DarkTalesfromElderRegionsNY

by Hieber, Leanna Renee

  Stefan was one of those that she couldn’t quite block out.

  He was very loud and he annoyed her so much, especially because she was one of the few, living or dead, who also saw him as a boy. His name was even different as a boy. When she first met the boy, he told her to call him “Jimmi.” As a young boy he was rather happy, pleasant, but mischievous. He liked to knock over their cameras and laugh at the team when they sat in Cottage B investigating. Gwen realized that Stefan had split himself, into the rude old man and the boisterous young Jimmi because he had been happiest as a boy, running up the “t’garns’l.” Gwen had no idea what that was, but when he told her she got an image of a boy almost flying up a grand ship’s sails with blue skies and blue sea and the sun shining above. Gwen got sporadic names and images but she wasn’t by any means familiar with sailing, so they were all utterly alien. The only names that stood out was a ship called the Neptune and another called Najaden. She saw the name of that ship on its prow. She saw Jimmi running up and down the rigging of the Neptune’s top most sails, flitting about the deck, shuffling below deck in the galley with the cook. As she saw the ship in port, unloading and loading goods, she saw the boy always with a smile and quick feet.

  He had never, in his long life, been able to regain that happiness, and despite his insults as the old man in the stove-pipe hat, she felt sorry for him. It was truly a revelation, one night in Cottage B, that the two spirits, Jimmi and Stefan, were the same. She sat on the floor, which became customary since there usually was no place else to sit on these investigations and she didn’t like the idea of standing for hours on end. She felt Stefan’s shape behind her and Jimmi’s in front of her. There were the 3 other members of the team with her, all facing each other. Everyone pretty much took a wall in the room to claim as their own and pushed their backs against it. The only wall left wasn’t much of a wall, but a narrow strip between where the fireplace ended and the doorway to the next room began. It was enough to get your back against, but barely. Stefan stood in the doorway and as she tried reaching out to Stefan and Jimmi, they both rushed at her simultaneously. She knew in that instant, regardless of what anyone might say, regardless of what “evidence” anyone could provide, that the two were the same.

  She saw Stefan’s life and it was a good one until he grew from a young boy into a man, which is usually the way of things. She saw him flickering around that ship, but she saw him on that ship as a young man as well, crossing the Atlantic. She saw how his happiness crumbled in horrible seas and ice storms, when the ship was hung up on rocks, as frozen men were swept overboard at night, while the survivors lashed themselves to the deck to prevent being claimed by the sea. She saw how his happiness was destroyed when the small boats carrying the first half of the survivors was thrown onto the shores of an uninhabited winter wilderness. Stefan watched that boat reach the shore from the deck of the sinking vessel. It came back for him, the remaining men, the Captain, and the Captain’s son. But the sea did want to claim them all and Neptune himself came up from his depths to swallow the small boat just as it was closing on the shore. The Captain and his small son were thrown up briefly, but taken back down. Stefan was spat out whole on shore. The other men on board never did resurface.

  Gwen saw a running stream of images, like a film in fast-forward: the cook making a fire, snow deeper than their knees, frostbitten fingers, lost toes, huddling in a makeshift shack, sucking on salt beef and lumps of snow, and a days-long trek through the forest to what looked like a Native American camp. The blend of images ended with wasted, worn, and utterly broken young man standing on a dock. His once smiling face was raw where it had been bitten by the cold. She saw a man, that cook he had helped as the boy Jimmi; the men both bid each other farewell. The cook went in one direction, Jimmi boarded another ship that went back across the ocean. When she next saw him signing for passage on yet another vessel, he signed his name as Stefan. He had grown a beard to cover the frostbite scars. He was 17.

