by Adam Selzer
And I decide not to dwell on it. All that matters is that after the tour, the tips are the best I’ve ever gotten, and in the morning Cyn texts me to say that we have three new five-star reviews online.
Chapter Twelve
“It doesn’t matter how much money you make or how much power you have or how much control you feel, when you die, you’re likely to end up naked and pooping. That’s just the way it is. And that’s . . . very egalitarian, and very equalizing, and I really like it.”
—CAITLIN DOUGHTY, ASK A MORTICIAN
In my research I find an interview with a “professional subject-gatherer” (a very polite term for “one who steals bodies to sell to medical schools”) in an 1878 issue of the Tribune. When asked if he enjoyed the work, he said, “Well, it wasn’t very pleasant at first, of course, but anyone gets used to it.”
That’s the way it is with creating psychic imprints. You get used to it. Fast. “Ghosting” old chronic patients starts to feel like a simple chore, like sweeping the spiders off the bus before the tour, or filling it up with gas after the weekend.
If they ever make a movie about Mysterious Chicago, they could probably show a whole montage of me and Cyn taking care of volunteers throughout July. With “Poor Unfortunate Souls” playing in the background, probably.
Sometimes we use the gorilla mask, and sometimes not.
We always offer to do things the way the volunteers want them done. One woman asks us to learn the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee” so we can sing it right before she shuffles off her mortal coil at the Holmes body dump. I’m not a great singer, and singing her off isn’t as good for our purposes as scaring her, but it’s a reasonable request, so we give it our best. And it might be my imagination, but the next night, when the tour stops at the dump, I think I hear the melody of the hymn, riding on the wind.
And I’m almost sure that I see the woman’s shadow.
It could always be something else. There’s always another possible explanation. But it’s undeniable the dump seems infinitely spookier once we’ve done some charity work there.
Our “subjects” are always so grateful to us that it really feels like we’re just doing a good deed, like shoveling their sidewalk or cleaning their bedpans or something. These aren’t suicidal people who could have benefited from help from a mental health professional; they’re terminal cases whose lives are effectively over already. We have guidelines regarding this sort of thing. They have to be chronically sick, above the age of average life expectancy, and totally and enthusiastically consenting. The one time a person seems a bit nervous about it, we cancel the whole thing and bring her back home. We don’t take any “clients” who have second thoughts.
She dies two days later anyway.
And we’re back at work on day three.
Cyn seems like she’s determined to make ghosts real just so Rick can show them to people. He notices the uptick in ghost sightings on the tours, and his tours get even better. As far as he knows, the ghosts people are seeing really could be people who died there years ago. For my part, when I’m running the tour, I tell the historical stories, and when people think they see a ghost, I just let them go on thinking it’s a ghost from the story I was telling. It’s not being dishonest, exactly. I’m just leaving certain parts out. And hell, I don’t know what they’re really seeing, either. I’m never totally sure that the brain punch thing really works.
Our five-star reviews multiply quickly.
And so does our average number of customers per night.
One day at the end of July I come outside to find that we’ve had one of the biggest single-day drops in temperature ever recorded in Cook County. It’s like summer has slipped out for a smoke, and autumn has crept in early while its back was turned. The air is crisp, the sky is gray, and it feels like heaven to me. I put on my long jacket and feel like I’m taking myself out of storage and coming back to life. A good six weeks earlier than I normally get to. It’s unnatural, maybe, but I don’t give a damn.
I leave Forest Park way early for the tour that night, take the Blue Line clear to Wicker Park, and spend way more than I should on the witchiest pair of boots John Fluevog makes. They’re out of my price range and not really practical for standing up on moving buses, but the heels make me feel so tall and powerful that I have to have them.
On Clark Street, Terrence the caricature guy has a leather jacket on. Tourists from Florida act like they’re in Frozen, huddling together as if temperatures in the sixties are something they’ve never felt.
Cyn grins at my outfit and says, “You look so goth, you’d tag walls with a fountain pen.”
I smile.
“You ever think about dyeing your hair black again?” I ask.
“Not really. The old people at the home might not like it. But I do miss it.”
“It made your skin look better. It was so bright next to the black hair. If you ever saw it, you would even say it glowed.”
She nods, and we just make general small talk about skin care, boots, and the weather, like strangers who are chatting for the first time.
We don’t once mention what we’d done the night before in the Alley of Death and Mutilation.
Not even later, when someone takes a picture there that looks almost like a full-body apparition of an old man crouching by the stage door. The kind of ghost you’d normally only see in a movie.
The cool weather holds into August. It’s almost like a miracle. Like something has thrown off the natural order of things.
If the leaves were changing color, and gallon jugs of the good apple cider had started showing up, perched on top of haystacks outside of the grocery store and next to the pumpkins and gourds at the weekend farmers’ market, it would feel just like autumn. It feels close enough as it is.
Zoey still hasn’t sent a picture, but I send enough cute selfies for both of us, now that I can dress the way I like to. It’s still a bit too warm for the jacket in the middle of the day, when the temperature hits its high, but it’s cool enough in the mornings and the evenings.
