Just Kill Me

by Adam Selzer

  He doesn’t elaborate on what he means by “partner,” but it’s easy enough to guess.

  “Jane woke up hearing a rustling sound,” he goes on. “So she said, ‘Mary, is that you?’ But Mary was still in bed next to her. So she looked down at the foot of the bed and saw a woman in an old-fashioned dress. Jane tried to turn on a gaslight to get a better look, but the woman was gone, just like a breath into the wind. She never decided that what she’d seen was really a ghost, but I don’t think she ever spent another night in that room, and the woman in the dress was seen off and on throughout her life, and even up to now. People report sightings of her on the tours from time to time.”

  Not a bad story.

  He shows us a few pictures that have been taken on the grounds and talks about the ghosts people say they’ve seen on tours, but he doesn’t have enough to say to keep us all on the bus until the DarkSide Tours group is done. They’re still roaming the grounds when we get out of the bus to explore ourselves.

  In the courtyard next to the house, the DarkSide guide, an older man in a cowboy hat with a long beard and a curly mustache, is pointing to a cement patch on the ground and saying, “Yes, that’s the spot where Jane buried the devil baby. They covered it up with cement so it couldn’t crawl back out.”

  Rick, who is standing next to me, groans.

  “Devil baby?” I ask.

  Rick shakes his head.

  “That was a rumor that went around in 1913. Some of the old women in the neighborhood started saying that a Catholic married an atheist or something, and God punished her by giving her a baby with horns, hooves, and a tail, and she ended up dropping it off on the doorstep here. Some of your less scrupulous tour guides swear it was all true, and that Jane Addams buried it alive.”

  “Hey,” I say. “My atheist mom married a Catholic, and I didn’t come out like a devil baby.”

  He looks my head over very carefully. “That’s debatable, padawan,” he says. Then he tilts his head toward the garden and says, “The old guy out there is Edward Tweed, my old boss from when I worked for DarkSide. He’s been running these tours for forty years now. Back in the old days people couldn’t fact-check him on their phones, so he could just make up any old shit and get away with it.”

  “People fact-check you on their phones?”

  “Oh, never. But I’m always afraid they will, and then I’ll look like a first-class ding-dong if I’m making stuff up. I keep an iPad full of primary sources, just in case.”

  The two of us watch as Tweed makes a speech about how the courtyard is also an Indian burial ground, and that Potawatomi came to the grounds to do a Ghost Dance to curse all white people after the Fort Dearborn Massacre in 1812. Rick says he doesn’t know where to begin explaining what’s wrong with that. And that the cement patch is just the base of a bird bath that used to be there.

  But Tweed’s customers are entranced.

  And he has a lot more of them than Rick and Cyn do. He winks at Rick, and Rick gives him a rueful wave.

  I immediately hate Edward Tweed, and resolve to write a story in which Madam Mim from The Sword in the Stone turns him into a toad.

  After a quick ride on the interstate up to the north side of the city, the Mysterious Chicago bus pulls into a little dead-end street with an overgrown vacant lot.

  “Here, where the vacant lot now sits,” Rick says, “H. H. Holmes, a multi-murderer from the 1890s, owned a building that he said was a glass-bending factory, but was more likely used for cremations. There’s no proof that he did anything sinister in the factory, but he sure as hell wasn’t bending any glass there. And there’s a pretty short list of things a known murderer would be doing with a hundred-and-fifty-foot-long furnace.”

  It looks like a good place for a body dump to me. The weeds have grown as high as my head. A couple of gnarled old trees stretch up past the electrical lines toward the sky.

  “We started coming here just as a historical curiosity,” says Rick. “People were always asking for H. H. Holmes stops after the book Devil in the White City came out and made him a star all over again. But his famous ‘murder castle’ is long gone, the site is too far from downtown for most tours, and frankly the stories about it are way exaggerated. So we started taking people out here now and then if anyone asked about him, and so much weird stuff happened that we added it to our standard route. One night we came out here and there were three hawks with dead doves in their mouths.”

