Author Archive
Ghost Fox, Ghost Forest
It’s late, too late to be walking my dogs, but I was grading papers and lost track of the time, so by the time Bugsy lays a sad snout on my leg, it’s already dusk. I leash him up, corral Arya, who is yapping hysterically because she saw maybe a spider? And out we go, down the neighborhood streets to the park.
It’s dusk, and the street and houses look like a picture you tried to take in the dark, spooky, hard to make out. Finally the streetlights come on—and right at that moment, about a half a block ahead of me, a fox runs past. But it’s not a regular fox. It’s . . . I don’t want to say “ghost fox,” but it looks like a ghost fox, spectral, long, and lithe. It runs up from the creek, crosses the street in front of us, and heads into the park.
But here’s what’s weird: my dogs don’t notice anything at all. They don’t bark—and Arya barks at everything, and Bugsy loves to chase critters. They don’t even look up. They just stand there, patient, like they’re wondering when I’ll start walking again.
So I do start walking, start running, actually. We’re heading for the park anyway, and I want to get a better look at that fox.
And now we’re in the park itself, under the dark limbs of some suddenly really creepy-looking trees. It’s ridiculous. I know this park, I’ve been here a million times. It’s just a city park, not a Mysterious Forest.
I thought I knew it, anyway.
Just ahead of us, a low gray shadow flicks up the dirt path, and I follow. The dogs are not only not interested in this chase, they’re actually hanging back a little now. Arya whines. I have to bring them to heel.
We run toward the back of the park, following that slender gray shadow as it runs across the open ground. It’s muggy and hot and it’s time to go home, and both dogs are whining now, and pulling back, but I have to see.
Not so many park lights here toward the back, and the trees are getting thick, elms and poplars and oaks thick with leaves that look black in the darkness. We fight our way through a clump of tall shrubs, my dogs crying high and scared, and come to a clearing where the moonlight falls bright and cold as a knife.
And we stop, and the dogs go silent, because something’s . . . wrong.
This isn’t the same park.
These aren’t the same trees.
This is a forest. A ghost forest. The trees aren’t low and dark and thick with leaves. They’re tall and slender as bones, white and bare, with twiggy twisted branches like an old person’s hands.
The tree right in front of me is the tallest of all, thicker than the others. And low on its trunk is a great black hole, shaped like an elm leaf, like an inky mouth.
A tiny white hand emerges from this black hole, and grips the side of the tree.
The leashes yank out of my hand, and silently my dogs scatter away.
But I don’t move. I don’t know why I don’t move.
Another little white hand appears, and grabs this other side of the hole. With great effort, the little hands pull and pull until a small white creature spills from tree and staggers out to stand a few yards from me.
The moon is like a spotlight. It’s a child. A tiny child, a young child, maybe four or five years old at most.
And I have a sudden thought, which is: the moon is revealing this child to me.
So that I can save her?
Or to warn me?
But she looks so sad, this child. A sad little girl, tiny and thin in her white-gray rags, white as the moon all over except for the purple around her black eyes and her lank, tangled black hair. I’d say she was a ghost—maybe she is a ghost — except that she smells so bad. She smells like my house the week a rat died in the walls and his body slowly decayed decayed until dust was all that was left, and the smell was gone.
“Are you all right?” I ask stupidly.
She stares at me. Her eyes are like the black hole in the tree.
“You okay, you need . . . ”
Her voice is high and rasping. “You have to take care of me.”
“Of course I will, are you lost?” I say. “Are your parents . . . “ I don’t know how to finish that. I don’t even know where I am, what this place is. Is she even real?
But that smell—well, that smell. She must be real.
“You have to take care of me,” she says again.
She sounds like some little queen. I want to laugh.
“You have to take care of me.” She takes a step forward. Her voice is sharp as a needle now. “You HAVE TO. YOU HAVE TO.”
