The Big Book of Ghost Stories

by Otto Penzler

  “Well … yeah,” he acknowledged. His face brightened a little.

  “And you certainly have nothing to fear from Letty Loos. A mere mention of the ghost’s accusation in the media, and voilà! Her husband’s case might be reopened.”

  “Rrrrr … ight,” he admitted, smiling a crocodilian lawyer’s grin, which of itself indicated that he was recovering his nerve.

  “Try to avoid drunkenness and blasphemy for a while, and if you must oppose the death penalty, do so only in your office. Meantime I’ll strike at Wellington Meeks where he lives.”

  “Meeks is dead,” Steve reminded me.

  “So,” I informed him, “is the person I intend to send after him.”

  Alas, that person was not my dad. Though at one time he’d been the senior member of the firm, he had failed to survive death—surely an ironic fate for a talented medium! But dying, like birth, is a major trauma, and you have to be pretty tightly wrapped to go through it in one piece. Dad lacked intense views on most issues, and even when he believed strongly in something (e.g., the hapless Washington Senators) was always ready to flip-flop in the presence of a stronger personality. As a result, the poor fellow delaminated at the hour of death—that is, he dispersed, his elements returning to the Cosmic All.

  Fortunately, my mom—who passed over soon after Dad—was made of stronger stuff, and quickly became my favorite Spirit Guide. Back at home, I mixed her a large Old Fashioned, being sure to muddle it with a cinnamon stick, not with a spoon. I placed the glass on a little table beside my La-Z-Boy, pulled the curtains to exclude the dull light of the November day, sat down, lolled back, and closed my eyes. I fixed my thoughts upon the last sight I had of Mom—lying in her coffin, a serene smile on her face, her pale hands holding a spray of baby’s breath and resurrection fern—and within ten minutes she manifested herself. Not, of course, in the crude, Tales-from-the-Crypt manner of the Hangman. Instead, her well-known voice distilled—a good word that Steve had used in a similar case—inside my brain, with no need to pass through my ears to get there.

  “Yes, Honey?” she said. “Problems?” I explained the situation—only to have her flatly refuse to help.

  “Death Must Die,” she sneered, “sounds to me like a bunch of cowards. What in the world is wrong with being dead? Anybody with any sense knows it’s better than living in one of those horrible prisons.”

  Tactfully I agreed, adding, “Still, it’s rough, Steve and his wife not being able to entertain whoever they please in their own home.”

  Mom has always been very strong for property rights and the sanctity of the American home, and she responded instantly to my ploy.

  “Well, of course you’re right there. I remember the first time your dad and I entertained a Negro. He was Dr. Dent from the college, and that night some hooligan threw eggs on our porch. If I’d caught him,” she added grimly, “he would have scrubbed that porch on his hands and knees.”

  “I just bet he would have.”

  “Using his toothbrush!”

  “Would’ve served him right. So Mom, what can I do about Wellington Meeks? He won’t admit that 419 isn’t his house any longer, or that the current owners have the right to live their lives in peace.”

  “I’ll ask around,” she said. “See if I can locate him. Maybe he just needs a good talking to. What’s he look like? I was a little tiny girl when he died, so I’ve no personal recollection of him.”

  Briefly I repeated Steve’s description, adding, “He’s a Prohibitionist.”

  She snorted. Mom is the only manifestation I’ve ever heard snort. “He sounds like a real drip,” she said. “These old bachelors! I bet he wore one-piece underwear and worried about his bowels. Probably a couch potato, too.”

  “Mom, I’m an old bachelor. And a couch potato.”

  “You’re different,” she replied, with true maternal love and irrationality. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  She signed off and I opened my eyes. The Old Fashioned had been consumed, right down to the maraschino cherry. Some spirits like spirits, I reflected. Some don’t.

  . . .

  A week passed. Nobody sued Steve. Another hopeful sign: his mother-in-law in Timonium spoiled her grandchildren rotten and kept interfering with Alsatia’s attempts to discipline them. Soon his wife was calling him two or three times a day to complain about her mama. Steve told me he thought she’d be home in a flash, except for her fear that Meeks might manifest himself to the children and scare them into autism.

