sky, so it was already dusk of the following Monday when Tim Brooks stopped by the rector’s house of Christ and Holy Trinity Church. Brooks stood at the door and knocked twice. He found a home that was silent. The battered old Voyager was missing from the driveway, as well.

  Brooks prowled further, walking to the rear of the house, hoping to find Osaro at work on his lawn. Instead, he came upon a back door which remained as unyielding as the front. And, in the lessening light of evening, scattered across the property was some of the flotsam from Osaro’s broken marriage. There was a small tricycle that Osaro’s son Paul had outgrown. There was a screened gazebo that had once been Carol Ann’s joy on summer evenings. There was also a four-foot-high cardboard and plastic basketball standard, hoop and net, meant for a child who was no longer there. Little mundane tombstones to failed relationships as a husband and father, Brooks thought to himself. He wondered if he, Brooks, could have done any better. The question also entered his head about Osaro’s spiritual interests, and whether they had someway compromised the man’s marriage. But it was only an idle musing.

  So instead of reaching conclusions, Brooks stood behind the silent rectory and took it all in. He filed all the details and in the end, he came away with a strange sense of condemnation and abandonment from Reverend Osaro’s domain, one he had never felt before.

  Why, Brooks wondered, should the small details of a man’s life give a greater impression than the man himself? As he climbed back into his car, he realized that this was often the case. In considering the whole, one must always consider even the smallest part.

  Brooks guessed that the minister might be working late. He drove the next two blocks and saw George Osaro’s dented white van in the church parking lot. The funny thing was, it had always made Brooks slightly uneasy to visit his friend here. There was always something awkward about it. That same sense of disquietude was upon Brooks again now, stronger than ever.

  Nonetheless, Detective Brooks parked his Wrangler in the parish lot. Then he walked to the church and entered.

  Despite the hour, there was activity at Christ and Holy Trinity. The pleasant gray-haired ladies who volunteer were busy with something in the vestry as well as downstairs. They directed the policeman to Reverend Osaro’s office.

  Brooks found George Osaro in his small tidy study downstairs from the pews and around the corner from his much discussed basement meeting hall. The pastor’s study was across the corridor from a kitchen. The door was open when Brooks arrived.

  Osaro was hunched over a letter, writing it in longhand, a green desk lamp throwing a bright beam across his desk, his dark eyes fixed and intense behind the round lenses of his glasses. The windows were high upon the basement walls and afforded insufficient light as the evening closed in on the daylight. Tim Brooks knocked.

  George Osaro never looked up.

  “Hello, Tim,” Osaro said ruminatively. “Something on your mind?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Come in. Sit down,” he said. “Give me a moment, then talk to me.”

  “Thanks,” Brooks said.

  Brooks entered the office and seated himself. Osaro still hadn’t looked up. He was concluding a letter in his small spidery handwriting. He wished to complete his thoughts. Brooks looked past him and saw that the high window to Osaro’s study overlooked the east lawn of the church, not the parking area. So Brooks, always alive with suspicion, wondered how the minister knew he was coming. Brooks also knew that his friend loved to play such mind games.

  Finally, with an eyebrow raised, one eye peered from above his round eyeglasses. Osaro gazed at him with mock reproach. “What are you doing here, you filthy heathen?” Osaro asked in an excessively somber voice. “Seeking confidential absolution for carnal sins past, present and—inevitably—future? Come as a supplicant, have you? Down on your hands and knees to beg for a merciful God’s forgiveness?”

  “Nope,” said Brooks. “Not a chance.”

  “Well, then,” Osaro said softly. “The pastor of this parish sees no spirit of contrition at all. Congratulations! You’re excommunicated immediately and remanded to hell in the bargain! How’s that?”

  “You can’t excommunicate me, you fraud,” Brooks replied with unfailing logic. “I’m not a member of your church.”

