by Noel Hynd
“He kept his eyes fixed on me. Then he pointed with his left hand. Very low. He was definitely indicating something. He pointed to the lower inside lining of the coat. His long index finger ran softly across the worn material. Then he straightened and, just as fast, vanished. I turned on the light and the room was still again.”
“The next day, I told my mother the story. She insisted I had been dreaming, of course. Told me that my imagination must have been running wild. Things like that didn’t happen.” Mary raised her eyebrows as if to suggest that she knew better.
“‘Well then, whatever happened to Grandpa’s coat?’ I asked her. And she told me. It was in the trunk of the car. It was boxed with several other things that were about to be thrown away. My mother felt that the old coat was so worn that no one would want it. She was probably right.” Mary grinned. “But I had a different reaction. ‘Let’s go look at it,’ I said.”
They went out to the car, Mary said, and eventually located the tattered coat at the bottom of the least accessible box. But they pulled it out, fighting with the weight of other clothes upon the coat.
“My mother is here tonight,” Mary said. “She’ll tell you what happened if you don’t believe me.”
Mary pointed to an elderly woman in the third row. The woman smiled and nodded. Mary kept talking.
“The coat pockets were empty. I laid the coat out on the ground, then ran my hand across the lining to the part that Grandpa had indicated. Immediately, I felt something. I almost jumped when I found it. We took a pair of scissors and undid the stitching on the coat. There were all of Grandpa’s important papers within the lining, right where he’d hidden them years ago. He’d worn the coat all the time because he was always carrying his papers with him.” She paused. “Everything was right where he had indicated back when his vision had appeared before me. “
Mary shrugged. At the rear of the church meeting hall, Timothy Brooks slipped quietly into the room. Brooks was a handsome, athletically built man in his late thirties, just above six feet tall, with dark blond hair, blue eyes and a square jaw. Unobtrusively, he sat down at a seat near the rear. Osaro, his friend, gave Brooks a very slight nod, imperceptibly to almost everyone else.
“Call it what you want,” Mary concluded. “A dream. Clairvoyance. A spirit. What was found was his will. And with it there was a notarized document, all filled out and legally executed, that Bettina had signed in nineteen forty-nine. It was a bill of sale. Grandpa had bought his share of the house from her. Bettina’s case was thrown out of court a week later.” Mary sighed.
“That’s the way we inherited our home on this island,” she said. “And that’s my first and only experience with the supernatural. The house is up on Cliff Road and I won’t tell you the exact location.” She smiled. “As for Grandpa’s coat, it’s our family superstition. We’ve never discarded it. We keep it in the front hall hanging right there on an old wooden coat rack. ‘In case Grandpa ever drops by again,’ my Mother still says. After all, there’s not one bit of doubt in our family: Grandpa’s watching over us. He even came back from the dead and gave us back our home. “
There was an appreciative murmur in the hall, followed by polite applause. It was led by Reverend Osaro, who again glanced at his watch. He allowed a few questions from the audience. Then, holding his pipe in his hand, he introduced a man named Leon Kane. Kane was seated at the other end of the table and appeared to be in his seventies.
“Leon?” Osaro asked, “What have you got for us?”
Kane seemed almost embarrassed. His hair was white and thin, his face round, his voice gravelly. Reverend Osaro had talked him into taking part in the colloquium, but he still seemed ill at ease with it.
“I’ll tell you something,” he said, shaking his head, “two years ago if you had told me that I’d be sitting here talking about ghosts, I’d—”
“Spirits,” the pastor corrected gently. “Let’s call them what they are. They’re living things, not dead. Same as you or I.”
“Spirits. Ghosts. Whatever, Reverend,” Leon Kane said a little cantankerously. “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them as far as I know.” Kane thought about it, then turned to the smaller, younger man. “Hell, I like the word ‘ghost’! What’s the matter with it? That’s what the hell my wife saw, so why can’t I call it that?”
“As you prefer,” Osaro said. The minister smiled indulgently. He did, after all, believe in freedom of thought. “Please go on,” he said, apology in his tone.
