She doesn’t talk to you, you’re not sure she knows you’re there. Maybe it’s easier that way. And in the summer months, when the attic just bakes, you go up and watch her in your undies.
You can make her scratch her head if you want. You scratch yours, she scratches hers. Usually.
It doesn’t always work, but still. She’s playing, and you’re playing with her.
She is so pretty. You were so pretty.
She is so pretty, she has such bright white sparkling teeth. How you’d love to have those teeth. How you’d love to knock them out of her head, with a hammer maybe, ever so gently, one by one, one little tap, and out they’d pop! How you’d love to liquefy them, and drink them down, and taste that rush of spearmint fresh.
Just to taste it again. Just once more. Once more in your life, and you wouldn’t ask for anything else.
* * *
Sometimes there’s an old woman in the attic, and she looks a bit like your mother, but she’s kinder than your mother, and she didn’t give you away. This old woman is the only one who speaks to you. “Hello, Rachel Taylor,” she says, and she loves to use your name, like it’s a matter of personal pride. She looks about a hundred, and she smokes a pipe, and that’s ridiculous, because you’ve never smoked a pipe, and you’re pretty sure your mother never smoked a pipe either.
She tells you stories of her childhood, and they should be your childhood too, but she gets them all wrong. She tells of when she was a farmer, or a priest, or a pirate. You don’t recognise any of it. Frankly, the daft old crone is talking bollocks. She puffs at her pipe, and sometimes she touches your hand, and she feels so warm and alive, and you don’t like that very much. You don’t see why she should be so warm when you feel chilled to the core. And she talks to you her bollocks, and you don’t talk back.
You can’t talk back, not since your tongue went the way of your gums. But she talks enough for both of you. You prefer it when it’s the little girl who’s in the attic.
And when neither the little girl nor the old crone are in the attic, you go up there to play by yourself. You play with a little Rolls-Royce car. Varoom. But it’s not an out loud varoom. It’s the sort of varoom you make silently in your head.
* * *
And at night. Most nights. But not every night. The good nights, she’ll come to you.
She comes in muttering, and she says such rubbish, and her concerns are all so very trivial, and her problems really so small. And you want to say ssh, you want to tell her it’ll be all right, relax now, easy, easy. You love her.
She doesn’t even know you’re there, there’s nothing you can do.
And she only comes in the dark, but you can feel how beautiful she is. The very shape of her is perfect, the imprint she leaves upon the bed after she’s left in the morning is as correctly proportioned as an imprint can be. You wish she knew she was beautiful. And if no one has ever wanted her beauty, well, that was their loss – and if no one has ever made her feel beautiful, their shame.
Nothing you can do, but you nuzzle into the elbow. It’s bony and hard and there’s such little feeling to an elbow, she won’t know that you’re kissing it. But you do your best.
And she should get out of this house. Whilst she has the chance. Because this can’t be all there is. There’s a better life waiting for her, she should just reach out and take it, what’s stopping her? You’re stopping her. You couldn’t bear it if she were to go.
You love her so much.
You want to see her, but she only comes in the dark.
You want to see her, but you daren’t turn the light on, you might alarm her. And you mustn’t do that. Not with all her teeth, all the teeth in the world. If she’s scared, she’ll bite.
20TH CENTURY GHOST
Joe Hill
The best time to see her is when the place is almost full.
There is the well-known story of the man who wanders in for a late show and finds the vast six-hundred-seat theater almost deserted. Halfway through the movie, he glances around and discovers her sitting next to him, in a chair that only moments before had been empty. Her witness stares at her. She turns her head and stares back. She has a nosebleed. Her eyes are wide, stricken. My head hurts, she whispers. I have to step out for a moment. Will you tell me what I miss? It is in this instant that the person looking at her realizes she is as insubstantial as the shifting blue ray of light cast by the projector. It is possible to see the next seat over through her body. As she rises from her chair, she fades away.
