Ghosts: Recent Hauntings

by Richard Bowes

  Raising her hand, Carol covered her own right eye with her palm. The little girl remained still and silent. Carol lowered her hand from her face. “Peek-a-boo,” she said.

  Finally, the little girl smiled shyly and lowered her own hand. She had no right eye at all, just a smooth indented bank of flesh.

  Carol was really good. She hardly jumped at all and her gasp was as short-lived as could reasonably be expected.

  The little girl’s voice was very matter-of-fact. “Momma lost my eye patch,” she said.

  “Oh. That’s a shame,” said Carol, trying to keep her own voice as equally everyday.

  “She’s gonna get me another one. When she goes to town.”

  “Oh, well, that’s good. Will she get a nice color? Do you have a favorite color?”

  The little girl shrugged. “What are you, retarded?” she said. “It’s an eye patch. Who cares what color it is?”

  Carol didn’t know whether to laugh or slap her.

  “You can go now, if you like,” said the little girl. “I have to make water.”

  “Oh. All right. Sure. Well, look after yourself,” Carol said and, raising her hand in a slightly awkward wave of farewell, headed for the exit door. The little girl called after her.

  “You take care in those woods now, Carol,” she said.

  “I hadn’t told her my name,” said Carol.

  “Well, that was weird,” Michael said.

  Carol smiled, pleased. “That wasn’t weird,” she said. “It got weird. Later. After I got lost in the woods.”

  “You got lost in the woods?”

  Carol nodded.

  “Why’d they let you go wandering off on your own?”

  “Who?”

  “Your new American friends. The people you were in the café with.”

  “Ha. Café. Diner, stupid. We were in America.”

  “Whatever. How could they let you get lost?”

  “Oh, yeah.” She thought for a second, looking out to their side at the boating lake and its ghost moon. “Well, p’raps they weren’t there to begin with. Doesn’t matter. Listen.”

  Turned out Carol did get lost in the woods. Quite deep in the woods, actually. Heart of the forest, Hansel and Gretel shit, where the sunlight, through the thickening trees, was dappled and spotty and where the reassuring blue sky of what was left of the afternoon could be glimpsed only occasionally through the increasingly oppressive canopy of high leafy branches.

  Carol was tramping her way among the trees and the undergrowth on the mossy and leaf strewn ground when she heard the sound for the first time. Faint and plaintive and too distant to be truly identifiable, it was nevertheless suggestive of something, something that Carol couldn’t quite put her finger on yet. Only when it came again, a few moments later, did she place it. It was the sound of a lonely ship’s horn in a midnight ocean, melancholy and eerie. Not quite as eerie, though, as the fact that once the horn had sounded this second time, all the other sounds stopped, all the other sounds that Carol hadn’t even been consciously aware of until they disappeared; birdsong, the footsteps of unseen animals moving through the woods, the sigh of the breeze as it whistled through the branches.

  The only sounds now were those she made herself; the rustle and sway of the living branches she was pushing her way through and the crackle and snap of the dead ones she was breaking beneath her. Carol began to wonder if moving on in the same direction she’d been going was that great of an idea. She turned around and started heading back and, within a few yards, stepping out from between two particularly close trees, she found herself in a small grove-like clearing that she didn’t remember passing through earlier.

  There was a downed and decaying tree trunk lying in the leafy undergrowth that momentarily and ridiculously put Carol in mind of a park bench. But she really wasn’t in the mood to sit and relax and it wasn’t like there was, you know, a boating lake to look at the moon in or anything. So she kept moving, across the clearing, past the downed trunk, and stopped only when the voice spoke from behind her.

  “What’s your rush, sweetheart?”

  Carol turned back. Sitting perched on the bench-like trunk was a sailor. He was dressed in a square-neck deck shirt and bell-bottomed pants and Carol might have taken a moment to wonder if sailors still dressed like that these days if she hadn’t been too busy being surprised just to see him at all. He was sitting in profile to her, one leg on the ground, the other arched up on the trunk and he didn’t turn to face her fully, perhaps because he was concentrating on rolling a cigarette.

