by Ellen Datlow
Sheer reflex took over. I typed back, keys clicking: Who R U?, then, Where R U? Hit send, then waited. The seconds stretched out, my rough breath the only sound in the stairwell under a faint buzz of neon. Finally, the “incoming” dots rippled once more.
inside
Inside where? Name? An even longer pause, this time, and my patience snapped. NAME, I typed. Or fuck off. Breathing even harsher now, as much with anger as fear.
The reply appeared without warning, as if the “incoming” signal had been turned off. inside, it repeated. U NO WHERE.
Then, dropping back into lowercase, as if exhausted: help me
I’m nowhere? I thought, before realizing what that space between O and W meant: You know where. Which was bullshit, of course; how was I supposed to know anything? Except—
I did.
No, I thought, mouthing it, unable to find the breath even to whisper it. No, I’m sorry, no. Not me, not this. Not my job.
please, appeared on the screen, in its rounded grey box. Then after a longer pause: please. And once more: please. My screen gradually dimming even as that beat between each word kept on lengthening, exponentially, like each new message was burning through my phantom correspondent’s own store of energy and draining my battery at the same time: iPhone as Ouija board, a process impossible to explain, or sustain. Until one last word appeared, grey sketched on ever-darker grey, simply reading—
loren
Behind me, I heard the door to the stairwell rattle once: firm, distinct, imperative. And—
That was it. The tipping point. Where I instantly knew, in every cell, that I was done.
I leapt to my feet and powerwalked to the King Street TTC stop, hands completely steady, deleting the entire message chain as I did. I no longer cared about proving anything, to anyone. Then I called my mother.
It took quite a few tries to wake her up. Ten years ago she’d have been answering a landline, and I had no doubt she would’ve been supremely pissed. But technology smooths stuff like that over, these days: She already knew it was me, so a mere glance at the clock was enough to tell her something must be wrong—family doesn’t call after two a.m. for anything but an emergency. “Loren?” she asked, half muzzy, half frightened.
I opened my mouth, and burst into tears.
• • •
If you’re looking for closure here, you won’t find much. These stories I collect now are only alike in their consistent lack of completion or explanation, their sheer refusal to grow a clear and satisfying ending—is any story ever “finished,” really? Not until we’re dead, and maybe not even then.
That’s why telling the story, or being willing to listen to someone else’s version—this story, or ones just like it—can sometimes feel like enough, though mainly because it has to be; because there’s simply no other option. Because what I’ve learned is that our world is far more porous than it seems . . . full of dark places, thin places, weak places, bad places. Places where things peer in from whatever far larger, deeper darkness surrounds us, whatever macroverse whose awful touch we may feel on occasion yet simply can’t perceive otherwise, not with our sadly limited human senses.
Because this is the basic trap of empirical knowledge—just one of a million million traps we’re all born into, pressed like a fly between two sheets of this impossible cosmic amber we call time: The “fact” that if all data is essentially, inherently unreliable however it’s gathered, just as we ourselves can never be more than imperfect and impermanent, our ideas of the world must always be taken on faith. Even if we have no template for even pretending to view what we come across through faith’s lens, because “faith” is just a word to us . . .
. . . not just faith in God, mind you. But faith in anything.
• • •
I slept on my mom’s fold-out couch for close to ten hours, not waking until after noon. Several messages from Greg were waiting on my phone. Again, I deleted them all, then wrote him an e-mail that said simply, I quit, which I sent without even signing. I half considered adding Sorry, but couldn’t bring myself to type the word. So maybe not so much better than Gavin was to me, in the end, but at least I had way more excuse for being brusque, in context; that’s what I told myself, anyway.
Mom made me some soup and toast, watched me eat, then cleared her throat. “Honey,” she began, “forget what I said before—you can absolutely stay with me till you go back to school. I don’t want you to worry about that, okay? But we should probably at least go get the rest of your stuff.”
I shook my head, trying to will my voice calm. “No, that’s okay, no point to that—like, at all. It’s not a big deal. I . . . don’t need it.”
