Suddenly a pinpoint of motion entered that world, and my dead eyes became fixed on a speck high above my reclining form, a speck that was slowly getting larger. At last its shape took on the definition of a square, and as it drew nearer it seemed as though I lay at the bottom of an elevator shaft, with the car above rushing down at me. Though I struggled to move, I could not. My dead eyes could only watch helplessly, as further doom approached.
In one final instant the dark square drove all the white world away, and pain crushed me, shattering skull, smashing brain, hurling my dream entity into an abyss from which there would be no rebirth.
So naturally there was no choice but to wake up.
When my eyes opened in the darkness, I hitched in a breath of relief. I was lying on my left side, facing Linda, and I put my arm around her, careful not to wake her. I closed my eyes again, but opened them immediately, fearful that I would fall back into the nightmare. Better to remain awake and get my thoughts off Anna Huber and Mrs. Mortimer, for I had no doubt that they were the source of my dire dreams.
I turned slowly, still not wanting to rouse Linda, onto my back and then my right side, closing my eyes with the superstitious conceit that my movement was thus more stealthy, and opening them again when I was in the proper position.
Before me I saw the face of a little girl. Her eyes were open wide, staring at me fearfully. Or maybe her fear was a reflection of my own.
What made the apparition more frightening was that she wasn’t standing next to my bed, but rather parallel to my own recumbent body, as if floating sideways in the air. Her hair was covered by a white kerchief tied under her chin, but the strands of hair which had escaped it were hanging down on either side of her face, rather than dangling toward the floor. That detail was the most uncanny of all, and made me think that I was still dreaming, because even ghosts had to obey the laws of gravity, didn’t they?
It was simply another dream, a dream inside a dream, as I’d occasionally had before. So I commanded myself to wake up.
The strategy didn’t work. As those eyes continued to look into mine, I felt my breath lock in my throat, and the hair on the back of my neck tingle. I thought if I could only speak or make some kind of noise, the vision might disappear.
Then I squeezed my eyes shut hard, frowning with the effort, and made a throaty croak that I hoped the thing would hear as a command of banishment. I moaned again, now wanting Linda to wake up, and she did. “Michael?” she said sleepily, “Michael, are you all right…wake up.”
She shook me and I opened my eyes. The girl was gone. “I’m okay,” I said. “Just a bad dream….I’m gonna get some water. You want some?”
“I’m fine,” she said, and I knew that what she wanted most was to get back to sleep.
I shuffled my way to the bathroom, where I turned on the blessed light and looked at my frightened face in the mirror. The cold water felt good on my skin, and, as I blinked the drops away, I saw that I was perfectly alone. I sat on the closed toilet seat and tried to rationalize away what I thought I’d seen.
Though I hadn’t realized it during the dream, I could now see that all the events consisted of Mrs. Mortimer’s catalogue of violent mishaps, not missing a trick. There had been injury and death by fire, by scalding, by a “great knife,” by falling, by sickness, and finally by the “great box” falling on my head. I had lived through all the terrors that The Peep of Day might have inspired in little Anna Huber, and then awoke—or thought I had—only to be confronted by my further dream of the young victim herself, her face still showing the fear of what she’d read about and what I’d imagined in my dream. That was all. Perfectly explainable and rational.
I stood up and smiled at myself in the mirror, then used the toilet, rinsed the sleep mud from my mouth, and went back to bed, where I passed the night, as far as I could recall, dreamlessly.
The next morning I kissed Linda goodbye. She was attending an education conference in Pittsburgh, and would be spending the night. Left alone in the house, I went into my office, turned on the computer, and opened my outline for the new novel. Nothing came easily. I had characters, but getting those characters to act in a way that would produce a coherent narrative seemed to be beyond my abilities. It was always, I reminded myself, hard work, but it seemed harder than ever.
