by Joe Hill
The basement was a large, high-ceilinged space, with a cement floor and beige brick walls. The single long room was divided in two by a wall of stiff chain-link, painted black. On one side was a small, tidy area for the custodial staff. A row of lockers, a card table, stools. A Coke machine buzzed against the wall. I couldn’t see into the rest of the basement—the lights were switched off on the other side of the chain-link divider—but I heard a boiler roaring softly somewhere off in the darkness, heard water rushing in pipes. The sound reminded me of what you hear when you listen to a seashell.
At the foot of the stairs was a small cubicle. Windows looked in on a cluttered desk covered in drifts of paper. A stocky black man in green coveralls sat behind it, turning through the pages of the Wall Street Journal. He saw me standing by the lockers, and got up, came out, shook hands—his was callused and powerful. His name was George Prine, and he was the head custodian. He pointed me to Morris’s locker, and stood a few steps behind me, arms crossed over his chest, watching me go through it.
“Your boy was an easy kid to get along with,” Prine said, as if Morris had been my son instead of my brother. “He drifted off into his own private world now and then, but that’s pretty much the order of things ’round this place. He was good about his work, though. Didn’t clock in and then sit around tying his boots and yapping with the other guys like some do. When he punched his card he was ready to work.”
There was next to nothing in Morris’s locker. His jumpsuits, his boots, an umbrella, a slim creased paperback called Flatland.
“’Course after he got off work, that was a different story. He’d hang around for hours. He’d get building something with his boxes and go so far away into himself, he’d forget dinner if I didn’t tell him to get.”
“What?” I asked.
Prine smiled, a little quizzically, as if I should’ve known what he was talking about. He walked past me to the wall of chain-link and flipped a switch. The lights came on in the other half of the basement. Beyond the chain-link divider was a bare expanse of floor under a ceiling crawling with ductwork and pipes. This wide, open area was filled with boxes, assembled into a sprawling, confused child’s play fort, with at least four different entrances, tunnels and chutes and windows in strange deformed shapes. The outsides of the boxes had been painted with green ferns and waving flowers, with ladybugs the size of pie plates.
“I’d like to bring my kids here,” Prine said. “Let them crawl around inside there for a while. They’d have a blast.”
I turned and started walking for the stairs…shaken, cold all over, breathing harshly. But then, as I brushed past George Prine, an impulse came over me, and I grabbed his upper arm and squeezed, maybe harder than I meant to.
“Keep your children away from it,” I said, my voice a strangled whisper.
He put his hand on my wrist and gently, but firmly, pulled my hand off his arm. His eyes held me at a distance; he regarded me with an air of calm, wary consideration, the way a man might look at a snake he’s snatched out of the weeds, holding it just behind the head so it won’t bite.
“You’re as crazy as he was,” he said. “You ever think of moving in?”
I HAVE TOLD this story as completely as I can, and now I will wait and see if, with this act of confession behind me, I can drive Eddie Prior back into my unconscious. I will learn if I can settle once more into my days of safe habit and thoughtless repetition: classes, papers, readings, English Department functions. Building the wall back up again, brick by brick.
But I am not sure what has been pulled down can be repaired. The mortar is too old, the wall too poorly constructed. I was never the builder my brother was. I have been visiting the library in my old hometown of Pallow a lot lately, reading over old newspapers in microfiche. I’ve been searching for an article, some small report, of an accident on Route 111, a brick dropped into a windshield, a Volvo off the road. I’ve been trying to find out if anyone was badly hurt. If anyone was killed. Not-knowing was once my refuge. Now I find it impossible to bear.
And so maybe it will turn out I have been writing this for someone else after all. The thought has crossed my mind that maybe George Prine was right. Maybe the person I should show this story to is Betty Millhauser, Morris’s ex–care coordinator.
At least if I was living at Wellbrook, I’d be in a place where I might feel some connection to Morris. I’d like to feel a connection to someone or something. I could have his old room. I could have his old job—his old locker.
