Phantom

by Thomas Tessier

  * * *

  11. Explanations

  Michael Covington sipped the gin cooler he had made for himself. It was somehow wetter and more refreshing than bourbon on a hot languid evening like this. Washington had been a pressure cooker all day. The air conditioning in the office had broken down for three hours and the humidity was such that sweat poured off people even when they sat still. He felt better now, stretched out on a chaise lounge in the backyard at dusk with a tall drink; better, but still pretty dam hot. And here was his son, sprawled on the grass, looking up, waiting for Michael to say something.

  "Ned, I'm going to tell you something that happened to me once, when I was a boy about your age. It's a true story and I can still remember it vividly. Maybe it'll help you understand a little better some of the things you've been wondering about."

  Michael paused, staring at the clear, icy drink in his hand as if it were a crystal ball geared to reveal the past in an exemplary light.

  "I think I told you before," he went on, "that for a few years when I was a youngster I had a paper route. I used to deliver the Sunday newspapers to a lot of houses in our old neighborhood—in fact, I had a hundred and eight customers at one time, so you can see it was a pretty big route. And in those days we had to handle quite a few different newspapers that no longer exist, like the Journal-American, the Herald Tribune and the Mirror. I even carried a Polish newspaper, but I can't remember the name of it now. I bet I could walk through that neighborhood in my mind and still tell you the names of all my customers and which papers they took .... Not that it means anything now.

  "In Buffalo the weather is a lot rougher than down here in the winter. The snow falls by the ton. Remember the pictures Grandpa Fred sent the year before last, with the snow piled up higher than a grown man? Well, it was that bad or worse every winter when I was a boy, or it seemed that way. And you know how fat and heavy The New York Times is on Sunday—imagine lugging it through snow drifts that come up to your chin, trying to keep it dry and get it safely behind someone's storm door that is frozen half-shut. I'd be kidding you if I told you I enjoyed it, because I didn't; I hated every minute of it. The weather, the dogs, the waking up at six in the morning, the crabby customers who'd try every trick in the book to avoid paying you a lousy fifteen or twenty cents .... But it was all good experience, I guess, and the money, while it wasn't a great deal, did help in those days.

  "Anyhow, the thing I was going to tell you about happened on a Friday night. It was in the summer and it was a hot night like this one. I was riding around on my bike collecting money from some of my customers, and it must have been nine o'clock or a little after, because I remember it was fully dark. I stopped in to Benny's, our neighborhood grocery store, to get some candy. Junior Mints and Necco Wafers, those were my favorites. When I came out of the store and started to pedal my bike away, I noticed the moon. It was huge, it was like an enormous golden pumpkin in the sky, bigger than I'd ever seen the moon before.

  "I rode along on my bike, cruising, eating candy and collecting money at a few more houses, but I went more slowly and I couldn't keep from looking at that moon. It was so large it seemed to me there had to be something wrong. And then I began to get scared. The only reason the moon could be growing so big was that it had to be coming closer. The more I looked and the more I thought about it, the more I was sure that the moon was going to crash into the earth that very night. It would be the end of the world, and the worst part of it was that I had no doubt the moon would hit smack in the middle of Buffalo.

  "I know it sounds silly now, but I believed it at the time, and boy did it scare me. Could I be the only person in the world who knew what was about to happen? Why were there no sirens, no emergency measures being taken? The neighborhood was perfectly quiet and peaceful. Surely there were scientists somewhere who were supposed to keep an eye out for possible catastrophes like this. But then I thought, maybe there's nothing they could do. How could anybody stop the moon from plowing into the earth, if that's what was in the cards? Maybe they deliberately weren't telling anyone, so there wouldn't be a panic.

  "Ned, that moon hung so big in the sky I was sure I was going to die that night, and my family and everyone else in the world along with me. I wanted to race through the streets on my bike, yelling and warning all the people about the disaster that was about to take place, like a kind of newsboy Paul Revere. But it seemed crazy to me that nobody else had noticed it, so I decided to tell one person first, an adult, and see what kind of reaction I got.