And then somehow, faster than I can see it, she’s right next to me, and her arms are around my waist. And suddenly she’s climbing me like a monkey, she’s incredibly strong, and her thin little arms are around my neck like ropes and her mouth is wide open, and inside it’s as black as a cave, black as the hole in the tree, and she’s screaming YOU HAVE TO, YOU HAVE TO.
And then I feel it.
I feel sharp little teeth plunging into my neck.
I feel her little black mouth sucking on my throat, every mouthful a pulse of blood straight from my heart, like she’s a hungry baby and my heart is a bottle of milk she’s draining dry.
I am screaming, I know that. I hear myself, screaming. I am trying to pull her off, but she’s incredibly strong. I hear the crunch of dead leaves under my knees before I realize I’ve dropped to the ground.
“Don’t,“ I hear myself moaning. “Don’t, don’t.” But the hard arms wrap tighter around me, the bone-fingers wrapped in my hair, the wiry little legs like a tight leather band around my chest, and I’m falling, I think I’m falling, the white moonlight goes black, and . . .
And . . .
Well, I’m telling the story. Aren’t I? So you know I didn’t die, don’t you?
Don’t you?
. . . Did I die?
I don’t think I died. I woke, anyway, later. A snuffling came at my ear. Bugsy, I thought (no way it was Arya, that idiot): he hadn’t abandoned me after all.
But the bright sharp little tongue, and the narrow snout—those weren’t either of my dogs. It was a low gray shadow at my side, the gray fox. The moonlight had left the grove, had moved on, so it was too dark to see. But I stood, I was dizzy as hell, but I stood, and I followed the fox.
It felt like I followed that ghost of a fox all night. It was taking me in circles, I was sure, and I thought again that I would die, this couldn’t be right, it was playing with me.
But one last left turn, and I was standing on the street, with in the bright ugly light of the streetlight. And I started crying, I cried, I was so relieved. I walked and stumbled and ran the few blocks left toward home.
And I’m home, I made it home. But my dogs never came back. I posted rewards, I checked the Humane Society, but I never saw those dogs again. I miss them every day. Even Arya.
And somehow I can’t quite get myself to go to work. I sit in my house all day. I just rest here. There doesn’t seem much reason to go out.
After a few months, I started hearing voices in the house. Voices of people talking, like they live here or something.
Are they ghosts?
Am I the ghost?
Where are my dogs?
(Inspired by my friend Patrick Lopez’s story about a ghost fox. Funny, I haven’t seen Patrick in a while.)
The Substitute
Substitutes are the worst obviously, but this one wasn’t so bad. She was pretty, for one thing, with a snub nose and eyes sort of permanently smiling at you. And she was pretty nice, without being goopy. She just seemed regular. We liked her.
Especially I liked her. Our regular teacher doesn’t really like me very much, but the substitute did.
She was there the week we presented science projects.
My friend Mariela went before me. Her project was on lobotomies, where they stick a needle in your eye to kill a bad part of your brain. Or it turns out now they do it in surgery, but in the past they used to stick a needle through your eye into your brain. And this is not like a hundred years ago, but even in the 1960s and 1970s! Gross.
My project was “Extraterrestrial Life—ALIENS AMONG US.” The title was kind of corny because obviously there aren’t real aliens. But some people think there are alien microbes around. In fact some people think that’s actually how life on earth got started even, maybe—some alien microbes landed here and life started growing from them.
“So maybe life just came raining down on us from outer space,” I said at the end of my presentation. “And maybe that’s even still happening now.”
Then I curtsied, which is ridiculous, but whatever, I just did it to show I was done. The class clapped for me, and when I passed her desk to sit down, the substitute leaned toward me.
“I think you’re righter than you know,” she said, and smiled.
The final bell rang, so we packed up to go home. I was kind of glowing. But the substitute stopped me at the door.
“Got a second, Aisha?” she said. “I loved your project. Lovely work. Let’s talk a bit more. Maybe we should consider this project for the district science fair.”
