Ghosts: Recent Hauntings

by Richard Bowes

  “It wasn’t there before,” she said and he turned a page, scowled at the book instead of scowling at her.

  “Of course it’s always been there. Don’t be silly.”

  “But Aaron, the wall—”

  “I’ll call Mrs. White to get a plumber up here to look at the wall,” he said. “I’ll call her first thing tomorrow.”

  And now, hours and hours later, she lies wide awake, alone with the night and the contented sound of his snoring, all the restless, old building noises, the muffled murmur of the city outside that never quite goes to sleep, never completely. Like me, she thinks, wishing now that she’d shut the bedroom door so she couldn’t see the hallway or her grandmother’s painting propped there against the wall beneath the stain. But Aaron doesn’t like to sleep with the door shut, so she left it standing open. Terry forces herself to close her eyes.

  Of course it’s always been there, he said. Don’t be silly, but she knows better, because she has a photograph, a Polaroid of herself sitting beneath the painting when it was still hanging in the dining room, before Aaron asked her to move it to the hall to make room for a Rothko print he’d ordered from a catalog. The Polaroid is very clear and there’s no girl standing where the trees meet the edge of the field. She showed it to him after dinner, but he only frowned and told her that the girl was too small to see, that there wasn’t enough detail in the picture to make her out.

  Click, click, click, click, claws on wood, and when she opens her eyes it’s standing in the hall, sniffing at the painting.

  Wake him up. Wake him up now, but then it turns its head, sleek skull, skin stretched too tight, those shining, silver eyes and she doesn’t say a word, doesn’t move a muscle. Would stop breathing, would stop her heart from beating if she knew how, and the black thing sits back on velvet haunches and watches her from the doorway. It holds its head cocked to one side, curious dog expression on its not-quite-dog face, and the dim light through the bedroom window plays tricks in its eyes.

  Like rain, the sudden, soft patter of something falling against the roof, and Let me shut my eyes, she thinks. Please God let me shut my eyes. In the doorway, ebony lips pull back to show teeth like antique ivory, and there’s that smile for her again, that smile for her fear, her silent prayers, and now the rain against the roof is so much louder, the loudest raindrops she’s ever heard and how the hell could Aaron sleep through that?

  The animal opens its jaws wide and its howl is the thunder waiting behind the rain, the brittle crackling of the sky, and Terry thinks that there are words in there, too. A small voice sewn up taut, held fast in the rumbling cacophony, lost little girl at the edge of a wood that runs on and on forever.

  Let me not see, not hear, please not ever again I won’t have to see this, ready to give up eternity for an instant, begging to a god she doesn’t believe in as the black thing steps, finally, across the threshold into the room, stands at the foot of the bed, and the air smells like wildflowers and oil paints, turpentine and warm sunshine on grass.

  And then the rain stops falling (if it was rain) and the summer and brush-stroke smells are gone (if they were ever there at all), and where the black thing stood there’s only a view of the hallway and the stained wall and the painting leaned against it.

  Sleepwalking though the sun-drowned morning, waking disoriented and more exhausted than when she went to bed. Terry called the shoe store and told them she was sick and wouldn’t be in today, not so sure it was a lie, nausea and the dull beginnings of a headache, sweating even though the air conditioning was turned down to sixty-five. Not bothering to get dressed, no point if she wasn’t going to work, just the gaudy Six Flags T-shirt she’d slept in, panties, bare legs, bare feet. “You don’t look so good,” Aaron said on his way out the door and then she was alone. Another cup of coffee, too much milk and not enough sugar, and she’s watching sparrows at the bird feeder outside the kitchen window, tiny, nervous beaks snatching greedy mouthfuls of millet and canaryseed until a big blue jay comes along to frighten them away.

  A heavy, tumbling sound from the hall, like falling books or rocks, and then surprise that it doesn’t startle her or the hungry bird at the windowsill. She turns to see, the perfect, unobstructed view through the dining room to show her nothing at all, and Terry sets her coffee cup down on the table. The jay watches cautiously as she gets up, slides her chair back, and goes to the drawer where Aaron keeps the few tools they own; she takes out the hammer, a pair of needle-nosed pliers, a sharp linoleum knife, and carries them with her to the hall.

