by Ellen Datlow
“No one’s ever found it?” Kathryn asks.
Georgina shrugs.
“Maybe if they ever do those repairs they’ve been promising for years . . .” She finishes her wine and shrugs. “Anyway, maybe I could do something with that for my part of the exhibition.”
Abby stands.
“I have a story, but give me a sec.”
There’s a slyness to her expression as she disappears into her studio. She and Kathryn have spaces on the first floor, while Lettie and Georgina have studios on the half floor overlooking the common room. The whole building used to be industrial storage space, renovated during the city’s renaissance in an attempt to attract artists to the region and create the next big hipster neighborhood. Abby returns with a second bottle of wine.
“You’ve been holding out on us.” Georgina nudges her as Abby opens the bottle and pours. Lettie covers her glass.
“This is something that happened at my grandmother’s school when she was in tenth grade,” Abby says as she settles back down. “There was this group of popular girls. Everyone called them ‘the pack,’ though not to their faces. Even the teachers were afraid of them.
“Anyway, halfway through the school year, a new girl named Libby joins the class. She’s painfully shy. Her clothes are out of style, like maybe her family doesn’t have much money. Basically, she’s that kid that every class has, the one with victim written across their forehead.
“The leader of the pack is a girl named Helen. One night when her parents are out of town, she invites Libby to join the pack for a sleepover. Libby’s never slept away from home before, but Helen won’t take no for an answer. All the other kids in the class know the pack is planning something, but they’re too scared to warn Libby in case Helen turns on them instead.”
Abby takes a slow sip of her wine, reveling in the attention as she unwinds her tale.
“Anyway, Helen finally convinces Libby. The night of the sleepover arrives and Libby pulls an old-fashioned nightgown with long sleeves and a skirt that almost touches the floor out of her overnight bag. As they’re all getting changed, Susannah catches a glimpse of bruises on Libby’s thighs and arms, just a quick flash before the nightgown covers everything. She tells Helen, but not the other girls.
“After they’re all dressed for bed, Helen tells them how the woods behind her house are haunted, then she insists they play truth or dare. When her turn comes, Libby picks truth, and Helen asks, ‘Who do you love more, your mother or your father?’ Libby’s eyes go wide, she looks scared and won’t answer, rubbing at her arms through the sleeves of her nightgown. ‘If you won’t answer, then you have to do a dare,’ Helen says. The other girls start chanting ‘Dare, dare, dare,’ until Libby gives in.
“ ‘I dare you to go into the woods behind the house and play the hanging game,’ Helen says. She grabs a pair of her mother’s silk stockings and drags Libby outside. The other girls stay inside and watch through the window as Helen makes Libby stand under one of the trees and wraps one leg of the stocking around her throat and the other around the lowest branch.
“ ‘Now close your eyes and count to one hundred, then you can come back inside,’ Helen says. Libby closes her eyes and starts counting aloud while Helen walks backward toward the house. When she gets to the door, Helen is planning to lock it behind her, and then she’ll make the rest of the pack hide. But before Helen can get to the house, Libby screams, and Helen freezes. Libby is thrashing, clawing at the stocking. By the time the other girls run out of the house, it’s too late. Libby isn’t breathing. It’s as if something pulled her into the tree and left her there to hang.”
“That’s a horrible story,” Kathryn says.
Abby opens her mouth to protest and at that exact moment, something hits one of the windows. The sound is like a gunshot, and Lettie jumps, knocking over her wine. Georgina scrambles up to get a towel. She hands it to Lettie, but Lettie only twists it into a rope between her hands. Then she speaks, staring straight ahead.
“When I was eleven years old, my big sister and I came home from school and found my mother sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor. She’d smashed some of our plates, and she was putting the pieces in her mouth one by one.” Lettie takes a breath, and Abby leans forward slightly. Kathryn and Georgina go still, staring at Lettie, who continues to look straight ahead. “We screamed for her to stop, but it was like she couldn’t hear us. My sister grabbed her wrists, and then hit her to make her stop. When my mother finally looked at us, it was like she didn’t know who we were.”
