by C M Muller
“Seriously, Jerry,” Gordon asked. “How’d you hear about this place?”
“Cosgrove saw it,” Jerry said. “About fifteen years ago. He told me about it last year before he retired.”
“How come I never heard of it? A hundred and fifty year old monastery is kind of hard to hide, don’t ya think?”
“Not if no one’s looking for it. They’re a separatist group. They left the Church, or the Church kicked them out. Not sure which. It was a long time ago. So they’re really off the map.”
“So what’s this service we’re going to see?” Gordon said. “What makes you think they’ll even let us in?”
“Cosgrove saw it one Christmas Eve back when he was an adjunct. I asked him how he got them to let him in and he said it was no problem. He said they didn’t seem to care if he was there or not.”
“Yeah? So what do they do? Sacrifice chickens?”
“No. He just said it was something he’d never forget for the rest of his life. Probably some kind of archaic form of the Christmas vigil.” Jerry took a deep breath and started chanting in his best spooky baritone, “Kyrie...Domine...Dominus...”
The hills and trees that had crowded around the sides of the road had begun to fall away. Maddy could sense more than see the barren fields stretching out around them. Occasionally the lights from a far away farmhouse would float by in the distance like the lights of a ship far out at sea.
A Christmas Eve Mass. The last time she had been to one was with her parents—how many years ago? She closed her eyes and saw again the glow of candlelight, smelled the scent of pine and hot candle wax. The memory of an old song was stirring inside her chest, almost rising to her throat. What was it? More than once she had awoken with tears on her face from a dream of music so intensely beautiful and moving that she’d thought her heart would burst. Jerry had explained that it was just another trick that her brain was playing on her, that there really was no music, just the sensation of beautiful music that our brains manufacture for us. That didn’t seem right to her. Just because she couldn’t remember the music, the exact melody or the words, that didn’t mean it was never there.
Looking out at the few stars glittering over the barren snowy fields, it came to her—the child she was carrying inside; this would be its first time in church. She decided it would not be the last. It didn’t matter what Jerry said about it. It was what her mother and father would have wanted. She would give that gift to her child. And to them.
A light appeared far away in the darkness, a pale glow that looked like a single lamp moving slowly across the frozen fields. “There it is,” Jerry said.
Maddy could make out the shape of a rectangular building far off the road, light shining from a single window. Jerry slowed down and turned on to a long, narrow road that took them down into the fields and closer to the building. The road had not been plowed and there were no tire tracks in the snow. The tires rumbled and crunched and occasionally banged over deep holes hidden by the snow.
“Shit,” Gordon said, “are we even on the fucking road?”
“Don’t worry,” Jerry said through gritted teeth as the car banged its way over the rough surface. “We can’t get lost. It’s right there. All we gotta do is follow the light.”
“Follow the light, Jerry...follow the light!” Gordon said in a spooky falsetto.
As they drew closer Maddy could see that the building was made of bricks that had once been covered with white paint that had grown thin and worn away. The roof was flat except for a kind of square tower at one end. The windows were all small and dark except for one that threw a narrow trail of pale, weak light on the snow.
“Looks more like a prison,” Gordon said.
Maddy looked around and saw there were no other cars or trucks in sight. “Are we the only ones here?” she asked.
“Looks like it,” Jerry said. “I guess they don’t get a lot of visitors...”
They all sat in the car for a minute, looking up at the tall, weathered brick walls and the single lighted window above. Maddy noticed that Jerry hadn’t turned off the ignition.
“Are those bars on the windows?” Gordon said. Maddy looked up at what Gordon was seeing, but the small windows were so dark and grimy it was hard to tell.
“Jerry,” she asked, “are you sure this is the right place?”
“Absolutely,” he said, finally shutting off the ignition. He sat there for another few seconds looking at the building. Then he opened the car door. “Come on.”
