by Glen Huser
When the lights came on again several seconds later, Carolina Giddle was sitting in the wing-backed chair.
Another gasp, like the breath of a ghost, rippled through the room.
Carolina Giddle’s hair was white with a couple of white cloth roses tucked into the curls. Her face was the color of chalk, and her eyes were rimmed with black. Blackish-red lipstick outlined her mouth. She wore a long lace-trimmed whitish dress of some thin material that looked like it could have been spun by spiders. It was torn and tattered in places.
She made a beckoning gesture with her hands, and everyone in the room drew closer.
“Y’all make yourselves comfortable,” Carolina Giddle said in a voice that sounded a little crackly, as if she had put it on to go with her ghost dress. There were chairs and floor cushions close to where she sat.
“Now, is everyone ready for our ghost-story extravaganza?”
There was a chorus of yesses along with some moans and little shrieks.
“Me first!” Angelo Bellini shouted. No one argued. He’d been better since Carolina Giddle had been babysitting the Bellini children, but he could still throw a pretty amazing tantrum.
“This isn’t a whole story,” Angelo said as he climbed onto the storytelling stool. “It’s a…what?”
“A riddle,” Amanita Bellini prompted.
“Yeah. A widdle.” Angelo inhaled a big breath of air. “Where do baby ghosts go in the daytime?” Before anyone could hazard a guess, he hollered out, “A dayscare center!” and quickly climbed down off the stool, a big smile on his face as everyone laughed.
Benjamin was next.
“There was this spaceship,” he began, “and it was sort of like the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle except it had eight tail blades, not four, and the front cone had a sensor spike sticking out of it sort of like a narwhal horn…”
It took him fifteen minutes to tell the story.
“Wake me when it’s over,” Dwayne said halfway through.
Then Lucy Hooper took over the chair and told a story about a spooky hitchhiker who had four thumbs. Hers only took five minutes.
There were six stories in all, followed by a break for snacks. The ice cubes in the punch bowl had melted and a fat worm candy hung out of Angelo Bellini’s mouth. The room was filled with the sound of crunching bone rattlers and granghoula bars. Dwight and Dwayne Fergus’s tongues turned green as they licked the sparkles off their popcorn balls.
Herman Spiegelman dimmed the lights. The tea candles next to Carolina Giddle flickered excitedly.
It was time for Carolina Giddle to tell her ghost story.
When she was a young girl, my great-aunt Beulah lived here — in Apartment 712 — right across from where I live now. The Blatchford Arms, in those days, was the fanciest apartment building in the city. People would sometimes come just to ride the elevator which, you have to admit, still looks pretty fancy even if it does creak and moan like a banshee on a bad night. Imagine how shiny it all was a hundred years ago when everything was new — the marble tile on the floor, the brass bar for hanging onto, glass frosted with designs that looked like the feathers of exotic birds.
Beulah had only been living in the building for a couple of months when she met Ada, who lived on the fourth floor. They became best friends. When Halloween rolled around that year, Ada’s parents let her host a masquerade party.
The girls spent weeks getting ready for it.
Beulah devoted a lot of time to her costume. She was dressing up as Pierrette, a kind of clown figure you might see on the stage back then. She talked her mother into buying her some white silk pajamas, and she attached black pompoms to the buttons of the pajama jacket. With pipe-cleaner wire and starched handkerchiefs, she created a ruffle for the neck, and on her head she wore a black skullcap from Chinatown. She painted her face white with clown makeup and applied perfect pink circles to her cheeks. She darkened her eyebrows and outlined her eyes with black eyeliner. She was something to see!
It took quite a while to get ready, and Beulah knew guests would already be arriving down in Ada’s apartment. So she hurried into the hallway to catch the elevator. The arrow above the elevator gate indicated it had to come up from the lobby.
As she waited, Beulah looked out the hall window onto the lawns and gardens below. This was back in the days before a parking lot circled the building.
It was a perfect Halloween night. A full moon bathed the scene below her with a silvery glow. At the edge of the garden, children had built a bonfire. She could hear their faint laughs and shouts as they tossed dead branches and bits of broken furniture into it.
But then she became aware of another sound. A closer sound.
Someone coughing. It seemed to be coming from behind the door of Apartment 713.
That was very odd, because that apartment belonged to the Van Rickenhoffs, the family that owned the building, and they were never there. It had been closed up, Ada told Beulah, ever since the Van Rickenhoff daughter, Grace, had died from consumption the year before.
Could the family have returned without anyone realizing it?
Cough. Cough.
Maybe it was just the radiator in the hall.
Cough. Cough.
No, it was definitely coming from someone just behind the door of Apartment 713.
Beulah looked at the arrow above the elevator gate again. It had moved up to the number 4 on the dial. Likely people getting off for Ada’s party.
Cough. Aargh. Cough.
