The Saturday Night Ghost Club

by Craig Davidson

  He set the flap back softly. “Her head’s poking around the corner of the kitchen. But we can’t throw the catnip in. She’ll just play with it and not come out.”

  “What about our shoelaces?”

  “Perfect.”

  We stripped the laces from our sneakers, and I knotted them together into a long string. Billy tied the catnip Baggie to one end.

  “Lift the flap, Jake,” he told me.

  Billy swung the string like a lasso and tossed the Baggie through the flap.

  “She’s interested,” he reported, jigging the string the way a fisherman works his line to coax a fish to bite. “She’s taking a sniff. Come on…a little closer…”

  “Oh God, yeeeeesss!”

  The euphoric cry came from the upper floor of the house. This was followed by a full-throated rumble like a grizzly bear awakening from hibernation—except there was joy in that sound, a tidal wave of pleasure so all-consuming, so gratified, that it was scary.

  Billy and I exchanged an anxious glance. Next, we heard footsteps.

  “Oh dang,” Billy hissed as he reeled in the string.

  No sooner had the cat door settled in place than a man padded into the kitchen. I recognized Stanley Rowe, in nothing but boxer shorts and tube socks. I was shocked at how extraordinarily hairy he was, and he was smiling, an expression I’d never known to grace the undertaker’s face. Yes, Stanley Rowe was grinning like a schoolboy, one sock yanked up to his knee and the other wadded around his ankle like a half-shed snakeskin. I recall thinking how beautiful he looked. Not physically—Stan Rowe didn’t have that in him, not with his keratin-deprived skin and galumphing body—but his happiness made him beautiful in that moment.

  Billy and I crouched on the other side of the door with our eyes just above the windowsill while Mr. Rowe opened the fridge and slugged down orange juice straight from the jug.

  “You want anything, Janet?” he called.

  “Just you back in my sweet lovin’ arms!”

  Billy and I exchanged glances. The woman’s voice must belong to Lex’s ex. The witch.

  Mr. Rowe chuckled. “You’re a lucky man, Stan.” He shut the fridge and loafed back upstairs. “Lucky, lucky man.”

  Once he was gone, we dissolved into a fit of giggles. The sight of Stanley Rowe in his underwear was insanely funny. My chest felt like it was going to splinter, I was struggling so hard to keep my laughter in.

  “See how hairy he was?” Billy whispered.

  “Like a bear,” I said. “Or a sweater he can’t take off.”

  We gulped huge whoofs of air to tamp down our mirth and went back to work. I lifted the cat-door flap so Billy could sling the bag in. Working cautiously, he lured the cat outside. Becca was a slender calico, pie-eyed and drooling from the ’nip. When I picked her up she purred, kneading my shirt with her paws.

  We slipped through the gate to our bikes, the tongues of our lace-less Converses whapping our ankles. Becca went into the carrier without a fuss. We rode away like bandits.

  Back at So Beta!, Lex melted at the sight of his long-lost cat.

  “You little twerps actually pulled it off.” There was rare delight in Lex’s voice as he cooed, “My Becca, my little Becca the boo.”

  The cat seemed happy enough to see him. My impression of cats was that you could be the Malibu Strangler and so long as you fed and fussed over them, most would tolerate your company. I felt bad for Janet, who would soon find Becca missing. But according to Lex, it had been his cat all along, so all we’d done was enforce his right of ownership.

  We were re-stringing our shoes when Uncle C stepped into So Beta! He checked up, not expecting to find us there, but his face broke into an easy grin.

  “How are you, my dear boys?”

  After an awkward silence, Lex said, “They got Becca back for me.”

  “How did you manage it?” When neither Billy nor I piped up, Uncle C offered a wry wink. “Ah. I see. Trade secrets.”

  With that wink, the chill between us melted away so quickly that I could hardly remember having felt it in the first place.

  “Now, boys,” Uncle C said, “I’ve been thinking about the next meeting of our little club—”

  Lex said, “Is that still going on?”

  “Why ever not, Lex?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Cal. Maybe because…” Lex trailed off, thinking better of whatever reservation he had been set to lodge. Uncle C faced Billy and me, focusing his full attention on us. It was unnerving, those twin balls of light blazing in his eye sockets.

