Spirit Lost

by Nancy Thayer

  Her banner of seasons was half on the floor, half on the table. It had been ripped into shreds and tatters. Willy turned slowly, looking around her, the candle throwing eerie shadows on the walls. Everything she had done in this room had been destroyed.

  “Oh, God,” Willy cried. “Oh, no.” For now she had no doubts about the existence of the ghost. And now she feared its power.

  She hurriedly left the room, once again, shielding the candle with her hand. She climbed the attic stairs, feeling her heart swell with terror as she went farther up into the ghostly cold domain. Tears ran down her face, and she carelessly wiped away at them with the back of her hand.

  Aimee was still at the foot of John’s bed, making small growling noises in her throat. Willy crossed the attic and sank down on to the bed at her husband’s side. She could see by the candlelight that he was still sleeping. She touched his forehead. It was very cold.

  “You wretched, pitiful bitch,” Willy said aloud. “You can’t have him.”

  I will sit here all night, she thought, I will sit here in the dark, I will sit here without leaving his side again, I will sit here if all the candles blow out, burn out, I’ll listen to the wind howl, but I will not leave his side, I will not leave him to her.

  But then she did leave his side, for just a moment, to fetch the flask of brandy from the table. She sat down next to John then and sipped the brandy, which burned her pleasantly. The cat moved next to her and settled down against her, not sleeping, very alert.

  So Willy began to wait. In her mind it was the dawn that would save them; in her thoughts she had only to wait until the light came. She thought that as long as she was at John’s side, the ghost could not come to him, could not take him.

  But after a while a new fear came to her, a terrifying new thought, and she cursed herself for her stupidity, for her dull-wittedness.

  The ghost was taking him now. How could she not have guessed? The ghost was taking him now, even as Willy sat by his side.

  How incredibly stupid she had been, Willy thought. John was not sleeping. He was dying.

  Willy took his hands in hers and sat there for a moment, just holding her husband’s hands, which were so cold. This is a poisonous trade the ghost is making, Willy thought; she is taking my husband and leaving me with her burden of grief and jealousy and bitter despair.

  “Oh, God, help me!” Willy called aloud.

  She threw back the covers and lay down next to her husband, pulling his body against hers. He lolled next to her, as limp as a doll. She chafed at his hands and arms and face, trying to rub warmth into them. She put her head on his chest. His heart was still beating; it was racing. But his body was chilling, and his breath was shallow, and now she could not get him to come awake.

  For one long moment, Willy felt the injury of defeat, which was colder than the negative air of the moon, which was more painful than the deepest cut. She thought of how her life would be if John died now, if he left her for the ghost of Jesse Orsa Wright. She knew that if this happened, the world would expand endlessly around her, an infinity of black despair.

  As she lay on the chilling bed, holding her husband’s body next to hers, Willy seemed to see, shimmering in the air beside her, the figure of a woman. It was not a clear figure, only a sense of outlined shining in the darkness of the attic, only a shape that was curved and bent in a posture of deep grief.

  And Willy thought now, not of herself or of her husband, but of Jesse Orsa Wright, who had lived in this house a century ago, who had given up all chance of an elegant Bostonian life to come live on this isolated island, because she loved Captain John Wright above all other things. Willy thought of how it must have been for Jesse Orsa after she heard of her husband’s death and then of his desertion—how that proud young woman would have lived her life in an agony of loneliness and longing and anger and grief, laughed at or pitied by the people of the town, who knew her husband had not loved her enough to stay with her, mocked by her own body, which craved the touch of the man she loved. Year after year Jesse Orsa Wright had lived this way, yearning to be held and touched and loved and admired, wondering what she had done or not done to cause her husband to desert her for an unclean, uncivilized native girl, grieving over all she had lost, all she had never had. And why did not Jesse Orsa Wright deserve to be loved and touched and admired and held? Why should she suffer so all through her life, through more than sixty years of life, and then through all eternity?

