by Adam Selzer
Back onboard, Cyn is alone, waiting on Rick to come back.
“What did you think of the tour?” she asks.
“It was a blast,” I say. “Rick’s a hell of a tour guide.”
“Rick is going to be a star,” says Cyn. “It’s adorable how excited he gets about this stuff.”
“I get the impression that right now is one of the times when you’re together?”
“Right now it’s kind of ambiguous, relationship-wise.”
“Got it.”
“We drive each other nuts, but we’re way too mixed up in each other’s lives at this point not to be together. We have a history. That kind of shit. But there’re some possible business developments and stuff coming up, and we’re not sure if presenting ourselves as a couple would make things better or worse.”
Rick bounds back onto the bus from the Walgreens with a couple of cheap Chicago souvenir T-shirts and a roll of clear packing tape.
“What’re the shirts for?” I ask.
“Nothing. I just wanted the wire hangers they came on.”
“That’s some smart shopping, Rick,” says Cyn. “There’s about ten places we could go and just buy hangers.”
“But I want to do it now.”
He removes the shirts from the hangers and tosses them into a Rubbermaid bin at the front of the bus where they keep tools and cleaning supplies. Then he bends the wires into an L shape and tapes his phone to one end, so he can slide it under the door, prop it upright, and take pictures.
“Behold,” he says, holding it up like a proud kindergartner who just made a bird feeder out of a pinecone. “The Tomb Snooper 500.”
Awesome.
Then he pulls up a picture on his phone of a graveyard at night, with little white balls of light all over, and shows it to me.
“Pop quiz, padawan,” he says. “This is the official start of your training. You know what they call these things?”
“Orbs, right?” I say. “People show us pictures of them at the funeral home sometimes and say it’s someone’s soul.”
Rick rolls his eyes. “Right. And I don’t ever want you to bring them up on tours. They’re a cheap parlor trick. And as far as we can tell, Edward Tweed from DarkSide invented the idea that they’re ghosts.”
“They’re usually dust,” says Cyn. “Or a problem with a cheap lens.”
“If people show up and they’ve already heard of them and make a big deal out of getting them in pictures, I just sort of let them go ahead and have fun with it,” says Rick. “But if anyone asks you if they’re for real, just say they’re ghost farts, not ghosts.”
“Got it.”
I like that he’s talking as though I already have the job. Finding the crack under the door of the tomb must have really ingratiated me to him.
“You know,” says Cyn, “in a roundabout way, they are ghosts.”
“What kind of roundabout way?” Ricardo asks.
“Well, there’s nothing new under the sun. The atoms that make up those dust particles were probably bonded to molecules that were part of a human being once. So they’re sort of ghosts. In a way.”
“Yeah, but in that same way, they’re also beetle shit,” says Ricardo. “Fuck orbs. Let’s go get some food.”
Cyn drives us back up north, toward Lincoln Park and the Couch family mausoleum. It won’t be dark for a while yet, so we head into a nearby diner Rick recommends, where Cyn spots me ten bucks from the tips to get a dipped Italian beef sandwich and a Sprite. I’m a bit hard up for cash right now—I dented up the hearse a couple of months ago, and what little I make working at the grocery store is eaten up paying Mom back for the damages. It’d be nice to make enough to have some spending money for once.
“God, I can’t wait to snoop that tomb,” Rick says. “Even Marjorie Stone probably didn’t know what was in there.”
“She probably never even tried to find out,” says Cyn. “She would’ve found a way in. You know it.”
“But she didn’t,” says Rick. “And now we will, motherfucker!”
He holds up a hand for a high five, and I don’t leave him hanging, even though I have no idea what he’s talking about.
“Who’s Marjorie Stone?” I ask.
They look at each other, then back at me.
“Kind of a long story,” says Rick. “I assumed Cyn told you all about her when you were a babysitting charge.”
“Not that I recall.”
“I’d just moved to Forest Park back then,” says Cyn. “I was sort of trying to forget her.”