I have always wanted to be in that big fair, and I had worked so hard on this project. I know it sounds stupid, but just, I was excited. I pulled a chair up to her desk and sat down.
“Why do you think alien microbes might still be visiting?” she asked. Her long red nail was sort of drawing along her grade book, like she didn’t notice it. Her eyes were on me, warm and brown. “What do you think they want?”
“Oh, well,” I said. I was stumbling a little because I wasn’t sure what she meant. “They’re just microbes so . . . I don’t think they want or don’t want things.”
When she smiled, her eyes crinkled in such a nice way. “What about Noah’s presentation, though?”
Noah had done his on toxoplasmosis, which is where cats spread this microbe around, and when mice eat the microbe, they start liking cats and being super friendly to them. It’s like this bug whispers in their brains that Cats are the best! No reason to be afraid of cats!
And once they stop being afraid of cats, well, they’re a lot easier for the cats to catch. Which is convenient for the cats. But it’s bad for the mice they kill and eat.
The substitute was leaning over me now, looking at my presentation on my school iPad. Her hair was touching my hair. She put one long pretty finger on my iPad, like she was about to make a point about something there.
I felt weird, like she was too close. Her arms were making a cage around me. And she had pushed in so that my chair was scootched all the way to the desk, so I couldn’t even slip down. My heart started beating a little hard, like it was scared for no good reason. She’s nice, though, I told myself. She’s really, really nice.
She put her lips close to my ear, so close I could feel that the lips were smiling. Then long and slow, with a long, raspy breath, she whispered: “I’m not really nice.”
I didn’t feel anything going in my ear except breath.
I didn’t feel a worm or a bug or anything.
But something must have gone in. Something did go in. What went in me? I don’t know. Maybe it was a microbe.
All I know is now there’s something that’s not me inside my head.
At first I hardly noticed. Our regular teacher came back the next day, and she wasn’t as nice, and she said my science project was Nonsense and not only would I not be going to the district science fair, I would have to start all over with a new idea just to get a passing grade. I couldn’t believe it.
And that same day, this thing in my head started doing things. But it wasn’t me.
I had to go to the library to find a new topic. They let me on the computer for twenty minutes to google around about it. I didn’t really have any ideas.
But then all of a sudden, I did. Or this thing in my head did, this thing that wasn’t me. It made my hands type out “Dr. Cynthia Weinstein new vaccine” in the google box. Which, I have never even heard that name before. And something came up! I was so freaked out from my hands typing on their own I almost got out of the chair, but my body stayed where it was and made me read the first article. Which was hard because it was pretty sciencey, but apparently this Dr. Weinstein had invented a flu vaccine that she said would prevent not just this year’s flu, like most vaccines, but all flu, ever. You take this vaccine once when you’re a kid, and never get the flu!
At first other scientists had said it couldn’t be. But I guess now some were coming around. It was a Debate in the Scientific Community.
Yeah, that would be good for a science project. But: I didn’t want to do a science project on something my hands typed out without my permission. So I tried to get up. But my body stayed sitting. It turned to the librarian, all straight and proper, and this thing in my head said to the librarian, “Miss? I wonder if may I print this article, please?”
Who talks like that? Not me. Not me.
When the librarian gave it to me I rushed out words in my own voice, saying I felt sick, really sick, I had to go home. She called my mom, and when Mom came and saw me, the madness fell off her face.
All the way home I tried not to talk, in case the other voice came out.
For the next week, I fought with the thing in my head. It wanted me to do my science project, but I wouldn’t. I stayed in my room playing Minecraft instead. I stopped looking in the mirror, because when I looked in the mirror I saw my eyes were half scared and half hard and angry. The scared part was me.
But even though I tried, that thing got better and better at using me. It made me hold the back of my neck stiff and hard, so it ached at night. It wouldn’t let me just do things, he had to be mean about it. It talked with my mouth, it sounded fake. It answered in class in its stupid prissy voice and made everyone hate me, even my friends.
