The Forgiving

by Wesley McCraw

  “Ghosts are make-believe, sweetie.” A blood-caked hand reached into the light and pointed. “Right over there, hanging on that tree . . .”

  On the backside of the gnarled cherry tree hung a key on an iron spike.

  “All you have to do is get that key, and you can free us.”

  They're trapped! Zelda realized. They can't get me!

  Body odor wafted from the other side of the gate. Something even fouler festered underneath. The girl put her hand to her nose to ward off the stench. She hadn’t thought ghosts would smell.

  “No-no-no, be a good girl. Zelda, you're a good girl, aren't you?”

  “Do you have Dolly? I—I lost her. I lost her to the House.”

  The blood-caked hand reached back, and for a moment, because of the shadows, the figure had no arms and no head. Then, the reaching hand pulled Dolly from the darkness into the light.

  Zelda gasped. “You have her!”

  Dolly was safe and whole. A little primping and a little love would restore the flattened husk dress to its original shape.

  The girl glanced around (no one was on the sidewalk) and cautiously crept to the gate.

  The blood-caked hand held Dolly out, but not far enough that Zelda could reach it through the bars.

  “She’s mine!”

  “First, the key.”

  Tears pricked the little girl’s eyes.

  She rushed to the cherry tree. She had been growing fast (Mother always said so), but even stretching on her tippy-toes on the tangled roots, Zelda was too short. She pounded the knotted trunk with her fists to no effect. The tree was too big.

  She grabbed a stick from the ground and used it to knock the key off the spike. “Take that!”

  The tree blocked the lamplight, so she had to search blindly through the decaying leaves and the maze of roots, all the time being careful not to dirty her nightgown. Mother can’t know I’ve been outside! she thought, not realizing grease had already stained her chest and back when she had tried to squeeze through the bars.

  She groped sticks, more leaves, more roots, cherry pits, a tiny slug, and there, in her cold fingers, the key! “Yes!” With the key, she rushed back and halted a few feet short of the gate. The dark forms were hard to make out, still in the shadows, but they were dirty. That much was obvious. They choked her with their stench. They made her feel tiny and weak.

  “Hurry!” said the figure holding the doll.

  Zelda gripped the key tight. She looked up and down the deserted street. It felt as if the night air had just dropped twenty degrees. She trembled. “If Mother sees me . . .” She resisted the urge to wipe her dirty hands on her gown.

  The doll tilted from side to side, giving Zelda a quizzical look.

  “Just a bit farther. Your dolly needs you.”

  The bloody fingertips that animated Dolly had stained the delicate husk dress a dark red. Hopefully, water would wash away the blood. If not, Zelda would still love the doll despite its stains; real love was unconditional.

  Her vigilant mother sometimes checked in on her in the middle of the night, whispered a prayer, “Keep my baby safe,” and straightened the quilt. If Zelda failed to return soon, she might be missed. Possibly Mother was already searching the house. She could already be charging down the street, furious with Zelda for once again being the disobedient child.

  The little girl need not have worried. Presently, her mother slept, dreaming of the end of the world.

  The dark things stood there waiting behind the gate. There was no rattling chains, no shrieking, no ghostly glow. Their eyes didn’t burn in the dark. Not monsters, the girl decided, just people who wanted free from Jacobi House. Who was she to keep them locked up? With renewed determination, Zelda stepped forward with the key outstretched, ready to make a trade.

  2

  Before the House

  In the Oregon high desert, a magnetic and handsome forty-year-old named Howard Stark broke earth not far from a sacred bush. He shoveled with gusto. By the time the hole was waist-deep, sweat darkened his graphic tee at his back and chest and under his pits. The heat leaded his muscled arms, and it took mental effort to continue to dig with any potency.

  An unnatural skittering flittered, like metal bristles scraping back and forth against a cave ceiling, and he was cast in shadow. Before he could look up, the sound had stopped and the sun had returned.

