The Shadows Behind

by Kristi Petersen Schoonover

  The

  Shadows

  Behind

  Kristi Petersen

  Schoonover

  Books & Boos Press

  Hebron, CT

  Copyright © 2019 Kristi Petersen Schoonover

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.

  Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination.

  “Jarring Lucas” first appeared in Canopic Jars: Tales of Mummies and Mummification (Great Old Ones Publishing, Nov. 2013)

  “Down in the Green” first appeared in Sinfully Twisted (Feb. 2006)

  “Candle Garden” first appeared in The Taj Mahal Review (June 2007)

  “Under the Kudzu” first appeared in Behind Locked Doors (Pill Hill Press, March 2012)

  “Mujina” first appeared in Dark Passages II (Skinwalker Press, Fall 2016)

  “Doors” first appeared in Carpe Articulum Literary Review (Vol. 3, Issue 3, Fall 2010)

  “Roots” first appeared in Pernicious Invaders (Great Old Ones Publishing, Nov. 2016)

  “The Thing Inside” first appeared in Unnatural Tales of the Jackalope (Western Legends Press, June 2012)

  “Deconstructing Fireflies” (with Nathan D. Schoonover) first appeared in The Illuminata (Dec. 2006)

  “How I Learned to Stop Complaining and Love the Bunny” first appeared in Citizen Culture Magazine (Feb. 2005)

  Front cover image from pxhere.com, design by A. L. Cortez

  Edited by S & L Editing (http://www.slediting.com)

  Books & Boos Press

  PO Box 772

  Hebron, CT 06248

  http://www.booksandboospress.com

  ISBN: 978-0-9979329-6-6

  For Manzino, who knew the shadows, but never let them crush his spirit, and was always there when I needed him.

  I love you.

  . . . and miles to go before we sleep.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Immolation

  Thirty-Seven Birds

  Hourglass

  Jarring Lucas

  Down in the Green

  Snake in the Grass

  Candle Garden

  Hairless Girl Does the Hula

  Once, the World Was Dark Enough for Sleep

  Under the Kudzu

  Mujina

  Doors

  Roots

  The Thing Inside

  Deconstructing Fireflies

  How I Stopped Complaining and Learned to Love the Bunny

  Attempted Delivery

  FOREWORD

  I once wrote that whenever you look behind a ghost story, what you will find is eternal love, unbearable loss, and unconquerable fear. To this list Kristi Petersen Schoonover adds regret, and mistakes that can never be set right.

  These are the things that haunt us, creating, as Schoonover tells us in one of her stories, the shadows that “ghosts, or God knew what else” move into. The characters in her new collection, The Shadows Behind, occupy haunted, complicated worlds, where things go terribly wrong, and there is no easy way forward. People die, people hurt each other, people screw up, creating yet another monster to lurk in those dark corners we try so desperately to avoid. You can fight them, or you can surrender, but you cannot make them go entirely away. Sometimes the monsters win, sometimes you can even forge a truce, but they will always be there, and as long as you live, there will always be more to join the growing crowd inhabiting the shadows. The characters who do best in Schoonover’s stories are the ones who embrace their shadows, and try to see them differently.

  This doesn’t necessarily lead to a happy ending, and this is what makes Schoonover’s stories so satisfying. How can a life in which death and loss are inescapable, a life in which we make devastating irreversible mistakes, ever be truly happy? Acceptance isn’t happy. It’s peaceful—and it is a worthy and realistic goal. There is truth in the shadows, even if it isn’t pretty, and you will find all your friends there. By the end of The Shadows Behind, Kristi Petersen Schoonover has masterfully illuminated a path to a liberating peace, in a poignant and deliciously scary way: look directly into the shadows, listen to your heart, identify what you are grasping so tightly and let go. Otherwise, like some of Schoonover’s chilling characters, you will become the scariest—and deadliest—monster lurking in the darkness.

