Ghosts: Recent Hauntings

by Richard Bowes

  I kept reciting the juju spell, but it didn’t seem to be working. I finally realized that I was showing fear, that my recital of it didn’t have the African tone for the words; they sounded exactly like what they were words read off paper and pronounced poorly.

  I admit all this reluctantly, for I’ve faced many horrors, but this one was strong well beyond my expectations. I had never seen the chalk line break so easily. I closed my eyes, started to quote the words again, this time not by rote, but with feeling.

  When I opened my eyes, my heart sank. It hadn’t mattered. The field was starting to fade, and the long fingers of the thing took hold of the tip of my shoe, jerked it off my foot, and snapped into the spinning vortex. The room became dark. The light of the candles flickered; a sure sign that the jinni was breaking through. The air stank and it grew warm, like a campfire had been built all around us.

  As it was tearing its way in, I attempted to draw the line with the chalk again, but each time I reached, it reached too, and finally it caught me by the tip of my finger. I tried to pull it back, but it had me in a snug grip, and in a moment I felt a burning, tearing pain that nearly made me faint. It pulled the tip of my finger off like it was snapping loose a damp piece of taffy. Blood dotted the floor with hot red splashes.

  The chalk was buckling. The rip was widening. The field was about to break completely.

  On instinct, for a weapon, I grabbed up one of the Coke bottles by the neck, just as this thing, this shape-shifting thing, plunged through the barrier. I swatted at it with the bottle, and in a rush, the jinni turned thin and smoky, and was sucked directly into the bottle: all of it.

  I quickly put the open bottle top against the floor, gently, and told Nora to roll up the paper with the juju spell on it, and she did. I took it, and with one quick move, lifted the bottle and jammed the paper inside. Then I grabbed up the candle, and ignoring what the hot wax was doing to my fingers, I packed the mouth of the bottle with it. The wax had another effect; it sealed off my finger wound.

  The jinni roiled around inside the bottle like a lava lamp, but it didn’t come out.

  Nora said, “What happened?”

  “I have to admit to an accident,” I said. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me. But remember the quote I told you that was anonymous, about the jinn. ‘And when the mouth of the container is presented, and a request is made—’ ”

  “Then to its prison it must return,” Nora said, finishing off the line.

  “I misunderstood. I thought it had to be the container it was placed in originally. But it’s clear now. Once it was subject to a spell, if a container was put before it, it had to enter it. It didn’t have to return to its original confinement, it just had to imprison itself. It was merely responding to its initial commands, given to it those long years ago.”

  “So, our jinni wasn’t so bad after all,” Nora said.

  “Bad enough,” Gary said.

  I remembered I had considered scolding them for bringing a lunch and Cokes into a power circle. I decided not to mention that.

  Not much more to tell. We put the bottle in a metal ice chest and covered the bottle in four or five inches of dry concrete, and put water in it, and let it dry for a couple of days on the landing of our hotel room. The day after it was solid dry, we rented a boat and motored it out into the Gulf where it was deep, and dropped the chest full of concrete and the trapped jinni into the depths of the water.

  Dana leaned back, and said, “Well, that’s it.”

  We all sat silent for a while. The smokers had forgotten to call time and go smoke. They had listened without interruption from start to finish.

  Finally, I said, “It’s a good story, but how are we to know it’s nothing more than a story?”

  “Oh,” she said, holding her glass while Kevin refilled it and someone turned on the lights, “you don’t. Remember? I said it didn’t matter to me . . . But . . . ”

  She reached inside her coat pocket and brought out something small and round.

  “This is the mirror in which the jinn’s image was trapped, and considering I thought you might ask something like that, just for grins, I brought it with me.”

  “It’s easy to fake things,” I said, but then my mouth fell open.

  She held the mirror toward us, and all I can tell you is what Dana said before. There’s no way to truly describe the image that had been trapped inside that broken mirror. It sent chills down my back, and in fact, the whole room for a moment seemed as if it were made of ice. None of us questioned its validity.

  Another thing. As Dana held the mirror out, I noted that the tip of her index finger on her right hand was missing; where the tip should have been there was a glistening wink of bone.

  She smiled, put the mirror away, then without another word, downed her drink, rose from her chair, and departed leaving us speechless.

  About the Authors

  Peter Atkins was born in Liverpool, England and now lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of the novels Morningstar, Big Thunder, and Moontown and the screenplays Hellraiser II, Hellraiser III, Hellraiser IV, Wishmaster, and Prisoners of the Sun. His short fiction has appeared in such bestselling anthologies as The Museum of Horrors, Dark Delicacies II, and Hellbound Hearts. He is the co-founder, with Dennis Etchison and Glen Hirshberg, of The Rolling Darkness Revue, who tour the west coast annually bringing ghost stories and live music to any venue that’ll put up with them. A new collection of his short fiction, Rumours of the Marvellous, was recently shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award. He blogs at www.peteratkins.blogspot.com.

