The Loveliest Dead

by Ray Garton

  A few minutes after ending her conversation with Kimberly, she was about to join Miles and Martha in the living room when the phone chirped. She turned around, went back into the kitchen, and answered it.

  “Jenna Kellar?” a woman said.

  “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “Donna Lopez, the Eureka Times-Standard.”

  “What?”

  “I’m calling about the story of a Dwayne Shattuck who says he was beaten up by a ghost in your house. Is that true?”

  “Look, um ... I’d rather you not write about this.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I don’t want... my family doesn’t want this kind of attention. Please don’t write about this. It’s really not a story, it’s—”

  “Wanda Bundy, a registered nurse in the ER at St. Joseph Hospital, called the police when Mr. Shattuck showed up badly beaten, and Mr. Shattuck told Officer Tom Mayhew of the Eureka Police Department that he was beaten up by a ghost in your living room. According to the report, Officer Mayhew talked to you, and you corroborated Mr. Shattuck’s story. You said, and I quote, ‘I saw it happen.’ It’s a matter of public record, Mrs. Kellar, and I’m writing the story. I’m just calling to see if you have any comment. Do you believe your house is haunted, Mrs. Kellar?”

  Jenna stood with her mouth open for a long moment before saying, “No, I have no comment.” She returned the phone to its base.

  As she stood with her hand on the phone, Jenna’s heart hammered. She could not decide what frightened her more—Dwayne’s warning about what he said was in the house, or the idea of being identified in the newspaper as “the people with the haunted house.” She imagined children picking on Miles at school because of the story. She would have to explain it all to David. Suddenly, Jenna felt exhausted.

  When Miles’s bedtime came, he asked again if he could sleep in her bed.

  “Okay,” she said, “but only for tonight.”

  Relief passed through Miles, and his entire body seemed to relax before her eyes. She told him to go clean up and brush his teeth, and she would be up in a while.

  Martha said good night and retreated to her bedroom down the hall.

  Jenna went through the house and turned off all the lights. By the time she got upstairs to her bedroom, Miles was already sound asleep.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Thursday, 2:42 A.M.

  Jenna sat up and listened. Had she been dreaming, or had she heard ... There it was again: children laughing, boys, in the backyard, and the shriek of the swing’s chains. They were back.

  She carefully got out of bed without disturbing Miles. She wore a long yellow cotton nightshirt that fell to her knees, with a giant panda on the front. Putting on David’s robe, she poked her feet into her slippers, then hurried down the hall. Halfway down the stairs, she faintly heard the music again. She stopped on the stairs and listened a moment to be sure.

  It’s not Josh, she thought.

  The plinking notes of Brahms’s “Lullaby” grew louder and clearer as she turned left at the bottom of the stairs and went down the hall. Light fell through the kitchen doorway, and the sound of Martha’s radio playing clashed with the delicate tune.

  Martha sat in the breakfast nook. She hummed quietly, head low, elbows on the tabletop, and hands pressed over her ears, eyes closed.

  As it had the last time she’d heard it, the music came from the laundry room—from behind the basement door.

  The laughter sounded just outside the window and the swings screeched. There was no wind blowing tonight.

  Jenna went to the back door. She turned on the porch light, picked up the flashlight, and went out on the porch. The flashlight sent a bar of light through the misty yard. After hurrying down the steps, she stalked through the weeds and passed the beam over the slide and the swings, all around the yard, and found no one. The swings swept back and forth on wobbly chains, as if just abandoned. But she could still hear them—their laughter was directly in front of her ... just behind her... to her left, her right. She stood in place and turned all the way around. There was no one there.

  In the damp night, Jenna was already cold, but the phantom laughter chilled her bones. She turned and went back toward the house. Before going up the porch steps, she turned around and aimed the flashlight out at the yard one more time.

  The laughter stopped and the light passed over empty eye sockets and rows of small teeth exposed by rotting flesh that had peeled back over the cheeks. The image of the group of dead, rotting boys lingered for a moment after they disappeared, like the visual echo of a camera’s flash after a snapshot is taken.