One night I before I went to bed, I saw the article. I didn’t want to see it, it was scary, so I flipped it over. But when I did I saw something, and I picked it up after all. The microbe this doctor wanted to use in the vaccine—the name of it, a long scientific name, sounded familiar. I went to get my old science project on the aliens. The thing in my head didn’t WANT me to, it made my fingers so stiff I had to pushed on the iPad with flat fingers.
It’s getting stronger.
But I found the presentation. I saw where that name came from.
It’s one of the microbes this one scientist thinks is alien.
I looked again at that article the librarian printed out. It had a picture of Dr Cynthia Weinstein. And her face had that same look I see in the mirror. Her eyes were scared, with something hard and angry standing behind them.
The microbes want me to do my science project on this new vaccine, I thought. Because they want everyone to take the new vaccine.
Because then everyone will be like me.
**
I am hardly myself any longer. The words I say are almost never mine. How can’t everyone tell it’s so fake?
But they can’t, even my mom can’t. I think they think I’m the fake—but it’s not me! It’s these imposter microbes or aliens or whatever!
HaHA laughs the imposter. When something wasn’t funny.
While I’m writing this, the imposter in my head says SHUT UP, SHUT UP, STOP. It’s angry.
I have an idea how to kill him, while I can still control my body a little. But will it kill me, too?
My idea is that maybe I could I find the exact spot in my head where the imposter is, and stick a needle in there and kill it. Like in a lobotomy, only I’m not killing MY brain, I’m killing this bad thing inside me.
Supposedly you can do it through the eye. I imagine a long knitting needle sliding in, and part of me is afraid, and part of me is furious and happy.
And I don’t know which part is the me part.
I’m going to kill that lying thing before it destroys me, before it destroys the whole world. While I’m still here to know I’m not that thing, I’m going to kill it. I’m going to kill it. I won’t be a mouse in love with a cat.
And I’ll tell the world, I’ll tell Dr Cynthia Weinstein, I’ll tell everyone how to stop the aliens microbes, and I’ll make them believe me.
I hope it works
Here goes.
Night Walkers
They’d started late. The baby had spit up something, so they waited to see if he was sick, but he wasn’t. So they left anyway but not On the Dot of Six like Dad had said. A lot later.
The van sped down the highway, then rolled along blacktop roads, then crept down a gravel track crowded by dark trees. “It’s not the end of the world if we don’t finish the hike,” Mom said. “If it starts getting dark, we can just turn around.”
Dad didn’t say anything.
Toni sat in the back by the baby, watching him kick at the air. She had a new backpack with her own bottle for water, her own small flashlight, and purple plastic binoculars. She wore a hat, and her face was smeared with sunscreen. She was excited.
Now the van pulled up by a tiny log building. A smiling woman in a ranger hat stuck out her head, took some money, and handed Dad a trail map. Then she glanced at her watch, and her smile faded a little. “Now you be sure to get back before dark,” she said.
“Oh, of course,” said Mom. Her long hair was tied up under a wide-brimmed hat.
“Late start, so that might mean turning back early,” said the ranger.
“Nah, we’ll make it,” said Dad.
“But if we don’t, we’ll turn back,” said Mom. “I mean right? It’s not a competition.”
“That’s the right attitude,” said the ranger. “Ten years ago, when I was new at this job, a family like yours went out on this hike. But they stayed out after night fell, and”–she glanced at Toni, then leaned in and lowered her voice. Mom’s face became a worried frown.
The ranger straightened and smiled uneasily. “Anyway,” she said. “Made a big impression on me. So just make sure to get back before nightfall, all right?”
“Sure,” said Dad. “And if we don’t, we have a flashlight.”
Mom frowned.
“I’ll leave a light on for you,” the ranger said. She smiled as if she had made a joke. But Toni thought it wasn’t a real smile.
The beginning of the hike was all trees and going down and down for a long time. The air smelled woody, fresh and alive. Dad carried a pack with sandwiches and insect repellant and water; Mom carried the baby on her back.
