Ghosts: Recent Hauntings

by Richard Bowes

  Panic was burning up my oxygen. Lack of oxygen was making my panic worse. Somewhere in all of this I managed the one clear thought that I was never going to get out of the Box if I didn’t unbuckle my harness first.

  It was at this point that the non-existent figure in the seat opposite leaned forward. In a smooth, slow move, it reached out and placed its hand over my harness release. The goggled face looked into my own. Between the flat glass lenses and the mask, no part of its flesh could be seen. For a moment I believed that it had reached over to help me out. But it kept its hand there, covering the buckle. Far from helping me, it seemed intent on preventing my escape.

  I felt its touch. It wore no gloves. I’d thought that my own hand might pass through it as through a shadow, but it was as solid as yours or mine. When I tried to push it aside, it moved beneath my own as if all the bones in it had been broken. They shifted and grated like gravel inside a gelid bag.

  When I tried to grab it and wrench it away, I felt its fingers dig in. I was trying with both hands now, but there was no breaking that grip. I somehow lost the rebreather mouthpiece as I blew out, and saw my precious breath go boiling away in a gout of bubbles. I wondered if Buster would see them break the surface but of course they wouldn’t, they’d just collect and slide around inside the floorpan of the Box until it was righted again.

  I had a fight not to suck water back into my emptied lungs. Some dead hand was on my elbow. It had to be one of the others. It felt like a solicitous touch, but it was meant to hamper me. Something else took a firm grip on my ankle. Darkness was overwhelming me now. I was being drawn downward into an unknown place.

  And then, without sign or warning, it was over. The Box was revolving up into the light, and all the water was emptying out through every space and opening. As the level fell, I could see all around me. I could see the other seats, and they were as empty as when the session had begun.

  I was still deaf and disoriented for a few seconds, and it lasted until I tilted my head and shook the water out of my ears. I had to blow some of it out of my nose as well, and it left me with a sensation like an ice cream headache.

  My harness opened easily, but once I’d undone it I didn’t try to rise. I wasn’t sure I’d have the strength. I gripped the seat arms and hung on as the Box was lowered.

  I was still holding on when Buster Brown looked in though one of the window holes and said, “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  He was not impressed. “Oh, yes?”

  “Had a bit of a problem releasing the buckle. Something seemed to get in the way.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He looked at the unsecured harness and said, “Well, it seems to be working well enough now.”

  I’d thought I could brazen it through, but my patience went all at once. “Just leave it, will you?” I exploded, and shoved him aside as I climbed out.

  I never did tell Buster what I’d seen. That lost me his friendship, such as it was. I went on sick leave for three weeks, and during that time I applied for a transfer to another department. My application was successful, and they moved me onto the firefighting course. If they hadn’t, I would have resigned altogether. There was no force or duty on earth that could compel me into the tank or anywhere near the Box again.

  The reason, which I gave to no one, was simple enough. I knew that if I ever went back, they would be waiting. Terriss, and all the others in my crew. Though the choice had not been mine, I had taken away their luck. Now they kept a place for me amongst them, there below the sea.

  Wherever the sea might be found. Far from being haunted, the Box was a kind of tabula rasa. It had no history, and it held no ghosts. Each man brought his own.

  My days are not so different now. As before they begin in the classroom, with forms and briefings and breathing apparatus drill. Then we go out into the grounds, first to where a soot-stained, mocked-up tube of metal stands in for a burning aircraft, and then on to a maze of connected rooms which we pump full of smoke before sending our students in to grope and stumble their way to the far exit.

  They call these rooms the Rat Trap, and they are a fair approximation of the hazard they portray. Some of the men emerge looking frightened and subdued. When pressed, they speak of presences in the smoke, of unseen hands that catch at their sleeves and seem to entreat them to remain.

  I listen to their stories. I tell them that this is common.

  And then I sign their certificates and let them go.

  She had been dead for over seventy years, and she would be dead

  forever and forever.

  Ancestor Money

  Maureen F. McHugh

  In the afterlife, Rachel lived alone. She had a clapboard cabin and a yard full of gray geese which she could feed or not and they would do fine. Purple morning glories grew by the kitchen door. It was always an early summer morning and had been since her death. At first, she had wondered if this were some sort of Catholic afterlife. She neither felt the presence of God nor missed his absence. But in the stasis of this summer morning, it was difficult to wonder or worry, year after year.

  The honking geese told her someone was coming. Geese were better than dogs, and maybe meaner. It was Speed. “Rachel?” he called from the fence.

  She had barely known Speed in life—he was her husband’s uncle and not a person she had liked or approved of. But she had come to enjoy his company when she no longer had to fear sin or bad companions.

  “Rachel,” he said, “you’ve got mail. From China.”

  She came and stood in the doorway, shading her eyes from the day. “What?” she said.

  “You’ve got mail from China,” Speed said. He held up an envelope. It was big, made of some stiff red paper, and sealed with a darker red bit of wax.

  She had never received mail before. “Where did you get it?” she asked.