  In her eagerness to get into the house, Jenna tripped going up the steps and nearly fell through the door. She closed the door and locked the deadbolt. Still holding the shining flashlight, she turned to the laundry room. Brahms’s “Lullaby” still played from behind the basement door. She turned and looked at her mother in the breakfast nook at the other end of the kitchen. Martha’s head was still low, her hands still covering her ears, eyes closed. Jenna was not even sure if Martha had noticed her yet—it seemed Martha was trying hard to avoid noticing anything.

  In the laundry room, Jenna jerked the warped basement door open and shone the flashlight down the stairs. The light shivered ahead of her as her hands trembled, and she could feel her heart throbbing in her throat. She took a few steps down and shot the beam over the rail, down into the basement.

  The twinkling music was clear, coming from the filthy old teddy bear lying facedown on the dirt floor. The tarnished key in its back turned slowly.

  I shouldn’t have been able to hear that from the stairs, she thought. It’s not loud enough to be heard beyond the basement door.

  She moved the beam through the small basement, over the stacked boxes and crates and bags. Jenna half expected to see the little boy with the hooded jacket—

  Mommy—

  It’s not Josh.

  —but there was no one down there.

  The teddy bear’s music gradually slowed to a stop as Jenna’s flashlight fell on the bear again. David had said he wanted it to stay in the basement, but Jenna found herself wanting to rescue the poor old toy. It might have been the tune it played—Brahms’s “Lullaby” conjured pleasant memories of a gurgling infant Josh. Jenna carefully made her way down the stairs. She heard a small clicking sound and stopped halfway down to listen.

  Ticka-ticka-ticka-tick. Ticka-ticka-ticka-tick.

  Jenna tipped the flashlight to the right, over the rail, and back and forth through the basement.

  Ticka-ticka-ticka-tick. Ticka-ticka-ticka-tick.

  It was a tiny, insignificant sound, so she ignored it and continued down the stairs to the basement’s dirt floor. She turned right and found the bear with the flashlight. A moment after the beam landed on the bear, it began to play Brahms’s “Lullaby” again, clearly and at a faster pace than it had been playing earlier. She watched the key turn slowly in the bear’s back. Jenna realized the sound she’d heard on the way down had been the key being wound up.

  Her knees bent and she reached down with her left hand to pick up the bear. A large fleshy hand closed on her wrist, cold and powerful, and Jenna sucked in a breath as she reflexively stepped backward, still clutching the teddy bear. As she moved, the light sliced across a fat belly stretching a dirty T-shirt, flanked by an open denim vest, flashed up over a white, forward-tilted cowboy hat. She swung the long, heavy flashlight like a club, but it connected with nothing. The hand on her wrist was gone and there was no one standing in front of her.

  “Get outta here,” a low, whispered voice said from the darkness to her left. “You got no business down here.”

  As Jenna hurried clumsily backward to the stairs, the light found him standing among the stacked boxes and crates, but the beam bounced around as she got onto the stairs. There he was again, standing near the foot of the stairs. Each time the flashlight’s beam fell on him, he melted away like paper-thin ice in the hot sun.


  Still holding the teddy bear in her left hand, she stopped a third of the way up the stairs and passed the light through the basement. He was gone. She continued up. Jenna felt the cold, fat hand close on her bare ankle as the low, gravelly voice said, “Fuckin’ women.”

  She pulled her foot away without effort and ran the rest of the way up the stairs, screaming. She slammed the basement door shut with the weight of her body and dropped the Mag-Lite on the laundry room floor.

  You can’t believe anything you see or hear in your own house, Ada had said of living with a poltergeist.

  That was no poltergeist, Dwayne Shattuck had said. You’ve gotta get your family outta this house.

  Martha had heard Jenna scream—she stood in the middle of the kitchen now, jaw slack. Jenna was on the verge of hyperventilating as she embraced Martha. She stood like that for a while and forced herself to calm down. Martha’s shoulders hitched, and Jenna realized she was sobbing.

