by Ellen Datlow
The light in the hallway was on again. He tore open the door and looked out on an ordinary hall: no silhouette in sight, the hall just as it had always been, except for the blood drizzling from his fingers onto the grimy carpet.
• • •
The fingers had been reattached, though he could feel nothing in the top joint of either of them—it was as if they were dead. He had thought long and hard about this second time, unsure what to make of it. The only point in common between his aunt’s house and his dorm room, at least that he could see, was himself. The ghost, if it was a ghost, must be tied to him.
But why him? For this, he had no answer. Nor did he have an answer for why it would visit him so infrequently, or why both times it was always reduced to that single gesture of standing in a doorway, his doorway, the doorway to his bedroom, in the dark.
3.
A decade more passed, he told his therapist. He graduated, got a job, became a responsible citizen. He met the man who would become his husband, they fell in love, lived together, married once the law allowed it. They bought an apartment together, and he allowed a certain form of existence to crystallize or calcify around him. And yet, all the while he was waiting, wondering when—not if but when—despite his move far away, his haunting would find him again. For it would find him, he was sure of that.
He had a few false alarms. Times when he awoke to find his husband, who tended to come to bed much later than he, standing in the open door, motionless, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness before navigating a path to the bed. But his husband’s silhouette looked nothing like the silhouette of his haunting. Arn was the larger of the two of them by far. His husband, small, could not come close to filling a doorway.
• • •
The third incident he thought at first was just that—his husband hesitating in the doorway just before coming to bed. He felt a presence and half opened his eyes, and groaned, and said, “How late is it? Come to bed already.”
When there was no answer at all, not a sound, he found himself startled fully awake.
The room around him seemed too dark. He turned and could just make out the open doorway.
“What’s wrong?” he started to say, but got very little of it out, for he realized the shape in the doorway was so large it could not possibly be his husband. And, in any case, his husband was there already, in the bed beside him, breathing heavily, sound asleep.
And then, he told his therapist, something happened that I didn’t expect. You see, I had made the mistake of inviting it, whatever it was, to come to bed.
• • •
The figure was still motionless, still little more than a silhouette, but it was no longer in the doorway. No, it was just inside the room now, as if a bit of film had skipped or as if he had closed his eyes and it had moved only while it could not be seen. And then it was closer still, and closer still, until it was there, just beside the bed, but still motionless, still little more than a silhouette. He could see again those dull gleams that he thought of as the gleam of its eyes—but could see now that they were scattered all over its body, as if its entire skin was studded with them, with eyes that couldn’t quite be made out. He couldn’t move. It came very close until it was touching him but he couldn’t feel anything. And then it came closer still and he felt very cold. And then it passed slowly through him and across the bed.
Somebody’s breath was hissing fast through clenched teeth, and though he rationally understood it must be his teeth, his breath, they still seemed to belong to somebody else. Someone was screaming and it was him screaming, only it wasn’t him either. And then his husband was shaking him and the light was on and shining into his eyes and the figure in the doorway was again nowhere to be seen.
• • •
Where do you think it went? his therapist asked, after waiting long for Arn to continue.
My husband, he said.
Your husband?
He was the only other one in the bed. It was moving toward him. It moved through me and toward him.
Don’t you think that—
Now, sometimes in its least guarded moments I see something flit across his face, coming to the surface to breathe.
It seems to me—
It’s his haunting now. He doesn’t know yet of course. How could he? He won’t know until it is his turn to see it in the doorway.
But then where was it before?
Arn looked hard at his therapist. Can’t you guess? he asked. Why do you think my father left? What do you think he was looking for in my face? The same thing I was no longer finding in his. It must have been in him before. After it left him, where else could it have been but in me?
• • •
He cracked his neck, then slowly took hold of the arms of the chair and pulled himself to his feet. He looked older, tired somehow, almost a different person.
Next time, he said, you can ask me the usual questions. Next time we can analyze all this to death.
We still have a few minutes remaining, his therapist said. I really think we should talk about this.
But Arn just shook his head. Next time, he repeated, and made his way to the door. Upon opening it he hesitated a moment, his body nearly filling the frame. Then he turned his shoulders slightly and sidled through.
4.
It was a moment that the therapist would think about often, particularly after it became clear that he would never see Arn again. After Arn missed the next few appointments and he took steps to try to find him, he would discover, talking to his distraught spouse, that Arn, like his father before him, had simply disappeared.
Which meant the therapist’s last real memory of Arn was of the man standing motionless in the open doorway, facing away from him. But the back of his head still, somehow, gave (when the therapist thought about it later, alone, at night in bed, in the dark, struggling to sleep) the impression of looking back in, of noticing him.
The Jeweled Wren
Jeffrey Ford
On a late October afternoon, the sun still casting a weak warmth, Gary, sixty-eight, a large man with a drastic crew cut, and Harriet, sixty-five, a small woman with big glasses and short gray hair, sat out behind the garden on the green plastic bench drinking bourbon, taking in the autumn wind, and looking out across the stubbled wheat field toward a house a half-mile distant.
