The 'Geisters

by David Nickle

  “Close the hatch!” Ann shouted. Her mom shook her head: “No honey! I don’t want you trapped. Just stay there,” and Ann screamed, so that her breath steamed in the cooling air:

  “Close it!”

  And at that, the boat pitched, and her mother slipped back, and then Ann couldn’t tell anything, because the hatch was shut, and she was back in the hold of the steamer.

  “Where is the girl?”

  “She was knocked right out when we left.”

  “Well she isn’t now, dumkopf. She has escaped. We must search the ship.”

  “Who’s there?” The cabin—the hold—was dark as night. Ann held Barbie tight, and felt the deck pitch underneath her. A lash of rain and water hit one of the portholes and drew back. A latch clicked, and she heard one of the drawers sliding open. Then came a clattering—a sound of cutlery dumping onto the deck.

  “Not here.”

  “Philip?” The voice didn’t sound like Philip—it seemed deeper than he could manage, and . . . somehow foreign, and . . . it seemed to be everywhere.

  Maybe at her shoulder.

  “The little bitch is crafty,” it said.

  “Only so many places to be crafty,” it said, “on this ship.”

  Something covered the porthole then, for just an instant—and Ann felt a plastic bowl bounce off her ankle. When the porthole reappeared, Ann could see a rime of frost forming around its edges.

  “Not there.”

  Ann felt her stomach turn then, and the light shifted and shifted; the wooden hull moaned and the water that had gotten in sloshed frantically. Ann swallowed—tears of panic crawled from her eyelids. She held the Barbie tighter, and thought: We’re in the waterspout!

  “Here?” Something snapped, and dishes clattered and Ann felt herself being pressed against the ladder now as the spinning grew quicker.

  “Where is that little bitch?”

  The boat was going to break apart!

  “Give yourself up!”

  “No please no!”

  Ann squealed, as she felt something squirm under her arm. She reached in and pulled out Barbie, still soaking wet in her tennis outfit. She looked the doll in the face—and then turned her away, to face the dark—and (hating herself), she shouted to the dark hold: “Here she is!”

  The boat pitched again, and Ann slipped in the water puddling in the bottom of the boat, and when she righted herself, she was empty-handed.

  Something whistled—maybe the kettle they had for making tea. . . .

  Maybe Barbie, in the clutches of the bad men . . .

  Screaming.

  Whichever it was, whistle or scream—the noise cut short with a great crack! sound, and a sudden listing, as the Bounty II struck rock, and the spinning stopped for good.

  Philip had scraped his hand raw on a rope. The Bounty II would need a new mast, a new propeller, and all or part of a rudder, and someone would have to come by to look at the hull just to be sure. But with those exceptions, no one was hurt, and dad’s precious boat had survived.

  Later, that night, their mom would call it that: your precious boat, as a way to contrast the preciousness of his daughter, his son, his wife . . . himself.

  When Ann opened up the hatch and climbed onto the deck, there were no harsh words. The boat had tangled in some water-rounded rocks that peeked out of the lake near a stand of pine trees on the shore. It was listing heavily to port, so the whole family was as much leaning against the deck as they were sitting on it. The whole deck was in shadow. The sky was brilliant blue directly overhead; to the east, towering thunder-headed clouds sped away. Her mom was there by the hatch, prying it up.

  “My God, baby, you’re cold as ice!” she said as she drew Ann into her arms. “It’s like a freezer in there!”

  Ann held on to her mom tightly as she pulled her into the sunlight. Their dad scrambled around them, and reached into the hatch. He unstrapped the first aid kit and hauled it to the wheel, where Philip hunched over his injured hand.

  Her mom chided her for shutting the hatch, but gently. “It might seem safe to lock yourself in there, but it just traps you, honey. If the boat had turned over . . .”

  “I didn’t shut myself in there.”

  “It’s okay if you did this time. It was pretty scary up here.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “Just remember not to do it again.”