  “Mom, what’s wrong?” she said as she pulled back.

  Martha’s lips collapsed into her mouth because she wasn’t wearing her dentures. Tears sparkled on her cheeks. “Did you see them?” Martha asked.

  “See what?”

  “The boys?”

  Jenna flinched. “You’ve seen the boys?”

  Words tumbled out of her between sobs, and she leaned heavily against Jenna. “Every night. I can’t take it anymore, Jenna. They’re in so much pain, they’re crying, I can tell, but I can’t hear them, they don’t make any sound. I can only see them in the dark, so I turn the light on, but even then, I still know they’re there.”

  “Mom, calm down. Come back over here and sit down.” Jenna led her back to the breakfast nook and they sat down side by side. Jenna put the teddy bear on the table. It still played its song, slow and labored now, nearing its end, while the radio played upbeat big-band music. She stroked Martha’s back until the sobs receded. “Who’s crying, Mom? Who’s in pain?”

  “The boys in my room. At night. Hanging on the walls and strapped to chairs. Young boys. Naked and bony, like they’ve been starved.”

  Jenna was still calming down from her scare in the basement and needed a moment to process what Martha was saying. She stared with wide eyes at her mother for several seconds. “Why didn’t you tell me about this before, Mom?”

  “You mean ... you believe me?”

  “Mom, if you only knew the things I’ve been seeing. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was afraid you’d think I was losing my mind and you’d wanna ... put me in a home.” She sobbed again, and Jenna held her close for a while.

  “There’s no way I’m going to put you in a home, Mother. Do you understand? No way. I admit, I thought you were a little confused at first when you saw those kids in the backyard, but it turned out you were right. I’m sorry I doubted you. You should’ve told me sooner, Mom. I’ve seen them, too. For a while, I thought I was seeing Josh.”

  “Oh, no, honey,” Martha said, “it’s not Josh. I don’t know what it is, but I see ‘em in my room every night when I turn the lights out. So I don’t turn the lights out anymore. But tonight the bulbs in my overhead went out and it got so cold in the room all of a sudden, and I could see them struggling and crying even worse than usual, and I had to get out of there.”

  “You don’t have to go back in there. You can sleep on the couch until we figure out some other arrangement. Okay?”

  Martha nodded against Jenna’s shoulder. “I don’t want to go back to bed just yet, though,” she said, pulling away. “I think I’ll fix a hot drink and do some reading. Would you get my glasses, honey? I don’t want to go back in there. And while you’re there, grab the glass beside my bed. It’s got my teeth in it.”

  Jenna left the kitchen and went down the hall to Martha’s room. She reached for the doorknob, but hesitated when she remembered what Martha had seen in there. She considered going back for the flashlight, which she realized she’d left on the laundry room floor still shining. Instead, she went to the foot of the staircase, flipped the wall switch, and turned on the hall light. An old mirror with a dark walnut frame hung on the wall near Martha’s bedroom door, and Jenna paused to look at her reflection. Her eyes were puffy from sleep and she looked tired, but she saw something else in her face—fear.

  When she opened the bedroom door, light spilled into the bedroom and over the bed. From the doorway, she could see Martha’s glasses, and her teeth in a glass of water on the stand beside the bed.

  Jenna entered the room and went to the bedstand, picked up the glasses in one hand, the glass holding the teeth in the other, and turned back. For a fraction of a second, she thought she saw movement on the walls in the darkness, beyond the light cast into the room from the hallway. She stopped and squinted into the dark. All she saw were the still-bare walls of Martha’s bedroom. She hurried out and pulled the door closed behind her.

  Martha had put the kettle on the stove and was dropping a tea bag into an empty mug when Jenna came back into the kitchen.

  “Come here and talk to me, Mom.” Jenna went to the breakfast nook and put Martha’s things on the table. She went to the laundry room and got the flashlight, turned it off, and put it in its spot beside the back door. She sat down at the table across from Martha, who had taken her usual seat.

