Mansion of High Ghosts

by James D. McCallister

  “Oh, kiss my foot, woman.” Eileen, collapsing across Chelsea’s legs, wailed and grabbing at handfuls of the thin hospital sheet. “Lord have mercy. My sweet angel.”

  “Mama, quit it. I’m fine.”

  Eileen’s eyes, bulging and feral. “But the baby—?”

  “I lost it.” Now the salty tears came, her chest and throat tight with a rush of realization. “My baby’s gone.”

  Holding one another, the women wept and sobbed until Eileen suffered one of her abrupt mood-switches. She shut off the torrent of grief and sat up dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, one she didn’t deign to offer to her daughter.

  “Poor Dusty—his heart will break.” A theatrical gasp. “Now: We got to get him back here so y’all can be together. Talk through it all. Start getting right again.”

  It seemed so much like playacting Chelsea didn’t have much of a reaction, not now that some fresh tears had cleansed her, disabused her of sentimental notions. Getting out of this baby thing was good.

  Except for the part about tricking Billy into loving her. She’d regroup on that.

  “I don’t think I was supposed to have this baby anyway, Mama. Not after what Dusty done.”

  “Hush your hateful mouth. Besides, don’t forget,” her Mama said with one of those trademarked, pitying, sad smiles of hers. “Y’all can always try again.”

  “But, Mama—I don’t love him no more. That ain’t no way to make a baby.”

  Eileen scoffed. “Folks do it every day.”

  On that note Eileen pirouetted out with a flourish of the curtain worthy of a diva having taken the last of several bows. Coughing into her handkerchief, she called out for Dusty to come and begin making the family whole again.

  Thirty-Nine

  Billy

  Billy, sprawled nude and greasy beside Melanie, sweated out the booze of the last few days. Feeling all sorts of lousy, he nonetheless insisted on getting a BJ. Melanie had been reluctant, what with Ruck in the other room, but Billy, ya know ya know, had his way of insisting.

  After slapping her in the face with it a few times she went to work, tracing a languid finger up and down, licking and tickling her way from navel to the start of his pubic hair.

  Right as she started getting into it, he changed his mind. After seeing Libby’s face earlier, this brazen sexuality felt profane.

  “Mood pocket. Raincheck.”

  Melanie, like, what? “Well mister, here’s a suggestion. I’m into it, now. You get yourself in the mood.”

  “Hell of a night. One for the books.”

  “All the more reason—you’re so tense. Besides, your friend? You’re right—he’s dead to the world.”

  True-that: Ruck, once the Crown gone, had been further placated by a twelve-pack of Bud tallboys procured by Roy Earl from a gas station around the corner. Ruck, consuming every can but one, belching and pissing and going through mood swings of lucidity and profane, mad soliloquies until finally passing out on the media hub couch.

  As he snored, the other three sat in the kitchen and discussed past events, filling Melanie in on the days of old—a sanitized version, anyway. Roy Earl, never having heard about Devin on the roof, about Libby and Billy making out in the dorm room, which is how Billy termed the incident, now looked at him with different eyes. Making to go home not long after. Asking what else he could do; telling Billy for the fourth time to ‘let Creedence know’ of his willingness to help.

  Again, though, all too much. Begging off from her ministrations. “Sleep. I’m whipped.”

  “Besides,” breathy and insistent. “I can be quiet—you know I can,” while brushing her fingertips along the shaft of the now half-mast meatwhistle.

  His Billyness, with its one good all-seeing eye: Shall we come, you and I, while we can?

  Billy, trying to relax. Quelling the thoughts of bothersomeness that made him want to kill Melanie outright. For it not to be a sex accident like all the others through the years, nor the self-defense incident with the black dude that night.

  Yeah—out-and-out kill somebody. The next person who didn’t do what the fuck he wanted. You talk about relieving tension, boy, I tell ya, hearing Rodney Dangerfield and seeing the bulging eyes of the late pothead comedian. That’ll get you some respect.

  Forgetting all that: Melanie, going to work with deft tongue and teasing fingers, gentle at first, a true blow job, using her warm breath as much as her flesh to stimulate him; a fingertip, pressed with gentle intention against his tender taint. A dance of delicate flesh and nerve endings.

