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G is for Ghosts

Page 6

by Rhonda Parrish


  “Father,” he says, barely inclining his head.

  Helen’s face is drawn tight, pallid with pain. I sit on the bed beside her, sinking into the goose-down.

  “She journeyed again,” Cristan says. He does not meet my gaze.

  I take her hand. The ghost is already claiming her body. Leathery scales have enveloped her arm to the elbow.

  I whisper an Our Father, a Hail Mary, moving the beads of the rosary through my sweat-slick fingers, cherishing their familiar texture. The scales, which were flowing like a green river, halt halfway up her bicep.

  “How long was she away?” I ask, reaching into my bag for a vial of sanctified water, my ragged sash, my crudely-bound book of exorcisms.

  “Four hours, maybe five.” Cristan’s eyes are far away. “If only you could see the wonders we see, Father! Ice-crowned mountains whose peaks scrape the clouds… oceans aglitter beneath a hundred moons… ancient cities burning with light—”

  Helen moans. Her eyes open. They are yellow, pupils slit to daggers. She begins to babble an alien language that crawls into my mind like worms, like madness. A foul wind snuffs out the candles ringing her bedside. The servants flee, forking provincial wards against evil.

  Cristan hurries to his quill and vellum.

  I turn away.

  “This will kill her,” I say. “A body—a mind!—can only endure so much. I can continue to purge her of these little ghosts, but there is no telling what may return with her next time. Is her life worth your verse?”

  The foppish poet meets my eyes and quickly looks away.

  They are fraternal twins. One journeys, the other transcribes. That Cristan calls himself a “poet” is laughable, as the insights gleaned on those unimaginable sojourns are not his to claim. They belong to Helen—the poor child—who for love of him surrenders herself to unimaginable winds, riding them to other times, other places.

  Sometimes others return with her, like leaves riding the wake of a whirlwind.

  The Rite does not last long. She bucks and writhes against her restraints, froth erupting from her mouth in a noxious black jet. Her howls echo throughout the bedchamber, and I hear the ghosts now—there are many this time—keening from somewhere within her, like the cries of children fallen down a deep well.

  I shut my heart to their plaintive voices.

  The scales drip down her arm, flake away, perish. Her hand warms in mine, nails shrinking from horny claws to pale pink crescents. Her jaw unclenches. The voices diminish to a murmur, the susurrus of a distant ocean, the stir of leaves in faraway trees, and then silence.

  I blow out my breath.

  “Is it gone?”

  Cristan looks shrewdly upon her, only a few hastily scribbled lines marking his vellum. I know with weary certainty that he will compel her to journey again.

  “She needs rest. Bring her broth, some watered wine.” And I turn to face him, willing myself not to loathe the sight of him. “Do not ask it of her again. In God’s name, I beg you.”

  Contempt and uncertainty crowd his eyes. He opens his mouth to speak, closes it, walks to his desk and opens a drawer. He returns with a bulging pouch of silver.

  “You always speak of this ‘God,’ and yet I have seen nothing outside of these rituals that would convince me of its presence. Are you sure it is not you who dispels the ghosts, Father?”

  The blasphemy was spoken lightly, but innocently. This world does not yet know the God of Abraham.

  He places the silver in my hand.

  I look back on Helen’s sleeping form, at the play of firelight and shadow across her face. I remember the confused horror felt upon our first meeting, the blinding pain. Falling down that long, dazzling tunnel of light.

  Waking as a stranger in an alien land.

  It was a kind of resurrection. The cancer devouring me had disappeared, burned away somewhere the space between worlds. Helen had taken away my life and given me a new one, and I love her for it.

  And I hate her for it.

  Cristan sees me to the door. A carriage is waiting to take me to the nearby village where I have made my home. I am building a Church there; it is small, but with the help of Cristan’s silver it may yet flourish. Perhaps the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost have some greater purpose in store for me. Why else would they toss me to this alien shore, flung farther than any missionary in the history of His world?