Then there is the story about the group of friends who go into the Rosebud together on a Thursday night. One of the bunch sits down next to a woman by herself, a woman in blue. When the movie doesn’t start right away, the person who sat down beside her decides to make conversation. What’s playing tomorrow? he asks her. The theater is dark tomorrow, she whispers. This is the last show. Shortly after the movie begins she vanishes. On the drive home, the man who spoke to her is killed in a car accident.
These, and many of the other best-known legends of the Rosebud, are false… the ghost stories of people who have seen too many horror movies and who think they know exactly how a ghost story should be.
Alec Sheldon, who was one of the first to see Imogene Gilchrist, owns the Rosebud, and at seventy-three still operates the projector most nights. He can always tell, after talking to someone for just a few moments, whether or not they really saw her, but what he knows he keeps to himself, and he never publicly discredits anyone’s story… that would be bad for business.
He knows, though, that anyone who says they could see right through her didn’t see her at all. Some of the put-on artists talk about blood pouring from her nose, her ears, her eyes; they say she gave them a pleading look, and asked for them to find somebody, to bring help. But she doesn’t bleed that way, and when she wants to talk, it isn’t to tell someone to bring a doctor. A lot of the pretenders begin their stories by saying, You’ll never believe what I just saw. They’re right. He won’t, although he will listen to all that they have to say, with a patient, even encouraging, smile.
The ones who have seen her don’t come looking for Alec to tell him about it. More often than not he finds them, comes across them wandering the lobby on unsteady legs; they’ve had a bad shock, they don’t feel well. They need to sit down a while. They don’t ever say, You won’t believe what I just saw. The experience is still too immediate. The idea that they might not be believed doesn’t occur to them until later. Often they are in a state that might be described as subdued, even submissive. When he thinks about the effect she has on those who encounter her, he thinks of Steven Greenberg coming out of The Birds one cool Sunday afternoon in 1963. Steven was just twelve then, and it would be another twelve years before he went and got so famous; he was at that time not a golden boy, but just a boy.
Alec was in the alley behind the Rosebud, having a smoke, when he heard the fire door into the theater clang open behind him. He turned to see a lanky kid leaning in the doorway – just leaning there, not going in or out. The boy squinted into the harsh white sunshine, with the confused, wondering look of a small child who has just been shaken out of a deep sleep.
Alec could see past him into a darkness filled with the shrill sounds of thousands of squeaking sparrows. Beneath that, he could hear a few in the audience stirring restlessly, beginning to complain.
Hey, kid, in or out? Alec said. You’re lettin’ the light in.
The kid – Alec didn’t know his name then – turned his head and stared back into the theater for a long, searching moment. Then he stepped out and the door settled shut behind him, closing gently on its pneumatic hinge. And still he didn’t go anywhere, didn’t say anything. The Rosebud had been showing The Birds for two weeks, and although Alec had seen others walk out before it was over, none of the early exits had been twelve-year-old boys. It was the sort of film most boys of that age waited all year to see, but who knew? Maybe the kid had a weak stomach.
I left my
Coke in the theater, the kid said, his voice distant, almost toneless. I still had a lot of it left.
You want to go back in and look for it?
And the kid lifted his eyes and gave Alec a bright look of alarm, and then Alec knew. No.
Alec finished his cigarette, pitched it.
I sat with the dead lady, the kid blurted.
Alec nodded.
She talked to me.
What did she say?
He looked at the kid again, and found him staring back with eyes that were now wide and round with disbelief.
I need someone to talk to, she said. When I get excited about a movie I need to talk.
Alec knows when she talks to someone she always wants to talk about the movies. She usually addresses herself to men, although sometimes she will sit and talk with a woman – Lois Weisel most notably. Alec has been working on a theory of what it is that causes her to show herself. He has been keeping notes in a yellow legal pad. He has a list of who she appeared to and in what movie and when (Leland King, Harold and Maude, ’72; Joel Harlowe, Eraserhead, ’77; Hal Lash, Blood Simple, ’85; and all the others). He has, over the years, developed clear ideas about what conditions are most likely to produce her, although the specifics of his theory are constantly being revised.
