The Afterlives

by Thomas Pierce

She took a few steps down the stairs, and I assumed we were on our way to the kitchen, where she would reveal a hole in the baseboard behind the stove, the entrance to a rat’s nest, something terrible and stomach-churning, but she stopped us halfway down and pressed her back flat to the wall.

  “Do like me,” she said.

  And so all of us stood side by side, butts against the wall as if we were making room for a person to pass with a large tray of food. We’d been standing that way for two or three minutes, silently, when I asked her, as pleasantly as possible, what the hell we were doing.

  “You’ll know it when it happens,” she said.

  “When what happens?” Annie asked.

  “Just wait.”

  We waited.

  “Just wait,” she said. “It can take some time.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Depends. You can’t rush it.”

  Annie’s stomach growled. “Sorry,” she said.

  We waited for a few more minutes and then Ruth said, “It never happens when you want it to. I have no control here, you have to understand. She’s not a magic trick.”

  “She?” Annie asked.

  Ruth nodded and invited us downstairs to her office for another demonstration. She said she had something else she could show us since this didn’t seem to be working tonight. “Keep hold of the rail as we go down,” she warned.

  Her office was a small room off the kitchen. The flimsy white shelves on the wall over her desk were overloaded with papers and files. Under the desk sat a small pea-green safe and a stack of blank employment forms. She shut the door and sat down in a roller chair. We unstacked two dining chairs from behind her door and arranged ourselves near her computer, which she’d just turned on.

  “I think I should just play you this without any introduction,” she said, turning the computer speakers toward us, fiddling with the knobs.

  What we heard when she pressed Play was a whooshing noise, sort of like a vacuum cleaner or television static.

  “So what is this exactly?” I asked.

  She smiled. “This, my friend, is the proof.”

  THE TALE OF THE DOG ON FIRE

  The story Ruth told us that night in her office began, as such stories so often do, with the purchase of the house itself. A longtime restaurateur, she’d relocated to Shula from Austin in order to be nearer her girlfriend and had noticed that what our town lacked was a decent Tex-Mex option. The house on Graham Street was an obvious choice for its proximity to downtown and to a gravel parking lot across the road, not to mention the fact that with an upgrade to the kitchen and the demolition of a few walls downstairs, Ruth would easily be able to transform the space into a cozy and charming restaurant. It was only after Ruth had signed on the dotted line that the seller, via her real estate agent, warned Ruth about the staircase.

  People were always falling on the stairs, the agent said.

  Something odd about them.

  Little accidents, strange incidents.

  The damnedest thing.

  Just be careful.

  Ruth thought nothing of these warnings. So what if the stairs were a little dangerous? The house was old—uneven, forever settling—and anyway she didn’t plan to use the second floor that much, except perhaps as storage.

  The trouble began not long after Su Casa Siempre opened its doors, when Ruth learned that her head chef was having an affair with one of the servers. The chef—a rather intense but talented woman—was married, unhappily, and the server was a real beefcake, not very smart but hardworking and quick-footed, one of the best waiters on staff. These little flings, Ruth explained to us, were not so unusual in the restaurant business, and so she never even considered intervening. As long as people performed their jobs, her policy was to never involve herself in their personal business.

  But then one night the chef’s husband showed up during a rush, demanding to see his wife. He’d discovered some incriminating texts on his wife’s phone and was irate. Ruth tried to convince the poor guy to go home and wait there—not because she wanted to protect her chef, who apparently wasn’t a very likable lady anyway, but because she didn’t want the couple to make a scene in front of the diners. But the husband refused to leave until he saw his wife, and so Ruth, desperate to resolve this quickly, sent them both upstairs to one of the old bedrooms, asking them to please keep it down.

