Absent Company

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  I never know exactly how to answer such a question. As with any of the things I write about, my temptation is to say, “Literally, no.” I could go on to explain that most of the so-called true-life accounts of ghostly encounters seem far too ordinary to me, couched in the terms, and reflective of the desires and needs, of the living. I could go on to say that I suspect that if there are, in fact, ghosts, their reality must be far more extraordinary than these accounts suggest. But I seldom bother, because I find that sort of issue irrelevant to my own work. At least in terms of my writing, I have only the most passing interest in a “literal world”.

  What I choose not to talk about, however, is how one of the most vivid smells in my life is the sweetness of the hair of a child now dead, or how some of the most distinctive voices in my head are ones I have not heard in years. Or even how the old Victorian house I own now can never seem completely my own—it is too unmistakably an accumulation of destinies altered and lives completed over the last one hundred years. I see the evidence of this in every room. Every repair job, every small bit of remodeling, entails a journey into the past and into other people’s lives.

  Although we are continually admonished to live in the “now”, told that to do otherwise exposes us to everything from neuroses to cancer, most of us find it impossible to comply. When reading Wordsworth’s lines that “the world is too much with us”, I’m often tempted to substitute “past” for “world”. Indeed, for many of us the past is the bulk of our world. For an unfortunate few it is the only world they will ever know. It has power beyond reckoning: it petrifies the living and enlivens the dead.

  This kind of continual backward glance is not something I would ever advocate. We should never permit the past to cloud and obscure what is breathing and growing around us. But I also believe that there is knowledge and discovery in the power of the past. In the best ghost stories, the awe engendered should be as profound as the terror.

  A close study of the ghost story teaches us that all the forms of memory are virtually incalculable. Our lives, and the lives of all we have loved, are recorded in the way a sheet drapes across the bed, in the tattered remains of a poster glued to a fence, in the shadows cast by a particular arrangement of furniture, in the pattern of freckles on a child’s face.

  At times it seems impossible to separate these memories from who we are. When we peer into the darkened room and attempt to apprehend all the shadows dwelling there, we seem to be looking into the very heart of ourselves, where each ghostly manifestation is an essential part of us, a significant event in our lives, perhaps even an organ of unknown function. To look at the ghost is to see ourselves and our destinies.

  These tales of Charlie Goode were written against a background of reading which has included M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, A. M. Burrage, E. F. Benson, and H. R. Wakefield. Although in the main body of my work the strange manifestations of reality are seldom identified as ghosts, I have come to understand that the vast majority of my fiction concerns in some way the idea of ghosts and the power of the past. The Charlie Goode stories are intended as an acknowledgement of the influence and pleasure provided me by the aforementioned masters of the English ghost story.

  Steve Rasnic Tem

  Denver, 1990

  Originally published as the introduction to Absences: Charlie Goode’s Ghosts

  (The Haunted Library, 1991)

  The Dancers in the Leaves

  Charlie Goode barely knew the old woman when she invited him to tea. But because he barely knew her he didn’t feel that he could be so impolite as to refuse.

  “You study ghosts,” she said, wrinkled lips poised over the silver rim of her cup.

  He balanced the matching saucer awkwardly on one knee as he sipped from another delicate cup in her set. He would probably have felt less self-conscious if he hadn’t been so aware of the value and rarity of the old woman’s antique china. “I have an Interest,” he said. “Not a very scientific one; it’s more of an emotional connection, I suppose.”

  The old woman rattled cup against saucer impatiently. Charlie winced at the sound, imagining hairline cracks forming in the porcelain. “You solve puzzles, I believe. Involving ghosts?”

  Charlie scratched his chin, thinking. “That word ‘solve’ makes me a bit uncomfortable. I’m certainly no ghost finder, no John Silence, Carnacki, or Miles Pennoyer. I can’t say that I’ve ever truly solved anything. I’ve just been willing to stay around when things were developing. Sometimes that’s a help to people; but oftentimes it makes no difference at all.”

  The old woman brought her cup down with a clatter. “For heaven’s sake, man! I’ve heard that at least you have an … affinity for such things?”