  “I propose a daytime excursion to a sunken wreck. A car abandoned in a shallow oxbow lake off the Niagara River.”

  If I’d been watching Lex right then, I’d no doubt have seen the blood drain out of his face. But my attention was on Uncle C.

  “A car?” said Lex. “Where did you say it was?”

  “West of town. I know the place.”

  “Do you?…Cal, what happened there?”

  “An accident,” Uncle C said. “A car ran off a bridge. Someone drowned.”

  Lex let his head drop. “This town’s full of sorrows, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” said Uncle C, as if he’d never thought about it until then.

  “You really think we ought to go, Cal? Considering how it all went at the tunnel?”

  “Lex, you’ve got goosebumps.” My uncle gave his old friend a thunderous clap on the back. “You’re just not built for this paranormal stuff, are you?”

  “Is the sunken car haunted?” I asked.

  “That is for us to investigate. But we’ll do it in daylight. Take a break from the moonlit ghost hunts. Who’s in?”

  “Me,” Billy said immediately. After a pause, I nodded.

  “And you, Lexington?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Uncle C gave him a smile as big as all outdoors. “The opportunity awaits.”

  iii.

  The following Saturday, the morning air held a hazy effervescence. I’d already shoved my snorkel and mask in my backpack and was in the kitchen making a PB&J sandwich when Dad came downstairs.

  “Where are you off to this fine day?”

  “Out with Uncle C and Billy.”

  Dad thumbed a shard of sleep-crust from the corner of his eye. “Be safe. A lot of Bigfoot sightings hereabouts. The Loch Ness Monster’s cousin is lurking in the Niagara River, too.”

  “Dad.”

  “Only reporting what I’ve heard.”

  The neighbourhood was waking up as I pedalled down the street. Sunshine hung in lambent curtains over the lawns. I imagined the heat circling like a restless buzzard: present, waiting, but not yet touching down.

  Uncle C waited in front of the Occultorium. Lex wasn’t with him. Shouldering a huge backpack, he said, “Let us venture boldly forth.”

  We rode down Clifton Hill. My uncle slalomed between the parking meters—the one time Uncle C looked graceful was when he was straddling a bike, where his limbs took on a heron-like elegance. We continued to the Niagara Parkway edging the river. The water shone through stands of poplar; the river was wide and sleek, mirror-calm on its surface while below, I knew, it rushed with furious menace.

  The sun was starting to throw corridors of heat down the streets. Strips of hot-patch softened into gummy ribbons that sucked at my bike tires. We pedalled to the bend at Burning Spring Hill to reach Dufferin Island. The slack water ringing the island flowed into a series of oxbows, or small lakes created by water spilling over the riverbanks. They were shallow, warm, and we local kids got territorial over them. Certain clubs or groups of kids were known to colonize a given oxbow, turning it into a private fiefdom. It could get so that trying to swim in a “marked” oxbow was to invite a fist fight.

  The oxbow we stopped at was the largest of the chain, too big for anybody to claim feudal rights. A bridge had once spanned it. Rusted jags of rebar snaked from crumbling concrete on the opposing shores.

  The lake was quiet when we showe
d up, but as the day wore on the oxbow’s banks would collect families and young lovers and anglers with a taste for catfish. My uncle and I had staked out a spot on the shore when Billy showed up with Dove. My uncle unzipped his massive backpack and hauled out a dinghy. The black plastic was festooned with PVC patches, their edges bubbled with contact cement.

  “She’s seaworthy, I promise,” my uncle said, inflating it with a foot-bellows.

  It wouldn’t be a disaster if the dinghy sank. Oxbows rarely rose above neck-deep, except in their middle where they might dip to ten. Dove kicked off her shoes and dug her toes into the lake bank. The alluvial soil had a claylike feel under your toes.

  Dove yanked a foot back. “Sheeeeeee—it.”

  Her toe had been cut on a shard of glass from a shattered, buried Coke bottle. It was a grazing incision that could have been made by a surgeon’s scalpel. A line of blood leaked from it, the red stark against her skin. We sat there, everyone looking at the cut, just watching Dove bleed for a moment.

  Then my uncle said, “Heeeeeead ’em up, mooooove ’em out!”

