G is for Ghosts

by Rhonda Parrish

  I peeked into the urn, and there was dust, dullest, grayest dust and my mood shifted to the disappointed. I put the box back on the table, but just then heard a sound coming from inside the urn, something like a sigh or a high whistle.

  Then, Dionysia rose. It is a feat that she is capable of only sometimes, in this case, the equinox permitted her to transmute. What I witnessed almost made me wet my expensive pants. The ashes ascended, first slowly as if a draft had stirred them, then they went up in a powerful storm that stirred the air into a whirlwind. From that, Dionysia emerged, a perfect Venus, except there is nothing shy, nothing innocent in Dionysia. Her eyes, black and silver, say as much. I have seen her rise dozens, hundreds of times by now, but it is still startling every time. I am still left frightened every time.

  I cannot fully remember if she came to me clothed, that first time. I do remember her bare feet on the table, perfect toes, unpainted. Her lips bent into a smile. She stepped on my chair, placed her right foot right between my thighs and put her left one on the ground. “Hello there,” she said. “Someone has sent me here to dance for you.” I could not move. My body would not obey me.

  I believe I stared. I must have. She gave no indication that she cared. Dionysia started dancing, and while it did enthrall me physically, disappointment soon spread all over her face. She rubbed herself against me and made a moue. “There’s nothing inside of you, is there, you are completely hollow. What a shame. What a perfect waste of my very limited time.”

  “W... what are you talking about?” I said.

  Dionysia shrugged. “You are a boring thing, a puppet. Did you sell yourself to a demon? You have the right smell about you, blood and uncouth hunger. They like that. Of course, they never leave anything for the rest of us.”

  I knew cannibals, and I was all of a sudden very afraid of what this beautiful creature was going to do with me. “What are you talking about?” Never had I thought that I would be the hysterical one in such a private and intimate encounter, but my body was enthralled by her presence alone, and I could not do anything she didn’t want me to. I was as bound as I had bound when I indulged.

  Dionysia shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll still need to be paid. Perhaps we can come to an arrangement.”

  That is how it started.

  The house with the mahogany table and the state-of-the-art security system is a distant memory. So is my car and the tailored suits and the soft shirts. Dionysia allows her slave comfort only when it serves her.

  “You brood.” The moon was an empty blackness in the sky, and so Dionysia was out of her urn. I had spent the last twenty-eight days guarding her urn in an abandoned church, had done the same in a once sacred forest clearing before that. When she was ash, Dionysia liked to sleep in places that held ancient power.

  “Am I not allowed to brood? I didn’t know you minded.”

  She wore a simple white shift, girdled with gold around her waist. The fabric was suggestively thin, and when she rose from the altar on which she had been lounging, it revealed more than it covered.

  “It is delightful, actually,” she said and sat down on the pew next to me. It was drafty in the church, and I was cold. I told myself that is why I shuddered when her thigh came to rest next to mine. “But it is a small delight. I have been called to something much more pleasing than your brooding.”

  “Where?”

  “You will enjoy it very, very much.”

  “Where?”

  “You’ll find out. I’ll let you know where we’re going in the morning.”

  “We... we could go tonight,” I said. Her hands were beautiful, smooth, fingers and nails perfectly shaped. Her right hand was slowly moving up my thigh.

  “Are you not tired? Would you not rather be on your back and relax?”

  I had done this too, formed my desires into questions. Before I met Dionysia. I had wondered how the questions had the power to make a person cry, but I wondered no more.

  My body did what Dionysia wanted, just like it had done since we met. The church floor was cold and rough against my skin, and Dionysia’s perfect shape held unforgiving sharpness that opened up some of the scars she had given me for the last new moon, drew patterns across others, older ones. How well a church echoes crying.

  Morning took a long time coming.

  Dionysia, when she is dust and ash, is formless, little more than a faint specter. However, that doesn’t mean she is weak.

  Wake up, it is time to go.

