Читать книгу Dredging the Choptank - Kimberley Lynne - Страница 14

May 25th

Black Shapes

The hard man in Fells Point was not the first ghost story in my life. I repressed many poltergeist experiences until they cropped up again during this project, surfacing like mysterious skin rashes, skirting around baseboards like the black shapes. American society does not encourage its members to tell ghost stories. Some spectral tales begin with a reckless group of teenagers telling ghost folklore and a phantom descends, as if the narration of the story summoned up the real thing. The fabricated stories of The Woman in Black, The Ring, The Turn of the Screw, and The Mummy all have curses associated with the telling of the tale.

I wondered if those curses turn the ghost stories dissociative. Joseph Campbell theorized that when a myth separates from the society that created it, the story becomes disconnected. Commercial television jingles and reality TV are decidedly dissociative; they replace the informing archetypes in our brains with a useless jumble of confusion. But ghost stories don’t disconnect people from their society. They reflect our need as a society to know the Other Side of the Veil, to know what happens after death, to communicate with those who have crossed, to trick death one last time before he finally finds us, to cheat the Devil, and to transcend our own demise. Most ghost stories project a further reality than this one and disqualify the end of our consciousness. We need ghost stories. I find them more reassuring than the doctrine of most religions. Phantom legends have been part of our lore for centuries. The survival of these associative myths is a very positive cultural sign and a fictional Darwinism – ghost stories have common ancestors and the ones that best adapted to their surroundings endured. It’s the natural selection of folklore.

By learning her stories, I was connecting to Maryland and to her checkered past.

I told my friend Joe the Big Liz story. I was evolving the tour’s narrative voice by re-telling the stories and adjusting my writing style. Ghost stories, parables and myth are told in basic language since they’ve been repeated by generations. Folklore archetypes work like metaphors work: with something tangible they help us understand a disembodied concept.

“The wind will howl and soon you’ll hear Big Liz’s shuffling step,” I drawled, telling Joe the swamp story.

Joe was born in Frederick, Maryland, and he owns an antique store called Fat Elvis. He re-circulates dead people’s stuff back into the community. “No more. Stop,” he said. He paused and his brown eyes twinkled. “Okay, more. Tell me more. Is she carrying her head?”

That’s precisely how I feel about ghost stories.

Stop. No. More.

We love ghost stories and repress them all at once.

“New ghost stories are scarier than older ones,” Joe said. “Somehow the fresher ones are more powerful.” His goatee flexed as he thought. “Like it can still happen now.”

“Like the older ones are further away?” I asked. This thinking seemed so linear.

“Maybe,” he said.

“But Big Liz is still off Route 50,” I said dubiously. “Ysabel knew her story and she’s fifteen.”

The older ones hold power from all those years of the ghost being dead, from all those years of the story being told. Each re-telling by each generation makes the story more powerful; certainly each chronicling increases impact and increases the story’s base. The reporting conjures it, perpetuates it, like prayer.

I took a chance and told him one of mine, just to keep the story alive a little bit longer. All this thinking on ghost folklore reminded me of a darkness I once saw, a darkness much deeper than the little black shapes.

“All right. I know a fresher, newer ghost story,” I said

I was working tech theatre at Essex Community College in Baltimore and standing at the fly rail backstage during a performance of Camelot. A thick, black, lighting cable had slipped and hung in a long heavy loop, blocking the offstage exit of one of the castle units. The tech crew waited in the wings to roll the castle units offstage in a complicated scene change, and Beck, our beloved production manager, stood beside me.

“Go tell Eric that we’re going to have dress that cable before we can clear the castle,” he said. Then he slowly put his hand on my arm. ”No, wait, you don’t have to.”

Rumor in the tech staff was that Beck was a warlock; maybe because he sported a long ponytail and could rip through lumber like butter. I don’t know about his religious leanings, but he saw the darkness coming before I did, a moving darkness darker than offstage, gathering around the cable, not really lifting it, but pushing it up, up over the edge of the castle. All the crew techs saw it, and shook their heads, as if their eyes would work better after the shaking.

“There could be a logical explanation,” said Joe.