“Lettie.” Kathryn touches her arm. Lettie blinks, and slowly turns her head. The candlelight plays tricks with her eyes, turning them to glass.
Kathryn’s hand slides from Lettie’s arm as though pushed away.
“Honey, you don’t . . . ,” Kathryn starts, but Lettie ignores her. Georgina frowns, and Abby scoots forward so she’s sitting on the edge of her chair, but she doesn’t reach for Lettie or her restless hands.
“As long as I can remember, my mother thought she was haunted. She would go on binges of eating, trying to fill herself up so there was no room for ghosts inside her skin. But other times she refused to eat at all, nearly starving herself and begging the ghosts to take her.”
Lettie looks at each of them in turn, still twisting the towel in her hands.
“On my sixteenth birthday, I came home from school and found my mother and my sister dead. My mother was lying on her bed. There were clothes scattered on the floor, a lamp knocked over, like there’d been a fight. There were empty pill bottles with the labels peeled off. My mother’s hands . . . it looked like someone had bitten her. They were all bloody and there were teeth marks on her skin. I screamed for Ellie, but she didn’t come. Then I found her in my mother’s bathroom. She was lying in the bathtub with her clothes on. It looked like maybe she’d hit her head. There was blood around her mouth. I don’t know if my mother killed her, or . . . I don’t know.”
Lettie wraps her arms around her knees, hugging them to her chest. She rocks slightly, then puts her head down, her voice muffled when she speaks.
“My sister is starving, and she wants to come home.”
Interlude #1—A Room with One Door
There was a game my sister and I used to play when we were little. When our mother was having one of her bad days, we’d go into the crawl space under the basement stairs. It was just big enough for us on our hands and knees, or sitting down, and there was only one way in so it felt safe.
The game was called Brick by Brick. There was a deck of cards, each with a picture of a different room. In the real rules, we were supposed to play against each other, but Ellie and I always changed it so we took turns drawing cards and building the house together. We were born only eleven months apart, so really we were more like twins than sisters.
In the game, there were little plastic figurines that came with the cards: red, yellow, green, and blue for the people, and white for the ghost or the monster. The idea was to move through the house as fast as possible, so the monster wouldn’t catch you. The trick was, if you built a secret passageway, or a hidden staircase to get through the house faster, the monster could use it too.
Sometimes Ellie would make up stories about the house while we played. She’d tell me about all the things in the rooms, and the lives of the little plastic versions of us who lived there. The monster was in her stories too, but there it was nice and it wasn’t trying to hurt us at all.
The little plastic figures got lost at some point, but I still have the cards. On nights when I can’t sleep, I take the deck out and arrange the cards different ways. If I close my eyes just a little bit while I’m doing it, I can almost see Ellie moving around inside the card house. If I manage to get the sequence of cards just right, she’ll be able to find her way out and come home. The trick is, what if the monster finds the way out first?
Black & White
The second room in the gallery contains a series of black-and-white p
hotographs by Georgina Rush. One grouping is labeled The Tomb, the other, The Woods The Tomb photographs depict a spot beneath a highway overpass—graffiti, empty bottles, a half-finished meal in a Styrofoam container. Even so, there’s something mystical about the images. They suggest a sacred site, an archaeological dig. Something is buried here, and the artist is documenting its unearthing.
The Woods depicts rows of trees on the far side of an empty field. Rather than a wild forest, these trees are planned and planted, and Rush achieves a stunning effect with the light coming between the trunks. Despite the regularity of the rows, there is something uncanny about the trees. The spaces between them are full of waiting. One cannot help feeling the woods, and perhaps the photographs themselves, are haunted.
In the center of the gallery there is a pedestal holding a laptop with files that visitors are encouraged to explore. These are raw, unprocessed images, outtakes from the exhibition. The one incongruity is a video file titled “Overlapping Voices (Abby’s Possession).” The film appears to be shot in the studio shared by the four artists. It’s unclear how it fits with the photographs on the wall, however it’s possible the film is another outtake, a dress rehearsal for the performance piece Abby Farris had planned for the show.