“Where was I?” Kane asked.
Osaro helped him. “Two years ago, if anyone had told you.”
“Oh, right. That’s it. Of course,” Kane said. “Look, I’m a sane, sober guy. I’m a retired firefighter. Worked on the fire department in Providence for seventeen years, then I come here, was on the Nantucket Fire Department for another five. Retired nine years ago. Widowed two years ago, which is what I want to tell you about.”
A hush slowly covered the hall.
Kane waited for a moment, as if to work up a final element of courage. Then he began.
“I was watching the Bruins play hockey one evening,” he said. “My wife was in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner. It was about seven-thirty in the evening. I remember it real well. The Bruins were playing the Rangers at Madison Square Garden. Cold night in the early fall. The game had just started. Anyway, I’m watching the television and I hear a man’s voice in the kitchen with my wife.”
Someone laughed very quietly at the notion of a strange man in the kitchen with the retired fireman’s wife.
“I heard the man say, ‘Laura, I’ve come for you.’ Nothing more. Just that. But very clear. I heard them words. I looked toward the kitchen and I didn’t see nothing. Nothing at all. It was one of them things that even after it happened, I couldn’t even tell whether it really had happened.” He glanced around to no one in particular. “Know what I mean?”
There were nods around the room. Most of the audience listened attentively, including Tim Brooks, still stationed toward the back.
“So finally I yelled out to the old girl, ‘Laura?’ That was my wife’s name. Laura,” Mr. Kane said. “‘Laura? You okay out there, honey?’ No answer. So now I’m wondering: What the heck’s going on? Well,” he chuckled, “I started to get up. You know, pull my fat old self up out of the chair. Just then, Laura appeared at the kitchen door. Well, we’d been married for thirty-six years. And I’d never seen her so shaken. ‘Honey?’ I asked her. ‘What is it?’ She looked real frightened.”
Kane paused, then went on. “‘I just saw my brother in the kitchen,’ my wife said. She was talking about her brother Willie. Her only brother. Well, Willie had died in a car accident in Natick. Willie had been dead for six years.”
Kane’s wife came over and sat down on the ottoman near his chair. He put his hand on hers. She said she was terribly scared because she knew she hadn’t imagined what she had seen. She had seen a ghost, she had said. That’s what she had called it. A ghost. So Leon Kane continued to call it that, too, Reverend Osaro notwithstanding. In Leon Kane’s explanation, Willie had been there one minute as solid as a stone barn. The next moment he had been gone.
“I would have talked her out of it,” Leon Kane said, “I’m sure I would have. But I didn’t ’cause I heard the voice, too. Clear as a bell. ‘I’ve come for you, Laura.’ Plain as day. Just like that. And know what? It was Willie’s voice. I recognized it, too.” Two little waves went around the audience in the meeting hall. One of fascination. The other of discomfort. Kane gave the moment a long pause, and even Tim Brooks felt a hair or two rise on the back of his neck.
“I guess he had come for her,” Kane said. “Came from wherever you come from after you’re dead.” He pursed his lips. “Next day, the very next day, my Laura had a stroke. By evening she was gone.”
He ran his hand through his hair. It was clear that the story still caused him anguish. For a moment, thinking of his wife of thirty-six summers, s
omething caught in his throat and he couldn’t talk.
“But that’s not even the end of the story,” he added as he recovered. “See, we was redecorating the house, Laura and me, when she died. The next thing that we was going to do was get rid of this ugly old green carpet that we had in the den. Well, three days later I come home and the carpet was in a big heap on the floor. It had all been pulled up. I didn’t know how it had got that way. I thought one of my daughters had done it. Or one of the grandchildren who were visiting. But, no. None of them confessed to it. So I put the carpet back down. Sure enough, I found it pulled up again two days later. And then a third time after that.”