  These are the questions that hound me every time I leave the manor, pockets heavy with heathen silver, the wind off the moors tearing at my homespun coat.

  And yet tonight I am stopped cold, hand frozen in its reach to grasp the carriage door, struck by a new one—a thought so terrible that I fear the razor-edge of its contemplation.

  Were any of the ghosts I have banished from Helen of my world? And if they were—then where, God forgive me, have I sent their souls?

  F is for Father

  Andrew Bourelle

  The summer I turned fifteen, the summer of the nightmares, the summer when my dad was arrested for murder, was, in many ways, the happiest summer of my life. It was the summer I won the two-hundred-meter medley competition at our pool’s annual end-of-summer swim meet, and I was the healthiest I’ve ever been, body, mind, and—I’d guess you could say—soul. This was before I was in therapy and before I almost died from my eating disorder—before life got really, really hard for a while—so I sometimes look back on it all with a nostalgic fondness even though I can recognize how messed up that is.

  It was the summer I spent most of my time at the Gardners’ house because my parents were never around. And when they were, they were yelling at each other. Mom had a job at the county assessor’s office filing paperwork on housing inspections and screwing her boss in the back of his van down by the river on their lunchbreaks. And Dad, of course, was the chief of detectives for the county sheriff’s office and was on the hunt for the Elk County Killer, which is ironic now when you look back on it. Throughout middle school, I’d been at a different school in a different county, and I’d been allowed to stay home alone and take care of myself. But after we moved and I started at the new high school, the murders started—or disappearances, I guess I should say. No one knew for sure then that the girls were dead, even though we know it now. Although the victims were seventeen and eighteen—all beautiful and popular and older-looking, more woman-like—and I was just some beanpole fifteen-year-old who was good at swimming, Mom and Dad were terrified enough that they wanted me to be with someone during the day. The Gardners, who were the only retired people in the neighborhood, were the obvious—and only—choice. They were new to the neighborhood, too—beating us there by only a few months—and they hadn’t felt particularly welcomed when they arrived, so they made a special effort with us when our moving truck pulled up. Mom and Dad didn’t exactly hit it off with them, but I—having never felt quite comfortable with kids my own age—took to them right away.

  To get to their house, I always walked along the path next to the cornfield and came in through the back of their property. The fence was mortared stone, but there was a little wooden gate that was always unlocked.

  In the morning, I’d stroll over and find them both knee-down in their garden, working the soil before the day got hot. That was something funny about the Gardners—they were gardeners.

  On my birthday, the corn in the field was still short, barely past my knees, and their crop of vegetables—everything you could think of; the garden took up the whole back yard—was only starting to bear fruit. But when I came over, Mrs. G (that’s what I called them, Mr. and Mrs. G) was making me an omelet using their own vegetables.

  “You need your protein for swimming,” she said, putting the massive omelet in front of me.

  God, I could eat back then. I had the metabolism of a young horse—and I looked like one, too, all limbs and no curves—and I could just eat and eat and eat, and I’d burn it all off in the pool.

  When I finished the omelet
, she showed me that she’d also made me a carrot cake, my favorite.

  I ate a big slice of cake and Mr. G ate two, then we loaded into the car, and they took me to swim practice.

  Kids think anyone older than their parents must be really old. Anyone retired must be near death’s door. So of course I thought they were ancient. But Mr. and Mrs. G were just a few years into their sixties, still quite healthy. Mr. G’s hair was entirely gray, but he had a full head of it, and even though he had crow’s feet and wrinkles and age spots, he had muscular arms and strong veiny hands. He could put a Coke bottle in the crook of his elbow and twist the lid off that way. Mrs. G was a sweet old lady, with short curly gray hair and yellowing teeth. She was always on the move, doing something in the kitchen or working in the garden. Mr. G was like a quiet, contemplative bear; Mrs. G was a bee, always buzzing.

