Ghosts: Recent Hauntings

by Richard Bowes

  “He’s still here?”

  The color is going out of her. She seems to flatten, like she’s a cut-out, or something drawn on paper. “I’m tired . . . yes. Yes he’s here. Charles is Mr. Wemberly now. He’s in charge, like he said he’d be. He’s the one who put you in here, this room. Goodbye, Douglas, for now. Try to pretend you’re someone else when Sack comes in. That’s what I always did when Charles . . . and the nurses would pretend . . . can’t . . . ”

  That’s all I can hear. She is slipping into the wall—almost as if something in it is pulling her slowly in, against her will. The wall is drinking her in the way water sinks out of sight into deep sand. Then she’s gone.

  I feel like I’ve fallen into a wall, too. I close my eyes. I don’t try to call to her, though. Bethany needs to rest.

  A nurse comes, looks at my sore, mutters that it’s not so bad. Goes away. An orderly comes, checks my lower parts, shrugs, and goes away. I hear the sound of a mop in a bucket in the hallway. Some kind of broth is brought to me, and I’m fed with something like a turkey baster. They have to crank the bed up a bit so I don’t choke. They get irritated when I choke.

  The bedsore is tormenting me. It hurts and it itches. The itching always makes me imagine insects are crawling into the bedsore. They’re getting into it and laying eggs that will become hungry little grubs that will eat their way out of my brain. Sometimes I think I can feel them beginning to chew through the soft tissue inside my skull.

  I must not think about that because if I do it just gets more and more vivid, worse and worse and I have to immmm. One of the ways I change the direction of my thoughts is to try to remember a song, note for note. There’s one by The Turtles.

  So happy together . . .

  They’re crawling into the wound . . .

  So happy to-geth-errrrrr . . .

  I think of songs and I watch dust motes. I watch the color of the sunlight deepen, and the crooked squares of light from the window travel down the left hand wall and vanish entirely, and the dread of Sam Sack comes on me, much later, when the light is switched off. I try to sleep, hoping for a good dream. But I can’t sleep.

  Sack.

  He comes into the dark room, I know it’s him from the smells—rancid sweat and Top tobacco. I can just barely see his silhouette. I hear the rustle of his homemade mask. He puts it over his head in the darkness. He switches on the little lantern he’s brought, dialed down low, and raises it up to see me, and so I can see him. There’s the sack on his head with holes cut in it—actually it’s a small pillowcase, but for a long time I thought it was a sack. So I think of it that way and I call him Sam Sack.

  “Glad to see me?” he asks, his head cocked, his voice hoarse. It’s always hoarse. He adjusts the pillowcase with his free hand to let him see out the crudely cut holes better. I can’t see his face, only the eyes. Around his covered mouth, the cloth gets damp and dark with his breath. Why does he even bother with the mask? Maybe he’s got the “sack” on in case anyone turns on the light. Maybe he’s hoping he can run before they identify him. Or maybe he doesn’t want me to see his face. Because even though I couldn’t tell anybody who he is, he feels more powerful, stronger, if I don’t know. Maybe his face is one a man would laugh at.

  But I think I know who he might be—kind of. No, he’s not Charles Wemberly. I can tell from smells on him—and the dirt under his yellow fingernails, his calluses, his oily overalls—that he’s probably on the maintenance staff. I think he’s the night janitor. He’s a white man, gangly, but with a pot belly. He has cigarette stains on two fingers of his right hand. Once I heard an aide walking by in the hall, saying, “Maybe Sam can clean it up tonight, I’m not going to do it, I’m going off shift.” I figured maybe he was that Sam. Sick Sam Sack.

  He climbs up on the narrow bed, and straddles me, and I close my eyes. He starts pressing my eyes with my thumbs. “I could cram ’em back into your brain,” he says, “and you couldn’t do nothin’ about it.’ ”

  He pushes hard, and it hurts, but he’s careful not to break anything there. He broke a couple of my toes once, and the nurses never seemed to notice. But they’d notice if he poked out my eyes.