  “That’s absurd,” I told him. “Meeks has never frightened a child. Actually, being a bachelor, he’s probably afraid of them.”

  “Maybe you’d like to explain that to Alsatia.”

  Cautiously, I said I didn’t want to get between a man and his wife. In no place on Earth, save perhaps Afghanistan, is the danger to non-combatants greater. Instead, I assured him that if we could only hold out long enough, Meeks would gradually weaken and lose his power to make trouble.

  “You’re telling me that ghosts”—this time he used the G-word without a quiver—“are mortal, like the rest of us?”

  “Nothing is truly immortal except Nature, and of course God, if there is one. A few ghosts delaminate and all of them, given enough time, fade away.”

  “How long does the fading take?”

  “Depends on the strength of the personality. Sometimes only a few weeks. Sometimes centuries.”

  “Oh, great,” he said. “Centuries.”

  He added a string of four-letter words that I considered unworthy of a professional man, not knowing that the time was fast approaching when Meeks would make me lapse into vulgarity myself.

  Next day began badly, then got worse. The digital Standard showed up on my Hewlett-Packard carrying on Page One an all too circumstantial account of Meeks’s last appearance. The article (Death Protesters Meet the Real Thing) three times referred to 419 Merritt Street as “the Hangman’s House.” I could almost feel Steve’s real estate agent shudder. About ten o’clock the man himself phoned to add to the quota of bad news. His maid Annunciata had called his office to report that a huckster who did bus tours of Historic Greenwood Falls was at that moment parked across Merritt Street, haranguing his passengers about the ghost.

  “I’m filing for an injunction to stop him,” said Steve, his voice shaking with anger. He directed some rather harsh remarks at me for failing to solve his problem, but most of his rage was directed at Wellington Meeks.

  “Goddamn him,” he growled, audibly grinding his teeth, “I’m gonna go home tonight and get sloshed. I’m gonna change my registration from Republican to Democrat. I’m gonna take the anti-death-penalty case pro bono and fight it all the way to the Supreme Court. I’m gonna find Meeks’s goddamn grave and piss on it. I—”

  Clearly the fellow needed to vent, so I let him. When he quieted down, I warned him that fighting the dead was a fool’s game. What could he possibly do to Meeks, compared to what Meeks could do to him? Steve grunted and growled some more, but finally rang off. I hated to hurry Mom, but the situation left me no choice. So I mixed her a drink, returned to the La-Z-Boy, and put in a call. Her voice, when she responded, sounded less confident than I could ever remember it. She’d located Meeks, but found him immovable.

  “He’s a tough nut,” she admitted. “I’ve known some pigheaded people in my time, but that man takes the cake. I told him, ‘Here you’ve survived death, you’ve finally got time to relax and enjoy yourself, and what do you do? You waste it scaring people back on Earth.’ ”

  “What did he say?”

  “He just got this terribly annoying smug look on his face and said that a pwinciple—as he put it—was at stake. And get this: women don’t understand these things. According to him, that’s why he never married. He never found a woman who was up to his standards.”

  “What a shit. Sorry, Mom. The word just slipped out.”

  “There’s a time for everything, dear, including the S-word, and this is as good a time
as any. Oh! That man.”

  I’d really expected Mom to handle the Hangman for me, and now felt somewhat at a loss for a strategy. I tossed the notion of exorcism at once. What could more certainly arouse the scorn of a confirmed Presbyterian than the sight of a Catholic priest doing his mumbo-jumbo? As for holding a séance, forget it—the problem with the Hangman was not to make him manifest himself, but to stop him from doing so. I was still wrestling with the problem when, at ten-thirty that evening, the phone rang. The instant I lifted it, I knew that Steve was in trouble—more trouble.

  He was drunk, his normally crisp diction gone all mushy. “God, you should shee it,” he maundered. “You should shee it. God, it’sh horrible.”

  “Get a grip,” I said. “I’ll be there in two shakes.” (Not, perhaps, the best thing to say to a man so badly shaken.)

  When I arrived his porch light was on, but the house was dark. Walking up the neat path of herringbone brick to the front door, I could see through the windows a dim, slowly moving, rather unpleasant greenish glow—the kind of thing that any ten-year-old knows means a haunting, and any adult knows means the luminescence of decay. In this case, I thought while ringing the bell, both would be right.

