Out Through the Attic

by Quincy J. Allen

  She’d at least left him with a flask of imported Irish whiskey to celebrate a successful guide-in or lament a failed one. He pulled the flask from his pocket, twisted off the cap and held the flask up in salute to the retreating blotch of The Balor’s massive hull against a black sky as it blotted out the stars on its journey back into space. He tilted the flask into his mouth and took a couple of long swigs that burned sweetly as they went down. Quint closed his eyes and breathed deeply. He was exhausted, and the adrenaline was starting to wear off. Before he knew it, he was sound asleep.

  

  A chill as deep as the grave seeped into Quint’s body, startling him awake. It was an unnatural cold very different from the normal cold of the oncoming Dea-Domhan winter. He opened his eyes when his ears picked up an eerie, rhythmic chanting coming from down the hill towards the direction of where The Balor had delivered its payload. The cold deepened, and for the first time since his arrival he could see his breath as he exhaled into the sky. A ghostly shimmer at the corner of his vision forced him to turn his head and stare into the darkness as a tingle of fear gripped him. There was nothing there, but the cold didn’t abate. He stood up and put his frozen hands into his armpits, turning towards the project site.

  His eyes widened and his jaw dropped open. He found himself suddenly questioning his sanity and an even greater fear tightened itself around his insides.

  He could now see where the chanting was coming from. The area down the hill was surrounded with lit torches, and a great bonfire shone brightly at the center of the newly arrived circle of massive stones. Circles of people in white, hooded robes surrounded the bonfire, hundreds of them. The bone-chilling cold seemed to fade, and the temperature returned to normal, abating his fear somewhat.

  “What the hell?” All he could do was stare in disbelief. Stonehenge, Kyteler’s prize, was there just as it should be, but everything else made no sense at all. As he stood staring at the spectacle, he caught an occasional glimmer of faded, bluish-white forms, looking almost like glowing smoke, meandering through the sparse vegetation of the area moving away from the bonfire.

  One of the hooded figures detached itself from the edge of the circle and started walking up the hill towards him. He instinctively reached for his service-blaster and realized that they didn’t issue them on colony worlds where there wasn’t indigenous fauna. He spotted a few more ghostly wisps receding into the darkness away from the flame as the hooded figure approached.

  Quint struggled with a severe flight-or-fight conflict, but finally curiosity won out as the hooded figure entered the small clearing of the encampment. Delicate hands lifted up and pulled back the hood to reveal beautiful green eyes, fiery red hair, and freckled cheeks.

  “Quint …” Maggie started but she didn’t know quite where to begin.

  Quint grasped on to the tangible reality of the woman he loved as an anchor in the sea of confusion that threatened to wash him away. “You mind telling me what the hell is going on?” He didn’t know if he should be angry, scared or just chuck it all and go crazy right then and there.

  “This is what it was all about, Quint. I meant to tell you, but there wasn’t any way. You’d have to see it to believe it …. from the beginning.” She reached out her hand and smiled in the bewitching way that always hooked his heart.

  “Uhh … and what is this, exactly?” They moved closer and held each other. He latched onto the solid footing of her embrace, and the seas of confusion around him calmed.

  “Kyteler … he died just after buying Stonehenge from the Earth government. They needed the money and his lawyers were able to make the case to the Unified Systems Council that Stonehenge was a piece of Celtic heritage. He had himself buried there amongst the old graves around the monument. He wanted to live forever, and this was his only option.”

  “You haven’t answered me,” he said a bit more pointedly than he intended. Perhaps it was caused by the wispy ghost of a woman slowly walking by wearing clothing that looked like it came from the dark ages. The air chilled once again, and they could suddenly both see their breath in the night air.

  “Good, old-fashioned, Irish ghosts,” Maggie said quietly and without fear. “A new Irish world needs Irish ghosts. Stonehenge let us wake them here. We brought Kyteler back from the dead a short while ago along with the others.” She kissed him gently and hugged him. “Welcome home, Quint,” she said and never let go of him.