  “Details, details,” said Osaro airily. “You’re always wrecking my fun. I’ll excommunicate anyone I wish. The other day I was catching up on some back business and excommunicated Dick Cheney. I’m thinking about Stalin next, but I do have to have priorities. Maybe I’ll get Simon Cowell next.”

  They both grinned with the joke.

  “We’re breaking away from the mother church here, Timmy,” Reverend Osaro continued. “Setting up our own outrageous little sect. Want to play John to my Jesus? Or, more tastelessly, Goebbels to my Hitler?”

  “Nope,” said Brooks steadily, not continuing the banter. “Neither. But I wonder if I might talk to you about something.”

  “Oh, Lord.” Osaro sighed. “Sounds serious again.”

  “It’s a serious question on an arcane subject.”

  “Police or personal? Carnal or spiritual?”

  “A bit of both.”

  “Ah. I see. One of those.” Osaro smiled. “We have to behave like adults for a few minutes, huh?”

  Tim Brooks nodded. Reverend Osaro sighed a second time.

  He held up a hand, asking his friend to wait.

  Then the pastor put his signature upon the letter he had completed. He glanced at it for thirty seconds and set down his pen. Then he looked up again.

  “Sure,” said Osaro, removing his glasses. He reached for a cup of steaming tea. “Sorry to keep you waiting and forgive the flippancy.”

  “No problem.”

  Osaro smiled amiably, the grin crinkling his face. For some reason, Brooks noted, today the minister looked as if he had just passed from youth to middle age.

  “What’s on your mind, Tim?” Osaro asked. He steadied his glasses along the bridge of his nose. Then he pulled a tea bag out of the cup and threw it into a plastic waste basket where it landed sloppily, with a small soggy thud. “Hope it’s better than what’s on mine.”

  “What’s on yours?” Brooks asked.

  Brooks reached to a lamp next to him and turned it on, lifting himself from the shadows of the room.

  “‘Spiritual Nantucket’,” Osaro said. “Or ‘Ghost Night,’ as it seemed to be known in the local vernacular. Ready for this? I have received not one, not two, but three complaints to date from the diocese about it. Actually, ‘complaint’ is too mild a word. ‘Reprimand’ would be more accurate.”

  Osaro thumbed a trio of letters on the side of his desk. “Remember those phone messages which I told you were waiting for me? Well, if I value my position in this parish,” the pastor said, looking angrily at the correspondences, “I’m told by those who hold a terrible swift sword above me, I’m not to engage in any such quote malarkey and pop hocus-pocus unquote again on church property. And if I know what’s good for me, I’m further informed, I won’t dirty my proboscis with it anywhere else on the face of
this planet, either.”

  Osaro shook his head in extreme annoyance.

  “That’s what I’m responding to right now,” Osaro continued, indicating the letter he had just finished. “Lord help me,” he sighed. “You’d think I’d appeared on ‘Jerry Springer’ and performed an exorcism in the nude.”

  He grimaced and gazed contemptuously at the letters.

  “Maybe you should have,” Brooks said. “It would have drawn attention away from your local spirit shows.”

  “Ha! Good one, Brother Tim,” Osaro said.

  Sometimes when Osaro spoke, an extraordinary stillness came over him, as if he were listening to his own voice being played back to him. This was one of those moments. The minister continued.

  “I’m still assigned to this parish, but just barely. Stuffy old goats in Boston,” he said. “Got a letter from Bishop Albright, himself, I did. An intemperate letter, at that. The man’s a bore, Tim! Why doesn’t someone just send him to bed with a glass of milk? But established hierarchies tend to breed that sort of anally retentive white-bread reactionary, I suppose. Aren’t police departments much the same?”

  “Frequently they are,” Brooks concurred.

  “Anyway,” Osaro continued, “if you also wish to take me to task about ‘Spiritual Nantucket’ at this late date, feel free. But you’ve been deprived of the honor of being the first.” His pipe was unlit in an ashtray at his elbow. The ashtray bore the logo of the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, from where the minister had borrowed it three years earlier.