And if that isn’t enough—if their drugs and their therapy sessions and their isolation can’t save me from myself—there is always one other possibility. If George Prine hasn’t demolished Morris’s final cardboard maze, if it’s still standing there in the basement, I could always climb in someday, and pull the flaps shut behind me. There is always that. Anything can run in families. Even disappearing.
But I’m not going to do anything with this story yet. I’m going to slide it into a manila envelope and stick it in the bottom right-hand drawer of my desk. Put it aside and try to resume my life, where I left off, just before Morris disappeared. Won’t show it to anyone. Won’t do anything foolish. I can go on for a while longer, pulling myself through the dark, through the tight spaces of my own memories. Who knows what may lie just around the next corner? There may be a window somewhere ahead. It may look out on a field of sunflowers.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was originally released by PS Publishing in England, two years ago. Thanks are owed to those who gave so much of themselves to make that first edition happen: Christopher Golden, Vincent Chong, and Nicholas Gevers. Most of all, though, I want to express my gratitude and love to publisher Peter Crowther, who took a chance on 20th Century Ghosts without knowing anything about me except that he liked my stories.
I’m grateful to all the editors who have supported my work over the years, including but not limited to Richard Chizmar, Bill Schafer, Andy Cox, Stephen Jones, Dan Jaffe, Jeanne Cavelos, Tim Schell, Mark Apelman, Robert O. Greer Jr., Adrienne Brodeur, Wayne Edwards, Frank Smith, and Teresa Focarile. Apologies to those I might have left out. And here’s a special holler of thanks to Jennifer Brehl and Jo Fletcher, my editors at William Morrow and Gollancz, respectively; two better editors a guy could not wish for.
Thanks also to my Webmaster, Shane Leonard. I appreciate, too, all the work my agent, Mickey Choate, has performed on my behalf. My thanks to my parents, my brother and sister, and of course my tribe, whom I love dearly: Leanora and the boys.
And how about a little thanks for you, the reader, for picking up this book and giving me the chance to whisper in your ear for a few hours?
Gene Wolfe and Neil Gaiman have both hidden stories in introductions, but I don’t think anyone has ever buried one in their acknowledgments page. I could be the first. The only way I can think to repay you for your interest is with the offer of one more story:
SCHEHERAZADE’S TYPEWRITER
Elena’s father had gone into the basement every night, after work, for as far back as she could remember, and did not come up until he had written three pages on the humming IBM electric typewriter he had bought in college, when he still believed he would someday be a famous novelist. He had been dead for three days before his daughter heard the typewriter in the basement, at the usual time: a burst of rapid bang-bang-banging, followed by a waiting silence, filled out only by the idiot hum of the machine.
Elena descended the steps, into darkness, her legs weak. The drone of his IBM filled the musty-smelling dark, so the gloom itself seemed to vibrate with electrical current, as before a thunderstorm. She reached the lamp beside her father’s typewriter, and flipped it on just as the Selectric burst into another bang-bang flurry of noise. She screamed, and then screamed again when she saw the keys moving on their own, the chrome typeball lunging against the bare black platen.
That first time Elena saw the typewriter working on its own, she thought she might faint from the shock of
it. Her mother almost did faint when Elena showed her, the very next night. When the typewriter jumped to life and began to write, Elena’s mother threw her hands up and shrieked and her legs wobbled under her, and Elena had to grab her by the arm to keep her from going down.
But in a few days they got used to it, and then it was exciting. Her mother had the idea to roll a sheet of paper in, just before the typewriter switched itself on at 8 P.M. Elena’s mother wanted to see what it was writing, if it was a message for them from beyond. My grave is cold. I love you and I miss you.
But it was only another of his short stories. It didn’t even start at the beginning. The page began midway, right in the middle of a sentence.
It was Elena’s mother who thought to call the local news. A producer from channel five came to see the typewriter. The producer stayed until the machine turned itself on and wrote a few sentences, then she got up and briskly climbed the stairs. Elena’s mother hurried after her, full of anxious questions.