“Any of it?” I shrugged; she sighed. “Well . . . even so, you do need to leave Greg’s keys there, right? For whoever he hires next. That’s only fair.”
There wasn’t anything to say to that except yes, much though I didn’t want to.
So back we went to Bathurst and King, in a cab, with Mom visibly struggling all the while to not ask exactly what had convinced me I was no longer able to physically occupy that particular space anymore, in the first place. I ran the prospective conversation in my head as I sat there, trying it out, but there was no version of it where I didn’t end up sounding frankly insane. But does it matter? the memory-Mom in my head replied, logically enough. Whoever sent you those messages clearly knows who you are, where you live—one of the places you live. Might have followed you to the other. That’s reason enough to quit right there, without all the rest.
(I’d left my phone behind, at Mom’s, just to be safe—no messages from beyond to interrupt as we blew in there, got my crap, got back out. I’d drop the keys on the breakfast table and be done with it. Just fifteen minutes more, maybe ten, and I’d never have to see that fucking place again.)
Then the tone came back, right outside the door, worse than ever—like a punch, or a skewer through the ear. It seemed to happen just as I slipped the key into the lock and cranked it widdershins, in the very second before making the decision to turn it and actually doing so; loud enough I felt the click instead of hearing it, so bad I barely kept myself from losing balance. I hugged the doorjamb as it opened in order to keep myself from doubling over, free hand slapping up to shield my eyes, and cursed like a sailor.
“Are you okay, Loren?” Mom asked, from behind me, as I made myself nod, somehow.
“Fine,” I replied, skull abruptly on fire, unable to stop my words from slurring—fresh silver agony everywhere on top of the usual pulse in my bones, my jaw, my eye sockets, a chewed tinfoil drone. “Less juss . . . do this quick, ’kay? Don’ wanna be ’n here . . . longer’n I have to.”
I know Mom could hear the tone too, if only a little; I could tell from the way she suddenly stopped and stared, almost on the Motel’s threshold, as though reluctant to move any further inside—hell, I sure didn’t blame her. Once upon a time, simply being able to demonstrate the Motel’s awfulness to someone who hadn’t already paid to stay there would’ve been unspeakably satisfying, but I was way beyond that now. From the corner of my eye, I saw Mom knuckle her ears like she was trying to get them to pop after a long flight. “Jesus,” she said, voice caught somewhere between disgust and amazement. “This is . . . ugh. Has Greg ever been here, in person?”
“Dunno,” I replied, staggering forward to wrench the guest bedroom closet’s sliding doors open. “Colour’s not his fault, though. Came this way.”
“Ugh,” she repeated. “So this was deliberate?”
She helped me pull out my suitcases and toted the first one out into the hall while I flipped the other open, stuffing everything haphazardly back inside without any sort of regard as to whether mixing used toiletries with lingerie was a good idea. Some lingering sense of professionalism drove me to check that the fridge was empty and the trash cleaned out, but that didn’t take long; Mom was already coming back in as I zipped the second case shut. “Done,” I called, voice wobbly, my whole head twin
ging like a wound. I remember feeling as though if I opened my mouth too wide, my teeth might fall out.
“Great,” she called back. “Mind if I just use the toilet?”
“. . . ’course not,” I lied.
And here is where my memory always starts to bend, the way things do, under pressure—where it speeds up and slows down at once, stuttering and swerving. I remember putting the case near the door and turning round, hearing Mom call through the washroom door, sounding slightly ill: “No wonder they complained about the lights.” I think I actually might have laughed at that. And then there’s a weird skip, a time-lapse, some sort of missing piece, an absence: a hole in my mind, a scar or flaw, something either too bright or dark to look on directly. The pain dims; the tone dims. I can’t hear my mom anymore. I can’t hear anything but my own breath, my own heart.
I’m back in the guest bedroom, standing in front of the wall. Bright sunlight outside, falling through the concrete shaft like rain. Floating motes of dust lit up like sparks against a grey-black wall.
Loren, a voice says, inside my head. You came back.
