There is tragedy in the form of an accident, and then there is malice. Sarah continued to fiddle with the radio while Samuel posed, ready to make his re-emergence, practicing what he would say. Sarah spent an hour with that thing, but they never saw Samuel again.
Time, what effect does it truly have on intention? When Samuel was a boy in Missouri, he thought he’d grow up to be a steamship captain. As a businessman, he nearly lost all of his book earnings with his idea for a typesetting machine, that blasted thing. Given that Samuel had no money to lose or prestigious awards to win in his current state, he wondered where he would draw the line and decide that he failed in his investigation. What would become of him when he did so? If he gave up, would he move on? What would Liv and the girls think of him? Surely they were watching.
A young family moved into the building, a man and a woman and their two daughters, ages six and nine months. For upwards of a year, they were fine, despite Samuel spending so much time roaming their third-floor unit that he forgot details about the other tenants. He even stopped monitoring Sarah and Jennifer, who continued to tell their story of seeing him to everyone in the building, maybe even the city. Hell, Samuel thought, maybe in some way he was the ‘Bell of New York’ all over again.
Evil is never consistent, he began to conclude. It rests often, for it would be otherwise discovered. Like a criminal pushing his luck, score after score, body after body. Evil is intelligence and if it gets its way, evil is forever. There is solace to be found in this, though. If evil knows to sleep and lay low, then that means there are forces out there who hold the ability to vanquish it. Evil fears death, the true death that brings with it an end to all levels of existence. Samuel smiled to himself upon realizing that there’s always a way to kill something. If only he had someone to tell that to. Oh, what is a wordsmith without an audience?
As the young family went untouched, Samuel told stories to tenants while they slept. Notably Jennifer, but others, too, like the politician on the fourth-floor penthouse. A good man, fighting establishments that continuously buy out other members of his ilk. Samuel would have loved to talk with him in life, so he made sure to do so in death.
A lively, old woman, Mrs. Potter, startled Samuel into action by screaming in the stairwell on the first floor. Samuel made the mistake of traveling down the stairwell instead of floating through the floors, and in doing so became stuck in that incessant loop, helpless to hear her screams echo on and on.
“Stay with me, please,” a man shouted as Mrs. Potter moaned.
“They were smiling the wrong way…” Samuel heard Mrs. Potter whisper and choke. By the time he was free of the endless maze of stairwells that seemed to go on and on in Samuel’s mind, Mrs. Potter was dead and an EMT was loading her onto a stretcher, her body shrouded by a white sheet.
“I think she saw some type of animal,” Samuel heard a man who turned out to be her nephew say, before wondering what type of beast that shadow truly was.
Samuel didn’t like the television when he first saw it. In fact, he downright hated it. Hated the way it captured people, the way they moved and laughed. Picture and radio recordings were one thing but people? Moving around in that little box? To think that a ghost was disturbing…. What if television recordings made ghosts of everyone? Samuel began to feel silly, as he hovered over his would-be-friend of a politician night after night, watching that make-believe world.
He found the shadow through nothing more than dumb luck. Something wasn’t right about the family with the two young children on the third floor. Samuel had no doubts that the infant was in danger, despite its rapid growth. Old ladies and infants, they fit together. Samuel was surprised to find the shadow slithering along the ceiling above the father, as he drank.
The shadow was the father’s own personal black cloud and Samuel watched it, in awe, for so long that he didn’t realize just how the man was drinking. Staring at the can, tilting it back, placing it back on the table without releasing his grip before launching it back again. Like a machine, drinking without thought, his eyes blank, his lips grim. The eyes weren’t entirely blank, Samuel realized. He could see it, a part of the shadow dancing next to each of his pupils.
“Why?” Samuel asked. What manner of devil gained from death? Samuel always imagined hell as being in suffering.
“You don’t know what pain is,” the father said, finishing his beer and standing up. Was he talking to Samuel?
“I lost my wife, my daughters, years before I passed,” Samuel said. There’s no worse a person than one that measures you by your tragedies. The father ignored him, retrieved another beer from the fridge, and sat back down. The mother and the children remained in their rooms unaware.
The father, faster than before, finished his beer and then stood, walked right through Samuel and made his way toward his kids’ room. Before opening the door, he turned, looked right at Samuel and said, “it gets easier, after a while,” and then he strolled into his children’s room and slammed the door loud enough to shake the apartment. Samuel made to follow him before a wall of shadow blocked his path.
Rippling and crackling like fire, the wall of black seemed to mock him, chuckling in a never-ending cascade like rainfall. Samuel raised a hand to the wall and the fingers on his left hand began to melt, his skin flaking off to reveal pulpy flesh and bone as he reeled back in horror. “Why?” he shouted again, hoping against half-logic that if one somehow caused evil to question itself, it’d collapse under the weight of its own intent.
Samuel rose from the floor, floating and flying without any sense of pleasure. Screams were coming from within the children’s room. It was too easy to imagine what the fists of a two-hundred-and-ten-pound man could do to any adversary of flesh and bone, let alone children. Samuel began to scream, and as he did so, the light bulbs on either side of him flickered before shattering in an eruption of sparks and glass. He wasn’t spared a moment to consider this new way of interacting with the world, as he was thrust into the total darkness, at the mercy of the shadow’s intentions.