The next part of the hike was long grass and yellow and pink flowers and a flat trail. Toni liked that. They walked a long time. Then came a bad part of the hike, which was more trees, thicker and older ones, and a trail that went up and up forever.
Toni didn’t like this part, but you Shouldn’t Complain. Once they stopped and ate tuna fish sandwiches.
After a while, their shadows got long, and the birds woke up to dart and sing around them. Mom said, “I wonder if we should turn back.“
“We’re almost there,” said Dad. His eyes were bright. He was looking ahead, and not looking at them.
Mom jogged to catch up with him, bouncing the baby on her back. Toni heard her say, “But remember what the ranger said about . . . ” She couldn’t hear any more.
Dad was wrong, it wasn’t almost, it was a long while yet. In that long while, as they trudged on, Toni watched her parents’ shadows grow spindly-tall and monstrous. Even the baby’s shadow-arms were long and thin, waving on the green and yellow grass.
Finally they came to an enormous lake, gray in the slanting light. “This is it,” said Dad.
“I’m gonna take off my shoes and socks and put my feet in!” said Toni.
Her mother looked hard at her father.
“Ah, I think we need to head back right away, buddy,” Dad said. “The walk took a little longer than I thought. We want to get back before dark.” He looked at her mom, and his look said Sorry. “We should probably head back right now, actually,” he said.
“But I’m hungry,” said Toni.
“Grab an apple and eat it on the way.”
They walked down and down, and they walked flat, till Toni was tired of walking. The shadows went away, and the light turned clear and strange, then dim and dimmer. Then light was hard to see in; then it was almost gone. The birds went away.
When they came into trees again, the light was gone.
Dad switched on his flashlight. “Well, now we’re in for it,” he said, in a voice like a joke. But no one laughed, and after a while he said, “We’re fine, you guys. Come on. It’s the same place we just walked through, only now it’s dark. It’s the exact same place—it wasn’t scary an hour ago.”
But it was scary now. The night had fallen on them, the night held them in its black jaws. Far above, wind rushed through the tops of trees like a long sigh, then went silent. The flashlight played ahead of them, worrying in all the corners of the trail as it ran down and down and down.
At least it isn’t the going up part anymore, Toni thought.
“Toni?” said her mother suddenly.
“I’m here.”
“Stay right by me,” said Mom. “Hold onto the strap of my pack and don’t let go.”
Toni watched the patch of light running along the ground ahead of them like a ghost.
“Should we sing?” said Mom.
No one answered. The night was like a black wool blanket wrapped all around them.
The ghost-light raced up the path, growing smaller and smaller. “I can’t move that fast with the kids,” said Mom. “Slow down.”
“Hang on,” said Dad. His voice was farther away. “I think I heard something.”
“Don’t go far,” said Mom. “We shouldn’t separate. Remember what the ranger. . . besides, we need the light.”
“Not going far,” said Dad.
“Toni, hold onto that strap,” said her mother.
The light was a small bobbing thing now, a glowing apple far up the path. It moved to the left, played against trees. Dad’s voice: “I just want to see—“
The light went out.
There was silence.
“Honey?” said Mom. Her voice was high. “Anything wrong?”
Silence.
“Steve?” she called, louder.
Silence, except the night insects, and the sighing, invisible wind.
“Steven!” she shouted.
The backpack strap yanked out of Toni’s hand; she heard steps, running along the dirt. “Mom!” Toni called. She was too afraid to move. The steps stopped. There was a long silence. They listened to each other breathing hard.
“Toni.” Mom’s voice, finally. “Do you still have that flashlight?
Toni kneeled down to open her backpack, feeling around blindly inside. By the time she had it in her hand and the pack shrugged back on, the warmth of Mom’s big, safe body was at her side. They found each other’s hands in the dark, and Mom clicked the flashlight on, shone it around. It only made a little egg of light, compared to Dad’s, but it was something.
