The Elevator Ghost

by Glen Huser

  “And then you can give that grove of pines on the south slope a good shaking, so they drop their pine cones. It’s that time of year.” The mountain king’s wife stirred her hominy grits and sighed with satisfaction.

  Hubert sighed, too. He was actually leaning against Carolina Giddle. If only, he was thinking…

  Carolina Giddle stirred and stretched and gave a little pull on one of her crystal earrings. The tea candles were sputtering. A couple had already gone out.

  “Can you guess what I have in my bag?” she said.

  Hubert and Hetty looked at her, wide-eyed.

  “Not… ” Hubert stammered.

  “Yes, indeedy.” Carolina Giddle got her bag from the hallway and came back with two pens in her hand. “The mountain king’s wife visited me, too. I bought a whole batch of these from her. So here’s one for each of you. Now let’s see if they work.”

  She tilted the shade on the table lamp, so that when she placed her hands in front of the bulb, it made a large shadow on the living-room wall. In a minute, she had arranged her fingers in such a way that the shadow actually looked like a wolf’s head.

  Hubert and Hetty didn’t have to be told to flick the switches to turn on their pen lights. They played their lights against the shadow.

  “Yes!” Hubert exclaimed, waving his hand so that the light skittered all over the walls and ceiling.

  He thought he heard a wolf whimper.

  But maybe it was just the radiator making one of its funny noises.

  Carolina Giddle gave the old heat register a little tap.

  In the hall there was a sound of metal groaning and moaning.

  “I think I hear the elevator,” she said. “Bet it’s your mom and dad. Best get my things ­together.”

  That night, Carolina Giddle didn’t go down into the sunroom with her cup of rosehip and raspberry tea. Instead she went to the parking lot. Trinket was in a stall near the gate where a street lamp shone down on her. Bits of glass — necklace beads, crystal charms, strapless watch-faces — glinted and winked from the lovely clutter of the Volkswagen’s coat.

  “Howdy, old gal.” Carolina Giddle gave her an affectionate pat. “I had a lightning bolt thought today. You and I are going on a little jaunt. Over to the Blatchford seniors’ home. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”

  It was after midnight when the car chugged into the circular drive in front of the residence. The building was dark, but the old-fashioned post lights by the front entrance cast a soft light over the nearby benches tucked into shrubbery.

  Carolina Giddle was not particularly surprised to see a woman as old as you can imagine and as wispy as the evening mist sitting on a bench.

  “Aunt Beulah.” Carolina Giddle greeted the old woman warmly as she got out of the car.

  “Carolina.” Aunt Beulah’s voice was soft and crickety as a hickory branch scratching against a windowpane. “I been waiting for you.”

  “I should have known.”

  “I’m not very mobile,” Aunt Beulah apologized. “Gertie took away my wheelchair soon as I passed over.”

  “You just take my arm,” Carolina Giddle said, “and we’ll get you into the car.”

  FOUR

  Eyes of the Movie Monster

  “Where are you going, Daddy?” Elsa Lubinitsky was practicing the Volga Boat Song on the piano. She stopped to watch her father arrange his jacket collar so that it was even all around. He ran a comb through his tangled curls.

  “Insane.” He turned and winked at her. “I’m going insane.”

  “No. Really.”

  “On a date.” He changed his mind and flipped the jacket collar up. “Dinner. A concert.” He made a face at himself in the mirror. “A date with Miss Peebles. You know — the lady who works at the art supplies store.”

  “Oh.” Elsa played another line of the ­Volga Boat Song. Miss Peebles had a voice that sounded like she’d just sucked in air from a helium balloon.

  “Can we go?” Luba, Elsa’s younger sister, whined. With one hand she waved a sheet of paper with an outfit she’d designed for a ­giraffe cut out of a National Geographic magazine. In the other, she poised some scissors so the blades made a V.

  “Me, too.” Five-year-old Galina jumped up. She’d been drawing a scaly bat-winged monster on a sheet of paper her father had given her from his portfolio case.

  “You munchkins!” Rubin Lubinitsky laughed. “I told you. This is a date. Your poor father needs to get out once in a while.”