  It was horrifying to her to see his ordeal, defined in a moment, but the visions didn’t end with his new name. She saw him in his 30s at war. He wore a uniform that reminded her vaguely of the uniforms she saw in an episode of Sharpe’s Rifles, except Stefan was on a ship loading the massive guns, instead of running around the field fighting Napoleon. She saw Stefan in another small boat with his Lieutenant, saw Stefan’s face slashed and his ear almost severed from his head, saw his fellow cut down beside him, saw him whipped while in some prison which didn’t seem much like a prison because it was a barn and a cow chewed it’s cud while the skin was whipped from Stefan’s back. Gwen knew time passed in the vision because she saw how it ravaged him. Ultimately, she saw him forced to take a job on a steamer after he broke his arm falling from the rigging the year before. He was an old man by then and he was lucky all that fall did was break his arm. It was a clean break, and again he was lucky that it healed at all. Even luckier that he was able to use the arm after. When he could no longer raise the sail, he was discarded. No one wanted a broken sailor with a mean temper. Against his better judgment, he took that job, that last job, on a steamer bound for New York Harbor. It was a monstrous vessel and like Jonah’s Wale, it wanted men to fill its belly. Despite his weakened arm, he was still of use in that kind of crew and they were only too happy to sign him on. He was only too happy to leave the ship behind, with its soot and furnaces, a hellish inferno that haunted his dreams ever after. She even saw his application to Snug Harbor denied because, having worked a steam ship, albeit briefly, he wasn’t considered a true sailor— someone who raises a sail. To the waspish little man taking Stefan’s application, it didn’t matter that Stefan had been a proper sailor all his life, had fought in the Danish Navy even serving on the much lauded Najaden. Because of Stefan’s arm, he could no longer raise a sail. He tried another attempt some weeks later to gain residence at Snug Harbor, but was denied yet again, and he all but gave up. He was so very tired and completely spent. Several months later, after using his last coppers for bed and board in a hovel in Mulberry Bend across the harbor in the city, Stefan heard from a derisive old snug frequenting the same saloon that Snug Harbor been forced to open its doors to seamen regardless of whether their ships were steam or sail. Stefan was shamed he had worked on a steamer at all, but he came back to Snug Harbor to try his luck for a third time. It was either that or die in a rum bottle in Five Points.

  Gwen saw why Stefan was so angry and so bitter. With a stranger’s eyes, Gwen saw Stefan’s life as something harsh, but she also saw that he was blessed with an uncommon luck. To survive shipwreck, starvation in a winter wasteland, war, imprisonment, countless injuries and near drownings, all to finally find himself at a place like Sailor’s Snug Harbor, to be rejected but then taken into the fold to live out his remaining days in the most comfort he had experienced? Stefan was too bitter to see it as luck. Gwen wished she could make him see the luck in his life, perhaps in the seeing, he would find some ease, but she didn’t know how. She didn’t know how any of this worked and she wasn’t convinced she wanted to know.

  Before Gwen met Stefan, she had never thought of herself as one of those I-see-dead-people people. She had had dreams for a time, prophetic premonitions that made no sense whatsoever, but those, for the most part had stopped when she had turned thirty. When she was little, she used to think that a vampire lived in the mulberry tree outside her house and that he would follow her when she and her brothers would walk the few blocks down Bedell Street to P.S. 3. Gwen had watched a lot of horror movies with her mom; PBS’s Friday nights were Monster Theater, and no one thought much of her tree-dwelling imaginary vampire that flickered around her in the daytime. It must’ve been something she saw on T.V. But, as she got older, especially after her family moved from Pleasant Plains to the aptly named Tottenville, the “vampire” for a very brief time disappeared. She still watched the same monster movie movie marathons, but the vampire disappeared only to be replaced by a series of other specters: a curly haired man
who would pace up and down the basement stairs carrying an axe, a man in blue coveralls that stood inside the gazebo down the block—his legs engulfed by the foundation of the gazebo itself, an old lady who would sit on the porch of the house around the corner but would sit on a seat that was no longer there—and sit with her entire left side through the side of the porch, almost like she was sitting on what used to be a stoop but was now an enclosed porch. Seeing these things seemed, when she was younger, to be limited to her neighborhood, to the area around her house specifically.

