Thirteen Shadows: Ghost Stories

by Aaron Polson

  The doorbell rang in the afternoon, and I should have had the clairvoyance to avoid answering it. I found Uncle Bobby standing on my porch, staring at me through some massive sunglasses with his hair looking a little like he made a raid on the Miss Clairol isle at Springdale Plaza, and he wasn’t shaking enough to hand him a glass of milk and dust off that old joke.

  “Aaron, buddy!” Even his voice resonated a little younger. “How’s the book coming? I’m sure you’re making progress, man.”

  I pulled some awkward shifty eyes thing so as not to stare, but his hair was much darker, and his face looked smoother too, perceptibly younger. His smile grew big and fat; even his teeth appeared younger—whiter. So he had this big bug eye/smile thing going on and I was speechless, sort of feeling like he caught me napping on the job.

  “Yeah, um.” I smiled. “I’ve finished about three chapters.”

  “Sweet buddy, you think you can knock out the rest in a week or two?”

  “Sure.” I shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other. “Yeah, I can probably make that happen.”

  He handed me this fat envelope, and I didn’t even want to think about the money inside. “Here’s an advance buddy, for the good work you’ve done.” His smile flashed and then he shuffled toward his car, an old Chrysler New Yorker—silver.

  My mouth opened and words tumbled out without my permission, “I thought you couldn’t drive.”

  “Yeah, funny thing,” he said as he stood next to the driver’s door, “the doc has me on some new vitamins.” The sun reflected from his big bug glasses as he climbed into the car.

  All of a sudden something furry crawled into my stomach, and I hid in my room, crashing on the bed. I tossed the envelope full of money on my desk, scattering pages of Geschlechtmaschine’s escapades. One of the pages fluttered over to the bed, and I fought a pretty strong inclination to just tear the paper to bits.

  The fat envelope stared at me for a few days before I caved and started plugging away on Uncle Bobby’s masterpiece. Call it guilt if you want; I just wanted to finish and be done. So far Baron Von Sex Machine “conquered” his neighbor, his dog’s vet, a checker at the local Piggly-Wiggly, and twin, yep—two at one time, used car salesgirls. I kept waiting for some big satiric pay-off as I read this crap, but in reality, it was just pages of self-indulgent drivel. I wasn’t versed in erotica, but I was willing to bet this wouldn’t even sell on that shelf.

  I managed another sixty pages over two very hazy days, typing a bit, napping, typing, napping. The work was mindless and I tried to focus on individual letters instead of words, making it easier to ignore how inane the book had become. At some point around page 150, I realized I harbored some jealousy of the good Baron. I thought of Julie and how badly I pined for her last year, realizing that I frittered a year in college waiting for someone who really never wanted to be with me. At least the Baron didn’t worry about rejection—in his world of fiction no woman could resist his prowess.

  One night I dreamed of Geschlechtmaschine in bed with my mom, and I woke up sweating. Only thirty pages remained in the “to type” pile. The next morning I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—climb out of bed. My legs were lead, and my head filled with oatmeal.

  “Elliot?” Mom called sometime after noon. I was frozen, my mouth wouldn’t even move—if it did I thought oatmeal would pour from my brain cavity out the open orifice. Less than five minutes later she pounded on the door, “Andy please open this door!”

  “It’s not locked,” I mumbled.

  She punched through the door and sat down on the edge of my bed, “Elliot, are you alright?”

  I pulled the comforter over my face, “yeah, fine.”

  She yanked the comforter off my face and gasped. “Elliot, you look awful.” She started crying, a big secret from the mother’s handbook. I never could handle the crying. “Tell me,” she said between sobs, “is it drugs? Alcohol?”

  I shut my eyes against the light. “Uncle Bobby’s book,” I muttered.

  “Don’t lie to me, Andy.” Mom shifted from sob to anger with one smooth action.

  “I’m not,” I said, “really. The book is creepy. Really creepy.”

  She stood up and walked to my desk, “How bad can it be?” Picking up a page, she started to read, and I watched her expression go through the rainbow from incredulous through disgusted and finally landing on utter repulsion. She dropped the paper on the desk like a snot-filled Kleenex.

