Down These Strange Streets

by George R. R. Martin; Gardner Dozois

  I stayed in Penacook for a couple more days and I bought myself the box I carry today. It’s a small brass thing, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, about as big as a pack of cards. The ring of hair went with me and from then on, well, I guess I was haunted.

  The Lady was quiet for a few days after. I’ll spare you the details of how I tried to get her to perform—once for a newspaper guy and once in a bar when I’d had too many shots. She stayed in the box and then, just to rile me, blew in my ears all the way home until I was swatting my own head in frustration. I had enough money to live and I spent that time thinking. What if every ghost had its link to the world, like the Lady’s lock of hair? It took me a while, but after about a week, I found myself in Franklin County, Massachusetts. I stopped again to put new ads in all the local papers. For the first time in years, I changed the copy and sold my services as a Ghost Hunter—Satisfaction or Your Money Back. It didn’t hurt that I’d made more money from Mrs. Weathers than my previous six jobs combined. I didn’t even grumble at the rates per word they quoted. There was gold in them thar hills.

  The first few months were a bit of a nightmare, I don’t mind telling you. It wasn’t that I didn’t get any calls; I did. I even thought I’d have to get another cell for work, it was so busy. The trouble was that of the houses I visited, not one of them had anything more supernatural than mice behind the walls. Even so, I learned the skills and I put a toolbox together that a carpenter might have approved. I could strip a room in an hour, and I guess the good builders and painters of Massachusetts must have thought it was Christmas with all the extra work I left for them. I found grumbling old pipes, rat nests, a bird trapped in a chimney, all sorts, but the Lady kept quiet. Outside, she would still tickle my head at times, just to show me she was there, but in the houses, she was quiet as the grave probably should be.

  The money ran out and for a time I was forced to go back to the old work, just to keep the main ads running and pay for gas. She didn’t like that. I could feel her breath on my face, pushing me away whenever I went to do my readings, until I had to leave the box in the motel room.

  It all changed that winter, after a heavy snowfall. I had a live call from my Hunter ads, though it meant driving to a town named Montague, about forty miles from where I was. I couldn’t afford chains and it was hard going, maybe four hours of creeping along with the wipers going and the lights lost in a blizzard. All those big trucks kept whooshing by as well, making me nervous.

  I had my tools and the Lady’s box with me and maybe I imagined it, but there was a feeling of excitement as I pressed the bell of a huge old house on Treadle Road, to the south of Main Street. A young Asian woman opened the door and I smiled at her, thinking that servants were a good sign for a payday. I felt that slight pressure at the back of my head as well, pushing me into the house after her.

  I’d been wrong before, but not that time. I was taken to a proper library, filled with books from floor to ceiling. The man who finally came to see me was young to own a place like that. I wondered if he’d inherited it, or whether he was some high-powered broker or something. He looked uncomfortable the whole time he talked to me, and I couldn’t read him that well. Turns out it was his wife who had called me, but she was out of town. You could see he would rather have thrown me out, but the snow was still falling and I assume his wife was not the sort of woman you cross lightly. I’ve met a few like that.

  He took me upstairs, fidgeting the whole time, like he couldn’t keep his hands still. He didn’t offer me a drink or anything, and I could see he was going to stand over me to be sure I didn’t steal anything. I didn’t mind, though, because the Lady was pushing me the whole way, like she knew there was something good up those stairs.

  The stairs opened up onto a landing with six or seven doors. To my surprise and mounting interest, he had to unlock one of them before I could go in. He saw my look and made a grimace.

  “It’s always cold in here, even with the boiler going. I don’t think it was properly insulated when the house was built.” I just smiled politely and he made his face again and led me in.

  It was cold. Not freezing, but chilly after the rest of the house. Straight away I could feel the Lady blowing on me, but I didn’t want to make it look easy.

  “My usual fee is six hundred dollars for this kind of work,” I said. He looked as if he’d bitten into a lemon when I said that, but I just stared him down.