  Salting Dogwood

  (Originally appeared in Spirit Legends: Of Ghosts and Gods from RuneWright Publishing in August 2011.)

  JULY 17, 1918—HEMPHILL, TEXAS

  Time is a funny thing to a ghost. It stretches and bends and squats down in hot times like wax. It can fold over on itself or even break when the world is cold. That’s how Harriet Truth’s ghost knew it was just about time to move on. It was the promise she’d made to her daddy that held her to earth when the Lord’s light called her, but what pulled at her now came from somewhere else.

  Her ghost flickered and shimmered beside old Preacher Johnson, listening to him speak kindly of a lamb taken too soon and a woman who had already known too much loss. Her mamma’s crying was hard, and this, the second funeral in ten years. It was a long, drawn-out wailing full of agonized sobs and a bereaved askance hurled at Heaven and He who ruled it with such apparent indifference. The cries pressed in on Harriet like fresh-dug earth on a coffin. Her mamma kneeled between the old grave and the new. She’d cried the same way when they buried Harriet’s daddy after the lynching. Daddy’s headstone was small and plain and not even paid for by the county like it had been for most of the others. Harriet stepped in front of her mamma and traced fingers over the 1908 of her father’s stone and then the 1918 of her own. It was just one more 1918 added to the millions carved into wood and stone in the aftermath of the great influenza epidemic. Those ten years had passed quickly, her promise clouding over everything.

  With a fold of time, Harriet returned to those two dark weeks full of burning crosses and tightened nooses. She stood in the middle of that last, black night when white shrouds dragged her daddy out of the house, lit the house aflame and set daddy in the nearest blackjack oak waiting for someone to cut him down. Daddy had screamed and told mother and child to run out the back as fast as they could. Daddy would be the last of the nine killed. Mother clutched daughter, hidden in the woods until sun-up. Then they returned to the ash of their small home and discovered what had been left for them in the blackjack out front. Her mother had gone running and screaming to get help, but that was the spot where Harriet waited, looking up at her daddy, her hand resting on his still boot. That’s where she made her promise.

  The murder of a white man set it all off. Most around Geneva knew Hugh Dean. He was a peaceful man, not inclined towards the antipathy to blacks that was day-to-day in East Texas and much of America. He’d been shot to death in Rockhill Church right there in Geneva, and rumor had it that the six black men who ended up in the Sabin County Jail were responsible. A few nights after their arrest, a mob of over a hundred came, some in white, some not, and most carrying torches. The first five were hanged, and the sixth was shot trying to escape. Two more black men were hanged the following night outside of Hemphill. The next night they got Harriet’s daddy. He was the ninth man guilty of being black. The whites in East Texas all figured justice had been served and forgot the whole thing.

  Time folded in on Harriet again, taking her back a few days and revealing the truth. It was Dean’s affable nature that did him in. Harriet stood inside Rockhill Church surrounded by white shrouds. Morning sunlight hit the congregation through stained glass, painting rainbows across a hood-pointed, white canvas. It wasn’t Sunday, and there was no preacher. At the pulpit stood a man in red who hollered into the sea of white like a hurricane building up into something terrible. He reminded Harriet of a dragon, eyes all aflame.

  “My brothers! I’ve heard that the town of Geneva is not pure!” He was a thick man, but strong,
in his late twenties, and his malevolent eyes almost glowed beneath slim eyebrows of black. The congregation denied the accusation, but they knew the truth. “What’s more, I’ve heard that one of our own, a white man, has taken to treating those mongrels like they were more than animals!”

  In one voice they shouted, “Dean!”

  The dragon’s voice quieted almost to a whisper, but the fire in his eyes grew ten-fold. “My brothers, I have a plan that will allow us to rid Geneva of the traitor and set many fruit in our righteous dogwood tree! All I will say is that when you find the traitor’s body, find dogs to collar for the crime, and the Klan will serve up its justice. I will return when they are caged and rid Sabin County of the impure.” He paused, taking a long deep breath, and stared down at upturned hoods framing bright, hungry eyes. “ARE YOU WITH ME, MY BROTHERS?” he screamed.

