Ghost Chant

by Gina Ranalli

  Ghost Chant copyright © 2014 by Gina Ranalli. All rights reserved.

  Published by Grindhouse Press

  POB 222

  Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387

  Cover design copyright © 2014 by Matthew Revert. All rights reserved.

  Grindhouse Press logo and all related artwork copyright © 2014 by Brandon Duncan. All rights reserved.

  Ghost Chant

  Grindhouse Press #025

  Paperback ISBN-10: 1941918069

  Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-941918-06-7

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author.

  Also by Gina Ranalli

  Dark Surge

  Rumors of My Death

  Chemical Gardens

  Mother Puncher

  Wall of Kiss

  Suicide Girls in the Afterlife

  Sky Tongues

  House of Fallen Trees

  Praise the Dead

  13 Thorns (with Gus Fink)

  GHOST

  CHANT

  1

  Listening to the rain pound the roof above her bed, Cherie Drew lay flat on her back, unable to sleep. The glow from a nightlight in the bathroom barely illuminated the bedroom, but it was enough to see Warren easily as he punctuated the sound of the rain with his soft snores.

  He also lay on his back, the sheet shoved down to his waist and Cherie was tempted to reach over and touch his furry chest, feel it rise and fall beneath her fingers.

  She’d been trying to sleep for hours but that was nothing new. Sleep had never come easy to her and it had never mattered if she took medications for her insomnia or not. Nothing worked.

  Glancing at the digital clock on the dresser, she sighed. 3:47 AM. She considered getting up, maybe going downstairs to the living room and cracking a paperback for a while, but she knew from experience that would make her no sleepier than she was now.

  She looked at Warren again and this time rolled over to face him, reaching out her hand toward his body when he suddenly sat straight up and loudly announced, “There’s something in the hallway!”

  Startled, Cherie sat up with him, peering into the dark hallway outside the open bedroom door. She saw nothing out of the ordinary and turned to speak to Warren, alarmed by the expression of fearful confusion on his face.

  Before she could question him, he tilted his head slightly, wide eyes still focused on the dark hallway and asked, “What is that?”

  She frowned, touching his shoulder. “Honey?”

  Warren didn’t react to her touch or her voice, but instead lay back just as abruptly as he’d sat up, his eyes closing immediately.

  “Warren?” Unnerved, she looked from him to the hallway and back again.

  Nightmare, she thought. She lay back as well, still facing him. They’d been seeing each other for a little over three months and she’d never known him to talk in his sleep, but she supposed three months was a relatively short time. Clearly, it wasn’t a common thing for him, but she made a note to mention it to him in the morning just the same. She was just grateful she’d already been awake, otherwise his bizarre outburst would have scared the shit out of her.

  She closed her eyes and concentrated on the sound of the rain and the occasional traffic driving by. It was soothing and eventually she could feel her breath slowing down, her mind emptying, and she was awake just long enough to be thankful for the arrival of sleep at last and then she was out, the insomnia defeated for now and really, wasn’t now the only time that mattered?

  2

  She slept until just before noon and was dismayed when she awoke to find Warren gone. Not surprised, but disappointed.

  It was Friday and of course he’d had to work, but still she’d hoped he might decide to play hooky with her one day. Maybe they’d see a movie or even just stay in and watch one. It wouldn’t matter which. Just having him near during daylight hours would be a nice change.

  Swinging herself out of bed, she noted that it was still raining outside—even harder than it had been during the night—and the room was drenched in gloom. She turned on the bedside lamp, dispelling some of the grayness, and padded her way to the bathroom.

  Halfway through her shower, she remembered Warren’s odd behavior.

  There’s something in the hallway.

  What the hell could he have been dreaming about? Nothing good, that much had been obvious by the fear on his face.

  She pondered the mystery as she washed her hair and then promptly dismissed it. He probably wouldn’t remember a thing about it anyway. Wasn’t that how it usually was for people who talked in their sleep?

  Once her bathroom chores were over, she went back into the bedroom to discover the bulb must have blown on her bedside lamp and the room was gloomier than ever.

  Towel wrapped around her body, she crossed the room and pushed the switch on the lamp, already wondering if she had any spare bulbs in the linen closet. She was always forgetting to pick some up.

  To her surprise, the light turned on.

  She stared at it briefly, her brows knitting together in puzzlement. Then she shook her head and went about the task of getting dressed, pulling on soft jeans and a fifteen-year-old Batgirl T-shirt she’d owned since her early twenties.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, she put the kettle on to boil water for tea and went to the window above the sink.

  She heard a child’s voice outside.

  Before she’d even pushed back the cheery yellow curtains, she knew what she would see: six-year-old Maggie Kerr from across the street, once again in Cherie’s yard, plucking up the carnations flanking the walkway.

  Cherie grimaced and tapped on the glass.

