by Glen Huser
“You must tell me more when I come up to babysit on Sunday evening.” Carolina Giddle flashed a smile at the three children.
“Will you tell us a story?” Lucy asked. “We heard you always tell ghost stories.”
“If you’re sure you won’t be frightened.”
“Yay!” Emma did a pirouette and dropped her armload of towels.
“Phooey.” Benjamin brought the soap bottle to a sudden halt. “I’d sooner hear a story about aliens.”
Carolina Giddle hefted her laundry hamper to her other side. “We’ll have to see what settles into the storytelling air of the evening. My grandma always said you can feel a good story coming the same way you can feel a good ice cream coming when you first hear the tinkle of a Dickie Dee bell.”
On Sunday evening, even as his parents were leaving phone numbers and instructions with Carolina Giddle before they headed out the door, Benjamin was packing his collection of model spaceships into the living room. He wanted Carolina Giddle to have a full viewing of his collection.
“Don’t touch them, Emma,” he warned. “You know what happened to my Mars climate orbiter.”
“But I needed a treadmill for my Barbies.”
“Perhaps you can help me clear a space to put out some snacks, Emma.” Carolina Giddle opened her large handbag. She drew out a lumpy plastic grocery bag and a couple of plastic containers.
“And, Lucy, could you find me a plate for these Martian Munchies?” Carolina Giddle held up something round and green, like a tennis ball flecked with icing sprinkles. “I hope none of you are allergic to popcorn.”
“Not me! I’m not bellergic.” Emma did one of her little twirling dances perilously close to another of Benjamin’s models. “What’s in these?” She stopped and tapped her fingers over Carolina Giddle’s containers.
“Well, let’s see. In this one I have delicious frozen alien worms.”
“Eww, worms.” Lucy made a face.
“From Venus.” Carolina Giddle toyed for a minute with her silver hair clip. It looked like a giant dragonfly. “Worms are a great delicacy to the Venusians.”
“Well, actually…” Benjamin gave a little yank on Carolina Giddle’s sweater. “It’s very unlikely that there are worms on Venus. The Russians thought they spotted a scorpion but scientists have decided it was just a lens cap that fell off some of their equipment.”
“There is much yet to be explored on Venus,” Carolina Giddle said knowingly.
Emma opened the lid on the other container.
“Oh, wow,” she giggled. “These look like bugs, too.”
“Jupiterian Jumbles,” Carolina Giddle said. “Very healthy. I make them with carrots and celery and peanut butter.”
It took Benjamin the better part of an hour to present all of his space models to Carolina Giddle. Lucy and Emma busied themselves with a game of Chinese checkers, careful to lick peanut butter and green icing off their fingers as they moved marbles over the playing board.
“Hey!” Benjamin finally noticed the snacks were disappearing. “Save some of those for me.”
“Yes, it is your turn to take a little sustenance,” Carolina Giddle said. “Why don’t we all find a comfortable spot around the coffee table? I’ll light a few candles, and we’ll need to find a spot for Chiquita.”
All the children in the Blatchford Arms had heard about Chiquita.
“She’s fond of a good ghost story,” Carolina Giddle noted.
“Is it your birthday?” Emma asked, eyeing the candles as she crunched the head of a Jupiterian Jumble.
“Oh, dear, no! But candles always help me to focus when I’m telling a story. I call it the incandescence factor.”
When they were all settled, and Chiquita was chewing on something that looked suspiciously like a real worm, Carolina Giddle began.
“This is a story my Aunt Bedelia told to me when I went to stay with her for a couple of months when I was ten — about your age, Lucy. She lived in Roswell, New Mexico — ”
“Roswell!” Benjamin jumped up from his cushion and nearly stepped on his model of the Starship Enterprise. “That’s where some UFOs crashed and they found bodies of aliens but the army said they weren’t really extraterrestrials — ”
“Yes, Benjamin, you’re right. But you must be as quiet as a stealth plane, or this story will never get off the ground.”
