“You’re in the middle of a ghost tour, you Danish weirdo. Why would they hear you when there’s stories about dead sailors and women hanging from trees and such nonsense—”
Just then a round woman with brutally teased so-red it’s pink hair, “Sssssssssssshed” her so vehemently in Gwen’s face that Gwen’s cheeks felt a light rain.
“Sssssh your-fucking-self you cow, what’s your fucking problem?”
“I paid good money to listen to the experts, not to listen to you talk to yourself.” As the round woman walked away, Gwen heard a squelching noise that reminded her of the midget woman stomping away in Sixteen Candles. Gwen didn’t hear the slosh of a liquor bottle, but was overwhelmed suddenly by a cloyingly sweet odor she thought was the woman’s perfume. The scent enveloped Gwen and made her gag. She had to turn away, closed her eyes, and leaned over against a small, gnarled tree for support.
Her brother and his wife had been near the front of the group, saw the exchange with the round woman followed by Gwen doubling over near the tree. Stefan said nothing. He stood beside her tapping his foot. She opened her eyes, looking at him over the top of her glasses just as Rich walked through Stefan.
The man in the stove-pipe hat did not move. He continued tapping his foot in mounting irritation and Gwen just stared.
She thought she was going to faint. Rich and his wife Denise were asking her questions, but Gwen couldn’t talk. The scent still wrapped itself around her, working its way up her nostrils and down her throat. She could taste it and it reminded her of the talc and wax smell of her second grade teacher Miss Coyle’s lipstick. Miss Coyle loved her students, often hugging or kissing them on the cheek. Miss Coyle also loved ruby red lipstick that never stayed in place. Whenever she smiled, her front teeth were so smeared in lipstick, it gave Gwen the impression that the woman was a vampire. That waxy, cloying smell had something else, something sinister beneath it. The more Stefan tapped his foot, the worse it became. Gwen felt herself immobilized. Her eyes unfocused and her breathing became momentarily labored.
“Denise, ring Scotty. Lyn’s having a seizure. We have to take her home,” Rich took his sister by the shoulder and put an arm around her waist to hold her up. Her legs had suddenly became water. Soon enough what she called the nods would start, when she was overcome with an almost narcoleptic urge to sleep.
Stefan quirked an eyebrow and muttered something that sounded to her like Lazarus’ tater tots. He told her later it was a Dutch version of see you later. When Rich guided her away from the tree and away from Stefan, the smell dissipated. Her head didn’t clear up for a good day or so, and she spent the next few days intermittently in bed.
At home, she messaged her friend Zoë in Germany about any bizarre Dutch phrases with Lazarus in them. Gwen knew Stefan was a little full of shit. Eventually, Zoë said that it was an insult that wished someone caught leprosy; basically, it was like telling someone to go fuck themselves and die of leprosy. The tater tots thing was genuinely a see you later.
“At least he didn’t call you a Klerelijer or a Kankerlijer,” Zoë messaged. “That’s like telling someone they’re going to fuck off and die of cancer, or cholera.”
“How would I know what those sound like. This guy did call me something that sounded like clearer laden,” Gwen typed.
“Yup. It was the cholera one. Kankerlijer. Fuck off and die of cholera. Nice introduction to an entire culture. Where’d you meet this guy?”
Gwen told her and Zoë didn’t write back. They weren’t really close friends, having only met once at a ComicCon a few years back. They fought over the last seat in a standing room only crowd that was there to hear Neil Gaiman do a reading from The Graveyard Book. Since Zoë was so very much smaller than Gwen, looked maybe eighty pounds soaking wet, and no way in could see over the standing crowd, Gwen let Zoë share the seat. She sat on Gwen’s lap and the two went out for drinks afterwards, keeping in touch via the interwebs.
Nonetheless, Gwen supposed it was a bit too much for Zoë to believe Gwen was being insulted by some dead Dutch dude. As long as the ghosts were in Gaiman’s stories, Zoë could handle them. As soon as they started reaching out and telling you to fuck off and die of leprosy, then it just wasn’t cool any more.