  A chorus of unified, bloodthirsty hatred bathed him in its heat as the congregation shouted “YES!”

  Another fold set Harriet in a lavish downtown Houston office days later. She stood just inside a closed door, the backs of three men faced her, and a thick man with black hair sat concealed behind a desk and an upraised newspaper. She heard a satisfied chuckle from behind the newspaper and then watched it slowly descend, set upon the desk like a hard-won trophy. The face exposed was that of the dragon, but the fire in his eyes shone as nothing more than a simmering spark waiting to be rekindled.

  “Gentlemen, Dean is dead,” the dragon purred. “Murdered in Rockhill. Six have been arrested and await us in the Hemphill County Jail. Send word and gather the flock. We will make our way to Hemphill tomorrow night and mete out the justice of the Klan.”

  The vision faded before Harriet like smoke exhaled into a breeze. The dragon’s voice shrank to a distant whisper. The haze was replaced with the peaceful silence of her own grave after the last tear was shed, the last mourner departed. She kneeled upon the fresh earth covering her coffin and traced a finger over the date carved into her headstone once again. Harriet shuffled back across her grave and thrust her arm down through the cold, loose earth. She didn’t have to search. The postcard came up out of the earth clutched in her hand, and she stared at the picture.

  On the night the first six had met Klan justice, someone in white took a photograph of their dogwood tree and its grisly fruit. A few days later, the Harkrider Drug Co. in Center, Texas made a postcard out of it. Such postcards were common in those days. Lynching was something people bragged about, and folks bought and sent them to friends and family showing what they’d seen, even boasting they’d been there or taken part. It wasn’t the first such postcard Harriet had seen, nor would it be the last, but it was the only one she kept.

  Harriet had been sick for a week before going on to the Lord’s grace. She had seen plenty go before her as a result of the sickness that swept around the world. On the fifth day of coughing, knowing what was coming, she asked her mamma to get the postcard out of her secret box under the bed where she’d kept it safe for ten years. At first her mamma fought her, cursing the card and threatening to burn it, but Harriet, laying in feverish sweat and coughing thick globs of death, was suddenly very serious.

  “Mamma,” she said, “I needs that card … to remind me of the promise I made to Daddy. And I wants you to bury me with it.” Another coughing fit took her, and hot tears scorched their way down her face. “Promise me.”

  With tears of her own, her mother made the promise with her eyes closed and a hateful heart then handed the card to Harriet. Harriet took the card carefully in her hand, staring at the tree and the men in it. She flipped it over to the poem on the back. She’d never learned to read, but she’d heard the poem enough times to remember it. It was entitled The Dogwood Tree, and she recited the words to herself so her mother couldn’t hear:

  This is only the branch of a Dogwood tree;

  An emblem of WHITE SUPREMACY.

  A lesson once taught in the Pioneer’s school,

  That this is a land of WHITE MAN’S RULE.

  The Red Man once in an early day,

  Was told by the Whites to mend his way.

  The negro, now, by eternal grace,

  Must learn to stay in the negro’s place.

  In the Sunny South, the Land of the Free,

  Let the WHITE SUPREME forever be.

  Let this a warning to all negroes be,

  Or they’ll suffer the fate of the DOGWOOD TREE”

  Slipping the postcard in her apron, Harriet’s ghost felt a tug upon her soul and drifted through silence to her next resting place to await her opportunity.

  MARCH 27TH, 1925—INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA

  Madge Oberholtzer locked her office door and walked down the hall of the Indiana State Department of Education building. For three years, she’d been teacher and administrator of the literacy program for disadvantaged children of any race. Her shoes echoed off tiled floors and stone walls as she headed towards the ladies’ room. It was because of her job that she’d met David Curtiss Stephenson.