“Fair enough,” says Rick. “So, Marjorie Kay Stone was this old woman in Magwitch Park. You ever go out there?”
“Nope.”
“No reason why you should. It’s a dump.”
“It’s one of those old Route 66 towns off I-55 past the edge of suburbia,” says Cyn. “We were kids together there. And we met Marjorie after Ricardo tried to bury his dead hamster in her backyard. What was the hamster called?”
“Sonja,” Rick says, putting his fist to his chest in salute. “I wanted her to be someplace classy where no dogs would dig her up. That backyard had all these statues, bushes shaped like dolphins. Even a little pond. Classy as fuck.”
“Got it.”
“She was a retired professional thing-finder,” Rick says. “Ran an outfit called Finders of Magwitch Park. If some collector wanted a rare old ring, or a painting that went missing in World War II, or if a movie director wanted some hard-to-find prop, she’d find it.”
“And this was before the internet,” says Cyn. “It took some real talent to find rare things back then.”
“The internet kind of put her out of business,” says Rick. “And made her into a bitter old psycho. Working with the old people at the home is a breeze compared to her.”
The two of them swap anecdotes about Marjorie Kay Stone for a bit while I eat my sandwich. She sounds like quite a piece of work.
“There were wine stains all over that house from Marjorie getting pissed off and throwing glasses at the wall,” says Rick. “Including the bathroom. Which means that now and then she’d be drinking wine on the toilet, and get so mad she threw the glass at the wall.”
“Thank you for that image,” says Cyn. “Now I’m gonna have to hope there’s a rotting body in the Couch tomb so I have something more pleasant to picture than Marjorie drinking while she pees.”
“New topic,” says Rick. “What are we gonna find in the Couch Tomb.”
“There’s probably nothing to see by now, even if it was totally full and they never moved anyone,” I say. “Even the coffins have got to be dust by now.”
“Not necessarily,” says Cyn. “That was a seven-thousand-dollar tomb in 1850s money. There’s a pretty good chance they would have sprung to put him in a Fisk Metallic Burial Case.”
“Let us hope and pray,” says Rick.
“Are those the really ornate metal coffins with the window over the face?” I ask.
Cyn smiles. “See? I told you she knew her shit.”
“Nice,” says Rick. “Yeah, those are the ones. They found one buried in Lincoln Park in the 1990s, just over where the parking lot is now, so Ira might be in one, and might even still be in halfway decent shape. Anyone else is probably dust, though.”
“You ever see that one movie version of Romeo and Juliet,” I ask, “where they bring Juliet into the tomb and everyone’s just rotting on open slabs, like they wouldn’t have turned to dust years ago?”
“Is that the version from the seventies?” asks Ricardo. “The one where you see his butt?”
“And her boob for a second.”
We high-five again.
I have never high-fived so much in one night.
I take another bite of my dinner and feel like I’ve arrived in my element for the first time. Like my life is finally beginning.
I almost fit in with the theater group at school, and with the other kids when Mom goes to funeral director conventions, but not like this. I
can’t think of another time when I felt so at ease talking to two people. Being able to make references to rotting corpses without worrying that I’ll freak them out is like a load off my shoulders. Maybe I could even tell them about the stories I write, and what goes on in them. I feel like I could.
This is awesome.
The city is awesome.
The Italian beef sandwich I am eating is awesome—the spices are just right and they dipped it in the gravy just enough.
The way Cyn is eating the chicken-and-rice soup with her fingers is awesome.
The yuppies walking past the window with their kids on leashes and their dogs roaming free are awesome. In their own way. I guess.
And the fact that I’m hanging out on something like equal terms with my former babysitter is awesome. I’ve been clicking the “I’m an adult” buttons on fan-fic boards since I was thirteen, but this is the first night that I really feel like one of the grown-ups.
We want to wait to “tomb snoop” until it’s totally dark out, so after we park the bus on the road by the museum, we settle in to wait. When I think about it, I realize that it’s the longest day of the year. Solstice.
