by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
No.
He’d seen what he’d seen, the man and the crowd and the cyclist, heard the snatches of grating, discordant music, and he wanted to know a why and a what and a how.
The community trust office was based in a small but imposing building several streets away from the civic center. It looks like an old pub, thought Channing, as he approached it, and then he realized that that’s exactly what it was. “This building has been created from the remains of the Old Dun Cow, a public house that stood in the village of Gentholme from 1743 until its demolition last year,” read the plaque above the main door. It even had a pub sign, reading “The Gentholme Community Trust” rather than “The Old Dun Cow,” swinging slightly above the door. Given that there was no breeze, Channing wondered if the swing was engineered, electrical, to help increase the impression that this was an old-fashioned pub rather than a modern office. Inside, though, the pretense of the building being aged was dropped.
Through the door was a bright open space filled with information racks and digital displays showing the development of Gentholme from a village to its current incarnation as a new city, maps outlining the green space that the government had rezoned for the development and the proposed layout of the streets and buildings. Time-lapse presentations showed the initial buildings growing like flowers, unfurling and turning to face the sun without apparent human intervention. Where the bar should have been was a row of computers, each in an individual carrel, with a large notice above them reading “Free Internet Access.” There was a young man sitting behind a desk on the other side of the room who started to rise as Channing came in, but Channing waved him back down; he didn’t want to talk, or to volunteer, not yet. He wanted to think and see what he could find out.
He wanted answers, or maybe to know the questions.
Channing browsed the leaflets and posters on the walls; it was probably the only public place in Gentholme he’d been that seemed complete, that didn’t have gaps and spaces and unfilled lacunae. He picked up one of the leaflets and read the glossy words inside.
Gentholme uses the most modern building and planning techniques to ensure a town that is as energy efficient and safe as it is welcoming and friendly! Public spaces have been designed using the best elements of the past but with a modern twist, creating a secure and comfortable environment that looks resolutely forward while retaining an intimate knowledge of the past. Where possible, materials from other places have been used to create Gentholme’s unique personality, a careful blending of the years that have gone and the years to come!
The passage was in large type and surrounded by brightly lit photographs of Gentholme. Only, he saw, they weren’t photographs but rather incredibly detailed and photorealistic artists’ impressions of what Gentholme would be, digital images of the park and the commercial centers and rows of neat, attractive housing peopled with little pixelated figures walking and shopping and lying in the sun. The rest of the leaflet was filled with more of the same: bright exhortations to trust in the developers’ visions of the future city, promises around low environmental impact, and grand aspirations to have a “recycled heart.”
It was on the rear of the leaflet that Channing found the phrase that made him stop, that sent images tumbling across the inside of his vision, dark behind the sunlight, that took his breath and clenched his belly.
That made him really see the ghosts.
GENTHOLME: CARRYING THE PAST INTO A BRIGHT NEW FUTURE.
—
Channing ran his hand along the park wall, feeling the grit of the stone against his fingertips. It was warm from the sun and it was as though he were brushing the flank of some huge, solid beast. When he laid his hands flat against it and pressed down it felt as though he could feel the heat of its life pulsing.
The boy with the blue balloon was still standing on the far side of the playground. The bright blue teardrop bobbed as Channing walked toward the boy; it jerked back and forth in a breeze that Channing couldn’t feel. How long ago was that wind blowing? Channing thought. How long ago, and how far away?
The boy was dressed in a school uniform, knee-length shorts and a blue sweater. He didn’t look old-fashioned, exactly, but he wasn’t modern either. He’s my age, thought Channing, or was my age when he was given the balloon. Or I was the same age as he was when he got the balloon. Has he aged? Does he know? I don’t know how this works.
When he reached a point about twenty feet from the boy, Channing stopped and kneeled. “Hello,” he said.
The boy didn’t reply.
“Do you know where you are?” he asked, but still the boy remained silent. In the distance, Channing heard a snatch of the music again, or rather, he heard lots of snatches of music all overlaid, interlocked and straining against one another, strangling one another. Already, shadows were forming in the trees that lined the slope behind the boy, moving and coalescing, forming people.
Forming ghosts.
Channing held his hand out, but the boy took a step back. “I’m not allowed to talk to strangers,” he said, nodding in confirmation of his own statement, balloon and head moving momentarily in time with each other.
“I just thought, with you and me being here each day, we should say hello to each other,” said Channing. “You are here every day, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know,” said the boy. “I think so, but I’m not sure.”
“Where do you live?” When do you live?
“I don’t know.”
“What happened to you?” asked Channing, unable to stop himself. I’m talking to a ghost, he thought, a dead child.
“I don’t know,” said the boy again, head dipping and rising, dipping and rising, balloon spasming at the end of its string tether as the unfelt wind picked up. A cowlick of hair danced away from the boy’s head, reaching up, and then fell across his forehead. The boy looked at Channing from behind the hair and said, “I’m lonely. I’m scared. I want my mom and dad. Do you know where they are? I want my mom.”