  “Ready-mades are easier,” the sailor said. “But I like the ritual—opening the paper, laying in the tobacco, rolling it up. Know what I mean?”

  “I don’t smoke,” said Carol, which wasn’t strictly true, but who the fuck was he to deserve the truth.

  “You chew?” he asked.

  “Chew what?”

  “Tobacco.”

  “Eugh. No.”

  The sailor chanted something rhythmic in response, like he was singing her a song but knew his limitations when it came to carrying a tune:

  “Down in Nagasaki,

  Where the fellas chew tobaccy

  And the women wicky-wacky-woo.”

  Carol stared at him. Confused. Not necessarily nervous. Not yet. She gestured out at the woods. “Where’d you come from?” she said.

  “Dahlonega, Georgia. Little town Northeast of Atlanta. Foot of the Appalachians.”

  That wasn’t what she’d meant and she started to tell him so, but he interrupted.

  “Ever been to Nagasaki, honeybun?”

  “No.”

  “How about Shanghai?”

  The sailor was still sitting in profile to her. Talking to her, but staring straight ahead into the woods and beyond. He didn’t wait for a reply. “Docked there once,” he said. “Didn’t get shore-leave. Fellas who did told me I missed something, boy. Said there were whores there could practically tie themselves in knots. Real limber. Mmm. A man likes that. Likes ’em limber.”

  Carol was very careful not to say anything at all. Not to move. Not to breathe.

  “Clean, too,” said the sailor. “That’s important to me. Well, who knows? Maybe I’ll get back there one of these days. Course, once they get a good look at me, I might have to pay extra.” He turned finally to face her. “Whaddaya think?”

  Half of his face was bone-pale and bloated, as if it had drowned years ago and been underwater ever since. His hair hung dank like seaweed and something pearl-like glinted in the moist dripping blackness of what used to be an eye socket.

  “Jesus Christ!” Carol said, frozen in shock, watching helplessly as the sailor put his cigarette in his half-ruined mouth, lit it, and inhaled.

  “Calling on the Lord for salvation,” he said. “Good for you. Might help.” Smoke oozed out from the pulpy white flesh that barely clung to the bone beneath his dead face. “Might not.”

  He rose to his feet and grinned at her. “Useta chase pigs through the Georgia pines, sweet thing,” he said, flinging his cigarette aside. “Let’s see if you’re faster than them little squealers.”

  And then he came for her.

  “I was a lot faster, though,” said Carol. “But it still took me ten minutes to lose him.”

  “Fuck, Carol,” said Michael. “That wasn’t funny.”

  “I didn’t say it was funny. I said it was weird. Remember?”

  Michael turned to look at her and she tilted her face to look up at his, dark eyes glinting, adorably proud of herself. They’d walked nearly a full circuit of the lake now, neither of them even thinking to branch off in the direction of the park’s northern gate and the way home.

  “Well, it was weird all right,” Michael said. “Creepy ghost sailor. Pretty good.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Turns out there was a ship went down there in the second World War. All hands lost.”

  “Went down in the woods. That was a good trick.”

  “It wasn’t the wood
s. Didn’t I tell you that? It was the beach. That’s where it all happened.”

  “Was it Redondo?”

  “The fuck’s Redondo?” she said, genuinely puzzled.

  “It’s a beach. In America. I’ve heard of it. It’s on that Patti Smith album.”

  “Oh, yeah. No. This wasn’t in America. It was in Cornwall.” She thought about it for a moment. “Yeah. Had to be Cornwall because of the rock pool.”

  “You didn’t say anything about a rock pool.”

  “I haven’t told you yet,” she said, exasperated. “God, you’re rubbish.”

  Michael laughed, even though something else had just hit him. He was walking on a moonlit night alone with a beautiful girl and it apparently wasn’t occurring to him to try anything. He hadn’t even put his arm around her, for Christ’s sake. Terry and Kirk would give him such shit for this when he told them. He wondered for the first time if that was something Carol knew, if that was what had always been behind her stories, why she found them, why she told them, like some instinctive Scheherazade keeping would-be lovers at bay with narrative strategies. He felt something forming in him, a kind of sadness that he couldn’t name and didn’t understand.

