It was signed, worth maybe one hundred dollars. He stepped closer. He could never get Calliope to let him anywhere near the thing when she was around, but she took terrible care of it. It was taped to the wall all crooked, sort of sagging in the middle.
He touched the slick surface—slick, but not smooth—something soft and lumpy lay between the poster and the wall. What? White light pulsed up around the edges of his vision as he lifted one creased corner.
Something black slithered to the floor. He knelt. With the whiteness, his vision had narrowed, but he could still see it was nothing alive. He picked it up.
A wig! Or at least part of one. Byron tried to laugh. It was funny, wasn’t it? Calliope wearing a wig like some old bald lady? Only . . . only it was so weird. The bones. This—hair. The way Dory had disappeared.
He had to think. This was not the place. He smoothed down the poster’s tape, taking the wig with him to the basement.
He put the smallest bone in a clamp. It was about as big around as his middle finger. He sawed it into oblong disks.
The wig hair was long and straight. Like Dory’s. It was held together by shriveled-up skin, the way he imagined an Indian’s scalp would be.
What if Calliope had killed her little sister? It was crazy, but what if she had? Did that mean she’d kill him if he told on her? Or if she thought he knew?
And if he was wrong, he’d be causing trouble for her, and Uncle Marv, and Aunt Cookie, and he might have to go live at home again.
Gradually, his work absorbed him, as it always did. When Calliope came in, he had a pile of bone disks on the bench, ready for polishing. Beside them, in a sultry heap, lay the wig, which he’d forgotten to put back.
Byron looked up at his cousin, unable to say anything. The musty basement was suddenly too small. She was three years older than him, and at least thirty pounds heavier. And she saw it, she had to see it. After a moment, he managed a sickly smirk, but his mouth stayed shut.
“Whatchoodoon?” She didn’t smile back. “You been in my room?”
“I—I didn’t—“
She picked it up. “Pretty, ain’t it?” She stroked the straight hair, smoothing it out. “You want it?”
No clue in Calliope’s bland expression as to what she meant. He tried to formulate an answer just to her words, to what she’d actually said. Did he want the wig. “For the bow I’m makin, yeah, sure, thanks.”
“Awright then.”
He wished she’d go away. “Neville be here tonight?”
She beamed. It was the right question to ask. “I guess. Don’t know what he sees in me, but the boy can’t keep away.”
Byron didn’t know what Neville saw in her either. “Neville’s smart,” he said diplomatically. It was true.
So was he.
There was more hair than he needed, even if he saved a bunch for restringing. He coiled it up and left it in his juice can. There was no way he could prove it was Dory’s. If he dug up the backyard where the tree fell, where he found the bones, would the rest of the skeleton be there?
The police. He should call the police, but he’d seen Dragnet, and Perry Mason. When he accepted the wig, the hair, he’d become an accessory after the fact. Maybe he was one even before that, because of the bones.
It was odd, but really the only time he wasn’t worried about all this was when he worked on the gimbri. By Thanksgiving, it was ready to play.
He brought it out to show to Neville after dinner. “That is a seriously fine piece of work,” said Neville, cradling the gimbri’s round leather back. “Smaller than the other one, isn’t it?” His big hands could practically cover a basketball. With one long thumb he caressed the strings. They whispered dryly.
“You play it with this.” Byron handed him the bow.
He held it awkwardly. Keyboards, reeds, guitar, drums, flute, even accordion: he’d fooled around with plenty of instruments, but nothing resembling a violin. “You sure you want me to?”
It was half-time on the TV, and dark outside already. Through the living room window, yellow light from a street lamp coated the grainy, gray sidewalk, dissolving at its edges like a pointillist’s reverie. A night just like this, he’d first seen how pretty Dory was: the little drops of rain in her hair shining, and it stayed nice as a white girl’s.
Not like Calliope’s. Hers was as naturally nappy as his, worse between her legs. He sneaked a look at her while Byron was showing him how to position the gimbri upright. She was looking straight back at him, her eyes hot and still. Not as pretty as Dory, no, but she let him do things he would never have dreamed of asking of her little sister.
Mr. Moore stood up from the sofa and called to his wife. “Mama, you wanna come see our resident genius’s latest invention in action?”
The gimbri screamed, choked, and sighed. “What on earth?” said Mrs. Moore from the kitchen doorway. She shut her eyes and clamped her lips together as if the awful noise was trying to get in through other ways besides her ears.
Neville hung his head and bit his lower lip. He wasn’t sure whether he was trying to keep from laughing or crying.
“It spozed to sound like that, Byron?” asked Calliope.
“No,” Neville told her. “My fault.” He picked up the bow from his lap, frowning. His older brother had taken him to a Charles Mingus concert once. He searched his memory for an image of the man embracing his big bass, and mimicked it the best he could.
A sweeter sound emerged. Sweeter, and so much sadder. One singing note, which he raised and lowered slowly. High and yearning. Soft and questioning. With its voice.
With its words.
“I know you mama, miss me since I’m gone;
I know you mama, miss me since I’m gone;
One more thing before I journey on.”
