Ghosts: Recent Hauntings

by Richard Bowes

  Bill Messinger jumped to his feet and for a moment seemed preoccupied with brushing what might have been pastry crumbs off the bottom of his suit jacket. Max Baccarat frowned at him, then glanced down at the skirts of his dressing gown in a brief inspection. Bill continued to brush off imaginary particles of food, slowly turning in a circle as he did so.

  “There is something you wish to communicate,” Max said. “The odd thing, you know, is that for the moment, you see, I thought communication was in my hands.”

  Bill stopped fiddling with his jacket and regarded the old publisher with his eyebrows tugged toward the bridge of his nose and his mouth a thin, downturned line. He placed his hands on his hips. “I don’t know what you’re doing, Max, and I don’t know where you’re getting this. But I certainly wish you’d stop.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s right, Max,” said Tony Flax.

  “You jumped-up little fop,” Max said, ignoring Tony. “You damned little show pony. What’s your problem? You haven’t told a good story in the past ten years, so listen to mine, you might learn something.”

  “You know what you are?” Bill asked him. “Twenty years ago, you used to be a decent second-rate publisher. Unfortunately, it’s been all downhill from there. Now you’re not even a third-rate publisher, you’re a sellout. You took the money and went on the lam. Morally, you don’t exist at all. You’re a fancy dressing gown. And by the way, Graham Greene didn’t give it to you, because Graham Greene wouldn’t have given you a glass of water on a hot day.”

  Both of them were panting a bit and trying not to show it. Like a dog trying to choose between masters, Tony Flax swung his head from one to the other. In the end, he settled on Max Baccarat. “I don’t really get it either, you know, but I think you should stop, too.”

  “Nobody cares what you think,” Max told him. “Your brain dropped dead the day you swapped your integrity for a mountain of coffee sweetener.”

  “You did marry for money, Flax,” Bill Messinger said. “Let’s try being honest, all right? You sure as hell didn’t fall in love with her beautiful face.”

  “And how about you, Traynor?” Max shouted. “I suppose you think I should stop, too.”

  “Nobody cares what I think,” Chippie said. “I’m the lowest of the low. People despise me.”

  “First of all,” Bill said, “if you want to talk about details, Max, you ought to get them right. It wasn’t an ‘over-under shotgun,’ whatever the hell that is, it was a—”

  “His name wasn’t Hakewell,” Tony said. “It was Hackman, like the actor.”

  “It wasn’t Hakewell or Hackman,” Bill said. “It started with an A.”

  “But there was a house,” Tony said. “You know, I think my father probably was an alcoholic. His personality never changed, though. He was always a mean son of a bitch, drunk or sober.”

  “Mine, too,” said Bill. “Where are you from, anyhow, Tony?”

  “A little town in Oregon, called Milton. How about you?”

  “Rhinelander, Wisconsin. My dad was the chief of police. I suppose there were lots of woods around Milton.”

  “We might as well have been in a forest. You?”

  “The same.”

  “I’m from Boston, but we spent the summers in Maine,” Chippie said. “You know what Maine is? Eighty percent woods. There are places in Maine, the roads don’t even have names.”

  “There was a house,” Tony Flax insisted. “Back in the woods, and it didn’t belong there. Nobody builds houses in the middle of the woods, miles away from everything, without even a road to use, not even a road without a name.”

  “This can’t be real,” Bill said. “I had a house, you had a house, and I bet Max had a house, even though he’s so long-winded he hasn’t gotten to it yet. I had an air rifle, Max had a shotgun, what did you have?”

  “My Dad’s .22,” Tony said. “Just a little thing—around us, nobody took a .22 all that seriously.”

  Max was looking seriously disgruntled. “What, we all had the same dream?”

  “You said it wasn’t a dream,” said Chippie Traynor. “You said it was a memory.”

  “It felt like a memory, all right,” Tony said. “Just the way Max described it—the way the ground felt under my feet, the smell of my mother’s cooking.”

  “I wish your lady friend was here now, Traynor,” Max said. “She’d be able to explain what’s going on, wouldn’t she?”