  “So that’s why you smell like vanilla ice cream.” Elsa rolled her eyes. “Ooh-la-la!”

  “Ooh-la-la yourself, you goof. It’s aftershave. You’re supposed to smell like vanilla ice cream when you go on a date.”

  “Gots on your shiny shoes,” Galina ­observed. She couldn’t resist trying her felt marker on one of the toes to see if it left a mark.

  “How come your pants are all sharp down the middles?” Luba put down her giraffe and ran a finger along the creases.

  “They’re going-out-to-dinner pants. So you look good sideways.” Their father heaved a sigh. “Now, no more questions. Better yet, let me ask a question. Has anyone seen my keys?”

  “Not me.” Galina grinned. But she couldn’t help glancing at the sculpture they all called the Wonky Dish Man. It did have something like an empty dish for a head. It collected many things. Balls of plasticine, Cheerio bracelets, loose change. And keys.

  “There.” Rubin plucked his car keys from the Wonky Dish Man’s cranium. “Your father is ready to roll.”

  “Who’s going to stay with us?” There was a tremor in Luba’s voice. She hoped it wasn’t Mrs. Byle, who smelled like an ashtray and always made them go to bed by seven-thirty.

  “Ms. Giddle.” Rubin leveled a look at his three daughters. “And no tricks. You’re not to use my acrylic paints to decorate the fridge door or any other appliances. And no carving anything out of soap. No sharks or candle-holders. Knives are verboten. Elsa and Luba, I expect you to keep an eye on Galina. You know how she can — ”

  The doorbell rang.

  “There’s Ms. Giddle now,” Rubin said, folding his collar down. As he went to open the door, he grabbed a fedora from the hall stand to cover some of his wild hair.

  Carolina Giddle wore a shawl that made Elsa think of a spiderweb that had got out of control. In fact, it was pinned at her shoulder with a brooch shaped like a spider.

  “Hey!” Luba shouted. “You’re the lady with the funny car!”

  “Don’t be rude. And be careful with those scissors.” Rubin gave Luba a stern look. To Carolina Giddle, he said, “If the girls are exceptionally good they can stay up a bit late tonight. Since there’s no school tomorrow.”

  “Yay!” Elsa banged the lid down on the piano keyboard.

  “Bye, Dad!” they chorused as he slipped out the door.

  Carolina Giddle patted the bag she’d brought with her. “I wasn’t sure what we’d want to do this evening so I brought some games and playing cards. Let’s see, there’s Snakes and Ladders and — ”

  “Let’s play Mix ’n’ Match!” In her excitement, Luba came pretty close to jabbing Carolina Giddle with the scissors still attached to her hand.

  “Mix ’n’ Match? Don’t tell me you have a game I’ve never heard of.” Carolina shook her head in amazement, and a strand of her flyaway hair escaped from a dragon-shaped clip and popped onto her forehead. “I thought I knew all the games in the world.” She eased the scissors away from Luba’s fingers.

  “It’s easy,” Elsa began. “You take some blank sheets of paper…”

  “Let me tell.” Luba tugged at her sister’s sweater. “You gotta fold the paper into threes and… ”

  So that’s what they did. Mix ’n’ Match.

  There was no shortage of drawing paper in the Lubinitsky apartment. After a
ll, Rubin Lubinitsky made his living as an artist. Carolina Giddle folded each piece into even thirds as the girls explained that each player — in a secret corner — would create a funny character. The character’s head would be in the top third of the paper; the body in the middle; and the legs and feet in the bottom. Once they were finished, they would cut along the folds and then mix and match the body parts to make even crazier characters.

  When it came time to cut and reassemble the pieces, Galina held onto the monster she had drawn on her paper.

  “No!” Galina screamed when Luba tried to take it from her. “Don’t cut him up!”

  So, while Galina stayed in her corner and hummed a little song to her monster, the others took turns taping body parts together to make weird and wonderful creatures.

  “This is the most fun I’ve had since we played double-dare dressup with my cousins when I was about your age, Luba.” Carolina Giddle was holding her sides with laughter as Elsa added huge, clumpy hairy feet to a lady wearing an elegant cocktail dress. The lady’s head looked like it might belong to a witch. But the witch had flyaway hair and dangling crystal balls hanging from her ears.

