“I know, sir—you’ll be a great help. Mr. B.B. will put you where you’ll be the most useful.” Rudy glanced over the man’s head at his silent, smiling friends. “All of you should report to Mr. B.B. for your assignments.”
The old man trotted off happily, his elderly contingent struggling to follow with the same energy. It occurred to Rudy then that the one thing he and B.B. had never discussed was liability insurance. Rudy watched as B.B. and his helpers finished erecting the first of four corners for the castle. Then the helpers went on to the next corner while B.B. walked back to Rudy. Rudy was amused to see that the old man he had just talked to now seemed to be in charge of the “corners crew”.
“Are you sure these old people can handle all this construction?” Rudy asked. “Those blocks are heavy.”
“Two hundred pounds, easy,” B.B. replied. “And you got some learning to do about just how much an old person can do.” B.B. chuckled. “Don’t worry. This is just about the age group I wanted—they’d be the ones that would have the skills and any understanding about what we’re trying to do here.” His voice went soft. “They won’t say anything to you, but most of them have somebody they know that’s been lost. They know something’s been wrong here a long time.” He crouched down in the snow and scratched lightly at its surface. Rudy watched with an odd sort of anxiety. “I laid out a bottom row for a foundation, and once all the corners are up they shouldn’t have any trouble filling in the walls. I’ll plumb the walls every now and then to check the angles, but we got old-time carpenters out there—they know what they’re doing. And a few of the young ’uns’ll help out where they need a little more strength on the job.”
“And the openings?”
“I’ve got a couple of fellows picked out to help me on those. It should look pretty much the way Old Finney had it, I guess. I’ll do a little sculpting on the towers, and once the sun’s down it should be cold enough to use a sprayer for freezing up some interesting effects. So that should do it, right?”
Rudy watched the second corner go up. B.B. was right: the old man seemed to know exactly what he was doing. “B.B., you said these old people have an understanding about what we’re trying to do here.”
“Yeah.”
“What is it that we’re trying to do here?”
B.B. continued to scratch at the snow. Rudy was beginning to find it irritating. “Hell … I don’t know, Rudy. We’re harvesting the ice out of the pond, getting out way more than we need—I’ve got a fellow and some kids out there now cutting even more—because that’s the way Old Finney did it. We’re building that castle, too, because that’s what Old Finney did. We’re doing everything he did, and we’ll see what happens. Maybe nothing—I don’t know. But what else do we do?”
Rudy looked out over the pond, which today, with so much of its ice removed, looked very much like any other pond. The water was perfectly calm, reflecting the deep blue of the sky. The morning’s clouds had blown away so that the afternoon grew steadily colder, but no colder than might be expected in this climate. He tried to trace the steps that had led him to this ice-harvesting party he was throwing, this ice-castle-raising by his pond, but he could not—it was as if he had been on automatic pilot since his arrival here. It had started with some shadows he had seen in the ice, and which had both surprised and appalled him—he knew that much—and it also had something to do with what he had been thinking about survival, and guilt, and terrible grief and what other people meant to you. When they surrounded you so tightly you could not breathe, what did they mean? Were they the essence of life, or the threat of your imminent death? ‘I don’t know,” he said out loud.
“Then let’s just continue this and see what happens,” B.B. said.
After B.B. went back to the construction site, Rudy watched for several hours as the blocks of ice rose rapidly out of the cold, forming walls and entranceways, gates and towers. Every now and then he would go over and lend a hand, raise a block or use a chisel, but most of the time he was obviously just in the way. The blazing white eye overhead gradually went away.
Twilight came and soon God could no longer see what humankind was up to. That pond is much bigger than it is, he thought, as the castle expanded, using up more and more ice, far more ice than Rudy thought the pond could possibly contain. He watched as B.B. climbed on top of the towers and created ice domes with tall spires growing from their centers. He watched as B.B. used a hose attachment to throw misted curtains of water over parts of the structure, where they froze into lacy contours and intricate ornamentations. He watched as minarets and turrets were added, ceilings with long icy stalactites, stalagmite pillars, ramparts and slides and secret pockets in the ice.
