Echoes

by Ellen Datlow

  She slammed the door closed. “Bad meat,” she whispered. “The power’s off to everything.”

  “God, that smell. Maggots are growing in my brain from it.”

  She’d already moved on and was inspecting the cabinets. “Look here,” she quietly called to him. Her flashlight illuminated the contents of a cupboard. “What do you see there?”

  He moved closer and added the glow of his own flashlight. “Six cans of Beefaroni and a withered potato sprouting eyes.”

  “I’d say that’s at least tangentially haunted.”

  “Does six cans mean they liked it or they didn’t?” he asked.

  From the kitchen, they moved on to the second floor where there were three bedrooms. He complained in whispers throughout his awkward ascent, the flimsy cane without a rubber tip tapping loudly upon each step.

  “Keep it down,” she said as he hobbled up next to her in the hallway of bedrooms. It was clear right away from the thumbtacked drawings on the doors that each of the girls had their own room.

  He surmised that the one at the far end of the hallway from the stairs belonged to the parents.

  “Pick one,” she said. “We’ll just look in and take a peek and then we’ll split. The place smells like ancient ass.”

  “No argument there,” said Gary.

  She took the left-hand side and he the right. They each pushed open a door, flashlight lit and ready.

  Harriet rummaged for only moments before discovering some pages of homework scattered upon the dresser. There she read the name—Imsa Bridges. The girl’s handwriting was very neat. Her theme was the four seasons. In it she claimed that the last days of summer might be the most beautiful of all. She likened winter to a sleep, and the autumn, heralded by the wind chime, was a season in which secrets both hideous and bright were revealed. Of spring, there was no mention.

  In Gary’s room, there was a hole in the middle pane of the triple-paned window. It looked as if the glass had been suddenly punched out. Rain had invaded and puddled on the floor. He could feel the inordinate dampness of the space. As he moved his flashlight around, he saw that shelves of a fine blue fungus had grown all over the walls. From outside there came a noise of tires on gravel and in that instant, he looked down and there was a picture frame holding a faded polaroid of one of the girls. The frame was made of blocks with letters, and the letters spelled her name, SAMI BRIDGES.

  “Shit,” he heard Harriet say across the hall. He hobbled toward her door, and as he did she came out and whispered, “Turn off the flashlight.”

  “What?”

  “Someone just pulled up in an old yellow car.”

  “Fuck,” he said, and with that word they heard the front door downstairs creak open. She took him by the arm, and they moved along the hallway toward the last room. She whispered to him as they went, “If I hear that fuckin’ cane on the floor, I’m gonna beat ya with it.”

  From downstairs came a bellowing male voice, “Sunny.”

  The next thing Gary knew he was on his considerable stomach on the floor and Harriet was shoving while he shimmied under the bed. After he was hidden, she tiptoed around to the other side and got under. Once she was in place they found each other’s hands to hold.

  “This is so fucked up,” he whispered.

  “Shhh.”

  The voice called again, this time up the stairs from the first floor, “Sunny?” There were footsteps ascending. As if that started something in motion up on the third floor, they heard the screams of children and a woman repeating the phrase, “Save yourself.”

  The door opened. Somehow the electricity had come back on because light from the hallway streamed in. From where they lay, they could see the boots, the jeans, and the bottom of the intruder’s white T-shirt. They watched him open the middle drawer of a dresser, and reach in. When his hand reappeared, it was holding a revolver. He left the room and a moment later they heard him on the stairway to the third floor.

  “Hurry up,” she whispered and slipped out from under the bed. She ran to his side, grabbed his arm, and pulled harder than he pushed to free him. The first gunshot upstairs went off as they clasped hands and she helped him to his feet. Before the second shot went off they’d reached the stairs. Gary was moving faster than he knew he could. The pain was there but it paled in relation to gunplay. When Harriet opened the front door, deep screams of agony rained down from above.