Neville turned his head to see if anyone else heard what he was hearing. His hand slipped, and the gimbri sobbed. He turned back to it.
“Lover man, why won’t you be true?
Lover man, why won’t you ever be true?
She murdered me, and she just might murder you.”
He wanted to stop now, but his hands kept moving. He recognized that voice, that tricky hesitance, the tone smooth as smoke. He’d never expected to hear it again.
“I know you daddy, miss me since I’m gone;
I know you daddy, miss me since I’m gone;
One more thing before I journey on.
“I know you cousin, miss me since I’m gone;
I know you cousin, miss me since I’m gone;
It’s cause of you I come to sing this song.
“Cruel, cruel sistah, black and white and red;
Cruel, cruel sistah, black and white and red;
You hated me, you had to see me dead.
“Cruel, cruel sistah, red and white and black;
Cruel, cruel sistah, red and white and black;
You killed me and you buried me out back.
“Cruel, cruel sistah, red and black and white;
Cruel, cruel sistah, red and black and white;
You’ll be dead yourself before tomorrow night.”
Finally, the song was finished. The bow slithered off the gimbri’s strings with a sound like a snake leaving. They all looked at one another warily.
Calliope was the first to speak. “It ain’t true,” she said. Which meant admitting that something had actually happened.
But they didn’t have to believe what the song had said.
Calliope’s suicide early the next morning, that they had to believe: her body floating front down in the cistern, her short, rough hair soft as a wet burlap bag. That, and the skeleton the police found behind the retaining wall, with its smashed skull.
It was a double funeral. There was no music.
Far from being haunted, the Box was a kind of tabula rasa.
It had no history, and it held no ghosts . . .
The Box
Stephen Gallagher
It was a woman who picked up the
phone and I said, “Can I speak to Mr. Lavery, please?”
“May I ask what it concerns?” she said.
I gave her my name and said, “I’m calling from Wainfleet Maritime College. I’m his instructor on the helicopter safety course.”
“I thought that was all done with last week.”
“He didn’t complete it.”
“Oh.” I’d surprised her. “Excuse me for one moment. Can you hold on?”
I heard her lay down the phone and move away. Then, after a few moments, there came the indistinct sounds of a far-off conversation. There was her voice and there was a man’s, the two of them faint enough to be in another room. I couldn’t make out anything of what was being said.
After a while, I could hear someone returning.
I was expecting to hear Lavery’s voice, but it was the woman again.
She said, “I’m terribly sorry, I can’t get him to speak to you.” There was a note of exasperation in her tone.
“Can you give me any indication why?”
“He was quite emphatic about it,” she said. The implication was that no, he’d not only given her no reason, but he also hadn’t appreciated being asked. Then she lowered her voice and added, “I wasn’t aware that he hadn’t finished the course. He told me in so many words that he was done with it.”
Which could be taken more than one way. I said, “He does know that without a safety certificate he can’t take up the job?”
“He’s never said anything about that.” She was still keeping her voice down, making it so that Lavery—her husband, I imagined, although the woman hadn’t actually identified herself—wouldn’t overhear. She went on, “He’s been in a bit of a funny mood all week. Did something happen?”
“That’s what I was hoping he might tell me. Just ask him once more for me, will you?”
She did, and this time I heard Lavery shouting.
When she came back to the phone she said, “This is very embarrassing.”
“Thank you for trying,” I said. “I won’t trouble you any further, Mrs. Lavery.”
“It’s Miss Lavery,” she said. “James is my brother.”
In 1950 the first scheduled helicopter service started up in the UK, carrying passengers between Liverpool and Cardiff. Within a few short years helicopter travel had become an expensive, noisy, and exciting part of our lives. No vision of a future city was complete without its heliport. Children would run and dance and wave if they heard one passing over.
The aviation industry had geared up for this new era in freight and passenger transportation, and the need for various kinds of training had brought new life to many a small airfield and flight school. Wainfleet was a maritime college, but it offered new aircrew one facility that the flight schools could not.
At Wainfleet we had the dunker, also known as The Box.
We’d been running the sea rescue and safety course for almost three years, and I’d been on the staff for most of that time. Our completion record was good. I mean, you expect a few people to drop out of any training program, especially the dreamers, but our intake were experienced men with some living under their belts. Most were ex-navy or air force, and any romantic notions had been knocked out of them in a much harder theatre than ours. Our scenarios were as nothing, compared to the situations through which some of them had lived.
And yet, I was thinking as I looked at the various records spread across the desk in my little office, our drop-outs were gradually increasing in their numbers. Could the fault lie with us? There was nothing in any of their personal histories to indicate a common cause.
I went down the corridor to Peter Taylor’s office. Peter Taylor was my boss. He was sitting at his desk signing course certificates.
I said, “Don’t bother signing Lavery’s.”
He looked up at me with eyebrows raised, and I shrugged.
“I’m no closer to explaining it,” I said.
“Couldn’t just be plain old funk, could it?”
“Most of these men are war heroes,” I said. “Funk doesn’t come into it.”
He went back to his signing, but he carried on talking.