  “You should know I don’t believe any of this,” he said, like he was scoring a point. I waited for him to think of his wife and how angry she’d be if he said he’d sent me away. Thing was, though, I’d have done it for free at that moment, just to see how it should work. Still, I waited until he nodded.

  “Cash,” I added. He almost sneered at me.

  “Of course,” he said.

  I left him alone. Time was I’d have taken pains to annoy a man like that, maybe even broken him up a little, but I was eager to get on and I could feel the Lady pressing me farther into the room.

  It took about five minutes, maybe less. I’ve learned since not to do it so quickly. The Lady guided me to the right place, and I used a handsaw to cut a floorboard and a claw hammer to yank up the right part. I found a piece of bone lying in the dust there, black with soot.

  “Have you ever had a fire here?” I called over my shoulder. He was looking kind of horrified at the damage I’d done, but he nodded.

  “My grandfather’s time, yes,” he said. It would have been a good hit, just the sort of thing they don’t expect you to know, even though it would have been in all the local papers at the time.

  “And someone died in that fire, in this room,” I said. It wasn’t even a question, and he just gaped at me as I brought the bone out into the air. It was only a piece and I couldn’t tell which part it had come from. Maybe an ankle, I don’t know. It was enough to keep the spirit in the same place, though. I could feel the temperature dropping, though there was nothing special, like frost patterns on the window. This wasn’t a powerful spirit. I’d meet those later.

  I took the bone out of his house and he paid me in cash, with all his sneers and fine attitudes neatly cut out of his manner. He had a look of awe in his eyes when he went up to check the room and found it warm. I had the bone in my pocket and it felt like there was winter all round me. I saw the man flinch as he took my hand and pumped it.

  “I’ll destroy it,” I promised. I did too. I wasn’t ready then to take in another boarder, and a spirit who just made you cold was no use to me.

  I don’t know what he said to his wife, but that girl had connections and there are a lot of old houses in Massachusetts. I stayed there for another six months and work came flooding in. There were the usual blanks, of course, but the Lady helped me with two real ones and I was off and running. I put my rates up for the big houses and for the first time in my life, I made some real money, enough to change out the transmission on the car. I even thought of renting a house for a time, but I’m happier moving on, always have been. Of course in the past, there’s always been bad memories to run from. I passed my fiftieth birthday in a motel and I even bought myself a goddamn cake and a candle. The Lady blew it out and I drank a fifth of good whiskey.

  I found Geronimo halfway through my second year. Now I know what you’re going to say and I agree with you. Why would that old Apache medicine man haunt an abandoned mansion in North Carolina? My honest guess is that whoever he really was, he just likes to call himself something different. I don’t know whether he was a New York broker who leaped out of a window, or just some cattle driver from the thirties. I do know he’s powerful, and that’s what matters. That’s what dragged me two hundred miles south when I heard about that old house, falling down with neglect and no one daring to live in it for half a century.

  He has enough strength to speak to me. Maybe working with the Lady made me sensitive, I don’t know, but I can hear the old man as a whisper and understand maybe about a quarter of it. The Lady and I found his relic
in the usual way, but that was all that was usual. I’d grown accustomed to thinking of spirits as weak things—a slightly chilly room isn’t The Shining, if you know what I mean. Geronimo could call up a storm, and we found his relics while there were books and dust swirling around us. I had to use an old door from the basement to cover my head while we dug out his bones. I guess he was probably murdered, as they don’t let you bury your loved ones in the garden, even in North Carolina.

  I dug them all out and took them down to the furnace in the basement. It took me half a day to get it going again, with four trips to a hardware store for supplies, but you need a high temperature to reduce bone to ash. You can’t just throw gas on it and stand back. I had the last bit in my hands, a piece of broken yellow bone, when the Lady blew on my face. The house had gone very quiet since I started the burning and I could feel the tension, the way air feels before a storm.