  At swim practice, which was held in the mornings before the pool opened to the public, Mr. and Mrs. G always sat on the grass by the pool and watched. This was before cell phones, so nobody’s noses were stuck in their devices. Still, the other parents read books or newspapers or chatted with one another. It was only practice, so they didn’t really care to watch closely. Their kids probably didn’t want them to watch. They wanted to pretend their parents weren’t there. But Mr. and Mrs. G were actually interested, and I was genuinely touched that they watched me and, afterward, would talk about the practice heats or what Coach might have been saying at any particular time.

  At the end of practice, when all the kids gathered around sitting cross-legged on the pavement, feeling the sun—just starting to get hot—on our shoulders, Coach said, “Today is someone’s special day. Happy birthday, Kara.”

  I blushed. I hadn’t expected this. But while I was swimming, Mrs. G had crept up and told him that it was my birthday.

  Everyone sang happy birthday, which made me blush even more, then afterward, Coach said, “You know what this means, don’t you, Kara?”

  I shook my head no. I didn’t know.

  “You’ll be racing with the big kids this year.”

  My eyes went wide. We’d moved to town a little over a year ago, so this was my second season with the team, and I hadn’t considered at all that I’d be racing in the fifteen-to-eighteen category.

  Mrs. G noticed my nervousness and asked me on the ride home if I was scared. I played it off like I wasn’t, and I think the truth is I wasn’t that frightened by racing the older kids—I knew I was faster than a lot of them. It’s just that when I was finally lumped into the older category, it occurred to me that maybe—just maybe—I might be old enough to draw the attention of whoever had been abducting the girls in our town.

  The next morning, when my mom was in the bathroom putting her makeup on and my dad was sitting at the table, reading the paper and drinking coffee, his gun already clipped to his belt, I wanted to tell them about moving to the higher bracket. But Dad—with puffy hammocks of skin hanging under his eyes and a square of toilet paper glued to a red shaving nick on his cheek—would hardly have heard a word I said. Mom neither. I assumed Dad’s thoughts were on the case. I didn’t know then that Mom was sleeping with her boss, but I knew she was distant and perpetually irritated with my father.

  So I didn’t mention my anxiety about swimming. And I certainly didn’t mention my fear about being kidnapped and killed.

  Instead—and I’m not sure why—I mentioned the dream I’d had the night before.

  “I dreamed about Jennifer Staples last night,” I said.

  Dad looked up from his newspaper. It might have been the only thing I could say that would get him to notice me. Jennifer Staples was the first girl to disappear. She’d been a senior last year when I was a freshman. She disappeared the week before Homecoming.

  “What happened in your dream?” he asked.

  “Nothing really,” I said. “She was brushing her hair in front of a mirror, like she was getting ready to go out. I was her, actually, in the dream. But even if I hadn’t seen her in the reflection, I would have known it. Kind of like I was inhabiting her character.”

  “That’s it? She was just brushing her hair?”

  “That’s it.”

  This might have been a good time for one of my parents to talk about what was going on, to ask questions about how I was feeling with everything that was happening. But instead, my dad, no longer interested, went back to reading the paper. And my mom walked by, took one last drink from her coffee on the counter—a red lipstick splotch permanently staining one side—and said she was late for work.

  “Something tells me you won’t get reprimanded,” Dad said without looking up.

  Mom left without another word.

  This was the Midwest, and parents didn’t talk to their kids about feelings and anxieties. Not back then. At least mine didn’t. Maybe it’s different now.

  When the dreams continued, I decided not to bother mentioning them again.

  When I think of that summer, the dreams aren’t the first thing I think of. They got worse—turning from brief, pleasant images to full-blown, wake-up-in-a-sweat nightmares—but I have to stop and make myself think of them, to remind myself that was part of the summer. Because what I really remember is swimming. Growing stronger and stronger and Coach noticing and encouraging me. Saying that since I was strong in all four areas—backstroke, breaststroke, freestyle, butterfly—that I should try to race in the medley.