  "The next customer on my list was Mr. Trunk, an insurance man who took the Times and was always nice to me. I rang his doorbell, collected the money and the usual dime tip, and I almost didn't say anything, I was so nervous.

  "But just as he was closing the door I said, 'Mr. Trunk, take a look at that moon.'

  "He came out onto the front porch and gazed up at the sky. 'Yeah, that's quite a moon,' he said, calm as could be.

  '''It's really big,' I said.

  "Mr. Trunk nodded his head and said, 'Sure is. It's a beautiful moon tonight.' And then he said goodnight and went back into his house. It hadn't bothered him at all.

  "The idea that the world was going to end began to fade in my mind from that moment, and by the time I got home I didn't even mention it to anyone in my family. But it was still hard to believe that I could be so wrong. The moon that had filled me with visions of death and destruction, oceans boiling and cities being ground to dust, had brought the completely opposite reaction to Mr. Trunk. He thought it was beautiful, and he was right. I didn't know what to make of it for a while, but I'll tell you this: I was glad when I woke up the next morning and found that I was still alive and the world still existed. And here's another interesting thing: if the moon really was going to crash into the earth, it wouldn't make any difference whether it was day or night, right? But we think such thoughts only at night; they never occur to us during the day, for some reason.

  "So you see, Ned, you can look at something and think you know what it is, what it means and what's going to come of it. You can be so sure that your heart booms and you can barely put two words together. But you can still be wrong, one hundred per cent wrong. The important thing to remember is that there's always an explanation for everything. We may not know what that explanation is, or we may not understand it completely, but that doesn't mean that anything our minds dream up is true. It just means we haven't found the truth yet, that it's still hidden, waiting for us to uncover it:

  "You asked me if I believe in ghosts and phantoms and things like that, and I have to tell you that I don't. Plenty of people do, even adults. Maybe I'm wrong, but in all the centuries that people have talked about such things no one has been able to come up with a bit of solid proof. And why not? I believe it's because they just don't exist, however much people would like them to. Wouldn't it be nice if we could talk to a friend or a relative who had died? I'd love to be able to talk to my older brother, Jim. I hardly knew him when he was shot down over Korea, but wishing isn't enough, and imagining that something is real doesn't make it real.

  "Same thing with magic. Everybody likes to watch a good magician at work, but you have to find the explanation if you want to know what's really happening. Remember the stories about the great Houdini and how he amazed thousands of people in his day? He would be all chained up and in the strongest handcuffs made, and just before they put him in a trunk his wife would kiss him good-bye, like it might be the last time she saw him alive, right? Well, she had a key in her mouth and when she kissed him she passed that key into his mouth, and that's how he could start to get free and make another miraculous escape. But it wasn't a miracle and it wasn't magic; just a simple key.

  "That's what you have to look for when you think you've come across something strange or spooky: the explanation behind it. We could sit here for a couple of hours and watch the sky, and sooner or later we might see something unusual. The light of an odd shape or color moving through the night. Does
that mean we've seen a flying saucer from another planet? Well, that is one possibility, but it isn't very likely, is it? The chances are it would be a jet plane at a high altitude or a helicopter skimming along the horizon or a meteorite or one of those satellites we've put into orbit—or any number of other things, like reflected light on a dark cloud, who knows what. It may not be as exciting as the idea of visitors from outer space, but that's the way it is. The simplest, most down-to-earth explanation is usually the one that turns out to be true.

  "Now I'll tell you one more thing, Ned. No explanation ever makes anything less special than it seems to you. I've looked at that moon thousands of times since that night in Buffalo and it has never, ever been as big as it was then. I don't expect it ever will be, either. That moon, that night, will always be special to me because I saw it the way no one else did. And the fact that I was all wrong can't change that one little bit. Do you know what I mean?"

  "Yeah," Ned said without conviction.

  "Okay?"