  Every now and again in her new bedroom, in their new house in the old town of the dead, the vampire would reappear floating just outside her window. When she was little, she barely saw his face, but now he would float there and stare at her for hours, his dark green eyes watching her like a tiger watches its dinner, his white-blonde hair floating about his head like seaweed. As she got older he looked less vampire-like and more menacing. Sometimes, he would come into her room, slipping past the window, through the cracks and chinks in the glass. When he came through the cracks, passing around her locked bedroom door, looking flat and white like Johnny Paper, she took a leaf from Van Helsing’s book and ran to the kitchen for some garlic. Since her mother was never a chef, Gwen knew the kitchen downstairs would be devoid of live, raw garlic so she had to make do with bottle of clumpy garlic powder that she shook in a line across the threshold of her bedroom door and across the windowsills.

  It kept the vampire away for about a week.

  Soon enough, when she least expected it— walking down Amboy to the intermediate school, taking the train to the high school, she thought she caught strange glimmers of something distinctly other superimposed in her everyday: the glimmer of eyes from curbside puddles, faces peering out of the dulled metal of the subway doors, shadows following her up the road from the train station to her house, and— most pernicious of all- grimacing, devouring smiles flashing at her from random people she passed in the crowd. The smiles weren’t the worst. It was when their eyes rolled over black, like a shark... or a demon. These things blessedly did not happen every day, but they did happen any time, any place, and Gwen was so not having it. But, she didn’t know how to stop it from happening either. She learned long ago to simply keep quiet about what she saw. It was fine for the horror movies, but not fine for regular life. When she was about twelve, about six months after her family had moved and she was home sick from school, she had seen a documentary about a girl who claimed to see ghosts but, according to her mother and her church, she was actually possessed by the devil. The rest of the program consisted of a priest of some kind screaming over the girl with a book of prayer. The girl’s body became twisted, full of welts, scratches, boils, and scars. Just before a fit was about to begin, her eyes would roll over black and over time, her teeth began to fall out and her eyes just stayed black. Gwen never watched the end of the program because her brother came home and slapped a copy of Robocop into the VCR without a word to Gwen. Since Gwen had been hiding her face under her blanket and peering over the edge to watch the program, he figured she wasn’t really watching it after all. Gwen never did find out what happened.

  Of all the horror movies Gwen saw, she could never watch any movies about demonic anything and she did not have the courage to watch The Exorcist until she was well into her thirties, well after she had moved in with her fiancé, Scotty. That documentary scared her so horribly that she never again spoke to her parents about the vampire floating by her window or the people who weren’t there.

  In the last few months, Scotty began working at Snug Harbor doing a security gig, Gwen’s abilities, for lack of a better term, changed radically from a once-every-so-often thing, to something more persistent. Being out of work, she often spent time using the computers and pathetic excuse for job-assistance at Work Force One down the block from the Saint George ferry terminal and train station, which was itself a very short bus ride to Snug Harbor. From there, she and Scotty would drive home together. Admittedly, she could have taken the train home that first time, but she wanted to see where he worked. Being a native Staten Islander, Gwen was embarrassed to admit but she had never visited Snug Harbor. Well almost never. There was that one school trip... and all she remembered was making a pretty pink and gold puppet out of a brown paper lunch bag and old brass buttons, getting sick on the bus ride home, and having her hideous first grade teacher Miss White force Gwen to use that pink and gold puppet as a barf bag. She wanted to replace that ordeal with something else, something pleasant. And Scotty said there were gardens. She loved the idea of getting lost in those gardens.

  So, her once a week trips became almost once every other day. There were times when she couldn’t go, when she had to clean the bathroom, keep up with the cooking, or do the laundry, or times when she had the rarest of rare: a job interview. Those times away were sheer agony. The more she spent wandering the grounds at Snug, the more she wanted to wander the grounds and do not much else. She loved walking down the alleyways in-between the grandiose Neo-Classical, Greek-Revival buildings, trying to recall all the terms from her art and architecture class— cornice, portico, pediment, Ionic, cupola. She spent hours looking into the myriad windows, running her fingers over the bark of the myriad trees, and meandering down the myriad garden paths.

