Instead of Three Wishes: Magical Short Stories

by Megan Whalen Turner

  The foreman led them out onto the factory floor. One by one, he dropped employees at their workstations until only John was left. Then he led the way to a ladder that climbed up one wall until it disappeared into a catwalk near the roof. John craned his head back to see what he could make of the machinery up there but didn’t look long. It hurt his neck and made his stomach feel peculiar. He looked back down when the foreman began talking.

  “I understand your psych profile says you enjoy working by yourself, and you’re not afraid of heights. Normally you’d be trained by someone who works these cranes every day, but the last operator walked off the job without giving notice, and I can’t spare one of the lower crane workers to break you in. Fortunately, I worked this crane and every other at Gerwinks. Used to be a high crane man before I was promoted. I’m pretty sure I remember the important stuff. We only use the big crane once or twice a day, so you should have plenty of time to figure out anything you need to know, and the rest of the shift will go easy on you for a bit. Any questions before we climb up?”

  John had only one question. “That guy, the one that used to work the crane, he quit?” John had never heard of anyone quitting a job.

  “Yeah, he said he got bored up there. Said he was lonely.” The foreman shrugged.

  Someone behind one of the surrounding machines called out, “Why didn’t he just admit he was afraid of ghosts?”

  The foreman looked in the unidentified workman’s direction. John didn’t hear him say anything, but the man at the machine turned quickly back to his work.

  The foreman turned back to John. “Let’s get started,” he said, and began to climb the ladder.

  The operation of the big crane was simple, but it responded slowly to instructions and so took some skill to operate. After the first few times up and down the ladder, the height ceased to bother John, and after the first week or so he was no longer winded and puffing when he finished his climb. This and one other thing seemed to prove the validity of his psych profile. John was entitled to one fifteen-minute coffee break every two hours, and a half-hour food break twice a day. But even after a month of building his muscles on the never-ending ladder, John couldn’t get down from the crane and back up in less than eleven minutes. On coffee breaks, that left him four minutes to spend in the employee break room before he had to head back up to work. So he didn’t climb down for his breaks and only rarely climbed down for the nineteen minutes he could grab at lunch. He didn’t mind the lack of company, he preferred to be alone, but he missed the hot coffee. He went to the employee store to find a thermos. The shop girl was expecting him.

  “Is it a thermos you’re looking for?”

  “Yes, it is, how did you know?”

  “Well, I’d heard that there was a new man on the high crane, and every new man gets a thermos so he can take his breaks up top.”

  “Every one? Have you seen many people in this job?”

  “Oh, yeah, three or four. Nobody lasts long. They claim that they get lonely up there, but if they weren’t loners, they wouldn’t have gotten the job in the first place. It’s the ghosts.” John wanted her to explain, but a look from her boss silenced her. John took his thermos and went back to work.

  With a thermos and a boxed lunch, John was very happy. Once a week, he would check books out of the factory library and carry them in a pack up to the crane. During his fifteen-minute breaks, he would stretch out on the catwalk with a book and a cup of coffee, reading and sipping until a buzzer summoned him back to work. On the longer lunch breaks, he liked to climb to a particular alcove formed by crossing I beams and settle in for a longer read. So far above the factory floor, the noises of the individual machines and the shouts of the workers below were softened and provided a pleasant background. John felt he was in a world of his own.

  For the first time, he had a little privacy to think his own thoughts. He didn’t need to worry about what the Matron might discern from the expressions on his face. There was no one to bother him, no one to interrupt his reading as he paged through book after book.

  “Excuse me. Excuse me.” The voice repeated itself several times before John realized that high above the rest of the world someone was talking to him. He looked up. Standing with her hands on her hips and her head tilted forward was a girl with long dark hair. She was wearing a shapeless blue sweater and lighter blue pants. Her legs disappeared into the iron grille of the catwalk just above the ankles. John swallowed and gripped the covers of his book tightly. He continued staring at those feet, or anyway at the catwalk where the feet should be, until the girl said, “Excuse me,” again in an exasperated voice. John wasn’t sure how many times she’d said it already, but he suspected quite a few.

  “Yes?” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “You’re sitting on my book. Could you move for a moment?”

  “Uh, sure.” John crabbed sideways about two feet. Away from the girl.

  “Thank you,” she said, “I don’t like to reach through people in order to get things.” She leaned forward and stuck out a hand. For just a second, John saw a book in that hand, and then she was gone.

  That afternoon, John climbed down the ladder to eat his lunch in the employee break room. He looked around for a familiar face, and when he saw one he recognized, he went and sat down beside it. John had little experience in opening conversations, so he ate his lunch in silence. Only when he thought the other man might leave without saying anything at all did John begin.

  “You, uh, you said something when I first started work, didn’t you? Something about the guy who worked before me being afraid of ghosts.”

  “Oh,” the man replied. “Are you the new guy on the high crane?”

  John nodded.

  “Yeah, I saw the guy come down from the crane one day, white as a sheet. The next day he didn’t show up for work. The factory said he got bored and quit, but we all figured he’d seen a ghost.”