~III~
The next time Gwen was at Snug, maybe a week after her seizure, she was sitting outside the security office waiting for Scotty. As usual, he was working an overnight and without telling him she was coming, Gwen took the train to the ferry and the bus down Richmond Terrace to Snug Harbor. The night had gotten cold and she knew it would get crappier with the coming storm. But she had shoved an extra fleece in her backpack, had grabbed an umbrella, her blue hot/cold bag, a few cup-o-noodles, two microwaveable dishes, and had fixed a large thermos of tea before she went to a local taquería a few blocks up from the ferry to bring some tortas, tostadas, and cincronizadas as a surprise. She stuffed the steaming delicacies into the thermal bag to stay warm. She got to Snug just as a steady rain began to fall. She managed to pull out the umbrella and make it to the covered alleyway behind C-Hall with the ominous name Shinbone Alley, just as it deluged. Scotty was not amused as she squelched into the dilapidated, square building that once served as the sailors’ canteen but now barely passed as the security office. If anything, he was furious.
“Riding the fucking S40 at this time of night? Are you insane? You just had a bad fit, Gwen, did you want to have one on the fucking S40? Those skells that ride that would have eaten you alive.”
“I ride the S40, dickhead. I just wanted to surprise you.” She set down the cooler bag. “There’s tea in there and some stuff from the taquería. I thought we’d have a meal, but,” she shrugged. “I’ll leave,” she was angry, but knew he was right. She shouldn’t have come. It had been two years since she had had a seriously bad seizure, one that had her hospitalized for three days because the doctors didn’t know what happened. That was the first time the word epilepsy had ever been spoken to her. Initially, they had thought she had had a stroke. Partial complicated seizures, or something relatively intimidating, was her diagnosis and would explain her periodic dizzy spells that she had always had, ever since she was a kid. When she was about 7 or 8, the doctors had tested her for everything from diabetes to leukemia and ultimately just told her mother Gwen was an overly sensitive child with a weak constitution. In the hospital, she was told she had been very lucky not to have had any acute seizures prior to that. That episode at the Paranormal Tour was the first more overt seizure Gwen had had in quite some time. Small seizures came and went maybe on a weekly basis. She never had been aware she had been having them prior to being hospitalized, and since then, she only knew she had had one because the immediate after-effects were to make her feel fuzzy-headed with the overwhelming instinct to sleep. Sometimes she got a bit dizzy. During the seizure, she remained fully awake and aware, but the muscles along her arms, back, and face felt electrified in a painful, twitchy sort of way. Once it passed, she was fine, except for the need to sleep, which could last anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours. Really bad ones, like when she was hospitalized, left her in a really bad way, sometimes almost paralyzing one side of her body. Still, she didn’t think this last one was a really bad one, even though her brother, the all-knowing EMT, and Scotty did.
She let Scotty stew for a minute as she slowly zipped up her coat, turning back toward the door. She got as far as opening the door, but knew full well he would stop her exiting office.
“No, stick around. I’ve got some nonsense wedding and some crap to do, so I can’t sit here with you yet, but I have an early meal so we’ll eat and then maybe I’ll call you a car? I don’t want you staying the whole shift and I can’t drive you home. It’s too cold and I don’t want you getting sick.” Scotty gave her a quick hug before he bundled up in a bright yellow rain slicker with reflective tape along the cuffs and hem. He readjusted his long dark hair, rewrapping his ponytail and tucking it securely under his security cap and flipping up the hood o
n the slicker, he grabbed a large mag-lite and a massive ring that easily housed several hundred keys. He blew her a kiss and went out into the growing storm.
It sometimes irritated her how he thought she was a china doll that needed protecting. It habitually irritated her when her health kicked her in the face and made her into that fucking china doll. She was not calling a car. She didn’t tell him about the extra fleece, the change of socks that she sat down and put on to replace her soggy ones, or the slip-ons she also secreted in her backpack, which she also put on. Rigging up a makeshift drying rack for her socks and boots using an unused metal inbox which she put on the broken radiator just behind the space heater, she went back to her Mary Poppinseque bag and removed the extra fleece and assorted oddments she thought would come in handy for pulling an all nighter at Snug.