My knees give out. That’s never happened to me before, not even when I’m drunk, and I’d always thought the idea of your knees “giving out” was just a turn of phrase, an exaggeration. But no, apparently it can happen, because it does: boom and down, my ass hits the floor as my teeth clack together so hard it hurts. And the tone comes back up, so high it’s all fuzz, a horrible blur through every part of me at once, yet the voice, that voice—it cuts through. It’s barely a whisper, but I hear it, so clear the words seem to form themselves against my eardrums. So clear it’s like I’m thinking them.
Help me.
You have to help me.
I’m a guest.
The tone, louder than it’s ever been, raw and primordial, wobbling like mercury. Each word vibrating as if a thousand different voices are saying it, at a thousand slightly different pitches. As if the world is saying it.
Some gigantic clamp vises my head, forcing it to look upwards once more, at the wall. Too far away to touch, now, but my hand—my left hand—reaches for it anyways, pulled as if on a string, a fishing line hooked where that blue Y of a vein humps across its back. My vision de-rezzed out to the point that the wall looks like nothing but a swirling cloud, a roiling cumulonimbus storm head; it’s crumbling, disintegrating, just like me. The wall pixelating like static then beginning to clear, its atoms getting further apart, becoming intangible. And at the heart of all that roiling grey I see something else, something new, forming: pale, surrounded by darkness, a monochrome infected wound coming up through colourless skin. It stretches its arms out to me.
But no, not it. Her.
Poor little missing Miss Barrie, come for her now-endless Big-City-cation. Staring out at me from the solid wall, from whatever lies on the other side of all solid walls, with blind, milky eyes and her flesh bleached like cotton, wavering in and out, an illusion of solidity. Her hair floating upwards, mouth stretching horribly wide as some abyssal fish’s—a bad parody of a smile made by something that’s never known how, the very opposite of welcoming.
And that voice again, inside me, deeper yet. I feel my lips move as it speaks, pleading.
Caught hold of me, it won’t let go, I can’t
Are you there?
Help me, please, just reach in
Reach in and pull me out, I’ll help
Just help me, please
That fetid, acrid smell back too, so thick, my lungs rigid with it. And then I’m up on my feet again, far too close, unable to remember moving; if only I reach out a little further, I’ll plunge effortlessly through solid matter, like grey and filthy water. With Miss Barrie reaching back for me, her fingers almost touching mine, their too-pale tips already emerging from the wall’s miasma, making my neck ruff with some sort of itchy, awful, sick-making anticipation—
That’s when I see them, all around her: tendrils, trailing. Black strings in blackness, grey shadowed. These weird strings at the corners of her mouth going up and back into the darkness, pulling and tweaking, twitching her lips, opening and closing her jaws. Plucking at her mouth’s corners, hauling her limbs into place, raising her slack, soft, drained hand. Her tongue is working the wrong way for the words she’s “saying,” and it looks dry. Like she’s being played long-distance, like a theremin. Like a spider’s web filaments, tugged on from afar, tempting in a fly. Like some invisible puppeteer’s strings.
Time started working the right way again, then: I wrenched back, just in time to see the blackness just above—behind her—move. There was a sort of stain on her left shoulder I’d thought was just my eyes failing, trying to translate something nobody should ever see, into visual signals a human retina could read. But no: As I watched, it rippled, mimicking some much larger wave. A matching mass of utter lightless black reaching out for me, one single finger longer than any of Miss Barrie’s limbs, first pointing, then wagging slightly—Oh, you! Always so difficult—before turning over, crooking, in clear invitation. Curling up and back, then down, then up and back again.
Beckoning.
Come closer, my darling, come closer. Let me touch you, the way I’m touching her. Let me know you. Let us be . . . together.
Loren, come.
At which point I did exactly what I told you to do, if you ever see something similar. Threw down Greg’s keys, so hard they bounced, and just.
Fucking.
Ran.