The castle followed a plan B.B. had drawn up based on a few old photographs and the recollections of a few of the old-timers around town. It was an elaborate structure—Rudy was beginning to see why it would have been a tourist attraction—and it went up far more quickly than Rudy could have imagined, as if the ice came directly out of the pond prefitted, and each block helped its carrier find the perfect spot for its placement. Despite the often uneven surface of the ice, Rudy could barely make out the seams as the blocks were assembled into walls.
“It’s beautiful!” a woman’s voice said behind him. “It’s just like I remember it!”
Rudy turned to face Emily Lorcaster, who gazed at the castle with tears in her eyes. Rudy thought to caution her against crying, to warn her that her tears might freeze, but talked himself out of the silly notion.
“Where’s your husband?” he asked.
“Oh, he won’t come here. He doesn’t approve”—she gestured vaguely at the ice castle—“of all this.” Again, she seemed transfixed by her glimpse of the ice castle.
“And why’s that?”
“He thinks I live too much in the past as it is. He thinks we all do, and that it isn’t healthy. Besides, he never much cared for my grandfather.”
No one did besides you, Emily, he thought.
“But from here … it’s so magnificent!” she exclaimed.
“You can take a closer look,” he said. Much to his surprise she grabbed his hand and pulled him along with her to the castle. She suddenly seemed like a young girl, and he began to wonder what it was she wanted from him.
She forced him to move too fast for the snow and icy slush that fronted the castle. Each stumble threatened to send them both face-first into the frozen ground. As they moved awkwardly around the shore of the pond he found he was amazed by its clarity. If the sky weren’t so dark now he might be able to see all the way to its bottom. Gone were the shadows, the sense of something lurking just beneath the surface. The ice blocks of the castle varied in color from frothy white to near-transparent. All the shades of purity, he thought. Apparently, the ice harvest had done something to the essential quality of the ice.
“It’s gorgeous!” she cried, leading him through the huge ice archway that formed the main entrance. Townspeople pushed past them laughing and singing, some of them even dancing, their hands stretched out, reaching, striving to form a massive daisy chain with everyone they passed. Even in their heavy winter garb, they moved with no awkwardness, no stiffness, as if they wore nothing at all.
He looked overhead as they entered the first big room. Icicles hung down in clusters like a series of elaborate chandeliers, the illusion made more perfect when they caught the last rays of the dying sun coming through the entranceway. The room was almost a perfect circle. Several ice tunnels led off to other parts of the castle.
“This is incredible!” he said. “It is a palace!” In fact, it reminded him more of the make-believe castles in fairy stories, or the way he’d imagined Spanish cities must be when he was a child: exquisite in their appearance and unfailingly comfortable. And it was the heaven his father had believed in as a child, but had been denied in the years after his release from the camps.
They wandered through a series of ice caves and larger chambers, passing more and more of
the townspeople, some of whom laughed their way through, others shambling in silent awe. In some rooms were ice benches and chairs where people sat. If they remained there too long, would they be able to get up, or would their clothes be frozen to the ice? Now and then he thought he heard B.B.’s voice winding its way from some other part of the castle, but he never did see him.
Some of the townspeople stood in darkened corners of the structure, as if waiting for something. It bothered him. Everyone was watching him.
The castle was much bigger than it had first appeared from the outside. They hadn’t had enough time to build all this. Again, he looked around nervously for B.B., to explain things to him. Fog swirled in some of the entrances and under some of the doors—condensation and sudden changes of temperature, he thought. Old men and women came in and out of the fog, but none said anything to him. When they came close he moved, afraid to have them touch him.
He came to see the townspeople as not simply other, but other. Their faces were grey and shadowed. They were no longer human.… Sometimes in distant halls he could hear a small girl’s laughter.