  “Yes,” he said carefully. “I have an affinity for such things.”

  “Well then …” She flashed a satisfied smile, incongruous in the dour face. She stood and hobbled over to a large window in the back wall of the house. Charlie stood awkwardly, placing his tea things carefully on a side table. The old woman opened the window curtain, exposing a back yard lined with tall trees, red, brown, and yellow leaves travelling small eddies to the already well-padded ground. “They’ve grown to be quite a distraction, you see.” She gestured out the window.

  “The leaves?”

  “Mr. Goode, it is the leaves I so value. I’ve always looked forward to this time of year, and this view of my back property. It is the dancers I find so troublesome.”

  Charlie joined her at the window. At first he could see very little. The overhead canopy of branches permitted only stray threads of sunlight to reach the ground. Falling leaves and dust filled the space as if it were an enclosed chamber, a great ballroom. And then a shape began to appear, a clouding in the translucence of the space, a form that bobbed and strode delicately, like a dancer’s foot.

  “A hundred years ago there was an outdoor pavilion here,” she said beside him. “The bandstand was behind those trees. Sometimes they danced until well after dark, I hear.”

  The foot became a slender leg, wrapped in white that faded into transparency now and then, then appeared again to catch the vague light. Then another leg, then a delicate torso, and finally a woman with dust motes for flesh, shadows for hair, turning and gliding, dancing through the leaves that filled the old woman’s back yard.

  “It isn’t fair,” the old woman whispered beside him.

  “Don’t you find her lovely to watch?”

  She hesitated, and he could hear the change in her breathing. “I used to dance, when I was young, but now I don’t dance any more. I used to have strength and lightning in my step, and now it’s as if my limbs are full of sand. I used to have a living husband, a good man, and now I have a stone to visit on Sundays. I used to have children, now they’re as much memory as my husband, or that long-decayed pavilion with its dancers. That young woman, once she was alive, but now she’s alive no more. And still she’s here trying to dance. It just isn’t fair.”

  Charlie reached down and grasped the old woman’s hand. The wind in the yard kicked up the leaves as the translucent form whirled faster, arms thrown out as if to touch the dark trees. The wind pulled back branches, and the sunlight spotlighted her dance, passing through her to redden the leaves, as if her dancing feet had set them on fire.

  And then another tall figure visited the light: a narrow coat of shadow and rough bark, a beard of moss and twigs, he took the hand of the woman and together they turned and glided through the leaves which lifted slightly off the ground and swirled with their passage.

  “They’re dancing,” the old woman said softly.

  “What else can they do?” Charlie replied.

  Here and there, grey and brown moths, so light in shade they appeared to Charlie to be growing gradually transparent, floated out of the disturbed leaves and beat their wings in slow motion, in time to the dancers’ steps. They were joined by dozens more, and then hundreds more, rising and turning, dancing, until eventually the outlines of the trees grew
fuzzy with them.

  The wind spread the overhead branches farther apart, so that now the light fell heavy on the dancers below, who had been joined by two more couples: a small pale man with a woman who looked pink-edged in that light, a dark figure with a bird nest for a head waltzing with a collection of spider webs, sunlight, and dust.

  “What can you do about them?” the old woman asked him anxiously. “They come every autumn now.”

  Charlie felt a vague floating sensation, as if his arms and legs were about to rise into the air. He clasped the old woman’s hand more tightly for support. He smiled. “There’s nothing any of us can do, ma’am. Not a thing we can do about any of this. All we can do as long as the sunlight, or even the moonlight, shines on our faces and makes them warm, is try to enjoy the dance.”

  With that he led her out into the middle of the floor, bowed, and guided her into what he could remember of the waltzes of his youth. After some hesitation she began to glide with him more easily. Warm music filled his head, and after a while the two of them gazed together at the dancers sweeping through the leaves on the other side of the glass, who more and more came to match their reflection, and dance the same dance.

