by Mark Teppo
"You think someone might have set it?"
"I’m sure I never said such a thing." She pushed herself away from the table. Her hands sought shelter in her apron pockets.
The doctor’s voice caught her before she could walk away. "You are the owner here?"
"I am. My husband died a few years ago."
"And you have seen evidence of ghostly activity, to the point where you wish to hire a ghost handler to put it to rest?"
"Daily," she said. "It throw things, and it knocks at night on the doors and the windows. It smears the ashes from the fireplace over the tables and walks on the ceiling, leaving it all smudged."
The vehemence in her voice surprised him. The kitchen’s clatter had stilled, to a point where he wondered whether the cook and maids might be standing just out of sight, listening. If all of this were true, they’d want the ghost gone as ardently as their mistress did.
"Very well," he said. "I’ll start speaking to the staff and figuring out how best to rid you of this trouble."
"Just the one," she said.
"Just the one?"
"I want Kim gone," she said. The vehemence that had surprised him before grew even narrower and more focused now. "I want her ghost gone. But Ellie stays."
Charlotte stirred in her seat. Doctor Fantomas ignored her.
"Have you seen signs of Ellie?"
Efora shook her head. "But I know she must be here, if Kim is," she said. "I even wonder if things might not be worse, if she were not here to intervene."
The interviews would be left until after service was complete and they themselves had dined. Efora suggested he might want to lie down before then.
It was true. He was tired. Tired of chasing ghosts, of what he would have to do to rid the place of Kim, at least, and perhaps Ellie as well. He would lay his head down and not think of it for a little while.
Although the establishment was restaurant, rather than inn, Efora had found them rooms near the kitchen, which sometimes housed excess workers. The Doctor appreciated it in more ways than one. While it would be good to be close, to be able to see a ghost whenever it appeared, it was good, too, to save the money that housing himself and Charlotte would have cost.
It was a simple room, furnished with household cast-offs. An attempt had been made to gussy up the old dresser with its scratched and clouded mirror by draping a length of white lace and linen across it, but the fabric’s crispness only made the wood look more neglected. A shuttered window returned the mirror’s blank gaze on the opposite wall.
Despite the fact they were on the western side of the building, away from the wing where the two girls had perished, the Doctor could detect a hint of smoke clinging to everything around him, an ephemeral reminder whose presence you found yourself forgetting with time, until you stepped outside and then back in, to be struck anew by the pungency.
A taut blue coverlet overlaid the bed, and a coiled rag rug nearly filled the rest of the space in the tiny room.
Mercifully, a bowl of hot water and towel sat on the table that capped the bed’s foot. He laved himself, took off his boots, and laid down. He thought it would be hard to sleep, but it seemed only moments before he heard Charlotte’s soft knock on the door, summoning him to the meal.
He and Charlotte were fed with the rest of the staff, after the last of the diners had counted coins onto the table and left. It was an extravagant but odd meal, and the quality varied widely: tender dumplings scented with golden flakes of spice and patterned with young sage leaves accompanied burned sticks of meat so strongly flavored that they made the eyes water. A cream custard flaked oddly from the spoon, its texture closer to that of a fungus. Blobs of fat dripped from a meat loaf, studding it like crude bone buttons.
The Doctor ate but little, and Charlotte, as was her custom, simply chased food around her plate, moving it from one side to the next in between sips of water. Both of them declined the fish tea they were offered. From the grimaces of others, they had chosen wisely in doing so.
The staff and family, as they surrounded the great ironwood table in the back of the room: Efora, Efora’s aunt Tabita; Liam the cook, a thin-framed boy so young that the doctor found it hard to believe he was more than a pot-boy; Efora’s country cousins, young women named Collie and Mulia who worked as waitresses; elderly Phineas, who oversaw the front end of the room; pot scrubber and handywoman Liza, a lazily handsome woman who flirted with everyone at the table.
