This time I am not dreaming.
I manage to grab my coat and boots from the hall outside my door and flee the apartment into the night. They drive me, their roars echoing in the streets. They call to each other, herd me toward the subway station with snorts and gnashed teeth. I barely make the last inbound train, and sit alone in a car in my boots, sweatpants, and a t-shirt. Outside, they gallop and lunge, thudding against the windows. A shod hoof smashes at my face and cracks the Lexan. I change to the Green Line and emerge again at North Station. No one sees the horses but me. If I try to move in any direction but toward the park they rear and block my path. I hurry down Causeway toward the water.
* * *
I am back on Commercial Street, but not the one I know. It takes me a minute to get oriented. The park is gone, replaced by the elevated train, the city paving yard, and piers. The street is covered with rail tracks. Stevedores and carters load horse carts with heavy barrels and crates. The air is heavy with the smell of coal smoke, manure, and the metallic tang of blood from the slaughterhouse. Underneath it all is a deep and permeating scent that is overwhelmingly cloying. The neighborhood is busy with activity. Italian women hang their laundry from tenement windows in the hazy air. A group of children walk home from school on the sidewalk.
Ahead stands the brick facade of the Purity Distilling Company. It is dwarfed by an enormous brown steel tank, taller even than the elevated tracks of the Atlantic Avenue line. It must be nearly fifty feet tall and a hundred across. There is a rumble and I look for the train that must be coming down the track but there isn’t one. People pause in the street, unsure of where the sound is coming from. The rumble becomes the groan of straining metal, the machine-gun popping of steel rivets. With a thunderous explosion, the steel plates of the tank give way and a massive, ponderous wave of dark brown syrup courses from the ruptured vessel. It expands outward, tearing down the buildings of the paving yard and twisting the steel uprights supporting the train tracks. The wave washes across Commercial Street, eight feet high, impossibly fast yet languid at the same time and breaks against the tenements at the base of Copp’s Hill. Within minutes the whole area is a thickening pool of dark brown liquid filled with debris and bodies. It is over my knees. I wipe it from my face and taste molasses. It is everywhere. In every direction, it looks like the aftermath of a storm surge from a hurricane. Buildings lie in sticky ruin, or in half collapse, torn from their foundation. I cannot see the children in their school clothes.
Forms struggle in the congealing mass, impossible to tell if they are men or women, or even human beneath the surface. And, above it all, I hear the horses screaming. They have been torn from their harnesses and ripped from their carts. They flail and thrash, struggle to regain their footing on broken legs, but they cannot. It is a swamp and it pulls them under. I try to help, to grab one by its bridle and pull it up but it is too heavy and the molasses too thick. I can do nothing. Across the yard, dark figures roll and reach up, a hand or hoof breaks the surface and then submerges again. The horse before me snorts and tries to blow thick brown foam from its nostrils but it is filling up. The weight of the molasses presses on its ribs. I can see the scars of lash marks on its back beneath the sweetness. It chokes. Its lungs fill. Its eyes are deep and brown and filled with terror that it cannot voice. I tell it that it will be o.k. and tears run down my face. I slouch down in the mire and stroke its sticky head while it dies. Around me, I can hear more horses crying out for help, but I cannot reach them. My hand is covered with a mass of hair and syrup. Chicken feathers from a crushed slaughterhouse float gently in the air like snowflakes.
People come. Firemen, locals. They try to pull the people from the swamp, but the horses remain glued in place. The last one moving is a powerful draft horse, perhaps a bay beneath the treacle but impossible to say. It turns laboriously, hitched to the Catherine Wheel of its dead harness-mate in a tangle of reins and straps, with a splintered yoke between them. It circles the corpse of the other horse in a sluggish orbit until it can no longer move and, finally, settles slowly into the mire. By the time the sun begins to set, men start to shoot the horses that remain alive until the screaming stops.
They are all dead. Dozens of them.
They are all dead, now.