  A woman across the table heard the man and looked up. She smiled at John. “The factory does not believe in ghosts,” she said. “No one is supposed to mention them.” But she encouraged the man to tell the story. Other employees around them leaned closer. Ghost stories around the lunch table were too entertaining to be prevented by factory policy.

  Many years before, the city had been smaller. At its outer fringes were green spaces, public parks, and private estates. As the city grew, the green spaces disappeared, the parks were rezoned, and the estates were absorbed in lieu of taxes owed to the government. Only one open space remained.

  “Before this factory stood on this piece of land, there was a preserve here,” the machine operator began. “Owned by a family named Gerwinks. They had a big house on a hill in the middle of it and all around was trees and bushes and grass. There was a wall that kept the rest of the world out, and inside the wall there was supposed to be animals like rabbits and squirrels and things that hadn’t been seen in the city for years. One day a bunch of businessmen came to see Old Man Gerwinks and said they wanted to buy the land. He said no. They kept offering more money, and he kept saying no. Well, lo and behold, one day Old Man Gerwinks gets smooshed by a truck right outside his own front gates. Too bad, bad brakes on the truck. Such a tragic accident.

  “The businessmen go to Mrs. Gerwinks. They say how sorry they are about her husband and would she like to sell the property? Mrs. Gerwinks was tougher than they expected. She says no, just like the old man. So the businessmen went to the government and said that the land was going to waste. It shouldn’t be allowed. If the land had a factory on it, the factory would make money and provide jobs, jobs people needed. So the government changed some laws and told Mrs. Gerwinks to sell.

  “The old widow went to court. She said the land was special. She thought that anyone who wanted should be able to walk through the park. But the court told her that people didn’t need grass and trees—they needed more buildings. The court told her she had to move. But the businessmen assured her that everyone would
remember her husband because they would call the new factory the Gerwinks building.

  “The judge gave the widow and her family until the end of the week to move out. She told the judge she intended to live and die in that house and nothing he said had changed her mind. She would live in it forever. She went home and locked the gates behind her.

  “The bulldozers showed up on schedule Monday morning. Nobody had seen any sign that the family had moved out. The bulldozers rolled right through the gates and up the hill to the house, and that’s where they found them.” The man paused again in his monologue and took a sip of coffee.

  “Found them?” John prompted, though he could guess the end of the story.

  “All of them,” the man said. “The whole family. The widow and her kids and her brother and his kids. She’d poisoned everybody who lived in the house, and they were all dead.”

  There was silence at the table. For a moment the noise of other employees in the lunchroom seemed very far away.

  “Then what happened?” John asked.

  The machine operator looked at John in surprise. He lifted his coffee cup and waved it at the walls around him. “What do you think happened, son? They buried those people and tore down that house and flattened the trees and stuck up this big old factory, and that’s why we all have jobs and make money and aren’t living somewhere in a doorway.”

  “But the ghosts come back,” another employee insisted. “Every time there’s been an accident with the machines somebody says they saw the widow Gerwinks come back to check on her property.”

  “My cousin works in the south factory, and she swears she saw two kids chasing a ball down an aisle,” said another. “A week later a water pipe broke and the works were flooded for three days.”

  “But nobody admits to seeing the ghosts anymore,” someone warned John. “People who do lose their jobs.”

  The machine operator put his coffee cup down and got to his feet. “Now,” he said, “it is time to go back to those jobs, before the foreman comes looking for us.”

  Too late, John noticed the foreman sitting across the crowded room, looking at the cluster of employees. The group dissolved as each person hurried back to work, but the foreman’s eyes remained on John. As John headed for the door, the foreman rose from his table and met him on the way.

  “I’d like a word with you,” he said, and walked with John back to the base of the ladder to the high crane. When they reached the ladder, the foreman took his arm.

  “The factory doesn’t like to hear too much talk about things it doesn’t believe in. Contrary to what you may have heard, the factory has never found a single problem caused by ghosts. So if you meet any ectoplasmic spirits up there in the high crane, I suggest you be polite and they’ll probably be polite right back. You’re up there alone for fourteen hours a day, and you might find it’s nice to have someone to talk to.”

  John started back up to work wondering if the foreman believed or didn’t believe in the haunting. For the rest of the day and the rest of the week, John watched for another visitation, but as far as he could tell, he was alone above the factory floor. Each morning on his way in, the foreman picked him out of the rest of the shiftworkers and nodded a greeting.

  It was ten days before John saw his ghost girl again. This time he saw her from the crane’s cab as he floated by, ferrying a broken press to the repair shop. He couldn’t stop, couldn’t even slow down the crane. He just turned his head slowly and stared until she was hidden by the I beams of the alcove she haunted. She was floating eighteen inches above the catwalk, sitting with her feet stretched in front of her, reading a book. She never looked up.

