Before There Were Angels

by Sarah Mathews

  “You don’t have to even consider it …” she repeated with an expression between beseeching and excitement.

  “All right, then.”

  The expression changed to seductive begging. “But you could.”

  “Who died?”

  “Well …”

  So lots of people died. “Well?”

  “It’s a classic Victorian,” she started.

  “Where?”

  “In Haight Ashbury.”

  “And?”

  “It’s very beautiful.”

  She showed me a picture. It really was. But what was all that scene-of-the-crime police tape doing there?

  “And?”

  “It’s haunted,” she announced triumphantly.

  “Who is haunting it?”

  “Will you come and look at it, without being prejudiced?”

  “Or even informed?”

  A sweet smile. “I’ll tell you about it afterwards.”

  “And the boys?”

  “Yeah, they can come and look at it too.”

  “And George? I have a feeling we are going to need George.”

  George was our alcoholic Old English Sheepdog, just like the other two alcoholic Old English Sheepdogs Belle had owned. High end alcoholics at that - Bombay Blue Sapphire gin, Speyside 12 year aged single malts, and Fat Tire to get the day started. Still, he could hold his drink, and after obviously his hair-of-the-dog kick-starter, he was amenable enough and hopefully up to identifying any ghost loitering in the house who would be too mean to handle.

  And Belle had always threatened me that, if I were to get involved with her, I would have to accommodate a few ghosts in the closets, although she had started me slowly in an ordinary mid-San Francisco apartment with shouting outside in the street but no wailing from the bathroom.

  “OK, when do we go to see this house?”

  Belle leaned over the bed where I was watching a You Tube trailer for a movie we were considering seeing that evening, and kissed me. “Thank you.”

  “Mmmm,” I said cagily.

  She bounced on the bed. “You’ll love it, you’ll see.”

  “During daylight,” I added.

  “During daylight,” she emphasized.

  * * *

  So there we were standing outside Belle’s Victorian in Haight Ashbury, all five of us - Belle, me, the twins Zack and Stevie, and George the dog. Positively ‘Famous Five’ on the cusp of their latest adventure.

  The police tape had gone and the front of the house looked gorgeous with its gold and sky-blue detailing.

  The realtor came running up, which is not a sight you usually see in San Francisco - anyone in a hurry. I guessed that she might be leaving the house twice as fast after the viewing.

  “Hello,” she said. “Sandra Bullock.” Not the one I had seen. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? And quite a bargain.” Well, we all knew why, but not enough of why yet; that Belle was keeping to herself.

  The twins were already wrestling and calling each other identically ugly as Sandra keyed open the door and we all burst in. It is going to be something of a stand-off, I told myself as I watched the boys. The ghostly resident of the house might already be more scared of the new occupants than we would ever be of him.

  “The main room,” Sandra said, indicating the room to the right. It was large, light, high-ceilinged and friendly.

  “Very nice,” I said.

  Sandra didn’t agree quite as quickly as a realtor normally would.

  “The dining room is through here,” she said, leading us on and moving fast.

  That was great too. I could certainly see us living here, but there was something I needed to know first …

  “It has a really welcoming atmosphere,” I observed, to be greeted with a false smile.

  “Y-e-s.”

  I knew that inflection on the word ‘Yes’.

  We saw a kitchen and another all-purpose room, then Sandra suggested that we explore the upstairs ourselves, no need for her to join us. The function of the rooms was obvious. To scare us, probably.

  But they were fantastic too, all freshly painted, and there was a trapdoor into the attic. I wasn’t going up there, nor into the cellars.

  “Looks excellent,” I said as we came back downstairs again, leaving the boys to continue arguing over what bedroom they would each like to have.

  “I am glad you like it,” Sandra replied. ‘Relieved’ might have been a better word.

  “Do you really like it, darling?” Belle asked me.

  “Sure. So far.”

  “So far?”

  “Yes, so far. You know what I mean.”

  “Oh that.”

  “Yes that.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it when we get back to the apartment. It’s a really interesting story.”

  “Bet it is.”

  There was a series of very loud bangs upstairs. Was that the boys, or …? Well, whoever the ghost was, he was going to have his work cut out making his presence known over the din of the boys. It was going to be ‘The Canterville Ghost’ all over again.

  “Come on, boys,” I shouted upstairs, only to realize that they were already downstairs beating each other up in the dining room.

  OK.

  * * *

  “You see,” Belle started, “there was once this family, two parents, two sons …”

  “Is this us or them?”

  “Them … well, both really.”

  “And …?”

  “The husband had a psychotic ex-wife …”

  “Rings a bell.”

  “Who lived close by …”

  “At least we don’t have that.”

  “And somehow she got the keys to the house, probably by copying the keys of one of the boys.”

  “OK.”

  “And she turned up one morning, really early, around six o’clock, let herself into the house, and went up to their bedroom …”

  “And shot them.”

  “She shot the woman first, in the head. It wasn’t clear if she was planning to kill her husband, but then the children came running in wanting to know what was happening, and she shot them dead too. After that she had no choice, but she only gave him a gut shot and he took a long time to die, several hours.”