  All in one exhilarating rush, at last she took him fully into her mouth, no small task.

  Billy’s reddening watchtower, now grew harder than the roadway upon which he and Ruck had traveled all those miles home, harder than the steel in the hull of a great starship blasting off from a barren moon. Took so much blood to fill it all the way up he often grew lightheaded during intercourse, suffered dissociative reveries leading to the accidents.

  In the dim light, Billy, glancing down and meeting her eyes, which announced:

  I love you I love you I love you—oh, how I love you, Billy Steeple.

  Terrifying.

  But why not go with this? A decent pop to wind down a stressful, whirlwind week of events; a woman, willing, to serve all these needs, and more.

  Aw—did he halfway love Melanie?

  Did he feel like, maybe he’d found the one? Since Libby, he meant?

  Did he love this woman?

  Billy, an emotional highway accident. His mind, a mess.

  His control, tenuous.

  Ready to explode, he realized.

  Because, of course, Billy, incapable of not imagining Libby down there instead of Melanie. Melanie, a woman everything that Libby was not—as available and perfect and willowy and blonde and crazy and alive as much as anyone could reasonably hope for, and not really all that crazy, either. Not in the grand scheme. Even digging the fake-rape bits, the cherry on top, so long as nobody let it get all accidental. A little clingy, perhaps—but who could blame her? Billy Steeple, in the house, y’all. Who wouldn’t cling.

  Melanie, loving him, yes; but Libby’s eyes flashed in front of him, her face the way it had looked in the small fading picture Ruck had stupidly lost over the railing.

  Billy, a pressure building, warmth and energy ready to flood out of him.

  Libby—oh, Libby.

  A sudden, spasmodic eruption. Melanie, gagging and choking out Billy’s thick semen through her nostrils like lunchroom milk. Falling back, overcome.

  “Surprise surprise.” Breathless, his face hot. No incidents like this ever, not even the first time. Control, his watchword, an ethos by necessity. Mel, not a swallower.

  Looking at his spasming organ. What gives, bud?

  Realizing, then. How close he’d come. To an accident. A premature pop, why, it had saved everyone a whole lot of trouble.

  Think about it—if he’d had an accident, he’d have needed Ruck to help deal with mess. That would have taken too much explanation.

  Billy, feeling that his friend would help, though. They already enjoyed a bond going way, way beyond helping your boy dump a muh-fucken body somewhere, yo. Billy wouldn’t even need to explain. Shit happened. Devin Rucker knew this. He’d be a little judge-y, sure. But, he’d still help conceal the corpse. No question. It’s what friends did. Adolescent loyalty like theirs, Gen-X and solid as granite, was difficult to impugn. Particularly in the face of explanations, like, well, the death of this woman was only an accident.

  “Sorry, girl—the excitement, it got away from me.”

  “That was epic, and not in a good way,” thick and wet and disgusted. “Uncool.”

  Billy’s nuts re-tightened as gravel rumbled from the doorway. “Oh, you cheating bastards.”

  Ruck.

  “Dude—shut the fucking door.”

  But no, Ruck, trancelike, a silhouette in the doorway, dropped the last of the beers onto the hardwood floor with a hissing cl
unk. Slobber ran from his mouth in a string like the spew hanging out of Melanie’s hair and off her chin. “I’m-a kick some ass now, son.”

  Melanie, screaming, grabbed a blanket to cover herself. Billy, flopping like a harpooned tuna, got twisted up in the silk sheets. “Ruck, not now—”

  But Ruck lunged forward with an aggrieved yelp: “Libby, don’t let him do this to you—to us.”

  Billy, not the only lunatic in the condo, threw his forearm against Melanie to send her tumbling headfirst off the bed. Her bare feet flew in the air before she hit the unyielding floor, thud.

  Billy, grabbing at Ruck, the two old friends now grappling like costumed wrestlers on television: Bigdick Bill versus The Shitkicker, one fall, winner take all. But no fake wrestling kayfabe playing to the rubes in the cheap seats: Ruck, flailing away and moaning as if in a waking nightmare.

  Billy, shrieking high and nasally, bundled the skinny drunk into a naked bear hug. “Give up, Ruck—quit.”

  But no; Ruck, struggling and refusing to quit.