  And I remember life at Mr. and Mrs. G’s house—the vegetable-packed omelets for breakfast, the ham sandwiches with tomatoes and lettuce for lunch, snacks of carrots and celery and cucumber in the afternoon. And as I stayed for dinner more and more often, we’d eat potpies packed with the vegetables I helped pick and spaghetti made with sauce from their own tomatoes, which I helped them jar. My parents were at home, microwaving pizzas or heating up takeout Chinese left over from lunch. But me? I was eating like an athlete should.

  And I didn’t just eat the food—I helped in the garden, planting seeds, kneading the soil, plucking weeds, picking the vegetables when they were ready. It’s not like Mr. and Mrs. G used me as free labor. They could have done it faster without stopping to teach me, but they seemed to like having someone to share their gardening skills with. And I liked learning from them.

  I could feel myself growing stronger that summer. Not just my muscles, but also my lungs. I could hold my breath for two minutes. I learned how to time my breathing for optimal effect, taking in just enough air to keep my fastest pace. As I kicked my legs and swept my arms through the water, I felt like I was gliding through some kind of substance that only I understood. It wasn’t water. It was something else. Other people fought against it. Splashed around like they were afraid of it. They could drown in it. But in water I was grace. Like a dolphin. I was home.

  We had a scrimmage among our swim club to see who would race in the meet at the end of the summer. The top two in each category would compete. I finished third in the medley behind Candace Wardlow and Libby Wilson, who were both starting their senior years. Libby was short and squat, sort of a tough tomboy whose daddy owned a farm. She wasn’t particularly popular except during swim meets when all of her teammates were appreciative of her strength.

  Candace, on the other hand, looked like an Olympic athlete. She had a womanly frame and long muscular legs. Curves in all the right places. She was the girl who all the dads looked at and pretended not to. And she was the favorite to win. When I came in third, meaning I was the first alternate, she gave me a nod of respect and climbed out of the pool, confident no little upstart would take her crown. The other girls—there were five of them—were pissed. Of course they congratulated me, but they’d all spent the last year or two hoping to one day make it into the top two after Candace and Libby were too old. Now that some newcomer fifteen-year-old was already passing them, those dreams seemed farther away.

  The Gardners were ecstatic, Mrs. G literally jumping up and down when I looked over at them. Mom was
there, but she was over in the corner by the fence, talking to a guy from work, not even realizing my race was happening. Dad made it somehow, even though he worked seven days a week back then. But I got the feeling he was looking at Candace more than me, just like the other dads.

  When I got out of the pool, a couple of the older boys, Bart Robertson and Denny Ostrom, congratulated me, and as I walked over to my towel, I overheard one say to the other, “Man, Kara is growing up.”

  I was pretty naive back then, but even I knew there was something in what he was saying that went beyond swimming. He wasn’t just complimenting my speed in the water.

  So that night, after my parents were asleep—which was late because Dad hardly ever slept—I went to the bathroom and stripped to my underwear and looked at myself in the mirror. I’d heard of people going through growth spurts—I’d once heard boys saying a female classmate “got her boobs” over a summer—and I realized that was happening to me. The skinny girl, all knees and elbows, was turning into an attractive young adult, muscular and lithe and womanlike.

  I was no Candace Wardlow, but I maybe wasn’t much farther behind her in the looks category than I was with swimming.

  I went to bed with a mixture of emotions

  I thought maybe I wouldn’t be so lonely anymore.

  Maybe this school year I’d have friends besides the retirees down the street.

  But, also, maybe now I would become a target.

  That night, I dreamt of another missing girl, and this time the dream wasn’t so innocent, not just someone brushing her hair. I was Julie Ross, and I wasn’t looking in a mirror. I had a bag over my head and there was a terrible smell coming from the damp cloth—sweet and pungent and overwhelming. Someone was grabbing me and holding the bag over me, and I was fighting them but starting to feel weak.

 

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