By the end of the day, I had saved a few more ideas, another couple paragraphs of tenuously linked incidents that I might conceivably be able to turn into a novel. I ate a light dinner, watched an old John Ford Western, and crawled into bed with a crime novel written by one of my friends. It was good, but I kept thinking about the dream I’d had the night before, and the other, far more realistic one that followed it.
Anna B. Huber’s little book was still on my nightstand. I set down the novel and picked up The Peep of Day, turning to the introductory section of horrors and ascertaining that my dream had mirrored them perfectly. Whatever my other literary weaknesses might be, poor memory was not among them.
The unproductive struggles of the day had worn me out, and I set the book back down and turned off the light. Despite my tiredness, I knew I would have trouble sleeping, as I always did when Linda was away. I decided to try and replace the comfort of her warm body with the novelty of having the spacious bed all to myself, so I positioned myself in the middle on my back, with my arms flung out to either side. Being King of the Bed ran a poor second to having Linda there, but it wasn’t long before I drifted to sleep.
It was shortly after midnight when I awoke. I know, because I looked at the clock afterward. And I know I awoke, because after it happened I got up and sat in the kitchen for a long time with three fingers of Jack Daniels over ice.
This time I didn’t awaken out of a dream. I just came to consciousness slowly, as though a soft voice were urging me, though I heard nothing. I was still lying in the position I’d been in when I closed my eyes, looking up at the ceiling. And there, her body floating above mine, was the little girl of the night before, still wearing her dark dress and white kerchief, her stray locks of hair still defying gravity.
The shock made me catch my breath again, but I let it out carefully, with the sensation that any sudden sound or movement on my part might bring her dropping down upon me. She didn’t glow from within, as I’ve always imagined ghosts do, but seemed revealed as though by candlelight. Her hands were clasped in front of her, and her face wasn’t as frightened as it had been the night before. There was more of a sense of shocked awe, and I wondered what she was seeing.
I blinked quickly, but she didn’t go away. My heart was beating heavily with fright, and I knew I couldn’t continue watching. I jerked my head away from the vision into the pillow and threw my arm across my face. For a long time I stayed that way, waiting until my heart slowed its thunderous pace. Then I moved my arm and opened my eyes.
I was alone in the dark room. A shudder shook my body, and I took in several deep breaths before turning on the light. The reality of my surroundings assured me that what I had seen had been no dream. I was awake, and I had seen that little girl as surely as I now saw the lamp, the sheets, the posts of the bed, the bookcases in the corner, my clothes hanging on the hall tree.
She had been real, and she had been real the night before. A little girl, no more than seven years old, with blue eyes and brown hair, a narrow mouth and a small pug nose. As non-frightening a spectre as one could imagine, yet her form had terrified me.
I got out of bed and fixed myself that drink, then sat at the kitchen table and tried to imagine how I had brought her back. That she was Anna B. Huber, I had no doubt. From the kerchief, I suspected she might be (or have been) a member of one of the Pennsylvania Dutch Anabaptist sects in which the women wear head coverings, and Huber was a name common among the Amish and Mennonites. But assuming she was Anna, what had I done that had made her shade feel it necessary to return?
I tried to recall specifically what she had written in her book, and fetched it from the bedroom. After reading it
all again, I became convinced that the poem and her desire to be remembered after death was the key. Remember me …remember me …hose were the words she had written over and over again, prefaced by: “…here youns can see my name when I am dead and gone.” I had seen far more.
I had dreamed what little Anna Huber had dreamed, all those horrible fates of which she had read in Mrs. Mortimer’s book, and the trauma of that dream had been enough of an emotional tempest to stir up her shade, to bring her to me face to face on two separate nights, with unequivocal admonitions to remember me, as though I now had any choice.
I didn’t want to see her again. How could I even think of going to sleep, when I might awaken to find Anna at my side or above me, or, should I fall asleep with my head buried in the pillow, somehow beneath me, part and parcel of the mattress itself ?