  Stephenson had caught her attention back in January at the annual State employees’ dinner. He’d done his best to sweep her off her feet, with a fire in his eyes that stirred something within Madge, but the stirring wasn’t amorous. It was attraction, like bees to honey, but bereft of desire. He was a few years older than her, heavyset with a shock of black hair covering his head and slim eyebrows over narrow, calculating eyes. He was wealthy, very powerful and deeply involved in politics. He’d been instrumental in helping Jackson win the ‘24 Governor’s election only a few months earlier. He courted Madge throughout dinner and, despite having no actual interest in the man, she found herself accepting his offer for another date that turned into a third. He was courteous and polite, taking her to expensive restaurants in his chauffeured Cadillac, and yet she felt nothing for him.

  When she was in her teens she wanted nothing more than to marry and have children, but her fever during the great epidemic seemed to have burned the dream right out of her. From that moment on, all she had cared about was teaching children how to read. And yet, in the back of her mind there was a strange sense of waiting for something, and she wondered if Stephenson was it.

  Things had gone badly at the end of their third date. The conversation had turned to more personal matters, and Stephenson mentioned with bravado that he was the recently anointed Grand Dragon of Indiana and leader of 250,000 pure, white souls. Her stomach turned, and that’s when she’d told him about the nature of her students. She’d expected him to explode, to scream and curse her, but he hadn’t. He’d looked at her with a wicked little smile, as if he’d known all along, and his eyes sparked like the devil himself was dancing inside his skin. She’d excused herself, boarded a trolley and ignored his calls and messages for almost three months.

  And then he’d called, only a few hours ago. Madge had been seated in her small office grading papers and preparing for her next class when the phone rang. She normally didn’t take calls until after her last class. It was as if her hands belonged to someone else. She watched them put down the papers, pull the candlestick phone-stand towards her and lift the small receiver off its hook. The receiver to her ear, she leaned in to the mouthpiece, her mouth shaping words that weren’t hers. “Indiana State literacy program, this is Miss Oberholtzer.”

  “Please don’t hang up.”

  Recognizing his voice stirred within her a feeling of immediate disgust. His speech was slurred, albeit slightly, as if he had been drinking, which surprised her since prohibition was well respected in Indiana. She felt the urge to simply slam the receiver down, but something stayed her hand.

  “What is it you want, Mr. Stephenson?” Her question came through, toneless and cold.

  “My reasons are professional not personal, I assure you,” he said in his firm, silky-smooth Texas drawl. He’d told her when they first met that he had been raised in Houston.

  “What could you possibly have to speak with me about in a professional sense?” Her own curio
sity surprised her.

  “I’m glad you asked. The truth is I was speaking with Governor Jackson this morning. We both believe that someone of your distinct qualifications and demeanor would be ideally suited to a new position he’s creating.”

  “Forgive me if I’m not a little suspicious, Mr. Stephenson. We’re very different people.” She didn’t hide her distaste.

  “True enough, to be sure, but that’s the reason the Governor thought of you. This position is something for the good of the State. Would you be disposed to come discuss it this evening? I can send my car to pick you up.”

  She wanted to refuse, to tell the wretch that she had no interest in anything he or the Governor—whom she knew was also Klan—had to offer, but she heard herself saying, “Certainly, Mr. Stephenson, as long as your intentions are of a professional nature. You may have your man pick me up at five o’clock.”

  “Thank you, Miss Ober—”

  She hung up the phone and stared at it as if she’d never seen one before. She wracked her brain for some explanation as to why she would have conceded to his request. It was impossible, and she couldn’t imagine what possessed her.

  An image floated up out of her thoughts like cloudy mud when you step into a still pond. Madge had a vision of Stephenson, but it didn’t come from her memories, and it wasn’t in Indiana. The memory was ghostly, faded, smoky, like a dream seen through a dirty mirror. Stephenson wore crimson and screamed into an ocean of pious white hoods spotted with strange patterns of color. His eyes were that of a fiery dragon, and he breathed smoke.

  The vision faded, and she found herself standing before the ladies’ room door. She shook her head, trying to clear the frightful vision, and walked in. She stepped up to the sink, turned on the water and stared at her reflection. The face seemed almost foreign to her, and a chill coursed its way through her body. She leaned down, splashed her face with water and lifted her head.