  “Charming. And what happened to her?”

  “Nobody knows. She disappeared.”

  “You don’t think she is still in the house, do you? We didn’t check the attic or the cellars.”

  “No, I don’t think so, but nobody knows. She made a clean getaway. There again, this only happened two months ago …”

  Belle liked her ghosts like I liked my steak, still breathing.

  “So what do you think?” she asked expectantly.

  “It’s a lovely house.”

  “It is, isn’t it? A great old Victorian,” she enthused.

  “And it’s cheap, isn’t it?”

  “Very cheap. A real steal.”

  “And it comes with a ghost or four, although George didn’t seem too troubled by anything.”

  “No, he was walking around and he seemed fine with the place.”

  I turned to George, grabbing his head. “What do you think, George?”

  It was clear what he thought - it was time for a gin and tonic. We would all need those, and in about the same large quantities as George tossed them back.

  It was the second worst decision of my life agreeing to live in that house, the worst one being to have ever married Rafaella. But the house had seduced me - what can I say? - and Belle was so happy, and I loved making Belle happy. And the sex with Belle would be good that night, as it always was. We had spectacular sex.

  Chapter 5

  You must have stood in front of a new house when you are on the threshold of occupying it for the first time, wondering what level of happiness you will find on the other side of the front door.

  A new house is, after all, a commitment beyond money - it is a commitment of the next segment of your life -
and somehow the house plays a living part in that. It is not just bricks and mortar, it is someone you hope will be an accommodating friend, generous in the joy it will extend to you.

  So I stood there.

  There were the usual steep steps and a dark blue door. Sure, I had seen those before when we viewed the house, but now they were mine - not entirely mine as we were renting not buying it - but mine utendi, if not fruendi or abutendi. Sorry, slipped into Roman land law there for a second.

  Suddenly, the steps came into detail as if under a microscope, and all that blue and golden detailing towered over me to the point of making me dizzy. And those front windows, beyond which there were rooms for living and eating, and cooking and storing things and, the next level of reflective windows offering bedrooms and a bathroom.

  No faces showed in the leaden-shadowed windows.

  There is so much you cannot see from outside a house and so much you hope for, the rooms filled with light and laughter, the bedrooms filled with sleep and lust, the bathroom scented with almond and lavender. Well, maybe not lavender - a bit maiden aunt. Macadamia, coconut, mango. Aloe vera.

  If I was having a moment of deep thought, of course the twins weren’t. Closely followed by George the dog, Zack went straight up to the front door and bashed it with a hammer. Why did he have a hammer on our first trip to this place?

  “Zack, don’t smash the place up! We’re here. We have the keys. You are making holes in the door.”

  He turned and laughed. “Come on, then. Open up.”

  I shrugged at Belle, who laughed back. Stephen laughed too. Next time he would play the hammer joke. Next time it wouldn’t be funny, but Stevie would insist it should be. It would be his turn. The second twin always copies the first, even if he is the second twin by only a few minutes.

  Zack smashed the front door again with the hammer. “Come on. Come on,” he challenged us.

  “Zack! That hammer is for your brains, not for the door,” I explained.

  Zack turned the hammer on himself and smacked himself in the forehead much harder than I would ever have considered.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” he declared, slightly dazed.

  Stevie laughed. He wasn’t going to copy all the antics of his brother.

  But this house was different. This house wasn’t an empty shell of wood, sheetrock and glass. This house was alive, or at least it had the potential to be alive. It had the possibility, or probability, of four ghosts and, as I was to learn later, of one ex-dog.

  This house was already full. We were layering ourselves over the top of its pre-existence. We might not be welcome at all. That would be a matter for negotiation.

  Still, Zack had struck the first blow, and hammers must scare even ghosts with their noise.

  I jostled with the keys. Keys get all mixed up when you are in a hurry. It took me a minute to find the right key as Zack whacked the door paint one more time. In irritation, I tried to identify a mark he had made so I could point at it in parental, proprietary outrage - not being the owner, but still being responsible for all damage - but there wasn’t any. Zack knew exactly how to judge the impacts of his acts.

  The hallway yawned emptily and the twins threw themselves into its jaws, tripping over George, and we were officially living there.

  The atmosphere was exactly the same. San Francisco has a lot of sunshine, and this day and the day we viewed the house were identical weather wise. It seemed like a very happy house in every single room, the sun streaming in, the warmth off the walls, the spirit of optimism in our hearts.

  The way the boys (and George) ran around the place, you would have believed that any prior occupants would have been gathering up their luggage and heading for the refuge of the great outdoors. There was a huge amount of banging of doors and floors as the twins raced into every echoing room and committed their juvenile rites of occupancy.

  The house was ours. There were no other tenants. Nothing could withstand the aggression of the twins.

  Belle and I laughed.

  “I love our new home,” Belle said.

  “It really does feel like home, doesn’t it?” I replied.

