The Ghost Sequences

by A. C. Wise

  She feels the pang of Andrew’s grandparents’ loss anew, leaning her forehead against the glass. They’d never spoken of it directly, but Sophie had had her own toothbrush here, spare clothes. Sometimes she’d gone weeks at a time without crossing back through the trees planted along the property line, and never once had Andrew’s grandparents complained, or suggested she’d overstayed her welcome. She could stay as long as she wanted; she’d always had a place here.

  Sophie glances at the barn again, trying to make the shadows resolve in a way to prove that memory playing tricks with her is the only reason it looked like the door stood open. Should she go outside and check? Before she can decide, a terrible cry splits the night. It’s the worst sound she’s ever heard.

  Animal, human, visceral, bypassing her brain and jack-rabbiting her pulse. She’s down the stairs and to the front door before she’s aware of what she’s doing, running barefoot out the door.

  She stops on the porch, the boards chilling her feet, grit meeting her soles. The cornfield is dark, half fallen to ruin. The wind shakes the leaves, and the light plays tricks, making shadows reach toward her.

  The sound comes again, distant now, and less human. Only a fox, or a night bird. A normal sound. Nothing to fear. Her heart slows to a canter, to a trot. She waits a moment longer, then stiff-legged, Sophie retreats, easing closed the front door.

  “What’s wrong?” Andrew peers down from the top of the stairs, bleary-eyed with sleep.

  “Didn’t you hear—” It was a fox or a cat. It was nothing. There are no ghosts here.

  “Never mind. I didn’t mean to wake you.” She’s eleven-years-old again, telling Andrew’s grandmother she only had a bad dream.

  “Go back to sleep,” Sophie makes herself climb the steps, shooing Andrew toward his room—his grandparents’ old room.

  He looks doubtful, and Sophie forces a smile, though something brittle in her chest cracks, a jagged fragment pressing against her heart. She isn’t being a coward. There’s nothing of value in the barn, no reason to check until morning. She only imagined the door being open.

  As she climbs back into bed, she tells herself it’s too late to unwind the aftermath of that Halloween night. Too late to undo what is done. She couldn’t have stopped it, and it’s not her fault. And she tries very hard to make herself believe it.

  *

  Mrs. Everett Moseley disappeared without a trace in 1971, but even before she vanished, it seems there was something strange about her. In the wedding announcement printed in the Napierville Gazette, she is referred to only as Mrs. Moseley, never by her own name. No one I talked to about the story knew what it was either.

  After they were married, hardly anyone even saw Mrs. Moseley, even though Everett Moseley was a familiar face around town. He was a member of the Napierville Volunteer Fire Company, he regularly ate and drank at the local pub, and he belonged to the Moose Lodge.

  According to the stories, one day Everett Moseley walked into the hardware store to buy a shovel and cheerfully told the clerk that he was going to kill his wife and use the shovel to bury her. The clerk assumed it was a joke, but informed the police anyway. Walt Standish, who was the sheriff at the time, went to look personally.

  He found no evidence of murder, but he didn’t find any sign of Mrs. Moseley either. When questioned, Everett Moseley claimed she’d run away. The sheriff did find a large amount of earth dug out of Everett Moseley’s lawn, however, about the size and shape of a grave. Moseley claimed it was for a new septic system, though the border had been planted with marigolds.

  No official charges were made, Everett Moseley declined to file a missing persons report, and Mrs. Everett Moseley was never seen again.

  Various ghost stories grew up following the case. Supposedly, the grave, or the hole, or whatever it was remained on Everett Moseley’s property until he moved away. Some stories say he tried to fill it in, but it wouldn’t stay filled. Others say it filled in just fine, but it would mysteriously reappear on the anniversary of the day Mrs. Moseley vanished.

  I had several accounts from locals who used to drive out to the Moseley place when they were kids. The story went that if you parked in the driveway facing away from the house, and turned off all the lights in the car, you would see Mrs. Everett Moseley standing at the side of her grave in your review mirror. Some people claimed to have been chased by the ghost, and one person swore up and down that Mrs. Moseley had gotten close enough to touch his car. When he and his friends got home, there was a dent in the trunk, just about the size and shape of a woman’s hand.

