The Saturday Night Ghost Club

by Craig Davidson

  When she spoke next, it was in mimicry of a minister at a wedding. “Do you, Jake Clarence Baker, swear to hold Dove Petunia Yellowbird’s hand as she sheds this mortal coil?”

  “Petunia?”

  “I’m screwing around. I don’t have a middle name. Do you promise, though? Promise you’ll usher me into the long dark?”

  “I do.”

  “Then by the power vested in me, I knight thee, dub thee, whatever-the-hell thee, both death partners until the day you shall, uhh, yeah, die.”

  There are still days when I’ll drift back to the instant when, disoriented by Percy Elkins’s exploding firework, I’d seen Dove standing in the schoolyard with a skateboard slung like an axe over her shoulder. Years later, I assisted on an operation where a surgeon many times my superior unblocked a neural pathway to give a four-year-old girl sight. I was there when she opened her eyes. The moment she saw her parents and brother—who before then had been merely voices—she broke into an astounded cascade of giggles. That was the closest I can come to my own sense of seeing Dove that first time: something unlocked inside me and these fresh possibilities flooded in, opening my whole world up.

  I’d never fall for anyone as hard as I fell for Dove Yellowbird. You always fall hardest the first time, don’t you? There’s no bottom to it. As I reached teenagehood and beyond, I’d hear guys say: I just don’t get women. And sure, I didn’t get women either, but wasn’t that the best part, the not knowing? Where else could that wild, passionate, scream-it-from-the-rooftops love come from?

  iii.

  Another school year rolled around. At first, I thought this meant the taunting and bullying would start up again. Another year of hanging out by the monkey bars trying to cast a spell of invisibility on myself. But a series of minor seismic events would lead to a different social situation that year, and I soon found that I no longer dreaded the school bell.

  For one, Percy left me alone. The first day of school he showed up with a splint on his nose. It turned out his doctor was right: there would always be a bump on it, the bump I’d put there. I hoped he’d think of me every time he glanced in the mirror.

  Second, there was Billy. He was in my grade, same class. I kept waiting for him to find better friends, but that never happened. Then as now, Billy was Billy; if he liked you, he stuck by you. It didn’t matter to Billy that I was a pariah. He retained that stillness I had seen in the summer, but at school it translated as cool. Billy Yellowbird was mysterious, man, and that shine rubbed off on me.

  That fall, for the first time, I wasn’t picked dead last for kickball. I was picked second-to-last, a colossal step up. I discovered that I could ask to borrow a slice of paper from a classmate and, wonder of wonders, actually get one…still, I brought my own paper just in case.

  I didn’t go mad with this new-found status. I hung out with Billy, paying him back in whatever small ways I could. We’d sit in my garage after school reading Creep Show comics and copies of Fortean Times. I helped him prepare for math tests. He applied himself with the same intensity with which he approached all endeavours and gradually he got better. Ours was a small, contained universe and I was happy within it.

  It was late September and I was biking home after visiting Billy one Saturday afternoon, tires crunching through drifts of early autumn leaves, when I spotted Uncle C on a bus bench at the corner of Dunn and Hagar.

  I hadn’t seen him since the night at the burnt house. Looking back, I can see that my avoidance had been purposeful. Sure, I could say I was preoccupied with Billy and Dove—and that wasn’t exactly untrue—but the deeper truth was that the Ghost Club meetings, especially the final few, had left me unsettled. Still, I’d stopped by the Occultorium once or twice since that night on the hill. It was always locked. One time I saw the red light flashing on the Bat Phone as it rang inside the empty shop. I hoped that Dark Heshie and the Watcher and the rest of Uncle C’s network weren’t having separation anxiety. He hadn’t come by the house for our regular Sunday dinners in a while. When I asked my mother about this, she said, “Your uncle comes and goes as he pleases,” and would say no more.

  My uncle gestured me over. “We’ve got one final mission, Jake. Tonight.”

  I hesitated. The Ghost Club had been a summer thing, hadn’t it? But there was something about Uncle C—maybe it was the anxious twitch of his fingers, as if he was plucking the strings of a guitar—that forced me to consider his proposal. “Where are we going?”

