by Adam Selzer
“Ever hear of a former insane asylum that wasn’t supposed to be haunted?”
He pulls a flask from his pocket and offers me a sip. I turn him down. If it was after the tour I might take it, but I don’t want to be lightheaded at work.
“I don’t really traffic much in those kinds of stories,” I say. “I’m afraid I’m gonna get fact-checked.”
“Look,” he says as he unscrews his flask. “I know our stories are shit. But Edward’s got a fan base. And when they come on a DarkSide tour, they want the Edward stories.”
“Fair enough.”
“And keep this on the down low, but I’m in talks with Ghostly Journeys, the company down in New Orleans, to bring them up here.”
This is interesting news.
“I heard someone was.”
“Sooner or later someone’s gonna do like Vince McMahon did to pro wrestling in the ’80s. Gather up all the best talent from the rinky-dink local markets and build an empire. You want a job? You could get more tours with me, and they’re talking to that TV fucker, too. If we get you, we get the show. I’m sure that’d clinch it.”
“I’m pretty loyal to Rick and Cyn.”
“Yeah, but how many tours do you get to run?”
“Couple a week, usually. Sometimes three.”
“What if I got you three or four more, and paid you double? Because one day Rick’s gonna get a part in some B-list sitcom pilot and leave you out to dry.”
I’m about to tell Aaron off when I hear a voice behind me that makes me forget all about him.
“Hey.”
I turn to see a vision in black, with red hair and a giant, unbelievable smile.
Morticia.
Our vanishing hitchhiker.
I try to smile back half as alluringly as she smiles, and forget all about Aaron Saltis and Ghostly Journeys.
“Hi, you,” I say. “We were starting to think you were a ghost the whole time.”
She laughs. “Well, who says I’m not?”
“No one,” I say. “In fact, I sort of like to imagine that you are.”
Aaron breaks in and says, “I can’t see through you,” but she doesn’t take any notice of him. She keeps looking at me as she wiggles her fingers in front of her face and says, “Boo.”
Then she smiles.
Oh God. She’s flirting with me.
Outrageously, even.
“I’m Megan,” I say.
“I know.” She laughs. “It’s my last night in town, and I wanted to tell you how much fun I had on the tour. Thought you might be here.”
“You want to come again tonight?” I ask. “On the house?”
She smiles, then nods. “Sure.”
I excuse myself from Aaron, and Morticia and I walk out to the Ronald McDonald statue and chat a little bit.
I’d thought she was in town for the comic convention before, but she says she’s been in town for the summer, working some sort of marketing internship. She says her name is Enid. No one’s name is Enid. But I don’t care if she’s lying, really. It’s better if she is, in a way. Obviously I’m not trying to cheat on Zoey with her if I don’t even try to get her real name, right?
Right?
I tell her all about Lillian Collier, and all the research I’m doing, and the word “snuggle-pupping,” which she thinks is the best word she’s ever heard, too.
“How would you like to be known as one who snuggle-pups?” I ask.
She laughs. “I’d like it fine.”
Then she demurely sips from a water bottle and looks out at the city.
“There aren’t many people like me back home,” she says. “If you know what I mean. I was sort of hoping I’d meet someone here. Have a little fling. Get some snuggle-pupping in.”
“Yeah?”
“Hasn’t happened yet, though.”
And she bats her eyelashes.
At me.
Me.
I don’t give my very best tour that night. I’m usually not as good when Cyn drives as I am when Rick does, and anyway, I can’t focus because I’m too busy checking to see if Morticia (I still call her that in my head, not Enid) is looking at me. She usually is. I’m the tour guide, after all.
Every time she catches me looking, she smiles. Her teeth are perfect. I wish any part of me was as perfect as her teeth. I pretend not to notice when she brushes her shoulder against mine in the Alley of Death and Mutilation.
At Hull House, as customers roam through the courtyard and peer into the front windows, I walk around to the back of the house. Morticia comes around behind me. We’re alone.
I know I shouldn’t be doing this blatant flirting.
Not with Zoey and all.
But I’m like a moth and Morticia’s like a flame.
“You know,” she says, “you’re really good at this job.”
“Thanks.”
“Lillian Collier would be proud of you, cuddle cootie.”
I smile, and she moves an inch closer. I can feel her breath on my face. She is totally coming on to me.
“So this is your last night in town?” I ask.
She nods. “Going home tomorrow.”
Her toes bump into mine.
I feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck, and for the first time ever, I really, really feel like there’s something supernatural about Hull House.
But it probably isn’t ghosts making me freak out.
“Are you going to disappear outside of the Water Tower again?” I ask.
“Do you want me to?”
“I sort of like the illusion,” I say. “There was a cemetery there once, so it’s like you’re our own beautiful vanishing hitchhiker.”
“I can disappear again and make it part of the show,” she says.
“When you go back home, you’ll leave a ghost story behind in Chicago.”
I feel her breath on my nose, and she wiggles her fingers in front of her face and says, “Are you scared of me?” with a teasing smile.