Cyn goes to the gas station across the street to get some oil for the bus while Rick and I relax on the duct-taped seats. I pull out my phone and send Zoey a text saying I’m going “tomb snooping,” and she texts back, “Don’t you dare get sucked into the netherworld, baby,” followed by a heart.
Rick reads it over my shoulder. “Boyfriend?” he asks.
“Girlfriend,” I say. “But we’re long distance and I haven’t seen a picture of her, so . . .”
“So it might be a boyfriend.”
I shrug. “I could live with it either way.”
“What if she’s fifty, though?”
“That’d be harder.”
“And what if she’s twelve?”
Now I put the phone in my lap and feel a bit sick.
“Shit, I hope not,” I say. “Or I’m in real trouble.”
“You been sexting with her?”
“Maybe a little.”
“Or a lot?”
Some blood rushes to my face.
“I don’t show my face in those shots,” I say, “but I’m also sending her fan-fic about the Evil Queen from Snow White in her witch disguise hooking up with the Emperor from Return of the Jedi. And some of them aren’t exactly suitable for twelve-year-olds.”
He cracks up and asks to see some, but I shake my head. No one but Zoey ever reads my stuff and knows it’s by me—everyone else who sees it doesn’t know anything about me except my screen name.
And now I’m a bit afraid to send her anything else.
God. You always worry that some pervert is gonna lure you someplace when you meet them online. I guess I never stopped to think that maybe I could be the pervert.
There’s no way Zoey is twelve. She talks about bands like Dresden Dolls and Rasputina that most twelve-year-olds wouldn’t know. I guess I knew them when I was that age, but only because Cynthia had introduced them to me. Anyway, Zoey’s too damned proficient and creative when it comes to cybersex not to have at least been reading erotica for years.
Still, I know that at least to some extent, being with her at all is a bad idea. It’s like Ginny Weasley writing in Tom Riddle’s old diary because it wrote back, until it turned out to be Voldemort talking to her. I’m trusting someone without being able to see where she keeps her brain.
But Zoey understands me. The stuff in my stories doesn’t scare her. She gets all my references; I never have to explain that Chernobog is the demon thing in Fantasia or that Grimhilde is the Evil Queen’s name in Snow White, according to early marketing materials, though it’s not completely canon.
And she thinks I’m awesome.
It’s hard to let go of someone who keeps telling you that you’re awesome.
Especially when you spend your work life bagging groceries for people who seem to think you’re a muckworm (OED word for “a worthless person,” first recorded in 1649), dogbolt (1465), or pettitoe (1599).
After a long day of abuse from customers, I need someone to tell me how pretty I am, how good my stories are, and call me adorable pet names while we fool around via text. No one else is lining up to do it. But at least I have Zoey. She’s all I have, and all I need.
And while we wait for the sun to be down, I actually talk about all of this stuff with Rick and Cyn. About Zoey, about my stories, the unusual turn-ons and wirings in my brain that meant that every crush I ever had was doomed to lead nowhere. This is stuff I’ve almost never said out loud before. When I have, they seemed freaked out and I had to say I was just kidding.
Sometimes it even freaks me out. Sometimes I give myself the creeps. Sometimes I think I frame my stories around Disney villains and stuff just to give them a veneer of humor and silliness to take the edge off.
But Rick and Cyn don’t make fun of me. They don’t seem to think I’m a nut. They even talk a bit about the stuff they’re into themselves. It’s pretty soft-core, but it’s obvious that I can be myself with these two, and it’s so liberating to talk to someone about this stuff that I almost want to cry.
I don’t want to monopolize the whole conversation by talking about myself and Zoey, like the two of them are my therapists, so I ask about the ghost Cyn said they knew back in Magwitch Park. They say she lived at Marjorie Kay Stone’s house.
“Marjorie had been hired to find a real ghost who could act in a movie,” Cyn says. “It was one of the few things she couldn’t find.”