They talked about their daughters, grown and moved away a decade earlier, how the cut field looked like a Breughel painting, Harriet’s uncertainty about the woman at work who would soon replace her when she retired. After that burst of conversation there was silence.
Gary broke it by asking, “What did the doctor say?”
“Drink more bourbon,” she said, and Gary knew, because he’d known her for forty-four years, to change the subject.
“So, did we ever decide what the fuck is going on over at that place?” he asked and pointed with the hand holding his drink at the distant house.
She had a blue blanket wrapped around her, one corner thrown over her head like a hood. “If you notice, there’s all kinds of action, but it’s all subtle, incremental. And you have to be aware when you drive past.”
“I noticed the hanging geranium that appears on the porch certain mornings and disappears by noon,” he said.
Harriet nodded. “For three weeks this past summer, I swore someone had a tomato garden going behind the place. But when I slowed down and concentrated, there was nothing there.”
“Have you seen the two little blond girls playing outside lately?”
“I haven’t seen a person there in months,” she said.
“There was a yellow car in the driveway when I drove past a couple of weeks ago. It was the only time I’d ever seen it there—might have been an old Mercury Topaz like we had back in the nineties.”
“Never saw it,” she said.
“The circumstantial evidence for being haunted kind of adds up,” said Gary.
“We should go over there and look in the windows,” s
aid Harriet.
“Why?”
“I have the next five days off from work, and I want to do something crazy while I still can.” She poured another drink and held it up. He touched the rim of his glass to hers.
“You mean go across the field?” Gary asked.
“Now that its cut, it’ll be easy.”
“With my bad leg?”
“I’ll get you a cane. You’ve got to get up and move around anyway. That’s what the doctor said about the band syndrome.”
“But what if someone actually is living in there, and we look in the windows and they see us. We’ll be fucked. Even without the bad leg, at this stage of the game, running is out of the question.”
“There’s nobody over there,” Harriet said. “The car probably belonged to a real estate agent.”
They sat drinking, watching the wind shake leaves from the giant white oak, and the turkey vultures circling over the field until the sun set a little after five. Then she helped him up and as far as the garden. Eventually he got his leg going and passed beneath the apple trees on his own. Inside, she put the news on in the living room and he fed the dogs.
In bed, they talked about her looming retirement. He already only taught part-time at a local university. Did they really need six acres and a hundred-and-twenty-year-old home? They arrived at no answers. Luckily, the haunted house across the field wasn’t mentioned. He thought that was the last he’d hear of a trip to it, but the next day she returned from Walmart with two flashlights and a cane. He asked when and she told him, “By cover of dark.”
“You mean tonight?” he said.
She had a brief coughing spasm, the likes of which she’d been having fairly frequently of late. She nodded. Before he could complain, she caught her breath and said, “Hold on a second. Didn’t you ever really want to just know what the fuck was up with something?”
“I guess,” said Gary. “But . . .”
“Well, that’s what’s going on here. You and I, just us, together, we’re going to get to the bottom of this.”
“Let me see that cane,” he said. He pictured himself out in the cut wheat field, lurching forward, the cane snapping beneath sudden weight and then a face-first dive into the mud.
She handed it to him and he said, “It’s a cheap piece of crap. That’s a cane for training horses.”
“Perfect then,” she said, and handed him a flashlight.
The sky was clear and full of stars but it was cold, and he felt it in his hip. Every time he leaned on the cane it sunk two inches into the damp ground and set him off balance. Still, he took a deep breath and launched himself forward into the night. She helped him along through the orchard and past the garden to the edge of the cut amber field, where she let go. He stumbled through the wheat stubble toward an old white house, invisible in the distance. Fifteen minutes later, she stood in the middle of the miles-deep field, smoking a cigarette and staring at the moon. She’d been there for nearly five minutes already, waiting for him to catch up. As he scrabbled toward her, she said, “How’s the leg?”
“Hurts like a bitch,” he said. “I think I feel bone on bone. This is no IT band syndrome.”
“Don’t give me that bone on bone business,” she said. “Pick up the pace or we’ll be at this all night.”
He stopped next to her and turned to take in the enormity of the field around them. “I know why those turkey vultures were circling above here yesterday,” he said. “They were feeding on the last two nitwits who decided to do something crazy.”
She laughed and they walked together for a while.
From a quarter mile distance, they could make the place out, what was left of its white paint reflecting moonlight. She strode ahead impatiently, and he hobbled over the lumpy ground. Somewhere in the middle of their approach, he had a memory of the two little girls, both in frilly white dresses, playing in a red plastic car with a yellow roof. One seemed to him a year or two older than the other.
Harriet slowed down and pointed. “Check it out.”
There was a dim light on in the upstairs window at the side of the house.