As a young man, thoughts of her were always on his mind, or simmering just beneath the surface; she was his first and most strongly felt obsession. Then for a while he was better – when the theater was a success, and he was an important businessman in the community, chamber of commerce, town-planning board. In those days he could go weeks without thinking about her; and then someone would see her, or pretend to have seen her, and stir the whole thing up again.
But following his divorce – she kept the house, he moved into the one-bedroom under the theater – and not long after the 8-screen cineplex opened just outside of town, he began to obsess again, less about her than about the theater itself (is there any difference, though? Not really, he supposes, thoughts of one always circling around to thoughts of the other). He never imagined he would be so old and owe so much money. He has a hard time sleeping, his head is so full of ideas – wild, desperate ideas – about how to keep the theater from failing. He keeps himself awake thinking about income, staff, salable assets. And when he can’t think about money anymore, he tries to picture where he will go if the theater closes. He envisions an old folks’ home, mattresses that reek of Ben-Gay, hunched geezers with their dentures out, sitting in a musty common room watching daytime sitcoms; he sees a place where he will passively fade away, like wallpaper that gets too much sunlight and slowly loses its color.
This is bad. What is more terrible is when he tries to imagine what will happen to her if the Rosebud closes. He sees the theater stripped of its seats, an echoing empty space, drifts of dust in the corners, petrified wads of gum stuck fast to the cement. Local teens have broken in to drink and screw; he sees scattered liquor bottles, ignorant graffiti on the walls, a single, grotesque, used condom on the floor in front of the stage. He sees the lonely and violated place where she will fade away. Or won’t fade… the worst thought of all.
* * *
Alec saw her – spoke to her – for the first time when he was fifteen, six days after he learned his older brother had been killed in the South Pacific. President Truman had sent a letter expressing his condolences. It was a form letter, but the signature on the bottom – that was really his. Alec hadn’t cried yet. He knew, years later, that he spent that week in a state of shock, that he had lost the person he loved most in the world and it had badly traumatized him. But in 1945 no one used the word “trauma” to talk about emotions, and the only kind of shock anyone discussed was “shell—.”
He told his mother he was going to school in the mornings. He wasn’t going to school. He was shuffling around downtown looking for trouble. He shoplifted candy-bars from the American Luncheonette and ate them out at the empty shoe factory – the place closed down, all the men off in France, or the Pacific. With sugar zipping in his blood, he launched rocks through the windows, trying out his fastball.
He wandered through the alley behind the Rosebud and looked at the door into the theater and saw that it wasn’t firmly shut. The side facing the alley was a smooth metal surface, no door handle, but he was able to pry it open with his fingernails. He came in on the 3:30 P.M. show, the place crowded, mostly kids under the age of ten and their mothers. The fire door was halfway up the theater, recessed into the wall, set in shadow. No one saw him come in. He slouched up the aisle and found a seat in the back.
“I heard Jimmy Stewart went to the Pacific,” his brother had told him while he was home on leave, before he shipped out. They were throwing the ball around out back. “Mr. Smith is probably carpet-bombing the red fuck out of Tokyo right this instant. How’s that for a crazy thought?” Alec’s brother, Ray, was a self-described film freak. He and Alec went to every single movie that opened during his month-long leave: Bataan, The Fighting Seabees, Going My Way.
Alec waited through an episode of a serial concerning the latest adventures of a singing cowboy with long eyelashes and a mouth so dark his lips were black. It failed to interest him. He picked his nose and wondered how to get a Coke with no money. The feature started.