  “Uh-oh,” Luba shrieked. She pointed at the corner where Galina was humming. With magic markers, she was drawing a monster on a canvas. Rubin Lubinitsky had primed it with white gesso earlier in the day, getting ready to begin a painting.

  Galina’s new monster had fiery hair that looked like bedsprings, pointy ears and a mouth with vampire teeth. It had scales on its arms and legs, and claws instead of fingers and toes. Bat wings sprouted from its shoulders.

  She was just about to draw in the eyes when Carolina Giddle said gently, “You may not want to draw in the eyes, Galina.”

  “Why?” Galina held on stubbornly to her marker.

  “Well, I’ll tell you. But first we need to clean up our Mix ’n’ Match mess. And, Galina, I see a can of white gesso there that you could use to cover up your monster. I’m sure your sisters would help you.”

  “No!” Galina glared at them all.

  “Don’t look at me.” Luba scowled back at her sister.

  “We’re trying to teach her consequences,” Elsa explained. “She makes a mess, she cleans it up.”

  “All I can say…” Carolina Giddle looked seriously at the three of them. “Is that we’re luckier than a handful of four-leaf clovers that Galina never drew in those eyes.”

  “Why?” Galina reluctantly lay down her marker.

  “Teeth brushed and into your nightclothes first.”

  “Can I wear my Wild Things pajamas?”

  “Of course, sweet pea.”

  It took the better part of an hour to clean everything up, to get into pajamas and to have their bedtime snack. Carolina Giddle had brought squiggies — crunchy squares with jelly fillings all the colors of the rainbow that gave off little explosions of chocolate as you ate them.

  “Now, you can each have one more squiggy if you promise to nibble very quietly. And I’ll tell you the story about the eyes of the movie monster.”

  The girls snuggled up on the sofa.

  Carolina Giddle fetched a mesh cage out of her bag.

  “This is Chiquita,” she said, “my pet tarantula. She’s fond of a good monster story.” Chiquita nodded her hairy head and did a little run around her cage that made the girls squeal.

  But Carolina Giddle hushed them quickly. “Don’t encourage her or she’ll be showing off all evening.”

  Chiquita settled down, snacking on a couple of dead flies and a tiny piece of squiggy square that Galina was allowed to slip into her cage. Carolina Giddle licked a bit of melted chocolate and jelly off her own fingers before she began.

  This story was told to me by an old man. ­Diego del Monterrey worked in the special effects department of a movie studio where I worked many years back.

  “Do you remember those monster movies from the early days of sound pictures?” he asked me one evening when we were all working late. We were waiting for the moon to come out from ­behind some clouds for a night shoot.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “I was too young to see them at the theaters, of course, but I loved watching them on TV when they came on the late show. Dracula and Frankenstein and The Wolf Man.”

  “Well,” Diego said, “you never saw the ­scariest one of all. The Scaly Batmonster of Scuggins Creek.”

  He was a young man back then, hardly more than a teenager, working at one of the Poverty Row studios. They made really cheap movies, and the head of the studio, Clifford B. Mizer, was the cheapest and nastiest studio chief you might ever run across. When he saw how monster pictures were raking in tons of money at a studio across the way, he thought it was something he should try.

  “Get that young artist Diego del Monterrey working on it,” everyone told him. “He’s amazing.” Diego’s grandfather was Mexican. He had shown him how to capture creatures of the imagination on paper. One of his best was a dragon-man with a long spiky spine and tail, who could breathe fire out of his nose. And then there was Electroman, who shot electricity out of his fingertips and glowed in the dark.

  “But be careful with the eyes,” his grand­father always said. “Unless you say a blessing as you paint in the eyes, the creature may rouse itself to life and become a true monster.”

  So, whenever Diego came up with a new creature, he said his grandfather’s Mexican blessing as he drew in the eyes.

  When Clifford B. Mizer saw Diego’s paintings, he became very excited.

