Thirteen Shadows: Ghost Stories

by Aaron Polson

  Fear for Helen’s safety grew in my stomach, scratching away like a ball of nails until it spilled over one night after work. Helen faded like a ghost through the lab doors, and I followed her.

  Filled with worry and concern—as a friend and coworker, I drove to her apartment. She lived in a little place near what we called the student ghetto, the run-down houses and squat apartments that served as home to a good number of undergraduates. She didn’t answer the bell and the front door was locked. I heard something—a muffled voice from inside.

  I wouldn’t usually sneak around in the bushes like some kind of half-crocked private eye, but the voice scared me, sent a chill across the back of my neck. I crept to the side of the house, and the voice grew clearer. It was Helen.

  “Please, Daddy!” she shouted, followed by a dull whacking sound.

  I balanced on her air-conditioner, caught the lip of her bedroom window with my fingers, and pulled myself to tip-toe so I could peer inside. Helen was alone in the room, flogging herself with something that looked like a short stick or bat, but a yellowish white—a human femur stripped clean of its flesh as only Dermestidae could. A skull, her father’s skull, sat on the dresser, watching over his daughter’s self-abuse with a gallows grin. Helen’s face, though smeared with tears, wore a small ghost of a smile. When the police came, they found the rest of him in her bathtub, his assorted parts in various states of decomposition amid a swarm of beetles.

  Aunt Tessie’s Burden

  Allison and I had been married for a month when my Great Aunt Tessie died. My mother, as the closest surviving relative, arranged the funeral. Maybe twenty people attended the service, mostly Mom’s friends who felt a simple duty to her. Some didn’t know Tessie at all. Allison came with me, bringing warmth and balance in her soft hands and still face, springs of sweet maple hair and quiet green eyes.

  After Tessie’s service, we endured a luncheon in the church basement. Mom nearly collapsed with relief, happy to be through with arrangements and duties, having buried Tessie’s sister, her own mother, just six months prior. Allison pulled me into the bright sunshine from the basement, gladly leading me back into the world of the living.

  “You didn’t know her well, did you?”

  “No. She was just someone who sent a card on birthdays, Christmas—you know the drill. She was a little eccentric. The black sheep, I guess.” I forced a smile; funerals always stirred such dark and dirty memories.

  “Thinking about your dad again, bub?” She squeezed my hand.

  “Yeah.”

  "I wish I could have met him."

  The thin stranger came to our apartment a few days later. He was pale, a flicker of white dressed in a dark t-shirt and bunched khakis. Sunglasses covered his eyes despite the clouds. Even through the dark lenses, I felt his razor gaze plucking hairs on the back of my neck. “I’ve been sent by Mr. Browning—your aunt’s lawyer?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, feeling just a touch off in his presence.

  “Your inheritance. Your aunt’s will. I’ve come to deliver some things.” His voice cracked against my ears like ice while his face pinched in, too thin and gaunt.

  I noticed then he held a small box—about the size of a carton of typing paper, but not as tall. He held the box toward me, and I caught it in my hands, surprised how light it was. The man turned quickly and began walking away.

  “Do I need to sign for this?” I called after his swiftly retreating figure.

  He stopped and turned. “No. They’re yours. Just make sure you read the labels very carefully.” Then he smiled, sending a dagger in my gut. “You want to make sure you’re on time, so to speak.”

  I looked at the box. “On time?” I asked, but he had vanished.

  “Empty jars?” Allison dropped her backpack on the couch when she returned from class that afternoon.

  “They look empty. But they’re sealed and labled.” I held one clear glass container up for Allison to see, label out. The small box contained twelve mason size jars, each with seal intact and a small white label on one side. “There is a note, too. ‘Day is important. Exact time not so much. Open only when ready; contents spoil otherwise.’” I squinted at the paper, hoping to squeeze some understanding from those cryptic scribbles. “Mom had said that Tessie was a bit off toward the end. I don’t see any ‘contents’ in these jars.”