  I’d grown to trust the Lady and I put that old bone in my little box and took it away with me. Maybe she talked to him. Maybe she told him about the exciting life on the road and he went along. Hell, maybe a ghost in an abandoned house gets lonely, I don’t know. I didn’t really need him, or so I thought at the time. The Lady was my finder and I was getting a name for myself. I’d even had TV companies sniffing around me, but I don’t want my face shown around the country. There are a few people who would be very pleased to see it, and I don’t want to meet them again, not ever.

  I did say there were four of us, when I started this record. The last to join my little family was about as muscular as Geronimo. He could throw things around like you wouldn’t believe. It was an old place in Georgia where I found him, overgrown with so much green crap that it looked like it was about to sink into the marshy ground. I nearly fell through the floor more than once. There was graffiti on the walls and beer cans all over the ground floor, even some marks from fires, where kids had tried to light the old place. It was too damp to burn, I think.

  I’d gone looking for his relic and he’d come at me in a dust devil, blowing the filth of a century of neglect into my face. I was blind for a while, and only the Lady guiding me got me out into the sunshine. However, I’m a professional and it wasn’t so hard to buy goggles and overalls for the second trip. As it happens, I didn’t need them. I reached the old kitchen and as the wind started up, I opened my little box.

  “Meet the kids,” I said. Well, that wind just died on the spot. I imagined them all sniffing each other like dogs.

  “I can take you to places you’d never see otherwise,” I said aloud. That was how I added an old gold locket with a lover’s lock to my box. I never could hear him, but Geronimo told me his name was Thomas, so I always called him that.

  Together, we toured the country for maybe three years. I never found another like Tom or Geronimo and if I had the slightest trouble, I’d just open the box and the air would get real heavy while they slugged it out. I don’t know exactly how they could give a ghost a beating, but those boys seemed to love it when we had the chance. I might have gone on like that forever, until the fall of ’04, when I finally met Erwin Trommler. He’s sort of the reason I started this record, so if you’ve been drifting while I gave you my valuable wisdom, it might be time to sit up and gulp the cold coffee.

  I’d worked the East Coast for a few years and I’d been thinking of heading farther west, maybe to Memphis. I’d gotten the idea that someone with my talents should visit Graceland, you know? If you don’t understand right away, you never will, so don’t worry about it.

  Before I went, I had a live one call me to Long Branch, New Jersey, right on the coast. Ms. Gorski, she called herself, so I knew she was going to be an ugly one. Not that I did that anymore. Taking out the ghost trash doesn’t seem to get them hanging off you the way speaking to the dead does. I worked out the distances and thought, yes, I could do that job and then swing west to reach Graceland in the fall.

  She was standing on the step waiting for me when I swung into her road. In fact, she wasn’t too bad looking. She was dark-haired and sort of formal in her manners, maybe a little plumper than I like to see in a woman, but not too far gone. I spotted her and pulled up, taking my box from the front seat. I know they could travel in the trunk, but it seemed disrespectful somehow.

  When we were all inside, I took a look around, pleased to see the signs of serious money. I have a pretty good eye for antiques and there were some nice pieces in there. Good neighborhood too. It’s not that I won’t help poor people, it’s more like I have to make a living too and poor people don’t pay so well. So I was relaxing a bit as I sat there on a sofa that must have cost more than my car.

  “Tell me about your father,” I said. I had a routine by then, mainly to give them a sense of value for money. I could feel the Lady breathing on my neck, so I knew it was a real one. Talking to the clients didn’t help me find relics any faster, but if I didn’t, I think I’d have been the loneliest man alive.

  Now you have to understand that her father, Erwin, had died just a few days before. If it had been a different kind of call and if she’d been more to look at, it could have been a fun afternoon for me. Like I said, I don’t do that anymore, but I didn’t see any grief in her. She just sat there and talked, but all the time I had the feeling she was giving me nothing. Hell, maybe I am psychic. She told me his name and that he’d come through Ellis Island a long time ago. He’d been about ninety when he died. I could see she didn’t like talking about him at all. So I pushed for more details, with my bump of curiosity itching away like crazy.

