Haunted Nights

by Ellen Datlow

  But, if you’re thinking I just imagined all this, I beg you to reconsider. And if you think I’m making it all up to cover something else, then I guess I’m not surprised.

  I trust you, though.

  I came in here myself, didn’t I? Not because you sleuthed me up, not because evidence was pointing to me and only me, and not because Marion’s parents were nudging you.

  I’m here to tell you what happened Halloween night, two weeks ago.

  I had just taken the first cold bite of the one waffle I was allowing myself, for having made it this far past Marion’s death—it was a made-up communion, I admit, something I was definitely doing in remembrance of her—when a shuffling on the porch presented itself.

  Because I’m a dad, the first place I looked wasn’t the frosted window, but to the two car seats Zoe and Keithan were still sleeping in. When you’re a dad, you make sure your kids are safe, and then you check on the rest of the world.

  Sure they were all right, I edged over to the window, saying it singsong in my head: “Trick or treat?”

  Not that there would be any trick-or-treaters at our altitude, at the door of a cabin only lit up maybe once a weekend, a cabin I’d needed four-wheel-drive low to get up.

  There was nothing on the porch. No little goblins or superfolk, of course, but no black bear snuffling at the base of the door, no lion eyeing the love-seat swing, daring it to creak just one more time.

  “Raccoons,” I told myself, not really sure if raccoons hibernated.

  Because raccoons have hands, though, I twisted the dead bolt, and that was just enough sound to stir Zoe, who stirred Keithan. That’s how kids are, right? You can play the song in your SUV at full tilt, sing along and cry with the memories associated with that particular song, and the kids just sleep. Then lock a well-oiled dead bolt and they’re sitting up, wondering what that cacophony was.

  I didn’t mind. If they weren’t up now, then they’d be up all night. So I fed them and changed Keithan and then, feeling ambitious—also wanting to keep all the hesitant “just wondering if you made it” phone calls from coming in—I suited them up, the inchworm and the little devil, and booted my laptop awake. It grabbed the network right off.

  That Marion’s mom answered on the first ring told me that she’d been sitting there waiting.

  Marion’s sister Denora was over too, and they crowded the monitor to see the kids. I held them up one by one and turned the little devil around, to show her tail, and I made sure my smile wasn’t too forced.

  “Sure you’re all right?” Denora asked when Marion’s mom had traipsed off to help arrange suitcases for their annual November “jaunt” to Paris—video calls are always fun for the first minute, then a chore for the rest of the conversation—and, with a kid on each knee, I told her we were fine, we were great. We were becoming a family again. And Marion was still part of it.

  This was enough for Denora.

  “I’ll pretend the connection failed,” she said, looking down to manipulate the mouse. “You wanted some alone time, I know.”

  I nodded thanks, keeping my lips together, and she whispered bye and terminated the call, leaving me blissfully alone for what was supposed to have been the whole month.

  I disconnected from the Wi-Fi as well, just to be sure nobody would be ringing in. Feel free to scavenge logs or anything from my laptop, but I can tell you now: as far as I know, the network was up. I just wasn’t hooking into it.

  Does it look guilty to disconnect like that? Like you’re trying to hide?

  I hope not. I hadn’t even considered that.

  But I’m telling you now, anyway, so you can believe me.

  So, because it was Halloween, I let the inchworm and the little devil keep their costumes on, not that they really understood, and I took my usual inventory of the food and alcohol left behind by whichever sister had stayed here last, and then there were the three back-to-back viewings of that cartoon that zones them out, that I always promise myself I’m not going to use, and then came the crying that means they’re tired again.

  Thirty minutes after that, it was snoozeville, like always.

  Because we’d never considered it, there was no bassinet or crib up here. And definitely not two of each. My solution was to tuck Zoe and Keithan back into their car seats, and strap them in for good measure.

  I imagined an avalanche scouring down the face of the mountain for us and two kids riding its crest in their car seats, their mother’s children, for sure.

  My first glass of wine, I lifted it in memory of Marion.

  My second glass, there was a single knock on the door. Like a hand barely closed into a fist, then reaching across to lean on the door more than actually knock.

  I stared across the living room, trying to convince myself I hadn’t heard what I knew I’d heard.

  Had Marion’s mom hustled everyone up through the storm, because I wasn’t answering a call?

  But I’d have seen headlights. I’d have heard snow crunching under all-terrain tires.

  It wouldn’t be a lost hunter, either, unless that hunter was really lost; rifle season had closed ten days earlier. I’d read about it in the paper.

  Game warden, maybe?

  Just knocking once?

  You’re being stupid, I told myself, and hustled my own self across the rug, hauled the door open all at once, to prove how stupid I was being.

  Standing there was Marion.

  I know, I know. But you’ve got to believe me.

  Marion Graves, who had fallen from a face of rock into roiling waters fourteen months ago and likely been shattered on rocks, ground up by thousands of gallons of spring melt, was supposed to be lodged in debris somewhere in miles of underwater, only to surface this season or next, she was standing there before me in a ski outfit that was still in the garage down in town, a blank white mask pulled over her face, surely scavenged from some trailhead trash can.

