That Halloween, my uncle and I said our goodbyes to Billy, and he set off home. We moved west, just the two of us, walking without speaking, only the whisper of our shoes and the brush of Uncle C’s microphone cord on the sidewalk. He looked good, though that may have been the bronzer. Still, I sensed he was happy—my uncle had no emotional firewall, and you could read his face as easily as the hands on a clock.
ii.
Whenever I’m in town, I stop by the Occultorium, which still sits on the corner of Walnut and Ellen, spitting distance from Clifton Hill. You’re welcome to pop in yourself, stock up on shrunken heads and Haitian curse amulets. If so, you might spy the Bat Phone through the beaded curtain at the back. It doesn’t ring these days. Truth seeking is a young man’s game, my uncle said the day he unplugged it. The phone remains in its place of privilege, though, and I like to imagine that my uncle’s eyes drift to it from time to time, half-expecting it to ring—that would be one call he’d have to answer. I often wonder what became of Uncle C’s network of cranks and conspiracy theorists. Dark Heshie, the Venomed Voice, the Watcher. People the world had broken in some ineffable way, the same way my uncle had been broken, the same way we all end up a bit broken—a collection of small hurts, hairline cracks in the foundation—who were only looking for something to give their lives meaning, hope, or at least help deal with the confusion. Some of us find it in faith, some in science and some in the lightless places between those pole stars.
Uncle C never married again. Never had a child. Which was tragic, because he would have made a great father. He did adopt a black Lab, Skeptic, who suits his personality. He and Skeptic come over for Sunday dinners at my folks’ house, where the conversation will sometimes ping on a topic best left buried and a pall settles over the table…but never for long. They’re all good at directing their boat into cheerier waters, whether consciously or not.
“I can’t believe our Jake grew up to be a doctor,” Calvin might say. “A healer of men!”
Sometimes I fall into thinking about my uncle in the context of fate, fairness, the transforming forces that haunt our lives. I don’t know why that awfulness befell his family. All I can say is that evil exists in this world, and it has to touch somebody. Plus, evil is chicken-gutted. It finds the weakest spots between the beams. The uncle I’ve known all my life is not the same man he was before I came along. Grief and loss crushed him into a shape unrecognizable to his prior self.
The other thing I know is that my uncle will never understand his own strength. It was this strength he must have called upon during those nights he spent in the basement of the Occultorium with the beat of the falls pulsing against the fieldstone walls like a heartbeat; isolated under the light of a bare bulb with the spirit phone, keying the name of a woman he’d never known on the Speak & Spell.
L-Y-D-I-A
I imagine the machine issuing its deep-space crackle as he sent those five letters into the ether like a note in a bottle, over the curvature of the earth, her name floating between worlds known and worlds only guessed at, up to the Super-Sargasso—that vast dark thing poised like a crow over the moon—my uncle’s breath locked behind his ribs as he waited, wondering why this meant so much to him. Did a voice drift through the silver horn one of those nights, soft as a lover’s breath on the nape of his neck?
He must have needed strength on those other nights when he sat bolt upright in bed with the remnant of a dream draining from his brainpan: the vision of a woman and the house they shared atop a hill. His happiness must have curdled into a feeling of immense loss at the realization it was only a dream, that the life behind his eyelids wasn’t his own and never had been….Perhaps he tried to fasten the dream in his mind, enjoy it a heartbeat longer, but something was stealthily pulling it away from him—and on the next beat it was gone.
On that long-ago Halloween night, I took my uncle’s hand: a boy-vampire and a game-show host walking hand in hand through the long dark of Cataract City. Years later, we would walk these same streets with Skeptic and my son Nicholas, who was dressed as a ghost in a plain bedsheet with eye-holes cut in it. My son was between us, holding our hands. And Uncle C, whom by then I called Cal, knelt beside his great-nephew and peered into the boy’s eyes through those holes.
“Nicholas, did I ever tell you that there are friendly ghosts? Right here in our fair city, yes! They live in the space between waking and dream, and if we know where to look, we can spot them. Just before you fall asleep, you’ll see a shimmering.”
Skeptic issued a soft bark, as if in agreement. Nicholas looked at me, his eyes expressing curiosity but no fear, and I offered a wry smile to let him know that hey, maybe there are ghosts, but he shouldn’t swallow everything his great-uncle says.
