by Steve Vernon
Just that quickly, a girl in a torn wedding dress with pale white skin and dark mascara circles under her eyes, painted blue lips and a rope around her neck jumped out of the shadows, shrieking like a cat who had swallowed a fire siren.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” I screamed, and jumped right into William’s waiting hands.
*
I have always had a thing for hands.
Hands are important. Hands are how you grab on to life and hang on. I couldn’t stand dating a man with pudgy little sausage fingers. I need to be touched by a man who looks like he can handle life.
William had long strong powerful hands.
From the moment I felt him catch me as I jumped backwards from the terrifying sight of that senior co-ed in zombie make-up, rubber noose and a tattered wedding dress that she had probably bought at the Salvation Army rag store.
“Well don’t that give your toque a spin,” William said. “I got girls falling on me like summer ticks.”
When I heard that flat drawn out Cape Breton accent I nearly laughed so hard I almost peed myself.
“I wasn’t scared,” I said, turning to face him.
“Not much,” he said, taking my hands and squeezing them gently.
From the moment that he took my two hands in his, he had me worked and willing - like a fist full of putty in his long strong fingers.
“You look scared,” was all he said, but what I heard was we ought to go to bed and I will marry you and we will have babies and later on when I have a lawyer’s salary I will buy you a fine, fat house and surround you with Cadillacs and credit cards.
You can hear an awful lot in three little words, even words as insignificant as “You look scared.”
*
Four nights and two dates later William and I snuck back into the Shirreff Hall bell tower.
And then we did it.
Don’t play dumb by asking me what “it” is. From high school up until the age of thirty-eight, “doing it” means just one thing only.
Let me tell you, no matter what anyone else says, doing it just wasn’t any big deal. He fumbled and I fumbled and I bit his lip only not meaning to and then we bumped heads and swore but not in a nice way.
And then we did it.
It was no big deal.
I won’t lie and tell you that the world turned. The truth was that the world was already turning when me and William went ahead and did it. It’s part of the whole college experience, I guess. If you haven’t managed to do it in high school then you better get yourself some hurry-up, come college time.
So we did it.
Four days after we did it I threw up before breakfast.
And after breakfast.
And in between.
The flu, I thought. I’ve got a case of the flu.
Only it wasn’t the flu.
*
“You’re pregnant?” William said - using the same intonation that might have better been used to ask me if I’d recently contracted the bubonic plague.
It was shock, I told myself. He was surprised, the same way I had been surprised by that girl jumping out at us up in the bell tower. Any minute now he’d calm down and he’d smile at me the way he did just before we started doing it.
Only he didn’t smile.
He called me names. A lot of names and some I hadn’t ever heard before. Speaking as a Digby girl, raised near working men I thought I had heard every name that there was.
Only I hadn’t.
“How could you be so stupid?” he asked.
“I’m not stupid,” I said.
I was stupid and I knew it but I would be damned before I told him the truth.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” William said. “Were you born with a hole in your head as big as the one between your legs?”
That hurt.
That was mean and that really hurt.
“Well you were doing it too,” I said.
“Weren’t you on the pill?”
“You know I wasn’t.”
He looked at me and he blinked like I’d told him something he’d never heard before in a language that he didn’t quite understand.
“Well then this whole thing is your fault,” he said.
I opened my mouth.
And then I closed it.
Nothing fell out in between.
William just shook his head, slow and hard.
“Not my fault,” he said.
And then he just walked away.
Two nights later I came back up to the bell tower, with a brand new rope.
*
It was quiet up here. I had heard that some girls liked to come up here and study because it was so quiet. But they never came up here at night.
At least that was what I was counting on.
I had come up here to end my life.
Does that sound extreme to you? Does that sound like something a drama queen might try and pull off?
Maybe so. But I had thought things over long and hard. I did not have it in my heart to kill this baby. Yet I did not have it in my heart to take the bus back to Digby and look at my Dad who had worked so very hard to pay my way into Dalhousie. We hadn’t qualified for much in the way of help. Dad had paid the bulk of it. I had seen him go to the bank every week and hand the teller a crumpled bundle of bills, usually stinking of freshly-caught fish and Old Spice.
He’d worked too hard for me to go home and disappoint him. That thought scared me more than any ghost story. The look of quiet disappointment that my Dad would give to me as I first got off the Digby bus.
And then there would be the years I’d have to spend raising the baby. Dad would pay for that too. I could get a job, the fish plant hired sometimes, but we all knew that the days of the fish plant were coming to an end.
And now, I was too.
I threw the rope up over and tied a slip knot and drew it snug. Once I’d secured the rope I tied the noose.
I was always good at knots.
I carried a chair over to the noose.
This was it, I thought.
I was really going to do it.
I stepped onto the chair. It teetered a little. I found a scrap of cardboard and folded it tight to snug beneath one of the chair legs to keep it at an even keel. If I was going to hang myself I certainly didn’t want to break my neck falling off of a wobbly chair.