  Stacy Horn

  Author of Damnation Island and Imperfect Harmony

  January 5, 2019

  Immolation

  I ’m used to going to far-flung places and the various dangerous means of travel usually involved in getting there: dynamite-packed trucks that leak gas, planes with bellies so rotted I can see through to the open sky, elephants with sour attitudes.

  Sumbawa was a different story: after a twenty-five-hour-plus flight from New York to Bali, every ferry, truck, minibus, and finally boat was not only unreliable, it didn’t seem to come with a set price: I had to negotiate, my friend, negotiate much more than I ever had anywhere else. What got scary was that I had to know my Indonesian currency pretty well, or I was just plain screwed.

  The leathery captain of the speedboat I hired for the last leg of the journey doubled his price and shoved a crude puppet—a flat, jointed thing with a hideous face (for protection, he said)—in my hand when he learned I was going to the mountain. He next cited vanishing tourists in an effort to change my mind, even as he drove like James Bond to get me there in a hurry.

  When, at last, after forty grueling hours, I arrived—seasick and unnerved—at the port of Calabai, there was only one thing on my mind: a cot, or even a patch of ground covered in fronds.

  Then, there stood Rosalia: a silhouette in a white sarong against a row of palm trees.

  And I forgot everything.

  ~~**~~

  When Rosalia had called me from her sat phone and asked if I could come to Sumbawa to help excavate a structure buried in Tambora’s 1815 eruption, I was more than willing. “There are lots of eager kids around, Thompson, but this thing—this project needs you, your incredible instinct . . . this could be what’s left of one of the cultures that was wiped out . . . but there’s—”

  The reception burbled into a choppy mess, like a badly scratched record. “Rosie? Hello?”

  Suddenly she was clear again: “. . . need to know, are you happy?”

  I looked around the only bar in Wilkeson, which at one in the afternoon was empty save for me. The question was a punch in the gut. The geese had flown south on my last relationship; Kelly had left me in my sea of papers and boots mucked with the dirt of perhaps twenty digs, including Pompeii, claiming I had no love for anything except my work. Rosalia didn’t know this, and she didn’t need to—we’d been out of touch, except for the occasional e-mail asking permission to quote one another’s reports for a submission to some academic journal—for nearly a decade. Perhaps she was asking me this for other reasons: Did she want to get back together? “Why?”

  Despite the terrible connection, I heard that frustrated sigh she always made when she had to clarify something she felt should’ve been obvious. “It’s important.” Crackle, crackle. “Just . . . just answer the question.”

  Well, that didn’t sound too hard. “I’m on solid ground, Rosie. No worries.”

  Crackle, crackle. “I’ll send
you details. Come as soon as you can.”

  ~~**~~

  Rosalia is no longer that willowy, carefree girl in jeans, her sunburned cheeks spattered with ancient volcanic ash. She seems shrunken, and looks older than she should; she even has crow’s feet. In my mind’s eye, though, she’s no different, and when she lends her slight hand to help me out of the boat, her pull is so strong I nearly crash into her.

  “Thom.” She hugs me; she smells like apples and sweat. “You look exactly the same.”

  “So do you.” I peer beyond her shoulder. Because of the poor condition of the dock, I’m expecting a rundown huddle of shacks; what I’m treated to is a cheery neighborhood of vibrant cabins—yellow and aqua, pink and green, purple and orange—with colored glass windows. Palm trees sway lazily, and a thrashed-together bridge plunges deep into a jungle laced with pops of jasmine. The air smells of salt and lemons.

  It’s hard to envision that only two hundred years ago this place was a seething cauldron of hell that took the lives of thousands in an instant.

  “I’ve rented a really nice place, but it’s a ways outside of town.” She leads me from the dock.

