He laid his palms on the casket lid. “She’s in here, Billy, I promise you.”
“Show me,” Billy said. My uncle lifted the lid.
The woman inside looked like Billy’s grandmother. Same skin colour as her grandson—only paler now, as was natural—same elegant forehead and nose. Her head was propped on a satin pillow, arms crossed over her chest. Her eyes were closed and her face serene. I remember hoping all faces settled into such expressions once the life had flowed out of them.
Billy touched his grandma’s cheek as if to make sure she was really there. He pulled back with a slight sigh, then spoke a few words I couldn’t understand.
“We can close it now,” he said.
My uncle led us back out through the showroom. Our eyes had adjusted and we moved sure-footedly amongst the coffins—until I spotted something unexpected and stifled a scream.
A figure stood in the corner, so still that at first I’d mistaken the shape for another casket. I came to a dead stop facing it. The vein in my throat ticked a nervous rhythm as a face swam out of the murk. The undertaker, Stanley Rowe. He stood watching us without anger, unmoving, silent as a sentinel.
“Hustle up,” my uncle said, spiriting me out of the room.
I glanced over my shoulder to warn Uncle C about Mr. Rowe…and saw something. It was one of those moments when the world doesn’t make sense, but later, when you see events in their proper light, understanding sinks in.
My uncle was looking straight at Mr. Rowe. Their eyes met across the dark air and my uncle…he nodded. The slightest tip of his chin.
Outside, the night air chilled the sweat between my shoulder blades. We moved from the shadow of the funeral home, through the trees into the graveyard. The moon glossed each blade of grass in a wrap of silver. We walked, letting the adrenalin seep out of our pores, until we came upon a freshly dug gravesite.
My uncle sat with his legs dangling into the open grave. He gestured for us to do the same. We each claimed one side of the rectangular hole. The headstone sat in the final side, with no name yet on it. The stonemason would come by to engrave it tomorrow.
“This is where she’s going,” Billy said with sorrowful certainty.
The rumble of the falls carried up from the Niagara River basin, rolling along the streets and barren parkland.
“Will she be able to hear the river she missed, down there under the ground?” Billy asked my uncle. “How will she see the trees—her trees from back home?”
“What I hope you understand, Billy, is that the only thing going into this hole is your grandmother’s body. And our bodies themselves?” My uncle tweezed the skin of his arm and let go. “Just vessels to bear us along. The guiding part of her, the part you loved and that loved you…it’s already gone. It’s part of the atmosphere now, like the steam rising off a bath. So yes, she can see those trees. She can see the monkeys in the Brazilian rainforest or the rocks on the moon if she wants.”
“Or the river that flows into Slave Lake,” Billy said.
“Of course, yes. All that’s left now is the ceremony. Doesn’t really matter if she’s in a coffin or a canoe or a fire. The ceremony is about respect for the dead and a sense of ending for the living. Every story needs its conclusion, yes?”
“Thank you,” Billy said.
Uncle C looked relieved. “You’re most welcome.”
“Thank you for coming,” Billy said to me.
“Oh.” Surprised, I grinned. “Yeah, sure. I liked it.”
“Sorry about grabbing your arm.”
I waved it off. “I mean, it was creepy.”
“I can’t fathom why,” my uncle said, genuinely mystified. “Death and life are just different sides of the same natural state.”
Billy said, “Uh, no, it was really creepy.”
He and I laughed—the first time we’d done that together.
Uncle C pulled a shoebox out of his satchel and set it on his lap. The box was tied in butcher’s twine knotted into a bow. “More than a century ago, there lived a man named Charles Fort. His name will be unfamiliar to you. His ideas are not taught in schools. He died a penniless pariah, as has many a great man. Fort believed in a place up there.” My uncle crooked a finger skyward. “Not heaven. Closer than the planets, even closer than the moon, but un-glimpsed. He called this place the Super-Sargasso Sea. The Sea of Lost Things.”
My uncle’s fingers fussed with the bow, but he did not untie the box, not yet.
