“Bats!”
“They see us!” said Frank.
“They hear us!” William realized. "They can hear things people can’t hear!”
The bats circled away from the ghosts, hiding inside the bell, hanging upside down from the clapper. More and more of them swooped to get away from the ghosts until dozens—hundreds—covered the clapper. When the ghosts moved to one side of the bell-tower, the bats swerved to the opposite side of the clapper.
A soft clang rang out; the movement of the bats rocked the clapper.
“Move! Fly!” Frank and William rocketed around to keep the bats moving, to keep them seeking a safe place opposite the ghosts.
Clang! The clapper hit one side of the bell. Clang! With every clang the ghosts circled to the opposite side, making sure the bats kept moving back and forth.
Clang!
Windows were thrown up in the town below.
“What’s the alarm? What’s happening?”
The neighbours across the street saw the fire. “Call the fire department!” one shouted to his wife.
“Wake up the neighbours!” his wife called back.
Soon people were running up the street, shouting, pounding on house doors.
Clang! The ghosts kept the bats moving, flying, clinging inside the bell.
Clang! The bats kept the clapper moving.
The firehouse horn began sounding to call in the volunteers. The engine fired up and sirens howling, like a quarrelsome cat, roared up the street.
“Here’s the hydrant!” a boy shouted. The hose men completed the hook-up while other firemen rushed inside the house, making sure everyone was out.
Frank’s son stood in his pyjamas in the street, one arm around his wife, the other holding young Jack. “I don’t know what happened,” he kept saying. “What happened?”
William’s daughter, her husband, and little Kirstey had stumbled down the stairs in their night things. Neighbours rushed to keep both families warm with blankets.
The fire chief told them, “It’s mostly in the shed. Some of the siding on the houses caught fire, but we’ll put it out without too much damage.”
As the shock began to wear off, young Jackie and Kirstey climbed excitedly on the fire engine. Kirstey rang the engine’s bell, and Jackie blew the horn repeatedly, a loud blasting blare, more like a freight train blast than an ordinary car horn.
Wrapped in blankets, the parents began to heave sighs of relief. The shed fire was easily put out, the nearby homes sprayed with water to prevent them from igniting. Steam rose from the remains of the shed.
“Marty, what are you doing?” William’s daughter cried to her teenage son. Marty, upon discovering the fire was out, had sneaked back among the smoking wreckage of the shed.
“Nothing,” he said. “I was just seeing that the fire was out.”
The fire chief told his parents, “We’ll stay until everything is completely out. Then tomorrow the inspector will come to see if he can find what caused the fire. Do any of you smoke?”
“Oh, no!” said William’s daughter. “We’re a smoke-free house. My husband gave it up years ago.”
Marty, holding something under the blanket draped over his shoulders, moved off a little ways down the street, and dropped it into a neighbour’s trash can.
William, who had hovered with Frank over the scene, once their service at the belfry was no longer needed, scrutinized his grandson. Now he knew what Marty had been doing out in the shed before going to bed. Sure enough, when William peered into the neighbour’s trashcan, a pack had been discarded there, open, revealing a jumble of cigarettes falling out.
People were beginning to disperse. A couple of firemen and a police officer were assigned to stay on site and secure the scene. A reporter from William’s old newspaper was interviewing Frank’s family and the bystanders to find out what they had seen.
“But who rang the bell?” said Frank’s son. “That’s the person who should be interviewed. He gave the alarm and saved us all.”
But no one seemed to know who gave the alarm. The policeman went up to the town hall to see if the alert citizen was still there.
“The door was locked from the outside,” he reported. “Who had the key?” But no one except the janitor and the mayor had keys. They were among the crowd, and denied being the ones who rang the bell. Who could have gotten in?
“It must have been an angel,” William’s daughter said. And that’s what was to appear in the paper the next day: “Mysterious Angel Rings Alarm Bell, Saves Families from Fire!”
“Well, I never thought I was an angel,” said Frank.