Maddy’s legs sank up to the knees in the snow as they plodded toward the building. “Don’t these guys believe in shoveling?” Gordon groaned. “How do they get in and out of this place?”
“Maybe they don’t,” Jerry said what Maddy had been thinking. No cars, no trucks, no vehicles of any kind. No tracks in the snow, which was four days old by now. Under any other circumstances, Maddy would have concluded that the building was abandoned—if it wasn’t for the pale yellow light burning in the little window above. As she looked up, Maddy saw a thin shadow pass behind the window, blotting out the light for a second.
“Jerry,” she said, taking his arm. “Look—somebody’s home.”
“Yeah?” he said with a forced-sounding cheerfulness. “See? I told you this was the right place. Come on...”
They approached a double wooden door set deep into the wall, the old wood painted an ugly institutional brown. “Shouldn’t there be a bell or a buzzer or something?” Gordon said.
“Do you think this is the right door?” Maddy asked.
“Hey, do you see any other door?” Jerry said, sounding strained for the first time. He reached out, took the doorknob in his hand, pushed, and the door swung open a few inches.
“See?” Jerry said. “If they weren’t expecting anybody, why would they leave the door open?”
“Maybe because they weren’t expecting anybody,” Maddy said, angry at the stirrings of fear deep inside her. She had wanted this to be beautiful. She had needed that. She still did. And she didn’t want anything or anyone to ruin that. “Come on,” she said, stepping in front of Jerry. “We don’t want to be late.”
The first thing Maddy noticed was how cold and empty it was inside. Bare, whitewashed stucco walls. Worn wood floors. No furniture. No decorations of any kind. Not even any sign that this was a church. “Which way is it?” she whispered. She could see ghost-traces of her breath from the corner of her eye as she spoke.
“Shit, these guys don’t believe in turning up the heat, do they?” Gordon said.
“Cosgrove said something about a balcony...” Jerry said. A flight of steep, boxy stairs led up the wall on their left to a closed door. Jerry led the way, followed by Maddy, then Gordon. At the top of the stairs, Jerry opened the door and Maddy followed him inside.
Maddy could feel the space below them before she could see it, a drop-off hidden in the dark. She hung back, not wanting to step over the edge until her eyes adjusted. Soon, she saw a faint, throbbing light coming from below. They were on a balcony like Jerry had said. Jerry was already standing at the railing looking down and he beckoned her over silently. Maddy walked over to Jerry’s side and looked down.
The space below them was filled with candles burning in row after row, casting enormous wavering shadows on the walls. Some of the candles were moving in a line and Maddy saw that they were being carried by men walking slowly in a line toward a plain altar with only a rough wooden cross nailed or bolted to the wall. The monks all wore plain brown robes and the tops of their heads were shaved in the traditional tonsured style. One of them—Maddy couldn’t see which one—was chanting words she couldn’t understand but recognized as Latin, the sound of his voice made larger like his shadow in this cavernous space.
Maddy felt Jerry’s hand come to rest on top of hers where it rested on the railing. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he whispered in her ear. She turned and saw his tender smile and felt surprised to realize that he’d done this for her, that she was the reason he�
��d brought them here tonight. He’d known what she needed. For the first time she felt a surge of warmth and certainty, knowing he would be a good father.
A bell rang somewhere and all the monks joined together in the chant which was not a song but like a song in the way that the tone of their words seemed to reach inside her and move things, touch things. She swallowed the lump that had risen in her throat and took a deep breath, letting the sound of the monks’ voices and the glow of a hundred candles take her back to a time before the terrible thing had happened, before she’d read the words that wiped out the happy memory of her mother’s and father’s lives. She closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of burning candles and could see her mother’s face again, young and smiling and looking down at her. Yes. Beautiful. Isn’t it all so beautiful?
The bell rang again. Maddy opened her eyes and saw four monks appear below from under the balcony, pushing wheelchairs, then two more. Elderly monks slumped in the wheelchairs, small as children, their thin bodies appearing to melt into their brown robes. The monks brought the wheelchairs down the aisle and arranged them in a line directly in front of the altar.