“Fort recorded his findings in The Book of the Damned. In his eyes, that was us. Humans were the damned for failing to see what was right in front of us. He hypothesized that up there, ten miles above, you will encounter a gelatinous membrane—how else would the stars twinkle, if not for their light quivering through gelatin?” He chuckled. “Well, this was before the space race. Fort believed the Lost Sea hovered beyond that layer, that there were invisible worlds in the sky. Some took the shape of spokes or wheels, others were giant sentient beings. Fort reported seeing a vast dark thing like a crow of unholy dimensions poised over the moon.”
Billy sat with his hands braced on his knees, leaning towards my uncle’s hypnotic voice—I worried that if he leaned any further, he’d topple into the grave.
“Fort theorized that things from our world were drawn into this Lost Sea—sucked up, as if with a giant vacuum—only to fall back to earth, horridly altered. Falls of fish, dead and stiff. When those fish were fried in a pan, they turned into hissing blood. Black snowflakes, too, which Fort claimed to be the burn-off of alien factories forever churning between the stars. Rains the colour of India ink, of caterpillars, of ants the size of wasps and of spiders’ webs. Fort recounts an occurrence in northern Quebec where an inland lake was found covered in clumps of hair like floating toupées.”
“Why would aliens drop hair on us?” I said.
“That, Fort did not care to elaborate on.” My uncle patted the box. “Now, I found this downstairs the other day during my hunt for those pesky tea bags.”
He untied the twine and lifted the lid. Billy and I stared into the box, its contents arrayed under the moonlight.
“They’re called fairy crosses.”
Inside the shoebox sat a pair of crude crucifixes. Instead of wood or stone, they were made out of white crystal, like the sparkling formations inside a geode.
“According to Fort, a tiny race the size of fairies descended from the Lost Sea. Their spacecraft were never discovered, but why would they be? No bigger than a can of corn, I’m sure. When these explorers died, their kin buried them in matchbox coffins. Over time their bodies atomized, flowed up through the ground like spring buds, and emerged as these.”
“Those are aliens’ bodies?” said Billy, wonderstruck.
“Only what’s left. No life, only the residual beauty. Put your hands out.”
Uncle C set one cross in each of our hands.
“I thought we could leave them here. They’ve been cooped up inside this box for too long. What do you say, Billy?”
After a brief deliberation, Billy positioned his cross in front of the gravestone. He looked at me encouragingly, so I did the same.
“Ah,” said Uncle C, “this is a suitable spot indeed.”
He settled the lid on the box and tucked it back into the satchel.
“We could have more fun like this, fellas. There are places I know, places in our city, where the barriers between our world and the spirit realm are full of holes. Things go slip-sliding through all the time.”
“Scary things?” I said.
“Nothing we can’t handle, Jake. And you’d have a knowledgeable guide. You know I’d never put you in danger, don’t you?”
I caught an unfamiliar thread of desperation in Uncle C’s voice, as if he wanted me to nod, which is what I did.
“So, what do you boys say—make it a weekly thing. The Saturday Night Ghost Club.”
Looking back, I am struck by how precious little it takes to convince an unwilling outsider and th
e new kid in town to agree to any plan, even one that involved following a gangly middle-aged man into haunted territories.
“Ho-ho, then we have a pact.”
My uncle spanked his hands, then glanced at his watch. “We ought to toddle off…and let’s keep what happened tonight between us, hmm?”
v.
I returned home to find my father drinking a beer at the kitchen table. He was still dressed in his work clothes with his tie looped around his neck like a garrotte. He’d been coming home late most of that spring. The GM plant was cutting back. Everyone was crabbing about the Japanese, but my father conceded they made better cars. For the first time ever, Dad was issuing foreclosure papers. Houses, small businesses. He’d been forced to lower the boom on his own friends and neighbours.
“Where you been?”
“Uncle C’s shop.”
“Big news come in over the Bat Phone? Leprechauns massing forces under the falls, planning a sneak attack to recover their stolen gold?”
“Come on, Dad.”
He gave an arch nod at the clock. “Your uncle keeping extra-late hours?”