  He says, “I was thinking of the sewing needles today, how maybe I could do you with the pins again, they don’t leave much mark, and the aides just think it’s another sore or such.” He slaps me, once, hard. Stinging the left side of my face. It makes a loud noise in the room. The mark will fade before the nurses see it. And would they do anything if they did see it? I don’t think so.

  He slaps me again, and twice more. “Maybe this’ll wake you up. Wake up in there, dummy! Wake up!” He laughs softly.

  His eyes in the pillowcase holes are bright.

  Sometimes he’ll pull hair from my head, my pubes, my armpits, one hair at a time. Once he started pulling out a fingernail, but blood came, and he decided that might draw too much attention, so he left it partly pulled. No one noticed. They clipped it like they always do, without a comment.

  Sack puts his weight on my chest, presses down with his knees. I can’t breathe. He waits. Spots appear over my eyes. I’m close to dying. I wouldn’t mind if he’d finish it but I know he won’t. He won’t let me off the hook. I make the immmm sound and he gives out a soft laugh of pleasure. Then he lets up, easing off, letting me breathe. Then he does it again, almost smothering me, two times more.

  Maybe I’m starting to turn blue, because he quits, and climbs off the table. “I’ve got something else for you.” As I lay there, breath rasping, he reaches into his pocket, takes out something brassy. He fiddles with it and holds it up so I can see it better. Lipstick. “I’m gonna pretty you up a little. I got a lady’s brassiere, and this. I’m gonna put this on your lips and rub it on your cheeks. I’ll clean it off before I go. And this time, I’m gonna have your ass. The girl I use—she died. She killed herself. So it’s you, now. We got to make you a little more like a girl. I’m gonna call you Sissy Thing . . . ”

  He starts drawing on my lips with the lipstick, whistling a song. “Camptown Ladies.”

  I feel something I haven’t felt for a while. I try not to feel it, because if I do, it’s like I’m on fire and can’t put the fire out.

  It’s pure rage. And there’s nothing I can do to express it, but breathe harder. I can sort of snort out my nose at him. That’s all. This only makes him laugh, and he hits my testicles hard with his knee. The pain brings the rage up like a siren blasting full volume in my mind.

  I fight the rage. Rage hurts me. I have to keep it down. Pretend to be someone else, like Beth says. Beth . . .

  She’s there, suddenly. Standing to my right. Sack doesn’t seem to see her.

  “Douglas,” she says, in my mind, “let yourself rage at him. If you do, then you’ll go into the rage, and you’ll be gone enough into it, and that’ll open a door for me, so I can help you . . . ”

  And I stop fighting it. The rage was like a pot of water boiling over, making the lid rattle and fall away . . . I was uncovered by it . . .

  I feel an unspeakable, glutinous intimacy. Is this being raped? But he hasn’t started that yet. This is up higher, coming from somewhere else—something is pushing into my gut, right under my rib cage. It’s passing through the skin without breaking it. But I feel it force its way into whatever it is, inside my body, and brain, that I think of as me. It’s doing it insistently, not brutally. I realize it’s Beth.

  Then I feel something strange in the muscles of my face. Like I have a muscle twitch. But it’s a muscle twitch that makes my mouth move. My tongue. A jabbery sound croaks out of me. Then some control comes and I say a word right out loud.

  “Sack,” I say. Not in my mind—I say it with my mouth.

  He turns to look at me, his head cocked to one side again. Staring. “You can’t talk . . . ”

  “Sam Sack,” I say. “You’re Sam.”

  Only it’s not me saying it. She’s saying it for me. She’s joined me. She’s with me in here. Beth! I
can feel her there, a warm presence, twined about my spine, swirling at the back of my head, and stretching into my arms . . .

  My arms are twitching. Jumping. They’re wriggling. The straps are loose. My hand is fumbling at a buckle on the restraints.

  Sack raises a fist, slowly, over his head. I can see him flexing his arm muscle. I realize he’s going to hit me. Beat me to death, to keep me quiet.