“Me neither,” replied William. “Do I look like an angel?” The two floated their way back to the graveyard, the excitement over, the crowd gone home.
As they slipped into their familiar graves, Frank said, “Well, at least one good thing about being dead is there’s no one to holler at you for being out all night.”
A grumbling voice came from the next grave plot. “Will you guys please shut up? I’m trying to get some rest.”
“Old Crowley,” said William.
“I take back that last remark,” said Frank.
Silence settled over Union Church Cemetery.
~~~***~~~
The Once and Future Ghost
Janet McGinity
The clock struck 11 with a dull bong. Vera methodically wiped down the counter around the sink with a rag. With a weary sigh, she pushed hair off her face where it had come loose from her greying ponytail.
Vera rinsed the rag under hot water, wrung it out, and hung the damp cloth on the stove door handle. Then she opened the cabinet drawer to get a clean rag for tomorrow. The cloth resisted. It caught on a lump at the back. Vera tugged, and the rag finally came free. A small, heavy object snagged in a fold.
Curious, she pulled away the crumpled fabric, revealing a rose cameo. On the back of the stone was an open gold pin. Its sharp tip had stuck in the rag.
Vera held the cameo under the stove’s fluorescent light to see it better. The profile was of a young woman, glassy white against the deep blush of the rose quartz background. Her hair was gathered back in a pompadour style, with tendrils escaping around the ear. Earrings glinted as small bumps against the relief. “How strange,” she mused. “It must have been at the back of the drawer. I wonder how long it’s been there.”
She opened the drawer all the way, finding a two-inch space where the back wall did not quite meet the bottom. Perhaps the cameo fell from the drawer above, which had the same space at the back. Vera occasionally found odd articles around the house, dropped or lost by the people who had lived there before she and her husband, Arnold, bought the old Bennett house 10 years ago. Last week, she found a Christmas card stuck between a bedroom wall and the baseboard. Faded copperplate writing wished, “Dear Maude, a happy and prosperous 1913.”
Vera wondered about the woman who had worn the cameo. Might she be one of the Bennett girls? Vaguely, Vera remembered a photograph at the county museum of four laughing young women, arms entwined, carrying on in front of their home. Their long skirts, high-necked blouses, and pompadour hairstyles suggested a year around 1905. She thought one of the women might have worn a cameo on a ribbon around her neck.
“I must go to the museum and look at that photograph,” she said to herself. “I’ll do that tomorrow, if it’s open.” She took the cameo to the bedroom, and put it in a small cardboard jewellery box. The cameo seemed to pulsate against the white cotton wool lining. She ran her fingers lightly over the profile. It felt warm.
Vera frowned, closed the lid, and put the small box on the bedside table. She returned downstairs, checked that the front and back doors were locked, and turned out the lights like she did every night. The last thing she thought, before falling asleep, was that she must tell Arnold this Friday about finding the cameo. Another oddity in this strange old house.
The Bennett house had stood empty for five years before she and Arnold bought it.
The last of the family, an old lady living in Massachusetts, had not visited for a decade before she passed on. A nephew put the house up for sale, contents included. The real estate agent was happy to pass their purchase offer to the nephew, who was quick to accept and hand over the keys.
Tucked into the Maple Grove Valley below a narrow ridge, the house faced a quiet road just inland from the Bay of Fundy. A few commuters passed early each morning, going to jobs in Parrsboro. Pickup trucks rumbled through on their way to pulp-cutting operations on the other side of Cape Chignecto.
Arnold worked at one of these operations, deep in the woods. It was too far to return home at the end of a shift.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right, alone for five days at a time?” he’d asked, after he’d got the job with the Shulie pulp operation.
“I’ll be fine. I’m used to being on my own. After all, think of the women whose husbands were away fighting in the Second World War. They were on their own for as much as six years. Nobody complained.”
“Well, if you’re sure….” He gave her a surreptitious glance. She was self-reliant, but with no family in the immediate area, she’d have to ask neighbours for any help she might need.
