Ash Wednesday

by Chet Williamson

  Finally, in mid-January, Beth began to ask Jim, as diplomatically as possible, what he intended to do with himself. “You write so well. Why don't you write something," she suggested. He nodded and said that maybe he would. When she got back from school the next day, he was sitting at the kitchen table, the typewriter in front of him, a four-year-old Writer's Market at his side. He seemed embarrassed.

  "I was looking through this," he said, "just flipping through, and I saw this section on greeting cards." He laughed, and she laughed too, not sure why but glad to see him doing something. "And I thought, hell, I hate greeting cards, but it was always because I thought any idiot could write them, and then I thought well then why couldn't I?"

  "So did you?"

  He chuckled again, self-disparagingly. "Yeah. Nine of them."

  "Nine?"

  "Uh-huh. Four birthday, two Mother's Day, three Christmas."

  "Are they good?"

  "Of course not. They stink. After all, I want to sell them."

  "Well, can I hear them?"

  His smile faded slowly. "You really want to?" She nodded. "Okay, then." He picked up a sheet of yellow tablet paper, handwritten, with numerous strikeouts. "Here's . . . uh . . . a birthday one." He read it. It was a short verse, sing-song yet clever, and she was smiling when he looked back up at her.

  "Pretty terrible, right?"

  "No," she said quickly. "I've read a lot worse." And some better, she thought. But he seemed for the first time in weeks to be actually enjoying himself, and she would not allow herself to dampen that. "Actually, I thought it was pretty good."

  "Well''—he smirked—"thanks for the compliment. But it doesn't have to be good—it just has to sell."

  "You're going to submit it?"

  "What the hell. All it costs is eighteen cents, right? And they pay up to twenty-five bucks for them. Not bad for a ten or fifteen minute poem."

  Beth encouraged him to send them in, not worrying what would happen when they came back, as she had no doubt they would. It was enough that he had regained interest in something—anything—again, and she would do all she could to foster that involvement. To her surprise, however, four of the ideas sold the first time out, for a $65 total. In the meantime Jim had been writing more, spending more time on the ideas and on the verses themselves, turning out four or five a day. Tru-Line Cards began to buy nearly everything he sent them, and he began submitting what he thought were his better efforts to Hallmark and Gibson, who slowly began to accept his material, and eventually to ask for specific subjects.

  So the months went by, Jim stayed at home, and soon the financial concerns that Beth had had were resolved. Jim was making close to $800 a month writing greeting cards, and some weeks his income actually exceeded her own. The next winter, when he figured it out, he found that he was able to sell four fifths of what he wrote.

  But although the cards kept him busy and kept them financially secure, his reclusiveness increased. He had occasionally accompanied Beth to school functions, but he'd seemed so self-conscious and the parents had been so obviously ill at ease in his presence that she no longer pressured him to come. When they did go out, it was to a restaurant in Lansford, where few people knew them. The only public place in Merridale that Jim was willing to frequent was the Anchor, where he would sit alone and drink two or three beers after his daily writing was done at 2:30 or 3:00. Beth didn't realize it at first, and discovered it one day when school was dismissed early, and there was no Jim to greet her at home. "Well, who do you know there?" she asked him when he told her he went there almost daily.

  "Nobody. To talk to."

  "You just sit and drink alone?"

  "Yeah."

  "Why?"

  "I have to."

  "I don't—"

  "Some of the factories—they let out at three or so. And . . . the guys who work there, they know who I am."

  "I still don't see," she said, but she was afraid she was starting to.

  "They know about what happened."

  "And that's why you go there?" He can't be saying this, she thought.

  "Yeah."

  She could feel her lip trembling. "I don't understand, Jim," she said. "I just don't understand."

  "I don't really know if I do either," he said, shaking his head and smiling apologetically.