“Remote control,” the producer said, her tone curt. She looked back over her shoulder with an expression of distate. “When did you bury your husband, ma’am? A week ago? What’s wrong with you?”
None of the other television stations were interested. The man at the newspaper said it didn’t sound like their kind of thing. Even some of their relatives suspected it was a prank in bad taste. Elena’s mother went to bed and stayed there for several weeks, flattened by a terrific migraine, despondent and confused. And in the basement, every night, the typewriter worked on, flinging words onto paper in noisy chattering bursts.
The dead man’s daughter attended to the Selectric. She learned just when to roll a fresh sheet of paper in, so that each night the machine produced three new pages of story, just as it had when her father was alive. In fact, the machine seemed to wait for her, humming in a jovial sort of way, until it had a fresh sheet to stain with ink.
Long after no one else wanted to think about the typewriter anymore, Elena continued to go into the basement at night, to listen to the radio, and fold laundry, and roll a new sheet of paper into the IBM when it was necessary. It was a simple enough way to pass the time, mindless and sweet, rather like visiting her father’s grave each day to leave fresh flowers.
Also, she had come to like reading the stories when they were finished. Stories about masks and baseball and fathers and their children…and ghosts. Some of them were ghost stories. She liked those the best. Wasn’t that the first thing you learned in every fiction course everywhere? Write what you know? The ghost in the machine wrote about the dead with great authority.
After a while, the ribbons for the typewriter were only available by special order. Then even IBM stopped making them. The typeball wore down. She replaced it, but then the carriage started sticking. One night, it locked up, wouldn’t move forward, and oily smoke began to trickle from under the iron hood of the machine. The typewriter hammered letter after letter, one right on top of the other, with a kind of mad fury, until Elena managed to scramble over and shut it off.
She brought it to a man who repaired old typewriters and other appilances. He returned it in perfect operating condition, but it never wrote on its own again. In the three weeks it was at the shop, it lost the habit.
As a little girl, Elena had asked her father why he went into the basement each night to make things up, and he had said it was because he couldn’t sleep until he had written. Writing things warmed his imagination up for the work of creating an evening full of sweet dreams. Now she was unsettled by the idea that his death might be a restless, sleepless thing. But there was no help for it.
She was by then in her twenties and when her mother died—an unhappy old woman, estranged not just from her family but the entire world—she decided to move out, which meant selling the house and all that was in it. She had hardly started to sort the clutter in the basement, when she found herself sitting on the steps, rereading the stories her father had written after he died. In his life, he had given up the practice of submitting his work to publishers, had wearied of rejection. But his postmortem work seemed to the girl to be much—livelier—than his earlier work, and his stories of hauntings and the unnatural seemed especially arresting. Over the next few weeks, she collected his best into a single book, and began to send it to publishers. Most said there was no market in collections by writers of no reputation, but in time she heard from an editor at a small press who said he liked it, that her father had a fine feel for the supernatural.
“Didn’t he?” she said.
Now this is the story as I first heard it myself from a friend in the publishing business. He was maddeningly ignorant of the all-important details, so I can’t tell you where the book was finally published or when or, really, anything more regarding this curious collection. I wish I knew more. As a man who is fascinated with the occult, I would like to obtain a copy.
Unfortunately, the title and author of the unlikely book are not common knowledge.
About the Author
Joe Hill is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller Heart-Shaped Box, a two-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, and a past recipient of the World Fantasy Award. His stories have appeared in a variety of journals and Year’s Best collections. He calls New England home.
www.joehillfiction.com
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ALSO BY JOE HILL
Heart-Shaped Box
Credits
Cover design by Ervin Serrano
Cover photographs: theater by Mike Powell/Getty Images; woman by Vincent Chong; man by Kristin Gerbert/age fotostock/Superstock
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
20TH CENTURY GHOSTS. Copyright © 2005, 2007 by Joe Hill. Introduction © 2005 by Christopher Golden. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2007 ISBN: 9780061804762
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