  —Spooks, Specters, Superstitions, and True-Crime Tales of the Saratoga Region

  *

  The smell of coffee greets Sophie as she enters the kitchen. Gauzy yellow curtains, made by Andrew’s grandmother, frame the window above the kitchen sink, pulled wide to let in a flood of sunlight. The house is quiet. Andrew must have gotten up early and gone for a run.

  She pours herself a cup from the pot, and a flare of color catches her eye. There’s a bowl of marigolds sitting on the kitchen table.

  It’s so unexpected, so out of place, all she can do is stare. Until the front door opens, startling her, and Sophie jumps, hot coffee splashing her knuckles.

  “Hey.” Andrew’s arms are laden with groceries. “That’s barely drinkable.” He gestures with his chin at Sophie’s mug. “I got desperate this morning and made a pot from an old container in the back of the pantry. I have the good stuff here.”

  He produces a package smelling of freshly ground beans.

  “Did you buy flowers?”

  “What?” Andrew plucks Sophie’s mug from her hand and dumps the contents into the sink as he starts a fresh pot.

  “Marigolds.” A chill seeps along her spine, a sense that someone—not Andrew—was in the room just before she entered.

  Andrew turns, frowning. “You didn’t pick those?”

  “They were here when I came down this morning.”

  “Nobody else has been in here, Soph. I locked the door when I left and unlocked it just now. They weren’t here last night?”

  She shakes her head. She’s certain she would have remembered seeing them, especially since she’d just been thinking about planting marigolds.

  “Kitchen door?” Even as Sophie glances at it, it’s clear the bolt is in place. She would have heard someone breaking in.

  “The caretaker your grandparents hired doesn’t still have a key?”

  “I don’t think so.” Andrew frowns.

  Sophie rounds the counter to the table, fighting the instinct at the back of her mind that screams danger and makes herself touch one of the petals. It’s velvety beneath the pad of her finger.

  “They’re fresh.”

  “That is fucking weird. But nothing is missing, right?”

  “I don’t think so?” Everything seems to be in place, but there’s a nagging sensation of something she’s overlooked, something more than the flowers screaming their wrongness with their bright oranges and yellows.

  “Okay, well, I was going to set up home security cameras anyway, but I’ll make it a priority. It’ll be a selling point when we put the place on the market.”

  Sophie looks back to the kitchen door, and the answer clicks into place. There are holes in the paint and the plaster where nails should be.

  “The horseshoes. Your grandmother used to keep them above all the doors. You don’t remember?”

  “Maybe they took them down when they moved? Took them with them to Florida?”

  The condo in Florida is not the house that needed protecting, Sophie thinks, but she doesn’t say it aloud.

  “I’m sure there’s a rational explanation. So, coffee first, and then we can get started cleaning.” Andrew pours for both of them, and Sophie wants to shake him.

  Why isn’t he freaked out?

  But why would he be? She’s the one who heard something scream last night, who imagined the barn door was open. The memory, the uncertainty, chills
her all over again.

  “I can start on the barn.”

  “Sure, we could—” Andrew starts, but Sophie hurries on, her words running over his.

  “You should start with the attic. There’s a lot of stuff from your grandparents up there. You should be the one to go through it. If I find anything besides junk, I’ll set it aside for you.”

  “Your funeral.” Andrew shrugs.

  Sophie listens for doubt in his voice. She’s acting suspicious, so why doesn’t he suspect her? And why doesn’t she just come right out and say that she saw someone or something creeping around the barn? Because she didn’t see anything; she just heard a weird sound, and once she double-checks, she can tell him with her mind at ease.

  *

  Once upon a time, all a body had to do to own a parcel of land hereabouts was to stake a claim to it, and refuse to move if anyone tried to take it from them. A man who wanted to build a farm set out to do just that.