Near the back of the castle they arrived at a short staircase of ice blocks. “This way,” Emily whispered. “We can get away from all these people.” Then she pushed him up the stairs.
The ice walls here were imperfectly formed, their surfaces streaked and cracked. In fact, a crevasse had formed on one wall, so large that Rudy feared for the safety of the entire structure. “I think we’d better warn …” he said, turning around, but Emily Lorcaster wasn’t there.
The castle suddenly seemed very quiet. He turned back around and looked at the damaged walls. The outer layers of ice were shaving off and dropping onto the floor. Dark stains flowed down the walls as the ice began to melt. Black rivulets criss-crossed the ice floor.
Rotted chunks of ice fell from the castle roof, shattering into bone-shaped fragments at his feet.
In one corner of the room was a crib sculpted out of ice. He walked over to it. Black holes had melted into the bottom of the crib. He bent closer to peer inside: the holes seemed endless. Their edges melted together, widened, the dripping ice around those edges half frozen into icicle teeth. Rudy stepped back. They looked like a nest of hungry mouths.
He turned away and stared at the slight shadows of countless children trapped within the crumbling ice walls. Their faces came closer to the surface. He could see that all their mouths were open. Their shadow hands came up to the surface of the ice, fingers outstretched, and then their emaciated arms and skeleton fingers thrust completely through the ice, begging, desperate to touch. Their porous skin hung like pale, damp tissue from their bones, as if they had been underwater for a very long time.
The ice walls began to split. They leaned precariously. In the distance he could hear other parts of the structure rumbling. Rudy could feel the closeness of a terrible cold.
In me, he thought. The terrible cold in my heart and in Old Finney’s heart is responsible for all this ice. The floor split open as the ice blocks beneath him slipped and faulted. Rudy fell past long curls of ice, broken white cornices, shattered pinnacles many feet tall, curtains of icicles and fragile accumulations of rime. The pond is much bigger than it is. Countless frozen hands tried to grab him, whether to hurt or help him he had no idea. We all live in a cemetery, all of us—there’s no escaping it. He thought of concentration camps where the dead were stacked into huge freezers, then shipped into the German mountains by the thousands in order to cool the Führer’s summer home. His arms and legs grew numb, his chest almost too cold to move the air through his lungs.
He could barely feel. But isn’t that what I’ve wanted?
The sudden halt in his descent left him dizzy and unable to breathe. He was inside a huge bubble of ice, it seemed, the only entrance or exit being the hole he’d torn through the ceiling during his descent. I’m down inside the frozen pond. The pond has a basement.
Around him lay hundreds of small hummocks of ice. Mounds of snow. The air was so cold that the warmth of his body, carried in his breath, created great stretches of white cloud across the chamber. Scattered about were larger pieces of ice, almost small bergs, with hollows and soft places, the ravaged ice skulls of a tribe of giants.
The coldness in my heart created this cemetery. He thought about Eva, sweet Julie, Marsha and their unborn child, his father dead of cancer (“I caught it in the camps. It sounds crazy but I swear—I know it’s true.”). His life had become a tomb. His heart was a headstone of ice.
Thin hands with broken fingernails broke through the surface of the icy hummock beside him. The sounds of cracking and shifting ice filled the chamber, echoing back and forth from wall to wall until it overlapped his own thoughts and it was his thoughts cracking, his nerves splitting and thawing his emotions.
Across the chamber, hands and knees and feet and heads emerged from the ice, flesh tearing on the ragged edges of ice, bones breaking audibly. But there were no outcries. No blood. Pale faces tight against the bone. Slow shuffling gaits. Eyes straight ahead, uninterested in what lay around them. Mouths gaping, moving, hungry for something but not knowing what. All those Old Finney had murdered over the years and dumped into Ice House Pond rose up and began to walk.
The forces of memory set in motion, ready to devour the living. The pond was much much bigger. Once he’d set them in motion, Rudy could not avoid the moving walls of ice. The walls of ice crushed everything in their path.