  She turned and went into the kitchen, where she stood shaking. It had been too easy, she thought. The way she had changed the house, had so slowly and methodically covered the traces of Terry's existence. Every week, every day, she had made something else disappear—into the attic, the cellar, the garbage, out of the house. Only the photographs remained, the big hand-tinted 12" by 24" over the piano, the smaller 8" by 10"s in the hall, the family portrait they'd had taken when Terry'd turned six. She had thought she'd been storing the memories away too, and with them the guilt.

  But she'd been wrong. The house they lived in was haunted, and the ghost would always be there no matter what she did, what she said, because Jim wanted it there. He would remember Terry, and would remember what he thought he'd done to him his whole life. But the memory would not be as other bereaved parents remembered children they'd lost. Remembering Terry would be bitter, not sweet. Remembering Terry would mean remembering Terry's death. Remembering Terry would always mean remembering a nightmare.

  Remembering Terry . . .

  CHAPTER 8

  Jim Callendar lay in his bed staring into darkness, reliving what he could not forget. He turned his head when he heard Beth cough from somewhere in the house, and then he sat up, listening to the dogs barking, barking incessantly. Rising, he walked to the window and pulled back the curtains once more.

  A gray tinged with crimson was beginning to lighten the sky, but the blue lights were still there, shining more faintly with the approach of dawn. With the binoculars he could make them out as human figures, men and women, naked. He tried to call Bill Gingrich again.

  This time he got through. Gingrich's "Hello" sounded brisk, perfunctory, as if he'd been awake for some time. "Bill, this is Jim Callendar."

  "Jim, yeah, hi."

  "I tried to call before, but your line was busy.”

  “Uh-huh."

  "Beth and I've been wondering what's going on in town. We've seen the blue lights and—"

  "Okay. I just got off the phone from talkin' to AP and UPI. Now, I've been checking this thing out for about an hour, and from what I've been able to figure, this whole place is crawling with ghosts."

  "Ghosts?” He heard a noise behind him. Beth had come into the room.

  "Right out front with you, Jim. There are people all over this town. Blue people. Glowing. They don't move, they don't talk, and I'm damned if I'm gonna be the first to try touching them, so I can't say if they're solid or not. But you can sorta see through them."

  "Bill, are you—"

  "Shut up. You said you want to know, so I'm telling you. The weird thing is that I recognize some of them, and they're all dead. Some for years."

  "But what—"

  "Jesus, will you stop interrupting me! Maybe I am nuts, but if I am, so is the whole fucking town. People are going apeshit down here—scooting for the high timber. But not me—I got the story of the century!"

  Jim had never heard Gingrich so excited. "Well, what . . ." he stuttered, feeling foolish. "Well, I wonder what . . . what we should do."

  "Take off if you're chicken, hang around if you're not. Me, I'm getting out the Leica and shooting a few dozen rolls of film before we all wake up."

  "Bill, wait. These . . . these dead people. I mean, why are they there?"

  "Christ, I don't know. At first guess, I'd say they show up where they lived, maybe where they died. Got one accident victim I remember, spread out on the town square just like he was thirty years ago. I've still got that photo in my files. Oh, Jesus, it's incredible . . ." Gingrich's voice broke, but whether from excitement, fear, or awe Jim couldn't tell. "Hey," he added, "if you like, I could use you down here later today.
The outside press'll be coming in in droves if I'm any guesser, and I could use some help to handle them. I'll talk to you later." And he hung up.

  "What did he say?" Beth asked.

  Jim told her everything. When he finished, they were both pale.

  "What shall we do?"

  "Get dressed," Jim said. "Then we'll decide." He kissed her on the cheek, went into the bathroom, and stepped into the shower, turning the nozzle so that the hot water stung his skin. Only for a second did he wonder if all that Bill Gingrich had said was true. Then he thought about what he had seen and about what Gingrich had told him. He thought about the ghosts of people appearing where they had lived in life, and where they had died.

  After he dried himself, the first thing he did was to go into what had been Terry's room. He was both disappointed and relieved at finding it empty. When Beth went into the bathroom, he walked through the entire house and then outside into the yard. There were no dimly gleaming figures nearby.