  Every day he worked from sun up to sundown, but it wasn’t long before he began to feel like someone was watching him. He would wake to strange sounds—footsteps and someone rapping on the door of the little cabin he’d built himself. This went on for several nights, with the man finding nothing, until one day when he felt someone watching him and he turned around to see a woman standing between two trees. Her feet were bare, and they were very long. Her hair was very long as well and just looking at her, he knew she wasn’t human.

  He crossed himself and told her to leave. The woman answered him in a grating voice, like it pained her and she was unused to human speech.

  “As a child, my grandmother buried me here. She put earth in my mouth, and left me for three days, and when I woke, the land knew me, and I knew it. But you do not belong here.”

  The man was afraid, so he threw the iron nails at her that he’d been using to fix his cabin.

  She took the nails and drove them through her own feet and into the earth saying, “I stake my claim, and I will not be moved.”

  Terrified, the man fled to one of his neighbors and told him what had happened. Together they gathered more men and when they returned, they found the woman exactly where the farmer had left her. Try as they might, they could not pry the nails from her feet. They threw stones, bruising her flesh and drawing her blood, but she did not move.

  They said prayers, and tried all they knew, and at last, exhausted, they laid down to sleep. As soon as they did, the woman began to shriek, ungodly sounds that kept the men from their slumber.

  For three days and three nights they endured her wails, then they woke to terrible silence and found that she had died. Her corpse, however, remained nailed exactly where she had stood and still they could not move her.

  Then one of the man’s neighbors suggested a terrible thing.

  “Marry her, and as her widower, the land will belong to you.”

  The farmer was sickened by the idea, but at last, he allowed himself to be convinced. The men brought a priest, and the groom went to stand by his bride. As the priest began to speak, a wind rose and moaned through the bride’s open mouth. The farmer felt such a deep terror that the moment the ceremony was done, he took up a blade and struck off his bride’s head. When he did, her body finally fell from where it stood.

  He buried her, but did not mark her grave.

  In time, the man replaced his little cabin with a farmhouse. With more time, he met a woman he asked to be his wife. Nine months after that, their son was born. And a year after that, a daughter. Eventually, the farmer forgot how he had won the land. And it was then, when the farmer had forgotten, when his first two children had begun to walk, and his wife’s belly had begun to swell again, that the farmer’s first bride returned.

  *

  Sophie pulls her hair into a rough ponytail, listening to the ceiling creak as Andrew moves around the attic. Her stomach butterflies—a strange combination of guilt and unease. She should tell Andrew about the barn, but deep down, she’s afraid. The scream, the open door, they feel like part of a story that’s been going on for a long time. Her story.

  When she could have spoken, she chose silence. She chose to blinker herself to what she did not want to see. The woman in the corn. Her father, freezing partway across the lawn and looking up at her standing at the window.

  Until it was too late.

  When she finally had crossed back through the trees after that Halloween night, Sophie had found her mother on their battered couch, chain-smoking. She’d told Sophie matter-of-factly that her father had run off. There’d been a bruised quality to her mother’s eyes, more wrinkles gathered at their corners than her age warranted. Sophie remembers watching her mother’s bony shoulders as she reached for a fresh cigarette. Above the scooped neck of her tank top, Sophie had been able to count the first few bones of her mother’s spine.

  Life had worn her thin, but with her father gone, Sophie had briefly hoped things might get better. But it had only been a different flavor of neglect, another kind of uncaring. More often than not, the house sat empty, her mother gone for long hours at a time with no explanation, and Sophie would creep through the trees and find herself on Andrew’s grandparents’ porch or in their kitchen, holding onto her hurt and never speaking aloud all the things that were wrong.

  On her way to the barn, Sophie gathers garbage bags and heavy work gloves. She’s relieved to find the padlock in place, the chain still wound around the doors, but the relief doesn’t last long. The hooked bar isn’t pushed in; only rust holds it shut. A gentle tug and the lock opens. Sophie unwinds the chain and lets it slither to the ground.