  My eyes were sleep encrusted, or maybe it was blood. My body hurt, and it was stiff with the cold that had settled in my bones. When she had first taken me as her slave, I was strong enough to carry another person, even if they struggled. I no longer had that kind of muscle mass.

  Dionysia was barely visible, she looked like a person-shaped patch of fog that hung in the icy church and scattered the morning light.

  Get up. We have places to be, she said, and I obeyed. If I didn’t, I knew from experience that she would haunt me to the brink of madness. She had quite the touch in that area.

  I had done my best to put my clothes back on last night after she was done, but there was also an old blanket, a prized possession. It was still on the pews, and I draped it over my shoulders while I walked toward Dionysia’s urn on creaky knees.

  I could feel her watch me in her specter form.

  “It’s another month to get there then?” I said.

  Her chuckle rang through the vaulted hall. Silly man. Not when there is an equinox tonight. I met you on an equinox, and I think you’d remember. Now move.

  Her last word came out as a hiss, and I could feel shadows lapping at my mind. The warmth of fear spread through me, and I did move.

  The channels through which Dionysia arranged her appointments were largely a mystery to me. She made me take and deliver messages, both over the phone and in person, and as far as I knew, I had never spoken to the same individual twice. That didn’t much surprise me. I had always known in my bones that Dionysia was an old thing, and old things get around.

  She guided me and her ashes to an unimpressive brownstone in a quieter part of the city. The door on which she made me knock had been recently painted a lush coral, just the color of the roses on my mahogany table, back when I first met her. A woman opened. She was young, not actually a woman. A girl, all firm and perky.

  “Do you have it?” she asked, and when she spoke, it made her lips stand out, lush and full and beautiful in her made up face.

  Tell her yes. Dionysia said.

  “Yes,” I mumbled, and looked down. I couldn’t help notice the stockings, frill and lace, the short skirt, the high heels.

  You want her, Dionysia said, and her presence next to me grew stronger.

  I hastily shook my head, even as I followed the girl inside.

  I think you could touch her, she might let you. Do it. I’ll reward you for it, after tonight’s festivities. Her voice was taunting and tempting and sharp as a scalpel. I knew just what reward she had in mind.

  I shook my head again, and forced my eyes to the floor, hardwood, then lush carpet, then hardwood again.

  “Hey, you okay?” the girl said, but I didn’t dare meet her eyes.

  “Yes,” I said to the floor.

  “Whatever. It’s through there. I was told to let you go in, then I’ll lock the door after you for the rest of the night. You better be quick, because those guys are expecting, well, not some smelly beggar.”

  I nodded. I did not dare imagine what I would have said to the girl before I met Dionysia. What I would have done with her.

  She held the door open, and Dionysia gave my mind an extra nudge. I crossed the threshold. The door fell shut behind me, and I heard the key turn in the lock even over the low conversation. I looked up and found most of the faces staring at me to be familiar.

  It was them, the elite group of my most obscure acquaintances, the ones that loved the darkest indulgences and the
most sinful delights. Right now they had drinks in front of them, and they were clearly waiting for the evening’s main event. I remembered such gatherings, the anticipation. There was always a present to be unwrapped, frill and lace. The eyes of these men were full of want, oh, so full of want.

  Surprise, said Dionysia, and there was humor in her voice, sticky sweet as summer honey. Now open the urn.

  I wanted to hesitate, I wanted to show these former friends of mine that, yes, I was still one of them. But then, a corpulent gentleman with whom I had shared many a story, recognized me, said my name, and shame flooded my heart. I opened the urn, and Dionysia danced.

  After she is done, Dionysia always leaves something behind. Her network of helpers handles disposal. They look like coma patients to me, these men that saw her dance, either that or demented, their mind all scattered. I’m not sure which is worse.

  But that night, behind the coral colored door, it didn’t quite play out that way.

  “Look at you,” Dionysia said, striding like a soldier armed with her nakedness. “Look at you. Nothing left in you to pay me with.”