  “My God,” Willy cried, rising up on the bed so that she was kneeling next to her husband. “My God,” she cried, and raised her arms through the dark, icy air of the attic so that she knelt with uplifted arms, supplicating any god that might be in the heavens or anywhere in the universe. “Dear God, if there is any goodness in you or in your world, there must be a love which will console this woman, which will soothe her, which will overcome her sorrow. Oh, God, there must be a love in this universe that is equal to this woman’s grief! Or how will we all be freed from it?”

  Willy seemed to hear her own voice echo in her ears. She heard nothing else except the wind tearing and pounding at the attic roof and windows and walls. It had seemed to her that she had truly seen a shape, shimmering through her tears, of a grieving woman, but now that illusion had vanished, and Willy knelt alone. The air around her was frigid. And she understood that she should not depend on God.

  She had set the candlestick on the floor, and still the candle burned, its flame throwing off a small but definite light. Willy moved to the side of the bed and pulled her husband to the side so that she could see his face in the light of the candle. She pulled at him, she pulled up his eyelid; his eye was rolled up in his head. She could not wake him.

  So now her grief and compassion disappeared, to be replaced with a singeing fear. Prayers would not save her husband now. At least not prayers alone.

  Taking the candle with her, she went as hurriedly as she could through the dark down the stairs to the bedroom to call an ambulance. But the telephone was dead. Willy held the instrument in her hand for one long moment, wondering if it was the storm that had caused this or the ghost. In any case, she would get no help from outside this house, not unless she went out now and searched through the streets for a house with lights on and knocked on the doors and persuaded some stranger to come back to this house with her.

  She turned and went back to the attic. John lay collapsed as she had left him. The cat prowled, yowling softly, up and down the bed, all her hair ruffled.

  Willy set the candle on the floor. She took her husband’s arms in her hands and pulled on him. He did not come awake. She continued to pull at him, grunting slightly with her efforts. He rolled toward her at last, and as she knelt to take his weight in her arms, he slumped against her, sending them both sprawling onto the floor, knocking the candlestick over. The flame was extinguished. Her ankle turned under her painfully.

  “Damn you, Johnny, help me,” Willy said, trying to push her husband’s helpless body off hers. He was as heavy and useless as if he were dead.

  “Damn you, damn you,” Willy said, crying now, fighting to get him off her so she could stand, and at last she was out from under him. She was sweating now in spite of the cold of the attic, and her hair had come loose from its braid so that it drifted across her face and caught against her nose, tickling her irritatingly. Somewhere near her in the dark, the cat mewed.

  Willy bent over her husband and pulled at him. She managed to get him into her arms in a clumsy mock-lover’s embrace that nearly broke her back. By bending over nearly to the floor, she could keep her arms wrapped around him just under his arms, so that his head lolled and his legs dragged backward. In this way she began to maneuver across the attic toward the stairs.

  It was when she was at the top of the stairs, catching her breath before attempting the descent with him in her arms, that she felt the resistance. He was not resisting. Her husband was limp in her arms. But now when she pulled, it seemed that he weighed a thousand pound
s. Her greatest effort could not seem to budge him. He weighed more than a piano, more than a house. Straining, gasping, Willy pulled on her husband’s body and knew the ghost was using all her invisible powers to hold him back.

  Willy sat down on the top step and rested there a moment, panting. Aimee was nervously rubbing against her, making questioning mewing noises. Now that Willy’s eyes had had time to adjust to the total darkness of the attic, she could see how the windows were just a faint bit brighter than anything else, how they seemed like squares of exploding radiance. It was the blowing snow. The wind caused the falling snowflakes to burst against the windows in random spatters, and for one long moment Willy was mesmerized, watching. Then the wind gained force again and battered the house, howling as it hit, making the house creak and groan with the impact.

