Читать книгу Ghostlove - Dennis Mahoney - Страница 9

3. STRANGE COMPANY

The three-winged pigeon returned to my study’s windowsill every morning at exactly 9 a.m.

His punctuality may not have been preternatural but rather a perfect inner clock attuned to daily sunlight. His reliable visits mollified my loneliness, and I began to pause in my habitual reading at precisely 8:59 a.m. to witness his arrival.

Why did he come? What did he want? He was an ordinary rock dove, pale gray with black-barred wings and an iridescent purple throat, in every way normal except for his extra limb. I admired his strange beauty and, as many people do in their relationships with animals, began to assume a degree of rapport that may have been imagined.

One morning before his arrival, I opened the sash and placed a bowl of sunflower seeds on the ledge. A blade of winter air cut across my ankles while I waited in my reading chair.

The pigeon landed in an anarchy of wings and scrabbling claws, a sudden fluttery mess that rapidly resolved to elegance and calm. He cocked his head and looked at me. I cocked my head back.

The pigeon ignored the bowl at first, seemingly enchanted by the window’s open sash and relishing how the house’s warmth breezed through his feathers. He stepped toward the room and I wondered with excitement if he might decide to enter. Instead he looked at me a while, neither inside nor out, and my thoughts swayed poetically to thresholds and portals.

At 9:03 a.m., he nudged the sunflower seeds brusquely with his beak, ruffled his neck, and flew away, leaving the window and the room emptier and colder.

Likewise, June kept visiting and vanishing. I wrote simple messages on my bedroom window—“Good Morning”, “Who Are You?”—but she either refused to answer or had lost the ability to do so.

Still I sensed her in my room once or twice a day. Whenever she was near, I greeted her aloud, wrote on the window, or tried new ways to get her to communicate. I blew out candles to see if she could manipulate the coils of rising smoke. I held a pen to a notebook and cleared my mind, hoping she’d possess me into automatic writing. Nothing helped, nothing worked. She intensified and faded like a drawing under tracing paper. At times she felt close—an onion skin away—and then the layer grew between us and she blurred or disappeared.

One night in February, I made a gut-wrenching discovery.

June had been completely absent for half a week and I had ceased to look for her return. I’d assumed she was choosing to avoid me or had simply lost interest, and the rejection had almost put me off trying to contact other spirits, encounter Mr. Gormly, or care about the pigeon visiting my study.

The house had accepted me fully by then, presenting a steady array of wondrous or disquieting phenomena, but that particular day was mostly uneventful, and even the blinding light that strobed for eight minutes from the downstairs toilet was a disappointing substitute for personal interaction. I left my study just before midnight, took a shower, and entered my bedroom naked. Despite my room’s humid warmth, a mild fever had left me with a chill, and I walked to my secondary storage closet for an extra blanket.

When I opened the closet door, I felt a strange, quavering air in the narrow dark space. I’d opened the closet four days earlier and encountered nothing unusual, and so I backed away and pondered the peculiar new atmosphere.

I realized it was June. Several seconds passed before she rushed out of the closet and moved directly into me. I felt a flood of empathy and mutual possession as our lonelinesses blended in a saturating hug. Just as quickly, she was through me and behind me in the room. I crouched and cried—wept is more exact—not only from the wine-drunk sadness she’d infused me with, but also from the body-wide loss of our communion. We’d been thoroughly together. We were thoroughly apart again.

I pressed my spine against the doorjamb, head between my knees, and waited for my breathing and my tears to settle down.

She’d been locked inside the closet, possibly for days. Had she materialized there and found herself trapped, or had I locked her in myself earlier that week? Either way, opening the door had proved impossible to a ghost who could barely trace her name. She’d been as hopelessly confined as a child in a latching fridge.

I stood and crossed the room, turning off the lamp so the only illumination came from a streetlight glowing down the block, and quickly got dressed in boxers and an undershirt.

I sensed June’s presence more easily than ever. Passing through me, she had left me with a tinge of who she was, as if we’d kissed and I could still taste the flavor of her toothpaste, or as if the two of us had talked all night and I could recognize her voice days later in a crowd.

She hid between the bed and the wall, near the nightstand corner with the tumbleweed dust. She filled the air as tangibly as worry in my chest. Instead of touching her again, I sat beside her on the floor and hoped my mere companionship would give her reassurance.

Her terrible ordeal had raised many questions.

If she could vanish from the bedroom any time she chose, why had she remained imprisoned in the closet?

She couldn’t drift through walls, so how had she drifted through my body?

Assuming she could walk and sit, did gravity affect her?

How much of her was physical? How much of her was not?

I let my thoughts float and focused on her mood. Her electrical panic seemed to disperse, and eventually she moved and lay on the bed above me, watching me—I think—and comforted to have me there.