  Hearts

  There was a sharp pain near the middle of Bobby’s chest. He’d been ill for several days; the only reason he was out and about now was because his grandfather needed him. If he’d been older, he might have thought he was having a heart attack. But he’d just left his bed too soon. People don’t die of heartbreak, he knew, although he didn’t know why not.

  His grandfather’s driving didn’t help any. The constant jarring, the sharp turns made to correct miscalculations, made his body feel loose to the point of dissolution. Charlie Goode had a reputation as a highly competent man; Bobby wondered if anyone else had ever noticed how his grandfather drove.

  When he’d taken off the last semester of his sophomore year of college, he’d thought he’d be bringing a fiancée home to meet his mother. But Joan had disappeared just before Christmas. After two weeks of frantic phone calls and fruitless searching he’d received the card from her (bright red, art deco design, non-committal patter) telling him that she just couldn’t go through with it. He hadn’t said anything to his mother; she had her own problems of the heart. The current boyfriend had left the house for the third time in a year.

  As his grandfather stepped on the gas to climb a sudden hill, Bobby could feel his heart’s blood roaring inarticulately in his ears.

  It had been some time since Bobby had been into the town of Darkwater, Virginia. His grandfather lived only ten miles from there, but Charlie had never much cared for the town. Most of its citizens were related in some way to one of four families. Outsiders were not exactly excluded, but the good citizens didn’t go out of their way to strike up a conversation with strangers, and a stranger was anyone who didn’t live there, however familiar.

  Charlie did have a couple of old friends in the town: Dr Mullins, the general practitioner, and old Maggie Gibson, who lived on the outskirts of the town and who had become a virtual hermit in the last few years. Bobby knew his grandfather bought supplies in Darkwater when he was forced to, but the old man described those transactions as “quiet affairs, as if one were doing business with deaf mutes. All requests, prices and negotiations are mimed.” At the time Bobby had taken him literally, until Charlie cracked a smile. “Almost! I swear,” he’d said. Bobby had a difficult time imagining Charlie in such a context. Although intense and thoughtful, in public dealings his grandfather was normally garrulous to a fault.

  But this day his grandfather had business in Darkwater, and as frequently occurred when there was physical labor involved, grandson Bobby was enlisted. An elderly lady from one of the four families, Miss Alice Collins, had recently died. Her sister, Mrs. Irma Bledsoe, had hired Charlie to appraise the contents of the old lady’s home.

  “Are you actually getting paid for this one, Granddad?” Bobby asked pointedly.

  Charlie didn’t reply at first, his narrow frame bouncing crazily behind the wheel of the truck. Bobby was suddenly alarmed by his grandfather’s frailty. Charlie peered over the top of the oversized steering wheel, making the turn onto Darkwater Road before looking over at Bobby with a grin.

  “Oh, the pay’s good enough for an old man with minimal expenses,” he said. “A few dollars—some of which I’ll be paying to you for your kind assistance—and my choice of the scrapbooks Miss Alice Collins collected over the years, as well as any other relatively worthless memorabilia I might care for. Irma Bledsoe requested—or rather ordered—that I have all but the saleable antiques hauled off to the county dump.”

  Bobby grimaced. “Great. I’d have thought that Irma Bledsoe would have wanted to go through the personal items herself.”

  “I don’t know, but she insisted on this arrangement. She said she didn’t want anything that belonged to her sister, said she wasn’t even going to set foot in that house.”

  Mrs. Bledsoe was waiting out in front of the house when they got there, an old black umbrella held over her head like a giant dead flower, no doubt to keep the sun off her head. “See there,” Charlie said. “She won’t even go up on the porch to get out of the sun.”

  “You’re late, Mr. Goode.” The face under the umbrella was pasty and damp, the only pink discernible rimming the hard black eyes. Bobby thought of fish. She jabbed the house key at Charlie like a knife.

  “Sorry, Miz Bledsoe. It’s the roads, you see.”

  Mrs. Bledsoe turned away and started towards an ancient black Buick parked at the curb. She stopped and looked back at them. “Speed is most important in this job, Mr. Goode.”

  “Yes’m.