  We made plans to meet at the graveyard at seven, just the two of us. He promised I’d be home in time for bed. That evening as I sat pushing my mashed potatoes around the plate, Mom put down her fork and said, “Why so glum, chum?”

  I’m not sure why I chose that moment to tell my folks, after keeping the club a secret all summer—but I did. Told them everything. Head down, eyes on the tabletop. When I got to the part about leaving Uncle C at the burnt house, my mother pushed away from the table and left the kitchen.

  “This was such a baaaad idea, Jake,” my father said. “And that you’d keep it all to yourself—goddamn, that’s not like you at all.”

  When Mom returned, the skin around her eyes was red and puffy, and she had a plan. “What you’re going to do, Jake,” she said with uncanny calm, “is go to the cemetery tonight. Your father and I will come, too—not with you, but behind you.”

  “Why? Is something the matter with Uncle C?”

  “We’ll tell you the whole story,” my mother said. “We should’ve told you a while ago, but it’s complicated, and right now we don’t have time.”

  I set off to meet Uncle C at a quarter to seven. Mom and Dad were going to follow in the car. I felt treacherous, like a snitch wearing a wire.

  My uncle waited at the Fairview Cemetery gates. His face was furred with a Brillo-pad beard—which was strange, because he had always been clean-shaven, ever since I could remember—and he exuded a new smell, musty and a little stale. I know now that it’s the smell of age, nothing else, just the un-maskable smell every human body develops over time.

  We stepped through the gates, breezing past rows of gravestones so old that the wind and rain had scrubbed the names and dates away.

  Uncle C said, “How’s school going?”

  I told him that things were pretty okay, actually.

  “That’s good, Jake. You’re a good kid, and you’ll be a fine man. People will be drawn to you, just you watch.”

  We continued through the graveyard to reach a statue of a hooded woman with her arms outstretched. Her stone eyes gazed at the sky. Green mould crawled the folds of her robe where it spread across the grave plinth.

  “Her name is Black Agnes, Jake. Ever hear of her?”

  When I shook my head, my uncle said, “She used to live around here way back in horse and buggy days. With her husband and young daughter in a homestead along the river. They had a good life, but it was a dangerous time. You had disease and starvation and calamity or…or drowning, say.”

  He cleared his throat of some hidden obstruction and went on. “Black Agnes’s daughter was down by the river one day, running far ahead of her mother. Then as now, the banks were treacherous. The rocks may as well be covered in grease. It happened too fast for her mother to even know she was gone, Jake. After a while, Agnes followed the path down to the river, calling her daughter’s name, and saw a white ribbon stuck on a thorn bush near the water. The same one her daughter wore in her hair. Just that lonely ribbon and the deep, endless river.”

  The Long Dark. Dove’s words formed on a movie theatre screen in my mind, hovering there weightlessly.

  “To lose a child, Jake…nothing worse. Especially like that. To lose sight of her for what must’ve seemed like a second. Gone. Disappeared. Drowned probably. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure, right? But there’d always be that niggling worry. What if the river spat her up five miles down? Had she staggered from the water, coughing and retching, to find…who knows what could have happened? Sometimes, Jake, disappeare
d is worse than dead. With dead, at least there’s an end.

  “After that, Agnes wasn’t the same. She never had another child to replace the one she’d lost. She grew silent and introspective. She’d wander the riverbanks calling her daughter’s name. She’d go at night, barefoot in the chill, coming home shivering with mud caked on her nightgown. That’s how she got her name, Black Agnes—because she was always out in the blackness looking for something never to be found. Five years after her daughter’s disappearance, Agnes died. Her husband buried her here and had this statue built.”

  My uncle reached up as if to touch the statue’s outstretched hand…but his hand recoiled before making contact with the stone.

  “The legend of Black Agnes is a different matter altogether. It came from a dare, long after Agnes had been buried. One of those silly dares teenagers egg each other into. A local girl’s friends goaded her into spending a night in this graveyard, sitting right here, beside the statue. She was terrified, but peer pressure’s a terrible thing. The next morning the girl was discovered in the statue’s arms. An autopsy revealed that she’d been squeezed to death. Her internal organs were pulped, her bones shattered. As if she’d been hugged.”

