My footsteps echoed on the wooden steps as I went down. The basement was bigger than the shop above, lit by bare bulbs staggered along a low ceiling. The space was packed to the beams with boxes and other items covered in drop cloths. Despite the sepulchral lighting and the cobwebs that hung like silken parachutes in every corner, I’d never found it all that creepy.
“Uncle C?”
“Over here.”
He’d shoved a bunch of stuff aside to clear a path into the furthest reaches of the basement. I found him sitting with a packet of tea bags on his lap. He smiled when he saw me but there was something odd about his eyes.
“It’s so…so very strange, Jake.”
I didn’t like the flutter in his voice and the aspect in his eyes: as if something was capering, barely visible, in each pupil. A tiny creature moving towards the light while flinching from it at the same time.
“I…I forgot all about it.”
I followed his pointing finger to the object he’d unearthed during his search. It looked like a battered old suitcase.
“Help me lug it upstairs, will you?”
I don’t want to. I couldn’t say why—it was nothing more than a boy’s innocent intuition—but I wanted nothing to do with that case.
I helped my uncle lug it upstairs. He set it on the counter in front of Billy. He unsnapped the brass clasps and lifted the top. A name was stamped in faded gold foil lettering on the underside of the lid: Psycho-Phone.
“It’s called a ‘spirit phone,’ boys.”
What lay inside resembled a portable phonograph player, the type that went out of fashion in the 1920s. It had a complex series of rotating rods, sprockets and brass gears, and a gauge numbered just like the face of a clock but with four hands instead of two, like a diver’s chronograph. Sitting in the place where a turntable would normally be was an old See ’N Say toy, the same kind I’d had as a young boy: a red dial that went round and round until it settled on one of the twelve animals circling its perimeter and a voice said, The cow says moo or The cat says meow.
“It’s been modified,” said Uncle C, unhooking a silver horn from the lid and coupling it to the main mechanism. “It was built to record its impressions on wax cylinders, which were what people used before vinyl swept the nation.”
“What does it do?” I asked.
“Opens a connection, or so they say.”
He unclipped two fittings at the edge of the case, levered the mounting up and withdrew something from underneath. It was another electronic toy—a Speak & Spell—wired to the original components.
“Thomas Edison built the first spirit phone,” Uncle C said, “to try to contact his sainted mother.”
He unrolled an electrical cord from the base of the Psycho-Phone.
“Would you like to try to contact your grandmother, Billy?”
“Yes.”
“This is an unorthodox method.”
Billy said drily, “Looks like it.”
“Using a spirit phone is like patching into a party line,” my uncle said. “There’s a million spirits floating around. It’s not for sure that your grandma will break through the static, though I’m sure she’d want to.”
Uncle C put his hand on Billy Yellowbird’s shoulder—or almost did: his long fingers hovered millimetres above Billy’s T-shirt, not quite touching. He said quietly, “Not all of the dead mean us well. There’s evil—I mean genuine, profound evil—mixed in with the good. You never know what you’re going to pull in. Maybe something quite awful.”
“I’m not scared,” Billy said. I was shocked to hear it, as the possibility of a malevolent entity invading a seance curdled the marrow in my own bones.
“What do you want to speak to her about?” I asked.
Billy traced a circle with his fingertip on the countertop.
“We moved here from Slave Lake. My mom, my sister and my setsuné. My mother, she got a job at the hospital. She’s a nurse. We have a house on Harvard Street. But my setsuné, she didn’t like it. She missed her river, her trees.”
“We have a river here,” my uncle said. “Trees, too.”
“Her river, her trees. So, she got sick and so…she died.”
“And you can’t take her back, because it’s illegal to transport her body beyond town limits,” my uncle said.
Billy showed my uncle his palms. “I don’t know the reasons why, but we can’t bring her home.”
Uncle C rolled the plug of the Psycho-Phone between his fingers. It was frayed as if mice had nibbled it. Maybe, I thought, the phone wouldn’t work.
“You just want to know that she’s made it safely to the other side?”
“That’s all.”
