20th Century Ghosts

by Joe Hill

  “Our sister Kate is dead,” said the oldest girl.

  “This is where we’re having the wake,” said the middle daughter.

  Kate lay very still on top of the sacking. Her eyes remained shut, but she had to bite her lips not to grin.

  “Do you want to play?” asked the middle daughter. “Do you want to play the game? You could lie down. You could be the dead person and we could cover you with flowers and read out of the Bible and sing ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’”

  “I’ll cry,” said the oldest girl. “I can make myself cry whenever I want.”

  Killian stood there. He looked at the girl on the ground, and then at the two mourners. He said at last, “I don’t believe this is my kind of game. I don’t want to be the dead person.”

  The oldest girl flicked her gaze across him, then stared into his face.

  “Why not?” she asked. “You’re dressed the part.”

  BOBBY CONROY COMES BACK FROM THE DEAD

  Bobby didn’t know her at first. She was wounded, like him. The first thirty to arrive all got wounds. Tom Savini put them on himself.

  Her face was a silvery blue, her eyes sunken into darkened hollows, and where her right ear had been was a ragged-edged hole, a gaping place that revealed a lump of wet, red bone. They sat a yard apart on the stone wall around the fountain, which was switched off. She had her pages balanced on one knee—three pages in all, stapled together—and was looking them over, frowning with concentration. Bobby had read his while he was waiting in line to go into makeup.

  Her jeans reminded him of Harriet Rutherford. There were patches all over them, patches that looked as if they had been made out of kerchiefs; squares of red and dark blue, with paisley patterns printed on them. Harriet was always wearing jeans like that. Patches sewn into the butt of a girl’s Levi’s still turned Bobby on.

  His gaze followed the bend of her legs down to where her blue jeans flared at the ankle, then on to her bare feet. She had kicked her sandals off, and was twisting the toes of one foot into the toes of the other. When he saw this he felt his heart lunge with a kind of painful-sweet shock.

  “Harriet?” he said. “Is that little Harriet Rutherford who I used to write love poems to in high school?”

  She peered at him sideways, over her shoulder. She didn’t need to answer; he knew it was her. She stared for a long, measuring time, and then her eyes opened a little wider. They were a vivid, very undead green, and for an instant he saw them brighten with recognition and unmistakable excitement. But she turned her head away, went back to perusing her pages.

  “No one ever wrote me love poems in high school,” she said. “I’d remember. I would’ve died of happiness.”

  “In detention. Remember we got two weeks after the cooking show skit? You had a cucumber carved like a dick. You said it needed to stew for an hour and stuck it in your pants. It was the finest moment in the history of the Die Laughing Comedy Collective.”

  “No. I have a good memory and I don’t recall this comedy troupe.” She looked back down at the pages balanced on her knee. “Do you remember any details about these supposed poems?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “A line. Maybe if you could remember something about one of these poems—one line of heartrending verse—it would all come flooding back to me.”

  He didn’t know if he could at first; he stared at her blankly, his tongue pressed to his lower lip, trying to call something back and his mind stubbornly blank.

  Then he opened his mouth and began to speak, remembering as he went along: “I love to watch you in the shower. I hope that’s not obscene.”

  “But when I see you soap your boobs, I get sticky in my jeans!” Harriet cried, turning her body toward him. “Bobby Conroy, goddamn, come here and hug me without screwing up my makeup.”

  He leaned into her and put his arms around her narrow back. He shut his eyes and squeezed, feeling absurdly happy, maybe the happiest he had felt since moving back in with his parents. He had not spent a day in Monroeville when he didn’t think about seeing her. He was depressed, he daydreamed about her, stories that began with exactly this moment—or not exactly this moment, he had not imagined them both made up like partially decomposed corpses, but close enough.