Some people try to pretend the change in the weather isn’t happening. I still see girls in short shorts and bikini tops walking around outside, even though they’ve got to be freezing. When we drive up Lake Shore Drive, there are still people swimming beside us along the edge of Lake Michigan.
But other people surrender, and just admit that October has come home early this year. We never put up Halloween decorations at the house—that’d be in pretty poor taste at a funeral home—so I’ve always relied on my neighbors. A house near mine always puts out theirs early—they usually have a bunch of little plastic skeletons that dangle from their tree and dance in the wind—and this year they start even earlier. It’s not even September, and they have the skeletons out.
I love this.
I go tromping around wearing boots like Gaston.
While Cyn and I perfect our technique as charitable ghosters, Rick and I refine our two-step act on the tours we run together. One prank that goes over particularly well is pulling up next to people at traffic lights and asking if they want to come to the body dump with us. One time we pull up at a stoplight next to a guy who’s riding around with a girl and just say, “You wanna see a dead body?”
He waves and says, “I got dead bodies in the trunk, man!”
“Well, pop it, Al Capone!” says Rick. “Let’s see!”
And the dude pops his trunk. I jump off the bus and start rooting around inside. Obviously there aren’t any bodies in it, just a bunch of baseball equipment, but when the traffic light ahead of us changes, I slam it shut, jump back on the bus before we start moving, and pretend it was full of corpses.
“You knew to sever the arteries and everything!” I say. “You’ve done this before!”
“Sure have!” the guy says. “And she’s next!”
He points at his girlfriend, who smiles and laughs as they drive away.
I’d say that it’s kind of a fucked up joke to make
, but it isn’t that different from Rick’s and Cyn’s sense of humor as a couple, really. Cyn jokes about killing Rick pretty regularly, and now and then he’ll give it right back to her.
I don’t ask, but I’m pretty sure their relationship is in “on again” mode.
One night on a ten o’clock tour, when it’s actually dark out, we pull into the body dump and there’s a van that’s a-rocking.
I can just picture the guy saying, “Come on, baby, I know the perfect little dead-end street, no one ever goes there. . . .” Then here comes the tour bus!
Our being there does not stop them. For a minute I think I should tap the window, just to let them know they aren’t alone, but then I think of Mrs. Weyher and figure that maybe they’ll help us out a little.
One OED synonym for having an orgasm is “die.” Like, half the time they say “die” in Shakespeare, they mean it both ways.
Maybe there’s more than one way to make a ghost by dying at the body dump.
We experiment a bit with new stops, especially places where Cyn and I have taken care of someone. The first time Rick steers the bus up to Death Corner, we notice something weird: snow.
One of the four vacant lots surrounding the corner is fenced off, and behind the fence is a thin layer of snow.
Snow!
The weather is colder, but not that much colder.
We all step out and wander up to the fence that blocks access to the lot itself. The snow starts a few feet inside, so no one can quite reach it to see if it’s cold. But it’s there, and there are footprints going through it, like a ghost has walked through. Or danced through, really. The footprints don’t seem to go in any logical path, just all over. It’s positively chilling.
But after the customers get off the bus at the end of the tour, Rick just laughs.
“It’s probably just some weed killer,” he says. “They’re about to put up townhouses there.” Then he pauses, looks up thoughtfully, and says, “I hope someone has the foresight to call their house ‘the House at Death Corner.’ Get kind of a goth Winnie-the-Pooh vibe going.”
I don’t tell him, of course, about the old woman, all skin and bones, who was punched in the brain right outside the fence two nights before.
One night, when we have two tours to run, I pull a trick on Rick.
The week before, I ordered a commemorative James Garfield spoon, just like the ones that had been stolen from his tomb, off eBay for the whopping price of ninety-nine cents. And on the seven o’clock tour, I hop the fence at the Couch tomb and slide it about halfway under the door, so the handle is sticking out.
On the ten o’clock tour, I direct Rick to take a route that I know will get us stuck in traffic, then have him tell the people all of his theories about the theft of the spoons from the James Garfield tomb.
“Now, here’s the real kicker,” he says. “The guy who shot Garfield was a Chicago man. Charles Guiteau. A complete nut who sort of failed his way through life. One of the things he failed at was joining a free-love cult called the Oneida Community. They kicked him out and he tried to sue them. Now, here’s the thing: the Oneida Community is still around, only they stopped having free love. You know what they do now instead of having sex?”
“What?” I ask.
“They manufacture silverware,” he says. “Spoons!”
He and I think this is the funniest thing ever, even though only a couple of customers laugh.
When we get to the tomb, I tell Rick I hurt my ankle hopping the fence on the seven o’clock tour and ask him to do it for me. Anytime you ask Rick to take the spotlight, he’ll do it.
So he puts the bus’s flashers on and leaves it by the side of the road, follows us out to the tomb, and jumps the fence. He notices the silvery glint sticking out from under the door right away.
“Hey, this is new.”
He pulls the spoon out and stares for a second. Once he realizes what it is, he shakes his head for a second, then starts to laugh so hard he literally falls onto the ground.