  Willy could make out certain shapes in the attic now: the bed, the chairs and tables, and the looming, large canvases, so dark that she could not make out what was painted on them. She could see the dark shape of her husband’s body where she had dropped him next to her. She took a deep breath. She willed herself to be strong and brave and sensible. She took his arms with her hands and pulled with all her might.

  She could not budge him. It was not that he didn’t move but, rather, that, as she pulled, a force stronger than hers resisted, pulling John in the opposite direction.

  “Shit,” Willy said under her breath. She was as angry as she was frightened.

  She moved around behind John then and instead of pulling began to push. He was almost over the top of the first stair, and she hoped that once she got him going, gravity would come to her aid. Kneeling next to him, she placed her hands on his back, and with all her strength, she pushed. Grunting with exertion, she pushed. Aimee mewed next to her. Willy took deep breaths, trying to calm herself, for she was sobbing with frustration and with effort. The wind hit the house with a roar, and Willy shoved her husband’s body one more time with all her might. Slowly his body moved to the edge of the step, so that his head thumped down onto the top step, and then she got his upper torso over, so that gravity did take hold, and John began to slide with a rough, uncontrolled thumping, down the stairs.

  Willy hurried down alongside him, trying to catch him now in his fall so that he would not hit so hard. She managed to grasp his head in her arms, and they both tumbled, pushed by the impetus of his fall, to the bottom of the steps. They landed, sprawled and bruised and battered, against the broken attic door.

  It was not over yet. Willy could tell that. She rose to her feet and pushed open the attic door, but now each movement she made took all her willpower and strength. It was as if she were trying to move her limbs while they were encased in cement. It was an awkward, weird, silent battle she found herself waging, a clumsy, stumbling fight. She felt like a creature caught in a straitjacket.

  But she had just as much manic, insane, fierce, desperate strength. Now she lost all civilized restraints, and her grunts turned into deep animal groans that tore from her stomach as she fought to move herself and her husband into the hallway of the second floor. Her tears had stopped; she had no energy for crying. Her breath came in pants. She was not afraid or even thinking; she only pulled her husband, then squatted, resting, catching her breath, then grabbed hold of him and pulled again.

  In this way she maneuvered herself and her husband to the top of the staircase leading down to the first floor. At the bottom of the first floor stood safety. Willy thought: the front door. She would open the front door and get them both out of the house. She did not think the ghost had jurisdiction outside this house.

  She did not want John to make his way to the first floor in the same manner he had gotten down from the attic—not that dangerous headfirst free-falling sprawl. She was aching from it and knew that she was bruised, contused in places. She could not see her husband clearly in this dark hall, but she was afraid the fall had battered him badly. He was still breathing, and his heart was chattering along in his chest, but he was very cold and showed no signs of consciousness. She did not want to endanger him any further.

  The staircase to the first floor was longer than the one from the attic, the rise of the stairs higher. It was an elegant descent, but it could be treacherous, especially now that John was unconscious and Willy so weak.

  She took a deep breath and summoned up all her energy. She hoped that the ghost’s power would be weaker on this floor, this far from the attic. She was bending over to take John in an embrace when she first heard the cat’s fierce cry—“Wrrrrrow!”—and then felt the stunning blow.

  She was shoved by two hands with such force that she nearly flew through the air. She screamed, reached out to grab hold of something, anything, and crashed downward, falling against the banister. The weak balusters snapped immediately, and Willy fell through them, pitching downward like a person sucked through the teeth of a whale. Instinctively she clawed at the steps and caught a finger-hold in the carpet runner at the edge of the stairs. While her hands caught her, holding her arms and upper body firm, her legs and torso swung downward until she was lying against the stairway wall, swinging slightly.

  She could not keep purchase here; so, not knowing in the dark how far she had fallen, how close to the first floor she might be, she let herself drop to the floor.

  She landed with a painful crash; it felt more as if the hard surface of the floor had flown up to smack her than that she had fallen. The wind was knocked out of her. She lay still a moment, her whole body cramped in one long agonizing ache. At last, like a knife coming to her, her breath came back. Carefully she put her hands at her side and pushed herself up into a sitting position. She moved her legs and arms. Nothing was broken.