  He squinted and shielded his eyes with his hand. Next to his backpack and canteen were his hiking boots with his damp socks tucked inside. Desert shrubs grew from parched earth. South, the Alvord Desert stretched to the harsh Steen Mountains. West, Hart Mountain rose and cradled the expansive and desolate Warner Valley. In the other directions were more sagebrush, rock, and flat land.

  He crossed himself and pulled out a laminated portrait of Isabel Torres beaming, holding a Venezuelan baby, the picture taken a year before he had found her in front of the cantaloupes at a Market of Choice in South Portland. It still amazed him they had met under such mundane circumstances. Each day they remained together, she reignited his hope for redemption. She trusted him, even when he didn’t trust himself. Isabel Torres was his baptism. He kissed her picture and put it away.

  He stripped off his shirt, revealing his fit body to the sun and desert. The canteen water tasted stale and metallic, and when he wiped his face with the back of his hand, his lips stung.

  The silt, clay, obsidian shards, and pumice would have been impossible to dig through as quickly if the followers of Osho, a cult leader formerly known as Rajneesh, hadn't dug this hole once before. Howard dug until the surface was a foot above his head and the cold otherness of being underground chilled him.

  On the surface, next to the pit, a rattlesnake slithered into an “S” shape; licked the air, taking in the man's odor; and then slithered back in on itself, forming a figure eight.

  Howard was too absorbed in his digging to notice the danger above. The shovel made a dull thud, and a jolt shot through his arms like an electric shock. Not sure if the sensation was real or imagined, he carefully dug around the buried object's edges, until there was a rectangular mound left at the bottom of the pit. The whole time, his body tingled (his lethargy had evaporated). He brushed away the soil and revealed something wrapped in waterproof duck canvas. He got it by its corners and pulled. It left a rectangular hole in the earth. He held the mysterious object in the sun—as if warming it, as if presenting it to the air and to God—and then he placed it on the surface.

  The snake slithered off the edge of the pit, fell, and thumped onto the cool floor. Howard sprung and was on the surface before he even realized what had fallen.

  A freaking rattlesnake! A bite from one of those, so far from civilization, could have been fatal. He calmed his breathing, and his pounding pulse faded in his ears. The sun dried his forehead.

  He clutched the object to his bare chest. God led me to this! The holy bush near the pit now resembled every other bush in the desert.

  The long strip of canvas unwound like a bandage covering a scar, only this scar was a raised triangle on the cover of a hand-stitched, leather-bound book. Osho had feared this book, and had it buried; now it was unearthed. Howard was a collector of cult artifacts and wanted the pages to remain free of dusty fingerprints. He would study the book soon enough.

  It fit into his backpack neatly, as if designed to fit there. This find was providence. It had rewarded and renewed his faith.

  Despite his triumph, exhaustion seeped back in. His nearly empty canteen now felt at its heaviest. After a sip, he dusted off his chest with his shirt and tucked the shirt back into his filthy cargo shorts. A shower would solve the dirt and the sweat. Once he was clean, Isabel’s embrace would solve the rest.

  His shovel was still in the hole, five—maybe six—feet down. The snake coiled.

  Howard got on his hands and knees. The shovel was propped against the pit wall. He could probably grab it if he stretched.

  The desert rough on his bare stomach, he reac
hed in, careful not to make any sudden movements. The shovel's handle was still too far away. The snake’s forked tongue tasted the man's stink some more, and still, Howard reached farther, clutching the rim of the pit with one hand. So close! Pumice rained down. The tips of his fingers touched the handle.

  The snake rattled its tail, pulling back, readying itself to strike.

  The man snatched the handle and pulled himself back up. He got his feet under him and scrambled back. He let his heart calm again before stabbing the pile of rocky dirt with the shovel and scooping up a heap. The snake remained coiled at the bottom of the pit, its blood likely cooled from the cold clay. Howard couldn’t just bury the poor thing alive. Even if the animal could kill him with one strike, it was one of God’s creatures.

  He carefully used the shovel to drag the deadly reptile up the side of the pit. It did little to resist, only squirming slightly at first and hissing. “That’s right. Everything’s okay. Just a bit farther.” With a little heave, the snake flew and landed out in the desert. It froze, stunned from the landing, but recovered after a few seconds and slithered away as if nothing had happened.