  “Is everything all right, Carol?” he asked, though he couldn’t say why.

  “Well, it is now,” she said, deaf to the half-born subtext in his question. “I got away. I escaped. But that spoils the story, dickhead. You’ve got to hear what happened first.”

  The park was silver-gray in the light from the moon. He wondered what time it was. “The rock pool,” he said.

  “Exactly,” she said, pleased that he was paying attention.

  She hadn’t seen it at first. Had kept moving along the deserted beach until the sandy shore gave way to rocky cave-strewn outcrops from the cliffs above the coastline. It was only when she clambered over an algae and seaweed coated rock wall that she found it. Orphaned from the sea and held within a natural basin formation, the pool was placid and still and ringed by several large boulders about its rim. It was about twenty feet across and looked to be fairly deep.

  On one of the boulders, laid out as if waiting for their owner, were some items of clothing. A dress, a pair of stockings, some underwear. Carol looked from them out to the cool inviting water of the pool. A head broke surface as she looked, and a woman started swimming toward the rock where her clothes were. Catching sight of Carol, she stopped and trod water, looking at her suspiciously. “What are you doing?” she said. “Are you spying?” She was older than Carol, about her mum’s age maybe, a good-looking thirty-five.

  “No, I’m not,” Carol said. “Why would I be spying?”

  “You might be one of them,” the woman said.

  “One of who?”

  The woman narrowed her eyes and looked at Carol appraisingly. “You know who,” she said.

  “No, I don’t,” Carol said. “And I’m not one of anybody. I was with some friends. We went to France. Just got back. The boat’s down there on the beach.”

  “They’ve all got stories,” the woman said. “That’s how they get you.”

  “Who?! Stop talking shit, willya? I . . .” Carol bit her tongue.

  For the first time, the woman smiled. “Are you moderating your language for me?” she said. “That’s adorable.”

  Carol felt strangely flustered. Was this woman flirting with her?

  “I understand,” the woman said, still smiling, still staring straight into Carol’s eyes. “I’m an older lady and you want to be polite. But, you know, I’m not really that much older.” She stepped out of the pool and stood there right in front of Carol, glistening wet and naked. “See what I mean?” she said.

  Carol felt funny. She swallowed. The woman kept her eyes fixed on Carol as she stepped very close to her. “I’m going to tell you a secret,” she said, and leaned forward to whisper the secret in Carol’s ear. “I’m real limber for my age.”

  Carol jumped back as the woman’s voice began a familiar rhythmic chant.

  “Down in Nagasaki,

  Where the fellas chew tobaccy,

  And the women wicky-wacky-woo.”

  Carol tried to run but the woman had already grabbed her by the throat. “What’s your rush, sweetheart?” she said, and her voice was different now, guttural and amused. “Party’s just getting started.”

  Carol was struggling in the choking grip. She tried to swing a fist at the woman’s head but her punch was effortlessly blocked by the woman’s other arm.

  “Your eyes are so pretty,” the woman said. “I’m going to have them for earrings.”

  Her mouth opened inhumanly wide. Her tongue flicked out with reptile speed. It was long and black and forked.

  “But like I said,” said Carol, “I escaped.”

  “How?” said Michael, expecting another previously unmentioned element to be brought into play, like a knife or a gun or a really sharp stick or a last-minute rescue from her Francophile friends from the recently invented boat. But Carol had a different ending in mind.

  “I walked into the Moon,” she said.

  Michael looked up to the night sky.

  “No,” said Carol. “Not that Moon. This one.”

  She was pointing out towards the center of the utterly calm lake and the perfect Moon reflected there. Looking at it with her, neither of them walking now, Michael felt the cold of the night as if for the first time. He waited in silence, afraid to speak, afraid to give voice to his questions, afraid that they would be answered.

