Paper Ghosts

by Julia Heaberlin

  I rove the light over the porch. “Are we here?” I ask again. No answer. The front door is latched tight. Up close, it’s newer than I expected, considering the condition of the shingles and the swing. It’s outfitted with a solid lock.

  The large picture frame window behind the swing is equally unyielding, double-layered with storm glass. No damage from forest critters or vandals. The inside window shade is an eyelid shut tighter than Carl’s.

  I know it can’t be, but I feel like I’ve been here before.

  On this porch. In this forest.

  Two little girls in white, one a ghostly blur. The Marys. In the stories I made up on my closet floor, I gave them a hundred names.

  Something is traveling down my neck. I slap it away. A porch spider. The girls, playing, giggling, dancing a bird feather on my skin. Did they bring me here?

  I wonder if I’d tried hard enough to root out their fate. I’d never wanted to enter those two little girls as numbers in Carl’s dead column. It was fine for me, better even, if they existed only in his picture and I controlled their lives from my closet floor. Nothing bad happened in that forest.

  In Carl’s heyday, one well-known New York art critic speculated that the ghostly Mary in motion was superimposed. He said Carl was copying the disturbing feeling of a famous twins photo by Diane Arbus, two seven-year-old girls she pulled aside at a Christmas party.

  The father declared it the worst likeness of his daughters ever, a photo that turned out so creepy and iconic it was said to inspire Stanley Kubrick’s casting of twins in The Shining.

  The same critic similarly disparaged two other photographs in Carl’s book—the Mystery Lights in Marfa and the ghostly face swirling in fabric and algae in Galveston. He dismissed Carl as an illusionist, a trickster, not a documentarian. That was before anyone called him worse.

  Carl’s public response to that critic? “What’s everything but an illusion? Pity you—dying alone in a toilet-size New York apartment after eating bad pasta with one of your cat’s hairs in it.”

  I try to match Carl, the wit, the artist, with the one who brought me to this purgatory between hell and moonlight. The cicadas are still trilling. I turn to face the yard, dense with firefly glitter.

  When the swing moans, I jump. The moon is suddenly gone, like it has been shot out. My light clatters to the floor, a second shot, snuffed out the moment it hits. I whip around. Carl is standing in the shadows.

  “Did you know fireflies synchronize their flashing?” He’s extending his hand. “You’re jumpy. I’m just giving you the key.”

  I can’t make out the tiny object he is holding to confirm that. I step forward and connect my fingers with his anyway, a little bite of electricity. The piece of metal is warm and oily with his perspiration.

  I had thought it might be the little key to nothing he wears around his neck, the one that belonged to the girl in the desert. It is, in fact, a perfectly ordinary door key.

  It could belong to this house, to one of our old motel rooms, to the front door of Mrs. T’s. He could have picked it up in a nest of gravel in a parking lot while panning for gold.

  My arm is aching from inside the bone. I crave another pain pill. Or two or three.

  I yearn for running water and soap for the insane itch and burn that are beginning to trickle up my arms and ankles, the work of cunning insects and thorns along the dark trail.

  I want to drop backward, fall forever, and land on a place soft and endlessly deep. It is the opposite of how I thought I would feel while I stood on the precipice of answers.

  “Whose house is this, Carl?”

  “Mine now. Inherited from my aunt.” He picks up my flashlight from the floor and gives it a shake like an experienced magician. It cooperates, lighting up the swing’s splintered frame and the floor beneath. Barfly’s tail twitches under the swing, lightly tapping the machete’s serrated edge.

  “No electricity turned on inside,” Carl announces, holding out my flashlight politely. “You’re going to need this.”

  I stick the key in my pocket to grab the flashlight. My wrecked arm is a monster obstacle to even the simplest task.

  Carl is instantly, nimbly, pulling something else out of his pants. A small can. Pepper spray?

  “Why the hell do you keep jumping back?” he grumbles. “For sweet Christ’s sake, it’s WD-40. For the lock on the door.”