“She should’ve tried your plan to kidnap Resurrection Mary,” I say.
“Yeah, she was way ahead of us on that,” says Rick. “She said she found Mary, but it turned out that she couldn’t act for beans.”
I’m not sure how to take all this. I mean, Rick and Cyn seem like reasonable people who don’t believe every dumb ghost story they hear, but they’re both pretty casual about saying they knew a ghost personally when they were kids.
It was probably some girl who identified as a ghost. Maybe she only ever wanted to be referred to in the past tense or something. I’ve seen people identify as stranger things online.
I guess believing in ghosts sort of comes down to the matter of what counts as one and what doesn’t. When I pull out my phone to check, I see that the OED lists over one hundred and fifty definitions of the word “ghost.”
There has to be at least one I can believe in.
Leaves rustle in the trees around the tomb.
A girl in yoga pants walks past without even looking at it.
Up in the sky, above the lake, there are a couple of clouds that look like the Headless Horseman chasing a mailman. I hope he catches him.
The shadows grow longer, then just melt into the darkness as the sun goes down. At ten o’clock, we decide it’s finally dark enough.
Go time.
Cyn grins at me. “Now, when you go back to Forest Park, you’ll be Megan Henske: Grave Robber.”
“Hey, we’re not robbing anything,” I say. “Unless it turns out he was buried with some commemorative spoons.”
“Speak for yourself, padawan,” says Rick. “If there’s anything jewel-encrusted, I’m having it.”
We start marching through the park like we’re in one of those slow-walk scenes they always have in superhero movies, and I feel a lot like I did back in the old days, when I was helping Cyn with her petty vandalism. Like we should be singing a villain song as we go. Like a cloud of bats should be following in our wake.
Rick and I give up on walking and just run like wild children toward the tomb.
Cyn doesn’t run. She just walks, in the same casual stroll she used when she left the scene of a wall tagging. When I look back she’s striding along, staring straight ahead, not picking up her pace. Like a queen who’s just ordered the guy kneeling in front of her to be beheaded on the spot, and has more interesting things to do than stick around to watch the axe fall, or even turn her head wh
en she hears the thud.
Rick hops the short fence around the crypt, shimmies the Tomb Snooper 500 under the crack beneath the metal door, and moves the wire hanger around, trying to get the phone to point in the right direction. A camera app with an interval timer takes a photo every two seconds. Flashes come from under the crack, giving me ideas for a story where the Emperor and the Evil Queen (in her old hag disguise) do it in this very tomb. I love writing about those two. They’re an adorable couple. They have the same taste in black hooded robes.
Cyn picks up a stick from the ground, swishes and flicks it like a Harry Potter wand, and says, “Alohamora,” the unlocking charm. It doesn’t work, obviously, so she swishes and flicks it at Rick’s upturned ass and says, “Coitus.”
“I’m working here!” said Rick.
These are my people, all right.
The first time Rick pulls the phone out, the pictures are nothing but dark blurs.
He adjusts some settings and tries again. This time, he says, “Eureka!” and holds up the phone for us to see.
It turns out that what’s behind the door of the Couch tomb is . . . another door.
Seriously.
Behind the door is a sort of foyer backed by a larger, slightly more ornate-looking stone door.
And orbs. Lots of those. It’s dusty in there.
“Damn it,” says Rick. “Kind of a metaphor for life, isn’t it? There’s always another door.”
“Any space beneath that door?” I ask.
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“Even if there was, we’d need a bigger tomb snooper,” says Cyn. “The Tomb Snooper Five Hundred and One.”
“Okay,” says Rick. “Well, we’ve passed level one. Now we get back to the drawing board and work on level two. Still, how long has it been since anyone saw the inside door? We fucking rule!”
Cyn pats me on the back. “Welcome to the profession,” she says. “Rolling with the rotters.”
Rick and Cyn drive the bus to the Blue Line stop at Halsted and I-290, right near Hull House, so I can take the train back home to Forest Park.