Most of them were subdued, though, stealing glances at the doctor and his companion. Liza addressed him outright: "What will you do, once you find the ghosts? How will you know which is which? Is it that precise, your vision? What determines what dress a ghost wears?"
"The same dress they would envision themselves in when imagining or dreaming in life," he said. "Most see themselves in something from a happy moment. What would you think Kim or Ellie would think their happiest moments?"
"That silk dress Kim danced in," Liam said. The two waitresses flicked glances at him, then each other, letting out muted giggles, which everyone else ignored.
"And for Ellie, her cook’s apron," Efora said in a fond tone.
"But it is that easy?" Liza pursued. "We have not seen the ghosts in such forms, but rather as balls of lights, or half-seen shadows or sometimes outright invisiblities."
"When I see, it is with a sharper eye than yours, perhaps. One accustomed to the frequencies at which such creatures vibrate."
Liza seemed inclined to pursue this question further, but Tabita interrupted. She was a classic old crone of Tabat, her skin darkened from exposure to the salt wind, her hair cut short in the manner of sailors, which older women affected due to its easiness, if they had retained enough hair to make the style dignified.
Tabita had. She was a severe but elegant woman of perhaps sixty, with turquoise eyes and a string of amber around her neck. "They say ghosts linger because of unfinished business," she said to the doctor. "Is that true?"
He stroked his whiskers, eying the squid pudding that trembled like a fever patient in the center of the table. "On occasion, ma’am, aye."
"Is that why our twins linger then? Some unfinished business?"
"It is more likely that one or the other of them does not realize she is dead," he said, parceling out a fragment of the pudding, which smelled better than it looked. An oily sheen rainbowed its surface.
"How could they not know that?" a waitress squeaked, he wasn’t sure which one.
He fixed her with a portentous eye. No particular amount of ghost energy clung to her, other than the growth that covered them all, the ectoplasmic snail ooze that ghosts could not help but exude.
"When a death is sudden or violent, or both, the ghost can not realize what has happened," he said. "Just as sometimes a living person may forget great trauma, as a defense against what it might do to their mind, so do ghosts forget their death."
He did not speak of the circumstances of the twins’ death, but he did not have to. He could tell they were all thinking of fire stealing up the stairway, smoke creeping across the beds like living blankets, to choke the sleepers into something beyond dreams.
Had the twins awoken or just gone to sleep and never woke up? From the haunting, he suspected that was not the cause. Something more had happened, something that he would have to decipher in order to figure out what best to do.
At first, the doctor decided to speak to the staff one at a time in the small private room. There were few diners here, and he assured Efora Nittlescent that he would keep the demands on the staff time to a minimum.
Before he could do so, Charlotte followed him into the room. He could see eager words working in her throat, and spoke before she could.
"I have not decided yet."
She gulped back her speech, reshaped it. "An exorcism cannot be fine-tuned in the way she wants."
"Can’t it?" He stared at her.
Her gaze searched the ceiling, the crevices, the corners of the doorway. "Two ghosts wound to
gether cannot be untangled as though they were yarn," she said.
"That is the question," he said. "Are they together like that?"
"They died together."
"From what? Did someone set the place alight? Did they know who killed them? Such things might tie them together, admittedly."
"You want to play at detective," she said.
"I am a ghost handler," he said, and shot a severe frown at her. "Now go and fetch me the cook."
Liam revealed he had been more assistant to Ellie than anything else. Her loss, it seemed, had left him adrift.
"She allus knew what was what," he said glumly.
Something about the tilt of his shoulders, the way his eyes fled like minnows from a shadow on the shore bank, set the doctor’s teeth on edge.
"How did you get along with Kim?" he said.
A scowl as the boy spat into the fireplace. "She were a witch, that one."
"A magicker?" the doctor said sharply.
The boy’s hand flapped in weak rejection. "Naw, naw. A bitch. We been taught the other is more polite."