  I’d heard this island never really recovered from Tambora’s eruption—entire kingdoms were buried, lost forever—yet it doesn’t seem entirely true. There’s no shortage of guides to take trekkers up the mountain, and as we walk through the village, the scents change. There are the smells of fresh-baked bread, and cooking fish in a spice I don’t recognize but is reminiscent of burnt shallots and cinnamon. The residents of this shoreside village are in shorts, T-shirts, and other modern clothes—except, it seems, for one.

  The shoeless young woman in an orange dress has jet black hair—like Rosalia, who wears hers in a bun—down to her waist. She seems aware I’m staring and returns an alluring smile, one that makes me realize I am lonely.

  “Did you hear what I said?” Rosalia sets her hand on my arm.

  Prickles of excitement course through me. I realize I’ve been staring down an alley.

  The young woman is gone.

  “Is everything okay, Thom?”

  “Oh—yeah. I’m fine.” I look into Rosalia’s eyes and understand, that, yes. I want her back. “Just anxious to get started.”

  “That.” She sighs. “Could be a while, actually.” She approaches a motorbike propped against the side of a pineapple-colored building and stands it up, motioning for me to put my pack in the basket behind the double seat. “Get on.”

  We navigate the bumpy roads. For some reason, not even Rosalia’s closeness wipes the image of Orange Dress from my mind.

  ~~**~~

  It’s difficult to pinpoint the reason for the split between us. It isn’t like there was shit tossed on the lawn or that the bed grew cold; Rosalia and I didn’t even live together. While we’d focused on getting assigned to the same projects and digs, we were separated for four in a row. The conversations and calls dwindled during those months; I was in the middle of leading an excavation in Akrotiri when suddenly I realized we hadn’t communicated in almost eight weeks. We just sort of . . . well, lost track of each other after that. Things died in the volcanic fallout of new discoveries, you might say.

  I never stopped thinking about her, though; she was almost like an excavation herself. When the loneliness eventually got to me, I started dating Kelly, one of my students. At first, she seemed so much like Rosalia; passionate and excitable, ready to travel the world and solve its Plinian mysteries. After the first few months, it was clear she preferred staying home. She eventually shifted her focus to developing new ways of bringing excavations to life virtually, for students who couldn’t have those experiences. It didn’t mean she wasn’t brilliant. It just meant she didn’t want to play in the dirt, sweat like a boar and worry about where the next drink of clean water was coming from, and it caused friction between us that, in the end, we couldn’t overcome.

  Now, in the sprawl of Rosalia’s coconut timber house nearly an hour outside of the village, I’m struck by how Kelly pales in comparison. Rosalia seems taller and more agile than she did this afternoon as she works in the open-air kitchen, cooking a dish that fills the night with the smell of turmeric and garlic.

  Two bottles of Balinese wine sit in front of me. I choose one calling itself White Velvet, twist off the yellow top, and pour some into her glass. “I read about your collaboration at Sunset Crater a while back. Great work.”

  “Yes, well, I’m always working on someone else’s baby.” She pats something dry inside a towel and sets it aside. “I’ve never made that one discovery that’s going to make me National Geographic’s darling.”

  “So what? I didn’t.” I set her glass on the counter and return to my seat. “Lots of us don’t.”

  “That’s not what I’m about, Thom.” She grinds spices using a mortar and pestle. “I want the stability to stay in the field. I don’t want to end up curating at a museum or consulting at an engineering firm, but that’s where I’m headed. I’ve put in the work. It’s time I get what I deserve.” Sipping her wine, she turns to face me. “But I think what I just found may be it.”

  She tells me about the trip she took that’s resulted in my being here. “It can take a couple of grueling days to reach Tambora’s summit.” She leaves the inset grill and seizes a skillet. “About ten hours into the hike, my right leg was in a massive amount of pain. When I rolled up my pants, I found leeches. A few, in fact. Rimbo—my guide—told me to stay still and plunged into the jungle.”

  “We know that’s never good.” I sip my wine. It’s lighter than I like, with a hint of an almost cantaloupe-but-not-quite fruit I can’t identify.

