by Rose Caraway
Marcia put a kettle on the stove and joined her friend, other things on her mind besides Amber’s herbal tea insomnia remedies. Amber had a fourth-floor room, directly above Marcia’s on the third. “Does this place ever scare you?”
Amber took a bite of her leftover pizza and nodded, looking away laughing, embarrassed, Marcia guessed, by the unspoken admission.
Marcia wanted a smoke, but Ms. Garrity would have a Hereford if she smelled it. Less than thirty minutes to curfew, so the old lady would be around to clear the kitchen soon enough. “Girl, you won’t laugh when I tell you what I learned,” Marcia told her friend.
Elysium House occupied most of a block in an old neighborhood north of the university. Betty Garrity, the landlady since 1969, rented rooms only to female graduate students and maintained strict rules about noise and visitation. A sweet old hippy, gray-haired Betty’s moral values seemed at least two centuries out of date. Everyone said she’d had bad experiences with men, but no one knew the particulars.
“I did some research into this place’s history,” Marcia said. She was chasing a master’s in public policy and had a guaranteed job in the state comptroller’s office when she graduated. She had minored in history as an undergraduate and still knew plenty of people in that department. “Elysium House used to be part of a seminary,” she said. “This house was next to a church that’s gone now.”
“Creepy! What church was it?”
“A weird branch of the Unitarians—technically the Oswald Unitarians. Some old books call it the Church of the Evening Star. They were big in the 1870s. Elysium was built in 1888. It’s only been a rooming house since the 1960s. Before that it had been abandoned since 1926.”
“Abandoned?” Amber asked. “You mean like haunted?” She giggled a little, a nervous sound that Marcia found oddly comforting. She wasn’t alone.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. I found two books of county history that have stories about our little home away from home. One story from the forties is about five destitute children breaking into the place for shelter during the Depression. The author couldn’t confirm it really happened, but she believed it. Two of the kids disappeared and the other three went insane.”
“You’re making this up,” Amber accused her.
“There’s an older one, a worse one, about what happened to the seminary, and this one isn’t a folktale. It really happened. By 1910, there were only four students left—the church’s leader got caught in some kind of scandal and the church was almost extinct. One of the four remaining seminarians…killed all the others. The police found him inside, in some condition they wouldn’t disclose, but rumors said he was eating his fellow acolytes.”
“You are so making this up! Next you’re going to tell me the church was really a devil cult.”
“No.” Marcia shook her head. “Best anyone can tell they were just lapsed Unitarians.”
The kettle whistled sharply and Marcia had the satisfaction of seeing Amber jump.
“Listen.” Amber smiled and squeezed her hand before getting the kettle and pouring hot water into their cups, where the teabags waited. They shared the fragrant brew and the old house seemed very quiet and still as the Felix clock above the stove ticked toward curfew. “Mind if I sleep in your room tonight?”
“Mind? That sounds wonderful!”
In Marcia’s bed, they listened to Betty Garrity make her rounds, the old wood creaking as she slowly moved up and down the stairs, the not-so-subtle pauses as she listened at doors. Lights out at midnight was another one of her rules. Marcia’s jeans-clad legs entwined with Amber’s and she ached for what would happen as soon as the landlady was gone from the third floor.
They kissed as Betty passed by, Marcia dying to have Amber undressed and lying against her, skin to skin. Amber was a dedicated lesbian and Marcia thought of herself as bi, but no boy had ever treated her so well in bed or brought her to mad orgasms the way Amber did.
When they were both naked, Marcia explored Amber’s taut thighs, the stiff points of her high breasts, and lost herself in Amber’s kisses. Sweat slicked the places they touched, and musk and perfume hung heavy as mosquito netting over them. They sixty-nined long enough for each of them to come and then embraced, face-to-face, pressing and licking. She stroked Amber’s back, kneading the tight velvet muscle of her butt. They fucked, hands to clits, lost in each other’s open kisses, Marcia trying not to scream when she came again, but Amber did, apparently not caring who heard her as she spasmed and bucked.