  Billy, slamming him onto the damp sheets and holding him down, the two of them sucking wind and bouncing to rest.

  Billy, thinking that maybe the time had come to call for help—duh—but neither he nor Roy Earl had been able to raise anyone at the Rucker household earlier. Out for a big Saturday night in Edgewater County, perhaps?

  Billy, now speculating he should have let the cops take Ruck after all. Let them shuttle him off to the drunk tank or the psych ward, or maybe a lonely field or bog somewhere. Put the dog out of his misery.

  After all this Billy, feeling like a failure, but only for the second or maybe third time in his life. But wishing poor deluded Ruck dead? From whence these awful thoughts?

  Ruck, rolling off. Staggering out of the room. A thud, vibrating the walls: The heavy front door, slamming.

  “Oh, fiddlesticks.” Billy, face in hand. “Now I’ve got to go and stop him.”

  “Let that crazy asshole go.”

  “Can’t—I’m the protagonist. I have to fix all this.”

  “Billy: let him go.”

  “You really want to help?”

  “Of course.”

  “Go and rinse that disgusting glob of spooge out of your hair, you trollop.”

  Billy limped with heroism across the bedroom and grabbed a silk kimono—for their one-month anniversary present Melanie had bought them matching robes, and dutiful, he often sported his with pleasure and comfort.

  Bolting, best he could, down the hallway toward the front door, he heard Melanie calling out. “He was going to kill us both.”

  Billy shouted NO, disagreeing in one sense because he didn’t want the little shit to think she could tell him what to do, but with all the weed on hand, no cops.

  The distinctive cell phone ring-tone from back in the bedroom, a piece of music familiar to Deadheads as the principal melody of ‘Dark Star,’ stopped him in mid-swish.

  Melanie came out holding up the phone, the backlit screen reading ROY E PET.

  “Roy, thank god—we’ve had a fresh eruption over here. How’d you know?”

  The bossman’s voice came thin and shaking: “It’s Creedence. She’s had a bad fall—Mrs. Rucker said they had to take her to the hospital.”

  At this news Billy felt nutted anew, beleaguered and suffering death by a thousand unrelenting crises. “Is she all right?”

  “Think so, more or less. But still… Mrs. Rucker started crying about how she’d never get to see her grandbaby, now.”

  “Da-fuck that mean?”

  “I reckon Creedence had a miscarriage.”

  Unable to process: it all sounded like a soap opera subplot complication in which he had no emotional investment.

  “Well, this is like the seventh circle of Hades with these people.” Billy, charging out into the shared condo hallway, whispering so as not to disturb sleeping residents. “That’s all bad, yes; but Ruck’s had an episode. He’s out on the loose again.”

  “Fudge.”

  “Let me get back to you on this Creedence sitch, all right?” He rang off.

  Billy stabbed a finger at the down button, which opened the doors. Once inside he realized with a start that, if the elevator were sitting on his high floor waiting for a passenger, no way possible Ruck had taken it downstairs. In a mad rush he leapt back out of the closing doors just in time and raced for the fire stairs. He burst through the door head-first and started down, his big feet slapping on the cold concrete steps; Billy, calling out Ruck’s name.

  Forty

  Devin

  Devin tried to eat the hot food they’d brought to him, but the spices and vegetables had been too much. Only the bland little cubes of tofu had gone down without making him gag.

  Feeling downright sober.

  No head games.

  No confabulation.

  Way way way too lucid, y’all.

  Devin, drinking the beers and making Edgewater County smalltalk, reminiscing type-shit with Roy Earl. The times they camped by the river on the back-land. Partying and drinking in Roy’s grandfather’s pickup truck. Spray-painting the Blue Öyster Cult hooked-cross symbol everywhere that one summer. And at last, Devin, pretending to fall asleep so they’d all give him some peace.

  To sleep the dreamless drunk’s sleep.

  To rest.

  And ’twas thus that Devin, whilst he did sleep, it would not be for long. His dreams, incessant and troubled as ever, but soon interrupted by noises from the other room.

  From a place outside his consciousness.

  Reality versus dreamworld.

  Or was it?

  Awake yet not, Devin, floating toward the door and into the hallway and through another door; on the other side seeing, to his chagrin, Libby.

  Libby, at last, real and alive.