  “I feel his spirit in the house,” she said. “Things move and there are noises, not just bad dreams. If you come back tonight, you’ll feel it too. No one can live here until he’s gone. That’s all you need to know.”

  “Ma’am, you shouldn’t tell me my business,” I said. “If I tell you I need to know more, it’s because I do. Now I can just leave and maybe you’ll find some other fool, I don’t know. But I’m telling you, there’s no one else who can do what I can. If you truly want him gone, you’ll be honest with me.”

  She looked at me for a long time and I felt a kind of thrill, like I was on the edge of something.

  “I was born here, Mr. Garner. But my father was originally from Germany.”

  “Well, folks have to come from someplace,” I said. My own grandmother came through Ellis, bringing her little daughter with her. I wondered for a moment if they would have stood in line with the young Erwin Gorski.

  “He arrived in 1944. His real name was Erwin Trommler, before. He claimed to be Polish and he spoke the language fluently. He hid himself in America.” She hesitated again and I had a sort of premonition, not so much a psychic thing as a sick feeling in my stomach.

  “Tell it all then,” I said softly, reaching out to touch her arm. “I need to know.” There were tears in her eyes, just a glimmer, like I was seeing her heart torn out.

  “He worked in Bergen-Belsen for three years, Mr. Garner. I don’t know exactly what he did there, but he earned enough money to get false papers and get out before the end.”

  Belsen. I knew more about that than she did. The British found thousands of dead bodies in that place, left to rot on the ground. The ones they found alive made some of the most harrowing pictures you’ll ever see. Walking skeletons, with dead eyes, the ones who lived. Babies, women, piles of children. If there’s one thing that God will hold up to humanity, one thing to shame us on the day of judgment, it will be the Belsen concentration camp.

  “My father was a cold man, Mr. Garner. He never talked about his past. It was only after his death that I went through his papers.” She shuddered and I thought to myself that I didn’t want to see what she had found. Not then, not ever. Some things burn themselves so deeply into your mind that you can’t ever tear them out.

  “Will you come back tonight, Mr. Garner? I haven’t slept in here since he died, but I can still feel him. I want him gone. I want him properly dead.”

  I nodded, thinking I w
as going to have to make some plans for this one.

  “You stay out of the house,” I said. “I’ll come back when it’s dark.” To her credit, she didn’t flinch at the idea of giving me a key to a house full of antiques. I guess she’d seen something in my eyes as I’d listened. She trusted me, and I’d almost forgotten how good that could feel.

  I stood before that old place as the sun went down and I felt a little bit like an exterminator come to kill roaches. I had my tools, a pair of goggles, and some overalls. I suppose I looked like an exterminator as well. I also had my little brass box, with the Lady, Geronimo, and Tom. The Lady was pushing me in, with that breath on the back of my neck that wouldn’t let up, so I knew she was as keen as I was.

  I opened the door and closed it softly behind me. I’d been in enough homes over the years to know this one was real angry. Well, that was just fine with me. I was pretty damn angry myself.

  I stood inside that entrance hall in the moonlight and smiled to myself as I felt the air move and grow solid. I know the Lady’s touch, and that wasn’t it. Maybe I should have been freaked out by the feeling of cold fingers touching my face, but I wasn’t. I really wanted him to be in there. I wanted him to fight me.

  “I’m calling you out, Erwin Trommler,” I said out loud. “Come to me and see what I have for you.”

  Now I thought Geronimo and Tom were strong, but nothing prepared me for the feeling of fingers tightening on my throat. Throwing things is almost random, but this one had control and power. I began to choke and though I waved my hands in front of my face, there was nothing to grab.

  I opened the box. I don’t really need to, I guess, but it works for me and for them. I think they like jumping out on some spirit who thinks he’s a badass. The choking stopped in an instant and I coughed and wheezed, rubbing my throat.

  “Sic ’im,” I said.