  “Oh, please...” The corpulent gentleman. Bob. He had given me his name as Bob.

  “What a boring little puppet you are,” Dionysia said to Bob. “Did you sell yourself to a demon to make sure that uncouth hunger of yours was always fed? There is never enough left to satisfy me after a demon is done feasting.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bob said. He was crying and his face was red. His eyes found me. “Help me,” he said. He was unable to move. I knew what that felt like.

  Dionysia’s dark and silver eyes looked from him to me and back again. “He is my slave. All he can do for you is show you how it is done.”

  “What... how what is done?” Bob asked.

  Dionysia kneeled before him, took his cheek, even as he flinched. His body obeyed Dionysia, just as mine did. “How you pay off what you owe. Oh, and what a debt it is, each pound you will pay for, each ounce, all that you took and shouldn’t have.” She let go of Bob’s cheek and beckoned me over to her. “Come. Let us show him how you pay. The night is still young.”

  I started crying. I did not plead though. It had never done my girls any good either.

  D is for Debt

  Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman

  Her face was white as snow. White as midwinter’s heart. White as hospital sheets.

  It was her eyes that told me what she had come for. Her terrible rage and pain and, deeper still, the void that lapped at her heels. It echoed in my empty chest like a cathedral bell as she pressed her face to the glass.

  But I am getting ahead of myself.

  When the worst happens, what can you do?

  When your life is ripped away and you’re left with empty hands, how do you move through the hours, the minutes, the seconds? The spaces between ticks of the clock grow longer and longer.

  I filled them with a desperate consumption. Reality TV and my favorite fantasy novels from childhood. The soundtrack of Hamilton and long scrolling screens of fanfiction. I wanted to be numb. Cold. Perfectly impervious. But I sank into these stories with all the poise of a suburban housewife submerging herself in an ice bath. (In other words, very little.)

  The restraint of the aproned bakers on TV set my teeth on edge. I re-read the first paragraph of Howl’s Moving Castle five times without taking in a single word. The lyrics of “Unimaginable” sent me spiraling into a panic attack, and Archive of Our Own didn’t feel like it was mine anymore.

  Nothing helped. Nothing filled the void. Nothing, nothing made me feel cold enough. Nothing could numb the pain of an empty bedroom. Nothing could dull the whip slash of stumbling upon the shopping bag in the hall closet with its box of tiny, unworn shoes.

  Nothing, that is, until I held the book in my hands. It was thin and covered in that scratchy fabric they used to bind library books in sometimes. It was a sickly shade of green that looked like how I felt, and that almost made me crack a smile. Kwaidan was scrawled across the cover in a spindly, gray script. Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn, the subheading proclaimed in a neat stamp beneath. Strange things, I thought. I am a strange thing now.

  Perhaps you’ve heard of it?

  See, there was this guy called Lafcadio Hearn (what a name, right?) Anyway, he was straight-up haunted. Born in 1850 in Greece to an Irish rogue and a Greek woman whose head was an attic full of ghosts, he was abandoned by both his parents and shunted around to a bunch of relatives who never wanted him. They say he was scared of the dark, scared even more of abandonment. So his old aunt locked him into a pitch black room every night and let him scream himself to sleep. He went from Lefkada to Dublin to Cincinnati looking for family, and then from New Orleans to Martinique to Tokyo looking for work.

  Wherever he went, Hearn wrote and wrote and wrote. Lurid write-ups of local murders in Ohio and detailed recipes of creole cuisine in New Orleans. But when he moved to Japan, his pen fixed on the local ghost stories. He wrote many books filled to the brim with the uncanny and the marvelous, but Kwaidan was the most celebrated. Kids all over Japan still read it in school, and adults retell those strange stories in magazines, puppet shows, and whispers. Hearn became obsessed with them.

  And so did I.