  Allison shook her head. “This is someone’s name. And a room number at the hospital with a date.” Allison melted me with those green eyes, holding the jar for me to see. “Mark, this jar has tomorrow’s date on it.”

  My brain dissected the label as I lay in bed that night. The thin man’s voice echoed in my ears, “read the labels carefully.” The ceiling above the bed seemed to swirl, and the blazing red numbers on the alarm clock next to our bed bled through an hour before I finally rose, went into the living room, turned on a small lamp, and opened the box. After another hour or more, Allison found me sitting on the couch, holding the jar we had passed earlier that evening.

  “Mark, come to bed,” she said, simply a black silhouette backlit by a soft glow from our bathroom light. I obliged, climbing under the warm sheets, wrapping my arms around her curled body, burrowing into her soft hair, and trying to forget the jars.

  The thin man found me in my cubicle the next day. “Mark?” He spoke with his icicle voice, and in my afternoon stupor I felt as though he was but a shadow, just a hallucination or daydream. “Are you forgetting your inheritance?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Mrs. Simpson. You have an appointment. Anytime today should be fine. But I’m sure she won’t be pleased if she doesn’t meet you today.”

  I remembered the jars, the label, the name, room number, and today’s date. “Leave me alone, ok? I’ll call Browning and tell him you’re harassing me.”

  “Mark.” The man bent closer, pulling off the dark glasses for the first time. They were colorless, his eyes. Not white, black, or even grey, they just lacked color. A quiet sort of fear wrapped its hands around my throat, squeezing tightly when he looked at me with those empty eyes. “The jars are yours. Tessie chose you. She chose you.” He slid the glasses back into place on the bridge of his nose. “Mrs. Simpson needs you.”

  I went to a movie alone while Allison studied, only to come home to another sleepless night. In the morning, I poked at my cold cereal, watching the imitation Cheerios soften into a soggy stew. My lack of sleep, the man, and the jars—they drained my energy, my motivation.

  “Mark?” Allison, fully dressed and ready for her day on campus, emerged from the bathroom. “Did you get the note?”

  “Note?” I mumbled.

  “Yeah, your sister had the baby. Named her Amy.” Her face slipped closer, hovering on the edge of my weary vision. “Mark you need some sleep. Did you try—”

  “I tried to sleep, okay?” I growled.

  “Whoa. Settle down, bub. I’m just concerned.” She slid into a chair across from me at the table. “You look—you look like shit today.” I knew she was right; I saw my reflection in the mirror earlier, thick black pouches around my eyes, weak—even my teeth seemed translucent and unhealthy.

  “I’m calling in sick today. I have to do something.” I stabbed at the cereal with my spoon.

  “Ok bub, you just take care of yourself, huh?” She kissed me gently on my cheek, and her warm lips thawed a bit of my frostbite. “I kind of like you, and I want to keep you around,” she said with a forced smile before she shut the front door with a firm tug.

  I stepped off the elevator on the third floor of Springdale Memorial Hospital. The last time I had been inside a hospital was to watch my father slowly bleed into a wax mannequin and die, but I tried hard not to think of him that day. In my left hand I clutched the jar, and I moved as an automaton, clanking down the mirror-waxed floors toward room 329. A nurse walked toward me, looking through me, and I stepped out of the way just before we collided. “Hey,” I protested. She didn’t flinch. I looke
d at the jar.

  The smell caught me first: the awful, seeping smell of sour decay. I knew that horrible odor came from 329 and Mrs. Catherine Simpson. Stepping through the doorway, I saw her lying on in the middle of disordered sheets on a heavy hospital bed. A few people, I assumed members of her family, waited in the room. They talked, but I couldn’t hear them—just mouths popping open and shut with no sound.

  “They can’t see you. Not as long as you hold the jar.” The thin man stood next to Mrs. Simpson’s head. “Open it, there, right by her nose.” He pointed, and either the lack of sleep worked on me like a drug or the man had some strange power. I obeyed. As I stooped closer to Mrs. Simpson, I saw this creeping blackness around her fingernails, beneath her translucent lips, and sunken into her eye sockets. She abruptly opened her eyes, those horrible, white eyes, covered with thick, filmy mucus, just as I twisted off the jar’s brass lid.

