—This I know from a 007 movie. Sounded good.
—Moore?
(Do my Connery impersonation.)
—Okay, take it. By the way, don’t even think of bringing your recorder along.
AUDIO RECORDING
* * *
[Eighty Fahrenheit by the crickets. Door opens.]
MRS. BRODIE: Here you are!
A.: Hello, Mrs. Brodie.
MRS. BRODIE: Please, it’s Monique for you. Niamh, how are you?
A.: Sir. Thanks again for taking us on such short notice.
MR. BRODIE: Frank, Mr. Wells. No problem at all. Come in.
MRS. BRODIE: Did you guys walk all the way?
[Crickets fall silent behind the closed door; the interior resonates like a wood instrument.]
A.: Yes, it was a nice stroll. Such a warm autumn.
MRS. BRODIE: It all ends next week.
MR. BRODIE: There are tornado warnings. I must come your way early next week and help you with the boarding.
A.: Boarding?
MR. BRODIE: Panels. On the windows. You’ve never had tornadoes in your country, have you?
A.: No, that’s something we missed back in—
MRS. BRODIE: Oh, darling, your eyes! What happened?
A.: Oh. Uh … It’s nothing serious. There’s a funny story behind it, actually; I’ll tell you later.
MRS. BRODIE: Okay … Frankie, get our guests some refreshments while I check the chicken.
A.: Smells great.
MR. BRODIE: Mary, mother of Jesus! This wine’s worth five hundred bucks at least.
A.: [Hesitates.] Ah. Well … I’m sure Ambrose meant to drink it in good company.
MR. BRODIE: [Laughs.] I bet! Where’s that corkscrew? This I have to try. Monny, you gotta check this out.
[A pencil scribbling.]
What’s that? Oh, the lady’s right; we must let it breathe. First things first: Where is that damned thing … ? Here it is. Oh, listen, I haven’t told Monique yet, but Mr. Glew just phoned me yesterday. Told me about the land. Now, I really must—
A.: It’s my pleasure.
MR. BRODIE: But that’s more land than we can use!
A.: Hey, you work it; you own it. That’s how it should be.
MR. BRODIE: Well, what with your cousin’s gift first and now this, I’m starting to build myself some estate. And our kids aren’t really interested in the farm. The girl’s working at the Democratic headquarters in Richmond and the boy’s in college now, so—
A.: Look, you build an estate big enough and I promise you some second cousin twice removed will just sprout among the cabbages.
MR. BRODIE: [Laughs.] Yeah! You should know! [Pop!—a bottle uncorked.] Ah, there it is.
MRS. BRODIE: Here it comes! Everyone sit down.
[Words of approval lost between chairs being pulled out and cutlery clanging.]
MR. BRODIE: Well, dear, I think our guests would like to say grace?
[A slightly awkward, soft jazz–filled wavering.]
A.: Uh … Sssure … Uh, Niamh, would you like to do the honors? Thanks.
[Guests and hosts sitting upright, hands linking.]
[Blank.]
Amen.
MR. & MRS. B.: Amen.
A.: Thank you, Niamh.
A.’S DIARY
* * *
So, apart from the grace incident, so elegantly dodged, the lunch went smooth as silk. The Brodies were the perfect family, Niamh ate like a perfect daughter, I kept trying not to think how strong a tornado should be to compromise our house (and how far it would relocate the Brodies’ little Cape Cod–style farm, for that matter), and no other supernatural beings were alluded to until coffee.
It was tricky to bring the subject up. There’s no way ghosts can casually wash up in social talk. People who just let slip a reference to the occult in the middle of a serious debate (like, “I read in the Post that the global economy will relapse, and so says Saturn in Capricorn”) deserve execution.
Fortunately, my burned eyes, which never fail to impress an audience, served as a reminder of an open issue throughout the afternoon. And so, once we’d moved to the coffee table, I nudged the conversation toward Axton House. I first recounted our interview with Curtis Knox last Sunday as a token of my willingness to share any gossip about Ambrose’s activities; then, lingering on the motif of recent visits, I just dropped, “By the way, I saw the ghost too.”