As idiotic as it sounds, all I could think about was how to find some way to dispel or exorcise her presence, send her apparently harmless but very creepy spirit back to rest. I went into my office, powered up my computer, and did what I always do when faced with a question—I Googled it.
“Anna B. Huber” gave me only five hits, but that was all I needed. Thank God for genealogy on the Internet, I thought, as I perused the second entry, a web page from the Hershey family tree, logging the descendants of Christian Herche, a Mennonite bishop who came to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, from Switzerland in the early eighteenth century.
And there was Anna B. Huber, daughter of John Huber and Fannie Huber, who married Henry F. Hostetter, a descendant of Christian Herche, in 1865.
The year pulled me up short. 1865. The long inscription in The Peep of Day had been written in September 1863. Had little Anna been a child bride?
I read on to find that Anna had been born May 9th, 1846. That meant she had been eighteen when she had written the poem in the book, and nineteen when she married.
Eighteen. Not a little girl of six or seven, but a young woman of eighteen. She hadn’t even received the book until she was fourteen or fifteen.
I sat back and stared at the glowing screen, at the numbers that didn’t add up. I thought and thought, and came up with only one conclusion that made sense, and far more sense than visits from a ghost.
It had been me. All me. I had created my image of Anna B. Huber, seen a little girl where there was none. Her wish to be remembered had touched me so deeply—me, whose wish to be remembered through what I write is equally as strong—that I had dreamed of her terrors, still fresh in my mind, and then produced her, not physically or even psychically, but with my imagination, vividly enough that I had seen and believed. I had created my very own ghost to fill my need.
Only I had gotten the age wrong. I made a mistake, because I hadn’t known the truth, and now the truth revealed nothing more than a fabrication on my part.
It was certainly more likely than an actual ghost, wasn’t it? I laughed in relief at my self-delusion, and went back into the kitchen and finished off my Jack Daniels in celebration rather than need. Then my curiosity got the better of me, and I followed the trail of Anna B. Huber’s descendants.
She and her husband had two daughters, one of whom married and gave Anna a grandson and a granddaughter. Anna had outlived both her daughters when she died at the age of seventy-three in 1919. I was able to find her obituary in the Gospel Herald, a Mennonite publication archived online. There I learned that at her death she was living with her granddaughter, also named Anna, that “her place in church was seldom vacant,” and that “she was of a kind and sociable disposition which won for her a large circle of friends.”
Anna had apparently had a good life, and I was glad for her. With a smile I turned off the machine and went back to bed.
Lying in the darkness, I couldn’t help but whisper, challenging her, now that I knew there was nothing to be afraid of. “Come on, Anna,” I said. “Let me see you. If you’re there…if you’re anywhere…”
But I knew there would be nothing, and I was right.
If this was all there was to the story, it would be scarcely worth the telling. One more tedious example of a writer, surely the most unhealthily introspective breed of humanity, creating Ambrose Bierce’s all too accurate definition of a ghost: the outward and visible sign of an inward fear. But there was more.
Linda came home the next day, and that night I neither dreamed about nor saw Anna B. Huber, or the little girl I thought I had created in her imagined image. The end of the visitations had proven me right. Now that I knew what had caused them, they stopped.
I struggled on with my outline for the next few days, welcoming every distraction. I minimized my Word file frequently and surfed the net, and one day I Googled Anna again. I followed the genealogy further into the present, and found that Anna’s granddaughter had one child who was living. No name was given, a matter of course in many online genealogies, but the thought struck me that perhaps this great-grandchild of Anna Huber might be pleased to have something that had been so personal to his or her ancestor, and I determined to return the book to that surviving family member.
To do so, I had to get away from my computer and do some real-world sleuthing. Since both Anna Hubers, grandmother and granddaughter, had been buried in the East Petersburg Mennonite Cemetery, I decided to call the Mennonite church there. I first talked to an associate pastor, and told him that I was trying to trace a member of the Lefever family (Anna’s granddaughter’s married name). The pastor said that he’d only been at the church a year or so, but gave me the phone number of one of the ordained deacons, an older man whose family “went way back in the church.”