  Gary went through the door left open by Harriet, but didn’t count on the screen door that came back hard and clipped him on his left shoulder. It set him off balance when he went to take the first step down off the porch. His leg on the side of the bad hip just suddenly gave out, as it occasionally did, and by the time he reached the yard he was staggering toward a fall, madly employing unsuccessful cane work until his face was in the mud.

  Harriet helped her husband to his feet and brushed him off. He looked around on the ground for the cane and saw it by moonlight in two pieces. “Why aren’t we running?” he asked her.

  “Look,” she said, and they turned around. “The car’s gone and the house is perfectly quiet.”

  “Well, we certainly got to the bottom of that,” he said.

  She took his arm around her shoulders and he leaned a little on her with each step as they made their way back across the field.

  Despite how cold it had gotten, and that their words were steam, they sat on the porch, low music, three candles burning, bourbon and ice. He leaned back in his rocker and said, “So what’d you make of it?”

  “You think he killed them all and then himself?” she said.

  “Or they all killed him, or the girls killed the folks, or the wife did them all. Or just maybe, nobody killed anybody.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “The whole thing seemed kind of melodramatic. Did it ring true to you?”

  He shrugged. “All I can say is I was scared shitless. What about you?”

  “I’m not sure I even saw what I saw,” she said.

  “Some of it’s vague,” he admitted. “Could have been like a communal hysterical dream between the two of us.”

  “After we got outside, and you took a dive . . .” She raised her eyebrows and stifled a laugh.

  “I told you that cane was for shit.”

  “Anyway,” she continued, “before I picked you up, I saw something hanging on the branch of a pear tree right in the front of the house. By then I realized the car and its driver had vanished.”

  “That’s some haunted business right there,” he said.

  “I stuffed the thing from the tree in my jacket as a souvenir.” She took off her glove and reached into her pocket. Slowly, she brought forth something made of bright metal. She laid it on the table between them, and he lit it with his flashlight.

  There were jewels, fake or real, he couldn’t tell—in red, green, and blue. It was a bird in a nest feeding its chicks. Beneath hung metal chimes on thick wire. “It’s a wren, I think,” she said. She picked it up from the small table and stood. Leaning off the porch, she hung the wind chime on a branch of an ornamental maple only an arm’s length away. Before returning to her seat, she ran her fingers along the bottoms of the chimes and they sounded like icicles colliding. She shivered and pulled the blanket wrapped around her over her shoulders. The wind picked up and the temperature dropped.

  They had another drink and spent the next hour talking themselves out of the experience they’d had at the Bridges house. Eventually they sat in silence and soon after fell asleep wrapped up against the cold and fortified with bourbon. The sound of the wind chime in their dreams was like children giggling. A little before four a.m., he woke her and they went inside and up the stairs to bed.

  Beginning the next day, there was an unspoken understanding between them not to bring the Bridges house up in conversation. When Gary went out to teach, he went the long way around so as not to pass the place. Only across the empty winter field, a dot in the distance on the brightest day, an impression of sorrow on a cloudy one, wou
ld he view the Bridges’ house. Harriet also avoided passing the place, and drove the five miles out to the highway no matter where she was going.

  Past harvest to the first snow, Gary left the window open in his office. He counted on the cool air to keep him awake while he wrote. All through those days as the last frayed threads of summer vanished and the world turned toward darkness, the jeweled wren sounded, its intermittent tinkling ever a surprise. Its music leaked in through his office window while he worked, and swamped his thoughts. Sometimes when he’d stopped typing and was staring at the wall, the two blond girls came back to him. And from some distant recesses of his memory came a bellowing voice, “Sunny.”

  Harriet sat out on the covered porch every night, no matter the weather. Fierce winds, frozen temperatures, blowing snow, never stopped her. She put on her parka, cocooned herself in a blanket, and took her bourbon outside to smoke and cough or both. There were nights when Gary joined her, but often she sat by herself and decompressed from the day at work. Inspecting and then consciously forgetting each incident from the office she ran. One night in early November, she heard a sound like angels whispering and when she realized it was the chimes, she smiled and wept.