At first Alec couldn’t figure out what the hell kind of movie it was, although right off he had the sinking feeling it was going to be a musical. First the members of an orchestra filed onto a stage against a bland blue backdrop. Then a starched shirt came out and started telling the audience all about the brand-new kind of entertainment they were about to see. When he started blithering about Walt Disney and his artists, Alec began to slide downwards in his seat, his head sinking between his shoulders. The orchestra surged into big dramatic blasts of strings and horns. In another moment his worst fears were realized. It wasn’t just a musical; it was also a cartoon. Of course it was a cartoon, he should have known – the place crammed with little kids and their mothers – a 3:30 show in the middle of the week that led off with an episode of The Lipstick Kid, singing sissy of the high plains.
After a while he lifted his head and peeked at the screen through his fingers, watched some abstract animation: silver raindrops falling against a background of roiling smoke, rays of molten light shimmering across an ashen sky. Eventually he straightened up to watch in a more comfortable position. He was not quite sure what he was feeling. He was bored, but interested too, almost a little mesmerized. It would have been hard not to watch. The visuals came at him in a steady hypnotic assault: ribs of red light, whirling stars, kingdoms of cloud glowing in the crimson light of a setting sun.
The little kids were shifting around in their seats. He heard a little girl whisper loudly, “Mom, when is there going to be Mickey?” For the kids it was like being in school. But by the time the movie hit the next segment, the orchestra shifting from Bach to Tchaikovsky, he was sitting all the way up, even leaning forward slightly, his forearms resting on his knees. He watched fairies flitting through a dark forest, touching flowers and spiderwebs with enchanted wands and spreading sheets of glittering, incandescent dew. He felt a kind of baffled wonder watching them fly around, a curious feeling of yearning. He had the sudden idea he could sit there and watch forever.
“I could sit in this theater forever,” whispered someone beside him. It was a girl’s voice. “Just sit here and watch and never leave.”
He didn’t know there was someone sitting beside him and jumped to hear a voice so close. He thought – no, he knew – that when he sat down, the seats on either side of him were empty. He turned his head.
She was only a few years older than him, couldn’t have been more than twenty, and his first thought was that she was very close to being a fox; his heart beat a little faster to have such a girl speaking to him. He was already thinking, Don’t blow it. She wasn’t looking at him. She was staring up at the movie, and smiling in a way that seemed to express both admiration and a child’s dazed wonder. He
wanted desperately to say something smooth, but his voice was trapped in his throat.
She leaned towards him without glancing away from the screen, her left hand just touching the side of his arm on the armrest.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she whispered. “When I get excited about a movie I want to talk. I can’t help it.”
In the next moment he became aware of two things, more or less simultaneously. The first was that her hand against his arm was cold. He could feel the deadly chill of it through his sweater, a cold so palpable it startled him a little. The second thing he noticed was a single teardrop of blood on her upper lip, under her left nostril.
“You have a nosebleed,” he said, in a voice that was too loud. He immediately wished he hadn’t said it. You only had one opportunity to impress a fox like this. He should have found something for her to wipe her nose with, and handed it to her, murmured something real Sinatra: You’re bleeding, here. He pushed his hands into his pockets, feeling for something she could wipe her nose with. He didn’t have anything.
But she didn’t seem to have heard him, didn’t seem the slightest bit aware he had spoken. She absent-mindedly brushed the back of one hand under her nose, and left a dark smear of blood over her upper lip… and Alec froze with his hands in his pockets, staring at her. It was the first he knew there was something wrong about the girl sitting next to him, something slightly off about the scene playing out between them. He instinctively drew himself up and slightly away from her without even knowing he was doing it.
She laughed at something in the movie, her voice soft, breathless. Then she leaned towards him and whispered, “This is all wrong for kids. Harry Parcells loves this theater, but he plays all the wrong movies – Harry Parcells who runs the place?”
There was a fresh runner of blood leaking from her left nostril and blood on her lips, but by then Alec’s attention had turned to something else. They were sitting directly under the projector beam, and there were moths and other insects whirring through the blue column of light above. A white moth had landed on her face. It was crawling up her cheek. She didn’t notice, and Alec didn’t mention it to her. There wasn’t enough air in his chest to speak.
Phantoms Page 5