  “It wasn’t me,” she said.

  iii

  There was pizza back at the boathouse. Dad bought enough for the family and the contractors too, and some beer besides—“to drink to our good fortune,” he said, which sounded like a funny thing to say, at first. But Ann didn’t have to think long to realize that it had been a lucky day all around, and as the sun set on it, they all sat around a fire pit on the beach, going over just how lucky.

  Cal, one of the drywallers, had been taking a smoke break on the lawn when the storm came in and he’d seen the twister come.

  “Never seen anything like it,” he said as he reached for another bottle. “I go out, and it’s clear and hot. Couple clouds in the west, but nothing to write home about. Not even a breeze when I’m lighting up. You were out pretty far by then, but I could still see you fine. I remember thinking you were going pretty good for how calm it was on shore.”

  “Calm, and fuckin’—sorry—and hot,” said Luc, a carpenter in from Montreal.

  “Yeah, until then. I’m not even half finished my smoke, and suddenly it gets dark, and cold. The wind’s picked up, and there’s a cloud—a black cloud—right overhead. Blacking out everything. Thing snuck right up.”

  “Forecast didn’t say anything about it,” said Dad, nodding.

  “Forecasters don’t know their ass,” said Luc.

  “Not today,” said Cal, and clinked the bottom of his beer bottle with Dad’s.

  “Did you spot the funnel cloud?” asked Dad, and Cal nodded.

  “Didn’t know what it was at first. Never seen one of those before. But yeah. It was sort of dipping down toward the lake . . . and screw it, I thought. I pinched off my smoke and headed back inside. Figured we’d get hit. It was that close.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Luc!”

  “Ah. Sorry. Hey kid! Sorry!”

  Ann looked where Luc was waving. Philip had gotten up and was heading toward the boathouse.

  “It’s okay,” Philip called back. “I’m just taking a walk.”

  Ann had another slice of pizza and chewed on it as the workmen continued their tale: how they’d shut off the generator and headed to the basement, occasionally glimpsing the rising swirl of water from the lake. Cal insisted he’d said a prayer for the LeSages, and another workman who Ann didn’t know said he tried to get to his truck to radio for help. But the wind was

  too strong.

  They started to talk about how best to fix the boat, then. It was still tangled in the rocks—tomorrow, their dad would hire another boat from the marina across the lake, to come out and haul it back—so the conversation was pretty theoretical. As it dragged on, Ann asked if she might be excused and her mother sent her on. “Go find your brother,” she called after her and Ann said she would.

  It was, after all, what she’d been intending all along.

  Philip was inside the boathouse.

  Not the second floor, where they were living, but the bottom—a garage, basically, where you might actually house a boat or two, if you bought the right size of boat. He wasn’t hard to spot; he’d turned the light on, and was sitting inside, along the dock and in a torn old canvas chair that had been left by the last owners. The light reflected up off the lake and made everything seem underwater.

  “I peed in the lake,” he said when she came in. “So don’t go swimming.”

  “Ew.” Ann sat down on the edge of the dock beside him and peered into the water. It was black. It wasn’t quite still enoug
h to see her reflection. Philip tapped his heel on the dock. “How’s your hand?” she asked.

  “Good. Better.”

  Tap-tap-tap, went his foot. Ann looked out the front of the boathouse, which was open. The sun was pretty much down, but she could see the distant line of trees at the lake’s far side against the slightly lighter horizon. Soon there would be all kinds of stars out; since the storm, the clouds were all gone.

  “Were you talking to me?” she asked. “Right before the storm hit?”

  He was silent.

  “And after? When the hatch closed? Were you talking to me then?”

  “No,” he said.

  Tap-tap-tap-tap.

  “Because I thought you were,” she said. “I heard you talking. While I was playing. With my Barbie.”

  “I was kind of distracted,” he said. “Big storm. Remember?”

  Tap-tap.