  My right arm comes free. I watch my own arm as it rises up like a cobra—some creature I have no control over. Sack stares at it, hesitating—and then my left hand gets free. It jumps up and grabs him by the back of the neck. Holds him. His surprisingly skinny neck. My left hand makes a kind of claw, with the index finger, and thumb, and it stabs out, and jabs him in the eyes. As we do it, I remember all the times he dug his thumbs into my eyes. My own will, set free, joins Beth’s, and I push my thumb and finger hard, into his eyes. Popping through his eyeballs, digging into the eye socket.

  He gives out with a long, bubbling squeal, and blood splashes into the pillowcase and changes the color of the cloth.

  He quivers and shakes in my hands—and then he wrenches free and falls flailing back, blind.

  “Okay now,” Beth says, in my mind. “That’s enough. We stopped him.” Her voice is crystal clear. I can see her face in my mind, looking worried and almost pretty. “Let’s just get out of here, together. I can leave here with you. I can’t make it out of here alone . . . We can go out through that old tunnel . . . ” It takes some time to get better control of my limbs. But I get the straps off completely, and I stand. I’m dizzy, once I almost fall over, but I manage to stay upright. I feel firmer with every passing second. “I’m standing! Beth! I can move! You’re helping me do this?”

  “I’m connecting something that was broken in your brain, just by being here, inside you,” she says. “Let’s go . . . ”

  “Wait,” I say, my voice shaking.

  I feel waves of emotion go through me, rage and joy all mixed together, driving me along. I step over to the writhing man on the floor, and I kneel down to press my knee on his neck, and I put all my weight on it. I crush his throat, hard and slow.

  “Let’s go,” Beth says, sounding worried. “They’ve heard him scream! They’ll lock you up. We have to go.”

  “You’re doing this too,” I tell her, gasping the words out, breathing hard as I feel him struggling under my crushing knee. The blood is coming from his mouth now as well as his eyes. I’m feeling pain with all this movement, as if my joints are all rusty. Oil can, squeaks the Tin Man. “You’re doing it, Beth, as much as me.”

  “No. I didn’t even put out his eyes. I was just trying to push him back. Knock him down. Not that. You did that. No, I’m just here, but I’m not . . . doing that.”

  I can barely hear her through the roaring. The roaring that is coming out of me. Then I realize that Sam Sack has stopped moving. He’s dead.

  I pull the sack off his head—the bloody child’s pillowcase—and I throw it in the corner and I look at him in the light from his own lantern.

  He’s a monkey-faced man with a big red nose. Old, his face deeply lined. His eyes are gone, blood running like red tears from the sockets. My hands are slick with the remains of his eye matter.

  I stand up, feeling sick, and wracked with pain, but seething with a fierce delight. Roaring to myself with exhilaration!

  I pick up his lantern and open the door, ripples of disorientation going through me as I step into the hallway. An orderly, a thick-bodied black man with a shaved head, is coming toward me, frowning, investigating the noise—he stops, staring at me. Seeing the blood on me and the lantern and the diaper—and the lipstick. He backs away. I roar at him. He turns and runs, and I laugh.

  “We have to go downstairs,” Beth says, in my mind. “The tunnel . . . ”

  “No tunnel yet,” I say. Because it’s coming clear to me, now.

  I stumble along, managing to walk, spastic and hurting but loving every step. I hum to myself, sing bits of songs, just to hear my creaky voice. I find some stairs and go down—but only one floor. I step into the ground floor hallway, find the front door out into the grounds. It’s late, there’s no one watching it. It unlocks easily enough and I step out into the cold night. I’m almost naked, but I like the cold wind on me, the cold wet ground under my feet. I even like shivering. The stars, seen through the broken, racing clouds, are blue-white points of sheer intensity. I see the house in the corner of the grounds, near the front gate, close to the mossy concrete wall. I stumble across the wet lawn, through a pool of darkness. I make my way to the house, a white cottage trimmed in pale blue, in the corner of the grounds. I see there’s a light on at the small back porch.