  They spent Thanksgiving together, eating dinner at the Uncertain Diner. Later there were drinks on the porch. She smoked and he fiddled with a music box he’d recently bought. It worked on Bluetooth and could play the songs stored on his phone.

  Three bourbons in, Gary’s favorite head music swirled the night. Harriet said, “We’ve got to go back.”

  At first he said nothing, but eventually he nodded and said, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but yeah.”

  “Tonight,” she told him.

  “One stipulation,” he said. “Let’s take the fucking car.”

  “There are no other houses over there, and once you’re off the road, it’s so dark no one will see. I can park it in the empty tractor shed and we can walk from there,” she said.

  “Solid.”

  “Above all others, what’s the one thing you want to know?” she asked.

  “I’ll start with a general what the fuck and proceed from there.”

  “I want to know the calamity of events that led to it.”

  “Led to what?”

  “Whatever tragedy keeps calling these people back.”

  “Jeez,” he said and poured them each another drink.

  Harriet drove Gary’s CRV. They rounded the corner and as the Bridges place drew near, she turned out the headlights and coasted through the dark. She slowly piloted the car in and around tree trunks and hid it in the old structure as she said she would. Gary had a better cane, stronger, made to support the weight of an adult. It had a rubber tip and grips along the crook. His hip was worse every day and walking was becoming too great an effort, but Harriet insisted he keep moving. So he did. They both wore all black and carried their flashlights. She brought the Taser she’d bought online. He’d asked why she didn’t just buy a gun. And she said, “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

  “How do you kill a ghost?” said Gary.

  “You know what I mean.”

  She led him through the shadows and he tried mightily to keep up with her. From using the cane he’d adopted a rocking side-to-side gait like he was a windup toy. The house loomed in front of them and they slipped around the side to where the steps led down. They took the same route as they had before. This time they didn’t inspect the basement but went straight for the stairs that led up into the house. They passed the refrigerator and the Chef Boyardee and went directly to the hallway on the second floor.

  “Same rooms?” he asked.

  “No, up to the third floor.”

  “We’ll be trapped up there.”

  “We have to get up there and hide before that whole thing goes down.”

  “Hide?”

  “Yeah, so we see what happened. We need to know more.”

  He shook his head but followed her up the steps, which led to a large room, a window on every wall. It was lined with carpets and plush furniture in a powder blue with silver trim that shimmered in the flashlight’s glare.

  “Find a place to hide,” she said.

  He turned in a circle looking for something substantial to hide behind where it wouldn’t discomfort his hip, but there wasn’t anything that big in the room. “I’m not getting on the floor again.”

  “Shhh. Go in the closet over there,” said Harriet and pointed with the light beam.

  He saw where she meant, went to it and opened the door. It was dark and empty, damp concrete. Who has a concrete closet? he thought. He stepped in and closed the door over behind him but didn’t shut it. When he got in position, leaning on his cane, he peered out and around the room, using the flashlight, and finally found her ducked behind a sewing machine on a wooden box in the corner. The instant he spotted her, he heard tires on gravel. A moment after he doused his light, the front door downstairs flung open and that voice called, “Sunny.”

  The lights came on at once in a silent explosion. And there was the mother and two girls sitting on couches. The girls were silent and stock-still in their white party dresses. From Gary’s vantage point in the closet, he stood behind and above the blond woman, who sat on a divan in front of him. He watched her turn around on her seat, stare directly into the sliver of an opening he watched through and pierce his eyes with her vision. “Save yourself,” she said as if directly to him.

  That’s when Mr. Bridges stepped through the door, head turned in a way that made it impossible for Gary or Harriet to see the man’s face clearly.

  He wasn’t in the door more than a moment before his wife told him the same, “Save yourself.”