They stared at me for a while. I don’t think they even considered laughing. I added, “Hence my eyes, as you may have noticed.”
It was tense. Mr. Brodie even started a sentence switching back to “Mr. Wells,” after having agreed to settle on a first-name basis. I cut him off, insisted I was serious—I had seen the ghost and I thought they would be interested.
Once again, Mrs. Brodie’s curiosity saved the day:
“What’s she like?”
“So you know it’s a she,” I said.
They couldn’t retreat now.
I talked about the electrician from town, how he had hinted to me about the Axtons, and how he had refused to give me the whole story, just a name: the Ngara girl. This is the Brodies’ version of the story Sam wouldn’t tell.
Long before Point Bless grew bigger than a humble market, Axton House was already there, roughly as we know it. It belonged to the Axton family, who might have come among the first settlers in Virginia. Brodie says they were of Dutch ancestry, and boastfully proud of their bloodline. They claimed all land from the present town to Powome River, and the native Indians they took it from were the first to work on their plantation, which soon grew to require slaves from Africa and farther. The Axton patriarchs often traveled themselves as far as Australasia to fetch them.
Even in those brutal times, the Axtons were particularly brutal. They mistreated the slaves and didn’t show much more respect for free men. They kicked dust over the poor and engaged in land feuds with the rich. They were feared in the short range, hated from a distance. However, the enormous plantation seemed to run autonomously and the Axtons needed nothing from the prospering community of Point Bless—not even their fear or hatred. They shut themselves away, and the townsfolk chose to think they had banished them. Gossip and isolation were their weapons. The former might not have harmed the Axtons. The latter certainly did.
Charles Robert Axton, said to be the second-to-last male in the family, was born in 1814. He was rumored to be the son of first cousins, and not the first case in the family. Axton himself married his stepsister, who apparently died in childbirth. The child no one saw, though he was rumored to be profoundly retarded or malformed. Perhaps he never existed, and Axton was the last of his kin after all.
By the time Axton took the reins of the plantation, the good days for human exploitation had drifted away. With plenty of free states and cities for the fugitives to take refuge in, and the 1808 act prohibiting the importation of slaves, Axton had trouble refilling his ranks. By then, however, it was common knowledge that the Axtons didn’t just own slaves; they were selectively breeding them. When fugitives from the plantation spoke out, not needing to run any farther than Point Bless to find some sympathy, vile secrets were disclosed: They had seen masters picking out men, sterilizing the weak while forcing the strong to copulate with the women. And these fugitives were themselves the offspring of such selection, perpetrated by generations of Axtons in search of the strongest workforce: the perfect slave.
Evil, though, is often pestered by irony. Charles Axton spent his abominable life crossing humans and mixing strains, while his own bloodline of European gentry was slowly extinguishing. The slaves he bred were not only the strongest, but also the most prone to escape. With their numbers dwindling, the twisted fantasy of the family was tumbling down, as was the family itself. Only when Axton failed to produce a boy from a decisive crossing between—some say—a Senegambian man and a remotely Malaysian woman, he realized his failure: The perfect slave would never be born, and the Axtons would perish. Unless one problem sort
ed the other.
From that failed crossing Axton had obtained a girl. (Mrs. Brodie said, “A beautiful girl”; in Mr. Brodie’s version she was described as “hideous”; in any case, a girl carrying the most exotic and therefore freshest genes in her body.) Axton, on the other hand, had become a widower, and the rumored father of a deranged son. (According to this version, the son was virtually a beast, imprisoned in Axton House’s attic.) Axton’s last bad idea, worthy to top over a century of atrocities, was to have one bloodline save the other. The details are nothing that either Mr. or Mrs. Brodie wishes to taint their Christian home with. In few, brutal words, Axton fed the mixed-breed girl to his son, trusting the boy’s animal instincts would do the job. She wasn’t over eleven. But she’d been bred to be fit, and it showed.
