Читать книгу Ghostlove - Dennis Mahoney - Страница 8

2. THE BEDROOM GHOST

My father’s death made sense. I had visited the crash site, seen the trees along the road, and spotted several deer walking in the woods. I wasn’t at all surprised he’d swerved to save a deer because it fit the man I’d known—one who’d cared for me and my mother and hadn’t, despite his advice, put his own life before anybody else’s. I missed him and I grieved, but his death had given me answers.

My mother’s death had left questions. Now with Mr. Stick’s address, I could visit where she’d gone and learn what had happened. If the building was as special as my mother had described, I might be able to do what I’d failed to do at home: speak with her directly one last time and finally make sense of how and why I’d lost her.

I learned that Mr. Stick’s former home belonged to a woman named Mrs. Zabka, a widow of late-middle age whom I was able to reach by phone.

Mrs. Zabka was a shut-in, and although she declined my invitation to visit her in person, she was a friendly conversationalist, happy to answer my questions and, when I probed too deeply, polite in her refusal to divulge information.

She had acquired ownership of the brownstone from Mr. Stick a week before his death, which he had apparently known was imminent, and she even remembered speaking to my mother on one occasion.

“I liked her,” Mrs. Zabka said. “I was sorry to hear what happened.”

“What did happen?” I asked.

“Heavens, who can say? I never understood the place or most of what occurs there.”

I tried to engage her on the subject of her brownstone’s otherworldliness, mentioning some of the marvels and phenomena my mother had told me about, and Mrs. Zabka listened like a woman who believed or was simply too mannerly to baldly contradict me. I talked too long about my academic interest in the occult, trying to convince her I wasn’t a lunatic or quack, and then abruptly shifted to a personal appeal.

“I’m still haunted by my mother. By the mystery,” I said, “and not just the loss. I realize how off-putting all of this might be, but I’d like to see your house and spend some time exploring, if only so the place itself isn’t such a mystery.”

“You’re coming to a haunted house to stop feeling haunted.”

“That’s a good way to say it. So you do think it’s haunted?”

“I can promise you’ll encounter more than you expect, but I can’t guarantee it’s haunted by your mother.”

“If I can’t find my mother, I’ll try to find closure.”

“You might find a whole new opening,” she said.

“I’d appreciate the chance more than I can say. I’m happy to compensate you for letting me visit.”

“You could live there,” she said, “exploring all you like.”

She told me she was willing to sell the house, and had in fact been waiting years for an appropriate buyer—someone who understood the brownstone’s nature and wouldn’t balk at the stack of legal disclosures, failed inspections, decrepitude, and warnings. Given her shut-in status, I was surprised she wanted to move.

“Oh, I’ve never lived there,” Mrs. Zabka said.

She was an absentee owner, residing in the suburbs, and hadn’t visited the place in the years since Mr. Stick died.

“May I ask why you bought it?”

“Someone needs to own it.”

“Has anyone maintained it?”

“The house maintains itself,” she said.

Years of study and experience had taught me there was more than one kind of ghost. Some were caring. Some were violent. Some were grieving, scared, or lost. There were conscious ghosts who interacted with the living, and there were others who were more like residues or echoes—perceptible but totally unable to perceive.

What they all had in common was a tether to the world. Whatever the links or reasons, they were here instead of gone.

When my mother had left Mr. Stick’s house only partially herself, maybe part of her had stayed. Would she talk or be an echo? At very least, the house itself was bound to give me answers, and I was more than willing to face whatever dangers might exist if I could finally escape the limbo of unknowns.

I moved into my new home on a feverish January day that started off sunny and ended—auspiciously, I thought—with a squall producing thundersnow. Being immediately housebound because of the storm didn’t worry me, since I had already arranged for reliable grocery deliveries, I had no local friends or family to visit, and I had no intention of leaving the house after waiting so long to thoroughly explore it.