  He stood shivering in the cool fall air, thinking about what had happened and what would happen. He did not wonder if, only when he would go out to the place where Kaylor Hollow Road met Ginder Road to look for the children.

  And to find Terry.

  The Town

  GHOST, n. The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.

  —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

  CHAPTER 9

  Nearly all of Merridale thought it was still dreaming when it had actually awakened that Friday morning. Al Dixon stood staring at Susan, his dead wife, who was sitting naked at the kitchen table, until he could stand it no longer. Then he sat down on the floor in his bathrobe, his mouth still hanging open, and was found there two days later when the National Guard did a house-to-house check.

  Marjorie Longenecker had a fatal heart attack when she entered her living room and saw her mother sitting in the air where the sofa used to be. Her sister found Marjorie's body on the floor, and screamed at that, but screamed even louder when she saw her mother and Marjorie hovering together by the window.

  Three-year-old Christopher Jackson was delighted when he first saw his father (whom his mother had said was dead) standing in the living room, but became disappointed when he would not tell Christopher where he had been. He grew concerned when his father did not hug him, and finally woke his mother to tell her the news. Her reaction was not what he had expected.

  Practically every home near the center of the town was the scene of some like occurrence, and the older houses doubled and trebled in drama those that had seen only one or two generations pass. Mrs. Viola Stauffer, a spinster who could trace her Merridale ancestors back six generations, and who still lived in the house her great-grandfather had built, was inundated with blue unmoving shades. She walked with effort from room to room, looking at them, recognizing some, and crying all the while, frightened, but also thinking that now she would not be quite as alone.

  The Martin Rest Home, just off Market Street, was the scene of pure chaos. The shrieks of the nurses could be heard for blocks, easily drowning out the alarmed squalls of the elderly who suddenly discovered that the beds in which they lay were occupied by others, sometimes as many as seven, forming a lump of blue light and churning flesh, one moving and several still faces on the same pillow, as equally hard to look at as to imagine.

  Some of Merridale's residents rushed to their cars and left the town immediately. Others feared to step outside, finding the company of familiar ghosts more congenial than those who lined the streets. Still others went into empty, unhaunted rooms, turned on radios and television, and waited for the machines to tell them what to do, listening to the sounds of fenders crumpling and bumpers clashing outside as the hasty, fearful multitude fled their spirit-laden town. The telephones proved ineffective, as the lines to anyone important—police, fire department, local TV and radio stations—were all busy, and before long, all the lines became choked with people trying to call anyone. It was not, thought Frank Kaylor, going to be his day.

  Frank Kaylor was the chief of police of the village of Merridale, charged with keeping "lawn order," as he self-deprecatingly put it, among the 8,000 inhabitants. It was fairly dull work, and he liked it that way. Anything else would have meant that he wasn't doing his job. There were four men on the force beside himself, and together they were more than enough to handle things. Merridale was a tame place. The last murder had been eight years before, when the Kline boy had strangled little Ginny Fuller. It had been ugly—the high school whiz kid . . . seven-year-old retarded girl . . . sex-crime-then-stuffed-in-a-garbage-bag school. Kaylor had had nightmares about it for months. And two years from now Peter Kline would be up for parole. It was a shitty system, Kaylor thought. And very early this morning it looked like he might be going to get involved in it again. The phone had just woke him up, making both him and Lettie curse, and Dotty Sanders was on the other end, telling him that Marty had murdered Sheila Sommers, had just confessed it to her, and had begged her to call him. Kaylor thought they were both drunk at first, especially after what Dotty told him was in their bedroom, but she didn't really sound drunk, only upset to the point of hysteria. He told her to take it easy, he'd be right over, hung up, and began to dress.

  "What is it?" his wife asked from the bed.

  He shrugged. "A D and D. I hope." In the den he tried to get Bob Rankin, who was on graveyard shift, on the radio, but Rankin didn't reply for a moment. Just as he came on, sirens started to wail outside.

