by Tim McGregor
His face fell flat as he looked at her, as if he’d been caught out in a lie. “What are you talking about?”
“I think you’re in danger.”
“From what?”
Don’t do it. He’ll think your crazy and walk away as fast he can.
“A ghost,” she said.
The air went flat. The trembling in the detective’s hand stopped.
“I can see them. One of them attached itself to you. It’s in your house. That’s why you can’t sleep. It’s hurting you.”
She waited for a response. Anything at all but Mockler was stone. She went on. “That’s why I was at your house the other day. I tried to get rid of it. It didn’t work. I’m sorry.”
If anything, the silence became louder.
When he finally spoke, he sounded spent and defeated. “Jesus, Billie. You’re as crazy as he is.”
“I know how it sounds. How insane it is. But you have to believe me. This thing wants to hurt you.”
Mockler got to his feet with a groan, knees popping, and he went down the stairs. “See ya around, Billie.”
“Mockler, please. Don’t walk away.”
He stopped and looked back at her. “Hey. If you ever need anything, rip up my card.”
Billie propped her elbows atop her knees and let her head drop, listening to his footfalls fade away down the block.
33
A LIGHT DRIZZLE began to fall as Billie walked home. It steamed as it hit the sidewalk and she lifted her face to it, letting the rain rinse the few tears that had welled up.
You stupid girl, she mumbled. Drained from exhaustion, it took a force of will to simply plant one foot before the other and plod home. She felt brittle and hollowed out and hated herself for feeling any of it. It felt like she had been dumped and that was just plain ridiculous. What was he to her? Nothing. She barely knew him. He was engaged. He was a cop. There was no common ground. He had a crooked nose—
The crazy loop inside her head was already spinning out of control. She picked up the pace, hoping to outrun the cyclical torment she was prey to. Just get home, sort it out then.
The dead had other plans.
They came out of the rain, from the alleys and up out of manholes and crawling down fire escapes. Like sharks circling a wounded fish, they were drawn to her. Fragile and spent, Billie had let her guard down and the dead picked up the scent and came shambling forward. Dead men with twisted limbs or gaping holes in their heads, dead women with knives still stuck in their backs or blood dribbling from their wrists. Worst of all were the children, watching her with big, hungry eyes, these street urchins that had been cruelly used up and thrown away like trash into the rain gutter.
The spookshow in all its horrid glory, came out to greet her. All eager for their pound of flesh.
They trailed behind her and shambled alongside. Some reached out to touch her and her flesh prickled at their clammy hands. Others blocked her path, forcing her to go around or detour in the wrong direction. She told them to go away, to leave her alone, but they wouldn’t listen. Their anger and their bitterness came at her like stones thrown at a rabid dog.
Look at what they did to me
I didn’t deserve this
Someone has to pay
Pelted by laments and regrets and resentments, Billie turned numb. She wanted nothing to do with these lost souls. They had their chance and their misery held no claim on her. Their cloying neediness was suffocating.
She stopped in her tracks and the dead closed in around her like a mob. Their cold hands touched her flesh and pulled her hair and when one leaned in for a kiss, she could take no more.
Her pent up anger unleashed as she screamed at them to leave her alone. To go away. To stop touching her.
The first to drop away were the broken little children. Others backed away, some ran. The greediest and the neediest of the lost souls pressed in until Billie let loose in a banshee wail.
“You can all go to Hell!” she shrieked at them.
Some fell, others shuffled away. One of the dead, a woman in petticoats, flared hot and became corporeal as she ran into the street. Her face flashed visible in the headlights of the oncoming car and it swerved to miss her, the tires screeching as the brakes locked. A dull heavy thud echoed when it hit the lamppost, the front end crumpling in on itself.
The driver stumbled out, shaking his head and looking around for the ghastly woman who had ran into traffic. The only person on the entire street was Billie and she walked away quickly, leaving the driver confounded as he took in the damage to his grill.
The apartment felt wrong when she got back. Barren and too stuffy from the humidity. Her friends had walked away and now Mockler too and no one was coming back. Even the legless half-boy was gone and she almost missed the creepy little urchin. The only one coming back would be the shadow man that had devoured the little ghost.
She did not want to be here when the flies returned.
Quickly throwing clothes into a backpack, she locked the door behind her and scurried down to the second floor where she rapped her knuckles on the door of apartment three.
Bruce squinted his eyes at her as he swung the door open. “Billie. You wouldn’t happen to have a can of beans, would ya?”
“Uh, no,” she said, taken aback.
“I was gonna fix a mess of pork and beans but I didn’t have no pork, so I figured it’d just be beans. Turns out I ain’t got that either.”
“You can raid my cupboards if you want. You know where the spare key is.”
“Nah. I’ll fix something else.” He scratched his belly through the threadbare cotton of his undershirt. “What can I do you for?”
Big smile here. “Can I borrow the car? For, like, a couple days.”
Bruce kept scratching, like he needed to mull it over. “Which one?”
“Anyone. It doesn’t matter.”
“Take the Alpha.” He dropped a set of keys into her hand. “You going to your aunt’s?”