  Richard Bowes has won major and minor awards, published seven books and many, many stories. His Lambda-winning novel Minions of the Moon will be reprinted by Lethe Press in late 2012. Other recent and forthcoming appearances include The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Icarus, Apex, Jenny, and anthologies The Million Writers Award: The Best Online SF & Fantasy, After, Wilde Stories 2012, Bloody Fabulous, and Hauntings.

  Laird Barron’s first novel, The Croning, was published earlier this year. His most recent story collection, Occultation, and novella Mysterium Tremendum both received Shirley Jackson Awards in 2011. An earlier collection, The Imago Sequence, was also a Jackson award winner. His fiction has appeared in SciFiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous anthologies and is frequently reprinted in various “year’s best” anthologies.

  Steve Duffy’s third collection of short supernatural fiction, Tragic Life Stories, was published in 2010. A fourth collection, The Moment of Panic, is due out soon, and will include the International Horror Guild award-winning short story included here, “The Rag-and-Bone Men.” Duffy lives in North Wales.

  Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels, The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, and The Drowned Life. His new collection, Crackpot Palace, was published recently. Ford is the recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, and the Grand Prix de l’imaginaire.

  Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels and five short story collections. Her novel The Jane Austen Book Club spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Sister Noon was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Both Sarah Canary and The Sweetheart Season were New York Times Notable Books as well. In addition, Sarah Canary won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian, and was short-listed for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Prize. Fowler’s short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999; her collection What I Didn’t See also won the 2011 World Fantasy Award.

  Neil Gaiman is the New York Times bestselling author of novels Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, Anansi Boys, The Graveyard Book, and (with Terry Pratchett)
Good Omens; the Sandman series of graphic novels; and the story collections Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things. He has won numerous literary awards including the Hugo, the Nebula, the World Fantasy, and the Stoker Awards, as well as the Newbery medal.

  Winner of British Fantasy and International Horror Guild awards, Stephen Gallagher is a novelist, screenwriter, and director specializing in contemporary suspense. His television work began with the BBC’s Doctor Who series and includes miniseries adaptations of his novels Chimera and Oktober. He was lead writer on NBC’s Crusoe and wrote for Jerry Bruckheimer’s U.S. version of Eleventh Hour, the series he created for British TV in 2006. The Bedlam Detective was published in 2012 and he’s now working on a third Sebastian Becker novel. The author’s website is www.stephengallagher.com.

  Elizabeth Hand (www.elizabethhand.com) is the multiple-award-winning author of twelve novels and three collections of short fiction. Her most recent novel for adults, Available Dark, was named as one of the Top Ten Best Mystery/Thrillers of the year by Publishers Weekly. Radiant Days, a young adult novel, was published earlier this year as well. A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Author, Hand is also a longtime book critic and essayist who frequently contributes to the Washington Post, Salon, Village Voice, and DownEast Magazine, among many others. She has two children and divides her time between Maine and North London.

  Glen Hirshberg’s awards include the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award (for his novelette, “The Janus Tree”) and three International Horror Guild Awards, including two for Best Collection (for American Morons in 2006 and The Two Sams in 2003). He is also the author of two novels, The Snowman’s Children and The Book of Bunk. A third, Motherless Child, will be published fall 2012. His latest collection is The Janus Tree and Other Stories (Subterranean Press). With Dennis Etchison and Peter Atkins, he co-founded the Rolling Darkness Revue, a traveling ghost story performance troupe that tours the west coast of the United States and elsewhere each October. His fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies.

  Alaya Dawn Johnson is the author of Moonshine and Wicked City, urban fantasy novels set in the Lower East Side of 1920s New York City. She has also written Racing the Dark and The Burning City, the first two books of a fantasy trilogy called The Spirit Binders. Her YA debut, The Summer Prince, will be published in spring 2013. Her short stories have appeared in the anthologies Welcome to Bordertown and Zombies Vs. Unicorns. She can be contacted via her website, www.alayadawnjohnson.com.

  Stephen Graham Jones is the author of ten novels and two collections. Most recent are Zombie Bake-Off and Growing Up Dead in Texas. Next are The Last Final Girl and Flushboy. Stephen’s been a Stoker finalist, a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, a Black Quill finalist, and has been an NEA fellow and won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for fiction. He teaches in the MFA program at University of Colorado Boulder and in the low-res MFA at UCR Palm Desert.

  Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of several novels, including the award-winning Threshold, Daughter of Hounds, The Red Tree, and, most recently, The Drowning Girl. Her short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, with Love; Alabaster; A Is for Alien; and The Ammonite Violin & Others. Her erotica has been collected in two volumes, Frog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus. Subterranean Press published a retrospective of her early writing, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One) last year. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her partner, Kathryn.

  Marc Laidlaw is the author of six novels, including the International Horror Guild Award winner, The 37th Mandala. His short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies since the 1970s. In 1997, he joined Valve Software as a writer and creator of Half-Life, which has become one of the most popular videogame series of all time. He lives in Washington State with his wife and two daughters, and continues to writes occasional short fiction between playing too many videogames.