• • •
Mom found me back down on the street, eventually, shaking, cases in hand—looked like she wanted to rip into me at first, for leaving her along in that hellhole, till she saw I was crying again. Days later, I got an e-mail back from Ross Puget with an attachment that proved, in the end, not much more informative than any of his site’s articles. He talked a lot about liminal spaces, about ownership and possession, the idea that when a space is left empty for too long—especially intentionally—it might tend to drift towards the “wrong sort of frequency,” one that renders it easy to . . . penetrate. The Motel’s tone, he said, was likely be a sonic side effect of this collision between existential frequencies, the same sort of tension vibration seismographs pick up from continental plates grinding against one another; people theorized the same kind of fraying might explain what he called “apports,” objects mysteriously disappearing and reappearing at particular locations, side-slipping through space from weak point to weak point. Some of these psychic fault lines, he added, seemed to predate human habitation altogether, and could be incredibly localized; a one-story house on the same lot as the Motel might’ve never have had any problems. If I was still interested in trying to do something about it, he could recommend a few names.
I never answered, which I feel more than a little bad about. I did, however, forward the e-mail on to Greg, with a brusque postscript: If you can’t sell the place, burn it out and collect the insurance. I’m serious. Then I blocked his number.
Sometimes I dream of my time in the Puppet Motel and wake up heartsick, breathless, hoping against hope I’m not still there. Sometimes I get texts from an unknown number, and delete them unread. Sometimes my phone’s AI tries to talk to me, and I turn it the fuck off.
I do still hear it call to me, sometimes, though—it, or her. Because that’s the only real question, isn’t it, when all’s said and done? Was Miss Barrie only ever what she seemed, a drained shell run long distance, a mask over something far worse? Or is she still hanging there in darkness even now, two or three plaster layers down, waiting in vain for a rescue that never comes?
Does something have to be human—to have been human—to be a ghost? Ross’s articles could never quite agree. And that thing I saw, that barest fingertip: malign, or just lonely?
The woman inside the wall, she’s a ghost, now. I’m almost sure.
Still. I hear that thin, terrible voice, forever pleading with the empty air: Loren, Loren, help me. And see myself forever backing away, hands waving, like I�
��m trying to scrub all trace of my occupancy from the Puppet Motel’s polluted atmosphere. Thinking back, as I do: Stop saying my name, I don’t know you, I can’t. I can’t. I don’t know you.
That’s a choice, though, to believe that. It always was.
Like everything else.
So I track these stories on my own time instead, and whenever I think I’ve identified those who might be able to tell me about what happened, I arrange to make myself available. It doesn’t always pay off, of course—some are jokes, or pranks; some are mistakes, honest or otherwise. Sometimes, I’ve found, people try their best to persuade themselves of supernatural influence in order to reframe their own errors, to cast their own (entirely human) demons as things whose actions they couldn’t possibly bear any responsibility for.
But for myself, I know when a tale is true because when I hear it, that tone will start to resonate inside me once more, piercing me through from ear to jaw to bowels, ringing at my marrow like a struck bell. I can’t stop it, can’t help it. I just . . . can’t.
So I do the next best thing, and listen. Record, maintain. So that future seekers—people caught in the grip of something they struggle to understand, just like I once was—will have a place to go, to learn. To understand.
This world is full of weak places, after all, where dark things peer through, beckoning. One of which knows my name, now. And I just have to live with that.
I always will.
Air Valve Semilunar Astern
Nick Mamatas
Ever call up U.S. Patent 446054, granted on February 10, 1891, on your web browser? Do it! It’s for a certain “toy or game”—Elijah Jefferson Bond’s talking board. You know it as a Ouija board, the purpose of which is described in the patent as follows: “two or more persons can amuse themselves by asking questions of any kind and having them answered by the device.” The device does all the answering. Ain’t nobody here but us chickens, see? There’s an old story about Bond being compelled to bring his prototype—and his pretty sister-in-law, who was a spirit medium—to the patent office to demonstrate the board’s power by asking the spirits to spell out the name of the patent officer in charge of their file. They did so, and pale with fear, the clerk stamped the appropriate papers with his hands a-tremblin’. (Bond was a patent attorney; he probably knew the guy’s name anyway.)