The hacking cough made Beulah twirl around, and she was amazed to see the door to 713 slowly open.
A young girl stood in the doorway. It looked like she was dressed as a ghost for Halloween. Her face was almost as white as Beulah’s clown-face makeup. There was a feverish glow to her blue eyes, made all the brighter in contrast to the gray hollows beneath them. A couple of silk flowers were woven into her pale hair. She was wearing a white dress trimmed with lace.
“I’m wondering if you could help me?” she said to Beulah in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper.
“Of course,” Beulah said. “Are you going to Ada’s party?”
“A Halloween party?” the girl said. Then she smiled. “I love your costume.” She brushed her fingertips over the neck ruffle. “Can you help me fasten this corsage to my shoulder? The pin keeps slipping for me.”
She handed a cluster of white silk flowers to Beulah. It looked like some of the petals were beginning to come loose. Beulah tried to tuck them back in and bind everything together with a faded pink ribbon that dangled from the corsage.
When she took the pin, she was startled by how cold the girl’s fingers were. And when she pinned the corsage to the dress, she felt the same icy cold on the girl’s shoulder.
“There,” Beulah said. “If you’re going to Ada’s, we can go down together. What’s your name?”
The girl smiled. “The elevator is almost here,” she said. She closed the door to the apartment behind her and stood beside Beulah.
The elevator stopped, making a funny wobbly noise like it always did, as if it couldn’t decide exactly how to match its compartment floor with that of the apartment hallway.
It finally eased to a full stop.
“At last!” Beulah laughed nervously. She unlatched the wrought-iron gate.
And that’s when something very strange and unexpected happened.
The girl gave Beulah a violent push that sent her sprawling to the floor. Then she hurried into the elevator and pulled the gate closed.
“Hey, what are you doing?” Beulah hollered. She could see the girl through the glass.
Before the elevator started to move, it looked like the girl opened her mouth in a kind of a cry. You know how it is when you’ve really hurt yourself and you’re starting to cry but no sound comes out for a couple of seconds? That’s what the
girl looked like.
The elevator began to move.
Suddenly there was a horrible wrenching noise, and the sound of metal grinding. Beulah realized the elevator was plunging downward with nothing holding it back.
It only took a few seconds before there was a crash that reverberated throughout the building.
Beulah raced down the stairs. Doors were opening in the hallways, and people hurried along with her. At the fourth floor, Ada, dressed as a Spanish dancer, was in the midst of costumed people from the party.
She grabbed Beulah by the sleeve. “What happened?”
“The elevator fell!” Beulah began to cry, tears streaking through her white makeup. “And there was a girl in it. I…I was almost in it myself but she pushed me back!”
It only took a couple of minutes for them to make their way down to the basement. Sure enough, there was the wreckage of the compartment in a tangle of twisted cable and bent brass, with splinters of wood and shattered glass thrown about.
Beulah turned away. She felt she wouldn’t be able to stand seeing what had happened to the girl in the white dress. There was no possible way anyone could have lived through such a ghastly accident.
But then she heard one of the men in the crowd say, “Lucky there was no one in it.”
Could she have heard him correctly?
Beulah went over to the wreckage. The man was right. It did not contain the broken body of the girl. All she found as she bent closer to the floor was one small white silk rose.
“My great-aunt Beulah picked it up and kept it in a box with her jewelry all her life, and when she passed away, she left everything in that box to me.”
Carolina Giddle reached up and plucked a white rose from her hair.
“I have it to this day,” she sighed. “Aunt Beulah always said there must be such a thing as good ghosts, although that was the only ghost she ever met. She and her friend Ada were certain that somehow Grace Van Rickenhoff, who had died from consumption — TB as we know it — sensed that the elevator was about to make its last trip. She was determined that Beulah would not be in it when that happened.”
“They cough,” Herman Spiegelman said to himself. “Consumptives. A rattling cough, like an old radiator.”
“Apartment 713,” Lucy Hooper whispered to Hetty Croop. “That’s where Carolina Giddle lives. Right across — ”
Carolina Giddle rose from the wing-backed chair and stretched. She touched the pale silk roses of her corsage and smoothed the lace that trimmed the neck of the old white gown she wore.
“I will be mighty disappointed,” she said, “if there is a single bite left for me to carry up from the snack table. Take those leftovers up to your parents. I have my bag here and the bowls and trays fit quite nicely into it. We must thank Mr. Spiegelman for cleaning up once we are gone. And for being the lightmaster for our ghost-story gala.”
“Goodnight!” everyone cried out as they wrapped the remaining goodies in paper napkins to take home. “Happy Halloween!”
Only Dwight and Dwayne Fergus still planned to go out trick-or-treating at this late hour. They grabbed their pillowcases, stashed behind the aspidistra.
Carolina Giddle was no longer in her costume when she came back down to the sunroom an hour and a half later. It had been cleared of its Halloween decorations and the furniture put back in place.