I almost smiled at that. Then something softened inside and I had to choke back the tears. I wasn’t about to let myself cry. If I started crying now I wouldn’t see this whole thing through.
I took two deep breaths and climbed back onto the chair.
A bit of cobweb touched my cheek.
I brushed it away.
“This is it,” I said.
I almost scared myself. There, in the silence of the bell tower, those three whispered words sounded as loud as a fog horn.
I nearly fell off of the chair the second time.
Then I calmed myself and I pushed my head into the noose. I snugged the noose up tight to my neck. I knew that the knot had to be at one side of my neck or the other. I settled for keeping it close to my ear.
I wondered who would find me up here. I felt bad for whoever it would be. I hope I didn’t give them nightmares.
That was when I saw her.
She formed from out of the shadows, like a whisper of smoke braiding together into a physical form. She was standing there in front of me, a drab and lonely looking girl with long straight black hair that was gently smoked with a hide-and-go-seek of gray.
Penelope.
She stood there shaking her head as if to tell me that this was not the thing to do.
I stared back at her.
I could see directly through her, like she was made out of loose airborne slush that was slowly freezing over. I didn’t see any sign of zombie make-up, cheap mascara, or a dollar store rubber noose. She just stood there, with her feet hanging about a half a foot up from off of the floor, shaking her head.
She is ri
ght, I thought. This wasn’t the thing to do. This was a stupid way of dealing with my problems.
I decided, right then and there that I wasn’t going to hang myself.
Then I stepped about a half an inch back and the chair overturned.
I had a half a second to think to myself – I take it back – and then the noose drew tight around my neck. I swung there, kicking in mid-air, trying to wedge my fingers into the hollow of the noose which was snugged so closely to my neck that it felt as if I had swallowed a turtle neck sweater before letting it shrink.
I felt my fingernails breaking. I remember thinking to myself – damn, I’ve broken my fingernails, and then everything tightened and slowed and it felt as if a great silent vacuum was slowly swallowing what dim light remained.
And then all at once I felt a figure beneath me, leaning up and bearing my weight. A figure, holding me up and not letting the noose draw any tighter.
It was William, I thought crazily, as I clawed the noose free and tumbled to the ground.
Wrong.
It was not William.
I nearly brained myself on the over turned chair. I probably made enough of a racket to wake up half of the graveyards in the city.
Was it Penelope who had helped me?
Wrong again.
It wasn’t Penelope, either.
I lay there in the attic dust I and looked up and saw the shape of a man standing over me.
It was the tour guide, I decided.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I stared up and I could see him as if he were made out of smoke and water. Featureless and yet strangely familiar to me – staring down blankly with all the love that could ever be imagined.
“Take care, girl,” the phantom said.
And then, like a candle being blown out, the phantom shape was gone.
And all I could smell was the scent of freshly caught fish, Old Spice aftershave, and sea water.
I went back to my room and I showered for a very long time.
Three hours later, freshly toweled and snugged-up in a fuzzy flannel bathrobe, the security guards came to get me.
“Am I in trouble?” I asked, thinking that somehow my suicide attempt had been found out.
“It’s a telephone call at the reception desk,” the taller of the two guards said.
And then he ducked his head down, like he was embarrassed about something. I worried for a moment that my bathrobe had come undone.
“It’s pretty important,” he finished.
I pulled on a turtleneck while he waited outside of my room.
There was an elevator and we took it down and the girl at the desk handed me the telephone, looking away as if a comet had just flashed through the room.
It was my Aunt Rita on the phone.
She told me about Dad.
About how he’d fallen from the fishing boat and was dragged under and had washed ashore around supper time.
I guess it was fast when it happened.
He was wearing his oilskins and his gum rubbers and he’d sunk pretty fast but nobody could quite explain the length of freshly noosed rope that he held in his left hand, squeezed tightly like he was never going to let go.
*
It took four whole years but I finally did it.
William dropped out in the second year and went back to Cape Breton. The last I heard he was working at a saw mill.
I hope he cuts his fingers off.
His fingers and everything else.
I took the tour every year. The old caretaker who gave the tour died of a heart attack, at home with his wife. Photos of his six children and fourteen grandchildren were propped upon his casket.
I went to the funeral.
And then four whole years since that night in the bell tower I finally managed to graduate.
I stepped up to the podium to accept my diploma, wearing the long black robes and the flat black hat of a graduate and my Dad’s Nova Scotia tartan neck snugly tie around my neck.
I have written an awful lot of maritime ghost stories. Four collections full of them, actually. The books include Haunted Harbours: Ghost Stories from Old Nova Scotia, Wicked Woods: Ghost Stories from Old New Brunswick, Halifax Haunts: Exploring the City’s Spookiest Spaces, and my upcoming spring 2011 collection Spooky Shores: More Ghost Stories from Old Nova Scotia. All of these books are published by Nimbus Publishing, a long-standing Nova Scotia regional publisher – and yes, this is a blatant commercial. However, I have also written quite a few Virginia ghost stories for Virginia-based publisher by the name of Woodland Press. In the interest of full and truthful disclosure I will freely admit that I have never been to Virginia – but so what. Stephen Crane never saw a battlefield before he wrote The Red Badge of Courage.