  Martha took the upper plate from the glass, put it into her mouth, then shook water from her hand. She held a wadded-up paper towel in one hand with which she dabbed her eyes before putting on her glasses.

  The radio played “Harlem Nocturne” through patches of static.

  “How long have you been seeing this?” Jenna asked.

  “Almost since we moved in. It started right after I saw those kids in the backyard.”

  “Has it been getting... worse?”

  “Yes. At first, I only got glimpses of them in the dark now and then ... hanging from the wall, or strapped into that awful high chair. But now, they’re always there.”

  “How old are these boys?”

  “It’s different boys each time. The youngest are maybe four or five. The oldest are probably Miles’s age.”

  When the kettle began to whistle, Martha got up and made her tea.

  “How much do you know about this house, Mom?”

  “What makes you think I know anything about it?” she said. “All I know is that Leonard was raised here, and he came back to live with his parents after we broke up in Redding. Far as I know, he took care of them until they died, and—”

  “I know that part. You don’t know anything else?”

  Martha returned to the table with her tea. “Honey, I told you before, once Lenny left Redding, I never saw nor heard from him again, and I made no effort to keep in touch. Once every few years, I’d hear from a friend of a friend that he was still living here in his parents’ place. To be honest, hon, it wasn’t like we were madly in love or anything. He was an exterminator, and we met when he came in at work one night to spray the place for bugs during the graveyard shift. He made me laugh. He made all of us laugh. He was too shy to ask me out, so I asked him. We went out a couple times. We were only... together... once. If you want to know the truth, he wasn’t all that good. He was like a little boy, like it was his first time. It might’ve been, for all I know, but he was a man of forty-something, I expected him to have some experience. I was the inexperienced one, even as old as I was. I was in my late thirties at the time. Your mother was never popular with men, honey, and the few men I was popular with weren’t very popular with me, if you get my meaning. I learned that the hard way with a few unpleasant relationships. After those, I stopped trying.”

  Jenna smiled. “You’ve never told me this much before.”

  “Well, you’re all grown up now. We haven’t talked about this since you were a teenager, and I sure wasn’t about to tell you all this stuff then.”

  Jenna found herself laughing quietly. One of the reasons she got along with her mother so well was that Martha could always make her
laugh, make her feel better.

  The squeal of the swing’s chains rose in the stillness outside, and her smile fell away as she turned to the window. Its expanse of blackness reflected Jenna and Martha and the kitchen. When she heard the boys’ laughter outside, Jenna saw fear spread over her reflection.

  “Do you hear them?” Jenna whispered.

  “I hear them every night. Sometimes during the day, too. I don’t look out the windows anymore.” She turned the radio’s volume up a little, then sipped her tea.

  Jenna remembered the hideous faces the flashlight had illuminated outside—empty eye sockets and rotting skin. There were no boys playing in the backyard—she knew that. And yet she could hear the swings screeching and the boys laughing. She turned away from the window and tried to ignore the nagging suspicion that the boys were out there staring in at her.

  “Who was the man in the living room with the beat-up face?” Martha asked. “Did he have something to do with this?”

  She told Martha everything, from the first time she saw the hooded toddler in the upstairs hallway to the incident in the living room with Dwayne Shattuck, and everything that had happened since she’d gotten out of bed twenty minutes earlier.

  “Jenna, honey, you should’ve come to me with this before,” Martha said.

  Jenna shook her head slowly. “You’ve always been so practical, so down-to-earth about everything. I didn’t think you’d believe something like this.”

  Martha put her hand on Jenna’s arm and whispered, “Look, if getting old has taught me anything, it’s that I don’t know squat about nothin’. That nightmare in my bedroom ... it took a few nights for me to convince myself I was really seeing it and wasn’t just going batty. Put that together with everything you just told me, and I’d say there’s something in this house besides the four of us.”

  Something already disturbed it, Dwayne Shattuck had said.

  Jenna said, “The attorney told us that Leonard never remarried, but do you think he had other children?”

  “Not that I know of. Why?”