  I can see now that he’s telling the truth. He’s holding a mini-can, the familiar blue and yellow. He gives me wide berth on his way to the door. The hiss of spray fills the air.

  “All yours,” he says sarcastically, holding the screen door open.

  “You shot those little girls in these woods, right? The Marys? Their picture, I mean. You shot their picture.” I’m babbling. “Tell me what happened to them.”

  “Long dead,” he replies. “Go on in and see for yourself. I hope you don’t think less of me.”

  59

  The key fits, gliding easily in Carl’s grease.

  Until then, a good part of me didn’t believe Carl knew where we were, in spite of feeling that this porch was a familiar set piece, in spite of the disturbing legend of the James Dean junkyard ravine, in spite of Carl’s last wicked remark about the little girls in the photograph as if I am about to find their skeletons with white veils tied perkily to their skulls.

  The girl in the desert could be in this house. The lady in the rain. Nicole. Vickie. Violet.

  My sister.

  “You first,” I say to Carl. The words are sticky in my mouth.

  “I’m not going in.” Carl is holding up empty hands in surrender again. Wiggling his fingers. “I’m staying here on the porch with Barfly, where there’s a breeze. I suggest you open some windows in there. Be sure to check out my aunt’s sewing cabinet. It’s a gem of carpentry. Nothing like it. Her father built it right to her specifications as a wedding present.”

  I’ve nudged the door open farther with my foot, about four inches, revealing a sliver of inky black. I could wait until it’s light. My gut warns that every second counts. I keep the flashlight under my armpit and use my jeans to clean WD-40 off my hand, finger by finger. Carl must have unloaded the entire can.

  I think of a picture of my sister that only I will ever see. It was two nights before she disappeared, a crisp brain shot I return to again and again.

  She is fresh out of the shower, smiling, sitting cross-legged on her twin bed with wet, stringy dark hair that leaves damp spots on the shoulders of her yellow pajamas. Her face is scrubbed free of makeup. Her eyelashes are blond, lacy fringe.

  There’s a faint shadow under her green eyes that she hates and can never get rid of no matter how much sleep she gets. I think it makes her look like a fairy, delicate and ethereal. My big sister was most beautiful like this, with no artifice.

  “What are you scared of?” Carl asks impatiently.

  That’s just it. Now that I’m at the door and he’s inviting me in, I don’t know.

  * * *

  —

  The first thing to greet me isn’t a little girl ghost. It’s the vague smell of chemicals. Formaldehyde is my first thought. Darkroom fixer, the chemical bath that embalms an image forever, is the second.

  In pitch black, with one working arm, I choose my flashlight over my gun. I shoot the beam across the room to make sure nothing is moving—that Carl hasn’t arranged some kind of trap with those two men on my tail.

  I wish I’d thought to ask Carl for his more industrial flashlight. How weird and dysfunctional is our relationship that I’m certain my sister’s killer would obligingly agree to give me the better flashlight. That, minutes earlier, without a thought, I’d let him drink the last drop out of my water bottle.

  The quick sweep reveals a large, open room with a living area to the left, a small kitchen to the right, and the requisite fireplac
e for a little house in the woods. I quietly push the door shut behind me and turn the lock. There’s a dead bolt, a good one, so I throw that, too. No way do I want Carl popping up behind me. I’ll take the chance that everything in here is dead.

  I flip the switch on the wall twice. Nothing, as Carl promised.

  The chemical smell is nauseating, a hint of cover to an unpleasant stink.

  The swing on the porch has begun a high rhythmic whine that bleeds through the walls, harmonizing with the cicadas.

  Control your physical arousal. If it isn’t a race, don’t run. I take a minute for the 4X4 exercise. I breathe in four seconds, and out four seconds. I do this exactly fifteen times. The swing still whines.

  I visualize the search ahead of me. I see myself methodically investigating every room, an inch at a time. Walking out the front door into bright sunshine in about fifteen minutes without a scratch. It’s absurd, this visualization, but it has worked in the past.