  “Yes! Yes!” He had a high squeaky voice like a mouse. “These are marvelous! But I want something huge, gigantic. Bigger than Frankenstein, scarier than Dracula.”

  Diego pulled one more painting out of his portfolio.

  “How about this one?”

  It was the most horrible monster you could imagine. Squiggly hair coiled from its head like wire springs sticking out of an old chair. It had pointy ears and wings like a giant bat. Its arms and legs were scaly like a snake’s skin, and it had sharp claws like an eagle.

  “Marvelous!” Clifford B. Mizer squealed. “I want you should paint it on something as big as the wall in Soundstage Ten. We will bring in people and see how frightened it makes them.”

  “I will need money,” Diego said. He was making next to nothing as a boy who helped move cameras and sound equipment around. Barely enough to pay his rent, much less buy groceries. Dinner was often nothing more than a radish sandwich and a cup of tea.

  “Yes, yes,” the studio boss squeaked impatiently. “You will be paid. Now you should start. Don’t waste a minute.”

  Diego hunted up a huge piece of canvas and stretched it on a wall in Soundstage Ten. He had to use a ladder to sketch in the upper part of the monster. It took him several days. People from the studio would come by at lunch or after work just to see how it was coming along.

  “Ooh, those vampire teeth, how horrible!” they would say with a shiver. “And those bat wings! I can almost hear them flapping!”

  When Clifford B. Mizer’s niece came to look at the painting as Diego was adding the ­finishing touches, she screamed and hid her face in her ­uncle’s coat.

  “How can anything have such awful scaly skin and claws!” she sobbed.

  “Wunnerful! Wunnerful!” said the studio boss. “I want it should give you nightmares. The more horrible your dreams, the more money I make.”

  Diego was glad to hear him mention money. The next day was payday. He was anxious to see what Clifford B. Mizer would give him for this creation that was going to make him millions.

  He was on his ladder, painting in the creature’s greenish face, when the studio boss and his accountant came in the next day.

  “That’s very good,” Mizer said. “I’ve arranged a fifty-dollar bonus for you.”

  Diego felt sick to his stomach. “Fifty dollars? But I thought —”

&nb
sp; “It’s really just a painting.” The accountant stepped forward and smiled up at him. “We have to do all the work now, creating the Batmonster.”

  For a month Diego had been dreaming of how the Scaly Batmonster was going to be his ticket to a better life. Fifty dollars! It was nothing. They might as well have knocked the ladder over and given him a few good kicks.

  “I quit,” Diego hollered down at them. “But, wait. First I’ll just finish up the monster’s face. I’ve yet to paint in the eyes.”

  As he silently began painting in the left eye, he noticed that the canvas began to shiver a bit on the wall. It was as if some unseen force was moving it. There was a muffled sound, too. It was like the caw of a huge crow trying to work its way through a sore throat.

  Crrawww.

  Diego heard Clifford B. Mizer gasp.

  He carefully worked in the monster’s other eye.

  As he completed the last brush stroke, the creature began to stir from the canvas. Diego could feel the scales as its belly expanded into life. His ladder toppled, and he fell smack atop the startled accountant, who cried out and then began to whimper.

  Clifford B. Mizer stood beside them like a statue. And they all watched in horror as the monster struggled free of the canvas.

  Crraww. There was nothing muffled about its roar now. It was as loud as a locomotive going through a railway tunnel. Crraaaww.

  “No eyes on my batmonster,” Galina said, looking over at the creature she’d drawn on her father’s canvas. She curled against Carolina Giddle and stuck her thumb in her mouth.

  “Consequences,” Luba repeated, looking sternly at her sister. “Galina should get to work and fix — ”

  “Oh, be quiet. I want to hear what happened next,” Elsa muttered. “Did the batmonster eat everyone up?”

  Carolina Giddle smoothed the curls on Galina’s forehead.

  “Not exactly…”

  There was a scrabble of the monster’s claws as it began tearing around the soundstage, knocking over props and movie equipment. It was like a giant vulture trapped inside a cage. A smell issued from it that can only be described as a hundred rotten eggs exploding. They could hear the flapping of its huge bat wings as it tried to find a way out.