  Howard filled the hole and thanked God for protecting him from the snake and for helping him find the book.

  “Please, God, stay with me. I've only just begun.”

  The trek back through the wilderness would be a trial by flaming sun; he already showed signs of heat exhaustion. Just as well. It would give him time to build the courage necessary to look inside the book and do what needed to be done.

  ◆◆◆

  More than a year later, in Portland’s Old Town Chinatown, a Taiwanese ghost show played on an ancient TV/VCR combo. On the screen, an announcer led a young couple through the ruins of a house, a female psychic burned Ghost Money, and then the image paused and a red circle highlighted a distorted face in the background. Every episode was relatively the same: handheld footage of the living spied on by the dead.

  A Taiwanese shopkeeper dressed in a baby blue pantsuit sat on a stool and watched the show as she unwrapped and ate sesame seed candy. Her late father had owned this shop, and now it was hers. She had made few changes over the years. Asian god and demon statues crowded the front showroom. Ratty hemp necklaces hung from a rack on the counter near a terrarium covered by a white sheet. Paper lanterns hung among the rafters. Hopefully, a customer would come in soon.

  The face in the red circle had long hair and a drooping face. The mouth gaped. Shadow hid the eyes, or the poor spirit had no eyes.

  Already on edge from the ghost show, “Ma’am?” startled the shopkeeper half to death.

  On first impression, the man who stood a couple yards away came across as a thug. He wore a sleeveless tee and his arms had too many tattoos to take in at a glance, many of them brightly colored. It reminded her of Yakuza and the Bamboo Union, though he obviously wasn’t part of an Asian gang. For one, he was white.

  His hand ran over the ridges of a six-foot-tall, carved, blue dragon. The dragon and the man were about the same height.

  “I’m trying to find an unusual gift,” he said without looking at her. “Maybe something related to the occult.”

  “That's a spirit dragon: Shenlong.” If she was curt, soon enough the thug would go away.

  “Spirit, as in ghost?” he asked.

  “He controls the rain.”

  “But like haunted houses?”

  Her show paused on another distorted face. “Haunted houses are more about ancestors. Without the proper offerings, ancestors become unsettled.”

  “Cool, cool. That makes sense.”

  She stopped her show and turned off the TV. “Your name?”

  He looked at her. “Grip Porter.”

  He was younger than he'd appeared at first glance: probably early twenties.

  “I was just at Hoodoo Antiques. They suggested I try you guys. They have this haunted portrait. It’s of this lady—”

  “The woman in the lace hat.”

  “That’s right.”

  His attractive features softened his menacing edge, and his disarming smile showed off his good humor. Maybe her first impression had been all wrong. She knew it was easy to make assumptions about people. He seemed so good natured now.

  “Creepy shit,” he said and laughed. “They’ve seen her in the back of the shop when the store is closed, but she doesn’t trip the motion detectors. She even moves stuff around. But they weren’t selling. I guess she brings in tourists. You guys have something like that? A haunted artifact.”

  His full attention made her blush. He was very good-looking.

  Grip noticed his effect on her. He had noticed her apprehension before, and now he noticed this blushing. He always watched for the effect he had on women. The correct half-smile, a little lean, a lingering look, and he could usually get women to perk up and fizz like a soda pop, either that or they would fidget and preen like teenagers and act demure. It took older women time to overlook the tats, especially older Asian women, but now that the shopkeeper had thawed, hopefully she'd show the good stuff she kept away from the tourists.

  She lifted a necklace from the rack on the counter. “Guardian necklaces keep evil spirits away, evil Porter ancestors.”

  “Actually, my ancestors were saints. I’m the black sheep.” He gave her a mischievous grin. It was a lie. His parents were degenerates. He had a grandfather that had died in prison. His relatives were all poor and outsiders and scam artists and addicts and drunks and assholes. His older brother died in the army, and Grip wasn’t really sad about it.