Aunt Bedelia did live right where those sightings were said to occur. There is a good deal of debate about what actually happened, but no matter what anyone reports, Bedelia — who was about twelve years old in 1947 — never forgot what she saw and heard one night…
They lived on the edge of town, and their yard backed right out onto the desert. That night Bedelia’s dog ran out of the yard. Bedelia saw Muffin racing away, dodging cacti and jimson weed. Bedelia went after him, even though she’d been warned by her parents not to go out into the countryside by herself, especially at night.
The last glitter of sunset sat on the horizon like a thin ribbon of dying radiance, and already Bedelia could see a full moon rising in the desert sky.
“Muffin!” she called. “Muffin!”
She heard him bark in the distance, but she couldn’t see where he was.
Bedelia figured she must have walked for about half an hour when she finally stumbled into a small gully. Muffin was there at the bottom, crouched, whining at something half hidden by a stand of creosote bushes.
There was a whitish glow to whatever it was that was hiding. Eerie, like captured moonlight.
Oddly, Bedelia wasn’t frightened. But a strange feeling came over her. Something like sadness.
“Here, Muffin,” she called softly, and the dog turned and looked at her as if he, too, were pained by what he saw.
Slowly, Bedelia made her way down to him and gave him a reassuring pat.
“Who’s there?” she said, her voice quaking just a little bit.
As the evening darkened, the glow intensified slightly, and Bedelia became aware of a strange sound.
Who…owooo. It was kind of a cross between an owl’s hoot and a baby crying.
Who…owooo.
Muffin’s whine blended in, making the sound even more melancholy.
“I won’t hurt you,” Bedelia said.
Slowly, a creature emerged from behind the creosote bushes. It was no bigger than Bedelia herself, and humanoid in shape. It had a very large head. The glow it emitted seemed to pulse like a light from a generator when it is running low on power.
In one hand, it held a tubelike object.
“Who…what are you?” Bedelia asked.
The creature tilted its head a bit and gave her a puzzled look. At least it had stopped its mournful crying. It reached up and rubbed a finger against a panel on its chest. A small rectangle on the panel pulsed on and off. Then the creature spoke in a voice that sounded like it was being created by a machine.
“I am Maroo,” it said.
“Where do you come from?” Bedelia asked.
“From home,” the creature said in a strange artificial voice followed by a small sob that definitely didn’t sound like a machine. “I am lost.”
“Lost?”
“Our ship was intercepted and we crashed. I was on it with my father.”
Bedelia was so sorry for the creature that she reached out to give him a comforting pat. Before she could touch him, though, the tips of her fingers tingled as if they were zapped with a cold current. She drew her hand back quickly.
“You can come home with me and we can send for help,” she said.
“I want to find my father.” Maroo’s head swiveled to the left and then to the right. Bedelia noticed moisture seeping from one of his large almond-shaped eyes. “Will you help me look?”
“I’d like to help you but I don’t know where to begin.”
> “Would your companion know?” Maroo looked at Muffin, who was lying down on a patch of sandy soil by the creosote bush.
“Muffin?” Bedelia gave a small laugh. “Muffin’s just a dog.”
“I can ask him?”
“I’m afraid dogs don’t speak.”
But then Muffin surprised her by rising and wagging his tail and barking.
Bedelia watched as Maroo’s finger scanned the panel on his chest and found another small rectangle that pulsed.
“Rroof, roofff, ruff ruff,” Maroo barked.
“Rrooff woof,” Muffin barked back. He headed away from them slowly, toward the west.
“He knows where to go,” Maroo said to Bedelia.
“Maybe he does.”
Bedelia and Maroo followed Muffin.
They had been walking for about a quarter of a mile when they noticed flashing lights. Something was happening up ahead.
They came to the crest of another gully. When she looked down, Bedelia could see some army jeeps from the base nearby and a couple of ambulances.