The boy took a step toward Channing and held out his hands, string still clenched tight in one of them. Channing felt a wave of cold coming off the boy, the first real cold he’d felt since moving to Gentholme, and backed away, dropping his own hand.
“Please,” said the boy, and Channing heard the people at the bandstand and the old man outside the park in his voice, heard them all begging him for something he didn’t know how to give. “Please, I just want to go home and see my mom. I’ve been waiting for her but she doesn’t come. Do you know where she is? Please?”
Channing wobbled, balance unsettled, and then fell back, legs sprawled before him. The boy took another step and it got colder still. It hadn’t been cold with the man outside the park, or the crowd by the bandstand, had it? And yes, it had been cooler when he had seen the cyclist, but not cold like this, not this bitterness. But the boy was so young, Channing thought, so young, and he wanted his mom and to go home and it made him frigid with grief and loss and longing.
“Please,” the boy said again and took another step and the air seemed to crackle with chill and then Channing was up and running and not looking back.
Channing spent the afternoon wondering what to do, trying to piece things together in his head so that they made sense. Well, made as much sense as anything that accepted the existence of ghosts could do, anyway. He walked Gentholme’s streets, seeing the buildings expand, the land forming into new shapes, wondering about each person he saw. Were they real? Imaginary?
Ghosts?
Eventually, he knew he had to talk to Miranda about it. She would listen to him and tell him he was being stupid, or that he was right, or she would find the correct explanation. That was what Miranda did, she found out the right way to see things. It was why he loved her, and why he’d let her persuade him to move to Gentholme in the first place. “It’ll work,” she’d said after the first presentation and the tour around the various house plots, then little more than spaces marked out by plastic tape and architects
’ drawings. “I can see it, new and clean and healthy. It’ll be good for us.”
Channing went home and waited, sitting in his kitchen and looking out into the garden. They’d already planned what plants to buy and where they’d go; well, Miranda had. The garden was her realm, she’d told him, the kitchen his. She wanted a garden full of the plants she loved, so he waited, and as he waited, he imagined things growing and blooming and flowering.
“Hey,” said Miranda from behind him some time later, making him jump. Channing had been so lost in his reverie that he hadn’t heard her come in.
“Hey,” he said back, their usual greeting. “How’s your day been?”
She didn’t reply but instead shook her head and turned to leave the kitchen.
“Miranda, I need to talk to you,” he said, but she made a shooing motion with her hands and then left the room. He followed her, watching as she wandered around the house without settling. He waited, giving her a few minutes; sometimes this was how she was when her day had been hard, needing a period to shake off the day’s pressures and to relax. “Decompressing,” she called it, her decompression time. Channing made tea, brewing it strong the way she liked, and when Miranda finally returned to him, he led her into the kitchen and gently guided her to a chair. He set her drink in front of her, kissing her cheek as he did so, and then sat opposite her.
“I need to talk,” he said again.
“Yes? Now? Can it wait?” Miranda replied. “I’m tired. I don’t want to think.”
“No,” said Channing. “It’s important. Please.”
“If you must,” said Miranda, looking around the room. “At least I’m here. At least I’m home.”
Home, Channing suddenly realized. Yes, this is home, this is our home, which we bought and made ours. It’s where we belong. He reached out and took Miranda’s hand, took a deep breath, and then started speaking on the exhale.
“Miranda, it’s about Gentholme. I’ve been walking around a lot these last few weeks, since we moved in, and I’ve been seeing things. No, not things, people, and there’s something strange about them,” Channing said and let the whole story out of his head and into the world. When he finished, Miranda simply looked at him, staring for so long that, eventually, Channing felt the urge to speak, to break the silence.
“Well?”
“You think there are ghosts?” she finally asked.
“Yes,” he said. Miranda looked directly at him, focusing properly for the first time since her return from work. She looked around the room, through the window at the garden, and then back at him.
“Yes. It makes sense, I suppose.”
“Does it?”
“Yes, my love. It does now, anyway. I was wondering but now it’s clear. I understand. If they are ghosts then it’s no wonder they’re confused, is it? Think about it.”
“You tell me I think too much,” he said, smiling. Even to him, his smile felt weak and worn.
“Think,” she said. “They’re dead, and lost. We come to love places, we come to belong to places, even as we think those places belong to us. Those poor people are tied to the bricks and stones and tiles from the buildings of their lives, they’ve been tied to them for years and years possibly, and now the developers have torn them all down and are using the pieces to make Gentholme, to create a city that looks old even though it’s new. Those ghosts, they’ve come with the pieces, they’re still attached to buildings that no longer exist and that have been recycled into something new and placed somewhere new, but this isn’t where they lived or died so they’re confused. They’ve been dragged here, but they don’t know where they are, they’ve never been here before and nothing looks the same as they’re used to. That’s so horrible, so awful for them. They have nowhere to belong to and no one to tell them what’s happening.”
“Yes!” Channing near-shouted. “Yes, that’s what I thought: they’ve come here but they don’t know where here is, and it’s confusing them, making them feel terrible and hurt and angry.”