Every sign I can pick up tells me she wouldn’t stop me from kissing her.
And I want to.
I have really been wanting to find a way to kiss someone (without technically cheating on Zoey, of course). I’m really starting to feel like I’m missing out on something as a human being by never getting a real kiss. Cyn is making too many good points. If I can get it out of the way and see that it’s no big deal, not a necessary part of life, I can get her off my back. A harmless kiss with a girl who, for all practical purposes, functions as a ghost wouldn’t count as cheating, right? It would just be a way to cross something off my bucket list.
Then I hit on another idea.
“So, Jane Addams and her partner shared a bed for years,” I say. “But Victorians had these, like, romantic friendships. They might have been partners and girlfriends and all of that without ever getting physical. Poor unfortunate souls.”
She giggles a tiny bit, then says, “Let’s pretend we’re them and make up for lost time,” and then I feel her lips on mine.
She’s kissing me.
Oh, sweet holy Christmas hell. She is kissing me. I am being kissed.
And I am kissing her back.
Kissing! I am kissing!
It isn’t us kissing. As far as I’m concerned, we’re acting as proxies for Jane and Mary. It’s like a whole century of their romantic tension is being released in one beautiful kiss. But it feels incredible for me, too. It’s perfect and I feel like I’m going to leave an imprint behind on Hull House with my brain waves.
We’re still kissing a few seconds later when I hear the sound of Cyn starting the bus back up. Morticia gives me one more smile, then heads back for the bus. A DarkSide bus has pulled up, which is our cue to get going.
I feel like I could float to the body dump as the sun sets, hitting the skyline just right, so the city looks like a matte painting in an old movie, glowing and golden and beautiful against a red cloud sky.
I rely on muscle memory to get through the re
st of the tour, because my brain is too busy thinking, I’ve been kissed. I’ve been kissed. I did it. I won’t die unkissed! It makes it a bit hard to think about what I’m doing.
Like we planned, Morticia asks to be let out near the Water Tower, and when Cyn opens the door for her, she steps off into the crowd.
This time I run off and try to follow, half-expecting her to leave a shoe behind and sort of hoping she won’t, because I know I’d follow her, and then, well, things could get complicated. But I can’t just let her go without a good-bye.
“Wait!”
“Didn’t you want me to just disappear?” she asks.
“I don’t think ‘want’ is the right word,” I say. “Is there a word for when you want something, but you also don’t?”
“ ‘Bittersweet’?”
“Something like that.”
She smiles again, then says, “Good-bye, snuggle-puppy,” gives me a very quick kiss, and slips into the crowd of Michigan Avenue tourists.
I didn’t even get her last name. Or probably even her real first one.
She’ll always be Morticia to me.
My name and info are up on the Mysterious Chicago website now. She can find me if she wants to. Maybe I’ll see her again sometime.
I make my way back onto the bus and go through the motions of saying that we’re on the grounds of an 1830s cemetery, so maybe she was a vanishing hitchhiker, but my knees are shaking, and no one thinks it was seriously a ghost sighting this time. They can tell I’m just kidding about it.
But I decide that I prefer to think of her as just a ghost. A real ghost. Who somehow had a couple of weeks to come back to life and have one more chance to kiss someone, because she never did when she was alive. Now she can go back to her grave, satisfied.
And I swept her off her feet.
She was owlblasted (first recorded in 1603). Elf-stricken (1699). Puckfoisted (1890).
By me.
I look up more words on the train home, trying to find a word for what I’m feeling, a word for feeling elated that something happened, even though it can never happen again. A word for being glad Morticia disappeared but also wishing she’d stayed. The only good historical synonym for “bittersweet” is “glycipricon,” first recorded in 1599. And the only time it was recorded after that was once in 1621, in Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. “He saith our whole life is a glycipricon, a bitter sweet passion.”
It was just a kiss with a girl I’ll almost certainly never see again.
And the kiss wasn’t even us, it was us standing in as proxies for Mary and Jane (or, anyway, that was the excuse I used).
But it’s good to know that I’m not going to die without knowing how it feels to kiss someone properly. That I am capable of making people want to kiss me.
A couple across from me on the train make out like they’re going for the gold.
The rumble of the train sounds like a round of applause.
Chapter Sixteen
The next morning I wake up to my phone buzzing again and again. Even more than it did the day the maniac shot up Crystal Lake. I roll over and check it to see a long list of messages.
ZOEY BABY:
There’s a review about your tour last night. On a blog.
ZOEY BABY:
Wake up! LOL
ZOEY BABY:
ALARM CLOCK!
She’s texting so fast that more messages come while I’m trying to write out a reply.
MEGAN:
You know I don’t read reviews! It’s like playing chicken with my self-esteem.
ZOEY BABY
Relax. This one’s good. Really good. They loved it.
ZOEY BABY:
Why did they think your girlfriend was on the bus, though?
Shit.
I don’t normally read reviews, but I follow the link Zoey sent, since I already know it’s a good one.
And it is a good one. But right in the middle of it, there’s a random line about “our tour guide’s girlfriend” disappearing from the tour toward the end. They thought I was just joking about her being a ghost, and thought it was very cute.