“Yeah. I just need to get out of town.”
“No speedy stuff with that car. You gotta baby the old girl.”
“Done. Thanks, Bruce.”
“And don’t ride the clutch.”
“I don’t,” she said, miffed.
“Yes you do.”
Getting out of the city was a breeze but an accident on the 403 had curdled traffic and she worried the old Alpha Romeo might overheat or breakdown, stranding her on the highway. Her cell was charged but Bruce didn’t even have a phone so she wouldn’t be able to call him if there was car trouble. Getting it towed back to the city would break her bank.
Her worries were for naught. The Alpha rumbled along like a faithful old workhorse and by late afternoon she was turning onto the causeway that led into Long Point. The creeping vines on the trees and the smell of the lake coming through the open window had her muscles unclenching and her heart slowing. Comfort around the bend.
Aunt Maggie was asleep in the deck chair as she came up the front steps. Billie set the backpack down softly to avoid startling her. Asleep, her aunt looked peaceful but she also looked old. Frail even. Growing up, aunt Maggie had always been strong and tireless. Her hands were hard and calloused, her arms freakishly strong for such a small woman. It simply hadn’t occurred to Billie that the woman’s strength would be something that would fade. That her aunt and mostly companion throughout childhood would ever be anything than the eternal rock that Billie could tether herself to.
Settling onto the other chair, she placed a gentle hand on her aunt’s arm. “Hey,” she cooed.
Her aunt opened her eyes and smiled, as if she’d been expecting her niece all along. “Well, hello there. I nodded off, didn’t I?”
“That’s good,” Billie said. “You never used to nap.”
“I’m taking more and more of them these days. Run down, I suppose.”
Billie brushed a hair from her aunt’s eyes, testing her brow at the same time. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Dunno. Couple days maybe.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Nope. Don’t get up.” Billie patted the woman’s arm. “I’m going to bring my stuff in and get something cold to drink.”
“I don’t have any lemonade made but there’s concentrate in the freezer.”
“I’ll make it. You sit.” Billie hoisted up the backpack. “You want some?”
“Please.”
~
The chicken turned out a little charred. Billie never could get used to her aunt’s barbecue. The hot spots were never consistent. They ate it anyway and caught up on gossip in town. When the dishes were cleared, Billie had a nostalgic hankering for ice cream and suggested they take a walk. The Udderlee Kool offered heaping cones served up by polite but bored teenagers working summer jobs.
They settled onto the picnic table outside with mint chip and salted caramel in paper cups with little plastic spoons. Billie looked up at the horizon burning pink in the sunset. “The spiders are bad this summer,” she said.
“It’s all the rain we’ve had,” Maggie said. “More mosquitoes means more spiders. I’ve had the boy next door sweep the house twice already. He doesn’t do a good job of it, though.”
“I can do that while I’m here.”
Maggie watched the kids playing in the arcade. Barefoot and still in their bathing suits. “Are you going to tell me the reason for the surprise visit? Or should I guess?”
“Just needed some quiet. That’s all.”
“It’s not a boy, is it?”
“No.” Billie looked into the paper cup, the ice cream melting fast in the heat. A white lie because it was partly about a boy but she wasn’t willing to bring that subject up. Even though nothing had happened, Maggie would scold her for it anyway. “Did you know my dad very well?”
Maggie eyes flashed up, the spoon halfway to her mouth. “What brought that on?”
“We never talk about it.”
“Why would we?” Maggie countered, as if the matter had been settled long ago.
Billie stirred the ice cream. She should have ordered the kiddie size. “What do you think happened?”
“The same thing everyone does,” the woman sighed. “He took Mary Agnes away.”
The same vague statement Billie had heard her whole life. The rare occasion when the topic had been broached. “But what happened after that? I want to know what you think happened.”
“Honey, what is it you want? Details? I don’t have any.”
“Just tell me what you think happened. Did he spirit her away to Alaska? Are they shacked up somewhere with Elvis? What?”
Her aunt dropped the spoon into the cup and pushed it away from her. “Your father was not a good man, Billie. He was violent, especially when he was drunk. The two of them fought all the time. More so after you were born. She told him to stay away, his ego couldn’t take it.
“He got drunk that night and broke in and abducted Mary. Then he took her some place where she would never be found and he murdered her. Then he killed himself. The police believe he took her out into the marsh. If that’s true, they’ll never be found.”
The bluntness of it stung but she had asked for it and had no right to wince at its sting now. Billie watched her aunt stoop over, exhausted by the recall but no tears came. Her aunt, Billie supposed, had mourned her sister enough.
“I’m sorry to dredge it up,” she said quietly. “I know it’s painful but… I need to know.”
Maggie patted her hand. “And so you should. But why now? What’s brought all this on now?”
“I don’t know,” she fibbed. “I feel stuck. In life, you know. Like I can’t get anywhere. I feel like I can’t move forward unless I have answers to this.”
Another mosquito swam before her face and Billie brushed it away. “I’m not making any sense. Let’s get out of here before we’re eaten alive.”