Studio Session #2—The Ghost in the Machine
There’s a tapping sound so soft Kathryn barely hears it. When it finally registers, her first irrational thought is that there’s someone in the walls. Then she realizes the sound is at her studio door and opens it to see Lettie’s face, just a slice between the door and the frame. There’s darkness under her eyes, like she hasn’t been sleeping, and the rest of her skin is paler by comparison.
“Sorry, can I come in?”
Kathryn opens the door wider before Lettie even finishes, and Lettie steps inside, glancing over her shoulder.
“Sorry, I just . . .” She rubs her arms. When Kathryn closes the door, Lettie relaxes visibly, then offers a self-deprecating smile and shrugs. “You know how it is when you get in your own head sometimes.”
“Sure.” Kathryn gestures to her work table.
The frame for her piece is mostly complete. Wires trail across the table’s surface like a mat of tangled hair.
“I was actually just finishing up this part. Wanna see if it works?”
Kathryn clears space around the machine, bits and scraps she ended up not using. Most of the parts were bought at the local hardware store, but the crown jewel she found on eBay—a Ouija board in good condition, but showing signs of use, which is exactly what she wanted. The letters are a bit faded, and the felt pads on the planchette’s feet have worn away. The board sits in the center of a frame, and a thin metal arm runs from the planchette to the frame, hinged to allow a full range of motion. It can reach every letter and number on the board, along with “Yes,” “No,” and “Good-bye.”
“Wait.” Lettie touches Kathryn’s wrist as she reaches for the power switch.
A bandage wraps Lettie’s thumb, the edges dirty and peeling. There’s a dark red stain along one side, fading to brown.
“Can it really talk to ghosts?” The way Lettie says it, almost hopeful, gives Kathryn pause.
She lowers her hand. As a kid, she wanted so badly to see a ghost. All those stories she and her sisters told, gathered around a flashlight under sheets strung over chairs—if she could just see one of those ghosts for real it would make her special. But what she sees in Lettie’s eyes is completely different. Raw need. Loss. The room goes colder, air dropping out and goose bumps rising on Kathryn’s skin.
“We don’t have to.” Kathryn fights the urge to rub at her arms the way Lettie did. This whole thing was a terrible mistake. “It can wait until some other time.”
“No, I want to see.”
The chill goose-prickling her arms crawls up the back of Kathryn’s neck. There’s someone standing in the corner. Someone just behind her. If she turns to look, it won’t be there. The corner will be empty. But if she doesn’t look, the thing will continue to stand there. Not breathing, not moving. Just watching her. Always.
Lettie stands beside her at the table, close enough that their arms almost touch. Yet Kathryn is filled with the sudden, irrational feeling that Lettie is also standing behind her in the corner of the room. A shadow moves in the hallway, just visible through the crack in the door even though Kathryn is certain she closed the door after Lettie entered. Her heart thumps, and she bites down on her lip. A moment later Georgina peers through the gap.
“We heard voices. Is your piece finished? Can we see?”
Kathryn nods, her throat dry. Georgina pushes the door wide, and Abby follows her inside. The studio feels crowded with all of them there. Lettie moves around the table holding the machine like she’s sleepwalking and flicks the switch that turns on Kathryn’s machine.
The EMF detector attached to the frame lights up, lights cycling from green, through yellow, to orange and red before settling back down to a single green pip. The readout on the thermometer beside it shows the room at seventy degrees, slightly higher than normal with their body heat.
Nothing is going to happen. Nothing is going to happen and this is stupid and Kathryn wants everyone out of her room now. The lights flicker from green to red again and the mechanical arm holding the planchette jumps.
“Oh shit,” Georgina says, then laughs, a nervous sound. “Is it programmed to do that?”
Kathryn’s throat is tight. She wants to squeeze her eyes closed, but she can’t. For a moment, nothing else happens, then lights on the EMF detector spike and the arm moves again. The planchette scrapes to the left. The unfelted feet on the board shriek, worse than a chalkboard and nails. Then the planchette swoops down to the bottom of the board.
