The Haunting Lessons: 1, 2, 3, 4, I Declare a Demon War (The Ghosts & Demons Series)

by Robert Chazz Chute

  I stayed at the Sumner Hotel for my first few nights in Brooklyn. It was the cheapest deal I could find and it was close to the subway. I thought I’d be lonely, but I kept busy exploring. I did think about Brad a lot. I missed his arms around me. I could only imagine that he missed his arms, too.

  For all the time I’d stared back at my dead farm boy boyfriend, he told me nothing. I could feel want and need, but there were no words. Maybe the pain of the want and need eclipsed anything he could say.

  Mostly, I wished I could share those first days in New York City with him. It is an amazing place and no one should discover the joys of a strange city alone. I did all the things tourists do to orient myself to my new home, but I did wish he was there so I could share the experience. The City is a hive, and I didn’t even really know the Secret City of the Unseen yet.

  I took bus tours. I saw the Statue of Liberty and Central Park. I discovered the joys of Shake Shack and walked along the High Line, an abandoned, elevated railway track perfect for people watching. It was also good for ghost watching.

  It was on the High Line that I discovered the power of looking vaguely pissed off and bored. Every New Yorker cultivates that look and, after a little practice, I got it down. Unless they’re loitering, New Yorkers all walk like they are late for an appointment. In Iowa, people don’t hurry on escalators. New Yorkers don’t have time to ride escalators. They keep moving and they climb.

  I needed to practice looking like a native citizen. I was a little nervous being on my own in the big city for the first time, sure, but the dead worried me more than the panhandlers. In the West Village, I saw a woman in a bonnet and long skirts pushing a fancy blue baby stroller. It was so big and fancy, stroller wasn’t the right word. Judging by her style of dress, I guessed she’d have called it a baby carriage or a pram.

  The misty wistfuls in period dress look a little more wispy than the fresher ghosts. It’s as if they are deaf people who have been deaf so long, they’re forgetting the language of living. They seem to have lost how life feels. When I spotted the woman with the pram, I hoped at first that there was some kind of cosplay convention nearby. As she drew nearer, I couldn’t help myself. I glanced in the pram. Mercifully, it was empty.

  When I looked up, the woman looked at me sharply. I looked at the screen of my phone and adjusted my headphones. I turned up Taylor Swift’s Blank Space and busied myself looking for a Beyonce track. When I raised my head again, the woman had pulled back her bonnet to reveal half her head was burned to her naked, black scalp. I tried to keep my face impassive and jogged away. I ran a few blocks before I dared to look back. To my relief, the woman in the long black dress was not running after me, pushing an empty baby carriage.

  During those early days in New York City, I started each day at dawn. I walked the city and ranged farther and farther afield using the subway. Everywhere I went, men called after me. Some were polite and their friendliness seemed as open as the usual good morning wishes I would expect in small town Iowa. Others seemed more aggressive. “Hey, baby! You’re looking good today! What’s your name?” I gave them a stone faced nod and quickened my pace — hi, ho Silver! Away! — who was that masked girl?

  The stares and catcalls came in a steady stream. Not just for me, of course, but for many women. Only the elderly seemed to disappear into the camouflage of age. After a while, I tried to think of the barrage as part of the noise of the street, blending with the cacophony of engines and horns and the march of millions slowly pounding the sidewalk to concrete dust.

  Not long before my pilgrimage to the big city, I would not have taken all the attention with such stoicism. However, I’d discovered once you’ve had a hand in — er…a knee in — castrating a sexual predator? Let’s just say it’s empowering.

  I fell in love with New York, despite the dead and the catcalls. New York City feels like it’s alive and humming at the center of the universe. There is something in the air there besides pollution. The city is made for the young and ambitious with hope in their hearts and an unshakeable and stupid belief in their unquestioned potential.