  There are no fallen books, or anything else, but she’s sure the stain is much larger than it was the day before, that it’s grown in the night, almost as big as a grapefruit now. The smell much stronger, too, and Terry lays the tools on the floor, presses the fingertips of her right hand against the damp place and discovers that it’s grown soft, as well. It gives a little when she pushes and then slowly springs back again when she takes her hand away. She wipes her sticky fingers on the front of her shirt and moves the painting into the bedroom, leans it carefully against the foot of the bed. The girl in the yellow dress is still waiting at the edge of the forest, though Terry thinks that maybe the sky isn’t quite as bright as it was, gray-blue hint of storm clouds that she doesn’t recall, and then the phone rings.

  She sits on Aaron’s side of the bed and talks to Cyn, but doesn’t look away from the wall.

  “I was worried, kiddo. You never get sick.”

  “It’s probably something I picked up from a customer. I hate having to handle money. It’s probably just a virus.”

  “Lots of clear fluids and vitamin C,” Cyn says.

  “Right.”

  “So, how’s the ghost dog? Have you seen it again?”

  “No,” she says, answering too quickly and wishing she were a better liar. “No, I haven’t. I think Aaron was right. I think it was only a bad dream.”

  A moment’s silence from Cyn’s end, and Terry doesn’t have to see her to know her expression, that practiced skepticism, the doubtful frown, and “No kidding,” Cyn says. “That’s really too bad. I was starting to look forward to the séance.”

  “I was being silly. But I never said it was a ghost, did I?”

  “No, you didn’t. You never said it was a dog, either.”

  “It might have been a dog,” Terry says, staring at the wall, the soft, wet spot, and trying hard to think of a way to end the conversation without making Cyn more suspicious. “It might have been a dream about a dog.”

  “You know what, kiddo? I get off at two-thirty today. Maybe I should stop by on my way home, just to see how you’re doing. See if you need some chicken soup or anything—”

  “But I’m not even on your way home, Cyn. I’ll be fine, really. I’m feeling much better already. Listen, I left the kettle on the stove. I was making tea when you called.”

  “I’ll call you later,” Cyn says, sounding confused, sounding almost angry, and she makes Terry promise to call her if she needs anything before then, if she needs anything at all.

  “Sure thing,” Terry tells her, and they say good-bye, Cyn drawing it out as long as she can. Like she’s afraid she’s never going to talk to me again, like she’s afraid I’ll disappear the second she hangs up. “Just take it easy, you hear me? I mean it,” and a moment later there’s only the dial-tone drone and the work that’s waiting for her in the hall.

  Maybe I won’t need the hammer after all, she thinks, picking up the linoleum knife instead, and that’s when Terry notices the single, dark drop of blood on the floor at her feet. And she stands there, wondering what it means, this new wrinkle, how it fits or doesn’t fit, until she finds the smear running down the inside of her left thigh, the red bloom at her crotch. Only that, nothing ghostly, nothing strange, and the relief makes her smile; she briefly considers going to the bathroom to deal with it, but that would take time and the damage is already done, the stain on her panties, so she sets the curved blade against the wall and drives
it in all the way to the wooden handle. It requires hardly any effort at all, the plaster gone soft as cheese, and a stream of something clear leaks from the wound she’s made.

  “You think it’s ever as simple as that?” the black dog (if it is a dog, which she doubts) asks from somewhere directly behind her. “Having cut it out, you can cut it right back in again?”

  “I never cut anything,” Terry says, no longer smiling and she draws the blade down the length of the soft, wet spot. The edges of the slit fold back like the petals of a flower, sticky, sweating orchid flesh, and now she can see that the wall isn’t white inside.

  The black dog laughs and its claws click, click, click like rosary beads. “Of course you didn’t,” it chuckles. “Are you sure you have the stomach for this?”