“Carlos what’s happening? Carlos?” an unfortunate mother cried her mind-sapped husband’s name. The chuckling flames of shadow surrounded Samuel. “What have you done? What have you done?” Samuel heard the mother’s screams and realized two things. One, the shadow had been waiting a long time to use a man to do its dirty work. It had been salivating over the kind of horror it could create and it was pleased it now had an audience to its evolution. Two, Samuel was utterly helpless and incapable of saving a single person in the unit. He tried to vanish through the floor, but the shadow wouldn’t let him. It had him. It was finally paying attention.
Time for Samuel became a grandfather clock dumped over the side of a steamship and sunk to the muddy bottom of the Mississippi. When he got a hold of himself, the world was reborn. The century had turned again. The television and its miniature companions ruled. People held themselves to a different standard. As Samuel shifted through the floorboards, he wondered where the shadow had taken him. How had it snuffed out valuable moments from his afterlife? He wasn’t robbed of much, but something all the same. He found that everyone he had come to know as tenants within the building were dead, or moved out. So much for Sarah and Jennifer and Samuel’s own easing into the advancements of the world. The shadow wanted him further out of his element, another confused spirit moaning over indecencies centuries past. No, Samuel wouldn’t be taken for a fool.
He deduced the shadow must have a true lair, if not in the hearts and minds of men. If not within the walls themselves. The shadow must have a place to sleep, and rest, because unlike Samuel, the shadow was at home in its house of death. It had everything it needed and maybe, like Samuel, it was bound there. It’s one slice of the afterlife to call its own. Maybe, somehow, the shadow had once been like him. It could have been Samuel’s imagination, but his white suit was much more silver and gray than he remembered
On the first floor, he paced the beginning of the stairwell and thoug
ht of Mrs. Parker. The front door had changed, wires had been strewn throughout the walls and the building, how much of it was truly the same? Like the ship of Theseus consistently rebuilt until not a plank of wood remained of the original vessel, what was it that kept the building the same? What bound it other than a miserable shadow and a frustrated dead man? Samuel clenched his fists, and found himself sinking.
An age-old question he once pondered as a boy was, what if a ghost sank to the center of the earth? What if it sank and kept right on sinking and ended up in China? Or wherever bouts Missouri was lined up with if you stuck a pencil through a globe. Samuel sunk up to his chest and hoped he’d find out that answer quickly. Try as he did to go through the front door and emerge onto the roof, he never considered what might lie below. The house had no root cellar that he knew of, no underground labyrinth guarded by a minotaur to call its own. Samuel tilted his nose up and gave in. Failure as he was, he was ready to leave the house in the West Village, one way or another.
He found himself in the deep, dripping black of a sewer. It could have been nothing else. He didn’t need to see or smell. He could feel it, shivering along the nerves he wasn’t supposed to have. This is where it slept, the shadow. This was its true kingdom, it was never a resident of the building at all. An invader, much like Samuel. Like Samuel, slowly learning to influence the world, only, in this case, by snuffing a fresh pair of lungs, tripping an old lady and manipulating the open mind of a drunk. Samuel had talents, too. Much like how one is born with a knack for an art or a calling, in death you have ways of manipulating the world—even if the world has to catch up to you—through lights, radios and wires of all sorts. As Samuel he was forgettable, but as Mr. Twain? He was timeless.
The shadow was weakened, preparing for a long hibernation. He had it cornered. Twain’s emotion, when tuned just right, could burst a light bulb. He couldn’t touch the shadow, couldn’t physically harm it. But the house of death? He couldn’t make the shadow bleed, so he’d make it homeless.
Mark Twain rose above the sewers, shaking free the dancing nerves that tried to curl his spine. It was nightfall, and he visited each tenant, whispering into their sleeping heads and changing the pattern of their lives. He waited until morning. One by one, each of the tenants left the building: some for work, some for school or the pleasantries of a day off. Others oddly, with little reasoning as they lumbered to Washington Square Park, unsure of their intentions. All behaved exactly as Mark Twain intended.
As the sole not-quite-living resident of the building, aside from the shadow, of course, Mark positioned himself within the building’s middle, between floors and units, within a nest of wires and electric outlets. Born and perished in the passing blaze of a comet, he had landed here, in a place where reason and logic were shredded into lunacy. Where his words and his whit no longer mattered and he was stripped to nothing more than a good suit only he could admire. Mark Twain reached out and clenched his eyes shut of a world gone strange.
As a boy, he once worked on steamship with his brother. Called away to follow his passions as a journalist, his brother was killed by an exploding boiler on the very steamship they had operated on together. Death laughed at him, from the very beginning of his lifetime. It took his wife and children as compensation and left a rich man with no one to leave his possessions to. Mark Twain only had his words, tossed among the world and also taken from him, taken and twisted by all who may use them. He would have a say in one matter, at the very least, before pulling with every ounce of soul he had left in his pale, spectral form.