  When he woke every morning, in his bedroom over his parents’ garage, he felt flat and listless. He’d lie on his lumpy mattress and stare at the skylights overhead. The skylights were milky with dust, and through them every sky appeared the same, a bland, formless white. Nothing in him wanted to get up. What made it worse was he still remembered what it felt like to wake in that same bed with a teenager’s sense of his own limitless possibilities, to wake charged with enthusiasm for the day. If he daydreamed about meeting Harriet again, and falling into their old friendship—and if these early morning daydreams sometimes turned explicitly sexual, if he remembered being with her in her father’s shed, her back on the stained cement, her too-skinny legs pulled open, her socks still on—then at least it was something to stir his blood a little, get him going. All his other daydreams had thorns on them. Handling them always threatened a sudden sharp prick of pain.

  They were still holding each other when a boy spoke, close by. “Mom, who are you hugging?”

  Bobby Conroy opened his eyes, shifted his gaze to the right. A little blue-faced dead boy with limp black hair was staring at them. He wore a hooded sweatshirt, the hood pulled up.

  Harriet’s grip on Bobby relaxed. Then, slowly, her arms slid away. Bobby regarded the boy for an instant longer—the kid was no older than six—and then dropped his eyes to Harriet’s hand, the wedding band on her ring finger.

  Bobby looked back at the kid, forced a smile. Bobby had been to more than seven hundred auditions during his years in New York City, and he had a whole catalog of phony smiles.

  “Hey, chumley,” Bobby said. “I’m Bobby Conroy. Your mom and me are old buddies from way back when mastodons walked the earth.”

  “Bobby is my name too,” the boy said. “Do you know a lot about dinosaurs? I’m a big dinosaur guy myself.”

  Bobby felt a sick pang that seemed to go right through the middle of him. He glanced at her face—didn’t want to, couldn’t help himself—and found Harriet watching him. Her smile was anxious and compressed.

  “My husband picked it,” she said. She was, for some reason, patting Bobby’s leg. “After a Yankee. He’s from Albany originally.”

  “I know about mastodons,” Bobby said to the boy, surprised to find that his voice sounded just the same as it ever did. “Big hairy elephants the size of school buses. They once roamed the entire Pennsylvanian plateau, and left mountainous mastodon poops everywhere, one of which later became Pittsburgh.”

  The kid grinned, and threw a quick glance at his mother, perhaps to appraise what she made of this offhand reference to poop. She smiled indulgently.

  Bobby saw the kid’s hand and recoiled. “Ugh! Wow, that’s the best wound I’ve seen all day. What is that, a fake hand?”

  Three fingers were missing from the boy’s left hand. Bobby grabbed it and yanked on it, expecting it to come off. But it was warm and fleshy under the blue makeup, and the kid pulled it out of Bobby’s grip.

  “No,” he said. “It’s just my hand. That’s the way it is.”

  Bobby blushed so intensely his ears stung, and was grateful for his makeup. Harriet touched Bobby’s wrist.

  “He really doesn’t have those fingers,” she said.

  Bobby looked at her, struggling to frame an apology. Her smile was a little fretful now, but she wasn’t visibly angry with him, and the hand on his arm was a good sign.

  “I stuck them into the table saw, but I don’t remember because I was so little,” the boy explained.

  “Dean is in lumber,” Harriet said.

  “Is Dean staggering around here somewhere?” Bobby asked, craning his head and making a show of looking around, although of course he had no idea what Harriet’s Dean might look like. Both floors of
the atrium at the center of the mall were crowded with other people like them, made up to look like the recent dead. They sat together on benches, or stood together in groups, chatting, laughing at one another’s wounds, or looking over the mimeographed pages they had been given of the screenplay. The mall was closed—steel gates pulled down in front of the entrances to the stores—no one in the place but the film crew and the undead.

  “No, he dropped us off and went in to work.”

  “On a Sunday?”

  “He owns his own yard.”

  It was as good a setup for a punch line as he had ever heard, and he paused, searching for just the right one…and then it came to him that making wisecracks about Dean’s choice of work to Dean’s wife in front of Dean’s five-year-old might be ill-advised, and never mind that he and Harriet had once been best friends and the royal couple of the Die Laughing Comedy Collective their senior year in high school. Bobby said, “He does? Good for him.”