Yes. Good-bye. I-B. No. Good-bye. B-B-B. Kathryn tracks the motion, her mouth open. The machine is working as designed, but it isn’t supposed to do that. There’s no such thing as ghosts; rationally, she knows that to be a fact. EMF detectors can be set off by microwaves, cell-phone towers, or maybe she wired the machine wrong.
Beside her Lettie watches the board, rapt. The planchette moves faster, screeching as it does. Yes. Good-bye. Good-bye. L-B-I-I. No. I-L. No. L-I-B-I. L-I-B-I. The planchette whips through the letters, a blur repeating the last four with sharp insistence.
“Oh shit,” Georgina says again. “It’s spelling Libby. Like the girl in Abby’s story.”
Lettie makes a sound, not quite a breath, not quite a sob.
“What did you do?” Kathryn rounds on Abby. Her fingers clench and unclench at her side.
Abby’s mouth drops open, and she holds up her hands. If her shock is an act, it’s convincing. An ache makes itself known between Kathryn’s eyes, and she shakes her head once to dislodge it. What makes her think Abby had anything to do with this? Just because she told a ghost story about a girl named Libby? Besides, Georgina is the one who pointed it out so quickly, couldn’t it have been her? Or none of them, because no one has touched the machine except for her. It’s just a weird coincidence, and Kathryn is being paranoid.
“It’s something wrong with the wires,” Kathryn speaks quickly. Instead of turning off the switch, she yanks out the whole bundle of wires in one go, and the arm and the planchette fall still.
Lettie continues staring at the machine, willing it to move again, to speak. Her face is bloodless, except for one spot of color high on her cheek as though someone slapped her.
“It isn’t Ellie.” Lettie shakes her head. She turns to Kathryn, stricken. “It’s the wrong ghost.”
Kathryn pulls Lettie into a hug, but it’s too late. She can’t shake the feeling that she’s ruined everything. Something terrible is in the room with them, and she’s the one who let it in.
Interlude #2—A Room with No Windows
Georgina let me help her with her photographs. I don’t want to be in my studio alone. The red light in her darkroom is peaceful, and there are no windows. It reminds me of the crawl space where Ellie and I used to play
. Safe, except when the ghosts would tell my mother where to look and helped her make herself small enough to crawl into the darkness after us.
I watched Georgina make images out of light, then she showed me how to bathe the photo paper in the chemical wash. It’s like a magic trick, watching the picture fade into place. While I was watching her trees, they suddenly weren’t trees anymore. They were the wooden frame of a house still being built. A skeleton without windows, or walls, or doors. Then the chemicals finished their work and it was just woods, but there was someone standing between the trees.
I was so startled I knocked the whole tray over. It ruined Georgina’s picture. She told me not to worry, she could make another one, and she did, but there was nothing between the trees the second time. No house. No figure. Just shadows and light.
I think Georgina was afraid of upsetting me. Everyone walks on eggshells around me since the night the power went out. Except for Abby. The other day I walked into the kitchen and they were all there. I’d been in my studio with my earphones on, so I didn’t hear them until I opened my door, then Kathryn said, “So who moved it? A ghost?” But they all stopped talking the second they saw me. Kathryn and Georgina exchanged a look like they wanted to say something, but they didn’t know who should go first. Abby smiled, but in the end no one said anything. They just watched me get a glass of water and go back into my studio. Am I so fragile they all have to tiptoe around me? Or are they scared of something else? Do they know about the house I’m building with the cards? Or how badly I want to open the door?
Mechanical
Is it possible to build a machine to capture a ghost? That is the question at the heart of “Séance Table.” Ghost hunters have used a variety of equipment to detect paranormal activity for years—electromagnetic field detectors, voice recorders, infrared cameras. “Séance Table” makes use of some of those tools of the trade, specifically an EMF machine and an extremely sensitive thermometer. The goal of the piece is to mechanically facilitate communication with the paranormal world. A spike in EMF readings, or a drop in temperature, will trigger the arm attached to the piece’s frame, causing the planchette to move. Even though the motion is mechanically aided, the prime mover, the trigger if you will, is the ghost.