  For about fifteen minutes the couple was up there screaming at each other, but then their voices dropped off suddenly, and all was eerily quiet. Ruth, who’d been hanging near the bottom of the stairs in case the fight escalated, rushed up and peeked into the bedroom. There she discovered the chef and her husband, pants around their ankles, up against the wall, fucking each other with such intensity that they didn’t even notice the interruption. Ruth brought the door closed again and went downstairs to wait in her office.

  That’s where she was when the husband had his accident a few minutes later. Coming down the steps, he somehow tumbled forward and broke his wrist at the bottom. No one saw it happen. He swore that he hadn’t just fallen, that someone had pushed him. They looked to the chef, who insisted that she’d still been upstairs, in the bathroom. Ruth wasn’t sure who to believe. The chef had a notorious temper, and so it wasn’t implausible that she’d given her husband a shove. But then again, only minutes before, the pair had been having sex, which suggested to Ruth that they’d resolved their differences, at least to some degree.

  Anyway, someone wound up calling the cops—it was never quite clear who made the call—and, in the confusion, the cops were inclined to arrest the chef for assault and battery. It was a mess. To keep this from happening, Ruth had to make a statement, had to confess that she’d inadvertently witnessed the couple fornicating roughly against the wall. In the end, the police didn’t arrest the chef, though she did leave the restaurant early for the night to be with her husband in the emergency room.

  Not long after that Ruth fired her chef—for altogether different reasons, believe it or not—and hired a new one. Life continued. Business was good.

  A couple of months later, a server was coming down the stairs after stowing away some boxes when she fell, too. She didn’t break any bones, thankfully, but, like the chef’s husband, she swore that something had pushed her, or at least knocked her. Ruth gave her a week off work and then hired a repairman to examine the staircase, to see if any boards were loose, etc. When the repairman reported that the stairs looked just fine, Ruth had him install an extra handrail along the wall as a safety precaution.

  Then something even stranger happened, she said. Something that convinced her she needed to take more drastic action.

  Another night, another server. A young guy. He was coming down the stairs, drying his hands with a towel, when he burst into tears. A volcano of wailing and crying. This poor guy couldn’t control himself. The other servers dragged him into Ruth’s office, out of sight, and had to physically restrain him. Once they managed to calm him down, however, the guy was unable to tell them what had triggered it. It was inexplicable. Ruth sent him home for the night.

  A few weeks later a customer, looking for the bathroom, reported seeing a strange dark-haired man standing halfway up the stairs, a panicked look on his face, but when Ruth went to inspect, she saw nothing.

  After that she began performing experiments. Sometimes, after closing, she’d sit at the bottom of the stairs and just wait. What she was waiting for, she wasn’t entirely sure. She’d watch. She’d chat.

  “Chat?” we asked her. “Really?”

  Indeed, Ruth said. She’d sit on the stairs and whisper words into the darkness:

  Hello?

  Is anyone there?

  I’m here if you want to talk.

  Mostly she felt like a fool. There was nothing there. Of course there wasn’t. People had fallen—and so what? A server had burst into tears, but pe
ople cried all the time, didn’t they?

  Then, one night, Ruth felt it.

  Like a cool hand across her neck.

  A wave of sadness.

  A gently undulating wave of sadness.

  A sadness that rippled through her.

  But not all the way through her.

  Really there were no words to describe it.

  A strange feeling of life on top of other life.

  Overlapping histories. Overlapping stories.

  She was crying, she realized then. Whatever it was, it had reduced her to tears. She hadn’t cried in years, and yet—tears! This was serious stuff. She wasn’t sure what to do about it. She retreated into her office, slammed the door. But it clung to her, this terrible feeling.

  Clearly the stairs were haunted. She was going to have to wall them off entirely. She wasn’t the sort of person who believed in ghosts, but whatever was happening, it was real. That same night she made a sign and hung it on the bottom post.

  DANGEROUS! DON’T USE THESE STAIRS UNLESS YOU MUST!