“Easy enough to be a hero when you’re a boy without a serious thought in your head,” he said. “Ten years of peacetime and a few responsibilities, and perhaps you get a little bit wiser.”
Then he finished the last one and capped the fountain pen and looked at me. I didn’t quite know what to say. Peter Taylor had a background in the merchant marine but he’d sat out the war right here, in a reserved occupation.
“I’d better be getting on,” I said.
I left the teaching block and went over to the building that housed our sea tank. It was a short walk and the sun was shining, but the wind from the ocean always cut through the gap between the structures. The wind smelled and tasted of sand and salt, and of something unpleasant that the new factories up the coast had started to dump into the estuary.
Back in its early days, Wainfleet had been a sanatorium for TB cases. Staffed by nuns, as I understood it; there were some old photographs in the mess hall. Then it had become a convalescent home for mine workers and then, finally, the maritime college it now was. We had two hundred boarding cadets for whom we had dormitories, a parade ground, and a rugby field that had a pronounced downward slope toward the cliffs. But I wasn’t part of the cadet teaching staff. I was concerned only with the commercial training arm.
Our team of four safety divers was clearing up after the day’s session. The tank had once been an ordinary swimming pool, added during the convalescent-home era but then deepened and re-equipped for our purposes. The seawater was filtered, and in the winter it was heated by a boiler. Although if you’d been splashing around in there in December, you’d never have guessed it.
Their head diver was George “Buster” Brown. A compact and powerful-looking man, he’d lost most of his hair and had all but shaved off the rest, American GI-style. With his barrel chest and his bullet head, he looked like a human missile in his dive suit. In fact, he’d actually trained on those two-man torpedoes toward the end of the war.
I said to him, “Cast your mind back to last week. Remember a trainee name of Lavery?”
“What did he look like?”
I described him, and added, “Something went wrong and he didn’t complete.”
“I think I know the one,” Buster said. “Had a panic during the exercise and we had to extract him. He was almost throwing a fit down there. Caught Jacky Jackson a right boff on the nose.”
“What was he like after you got him out?”
“Embarrassed, I think. Wouldn’t explain his problem. Stamped off and we didn’t see him again.”
Buster couldn’t think of any reason why Lavery might have reacted as he did. As far as he and his team were concerned, the exercise had gone normally in every way.
I left him to finish stowing the training gear, and went over to inspect the Box.
The Box was a stripped-down facsimile of a helicopter cabin, made of riveted aluminium panels and suspended by cable from a lifeboat davit. The davit swung the Box out and over the water before lowering it. The cabin seated four. Once immersed, an ingenious chain-belt system rotated the entire cabin until it was upside down. It was as realistic a ditching as we could make it, while retaining complete control of the situation. The safety course consisted of a morning in the classroom, followed by the afternoon spent practising escape drill from underwater.
The Box was in its rest position at the side of the pool. It hung with its floor about six inches clear of the tiles. I climbed aboard, and grabbed at something to keep my balance as the cabin swung around under my weight.
There had been no attempt to dress up the interior to look like the real thing; upside-down and six feet under, only the internal geography needed to be accurate. The bucket seats and harnesses were genuine, but that was as far as it went. The rest was just the bare metal, braced with aluminium struts and with open holes cut for the windo
ws. In appearance it was like a tin Wendy House, suspended from a crane.
I’m not sure what I thought I was looking for. I put my hand on one of the seats and tugged, but the bolts were firm. I lifted part of the harness and let the webbing slide through my fingers. It was wet and heavy. Steadying myself, I used both hands to close the buckle and then tested the snap-release one-handed.
“I check those myself,” Buster Brown said through the window. “Every session.”
“No criticism intended, Buster,” I said.
“I should hope not,” he said, and then he was gone.
It happened again the very next session, only three days later.
I’d taken the files home and I’d studied all the past cases, but I’d reached no firm conclusions. If we were doing something wrong, I couldn’t see what it was.
These were not inexperienced men. Most were in their thirties and, as I’d pointed out to Peter Taylor, had seen service under wartime conditions. Some had been ground crew, but many had been flyers who’d made the switch to peacetime commercial aviation. Occasionally we’d get students whose notes came marked with a particular code, and whose records had blank spaces where personal details should have been; these individuals, it was acknowledged but never said, were sent to us as part of a wider MI5 training.
In short, no sissies. Some of them were as tough as you could ask, but it wasn’t meant to be a tough course. It wasn’t a trial, it wasn’t a test. The war was long over.
As I’ve said, we began every training day in the classroom. Inevitably, some of it involved telling them things they already knew. But you can’t skip safety, even though some of them would have loved to; no grown man ever looks comfortable in a classroom situation.
First I talked them through the forms they had to complete. Then I collected the forms in.
And then, when they were all settled again, I started the talk.
I said, “We’re not here to punish anybody. We’re here to take you through a scenario so that hopefully, if you ever do need to ditch, you’ll have a much greater chance of survival. Most fatalities don’t take place when the helicopter comes down. They happen afterwards, in the water.”
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings Page 41
