by Ellen Datlow
• • •
Jasper awoke with a start. The sense of something fading pulled him upright in his bed. He could almost see it: like a wisp of smoke. He felt desperately cold, and a longing that hurt so much it sprang tears to his eyes. A moment later it was gone, leaving him bewildered and shaken.
Morning sunlight flowed through his windows, outlining every ordinary thing—his piled clothes, his action figures, his air rifle—with solid clarity. There was nothing here that had not always been here.
He remembered the questions he’d asked Lily, and looked around the bed for any evidence that she’d been there. There was nothing.
Something tickled the back of his mind. A rag of memory: his sister, curled against him in sleep, huddling for warmth. Her cold fingers wrapped around his hand. Then it went away.
• • •
Jasper’s father hadn’t left the couch. The bottle at his side held more whiskey than Jasper had expected, which meant he’d spent most of the night asleep or unconscious. Jasper approached quietly. He pressed his hand to his dad’s forehead again. It still felt warm, but not as hot as last night. That seemed promising.
In that moment, he felt his mother’s absence more acutely than he had in weeks. It had been horrible at first, of course, and he hadn’t been able to stop crying, even when it made his father yell at him. When it got to that point, he’d run outside, into the woods so no one could hear him. Usually he’d go to the old car tangled in kudzu. He’d try to avoid going to the well when he could, because he didn’t want to make Lily sad. But sometimes he couldn’t help it. Sometimes he needed to be close to her.
Jasper snatched up his notebook and headed out to the car. He wanted to be by himself, where he could think.
His mother would have known what to do. She would have made him something nice for breakfast and she would have given him some medicine that would make him feel better. She would sit on the couch with him and hold his head in her lap, and say things in that quiet way she had which always made the world seem just a little bit softer.
He worried about her out in the world by herself. She needed her scooter to ride around on when she went anywhere. She was really big and sometimes that embarrassed her so much it made her cry, but her size was one of the things Jasper loved best about her. She felt comfortable and soft, and when she hugged him he thought it was the gentlest feeling in the world. He liked to help her get up off the couch because it made him feel strong. Sometimes she would let him ride the scooter. He missed that too.
She was too big to drive the car anymore. His dad had to take her places whenever she wanted to go. Jasper wondered how she got away from here, without his dad to drive her. She must have driven the scooter up the long dirt track to where the road started. And then down the road to wherever she ended up going.
He knew the scooter was too small to hold them both, so he understood why she left him behind. But he wished she had asked him to go with her anyway. He could have walked beside her. Who was going to help her get up now?
It occurred to him that she might have seen his book. He’d put stuff in there about the Holy Ghost. She wouldn’t have liked that. Maybe that’s why she left.
Of all the spirits, the Holy Ghost was the hardest one to write about. He never saw it, but it seemed like Mama saw it a lot. She sure talked about it a lot. He knew it had to do with Jesus and God; she told him once that it was the same thing—they were all the same thing—but then she’d talk about them like they were all separate, too. Jesus had always possessed a sinister aspect for Jasper because of it; he imagined Him rising desiccated from the dark cave where He had been interred, the shroud sliding down His face, His eyes terrible and red as they fixed upon Jasper’s every wicked thought, every evil hope.
Despite that, the Holy Ghost was supposed to be a protector. If it didn’t protect him, at least it protected his mom. That’s what she told Uncle Kyle that one night. Jasper remembered it clearly because it was what his uncle called an “example of behavior,” so he wrote it down in the book as soon as he heard it.
Sitting in the derelict car now, he read through that section again. It gave him a sharp pang. He’d almost forgotten that Uncle Kyle had told her to leave, all those months ago. It must have been him who gave her the idea in the first place. They’d been outside, talking by Uncle Kyle’s Chevy. His uncle was getting ready to drive back into town after spending the weekend with them. Jasper didn’t remember much about that weekend, except that his uncle and his dad didn’t talk to each other at all. They never liked each other much, but that weekend had an extra tension.