My uncle nodded. “Then let’s see what we can see.”
He inserted the plug in the outlet. For a prolonged heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the machine shuddered to life. The phone rattled on the counter, jittering sideways until it nearly toppled off the edge. The Speak & Spell screen glowed blood-red before blipping out. Pinholes of smoke rose up, carrying the smell of charred dust.
“Not to worry,” said Uncle C. “It hasn’t been used in a long time.”
The Psycho-Phone gave off a hum that prickled my skin. The air seemed to warm slightly; I imagined molecules tightening and rubbing together to create a friction I felt in the fillings of my teeth.
“Your grandmother’s name,” my uncle prodded. “Type it on the keypad.”
Billy pressed letters on the Speak & Spell. A-N-N-I-E.
“Now press ‘Enter.’ ”
Billy’s thumb dimpled the red square on the keypad—
AaaaNIE.
The word was spat from the plastic speaker in the toy’s uncanny voice. The name hung in the air, disharmonious, while the dial on the See ’N Say began to spin.
The duck says…
The dial didn’t stop the way it was supposed to, the way it always had when I’d played with it as a little boy. It just kept spinning and spinning—
The duck says…says…says…
The decal on the dial—an apple-cheeked farmer with a shovel—was partway peeled off, flapping silently as it spun faster and faster.
Say “quack,” I thought desperately. Just say “quack.”
When the machine didn’t oblige, I wrenched my gaze away and looked out the shop window. I needed to see there was still daylight outside—that there still was an outside—that the Occultorium hadn’t been lifted up like the farmhouse in The Wizard of Oz, spinning off into space…
Helplessly, my eyes were drawn back to the phone. It was making a new sound, one that didn’t emanate from the See ’N Say. It came from the silver horn.
Years later, as a medical resident, I’d listen to a recording from inside a human skull. All is quiet inside our heads, but by amplifying the natural magnetic impulses it’s possible to hear the living clockwork of a brain. This particular brain belonged to a patient with a late-stage tumour anchored in her occipital lobe. The recording lasted a minute or so. Its only constant was an unearthly hiss that crested and ebbed in time with the patient’s blood flow. It sounded like waves of static crashing on a distant beachhead. Within those waves, or outside them, were other noises: pings and crackles and purrs, liquid gurgles, a sound like the pitter-patter of feet dancing on a rain-rinsed tin roof. The professor told us they were made by magnetic waves bending around the rim of the patient’s brain. But he couldn’t tell us if we were hearing the patient’s thoughts themselves, or perhaps the sounds of the tumour creeping through her mind.
Sitting in that classroom listening to a stranger’s brain, I thought back to that afternoon in the Occultorium. At first, the sounds the spirit phone made were almost one with the run-of-the-mill noises of the shop: the tick of the clock and creak of the old floorboards. Almost but not quite, as if whatever was making them wanted us to know it was being sly. Toying with us. The phone’s sprockets and cogs wound as the sounds took on shape and weight. It was as if somebody was twisting the
tuner knob on a radio without stopping long enough to find a station, pulling in signals from beyond the reach of spacecraft or satellite, beyond the last collapsing star….
I looked at Uncle Calvin. The black pinholes of his irises glittered as they had in the basement.
Now, noise pulsed from the phone: throbs and burrs, something like Morse code followed by a vibrating wire that quilled the hairs of my inner ear. The old circuitry was struggling to transmute the transmissions it was receiving into sounds the silver horn could relay. I got the sense that the phone was the wrong machine for the job, that what we were trying to do was no different from trying to tell the time of day using a thermometer. The dial on the See ’N Say spun and spun and spun….I heard things. Screams in a dense sonic mist, wind sawing across rusted metal, something bubbling, rainfall like ten-penny nails. I would have slammed the lid of the Psycho-Phone, crumpling the horn between the lips of the case, but I couldn’t move, was paralyzed, the sounds ebbing into whale-songs as something else built behind them—a sinister presence running behind those melancholy arias. Soon all I could hear was horrid stifled breathing, breaths built out of whispers, realizing too late that the cadence of those breaths matched the rapid beat of my own heart.