Mr. Kane smiled. A ripple of laughter moved around the meeting hall. “So finally, hell! I got smart,” he said. “I threw it out! I ordered a new one that Laura had liked but had never gotten around to buy. Had the carpet people rush the order. Well, sir. I brought the new one home and put it down myself. It’s been there since. Never got disturbed.”
Again, he smiled ruefully. “Nothing happened again. What it seemed like,” he concluded, “was that Laura was keeping an eye on me for a few days to see if I could make it through her passing all right. When she saw that I could carry on without her, she left. She went to wherever good souls go.”
He shrugged.
“It’s not scary,” Leon Kane said. “It’s comforting, if you think about it real hard. See, deep down in my heart I know the person I love is out there somewhere. Waiting for me. I can’t explain it. I just know that in the same way Laura’s brother came for her, she kept her eye on me. And now she’s out there in The Good Place waiting for me. Heaven. That’s what I call it.”
His eyes were sparkling, though moist.
“I’m seventy-four years old,” Kane said. “And you know what? I’m not scared of making that trip myself someday. Not scared at all.” He smiled. “I keep hoping that someday I’ll look up, see her, and she’ll be holding out her hand to welcome me and I’ll know that it’s my time and she’s come to take me to Heaven with her.”
He tucked his lower lip into his teeth for a moment and held it. Then he turned toward Osaro. “That’s it, Reverend. That’s my story. That’s all.”
Applause followed. Then a few hands came aloft from those in the audience. Osaro cut off the questions.
“For reasons of time, I’d like to move to our final panelist,” he said. “Maybe if some of you have questions or comments for Mr. Kane, he might be generous enough to stay for a few minutes afterward to speak with you.”
Kane nodded to indicate he would.
“Otherwise,” Reverend Osaro said, “I’d like to go directly to our final guest, Doctor Richard Friedman.”
Osaro indicated a lean, angular man with short dark hair and glasses. The doctor looked like a doctor. He sat at the end of the table, next to Mary Rovere.
“Doctor Friedman is in private practice in Boston and has maintained a summer home here in Nantucket for the last ten years.”
“Two different homes here in Nantucket,” Dr. Friedman said, picking up the introduction. “That’s part of the story. We were pretty much driven out of the first one. I’m afraid my tale is nowhere nearly as uplifting as my predecessor’s.”
He cleared his throat and his eyebrows furrowed unpleasantly.
“The house is on Milk Street,” Dr. Friedman began. “It’s not terribly old. It was built around nineteen hundred and was only inhabited by four owners before us. I’ve traced who they all were. I don’t know of anything violent or terrible that ever happened at that address.”
It started, the physician said, on a day shortly after they had moved in. His daughter, Rachel, had a bedroom adjoining the guest room on the second floor.
“She’s a bright little girl,” the doctor said. “Very perceptive of moods and feelings, very conscious of many things that she can’t see.” He paused. “And she was always scared of a door on that floor leading from her room to the extra room. She was also very frightened of the dark.”
In his seat in a rear pew, Tim Brooks folded his arms before him. Through a veil of haze created by George Osaro’s pipe, there was already something unsettling to the doctor’s appearance. Rachel was playing near bedtime one night three years earlier her father said, when she looked up and saw the figure of a man. It came through the wall and stood before her. This he announced as bluntly as if he were diagnosing a common virus. The girl was terrified. But somehow the vision communicated with her.
“‘I’m keeping watch over my place,’ the vision said. Then the man disappeared before her eyes. Rachel fled down the stairs and screamed for her parents, describing what she had seen.
“We didn’t believe in such things’” Dr. Friedman said. “So we spent a lot of time insisting to our daughter that she must have fallen asleep and had a bad dream. But for weeks she wouldn’t use the room. And she slept with a light on when we finally coaxed her into moving back in.”
Friedman scratched his head. “I suppose we also had another indication that something extraordinary was happening. We bought Rachel a cat to keep her company. And we told her that the cat would protect her and would know if something was wrong. Well, our plan was to reassure her. But the idea backfired. It was sly little gray cat named Wendy. The hair on the cat’s back would stand up if you took it to the room. If you put Wendy down, she would drop her tail between her legs and slink away. And if you tried to carry the cat through that doorway, she would scratch and claw and fight you till you dropped her. The animal wanted no part of that area of the house.”