  “Another night there were chickens,” adds Cyn. “Like, six chickens, just randomly crossing the road.”

  “And here you thought that chickens only crossed the road in jokes,” says Rick. “But those are just environmental oddities. We also had sightings of a full-body apparition here, a woman in a black dress who appears and then disappears. One night we even thought we hit her with the bus.”

  “Worst night ever,” says Cyn.

  “It was snowing, the windows were fogged, and when we were backing up, we hit something,” says Rick. “I thought it was a tree or someone’s car, but then these two customers in the back started saying ‘No, there was a woman back there.’ ”

  “But there was nothing,” says Cyn. “I ran out and checked. No car anywhere near us. No tree. No footprints in the snow.”

  “And right after that,” Rick goes on, “we started getting pictures of shadowy, humanesque figures. Hard to say if they’re the ghosts of Holmes’s victims or maybe someone who died here more recently, but there’s something out here. There’s also a floodlight that sometimes turns on and off when I say the name of one of the victims.”

  Everyone wants him to try it, and Rick acts like he’s afraid to. But he consents, faces a floodlight attached to an old house at the back of the lot, and says, “Emily Van Tassel.”

  Nothing happens. The light stays off.

  “Well, there you go,” he says. “Now you can tell I’m not just faking you out, or that would have worked.”

  “It used to work,” Cyn insists. “But they disconnected the light altogether now. Even a ghost can’t get a disconnected light to come on.”

  It seems to me that anyone who can come back from the dead ought to be able to plug a light back in, so I don’t change my mind about ghosts being real, but the dead-end street does look pretty ominous, even in the glaring summer daylight. The curling weeds look like they’re beckoning us all to our doom. There’s something about the place that just doesn’t feel . . . right. When I step off the bus, the hair stands up on the back of my neck. The breeze seems like it’s cooler than it ought to be, and everywhere I look there are little touches that make this space seem eerier than your average dead-end street. There’s even some sort of blood red sap oozing from a tall Tim Burton–style tree at the edge of the lot.

  While we’re walking around, Rick tells me that Holmes didn’t kill anywhere near two hundred people, like the stories I’ve read about him like to say, but he did probably kill a dozen or so, which is plenty. Just knowing he was here, that I’m standing where he stood, is sort of chilling.

  As we’re heading back to the bus, I think I see a shadow that shouldn’t be there dart across the ground, like someone just ran by.

  Power of suggestion, I guess.

  “Hey, Rick?” I ask. “How many ghosts does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

  “How many?”

  I shrug. “Well, more than just Emily Van Tassel, apparently.”

  He laughs. “Yeah, from what I’ve observed here, unscrewed lightbulbs are their kryptonite. Who knew?”

  I have got to get this job. But I have no idea how I’m going to sell it to my mother.

  I’m not just a black-diaper baby, I’m a third-generation black-diaper baby. Mom grew up in the very funeral home we live in now, and took over the business when her dad died, right before I was born. According to her, Grandpa was the most upright citizen this side of a 1950s sitcom. He got a haircut every two weeks, didn’t take a single drink of booze in his entire life, and never swore or wor
e casual clothing in public. He probably ate really boring breakfast cereals. Plain Shredded Wheat would be my guess. With no bananas added.

  That’s what people expect from funeral parlor directors. Even though Mom can swear with the best of them and listens to classic rock while she works in the basement, she makes her boyfriends sneak in the back, and even goes to a church service now and then just to keep up appearances. She drinks once in a while, but never in public in Forest Park.

  She didn’t stop me from getting a lip ring or dying the bottom half of my hair bright red, and doesn’t require me to keep quiet about liking girls or anything, but I can picture her saying that having her daughter work in the ghost industry is just taking things too far. And I can understand that. Having a ghostbusting daughter living upstairs wouldn’t do wonders for the funeral home’s reputation.

  But I’ll find a way to make it work.

  This would be a history job, not a ghost job. Maybe I can sell it like that.