  I had good dreams in Iowa: love, safety, hot wood stoves on cold nights, room for puppies to roam and all the coziness of a life that would unfold as I predicted. In New York, I dreamt new dreams. I was going to divine the mysteries of the Secret City that boils beneath the Seen. I’d make the Unseen my bitch. I wasn’t sure how to do that, but seeing what others did not made me feel special, like whoever was writing my role had decided to create something different and fun.

  My first New York City nights might have been lonely if I’d been awake. However, since each day was a long hike, by nightfall I was back at the Sumner, exhausted and ready to sleep until the sun returned.

  After a week at the hotel, I started to form a plan. I needed a place to live. If I stayed at any hotel, my money would run out quickly and I wanted to make it last as long as possible. If I went back to Medicament I’d feel like a failure. Also, if the lady with the pram from the 1800s was any indication, my zombie boyfriend in waiting might have more patience than I had life left.

  I had my father’s last known address but I didn’t want to show up on his doorstep. There was a better than even chance he didn’t live there anymore. Either way, I didn’t want to show up looking like I wanted help or a stretch of floor space to sleep on. I wanted to make my appearance in his life look more casual. Like, “Hey, yeah, so I live in New York now and I just thought I’d keep in touch since we’re family and all.” I’d been through too much to play the part of the estranged hick daughter in the big city, even if that’s really what I was.

  Mama raised me to believe your parents are the people who raise you, not just some random biological accident of birth. When I was little, each Christmas I’d ask Mama where Daddy was. Her eyes would get wet and she’d shrug and say, “Anybody can be a father, but you have no Daddy. He opted out.”

  By my sixth Christmas, I understood that I shouldn’t ask anymore. At nineteen, I can say the move East wasn’t just about tracking down my father. I was curious, naturally, but I needed the city for something else besides an escape from Medicament and my armless sentinel.

  I came with a more mundane goal, too. Just like millions of others who come to New York, I wanted to lose myself in the city in the hope that, someday, the city would pause a moment and say, “That’s the famous Tamara Smythe. She’s a big deal. She’s one of ours, you know.”

  Of course, I had no idea how to get that famous and successful. I thought, as everyone who comes to New York City thinks, that it would all work out somehow. It’s a magical place, figuratively and literally. It makes you think you can do anything and you’re too cool to fail.

  Sorry. I didn’t know it at the time but, despite all my good grades and trying hard, I was an idiot.

  11

  I needed to learn more about the dead. Cities have more live people, therefore they have more dead people. I didn’t know where my life was going, but I needed a target-rich environment to figure out what was going on. Ultimately, I needed to figure a way to lift the curse. I guessed that it had happened to me for some reason. Once I discovered that reason and did whatever I needed to do, I hoped to be able to let the hauntings disappear. I’d somehow find a way not to see Brad in the field when I went back to Medicament. Failing that, I’d find a way to allow him to move on or find peace — whatever we are all supposed to do once we lose the knack for breathing.

  But first, I needed somewhere to live so I wasn’t a tourist anymore. I looked through online listings but everything looked too expensive to me. I was used to Iowa prices. New York City rents looked like the mortgage payment for a mansion back home.

  “You are home,” I reminded myself. I’d thought I was going to marry Brad Evers and live happily ever after. After a brief courtship, I knew my second choice was to marry New York City.

  I didn’t know how long it would take me to get a job, but my first order of business was to find a bachel
or apartment (a bachelorette, I guess.) It’s difficult searching for a job when you don’t have a permanent address. It’s also hard to find an apartment when you don’t have a job.

  Rent control apartments in New York are only passed down through families, so I had to find a rent-stabilized apartment. Cheaper apartments are so hard to come by, no one wants to leave them. When they do become available, landlords don’t need to advertise. The people who find these rare gems are well-connected with a vast network of friends to tip them off. Of course, I knew no one.

  The dead gave me an idea of how I’d find an apartment, though. Since this will work in any city, let’s call this Lesson 30: Download an app to your phone with an Emergency Services scanner and get ready to run to the apartments of the recently departed. Dead people vacate apartments, (or at least technically they are supposed to leave.)