Together, Mom and Toni and the baby walked a few yards in the darkness, calling for Dad. The toy flashlight ran a dot of light across the trees, then along the ground among the trees, where it picked out bark, a leaf, a black shape, a stone. They walked and called for a long time.
Mom told Toni to wait for a minute with the baby while she walked off the trail. Toni sat on the ground, holding the baby’s soft, drool-wet face by her own, and closed her eyes. “Keep talking,” she said.
“I’m here, it’s fine, I won’t stop talking,” said her mother from the trees.
After a while, Mom came back, with a new, darker silence around her, and put the baby on her back again. Together they walked down the dark trail. “We’re getting help,” said Mom. Her voice came fierce out of the dark above Toni, like she was arguing with someone. “We’re getting help, people with big lights and megaphones, people who know this area, who can help find him.”
Their feet crunched over stones. Even walking down as they were, it was hard to keep up with Mom right now. “Is he dead?” Toni asked.
“Of course he’s not dead,” said her mother sharply. “Why would you say something like that? He probably just twisted his ankle or something.”
“Then why doesn’t he answer us?”
“Are you holding on to that strap? Hold tight. Just hold tight.”
It had been hot in the day, but now the cool wind felt around your sleeves and collar for a place to slip in. Toni felt like her eyes were as wide as they could go, but still she saw nothing at all, unless she looked up and saw stars.
They walked for a long time. “Mama, I’m really tired.”
“Honey, I can’t carry you both.” The sound of her hiking the baby higher on her back, tightening the straps.
Then the flashlight went out.
“Mom.”
“It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t enough light to make a difference anyway.”
The cold air felt clammy on Toni’s faces. She zipped up her jacket higher. “Mom. What did the ranger lady say about that other—“
“Oh, nothing. Some old story. Keep up, honey. We’re going to walk a little faster. Are you holding onto the strap?”
Toni was starting to feel confused about up and down, ground and sky. The black trees were closing in around them, with their insect whisperings, with their low, scary night-bird calls.
“Look!” said Mom.
Toni looked. Far ahead, in the black distance, was a tiny glowing light.
“We’re there!” said Mom. She sounded like she might be crying a little. “We’re there, that’s the ranger station, we’re almost there. As long as you have something glowing to walk toward, you’re all right. So we’re all right.”
The baby, who had been so good all day, started crying. But at least that silenced the trees, the birds. They walked toward the glow, hearing only their crunching steps and the baby’s sobs.
Toni’s shoe came loose. She bent down in the dark, feeling for the shoestrings, pulling them tight across her foot.
Abruptly, the baby stopped crying. At that same moment, Toni realized she had let go of the strap.
“Mom?” she said.
First she said it in a small voice. Then she said it louder, in case Mom hadn’t heard.
But there was no answer, only insect whispers and animal breaths and the sighs of trees.
“Mom!” she screamed. She screamed it again. She screamed for her mother, over and over, eyes closed tight, shoe untied, feet planted on rocky dirt she hoped was the path. Toni screamed for her mom until she could only whisper, but she kept whispering, she wouldn’t stop, she whispered against the dark.
She opened her eyes and saw that tiny glow down the path.
As long as you have something glowing to walk toward, you’re all right.
She walked again, blind in the breathing dark.
Getting help. People with big lights and megaphones. I will be the one who saves them.
She looked up between the waving shadows of tree and saw the trail of wild, cold stars. She looked back at the glowing light.
“Mom?” she whispered, over and over. “Mom?”
Or they’ll be there, and they’ll save me. Someone will save someone.
“Mom?”
Toni walked toward the light, down and down the sloping trail. Sometimes her path wavered, so that she stumbled against a tree or brush, but then she straightened herself again. Once she stumbled over something soft, too soft for the rough forest, but she didn’t stop to pick it up.
Didn’t stop to find that it was shreds of a baby blanket.
As long as you have a something glowing to walk toward. As long as, as long as.