She seemed to fall asleep. I hoped she could dream.

I fell asleep, too. In the morning she was gone but I could feel the way she’d moved underneath my skin.

In early March, a new door appeared in my house. It was located in an unfurnished bedroom on the third floor and I confirmed—by studying photos from my realtor—the door didn’t exist when I bought the house in December.

The room’s plaster walls were painted a shade best described as abandoned-hospital green. Chunks of plaster had broken off, revealing the underlying brick. The room was small and dim. There was a single wooden chair.

When I entered the room from the hallway, the mysterious new door was centered in the wall to my right. The frame was six feet tall and two feet wide, and the door itself was roughhewn wood of an unknown species. The wood smelled of incense and midwinter wreaths, the way a temple door smells after decades of worship.

I opened the door toward me with a black iron ring pull.

The sight of myself beyond the door made me jump backward. My reflection jumped, too, but not with perfect symmetry. I stared at myself, observing how my self stared back, and then the two of us seemed to realize there were two of us indeed.

The doorway wasn’t a mirror. It was a passage to another room, identical to mine, in which a whole Other William looked at me, amazed.

Was he an Other William or was I an Other William? Had I summoned him by opening the door, or had he summoned me by opening a door in his own equivalent brownstone? Judging by my twin’s fascinated squint, he was puzzling over the same perspectival conundrum.

Twice we started to talk at precisely the same moment, then stopped to listen when we realized the other was speaking. I sat in the wooden chair, determined to converse with him. Other William did the same.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I’m William Rook.”

“So am I.”

We heard and saw each other clearly, which meant that soundwaves and light could pass between our rooms and yet I suspected, with primal anxiety, that to bodily cross the threshold would court annihilation.

“If you tell me you’re real,” Other William said, “it’s either true and I won’t believe you—because how can it possibly be true?—or it’s false and I’m delusional.”

“What if both of us are real and both of us believe it?”

“Ask me, then,” he said.

I straightened and inhaled. He slumped and held his breath.

“Are you real?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Maybe we’re hallucinating.”

“If we’re both hallucinations, there would have to be a third me. An actual hallucinator.”

I nodded and paused, acknowledging his good sense and feeling a strange sort of pride, as when I sometimes visualized myself as very wise. I wanted to impress him with an intelligent response, and I gave the matter an extra minute of consideration, knowing only a fool would consciously shortchange himself.

“We’ll talk about ourselves,” I said. “I’ll tell you everything I did today, in the finest possible detail, including what led me to open this door. When I’m finished, you’ll do the same.”

“What will that accomplish?” Other William asked.

“It’s easier to recognize a truth-teller once you get him talking.”

“Or a liar.”

Coming from anyone else, his persistent contrariness might have irked me, and yet his voice and even his thoughts were wonderfully familiar and I felt a kind of deep mental calm as we conversed.

I recounted every part of my day: my morning coffee and cinnamon banana; the four accounts of ravenous ghosts I’d read in the study; my exploration of the oddments room; the fingertip I’d accidentally severed; the reattachment of my fingertip using skinwort; the levitating squirrel; and the irresistible urge, beginning at 3 p.m., to visit the current room for no particular reason.

“Five accounts,” he said.

I realized he was right: I’d forgotten the dullest account of ravenous ghosts, but Other William had apparently read the same stories that morning and both of us remembered all five when he corrected me.

“We had the same day,” I said.

“Which proves you’re in my head,” Other William answered. “My brain created you and didn’t even bother to get imaginative.”

“Or we’re doppelgängers living identical lives, in identical brownstones, on opposite sides of the doorway.”

“Then shouldn’t we be opposites?”

“Mirrorlike,” I said. “Equivalent but backwards.”

“Is one of us evil?”

“I don’t think so. But you strike me as a pessimist.”

“And you’re an optimist,” he said with subtle condescension.

“We’re a literal split personality. It’s marvelous.”

“And chilling.”

We were restless then, as eager to do something else as anyone after intense self-reflection, and we agreed to separate for the time being and independently research our encounter before we met again.

I smiled. He did not. We said goodbye and closed the doors.

Walking away from myself left me viscerally disassociated, as if I’d floated out of my body as a whole second body. I was hyperaware that everything about me, from my tiniest movements to my thoughts, was being mirrored by myself in some identical reality. At first I felt doubly self-conscious, but my embarrassment seemed more in line with Other William’s negative demeanor, and so I shifted my perspective and began to feel positive and doubly alive. I was twice as active, twice as hopeful, twice as me.

I wanted to share my experience with someone other than myself and went to my bedroom, hoping June was there. She wasn’t in the room.

I wrote, “I need you,” in the window fog and felt twice as lonely.