“You got to get out, Mae. Take that boy and get out.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes you can! I’ll help you do it. It’s only gonna get worse now.”
“You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, Kyle.”
“The hell I don’t.”
“He’s not as bad as you think.”
“He’s worse.” He paused, and tried again. “I got a responsibility, Mae. You’re my sister. Jasper’s my nephew.”
“The Holy Spirit protects me, Kyle. Just like He does Jasper.”
“Like He did Lily?”
She slapped him then, hard. Jasper remembered the sound of it even now, the way it carried like a rifle shot, the way it made him feel sick in his heart.
“How dare you,” she said. “You got no right. No right.”
He put his hand on his cheek. Jasper tensed, waiting for him to hit her back, the way his dad would have done. Waiting for the sound of punched meat, the snap of a bone in her nose. His whole body grew heavy with dread. He wished he was bigger. He could fix things if he was bigger.
Nothing happened, though. Instead Uncle Kyle fixed his mom with a look he had never seen on him before, something ugly and sad. He said, “I got every right.” And then all he did was get inside his car and drive away, leaving a cloud of road dust hanging in the still, hot air.
His mom turned and made her way back to the house, treading carefully without her scooter, breathing heavily with the effort. Jasper wanted to go out and help her, but he was afraid she’d be mad at him for eavesdropping. And anyway, she had Jesus’s Ghost to help her, he guessed.
Sitting in the old car, Jasper studied the words he’d written down that day, and at the crude little image of a ghost—the kind with a sheet over its head—floating over a crucifix. It had seemed a daring illustration at the time, but now it just embarrassed him. How it would have shamed his mother to see it.
But his gaze kept drifting back to Lily’s name. She’d slapped Uncle Kyle when he said it.
Something terrible stirred in his brain.
Dad, what did you do?
• • •
Jasper pulled the boards away from the well. It gaped at him, dumb and hostile, exhaling its wet, earthy musk. He stretched out beside it, edging forward enough to peer over the edge.
His notebook laid open beside him, the pen resting in its gutter. He extended his right hand into the hole, gripping tightly the little flashlight he’d purloined from his dad’s toolbox. He felt the clutch of vertigo. If he dropped the flashlight, he’d pay for it with his hide.
Turning it on felt like an intrusion, but he did it anyway. Balancing on the lip with his chest, he reached out with his left hand and twisted the top of the flashlight. White light speared into the darkness, illuminating the moist, brick-walled shaft extending sixty feet into the earth. The walls glistened; things seemed to slide and skitter across them. He knew that might just be a trick of the light, but the instinct to recoil was strong, and he had to beat it back.
He aimed the light straight down. It was too deep, and the darkness swallowed it.
“Can you see me?” he said.
Jasper listened. He filtered out the sounds of the woods around him—the birds, the chittering squirrels, the shift of leaves in the wind. He focused the whole of his attention on the cool black gulf, and the silence that welled up from it like a breat
h. He thought he heard something whisper.
“Lily?”
He inched forward, the flashlight still aimed into the depths. He clutched the stone rim with his left hand, the top of his chest now over the open well. Was that a glint of something? The reflection of an eye? Something metal?
The image of his mother’s scooter flashed into his mind, broken and half buried in black mud. It hit him like a bullet, something fired through his skull from a distance, and the shock of it rattled him enough that he teetered on the edge, his body for one icy moment balanced like a seesaw between solid earth and the cold, deep fall.
Jasper scrambled away from the lip, the flashlight tumbling into the well. His stomach dropped, and for a dizzy moment he thought he had fallen too. He pressed his face against the packed dirt. Adrenaline sizzled in his blood. He lay there, breathing, until it went away. Only then did he realize that he’d lost the flashlight. With a feeling of despair, he peered into the well again, more carefully this time, and confirmed it. There, like a tiny, tumbled star, was a bright pinprick, and a little wedge of light. Everything around it was black; it illuminated nothing.