* * *
The vision of the flood recedes through the sepia of old photos and then I am back at the jobsite. The crowded tenements, the elevated train, and the ruins are all gone. The park, quiet and beautiful against the water in the night, remains.
The horses remain as well. Vaporous forms in the streetlights, their breath steams, and steam rises from their lathered backs. They stand in a loose semicircle, eyes rolling. I try to move to the side but they snort and rear, and press me back. I scuttle along the sidewalk in shaking hesitant steps, afraid of what revenge they intend to take upon me. They pin me up against a low stone wall by the entrance to the bocce courts, standing over me, hooves stomping against the concrete, echoing into the night. It is strangely quiet for the city, other than the sounds of the horses. They part, and another human is backed against the wall with me. It is O’Brien. He is wearing pajamas and his face is ashen. He mumbles prayers to Saint Mary and doesn’t respond to me. I see, behind him, a green plaque against the wall, and press against his shoulder until he slides over. I read it and then gesture for him to read it too.
Boston Molasses Flood
On January 15, 1919, a molasses tank at 529
Commercial Street exploded under press-
sure, killing 21 people. A 40-foot wave of
molasses buckled the elevated railroad tracks,
crushed buildings and inundated the neigh-
borhood. Structural defects in the tank com-
bined with unseasonably warm temperatures
contributed to the disaster.
-The Bostonian Society
These are the other victims of the flood. In their lives, they were harnessed and bound. Whipped, cursed and misused. They were not buried or mourned. They were sold for glue or dogmeat. Shot, rendered, and consigned to nothingness, nearly a hundred years ago.
They are not seeking revenge for our disturbing this place.
They, too, want to be remembered.
“The horseshoe,” I say.
O’Brien nods.
* * *
Under their watchful eyes, we move back to the hole we filled in the day before. We don’t have the keys to the backhoe, so we dig with our shaking hands in the muddy fill. Some stand in a ring around us while others tramp restlessly in field and the street, sighing and groaning.
“We find that goddamned thing, I’m gonna weld it to the cab of the backhoe, right on front there,” O’Brien says. I can only nod numbly.
We are fortunate that it is not buried deeply. I find it packed beneath crushed coffee cups and cigarette packages.
“I got it. I got it,” I say. I stand up and hold it high over my head so they can see. “See? We won’t throw it away again. I promise.”
A fog has come in from the ocean, softening the noises and edges of the city. The horses move again. They whinny and nicker across the fields, rearing and cantering freely. I can hear their voices as they echo away into the streets of the North End and disappear. They are gone now, and me and O’Brien shiver at the edge of the dirt pile in the dark, the horseshoe on the ground between us.
“Hey, Boss?” I say. “We got, what, four hours before work? You think maybe it’d be all right if I called in sick and got some sleep?”
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s a good idea. Think I will too. Biggs can run the site.”
“I never seen anything like that before,” I say. O’Brien shakes his head absently and stares across the street. He feels his pockets for a cigarette and comes up empty. I fish a pack from my coat, light up two and pass him one. A Boston PD cruiser passes slowly by and I give an easy wave. He drives on as if two guys smoking on a dirt pile by a hole on Commercial Street in the rain is perfectly normal. Maybe
it is. It’s more normal that what I’ve been doing since we first broke ground down here.
“Ghost horses. Fuck,” O’Brien says finally. “How do you like them apples?”
Everything Smells Like
Smoke Again
Curtis M. Lawson
December 12th
He’s dead. Eric’s worried because I didn’t cry. I overheard him talking to the boys, telling them that I’m keeping a stiff upper lip. That’s not it, though. Truthfully, this has been a long time coming, and he doesn’t deserve my tears. That well ran dry long ago, and mostly because of him.
Do I feel a tad abnormal about my callousness? It’s fucked up I suppose, but not as much as Eric must think. He can’t really comprehend what it was like for me, growing up the daughter of addicts. His childhood wasn’t perfect, but it was normal; vacations, family game nights, never finding suicide notes and empty pill bottles.