  Margo Lanagan writes novels and short stories. Her collection Black Juice was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, won two World Fantasy Awards, two Aurealis Awards, two Ditmar Awards and a Victorian Premier’s Prize, and was shortlisted for several other awards including a Hugo and a Nebula. The collection Red Spikes was the CBCA Book of the Year for Older Readers, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, a Horn Book Fanfare title, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Margo’s novel Tender Morsels won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book. Her latest novel is The Brides of Rollrock Island (Sea Hearts in Australia), and her fourth collection will be Yellowcake. She lives in Sydney.

  John Langan is the author of a novel, House of Windows, and a collection of stories, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. He recently co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters with Paul Tremblay. Langan lives in upstate New York with his wife, son, dog, and a trio of mutually suspicious cats.

  Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and numerous short stories. His novella, Bubba Ho-tep, was made into an award-winning film of the same name, as was Incident On and Off a Mountain Road. Both were directed by Don Coscarelli. His works have received numerous recognitions, including the Edgar, eight Bram Stoker awards, the Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature, American Mystery Award, the International Horror Award, British Fantasy Award, and many others. All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky, his first novel for young adults, was published last year. His most recent novel for adults is Edge of Dark Water.

  Maureen F. McHugh has published four novels and two collections of short stories. She’s won a Hugo and a Tiptree award. Her most recent collection, After the Apocalypse, was named a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Best Book of 2011, was a Philip K. Dick Award finalist, a Story Prize Notable Book, and named to the io9 Best SF&F Books of 2011 List as well as the Tiptree Award Honor List. McHugh lives in Los Angeles, where she is attempting to sell her soul to the entertainment industry.

  Sarah Monette lives in a 106-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, two cats, and one husband. Her first four novels were published by Ace Books. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among other venues, and have been reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies. The Bone Key, a 2007 collection of interrelated short stories, was re-issued last year in a new edition. A non-themed collection, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, was published in 2011. Sarah has written two novels (A Companion to Wolves and The Tempering of Men) and three short stories with Elizabeth Bear. Her next novel, The Goblin Emperor, will come out from Tor under the name Katherine Addison. Visit her online at www.sarahmonette.com.

  Reggie Oliver has been a professional playwright, actor, and theatre director since 1975. Besides plays, his publications include the authorized biography of Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed, published by Bloomsbury in 1998, and five collections of stories of supernatural terror, of which the latest is Mrs Midnight (Tartarus, 2011). His novel, The Dracula Papers I: The Scholar’s Tale (Chomu, 2011), is the first of a projected four and he is now working on the second volume, The Monk’s Tale. An omnibus edition of his stories entitled Dramas from the Depths is published by Centipede, as part of its Masters of the Weird Tale series. His stories have appeared in over thirty anthologies.

  Richard Parks has been writing and publishing science fiction and fantasy longer than he cares to remember . . . or probably can remember. His work has appeared in (among many others) Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and several “year’s best” anthologies. His second print novel, To Break the Demon Gate, is due out in late 2012 or early 2013 from PS Publishing. He blogs at “Den of Ego and Iniquity Annex #3”(www.richard-parks.com).

  James Van Pelt teaches high school and college English in western Colorado. His fiction has made numerous appearances in most of the major science fiction and fantas
y magazines. His first collection of stories, Strangers and Beggars, was recognized as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association. His second collection, The Last of the O-Forms and Other Stories, includes the Nebula-finalist title story, and was a finalist for the Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult Book Award. His novel Summer of the Apocalypse was released November 2006. The recently released The Radio Magician and Other Stories received the Colorado Book Award. James blogs at jimvanpelt.livejournal.com.

  Tim Powers is the author of twelve novels, including The Anubis Gates, Declare, Hide Me Among the Graves, and On Stranger Tides, which was adapted for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie of the same title. His novels have twice won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, twice won the World Fantasy Award, and four times won the Locus Poll Award. Powers has taught fiction writing classes at the University of Redlands, Chapman University, and the Orange County High School of the Arts. He has been an instructor at the Writers of the Future program and the Clarion Science Fiction Workshop at Michigan State University. Powers lives with his wife, Serena, in San Bernardino, California.

  Barbara Roden is a World Fantasy Award-winning editor and publisher, and a World Fantasy Award-nominated writer whose first collection, Northwest Passages, was published in 2009. She was born in Vancouver, B.C., and spent several years in the hotel industry in that city in the 1980s. She worked the graveyard shift for eighteen months, and drew on that experience when writing “The Palace.” In a letter to August Derleth, ghost story writer H.R. Wakefield said, “Night-working life is a thing apart & those who live it souls apart,” and that sense of being caught up in “a thing apart” is very much what the author had in mind with the story. She also drew on two notorious cases of real-life murder: the Yorkshire Ripper murders in England in the 1970s, and the serial killings in what’s now known as Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside—the setting for “The Palace”—between the 1980s and the early twenty-first century. Several of the characters in the story are based on real people, none more so than Sylvia, the Poe-reading desk clerk; readers can make the obvious conclusion from the fact that the Penguin edition of Poe that Sylvia reads still forms part of the author’s collection (and the keen-eyed might spot, in the story’s structure, a homage to Poe’s poem “The Haunted Palace”).