by Matt Ruff
“Damn it, Ruby,” she said, “stop wailing! It’s just noise!”
And then the greatest crash of all, a tremendous jolt as though the whole house had been lifted off its foundation and dropped. Letitia fought to keep her balance while Ruby collapsed against the wall. “Letitia!” she cried, only terror of falling keeping her from headlong flight. “I want to go home!”
“You are home,” Letitia said. When the Winthrop House bucked a second time, she was ready for it, feet braced like a captain on the deck of a rolling ship. Her ship.
“We’re not leaving,” she said. “This is our house now.” Leaning into the storm: “We’re at a tipping point.”
But Ruby wouldn’t stay.
Not long after daybreak, in what felt like an inversion of her dream, Letitia watched Ruby lift a hastily packed suitcase into the back of a cab. “Where are you going to go?” Letitia said, and her sister replied, “Away from here.”
As the taxi drove off, Letitia felt eyes on her and looked across the street to find the white woman on her porch, the smugness of her expression making Letitia wonder whether she knew about the ghost. Then she noticed Tree’s Cadillac, still parked at the curb, but sitting now on four flats with “NIGGER” scratched crudely across the front hood. So that’s it, Letitia thought. You think that’s what Ruby’s running from? She stared contemptuously across the street until her neighbor’s grin deflated like a punctured tire and she remembered something urgent she had to tend to indoors.
“I’m not leaving,” Letitia announced to the empty street.
Back inside the Winthrop House all was quiet, for now. The bucking and banging had continued for a quarter of an hour before abruptly ceasing, leaving a dissipated feel in its wake, as though the house were a spent battery. How long to recharge? Letitia wondered, gazing quizzically at Hecate. Is this going to be an everyday affair? Twice weekly? I’ll take whatever you throw at me, but I need tenants, too, and even South Siders might draw the line at nightly earthquakes. Then again, people rent apartments next to the L tracks all the time.
She decided to worry about it after breakfast and made her way to the kitchen, where she noted that the dishes, pots, and pans—most of which had come with the house—had been left undisturbed by the shaking. Come to think of it, none of the photographic plates in the orrery room had been knocked down either. So the ghost didn’t like to damage its own property. Interesting.
Letitia got out a bowl and a box of pancake mix. She was getting a measuring cup when she heard a soft creak of hinges behind her. She went into the corridor that connected the kitchen to the laundry room and found the basement door open. She stared at the steps leading down into darkness. Leaning forward carefully, she flipped the light switch. Nothing happened. She thought about the fuse box at the base of the stairs and thought, Maybe later. She closed the basement door and went back to the kitchen.
Letitia picked up the pancake mix again, registering the strange scrabbling inside the box a half-second too late. She tipped the box over the mixing bowl, releasing a cascade of roaches, maggots, spiders, and other squirming and crawling things. A fat millipede scuttled out of the measuring cup across the back of her hand and she jumped back screaming and waving her arm. The box hit the floor shuddering, its sides beginning to swell. Letitia glimpsed a mass of red worms erupting from a split in the cardboard and then her backpedaling feet carried her through a swinging door into the atrium.
She stood beneath the gallery, watching the crack under the swinging door. As the hammering in her chest subsided, she heard the sound of running water. She looked over at Hecate but the fountain was dry. She came out from under the gallery and looked up.
Warily she climbed the stairs. Steam was wafting from the master bath beside her bedroom. Inside, the tub was near to overflowing, and floating in the water was what Letitia took at first glance to be a body, bloated and purple. Then she caught a glitter of sequins. She dropped to her knees beside the tub, turned off the faucet, and reached into the scalding water to clutch the sodden gown. Purple seeped between her fingers, mingling with the dye from a half dozen other dresses, all ruined.
She knelt there, close to tears, until something made her turn her head and look at the mirror above the sink. Traced into the condensation on the glass was the same word that had been scratched on Tree’s Cadillac. Beneath it was a second, shorter obscenity. Letitia blinked as though she’d been slapped. For a moment, all feeling left her body.
Then rage filled her, and she was up on her feet and moving.