  “I like the big gross tear in your face,” the little kid said, pointing at Bobby’s brow. Bobby had a nasty scalp wound, the skin laid open to the lumpy bone. “Didn’t you think the guy who made us into dead people was cool?”

  Bobby had actually been a little creeped out by Tom Savini, who kept referring to an open book of autopsy photographs while applying Bobby’s makeup. The people in those pictures, with their maimed flesh and slack, unhappy faces, were really dead, not getting up later to have a cup of coffee at the craft services table. Savini studied their wounds with a quiet appreciation, the same as any painter surveying the subject of his art.

  But Bobby could see what the kid meant about how he was cool. With his black leather jacket, motorcycle boots, black beard, and memorable eyebrows—thick black eyebrows that arched sharply upward, like Dr. Spock or Bela Lugosi—he looked like a death-metal rock god.

  Someone was clapping their hands. Bobby glanced around. The director, George Romero, stood close to the bottom of the escalators, a bearish man well over six feet tall, with a thick brown beard. Bobby had noticed that many of the men working on the crew had beards. A lot of them had shoulder-length hair too, and wore army-navy castoffs and motorcycle boots like Savini, so that they resembled a band of counterculture revolutionaries.

  Bobby and Harriet and little Bob gathered with the other extras to hear what Romero had to say. He had a booming, confident voice and when he grinned, his cheeks dimpled, visible in spite of the beard. He asked if anyone present knew anything about making movies. A few people, Bobby included, raised their hands. Romero said thank God someone in this place does, and everyone laughed. He said he wanted to welcome them all to the world of big-budget Hollywood filmmaking, and everyone laughed at that too, because George Romero made pictures only in Pennsylvania, and everyone knew Dawn of the Dead was lower than low-budget, it was a half step above no-budget. He said he was grateful to them all for coming out today, and that for ten hours of grueling work, which would test them body and soul, they would be paid in cash, a sum so colossal he dare not say the number aloud, he could only show it. He held aloft a dollar bill, and there was more laughter. Then Tom Savini, up on the second floor, leaned over the railing, and shouted, “Don’t laugh, that’s more than most of us are getting paid to work on this turkey.”

  “Lots of people are in this film as a labor of love,” George Romero said. “Tom is in it because he likes squirting pus on people.” Some in the crowd moaned. “Fake pus! Fake pus!” Romero cried.

  “You hope it was fake pus,” Savini intoned from somewhere above, but he was already moving away from the railing, out of sight.

  More laughter. Bobby knew a thing or two about comic patter, and had a suspicion that this bit of the speech was rehearsed, and had been issued just this way, more than once.

  Romero talked for a while about the plot. The recently dead were coming back to life; they liked to eat people; in the face of the crisis, the government had collapsed; four young heroes had sought shelter in this mall. Bobby’s attention wandered, and he found himself looking down at the other Bobby, at Harriet’s boy. Little Bob had a long, solemn face, dark chocolate eyes, and lots of thick black hair, limp and disheveled. In fact, the kid bore a passing resemblance to Bobby himself, who also had brown eyes, a slim face, and a thick untidy mass of black hair on his head.

  Bobby wondered if Dean looked like him. The thought made his blood race strangely. What if Dean dropped in to see how Harriet and little Bobby were doing, and the man turned out to be his exact twin? The thought was so alarming it made him feel briefly weak—but then he remembered he was made up like a corpse, blue face, scalp wound. Even if they looked exactly alike they wouldn’t look anything alike.

  Romero delivered some final instructions on how to walk like a zombie—he demonstrated by allowing his eyes to roll back in their sockets and his face to go slack—and then promised they’d be ready to begin filming the first shot in a few minutes.

  Harriet pivoted on her heel, turned to face him, her fist on her hip, eyelids fluttering theatrically. He turned at the same time, and they almost bumped into each other. She opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. They were standing too close to each other, and the unexpected physical proximity seemed to throw her. He didn’t know what to say either, all thought suddenly wiped from his mind. She laughed, and shook her head, a reaction that struck him as artificial, an expression of anxiety, not happiness.