  The jar let out a small puff when I broke the seal, releasing the purple odor of lavender. Her face changed immediately, going slack, waxen, and dead—no longer the awful, decomposing dead, but a more peaceful, sleeping death. I backed away, unsure of what would happen next, and I watched a few family members approach the bed, one was crying, but I was miles away.

  Balled on the couch that afternoon, uncertain if I touched the floor of the hospital at all, I waited for him. The front door was locked, but the thin man didn’t even bother knocking.

  “Do you see why timing is important?” He asked me, sitting across the small room in a rust-red recliner. “Good thing old Catherine couldn’t get around well; we could have had a problem with her—more resistance.”

  I burped up a little bitter acid from my stomach and spit into the trashcan I’d placed at the side of the couch as a precaution after vomiting when I first came home. “I killed her.”

  “Nonsense. She was already dead. Did you notice the decay? Did you smell that room? You helped her.” He pulled off the glasses and studied me, and I cringed under his gaze. “It gets easier, Mark. Tessie understood, but it was hard for her at first, too. She chose you, remember?”

  “The odor from the jar?”

  “What was it? Lavender? A happy memory. The sense of smell is such a powerful guide, yes? Something to cheer poor Catherine in a moment of darkness.”

  “Allison…” I mumbled.

  “Yes, your wife probably should know; it makes things easier.” He rose and headed for the door. “Make sure you keep your appointments, okay? They need you.”

  I shook on the couch, roughly wiping my face with a shirt sleeve. I couldn’t tell Allison. I wasn’t sure I knew what had happened, what I had been asked to do by a dead woman I barely knew. Eleven more jars in the box. Eleven more labels with names, places, dates.

  Driven by a desire to finish Aunt Tessie’s burden and bury the empty jars, I followed the next label. I went on the prescribed day to find another elderly patient lying in the hospital. This time, I beat the creeping blackness and decay. The first time felt so strange I hadn’t made the link—my memory hadn’t engaged. When I saw this old man, Robert Thacker, swallowed by the vast hospital bed, wires, and tubes, I remembered my father, how he looked those last few visits, the cancer eating his body from inside out. Mom’s words rattled in my skull: “I wish I could take away his pain.”

  I looked at the jar and then the dying man. Unscrewing the lid and releasing the faint scent of fresh cut grass just under his nose, I waited, watched as his heart monitor flatlined. The nurses and doctors rushed into the room, me standing in the corner. They worked, pressed a few times with the defibrillator, but he was gone.

  After Thacker, I forced myself to think of Dad, imaging his wasted frame and labored breath. Somehow, thinking of my dad, his pain and release—I did keep my next few appointments, compelled somehow, but I still didn’t sleep. Allison seemed of another time. We grew distant quickly, newlyweds on other planets. I couldn’t touch her in the same way; I couldn’t feel the same way after I’d carried what I thought was death in a small glass jar.

  “What’s wrong, bub?” She asked one night after I’d opened a jar for Leon Willits, eighty years old, in his living room.

  “Nothing. Nothing, Allison.” I was wrong.

  Over the next few minutes our silence slowly faded into her soft sobs.

  “Can’t you talk to me anymore? What’s happened to us?” Her green eyes swelled red, rimmed with hot tears. “Dammit Mark, I love you.”

  “I can’t explain.” I buried my face in my hands; my stubbornness trapped me at the kitchen table. “The jars...”

  “This is about the jars?” She collapsed onto the couch, staring at the box. “You’ve opened some of them...”

  “Yeah...” This was my window, I heard the thin man’s words, how I should tell her, but how could Allison, vibrant and alive, understand? The memories of those brilliant green eyes seared my chest. “I’m going for a walk.” I grabbed my jacket, blew through the living room, past Allison on the couch. She was in bed when I returned home, and the apartment was blank and silent like a tomb.