When I called the deacon, I told him the truth—that I was looking for the child of Isaac and Anna Lefever in order to return an item that had belonged to this person’s great-grandmother. He knew right away who I meant and gave me the name and phone number. I’ll refer to that person here as Rachel Lefever, not the actual name nor even necessarily the correct sex.
Briefly, I called Rachel and arranged to meet with her at her house. I was surprised that she was familiar with my name from my writing, not from my novels but from a Pennsylvania Dutch children’s book I had done as a lark a few years earlier.
Rachel lived on a quiet, tree-lined street in East Petersburg, a small town a few miles northwest of the city of Lancaster. She was in her late eighties, but seemed active and healthy. The house was old and lovingly kept up, and she told me it had been in the Lefever family for years, and that it was here that her great-grandmother was living when she passed away.
We sat in the charmingly old-fashioned parlor and I gave Rachel the book, for which she thanked me profusely. “I just wish my mother could see this,” she said, after she had read the inscriptions. “She kept so many things that were her grandma’s—just thought the world of her. I was born two years before she died, so I really don’t remember her, but Mama told me about her over and over, so many stories.”
“The obituary I read said that she had a lot of friends.”
“Oh my, yes. Mama said that there wasn’t anybody who didn’t like Granny Anna. She always said that she was such a help when people lost someone.”
“You mean died?” I asked.
“Yes. She would go visit them, and they always felt better, because she told them that their mother or father or whoever it was really was with Jesus. She really believed that, and she made them believe it. Mama said Granny Anna had the strongest faith of anyone she ever knew.”
I was liking “Granny Anna” more and more. “I wonder why that was,” I said.
“Well, Mama said that Granny Anna told her—told everyone —that she’d actually seen Jesus once. Way long ago, when she was a little girl.”
I smiled, thinking about the power of children’s imaginations. “And do you think she really did?”
“She thought so. She even drew a picture with Mama’s crayons, years later, from memory, I guess, or what she thought she remembered. I still have it— would you like to see?”
“Sure.”
Rachel went over to an antique secretary in the corner, took a manila envelope from a drawer, and brought it back to me. She slid the drawing out and placed it carefully into my hands. It had been folded and refolded many times. The paper was yellow, and the folds were tearing at the edges.
“Granny Anna told Mama she saw Jesus twice, when she was six or seven. One night she went into her little room to go to bed and he was standing there, just for a moment. She got scared because she thought it was a ghost, but the next night she said he had his arms out like when he was on the cross, and she knew it was Jesus then. She swore till her dying day that it wasn’t a dream, that she really did see him. And since she did, she knew it was all true, and that if we believed he would come and take us home when we die. And that was what she told folks.”
I heard Rachel’s words, but they didn’t immediately register. My attention was fixed on the crayon drawing in my hands. I’m sure you know what I saw. A primitive portrait of myself, lying on my back, arms spread out, just as I had been the second time I had seen what I had thought was my dream-image of Anna B. Huber.
The Jesus in her drawing had a Van Dyke rather than a full beard, short hair rather than long, and a small, x-shaped birthmark on his right shoulder. It was at least a minute before I could talk again, and Rachel called my name several times before I responded. “I’m sorry,” I said, then found one logical thought within my whirling mind. “Do you have…a photograph of your great-grandmother?”
“Oh yes,” Rachel said. “When she was old, though. It was a shame, but she never had a photo taken earlier—it would be so nice to have a wedding photo, but I guess they didn’t do that very much back then.”
Rachel led me to a framed photograph sitting on a bookcase. It was small, but I could see on the face of the gently smiling old woman the same narrow mouth and turned-up nose of the little girl who had hovered over my bed.
The Night Listener and Others Page 27