  “I have a number of lady friends,” Chippie said, calmly stuffing a little glazed cake into his mouth.

  “All right, Max,” Bill said. “Let’s explore this. You come across this big house, right? And there’s someone in it?”

  “Eventually, there is,” Max said, and Tony Flax nodded.

  “Right. And you can’t even tell what age he is—or even if it is a he, right?”

  “It was hiding in the back of a room,” Tony says. “When I thought it was a girl, it really scared me. I didn’t want it to be a girl.”

  “I didn’t, either,” Max said. “Oh—imagine how that would feel, a girl hiding in the shadows at the back of a room.”

  “Only this never happened,” Bill said. “If we all seem to remember this bizarre story, then none of us is really remembering it.”

  “Okay, but it was a boy,” Tony said. “And he got older.”

  “Right there in that house,” said Max. “I thought it was like watching my damnable father grow up right in front of my eyes. In what, six weeks?”

  “About that,” Tony said.

  “And him in there all alone,” said Bill. “Without so much as a stick of furniture. I thought that was one of the things that made it so frightening.”

  “Scared the shit out of me,” Tony said. “When my Dad came back from the war, sometimes he put on his uniform and tied us to the chairs. Tied us to the chairs!”

  “I didn’t think it was really going to injure him,” Bill said.

  “I didn’t even think I’d hit him,” Tony said.

  “I knew damn well I’d hit him,” Max said. “I wanted to blow his head off. But my Dad lived another three years, and then the junkman finally ran him over.”

  “Max,” Tony said, “you mentioned there was a tract house in Manship. What’s a tract house?”

  “It was where they printed the religious tracts, you ignoramus. You could go in there and pick them up for free. All of this was like child abuse, I’m telling you. Spare-the-rod stuff.”

  “It was like his eye exploded,” Bill said. Absentmindedly, he took one of the untouched pastries from Max’s plate and bit into it.

  Max stared at him.

  “They didn’t change the goodies this morning, “ Bill said. “This thing is a little stale.”

  “I prefer my pastries stale,” said Chippie Traynor.

  “I prefer to keep mine for myself, and not have them lifted off my plate,” said Max, sounding as though something were caught in his throat.

  “The bullet went straight through the left lens of his glasses and right into his head,” said Toby. “And when he raised his head, his eye was full of blood.”

  “Would you look out that window?” Max said in a loud voice.

  Bill Messinger and Tony Flax turned to the window, saw nothing special—perhaps a bit more haze in the air than they expected—and looked back at the old publisher.

  “Sorry,” Max said. He passed a trembling hand over his face. “I think I’ll go back to my room.”

  4

  “Nobody visits me,” Bill Messinger said to Tess Corrigan. She was taking his blood pressure, and appeared to be having a little trouble getting accurate numbers. “I don’t even really remember how long I’ve been here, but I haven’t had a single visitor.”

  “Haven’t you now?” Tess squinted at the blood pressure tube, sighed, and once again pumped the ball and tightened the band around his arm. Her breath contained a pure, razor-sharp whiff of alcohol.

  “It makes me wonder, do
I have any friends?”

  Tess grunted with satisfaction and scribbled numbers on his chart. “Writers lead lonely lives,” she told him. “Most of them aren’t fit for human company, anyhow.” She patted his wrist. “You’re a lovely specimen, though.”

  “Tess, how long have I been here?”

  “Oh, it was only a little while ago,” she said. “And I believe it was raining at the time.”

  After she left, Bill watched television for a little while, but television, a frequent and dependable companion in his earlier life, seemed to have become intolerably stupid. He turned it off and for a time flipped through the pages of the latest book by a highly regarded contemporary novelist several decades younger than himself. He had bought the book before going into the hospital, thinking that during his stay he would have enough uninterrupted time to dig into the experience so many others had described as rich, complex, and marvelously nuanced, but he was having problems getting through it. The book bored him. The people were loathsome and the style was gelid. He kept wishing he had brought along some uncomplicated and professional trash he could use as a palate cleanser. By 10:00, he was asleep.