Eric and I are from different worlds. My in-laws, the people he grew up with, are wonderful, and I love them, but their stability has always left me feeling out of place. The way they have their shit together — it feels alien and untrustworthy.
Still, after fifteen years of holidays with them, anxiety swells inside me as I wait for things to go sideways at every get-together. I look at Eric’s dad and wonder how many beers he’s had and if this will be the one that pushes him over the line from buzzed to monstrous. I wait for my mother-in-law to take some off-the-cuff comment the wrong way and send Christmas dinner whizzing past my head. It never happens. I know it will never happen. Still, that fear persists.
It’s the same with Eric, himself. My husband is a caring and hardworking man. He’s not a drinker, or a party guy, or a skirt chaser. Despite him proving his worth over fifteen years of marriage, I get a knot in my stomach if he’s late from work. I feel sick when he catches the occasional buzz. Jealousy and insecurity overcome my heart if he mentions some female colleague too many times. Not once has the man ever given me cause to doubt him, but when the floor falls out from under you for eighteen years straight you learn to tread lightly.
It’s over now. Dad’s dead. To be fair he’d had one foot in the grave since Mom passed. After her death he quit partying and abandoned street narcotics, more fully embracing his pedestrian, solitary addictions. Cigarettes, pain pills, and nostalgia mostly. I can think of maybe two times in the decade-plus since Mom died that he’d left his depressing little subsidized apartment for anything other than a trip to the dollar store or the packie.
I suppose I could have been a better daughter. Yes, I could have reached out and been a shoulder to cry on. The kids were young though, and Eric and I were building our own life — a healthy life for the family I had chosen, rather than the one which fate had burdened me with. My father wasn’t going to ruin that with his depression and addictions. Enough of my life had been compromised for him. I wouldn’t allow him to take what I’d built for myself.
When he started getting sick last year, really sick as opposed to his normal state of perpetual unhealth, Eric suggested he come to live with us. I shot the idea down straightaway. Sure, I dreaded the thought of being around him, but that wasn’t it. There were also the kids to consider. I didn’t want them to see him sitting there day after day, popping pills and smoking butts, waiting for the reaper.
In addition to his habits and addictions there was also just... him. His backward, victim mentality and that acidic anger born of insecurity. How could I let his noxious, woe is me world-view infect their minds? To Dad, nothing was ever his fault. He was destitute because he had “been dealt a losing hand,” not because he burned every dollar he could have saved. His poor health was part of that same unlucky draw, and certainly had nothing to do with the abuse he’d put his body through. Even when Mom died, he blamed everything from God, to fate, to poor health insurance; but never the shitty life decisions the two of them made. I couldn’t let my kids grow up around that, thinking it was normal.
Is there a level of guilt for letting him wallow in the purgatory he’d built around himself? I suppose. We all make our own beds.
December 13
I couldn’t sleep last night. After the kids had gone to bed, and Eric turned in for the night, I lay awake thinking about my father’s lifeless face, framed by the funerary upholstery of his casket.
There is a level of surrealness at any funeral, staring down at a corpse that looks like an amateur wax museum replica of a loved one. The subtleties of their complexion are off just enough to make you doubt the legitimacy of the body. That one-size-fits-all expression of peace. The whole thing conjures thoughts of body snatchers and doppelgängers.
It was with such ideas in my head that I smelled smoke drift into my bedroom. Not the smoke from a stove left on, or an electrical fire in the walls, but the distinct smell of burning tobacco.
I didn’t smoke and neither did Eric. We never had. I wondered if one of the kids might be dumb enough to take up such a filthy habit, and in the house nonetheless. My nose crinkled as I rose from bed to investigate.
Our room was next to the boys’. I poked my head in to check on them and sniffed at the air. I could still smell the smoke, but not any stronger than I had from my own bed. Both Kyle and Georgie lay fast asleep, the funeral having been emotionally exhausting for them as well.