She walked down to the beach when Maggie went to bed. The wind coming off the lake was strong enough to keep the mosqutioes away but the sand fleas would gnaw her ankles if she lingered too long. She just wanted to put her feet in the water. The coolness of it felt good lapping over her ankles.
Long Point was riddled with shipwrecks. In Maggie’s house there was a poster in the hallway that showed the locations and names of the ships that had run afoul of the massive sand spit that jutted out into the lake. Since the Great Lakes had been sailed, there had been over four hundred shipwrecks in the waters around this long finger of sand. That was a lot of deaths and some of the dead lingered here over the site of their demise. It was only a matter of time before they found her.
The first ghost came up out of the water. There was another further down the beach and more out on the lake itself. Soon, everywhere she looked she saw the dead. Panic set in but she pushed it down and calmed her breathing until her heart cooled. She needed to learn how to close herself off to them. Gantry’s words. Keeping herself calm, she observed them without interest or fear. Fireflies in the night.
A few of them raised their heads, the way dogs do when they catch a new scent, but after a moment they dropped again and shambled along. It was working.
A stone’s throw up the beach was a dead man in tattered clothes not seen since the nineteenth century. Wading through the water, he kicked at the waves like he had lost something in the surf. She was glad he didn’t notice her. The look in his milky eyes was crazed and wild.
Unsure of how long she could keep herself closed off to this many of the dead, she waded up out of the water and walked back with her shoes in her hand. This was a test and she had passed but it was tiring, like keeping a muscle clenched.
Climbing into bed, she could hear the trill of a bird outside and wondered what kind of bird it was. She wished she could identify birds by their calls. It would be a good thing to know.
The awful vision of her mother in the coffin shot up as soon as she closed her eyes. She concentrated on the bird calling out in the night but the image of her mother’s face wouldn’t go away. When she opened her eyes, the idea came fully formed. Her mother was dead. She herself could see the dead, talk to them. If she went back to the old house, the one where she had hidden in the crawl space all those years ago, her mother might still be there.
She hadn’t spoken to her mother in twenty one years. Tomorrow, that would change.
34
POOLE, ONTARIO WAS a burnmark of a town thirty minutes north on highway 59. Billie hadn’t been back since she was eight and there was little that she recognized. A former tobacco community, the township had dried up in the late eighties during a land dispute with the local Ojibway nation. The old Woolworths had shuttered long ago and now the windows in half of the storefronts were ugly with plywood.
Rumbling down the main drag, Billie could have joked about it being a ghost town but it didn’t seem very funny given her reasons for coming back. The tour of downtown was over quickly and she turned the car around and doubled back but no part of this town matched up with the few memories she had of it. Turning south at the church, she ambled along until the tires thudded over the old rail tracks and on to the street where she used to live.
The houses were shabby and used up, the lawns overgrown and decorated with dollar store trinkets. Vehicles moored on cinderblocks, never to be repaired. Realtor signs withered on their posts, unseen and unheeded but the trees were pretty, massive willows that swayed lazily in the breeze.
Her gut began clenching as she recognized a few of the houses. She was getting close. Given the faded state of the homes so far, Billie could only imagine how bad her old house must be. Did anyone live there after they had, after what had happened there? For all she knew, it could have been bulldozed or burnt to the ground. Bad history, bad voodoo. A haunted house nobody wanted.
She pulled the car to the shoulder. There was no sidewalk nor curb, just a ditch and then the lawn and then her
old house. It looked the same. The white clapboard and dark green trim had been repainted some time over the last twenty years. The windows on the first floor had been replaced but the second story still had the old wooden sashes with the three-holed vent. The yard was mowed and rosebushes drooped with blooms under the picture window.
The gravel driveway crunched underfoot as she approached the house. She stopped, unsure of what to do now. She had expected the house to be deserted. Who could live here, with its awful history? There was a chance the current owners knew nothing of what had happened. It was, she reminded herself, over twenty years ago.
Billie gnawed her lip for a moment, feeling self-conscious and out of place but she hadn’t come just to gawk. Taking a deep breath, she opened herself up to anything that might be here. Her senses tuned to any signal that her mother’s ghost might still be here.
Hi mom. Remember me?
Her throat constricted as she choked up but the tears would just get in the way, blurring out her ability to see anything or anyone. Pushing it down, she took another step up the driveway and immediately the hair on the back of her arms stood up. Something was here.
Noise bubbled up and then someone came darting out from behind the house. A little boy, no more than five, ran past the side door and slowed when he saw Billie standing in the driveway. His hair was almost white it was so fair and it swooped into his eyes.
Billie smiled. “Hi.”
The boy gave the tiniest of waves before looking away.
“Do you live here?”
He kicked at the loose stones, glancing up at her. “Did you bring bananas?”
“Uhm, no.” She almost checked her purse to see if there were some there. “Sorry. I didn’t bring anything.”
With the sun directly in her eyes, the boy shimmered in the glare and she wondered if the child was whom she had sensed a second ago. Another one of the dead. She stepped into the shade and the boy became solid.
“Mom said you gotta bring something if you’re coming for lunch,” he said.
“Oh. Well, I didn’t come for lunch. I just wanted to see your house.”