  At 11:30, a figure wrapped in cold air appeared in his room, and he woke up as she approached. The woman coming nearer in the darkness must have been Molly, the Jamaican nurse who always charged in at this hour, but she did not give off Molly’s arousing scent of fires in underground crypts. She smelled of damp weeds and muddy riverbanks. Bob did not want this version of Molly to get any closer to him than the end of his bed, and with his heart beating so violently that he could feel the limping rhythm of his heart, he commanded her to stop. She instantly obeyed.

  He pushed the button to raise the head of his bed and tried to make her out as his body folded upright,. The river-smell had intensified, and cold air streamed toward him. He had no desire at all to turn on any of the three lights at his disposal. Dimly, he could make out a thin, tallish figure with dead hair plastered to her face, wearing what seemed to be a long cardigan sweater, soaked through and (he thought) dripping onto the floor. In this figure’s hands was a fat, unjacketed book stained dark by her wet fingers.

  “I don’t want you here,” he said. “And I don’t want to read that book, either. I’ve already read everything you ever wrote, but that was a long time ago.”

  The drenched figure glided forward and deposited the book between his feet. Terrified that he might recognize her face, Bill clamped his eyes shut and kept them shut until the odors of river-water and mud had vanished from the air.

  When Molly burst into the room to gather the new day’s information the next morning, Bill Messinger realized that his night’s visitation could have occurred only in a dream. Here was the well-known, predictable world around him, and every inch of it was a profound relief to him. Bill took in his bed, the little nest of monitors ready to be called upon should an emergency take place, his television and its remote control device, the door to his spacious bathroom, the door to the hallway, as ever half-open. On the other side of his bed lay the long window, now curtained for the sake of the night’s sleep. And here, above all, was Molly, a one-woman Reality Principle, exuding the rich odor of burning graves as she tried to cut off his circulation with a blood-pressure machine. The bulk and massivity of her upper arms suggested that Molly’s own blood pressure would have to be read by means of some other technology, perhaps steam gauge. The whites of her eyes shone with a faint trace of pink, leading Bill to speculate for a moment of wild improbability if the ferocious night nurse indulged in marijuana.

  “You’re doing well, Mr. Postman,” she said. “Making good progress.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “When do you think I’ll be able to go home?”

  “That is for the doctors to decide, not me. You’ll have to bring it up with them.” From a pocket hidden beneath her swags and pouches, she produced a white paper cup half-filled with pills and capsules of varying sizes and colors. She thrust it at him. “Morning meds. Gulp them down like a good boy, now.” Her other hand held out a small plastic bottle of Poland Spring water, the provenance of which reminded Messinger of what Chippie Traynor had said about Maine. Deep woods, roads without names . . .

  He upended the cup over his mouth, opened the bottle of water, and managed to get all his pills down at the first try.

  Molly whirled around to leave with her usual sense of having had more than enough of her time wasted by the likes of him, and was half way to the door before he remembered something that had been on his mind for the past few days.

  “I haven’t seen the Times since I don’t remember when,” he said. “Could you please get me a copy? I wouldn’t even mind one that’s a couple of days old.”

  Molly gave him a long, measuring look, then nodded her head. “Because many of our people find them so upsetting, we tend not to get the newspapers up here. But I’ll see if I can locate one for you.” She moved ponderously to the door and paused to look back at him again just before she walked out. “By the way, from now on you and your friends will have to get along without Mr. Traynor’s company.”

  “Why?” Bill asked. “What happened to him?”

  “Mr. Traynor is . . . gone, sir.”

  “Chippie died, you mean? When did that happen?” With a shudder, he remembered the figure from his dream. The smell of rotting weeds and wet riverbank awakened within him, and he felt as if she were once again standing before him.

  “Did I say he was dead? What I said was, he is . . . gone.”