Lying to my father was risky—he had a bloodhound’s way of sniffing out deceptions—but Uncle C had sworn me to secrecy. I opted for diversionary tactics.
“There was this new kid, Billy.”
Dad’s eyebrow tilted up. “A buddy?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“It’s hard to meet new people, Jake, and I know your”—my father puffed his cheeks up and blew out between pursed lips—“interests aren’t always the same as other boys’. Which is absolutely fine. But if this Billy shares some interests, could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
I blew at a hair that had fallen over my eye and dropped my voice in mimicry. “Could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
“Ah, screw it. I stole that line from somewhere.”
I sat at the table. My father gripped my wrist and turned my fingers up to the light. Too late, I noticed the rime of grave-dirt under my fingernails.
“I know your uncle doesn’t keep the world’s cleanest shop, but is it that dirty?” Dad got up and went to the fridge. “Want a soda?”
I ran a self-conscious hand over the bulge of my stomach. “Mom doesn’t like me drinking pop.”
“You’ll burn it off in this heat.” My father dug a grape soda out of the icebox, and another beer for himself. He set my can on the table and popped the tab with one squared-off finger. Then he braced his bottle’s cap against the table’s edge and slapped his free hand down on his wrist to pop the cap off. He lifted the bottle to his lips, corralled the foam, and sat with his legs stretched out in a V, toes up, one arm slung over the seatback. A lot of grown men in my hometown sat like that.
“Light beer. All your mom lets me drink anymore. Only two a night, too.” He stewed on this for a moment before brightening. “It’s best for all concerned.”
He regarded me evenly. His oft-broken nose hooked to the left. I suppose he found it weird that he’d ended up with a son like me: spacey and bookish, scared of every little thing. I wondered what kind of boy he’d expected.
“Your uncle…”
“Yeah?”
“Yes, Jake. Yeah is for truckers and toll-booth workers. Which are honourable ways to earn a living, but.”
I sipped my soda. “Yes?”
“Your uncle Cal is a good man, and he’s been through a lot. Your mom and me think it’s great, you spending time with him. But…when I was a kid I used to wish Peter Pan would show up at my window. He’d spirit me away to the land of make-believe where I could play all day and never grow up.”
He rubbed his palm over his squished nose. I sensed he was struggling with what to say, or the right way to say it. “That’s a great thing to believe as a boy. Enjoy it now, Jake, my fine feathered friend, because there’s nothing quite so odd as seeing Peter Pan all grown up.”
“Okay, Dad,” I said dutifully, because that’s what kids said when adults got weird.
He drew me into a rough hug. Stubble grated my cheek. He smelled of Old Spice and faintly, pleasantly, of malt.
“Up to bed, you strange and beautiful organism.”
I left him staring out the kitchen window, waiting for Peter Pan to arrive.
3.
THE SCREAMING TUNNEL
Neurosurgeons constantly grapple with the ways in which the brain can turn feral and lash out at its owner. Which is to say, we must become acquainted with heartbreak.
The girl was eight years old when her file landed on my desk. Earlier that year, her parents noticed that she would drift off in the middle of some task, even those she showed great fondness for such as painting. Her teachers remarked that she had developed the habit of settling her head on her desk and falling fast asleep. In every other respect, she was an active girl. Her energy was good when awake. She simply slept too much.
A week before the operation, the girl’s mother noticed her left eye protruding from its socket, as if something was pushing it out. An MRI revealed a mass lodged near her pineal gland. A malignant rhabdoid tumour, an aggressive form of cancer manifesting in children.
She was booked into surgery immediately. My sucker wand transited the lobes of her brain, moving through sticky webs of glia—brain glue, as it is known in our racket—to arrive at the tumour, which lay anchored to her ocular nerve. The delicate procedure was like vacuuming caramelized sugar off a strand of cooked spaghetti. The slightest misstep would snap the nerve and rob the girl of sight in that eye. I removed as much as felt safe before retreating.
The girl and her parents were given a room at the Ronald McDonald House and became fixtures in the hospital halls. Soon, it became clear that the tumour was winning. It was reprogramming the girl’s cells. This is why cancer is so aggressive in children: their bodies are growing, and the disease marshals those growth factors for its own ill designs.