The apparition didn’t appear again to Rachel. And though she was constantly mindful of the possibility of a reappearance, she did calm down with the passage of time. Gradually, the spookiness became less of a factor of daily life in the house. Then an incident happened two summers later.
“We did some extensive renovations on the upstairs of the house,” Dr. Friedman said. “The remodeling called for us to move the master bedroom to the extra room where the ghost had come from. Rachel was moved to the other end of the floor. My son, Jed, was in a room adjoining Rachel’s.”
He paused for a moment.
“I was there one night,” Dr. Friedman continued, “when a feeling of terror came upon me. It surrounded me and held me with fear. It was like a giant hand wrapping itself around me. Honestly, I couldn’t talk or move. I wanted to yell and couldn’t.” He shook his head. “Know what it felt like? It felt like something, some extraordinary presence, was trying to crush me, that’s what.”
Dr. Friedman knew he couldn’t battle this power physically. So he remembered fighting this force intellectually. As a doctor, he tried to figure out what was wrong with him: seizure, heart attack or spastic fit and do what was necessary to save his life. But equally, he knew that he was locked in combat with something not to be found in any medical journal.
“Eventually, I managed to stamp my foot. Then I got part of my voice back. I managed to let out a muffled grunt. Then a thought came over me. I don’t even remember thinking the words. I just blurted them out, surprised to hear my own voice. ‘I know,’ I said aloud. ‘You’re just watching over your place.’”
The statement, the doctor said, placated whatever force had gripped him. It gradually released him. There was a point, he remembered, when the feeling was very tactile something was holding him one second, letting him go the next. Then he staggered downstairs, terrified. He told his wife what had happened.
“We made the decision right then,” Dr. Friedman said. “We would get out of the house and sell it. There was no question in our minds that there was some utterly evil presence in that home. We couldn’t fight it. Nor did we dare. So the next day we started making preparations to leave.”
The preparations continued smoothly for several days. It was the end of August 2010, a quirky, moody time on Nantucket in any case as it directly followed a violent hurricane. The Friedmans assembled the clothing and belongings they wanted out of the house. They called their rea
l estate broker and cryptically announced that they would list the home for sale but buy another one on the island. The broker didn’t understand the logic because the doctor and his wife didn’t immediately explain what had happened. But the broker was grateful for the business and accepted it.
“Then my wife and I were in the living room on our final day of packing. We were within minutes of removing our final pieces of luggage. And naturally something happened that both of us will never forget. Something more totally terrifying than I ever thought I would experience in my life.”
The meeting hall of the church was very still now. From the back, Tim Brooks surveyed the audience as he held on Dr. Friedman’s words along with everyone else.
Dr. and Mrs. Friedman were in the downstairs living area, the doctor recalled. Their children had been sent to stay with grandparents. So they knew themselves to be alone in the house. Then, in mid-afternoon, they froze. Very distinctly they heard footsteps above them—right in the area upstairs where there had been two incidents.
“‘Richard, let’s get out of here. Right now!’ my wife Bonnie said to me. And maybe we should have. But I remember thinking and saying, ‘No. If we leave it might follow us. Whatever it wants, whatever it is, let’s settle everything right here.’”
On the stage near Reverend Osaro, Dr. Friedman sipped from a glass of water.
Bonnie Friedman huddled beside him, Friedman said, and they stood riveted in place as the footsteps above them grew louder. The footfalls neared the central staircase at the front of the house, then slowly descended.
They held their ground as, one by one, the footsteps came down the staircase, which they could not see from where they stood. The sound stopped a few steps from the bottom, held silent for a few seconds, then came the rest of the way, three quick steps in succession. They arrived at the base of the steps with a thud.
Mrs. Friedman gripped her husband. They were looking right at the spot where something should have been standing. But nothing that they could see was there.