Realizing that he could move, he moved his arm up to his chest. His hand melted right through the waistcoat…the cravat…the bloodstains.
He tried to feel his face, but could not feel the roughness of his beard or the outline of his cheek. Upon his head, he sensed the silk top hat listing to the left side but could not touch its brim.
His gaze turned back to the women. They sat transfixed, watching his every move. Whoever they were, he wanted to give them thanks for rescuing him. He wondered if he could speak and ask them in what place he had arrived.
But, just then, he looked past the table and saw the pregnant scarlet moon through the curve of the bay windows and had a sense of familiarity.
Had he once stood on this spot before?
The memory was faint—a hazy déjà vu from his former life. It eluded him and floated through his mind like the wisp of a feather floating on a summer breeze.
“Who are you?” the spectacled woman demanded again. Her speech quivered, despite its authoritative volume.
The crispness of her voice annoyed him, and he felt a strange heat emanating from his eyes.
The older woman sat mute with her hands folded in front of her chin. The innocent, eager look on her face amused him. He smiled at her then turned back toward the woman who seemed to think she was in charge. Who did she think she was, commandeering him with such an impudent tone?
Turning in a circle, he looked around the room and noticed the wood stove on the wall behind him and the sideboard with the lamp next to the window. Yes…yes...I know this place.
He found that he could move his legs as he walked in an unsteady gait past the trembling women to the window.
Outside, in the murky light, he saw the crumbled outline of an empty field. In the distance, there were trees...more numerous and much taller than he remembered. But, beyond them, a thin ribbon of water like a shimmering snake reflecting the moon’s luminescence sparked a chain of memories in his mind. He saw the stones, a path that he knew lead to the rose garden…and the fountain.
A shiver ran through him. He reached for the bloody spot on his chest again. This time, he felt something.
Dried blood crumbled between his fingers. It felt like rich soil, dissolving into dust. He rubbed it back and forth, then put his hand to his nose, smelling the pungent scent of his own death and the dankness of the earth, coupled with a floral sweetness.
He put a finger to his lips and tasted the musty metallic blend of dirt and blood. Then, he paused and marveled at the beauty of regaining the last component of his human senses.
The sound that came out of him next was something between a laugh and a howl. It echoed throughout the house, vibrating the tin tiles on the kitchen ceiling and rattling the windowpanes. It was a wicked piercing rupture of sound from the depths of his unchained soul.
The women covered their ears with their hands.
As the last breath of it echoed out of him, he beamed with joy. Then, he removed his hat and performed a grandiose bow before them.
“Mille grazie, Signoras.”
Chapter 3
When he spoke...he commanded her to leave.
Opal stared at the spirit with disbelief. One moment, he seemed as solid as the wood table in front of her. And the next ...he was a translucent fog. But his voice boomed in a thick Latin accent with a fierceness that made her tremble.
For a moment, she couldn’t speak or move.
Virginia simply smiled at the man with an idiot’s grin. Instead of fear, she seemed to be in a state of rapture.
As the apparition came towards them, they sat mute. Opal’s bowels tightened as he came to stand directly in front of her. There was an odor about him like the earthy scent of a freshly dug grave...but its repugnance was almost smothered by a perfume-like sweetness that reminded her of the overwhelming scent in a floral shop.
He bent down and looked at her with blazing green eyes. She was sure that she saw the flames of hell burning within and that this demon was about to strike her dead.
Though some kind of infernal heat churned within him, the air around his body seemed unnaturally cold like a breath of an arctic wind from an opened tomb. It swirled around him, increasing his ghostly ambience.
As they stared at each other, he seemed to study her as much as she examined him. Her thoughts raced as she feared for her life and pondered what to do next.
She had created him. She had brought him forth from the land of the dead. Her panic increased when she couldn’t remember the ending of the old gothic fable. Had Frankenstein killed his maker?
Words fell from her mouth before her mind could work out a plan. “In Jesus’ name…”
But, her half-hearted prayer was cut short when he put a finger to his lips, and whispered, “Shhh...”
His hot, sweet, rotting breath made her gag.
In desperation, she spouted the invocation that she had used in the séance in reverse, “Ebbat feesten dhatme...ebbat feesten...”
As she kept repeating the phrase, the spirit’s smile mocked her efforts. She saw Virginia across the table with her hands clasped together in front of her bosom. Why did she look like a child on Christmas morning? They were both about to die.
His hand reached out towards her, and she closed her eyes. Kill me quickly. Don’t make it hurt.
But after a moment, when she didn’t feel any pain, she opened them.
The spirit’s arm was turned, pointing towards the front door. “Arrivederci, Signora.”
Fear overtook any further rational thoughts. She bolted from her chair and ran from the house as fast as her chubby little legs could carry her, leaving the door wide open behind her.
She collapsed over the still-warm grill of her Cadillac, sobbing while she tried to breathe and calm her racing heart.
A few seconds later, she looked back at the old Victorian house, thinking that it was much too dark and quiet...