  I’d found my trainer on the Dark Web, where his reviews, detailed and frightening, maintained a steady five-star ranking. At the end of his insane games, he placed an icy can of Coke in my hand as a reward. I think of him now as I’m squeezed by awful silence.

  He once asked if I had noticed how the long pauses in the games were the worst. The waiting for what you couldn’t see coming.

  I had nodded obediently. I had sucked down his icy Coke and let it burn my throat, the most delicious thing I ever drank.

  My mind would be the thing to kill me, he’d warned. He could train my body. But my mind? That is where even soldiers fail.

  “You will never die on my watch,” he’d insist. I never believed him. Maybe that’s why he was so good at the game. Why Carl is so good. There is an established lack of trust.

  I drip the light more judiciously around the room, clockwise. Blackout shades. That’s why it feels like an underwater cave.

  A pine-framed couch with cushions and two oversize chairs, all obviously handmade. Photography books neatly arranged in a semicircle on a large glass coffee table. Paul Strand, Keith Carter, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank. Great photographers. The best. Henri Cartier-Bresson, master of the candid, the Hemingway of them all.

  There’s no TV, no stereo, no shelves, no magazines with dates. There is a worn wooden floor. A thick layer of dust that sits on everything. A charred log in a filthy grate. A stunning desert landscape over the fireplace, rich in rusty color, empty of life. Carl’s mark is in the right bottom corner, a tiny, black clf. A rare photo from Carl not in black and white.

  I scan the kitchen from where I stand. Gas stove, refrigerator, microwave, dishwasher. As soon as I step into the hallway, the smell burns and catches in my throat like airborne Tabasco.

  I count three doors, all firmly closed, two to the left, one to the right.

  My light flashes next on the cabinet at the end of the hall—a floor-to-ceiling behemoth of pine riddled with little doors and drawers of every size. The sewing cabinet Carl was talking about, presumably.

  I couldn’t have missed it. It’s enormous, running all the way to the ceiling. Daisies are hand-painted on the porcelain knobs.

  As I get closer, I see that almost every single drawer, every single cabinet, bears a white label with a name, written in Carl’s strong, artistic hand.

  Elizabeth Ann. Mary Louise. Jean. Sandy. Clara. Betty. Little Boo.

  Respectful, I think, just like the Waco memorial.

  I shakily skim the light over the cabinet.

  Searching for my sister’s name.

  Eleanor, Belle, Sophia, Poppy. Vivian. Dixie. Lulu. Sadie.

  Cinderella, Big Bertha, Gertrude, Scarlett, Penelope, Fiona, Tina.

  I’ve been saying their names out loud.

  When I stop, I can’t hear the porch swing anymore.

  60

  Rachel’s name isn’t here. Neither are the names of the other girls I’ve linked to Carl, three little red dots on the map, or any of the others who were runners-up. I don’t know what this means, or if it means anything.

  I’ve counted. Twelve drawers and ten small doors. My imagination is roaming all over the place. I can’t bear to open even one of them.

  I’m going to make Carl open this fucking sewing cabinet. Let him explain while I point a gun at his head. Make him touch whatever is in there.

  My pain and fury are drowning out everything else—the fact that he instructed me to stop and admire the carpentry.

  Maybe his brain only lets him see the things his aunt stored there in the past—the rainbows of fabric and thread; the pointy needles with invisible eyes; the mix of old buttons trapped like tumbled memories in old mayonnaise jars.

  It doesn’t matter. Some part of him knows. He didn’t bring me here to knit him socks from his aunt’s yarn.

  I have no idea if Carl has somehow sneaked into the house. I think I’d know. I think I’d feel him. I travel swiftly back to the living room. Slide the dead bolt. Open the front door a crack, and listen.

  The moon’s bulb is on. As soon as I step outside, it shows me everything.

  A lifeless swing.

  An empty porch.

  No Carl. No Barfly.

  The saucer to an old clay pot lies on the ground near the rickety porch trellis, half-filled with water. Carl has turned it into a makeshift dog bowl.