Now she saw him only between late Friday evening and Sunday evening. At the end of their brief visit, Arnold went to bed early, as he rose before dawn on Monday to drive the 40 miles to work.
In the morning, Vera looked at the cameo nestled in its box. She touched it. It was warm. The profile took on the delicate pink of living human flesh. Or could it be the sunlight reflecting off the rose quartz?
She phoned the museum.
“We do have pictures of the Bennett family,” said the volunteer who answered the phone. “However, I’m not sure there will be enough detail for you to identify the cameo. I’m sorry to tell you we’re closed until tomorrow. Mr. Collins, the curator, is at a conference.”
Vera sighed and hung up the phone. Studying the pictures would have to wait. In the meantime, she decided to contact her old friend, Norbert Kelly, who lived 20 miles away in the village of Port Hebron. Norbert knew more than anyone about the people in this part of the county, their family connections, and their lives. His memory was incredible. He would certainly know the family, and maybe even have information about the woman who wore the cameo.
Norbert was delighted to hear from her.
“We’ll have a good old chin-wag,” he said. “I’ll see you this afternoon, and I’ll make a molasses cake to have with our tea. Bring that cameo, Vera. You’ve got me curious to see it now.”
She put the cameo and a notebook in her backpack, hesitated a moment, and threw in a camera as well.
Vera drove slowly down the long, steep hill that ended at Port Hebron. There was plenty of time to get to Norbert’s house, on the last street by the river. On an impulse, she suddenly decided to visit the United Church Cemetery, close to the junction with the main road to Port Hebron. She parked the Honda, and walked into the older section. Methodists and Presbyterians were laid to rest here, before most of those churches merged to form the United Church in 1925.
A wrought iron fence surrounded the graves which were laid out in neat rows and family plots under old maples and older willows. Trees whispered in a slight wind off the Bay. Stone angels marked the graves of children. The air felt chilly, even on this mid-August day. Many tombstones bore the year 1918, the year of the Spanish Flu epidemic, including five Bennett graves.
Moss and a few faded plastic flowers covered some newer graves. Vera idly wondered how often relatives came to visit. She took a few pictures before getting back on the road.
Norbert was taking a warm molasses cake out of the oven when she came through the door. The tea steamed in a brown crockery pot on the woodstove. Vera greeted him with a hug, and sat at the kitchen table. She took out the small box, opened it, and held it out to her friend. She felt the heat of the cameo even through the box.
“Can you feel that?” she asked.
He looked bemused. “Feel what?”
“It’s warm. At least it’s warm when I pick it up.”
Norbert had noticed nothing. He scrutinized the cameo, examining it from all angles. He gave her a long look, and handed it back to her.
“Where did you find this?” he asked.
“I found it at the back of a kitchen drawer. The pin caught in a rag.” She stirred milk into her tea, and settled back with a slice of molasses cake. Norbert added sugar to his tea, and took a bite of cake.
“I don’t suppose I told you about the first Bennetts to come around here,” he said. “William Bennett came out from England with his parents as a child. Went to sea when he was a young man. In those days, all goods came across the ocean or along the coast. He travelled to England pretty often, the Mediterranean, China a time or two, South America—even went around the Horn. He’d come home every couple of years, always with trinkets for Gladys and the girls. Old William owned a schooner for a while. My father knew him well.”
Norbert blew on his tea to cool it. William Bennett, he speculated, might have brought the cameo home, as a gift for Gladys or one of his daughters. He didn’t recall seeing any of them wearing it, but fashion had changed by the time he was old enough to notice such things.
Norbert had been a boy of 15 at the time of the Spanish Flu so he remembered it, and its terrible toll on the village, vividly. Soldiers returning from the Great War had unknowingly brought home the infection. The flu spread like wildfire, striking down previously healthy people in only a day or two. They drowned in their own fluid-filled lungs, leaving stunned families to deal with their loss. Most were young men and women—not babies and old people epidemics usually took. Dozens of villages were abandoned, even their names now forgotten. Vera and Norbert had together visited several lost village sites. Nothing was left now but yellow daffodils around cellar holes, and country cemeteries with many crude wooden markers bearing the year 1918.