She grabbed the shotgun and headed for the orrery room. The door slammed shut as she approached, but she walked straight up and fired one barrel at close range, blasting away the doorknob and a six-inch circle of wood around it. She shoved through the doorway and took aim at the orrery.
As she squeezed the trigger an invisible force shoved the gun muzzle upwards. The shot punched a hole in the ceiling. Letitia swiped plaster dust from her eyes and gripped the shotgun like a baseball bat. But the ghost tore the weapon from her grasp, and then she felt hands on her shoulders, pushing her backwards into the hall. The door, what was left of it, slammed shut again.
“You can’t keep me out forever!” Letitia yelled. She kicked at the door, then ducked her head and stared balefully through the hole. “And when I do get inside, I’m going to take your little toy apart piece by piece. You just try and stop me!”
With a rattle and a crash, the elevator gate slammed open. Letitia straightened and turned towards the sound, feeling a sudden dash of fear. The phantom hands fell on her shoulders again; she tried to fight, but there was nothing solid to land a blow against, and she was dragged, kicking and flailing, out onto the gallery.
The elevator car was no longer on the second floor, or the first floor either. The ghost shoved Letitia to the brink of the open shaft; she caught the edge of the gate with one outflung hand and clung to it fiercely as she was tipped forward over the abyss.
“What you going to do?” she cried. “You break my neck, and then what? You think I won’t come back and haunt you? Go ahead! Make me a ghost! See what that gets you.”
The force pushing against her slackened. The air around her seethed with malice but she sensed uncertainty, too.
“I know you were here first,” Letitia said. “I know you think it’s your place. But you don’t get to keep it all to yourself, not anymore. I’m staying. Dead or alive, at war or in peace—that’s up to you.”
A sudden jolt broke her hold on the gate. Letitia gasped and shut her eyes and committed her soul to the Lord.
But the ghost flung her away from the shaft, not into it; and as she collapsed against the gallery banister, she heard the gate rattle shut.
Wednesday evening.
There had been a fire in an apartment house on State Street. The building’s tenants were gathered on the sidewalk, waiting for the firemen to depart so they could go back inside—either to salvage their possessions or, lacking other options, to reclaim their flooded and burned-out apartments.
Letitia observed the crowd from a nearby bus stop, her mind mostly elsewhere. It had taken a little more than twenty-four hours to track Ruby back to her old one-room flat—the lease to which, it turned out, she had never surrendered. Letitia had intended to sweet-talk her sister, get her to give the Winthrop House another chance, but the discovery that Ruby had had an escape route planned all along struck Letitia as a betrayal, as though Ruby had made a promise with her fingers crossed.
Ruby would have none of it. “You’re mad at me?” she said. “You drag me to live in a haunted house and it’s my fault when it doesn’t work out?”
“Well how’s it supposed to work out when you don’t even commit to it?”
“You commit to it,” Ruby told her. “You keep the house and the money too, I don’t care—it’s all yours now. That’s what you wanted anyway.”
“That is not what I wanted! The house is for us, Ruby! For us.”
“Yeah, you g
o on and commit to that, too. Whatever helps you sleep at night.”
That wasn’t fair, Letitia thought petulantly. Of course she wanted the house for herself—of course she did—but it was never just about her. Why couldn’t Ruby see that?
She noticed a tall and light-skinned Negro man standing among the tenants displaced by the fire. He was holding his cap in his hands, wringing it like a dishrag as he stared at a row of soot-stained windows on the apartment house’s upper floor. Seeing the bewilderment on the man’s face, Letitia felt a redeeming impulse to good Samaritanism. But before she could act on it, a little girl at the man’s side rounded on her in suspicion. “What are you looking at?” the girl demanded.
“Celia!” the man said sharply. He threw Letitia a quick look of apology. Then the bus came and Letitia, feeling rebuked, boarded without saying a word.
It was after dark by the time she reached her stop. From there she had another mile to walk, and though the blocks she passed were mostly colored, she stayed alert and kept a hand on the straight razor in the pocket of her skirt.