  After that, John saw her almost every day. Always in the same place, the alcove formed by crossing roof supports. Always she was reading. John couldn’t make out what book. He no longer ate his lunch there, but he found excuses to send the crane by in the early afternoon. Rolling silently on the rails that crisscrossed the roof, he could watch for her from a safe distance. Once he saw her rising up through the catwalk as if she were climbing invisible stairs, holding a book open in front of her while she climbed. As much as he saw her, she never seemed to see him.

  John thought, as he drifted along the roof, of the foreman’s advice. Be polite. Maybe they’ll be polite back. John had read more books since he started work at G-P than he had in his entire life. Reading the books was a luxury he would never grow tired of, but it would be nice to have someone to talk to, someone else who liked to read. When he had screwed up his courage, he walked over during a lunch break.

  “Uh, hello.”

  The girl looked up in surprise. She put the book she was reading down beside her and it disappeared. John stood silent, tongue-tied by terror or shyness.

  The girl continued to look up at him. “Did you want something?”

  John swallowed and stammered, “Well, no. It’s just that I’ve seen you here reading and I thought I’d, well, that it would, I mean, I just wanted to say hello. To be polite.”

  “That is very, very polite of you. Shall we introduce ourselves?”

  “My name is John.”

  “My name is Edwina. It’s nice to meet you, John.” She smiled at him, and John felt the terror, or the shyness, whichever it was, break into pieces and disappear as if it had fallen through the catwalk at his feet. When she asked if there was something in particular he might like to talk about, now that they were introduced, John had an answer ready.

  “What are you reading?”

  It was a book by a man named John Muir. John had never heard of him, but Edwina said they were very interesting essays on nature. John was just promising to look them up in the library when the buzzer sounded, calling him back to work. Edwina told him to stop in and see her again the next day.

  John looked for her during his next shift but didn’t see her. It was the day after that that she was sitting in her usual place looking like a statue as well as a ghost. She moved only to flip the pages in her book.

  She looked up and smiled when John said hello.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here yesterday after all. I was busy all day chasing dust balls with a mop. I’ve been here for hours today, though. Have you been busy or have you been ignoring me to teach me a lesson?”

  “Neither,” said John, “I’ve only seen you here for the last few minutes. I radioed down that I was going on break and came right over. You weren’t here before.”

  “Strictly speaking,” she said, “I’m not here now. At least I am in my here, but not your here.”

  “Exactly where are you,” John collected up enough nerve to ask, “if you are not here?”

  “Where is here, you mean?” she asked. “Here in deadland, in ghostdom, in limbo?”

  “Is it, uh, heaven?” John asked, thinking back to his rudimentary instruction in religion.

  “If it is,” said the girl with a laugh, “it’s everything it should be, but severely underpopulated. There’s just us: Mother and Uncle Tim, and Todd and Eunice, and Richie and Alex and Angela and me. I never thought of heaven as being quite this exclusive. Is it your idea of heaven?”

  “I don’t know enough about it to say,” said John, referring to his scant information on heaven, but the girl, Edwina, took him to mean her home.

  “Sit down,” she said, “and I’ll tell you about it. You’re the first nice ghost to come along in years and years.”

  Edwina described the house she lived in with her mother and uncle, her sister and sister’s husband, her brother, Richie, and her cousins, Alex and Angela. The house she lived in was exactly the same as it had been just before the demolition team arrived. The days passed and the seasons changed, but year after year the house was exactly the same.

  “And we have the mythical never-empty wallet of food as well,” Edwina explained. “As often as we take a cup of flour from its canister, a fresh cup takes its place. We have as much of everything now as we had when we started being dead.”

  John choked on his
lunch. Edwina continued, “But we never have anything new, of course. Mother shopped very carefully, right up to the last, but even back then there were things you couldn’t get easily. Chocolate, for instance. We’ve gone years and years without a taste of chocolate. I think the boys might have forgotten what it tastes like, but I still dream about it.”

  “Nothing ever changes? Not at all?”

  “Oh, some things. Little things,” said Edwina. “Mother has a stack of flower bulbs in the shed, and every year she plants them in a different pattern. We move the furniture around from time to time, but it always gets moved back eventually. Once there was a man who read poetry aloud, and I wrote it down. But that’s the only new thing to come into our world since we died.

  “And we never get any older. Richie and Alex will always be ten. My sister and Todd will always be newlyweds. Angela will always be two. And I will always be the only one with no one my own age to talk to.”

  “You have me to talk to,” pointed out John.

  Edwina smiled. “You aren’t afraid to talk to a ghost?”

  “Not at all.” John realized the truth as he said it.

  “Then I’ll meet you here every day and you can tell me about all the books you have in your world that I don’t have in mine. Do you read poetry?”

  The room that Edwina saw when she sat and read was an attic. It was at the top of the house, which had stood on the top of a hill, and this was the only part of the house that reached as high as the roof of the factory. If he concentrated very hard, John found he could see the old chaise lounge that Edwina sat on, and in the mist he could see the room around her, the bare floorboards, and the curtains covering the window behind her. He saw them most clearly when Edwina read to him.