  On the swing, he’s neatly lined up a collection of things removed from my backpack.

  A result of a bizarre sense of fair play or a way to push me ever so politely into madness? Both?

  I see the pain pills with the lid considerately removed. The water bottle. Three Tampax. One granola bar. A Ziploc bag stuffed with rocks and pebbles. The tiny key to nothing with the chain that hung around his neck.

  The water bottle is now filled to the brim. Where did Carl find water? I screw off the lid and take a sniff. From a stream? I sweep my light into the corner where I had tucked my backpack for safekeeping when Carl’s eyes were closed.

  It’s gone. My laptop, a travel kit of tools, a compass, the burner phones—all of it traveled into the night with Carl. He has successfully broken my other arm.

  I toss two more pain pills down my throat and chase them with a sip of water. I jam the granola bar in my mouth and chew it until the dank taste goes away.

  My trainer wouldn’t like these moves. Drinking from a bottle filled for me by a serial killer from an unknown water source. Dulling the edges of the pulsing pain in my arm that may be the single thing keeping me alert.

  I stroll to the middle of the yard and stare up at the cemetery of stars.

  “Carl!” I yell his name at the top of my lungs, in every direction.

  There’s no echo. Here, the sound just disappears.

  61

  I start with the first hallway door on the left.

  A small bedroom. One window. Blackout shade drawn and undisturbed, an old pine double bed with a wildly colored quilt of mismatched squares and nothing underneath but rodent droppings. A chest of empty drawers. A closet that holds six bare hangers and a man’s flowered Hawaiian shirt circa I-don’t-know-when.

  I rip the shirt off the hanger and throw it over my shoulder. It might be useful. A door that leads into a cramped, dank bathroom indicates this is the master suite. A beveled, clouded mirror reveals a deranged girl out of focus.

  I almost miss the old bookshelf by the side of the bed. Black-and-white photographs are grouped in simple frames. I shine the light on the first picture.

  A middle-aged man leans on a spade in a garden. The woman standing next to him is equally somber, face cast down. Carl’s aunt and uncle? There’s no skill involved in the framing or lighting of these shots. I rove the light to the next photograph.

  I stop breathing.

  The Marys are sitting primly on a flowered couch like they are waiting for me. Maybe a ye
ar or two older than in the shot in the forest. Hands impatient in their laps, legs on the brink of escaping, faces busting with grins. Since the first time I saw them, I’d been almost certain they were twins.

  In fact, they are two very separate girls. And now that they are sitting still, side by side, I can make distinctions. The more delicate nose on one, the wider eyes on the other.

  Their silky hair is identically styled in short blond bobs, not straggly and free like in the forest. I lay the flashlight on the shelf so it casts a spotlight and pull the back off the frame. The glass falls out with it, drawing a trickle of blood on my thumb. I suck its metallic taste and read.

  In memory of neighbor girls Mary Fortson and Mary Cheetham, age 11, Piney Woods. Last picture. Both born on same day May 5, 1935. Died Nov 6 and 7, 1946, one day apart.

  It doesn’t say why they died. It doesn’t matter. When they died, Carl wasn’t born yet.

  The critic was right—Carl was an illusionist. He never took his own picture of the Marys. He must have discovered old negatives. Stole someone else’s work. Created something new out of something old.

  Made up the story about the girls in his book even though the real one seems more morbid and interesting.

  All this proves is that Carl’s a liar. A thief. I already knew that.

  I don’t have time to mourn my playmates. I place the Marys back in the frame, shut the door, and leave them dead. I think I always knew they were.

  * * *

  —

  The sweep of the second bedroom takes no time. A blue futon sits on naked white tile. The closet is empty except for a broom. Blackout shades smother the two windows in here, too.

  I’m guessing this is where Carl slept every night after his trial. I don’t have the whole picture, but I’m arranging pieces of it.

  I stop at the third and final door.

  The smell is worst here. I can hold my breath for ten minutes underwater, five times the average person who is in good shape and relaxed in a pool.