“And there was a boy? Who wanted his mom?”
“A boy with a blue balloon,” said Channing, “and a man who was lost and people waiting for music and a cyclist looking for Eleanor, whoever she is.”
“A boy,” repeated Miranda as a fat tear trickled from one eye. She cried for a moment, head down, shoulders hitching. “That’s horrible. A boy, a child lost like that. He shouldn’t be alone.”
“I know,” said Channing. Miranda and he couldn’t have children; embryos refused to implant in the wall of Miranda’s womb, instead bleeding out of her on waves of cramping and anguish. They’d had to accept it, and as neither wanted to adopt or foster, Gentholme was the new start they’d promised themselves, that they needed, the start of their childless life together. Gentholme had become their home, the place they belonged to.
“What can we do?” asked Channing, but before Miranda could answer there was a knock at the front door.
“Answer it,” said Miranda, looking around again. “I’m thinking. Give me a minute, my love.”
Behind the frosted upper pane of the front door two shapes moved, Gentholme’s daylight behind them, turning them into little more than dark blurs. Channing, reminded uncomfortably of the crowd emerging from the trees to listen to a concert he could not properly hear, opened the door to find two policemen looking at him. Neither moved, and then one spoke Channing’s name and then Miranda’s name and reached out for his shoulder.
Miranda had gone from the kitchen when Channing went back in, and the back door was open, swinging gently. He left the house, not shutting the door behind him, and walked to the park. He didn’t go fast; he couldn’t, legs as heavy as sleep, head burning and gray. The old man wasn’t outside the park, and the crowd was no longer at the bandstand, but the boy with the balloon was still there. The balloon fluttered gently as the woman kneeling on the grass in front of him enveloped the boy in her arms.
“It’s okay,” Channing heard Miranda say. “It’s okay, I’m here now. Everything will be okay.”
They were coming now, the old ghosts, the displaced ones, the lost ones, coming out of the shades and corners, gathering around as Miranda stood. She held the boy’s hand tight, calling to them, drawing them in until they were clustered around her, male and female, old and young. Channing saw the cyclist, the old man, some of the people from around the bandstand and others, ones he’d not seen before, ones linked to stones and bricks he had not yet found.
Gentholme’s first home-grown ghost comforted the new city’s older dwellers, the boy’s balloon dancing by her head, and from somewhere Channing heard music.
(Winner of The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares: The Haunted City Short Story Contest)
Jerry had lived his entire life in Detroit. The Motor City. Motown. The “D.” The city of his birth, childhood, and well beyond, it was his first and last love. And so it was very difficult for him to watch it die.
Detroit’s demise had been long and cancerous, a slow and painful march toward ruin. Those who didn’t flee stayed to crumble and wither along with their fading metropolis. Faces once bright and vibrant turned pale and drawn; bodies once strong and agile turned slack, weak. Whatever disease ailed Detroit, it had spread to the city’s residents.
Jerry did his best to get by. He had no place to go and no desire to leave. Detroit would get better, he kept telling himself as he drove his delivery truck, day after day, through his beloved, rotting city.
One night, a few weeks back, Jerry had gone down to his corner bar. Nursing his third beer of the evening, Jerry saw a slender shadow of a man holding court in a booth near the back. A handful of people sat with him, hanging on his every word. It was as if he’d been sketched into this world with a blunt piece of charcoal, drawn in thick shades of smoldering embers.
“The city is a living, breathing organism,” the man said. “Therefore, it must be treated as such.”
“What do you suggest?” a woman asked him.
“Surgery,�
�� the man replied. “You need to go in and cut. Excise the cancerous tissue, the tumors that eat away at the very core. I have overseen such procedures in the past, and I am willing to do so here. But the people must act. They must obey.”
Jerry shook his head. Just another barroom commentator going on about how he could fix all of the city’s woes. If only Jerry had a dollar for every time he heard such talk.
He ordered another drink, and the shadow man and his ideas were forgotten.
A week later, he saw the man again, on television, when the mayor broke into the regularly scheduled programming to tell the good citizens of Detroit that he was instituting a new law. A brief period of mandatory donations would begin the following day.
Jerry watched the announcement on a TV he’d salvaged from a nearby junk heap and rewired. The shadow man stood behind the mayor, a dark spectral presence who appeared an ill fit among the smug politician’s standard entourage.
The picture on Jerry’s rescued TV was often a blizzard of interference. Its screen a constant flurry, as if to match the snow falling outside Jerry’s window.
The shadow man seemed immune to the scratchy whims of the television. He never once skipped or distorted, even as those all around him did so frequently.
Jerry turned off the TV and turned to his window. The snow was coming down in thick, cottony puffs. It had already dusted the street and ancient ruins beyond, the hills of brick and concrete and scrap that polluted his view.
Mandatory donations, Jerry thought. He wondered what more the city could possibly take from its residents. They were a ferociously loyal bunch. They alone kept the city running on fumes. But they had nothing left to give. Jerry certainly didn’t.