  Steve was in bad shape. The porch light showed his expensive tailored shirt stained with booze. His breath exhaled both the odor of brandy and a sickly undertone suggesting he had recently thrown up. He didn’t say anything as he let me in. Didn’t have to. Give the devil his due—Wellington Meeks had staged one of the most remarkable manifestations I’ve ever witnessed.

  The whole house seemed to be filled with suspended, gently swaying greenish-yellow corpses. Occasionally one would go through a series of jerky motions that I took to be postmortem muscular spasms. The hoods worn by the hanged men had become partly transparent, like stocking masks, and behind the veils every eye was wide and bulging, every jaw hanging, every tongue protruding. Ropy drool glued cloth to chin. With great reluctance, I stepped into that chamber of horrors, passed through a body, and heard the loathsome gurgle of its entrails releasing waste—as they must, when the body is suspended and at the mercy of gravity. Fortunately, Meeks’s prissiness caused him to omit the appalling smell of the real thing.

  “At least,” I muttered, “he spared us that.”

  Then the hanging bodies began to fade—dislimn—evaporate. Five minutes later the room was an ordinary early twentieth-century parlor, filled with the shades not of dead people but of imitation antiques. The lamps returned to life, their beams strengthening until a homey, comfortable radiance dispelled the dark. While Steve collapsed on the sofa and passed out, I went to the cellaret, selected a clean glass, and poured myself the last finger of brandy remaining in a bottle of Rémy Martin. I downed it at a gulp, fetched a blanket from the master bedroom, and spread it over my client’s recumbent form. Then, turning off all the lamps but one, I went home to bed. For the life of me, I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  Yet, as I lay with the covers drawn up to my chin, a steely resolution took form. I am, after all, my mother’s son. I found it simply insufferable that a decent man should have to endure this kind of persecution in his own home.

  “Wellington Meeks,” I exclaimed aloud, “this time you’ve gone too far! Prepare to take the consequences!”

  Sheer bravado, of course. Yet I slept soundly that night, knowing that this was no longer a merely professional problem. It was a fight, and I was in it to the finish.

  Sometimes going to bed is the best medicine. I woke promptly at my usual hour—seven—with a plan of action in mind. Maybe my subconscious is smarter than my waking self, or maybe I’d received inspiration while snoring. Whatever, I felt ready for a warm shower, followed by eggs and coffee, followed by action.

  At nine o’clock I was in my recliner, and by nine-twenty Mom had responded to my call. I told her briefly about last night’s manifestation, then inquired if she could access certain decedents I wished to talk to.

  “If they survived dying, I can find them,” she replied confidently. “When and where do you want them?”

  “Today, I want them here. Tonight, I’ll want them at 419 Merritt Street.”

  “Fix me a drinky, dear,” she replied, “and give me an hour.”

  By ten-twenty I was back in my chair, the Old Fashioned on the table, the curtains closed. Soon, out of the darkness wavering forms—at first mere sketchy outlines, then fuller and more convincing figures—began to emerge. All were male, which did not surprise me, for Southern chivalry guaranteed that none but the most appalling murderesses were hanged. My guests chose to appear, not in their striped prison uniforms—which they probably were anxious to forget—but in the garments they’d worn as free men. Some wore the battered top hats of chimney sweeps, some the white canvas of painters, some the bib overalls of farmers. Most wore the generic clothing of the working poor, collarless shirts and rough trousers held up by suspenders they probably called galluses. Their faces were strong and bony—the faces of the frontiersmen their grandparents had been. In the darkened room their eyes looked pale, especially those of the blacks who formed at least half the contingent.

  “Men,” I said aloud, “can you hear me?” There was a general nodding of heads.

  “Do I understand that each and every one of you died at the hands of Wellington Meeks?”

  A black man spoke up, his voice distilling in the usual fashion inside my head. “Yessuh. Mr. Meeks done done us all, I do believe.”

  Tight-lipped smiles passed around the group. A white man of particularly craggy appearance said, “That sumbitch. I asked the judge to give me death, but—”

  “You asked for death?” I interrupted.