  At first, Maggie didn’t look up, pulling a white carnation from the ground and shoving it into the pocket of her bright green rain slicker. The child was on her knees, pants almost certainly soaked through, as she went about her busy work.

  Cherie tapped the glass again, harder this time, thinking maybe the rain was impairing Maggie’s hearing somehow, but knowing it was more likely the girl was just lost in her own little world, as was often the case.

  Maggie ceased her singing and looked up at the window, her pale, freckled face haloed by the bright red curls of her hair.

  The girl saw Cherie staring at her, but her expression remained blank, leaving Cherie to wonder for about the hundredth time if the child suffered from some form of autism. In the three years since Maggie had moved in across the street with her single mother, Teresa, Cherie had never once seen the girl smile. When the small family had first arrived in the neighborhood, Maggie was relegated to her own front stoop, held prisoner by a baby gate, and Cherie’s biggest memory of the girl was her constant screaming and wailing, her little fists rattling the gate as though she were an angry inmate.

  It had grated on Cherie’s nerves to no end, but now that Teresa let the girl out from behind the gate, Maggie steadfastly refused to stay in her own yard, wandering onto the property of her neighbors as if the entire block belonged to her.

  That blank stare irked Cherie now and she moved away from the window and went to the front door, opening it and stepping out onto the small porch. Raising her voice to be heard over the rain, she said, “Those flowers aren’t yours, Maggie. I’ve told you that before.”

  Maggie’s vacant stare remained intact, but she rose to her feet and stood in the rain, her blue eyes watching Cherie as if she didn’t understand the concept of language.
>
  “Go on home now,” Cherie said.

  At first, the girl didn’t move, vacantly gaping. Finally, just as Cherie was about to threaten calling her mother, the girl turned away and slowly walked from the property and into the street. She stopped and turned to give Cherie a final glance before continuing on to her own front yard.

  “Jesus,” Cherie muttered before going back into her warm, dry kitchen where the kettle had just begun to whistle and signal the start of a new day.

  3

  Cherie had lived in the same house for over a decade. Her husband had owned it before their marriage and when he died, it went to her, despite the protests of his adult son. Luckily, she hadn’t heard from Allen for several years. He’d apparently given up on trying to render her homeless and insisting she’d never loved his father, a product solely of his selfish imagination.

  Her life was quiet now. Pleasantly so. She earned enough money designing websites to keep her refrigerator stocked, her utilities paid and her car gassed.

  Most of her free time was spent pursuing what she considered to be her real passion in life: painting.

  She had set up a studio in the basement, one small room cluttered with supplies and countless canvases of all shapes and sizes, all but a few of them decorated with moody abstracts.

  Cherie was in this room in the basement regarding a large canvas smeared with various shades of blue when the landline on the wall rang.

  She assumed it was probably her boss as they hadn’t spoken in a few days, but was pleasantly surprised to hear Warren’s voice.

  “I’m just calling to tell you I won’t be able to make it over to see you tonight.” He sounded regretful. “Ton of paperwork to do so not only will I be here all night, but I’ll probably have to take some of it home with me too.”

  “Aw,” Cherie said. “I was hoping to get an early start on the weekend. Thought I’d fire up the grill if this rain ever lets up.”

  “I’m really sorry. I’ll give you a call tomorrow, okay?”

  “Okay,” she agreed reluctantly, then remembered his nightmare. “Oh, hey. You left before I was awake so I didn’t have a chance to ask you . . . do you usually talk in your sleep?”

  “What?” He sounded puzzled, then laughed. “Not that I know of. Why?”

  “Well, you did last night. More like shouted, actually. Just about gave me a heart attack.”

  Warren was baffled when Cherie told him the things he’d said. “You looked scared. Do you remember what you dreamed about?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line as he considered. Slowly, he said, “No . . . Oh, wait. I think I do remember something. Not a nightmare though. Just that weird little kid across the street from you. I think I might have dreamed about her.”

  Though she didn’t say it, Cherie thought dreaming about Maggie sounded plenty enough like a nightmare to her. “I caught her picking at my flowers again a little while ago.”

  “Figures,” Warren replied, already sounding distracted. “Hey, I gotta go. Talk tomorrow?”

  “Yep.”

  She hung up the phone, disappointed. Knowing she wouldn’t be seeing her new boyfriend that night already made the house feel emptier.

  Walking back over to the easel, she realized she didn’t feel like painting anymore. She put her hands on her hips and looked around the basement. What now?

  “Another boring day that’ll turn into another boring night,” she muttered.

  Though she was, by nature, an extremely solitary woman—preferred it that way—she realized she was lonely.

  “Fuck it,” she mumbled to the vacant room. “May as well get out of the house for a while.”

  Being around other people, even if only briefly, sounded like a good idea. She turned off the lights and climbed the stairs. Back in the kitchen, she took her car keys from a peg by the door and went out into the dreary day with no clear destination in mind.