The building was an abnormally narrow but otherwise unremarkable brownstone, wedged like a shim between a pair of other brownstones. There was no house number, no baroque doorknocker, and no uncanny chill produced by its appearance. The chocolate-brick façade featured an oak door on the first story and skinny twin windows on each of the two upper floors. The neighboring buildings abutted mine directly and allowed for no side windows in the front two-thirds of the house. In the rear, however, my brownstone extended fully to the alley and the neighboring buildings didn’t, leaving space on either side and a smattering of windows that offered light and limited views.

My house’s slenderness contrasted with its extraordinary depth, which made the interior feel simultaneously claustrophobic and endless. Its hallways ran lengthwise but zigzagged at intervals, with the doorways to rooms alternating sides, and so it was impossible to stand in the front and look directly to the rear. The layout was nook-like, many-cornered, and disorienting. A child playing hide and seek could disappear for hours.

The entire building smelled of burnt cinnamon, except for my second-story bedroom, which smelled of warm spring mist. No actual mist was perceptible but the window overlooking the street was fogged with heavy moisture. I had a bed, a nightstand, a dresser, and a lamp, along with a small and tidy bathroom next to the bedroom closet.

The house contained a comfortable study, a formal dining room, an additional bathroom, innumerable closets and compartments, and many other rooms, both major and minor, that were connected in semi-logical ways and enticed me with unique personalities and auras.

And yet for all the promising character, nothing otherworldly revealed itself during my initial walkthrough, and shortly after dusk, with the January slush-light of sunset around me, I wondered if the house distrusted me. I was new, after all—as foreign to the building as the building was to me. Maybe the house was keeping secrets in the presence of a stranger.

Over the years, I’d found that undressing in unfamiliar places—hotel rooms, for instance, or long-neglected burial grounds—fostered greater openness and trust in my environment. My body was so compounded with my identity that physical nakedness seemed to expose my truest self. And while my vulnerability was largely symbolic—a necktie and pants hadn’t made me safer, especially since paranormal dangers were more liable to threaten my sanity and spirit—I felt more at risk without the armor of my clothes.

I undressed that night and walked around naked, wearing only my shoes because of the nails and broken glass in several of the rooms. I hoped the house would recognize my gesture of unguardedness. Desperate for any sign of life, I re-explored the whole building, listening and watching, and then I brushed off a chair in the dining room and sat beneath the unlit chandelier. I thought I heard the dust motes settling around me.

“Hello?” I said.

The dark offered nothing in reply.

“Hello,” I said again, answering myself.

I gathered my clothes and carried them up to my twilit bedroom, missing my parents and disappointed that my new home hadn’t presented so much as a ghostly twinkle or unexplained creak.

Upstairs, the bedroom’s tropical warmth soothed my chill from the otherwise wintry house, and I was prepared to sleep naked, as I might have done in summer, when I suddenly felt what seemed to be a breath inside my ear.

I spun. The room was empty. Nevertheless I felt the rising shame of standing there naked. My sense of being watched seemed to indicate a watcher.

I snatched a sheet to cover myself. I’d made my bed less than two hours earlier, and yet in the interval a spider’s nest, apparently hidden in the mattress, had spectacularly hatched. Dozens of grape-sized spiders polka-dotted the bed and scattered chaotically as soon as I exposed them. Many clung to the sheet I’d wrapped around my waist, and both my penis and my thighs were overrun with tickles.

I clutched the sheet and laughed. There I’d been, glum and lonely in the moribund house, and now a panoply of spiders and a ghost had appeared.

“Hello!” I said, thrilling at the animated room.

I swapped the sheet for flannel pajamas and sat on a narrow, spiderless section of the bed, and then I closed my eyes and covered my ears, exactly as my mother had taught me as a child.

I had encountered ghosts before but only passingly. I’d rarely felt the true, electric sparkle of connection. Generally ghosts regarded me with hazy apprehension, as if the skin between our worlds were too opaque to see through. Contact was often like a flashlight through a hand when only the glow and maybe a vein or two are easily discerned.

This was something else.

I sensed the ghost was female. She stood in the corner of the bedroom, slightly to my right, watching me and radiating needful curiosity. A D-minor tone persisted in my hearing like a pressure change, or possibly a memory of sadness, and I couldn’t tell if she or I—or both of us—was causing it.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m William. Do you live here, too?”