Something’s coming, I thought. Something horrible.
Within moments, the phone would give birth to a voice. I was positive of it. And when it spoke, that voice would not be human, or belong to anything that ever had been—
The noises cut out.
My uncle was on his knees with the plug in his hands. I was terrorized by the prospect that those sounds might persist despite the power cut, but the phone stayed mercifully dead.
“That was”—my uncle laughed, hah-ho!—“a little intense, wasn’t it?”
Billy’s face remained serene, but his fingertips were bloodless white where they gripped the countertop. He saw me looking and stuffed his hands in his pockets.
“Atmospheric harmonics,” my uncle assured us. “The vacuum tubes probably tuned in a distorted feed of CHSC AM radio. Nothing more than harmless signals.”
I wiped the clammy sweat from my forehead. “Signals,” I said robotically.
Uncle C shut the case. “Billy, this is a delicate question but—your grandmother, has she been, well, has she been laid to rest officially yet?”
Billy said, “No, but we already took her to the…the…”
“Undertaker?” I said.
“Yes, him. I didn’t like him.”
Cataract City’s undertaker was named Stanley Rowe. He was tall, discreet, suitably funereal, with a vinegary scent wafting off his clothes—a smell I now know to be formaldehyde.
“Undertakers can be a shady bunch,” Uncle C agreed. “One of their common scams is to sell their customers’ loved ones to medical supply companies to turn into skeletons—you know, the ones that hang in anatomy classrooms. They fill the coffin with sandbags and into the ground it goes, and nobody ever the wiser.”
“I don’t think Mr. Rowe does that.” I couldn’t say why, in that moment, I felt the need to stick up for the professional integrity of a man I hardly knew, but this seemed to mollify my uncle.
“Jake’s right, Stanley’s not one of those bad eggs. Listen, what would you like us to do?” he asked Billy simply. I noted that he was involving me in whatever this was—but I had nothing better to do, and besides, I wanted to help Billy too.
“I just want to know Setsuné is safe and happy, wherever she is.”
“There’s only one way to assure you of that,” my uncle said.
We made a plan and parted company soon afterwards. That night, tucked in bed, I would replay the sight of my uncle’s eyes shining strangely—and years later, looking at things forensically, as surgeons do, I realized that was the start of everything to follow. What had been buried had taken root again. In the basement under my uncle’s shop, where he stumbled upon a device whose provenance he could no longer recall.
iv.
We broke into the funeral home at eight o’clock the following night.
Uncle C, Billy and I met a few blocks up the road, near the cemetery gates. By the time I pedalled up on my BMX the sky had gone ashy above the treetops. Billy was there already. We waited in what felt like companionable silence, leaning on our handlebars, until Uncle C rode up on his ten-speed. My uncle didn’t own a car. I’d never seen him behind the wheel, not once in my life.
“All right, boys, sure you want to go through with this? No shame in second thoughts.”
Billy nodded. After a moment I did, too. I understood instinctively that Uncle C had invited me along in hopes I’d find a new friend. But the invite came with a catch. To gain Billy’s friendship, I’d have to see a dead body.
Uncle C shouldered his satchel and said, “Onward, soldiers.”
We approached the funeral home through the cemetery. Tombstones cast shadows on the sun-scalded grass behind the cast-iron fence. A raven—smaller than the one in the Occultorium, but big enough—observed us from its perch atop the granite mausoleum crypt, moonlight reflecting off its black doll’s eyes.
The Rowe Funeral Home stood on a hill that backed onto the cemetery. Its trio of greenish copper rooftops—covering what I would soon discover to be the parlour itself, the coffin showroom and the embalming chamber—loomed behind a network of spidery tree branches. A single light burnt in the cemetery beyond, its glow shimmering across the earth like a flame racing up a fuse. I wondered if it could be the lamp of a watchman, held aloft as he patrolled this brooding boneyard.
“It looks scarier than it really is,” my uncle assured us.