After she had led the boy back out, Charlotte returned.
"Liam’s a well-favored lad, eh?" the doctor said to her.
She sniffed in derision.
"If that’s the sort of thing that appeals to you," she said. "Have you seen the ghosts?"
"Not yet," he said. He didn’t mention the initial glimpse he’d had. He was never sure how finely attuned Charlotte’s senses were. Sometimes it seemed as though she could sense ghosts on her own but at other times she seemed to need him to point them out to her. It would make a fascinating paper some day, if he found enough time to settle down and write.
Something in Liam’s demeanor had told him already, but the Doctor pretended to be surprised both times the waitresses told him of the relationship between the cook and Ellie.
"They was to marry, come next year, Ellie said . . ."
"She kept it from her mother—Efora wanted her to marry her third cousin Lark Nittlescent. Nice favored boy, and well pocketed, but bland as custard . . ."
That interested him. Ellie wouldn’t have liked bland, indeed. Her menu featured quirks of taste and savor and spices that sometimes felt like blows, but ones that left you tingling with satisfaction. He knew that without her, what had come to the table was only a shadow of what it could have been, but she had designed the recipes, and they were as individual as signatures. As he ate, he had put together the strands, as though he were talking to her in his mind, drawing her out, finding out how she felt about fighting, or politics, or love.
Love. There was a dish on the menu called "The Cook’s Left Hand" and he thought, somehow, that it was meant as commentary on Liam. It was flavored with cinnamon, sometimes called "the forbidden spice" for reasons he was unsure of, which was an odd combination with the fish’s firm white flesh. Sour berries, no bigger than a sparrow’s eye and green as olives, had surrounded it. Somehow that combination of flavors, which should have seemed unsettling, mingled together in a way that enticed the tongue, as though flavored with desire itself.
She had loved Liam. Liam had seen the advantages of a partnership with her, at the least, and had perhaps even returned her love, just buried it so deep in sorrow that the doctor could not see it. Although the boy seemed to have felt strongly enough about Kim.
How, the doctor wondered, had Kim felt about Liam?
Before retiring for the night, he unshuttered the window, exposing a view of the restaurant’s rear courtyard, an expanse of wrought iron tables, chained to the fence as though someone were worried that they might go walking about.
He sat upright. The moon hit the window almost as bright as witchlight when first summoned. What had called him out of sleep? Some noise in the dining room, rhythmic as hammer blows but more muted. Footsteps? Perhaps.
He put on his breeches, head tilted as he tried to listen. The noises continued, stopped, restarted.
The door opened of its own accord. Charlotte. Beckoning him to follow.
She preceded him down the hallway. There was little light in its confines, but when she opened the door to the kitchen, everything was moonlight and steel, the rims of the great soup pots shining like rounded scimitars, the rack of cleavers and knives varying from the length of his forearm to the smallest paring blade possible, the tiles of the floor like moonstones underfoot, sending up a muted dazzle that mirrored the steel’s.
Charlotte was hunched as though trying to avoid notice. His or the ghost’s? He signaled to her to stop as she reached to push open the swinging door leading to the dining room.
She debated disobedience, he could tell, and he arched an eyebrow until she shrank back. Nevertheless, he felt a shrill cold comb along his back as he passed her to lay a palm on the door
Her malady drove her, he told himself. That was all. It drove her very hard indeed.
The pictures that had hung around the walls were piled on the floor, and handfuls of something were piled on top of them.
He sniffed. Feces, although perhaps not human, he thought.
"Fetch a light from the kitchen," he told Charlotte. She nodded, and he stood in the darkness, smelling it, waiting for her return. He wondered where the rest of the household was. Had they become so inured to ghostly activities that they slept through them? Or, he thought it more likely, they were hiding. Poltergeists could harm, had done so more often than rumors held possible, and most inhabitants of a ghost-ridden household learned that quick enough when they collected bruises from being shoved down coal cellar stairs or from objects thrown at them out of nowhere.