Allegedly, when Axton walked back upstairs to retrieve the girl, he found her cowering in a corner, and his son’s broken body sprawled on the attic floor.
Versions split again: Some say Axton killed the girl right on the spot. Others say he tried to do himself what his son failed to do. In both versions, the girl did not survive.
By the time Axton’s plan was so catastrophically foiled, the world outside Axton House had long been falling to pieces. During the decade it took for the mixed-breed girl to hardly reach sexual maturity, Axton had been too busy building expectations to pay any attention to his plantation, and most of his slaves were gone. Also, at the time of the gruesome climax of the story, a Civil War had broken out. That was when the last remaining slaves, the oldest of the bunch, fled as well. They didn’t go very far; most of them weathered the war in Point Bless (the town saw little fighting). They were not only Africans, but also Native Americans and South Asians. Many local black families descend from them; a few still feature slanted eyes. When they told the whole story, an old woman referred to the last child in their colony as the Ngara girl. Nobody knew what that meant or what language it stood for, but it stuck. It might be the name coined by a heterogeneous and multilingual community for a new race with a single representative.
Axton didn’t seem to care about the desertions. The rest of his life he was a shadow of his former self. Perhaps he was feeling the accusatory presence of the Ngara girl watching him. In 1865, the federals found him sitting on his ramshackle porch. No one knows exactly what he said to Captain Norton of the Union, but he got shot in the leg right then and there. It had to be amputated. He died in utter poverty and isolation in 1875.
It should be noted that this story was not recited in one go. Mr. and Mrs. Brodie interrupted and contradicted each other several times, and both Niamh and I threw in questions as well. It seemed to me that the Ngara girl legend was clearly common knowledge in Point Bless, but the Brodies had never compared their versions before. It’s like the story is alive within the community, but seldom verbalized.
After that, Mr. Brodie concluded, Axton House remained unperturbed for twenty-five years, until an English entrepreneur named Horace Wells, who went on to work as a railway engineer, acquired the land in 1900.
“And that’s when the legend of the ghost arose,” I supposed.
The Brodies stared at me as if I’d made a major mistake.
“Not at all. The Ngara girl had been seen long before. That’s why the house was unperturbed. Horace knew very well what he was getting into.”
Mrs. Brodie added, “In a way, I think that’s the reason he bought the house.”
We all remained silent. Not that I was surprised: I could understand the Wells’ way of thinking. Had I had the chance, I would have bought a haunted house too.
In the end, I had only one last question: “Why does the ghost appear to be linked to the bathroom?”
Mr. Brodie allowed himself a chuckle, as if to dissipate the dark mood of the evening. “That was no bathroom back then, son. They used outhouses.”
We left at dusk.
EXCERPT FROM JOHN LEEK’S GHOSTS OF GHOSTS. CHICAGO, 1980
* * *
For years in our profession, a strong current of opinion has discouraged referring to our area of expertise as ghosts. Many indeed, perhaps the most respectable of them, rather speak about entities, agents, or even more innocuously, phenomena. This tendency not only aims to push our bullied field of study closer to the jurisdiction of undisputed sciences by pulling it away from the deprecated realm of folklore, but also seems to admit, through the very imprecision of its terminology, that our science is still young—embryonic, according to Flyte (4)—and that we still face as long a road as Homo habilis did when he first grabbed a tool.