She thought about calling the police. Then, she realized what a ridiculous idea that was. Despite her popularity with a select few in the town over the years, most people didn’t believe in spirits. The tart little receptionist in the Sheriff’s office would probably hang up on her if she called 911. Even her son, Karl, a Sheriff’s Deputy, wouldn’t believe the story that had unfolded there tonight.
She was going to have figure this supernatural dilemma out on her own.
When she restored her nerve, she crept back up the porch steps. The front door was closed though she had left it open when she fled. After finding the doorknob locked, she pounded on the door and yelled. “Virginia! Virginia are you in there?”
But, there was no response. The house remained bathed in the blackness of night with no light inside, except the faint flickering of the candle dancing from behind the closed curtains.
“Virginia!” she screamed as she pounded again on the heavy oak door.
The silence was more frightening than anything.
She leaned out over the porch rail and looked up at the moon. It was a full moon, a Mead Moon—a time in summer when people had lucid sweat-filled dreams and connections were high with the other world. She wondered if somehow, the conditions were just right for interference from hostile spirits.
For the next two hours, she walked around the house, crying out Virginia’s name and trying to get in, until exhaustion and frustration made her give up and leave.
She drove home with trembling hands gripping the wheel and tears flooding her cheeks, hoping that the spirit was just a harmless obnoxious entity that had eventually dissipated on its own.
Back safe in her own driveway, she rehearsed the events of the séance in her mind. She knew that hostile spirit intruder stories were rare—something to protect yourself from as a matter of course—but not a common threat. An occurrence like that was as likely as being hit by a car crashing into your house while you were fast asleep in bed. You read about such things happening to others, but sane people didn’t lie awake at night worrying about such infrequent things.<
br />
But, apparently, she should have worried about the improbable. Hadn’t her Aunt Grace taught her years ago how important psychic protection was? Her aunt was the only one that hadn’t laughed at her mystical aspirations as she grew up. She only warned her to be careful.
In her defense, there were so few times that she’d even made any sort of spiritual connection—the whole point of protection seemed unnecessary. So, she’d dismissed the precaution as a formality and had gotten lazy since her early years of attempting connections with the dead.
Most of her séances ended up being over ninety percent show, anyway. She’d performed hundreds over the years, always making up for any lack of reality with her dramatic flare and intuition. It didn’t seem to matter to her clients. As long as they felt some sort of positive remembrance of their loved one, they never seemed to feel cheated. She always offered a money back guarantee for her services, and it was rare that anyone took her up on it.
But now, she realized that she’d been like a juggler for all these years—playing with lit torches with her eyes closed and never thinking that one might burn her.
Only the burn victim was Virginia.
She sat, slumped over the wheel. “Think, Opal, think,” she said out loud with no one to hear but the crickets and the stars.
Who was the spirit? Someone from another time...a young Victorian gentleman? His antique suit was spiffy, and his shoes were shined, but from the look in his eyes and his gruff tone, she doubted that he was any gentleman in the true sense of the word.
And why had he come through instead of HenryBlake?
Either he was a demon intent on mischief, or he was the spirit of a human that must have some profound emotional tie to the old Victorian house.
After more fruitless brainstorming, she went inside her small 1950’s cottage and searched for the slim Calathia phone book under a pile of magazines in the kitchen.
She let the phone ring twenty times, but Virginia didn’t pick up. Over the course of the evening, she phoned again many times with the same result.
*****
As the days passed, she drove over to the Blake house on a daily basis, but no one ever answered the door. She continued to phone, but on the rare occasion someone picked up, there was a click as soon as she spoke.
July turned into August. The wheat and corn in the farmer’s fields began to ripen, and the geese flying overhead looked fat with grain. Children in Calathia flooded the streets, carrying backpacks and notebooks as they began their new school year. She asked everyone she saw how Virginia was doing, but most of them said they hadn’t seen her much over the last few weeks. More time went by, and still...there was no word of Virginia’s fate.
After some pathetic pleading, she convinced her son to go over to the house, but each time he called to report that Virginia said, “she was just fine and to mind his own business,” before slamming the door on him.
Recently, she sighted the woman again herself...or at least she thought she did. On a bone dry and windy afternoon, she drove over to the house for the millionth time and parked across the street. After a few minutes, she saw the shadowy outline of a human body pass across the living room window. Her frazzled mind assumed that it was a sign that Virginia was still okay.
It was Sunday, the last official day of summer in September, when she finally saw Virginia in the flesh at County General, the only grocery store in town. As she wheeled her cart into the produce department, she spied Virginia’s white-as-snow hair leaning over a bin of apples. Opal ducked behind a rack of potato chips to avoid being seen. Virginia turned in the opposite direction, and she moved in closer, trying to gauge her condition.
As she trailed behind her cart towards the meat counter, she thought Virginia looked as frail as a sparrow. In her short-sleeved frock, her upper arms were no bigger in circumference than her forearms...making them look like two bony toothpicks attached to a skeletal frame.
Opal followed her through the store as she wandered from aisle to aisle, sometimes tossing something in her cart and others just meandering, humming to herself and retracing her steps. It almost seemed that she was just killing time, trying to avoid some dreaded appointment.