  “Go away,” Terry growls. “I’m done with you now. I don’t have to see you anymore.”

  “He’ll see this, you know,” it says. ”When he comes home, he’ll see this and know what you’ve done.”

  “Go away!” and she yanks the blade free of the wall and turns quickly around, slashing the empty air where the taunting black dog might have been standing an instant before. Stringy droplets fly from the tip of the linoleum knife and spatter the walls.

  “I’m not hiding anything from him,” she says. “I’ve never tried to hide anything from him,” and Terry thinks that she can still hear it laughing at her from somewhere very, very far away. Laughter like bad memories and wasted time, laughter black as its skin, and she turns back to the hole she’s made in the wall. At least twice as big as only the moment before, tearing itself wider as she watches, and the linoleum knife slips from her fingers and clatters to the floor.

  The laughter fades like thunder, rumbling, rolling away.

  When she reaches into the wall, it’s warm and soft and Terry breathes in the clinging odor that is as much being born as it is dying, as much conception as decay. She removes the small, hard thing from the quivering center and holds it cupped in one palm, the tiny porcelain doll grown so old the glaze has cracked and some of the paint has flaked away to show bone white underneath.

  “You did the right thing,” she whispers to the doll. “Never go into those woods alone,” and Terry sits down on the floor, dabs the porcelain clean with the hem of her shirt. In a few more minutes, the hole in the wall has closed completely, no sign that it was ever there at all. She glances through the doorway to the bedroom and there’s the canvas still leaned against the footboard, paint dried seventy years ago, whole long lifetimes ago, and now there’s no one standing at the shadowy place where the wildflowers end and the dark trees start.

  There are some things you can’t take back. Shake hands with an ineffable enigma and it knows you. It has you, if it wants . . .

  The Lagerstätte

  Laird Barron

  October 2004

  Virgil acquired the cute little blue-and-white pinstriped Cessna at an auction; this over Danni’s strenuous objections. There were financial issues; Virgil’s salary as department head at his software development company wasn’t scheduled to increase for another eighteen months and they’d recently enrolled their son Keith in an exclusive grammar school. Thirty-grand a year was a serious hit on their rainy-day fund. Also, Danni didn’t like planes, especially small ones, which she asserted were scarcely more than tin, plastic, and balsawood. She even avoided traveling by commercial airliner if it was possible to drive or take a train. But she couldn’t compete with love at first sight. Virgil took one look at the four-seater and practically swooned, and Danni knew she’d had it before the argument even started. Keith begged to fly and Virgil promised to teach him, teased that he might be the only kid to get his pilot’s license before he learned to drive.

  Because Danni detested flying so much, when their assiduously planned week-long vacation rolled around, she decided to boycott the flight and meet her husband and son at the in-laws’ place on Cape Cod a day late, after wrapping up business in the city. The drive was only a couple of hours—she’d be at the house in time for Friday supper. She saw them off from a small airport in the suburbs, and returned home to pack and go over last minute adjustments to her evening lecture at the museum.

  How many times did the plane crash between waking and sleeping? There was no way to measure that; during the first weeks, the accident cycled through a continuous playback loop, cheap and grainy and soundless like a closed circuit security feed. They’d recovered pieces of fuselage from the water, bobbing like cork—she caught a few moments of news footage before someone, probably Dad, killed the television.

  They threw the most beautiful double funeral courtesy of Virgil’s parents, followed by a reception in his family’s summer home. She recalled wavering shadowbox lights and the muted hum of voices, men in black hats clasping cocktails to the breasts of their black suits, and severe women gathered near the sharper, astral glow of the kitchen, faces gaunt and cold as porcelain, their dresses black, their children underfoot and dressed as adults in miniature; and afterward, a smooth descent into darkness like a bullet reversing its trajectory and dropping into the barrel of a gun.

  Later, in the hospital, she chuckled when she read the police report. It claimed she’d eaten a bottle of pills she’d found in her mother-in-law’s dresser and curled up to die in her husband’s closet among his little league uniforms and boxes of trophies. That was simply hilarious because anyone who knew her would know the notion was just too goddamned melodramatic for words.