“Maybe, but what?” I asked. “No one was up in the fly area. We all saw the darkness lift the cable up. What could that be?”

“Precisely,” he said finally. “I said could.”

“Maybe we want to believe the illogical because we want to believe the illogical,” I rambled. “But all of us together, having a group halluncination?”

“Isn’t there a hospital right next to Essex?” Joe asked.

Essex Community College is adjacent to Franklin Square Hospital, and some of its theatre department folklore recounts the recently hospitalized dead visiting the stage. A good percentage of the theatrical family believes in ghosts. We’re open to that sort of thing. In one theory, that belief is the reason that ghosts reveal themselves to us. We allow ourselves to see the unknown ships in the harbor.

My friend Tomi’s best ghost story happened in a theatre. Tomi and I went to high school together. He has silver, wavy hair and a big belly laugh. He’s one of our group’s storytellers. Tomi’s been seeing ghosts for years. “Have I told you my favorite ghost story?” He asked me, drinking his beer.

“We had finished the show and we were closing up Harbor Theatre. You know, Harbor used to be in that old Victorian building in Fells Point. North of the market.”

I nodded, smiling, remembering Tom Flower’s Locust Street directions.

“The stage manager went upstairs, right, to shut off the electric, to shut down the dimmers. So, you get that she shut everything off, electrically. That has to be clear. When she got back, we were all about to leave and we all heard that whoosh of a spotlight coming on – whoosh!

And a spotlight shone downstage center. A perfect, round circle of light right dead center. Now, there are some remains of juice in a circuit.”

“Yeah, but not enough to turn on a spot,” I said.

“And not a perfect downstage center spot.”

“So, I guess you left,” I said, grinning.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, tipping back in his chair. “We booked.” He smiled. “Those people didn’t want to stay for the real show.”

Not all theatrical types believe, though. I told my ghost cable story to two theatre carpenters recently. “Yeah, but you’re nuts,” said one.

“But that’s the story how I remember it,” I insisted.

Do you have to believe to see? See to believe? Do you have to believe in something all around you that’s usually hidden? Is that faith? I believed the ghouls in the Hampton Harvest Spook House were real, even though we helped Dad paint them. Why do the young believe ghosts more readily than those of us whose senses have been dulled by decades of life? Are we “trailing clouds of glory”25 as Wordsworth wrote, losing our vision of the mysterious magic of the universe as we age? Yet, the older I become and the more I see of life, the more I believe there’s more to life than what I see.

I tried to remember the ghost in the Dorchester Arts Council hall almost two months ago: the sensation of being watched, the wet lick, the vague after burn, the cold whoosh of air that passed through me, tingling my skeleton and raising the hairs on my neck.

The redness on my cheek had mostly faded. The bumps had lowered and turned white or clear. Weirdly, the curve of the pattern has shifted slightly on my cheekbone. It was inching up, slightly closer to my eye. I’m worried that my body absorbed the wall water. If the water caused an allergic reaction on the surface of my skin, imagine the damage it could corrode inside.

Karl was afraid to kiss it. He kissed around the edges of it. “Has it moved up towards your eye?” He asked.

“How could it?” I replied, turning over and away from him.

That night, I dreamt that I was in a house, looking out a window, at a graveyard. A man, tall, angular and wearing a white suit, appeared in the graves. I knew he was dead. I turned from the sight of him, and he was suddenly beside me in the house. He was very handsome and older with white, curly hair. We didn’t speak. I saw a woman in the graveyard, and then she appeared beside him. She looked like my dead friend Carol, all dressed up. I gaped. I waited for them to dissolve, to decay, but they did not.

The man said, “Everyone owes the debt of a death.”

The woman nodded. “Everyone.”

We dream in archetype.

I called Korinne and told her this dream. She laughed at its obvious message. “That was it?” She chortled. “That you’re going to die?” The first time she meditated on her place in the universe her revelation was “space and time are completely irrelevant.” She was furious; she wanted more. Then she said seriously about my dream. “Yes, it’s true that everybody owes a death, but they also owe their own life. We owe a debt of life.”

All these ghost stories are about the debt of the lives of its characters.