“You didn’t tell the whole story,” said an old crackly voice from the shadows. “You didn’t tell how, over the years, Grace and I became friends.”
“My stories are often a bit raveled,” Carolina Giddle said. “I just tuck the loose threads back in best I can to make a tidy edge.”
She wandered over to the old gramophone.
“Put on ‘After the Ball,’” Grace said softly. “I was pretty shook up from that elevator plunge, but of course you can’t really hurt a ghost. So I slipped into Ada’s party later that night. Everyone was dancing to ‘After the Ball.’ It was so lovely.”
Carolina Giddle found the record and put it on.
“We’re going to miss you,” Aunt Beulah said, her words caught up in the old waltz.
“I’ll miss you, too,” Carolina Giddle said.
It was close to midnight when Dwight and Dwayne got back to the Blatchford Arms.
A crescent moon looked like it was leaning against the east tower of the old apartment building.
“Hardly worth going out,” Dwayne complained. He pulled off his Freddy mask. At most houses porch lights were off and no one was answering to a cry of “Halloween apples!”
“Do you think there’s still some of Carolina Giddle’s treats left?” Dwight yanked down his Scream mask. “We could load up and — ”
The boys paused, speechless. In the No Parking space in front of the Blatchford Arms lobby door sat a trinket-scabbed Volkswagen wearing a huge cap of odd stuff. They could make out the arms of a coat rack, an upside-down armchair, a mattress, cardboard boxes, and some rolled-up rugs. It looked like a yard sale all tied together with bright scarves and braided rags and ropes.
And there was Carolina Giddle handing something to Herman Spiegelman just before she climbed behind the wheel of the bug.
“Hey!” Dwight shouted. But the Volkswagen was already easing its way out of the lot.
The twins watched as it paused at the main road and then turned south.
When they got to the lobby, Herman Spiegelman was still there. He was looking out to where Carolina Giddle’s car had been a few minutes earlier, as if he was waiting for her to change her mind and come back.
“Where did Carolina Giddle go?” Dwight asked angrily, as if it was all the caretaker’s fault.
“I’m not sure.” Herman Spiegelman sighed. “She said she was heading back to where she’d once lived. She said it wasn’t so much reason as rhyme that was calling her. No idea what she meant by that. But she left this for us to take care of. We can keep her in her cage here in the sunroom by the aspidistra.”
Herman Spiegelman pulled off a bright calico bandana covering Chiquita’s home. The tarantula looked at them. It seemed she waved one of her hairy arms agreeably before crawling under an aspidistra leaf the caretaker had plucked and tucked into the cage.
The caretaker shook his head in a way that grown-ups sometimes do when the ways of the world seem well beyond them.
“She said Chiquita had grown really attached to the Blatchford Arms and didn’t want to leave.”
“I don’t care if she doesn’t come back.” Dwight mumbled.
“But she will,” said Dwayne. “She’ll miss Chiquita.”
He placed the bandana gently over the cage.
“Won’t she?”
Afterword
Probably for as long as people have told tales, scary stories have been popular. In front of a cheery campfire or on a comfortable sofa, it can be fun to listen to the hair-raising adventures of others.
Carolina Giddle comes from a part of North America where ghost stories have thrived — the Southern United States. She builds some of her own tales on the framework of stories she might have heard herself as a child. But she borrows from other sources, too. We know she loved old horror movies such as Frankenstein, but echoes of newer movies also creep into her babysitting sagas — Johnny Depp’s Caribbean pirate pictures; films about extraterrestrials such as E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I wonder how she came across the Chinese legend about a painting of a dragon that springs to life when the artist paints in its eyes?
Roswell, New Mexico, offers its own intriguing accounts of a possible UFO crash and cover-up. There could well have been ghosts.
As for Carolina Giddle’s trinket-covered Volkswagen, I suspect she must have visited British Columbia at some point and been enchanted with poet Susan Musgrave’s decorated vehicle.
Glen Huser’s novels include Touch of the Clown (shortlis
ted for the Mr. Christie’s Book Award), Stitches (winner of the Governor General’s Award) and Skinnybones and the Wrinkle Queen (nominated for the Governor General’s Award and the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Award).
A former teacher-librarian in Edmonton, Glen has taught writing for children at the University of British Columbia. He recently explored his passion for musical theater in Time for Flowers, Time for Snow, a picture-book retelling of the myth of Demeter and Persephone (with a cd featuring a 180-voice children’s chorus).
Glen lives in Vancouver.
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Groundwood Books, established in 1978, is dedicated to the production of children's books for all ages, including fiction, picture books and non-fiction. We publish in Canada, the United States and Latin America. Our books aim to be of the highest possible quality in both language and illustration. Our primary focus has been on works by Canadians, though we sometimes also buy outstanding books from other countries.
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