  The car pulled away slowly, dreamlike in the heat. Bobby watched until it disappeared, but Charlie was already jiggling the key in the front door lock. The house was tall and elegant, a Queen Anne that stood out in a neighborhood of mostly newer, box-like homes, certainly none of them with exteriors as well kept. Curtains were pulled back in the front windows of two of the houses across the street, oval faces against the glass like pale balloons. It was too far to discern their features. No one was out on porches or street, even though it was barely past noon. If this was typical of the neighborhood, Bobby imagined Miss Collins to have been a pretty lonely old woman. He rubbed absently at the raw pain in his chest.

  When they opened the door the house air wrapped around them, warm and dry, faintly perfumed. Alice Collins had kept her house well, and scrupulously organized, so that there wasn’t the endless gathering and packing that had characterized similar projects Bobby had undertaken with his grandfather. Items in the attic, basement, and garage were stored neatly in barrels and boxes; and except for a couple of ratty-looking stuffed squirrels (Charlie had always had a bit of a taxidermy fetish), all of these objects were moved out to the curb for disposal.

  “Most of the furniture here isn’t the best, I’m afraid,” Charlie said as they were moving a sideboard out into the middle of the bright red parlor rug. “Antiques, surely, but not by any of the finer craftsmen, not even by any of the major manufacturers. Country carpenter’s pieces, mostly. Just take a look at the legs on this piece.” Bobby looked down at the sideboard’s legs. He couldn’t see anything wrong with them. “Not enough taper. The ankles are too thick, and the upper parts are slightly out of proportion. I bet if there’s a maker’s label it’ll say ‘Furniture by Rufus’ or some such.”

  “So it’s all worthless?” Bobby suddenly felt as if he’d wasted the day.

  “I didn’t say that. Mrs. Bledsoe just won’t be able to get top dollar, that’s all. Some tourist will pay the antique shops full price for these, just because of their age, but we’ll be selling to those shops, not somebody driving through in shorts and a camera. They’ll pay us less than half that, for sure.” Charlie looked around the parlor, out through the French doors to the fancy dining-room beyond. “Alice Collins liked lots of pretty things. But I’m afraid she had little taste. And like
a lot of people who recognize that about themselves, she tried to make up for it with sheer quantity.” He looked at Bobby and grinned. “I know what you’re thinking—what with the mass of junk I’ve got crammed into that house of mine! But the difference is I know most of that stuff is junk. I just happen to find junk interesting. Maybe I’m just a bit of a romantic. Now, this Miss Alice Collins was one real romantic. I’d say she’d had her heart broken more than a few times from the look of things around here.”

  Bobby stared at him. “I don’t understand.”

  “This is the house of a woman without a man, but who thought a lot about romance.”

  Impressions Bobby had been trying to put together since he’d first entered the house suddenly began aligning themselves after his grandfather’s little speech. The house was like other old ladies’ homes he’d been in before, but more so. The word that came to mind was “feminine”. It was the most stereotypically feminine house he’d ever been in, and not just the elderly sort of femininity embodied in fine old lace doilies and old-fashioned fragile collectables; there was a lot of the schoolgirl in the house, and the young bride as well.

  For one thing, there was a massive collection of dolls, scattered throughout the house, and all of them well-maintained, their dresses in good shape, their hair neatly combed and free of dust. Charlie said a few of the dolls were antique, but many of them appeared to be recently purchased. Added to these were all the stuffed toys, hundreds of them, and the toy grooming sets, and miniature tea sets and kitchenware, all of them well kept, as if some remarkably fastidious little girl had momentarily left her play.

  The pictures and other decorations on the walls seemed to indicate a female of a different age, however: pressed corsages in narrow, delicate frames, dozens of pictures of young men unsmiling in their stiff collars, bowlers and skimmers in hand, small placards promoting handsome movie stars of the past—which Bobby found vaguely familiar but whose names escaped him—numerous dance cards glued to lace borders and hung in diamond-and heart-shaped arrangements on the walls, romantic illustrations clipped from old books and fastened to polished wooden squares.