  When an ambulance calls in a 10-83, that’s a dead body. When the fire department radios in a 10-45, Code 1, that’s a dead body, too. Make a note of the address and keep your sneakers on because you’re in a race to get there before the apartment is snatched up by someone else.

  As ambulances or the Coroner pulled away from apartment after apartment, I’d just happen to show up at the landlord’s door asking about any vacancies, eager to fill out an application and ready to ante up a security deposit and first and last month’s rent.

  “Well,” they’d say, “one of our elderly residents just died in her apartment. Does that bother you?”

  “Let me see it first and I’ll let you know.”

  It still took me almost a month to find a small studio apartment on Church Avenue in Flatbush. I loved that I lived in a place called Flatbush, but it wasn’t located in the best place for someone like me. I was to live smack between the Downstate Medical Center and the massive Holy Cross Cemetery. In other words, I moved into Dead Central. I didn’t know that when I took the apartment. Seeing the misty wistfuls wander and pace and wait throughout the city is a shock. I wanted a target-rich environment and, boy, did I find it.

  Moving from small town Iowa to New York was a culture shock, too. The building was a walk-up above a block of stores unlike anything in Medicament. A barber shop sat on one corner next to a secondhand store that advertised books, watches and necklaces. Next was Chouchounette, a boutique filled with designer clothes, handmade jewelry and handbags. Next to that was a store that sold African movies and the last store on the ground floor advertised African hair braiding. A Jerk City stood on the corner, but it was closed up and graffiti covered the metal security gate at the restaurant’s entrance.

  My apartment was on the third floor. Even with every piece of furniture hauled away, the place smelled like old lady lavender. However, the old lady had kept the place spotless. She was also dead and gone and apparently had the good manners not to be too attached to the place.

  I bought myself a sleeping bag and a hot plate and a small pot. My first meal in my own apartment was a cup of instant chicken noodle soup and instant hot chocolate. Dinner came from envelopes, but it was all mine.

  I texted Mama: 1st nite in my new apt! So cool!

  Mama had the grace not to remind me I could come home any time I wanted. She didn’t say, “Or we could move to the next town. I can commute to work at the drugstore.”

  She held back on suggesting, “Maybe Northwestern could still cancel your deferment. You could start back at your studies right away without dropping a stitch!”

  Not that night she didn’t, anyway, so you can see why I love Mama.

  The hardwood floor wasn’t comfortable and I’d forgotten to buy a pillow so I shoved my backpack underneath my head. I missed my soft bed back at the Sumner Hotel, but I lay awake most of that first night listening to the traffic and thinking how crazy it was that I was in New York, nineteen and alone.

  But I was doing it!

  I think that first night was probably the second time in my life I’d really felt like a grown, adult woman.

  The first time was with Brad after we made love. It was Christmas night in his parents’ basement. (I couldn’t wait for the summer grass to grow tall. That was a good hiding place for us, but it was months away and I was eager.)

  I can still picture Brad, naked and unselfconscious, reclined on the rug in front of the family Christmas tree. I covered up, wrapping myself in a blanket.

  Mr. Evers had grown that Christmas tree. When it was ready, he and Brad and Chad cut the tree down while Mrs. Evers and I stayed by the fire and strung popcorn into garlands with a needle and thread. Brad’s Mom told me that decorating the Christmas tree with popped corn was an Evers family tradition. “Is that corny?” she asked.

  “Not until you said that, it wasn’t,” I said. “It was sweet.”

  Mrs. Evers smiled and watched my face as she told me, “I hope you continue this tradition, Tammy, with your own children. With my grandchildren.”

  As soon as his family was out of the house, Brad and I saw our chance to play house. I’ll never forget the first time. No one does. It was chilly in the room and the Evers family were out visiting with friends. Despite the cold, I was still warm all over.

  Afterward, Brad gave me his dimpled smile and said, “So…we’ve lost our virginity.”

  “I didn’t lose mine,” I told him. “I chucked it at you. I know exactly where it went.”

  “We’re good together,” he said.