  * * *

  We made a few trips and gradually filled the place up, although we had very little furniture until we collected whatever Belle had put in storage when she and the twins had moved to San Francisco. The twins, of course, slowed all progress with their running back and forth across the hallways and the stairs and the kitchen, and pretty much everywhere we needed to place boxes. But eventually our possessions were thrown into the middle of rooms, the boxes were emptied and our presence there was asserted.

  What we mostly had was clothes, and we started getting them onto hangers and shoving them away into the various closets and cupboards.

  My clothes were few, but new, as I had acquired a whole new wardrobe after entering the country. New wives never like the tastes of ex-wives, and Belle had declared that they all had to go. I must admit I wasn’t too upset about it; in particular I had been glad to see the last of the pink suit that Rafaella had surprised me with at one time. The boys, on the other hand, had legacy clothes. The boys belonged to Belle. I had only recently acquired them, although you would not have known that from any of our points of view. They viewed themselves as my children, except that I could claim no automatic authority over them - a perfect situation for them; all the permission with none of the restrictions of a natural father.

  I stood in our bedroom - the master bedroom, I suppose - and juggled hangers and clothes, sliding them impatiently onto the rod in the closet that was allocated for me.

  It was fun to be there, although packing and unpacking is always tiresome. I found a hanger sturdy enough to hold up my linen trousers, a nice thick plastic one that wouldn’t dump them onto the floor as wire inevitably did. As I turned away, I noticed the back of the closet door. Etched in long thick scratches were the words, ‘I hate you’, in what looked like talon marks torn down the door.

  I held my breath.

  Someone else had been here.

  Maybe someone else was still here.

  Chapter 6

  I liked the house the most before we had fully moved in, maybe because its sparseness suggested that it wouldn’t be hard to move out again, or because a cluttered house leaves far too much stuff for ghosts to mingle with or hide behind, shadows which could be innocent, or …

  No, actually, I think it is all about respect. When you have only minimal amounts of furniture in a house, you haven’t colonized it, it isn’t yours, the house belongs to itself and its other occupants every bit as much as it belongs to you, which is the very reason people cram every inch of their houses with the accumulation of objects and repaint all their walls at the first opportunity. New houses have to be tamed and made subservient to the purposes of the new occupiers.

  I don’t see it that way. In all likelihood, we are only passing through there for a few years, or possibly shorter. Why disrupt the pre-existing working relationship?

  I know this makes it sound as if a house is alive, but it is alive, full of the ghosts of the people and events that have gone on there, and this house was more alive or - as ‘alive’ seems a strange word to choose under the circumstances - more haunted than most.

  That first night, as the boys decided to share a room, Belle and I christened the house à deux, Belle shouting out her pleasure into the ceiling several times in a way that tended to disturb the decorum and sexual sensitivities of the twins but apparently not those of the house. The streetlights cast shadows into our room, but with no hint of malevolence, and as I covered Belle, I did not feel as if I was exposing my back to daggers or icy fingers.

  Maybe the house was watching us too, judging the peculiarities and habits of these new occupants and gauging the extent, if any, to which they could, and should, disrupt our lives.

  Indeed, we got through almost a week without incident, making it one of the few weeks of peace we were ever to have there.

  *
* *

  They picked on George first, or maybe he picked on George, which was cowardly and unfair to a woolly being who had never bitten, or even barked at, anyone or anything in his life, and who only asked to remain cheerfully inebriated and left to enjoy his high standards of food and alcohol, and to have his aching morning hangover dealt with by a bowlful of Fat Tire. We lived in a city where even the soup kitchens are Zagat-rated, and George considered himself fully entitled to a limitless supply of gourmet riches and brain cell tickling splendor. Why not?

  So who was emptying his bowl?

  He could see me pouring in the Fat Tire. He could see me turning my back and throwing the beer bottle in the garbage, then leaving the kitchen, and he saw nothing else as he approached the bowl, not least because his hair and his hangover were impairing his vision, but when he reached his bowl, it was empty.

  Empty?

  This had never happened to him before.

  He barked.

  That had never happened to us before.

  “George, what is it?” Belle called out to him. “Did Luke buy you the wrong gin?”

  “Beer,” I corrected her. “It’s Fat Tire. I don’t see the problem. Maybe they have changed their Chief Blender, or whatever he is called, or George is in need of two hairs of the dog this morning. Weird, though.”

  I got out of my chair and staggered to the kitchen. In common with many new residents of San Francisco, I was suffering from foot trouble. The doctor had given it a longer name, though, calling it plantar fasciitis, which is where you damage the ligament supporting the bridge of your foot by walking too many miles up and down hills while supporting several more pounds in weight than you should have.

  George was sitting by his bowl with a mixture of anticipation, confusion, and I have to say aggression, on his face. Whatever had happened, he was giving me time to fix it, but he expected me to make it my next priority and not to start arguing over who had drunk his Fat Tire. He didn’t necessarily expect me to believe that it hadn’t been him, but he didn’t want me to waste time while I considered whether to replenish his bowl or not.