She faded like a cellphone signal in a tunnel. I concentrated hard and leaned in her direction but a growing void of loneliness convinced me she was gone.

I opened my eyes and stared at the empty corner, where a hook and wire dangled from the rough brick wall. An earlier inhabitant had probably hung a picture there. I felt the ghost’s absence like I felt the missing picture.

I shooed the remaining spiders onto the floor and lay in bed.

“Someone’s in my house,” I thought. “Possibly a friend.”

I woke the next morning with a cobwebby head, but once I wiped the silk out of my hair and eyes, my bedroom felt common again, aside from the strange humidity and an odd cast of light that had followed me out of a dream.

“Hello?” I said.

The bedroom ghost was nowhere to be felt but I began the day with a reborn sense of possibility. I dressed in jeans, an Oxford shirt, and a necktie—a uniform that placed me in the relaxed professional mindset of someone comfortable at work—and walked downstairs to the kitchen. I remembered the brownstone’s original builder was entombed inside the house, and for reasons I couldn’t articulate, I strongly suspected his bones were in the wall behind the refrigerator.

The fridge itself was avocado green and had the kind of latch-handle door, outlawed since the Refrigerator Safety Act of 1956, that contributed to the deaths of curious children who accidentally locked themselves in. I started a pot of coffee and imagined, as it brewed, what it would feel like to suffocate alone inside a box. Just as clearly, I imagined being the skeleton in the wall.

When the coffee was ready, I carried the carafe and my favorite orange mug up to the second-floor study. This was a large, rectangular room in the rear of the house with two windows, decrepit brick walls, and a heavy plank floor that had been smoothed, by two centuries of footfalls, to creamy warm softness.

I had an oriental rug the color of bread mold, a simple but imposing work desk, a trio of bookcases, a small stereo with a turntable, an upholstered reading chair, and seventeen unopened boxes of books, bones, candles, talismans, phials, records, vintage occult instruments, notebooks, and ballpoint pens: everything required to make the study my center of operations.

I had scarcely unpacked the first box of supplies when I noticed a fluttery shadow in my periphery and turned to the window. A pigeon had landed on the sill. He tilted his head and watched me with a keen, beady eye and I approached the window slowly, happy for the company. His body was unusually thick, especially in the back, and I thought without judgment that he must be a glutton.

When the pigeon flew off, I discovered my mistake. His burliness hadn’t been fat but rather an extra folded wing. I opened the sash and stuck my head outside, startled by the sparkling cold and thrilled to see the three-winged pigeon flap away. The extra wing was on his right side and made him fly erratically. I watched him enter a leafless tree, tangle in the limbs, and extricate himself before he ascended over a neighboring house and fluttered out of sight.

An omen, I believed, of prodigies to come.

I wasn’t disappointed. Prodigies abounded.

One morning, I discovered my dining room was coated with an ultrafine layer of snow. The table, floor, and wrought-iron chandelier were lunar white when I entered, and I assumed the powder was dust until I wiped the table with my palm. The sensation was painfully cold but oddly refreshing, like peppermint absorbed directly into my skin.

According to a thermometer I fetched from my study, the dining room was eight degrees Fahrenheit despite an otherwise well-heated building and a working radiator in the dining room itself. When the localized cold began to disperse, I swept as much of the snow as possible into a Mason jar. The snow soon melted into seventeen ounces of water, and yet the water remained unnaturally cold. I was strongly tempted to drink it but ultimately placed the jar in my curiosities closet, where I discovered, in the shadows, that the water was faintly luminous.

Another day, the water in the house’s pipes became impossibly hot—well beyond boiling point without becoming steam. A one-minute flow not only deformed the kitchen faucet but raised the room’s temperature so dramatically I fainted from the heat.

When I revived and fled to the cooler hallway, I heard a deep, metallic groaning in the downstairs bathroom. The sound was coming from the pipes, which were bowing and distending from the superheated water. I ran the sink and bathtub faucets to relieve the strain but succeeded only in damaging the drain pipes, too.