  There’s a spot beside the barn door where the wood is darker, unfaded by the sun—the distinct shape of a horseshoe. Sophie rests her hand against it, fingers splayed, touching the nail holes left behind.

  Then the farmer holds the woman down and nails the horseshoes right through her hands….

  Sophie jerks back, shaking her hand out, pushing open the barn door all at once like ripping off a bandage.

  Slats of light coming through imperfect gaps in the wood slice through the gloom. It smells like soil. Like time and waiting. Piles loom in every corner—garden implements, boxes, old farm equipment. Andrew’s grandfather was forever buying things at flea markets and antique fairs, claiming he would fix them up one day, but he never did. There are old horse stalls in the barn, hold-overs from a previous owner. Old bicycles and bits of wood and broken furniture fill them now.

  Sophie turns in a slow circle, breathing in the dust. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for—would she even be able to tell if anything was missing? Or is she looking for something that doesn’t belong?

  Sophie steps deeper into the barn and her gaze lands on a spot where the packed dirt floor has been disturbed. Her pulse trips. There are garden tools jumbled in a box nearby. She takes a trowel, digging, clearing the rest with her hands. The work gloves remain tucked, forgotten, into her back pocket. Black earth rinds her nails.

  Sophie rocks back on her heels, looking at a flat wooden box uncovered by her efforts. There’s no lock. And why would there be? She flips it open.

  In the same way she expected to see her father running across the lawn last night, the almost overwhelming sensation that she will find her father’s cigarette lighter, silver and etched with a stylized horse, overwhelms her. She’d stolen the lighter from her father shortly before he disappeared—a small, stupid act of rebellion. It was the nicest thing he owned, too nice, and he didn’t deserve it. More than that, it was tainted somehow, and she wanted to take it away from him. As though stealing it could fix everything that was wrong.

  The first time she’d seen him with it, she’d just climbed off the school bus and her father had been standing on their front lawn, fidgeting with something that glinted silver in the sunlight. Sophie had tried to edge past him without saying anything at all, but he’d startled, a violent, involuntary motion, and he’d dropped the thing he’d been holding.

  It landed at
Sophie’s feet and she’d picked it up automatically. She’d barely gotten a look when her father had seized her wrist, hard, wrenching it as he snatched the object back from her.

  “Don’t touch that. It’s a gift from a friend.”

  His eyes had been wild—red at the edges, whether from drinking, or because he was on the verge of crying, she couldn’t tell. Sophie had stepped back, rubbing at her wrist. Her father hadn’t even apologized. He’d gone right back to staring at the trees, like he’d already forgotten she was there. Waiting on something or someone.

  She hadn’t even been looking for it the day she’d found it in her father’s bedside dresser. She hadn’t even thought about it as she slipped it into her pocket. She’d gone back to her room and hidden it deep in her sock drawer. The next day, the lighter was gone. She’d expected her father to confront her, to yell, to call her a fucking little thief and a sneak and trash, but he didn’t. She’d watched him searching for it, frantically, strung-out-looking and afraid as he’d looked standing on the lawn and turning it over in his hands as he watched the trees. Sophie hadn’t said a word, and she’d never seen the lighter again.

  There’s no rational reason why she should expect to see it now, but the feeling is so strong that for a moment Sophie can’t make sense of the box’s actual contents. The dull glint of metal forms a puzzle she can’t sort out until she blinks her vision clear and sees—four horseshoes, all of them broken, three inexpertly repaired.

  Weld marks cross the iron like ragged scars, and beneath the horseshoes there’s a folded piece of paper. Dirt sifts loose, trapped in its creases, as Sophie draws it out and unfolds it.

  Detailed drawings of hands and feet cover the page. Her father trained as an artist—he’d met her mother at art school, where she was studying to be a sculptor. He’d even worked in medical illustration for a while, but together, Sophie’s parents fed into each other’s self-destructive habits, their talent squandered, uninterested in pursuing their art anymore and doing just enough work to pay for the next round of drinks, the next fix of their current chosen drug.