They tangled outside the covers. Marcia enjoyed the cooling air on her bare butt, her mind warm and fuzzy as she thought, This must be how a guy feels after he makes a girl come. She liked the feeling. A colder breeze blew across her bottom, almost like the stroke of a slender hand.
Beside her, Amber made a choking noise. So severe was the cry that Marcia rolled away, untangling their limbs, thinking she had somehow caused physical pain, maybe cut off blood flow to Amber’s arm or leg, but Amber still gasped, the sound unmistakably now one of fear rather than pain.
Amber sat up, hugging her bare legs. “Damn it, Marcia. Don’t you see him? He’s right there! He’s watching us. Oh god, he’s dead and he’s watching us.”
She followed Amber’s gaze and saw only a shadow, but her lover’s frantic grab for a pillow, burying her face in it, convinced Marcia that she was not playing a joke. The room continued to chill unnaturally, as though a winter wind blew through an open window, though no breeze ruffled the curtains or rattled the blinds.
“There’s nothing there, Amber, I don’t see him.”
But then she did, pale, wearing a dark robe, his ash-blond hair tousled and matted, sitting in the big chair by the window, as vivid and real as anyone Marcia had ever seen and he was, just as Amber had said, staring right at them.
Achingly conscious of her nakedness, Marcia scrambled for the sheet, but Amber’s weight held it down. “Oh god,” Amber cried. She had turned to look again and gripped Marcia’s thigh hard enough to draw bloody little half-moons.
The tall, dead young man rose slowly from the chair, the depthless pits of his charcoal eyes fastened on Marcia. His robe came open but Marcia saw no body, only shadows where it gaped. As he approached, reaching out, then fading, she felt phantom hands, cold as wet cloth, run rough over her breasts, tweaking her nipples with ghastly play, and felt someone thrust against her pussy, smooth and icy.
Amber screamed. Marcia lost all control and screamed with her, forgetting what Betty Garrity would think, knowing only that, if the thing did not stop touching her, she would go mad.
“You think you know what it is,” the landlady told them. “But you’re wrong.”
Marcia and Amber had dressed, but it seemed to Marcia the room still smelled like sex, and she had the sense that Ms. Garrity knew exactly what had been going on in the room before he appeared.
“It’s one of the boys isn’t it?” Amber asked. “The last student from the seminary.”
“In a way…” old Betty said. She sat in the chair where the thing had perched.
“You know about this?” Marcia asked. “How can you live here?”
“This is the first time—that I know of, at least—that anyone else has seen him in almost twenty years. Oh, sometimes girls hear him or feel him, but to see him? That’s rare.” Betty Garrity clucked a little. She did not appear to be alarmed, only a little sad. “I don’t think he’ll hurt you.”
“You expect us to sleep here after this, Ms. Garrity?”
“Call me Betty, dear. I’ve been sleeping here a long time. He watches me sometimes. It’s flattering really, the way he still stares. I think you girls are making me a little jealous. Did he say anything?”
Marcia wanted to ask if she could move to another room, but she couldn’t find words. She still imagined him—whoever he was—suspended somewhere between Betty’s chair and the bed. The room had not warmed much at all. Amber still held her hand.
“He’s the one who murde
red the others, isn’t he?” Amber persisted.
Betty’s brow furrowed. “No, no, I don’t think so. His name is Mikhael—you know, with a K. You girls were fooling around, weren’t you?” Neither of them denied it, and Betty went on, “It’s all right. I had girlfriends too. No one can get you off like your best friend can, right?” Not-so-old Ms. Garrity smiled knowingly.
“What does he want?” Marcia asked, inwardly reeling at the sudden insight into her landlady.
“Oh, tonight I think he just wanted what any man might, to watch two pretty girls making love.”
“When does he visit you?” Amber asked, some of the mischief creeping back into her voice. The sound gave Marcia courage.
Betty demurred, but finally answered, “When I put on a show for him.”