  “I haven’t budged from this study in two hours,” Osaro said. “I’m sitting here scribbling inane letters of apology to the clerical halfwits who are my titular superiors. I have to get the words just right, you know. Just the right blend of sincere humiliation and fake contrition or I’ll be in the unenviable position of having to repeat the task.”

  “You’re in a great mood,” Brooks said.

  “You would be, too, if you were I, which, fortunately for you, you are not.”

  Once more, Brooks went on to agree and say that he understood. Osaro again peered over his glasses at his visitor. Then he opened a desk drawer and ferreted out some postage stamps. He set three aside on the desktop.

  “I really don’t know what you or anyone else thinks or expects of me, Tim,” Osaro said softly. He spoke with exasperation. “I know that Bill Agannis’ mutt doesn’t like me, but everyone else remains a bit of a mystery. Then again, maybe my ancestry is against me,” he suggested easily. “Maybe half-Japanese equals full Japanese and that doesn’t settle too well in these parts. It’s only seventy-some years since Pearl Frigging Harbor. Maybe feelings remain a little raw.”

  Osaro brooded for a moment.

  “I don’t think that has anything to do with anything else,” Brooks said. “Come on, you know that.”

  “Maybe. But I’ll tell you something,” Osaro began. “Seven days a week on this island I serve up religion to a comfortable well-fed congregation that really isn’t very interested. Then one or two times a year, I’m not averse to giving a little spiritualism to anyone who’s got five bucks to spare. It kicks in a little extra to the church budget.” He thought about it. “But some people think that’s inconsistent. So I won’t be doing it again.”

  Osaro leaned back in his chair. He folded his arms behind his head. Two rings of sweat stained the underarms of his pale green shirt.

  “‘Some people,’” Tim Brooks answered, “must include the bishop.”

  Osaro grimaced. A few of the volunteers were busy in the corridor. One of the gray-haired ladies went by humming an Andrew Lloyd Webber tune. Osaro rose and shut his door. “The bishop’s a bore!” Osaro said quietly. In his soft, vaguely Asian accent he had a faculty for lifting even rants to eloquence. “He accuses me of being into witchcraft. Or voodoo, not that he would know what either is. Or atheism, or… Ah, who knows what the idiotic old man thinks? On one hand he accuses me of some vague practice of mysticism, then the same day he turns around and ordains a militant bull dyke as pastor of a rural parish in Vermont.”

  Osaro clenched his teeth in disgust. Then he sat down again. “Anyway,” he concluded in a tone of injured virtue, “nothing could be so distant from the truth.”

  “A couple of Sundays ago,” Brooks said, guiding the conversation back to where he desired, “we had a talk in the church parking lot. You told me you could go into a ‘disturbed’ place usually a building—and, you know, ‘pick up the vibrations.’ You said you could tell if there was ‘anything there.’”

  Osaro raised his eyes again. Brooks now had Osaro’s full attention.

  “Yes,” Osaro answered, speaking slowly. “I did say exactly that.” From somewhere his interest in the conversation had been raised to a keener level. “Very often I can do that.”

  “You called it a ‘gift’,” Brooks reminded him.

  Osaro gave him a hopeless smile. Brooks knew the minister to be a man of moods. Today’s was definitely down.

  “Is that what I called it?” Osaro asked. “‘A gift’? How dreadfully fulsome of me. It’s not really a gift. It’s not even a talent. For me, it’s just a sense that’s there. Like touch. Or smell. Or sight. It’s an ability nature gave me. I didn’t ask for it.” He paused thoughtfully. “And I’m not sure I want it.”

  “But most people don’t have that ability,” Brooks offered.

  “I wouldn’t say that most people don’t have it,” Reverend Osaro countered, disagreeing immediately. “I think many people probably do, but they don’t channel it.” He gave it a second’s thought. “Know what percentage of Americans believed they’ve communicated with someone dead, Timmy? According to a 2010 survey in USA Today?”