A house is haunted only by the people who are in it.

My small square kitchen, with its familiar cabinets, cans of soup, and Mr. Coffee, was normally a room of nourishment and comfort. Then one night alone, I entered and found the space inexplicably smudged with sadness. The ceiling fixture’s bulbs glowed like failing candles and a sorrow from the past—from within the kitchen itself, or from a corner of my childhood?—seeped into the present like color through a bandage.

The three-winged pigeon continued to visit my study’s windowsill. I tried offering pumpkin seeds, corn kernels, breadcrumbs, cranberries, maggots, pine nuts, granola, and jackfruit, but the pigeon rejected them all. Every day, he perched and watched me with an unexplained intensity. There was something crazed and focused in the pigeon’s staring eye, conveying both inquisitiveness and imminent attack. I wished he would eat. I wished he would trust me.

I put off revisiting my doppelgänger, not yet prepared to face the ontological implications of his existence, and felt assured that he was wrestling with the same reservations.

I wrote on many of the house’s other windows, carrying a kettle of boiling water room to room to fog the glass. I left personalized hellos to June, my mother, and Mr. Stick, along with generic hellos to any other ghost who might discover them, but only my bedroom window retained its foggy words and none of the other windows ever showed an answer.

Sometimes I woke with no recollection of falling asleep—only a vague remembrance of insomnia—and felt the cosmic gap that yawned between days. Long ago, I didn’t exist. Would I cease to be again? What if the voids before and after, and the night-gulfs between, were truer than the twinkling lights that constituted life?

I had nightmares of waking up to solitude again.

One night as I was preparing for bed, I switched off my radio and the music kept playing at the lowest perceptible volume. A lingering charge in the radio, I thought, or a tuning-fork effect in my inner ear’s bones. And yet the music carried on, delicate and ghostly. I had to hold my breath to hear the melody unfurl.

It was Mr. Gormly’s radio playing in the basement. I was two floors above him but his music floated up, maybe through the radiator pipes or hidden ducts.

I hurried down from my bedroom, determined to finally meet him. But although I made little sound in my descent, he must have heard me coming because the music stopped playing. When I opened the basement door, the stairs were unlit and I regretted leaving my pocketlight behind.

“Hello?” I said in the dark. “Mr. Gormly, this is William. I’ve been hoping we could talk.”

Not a word, not a rustle followed my appeal. I used the railing to feel my way down and pulled the lightbulb cord, which was inconveniently placed at the bottom of the stairs.

The cord, no longer attached to the light fixture, tipped a bucketful of small, scrabbling insects into my hair. I shrieked and clambered back upstairs, swatting at my head and slamming the door behind me. The insects clung despite my frantic tousles, and as I fled to the bathroom for adequate light and a mirror, Mr. Gormly’s radio resumed playing music.

I spent the next hour shampooing, combing, and tweezering my scalp.

Removal proved difficult as the insects rolled themselves tightly into my hair. My head was a thicket of writhing cocoons, and I began to seriously consider shaving my head when I finally managed to extract one for study.

I consulted Philo’s Enchiridion of Extraordinary Insects and identified the vermin as Hungarian curlers. They were translucent gray, like blisters full of slush, with tacky abdomens that made them inextricable once they fully twisted into a host organism’s hair.

After learning that common smoke irritated their membranes, I lit a tightly rolled newspaper, blew it out, and wafted the plume toward my head. The curlers began to uncoil themselves and tumble onto the floor, where I crushed them under my shoe heel. The sound was like bubble wrap popping underwater.

I took no pleasure in their extermination but they couldn’t be allowed to further infest my home.

A single curler defied the smoke and I was forced to shave a portion of my hair with a straight razor. It left me with a bald patch, the size of a large postage stamp, to the left of my cowlick.

I admired this lone survivor’s tenacity to live and kept the hair cocoon in a Mason jar, which I placed next to the jar of luminous snow water in the curiosities closet.

According to Philo, metamorphosis would take anywhere from one to seven months. Damage to the subsequent page prevented me from learning about its future winged form, but my anticipation was a hopeful end to a hideous ordeal.

After mopping the crushed Hungarian curlers off the floor, I decided to contact a lawyer about Addendum 7c of the Affidavit of Title. I thought the incident might allow me to evict Mr. Gormly, and yet a deeper part of me wanted him to stay and negotiate his tenancy. I had the satisfying blood-rush of someone with an enemy and wanted to compel him to engage face to face.

June remained mercurial and oftentimes aloof.

Whenever I sensed she was near, I talked in the seemingly empty room and somehow, despite her lack of ears, she registered the soundwaves moving through the air. She saw me, too, and seemed to grow adept at interpreting my postures and expressions, whereas I never perceived so much as a vaporous silhouette of her form.