The moving figures were multiplying with a perverse fecundity. The bodies—so many of them—pressed up against him, touching, rubbing, pushing him hard against the ice. Now and then one would reach out to hold him, and he’d feel guilty when he evaded its grasp.
Rudy was appalled to discover that there was more than one layer of bodies below the icy hummocks. After the first wave had passed and gone to the icy sides of the bubble where it futilely attempted to scale the walls, more pale hands and feet and heads appeared from the ragged holes. The dead staggered forth, their hands outstretched, clutching one another in a great, obscene daisy chain. Flesh rubbed against flesh until they began to meld.
And after these another wave, and then still another. All the town’s dead rising up through the pond, through the doorway Old Finney’s coldness had created and Rudy’s own coldness had allowed to continue. They rubbed and joined until all these pasts were the same, all flesh the same, and Rudy was able to crawl his way out of the hole in the ceiling on top of this great mound of death.
Back on the shore, the ice castle was collapsing. He joined Emily and B.B. to watch the end. He thought about his family, his families, now long gone. When they died, the world should have died. If the world doesn’t die on its own, sometimes you have to murder it. Obviously he hadn’t been the first to feel that way. Old Finney knew. But now Rudy felt more free than he had in years. His families were gone forever. But he was still alive.
After a few days Rudy gave serious thought to what he would have to do to get back to the city and start his life over again. He thought it likely that Mr. Lorcaster would be eager to buy the place back from him, especially if Rudy had Mrs. Lorcaster on his side. Ice House Pond belonged to the Bay—it was too dangerous to permit some outsider to live there. B.B. would help straighten up things around the place, board up the windows, shut off the furnace for good. And seal up all entrances to the ice house. B.B. had claimed to have achieved some peace after what he’d seen in the ice castle, although he never would tell Rudy exactly what he had seen.
But Rudy knew such plans were useless. He knew he wouldn’t be leaving. Not anytime soon at least. When the next cold weather arrived in the Bay, pushing the fog into great pools that filled every depression, he was aware of the invisible hands on his body, seeking comfort and release.
Rudy’s father used to read him a story from one of the big fairytale books in his study, an adaptation of one of the Norse myths, having to do with the end of the world. Rudy had read the story to Julie hundreds of time
s, from the time she was four years old. She had loved it very much. When she had curled up against his chest during those readings, his stronger breath seeming to support and drive hers, he had thought he was protecting her from all harm. He had believed he was insuring her a long and happy life. As far as he had been concerned, Julie was going to live forever.
When the end of the world finally came—and certainly few were surprised that it came, having seen it in their dreams for years, having seen it even in the faces of their newborn children—the seas, lakes, and rivers all froze solid. The fish were all fixed in their places, their final sea-thoughts preserved for all time, so that looking through the ice the fishermen believed these fish had simply been painted on the underside of the ice, and they went home without their daily catch, waiting for death with their families.
When the gods died they began to dream, and those dreams took the form of snowfall. And the dead gods dreamed for a very long time. (‘I guess they had nothing else better to do,” his father had always remarked.) The snow piled up unendingly.
The winds screamed. There was no heat in the sun, which had become old and white, a blind eye.
The great wolf Skoll, who had pursued the sun through the heavens for millennia, finally caught up with it, leapt upon it, and devoured it. (‘You can’t escape the past,” Rudy had told her, hugging her close against the cold, hoping she would remember this someday. “You just learn to live with its ghosts.’)
The moon died in the night. The stars flickered and went out, leaving a darkness greater than any before.
Charlie Goode’s Ghosts
Introduction
Hauntings: The Power of the Past
Of all the supernatural creatures that inhabit my fiction, the ghost is the only one of which I’ve been asked, “Do you believe in such things?” In part this may be because the ghost is the most accessible, the most familiar motif of supernatural fiction, the figure whose factual existence the average person is most likely to accept. Those who scoff at the very idea of vampires and werewolves may very well believe wholeheartedly in the reality of ghosts.
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