  One afternoon—this was maybe a year later—a woman showed up and asked to speak with Ruth. She had a card. Her name was Sally Zinker and she was a professor at UNC. A physicist. She was legitimate, in other words. She’d seen the sign on the stairs and was curious to know why it was there. Ruth was reluctant to tell her. She didn’t want word to spread. What if it hurt business? But then the woman—this scientist—smiled and explained she’d heard some stories. Her mother-in-law, who was very old, had known some people who lived in this house once, a long time ago, and so she was familiar with its history. There’d been a fire, the physicist explained. A death. The house had an unusual energy.

  What the physicist wanted to do was run some tests. Ruth had no problem with these tests as long as she was covert about it. Ruth was curious, too, after all. If this woman could explain what was happening with math or physics, great. Ruth wasn’t one of those people who needed there to be mystery in the world, she said. Fuck mystery. Shine a light in all the dark places. Kill the dark. That was fine by her.

  Sally Zinker showed up on the appointed evening with two giant duffel bags of gear. As instructed, Ruth locked her up inside the restaurant alone for the night, and when Ruth returned the next morning, the physicist looked tired but basically unfazed. She thanked Ruth and left and that was that. Weeks went by and Ruth began to wonder if she’d ever hear from the woman again. Maybe it had been some sort of weird practical joke. Maybe she’d dreamed Sally Zinker.

  Eventually a package arrived in the mail, a manila envelope that contained a letter, a CD, and a stack of glossy 8x10 images. The pictures showed what looked like storm systems—swirled blobs of yellow, orange, and red. One image showed a blue splatter. Sally Zinker had circled the splatter with a marker. Very odd, she’d written beneath it, though she didn’t say what the splatter was or what it might indicate. The attached letter, which was only a single paragraph, thanked Ruth for the opportunity and explained that the most interesting discovery, the most compelling, was the recording she’d burned onto the CD. A twelve-second clip of audio recorded at roughly 1:33 a.m. EST on the stairwell.

  It was at this point in her tale that Ruth clicked the file on her computer once more.

  “What am I supposed to be hearing?” I asked.

  She cranked up the volume and restarted it.

  This time a voice burped up from the noise, each syllable barely distinguishable from the noise that surrounded it. It had said something—but what? I was going to have to study it more carefully, listen two or even three more times.

  Annie sat up a little straighter. “The dog’s on fire? Is that what it said?”

  With a blank, far-off expression, Ruth nodded.

  She played it for us again.

  “Now that time I heard something different,” Annie said. “I heard doll got flyer. Or, dole got higher.”

  “No, she’s definitely saying the dog’s on fire,” Ruth said. “I won’t even tell you how many times I’ve listened to this.”

  “So what happened to her dog?” I asked.

  The owner shrugged. The three of us sat there quietly for a moment. At our feet, I imagined it: a flaming dog, tail wagging like nothing was wrong.

  “Okay,” I said, “but what about the two grand? What’s this got to do with that?”

  “Oh, well, for years I just kept people off the stairs altogether. I made sure I was the only one who went up there. No one else was allowed. I didn’t want any lawsuits. But then I read a story in a magazine about a guy who claimed he could get rid of ghosts. This was more recently, just a couple of years ago. I hired him. He set up a cot at the foot of the stairs, and he slept there for a couple of hours on a Monday afternoon, while we were closed. Supposedly he had an ability to talk with ghosts in his dreams. But it didn’t work for us. He wasn’t able to extinguish the dog, as it were. I’d already paid him.”

  Annie asked to hear the clip again. Ruth clicked it, and it played through, all twelve seconds, but this time I didn’t hear the voice.

  “Dog supplier,” Annie said. “She’s saying dog supplier. Like a pet store is a dog supplier. It’s probably just some radio commercial that the recorder picked up.”

  “No, it’s real,” Ruth said.

  I tapped the computer screen with my index finger. I asked her if she could please send me a copy. If she could email me the file?

  Annie gave me a sly look.

  Ruth started a new email and dragged the sound file into it. “So there you have it, Mr. Byrd. The full story. I know it’s kind of crazy, but I trust this won’t keep you from approving the loan?”