  “Yes, sir, I did. I shot my own brother in a argyment over cards, when both of us was full of white lightning. I reckoned I deserved to die and the judge, he agreed with me. So there I was, the rope around my neck, all ready to apologize to pore Bubba when I met him on the other side. Only Meeks, instead of pulling the leever and getting it over with, starts giving me this sermon—nasty little voice he’s got, too—’bout how I ought to wepent and go to sleep in the arms of Jesus. As if I hadn’t just heard aplenty of that guff from the preacher while he was walking me to the gallows!

  “I got mad—I mean, hell, the hanging was my show, not his—and inside that black hood I raised my voice and told Meeks what he could do to himself and what he could do it with. So he shortened the rope—Goddamn him, I felt him pull on it. And because of that, when he drapped me my neck didn’t break, and I danced on air for maybe five minutes before I blacked out.”

  Suddenly I recalled the twitching and jerking figures in Steve’s house last night. Post-mortem spasms? Or the writhing of men that Meeks had deliberately allowed to strangle on the rope? I used to think of the Hangman as a quaint, rather absurd figure, who belonged in the comic pages of the twenties alongside Foxy Grandpa and Tillie the Toiler. Steadily that view had darkened as I watched his persecution of my client. Now I saw him as a sort of devil, all the worse for his smug self-righteousness.

  I asked the men to join me later that evening—Mom would show them the way—specifying what they should bring with them. They responded with grim chuckles. I added that, while I couldn’t reward them as they deserved, I could offer them a drink. The result was a curious sound—a rush and rustle like an autumn wind moving through a field of dying cornstalks. After a moment, I realized it must be applause. Well, they’d been dry a long time, poor fellows.

  Next I called Steve, and for a while he seemed likely to miss his own party. In a voice gone all weak and whiny, he told me he was packing up to abandon 419 and stay at a motel. I asked sharply if he was too much of a coward to fight for his home and family. That got him spluttering with rage—a good sign—so I begged his pardon, and after some more palaver we arranged to meet in his house that evening at ten o’clock. He promised he’d try to persuade some members of Death Must Die to attend, though holding out little hope that all would do so, and
none that Letty Loos would return to the place where Meeks had outed her.

  “Oh, one more thing,” I said. “Lay in a good supply of Kentucky straight bourbon. Say five or six liters. Just open the bottles and leave them out.”

  “I hate bourbon,” he growled.

  “You won’t be the one drinking it,” I told him, and signed off.

  Seldom do I have reason to feel like a soldier. My long-ago military service was spent as a draftee at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where the bloodthirstiest enemies I encountered were the gnats. My life today is even more quiet and withdrawn than Meeks’s, for he at least was always taking little trips here and there to do his dirty work, while I never leave the Old Dominion except to shop or eat an overpriced meal in Georgetown. And yet, as I set out for 419 Merritt that evening, I had the Hemingwayish feelings of a combat soldier—the dry throat, the accelerated and uneven heartbeat, the taste of pennies in my mouth. Fighting a devil, even a little devil, is no laughing matter, though I counted on my allies and felt the justice of our cause.

  I found awaiting me eight members of Death Must Die, who’d bravely returned to the house they must have remembered with horror and revulsion. As conversation began, I learned why they’d come. Nobody likes to be terrorized, and Meeks had made these folks very, very angry. Also, given their beliefs on the subject of the death penalty, he’d come across as the personification of everything they were fighting against. So, while half the original membership cravenly stayed home, the stronger half returned to confront their own fears, and the Hangman as well.

  I encouraged them to vent their feelings, then took a seat in the Lincoln rocker a few paces back from the group. The discussion began quietly, but as the Chardonnay passed from hand to hand, turned decidedly vigorous. They were like battered women who find in a support group the courage to denounce their abusers. Soon Meeks was being described in language more appropriate to a town meeting on medical care than to Steve’s respectable house. If Meeks never before heard himself described as a scumbag, swine, and sadist, he heard it that night. The three women present were just as frank as the men, a white-haired member of the First Families of Virginia even declaring, in the tones of an avenging fury, that “the little bastard ought to be hanged!”