  "Okay, yeah. Thanks, Dad." There was much, so much that Ned could say in reply. What about all those unexplained UFOs, what about the cases of people driven from their homes by ghosts or forces unknown, what about the people who just suddenly disappeared in strange circumstances? But his father had had his say and Ned felt it was better to let the matter rest there. "I think I'll go watch TV now."

  Michael smiled as his son crossed the lawn to the house.

  So much for my big speech, he thought. But maybe the boy took in some of it. If the message gets through, at least subconsciously, that will be enough. The kid's all right, Michael told himself. I wish I had some of his imagination. He should enjoy it while he can. Life gets ordinary soon enough. Wait until Ned has his first wet dream—that'll crowd some of this stuff out of his mind.

  Linda came out the back door of the house and walked toward him. Michael saw again how attractive his wife could be. She looked good in shorts and a light summer blouse. The ghost of the nineteen-year-old college girl whose appearance used to give him instant, embarrassing erections, could still be seen in this woman. If the heat wasn't so draining Michael could almost think about chasing her upstairs.

  "That was quite a conference you two had out here."

  "Just men-talk."

  "Telling your son about all the wicked women in your past?"

  Michael chuckled. "Not that kind of men-talk."

  "You were getting pretty animated there for a while. What were you doing, reciting 'The Cremation of Sam McGee'?"

  "No, just probing a few soft points in the Special Theory of Relativity."

  "I love you, Michael."

  "That's good, because I love you."

  * * *

  12. There Is Magic … and Magic

  "Well, well, well," Cloudy exclaimed. "If it ain't Mr. Tadpole hisself."

  "Hi."

  Ned smiled sheepishly as he greeted the two old men. Cloudy held a portable electric mixer in one hand and its two eggbeaters in the other. Peeler was sitting back with a can of beer, his face shaded beneath the visor of his baseball cap. He cracked one eye open to see Ned, then shut it again.

  "I thought maybe your daddy was keepin' you away from here," Peeler said. '

  "No, why?"

  "He come around to see me a few days ago."

  "He did?" Ned was puzzled to learn this. "What for?"

  "Just to say hello and tell me who he was. Last week some time, I guess it was. I was afraid maybe he didn't like what he seen and decided you should stay away."

  "No, he didn't say anything to me about it," Ned said. "I didn't even know he'd been here."

  "So where you been?" Cloudy asked.

  "Oh, around home."

  "Around home, huh?"

  "I was being punished," Ned admitted.

  "You was? What for? "

  "Last week I went up the hill to explore the ruins of the old spa."

  "You went up there? Alone?"

  Cloudy looked genuinely surprised, and Peeler pushed his cap back, taking notice.

  "Yeah, and I got home late and my clothes were muddy and I had a few scratches, so my mom and dad were kind of sore at me and I had to stick around the house for a few days."

  "I bet they was sore at you," Cloudy said. "You shouldn't never oughta go up to that place, Mr. Tadpole. Never."

  "It's dangerous," Peeler said. "You could break a leg and be stuck there and nobody'd hear you call for help."

  "I know, I know," Ned said, almost enthusiastically. "I nearly did get stuck there. It's the most incredible place I've ever seen."

  "You fall into one of them gardens," Peeler warned, "and you won't never climb out again, no how."

  "I know. It's like a jungle in there."

  "Worse," Cloudy said.

  "What did they have all those walls for, anyway?"

  "They was gardens."

  "They had all kinds of gardens and things in there," Peeler went on. "In one garden they'd have a certain type of grass growin' so that when you walked on it, it give off a pretty smell. Another garden'd be full of some kind of flower, just the one, so you'd get that smell. And the next garden, somethin' else, and so on. Every one of 'em was different, who knows what all for."

  "The gardens was quite the thing in their day," Cloudy put in, "White folks come from miles around and plenty kept comin' back for more. They paid a lot to stay at the spa." He shook his head, as if still amazed at the idea. "That was back in its heyday, of course."

  "Some of the walls had shapes—like, one was a rectangle," Ned said.

  "That'd probably be the old tennis court," Peeler said.