“Did you see it there before?” he asked. “There was no light there before, right?”
“You know, I’m not sure it’s a light on inside or if it’s from the moon beams directly hitting the window. As we get closer we might find it’s just a reflection.”
“If there’s a light on, I think we should turn back.”
“We’ll see,” she said.
In another hundred yards, they saw it had been but a reflection and that room was as dark as the rest.
Near the border between the field and the barnyard, Harriet held up her hand to stop him. They stood in silence—she breathing heavily, he shifting his weight off the bad hip and relying on the fragile cane. There were four buildings clustered at the center of the property, all once painted white. The main house, a three-story Victorian with a wraparound porch, like their own place; a barn; a long outbuilding—a kind of garage to cover a tractor; and next to the white submarine of a propane tank, a smaller garden shed. The yard was no less than seven acres, and much of it was covered with stands of black walnut.
“Pretty quiet,” whispered Gary.
“Creepy,” she said.
“It doesn’t get to me in a creepy way,” he said. “It makes me feel like this location, right here, is so far from the rest of life it would take a week’s walk along a dusty road to get within hailing distance of a Walmart.”
“Where are we gonna start?” asked Harriet.
“I don’t care, but no breaking and entering.”
“The garden shed is probably bullshit,” she said. “The tractor garage, I can tell right now there’s nothing in it.” She turned her flashlight beam on the structure’s opening and the light shone straight through into a stand of trees on the other side. “The barn is interesting but it looks locked up. Let’s start with the house.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “The place is dead. We’re too late.”
“Cheer up,” she said and crossed the boundary onto the lawn.
He followed her, and immediately it was a relief to be able to walk on flat ground and not up and down the furrowed muddy plough rows complicated by what remained of the shorn wheat. They passed the oak, whose biggest branch held a tire swing. The half-deflated tube turned in the wind.
“Maybe we should sneak around a little first and see if we hear anybody inside.”
“Okay,” she said, and instead went straight around to the front of the house, stepped up to the parlor windows, turned on the flashlight, and pressed her face to the glass.
When he caught up with her, he stood behind her, off the porch. “What do you see?” he asked.
“There’s furniture and stuff in there.”
“So they never moved out?” he said.
“Unless maybe they just left everything and fled.”
“But they couldn’t have because we saw them here as late as February, and I know I saw the girls one day in spring. Remember in March when it snowed eight inches? They had a sled out in the yard and were pushing each other around.”
“I’d seen the mother there quite a few times for a while.”
“Young woman, short blond hair.”
Harriet nodded. She turned away from the window. “Did you ever actually see her face?” She walked to the edge of the porch and he took her hand as she descended the steps. They headed around the house to search for other windows.
“Now that you mention it, no. I never saw her face,” he said. “What about the guy, did you ever see his face?”
“No.”
“I remember, that guy always had on a plain white T-shirt. Plain white T-shirt and jeans,” said Gary.
Along the side of the house, in the shadows near the chimney, she spotted, without use of the flashlight, a little set of steps that descended to a basement entrance. The door to the basement had glass panes, still intact, and a glint of starlight caught her eyes.
She stopped, backtracked, and only as she took the concrete stairs, flipping on her light, did Gary realize where she was headed. He watched from ground level as she descended.
“Well?” he said.
“I have news for you,” she called over her shoulder. “This door’s unlocked.”
Then he heard the screeching of the hinges as she pushed through the opening and stepped inside. He turned on his flashlight for the first time and gingerly descended, keeping one arm pressed against the side of the house and using the cane with every placement of his right foot. She’d left the door open, and he could see her light beam jumping around the pitch-black room.
The place smelled of damp and dirt. It was colder inside than it had been in the autumn field. The vault held one skid with boxes of what looked to be Christmas decorations, wilted silver garland spilling out the top. Another few boxes, also on skids, but those closed up and stacked neatly. There was the propane heater, the water softener, the fuse box mounted on the wall. A toad leaped across the dirt floor heading for the shadows.
“At every corner of the basement,” said Harriet, “there’s a plate with a rotting horse chestnut on it. Could be some ghost nonsense.”
“It’s to keep spiders out of the house,” said Gary.
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“Some guy told me when I was over walking in the preserve. There are a couple of those trees and they’d dropped these weird green globes. I asked the guy what they were and he told me all about them. I asked him if the spider thing really worked. He said, ‘Good as anything.’ ”
“Now what?” she asked. “There’s the stairs up into the house.” She pointed with her flashlight beam.
“Come on,” he said. “What are we even looking for anyway?”
“Anything ghostlike or ghost related.”
“Let’s go home,” he said.
She shushed him and started up the stairs.
In the kitchen, they found dishes in the sink, and a cigarette ash as long as a cigarette on the counter. Someone, some months back, left behind a cup of coffee and an English muffin with two small bites out of it. She opened the refrigerator. No light shone out, but a smell like Death, itself, wafted through the room.