Violet Ghosts

by Leah Thomas

  Once, that might have been a relief.

  “But if the killer is a vindictive bastard, he’s almost definitely haunting the place.” Sarah voiced our fears. “If we’re looking to try an exorcism, Dani, we’re probably gonna find a good target at the petting zoo.”

  Patricia shook her head. “I don’t think we should start our shelter outreach there. We don’t have the resources to provide for ten people, not yet.”

  “And we don’t know how to do an exorcism yet, even if we find the killer there,” I added.

  Sarah nodded. “Yeah, I know. We’ll build up to that bastard.” She closed her eyes, and the cursor moved the map until we were looking at a few small spots in another, more familiar part of Rochdale.

  “Downtown,” I said, as Patricia gasped, “That’s close to this motel.”

  “It’s actually in the motel,” Sarah said quietly. “Come on. A place this seedy, you had to know we weren’t the only ones haunting it. A girl was found bound and strangled in one of the rooms back in the fifties. Her name was Adelaide Williams. She was seventeen years old.”

  “What happened to her?” I asked.

  Patricia had her hand on her throat, rubbing old bruises in sympathy.

  “A man happened to her.” Sarah swallowed. “She was strapped to the bed for four days before anyone found her, because the Do Not Disturb tag was on the door. Whoever killed her had already skipped town. Motherfucker.”

  I stared at the red spot, so close to this supposed sanctuary. The spot was one of several in the downtown area, but it was the only one on our doorstep.

  We’d been here for years, and never known someone might be suffering beside us.

  “Okay,” I said grimly. “Where is she?”

  BUD LIGHT

  After we knocked on apartment 7’s door, no one answered for a good five minutes. Darkness had arrived. Despite the anger that had fueled us up the stairs and out the door and across the parking lot, in the frosted quiet, adrenaline abandoned me.

  “Are you sure someone’s in there?” I whispered. Sarah sat small and warm on my shoulder, kicking her skinny legs against my throbbing ribs.

  “Definitely. I slipped under the door to check.”

  “I didn’t even notice.” I hadn’t felt her weight leave me.

  “I’m telling you, the current tenant is in there, drinking beer on the sofa.”

  I inhaled through my teeth. Her description triggered some visceral memories.

  But whoever lived here was not my dad.

  “Knock again.” Sarah tugged on my earlobe.

  “Fine!” I raised my fist—­

  The door popped open and there stood one of our half dozen sorry tenants. I’d seen this guy around, but knew nothing about him besides his name. None of our tenants seemed to last long, apart from the little old woman in apartment 3.

  This man could have been anyone in Rochdale. He had a beer belly and a scruffy face, and looked like he worked too much for too little.

  “You need something?”

  “Yes, actually.” I cleared my throat, running through what we’d rehearsed in the basement. Patricia had helped us plan, but I wished she were here to whisper the words in my ear again. She had elected to stay in the lobby to “get the place ready for the new girl.” Her bruises had reappeared, as had the brambles in her hair, she was clearly nervous.

  “Wait—you’re the landlady’s kid, huh? And here I was hoping you were selling cookies.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that, but Sarah let loose a derisive hiss in my ear.

  The man reached a hand behind his head and rubbed the back of his neck. “Ah. Look, I know I’m late on rent, but I always pay once my check comes, so—”

  “That’s fine,” I said, back on track with our script. “Mom—Mom says you’re a good tenant, so no worries.”

  “Yeah? Well, yeah.” He hiccuped. “I try to be, yeah. It’s just tough.”

  I believed him, but I knew from Sarah’s snort that she did not.

  “Great. So, Mr. Mueller—did you get our notice about the scheduled maintenance today? We notified you three times.” This was bullshit, because obviously we hadn’t sent any notices. But he was clearly relieved about the rent and being in good with my mom, because he nodded.

  “Yeah, yeah, of course I did.”

  “Great! So you know that you’ll need to vacate your apartment for an hour this evening. From 8:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.”

  “Oh. Is that tonight? Can’t it wait? There’s a game on.”