  “It was in the mailbox at the end of the hollow,” Speed said. He said “holler” for “hollow.” Speed had a thick brush of wiry black hair that never combed flat without hair grease.

  “There’s no mailbox there,” she said.

  “Is now.”

  “Heavens, Speed. Who put you up to this?” she said.

  “It’s worse ’n that. No one did. Open it up.”

  She came down and took it from him. There were Chinese letters going up and down on the left side of the envelope. The stamp was as big as the palm of her hand. It was a white crane flying against a gilt background. Her name was right there in the middle in beautiful black ink.

  Rachel Ball

  b. 1892 d. 1927

  Swan Pond Hollow, Kentucky

  United States

  Speed was about to have apoplexy, so Rachel put off opening it, turning the envelope over a couple of times. The red paper had a watermark in it of twisting Chinese dragons, barely visible. It was an altogether beautiful object.

  She opened it with reluctance.

  Inside it read: Honorable Ancestress of Amelia Shaugnessy: an offering of death money and goods has been made to you at Tin Hau Temple in Yau Ma Tei, in Hong Kong. If you would like to claim it, please contact us either by letter or phone. HK8-555-4444.

  There were more Chinese letters, probably saying the same thing.

  “What is it?” Speed asked.

  She showed it to him.

  “Ah,” he said.

  “You know about this?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, “except that the Chinese do that ancestor worship. Are you going to call?”

  She went back inside and he followed her. His boots clumped on the floor. She was barefoot and so made no noise. “You want some coffee?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “Are you going to write back?”

  “I’m going to call,” she said. Alexander Graham Bell had thought that the phone would eventually allow communication with the spirits of the dead, and so the link between the dead and phones had been established. Rachel had a
cell phone she had never used. She dialed it now, standing in the middle of her clean kitchen, the hem of her skirt damp from the yard and clinging cool around her calves.

  The phone rang four times, and then a voice said, “Wei.”

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Wei,” said the voice again. “Wei?”

  “Hello, do you speak English?” she said.

  There was the empty sound of ether in the airwaves. Rachel frowned at Speed.

  Then a voice said, “Hello? Yes?”

  Rachel thought it was the same voice, accented but clear. It did not sound human, but had a reedy, hollow quality.

  “This is Rachel Ball. I got an envelope that said I should call this number about, um,” she checked the letter, “death money.” Rachel had not been able to read very well in life, but it was one of those things that had solved itself in the afterlife.

  “Ah. Rachel Ball. A moment . . . ”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Yes. It is a substantial amount of goods and money. Would you like to claim it?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Hold on,” said the voice. She couldn’t tell if it was male or female.

  “What’s going on?” Speed asked.

  Rachel waved her hand to shush him.

  “Honorable Ancestress, your claim has been recorded. You may come at any time within the next ninety days to claim it,” said the strange, reedy voice.

  “Go there?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said the voice.

  “Can you send it?”

  “Alas,” said the voice, “we cannot.” And the connection was closed.

  “Wait,” she said. But when she pushed redial, she went directly to voicemail. It was in Chinese.

  Speed was watching her, thoughtful. She looked at her bare feet and curled her toes.

  “Are you going to go?” Speed asked her.

  “I guess,” she said. “Do you want to come?”

  “I traveled too much in life,” he said, and that was all. Rachel had never gone more than twenty-five miles from Swan Pond in life and had done less in death. But Speed had been a hobo in the Depression, leaving his wife and kids without a word and traveling the south and the west. Rachel did not understand why Speed was in heaven, or why some people were here and some people weren’t, or where the other people were. She had figured her absence of concern was part of being dead.

  Rachel had died, probably of complications from meningitis, in 1927, in Swan Pond, Kentucky. She had expected that Robert, her husband, would eventually be reunited with her. But in life, Robert had remarried badly and had seven more children, two of whom died young. She saw Robert now and again and felt nothing but distant affection for him. He had moved on in life, and even in death he was not her Robert anymore.

  But now something flickered in her that was a little like discontent. Amelia Shaugnessy was . . . her granddaughter. Child of her third child and second daughter, Evelyn. Amelia had sent her an offering. Rachel touched her fingers to her lips, thinking. She touched her hair.

  What was it she had talked to on the phone? Some kind of Chinese spirit? Not an angel.

  “I’ll tell you about it when I get back,” she said.

  She did not take anything. She did not even close the door.

  “Rachel,” Speed said from her door. She stopped with her hand on the gate. “Are you going to wear shoes?” he asked.

  “Do you think I need them?” she asked.

  He shrugged.

  The geese were gathered in a soft gray cluster by the garden at the side of the little clapboard cabin where they had been picking among the tomato plants. All their heads were turned towards her.

  She went out the gate. The road was full of pale dust like talcum powder, already warmed by the sun. It felt so good, she was glad that she hadn’t worn shoes.

  As she walked, she seemed to walk forward in time. She came down and out the hollow, past a white farmhouse with a barn and silo and a radio in the windowsill playing a Red’s baseball game against the Padres. A black Rambler was parked in the driveway and laundry hung drying in the breeze, white sheets belling out.