  We dragged the dinghy down to the shore and tossed in our gear. The three of us kids straddled the gunwale as Uncle C waded out until the dinghy floated free, then we all hopped aboard. We sat with our backs against the rubber, inhaling the summery wet-inner-tube smell. Beads of water clung to Dove’s leg just above her kneecap. Each bead was swollen, almost too big, seven or eight beads spaced like an undiscovered constellation on Dove’s thigh, the sun’s light bending through each one to create a trembling rainbow….I realized that I’d been staring, transfixed, and when I glanced up Dove was scrutinizing me with her head tilted to the side, her face set in an expression somewhere between curiosity and mirth.

  “There’s a car out here.” My uncle pointed to the vague middle of the oxbow. “What happened was…first, let me set the scene. It was night, they say.”

  “They who?” Dove asked.

  “They who first told the story, those whose names are lost to the mists of time.” My uncle grinned. “Good enough?”

  “If they say so, Calvin.”

  “Oh, they do,” my uncle said. “The car spun out on black ice, crashed through the guardrail, went off the bridge that once spanned this lake. It crashed through the ice and sunk. The two passengers died. A father and his daughter. They tried to unroll the windows but the electrical system had shorted out. They both drowned.”

  This was hard to imagine on a bright summer day, but a scenario gradually formed in my mind: A winter night, the air flurrying with snow. A father and his daughter in their car, poking down the road. Maybe they’d been coming home from someplace…the Christmas tree farm over in Douglastown? Returning now in a warm car, sipping the spiced cider they’d bought from the little stand at the farmhouse. Then the tires lose traction, the car fishtails, slews, smashes through the rail, and for a moment there’s that sick weightless feeling you get on an amusement park ride—flutter-guts, my mother called it. Next, they’re crashing through the ice, which splinters with a squeaky-grindy sound, an ozonated taste hitting the back of their throats as the electrical system is fried by the inrushing water. And they sink, settling down to the bottom of the oxbow, the darkness of the water deeper than night. Maybe fish had darted past the windows in sleek quicksilver flashes. Maybe they had clawed at the windows, tearing their fingernails out, perhaps the father tried to smash the glass and push his daughter towards the surface but the water would’ve been awfully cold, and anyway, the car could have sunk on an angle—the girl could have kicked straight up only to hit a plate of ice.

  Dove said, “Their bodies aren’t still inside, are they?”

  “I don’t know what happened to them…” Uncle C trailed off, his eyes stuck somewhere above the treetops. “Stanley Rowe took them, I’m sure. Stan takes everyone who passes on around here, doesn’t he?”

  I said, “Why hasn’t anyone pulled the car out of the lake?”

  My uncle said, “Good question. But you’ve lived here your whole life, Jake.”

  I understood what he meant. Like the derelict buildings that were never torn down, the abandoned shopping carts that rusted away to atoms, and all the other monuments to the city’s general apathy, the car in the oxbow had become an accepted part of the scenery.

  “The legend is that, some days, you can see the girl floating above the water. It happens when day’s shading into evening—in that ashy light. Suspended there, mist in the form of a girl hanging a foot or so above the water.”

  “How does she look?”

  “How do you mean, Jake?”

  “He means,” Dove said to Uncle C, “does she look like she did before the accident, or how she looked after?”

  She was right. I didn’t want to see a poor creature like the girl in the Screaming Tunnel—in this case, a girl with saggy waterlogged skin and crayfish jostling inside her mouth.

  “I don’t know how she’d look.” My uncle lowered his eyes, tracking the water lapping against the dinghy. “I don’t know if there’s even any truth to the story.”

  Billy asked, “Is she a ghost?”

  “If she exists at all,” my uncle said, “she may be a preta. What are known as hungry ghosts. I’ve heard them described as humanoid, but with shrivelled, mummified skin, spindly limbs, long thin necks—almost giraffe-like. Giant bellies and small, sucked-in mouths. Hungry ghosts are born when a person dies wanting something, be it love or hope or sanity. That’s why they have slender necks and gigantic bellies. Pretas have enormous appetites but lack the ability to satisfy them.”

  “What could the girl have died in want of?” Dove said.

  “It could be something physical. She must’ve died in want of air. That seems the most likely, doesn’t it?”