  As he approached his wife, the two girls slid off the bench they were sitting on and fell to their knees. They clasped hands in prayer and recited the Act of Contrition. While they prayed, a dark cloud began to form against the wall across the room. They prayed hard, in unison, eyes peering through the roof to heaven. The father lifted the gun and put it inches from the back of the older girl’s head.

  It became obvious that the intonation of their words was the impetus for the cloud to take the shape of a man in a raincoat and hat. The vagueness of fog solidified into a cruel face, sharp like an ax head but also handsome. He walked forward as in a slow dream and took the gun from Mr. Bridges’s hand. Harriet thought she heard cymbals clash, and next she knew, the husband and wife were bleeding profusely from a hundred cuts each. The fog man moved with such speed and grace, she didn’t see the blade until he was almost done filleting them. Seven more stabs between them and the mother and father fell to the floor in puddles of blood.

  He called for the girls, still praying, to follow him. They stood in silence and did as they were told. As they headed for the door, Harriet and Gary saw that at his edges, the man in coat and hat was beginning to transform, vines of smoke slowly twining upward. Just then a coughing fit seized her. The fog fellow stopped, spun around on his heels, and took in the parlor. Gary didn’t watch, but he heard the words, “You, in the corner. Come out of there.” His legs went numb and his breathing became erratic. There was a struggle, and the stranger bellowed, “Come with me for a drive.” Gary could tell Harriet was being dragged toward the exit and the stairs.

  He lunged out of the closet as the sisters passed, knocking them over like pins in a split, his cane waving in the air. He clutched it near the rubber tip and swung the crook end at the head of the abductor. Harriet reached into her jacket pocket and took out the Taser. She pressed the button to charge it up and then jammed it against the fog man’s rippling neck. He was solid and smoke at the same time. With the addition of the electricity, his head lit up and he glowed green like an iridescent fish. The application of the cane nearly knocked him down. He staggered and Harriet broke free of his grip.

  Gary caught her in his arms. She turned and screamed, “Get out!” at the ghosts.

  The man in the raincoat and hat turned to dust, and eac
h of the sisters became a puddle. The lights were out.

  “I’m never coming back here,” Harriet said, as much to the walls as to Gary. “It’s a trap.”

  He said nothing until they were driving through the snow. “It’d take us a hundred hundred trips to figure the whole thing out.”

  “I don’t want it anymore,” she said. “I don’t want to know. I’m too tired.”

  Gary and Harriet tried to forget the entire enterprise, but the sound of the chime on the porch had the ability to drill through the walls of the house and find them wherever they were. Every time the wind blew that winter they contemplated the mystery, extrapolating scenarios based on the flimsy knowledge they’d gathered. By January, they were aware that every sounding of the wind chime distorted time, lengthening seconds, shrinking weeks, twisting speed, and dealing crooked minutes. A year buzzed by like a mosquito and they were retired.

  Hours became epics, and Gary and Harriet missed each other, passing along different corridors. Whole days went by and he wouldn’t see her, but he heard her above or below in the house and could call out and she would answer him. He would call that he loved her and she would answer the same. Different seasons, all but spring, came and went. And eventually her presence grew rarer and her voice quieter. One weak cough from some far-flung room of the old house. The sudden noise of a toilet flushing downstairs or the microwave dinging in the night helped him hold out hope that he’d run into her before long. Eventually, though, the distant echoes stopped altogether along with the written notes she’d leave through her days like breadcrumbs on the trail.

  One afternoon, he found himself in the bedroom, unable to recall why he was there. He happened to look out the window and saw her standing in the driveway with two suitcases. She wore the beret she only put on when traveling. He couldn’t believe it was her and tried to lift the window to call out for her to wait for him. His hip was so bad that by the time he reached the side door and the driveway, she was gone. He caught a glimpse of the yellow car, turning out into the street, and heading away. He staggered, about to fall, and the blond girls appeared on either side of him. They helped him into his rocker on the porch, pulled down the shade of night, and set the breeze to blowing.