  “Ok, Uncle Bobby is a little, um, off. But this book isn’t making you sick.” She stood up and wagged a finger at me. “I’m calling the doctor.”

  I wrenched myself from bed so I could stare at my pale ghost in the mirror.

  The next day I saw the doctor and he ran through the list of things I shouldn’t do. “Read Uncle Bobby’s book” didn’t make the cut, and I didn’t argue. This guy’s diploma hung on the wall to remind kooks like me that he wouldn’t believe stories of witchcraft and sorcery—not that the book dwelled in those categories, but to the learned doctor who knows? After his nurse punctured me a few times and stole some blood, I was sent home with orders to drink more water and take a daily vitamin.

  Charlie called every day, and I eventually agreed to meet him at Idle Hour for some pool.

  “Dude, you look like shit,” he said to me as we examined cues.

  “Thanks for the compliment.”

  “Hey man, whatever—you OK?”

  “Never better,” I lied. Then Uncle Bobby walked into the bar, flanked on either side by a woman almost a third his age. I looked right at him, but I couldn’t believe him. If he dyed his hair to look slightly younger a few weeks ago, the guy clearly drank deeply from Ponce de Leon’s magic fountain since then—his hair was almost jet black and his face smooth like the proverbial baby’s ass. What I really couldn’t grasp were the bimbos—I’ll grant they looked like exotic dancers or whatever—but how this geezer scored period was beyond my mental faculties.

  I tried to turn around and hide, but Bobby spotted me and meandered my way with his groupies in tow.

  “Andy, my boy!” For some reason I winced when he said my name. “I’d like you to meet, um,” he looked at bimbo one, “Brandy?”

  “I’m Brandy,” bimbo two said. Both giggled.

  “The memory, boy-o, the memory is the first to go.” He winked, and that furry thing in my belly woke up. “How’s the book—almost done, I’m sure. I was just telling the ladies about—”

  “Almost done, yeah.” I interrupted to prevent the furry thing from crawling out of my mouth. “Look, I’m on my way to finish, right now.” I glanced at Charlie; he shrugged and then nodded.

  “Great buddy,” he diverted to the bimbos, mumbling something about some movie he almost starred in back in ’65. Both giggled as I left the bar.

  As I typed that night, I realized that maybe Uncle Bobby wrote this creepy story about shit he wanted to happen. Geschlechtmaschine would be proud of the bimbos he led into the bar earlier. I utilized all of my personal strength to tackle the end of that sordid tale, hoping again that some sweet nugget of irony would rear its head, rendering the whole worthwhile. I managed all but maybe six pages before sleep shut my eyes for the night.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke and my eyes popped open, but the room was black. This was a black unlike lights-out-at-midnight-with-no-moon black. I panicked and held my hands in front of my face, and they weren’t there. Rubbing my eyes so hard I almost cursed the pain, I tried to break through that blackness.

  Then I groped for the edge of the bed, and finding it, I rolled toward the side nearest the door to the hallway. I gingerly slid my feet to the floor, arms fumbling towards the wall, bending in the direction I needed to go. Knuckles struck wall, and I felt my way into the hall and down to the bathroom. The counter sat just inside to my right, the light switch just above that. I fumbled for the light switch and flicked it on, but my eyes still rebelled. Inching toward the sink, I turned on the water and splashed my face.<
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  After a few moments the room grew brighter. I sank to the floor, heaving and out of breath from anxiety and the effort of working my way down the hall in complete darkness. As I sat gasping, my sight gradually returned—first as distorted, glowing shapes, and then becoming more detailed in small increments. Utterly spent, balled on the floor, I tried to understand what had happened. My head throbbed with every new rush of blood.

  I could see, although my vision was still somewhat blurred. I shut off the bright bathroom light, and shuffled down the hall to my waiting bed. Plunging in, I covered myself with the heavy comforter, and smashed a spare pillow over my face, trying to squeeze the pain out of my head. Quietly I waited for sleep.

  When I woke much later, I felt no better rested. My bedroom was much brighter, but I didn’t bother looking at the clock. Somewhere in the distant depths of my memory it was Saturday; I possessed no desire to venture out of that room.