Her unpredictable comings and goings kept me off-guard. Every time I undressed, slept, talked to myself, or blew my nose, I knew she might silently appear without my noticing. My lack of privacy led to openness. As my physical exposure grew more and more familiar, I became more comfortable telling her about my life, just as being naked in the house had made me feel at home.

I told her about the things I’d experienced since moving in: the three-winged pigeon, Other William, my nightmare about an indescribable cat. I told her about my mother’s trauma and my father’s fatal crash. One night I sobbed in her presence, lonely and unmoored, unaware that she was there until I suddenly sensed her leaving.

She came and went without reason, appearing when I didn’t expect her and disappearing—to where, and how?—as soon as I believed the two of us were bonding. I worried that my neediness would frighten her away and worried that my false nonchalance would do the same, and so I began to refrain from summoning her by writing on the window, and when she visited my room, I never asked where she’d been or why she’d come back.

I was essentially blind and deaf whenever we conversed, able to speak, emote, and gesture in fully-fleshed monologues while June remained invisible and mute. I couldn’t decide which of us had it worse with my voice never answered and her answers never voiced.

Our only means of communication remained my bedroom’s foggy window. She couldn’t move objects, let alone grasp a pen, but somehow her fingertip could slowly streak the glass. Her energy—maybe a fundamental electrical charge she’d retained after death—had just enough force to move molecules of water.

But even that required extraordinary effort on her part and I devised a simpler method by drawing two columns on the window—Y and N, divided by a line—and asking her yes-or-no questions. All she had to do was dot the appropriate column.

She was taciturn and sometimes stubbornly withdrawn, but I phrased my questions carefully and slowly came to know certain details about her.

She was twenty-one years old, and yet I suspected death had made her something of an old soul.

She could be warm and even playful, as willing to share the room in silence as to tease me with enigmas. One night, she spent ten minutes drawing what I believed to be an occult symbol on the window. At the height of my suspense, she squeaked the first X in a game of tic-tac-toe.

She was sorrowful and scared and wouldn’t tell why.

I knew nothing significant about her life before her death. She declined to answer questions on the subject and withdrew if I pressed too far, however subtle my attempt. Now and then I felt resentful, needing better than she offered. Other times, I blamed myself for needing more than giving.

One night I asked if she’d encountered other spirits, hoping she’d caught a glimpse of my mother, Mr. Stick, or anyone who had haunted the house long enough to know its secrets.

“No,” June answered.

“Maybe you have and didn’t realize. Do you ever feel as if you’re not alone?”

“No.”

“Have you experienced any subtle changes of atmosphere you can’t explain?”

“No.”

“How about a change you can explain?”

“No.”

“Have you seen anything remarkable I haven’t already mentioned?”

“No.”

We both grew impatient with our mode of conversation. Every small exchange was a game of twenty questions, riddled with mysterious abstractions and confusion.

I plunged into reading, hoping to learn more about the physics and abilities of disembodied spirits, of which there seem to be as many varieties as common living people, and we began to experiment with alternate means of communication.

She couldn’t move a Ouija board planchette. She was unable to write in a layer of superfine ash, which I had delicately poofed across a white lacquered table. I attempted a spell on myself called the Katten Oren, which briefly allowed me to hear every mouse and insect scuttling in my brownstone but not a trace of June’s voice or any of her movements.

Late one night, after a grueling day of study, I was sitting with June at the end of the bed, exhausted from my work and lapsing into sleep. My hand fell open. June twirled her finger in the center of my palm. I smiled, half-sleeping, at the feeling of her touch, which was not exactly physical and not exactly psychic. It was more as if the spirit in my hand was made of water and the spirit in her fingertip had delicately swirled it.

I jolted up and faced her, staring mid-distance at the spot I thought her face would be.

“Tell me if you just drew a circle. Y or N.”

I held my upturned palm toward her on the bed. She wrote a thick “Y”, clear and perfect, in my hand.

“What color are the walls?” I asked.

She wrote the word, “BROWN.”

I laughed and spun, dizzy from the inside out, and thought I felt her staring very hard in my direction. Then her presence seemed to flicker and I worried she had vanished.

“Are you here?” I asked.

She wrote the word “YES” inside my palm.

“We did it! We can talk now!”

June didn’t answer. I wondered if the breakthrough had frightened her somehow and thought about a thing my mother once said—that ghosts were only people, after all, same as me, and were as hesitant to show themselves as anybody else.

“June,” I said.

Nothing.

“Please don’t disappear again. Tell me about yourself. Why are you here?”

“I DON’T KNOW.”

“Is there anything you need?”

She wrote the word, “DEATH,” in the middle of my forehead.