  I shook my head. “It can’t wait, unless you want sewage to spit from your toilet.”

  “I’ll go to the bar.”

  “Thanks! I’ll tell the plumber he’s good to stop by, then.”

  Mr. Mueller closed the door. Sarah cracked her knuckles. “That’s that.”

  “What about Adelaide?” I asked, as we shuffled across the snow toward the lobby. “Did you see any sign of her when you slipped in there?”

  “Oh,” she said. “I couldn’t see anything, really. The guy’s a pack rat. But she’s definitely in there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I felt queasy and cold again, and I started seeing double.”

  “Like when we found Patricia,” I recalled. Sarah seemed less disturbed this time. She appeared beside me at full height and swung an arm around my neck.

  “Yeah, like that. So, Dani?”

  “So?”

  “Are we going to save her, or what?”

  I nodded. I really thought we could.

  MEOW MIX

  We watched Mr. Mueller depart in his pickup at around 7:30. Under the starless night, Sarah and I made our way across the parking lot, our poor excuse for an exorcism kit slung over my shoulder, just in case.

  We hadn’t gathered as many mystical materials as Sarah had hoped; our kit was a bottle of Morton salt and one of the motel’s crappy old Bibles. I’d found a basket of seashells intended for bathroom decor at the Dollar Tree, but I didn’t think any of them would actually function as a magic conch. There were two rosaries and some garlic for good measure.

  None of this felt as ridiculous as the fact that all these things were crammed into my old fanny pack.

  Sarah would not be deterred. Patricia seemed wan, losing her composure and her outline slightly as we prepared to leave the lobby again.

  Outside, Sarah was so wound up that she wasn’t maintaining her form, either. White light escaped her silhouette in arcs like solar flares, and I could only see the black of her eyes when she nodded at me on the doorstep of the apartment.

  “Here goes.”

  Sarah would have liked to kick in the door like some television badass—she definitely watched too much crime television—but she couldn’t, and I wasn’t the type. I turned the master key in the lock and pushed open the door. Without Mueller standing in the way, we had a clear view of the havoc inside.

  I threw my hand over my nose, wincing at the sour smell of cat urine and unwashed clothes. Sarah clicked her tongue and the lights came on. She hadn’t been exaggerating when she said the place was a wreck. Stacks of newspapers occupied every corner of the kitchen, and there wasn’t a single inch of counter space unpopulated by cups, pizza boxes, beer bottles, or other garbage. As we passed through the kitchenette into the living room, cat litter crunched into the carpet under my tennis shoes. The apartment’s air felt strangely fetid.

  “Patricia would have a coronary in here,” Sarah commented.

  There were worse things in the world than squalor, but often enough, squalor was a symptom of something else. Of being poor, or unmedicated, or lonely. Maybe it was a symptom of being haunted. No matter what kind of person Mueller was, he wasn’t alive when Adelaide was killed here. He wasn’t responsible for her death.

  “Are you certain she’s here?”

  “Definitely, Dani. It feels like there’s a beehive in my head. If it’s not her or it’s not her killer, then some other ghost has moved in for sure.”
r />   Something about the filth and the temperature and the odor made it feel as though the entire place was rotting. I wasn’t afraid of ghosts, but I was afraid of what had made them ghosts.

  “This way.” Sarah cocked her head to the right. “The buzzing is louder when I face the bedroom.”

  Considering all we knew about Adelaide’s death, that wasn’t surprising. I took a step forward. A floorboard creaked with stereotypical timing. I was about to comment on it, to break the quiet, when—­

  Something moved behind us.

  “What a fucking cliché!” Sarah declared, while I spun around, my heart in my throat. “It’s a cat.”

  My ribs ached too much to laugh. A tiny calico kitten, thin and mewling, toppled a pile of papers from the sofa to the floor. It now stood with its claws in the armrest, back arched and eyes locked on us—no, on Sarah.

  “I’ve heard cats can see ghosts,” I said. The kitten swiped at Sarah and hissed several times, puffing up its skinny little body.

  “Oh? Well, fuck you very much, too.” Sarah crouched before it. “I’m a dog person, you know.”