“Do not be alarmed, my boy, and don’t ever be afraid. These ghosts mean no harm. They are spirits who have lost their way. They wander the great unknown in search of peace, and wish to guide us to safety whenever we find ourselves in danger. But you have to believe. Only then will they reveal themselves to you.”
At this, Calvin kissed my son on the nose, his lips pressed to the sheet.
“And that,” he said, “is why I’ll always believe in ghosts.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First, thanks to my mother and father.
Let’s talk about Mom and Dad a bit.
I tend to be a bit of a magpie, collecting bits and pieces of ephemera, life stories and such, to cobble together my nest of a novel. I take my own experiences and those of others and spin them through a fictional filter, as do many writers. So, are Cecelia and Sam Baker in this novel my Mom and Dad? No, not exactly. But are they kind of alike? Sure they are.
My mother and father didn’t meet outside the Bonny in Niagara Falls. They met at the Speakeasy, a bar that used to sit on the corner of Bathurst and Bloor in Toronto. As my mother says, she first saw my father under a table there. As my father says, he first saw my mother dancing on top of that same table. Their eyes met, sparks flew, etcetera.
Dad was starting his career as a banker. Mom was finishing nursing school. They began to date. But Dad preferred more sedate activities than Mom. Going to movies, bars. Mom loved dancing, craved action. They didn’t jibe. Mom dumped Dad: Sorry, Donald, but this just isn’t working.
Dad pined for Mom like only a lovelorn young man can. And then—and this always gets me—he went out and signed up for dancing lessons from a Greek lady on the Danforth. Mastered the rhumba, the foxtrot, whatever the hot dance of the day was…the Bop? We Davidsons are notoriously poor dancers. Our hips are fused to our spines, preventing any kind of graceful movement. But damned if Dad didn’t try. Then he bought a new (used) car, a ’67 Pontiac, and went a-courting. Wonder of wonders, Mom took him back. They went dancing. Dad was pretty bad, but Mom appreciated the attempt. They got married, and a few years later I came along.
So, thanks Mom and Dad. Thanks, Dad, for getting those dance lessons. Thanks, Mom, for forcing Dad out of his safe zone. Thanks to you both, eternally, for all the support and love you’ve given me through the years. As I write somewhere in this book, “Kids never quite love their parents as much as their parents love them.” It’s almost impossible to do so, I think. I love my son more than he’s capable of loving me. But I think that if you’re a good, constant, ever-caring parent, in time that wheel does come around.
Thanks as always to my wife, Colleen, and our son, Nicholas. Always, always.
This book started out as a PhD thesis. I’d like to thank my advisor, Dr. Richard House, and Dr. Luke Kennard, Dr. Ruth Gilligan, Dr. Dan Vyleta and Dr. Paul McDonald for their thoughtful edits and wisdom in the developing stages of this novel during my stint at the University of Birmingham.
Thanks to my bud Sam Pane, whose audio documentary on the Screaming Tunnels brought me back to that time in my life when such places enthralled and terrified me in equal measure.
Thanks to Stephen King, John Bellairs, Wilson Rawls, Judy Blume, and all the writers I was reading at t
he age Jake is in this novel. I owe each of them a huge debt of influence.
Thanks as always to my agent, Kirby Kim, who puts up with all my writerly nonsense and hand-wringing with good cheer and grace. Appreciate it, mon frere.
Finally, huge thanks to my editor, Lynn Henry. I continually foist an ungainly mess of a manuscript on you, and somehow you manage to spin gold out of it. How do you do it? You are a meddler in the dark arts, I suspect. Calvin probably has your name in one of his spiral-bound notebooks. Yet, at the peril of your everlasting soul, you continue to make my work so much better. I am eternally grateful.
CRAIG DAVIDSON was born in Toronto and grew up in St. Catharines, Ontario. He has published four previous books of literary fiction, including Rust and Bone, which was made into a Golden Globe-nominated film; and Cataract City, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Trillium Book Prize, and was a national bestseller. His memoir, Precious Cargo: My Year Driving the Kids on School Bus 3077, also a bestseller, was shortlisted for Canada Reads. Craig Davidson has published several popular horror novels under the name Nick Cutter. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife and son.
The Saturday Night Ghost Club: A Novel Page 17