  “I’m not sure. I think we should practice. A lot.”

  He chuckled and nodded and stared at me.

  “As long as I’ve known you,” I said, “I’ve never seen you have a moment of self-doubt. How did you get so confident?”

  He shrugged. “Born with it. Some people have to settle for brains. I’ve got luck and self-confidence. That’ll do.” He winked and looked down at himself. “Besides, I’m not really self-confident. I’m cocky! Look! It’s happening again!”

  I thought about that night and how perfect the future looked for us. That is, until Brad’s good luck turned bad.

  Alone in a tiny, bare apartment and thinking of Brad, I suddenly felt like being a young independent woman with no plans kind of sucked.

  Brad and Tam. Tam and Brad. The forever couple.

  I thought of Brad’s arms and how it must have hurt him to have his limbs ripped from his body and chewed up with metal teeth. And still, despite his mortal wounds, Brad called me, hoping to hear my voice before he collapsed to the floor. Instead, he bled to death on the rug his mother bought in a bazaar in Egypt.

  Now I wasn’t part of the forever couple. I was just Tam. Alone and not near as brave as I tried to look. I waited a long time, trying to hold back the flood, but tears do have their way, don’t they?

  12

  Lesson 31: If you can see the dead, you are not alone.

  My little apartment on Church Avenue was bare, but that hardly mattered since all I did was sleep there. Each day I went out in search of a job. I’d printed off resumes that looked too short, no matter how creative I got with white space and a large font. Besides working for Mama, being a camp counselor and babysitting, I was short on job experience. I’d planned my extracurricular activities in high school around looking good to a university admissions committee, not a boss. I didn’t see how I could monetize a black belt in Hapkido. If I’d studied jazz piano instead of classical, maybe I could have played in a hotel bar or something.

  Though I had worked for Mama in the drugstore stocking shelves, I hadn’t even worked the cash register. I wasn’t qualified to be a pharmacy assistant, of course, so my first thought was I could get a job as a waitress. It’s the new girl in the big city cliche, but getting that gig turned out to be harder than it looked.

  The nicer restaurants weren’t hiring. Several store managers noted that I hadn’t even worked at a McDonald’s, so how did I think I’d fare managing a whole section when their restaurant was busy?

  I kept running into the same brick walls:

  “We require experience. We don’t give e
xperience.”

  “Come back after you’ve worked in fast food for a couple of years, kid.”

  “We serve alcohol so you’re not even old enough to work here.”

  I would have taken any job in food service, but the combined cash and tip minimum wage rate was eight dollars an hour. I didn’t want to burn through my settlement from Shibboleth so I kept looking.

  I looked at want ads and scrolled through ads on Craigslist. I knew I was getting desperate when I began to consider the creepier ads:

  “Female and male models needed, Rubenesque preferred. Must love ice popsicles and/or day-long lollipops. Generous compensation.”

  “Crimefighter requires sidekick. You supply powers and cape. I supply a logo (to be emblazoned across your chest and cape) that matches my own brand. Fighting skills required to subdue evildoers. Sewing skills a plus.”

  “No experience required as long as you are a Cat Whisperer! Our kitties don’t like baths and we need a motivated expert in cat wrangling to keep our army of angry cats clean! Save us from being a couple of old cat ladies on Hoarders! Compensation to be discussed. Job perk!: Cuddling and purring at the end of each day!”

  I looked at that last one a long time. The fact that, “Compensation to be discussed,” was the only line that ended in a period instead of an exclamation point did not seem to bode well for my earning potential.

  It was a late afternoon at the end of my second week of the job search when I hit my All is Lost moment. I could live on ramen noodles to stretch my budget, but I didn’t see how to live in the city without splitting the rent. To make my nest egg last, I’d have to cram four roommates into my tiny apartment.

  I’d been walking all day in uncomfortable shoes. I was sweating through a white blouse and trying to look stylish while hiking the city on the job hunt. It was the first week of October and surprisingly hot. My feet hurt and I was thinking about checking out the Cat Whisperer job.