Well. It would not be the first beating he’d taken.
Before he went home to receive it, though, he had his task to accomplish. He retrieved his notebook, found a blank page, and scrawled another question for Lily.
Did Dad hurt you?
He tore it carefully from the book, crumpled it loosely, and dropped it down the well. He sat for a moment, considering. He felt the heat gathering behind his eyes again, and he wrote another one.
Did he hurt Mama?
And he dropped that one down there too.
The tears came. He lay there, letting them have their moment. Then he wiped them away. He got to his feet, brushed off his clothes, and walked home to take what was coming to him.
• • •
Jasper found his father lying facedown on the floor. He stood paralyzed in the doorway, the heat of the sun prickling the back of his neck, a chill creeping out from his heart through the rest of his body. The bottle of Evan Williams lay on its side beside the couch, much of its contents spilled onto the floor, filling the little house with its reek.
A groan slipped from his father’s lips, and suddenly Jasper could breathe again. He crept inside, the fear of losing the flashlight returning to the forefront of his mind. Kneeling, he grasped his father’s shoulders and tried to turn him over. It was like trying to roll a felled buck.
His dad hissed through his teeth. A dark swelling had emerged where he’d been kicked in the head. He opened his mouth and a slurry of half-formed words spilled out: boneless, nonsense syllables. Somehow this scared him more than the ghosts.
“Dad, what? What?”
His father put his big hand on Jasper’s shoulder and tried to push himself up. The weight of him collapsed Jasper to his hands and knees, and he had to brace himself before his dad could try again. Even then he almost buckled, but it was enough for his dad to achieve his feet again. He stood uncertainly, his eyes drifting around the room as though he were looking for something familiar. He clamped Jasper’s shoulder with his left hand. He looked at his son with bewilderment.
“Dad?”
“I’ma gowow,” he said, and took a step toward the kitchen. He paused, as though considering his next move, and took two more steps before pitching to his left. There was nothing around for him to grab hold of, and he hit the floor hard. His head bounced off the floor with a hollow tok! He lay quietly where he’d fallen, eyes half-lidded. When Jasper shook his shoulder, he remained as still as the dead.
• • •
He could walk to the grocery store before sundown, but not there and back again. With luck, he wouldn’t have to; Mr. Wiley would be driving him back. Jasper didn’t know where else to go. The phone had been disconnected weeks ago, and Uncle Kyle was not coming back. He needed help, and Mr. Wiley was the only remaining adult in his world.
His father wouldn’t move. Jasper knew what drunk looked like; this was something different. He moved the bottle of Evan Williams to within his dad’s reach, in case he woke up and wanted it.
“I’m gonna get some help, Dad.”
He lit outside and made his way to the road. It lay out before him in a long, simmering ribbon, the horizon wavy with the day’s gathered heat. As he hurried along it, his mind cooked up fantasies of an old Chevy manifesting from that haze, Uncle Kyle emerging from it like a hero in a movie. But nothing like that happened. The road remained as empty as a kicked pail.
By the time he got to Wiley’s store, it was later than he’d thought it would be. The sun had already disappeared behind the tree line, spilling an orange light across the world. With a lurch in his gut, Jasper realized that Mr. Wiley’s car was not in the parking lot. Nor was anyone else’s.
He ran to the front door and pulled on the handle, ignoring the CLOSED placard hanging inside. The door was locked. He tugged again, calling out Mr. Wiley’s name and pressing his face against the glass.
Everything within looked like it had been sitting there for a long time. The only light came from the exit sign overhead, and from a bulb over the restroom on the other side of the store. The interior was a half-lit mausoleum, a place where things might live that could not live in daylight.
Despairing, Jasper turned away. Shadows had massed beneath the trees and encroached upon the street. The sky was a deep twilight blue, still lit like a lamp, but not for long.