Marcia saw Amber grin. Marcia guessed Amber had found a new friend. Old Betty was quite attractive, when you looked past the years. She kept herself fit and her gray hair fell soft around high cheekbones and a forehead that hardly showed wrinkles. Her eyes were bright blue and lively.
The room grew colder.
Betty smiled at them. “He won’t hurt you. I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone. I’ve wanted Mikhael to…touch me all these years, and he never has. Just the cold and sometimes a breeze.”
“Does he talk?” Marcia managed. “Have you ever talked to him?”
“Well, no. He wrote his name once on a piece of paper, but he doesn’t talk. He moans though, sometimes, like a man having a good time, when he watches me.”
Amber gripped Marcia’s hand harder, as Marcia’s head swam. “Listen,” she said. “Can we go down to the kitchen? I can’t sleep up here tonight.”
“All right, dear,” Betty said and they went down together to sit at the little table, drink tea, and talk. At first Betty talked about Mikhael, how she had first seen him and how she had discovered his desires.
“He likes stockings, girls. The old-fashioned kind.”
Then, the conversation drifted, to stories about New York City, then about bad boyfriends. Betty told them about living in a commune back in the day.
After a while they talked about nothing much. Then the sun rose and none of it seemed quite real anymore.
For ten dollars extra a month Marcia could have cabled a TV into the house satellite feed, but she couldn’t imagine sitting alone in her room watching the shows she wanted to see, the ones she needed to see. Just looking at all the fake haunting shit on YouTube made her hands shake so hard, she couldn’t tap the keyboard. She staked out the common rooms in the student union that had televisions and she watched ghost shows at all hours of the day and night—“Hauntings,” “American Ghosts,” “Ghost Hunters,” and others, all about people investigating possessions and haunted houses, and none of it really gave her any comfort or taught her anything useful about the spirit in Elysium House.
Nor did she sense Mikhael in her room again. Amber had struck up a friendship with Betty, and Marcia’s once lover now spent most evenings over tea with the landlady, then joined Betty in her room. Neither of them invited Marcia and she fought feelings of hurt and betrayal, though she understood why Amber might seek the older woman’s company. In her gloomiest moments, Marcia imagined them in bed together, mouth to mouth, hands busy, and Mikhael watching, his spirit summoned by the heat of their fucking.
Mikhael. Marcia wondered if he watched her. Did he lay immaterial and unsensed in her bed at night? The idea of sharing space with a ghost seemed silly and unreal, and yet. She guessed at least some of the people on the ghost shows must have experienced something much like what she had seen and felt.
How many more people in the world must have experienced things even stranger and gone on about the business of living? Was everyone haunted?
Marcia thought about it all the time.
She thought about Mikhael all the time.
On the first day of February, she brought two bottles of wine back to her room. Elysium House felt empty. Marcia heard no voices, saw no cars parked in the driveway or on the street. Alone. Exactly the opportunity she wanted.
Was that a breeze on the stairs? She felt as though someone ascended beside her, and she spoke his name aloud.
“Mikhael?”
Only the muffled sound of her own feet on the steps answered her.
She had barely reached the first landing when she felt the whisper at her ear, heard the words like a voice around a corner, a radio signal tattered by sudden white noise.
“I am here.”
He had never spoken to Betty, she thought with a surge of pride and confidence.
She shivered with his touch, unmistakable, an electrical bristling of every fine hair on her body, and she led him up the next flight, holding tightly to the rail. She couldn’t breathe, and could hardly open the door and fall inward to sit on the bed, terrified and happy.
The door blew shut behind her.
“Can you talk to me?” she asked.
Nothing answered but she felt a cool breeze around her and smelled strong incense—the kind you might smell in church. Invisible fingers touched her breasts.
She saw him then for an instant, immaculate and golden, his hair curled in the fashion of another age, his mustache ridiculous but beautiful. He had mahogany eyes and long, dexterous fingers. Then he moved toward her and dissipated.
“Oh god,” she panted, feeling the push of something cold and desperate, not so much against her skin as pressing an inch or so beneath it, the invasion eerie but not unpleasant.