The vehicles were at the edge of a wreck of some sort. There was a mass of twisted metal. It was strange metal like a cross between aluminum and fish skin. The lights from the army vehicles gave the wreck a silvery glow. Bedelia noticed what appeared to be rows of small windows in a part of the craft that hadn’t been so badly damaged — windows that scattered the light back at the soldiers and the medics milling around.
She heard a gasping sound from Maroo. Medics were carrying something out on a stretcher.
It was a creature that looked exactly like Maroo. Its eyes were closed. Black liquid seeped from a wound in the side of its head. She saw Maroo’s hand go up to the side of his own face as if he expected to find the same liquid oozing there.
Somehow Bedelia knew that the slight figure on the stretcher, so completely motionless, was dead. Muffin whimpered.
Then they noticed another stretcher being carried out of the wreckage. On it was a figure similar in shape and appearance to Maroo but quite a bit larger. There was a gash across this creature’s chest and more of the black liquid. But the creature’s eyes were open. One of its hands moved to touch the wound.
Maroo uttered a strange cry, like something caught in a machine.
Although it was hard to tell from that distance, Bedelia was certain the creature looked up to where they stood at the crest of the gully. Then its eyes closed, and its arm and hand fell limply to the side of the stretcher.
At the same instant, it seemed to Bedelia that something soft and glowing rose from the stretcher. The misty glow moved toward them. As it ascended the walls of the gully and moved farther and farther away from the activity around the wreck, it took on definition. It became a duplicate of Maroo only larger. Glowing as Maroo did. White, luminescent.
Maroo ran down to meet the figure. They clasped each other in a ghostly hug. By Bedelia’s side, Muffin wagged his tail and sighed softly. They watched as the two figures moved away from the crash site, as if they were being drawn by some unseen force. In minutes they were no more than two flickering lights in the distance, like a couple of fireflies in the night.
Oddly, without Maroo at her side, Bedelia felt suddenly frightened. She turned and hurried for home with Muffin scurrying along behind her.
“Where have you been?” her mother said crossly when she got home. “I’ve told you not to be running around outside after dark.”
“Muffin got lost,” Bedelia said, “but I found him.”
Something kept her from telling her parents what really happened that night.
She knew they would just think she was making up stories. And in the morning, she half wondered if it was something she’d dreamed.
When she and Muffin trekked out to the site the next day, there was no trace of the crash. The sand was oddly smooth and devoid of plants, as if it had all been carefully swept.
As they headed back, Muffin stopped at the crest of the gully where Maroo had stood with them and watched his father pass away on the stretcher below.
Muffin whimpered. He nudged Bedelia toward a jimson weed with something caught in its underbranches. It was the small tubelike object Maroo had been carrying. In the daylight, Bedelia could see exactly what it was — a model of a spaceship.
“Does your aunt still have the model?” Benjamin asked, his eyes transfixed.
“No, she doesn’t.” Carolina Giddle shook her head. The dragonfly clip in her hair winked at them in the flickering light from the tea candles.
Benjamin sighed. “I bet it was something. Too bad she lost it.”
“She didn’t,” Carolina Giddle said. “She gave it to me.” Reaching into her handbag, she pulled out a box.
Emma and Lucy leaned forward.
Benjamin reached out, his fingers shaking as they brushed the lid of the box.
“Go ahead,” Carolina Giddle said. “Open it.”
Inside, nestled in tissue paper, was the model.
It looked a little like a hot dog, with a double row of tiny windows where the wiener would go.
Later, Carolina Giddle ran into Herman Spiegelman as she was getting out of the elevator on the main floor.
He clicked off the vacuum cleaner. “You like to come down here to the sunroom at the end of a day, don’t you? If you got any tea left over you can always tip it into the aspidistra pot. That plant thrives on tea.”
It wasn’t until the caretaker had finished and headed to his suite that her friends appeared.
“Have you heard any more?” Grace was barely visible this evening. “You know, from the rhyming man?”
“Not heard, but I have a feeling I should —”
“Your mama always said no one had itchier feet than you.” Aunt Beulah shook her head. “Me, I was never one to travel much farther than a frog can spit.”