How could she stay away though? After having a ghost speak to her like a regular, everyday living person, she was so not missing out because of a fucking seizure; she had to come back. While she waited for Scotty to return, she went out the back door of the office, the one that opened into the old odd little hallway that extended down to a lower level lobby of one of their highfalutin’ art buildings. That odd little hallway outside the security office was lined with two long wooden settles built into the wall. She sat on the edge of the wooden bench, feeling the dark weathered wood and realizing literally hundreds upon hundreds of people over the span of almost 200 years had sat on that spot. Those benches and that hallway were glimpses into the old Snug Harbor, the original.
The creeping cold seemed to get into all her bones, despite the warm, dry socks and extra fleece jacket she had slipped on under her coat. The rain pounded the line of windows above the settles, beating the stone walls. Gwen looked out, toward Shinbone Alley and the set of weathered wooden doors that gave her a mild case of the wiggins. They made clanking noises, giving her the sense that any moment someone would come rushing through them. The wind that did whistle down the hallway, coming in from Shinbone, had an earthy pungency that made Gwen think of mothballs and her grandmother’s attic. She turned her head inside, away from the alley, toward the lobby and their bay of elevators. Looking down toward the elevators, Gwen thought the hideous mustard and orange rug reminded her of The Shining. Any moment the twins would appear imploring her to “Come play with us.”
Instead, her earlobe got tugged soundly.
“Fuck!” she shrieked as she jumped up, off the bench. She expected Scotty to be there, but she was by herself. Nonetheless, she had the distinct impression she was being laughed at. “Stefan if you’re going to bitch at me again in your fucking Danish, whatever, piss off with your tater tots.”
The man in the stove-pipe hat did not appear.
Suddenly, she had to pee.
Down the hall to the left, past the wooden benches, past the gaudy carpet, down another short hallway, were the only bathrooms in the entire building. The one on the left gave Gwen the über wiggins. The walls were crawling with spiders and there was a window that was always open a crack. Even if you just closed the fucker, did your business, washed your hands, when you turn to shut the light and leave, the window was open again. Of course it was probably a bad ballast or something, but still it completely creeped her out. The one on the right wasn’t much better, but the window stayed closed and there weren’t any spiders.
Gwen went in, knowing that aside from the caterers down the hall and up one short flight of stairs, there wasn’t any one else around in that building. With a wedding going on, those guys would be busy in the catering hall. Taking a moment of quiet reflection while taking a pee, Gwen thought she heard someone in the hallway, just outside the door. As she pulled up her pants, the door rattled savagely.
“Be right out! Hold your horses, man.” She washed her hands quickly, figuring she’d use the hand sanitizer in her bag back in the office, because there wasn’t any soap or hand towels in the bathroom anyway. The door rattled again, not as badly, but enough for the lock to strain. Wiping her hands on her pants, she felt the hair raise as she saw the badly stripped screws holding the lock to the door by a miracle. She also saw many times that that lock had been reattached, how many times it had been torn off the door by force. She wanted to vomit, felt in her pockets, and flipped open the knife that gave her enough confidence to ride the S40 at that time of night. If one of those catering motherfuckers wanted a piece of her, she was taking a piece of him. For some reason that was totally beyond her as she thought about this later on, she shut the light.
The doorknob turned once and she saw a definite shadow under the door. She thought she heard someone whisper, a man’s voice, but she couldn’t make out what he had said. It was low, but in a way that made it just beyond the range of hearing, not necessarily low in tone. As she stood there trying to figure out what to do, she felt someone behind her, felt the unmistakable pressure of a man’s body pressing against her. Reacting quickly, almost before her brain processed what was happening, she jabbed her elbow back and with the other hand holding her blade, slashed back. Throwing the bolt back and the door open, she shifted the knife slightly, preparing to slash in front of her. The shadow had still been under the door as the lock clicked back, but as the door opened, the hall was, like the bathroom behind her, completely empty. Without thinking, she ran back toward the security office. As she rounded the corner, she felt a wet smack across her cheek as someone screamed, “BOO!” Her ridiculous primal reaction to protect the eyeballs closed her eyes and froze her like a squirrel in the path of an oncoming bus. She expected Scotty to be standing there laughing at her. When she opened her eyes, the hall was still empty.