  Uncle C’s eyes found mine through the granular light. I couldn’t tell if he believed this story. He may have, but I didn’t. And that was the first time I felt it. A subtle pulling apart.

  “She’d been wrapped up in arms of stone, so the legend goes. The arms of Black Agnes, who’d mistaken the girl for her long-lost daughter and hugged her so protectively that she’d crushed the life right out of her.”

  A flashlight’s beam swept the tombstones off to the east. I heard Mom’s voice.

  “Jake? Cal? You over here?”

  Uncle C gave me a shocked and injured glance. I can see that expression still. I figure I’ll carry it with me the rest of my life. So you sold me down the river, eh, Jakey-boy?

  My mother and father stepped into view. “Oh,” my uncle said, “it’s both of you.”

  “Just enjoying the night air, Cal,” Dad said with a strained laugh.

  We stood in front of Black Agnes. My mother took her brother’s hand. “You okay?”

  My uncle smiled. “Never better, sis.”

  She spoke tenderly. “Black Agnes, huh?”

  Uncle C seemed surprised. “You know about her?”

  “You told me all about her, Calvin.”

  “I did? Can’t say I remember that.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t you,” my mother said.

  She took the flashlight my father had brought along and aimed the beam ten feet away from the statue of Black Agnes.

  LYDIA SHARPE

  1949–1975

  Mom pinned the flashlight beam on the tombstone. My uncle stared at it. Many different things seemed to pass over his face.

  “She’s got our last name,” he said after a long gulf of silence. “You know her?”

  “I might have,” Mom said. “Lots of Sharpes in this city. What about you?”

  My uncle’s upper lip twitched. It was almost a snarl, as if some predatory animal had momentarily seized control of his features.

  “Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said in a detached voice. “Like you said, lot of Sharpes around. Lydia. Nice name.” He laughed distractedly. “You know what, sis? Maybe I did know a…nope. Not coming to me.”

  My mother said: “No use racking our brains over it, Cal. Listen, we’ve got to get Jake home. School night.”

  “Okay, sis,” Uncle C said, his voice dreamy now. “I got my bike.”

  “Sam, why don’t you take Jake home? I’ll walk with Cal.”

  We left the cemetery as a foursome. Thunder bristled over the falls. When we reached the sidewalk Mom and Uncle C went one way, while my father and I went the other.

  “And so it ends, huh?” my uncle said to me as we parted company. “The good ole club.”

  “It was great,” I said sincerely. “I’ll never forget it.”

  Uncle C nodded. “It was great, wasn’t it—because it was ours.”

  Dad and I walked home without speaking. Something monumental had just happened—the knowledge of this itched inside my chest, present but not yet understood.

  My mother got home an hour later.

  “How’s Cal?” Dad asked.

  “He’s okay. He’s…no, oh, I don’t know.”

  Dad filled three mugs with cocoa powder and put the kettle on. When it shrieked he filled the mugs and stirred until the powder dissolved.

  Mom said, “Would you mind Irishing mine up?”

  Dad opened the cupboard over the fridge and splashed Jameson’s into Mom’s mug, and the same for his own. Mom took her mug and sipped, peering at me over the rim.

  “Some things you leave buried hoping they stay buried, Jake,” she began.

  And then, for the next hour, she disinterred the story of my uncle’s buried life.

  iv.

  Calvin Sharpe first spied Lydia Nix in the fall of 1968, when they were both freshmen at Niagara College. Lydia owned Calvin from that very first look.

  If my uncle could’ve seen the person he’d become: the Occultorium, the tie-dyed shirts, the Bat Phone, goblins and spooks…if he were able to view himself apart from the circumstances that had compelled the change, well, he would have found it perplexing. According to my mother, Calvin was, at that time, an “evidence of his eyes” sort of fellow. If it could be seen and touched and tabulated, then it was real.

  He attended college to study physics, which suited the man he was back then. Lydia would flip-flop on her major, eventually pursuing English with a minor in History. A more unlikely pair you would not find. Yin and yang, oil and water—but when it works, it works.