  The kitten tried and failed to scratch her and seemed utterly confounded when its tiny paw passed through her hand.

  But Sarah was completely smitten.

  “Who’s a little asshole, then?” Sarah let her ghostly fingers extend like spaghetti and dangled them like loose strings.

  I was about to remind her that we were here to look for ghosts, not pets, when a soft groan emanated from the bedroom. Sarah immediately drew closer to me, shifting in and out of focus.

  Whatever distraction the kitten had offered, we refocused. The kitten leaped away to hide from us, or from whatever haunted the bedroom.

  I looked at Sarah. She was bleary-eyed with pain from the nearby ghost, but she nodded.

  Together we crossed the filthy living room and eased open the bedroom door.

  ROPES

  “Ad—Adelaide?” I called. “Adelaide Williams?”

  Sarah flicked on the light, and we saw her. I couldn’t stop my horrified gasp.

  After the way we’d found Patricia, disheveled, half-naked, and confused, I thought we were prepared for what awaited us.

  And in a way, we were.

  The scene was just as horrible and senseless. Adelaide was partially exposed, lying on her stomach in a white corset with her arms and legs tied. The ghost of a sheet was draped over her brown legs. She’d turned her face toward the doorway. A wad of fabric had been jammed in her mouth, gagging her.

  Unlike Patricia, Adelaide seemed completely conscious of her fate. Her gaze was clear beneath her loose curls. Her brown eyes had an awareness of her situation. Countless people must have slept in this room without ever seeing her, but I suspected she’d seen them all.

  When our eyes met, she let out a muffled shout, jerking her limbs.

  I couldn’t leave the doorway.

  Eerily, Adelaide was floating a couple feet off the ground, midway between the grungy foldout and the bathroom door.

  “Someone must have moved the bed when they redid the room,” Sarah managed. Now that we were so close, Sarah was clearly ill, clutching her stomach and her appearance smearing when she moved. But she wasn’t a coward like me, and she approached Adelaide on steady feet.

  “Dani! Get over here.”

  Adelaide looked barely my age.

  “Dani,” Sarah repeated. “Come on! She needs help! She’s still tied up somehow.”

  I forced my legs forward. When I joined Sarah, I could see what she meant. While there was no longer a bed supporting her ghost, all the fabric that had touched her in death remained, just as it had for Patricia and Sarah. But for Adelaide, this meant not only clothes, but also the ropes that had tied her wrists to the bed frame. The bed frame was gone, but still she was bound to it.

  Knowing it was futile, I reached for the spectral knots—they looked so real—and watched my fingers pass through them. “You try, Sarah. I can’t touch the knots. They’re ghostly.”

  Sarah nodded, but when she put her fingers to the rope, she recoiled as if burned. She cursed under her breath.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s like touching knives. Like they’re made of hate.” Sarah tried again and cussed, her fingers partially disappearing. Adelaide closed her eyes and let out another horrible sound.

  “Can you do it?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. Why don’t we try salting the knots?”

  I couldn’t see what difference that would make, but Adelaide was watching us. We couldn’t do nothing. I pulled the salt from my fanny pack.

  “Wait.” Sarah cupped her hands around the bracelet of rope on Adelaide’s wrist. “In case it burns.”

  Feeling foolish, I sprinkled salt on the rope. At first it made no difference, but Sarah said, “More than that, come on.” So I switched the nozzle from the sprinkling side to the pouring one. To my amazement, as salt passed through the phantom fibers, they hissed and disintegrated, shrinking like slugs on pavement.

  Sarah whimpered as a few grains hit her hand and fizzled, pocking her with freckles of air, but she didn’t move until the first knot was disintegrated. With aching slowness, Adelaide pulled her freed arm close and held it to her chest like an infant.

  When we’d freed all her limbs, she drew herself up, pulling the gag from her mouth. Adelaide coughed and gasped, eyes watering, mascara or kohl streaking her cheeks.

  “You’re Adelaide Williams, right? I’m Sarah, and this is Dani.”

  “Folks call me Addy,” the ghost rasped. “Unless they’re calling me a hussy.”