  4

  She was back less than an hour later, an aluminum tray from her favorite Greek restaurant on the passenger seat beside her.

  The windshield wipers thumped rhythmically as she drove slowly up the residential street to her house. She slowed down further when she noticed a child in a green slicker crouching in the middle of the road almost directly in front of her driveway.

  Cherie sighed and stopped the car, waiting for Maggie to move. Several seconds ticked by and the girl continued with her close examination of something on the ground, maybe a worm or a snail.

  Could it be that the kid didn’t hear the car approach? Cherie pushed down her annoyance and gave the horn a quick toot.

  Maggie turned her head, but it was another ten seconds or so before she finally stood up, still making no move to get out of the way of Cherie’s car. It was disconcerting the way the child just stood there, rainwater dripping off her chin and regarded Cherie through the windshield as though she were seeing an alien being.

  Impatient, Cherie honked the horn, laying on it harder and longer than she previously had.

  “Magpie!”

  Maggie’s mother Teresa was emerging from their house, cigarette in hand.

  “Come on, sweetie, get out of the street!”

  Finally, Maggie obeyed, taking her time about it. Teresa gave Cherie an apologetic smile and waved with her free hand.

  Cherie returned the wave but not the smile and proceeded to pull her car into the driveway. In the rearview mirror she saw Teresa take Maggie by the hand and, together, they went into the house.

  Shaking her head, Cherie grabbed her dinner and prepared for another uneventful evening with herself and the sound of the relentless storm.

  5

  It was 7:30 and already dark when Cherie heard an insistent tapping coming from somewhere nearby. The wind had picked up considerably. Branches and pinecones bounced off the roof and windows, punctuated with sudden blasts of heavy rain, but the tapping wasn’t related to the storm.

  Cherie froze in the act of pouring herself another glass of wine at the kitchen counter, her head cocked, listening.

  The tapping came again—ping, ping, ping. The sound of metal against metal.

  She put down the wine bottle and went to the basement door, opened it and peered down into the darkness.

  A full minute passed with nothing and she was just about to shrug the whole thing off when the tapping started up again, much louder now that the door was open.

  “What the hell?” she whispered. She briefly considered the possibility of an intruder but dismissed it as ridiculous. She’d never in her life been afraid in this house, alone or not, and starting now seemed completely absurd. It was probably the hot water heater or something.

  She flipped the light switch and started down the stairs, hoping nothing—the hot water heater or whatever—wasn’t about to shit the bed. That would be an annoyance to say the least.

  The sound didn’t repeat itself as she searched first her deceased husband’s workshop, which hadn’t been used in years, then the overstuffed storage room.

  She opened the door to her art studio, hit the lights and nearly screamed when she saw Maggie Kerr standing in the middle of the room.

  Maggie still wore her rain slicker and, in one wet fist, held a putty knife Cherie often used to spread paint.

  Jaw agape, Cherie saw that the girl had most likely been tapping the knife against one of the old coffee cans full of varying sizes of paintbrushes on a nearby bench.

  Cherie’s shock quickly turned to anger.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  Maggie went into her usual staring blankly routine, which only angered Cherie more. She marched over to the little girl and snatched the putty knife from her hand, absently tossing it on the worktable.

  “I asked you a question! How did you get in here?”

  For the first time since Cherie had known the child, Maggie’s eyes widened slightly, which was better than no reaction at all, Cherie supposed.

  Cherie moved around the girl to the fa
r end of the room where the outside door was and, sure enough, it was slightly ajar. She must have left it unlocked the last time she’d gone into the backyard.

  “Dammit,” she murmured and turned back to the girl. “You can’t just walk into someone’s house, Maggie.”

  Instantly, her mind flashed back to the previous night.

  There’s something in the hallway.

  What is that?

  Now it was Cherie’s turn to stare. They both stood that way for a long time, eyes locked, barely breathing.

  Cherie thought about what Warren had said. That he thought he remembered dreaming about Maggie.

  “Were you in here last night?” Cherie asked, aware her pulse had sped up though she couldn’t explain why.

  But . . .

  But that wasn’t true, was it?

  She could explain why.

  Because she was suddenly afraid.

  She swallowed what felt like a lemon in her throat and took a step toward the child. “Were you in here . . . in my house . . . last night?” she repeated, angry again. Angry because she was afraid and didn’t know why. “Were you?”

  Maggie’s eyes widened further still and she shook her head quickly.

  “What are you, mute?” Cherie blurted. “Say something!”

  She advanced on the girl, who continued to shake her head in denial, raindrops flying from the top of her green hood.

  Cherie grabbed the girl by the shoulders and shook her. “Don’t lie to me, you little fucking monster! You were here! In my house! Just like you are now!” She flashed back to herself and Warren having sex the night before. “You were here the whole time, weren’t you? Spying on us! Did you like what you saw, you little fucking cunt? Did you?”