She was almost home when a mint-green Oldsmobile sedan cruised up alongside her. Letitia recognized it as belonging to one of her neighbors from across the street. The driver, a blond boy in his late teens, began calling to her: “Hey . . . Hey . . . Hey.”
Momma hadn’t given birth to any Heys. Letitia ignored him and kept walking.
Up ahead on her left was the defunct tavern. An alleyway ran behind it to the back of the Winthrop House. Letitia had sworn never to use the servants’ entrance, but the blond boy didn’t know that; as she approached the mouth of the alley, the Oldsmobile sped up and swerved onto the sidewalk in front of her, cutting her off.
“Hey,” said the blond boy. He leaned smiling out the driver’s window. “How you doing tonight? You need a ride somewhere?”
Letitia looked him in the eye. “I need you to get out of my damn way,” she said.
The blond boy reared back in exaggerated surprise. “Wow . . . Listen to you.” The doors opened on the far side of the sedan and two other boys got out. The blond boy got out too. They surrounded her. They were all taller than she was, but Letitia stood straight and clutched the razor in her pocket, thinking, First one to touch me gets a scar.
“You should learn to be more polite,” the blond boy was saying. “I mean, we’re just trying to be friendly. And here you are, walking around alone, at night, in someone else’s neighborhood.”
“It’s my neighborhood too.”
“No, it isn’t.” He raised a hand as though to strike her and then held it, inches from her face. “You don’t belong here. You—”
A low growl interrupted him. He stepped back and half-turned, hand still raised, as a dog emerged from the shadows of the alleyway. It was a German shepherd, a big one, with its fangs bared and its ears flat back against its skull.
“This is Charlie Boyd, Jr.,” Letitia said. “He’s staying with me, helping me keep an eye on my house . . . Charlie, this boy says we don’t belong here. What do you think of that?”
The shepherd lunged forward barking and snapping, and the blond boy danced back, saying, “Hey . . . Hey . . . Hey!” this time in a higher register. Letitia waited until the dog had the blond boy pinned against the side of the Oldsmobile and then did a slow count to ten. At the end of the count she snapped her fingers and the dog quieted and came to heel instantly.
Keeping his eyes on the shepherd, the blond boy fumbled for his door handle. Letitia looked around at the other two boys, who beat a hasty retreat to the far side of the Oldsmobile. All three got back into the car. From the driver’s seat, the blond boy looked at Letitia and started to say, “This isn’t over,” but Charlie Boyd, Jr., put his front paws up on the driver’s door and leaned in the window barking furiously, and the blond boy threw the car into reverse and stepped on the gas. The sedan backed all the way across the street and into the light pole on the far sidewalk, smashing a taillight and putting a good-sized dent in the fender. The blond boy gritted his teeth and shifted into drive and peeled out, leaving fat streaks of rubber on the asphalt. “This isn’t over!” he shouted, and as the Oldsmobile roared off into the night, the other boys screamed threats of their own.
Letitia just smiled. The taillight and the fender didn’t make up for Tree’s Cadillac, but they were a start.
She looked at Charlie Boyd, Jr., who looked back at her expectantly. “Yeah, OK,” she said. “Your daddy goes to the top of the tenants’ list.”
Barking happily now, Charlie Boyd, Jr., escorted her the rest of the way to her front door. But he wouldn’t come inside with her. As she fitted her key in the lock, the shepherd’s ears pricked up, and by the time she got the door open he’d turned tail and was trotting around the side of the house to his makeshift kennel in the garage, leaving Letitia to face Hecate alone.
Thursday.
Mr. Wilkins, an old friend of Momma’s who managed a Salvation Army store, was coming by to see what furniture Letitia still needed. He’d offered to deliver whatever she required in exchange for Letitia giving his mother a room with the first six months rent-free. Letitia was confident she could bargain that down to three months, but even so, she had to be careful. She was running out of rooms to trade for favors.
While she waited for Mr. Wilkins, she sat in the dining room dealing out practice poker hands, a peculiar form of devotion her father had taught her. Warren Dandridge had insisted that poker was a Christian game: Players who practiced virtue—learning and respecting the odds, keeping their emotions in check, managing their bankrolls intelligently—tended to prosper, while those who succumbed to vice—chasing long shots, letting passion rule reason—went the way of all unrepentant sinners.