  From the empty lot, we drive clear down Fullerton Avenue and then turn back onto Clark Street, going past the site of the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre (where Al Capone’s gang shot a bunch of guys from a rival gang in 1929) and into Lincoln Park.

  I already know that Lincoln Park was a cemetery once, but the customers who live in town all seem surprised when Rick tells them that.

  “We can’t really go into cemeteries on these tours,” says Rick. “They close for business at about four o’clock here, and they don’t allow buses even during the day. But we can make an exception for the one we’re going through now. Up until the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, this space was called City Cemetery. It was very progressive of the city to put aside a space like this to bury the dead. Before that, people who died in cities were usually buried in churchyards. Now, how deep is a grave supposed to be, everyone?”

  “Six feet,” people mutter.

  Rick looks right at me. “Hey, black-diaper baby: is that accurate?”

  I shake my head. “Five feet is closer to the industry standard,” I say. “And I think the state law just says it has to be at least eighteen inches.”

  “Right,” says Rick. “But in those old churchyards, they didn’t even always get that much. They ran out of space quickly, so they just stacked the coffins on top of each other.”

  “If you go online,” I add, eager to show my worth, “you can find an old book called Gatherings from Grave Yards, all about the condition of London churchyards in the 1840s. It’s awesome. They were nasty.”

  “ ‘Nasty’ barely begins to describe it,” says Rick.

  “Slubberly. Stercorous. Dungish.”

  He smiles as I list OED synonyms, but I worry that I’m overdoing it, so I shut up and motion for him to go back to talking. “Anyway, they thought they’d think ahead here in Chicago, and set aside a place way out in the outskirts where they wouldn’t run out of space and no one would have to smell it. First place they tried was about two blocks north of where we picked you up, but the city grew out to that space almost immediately, so they kept moving people further north. Eventually they put aside this hundred acres right here.”

  It’s a gorgeous park now. Looking at all the dog walkers and designer strollers roaming through the grounds, it’s hard to imagine it as a cemetery.

  “Obviously, this space wasn’t on the outskirts for long, and eventually the city put in the order to close City Cemetery and move all the bodies. And there are tombstones and statues all over Graceland and Rosehill cemeteries that we know were originally out here. But sometimes those tombstones were all they actually moved. They still dig up bodies in Lincoln Park just about every time they dig. And now, if you’ll all hold your breath in amazement, Switchblade Cynthia will execute a U-turn. In a bus with no power steering.”

  People chuckle, and as she waits for an opening in the traffic, Rick does his impression of a movie trailer. “In a world . . . where there are no rules . . . one woman . . . will challenge the laws . . . of traffic. Because when you can’t believe in anything . . . you can still believe . . . in Cyn.”

  Cyn pulls off a perfect U-turn, to rapturous applause.

  “That was totally legal right there,” she says. “As long as I don’t get caught.”

  She pulls the bus over on the street behind the Chicago History Museum, which sits at the south end of the park, and Rick starts telling ghost stories about the grounds. According to him, the early cops who patrolled Lincoln Park had all kinds of ghost stories about it—not just because it used to be a graveyard, either. In the 1890s the Tribune said that there had been enough murders and suicides in the park to furnish a ghost for every dark nook and cranny.

  “Now, there is at least one reminder of what this place used to be,” he says. He points to a little stone structure out in the middle of the grass between the museum and the road. “That little building is the tomb of Ira Couch and his family, which they never moved. You guys want to check it out?”

  Naturally, everyone does, so Rick calls out, “Cemetery safari!” And we follow him across the grass.

  “I’ve driven by this a thousand times,” says one guy as we trudge through the park. “Never realized it was a tomb.”

  “Yeah,” says Rick. “We get that a lot. If people notice it, they just think it’s a tool shed or something. But it’s a tomb.”

  Mom has pointed out the tomb in the park to me when we drove by a couple of times, but I’ve never gone to check it out up close. It’s about the size of a one-car garage, with the family name COUCH in raised sans-serif letters in the stone above a black metal door. A little spiked fence, about waist high, surrounds it.