  “Well, we won’t call you the second name,” I said awkwardly. To my astonishment, Addy laughed. What kind of resilience would it take to maintain a sense of humor after decades of suffering?

  “You know, these damn pantyhose taste of feet,” she said, plucking at the gag. “I mean, of all the things to complain about after being murdered, that was the part that I never expected to hate. How long have I been here?”

  “Um, around fifty years?”

  “Is that all?” she said, rubbing her wrists. “Imagine chewing socks for that long. Pardon my language, but that was hell.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Sarah said.

  “A lot of folks thought I had this coming. Me being a woman of the town. You can’t call it rape if you’re getting paid to do it.”

  “Of course you can,” Sarah said.

  “And you can definitely call it murder,” I added.

  “Uh-huh,” Addy said, narrowing her eyes. “Why you wanna help me, anyhow?”

  “Because,” Sarah said, “we’re the same as you.”

  “Well, that’s a laugh.”

  “Addy,” Sarah asked, “would you like to come with us?”

  “What, you gonna rescue me from my life of sin? He said the same thing, or maybe one of the others did. You wanna take me far, far away from here? No, no.”

  “You can’t stay here.”

  “I can’t, but I must,” Adelaide said softly. Already her limbs were stretching, the knots reappearing around her wrists as she lay back down. “This is how things are, see.”

  Sarah frowned, and a chill went up my spine. “It doesn’t have to be like that, Addy.”

  Before Addy put the gag back in her mouth, she said, “He won’t like it if I leave.”

  “You mean, the man who did this to you? Do you still see him here sometimes?”

  Adelaide blinked, her eyes fixed on the open door to the living room behind us.

  “Of course I still see him. Why? Can’t you?”

  The temperature in the apartment dropped like a stone, and the kitten yowled like it had been stepped on.

  “I feel sick.” Blood leaked in globules from Sarah’s mouth.

  “Sarah!”

  She popped like a soap bubble, gone, as an arm reached out of the shadows and yanked me back into the other room.

  FUNNY PAGES

  For a dizzying instant, I th
ought Mr. Mueller must have returned, or had been home all along, watching me talk to myself in his bedroom. But as I was dragged to the kitchen and scrambled to grab hold of the counters or chairs as I passed, every light in the sordid apartment was flickering on and off. The stovetop caught fire and the fire alarm wailed as I kicked my legs, knocking a coffeepot from a table.

  My captor dragged me, gagging, to the living room, where the television switched on and stuttered through channels at a breakneck pace. I couldn’t see my attacker’s face, but I knew the fuzzy, warm sensation of his arm around my throat. This wasn’t the heat of a living person, but the soft, needling pressure of a dead one, but one with more strength and presence than I’d ever felt from Sarah or Patricia.

  Oh god, Sarah, what is happening?

  The man spun me, pinning me to the wall. But it was generous to call this man—this thing?—a ghost.

  He looked nothing like Sarah or Patricia or Addy. He looked nothing like anyone. This thing had masculine shoulders and every time it moved, a wrenching, ear-popping screech filled the air, like tires on asphalt, like metal on metal, like dinner plates shattering against the floor. He had a man’s arms and a man’s torso and height and wore a man’s clothes—some kind of undershirt and dress pants combination. But where his face should have been, there was nothing but a ball of goopy black tobacco tar that slipped down onto his shoulders in a constant, churning stream.

  The dead man pulled a pack of cigarettes from a pocket. He shoved one between my teeth, and then, when I spat it out, he jammed another one in. It was then that I noticed that he had more than two arms. Could he have as many as he wanted? While one pasty white hand forced cigarettes on me and another held my jaw, another pinned my throat and a fourth reached into his other jeans pocket.

  He retrieved a length of rope.

  The pressure on my throat increased. I saw pinpricks of snow in the room. The light bulbs burst throughout the apartment and the sofa caught fire as the lamp exploded beside it.

  The thing grew taller and taller, slowly inching me up the wall until my head brushed the ceiling and my feet dangled free. Somewhere that kitten was still mewling.