She shed her blouse a little self-consciously. Mikhael’s vaporous apparition had vanished but she still felt him wrapped around her. She tasted him, exotic and rich, and a scent like pine smoke and pipe tobacco swirled around her. As she lay the garment aside, she felt him again, warmer than her own breath. She heard sounds of approval inside her head, and felt the urgency of thin, invisible fingers under her skimpy satin bra, but she teased him. Standing, facing him, the air moved around her, brushing the ends of her hair, her eyelashes. She unfastened her skirt and his hands lay upon hers with encouraging pressure. When his long, cool stroke against her panty-shielded pussy teased her, she bowed.
She almost came, her breath gone, flowing. Someone was licking her, she thought and suppressed a laugh. She abandoned caution and felt a sense of elation and experience beyond her material senses, like she might leave her skin and join Mikhael wherever the hell he was. She sat back on the edge of the bed and unfastened her garter.
“He likes stockings,” Betty had told her and Marcia wore real silk, smoky enough to contrast sharply against the tan cream of her thighs. She felt the invisible current surge around her as he rolled the first one down her leg.
Sorcerer, she thought, necromancer, words from fairy tales, but this was real.
Halfway through removing the second stocking, she felt Mikhael’s lips, vivid as snow, exploring the arch of her neck, kissing invisibly just under her ear and along her jawline. She lay back on the bed, surrendering to him, and felt his pine ghost breath against her nose and mouth, tasted spice and smoke as he kissed her with fierce, chilly lips.
Cold hands raised her hips, helping her with the panties until she lay bare except for the bra, feeling as naked as she ever had in her life, wondering what would happen next, hoping that Mikhael would fuck her. She practically tore the bra off and opened to him, terrified but excited, the sense of something icy pushing past her skin overwhelming.
Her clit swelled as though someone licked her and she began to buck, feeling his arms along her sides, his breathy hands on her bare breasts. She thrust up as the ghost tongue-fucked her, as vivid as any real lover. Even better than Amber.
Sorcerer.
She came, the room vanishing and reforming in fiery gold streaks. She imagined the dead seminary students like shadows around her, watching her naked and coming, coming, grinding against Mikhael’s tongue, his fingers. She bit her pillow to stop her scream and lay a long time, perspiration musky on her body, tran
scended, halfway to things no one knew, to knowledge and wisdom, and love.
* * *
The early weeks of February passed like remembered days of someone else’s life. Marcia woke in the morning, ate meals without flavor, and half slept through her classes. Her grades plummeted.
In her room, she felt Mikhael’s presence constantly, though she did not see him or feel his touch. Nor did she try to invoke him again. Amber and Ms. Garrity hardly spoke to Marcia now, almost seemed to avoid her, and Marcia wondered if old Betty guessed what Marcia had done. Did Mikhael even visit the landlady anymore? Did he visit Amber? Marcia hoped not, for both her own dark vanity and her jealousy, and because she honestly didn’t know if what she had experienced might not be a curse. She didn’t wish that on her friend. That thought repeated in her mind as Amber brushed aside her greetings and smiles. Yes, maybe Mikhael’s touch had cursed her.
The world felt thin. School began to seem like a play where her fellow students and the teachers spoke their lines like actors. The debates and finer points of theoretical governance seemed boring and meaningless. None of it mattered to her now.
Instead of studying government, she began to dig deeper through the university’s archive records, most of them digitized and easy to search, but a surprising number still maintained on yellowed card stock in massive, polished wood cabinets. She found collections of tracts from the Oswald Unitarians, but when she requisitioned the copies, nothing in them proved helpful. The church had been an enlightened voice of open-minded deism as far as she could tell from the arcane essays, though she found surprising traces of Gnosticism, an emphasis on the world of matter distinct from God and his angels. Like any church, there had been branches of belief even within the splinter sect. The scandal that ruined the seminary was related to some arcane difference of opinion that had caused the main ecclesiastical body—in Philadelphia—essentially to excommunicate the priests and students associated with the local denomination. As far as Marcia could tell, the whole sect had vanished entirely by World War II.