by Jeffrey Ford
“Not 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.
Hester 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 moonbeams 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, Hester 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 Hester.
“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.”
“OK,” 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.”
Hester 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 Hester, “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 weir
d green globes. I asked the guy what they were and he told me all about them and the thing about the spiders. 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 ghost-like 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.
She slammed the door closed. “Bad meat,” she whispered. “The power’s off to everything.”
“God, that smell. Maggots 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 pushed open their respective sister’s doors, flashlights lit and ready.
Hester rummaged for only moments before discovering some pages of homework scattered upon the dresser. There she read her charge’s 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. The dampness, the cold, brought fog with each breath and made his teeth chatter. 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 Hester 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 Hester 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 its importance paled in relation to the promise of gunplay. When Hester opened the front door, deep screams of agony rained down from above.
Gary went through the door left open by Hester but didn’t count on the screen door that came back hard and clipped him on his left shoulder. It left 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.
Hester 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 is 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. Before I came to pick you up, I stuffed this thing 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 off the small table and stood. Leaning off the porch, she hung the wind chime on a branch of an ornamen
tal 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.
“Harassing the nest of a wren in Eurasia is bad luck,” he said.
“How do you come up with this bullshit?” she asked.
“I must have read it somewhere.”
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 4:00 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, would he deign to view the Bridges house. Hester 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 blonde girls came back to him. And from some distant recesses of his memory came a voice bellowing, “Sunny?”
Hester 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.