  Hungry ghost. I was one hundred percent convinced I didn’t want to see one of those.

  “Pretas exist in torment, but it’s a gentle torment,” Uncle C went on. “They’re ghosts, after all. They don’t feel the same things we do—not with the same intensity as when they were alive. Their bodies are insubstantial and their emotions are, too…wait a sec…look, there, I see it.”

  Sunlight petalled through the water, creating lit shelves where it reflected off the silt, the light daggering down to flash off the sunken car. The metal seemed too close to the surface, somehow, hovering a mere foot below the water. Billy must’ve had this same sense. He dipped his fingers into the lake hesitantly, figuring he’d touch whatever was there, but his hand went in to the wrist and then the elbow before he pulled it out.

  “You’ll have to dive down to it,” my uncle said.

  Dove peeled her T-shirt over her head in one smooth motion. Her violet one-piece bathing suit glittered like fish scales and I could see the supple workings of her tendons through the fabric. The way she did this everyday action—so casually, as though she was undressing alone in her bedroom—was breathtaking in a way my twelve-year-old mind couldn’t fully comprehend.

  I wriggled out of my shorts down to my swim trunks. My thighs squeaked on the rubber bottom of the dinghy. I didn’t want Dove to see my pasty rotundness, the belly overhanging my trunks. By the time I’d struggled out of my shirt Billy and Dove were in the water, where they swam with easy grace. Billy generated fantastic momentum with the slightest scissoring of his legs. Dove lazed on her back, arms outspread, luxuriating in the sun.

  I pulled on my dive mask and adjusted my snorkel. The mask pinched my vision inwards—so much that I overbalanced and pitched forward with my arms oaring wildly, caught my foot on the rigging rope and fell face-first into the water. Water rocketed up my nose.

  “You are a great many things, nephew of mine,” my uncle said once I’d surfaced, “but light on your feet isn’t one of them.”

  We gathered in a rough ring, treading water above the car. Dove exhaled and let herself sink. Her chin dipped beneath the surface as her mouth filled with water. She spat it out in a stream and said, “I’m touching it. The roof, with
my big toe.”

  Knowing that the car was so close only amplified the tragedy. The length of Dove Yellowbird’s stretched-out body: that was the distance that had separated those two souls from their needless deaths. I cast an anxious glance at Uncle C, but his eyes were riveted to the sky. His chest moved visibly in and out, as if he was struggling to breathe.

  “Uncle C?”

  “Go,” he said, eyes still looking skyward while his fingers clutched the rigging lines of the dinghy. “Go on down and take a look. But carefully.”

  The three of us submerged. The water was clear, the view through my goggles glasslike. The car was sunk to its wheel wells in the bottom of the oxbow. Its paint job was perfectly preserved; it could have recently rolled off the factory floor. Air bubbles jetted from Dove’s nostrils and corkscrewed to the surface. My ears popped—the sound a crunch inside my skull.

  Billy gripped the window frame and levered his head through the passenger side. Dove crossed her legs and let her body drop until she settled near the lake bottom. The Yellowbirds’ eyes ticked here and there, taking everything in. When I saw no fear in their gazes, I kicked down to join them. My hands settled around the window frame. I flexed my arms, trying to pull myself down—Billy gripped my legs and pulled until I was next to him.

  The car was eerily intact. The seats were unripped, the dashboard in showroom condition. It reminded me of the ant frozen in amber that my mom sometimes wore around her neck: an ant that had died a million years ago. If I were to turn the keys in the ignition—and they were still there, attached by a foam boat key chain, which struck me as a horrible irony—it seemed conceivable the car would start, its headlights burning holes through the water.

  Even now, I can remember the small details. How the wipers had stopped halfway up the windshield, mid-wipe, the rubber chewed away by sunfish. Crayfish daisy-chaining from the open glovebox, linked pincer to pincer. The scene looked peaceful. There was nothing bloody inside that vehicle. It was like touring an old battlefield. The water and Father Time had cleansed the car of its horrors. But somewhere, nibbling at a recessed part of my brain, sat the knowledge that people had died here. The car was sanitized now, no different from a crime scene once the photos have been snapped and the chalk outlines washed away—but the psychic resonance persisted.