  Where the road met the highway was a neat brick ranch house with a paved driveway and a patient German shepherd lying in the shade under a tree. There was a television antenna like a lightning rod. The German shepherd watched her but did not bark.

  She waited at the highway and after a few minutes saw a Greyhound bus coming through the valley, following the Laurel River. She watched it through the curves, listening to the grinding down and back up of its gears. The sign on the front of the bus said LEXINGTON, so that was where she supposed she would go next.

  The bus stopped in front of her, sighing, and the door opened.

  By the time she got to Lexington, the bus had modernized. It had a bathroom and the windows were tinted smoky colored. Highway 25 had become Interstate 75, and outside the window they were passing horse farms with white board fence rising and falling across bluegreen fields. High-headed horses with manes like women’s hair that shone in the sun.

  “Airport, first,” the driver called. “Then bus terminal with connections to Cincinnati, New York City, and Sausalito, California.” She thought he sounded northern.

  Rachel stepped down from the bus in front of the terminal. The tarmac was pleasantly warm. As the bus pulled out, the breeze from its passing belled her skirt and tickled the back of her neck. She wondered if perhaps she should have worn a hat.

  She wasn’t afraid—what could happen to her here? She was dead. The bus had left her off in front of glass doors that opened to some invisible prompt. Across a cool and airy space was a counter for Hong Kong Air, and behind it, a diminutive Chinese woman in a green suit and a tiny green pillbox cap trimmed with gold. Her name tag said “Jade Girl,” but her skin was as white as porcelain teeth.

  Rachel hesitated for the first time since she had walked away from her own gate. This grandchild of hers who had sent her money, what obligation had she placed on Rachel? For more than seventy years, far longer than she had lived, Rachel had been at peace in her little clapboard house on the creek, up in the hollow. She missed the companionable sound of the geese, and the longing was painful in a way she had forgotten. She was so startled by the emotion that she lifted her hand to her silent heart.

  “May I help you?” the woman asked.

  Wordlessly, Rachel showed her the envelope.

  “Mrs. Ball?” the woman behind the counter said. “Your flight is not leaving for a couple of hours. But I have your ticket.”

  She held out the ticket, a gaudy red plastic thing with golden dragons and black. Rachel took it because it was held out to her. The Chinese woman had beautiful hands, but Rachel had the hands of a woman who gardened—clean but not manicured or soft.

  The ticket made something lurch within her and she was afraid. Afraid. She had not been afraid for more than seventy years. And she was barefoot and hadn’t brought a hat.

  “If you would like to shop while you are waiting,” the woman behind the counter said, and gestured with her hand. There were signs above them that said “Terminal A/Gates 1-24A” with an arrow, and “Terminal B/Gates 1-15B.”

  “There are shops along the concourse,” the Chinese woman said.

  Rachel looked at her ticket. Amidst the Chinese letters, it said, “Gate 4A.” She looked back up at the sign. “Thank you,” she said.

  The feeling of fear had drained from her like water in sand and she felt like herself again. What had that been about, she wondered. She followed the arrows to a brightly lit area full of shops. There was a book shop and a flower shop, a shop with postcards and salt and pepper shakers and stuffed animals. It also had sandals, plastic things in bright colors. Rachel’s skirt was pale blue, so she picked a pair of blue ones. They weren’t regular sandals. The sign said flip-flops, and they had a strap sort of business that went between the big toe and second toe that felt odd. But she decided if they bothered her too
much, she could always carry them.

  She picked a postcard of a beautiful horse and found a pen on the counter. There was no shop girl. She wrote, “Dear Simon, The bus trip was pleasant.” That was Speed’s actual name. She paused, not sure what else to say. She thought about telling him about the odd sensations she had had at the ticket counter but didn’t know how to explain it. So she just wrote, “I will leave for Hong Kong in a few hours. Sincerely, Rachel.”

  She addressed it to Simon Philpot, Swan Pond Hollow. At the door to the shop there was a mailbox on a post. She put the card in and raised the flag. She thought of him getting the card out of the new mailbox at the end of the hollow and a ghost of the heartsickness stirred in her chest. So she walked away, as she had from her own gate that morning, her new flip-flops snapping a little as she went. Partway down the concourse she thought of something she wanted to add and turned and went back to the mailbox. She was going to write, “I am not sure about this.” But the flag was down, and when she opened the mailbox, the card was already gone.

  There were other people at Gate 4A. One of them was Chinese with a blue face and black around his eyes. His eyes were wide, the whites visible all the way around the very black pupils. He wore strange shoes with upturned toes, red leggings, elaborate red armor, and a strange red hat. He was reading a Chinese newspaper.

  Rachel sat a couple of rows away from the demon. She fanned herself with the beautiful red envelope, although she wasn’t warm. There was a TV, and on it a balding man was telling people what they should and should not do. He was some sort of doctor, Dr. Phil. He said oddly rude things, and the people sat, hands folded like children, and nodded.

  “Collecting ancestor money?” a man asked. He wore a dark suit, white shirt and tie, and a fedora. “My son married a Chinese girl and every year I have to make this trip.” He smiled.