However, once we change all taboo words into pseudo-Latin, reformulate all the superstitious gibberish into academic jargon, embrace the scientific method, apply self-criticism, unravel speculation, dismiss demoted disciplines, tear up Kirlian photography, fire the mediums, destroy the hoaxes, expel the madmen, burn the pulp, and return to square one; once the whole corpus of parapsychology is reduced to one bookshelf of serious works on the occult and a handful of respectable students, among which I may not qualify to be, once we have done all this, ghosts will still be there. […]
It is fairly easy to get carried away in our work. Several reasons come to mind. 1) There is so much to prove, and so much recognition awaiting those who prove it. 2) There is so little to start with, and so frail, we feel the urge to back it up with fabricated replicas. 3) There are so few of us, we tend to think we are special. We describe ourselves pedantically as perceptive, receptive, sensitive, open-minded, and other meaningless attributes. 4) There are personal implications. The smallest phenomenon, if proved legitimate, opens the door to staggering possibilities for all humans. Any evidence of anybody’s afterlife implies an afterlife for us. 5) There is religion: We need to believe. […]
That notwithstanding, unexplained things are there, waiting to be explained. Call them what you want: entities, agents, phenomena—no term is too vague. Throwing together all contributions from all disciplines into one single container word, they will still amount to nothing but a speck.
Take ghosts from that pile—i.e., any real evidence (and by real I mean just nonrefuted) of unexplained phenomena ever documented that our spiritual background makes us associate with intelligent beings. Even narrowed down through the sieve of skepticism to a few cases scattered all over the world—Marbaden, Averoigne, the Areba twins, Skagen 1963, Bells of Thudeney, Bangharh, Chapelizod, Heck House, and a few others—the little pile of evidence remaining still shows some consistencies. This is what humbly, as a scientist, I daresay we know about what, for lack of a better term, we may call ghosts. And it fits on one page.
1. There are mostly invisible, inaudible, incorporeal entities that can at times be perceived in the same way by different unbiased observers.
2. When unperceived by other means, they have been consistently noticed as cold, humid, and electrically charged. These attributes have been measured.
3. When seen, they appear as vague shadows, as if their bodies were hardly dense enough to deflect light. They are never seen in darkness.
4. When heard, they may sound in frequencies either too low or too high for the human ear. Legitimate recordings exist. Contrary to popular belief, animals have not been proved to be more aware of them than we are.
5. They can speak, and are therefore assumed to have human intelligence.
6. In their presence, wave signals are distorted.
7. They cannot interact with material objects.
8. However, the fact that they are often linked to a particular place (what we call a haunted spot) suggests that they are aware of their surroundings, and of us.
9. There is always an oral background tradition (either previous and genuine or succeeding and fabricated) associating each one of them to a once living person or persons.
10. Not all mean any harm.
NIAMH’S NOTEPAD
* * *
(In bed.)
—What now?
—Nothing. The ghost is the least of my concerns.
<
br /> —So we back to shake books?
—What’s the point?
—We got a code to break!
—What for? That code will only lead to more codes, just like the Aeschylus cipher did. That’s their little game; they get off on secrecy for secrecy’s sake; they’re hiding nothing!
—You KNOW that’s not true.
—They even refer to one another in code! Leonidas, Hector, Prometheus—we don’t even know their names!
—Leonidas = Ambrose; Prometheus = S.W.L.; Sophocles = Edward Cutler (the guy who sent the CD from Ibiza) & Bob’s your uncle!
(He reads carefully.)
—Okay … 3 out of 20. Except for Bob. I don’t think I have an uncle Bob. Aunt Liza would’ve told me.
—We’ll find the rest. You just downhearted. Get some sleep.
AUDIO RECORDING
* * *
[A light switches on.]
[Bare feet cross the room. The toilet lid is lifted.]
[Silence for a reasonable lapse to pee.]
[Flush. Steps approach the microphone. A pencil telegraphs a message. A paper is torn. Footsteps exit. Light is switched off.]
A NOTE LEFT IN THE BATHROOM
* * *
You and I gonna get along?
NOVEMBER 19
DREAM JOURNAL
* * *
I look down to Earth. I’m a spit dropping toward the planet.
I can see the curve of the blue canvas far beyond my feet (the highest altitude a pair of Puma training shoes ever reached). And in the blue immensity below, the zygote of an island is growing.
I’m targeting it.
I’m free-falling to an island from a hundred thousand meters, at flesh-tearing speed.
The Supernatural Enhancements Page 7