  "Oh ... "

  "They had lots of stuff like that there, too."

  "And one wall formed a circle, and there was a gurgling sound, and smoke came from the middle of it. But I couldn't see because of the bushes."

  "You know what that might be," Peeler said.

  "What?"

  "That just might be the mud."

  "Mud?"

  "That's right. I heard they got a pit of some sort up there, with hot mud and steam that perked up from underground, kinda like a geyser, only different. And they say folks used to take all their clothes off and get right down in that hot mud and waller around for as long as they could take it."

  "Like Georgia hawgs," Cloudy added, grinning.

  "Why would they do that?" Ned asked.

  Peeler shrugged. "Somebody musta told 'em it was good for their health, or some such nonsense like that. Or maybe they was just havin' fun. No tellin' why folks do the things they do."

  Ned tried to picture grown men and women, naked, slithering around in hot, steamy mud that made that horrible slurping sound. The image was at once exotic and disturbing.

  "You know," the boy said, "I heard lots of things moving around in the brush. I could never see anything, but I always had the feeling that somebody or something was following me, watching me all the time. What do you think that was?"

  "Animals," Peeler stated flatly.

  "That's what I thought," Ned said, a little disappointed.

  "Raccoon, fox, possum—all kinds of animals would've moved into that place over the years."

  "I bet there's a big, juicy snappin' turkle in the lily pond," Cloudy said. "lf there is a lily pond." He thought about it some more. "They must be, a place like that."

  Ned decided to try his most daring speculation: "I was wondering if any—you know, swamp people, might be living in there now .... "

  "I don't guess so," Peeler said.

  "Too close to town," Cloudy elaborated. "Swamp folks, they don't like a town nor other people bein' too close to them. They hide out far away as they can get, that's why they ain't too friendly if you wander into their patch, see,"

  "If I had an old map of this area I could show you where the swamp people lived," Peeler said. "They had their own places, like Mud Hen Gut, Dolly's Quarter, Middle Runt Creek and Jenkins Dip—they was swamp folks hangouts."

  "I remember so
me of them places," Cloudy said. "Pissholes, every dad one of 'em too."

  "Were they real little towns, like?" Ned asked.

  "Naw, not hardly," Peeler scoffed. "Nothin' more'n a bit of marsh staked out by this family or that, and twenty or thirty idiot kids shacked up in a pigsty. That's all. But you run into the wrong bunch of 'em and they'd really have your nuts in a noose faster'n you could blink."

  "That's the truth," Cloudy agreed.

  "Are they still around?"

  "I don't care if they are, and I don't care if they ain't," Peeler replied promptly. "Last time I come across one of them fellers was ten or twenty years ago. I was pickin' berries and I guess I strayed some, when all of a sudden I notice this guy watchin' me. I could just see his face in the shadow of a tree about a hundred yards away-well, maybe not that far. Anyhow, I didn't act like I seen him, but I just kinda backed away, slow and natural, like I'd got all the berries I could get. And I scrammed outta there. I sure didn't want to meet him close up, nor his stumpy-toothed tribe, I can tell you."

  "Don't bother them, they don't bother you," Cloudy said. "Trouble is, you might not know when you're botherin' them till it's too late."

  "Anyhow," Peeler concluded, "you can be sure they ain't none of 'em livin' up to the spa. Ain't nobody could live in that place, way it is now,"

  "I got inside the building, too."

  "Inside the building," Cloudy cried in pain.

  "That's just askin' for trouble," Peeler said with a look that was as close to real anger as Ned had seen on the old man's face. "You stay away from there, hear?

  "Yeah, but—"

  "Never mind that. You supposed to be a friend of ours?"

  "Sure."

  "Okay, you do like we say."

  "All right," Ned said softly,.

  For a while none of them spoke. Cloudy resumed his examination of the electric mixer. The motor seemed to work fine by itself, but as soon as he attached the eggbeaters the appliance made a kind of strangled, grinding noise and refused to run. He removed the beaters and again the motor hummed smoothly.