  She nodded. “I remember,” said Ann. “And . . .”

  Tap.

  “What?”

  She leaned back and put her hand on his foot.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I think it was my fault.”

  Philip pulled his foot back and kicked a little. She let go.

  “Fuck off.”

  It was the worst thing you could say to someone, but Philip said it in a way just then that made her want to hug him.

  He drew his feet underneath the chair and he looked at her.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said. “It’s Dad’s.”

  “What?”

  “This never would’ve happened if we’d just stayed at home. If he didn’t buy that boat. And make us go out in it.”

  Ann turned around so her back was to the water, and she could face him directly.

  “Tell me the truth,” she said. “Swear. You didn’t say anything to me when I was down below? You weren’t, like, fooling around?”

  “Fuck.” He held up his bandaged hand like he was taking an oath. “Piss. Shit. Goddammit. That good enough swearing?”

  Ann rolled her eyes, and swung back around to look at the water. She pulled off her shoes, and dipped her feet in. It was freezing, but it felt good. It was numbing in its way.

  Feet still in water, she lay back on the dock and looked up at her brother. This was how Barbie would see things, she thought.

  “Good enough,” she said.

  “Someone was talking to you?” he said after a while. “During the storm?”

  She nodded.

  “Think it was a ghost?”

  Ann shrugged. “I thought it was you.”

  “Did it sound like me?” He tapped the side of her head with his toe, but gently.

  “At first. But then—”

  He nodded. “A ghost.”

  “On a boat?”

  Philip leaned forward so his face loomed over hers, upside down. “It’s an old boat,” he said. “Remember that picture of it? With the old guy, sitting at the wheel, waving?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe he’s dead. And maybe he doesn’t like being dead. And maybe he came all the way up here, to get—”

  His toe tapped again, against her ear.

  “—his—”

  “Ow!” It was harder this time, and Ann sat up fast.

  “—boat back!” he shouted, and leaned forward, started tickling under her arms, yelling “Bwa-ha-ha!”

  Ann’s feet came out of the water in a spray, and she kicked so more water came up, soaking them both. She squealed. He rolled out of the chair and onto his knees and dug in, tickling her waist. “Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,” he said.

  Ann brought her knees up from the water and gasped, “No no no!” And at that, he relented, fell back on his haunches, looked down at her with a grin.

  “I hate you,” she said, grinning back.

  “I hate you more,” he said, and slapped her on the shoulder.

  “No I hate you more.” Ann rolled over and got up. Her ribs hurt from laughing, and she was wet, and freezing cold.

  “I’m going to get changed,” she said, and stuck her tongue out. Philip gave her a pro-forma middle finger, then nodded. Made a show of shivering.

  “We’re both soaked,” he said. He got up too, and together they went outside and climbed the stairs to their temporary home in the boathouse. They paused at the door. On the beach, one of the workmen had just tossed another log on the fire, and the sparks climbed high over the roof—nearly as high as the roof of the main house, which towered tall and black behind them. The storm, the tower of water it made, hadn’t touched the house. It hadn’t touched anything here.

  But for the evidence of the boat on the rocks tonight, and Philip’s rope-burned hand, it might never have come at all.

  Ann heard a sob, clawing its way from her belly. She shut her eyes.

  Philip put his arms around Ann then, and hugged her close. She hugged her big brother back. She didn’t know if he was crying, then, but she sure was. He let her finish before he opened the door and took them both inside.

  “I don’t think it was a ghost,” said Philip as he turned the light on, “for what it’s worth.”

  THE JOINING OF TWO

  i

  The production company Ian Rickhardt had hired was to be editing the wedding video while Michael and Ann were off in Tobago; Ian Rickhardt had led Ann to expect that she wouldn’t see it until the honeymoon was over.

  “These guys are good,” he said. “Normally, they’d take a month on this thing. For me—for you, they’ll cut it in two weeks. One way or another—they’ll get it perfect. And when you’re back, we’ll sit down with bowls of popcorn and check it out.”