  I nodded and said of course this wouldn’t stop me from approving the loan. I’d only been curious, after all, not suspicious. My phone vibrated in my pocket. It was only later, as Annie and I shared an enchilada platter and nachos, that I checked my mail to ensure I’d actually received the file. I placed my phone flat on the table so that Annie could see what I was doing and would know I wasn’t just checking my mail in the middle of dinner. The file was there in my inbox as an attachment.

  TheProof.mp3.

  The scar on my chest is small and pink, across my upper left breast. Like the opening of a shirt pocket.

  I used to sometimes take a marker and draw little pens and business cards sticking out the top. I did this as a goof, standing in front of the bathroom mirror before work, but eventually, looking at my chest with its pocket, it really was a kind of shirt I began to see.

  A shirt that would eventually turn to tatters.

  A shirt I would one day have to remove.

  Annie saw my scar for the first time a week after our reunion in the restaurant. We were parked in front of her parents’ house. She was in my lap, bra off, and my shirt was half unbuttoned. She pulled away, I thought for a better view of my chest and the scar, but then asked if we should maybe relocate. I suggested my place, a twenty-minute drive, but she was nervous she’d fall asleep and didn’t like the idea of not being home when Fisher woke up in the morning. Plus, there were her parents to consider. She hadn’t prepared them for the possibility of her sleeping elsewhere for the evening, and now it was after midnight, well past their bedtime, and anyway, even if Annie had prepared them, staying out all night meant they’d have questions regarding her life decisions, a conversation she wished to avoid.

  It seemed to me that she had given all this some thought before now, that possibly she’d already considered every option available to us and had concluded that sex simply wouldn’t be possible for us tonight and was only trying to nudge me gently toward the same unfortunate realization. I still had my hand on her upper leg under her skirt, my fingertips at the fringes of her underwear, and my mind cycled, helplessly, again and again to the car: Why not here—with the seats back? Why not now?

  Then Annie sighed and said it would have t
o be the house. She nodded across the lawn at her parents’ two-story colonial. Perhaps sensing my uncertainty, she kissed me again and said I didn’t need to worry, as long as we were quiet. We dressed. After I moved my car down the street, out of sight, she led me across the yard, through the garage, and into the dark kitchen, which smelled strongly of vinegar. The smell rose up from all the counters and tables, from every surface. My shoulder knocked a pot hanging from a rack over the island, and it clanged against another pan for half a second before Annie grabbed both and quieted them. I apologized. She poured us both tall cups of water, which struck me as a very sensible thing to do. I followed her up the stairs, past the door to her parents’ bedroom, through which I could hear the noise of a sleep apnea machine. Fisher’s door was next. Annie motioned for me to continue down the carpeted hallway to a second set of stairs. Just before going up, I turned back to see her sticking her head in the door of her daughter’s room. Then she brought the door closed again, gently, and met me on the stairs. We ascended together to a renovated attic, Annie’s childhood bedroom.

  “Have you ever dated a mom?” she asked.

  “Not really.”

  She smiled coolly. “Not really?”

  “I haven’t, no.”

  She removed her shirt. “Well, it’s not always like this, I promise. Moving cars, sneaking around. It’s so high school, isn’t it?”

  I took off my jacket and tossed it across a chair near the bed. The room had low, sloped walls, small circular windows, and a private bath. I felt like we’d checked into a quaint bed-and-breakfast. Most of the artifacts of Annie’s childhood, it seemed, had been removed and replaced with tasteful lamps and area rugs. Along a far wall was a large stack of cardboard boxes, labeled with markers. Annie set our waters down on the only nightstand and turned on two oscillating fans—one near the door and another at the foot of the bed—before removing the rest of her clothes and sliding into bed. I tugged off my shirt and pants but waited until I was under the covers to stretch the elastic band of my boxer-briefs over my erection.