  Then I thought about the manuscript. A short stack of six pages waited next to the computer. For some reason, the text of Geschlechtmaschine stares at me on the screen from across the room—I didn’t remember leaving the file open.

  I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t finish the book—in the light of morning, my brain read last night’s blindness as a warning. Summoning all the energy left me, I gathered the manuscript, counting each page to be sure, and tossed them in an old box left behind when I moved home at the end of last semester. Deleting the text file was an easy point and click, and then I grab the box and head downstairs.

  As I opened the front door, the telephone rang. I kept walking, somehow knowing who was on the line. Mom stepped out of the house holding a cordless phone, and I tossed the box in the passenger seat of my car.

  “Elliot—it’s Robert,” Mom yelled from the doorway. I ignored her, and as I drove away I watched her trot after me waving the phone above her head.

  I drove without thinking, heading for an old rest area just east of Springdale, a spot where traveler’s used to stop before the interstate made small state highways unnecessary. The place was now more a park with picnic tables, green space, and those charcoal grills that are mounted on a pole cemented into the ground.

  I soon stood in front of one of those grills, wadding sheets of Uncle Bobby’s original manuscript into loose balls and stuffing them through the grates on the grill. After twenty or thirty sheets, I loosely piled the remainder of the yellow pages on top. Like a bonehead, I forgot the lighter fluid, but I found an old Zippo in my glove compartment. The dry and brittle pages went up like a whole pile of witches in Salem’s town square. Watching the yellow-orange flame lick the pages into black ash was a little sad, but for some reason I felt stronger just watching the paper burn.

  Uncle Bobby died later that summer. Old age, they said. Tucked inside his maple coffin, he looked peaceful, healthy, and younger than he had in years. I couldn’t help remembering his words—“I’m dying to get this published.” Karen let me choose one of Bobby’s paintings when they cleaned out his house. I bought a new computer with some of my college loan money that fall, and I pried the old hard drive from my former machine. A sledgehammer did the trick as I tried to make sure no one could ever recover Bobby’s masterpiece.

  That fall, I dated this girl who really enjoyed dusty, old bookstores. We found it in one of those places, a little hole-in-the-wall place called The Brown Bookshelf. The Adventures of the Arch-Baron von Geschlechtmaschine, Esquire. I picked up the book, brushed a few layers of dust off the cover, and flipped to the first page. Creepy how those words came back to me, how I remembered typing some of that stuff. On the back of the book was a picture of Uncle Bobby wearing his big, bug-eye glasses.

  The Sub-Basement

  “Daddy!” Tyler’s voice blasted through the night and jarred his father awake. Charlie Pinder rolled over and read the time on his bedside alarm clock. Too damn early.

  “Aww,” Charlie muttered, “the kid always wakes me up. She can sleep through anything...” Megan mumbled in her sleep, her hair a tangle of dark blue in the moonlight.

  “Daddy!”

  Charlie flopped his feet over the edge of the bed and brought them in contact with the cold hardwood floor. Behind him, Megan stirred but remained in a deep slumber, a slight hint of smile dusted across her lips. Charlie stumbled through the dark into Tyler’s bedroom.

  “What is it buddy?” he whispered. Tyler’s small face glowed green from his nightlight with a shining streak down his cheek.

  “Is there anything scary?” Tyler whimpered.

  Charlie knelt down next to Tyler’s bed. “No way buddy.” Charlie said.

  “The man in the basement said there was lots to be scared of.”

  Charlie blinked. “Who?”

  “The man in the basement.” Tyler wiped a sleeve across his face. “Where does grandpa live?”

  Charlie rubbed his forehead. “Grandpa lives in Cleveland, buddy.” He pulled the comforter up to Tyler’s chin.

  “The man said he was grandpa.”

  Charlie sighed. “You and me will go talk to him, together, in the morning. Okay?”

  “Yeah. Goodnight.”

  Pushing himself from the floor, Charlie padded across the hall.

  “He okay?” Megan asked, propped on one elbow.

  “Fine. He’s fine.” Charlie slipped into bed. “Asked about Grandpa. Says he talked to him in the basement.”