  “Let’s set, pardner,” she said. He remembered that when a skit wasn’t going well, and she got rattled, she sometimes slipped into a big, drawling John Wayne impersonation on stage, a nervous habit he had hated then and that he found, in this moment, endearing.

  “Are we going to have something to do soon?” little Bob asked.

  “Soon,” she said. “Why don’t you practice being a zombie? Go on, lurch around for a while.”

  Bobby and Harriet sat down at the edge of the fountain again. Her hands were small, bony fists on her thighs. She stared into her lap, her eyes blank, gaze directed inward. She was digging the toes of one bare foot into the toes of the other again.

  He spoke. One of them had to say something.

  “I can’t believe you’re married and you have a kid!” he said, in the same tone of happy astonishment he reserved for friends who had just told him they had been cast in a part he himself had auditioned for. “I love this kid you’re dragging around with you. He’s so cute. But then, who can resist a little kid who looks half rotted?”

  She seemed to come back from wherever she had been, smiled at him—almost shyly.

  He went on, “And you better be ready to tell me everything about this Dean guy.”

  “He’s coming by later. He’s going to take us out to lunch. You should come.”

  “That could be fun!” Bobby cried, and made a mental note to take his enthusiasm down a notch.

  “He can be really shy the first time he meets someone, so don’t expect too much.”

  Bobby waved a hand in the air: pish-posh. “It’s going to be great. We’ll have lots to talk about. I’ve always been fascinated with lumberyards and—plywood.”

  This was taking a chance, joshing her about the husband he didn’t know. But she smirked and said: “Everything you ever wanted to know about two-by-fours but were afraid to ask.”

  And for a moment they were both smiling, a little foolishly, knees almost touching. They had never really figured out how to talk to each other. They were always half on stage, trying to use whatever the other person said to set up the next punch line. That much, anyway, hadn’t changed.

  “God, I can’t believe running into you here,” she said. “I’ve wondered about you. I’ve thought about you a lot.”

  “You have?”

  “I figured you’d be famous by now,” she said.

  “Hey, that makes two of us,” Bobby said and winked. Immediately he wished he could take the wink back. It was fake and he didn’t want to be fake with her. He hurried on, answering a question she hadn’t asked.
“I’m settling in. Been back for three months. I’m staying with my parents for a while, kind of readapting to Monroeville.”

  She nodded, still regarding him steadily, with a seriousness that made him uncomfortable. “How’s it going?”

  “I’m making a life,” Bobby lied.

  IN BETWEEN SETUPS, Bobby and Harriet and little Bob told stories about how they had died.

  “I was a comedian in New York City,” Bobby said, fingering his scalp wound. “Something tragic happened when I went on stage.”

  “Yeah,” Harriet said. “Your act.”

  “Something that had never happened before.”

  “What, people laughed?”

  “I was my usual brilliant self. People were rolling on the floor.”

  “Convulsions of agony.”

  “And then as I was taking my final bow—a terrible accident. A stagehand up in the rafters dropped a forty-pound sandbag right on my head. But at least I died to the sound of applause.”

  “They were applauding the stagehand,” Harriet said.

  The little boy looked seriously up into Bobby’s face, and took his hand. “I’m sorry you got hit in the head.” His lips grazed Bobby’s knuckles with a dry kiss.

  Bobby stared down at him. His hand tingled where little Bob’s mouth had touched it.

  “He’s always been the kissiest, huggiest kid you ever met,” Harriet said. “He’s got all this pent-up affection. At the slightest sign of weakness he’s ready to slobber on you.” As she said this she ruffled little Bobby’s hair. “What killed you, squirt?”

  He held up his hand, waggled his stumps. “My fingers got cut off on Dad’s table saw and I bled to death.”

  Harriet went on smiling but her eyes seemed to film over slightly. She fished around in her pocket and found a quarter. “Go get a gumball, bud.”

  He snatched it and ran.

  “People must think we’re the most careless parents,” she said, staring expressionlessly after her son. “But it was no one’s fault about his fingers.”