  For reasons he could not identify, Bill Messinger did not go through the morning’s rituals with his usual impatience. He felt slow-moving, reluctant to engage the day. In the shower, he seemed barely able to raise his arms. The water seemed brackish, and his soap all but refused to lather. The towels were stiff and thin, like the cheap towels he remembered from his youth. After he had succeeded in drying off at least most of the easily reachable parts of his body, he sat on his bed and listened to the breath laboring in and out of his body. Without him noticing, the handsome pin-striped suit had become as wrinkled and tired as he felt himself to be, and besides that he seemed to be out of clean shirts. He pulled a dirty one from the closet. His swollen feet took some time to ram into his black loafers.

  Armored at last in the costume of a great worldly success, Bill stepped out into the great corridor with a good measure of his old dispatch. He wished Max Baccarat had not called him a “jumped-up little fop” and a “damned little show pony” the other day, for he genuinely enjoyed good clothing, and it hurt him to think that others might take this simple pleasure, which after all did contain a moral element, as a sign of vanity. On the other hand, he should have thought twice before telling Max that he was a third-rate publisher and a sellout. Everybody knew that robe hadn’t been a gift from Graham Greene, though. That myth represented nothing more than Max Baccarat’s habit of portraying and presenting himself as an old-line publishing grandee, like Alfred Knopf.

  The nursing station—what he liked to think of as “the command center”—was oddly understaffed this morning. In a landscape of empty desks and unattended computer monitors, Molly sat on a pair of stools she had placed side by side, frowning as ever down at some form she was obliged to work through. Bill nodded at her and received the non-response he had anticipated. Instead of turning left toward the Salon as he usually did, Bill decided to stroll over to the elevators and the cherry wood desk where diplomatic, red-jacketed Mr. Singh guided newcomers past his display of Casablanca lilies, tea roses, and lupines. On his perambulations through the halls, he often passed through Mr. Singh’s tiny realm, and he found the man a kindly, reassuring presence.

  Today, though, Mr. Singh seemed not to be on duty, and the great glass vase had been removed from his desk. OUT OF ORDER signs had been taped to the elevators.

  Feeling a vague sense of disquiet, Bill retraced his steps and walked past the side of the nursing station to embark upon the long corridor that led to the north-f
acing window. Max Baccarat’s room lay down this corridor, and Bill thought he might pay a call on the old gent. He could apologize for the insults he had given him, and perhaps receive an apology in return. Twice, Baccarat had thrown the word “little” at him, and Bill’s cheeks stung as if he had been slapped. About the story, or the memory, or whatever it had been, however, Bill intended to say nothing. He did not believe that he, Max, and Tony Flax had dreamed of the same bizarre set of events, nor that they had experienced these decidedly dream-like events in youth. The illusion that they had done so had been inspired by proximity and daily contact. The world of Floor 21 was as hermetic as a prison.

  He came to Max’s room and knocked at the half-open door. There was no reply. “Max?” he called out. “Feel like having a visitor?”

  In the absence of a reply, he thought that Max might be asleep. It would do no harm to check on his old acquaintance. How odd, it occurred to him, to think that he and Max had both had relations with little Edie Wheadle. And Tony Flax, too. And that she should have died on this floor, unknown to them! There was someone to whom he rightly could have apologized—at the end, he had treated her quite badly. She had been the sort of girl, he thought, who almost expected to be treated badly. But far from being an excuse, that was the opposite, an indictment.

  Putting inconvenient Edie Wheadle out of his mind, Bill moved past the bathroom and the “reception” area into the room proper, there to find Max Baccarat not in bed as he had expected, but beyond it and seated in one of the low, slightly cantilevered chairs, which he had turned to face the window.

  “Max?”

  The old man did not acknowledge his presence in any way. Bill noticed that he was not wearing the splendid blue robe, only his white pajamas, and his feet were bare. Unless he had fallen asleep, he was staring at the window and appeared to have been doing so for some time. His silvery hair was mussed and stringy. As Bill approached, he took in the rigidity of Max’s head and neck, the stiff tension in his shoulders. He came around the foot of the bed and at last saw the whole of the old man’s body, stationed sideways to him as it faced the window. Max was gripping the arms of the chair and leaning forward. His mouth hung open, and his lips had been drawn back. His eyes, too, were open, hugely, as they stared straight ahead.