  Magda Pierce was a beautiful young girl, a senior at Springdale High School, broken when her drunken boyfriend crushed his truck against a tree. I followed the label, my pied piper, and found this bleeding homecoming queen lying on the ground while the paramedics rushed like phantom angels to steal her from death.

  I stood amongst the bustle and confusion as an invisible man. The jar grew heavy in my hand when I looked at her face, cut and bloody, but impossibly young and surrounded by matted brambles of dark hair. She wasn’t the old, dying, “better off dead” variety I’d seen before. Her hair and face—I thought of my wife. “No,” I said aloud. “No, I’m not doing this.” The jar slipped from my hand, shattering as it clattered to the rough asphalt. “I’m not going to do this anymore.” I walked away, heading home.

  He stepped from the shadows as a stringy form from the black night. “Bad idea Mark. Magda needed you.” The thin man wore those dark glasses even in the night.

  “I’m done. I quit.” My finger shook in the direction of the wreck. “I broke the jar. I can’t kill that girl.”

  “Mark, I’m disappointed. Evidently you need an object lesson. I’ll see you soon.” And with those words, the man melted into the shadows.

  The knocking started around midnight—just a small tapping on the apartment door. Allison slept in our bed; I stared blankly at the flickering TV. Tap, tap, tap. My neck tightened with each tap, ice water flushed the blood from my veins, but I remained in the chair. Tap, tap, tap.

  “You going to answer that, Mark?” The man sat in the old rust red recliner.

  “How?” My skin crawled against his image, and the tapping became a steady faucet drip outside the door. Involuntarily I twisted toward the dark hallway and Allison. “Lower your voice.”

  “Still haven’t told the wife. Bad decision.” His mouth sliced into a knife’s-edge grin. “Look Mark. Go to the window.”

  Guided by invisible wire, I rose like a robot from the couch. I split the venetian blinds with my fingers, opening a crevice to see who tapped on the door. Magda, horrible and pale under the garish porch light, dark gouts crossing her face, one arm limp with snapped toothpick bone jutting at an odd angle—dead but not dead. Her intact arm continued a weak tap, tap, tap at the door.

  “I couldn’t do it—couldn’t kill her.”

  “You selfish bastard. She was already dead. Too bad really. So young. But she’s gone now, lost, broken on the pavement with that jar.” The thin man’s voice was cool in my ear, and then he was outside, laying his hand on the girl’s face. She crumbled to the ground, an abandoned marionette.

  I turned away from the window, slumped against the wall, and slid to the grey carpet. My heart stopped beating as I sat on the floor, becoming a senseless mass. My brain made suggestions, but my body wouldn’t move.

  “Do you see Mark?” The thin man spoke gently next to my ear. “I brought her here so you would understand. You don�
��t kill them—you don’t have that power." He motioned toward the jars, neatly tucked in the box under an end table. "All you do is supply their last memory, something beautiful to act as the release. The final push away from darkness—all the ugliness you've come to associate with death.”

  “But, You could do it—your touch did it.”

  “My touch doesn’t carry hope, Mark. Without hope the dead become the raw clay of legend—awful abominations lost in the night. You supply the link, the tether to save them from the filth that would settle in their veins.” He pushed his hands in front of him, turning them over to look at the palms. “The ghouls and wraiths of folklore. Call them vampires, demons, djinns... Whatever. Nonsense. Just people who died hopeless and alone, wandering until I found them and ended their living death. There's no beauty in that.”

  His hand moved toward the door. “Magda Pierce knows hell Mark, but she is gone now.” He paused for a moment. “Your job is hope, Mark.” He pushed the door open against Magda’s body. “Don’t worry about the girl; I’ll take care of her.”

  Discarded and crumpled like a foul rag, I remained on the floor for a long time. Eventually I drifted down the hallway and watched Allison sleep. An hour passed. I reached out with a trembling fingertip and touched her shoulder, but she rolled away. The waiting quiet ultimately seeped into my body, and I spent a dreamless night on the couch. When my eyelids peeled back in the morning, the room glowed a lighter grey with the dawn. Allison stood over me; her hair tied back in a ponytail, and her eyes set darkly in a pale copy of her face.