The tumour crept out of the girl’s ocular vault to infest her brain like the dark legs of a spider protruding from its hidey-hole, severing connections and rewriting memory encodings. Unable to stay awake, the girl took up new residence in a dream-realm. When lucid, she would talk about it—a world she named Jupita. The light there held an unearthly brightness, and rivers flowed the colour of gold. She spoke of glittering cities on the plains where castles towered behind alabaster walls. The girl wandered Jupita’s landscape with two companions: a robot, Gunther, and her best friend, a druid named Camphor. They had many thrilling adventures.
The girl slept twenty-three hours a day. She thinned drastically and had to be fed by IV. I asked the unit social worker to keep close watch over her parents. Hard enough to see your child suffer, harder still to have her locked away in the chambers of her own corroding mind. As a surgeon, ostensibly impartial, I didn’t know how I felt. I understood their sorrow but also sensed the girl was happy right where she was, in that world of her own summoning.
One afternoon near the end, she awoke and asked for her paint kit. Her mother arranged oils and paper on the bed, but by then the girl didn’t recognize her parents. Her mother could have been a nurse, the janitor or any other helpful stranger. Over the next half-hour, she completed two paintings. When they were finished, she slept again. I saw those paintings the next day.
The first was of the robot, Gunther. The second depicted the druid, Camphor. Her constant companions and protectors. Anyone could have spotted the resemblance.
The robot was the spitting image of her father. Camphor bore the face of her mother.
i.
A week after his grandmother’s funeral, Billy Yellowbird showed up at the Occultorium with his sister, Dove. She was the girl who had chucked a rock at Percy Elkins.
Until then, I’d taken little notice of the differences between boys and girls. Both were part of that big fleshy blob called people, or humanity, to use the ten-cent word I’d heard in social studies class. I could say that girls usually had longer hair and smelled ni
cer than boys (some girls at school had recently discovered Lou Lou perfume, which gave them the scent of vanilla wafers) but until Dove I’d never felt the giddy fizz of electricity that burst from my chest to form a blue-white nimbus in the air of my uncle’s shop—a phenomenon I prayed that I alone could see.
Dove eyed the raven above the cash register. “Morbid much?”
Billy hung his head. “Aww, Dove…”
She had walked in with the grand strut of a long-legged shore bird. Like Billy, her hair was dark: it shone like a curved mirror in the sunlight falling through the window. Now she strode to the counter, stuck her hand out at my uncle and said, “Hello, hello, hello. My name’s Dove, Dove Yellowbird. And that’s my brother, Billy.”
“They know me,” said Billy. “I brought you here, remember?”
“How am I supposed to know who knows you?” To my uncle: “I have to introduce him to everyone. He needs an official greeter half the time.”
My uncle gripped Dove’s hand in both of his and pumped vigorously. “Dove, an immense pleasure. My name’s Calvin. This is my nephew Jake.”
When Dove turned to me, my heart made a funny hop behind my rib cage.
“Hey you,” she said, either not recognizing me or choosing not to bring up our shared history. “I’ve heard about you. Billy says you’re a good egg.”
“Awww,” Billy moaned.
My uncle laughed. “Good egg. That is an apt descriptor.”
A coin of light danced in each of Dove’s eyes. They made me think of sparklers sputtering at the bottom of dark pools.
“Dove Yellowbird,” my uncle mused. “A name with two birds.”
“Yeah, except doves are symbols of peace and I’m not so peaceful.”
Dove was fourteen, two years older than Billy and me, but she seemed a decade older. A tin of Cherry Skol was parked in the front pocket of her jean jacket, a little hockey puck pressed to the denim.
“Cool store, Calvin. Where did you get this stuff?”
“It comes from all over, Dove. This charm amulet here?” He rapped his knuckles on the display glass. “From Egypt. And this monkey’s paw? Morocco. This All-Seeing Eye? Romania.”
The Saturday Night Ghost Club: A Novel Page 5