I turned and followed the smell down the hall, across the checkerboard tiles of our kitchen. It was dark and still. Neither the stove nor the oven were alight. Visible in the darkness, a trail of pale smoke snaked across the threshold, beckoning me into the living room.
Moonlight from the December sky poured through the open curtains, lending an otherworldly glow to the smoke, which terminated a few feet above the couch. Marla, our dog, growled low and glared at the wispy cloud. Her tail was tucked between her legs, and hackles stood up like a porcupine’s quills.
I searched between the cushions, looking for a burning ember of...something. Nothing was there. I placed my hands over the outlets, feeling for heat. More nothing.
A glowing dot of orange formed in the air — an angry little pixie — then faded away. A fresh puff of smoke followed the disappearance of the glow. Ashes from the burning nothing floated to the hardwood floor.
Not believing what I was seeing, I knelt down and pressed my finger into the gray soot. It was warm to the touch, and left a charcoal smear across my fingertip.
Eric called from the other room, concerned that I had wandered from bed. I looked up from the floor to find that the smoke had vanished and no angry, burning dot floated above me. Still, my finger was stained with ash. Confused and afraid I pressed my finger to my tongue. The bitter taste confirmed the ash as real.
December 18
I wished I were sleepwalking, experiencing some somnambulant night terror, but everyone could smell the smoke now. Eric grilled the boys, sure it was them secretly lighting up in the house or carrying the smell in on their clothes.
It wasn’t Kyle or Georgie, of course. Eric doesn’t listen when I tell him that, and I can’t quite be truthful — that each night I’m awoken by the smell of phantom cigarettes. What kind of nut house would they lock me up in if I told him how it mocks me through the night — the floating ember, burning to life then vanishing, followed by the puff of smoke exhaled from an invisible man.
Yesterday I cleaned the house while Eric and the boys went shopping. I sprayed the couch and the curtains with Febreze. Ignoring the cold, I opened the living room windows, and let the crisp winter air fight the acrid odor. It was then I noticed the stains on the wall. Yellow smears of tobacco, like the ones in the house I grew up in.
Scrubbing didn’t help much. Neither did the Febreze. Nothing really gets smoke out, except for time.
December 21
Things were getting stranger. Things were getting worse. I hadn’t slept in days. Last night I was determined to ignore the smell. At ten o’clock I snuck a few Tylenol PM capsules and rested my head. This is my new bedtime ritual, though it didn’t kee
p me asleep in this particular circumstance.
Just after midnight, a sound came from the living room and drew me from slumber —audial accompaniment for the smell of tobacco. Laugh tracks and pleasant, inoffensive music called out.
My eyes were heavy from the pills as I shuffled into the hall and through the kitchen. A blue glow, shifting in intensity, poured across the threshold. The ghosts of tar and nicotine were afire in the cold radiance.
Crossing into the living room, I could see the now-familiar burning dot floating above the couch. It pulsed in and out of existence, clouds of cancer billowing from the nothingness in between the moments of fiery glow.
The TV was on. This was a new phenomenon. A young Ron Howard looked up at Don Knotts, taking poor advice with earnest. Everyone laughed. Everyone except for me.
I clicked off the TV and went back to bed.
December 28
For the past week the TV wouldn’t stay off at night, and the smoke had become ever present. I couldn’t sleep anymore, not without chemical assistance, and the recommended dosage wasn’t cutting it.
Eric and I got in a fight. He thinks I have a problem — that I’m abusing the Tylenol PM. Listen to how stupid that statement sounds. It’s an over the counter pain killer, not OxyContin. Also, I would fucking know if a I had a problem. I grew up with addiction. I watched it every day of my childhood. What the fuck does he know about it? He watched an after-school special once? Or maybe a piece on Dr. Phil?
So I overslept and missed a few days of work. Who cares? It’s not like I’m the bread winner. I only work so we can have play money.
Wicked Haunted: An Anthology of the New England Horror Writers Page 5