  As far as anyone knew, that was Rickhardt’s plan all along.

  And it was—until he drove into town, met with the editor, had a talk about just how much he’d been able to achieve, and sat down with a rough cut.

  That changed everything.

  Ann and Michael were on the Buccoo Reef, snorkelling under a clear Caribbean sky with a glass-bottom-boatload of Venezuelans. It was very non-exclusive. The whole honeymoon had been managed by a business contact of Michael’s—Steve Clifford, a Trinidadian banker who either owed Michael a favour or was building up some credit.

  He’d found them a beach house—a two-floor cinderblock affair not technically on the beach but within sight of the sea. It was near the airport at the capital town of Scarborough, but not too near. Coconut trees surrounded it, and it was far enough from the road that it might be considered remote. Michael liked it because it was “off the grid,” the grid being the line of resort complexes that had breakfast buffets and swim-up bars and a list of activities.

  “Sounds like my kind of grid,” said Ann when they discussed it. But she was persuaded by photographs of those palm trees, and the promise of a housekeeper and driver.

  Steve Clifford would, in that spirit, have organized an exclusive just-the-two-of-them trip out to the reef and had in fact made the offer. But Michael and Ann had agreed: Steve had done enough already, setting them up in that beach house with their own housekeeper and cook, arranging a car and driver to be on call

  for them.

  By the time they decided to check out the local sea life, stepping back on the grid, getting to see some people, didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

  So Ann arranged for two spots on the Calypso Empress, a big outboard shaped like a shoebox, and they settled around the glass floor to watch the bottom of the sea scoot by.

  The Venezuelans were in a group, and they were tied up in wedding business too. They were all guests, though; the bride and groom were holed up at a resort by the airport, getting ready for the big day. These ones were friends of the groom; they worked with him at a newspaper in Caracas. It was one of the newspapers that didn’t much care for Chavez—or so Ann surmised from the conversation.

  When she pointed this out, several of the Ve
nezuelans laughed. “We all hate Chavez,” said one. “Even in death. That is what they pay us for!”

  The ride to the reef was just under a half hour. It went quickly. The Venezuelans were delighted to hear that they were on a boat with honeymooners, and peppered them with questions. When were they married? Where were they staying? Were there going to be lots of kids? Did they have an opinion regarding President Obama?

  They played a guessing game about their nationalities. The newspapermen pegged Ann as a Canadian right away, but guessed wrong twice about Michael. German? Swedish? Or (the closest one) Dutch?

  He seemed pleased when he finally had to tell them: “South African. We should have put money on it.”

  Soon enough, the glass-bottomed boat rendered up its rewards: a sand shark, schools of yellow sunfish, great crabs. A manta ray paced them for a while.

  The boat paused at a nondescript shallow that had been named the Nylon Pool by visiting royalty. It was rumoured to have rejuvenating powers, and everybody climbed into the water with that in mind. Rejuvenated (and a little bored), they climbed back out, and moved on to the reef, while the guides admonished them about the penalties to befall any visitor tempted to break off coral or do anything else to upset the ecology.

  The guides passed out masks and snorkels, black rubber shoes. No need for fins: the reef was shallow enough here that a tall person would have to crouch a bit to get the mask underwater. They all climbed down a little steel ladder that extended from the boat’s stern.

  Ann didn’t have to bend very far to get a look at the reef. It was a revelation! A school of tiny silver fish swirled around her ankle, and not far from her toe, a barnacled crustacean of peculiar origin moved aside. Her first impulse—to jump back, away from the world that she was invading—passed in an instant. The guides were right: this was an ecology, a whole world unto itself.

  She made her way across the coral—itself a huge living entity, maybe seven kilometres across, if you stretched the definition of living and entity.

  The water deepened and she was able to stand straighter, and she went deeper into that strange, drifting land, and thought: I could get used to this place.