“Fuck off Stefan. Leave me alone.”
“Stefan’s not here,” a voice murmured quietly with a chuckle that reminded her of the Cheshire Cat, even though she did not see a thing.
Gwen scattered for the office, slammed the door behind her, and huddled into a chair, hyperventilating. For the rest of that night, even though she managed to relax enough to read, she didn’t leave that room. Whatever was in the hallway didn’t follow her into the office. There were times, usually seconds before Scotty came back in, that she thought she heard footsteps in the hallway or she thought she saw the doorknob turn. But she kept both doors locked. If Scotty or his partner Steve needed to get in, they had keys. The storm never properly let up and, during one of the brief intervals that Scotty did come into the office, she told him she wasn’t leaving until he did with her. He didn’t immediately ask why because he was busy with fire alarms going off, some douchey wedding goers trying to break into one of the “haunted houses” and ultimately the fire department coming because of the alarms. The rest of the night was relatively quiet, except around 3 am, while she was knee-deep in a re-read of American Gods, she heard piano music. She closed her eyes listening to the tune which started as a Chopin nocturne, but then morphed into something you might hear in a ragtime dance hall or a saloon. She figured it was just the wedding and she went back to reading. The music got steadily louder the more she tried to ignore it, until it sounded like it was outside the door, in Shinbone Alley. Snapping her book closed, she sat up to really listen. The piano crescendoed and as she leaned forward to look out the high window above where she sat, to see if maybe someone leftover from the wedding was playing an Ipod, or if by some bizarre twist of fate, Scott Joplin was out there tickling the ivories. The moment she moved, the playing stopped. It was 3:33 am exactly and she had been listening to the piano for just over a half hour.
Gwen didn’t tell Scotty about the music, or about what had happened in the bathroom until they were heading home that morning. He was angry and a little insulted that she didn’t tell him right after it had happened. There was just too much going on. It was one of those shifts where he really didn’t sit down for more than a few minutes at a clip. And, when he did come into the office, he launched into an aggravated monologue about what had just happened. Before he got two sentences strung together, though, he was called back o
ut by his partner or by another minor catastrophe. That night included just about everything, and all during a pretty serious rainstorm, so Gwen figured that was permission for him to diatribe whenever he came into the office.
In addition to the fire alarms, sewage leaks, and assorted maintenance issues that were par for the course at Snug Harbor, before the wedding disbanded, Scotty and his partner found that one old lady had backed out of the parking lot and kept going down Chapel Road backwards and ultimately got stuck in a ditch just at Matron’s Cottage. Because she tried to keep driving backwards, the car began jerking up the front rise of lawn by Matron’s. When Scotty and Steve arrived, it looked to them like the small sedan was in need of an exorcism. Then, two teenage boys were discovered in a rather intimate situation on top of the castle, during a brief respite from the pelting rain. As if that wasn’t bad enough, since they were both underage and in flagrante delicto, they were smoking weed and decided instead of be caught with the flaming joint, they would eat it, while it was lit. Had they waited a mere five minutes longer, the renewed deluge would have undoubtedly extinguished the joint. Chasing one stoned, nude, shrieking 14 year old around the replica of a medieval castle during a rainstorm wasn’t the best moment. The end-cap was a higher-than-a-kite Lady Gaga wannabe from the wedding with her head stuck in a wrought iron railing. Remembering a story Gwen had once told him about her own dad, Scotty quoted Gwen’s grandmother almost verbatim when he asked the intoxicated reveler, “How did you get it in there?”
Gwen’s dad, roughly 4 or 5, had stuck his noggin in the railing outside of a Woolworth’s near his home in the Bronx. His mother had been in the store shopping, came out to find a crowd of firefighters and police officers keeping back a gaggle of onlookers. She approached, wondering where her son was, to find they were preparing to use a torch to cut the metal surrounding her son’s head. “Show mom how you got in there.” With a twist and a pop, “Like this mom,” and out he came. Not so neat and clean with Faux Gaga. A lot more cursing, runny mascara, and tears, but Scotty wanted to avoid the Fire Department having to use the Jaws of Life to remove the woman’s head from the railing.
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