  Lydia was beautiful, if atypically so. Her nose had been broken by a field hockey stick in high school, which gave it a bump much like the one on Percy Elkins’s nose. If anything, this imperfection served to heighten the surrounding beauty. Calvin was smitten, and was shocked when Lydia returned that ardour, the way it usually shocks a middling-handsome man when an out-of-his-league woman expresses interest.

  It didn’t take long after they met for their differences to become evident. Lydia took Calvin to palmists and tarot card readers. He had his life-line and love-line read, and the forecast was pleasant. The Hanged Man did not loom in their future.

  They fell in love. It happened naturally and easily. Calvin loved Lydia in a needful and elemental way, the way a flower loves the sun.

  They graduated and moved into an apartment in Niagara Falls. Calvin went to work for a petrochemical company while Lydia worked as an in-class teacher’s aide. On weekends, they went on double dates with my mother and the dangerous new man in her life, Sam Baker. Sam could be an unmerciful tease but Calvin was tolerant of it. They became a tight-knit foursome.

  Calvin and Lydia married on a July afternoon in 1972. It’s unlikely that Calvin ever knew a happier day in his life. They moved into a house on a hill outside the city limits—Lydia’s idea, a private idyll away from it all. The pragmatist in Calvin rose up—it was too isolated, cut off from the main arteries—but then he told himself he was being a wet noodle.

  Lydia became pregnant. It wasn’t anything they’d been working for, just nature taking its course. Life was coming together for them, as it sometimes does for good people who make a point of being decent.

  One night in late November there came a knock at the door.

  The region had been rocked by a cold snap. A thick carpet of snow had fallen, and the river lay frozen twenty yards out. Lydia opened the door to find two men. Strangers. One of them told Lydia that it was rather cold outside. Could they come in? I imagine him saying this politely, even bashfully, looking at Lydia Sharpe out of the tops of his eyes.

  When Lydia hesitated, the man reached into his pea coat and pulled out a long, sharp fillet knife. It would later be admitted as court’s evidence in a zip-lock Baggie marked 2-A.

  The papers would identify the m
en as Adrian Bellweather and Patrick Lucas, recent parolees from the penitentiary. Their prior misdeeds didn’t paint them as the monsters they’d prove to be that night, but their young faces were hived with old, cold cunning.

  What happened is impossible to say with any exactness. The known evidence is this: nothing was stolen, nothing was burnt and almost nothing was broken. The men left as they’d come, melting into the same darkness that had borne them to the front door. At the trial, when the prosecutor asked why they’d done it, the replies of both men would be couched in apathy. They saw lights burning in a house set well back from the main road. The opportunity had presented itself, that was all. It was all a game that went a smidge too far.

  You could say such individuals aren’t properly human. They merely drape themselves in the costume of humanity, clad in the same skin that covers everyone else’s bones while inside there’s nothing but wolfish hunger. After they left, Calvin waited as long as he could bear, out of a fear they might return. But Lydia was bleeding, and was well into her second trimester. Calvin carried her outside. The men had cut some wires under Calvin’s car hood but he knew a bit about cars. He tried to fix it while Lydia sat in the car, getting colder. He must have been petrified the men would come back. They might have been at the forest-line, waiting until Calvin had nearly got the car started before returning to finish things.

  Calvin connected the wires and tore down an unplowed road that led to town, to the hospital. The road crossed several bridges spanning the network of oxbow lakes. On the largest of these bridges, the wheel must’ve started to shimmy in Calvin’s hands. No no no no please no he must have thought, but as his physics classes had taught him, an object in motion tended to stay in motion.

  The car fishtailed, slammed into a barrier, pin-balled back into the other, hopped the retaining wall and crashed through the ice.

  It is not known what happened beneath the ice, in the frigid black. Surely Calvin tried desperately to save his wife. Surely, he’d have sacrificed himself so that Lydia and their unborn child might survive. But in the end, it was they who would remain down under the water while Calvin, through luck or providence, surfaced through the hole cleaved in the ice.