  Megan chuckled. “Right. My dad’s in Cleveland.”

  “I told him. At least the kid has an imagination.”

  Silence swallowed a few moments. Megan turned to Charlie. “You don’t think he’s talking about your dad?”

  “That bum took off twenty-five years ago.” Charlie shook his head. “Told Mom he was going out for a pack of cigarettes. Stupid bastard.”

  “Mmm-humm. Goodnight.”

  Charlie stared at the ceiling for fifteen minutes. Sleep wasn’t coming back so easily. “Megs, I’m a little restless, gonna watch some TV.”

  “Make sure you come back,” she muttered, half asleep.

  He hopped to the floor. “Funny.” A nice glass of milk. That’ll help me sleep. He walked to the kitchen, poured a glass, and listened. The house was still, only the occasional groaning of old wood and whispering ventilation. Charlie stood at the sink with his glass of milk, imagining people in the dark shadows outside. Nonsense.

  But—it won’t hurt to check.

  After swallowing the last few gulps of milk, Charlie hurried down the basement stairs. All was quiet, a deep blue silence that hung like old drapes over everything. He flicked on a light and squinted with the bright flare. The room smelled different. Old. A memory sputtered in Charlie’s brain.

  He worked his way around the basement, past the unused exercise machine, the ancient console TV, the stacks of boxes—books that never made it out after their last move. He stooped and snagged a book from the nearest one, held it to his nose, and inhaled. No. The basement smell was different the musty odor of old paper. My basement, back home—the old house on Lindbergh. Charlie shuddered at the sudden memory.

  In the laundry room he found a door. Pulling his pajama collar against the cold, his feet nearly frozen to the concrete, Charlie stepped closer. Funny, I don’t remember... One hand touched the knob; the brass was warm, out of place. He turned the knob and pulled the door open without thinking. A few feeble rays of light poked through the doorway, but couldn’t really penetrate the black veil.

  He found himself through the door before having the thought to go in. Devoured by a new darkness, a more complete quiet, Charlie Pinder said “hello” to puncture the silence.

  “Thank God, Charlie.” The voice was raw, wet and raspy. An old man’s voice. Charlie felt a boney hand clasp his arm. “Free at last,” the voice said. The hand released him. Charlie heard a door click shut. The room fell to black again.

  Charlie waited for a moment. His eyes did not adjust; no tiny beam of light streamed in to reveal his prison. After a while, he groped
about on his hands and knees, touching the edges of the room, finding each corner, wall, and crevice. The door was gone. He sat down.

  Someone will come and find me.

  Daddy’s Touch

  I’d worked with Helen for a few years before her father died. She was a quiet woman, always reserved and meticulous in the lab. Some of the other techs called her “cold” or “too weird.” I just figured her the private type.

  We worked together in the basement of the natural history museum on campus, stashed away in a windowless box next to the offices for graduate teaching assistants. We spent our days stripping the flesh from dead mammals so they could reconstruct their skeletons. We used beetles, these little black lumps called Dermestidae—skin beetles. Toss a poor, dead piece of road kill in a stainless steel container with some larvae, and the growing beetles lick the bones clean within a week. Our boss used to say, “They’re carnivores. They eat the flesh of the dead.”

  Helen received the call about her father while at work, and she didn’t even flinch. She only missed one day for the funeral, a private affair, and stayed late at work the next night.

  In the days after her father’s stroke, Helen looked a little off—her face pale and stretched—tired maybe. The only thing she’d say about him was, “he was not a nice man.” About a week after the funeral, I noticed bruises while we worked together scrubbing residue from small mammal femurs.

  “Helen, your arm,” I said.

  She pulled down her shirt cuff. “It’s nothing.”

  After I mentioned the bruises, she started wearing long sleeves. Black bags puffed under her eyes. She faded, bleached like a field of snow, pinched together and gaunt, like she wasn’t sleeping much. Maybe a rough boyfriend, I thought, especially if her father had been abusive. I imagined there had been abuse in her past, but my theory rested on gossip and interpretation of Helen’s stock line: “He was not a nice man.”