  “It says ‘Couch’ because it’s a resting place,” says Rick. “Ho ho ho.”

  “Is he still in there?” I ask.

  “Tough call,” Rick says. “It was built to hold thirteen people, and the general consensus is that it’s about half full. Or, you know, half empty. But there are a lot of different stories.”

  “Can’t they open it up and see?” someone asks.

  “Observe,” says Rick.

  And he hops over the fence and yanks on the door. It doesn’t budge.

  “See? It’s welded shut or something. And there’s no keyhole, no hinges, no latch. Just a metal slab that isn’t going anywhere. The handle is just a decoration.”

  “You think he might have any James Garfield commemorative spoons in there?” I ask.

  “One can only hope. You can’t expect zombie Ira Couch to eat brains with his fingers. Dude ran a very classy hotel. Abe Lincoln stayed there. So did John Wilkes Booth, for that matter. Right on the grounds where the Alley of Death and Mutilation is now.”

  I look down and notice a bug crawling under a crack between the metal door and the stone floor beneath it. When we’re walking back to the bus, I ask Rick if he knows about the crack.

  “Don’t tell me my ass is showing again.”

  “No, under the door. There’s a crack.”

  He stops in his tracks, then runs back to the fence around the tomb and looks down. When he sees that there’s a small gap between the door and the stone, his face lights up like a kid who found his Easter basket, and he runs all the way back to the bus, where he breaks the news to Cyn. Her face lights up too.

  “Well,” he says to me, “you wanna come back here and go tomb snooping after the tour?”

  “What kind of girl do you think I am?” I ask. “Of course I wanna go tomb snooping.”

  Cyn gives me a thumbs-up.

  I’m pretty sure this job is mine if I want it.

  Chapter Three

  After Rick and Cyn get the passengers back to the Rock and Roll McDonald’s and wrap up the tour, they split the tips, and we start making our tomb-snooping plans.

  “Okay,” says Cyn, putting her archaeology degree to use for once, “the first thing to know about tomb snooping is that it might feel kind of awkward at first, like you’re invading Mr. Couch’s privacy. Peeking in a tomb is like peeking in a bat
hroom.”

  “Decomposing: the final bodily function,” I say.

  “What’s the second thing to know about tomb snooping?” asks Rick.

  “That it’s awesome as fuck.”

  We all high-five.

  I don’t feel awkward at all about peeking into a tomb. You lose a lot of fear about invading the privacy of the dead when you’ve seen what goes on in embalming rooms. Mom kept me out of the actual embalmings when I was really little, but I started helping with makeup and dressing when I was ten, and I’ve seen a full-on embalming or two by now. Not enough to be used to what goes on in them, exactly, but enough that what little I might see in a one-hundred-fifty-year-old burial vault is small potatoes. In other words, “goose-wing” (first recorded 1377), “snotter” (1689), or “flap-dragon” (1700).

  Rick runs across the street to the Walgreens to spend his tips on tomb-snooping supplies, which I never would have guessed you could buy there, and I run into the McDonald’s to pee and finally check my phone, which has continued to buzz in my purse throughout the tour.

  Mostly it’s hearts from Zoey.

  But there are about ten from Mom:

  MOTHER DEAREST:

  Where are you?

  Mom and I are close enough that she isn’t used to me not answering her texts right away. Even now, I’m not wild about lying to her. But I’m sure as hell not going to tell her I’m out ghostbusting and tomb snooping with plans to make a career out of it. This is going to take some lying.

  I tell her I was watching a movie with Kacey, a girl I work with at the grocery store where I’m a part-time bagger. Then I send Zoey some goofy-face bathroom-mirror selfies and look up words for “tomb” on the online OED on my phone before I go back outside.

  Some good synonyms for tomb include “croft” (Old English), “lair-stow” (first recorded in AD 1000), and “the worm’s kitchen” (1500).