  She laughed in delight at his flirting. She already felt younger; he could tell. Women her age always liked to feel young again, and a little attention from an attractive younger man usually did the trick.

  “A spirit dragon, huh? Looks more like a snake with claws.” He browsed as she watched him. Piles of fake money lined a shelf. Bowls held red, crescent-shaped, bamboo blocks. He had no idea what they were for.

  Such a curious white boy, the shopkeeper thought, admiring his athletic form. She found it unlikely, but maybe this young man liked older women. Let’s see. She brought out a piece of paper and a long black pen. “I could communicate with the cosmic Mother for you, or with one of the Three Pure Ones. Or maybe with one of the lesser deities. Mazu perhaps?” She held the pen over the paper, ready to spirit write. She usually saved spirit writing for her loyal customers but was ready to make an exception.

  Spirit writing reminded Grip of the Ouija Board and the little girl in The Exorcist. Communion with demons opened you to possession and vomiting pea soup. Not that he believed in all that stuff. “Yeah, I’d rather not.”

  Disappointed, she put down the pen.

  He came upon a red and gold statue of an old man with a white beard made of real human hair. The man ruled from a throne next to more piles of Ghost Money and strings of prayer beads. A label on the statue read: “Tu Di Gong: God of the people.” The next idol down the line was a hideous, red goblin-thing with three eyes and brutal horns and teeth. It had no label.

  The shopkeeper pulled the sheet off the terrarium and revealed a mass of corn snakes of different colors and sizes, some over five feet long, their musk pungent like a pet shop. “Before the fall of man, snakes had wings. Then God cursed them to slither the ground. In Egypt, they were worshiped.”

  The snakes writhed, one ruby red, another almost pure white, the rest patterned in black, red, and brownish orange stripes or geometric splotches. Grip shivered. They caused a pain in his abdomen, like a contraction.

  His grimace worried her. “Snakes are sacred,” she said. How could he not like them when they were so exquisite? They were truly God's creatures.

  Grip was embarrassed by his own squeamishness. “I’m not really a snake guy. I’m more of a—” She dangled a white mouse by the tail over the mass of snakes. “—lover of tiny, cute animals. What are you doing?”

  The mouse squeaked and wriggled in terror.

  Not wanting to see it devoured
, Grip quickly ducked out of the shop and into the light of day without bothering to say goodbye.

  It pained her to see him go. Though, once he was gone, she felt a little ridiculous for being drawn to a man half her age.

  She wished him well as a way to release him from her thoughts. May the cosmic Mother bless and protect you.

  Despite her self-consciousness, she wouldn’t dismiss her instincts entirely. There was something special about Grip Porter. Whether that “special” was good or bad, she couldn’t say.

  ◆◆◆

  Meanwhile, Zelda’s brother Alex drew a circle on a piece of paper at his desk at school. His yellow crayon snapped from the pressure. He ripped down the waxy label and continued to draw with the stump.

  While he and the rest of his class worked, his second-grade teacher, Isabel Torres, cleaned a whiteboard with hand sanitizer and a paper towel. The alcohol in the sanitizer made it an effective alternative to expensive cleaning solutions. The children were all so quiet and focused that as she scrubbed, she noticed the ticking of the clock above her on the wall. For her, the last hour stretched longer than the whole morning before it. She had important plans after class.

  A gurgling sound, like from a hungry stomach, rumbled in the floor.

  Lumen Christi Catholic Elementary originally opened its doors as Lumen Christi School for Boys more than a hundred years ago. Back in those days, while Catholic priests taught young boys on the first and second floors, other priests used the basement as an infirmary for the old, dying priests and nuns of the whole Northwest area. The boys studied, and screams came from below, especially from the basement room reserved for exorcisms. A hundred years later, the basement housed school supplies and broken desks and projectors. Few people ventured by themselves down the dark corridors or into the stone, windowless storage rooms; the basement had a reputation for unsettling even the bravest souls. More than one paranormal website had featured the school as a haunted hot spot, quoting past custodians and students about eerie encounters with spirits from the beyond.