When Virginia reached the checkout stand, there were only six or seven items in her cart, very few for such a long time spent shopping.
Opal quietly parked behind her in the line. “Virginia…” she whispered.
Her head darted back and forth at the sound of her name. When she turned around, her eyes grew wide. Then, she picked her purse up and abandoned her cart as she darted towards the automatic doors of the grocery store.
Opal followed, puffing as she traipsed behind the arthritic woman who seemed to have acquired the speed of a gazelle. But, Virginia escaped into the locked doors of her old maroon Lincoln.
She pounded on the glass window. “Please, Virginia! Tell me what happened. I need to know if you’re alright!”
Facing straight ahead and not meeting her gaze, Virginia shoved her keys into the ignition and started the car. Then, she thrust it into reverse as Opal jumped back to avoid getting her feet crushed.
She watched Virginia peel out of the parking lot.
*****
As the first days of fall turned the air as crisp as fresh pears, she began to give up. She assumed that the spirit must have manifested briefly and then disappeared, or maybe it was still around and had continued on as little more than a nuisance. She hoped that Virginia was just angry with her for the failed attempt to reach Henry.
On some mornings, she got up, dressed for the day, and tried to cheerfully attend her appointments. This week, she gave a private tarot card reading to the Lutheran minister’s wife and drove over to the next town to do astrology readings for an unusually progressive quilting group. But, she had not performed a single séance since that hot July evening at VirginiaBlake’s.
This afternoon, she had nothing to keep her busy and stave off depression. She reclined back on her sofa and stared up at the ceiling, watching a spider spin a geometrical web from one corner of a picture frame to another on the wall across from her.
Dark raccoon-like rings marred the pale skin underneath her blue eyes. Her stomach gurgled, but she ignored it. Her appetite had all but disappeared lately. In fact, she’d inadvertently lost over ten pounds since mid-summer. All she had to do was think about what a failure she was, and the nausea returned.
After a few more minutes of ignoring her stomach’s unruliness, she decided to hoist her catatonic body up to make a ham sandwich. In her haze of gray thoughts, she forgot the mayonnaise and only slathered a thin swipe of mustard across the bread before slapping it together.
Back in the living room, she propped her ankles up on the coffee table and sunk back into the pillows with the plate on her lap. She tried to force down a bite of the dry bread and sighed with half-chewed dough in her mouth. Then, she picked up the remote and clicked on the television. It popped on at the beginning of the local 12:00 news.
“Sad news today...VirginiaBlake, a longtime resident of Calathia, was found dead early this morning on her property out west of County Road. Her body was discovered by her neighbor, AnnieBirmann. Deputy, KarlBauer, says the death seems to have occurred from natural causes, and it appears that no foul play was involved. He said that there have been several reports of vandalism and burglaries on that side of town, but there have been no reports of assaults. Blake was eighty-three. In other news...Sheriff Cardale has announced that he will be retiring at the end of this year…”
Opal began to choke.
She stood up from the couch, wheezing and coughing, trying to eject the bite of ham lodged in her throat. As her face began to turn blue from lack of oxygen, she thrust her left fist into her stomach and forced it out.
Then, she collapsed back into the embroidered pillows, forcing out a puff of dust and shredded rags from the worn corners.
As the news of Virginia’s death sunk in, she wrapped her arms around herself and t
wisted back and forth as if she could physically shake the awful feelings away.
There was no doubt in her mind that the spirit that appeared that hot night in July was somehow involved in VirginiaBlake’s death.
Tears welled in her eyes, followed by convulsive sobs. She leaned forward with her face buried in her hands and wetness leaking through her fingers.
For all these years, she had just tried to help people with their grief through her show of smoke and mirrors. It was never for want of compassion that she fudged a little here and there. How was she to know that her charity would lead to somebody’s death?
But, after a few minutes, her grief turned to anger. In over thirty years of performing séances for the residents of Calathia, no harm had ever come to any of her clients. Who was this coarse spirit, this black shadow that had forced his way into the plain of the living? All she knew was that he wore an old-fashioned suit and hat, and there had been a frightening hostility in his foreign accent.
Spirits of his nasty caliber were probably evil do-no-gooders who were as mischievous and troublemaking in death as they were in life. They were poltergeists, the kind that caused scary hauntings and threatened humans with bodily harm if they didn’t get their way.
And she had left Virginia there alone with him.
I shouldn’t have run. I should have stayed, forced my way into the house that night and faced him. “Oh Virginia,” she cried. “I’m so sorry...”
After a few minutes, she tried to console herself with the fact that there was a chance that Virginia had just died of old age. And at least now the Blake house was empty. If by chance, the spirit was still there...the house might stand empty for a while, and maybe that would allow any bad energy to dissipate. It was a very old house—it might be condemned now. Then, no one else could come into harm’s way.
Chapter 4
The dream seemed so real this time, GeorgiaMcKenna knew that she couldn’t be imagining it.
The Gardener Page 2