  I think her eyes are what I recognized first. How she was using them to implore—how she needed me to recognize her, after all these months.

  If you’re going to ask why I let her in, my first response would be simply that it was cold out there. The snow was swirling and skirling, nearly had my SUV drifted over already. My second response would be that her snow boots—moon boots, she’d called them when she’d first bought them—they were glittery wet, meaning she’d physically walked through some snow to get here, which I don’t think I would have had the imagination to remember to do, were I making all this up. But my third response is really the only one that matters: she was my wife. And she was back.

  “Marion,” I said, exactly like a word I’d been holding back for too long now.

  When she opened her mouth under her mask, her whole face shifted, and instead of my name, there was only a creak. Had the mask not been there, I may, yes, have been privy to a cloud of moths unfurling past her lips or to a vomit of black dirt, or even the cold water that would have made sense.

  But: the mask.

  It was Halloween, after all, wasn’t it?

  She draped herself around my neck, and I held her in return, my hands gentle, probing not so much for familiarity but for materiality—to see was she solid, was she real.

  She was. Even down to the smell I knew.

  She creaked broken words into my chest that I took to be her saying she’d missed me.

  “I missed you too,” I told her back, guiding us into the living room.

  What I was already spinning in my head was the explanation for this, the one the mask was cueing up: that it was Halloween, when things can happen, when borders can be stepped across; that this high on the mountain, nobody would be watching, so what harm could this one trespass do, really; that even the kids were sleeping, meaning I could just be making this all up, right? Dreaming it real.

  Except then, in a flurry of what I guess I would just call joy, Marion was off my neck, was leaned over the kids. When a drop of melted snow descended from her blank white mask to Zoe
’s cheek, Zoe squirmed away from it.

  This was really happening.

  “Where have you been?” I asked. “We thought—we all thought—”

  I didn’t finish, couldn’t, and she couldn’t answer anyway.

  How do you explain death to someone who hasn’t been there, right? The vocabulary surely doesn’t exist, and to have that description in my head, anyway, it would surely turn malignant, send its dark tendrils through the rest of what I called my life, and it would then pull me down, or across. Somewhere else.

  I’m thankful to her for sparing me that.

  Or, of course, it could be that she just wasn’t listening to me.

  She hadn’t seen her two little darlings for more than a year, after all.

  “They’re walking,” I told her, and when she turned to show me she’d registered this, I saw the impossible bulge under her ski jacket.

  At first I couldn’t process what I was seeing, what this bulge meant. And even when I did, it didn’t make sense. Either the gases of decay had swelled her midsection up, or she was carrying. She was pregnant.

  It was the latter. The way I knew was that the sway of her back, it was the same as it had been when she’d been carrying the twins inside her.

  She saw me see and looked down herself, as if shy.

  I took her hand, led her to the couch, to sit down by me, but at the last moment she peeled left, sat on the cowhide chair across the coffee table, the one we all knew was her dad’s.

  “Are you—are you going to be able to do this every year?” I asked.

  Already I was looking to the future. Imagining it into place. I would reserve the cabin for every Halloween. Marion wouldn’t age under that mask, in that already-outdated ski suit, but I would. She’d get to see the children grow into versions of her, into some version of me. More important, they’d come to know her.

  One day of the year, it isn’t much. But it’s so much more than no days at all.

  She didn’t answer me. Her hands were clutching one another between her knees. It suggested a demureness I wouldn’t have ascribed to the Marion I’d always known. Not that she was ever vulgar or anything, but she had always been insistently bold, sometimes even reckless. Thus the plunge off the rock face, right?

  But I have to think it was that same boldness that was giving her nerve now, for this return.

  “Is that part of it, then?” I said, nodding down to her stomach in what I hoped wasn’t a rude way.

  She was watching my eyes. Was this a confirmation of sorts?

  “You can’t—you can’t talk about it, can you?” I said for her. “That’s one of the rules.”

  Her not looking down meant yes. I have no doubt that’s what she was saying.

  I leaned forward, staring into her face, nodding with the pieces coming together in my head. Of the two of us, I’d always been the believer, in bigfoot, in aliens, in ghosts, in whatever the next thing was, so long as it was really and truly out there, while she’d always been the contrarian, the skeptic, the one who claimed that my insistence upon all this, it was just the religious impulse rising in an avowed atheist—that, deep down, I needed to believe in something.

  In life, I’d always resisted this, didn’t want to be that shallow, that transparent.

  After her fall, though, I’d started to wonder. Or, no, what I’d been doing, it was kind of making true everything she’d ever suspected of me, so as to preserve her. To preserve a Marion I could believe in, one who was always right, who was persistently smarter than her stupid husband.

  If she’d have been around and somehow outside this scene, this living room, she’d have said I was just finding a different object for my need-to-believe—her. All the belief I’d been storing up, that I’d been too timid to use, as it might look like bargaining for her return, I could spend it now, here.

  And? I probably would have jumped on that bandwagon as well. When you’ve lost your wife, you jump on any wagon you think might take you somewhere else, because you know where you are, it pretty much sucks.