Jasper turned for home. He would go out again in the morning, early. His dad would probably be up by the time he got back home anyway, maybe ready to lay some leather on him for being out so late.
The air was still, but the woods were alive on either side of him. Things moved out there in the darkness, rustling through the leaves and the branches. Overhead, Venus peered through the blue night.
The feral ghosts seethed in the woods to either side. These were the ones Jasper knew the least about. These were the ones that made the night sounds, the ones that surrounded the house in the moonlight, their numbers thinned only by the meager protections of the honey jars. They came hungry for his blood, drawn to his sins like angels to a stinking trough.
They need a home, Mama had said. They smell your nasty heart and they gonna move inside it. She had delivered that proclamation looming over him as he was settling into bed, the light coming into his room from behind her, so that she seemed the personification of all the dark entities curling through the woods at that very moment, sniffing out his wickedness. He spent that night fighting sleep, listening to every sound intruding upon the stillness.
Jasper had arrived at the place where he could cut through the woods to his house, shaving off a good fifteen minutes from his walk. By now the night had risen to its full grandeur. He stood by the wall of trees, staring into their depths. He’d never been out this late on his own, and had certainly never passed through the forest so far after dark. If he went through, he would walk close to the well; he could call down to Lily, and see if she called back. The thought was both appalling and irresistible.
He pulled his handbook from his back pocket and the pen from his front. He clicked the pen repeatedly, the sound of it grounding him in the moment, the notebook in his hand a link to the comforting memory of Uncle Kyle. He stepped into the woods. The moonlight was snuffed out by the foliage overhead. Treading softly, he crept through the trees toward the well, and toward home beyond it.
Sitting by his window at night, or huddled under the blankets with his father’s flashlight, he’d sketched out images of what he thought the feral ghosts looked like. Never having seen one plainly, he went by instinct, measuring their forms by the sounds they made, by the branches left shuddering in their wake. Glimpses here and there. What kind of ghosts were they? Were they once regular people, like Lily, only driven mad by grief and loneliness? And if so, what did that mean for Lily? Would she someday go mad too? Was she mad at him?
I’ll beat you harder than Dad ever did
.
Or maybe they were something different, like Mama said. Something more sinister, something hungry. Something that had never, ever been good or kind.
The darkness was nearly complete, and Jasper almost walked right into the open well. He sensed it before he saw it, the earth’s cold and rotten breath tickling his nose an instant before he would have pitched into thin air. He lurched backward and landed on his butt. Slowly, blood drumming in his temples, he lay on his chest and crept to the lip, peering down.
It was like looking into an abyss. No light intruded there, and when he lifted his arms off the ground he felt as though he were floating in some primeval space, as though the well led not to some underground water source but to the cold kingdoms of death, where stillness was absolute.
The little star of light was gone. He didn’t think he was going to get in trouble for the missing flashlight, though. He understood that his dad was dying. Something was wrong with his head and it was killing him. Uncle Kyle kicked him too hard.
That’s why he had to talk to Lily.
“He said he’s sorry,” Jasper said. “Okay? He said he was sorry so you have to leave him alone now.”
Was she even down there to hear him? He thought about the dark roads he imagined ghosts traveled, the ones that led from their graves to the haunting places—the bottoms of wells, the interiors of empty houses, maybe even to old chicken coops sagging with neglect. How long did it take to get from the grave to here? Did time work for ghosts the same way it did for people? Was a conversation with a ghost—like the writing in his handbook—one that took place over a distance of time?
Was Lily hungry down there? Was she starving?
“I’m sorry, Lily.”
Light speared up from the bottom of the hole. It blinded him, froze the breath in his lungs, and although he was in no danger of falling this time he felt as though a dozen hooks had latched into his body and strove to drag him down. He scrambled away, his skin prickling with adrenaline. The light played along the well’s edge. Something wet shifted in the mud.