I ran from the bathroom to the first-floor utility room. My ancient hot-water tank was oily black and massive, with heavily grimed gauges, knobs, and valves, like a repurposed boiler from an evil locomotive. A flaking label read DO NOT ADJUST. I twisted several unmarked dials, then kicked the tank to quiet an ominous rumble. Nothing appeared out of order, and when I returned to the bathroom and retried the faucets, the water’s temperature had already begun to drop.

Much of my plumbing was visible along the house’s exposed brick walls and the lasting damage was immediately apparent. Horizontal pipes had sagged. Vertical pipes had tapered and bulged like hideous balloon animals. There were blockages and leaks, and from that day forward, the pipes’ distorted widths caused my toilet to flush with breathtaking suction and my faucets to dribble or spurt with unpredictable force.

My radiators sounded like a choir of murdered children, and now and then I sat and listened, wondering if the house was threatening me. Yet the radiators’ song was balefully lovely and the distorted pipes lent a grotesque but singular aesthetic to the walls. The house, evolving in my presence, felt more and more like home.

A different sort of mystery came to light when I visited the basement.

One dirty lightbulb with a pull chain lit the area near the stairs, and I used my pocketlight to illuminate my way around the darker depths and grottos. Motes swarmed the air but the air felt dead. The space was loaded with support beams, cobwebs, discarded furniture, moldering crates, broken tools, and dust-furred debris. All told, it was an especially decrepit but otherwise typical old basement. The ceiling joists were low and flooring nails jabbed downward only inches over my scalp. The walls were irregular concrete, studded with rocks and bricks and rusted metal, and several partial collapses of the foundation had been reinforced with makeshift buttresses.

The floor was also concrete, with cracks, swells, oily puddles, mounds of dirt, and powdery efflorescence. Much of the floor’s rear half was a patchwork of iron plates, welded trapdoors, and wooden platforms weighted down with boxes and scrap metal.

In the northeast corner, I illuminated a curious tableau. A black iron safe was riveted to the floor. The safe was three foot square, with an imposing handle and a combination lock, and was surrounded by what appeared to be a child’s furniture set. There was a tiny chair, a miniature table, and a steel-framed cot the length of my leg. On the table stood a coffee mug and a stalagmite of wax with an unlit, semi-melted candle on top. Beside the cot was a small wooden radio, the dial of which was tuned to my favorite station.

The radio played when I switched it on. The candlewax was pliably fresh. After determining the safe was locked, I went upstairs to call Mrs. Zabka on the phone and ask her if she knew the combination.

Mrs. Zabka informed me that everything in the northeast corner of the basement belonged to a man named Mr. Gormly. He alone, she assured me, knew the combination. When I asked who Mr. Gormly was and where he’d gone after abandoning his possessions, she said the man had lived in the basement for decades and, as far as she understood, was living there still.

I was astonished by the news and asked her why I hadn’t been informed about him earlier. Mrs. Zabka corrected me: I had been informed when I read and signed Addendum 7c of the Affidavit of Title, which guaranteed Mr. Gormly’s right to inhabit the northeast corner of the basement in perpetuity. She assured me Mr. Gormly was a quiet tenant who paid his rent, in cash, on the night of each new moon.

That explained the mint-scented envelope, containing a hundred-dollar bill, I’d found in my study the day I moved in. I had assumed some previous inhabitant had left the bill behind.

“This is fantastic,” I said. “He must have known my mother and Mr. Stick. Decades in the house—imagine what he’s seen and everything he knows! I’ve got to introduce myself as soon as possible.”

“No one’s ever seen him.”

“How does he live down there with nothing but child-sized furniture?”

“He must be very small,” Mrs. Zabka said.

“But what does he eat and drink? How does he come and go?”

“That’s not for me to say. In fact, I don’t know.”

Needless to say, I was eager to meet my mysterious tenant and speak with him directly. When I failed to encounter Mr. Gormly on subsequent trips to the basement, I resigned myself to waiting for the next new moon, when he would emerge to pay his rent, and tried not to take his apparent indifference to me personally.