  In the living room with her now, though, when she was definitely throwing a blurry shadow in the firelight, when the snow was definitely melting off her onto the hardwood floor, when she was definitely blinking regularly behind that mask, I could believe in the old way again, the way I knew: she was a…a ghost, an apparition, a vision-given-form, a memory-made-solid. She was returning not so much to tie up loose ends—if that was why people came back as ghosts, then the world would be bursting with ghosts—but because she wanted to see us one more time.

  Only, there were conditions. It makes sense there would be.

  It’s what you tell your kids when they’re old enough to go to the park by themselves, right? Okay, I’ll let you go this one time, but only if you’re back before dark, only if you stay out of the trees, only if you leave if you see the same car drive by twice, and on and on.

  It’s how you preserve the world.

  One of the conditions Marion was having to work under, here, it was that she couldn’t impart any new information to me—she couldn’t speak at all. Probably something about balance: if there was X much on this side and Y much on the other side, then her saying YYYY to me, it would throw existence out of whack.

  “I understand,” I said to her.

  At which point, in a way only a husband would recognize, she lightly touched her pregnant belly.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” I said to her, instead of a response to what she’d just so obviously told me: that I wasn’t to mention her pregnancy.

  This was the Marion I knew. She was someone who would dare a mountain, only two months after giving birth.

  That’s the kind of woman who will nod yes to whatever conditions are necessary in order to return, see her family again. But what only her husband would cue into, it’s a certain glitter in her eyes. That she’s now getting away with something.

  That something? It was in her belly, I knew.

  She wasn’t pregnant when she died, of course, so that she was now, it meant either that there was sex on the other side and she’d been having it with someone, which begged the question why come back to show that to her husband, or it meant that this pregnancy, it wasn’t what it seemed, which made more sense—I can’t imagine biology and reproduction have the same mechanisms on the other side.

  I ask you, Detective, if your dead wife came back one last time, would you accuse her of adultery-after-death, or would you allow her something better than that?

  “Keithan looks more like you every day,” I said, to fill the room with patter. Who knew what other conditions applied here? Were there invisible forces massed at the window, listening in? Could the fire itself be a conduit? But of course those were just bad guesses, constrained by my own lack of imagination. More likely, if there were any active eavesdropping, then it was in some manner I couldn’t even conceive. As it should be.

  Meaning, we should behave ourselves.

  Not that Marion ever cared about proper behavior. Here, after my mentioning Keithan, she forced a croak that held two distinct syllables. The two of Zoe’s name, I was certain. What Marion was telling me, it was that Zoe was resembling me more and more every day, bless her.

  When Marion saw that I was hearing this as she said it, as she meant it, she—as if to prove she was still herself—threaded a loose bang back along the side of her head. This had been one of the mannerisms she was always chiding herself for, as it smeared hair oil onto her fingers, which she would then transfer to her face the next time she touched it without thinking.

  Only, this time, her hair stayed with her fingers.

  She held the loose strands on her knees and considered them.

  I said nothing about it.

  This meant that this visit was on a timer, of course.

  She could incorporate herself for only so long. And then she would begin to decay all over again.

  Already I could see the nail bed of her index finger, bruising into black.
r />   Would she, as I watched, suffer again all the indignities of her fall?

  “It doesn’t matter,” I told her, almost forcefully, as I considered it a declaration of my undying love.

  I would sit with her until she was bones, if need be.

  “They made a movie about you,” I said, smiling so she would get my estimation of that whole situation.

  She smiled, and looked into the fire.

  “It’ll pay for their college,” I said, nodding over to the kids.

  She nodded that that was okay, then. My guess is that the things that are important to us in life, they lose some of their importance in death.

  “Can you eat?” I asked, holding the rest of the waffle up.

  As if she was having to marshal things inside her so massive I couldn’t even guess at them, she stared at this once-bitten waffle, considering it and everything it could mean, perhaps. But finally she reached an unsteady hand forward and took it with trembling fingertips, lifted it in thanks, and turned away, as she had to raise her mask for access to her mouth. Here I could have glimpsed her profile, seen the face I’d known for so many years, but, too, I had to think she wouldn’t want me to remember her like that. So I looked away. Into the open door of the kitchen. Into nowhere.

  But I heard.

  The mask didn’t just lift, it peeled, it clung. Moistly.

  When I saw in peripheral that she was facing me again, the mask back in place, I then had to watch her try to swallow that small bite of cold waffle. Maybe swallowing’s something you forget, when you haven’t had to for so long. Or maybe it reminded her of the creek’s waters.

  She set the rest of the waffle onto the table beside her father’s chair.

  Neither of us said anything, but I knew: we didn’t have much longer.

  Meaning—meaning whatever it was she was smuggling across in her belly for us, for me, or just for the kids, she needed to deliver it soon, in the next few minutes.

  My dream, of course, spawned just while sitting there watching her decompose in front of me, it was that what she was bringing back, in infant form, it was herself. She was going to deliver the baby she’d been, thirty-two years ago, and then that baby was going to mature at an accelerated rate, in wide-eyed wonder, hidden away in this cabin, until, two or four or six years later, we could dress Marion up in weathered rags and “find” her back in the woods, where she’d been lost for so long, living on berries and grubs.