  “He came back with something to cut off the leeches.” She wipes her hands on a cloth and reaches into a small box on her counter. “Look.” She drops an object in my hand.

  It’s a pie-shaped piece of quartz a little smaller than my palm, and it’s clear it’s been worked. “There’s evidence of percussion flaking here. This was part of a tool. No, wait.” The rounded bottom betrays it. “It was maybe part of a carrying vessel of some kind. Possibly a bowl, maybe for gathering.”

  She’s beaming. “Turn it over.”

  On the side that isn’t carved, a blood-colored but indecipherable design reminds me of a primitive cave drawing.

  She folds her arms. “It’s not like the pieces that were discovered in the lost kingdom that was found on the opposite side of the mountain . . . I’ve actually handled those, and they’re like ceramic.” She sips her wine. “I made Rimbo take me to where he’d found it. There’s a crack in a pumice deposit, spilling stuff just like this.” She takes the rock from me and puts it back in its box. “I think what I’ve found is yet another buried village that, instead of having ties to Vietnam and China, has ties to somewhere else . . . southeast.”

  I envision the globe in my head. “Australia.”

  She smiles. “I’m willing to bet that color on there is ochre.”

  There is the hish of food sizzling in the frying pan.

  “Jesus.”

  She returns to the skillet. “Which might mean yet another culture was completely erased, one influenced by a country that was even more difficult to get to. I mean, we know of at least one language that was wiped out. This could be a second.” She sets our dinner before us, seats herself, and reaches for more wine. “This is it, Thom. This is what I’ve been waiting for my entire life. Mmmm.” She chews. “Looks like I finally got the balance right.”

  I look at the plate. A fish stares at me through clouded, dead eyes. “What is this?”

  “Ikan bakar,” she says. “It’s in a soy and chili-based sauce.”

  I’ve eaten plenty of off-the-wall stuff: steamed silkworms, giant ditch frog, candied grasshoppers—even tuna eyeballs. This dish, for some reason, is disturbing; I feel like I’m being watched. I pick at the jumble of unidentifiable vegetable bits that serves as a garnish. “When do we dig?”

  “Would you do anything for me?”


  I stop chewing the hard vegetables, which are like spicy grains of sand gritting against my teeth. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “We have to obtain a permit.”

  I try to hide my disappointment: Is this really why she asked me to come? Because I have stronger credentials? “Of course I’ll secure one for you.”

  “It’s not like that. This is a requirement for a bit of a different reason.” She sips her wine. “We have to show we’re strong enough not to fall prey to the ghosts of the eruption.”

  I almost choke. “What?”

  She sighs. “There have been disappearances on the mountain. The locals claim the angry spirits tempt the victims with illusions of grandeur, leading them farther and farther up the slopes. No one knows what happens, but they never come back.”

  I think of the crude puppet my sun-parched captain, babbling away, had forced on me, and now it makes sense. I’ve heard my fair share of eruption-related ghost stories. Residents of Naples say they hear the screams of the dying in the ruins of Pompeii; Hawaiians believe the goddess Pele knocks on doors asking for water; people in Katibung insist the burnt apparitions of refugees from Krakatoa’s wrath wander the nearby mountains. I took these stories as fictions, but Rosalia didn’t. She grew up on Martinique, and claimed that every morning she’d be awakened precisely at 7:52 a.m. by the final, hysterical prayers of the victims of Mt. Pelée. She fervently believed. It was part of her.

  Because she believes, I always pretend to. “So how’s a permit going to protect us from the supernatural? I don’t get it.”

  She picks at her fish. “These people don’t want trouble—in their language, Tambora means ‘gone.’ They don’t want to be under scrutiny if a tourist or visitor disappears. Anyone who wants a permit has to go before a council and prove he’s impervious to any temptation. That he wants for nothing. If he wants for nothing, the spirits have nothing to use against him. A lonely soul, apparently, is the biggest risk.” She looks at me.