The Baptists he’d grown up with hadn’t much cared for this way of thinking, especially after he took five hundred dollars off a minister’s son who’d tried to bluff a busted straight draw. By the time he met Momma he’d learned never to play against anyone he might share a pew with. Instead, like an itinerant preacher, he made his living on the road, traveling a circuit of back rooms and illegal gambling clubs. He played virtuously and strove against the unholy trinity of cheats, thieves, and police; he came home bloody and bruised sometimes, but he came home with cash in pocket. He provided for his family.
One day in 1944 he was playing in a basement casino in Detroit when the place was raided. The casino had a back exit that the cops had somehow missed, and in the confusion he and a friend managed to slip out and escape. They were a block away, still running, when they passed an off-duty patrolman coming out of a bar. The patrolman knew nothing about the raid but he went for his gun anyway and shot Warren Dandridge in the back, killing him.
Letitia still missed her father terribly, but she knew he was looking down on her, and with a deck of cards she could call him back to earth anytime she wanted. As she dealt the cards onto the table, she heard his voice in her ear, laying out the parameters of each hand—the game, the stakes, the size of the pot, her position relative to the other players—and then asking the question: What would a good Christian do here? And Letitia would answer, smiling, sensing him beside her nodding his approval.
She’d gathered up the cards and was reshuffling them when she felt another presence behind her. She didn’t turn around.
“Hello, Mr. Winthrop,” she said. “You play poker?”
No answer, but the goosebumps on her neck told her he was standing very close. She’d feel his breath if he still drew it.
Letitia gave the deck one more shuffle and dealt a hand: Three of diamonds. Three of clubs. Six of clubs. Six of hearts. Seven of spades. “Straight draw, two-four limit with one-and two-dollar blinds,” she said. “Pot’s opened in front of you and there’s four other players behind. You stay in or fold?”
A tingle of electricity in the air. The seven of spades twitched on the table, separating itself from the two pairs.
“Uh-uh,” Letitia said. “You’re only going to make the full ho
use one time out of twelve. And when you don’t—”
The seven of spades twitched again.
“OK. If you want to go broke . . .” She dealt another card. The six of diamonds. “Hmm.” Letitia picked the card up, checked the back for marks. There were none, but maybe he didn’t need any. “Interesting . . . I was going to invite you to sit down, but maybe we need to find a game where peeking won’t help . . . How about checkers? You ever play that with your boy? My daddy—”
An invisible fist pounded the tabletop. The deck was wrenched violently from her hands, cards flying into the air.
“What!?” Letitia cried. “What’d I say?”
THUD!
It sounded like a bird flying into the front window. Letitia turned to see a clump of what looked like mud splattered across the panes and dripping down onto the sill. A second, larger clod burst against the upper sash, making the glass shudder. As Letitia pushed her chair back and stood up, she heard clods striking other windows as well, splatting against the brickwork. By the time she got out into the atrium the noise had become continuous, a storm of brown hail bombarding the front of the Winthrop House.
She opened the front door and was assaulted by the reek of manure. Two farm trucks idled in the street. Hooded figures stood in the open back of each, reaching into big buckets of fresh cow shit. One of them pointed at Letitia and they concentrated their fire, Letitia ducking back only just in time, cow patties exploding against the shutting door.
Charlie Boyd, Jr., came tearing around the side of the house and was met by a barrage of shit clods. A lucky throw caught him between the eyes, turning his barks to yelps of anguish.
The bombardment continued. Letitia ran up the stairs. She had her hand on the shotgun when she heard glass breaking in one of the front bedrooms; she prayed it wasn’t the one with a bed already in it. Then she heard the trucks’ motors revving up. “No!” she shouted, dashing back down to the atrium. She yanked the front door open and went out, feet skidding in the manure now mounded on the doorstep. “Come back here!” she called. “You come back here!” She ran into the street after the trucks and raised the gun to her shoulder.