“They must have come from the infirmary,” Jerry whispered. Maddy could see one of the elderly monks nodding his head endlessly, another with arthritic hands drawn up under his chin, trembling violently. How kind, Maddy thought. To bring these aged, sick men into this circle of light one night every year. This was how it should be.
Another bell rang. Maddy looked down and saw five more monks appear from below the balcony carrying wheelless chairs by long wooden handles. In each chair sat an ancient-looking monk, more decrepit and emaciated than the last group.
“Jeez, how old are those guys?” Gordon whispered.
The monks brought the chairs to the front and sat them down close to the altar. Their backs were turned but Maddy could see the profile of one seated monk illuminated against the candle light. His sunken eyes were hidden in shadow, his mouth wide open in a kind of frozen, silent howl. A string of spittle hung suspended in his open mouth.
“Wait...wait a minute,” Gordon said. “What...”
Maddy looked closer and saw that what was hanging in the monk’s open mouth was not spittle. It was a spider web.
“Oh Jesus,” Maddy heard Gordon start to whine. “Oh God...”
“No, no…” Jerry was speaking fast in a brittle-sounding monotone. “This...this is...There are churches in Italy...This is what they do.”
Maddy couldn’t see the faces of the other monks seated in the front but she caught a glimpse of their hands clutching the arms of their chairs, the bones thin and fragile-looking as sticks, the skin bled dry of color and worn paper-thin.
The bell rang again. Two monks appeared carrying a wooden chest about three feet long. The chest was decorated with some kind of tarnished gold metal and studded with crude-looking gems that glowed dully in the candle light. As the two monks passed slowly with the chest, Maddy saw the other monks bow their heads, except for the ones seated in the front. The two monks set the chest down on a wooden stand in front of the altar and the chanting stopped.
“Jerry, please, let’s go,” she said, digging her fingers into his arm. “I want to go.”
“Wait...” Jerry whispered, his eyes fixed on the scene below. “Wait...”
The two monks moved to either side of the wooden chest, undid the metal latches and lifted the lid. It took Maddy a moment to understand what she was seeing. Inside the chest on a bed of white cloth was a small child, no more than a baby, dressed in a worn-looking white and gold brocade gown. The child’s mouth was open wide and the blackened gums were peeled back from the tiny yellowed teeth. In the hollow eye sockets were two large red gems that reflected the candle light and seemed to wink and move.
The bell rang one more time. Then the monks began to scream. They all stood where they were with their mouths open wide and screamed as though the skin was being flayed from their bodies. The terrible sound rose up and filled the space around her until she could not hear or speak or breath. She saw Jerry pressing his arms over his ears, his mouth moving like he was screaming too but she could not hear it. She looked for Gordon and found him huddled on the floor in a corner, clutching his head and rocking back and forth.
Without looking back, Maddy turned and ran from the balcony into the stairwell where the screaming was somehow even louder. Clutching her hands over her ears, she stumbled down the stairs and almost made it to the door before the terrible sound drove her to her knees. The screaming was coming from the walls around her and from the cold stones beneath her knees where she found herself kneeling and rocking. She knew that even if she opened the door and ran across the frozen field, the screaming would follow her; it would rise up from the ice and snow below her feet and pour down from the stars above. No matter how far she tried to run or how long she lived. The screaming was the sound that the world made and always would be.
Below the Falls
Daniel Mills
Gentlemen, I am tired of ghost stories. In my lifetime, I have heard a hundred such tales, a hundred variations on the same tired formula. We have the respectable narrator, the decrepit country house. A series of unsettling incidents: disembodied footsteps, say, or voices in the night. Finally there is the ghost itself, which bursts upon the narrator’s mind like the swift and violent intrusion of the repressed id. His faith is shattered, his sanity. He is never again the same.