I open the OED online and look up some quick words to send Zoey.
MEGAN
Puzzling.
MEGAN:
Knurry (1615).
MEGAN:
Snaggled (1896).
A minute goes by, and then she sends one of her own:
ZOEY BABY
Sussy.
I have to look that one up. It means “suspicious.”
I read through the whole review, trying to figure out what I should tell Zoey, exactly, and whether it might be better just to tell the truth and lay it on the line.
But ten minutes later she sends more texts.
ZOEY BABY:
FUCK YOU. I HATE YOU. DIE.
Then she sends me a link, and it brings me to a photo-sharing page with all of the blogger’s pictures from the night before. Ones that weren’t on the blog post.
There is a picture in the courtyard at Hull House, and in the background you can see me kissing Morticia, with a caption saying, Our guide and her girlfriend sneak a kiss when they think no one is looking. Awwwww.
My vision goes blurry for a second, and I try to send Zoey a message saying we weren’t kissing as ourselves, but as Mary Rozet Smith and Jane Addams (even though I know it sounds like a stupid excuse).
There is no response.
She has signed out of every online account we use to chat. When I try to send her offline messages, I get notifications back saying the accounts have been deactivated.
The only new thing I see from her in the next hour is an anonymous comment on that blog post, saying I am a fucking two-timing lying bitch and I suck.
I read it over and over again.
My stomach ties itself in knots. The blood drains from my face. My head swims, and I nearly throw up a couple of times.
She’s completely right about me.
What I did was completely unacceptable. And I hate myself for making Zoey feel the way she must feel right now.
After over an hour of trying to get in touch with her, I spend some time just looking up names for myself in the OED, words like “hayne,” “hinderling,” “whelp,” and “pilgarlic.”
cittern-head (1598)
pode (1528)
ketterel (1572)
scabship (as in “her royal scabship”) (1589)
There aren’t enough words for what I am.
There is no blood in my heart, just some goopy black crud chugging along through my arteries.
I finally post a comment of my own on the blog post.
Please text me, Zoey. I can explain.
She never does.
And I stare at my phone all day, waiting.
The Blue Line is full of old women in raincoats.
And scab-scalped men with jowls down to about their collar bones.
Scruffy winos wearing winter coats in August.
Sinister looking jag-offs whose body spray infects the train car.
None of them are smiling. Today everyone on the train looks like they’re heading out to rob a grave, or going back to their home in the sewer tunnels. And I feel like I belong with them. Like one of the raincoats should open like a cocoon so I can just fold myself in, hibernate all the way to the end of the line, and crawl out as one of them when the train gets to the airport, revealed at last as a a hideous slimy old hag.
This is real villainy. Being a villain is not singing and cackling in castles and holding your arms in the air as your minions fly above you. It’s hurting people. Even people you care about.
When I get to the McDonald’s, Cyn is waiting with the bus.
“You okay?” she asks. “You look like shit.”
I shake my head, then break down and start crying into her shoulder.
She gives me a hug without making me tell her what’s wrong first, then leads me onto the bus and shuts the door, so I can spill my guts in peace. She n
ods along, and when I’m done she hugs me and tells me I’m not a bad person.
“Listen,” she says. “You didn’t do anything you didn’t have every right to do.”
“I didn’t have any right to cheat on Zoey,” I say. “I never told her she had to send a picture of herself or I’d think of myself as a free agent.”
“No one would blame you if you had, though,” says Cyn. “You should have. I was afraid you were gonna go through life and never kiss anyone, all for someone who’s actually a sixty-two-year-old man.”
I exhale and wipe my eyes. My eyeliner is a mess. Right before the tour.
“But she understood me,” I say. “I told her everything about me, and she didn’t get freaked out. I may never find anyone like that again. If Morticia had read my stories, she never, ever would have kissed me.”
Cyn leans back in her chair a little. She looks like she’s about to say something comforting, then she stops.
“Wait,” she says. “You say you told Zoey everything?”
“Yeah.”
“Even about . . . our charities?”
I shake my head. “I classified that next to nude pictures that showed my face. Even she didn’t have that level of clearance.”
Cyn relaxes, gives me a big hug, says, “Ah, bless your twisted little heart,” and lets me cry a bit more.
“Can you still go on with the tour tonight?” she asks. “I mean, I could do the tour and drive at the same time if I have to.”
“I can manage,” I say. “I need to think about something else for a while.”
While we wait on the last party of two to arrive, a drunk college-age guy in a backward baseball cap hobbles up to me.
“Whuz this?” he slurs.
“Ghost tour,” I say. “We take people around to murder sites, disaster sites, body dumps, and places like that.”
“For real?”
“Uh-huh.”
He looks at the bus. I can look at his eyeballs and practically see the booze sloshing around.
“Fucking awesome,” he says. “Do you know the guy on Ghost Encounters?”
“Not that well,” I say, lying to imply I’d ever met him, or wanted to meet him, at all. “But we have a lot of mutual friends.”