  Rankin, his voice rising to a near-falsetto at times, told his chief what was happening and what had appeared in the town. "I'm not lying," he stressed over and over. "I really see them, Chief. Honest to God."

  Kaylor made plans to meet Rankin at the Sanders house. By the time he got there he had seen hundreds of the shapes lining streets and sidewalks, palely visible inside houses with undrawn curtains. "You see them? You see them?" Rankin pressed when Kaylor joined him outside the Sanders house on Glenview Terrace.

  "I see 'em," Kaylor replied grimly. "Jesus, Bob, what have we got here?"

  "I don't know, Chief, but I hope to shit they go away soon."

  Inside the house they found Martin and Dotty Sanders sitting at the kitchen table, their eyes averted from each other. Marty had come to himself enough to protest that it was all an accident, that he'd been scared Sheila would tell Dotty. Dotty was silent, her eyes wide in near-shock. While Marty babbled on, she gestured for Kaylor and Rankin to follow her, leading them into the bedroom, where they both gasped at the sight of Sheila Sommers (or her ghost, they both thought) lying naked on the bed.

  "It's not her," said Rankin in awe. "She's buried."

  Kaylor leaned down and tried to touch the glowing flesh. The way his hand passed through it terrified him for a moment, but he regained his composure and nodded. "You're right. It's not her. But it's something."

  While Marty Sanders moaned, "I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to," Kaylor had Rankin get the Polaroid from the car and take some shots while he contacted the state troopers. It took a while, but he got through, reported the incident, and asked for assistance.

  "Chief," the voice on the other end crackled, "you're gonna get more assistance than you know what to do with. We've been getting calls for the last fifteen minutes, and trying to get you for the last ten. What in hell's going on over there?"

  "Damned if I know, but if it's some kind of hallucination, then I'm seeing it too." After learning where the staters would arrive, Kaylor radioed the Merridale Fire Hall "Kaylor here. Where the hell's the fire?" he asked whoever answered.

  "No fire." The voice shook. "We just didn't know what else to do. You seen 'em?"

  "I've seen 'em. Folks are probably upset enough as it is without the damned sirens. Shut 'em off." Within a minute the sirens fell into silence.

  The Polaroids that Rankin gave him showed the bed, the bedside table, the lamp, but no sign of Sheila Sommers, or whatever psychic residue remained of her. "What is it, Chief?" Rankin asked. "What ar
e any of them?"

  "Let's not worry about that now. We got a man to take in." When Kaylor told Dotty that they'd have to take Marty to the station, she clutched at his arm.

  "I can come with you, can't I? I mean, I can't stay here."

  "Dotty, there's no place to stay down at the station. We only have the one cell. We could drop you off at a friend's if you like, or you could stay here, just not go in the bedroom."

  "Could you"—her voice sounded very small—"could you take it away?" Kaylor didn't answer and Dotty shook her head. "No. No, I guess not." She looked up at him. "Shut the bedroom door. Just shut the door and I'll stay here."

  She didn't say goodbye to her husband when they took him to the car, nor did he speak to her. Soon the three men were nearing the small downtown section of Merridale, and the blue forms were everywhere, like silent sentinels. There were several in both standing and sprawled positions across the roads, and once, when there was no room to go around, Kaylor told Rankin to drive slowly through one of the shapes.

  There was no sense of contact, but for a moment the top of the figure's head and part of his back were visible on the floor of the police car. They all jumped, and Rankin turned the wheel spasmodically, but kept the car on the road. "Steady, Bob, steady," Kaylor said. Martin Sanders giggled.

  Rankin pulled the car into one of the spaces in the town square. There were four or five cars parked nearby with their headlights on. While Rankin took Martin Sanders into the police station, Kaylor walked over to them. The cars of Tom Markley and Pastor Craven were parked side by side, so close they nearly touched. Markley's right-hand window and Craven's left were rolled down all the way, and Kaylor could hear them talking through the gap as he approached. He rapped lightly on the mayor's windshield and Markley jumped like a rabbit.