The Bennett family lost William first, then Gladys, then three daughters to the epidemic. Lucy, the youngest and only survivor, inherited the family home in which she and her husband Malcolm Wilbur lived with their two young children, before Malcolm was killed on a log drive. Two years after Malcolm’s death, little James died of pneumonia. Lucy stayed on at the house with her daughter Evelyn. One year, she took her child to visit relatives in Boston, never to return. She wrote to a distant cousin, who agreed to act as caretaker of the Bennett house.
In the years afterwards, the cousin rented out the house to summer tenants. Evelyn came back occasionally for only a few weeks at a time, until she was too frail to travel.
Vera listened intently to Norbert’s story. She imagined the widowed Lucy and her young daughter alone for days at a time, like herself, in the silent house.
She often felt the Bennetts had never left. The attic was chock-a-block with their things: trunks of clothing, boxes of postcards and books, a dressmaker’s dummy, a spinning wheel, a tea-set from China, even a sewing machine with a heavy steel needle for sewing sails. Vera often spent rainy afternoons in the dusty space, reading postcards, trying on a dress from the Gay Nineties, and imagining community life in an earlier time.
In those days, the population was 10 times what it was now. Men fished, worked in the mills, cut timber in the woods like Arnold did now, but not near enough to come home often. Women raised large families and ran the farms in the men’s absence. Gracious Victorian houses still dotted the countryside, the former homes of lumber barons, shipbuilders and prosperous farmers. The mansion of shipbuilder George Spicer, now an inn, even had a ballroom with polished hardwood floors. She’d applied for a waitress job there just a week ago.
Did Lucy Bennett wear the cameo to a dance at that home? Those were happy days, before the family was ravaged by the Spanish horror. Vera instinctively picked up the cameo from its little box.
Norbert noticed the gesture. “Something about that cameo speaks to you,” he said.
She grinned sheepis
hly. “It does. Maybe because I’m surrounded by their stuff. I suppose we really should clean it out, especially the attic. It hasn’t been touched in a good 50 years.”
A burst of heat erupted from the cameo lying in her palm. It pulsed like a heartbeat. She dropped it, clattering, to the floor. Norbert’s eyebrows lifted. Slowly, Vera picked up the cameo. Her jaw dropped. A spot of rosy colour highlighted the profile’s cheek.
“Did you see that?” she asked. Norbert shook his head.
Without thinking, Vera hurriedly dropped the cameo in the box and clapped on the lid, covering the flushed cheek.
Norbert poured her another tea. “I think you might have stirred something up,” he said carefully. “Or maybe something stirred you up.”
Sensing her unease with the cameo, he suggested she leave it with him for a few days, at least until Arnold returned and the three of them could decide together what to do. Vera felt strangely reluctant to do so.
“I’ll take it home,” she said. “Whatever it is, it can’t harm me. It’s only a piece of jewellery.”
Vera drove back with much on her mind. She made a simple dinner of fresh garden vegetables and cold ham, and listened to CBC Radio for an hour.
That night, she dreamed of a dance at the George Spicer house. Fireflies glimmered in the warm summer night. Young men and women waltzed to the strains of piano and violin. Guests spilled out of the brightly-lit room onto the lawn, laughing at a story. She heard a conversation, whispered urgently just under the sound of the music, but could not make out the words.
In the morning, Vera felt calmer. She glanced at the cameo. The profile shone white against the rose quartz. She touched the surface. It was cold—just inert stone.
She drove to the county museum, where the curator welcomed her to browse their photo collection. Within minutes, she found an album of the Bennett family, with captions in faded silver pencil. In one, William Bennett stood unsmiling with his hand on Gladys’s shoulder. She held a baby on her knee, and a toddler clung to her hand. In another, little girls with giant hair ribbons posed demurely in front of a potted fern.
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