  The hall was a well of darkness. Looking up, she saw how the darkness deepened toward the top. Up there lay her husband. Up there waited the ghost. Willy heard whimpering noises and realized she was the one making them; she clutched her arms to her chest and stood a moment just holding herself, trying to gather strength. She did not know if she had the courage, after that sickening fall, to climb to the top of the stairs again. But she had no choice. She could go out now in search of help, of course, but she didn’t know where she would find it or how long it would take—and while she was gone, the ghost would have John alone to herself. It was not a risk she could take.

  The cat mewed from the top of the stairs, a questioning mew that gave Willy courage. And then, for even more courage, she dragged herself to the front door and pulled it open.

  The fierce winter night blew in. Like a madman in a rage, the wind slammed its way into the house, screeching its anger, pounding at the walls. The bitter cold shocked Willy. But the hallway filled with a slight bit of wavering, unsteady, snow-blown light.

  She mounted the stairs. She hugged the wall, kept her back to the wall as she walked, and crouched as low as she could. She did not go all the way to the second floor but reached up with her arms and took hold of John’s body so that his head thumped down and rested against her chest, and in this way she negotiated her way down the steps, bumping her husband’s body down each stair but protecting his head with her own body.

  She did not stop when they reached the first floor, but kept on moving so that she propelled them both out the front door and out of the house into the wild winter night. She stood on the front-door stoop, gasping like a woman nearly drowned, felt the snow slap against her, and began to cry with triumphant, exhausted sobs.

  The lights were still off on Orange Street. From where she stood searching, she could see no signs of life or light. She knew John could not last long in these frigid temperatures—nor could she.

  Her coat hung on an elaborate Victorian walnut hall tree just inside the front door. In her coat were her car keys, she was sure. If she could get her keys, she could drag John to the car and drive him to the hospital. All she had to do was to get her keys.

  All she had to do was enter the house, a simple, everyday movement she had performed hundreds of times without think
ing. It would take only a matter of seconds.

  But for a moment she did not think she could force herself back through the doorway, which now seemed a portal to hell. Out here it was freezing, but inside it was as black as the tomb. Willy felt caught like a child in a nightmare, unable to move, unable to take her first step.

  Then she realized that she could not seem to feel John’s heart beating beneath her hands. She bent her head frantically over his face, shoving her hair away from her ear, trying to listen for the sound or feel the slightest movement of his breathing, but the churning snow made this impossible. Her hands were nearly numb with cold, but the fear that this was not the reason she could not feel his heart was what gave her the courage to reenter her house.

  She was certain that as she entered, a wail as loud as a plane screaming above the earth broke out around her, but later she discovered that no one else heard such a noise that night. Still, it seemed to her that she had to move through sound in order to reach her coat and that that sound was a piercing, shattering shriek of grief. She drove herself through the sound like a swimmer diving through dark waters. She tore her coat from the walnut coatrack and stumbled gracelessly from the front door. Terrified, she felt in the coat pockets: The familiar cold metal shape of the keys made her laugh out loud with relief.

  The rest was easy. Or later she would remember it as being easy. She managed to drag her husband to the Jeep, to shove and force and bend his body into the vehicle. She climbed into the driver’s seat and with shaking hands got the key into the ignition. After a heart-stopping moment, the cold battery roared to life, and miracle of miracles, the lights came on, great, powerful silver beams that caught the snowflakes in their dance.

  She knew the way to the hospital. It was difficult on the snow-covered roads, but it was not long. She was sure the ghost was no longer with her, and so she was not so afraid. But she would not leave John alone while she went into the emergency room to get help; she parked the Jeep and dragged him in her arms to the door of the building. A nurse on duty inside saw her and hastened to let them in. The hospital blazed with lights and warmth created by the emergency generator. Willy smiled at the nurse before she passed out at the nurse’s feet.