That’s my story and I am sticking to it.
This next story was the first Virginia ghost story I wrote and it originally appeared in Michael Knost’s Woodland Press anthology, Legends of the Mountain State 3 – and no, I have NEVER visited Virginia.
Take that, Stephen Crane!
Oh, My Hammer
(a John Henry story)
Fear tastes of old pennies, sweat and sawdust.
Waylon ran through the darkness, his heart hammering like a thunder of drums. He hadn’t gone home because he knew full well that would be the very first place the state police would look for him.
Why had he done it?
He had lost his temper.
That was plain enough.
Not that he’d ever loved that job in the hardwood flooring factory, but knowing he and five other men had lost their jobs because of that new computerized saw hit him harder than it ought to. Sure, they could blame it on the economy if they wanted to. They could blame it on safety and speed of production too.
They could even blame it on Waylon’s drinking.
But he hadn’t been drunk when he was fired.
He could still see the foreman Roscoe Huntington standing there with his big fat moon-face all greasy with sweat. Roscoe had looked down at his big fat feet, like he was ashamed and he ought to have been. He’d tried to pretend he was apologizing to Waylon for handing him that pink slip.
And then somehow like magic that ball peen hammer had been in Waylon’s fist as he’d swung that high hard arc landing smack-dab solid against the wrinkled beach of Roscoe Huntington’s sadly receding hairline.
Who would have thought a skull would have been so easy to crack?
Waylon had headed for the fire exit, slamming the door open and the fire alarm had gone off and people had stood there staring in that deer-in-the-headlights way that most folks had in times of crisis and no one knew what to do – except Waylon.
Waylon had run.
Sinner man, where you gonna run to?
Waylon could hear that old folk song his Daddy used to sing to him haunting him as he ran - that old song that went on and on about running to the rocks and running to the river and running to the moon without ever finding a hope of salvation.
That was really all Waylon’s Daddy had been good for - singing old songs that no one cared to hear anymore.
The old man hadn’t even sung on-key.
Waylon ran through the back lot of the factory, up over the pallets that teetered against the storm wire fence and then into the woods - with his work boots pounding up clouds of summer-dried dust behind him.
He ran like he had a compass in his feet.
He knew this country.
He had been born and raised and had played here when he was a kid.
From the woods he made his way into the hills and finally found himself kneeling at the mouth of the Big Bend Tunnel, just wishing for a cool drink of water.
I run to the rock, cried rock won’t you hide me.
They’ll never think to look for me here, he thought. Nobody came here anymore except for the occasional tourist and damn few of them would he here this late in the day.
All he had to do was get through the tunnel and keep on walking.
Nobody would find him.
Only he could not remember this old tunnel being so dark as it was. He should have brought himself a flashlight. He made a mental note to himself – the next time he murdered his foreman in a fit of rage he should be sure to bring along a flashlight.
Only he did not have a flashlight. All that he had was the ball peen hammer. He couldn’t figure out just why he had not bothered to drop it, but there it was, hanging in his hand like it would stick there until Judgment Day.
I might as well hang on to this hammer, he thought to himself. There was no telling what might be lurking in this tunnel that burrowed deep beneath the mighty Allegheny Mountains.
He stepped forward.
His feet sank into a foot of cold standing water. The early spring rain had flooded the tunnel. He stepped a little further. Now that he was into the darkness he could see a layer of mist rising up from the standing water.
I run to the river, but the river was bleeding.
His work boots weren’t made for wading any more than they were made for running, but he told himself he could handle the discomfort. Maybe he couldn’t handle working at the factory. He definitely hadn’t handled being fired very well.
But he could put up with a mile of soggy walking.
Who knows? If those West Virginia police bring along a pack of hunting hounds the water might throw them off the track. Of course, if the hounds lead the police to the tunnel mouth it wouldn’t take too much shrewd deductive thinking to figure out just where Waylon went to.
They would hunt him down and drag him to the judge who would bang his gavel and before you could say hammer-time Waylon would be spending his days and his nights in Alderson Prison.
Never mind that.
Don’t think about that now.
Just keep on walking.
He waded in a little further and then he heard something in the darkness.
Something ringing.
KLING!
“Oh my hammer,” a voice sang out, strong and low.
KLING!
“Hammer, ring.”
KLING!
Damn. He wasn’t alone.
“Oh my hammer.”
KLING!
“Hammer, ring.”
Whoever it was - they sang a whole lot sweeter than Waylon’s Daddy ever had – and it sounded as if the singing were coming from further down the tunnel.