But there is life in the old form yet. If we take the defining quality of a ghost to be its attendant sense of mystery, its otherness, then I propose to you that we are surrounded by such spirits at all times whether we choose to admit it or not. In pain the mind hides even from itself, becoming a darkened star around which light bends but does not pass through.
I hope you might allow me to read from an old diary. The tale it relates is, I aver, a kind of ghost story, though the dead do not walk in its pages, except in the usual way by which the words of the deceased survive on paper long after their graves have been filled.
The diary came into my possession some years ago when I was practicing medicine in Lynn, MA. A nurse at the hospital in Danvers, knowing of my interest in psychoanalysis, mailed it to me upon the death of its author, a young woman by the name of Isabella Carr.
Mrs Carr was born in Walpole, NH, and lived there with her mother and stepfather until the age of eighteen, when she was married to Horace Carr, Esq, of Beacon Hill, Boston. The diary begins shortly after her wedding and depicts the weeks immediately prior to her committal.
Aside from these few facts, the nurse’s letter was tantalizingly vague, and in the same spirit, I present the diary to you now without further prelude.
Apr 2
Alfie was here again last night.
I heard him at the door, his faint scratching. He was just outside the room, waiting for that late hour when the whole of the house lay sleeping and there was only me to hear him.
I opened the door. He scuttled inside, dragging his belly on the floor. He was terribly thin, his hair all in patches. It came away in tufts beneath my fingertips, baring the pitted skin beneath, the sallow flesh speckled with rot: they had buried him alive.
I dropped to my knees and wrapped my arms around him. He did not resist but merely lay with his head against my chest as I whispered into his ear.
I’m sorry, I said. I thought you were dead.
His breathing was strained and rapid but still he did not stir. He listened as the words poured out of me, an undammed torrent. I spoke for hours, or what seemed like hours, and later, I awoke to find him gone with the bars of sunlight on my face.
Bridget woke me. She entered the room while I slept and now applies herself to the tasks of stripping the bed, taking down the curtains. She whistles as she works—an Irish song, I suppose, for I do not recognize the tune.
Downstairs, the clocks all sound the half-hour, and I know that I have overslept. Mr Carr awaits me in the breakfast room. He will be dressed for his
clients, his club, checking his watch as the minutes tick past and still I do not come—
Apr 7
A letter from Uncle Edmund—
This morning I woke early, before dawn, and padded downstairs in my nightgown. In the hall I found the mail where it had been dropped through the slot. In amongst my husband’s correspondence was a letter addressed to me in my uncle’s hand.
I recognized it at once. Edmund is my father’s brother, his senior by ten years or more. He is a big man, like Father was, and likewise well-spoken, if occasionally given to maundering, and his avowed agnosticism had once made him a figure of some controversy in our household.
When Father died, Edmund took to writing me long letters, and these I cherished like jewels, for I heard my father’s voice in his words and seemed to catch his scent upon the page. The letters ceased with Mother’s marriage to Mr Orne, who is a Methodist of the meanest sort, though it was months before I realized they had hidden them from me.
Uncle Edmund had obtained my husband’s address from a gentleman friend in Walpole “of some slight acquaintance” with Mr Carr. He rarely speaks of it, but Mr Carr was born there as well and is, in fact, my mother’s cousin—though he relocated to Boston as a young man and was subsequently estranged from his family for years.
Now Edmund writes to say that Father’s house has been sold and is soon to be demolished. My mother has moved with Mr Orne to Vermont, so as to be nearer his church, while our neighbors the Bosworths have bought the property. They have plans to erect a gristmill, damming the creek where it plunges to the falls.
Soon it will all be gone: the gardens, the paths down which we walked on summer evenings, Father and I, when the damp lay thickly on the air and the rosebushes rustled all round. I remember. We crossed the creek at the footbridge, where the petals lay like a blood-trail, and sat together in a place above the falls while the current frothed and broke among the rocks below.