  March 2005

  About four months after she lost her husband and son, Danni transplanted to the West Coast, taken in by a childhood friend named Merrill Thurman, and cut all ties with extended family, peers, and associates from before the accident. She eventually lost interest in grieving just as she lost interest in her former career as an entomologist; both were exercises of excruciating tediousness and ultimately pointless in the face of her brand new, freewheeling course. All those years of college and marriage were abruptly and irrevocably reduced to the fond memories of another life, a chapter in a closed book.

  Danni was satisfied with the status quo of patchwork memory and aching numbness. At her best, there were no highs, no lows, just a seamless thrum as one day rolled into the next. She took to perusing self-help pamphlets and treatises on Eastern philosophy, and trendy art magazines; she piled them in her room until they wedged the door open. She studied Tai Chi during an eight week course in the decrepit gym of the cross-town YMCA. She toyed with an easel and paints, attended a class at the community college. She’d taken some drafting as an undergrad. This was helpful for the technical aspects, the geometry of line and space; the actual artistic part proved more difficult. Maybe she needed to steep herself in the bohemian culture—a coldwater flat in Paris, or an artist commune, or a sea shanty on the coast of Barbados.

  Oh, but she’d never live alone, would she?

  Amidst this reevaluation and reordering, came the fugue, a lunatic element that found genesis in the void between melancholy and nightmare. The fugue made familiar places strange; it wiped away friendly faces and replaced them with beekeeper masks and reduced English to the low growl of the swarm. It was a disorder of trauma and shock, a hybrid of temporary dementia and selective amnesia. It battened to her with the mindless tenacity of a leech.

  She tried not to think about its origins, because when she did she was carried back to the twilight land of her subconscious; to Keith’s fifth birthday party; her wedding day with the thousand dollar cake, and the honeymoon in Niagara Falls; the Cessna spinning against the sun, streaking downward to slam into the Atlantic; and the lush corruption of a green-black jungle and its hidden cairns—the bones of giants slowly sinking into the always hungry earth.

  The palace of cries where the doors are opened with blood and sorrow. The secret graveyard of the elephants. The bones of elephants made a forest of ribcages and tusks, dry riverbeds of skulls. Red ants crawled in trains along the petrified spines of behemoths and trailed into the bla
ck caverns of empty sockets. Oh, what the lost expeditions might’ve told the world!

  She’d dreamt of the Elephants’ Graveyard off and on since the funeral and wasn’t certain why she had grown so morbidly preoccupied with the legend. Bleak mythology had interested her when she was young and vital and untouched by the twin melanomas of wisdom and grief. Now, such morose contemplation invoked a primordial dread and answered nothing. The central mystery of her was impenetrable to casual methods. Delving beneath the surface smacked of finality, of doom.

  Danni chose to endure the fugue, to welcome it as a reliable adversary. The state seldom lasted more than a few minutes, and admittedly it was frightening, certainly dangerous; nonetheless, she was never one to live in a cage. In many ways the dementia and its umbra of pure terror, its visceral chaos, provided the masochistic rush she craved these days—a badge of courage, the martyr’s brand. The fugue hid her in its shadow, like a sheltering wing.

  May 6, 2006

  (D.L. Session 33)

  Danni stared at the table while Dr. Green pressed a button and the wheels of the recorder began to turn. His chair creaked as he leaned back. He stated his name, Danni’s name, the date and location.

  —How are things this week? he said.

  Danni set a slim metal tin on the table and flicked it open with her left hand. She removed a cigarette and lighted it. She used matches because she’d lost the fancy lighter Merrill got her as a birthday gift. She exhaled, shook the match dead.

  —For a while, I thought I was getting better, she said in a raw voice.

  —You don’t think you’re improving? Dr. Green said.

  —Sometimes I wake up and nothing seems real; it’s all a movie set, a humdrum version of This is Your Life! I stare at the ceiling and can’t shake this sense I’m an imposter.