The bedroom ghost was elusive, too.

I tried and failed to summon her with necromantic incantations, she didn’t speak via Ouija, and I was unwilling to perform any sacrificial rituals, not only for ethical reasons but also because she hadn’t seemed the type—or rather I hoped she wasn’t the type—who needed such inducements to interact.

I thought I sensed her sometimes, in a variety of ways. A sudden fascination with a corner of my bedroom, starting as an absentminded, daydreamy gaze that turned into certainty that somebody was there. A multihued scent I couldn’t quite name, like a link between otherwise unrelated memories. A fluctuating ringing in my blood-flushed ear.

Was I growing more attuned to hints of her existence, or was she growing more adept at making herself known? I often closed my eyes, covered my ears, and tried to feel her out. I spoke to her at night and waited patiently for answers. In the meantime, I explored the house, spent hours with my books studying other ways to contact the dead, and worried I had imagined her to counteract my loneliness.

One morning I woke and discovered a symbol, like a small crescent moon, had been drawn on the fogged glass of my bedroom window. There were three possibilities:

The ghost had attempted physical communication.

Someone—Mr. Gormly?—had entered my room while I was sleeping and written on the window.

I had sleepwalked and drawn the symbol myself.

Heartened, puzzled, and disturbed in equal measure, I dressed and went to the kitchen, where I mulled the symbol’s meaning and appearance. I ate a banana mashed with cinnamon, drank a cup of coffee, and returned to my bedroom with an idea.

Under the symbol on the glass, I wrote a little question mark.

Then I sat on the bed, sucked a cough drop, and waited for an hour in a meditative state. Eventually I went to my study to read a treatise called Fuliginous Semiology, hoping to expand my communication options with ethereal entities. Books were good friends that never disappeared, and yet for all their personality and telepathic strength—the ability of an author to speak to me directly, on demand, over time and space—the relationship was limited to what a book gave. I wanted to be needed back. I wanted conversation.

I struggled to concentrate because of my preoccupation with the ghost and, it must be said, my only halfhearted interest in the language of smoke. I went to my bedroom in the late afternoon with slumped expectations. My natural introversion, coupled with years of stillborn relationships, had led me to begrudgingly accept lonely solitude. I’d learned to fear connection as much as I craved it, avoiding bars and cafes and even social media, because the more I wanted contact, the more I felt its absence. This interminable loop afflicted me that day, and I entered my bedroom with the intention of wiping my question mark off the foggy glass, and with it any chance of further disappointment.

The ghost was in the room.

I immediately sensed her just beside the window, where she had traced a clumsy squiggle in the corner of the glass. The squiggle’s meaninglessness was moot. She’d returned. She had tried.

I walked to the window and stood next to her, happy to sense she didn’t disappear or move away. I wiped the window clean—the moisture felt warm but the glass felt cold—and then I leaned down and refogged the surface with my breath.

“Tabula rasa,” I said, feeling inwardly and outwardly the blankness of potential.

It seemed as if my whole day alone hadn’t happened. I drew a short mark, like the squiggle she had left me. Then I sidestepped, giving her room to stand in front of the window, and she drew a fresh line in answer to my own. Our squiggles intersected as a lowercase t. The point at which they crossed was intimately lovely with a teardrop of moisture clinging to the glass, exactly where our fingertips had alternately touched.

I wrote the word “William” above the “t” and moved aside again.

She took three minutes to write her own name. Her invisible finger trembled from the concentrated effort, and she paused after each completed letter—and sometimes mid-letter—like a person forced to write in an unaccustomed way. I imagined writing with my foot, or with a string instead of a pen. With each slow mark she made on the glass, I saw the evidence of care, doggedness, and need.

The finished word was poorly formed but wonderfully distinct.

I read her name aloud and she immediately vanished.

One second she’d felt closer to me than ever, the next she’d disappeared without a hint of explanation. Had writing on the glass depleted her somehow, or was she so akin to me—introverted, fearful of her craving to connect—that merely sharing her name had forced her to retreat?

I stared at what we’d written.

William

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June