We headed up the gravelled drive. The sly sounds of night infiltrated my ears: the rustlings of unseen bodies in the grass or hunching behind the mossy tombstones. I drew closer to my uncle, reaching for his hand…then stopped myself from grabbing it, but it was a near thing.
Our moon-washed expressions peered back at us from the darkened windows of the building. Uncle C led us to a door set in a brick alcove.
“This is the embalming room,” he whispered. “Behind this door is, well, death. Sanitary and sterilized, but still death.”
He produced a kit from his satchel. Inside were tools that looked like those the dentist used to pick at teeth. He selected one and fit it into the door’s lock. Next, he cocked his head, frowned and, in a manner that made the movement seem like an afterthought, turned the knob.
“Will you look at that. My skills of skulduggery will not be required.” He crouched before us. “Billy, your grandmother is behind here. Are you ready for that?”
Billy inhaled, held the breath and nodded.
“And you, Jake? You can always wait out here.”
The prospect of waiting alone in that alcove struck me as worse than whatever lay behind the door. “I’ll come.”
Uncle C produced a flashlight and waved us on. We trailed him inside, following the cone of light. A smell hit my nostrils: bitter and pruney, like the air wafting out of a jar of ancient preserves. The hallway funnelled into a high-ceilinged chamber. My uncle’s flashlight shone on washtubs and glass canisters of gauze and cloth bandages. The room was dominated by a stainless-steel table. A shape rested upon it, covered in a sheet.
Something clutched at my elbow. I almost screamed, but realized just in time that it was Billy who’d grabbed me. His eyes shone white as high beams in a flashlight’s glow. He let go of my arm guiltily.
“Sorry. I…thought I saw it move.”
I wished Billy hadn’t said that. Now all I could think about was the shape sitting up, the sheet falling away and a gleaming skull pinning me with a baleful glare as its wrinkled-apricot eyes rolled around in its sockets—
“It’s perfectly safe, boys. We’re the only lively things in here.” My uncle shone the light on the wall, which was inset with vaults. Their polished doors and handles reminded me of filing cabinets—which they were. Human filing cabinets.
My uncle said, “Your grandmother is in this on
e here.”
“How do you know?” Billy said.
“A little birdy told me.” He wrapped his fingers around the handle. “Ready?”
Billy said, “Yes.”
The trolley rolled out with a velvety rumble, its rails lined with ball bearings. As the cool air inside the vault mixed with the warmer air of the room, plumes of mist bloomed up. The mist shredded away to reveal a body laid out on the steel, shrunken in the way only death can shrink a person. Small and stiff and…
A man. Obviously and unmistakably a man.
“This…hmm,” said Uncle C. “This fellow isn’t your grandma, is he?”
“No,” Billy confirmed. “She looks different than him.”
The man’s lips were papery worms. His teeth were grey as gravestones and had little cracks in them like the hairline fractures in granite. Uncle C touched the tips of his fingers to the man’s forehead.
“Humblest apologies, good sir. Back to your rest.”
He shut the vault. “Sorry, boys. My fault entirely.”
Billy and I looked at one another. Billy’s eyebrow went up just a bit: This uncle of yours—is he for real?
“I know where she must be,” my uncle said.
He opened a door leading down another hall. The flashlight’s glow bobbed along walls clad in wallpaper the colour of crushed mulberries. We entered the casket showroom. Our shoes kicked up blue sparks on the carpet. Coffins were propped up on catafalques. My uncle strode around the showroom with his gangling lope, searching. In the uncertain light, he looked like a skeleton jingly-jangling through the catacombs. He collided with a jumble of metal wreath stands and said, “Blast it all!” softly.
Billy had stopped at a coffin that glowed like a giant lozenge. The “Celestial Sleeper,” sticker price $990. His fingers walked up the wood and along the silk cushioning.
“Big,” he whispered. “Softer than my bed.”
Uncle C said, “Over here.”
He’d located another room holding a single casket. It was so cold inside that our breath came out in misty vapours.
“This is the staging room,” he told us. “It’s where the body waits, all made up, for the first showing in the morning.”
The Saturday Night Ghost Club: A Novel Page 4