He isn’t fooled, of course. He knows right away that I planted it there. But once he gets ahold of himself enough that he can stand upright, he pats me on the shoulder and says, “Megan, I am so glad we hired you.”
Cyn continues to talk about hooking me up with one of her friends. Even while we’re heading up to the nursing home to pick someone up.
“You liked Morticia, right? Like, you would kiss her if you had the chance?
“She vanished. Like a breath into the wind.”
Cyn adjusts her ass in the seat.
“Have you ever texted Zoey while we were doing ‘charity work’?” she asks.
“Sure. I didn’t say what we were doing or anything, but I talk to her basically constantly.”
“She could still trace it to where you were, probably.”
“It’d just look like we were out for a slice of pizza or something. And they know we’re signing people out at the home. Shanita does, at least.”
“True.”
We pull around, back behind the excursion bus, and I take the gorilla mask out of the Rubbermaid container. We’ve upgraded from the plastic Target bag we had the first time. You can tell business is picking up. We carry our gorilla mask of scary death in style now.
“If she won’t even send you a picture,” says Cyn, changing the subject back, “you deserve a better girlfriend.”
“It’s an anxiety thing for her.”
“And you don’t worry that she knows too much about you while you know nothing about her?”
I don’t answer that.
Because I do, sometimes.
I worry that if anything ever happens with us, like if I break up with her, she’ll spread the worst of my stories all over and tell everyone who I am and where I live and the name of Mom’s business and everything.
If I don’t want that to happen, I might be stuck with her.
But I’m okay with that. Every time something funny happens on the tour, Zoey is the first person I want to tell. I never get tired of talking to her. She knows just what to say to turn me on, and might be the only person on the planet who ever will.
If I can’t be with her in person, I’m happy just to love the shadow she casts over the internet, and let it love me back.
Chapter Thirteen
I wake up one morning to a flurry of panicked texts.
ZOEY BABY:
ARE YOU OKAY?
Then
ZOEY BABY:
PLEASE ANSWER, MEGAN
Then
ZOEY BABY:
ARE YOU THERE? I NEED NEED NEED TO HEAR FROM YOU.
I roll over onto my back, rub the crud out of my eyes, and type back, “I didn’t get you pregnant last night, did I, baby?” with a couple of smiley faces.
This is the kind of “cute couple game” you do when you can’t have proper tickle fights—you joke about getting each other pregnant when it’s well beyond the bounds of biology for many different reasons. But she isn’t in the mood to joke today; she is genuinely scared about something.
She sends back a million or so emojis, and then a link to a news story. Some maniac has shot up a shopping center in Crystal Lake, a strip-mall town up in the far north suburbs. I tell her not to worry—I’ve never even been to Crystal Lake—then get up out of bed.
Mom and Clarice are in the living room, watching the live news. The maniac has been cornered in the back of a store someplace, and the SWAT team is surrounding it.
“Rough morning,” says Mom. “Six kids so far. More in the hospital.”
Clarice smokes and exhales deeply.
“What was this guy’s issue?” I ask.
“He posted something online about demons,” says Mom. “But who the hell knows?”
For a second I feel like a slimeball.
He’s blaming the supernatural. Aren’t I just encouraging people to blame the supernatural when something happens that they don’t understand right away? Even if I try not to? I’ve noticed that no
matter how insistent I am that the “devil baby” was just a rumor that went around in 1913, people get out of the bus and ask where it was buried, or if I’ve ever seen its ghost.
I sit and watch the news and sneakily text with Zoey a bit, telling her what a shit-pot I feel like. She texts back that I’m the good kind of ghost-tour guide. That if my customers didn’t come on my tour, they’d just go on an even less responsible one.
She’s right, I guess. If I wasn’t in the business, if Mysterious Chicago didn’t exist, it wouldn’t stop people from going on ghost tours. They’d just go on a DarkSide tour, or another one that didn’t care about getting the stories right. One that actively told them to think every stray light in their photos was a dead person up and floating around.
This is why Mysterious Chicago is here. To be the honest company. We are the ragtag band of rebels sweeping out the bullshit, just like Brandon said.
I still sort of feel like an asshole, though. I’m supposed to be working tonight. How can I make all those flippant jokes about death on a night like this? I wonder if Rick and Cyn will just cancel tonight’s tour.
Rick calls around ten in the morning.
“You ever hear of a guy called Vaughn Meader?” he asks.
“Nope.”
“He was a JFK impersonator. Legend has it that when Kennedy was shot, Lenny Bruce had to go onstage that night. First thing he said was ‘Poor Vaughn Meader.’ ”
“Have you ever had to run a tour on a night like this?”
“Are you kidding? People get shot up like this all the time in this country. It’s worse when it’s kids though.”
“So what do you do?”
“Well, if you’re lucky, it’ll all be tourists who’ve been hanging out at Navy Pier all day and didn’t hear the news yet.”
“Right. But even so . . . the Alley of Death and Mutilation is out. I can’t talk about dead kids today.”
“The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre site is out, too. And Death Corner. God. I might even skip the body dump, if I were you. No places with shootings or murders. No disaster sites where kids were among the victims.”