  When I found his book, finally, finally something disrupted the frenzy of my mind. The silence of the house didn’t seem quite so crushing. The ghost stories were about all kinds of things: men who fell in love with trees, intricate spirit worlds buried deep into anthills. But really, they were about women disappearing. A young bride lost just before her wedding. A moon princess stolen away from the home of her human parents.

  And…a snow woman. A woman who vanished twice.

  In Hearn’s version of the story, the yuki-onna, the snow woman, finds two woodcutters sheltering from a storm in an old hut. She kills the old man but finds his apprentice irresistibly beautiful, and she lets him live on the condition that he never speaks of this night, or her, to anyone. Later, the young man finds a beautiful woman to marry, has many children with her, and doesn’t put together until much later how much she looks like the snow woman he saw the night his mentor died. He tells his wife the story and, of course, the wife is the yuki-onna herself. She tells him that, were it not for their children, she would kill him for speaking that which he had sworn never to tell. Some stories are too painful to be told. And she vanishes, never to be seen again.

  This story, of all of them, haunted me. I Google’d the tale and found that there were many others like it told all over Japan—tales of seeing women in snow storms, women with eyes full of crystalized tears, women alone on white banks as the wind howls around them, drowning out their screams. I clicked link after link, reading through the night, through a tepid sunrise, until I came across this passage:

  In many tales of the yuki-onna, she was once a human woman who became lost with her child in the snow. Driven mad when her child freezes to death shortly before her, she becomes a ghost, a demon determined to steal the hot breath of the men she encounters in hopes of bringing her young son back to life.

  My water glass slipped from my fingers and shattered on my desk.

  Does she know that both she and her son are already dead? Does it matter? She walks alone through the snow for eternity, desperately reaching out for something she has lost forever. I understood that. In some small way, I knew exactly how that felt.

  I flew to Japan.

  Or rather, I flew from Ohio to LA. The hard little chair in Terminal 2 of LAX bit into my legs and the air conditioning was almost enough to numb me, but not quite. Then I flew to Tokyo, chasing Hearn’s footsteps across the world.

  If I could have, I would have felt ridiculous. All I knew was that this folktale, this ghost, had its hooks in me, and I had to follow the pull or the void would swallow me. I didn’t sleep. Instead, I watched the clouds gather into mounds and tumble down like snow. Kwaidan was
cool as I turned it over and over in my hands.

  A brief night in a hotel near Tokyo Station, followed by a blur of trains and buses. North, and further north still, where the snow was deep. At last, in the shadow of the Ōu Mountains, the wind grew cold as cut glass.

  I bought a room in a Japanese-style inn, a ryokan, but then, there, I had no idea what to do next. I sat on the low futon and held the green, ratty book, the reality of the situation settling around me like softly falling snow. I was in a foreign country, alone, chasing a ghost. Chasing more than one ghost, if I was being honest with myself.

  Outside though, the wind was beginning to howl. The owners of the inn, a kind couple who seemed surprised, but not displeased, to see a foreign woman show up alone on their doorstep, had told me that a storm was on its way. This is what I had wanted. This was what I had come for… and it was so cold. I felt the cold.

  She was coming. I knew she was.

  Come to me, I thought. Maybe I whispered it out loud.

  At the window, I soon heard a soft thud, a scraping. Japanese characters, katakana, formed through the condensation. Though I knew no Japanese, I knew what it said. It pulsed through the walls all around me. Emily. Emily, my daughter’s name.

  I put Hearn’s book down and went to the window and traced the lines with my finger. Emily. Through the fog outside, through the glass, a hand joined mine. Our fingertips met across eternity, across loss. As her face came into focus, I saw a mirror of my pain, of my longing, in her dark eyes. Come to me, the wind called, I understand.

  I opened the window.

  E is for Emily

  Roddy Fosburg

  Pale and trembling servants escort me to her bedside. Torches flutter on perspiring stone walls with each chill breeze from the open windows. Her brother—the self-styled poet, Cristan—stands opposite me, ink-stained fingers fidgeting with a stylus.