  There were times when Gwen would purposefully stay at the computers until the snide and self-righteous Work Force One receptionists would tell her it was closing time and didn’t she need to be somewhere else? That way she could pop on the S40 and get to Snug in time to watch the sun set. She would lose herself somewhere on the grounds until Scotty got off work at 10. Then, his hours changed to the graveyard shift and there were no more sly excuses to go to Snug Harbor. Gwen definitely felt a kind of withdrawal. While she walked those grounds, none of the bizarre seeing faces or black eye shit happened. Instead, she sensed things, stories mostly. When she touched the trees, walked the gardens, looked in the windows, it was like there were people over her shoulder, just beyond her line of sight, telling her a story about things that happened under those trees, in those windows, down those garden paths. Those private stories were hers and no one else’s. They were precious to her and she did not want to give them up.

  At first, she didn’t see any of people, though. She just sensed them and heard their stories in her head. She figured maybe she was just being creative, and that at some point she should write this stuff down. But she never did... and then when Scotty began working late nights, when she stopped visiting Snug for a few weeks, she began having dreams. Nothing truly bizarre, but snap shots from other people’s lives. She lingered in this in-between state, until her brother and his wife gave Gwen an early birthday present, a ticket to a Pre-Halloween Paranormal Tour at Snug Harbor. It was a strange gift, but Gwen’s brother Rich thought it would be up her alley: a bunch of ghost-hunting teams from around the Tri-State area would congregate at Snug Harbor, giving tours of so-called paranormal hot-spots, and even give tour goers a chance at investigating. Scotty was working a double shift, but he popped into the tour every so often to make rude noises at the back of the crowd.

  During that tour, Gwen first met Stefan and thought he was just some wackadoodle who came in garb. It was the weekend before Halloween so she thought he was dressing like the Snug Harbor Governor or something. He was tall and reminded her a bit of Abraham Lincoln. She barely came past the guy’s navel. He wore a form fitting, black wool suit with a waistcoat, hard-worn leather shoes that were seriously vintage, like the rest of his attire, and, the pièce-de-résistance, a stove-pipe hat. His face was completely unlike Lincoln’s; it was square, with heavy brows, thin angular nose and thick, curling, dark gray hair. He had one of those creepy beards with no mustache that Gwen hated, and he had a large sickle shaped scar that extended from just above his right temple, up in the hairline, down the right side of his face. The scar snaked toward his right ear, where it ended severely with a missing earlobe. He was strangely soft-spoken and lingered at th
e back of the tour group. He had an unusual accent that Gwen could not place at first. He told her he was from Copenhagen and she was embarrassed to think, initially, that he was from South Africa; there was a hardness to his consonants that reminded her of Afrikaner.

  “Is that near Johannesburg?” She had asked. The tour group was standing on the dark, overgrown path near Snug Harbor’s mortuary. Stefan’s smile evaporated, he cocked his head to the side like a confused dog, and whispered something in what sounded like German to her, but wasn’t. It sounded like “clearer laden.”

  “Excuse me?” Gwen turned toward the man in the stove-pipe hat as the tour guide began explaining how the tunnel system beneath Snug connected all the buildings, making it easier to transport the dead from the infirmary, various hospital wards, and tuberculosis unit to the mortuary without anyone seeing anything. Gwen had more than a vague sense she was being insulted.

  “I say you a stupid American woman. Copenhagen is the capitol of Denmark, yes?” He shook his head and tensed one hand alarmingly into a fist. She thought he was going to strike her for a moment. His face spasmed and then relaxed. He smiled again. “Daft or no, I have no choice but to speak to you. No one else will hear me.”