Were the ghosts in there with him? He closed his eyes, sent his senses outwards, but felt nothing. They had fled. At his approach or Charlotte’s? Did they know what danger they were in? It was rare for ghosts to have that much notion of things.
The door creaked, and Charlotte appeared, preceded by a half circle of candlelight. The flame flickered, even held in the glass chimney of the lantern held high in her hand. She wore nightclothes of a peculiar white shininess, elaborately flounced at the cuffs and hem. He ignored them. He had seen her in them before. She dressed affectedly for bed, as though she would dream some prince into existence, for whom she must be prepared in formal wear.
She raised her face, searching through the shadows flickering over chairs clustered around each long table’s expanse. "Some pictures are yet on the walls," she said.
"Kim’s, I suspect," the doctor said. "Bring the lantern over here."
She moved over to him, and they stood together looking at the face that looked out at them from the wall. It was a face the twins shared, but in her hand was a wooden spoon, and her apron was marked with stains in a less than decorative way.
"Not Kim at all," Charlotte said. Surprise was evident in her tone.
"No," the doctor said. "Not Kim at all."
They looked at each other. Doctor Fantomas was the first to voice it.
"Ellie is the poltergeist."
In the morning, he found Efora cleaning up, a bucket of soapy water beside its partner holding lumps of shit. She knelt beside the biggest pile.
"Why would the ghost do this, do you think?" the doctor asked.
Efora scrubbed a picture clean. It was a family group, a trio of bearded men with their arms around each other. "I beg your pardon?"
"Such an act is intended to send a message," the doctor said. "In this case, the ghost has defecated on every member of your family with a sole exception. Which leads me to believe that the ghost is the sole exception." He leveled a long finger at Ellie’s picture. "So I must query, madam, whether it is still Kim you wish exorcised?"
Wiping her hands on her apron, Efora rose to confront him with her gaze. An angry spot of red seemed pinned to each cheek, reminding him of a doll’s expression.
"I have not changed my mind," she said.
It was not what he expected. He gaped at her. "But if you leave Ellie’s ghost alone, it will continue to do such things."
She shook her head, still wringing her hands in her apron. "With Kim gone, Ellie will calm down. It was always that way. Then she’ll go back to the kitchen, will get us back to profitability. She was always dependable, my Ellie."
"You understand," he said, "that anything may happen. She may choose to leave with Kim gone. Or you may be wrong, and she may become a thousand times worse."
Her face was unconvinced.
A ghost flitted overhead. Which twin, Ellie or Kim? What would either of them think of their mother’s intention? He suspected Ellie would feel much more sanguine than Kim.
What had made Ellie feel betrayed by the entire family, including her twin?
If a picture of Liam had been anywhere in the array of faces, where would the ghost have placed it? Beside her on the wall, or in among the feces-smeared pile?
He went down his list, speaking to several others before he had Liam called to him again.
"Was Ellie happy with you the day before she died?"
The boy’s eyes were frantic, flitting everywhere. "Sure," he said.
"I don’t think so. The others say many of the ghost’s most malicious acts have been aimed at you."
He paused. Silence was often the best instruments in such interrogations. He was right. After a minute his mute stare levered the truth out of the boy as easily as a spoon extracting a nut from a jar.
"Kim made me," he said hastily.
"Made you what?"
"Come to her bed."
"And Ellie found out, of course," the doctor supplied.
"I didn’t think she had, but she must have. She wouldn’t speak to me at all that night, just glared whenever she saw me."
And Ellie had tried to do away with her rival, the doctor reflected, only to somehow get caught in her own fire. But surely she hadn’t meant to commit suicide. The ghost’s anger was that of someone who had not meant to die, anger against her state. Such ghosts were bad as poison in a well. They led the living around them to anger or despair, prompted loathsome acts that otherwise would have stayed undone. No, Ellie must be removed.