  “We should just keep going out the front gate,” Beth says.

  I keep on to the little house. Beth comes with me, she has to. She has no choice.

  I’ve heard the orderlies refer to the cottage. “You want the time off, go see Wemberly in that house out front, and ask. He lives out there . . . ”

  I find the backdoor unlocked, and step into the kitchen, still carrying the lantern. The kitchen is painted a sunny yellow.

  There is Charles Wemberly at the kitchen table, a fat balding elderly man in yellow pajamas. He’s eating a big piece of yellow cheese, which he’s cut up on a carving board, with a large knife. A bottle of Riesling is uncorked beside him. A wine glass brims in his age-spotted hand.

  He looks up; he stares; his jowly mouth hangs open, showing half-chewed cheese. His hand shakes; the wine spills.

  I stalk toward him and he gibbers something and flails, dropping the wine glass. I smash him in the face with the lantern. He rocks back. I drop the lantern and pick up the half empty wine bottle, and hit him in the face with it, over and over. The skin splits over the bones of his face, and I can see them showing through, till they’re covered with blood. He howls for help and thrashes at me and I keep smashing into him, knocking him off his chair, till the bottle shatters.

  I discard the neck of the bottle and take the knife he was using—and I straddle him, like Sack did to me, and I start sawing at the back of Wemberly’s neck. Cutting here, cutting there. Sawing through neck muscles, tissue I can’t even identify. I’m smelling blood; feeling its wet hot thick warmth on my hands, my wrists.

  “Oh no,” Beth is saying. Her voice in my head is a sustained high note on a violin. “Oh, no Douglas. We have to go . . . ”

  “It’s Charles,” I tell her, quite reasonably, saying it right out loud, as I saw at his back. He thrashes under me. I saw away, hacking down further, digging a trench in him around the spine, all the way from neck to tailbone.

  “Yes. But . . . ”

  “He’s the one who raped you and let you die. And he hired Sam Sack. He left me in a moronically cruel state of neglect for six years.”

  “Yes, but Douglas, listen please . . . We have to go.”

  “Wait!” I shout. “Almost done!” I keep sawing, working hard to separate the vertebrae from the body. I feel the strength of years of rage coming out in my hands, and he’s thrashing and squeaking and I drop the knife and I get a grip on the spine, I pull and wrench . . .

  It comes loose from his body, his entire spine comes out rather nicely, with his head attached. I have to cut through a few more connective threads around his neck, some cartilage, and then . . .

  I’m standing over the rest of his body holding his spine in my two hands. His head, his mind, is still alive in it, attached to the spine; his face is twitching convulsively, eyes going back and forth, back and forth.

  I swing his head on his spine, like swinging a polo mallet; it’s cumbersome, and I think of Alice in the Lewis Carroll book, trying to play croquet with a flamingo. But this one drips blood, and sputters.

  “This is to you, from me,” I tell Beth. “I am your man, Beth, and my strong arm has done this for you.”

  A shout comes from the back door and I turn to see the big black orderly and a white man in a uniform; he�
�s a security guard with longish hair and a cigarette in his lips and a gun in his hand.

  “Oh my fucking stars,” the security guard says. He’s staring at Wemberly’s wet-red spine, the attached head coated in blood.

  I swing the head on the spine and roar at them—and the guard’s gun roars back.

  “Beth!” I’m staggering back with the shot, which has struck me in the lower left side. Blood spurts out of me.

  And something else is leaving me—Beth.

  She’s draining out of me, with the blood flow. I see her floating away from me—she’s drifting away, turning around in the air to face me so she can see me as she goes. She’s getting smaller, going into a vast distance that shouldn’t be there, in a kitchen.

  “I’m out,” she says, speaking to my mind. “I’m free, Douglas. But I wish we . . . ”

  Her voice trails off. She vanishes. She’s gone. The guard is staring at me, uncertain what to do.