Carolina Giddle sighed. “If I’d known he stayed right there all these years…” With a finger she stroked the crystal in her left earring. “But let’s not talk about that. Tell me, Grace, about that Halloween just after you died.”
“Oh, yes, that Halloween. But you should tell it, Beulah.”
“I’ll never forget it.” The old woman took a deep breath. “That night of Ada’s party…”
SEVEN
The Elevator Ghost
It was Halloween night, and Carolina Giddle was giving a party.
“She’s having it in the sunroom,” Corrina Bellini said to Hetty Croop as they compared their invitations.
Each invitation was shaped like an eye-mask. Corrina’s had a tiny black cat on each corner and was dusted with gold sparkles. Hetty’s had a small jack-o’-lantern between the eyes.
“She told me her apartment was too small for everyone,” said Hetty, who was dressed as a ballerina. Red sequins spotted the nylon net of her tutu like a glittery rash of measles.
“Are you guys going to tell a ghost story?” Benjamin Hooper asked. All of the mask-shaped cards invited the guest to tell a ghost story — if they wanted to. “I’m calling mine ‘The Ghost Spaceship.’” Ben was dressed as a UFO. He looked out at the girls through his space goggles.
“I’m telling a story about a vampire dog that loves to drink cat blood,” Corrina said.
“I just want to listen,” Hetty said shyly.
The three joined a parade of children streaming through the sunroom door. Awful-looking spiderwebs drooped from its upper corners. Hubert Croop shuddered and smoothed the cardboard feathers of his owl costume.
The room was decorated with items the children had helped make the day before. Dwayne Fergus’s jack-o’-lantern, with its Dracula teeth and slitty eyes, grinned from the snack table.
Dwight had constructed a swamp monster out of milk jugs and ice-cream containers taped together with duct tape and painted green. It was covered with
drips of snotty slime he’d made by mixing mint toothpaste with engine oil. Eerie lights gleamed through its eyes and mouth.
One of Galina Lubinitsky’s drawings of a scaly bat monster was tacked on the wall above the aspidistra. The monster wore a mask over its eyes.
“She puts masks on all her monsters now,” Luba explained.
Luba and Elsa had made funny Mix ’n’ Match creatures. One had a head like a fairy-tale princess, a middle like an overweight heavy-metal rock star, and legs like Sasquatch.
The older Lubinitsky sisters wore costumes their dad had helped them create. Elsa was a Picasso painting with two huge eyes on one side of her face and a round striped tummy. Luba wore a costume covered with pictures of clock faces that looked like they were melting.
Galina, to no one’s surprise, was dressed like a bat monster. Scales had been carefully sewn on her pajamas. Her bat wings, made out of black garbage bags attached to wire coat hangers, drooped a bit in the back.
Lucy Hooper put on a record of “Danse Macabre.” Emma Hooper and Angelo Bellini twirled and danced beneath a disco ball that caught the light from tea candles artfully arranged between a large wing-backed chair and a stool against the far wall.
The snack table was covered with Carolina Giddle’s specialties. There was a tray of Rumpelstiltskin sandwiches and plates of purple squiggy squares and iced granghoula bars. Peppermint bone rattlers filled a ceramic bowl covered with small ghosts. Another huge bowl, as black as a witch’s cat, was filled with green popcorn balls.
“Martian Munchies,” Emma Hooper whispered to Amanita Bellini.
Frozen alien worms lolled in ice cubes floating in a punch bowl of lemonade. An urn was filled with Carolina Giddle’s hot Ghost Host brew.
But where was Carolina Giddle?
Herman Spiegelman, wearing his usual work clothes, was keeping an eye on everything. He made sure no one stood too close to the candles or got into a food fight at the snack table.
“He doesn’t need a costume.” Dwight nudged his twin.
“He looks like that guy who gets the bodies for Frankenstein,” Dwayne agreed.
Suddenly all the lights in the sunroom went out. Gasps and small shrieks circled the floor like surround sound.