  She told another story then, the last, he knew, that his sweet lost friend would ever tell him, the tale of how the other Moon had many ways into and out of this world: Through placid lakes on summer evenings; through city streets on rain-slicked nights; from out the ocean depths for the eyes of lonely night-watch sailors.

  And when she was done, when Michael could no longer pretend not to know in whose company he truly was, she turned to him and smiled a heartbreaking smile of farewell.

  She looked beautiful in monochrome, in the subtle tones of the Moon that had claimed her for its own. Not drained of color, but richly re-imagined, painted in shades of silver, gray, and black, and delicate lunar blue. She looked almost liquid, as if, were Michael to reach out a hand and even try to touch her, she might ripple into strange expansions of herself.

  “Thanks, Michael,” she said. “I can make it home from here.”

  Michael didn’t say anything. Didn’t know what he could possibly find to say that the tears in his young eyes weren’t already saying. The beautiful dead girl pointed a silver finger beyond him, in the direction of his life. “Go on,” she said kindly. “Don’t look back.”

  And he didn’t look back, not even when he heard the impossible footsteps on the water, not even when he heard the shadow Moon sigh in welcome, and the quiet lapping of the lake water as if something had slipped effortlessly beneath it.

  He’d later hear the alternative versions of course—the stories of how, one moonlit night, Carol had walked out of the third-floor window of her step-father’s house and the vile rumors as to why—but he would prefer, for all his days, to believe the story that the lost girl herself had chosen to tell him.

  He continued home through the park, not even breaking step as his fingers sought and found the numb spot on his cheek, the frozen place where her cold lips had blessed him, waiting for her frostbite kiss to bloom in tomorrow’s mirror.

  We stood, right in the spot where the mirror should have reflected us.

  Right where Grandpa died.

  The Muldoon

  Glen Hirshberg

  “He found that he could not even concentrate for more than an instant on Skeffington’s death, for Skeffington, alive, in multiple guises, kept getting in the way.”

  — John O’Hara

  That night, like every night we spent in our grandfather’s house, my older brother Martin and I stayed up late to listen. Sometimes, we heard murmuring in the white, circular vent high up the cracking plaster w
all over our heads. The voices were our parents’, we assumed, their conversation captured but also muffled by the pipes in the downstairs guest room ceiling. In summer, when the wind went still between thunderstorms, we could almost make out words. Sometimes, especially in August, when the Baltimore heat strangled even the thunderclouds, we heard cicadas bowing wildly in the grass out our window and twenty feet down.

  On the dead-still September night after my grandfather’s shiva, though, when all of the more than two thousand well-wishers we’d hosted that week had finally filed through the house and told their stories and left, all Martin and I heard was the clock. Tuk, tuk, tuk, like a prison guard’s footsteps. I could almost see it out there, hulking over the foyer below, nine feet of carved oak and that bizarre, glassed-in face, brass hands on black velvet with brass fittings. Even though the carvings all the way up the casing were just wiggles and flourishes, and even though the velvet never resembled anything but a blank, square space, the whole thing had always reminded me more of a totem pole than a clock, and it scared me, some.

  “Miriam,” my brother whispered. “Awake?”

  I hesitated until after the next tuk. It had always seemed bad luck to start a sentence in rhythm with that clock. “Think they’re asleep?”

  He sat up. Instinctively, my glance slipped out our open door to the far hallway wall. My grandfather had died right out there, felled at last by the heart attack his physician had warned him for decades was coming if he refused to drop fifty pounds. It seemed impossible that his enormous body had left not the slightest trace in the threadbare hallway carpet, but there was none. What had he even been doing up here? In the past four years or so, I’d never once seen him more than two steps off the ground floor.

  The only thing I could see in the hallway now was the mirror. Like every other mirror in the house, it had been soaped for the shiva, and so, instead of the half-reassuring, half-terrifying blur of movement I usually glimpsed there, I saw only darkness, barely penetrated by the single butterfly nightlight plugged in beneath it.

  Reaching over the edge of the bed, I found my sweatpants and pulled them on under my nightgown. Then I sat up, too.