TVs exploded. Outlets poured flame and light bulbs shone like miniature supernovas. Mark Twain fed the sparks until all around him melted and oozed, charred and blackened. For a moment, he admired the distinct beauty of such immense flames. Within them, he could feel his heart and how it soared and wept, for all the tenants lost, for the black clouds that would rise above his dear New York and how all of West and Greenwich Village would be a mess of soot and ash for weeks to come.
Mark Twain rode the collapsing floorboards with his feet pointed like daggers, stabbing into the shadow’s lair within the sewer. It squealed, too tired to flee as the fire consumed it. “Passion!” he screamed into laughter, for the troubles of the world occasionally needed to be illuminated, dug up and made to answer for all the pain they’ve caused.
Mark Twain drowned out the shadow’s squeals with his own laughter, before the flames parted and he stepped through a door that may have always been there, waiting for him to knock. As always, he left this world like a man who knows how enter, and exit, the stage.
Ghosts In Their Eyes
Trisha J. Wooldridge
1.
She watches. She watches. She watches their eyes.
She watches. She watches. In silence, she cries.
Penance for silence, see the ghosts in their eyes.
Nurse Emma remembers so, so many years
as nurse, secret keeper for Doctor Audaire.
She wishes she forgot so, so, many tears.
It would be easier if she didn’t care.
But she still has her own family at risk—
so she still does her job. Keeps secrets, tells lies.
When other families worry themselves sick
‘cause they see their loved ones with ghosts in their eyes.
Watching every window; she lurks at each door.
She welcomes each patient with speeches prepared.
Shows the facility, gives families the tour.
Shows each state-of-the-art room—except downstairs.
Modernized Victorian, at the road’s end.
Private yet accessible—it’s rated as best.
One hundred fifty acres usable land.
Yet she knows ghosts wander at Pinehaven Rest.
“Momma, I promise, this is all for the best.”
They all say that, you know, she says in her head,
as they walk through the doors of Pinehaven Rest.
They check for quality food, what type of bed,
if there’s mentally stimulating programs,
and if the nurses all know how to read ‘scripts.
‘Cause it’s Dad or it’s Mom or it’s Dearest Grams,
and the last argument ended in tearful fits.
Pinehaven Rest is the old Audaire home.
And the doctor is third generation heir
to the house, to the land, to every stone
of this practice—and all those under his care.
He’s followed the footsteps of family pride.
Not one doctorate, he has many degrees.
In psychiatry’s realm, he’s been published wide;
more hushed is his work in occult psychi’try.
Visitors come—all flowers and cheery glow.
Spirits soon wane within the Asphodel suites.
“Of course, I remember, that thing what...you know?
That time, with those people. Your favorite treats.”
“Does she even know me? Who I am? I’m here...”
“He’s just a little out of it. Anxiety.
We just gave him some meds. There’s nothing to fear.”
“What do they stare at? It’s like no one can see.”
Nurse Emma, she knows what her patients do see.
She’s watched enough patients have their ghosts pushed out.
Doctor Audaire said he was searching to free
his patients from mortal fear and soulful doubt.
If a patient could be outside the body
and return, safe and sound, a small taste of death—
why worry, afterlife’s promise was shoddy.
Epiphany’s price—he steals but a few breaths.
2.
She watches. She watches. She watches their eyes.
She watches. She watches. In silence, she lies.
Penance for silence, see the ghosts in their eyes.
“At the next rest stop, can we please have a smoke?”
/>
“I’m trying to quit, Gram,” Cass weakly protests.
“Besides, you’re on oxygen—you shouldn’t smoke!”
“Even criminals condemned get their last cigarette.
“Gram please,” Cass begs, “This isn’t some sentence—”
“It’s for my own good. So you told me. I know.”
Sick to her stomach, Cass wonders her penance.
All Gram can think is I am making her go.
The kids shouldn’t have to live through extra fear.
Worrying if Gram should forget meds or fall.
Seeing her hide crumpled butts, sneaking Dan’s beer.
No kid should make those daily 9-1-1 calls.
Medicine. Money. Care. So many reasons.
Gram would be better off at Pinehaven Rest.
Cass turns off the highway. Necessary treason.
She reaches for her lighter and cigarettes.
“Gram, look, there’s even Bingo, like at St. Joe’s.”
With narrow eyes, Gram asks, “So why all the glass?
I don’t play Bingo on display, for a show.
That’s what it looks like, a zoo. Take me home, Cass.”
“Mrs. Bihari, please, just give us a chance—”
“It’s Ms. and no. Leave us. Why can’t I stay home?”
Cass glares tears at the floor, shifts a nervous dance.
“It’s not safe for the kids if you come back home.”
“Nonsense!” cries the woman, stopping short to cough.
“Gramma, please. They followed you into the forest
when you left your O2 tank. You all got lost!”
“So you just put me in a warehouse of corpses?
I was fine! So were they! Was an adventure.
The tank would have only just slowed us all down.
Wicked Haunted: An Anthology of the New England Horror Writers Page 13