  “I would have no idea.”

  “Sixty-seven percent. Two-thirds of the great unwashed proletariat. Two out of every three adults you see on the street. That’s either a lot of crackpots or most people have sensed something at one time.”

  “Or else, a lot of people think they have,” Brooks offered.

  “My sense is just developed, that’s all,” Osaro said. “I’m aware of mine. If you hang around me long enough, you’ll develop the same sense.”

  “No way.”

  “Oh, yes, you will! You’ll see! And all of this, as I keep trying to tell people, is not even inconsistent with Christianity. Not entirely, at least. Why shouldn’t we receive signals from another world from time to time? Isn’t that the much-maligned bill of goods all of us guys with the reversed collars have been trying to sell for twenty centuries and counting? So why should everyone be so distrustful when it actually happens? The Bible even attempts to prepare us. ‘What sign can You give us to see, so that we may believe You?’ That’s John 6:30-31. Explain it to me, Timmy,” Osaro said, fiddling with his pipe. “Why does everyone assume either evil or lunacy whenever we try to rationally discuss life after death? Why does everyone want to see horns and a pointed tail when one could just as easily assume wings and a halo?”

  Brooks shrugged and opened his hands to suggest that he remained sympathetic. “I wish I knew,” he said simply.

  “The Resurrection is supernatural,” Osaro continued without a trace of apology or irony. “Holy Ghost, Saint Esprit and all that? How about Easter? The day of greatest joy in our faith, is it not? What is Easter other than a promise of eternal life?”

  Osaro looked at his visitor impassively.

  “You’ve been to church enough to know about Easter, haven’t you?” Osaro teased.

  “As I’ve told you before, I’m a good Protestant. Christmas and Easter. Those are the two days I drop by. Plus weddings and funerals.”

  “Greater faith I have never seen,” Osaro said in a mock-Old Lace Irish accent, his sense of wit and irony putting in a brief appearance. For a first-generation American, Osaro could also do a great Jimmy Cagney imitation whenever he was so inclined.

  “The problem we have,” Osaro said, “is that if the Archangel Gabriel appeared to trumpet the Last Judgm
ent the only coverage he’d get would be in the supermarket tabloids—right along with the Elvis sightings.”

  Again, Brooks smiled.

  “Sorry,” Osaro then said. “I’m giving you a diatribe. That’s not what you came for. What did you want to talk about?”

  “I want to know something straight-on,” Brooks said. “I want a candid answer. As honest and accurate as you can make it. No crap, all right? Promise?”

  Osaro opened his hands again. “Ask me anything.”

  “All this ‘spirit’ stuff,” Brooks began. “I know it’s a fascination of yours. But where does it fit in? Is this something that amuses you? Something you’re trying to learn more about? Or have you become your own convert?”

  As a trained investigator, Brooks had a method with questions: he would launch an armada of them at once, then lie back in wait and see what he had hit. “When you say ‘something’s there,’” Brooks continued, “are we talking about a matter of faith? Or do you think there’s really something tangibly present?”

  Brooks was surprised to see George Osaro’s face go quite dark. The minister folded his arms.

  “Congratulations, Timmy,” he answered. “I’ve been waiting for years for someone to ask me that question.”

  Osaro stared downward, apparently weighing his response. He held this posture for several seconds until he looked up again and found the policeman’s gaze still fixed upon him.

  “Okay,” Osaro said, speaking quietly again. “Brutally honest, right? And it goes no farther than this room?”

  Brooks promised.

  “Yes, when I sense something I think that something is very clearly there,” Osaro said. “It’s there, and I think it’s physically ready to come forth. All it needs is the invitation or maybe the specific occasion. And know what? Most of this scares me.”

  “Why?”

  Osaro measured his words with caution.