  But making love to Billy.

  A miasma of images and activity and struggle, a minute inner voice questioning after such a long separation what business Libby’s love-life was of his. Devin, late to the party: she’d fallen in love with Billy after all.

  Devastating.

  Lashing out, a blur, a moment of lucidity, and of shame: The now-now, unobscured, unmitigated consciousness. Sobriety, of a kind, at seeing Billy’s girlfriend.

  Not Libby.

  A tall woman who looked nothing like Libby.

  Oh, shit.

  Rushing through the condo in shame, the crashing sounds and the flashes of light pursuing like a pack of dogs, the clangorous howling roar that’d been the sound of the two cars plowing into one another opening up all around him on the road that day roaring in his ears. Snatching up his jacket and shades like Indiana Jones’s hat, stumbling and racing and fumbling with the door-lock, wrenching it open, into the corridor.

  Frantic. Head whipping, searching for the stairs. Finally seeing the dim red of the EXIT sign at the end of the hall. Kicking the fire door open; thankful for no emergency alarm.

  The top floor. A long way to the bottom. The reverse of Jimmy Stewart’s pursuit of Kim Novak—Vertigo had been Libby’s favorite Hitchcock. It had been rereleased on the big screen, they had gone to see it on a date back in high school. He wondered if Steeple had known that juicy little fact, her favorite Hitch. He hoped not.

  Several landings of stairwell lights seemed out. A code violation. He started down.

  Staggering and groping along in the dimness, the echoes of his own footfalls reverberating, plangent—the sound of an army chasing behind, an organized militia of Death’s minions ready to do the work at which they’d thus far failed, ignominious and incompetent. Down, down, down, ankles turning and claws grasping along the cold metal rail.

  Remembering this feeling at the Dead show all those years ago. The minions of death, chasing him out of the arena.

  Wait—why was he running? It was time to let them take him.

  Devin turned on his heel and spread his arms wide to greet his tormentors, his pursuers, to welcome the dark riders with open arms… but seeing
no one behind him, in his disappointment he could but only lose his balance.

  His grasp, slipping from the railing. And tumbling down the stairwell, legs and arms flopping like a rag doll, his head striking with a sick crack against the concrete of the landing.

  For a brief instant, the stairwell shone bright as though lit by a flashbulb. Light that redshifted, then grayed out.

  All quiet and dark, the Now becoming Then; Devin, suffused with peace and satisfaction. Endless, black nothingness—just like heaven.

  Forty-One

  Devin

  April in South Carolina: the white-petaled Bradford pears in full blossom, granulated pine-tree pollen sweeping through in sandstorm gales of yellow, cool mornings and warm afternoons, dappled light, the smell of petrichor accompanying a morning rain shower, the breeze tickling Devin’s cheeks like butterfly kisses. Oftentimes spring didn’t last long before it got thick and humid. Devin, hoping that wasn’t the case this year. They would be living together near a small park with a gurgling creek. It would be nice to spend time out there. Maybe get a leash for the kitten.

  The spring semester not yet over, not quite, but Devin and Libby had already signed a lease on a funky duplex over in the Arcadia Mill Village, a neighborhood about a mile from campus across the railroad yard. The first of May signaled a new life together, young love in full bloom not unlike the trees whipped up by the steady breath of the springtime, blossoms swirling and dancing like fluffy wet snowflakes.

  Devin, Libby, a mixture of petals in their hair as they carried down cardboard boxes of record albums, books and other random possessions. Stowing the boxes in the Mustang parked in the concrete fire lane, trunk and doors open like a midnight blue, metal mockingbird flexing its wings and tail.

  “Maybe we’ll have enough money for me to replace my VCR, too,” Libby said. Her access to movies, mission critical.

  “I’ll do without food if I have to, angel.”

  The Arcadia neighborhood they’d chosen was filled with old houses where the mill workers had once lived, at least until that culture faded away and the city became more urbanized, not to mention all the textile jobs going overseas. At the peak four such enormous mills operated in Columbia, with one of them, located at the confluence of the three rivers, enjoying historic status as the first all-electric textile mill in the country; it had been wired and built by a small startup called General Electric, their first industrial installation. Devin, knowing this only because of a field trip back in high school to the museum now housed therein.