The cold hand of the wind slipped around her throat. A rock sprang up in front of her foot and she slipped and fell, tumbling down the sloping trail.
Wait, though.
Toni sat in the blackness, crying a little, holding her hurt knee, thinking.
The trail was going down. But when they had started the trail, they’d been going down.
So if they were nearly back at the ranger place, the trail should be going up.
So why was the trail going down? she wondered. And if wasn’t the ranger station, who was making that light?
As if in answer, the light grows larger. The light is walking toward her now, brighter, bigger by the second.
And with the light comes a sound, a terrible sound, a sort of gurgling moan, half like a laugh, half like a strangled scream.
Toni’s almost blind again now, not from dark this time, but from the light in her eyes. But before she goes quite blind, she sees something behind the light. Three tall, black figures are coming toward her, elongated as afternoon shadows. The creatures are reaching out towards her with their long, spindly arms, making raspy growls in the back of their throats, gurgling, laughing, strangling back their own excited screams.
Mom, Toni whispers, as the long, thin arms snake towards her.
But then it’s dark again.
And then it’s dark forever.
How It Feels When They Come
It starts when you feel a little tickle on your right ankle. You’re lying on the couch, reading a book, and then this little . . . tickle. Small as a cat’s whisker.
But the cat’s not around.
It’s a good book, so you don’t think about it.
But then—ugh—you feel the tickle moving. The little tickle is climbing up your leg, right up onto your calf.
Disgusting. You slap at your leg.
Too late, though. It’s already crawled up to your knee, the soft, inside part of the knee, and it’s scratching away there. You’re sitting up now, trying to sort of reach up inside your pants’ leg to get it . . .
. . . but now you feel another tickle on your collarbone, like something walking across your collarbone on tiny insect feet.
Ugh, GROSS. You reach to pinch it off, to get it off you, but it’s already scurried down lower, inside your shirt. And now there’s another one on your other ankle—no, that one’s fast, it’s already up your calf. And the collarbone one is already tickling down your breastbone, straight down toward your navel.
Now you’re on your feet, of course. The book’s on the floor half open, its pages bent. There are so many little tickles now—god, one’s in your hair—and you claw at your hair: get it out, get it out.
Then you realize that you said that out loud, you shouted it, actually, and you’re still shouting, GET IT OUT! GET THEM OFF ME!
Clawing at your hair, you grab one of the little creatures. YES. You GOT it. But did you get it? Or did it get you? Because you can feel tiny, clawlike fingers and toes clinging to your index finger.
So you look at your hand, at the thing that’s wrapping itself around your finger. It isn’t a centipede; it isn’t a roach; it isn’t a horrid little spider. It isn’t anything you’d imagined.
It’s a human sort of thing, but tiny, and dull gray all over, with thick black stripes, and hands and feet like little claws. It has a sort of face, with shiny black eyes like tiny stones in its head. And it’s wearing a tiny black hat.
You look at the thing. It looks at you. Its dark gray lips twist up in a grin, exposing little black needle-sharp fangs.
Then, without warning it scuttles down your hand and up your arm, inside your sleeve.
And now you scream for real.
Because you see them, now, you see them all: streaming out of the walls, marching out of that faint crack in the ceiling, pouring out of the stuffing of the couch you were just lying on so comfortably. They’re running toward you on their tiny feet, hundreds of them, thousands.
Why are they here? Who are they? You don’t know. And honestly, right now you don’t have time to think about stuff like that.
Because the one on your stomach is biting. It bites hard. It hurts so much, so shockingly much, the pain radiates from your stomach throughout your body like an electrical field. For a moment you’re paralyzed with pain, you can’t move, you can only feel the agonizing pain, and behind it the tiny claw-hands and claw-feet that scamper over every part of your body.
Now, on your thigh, another bite. At your soft throat: another bite.
You run.
You scream and scream and you run out your front door. HELP ME, you’re screaming. THEY’RE ON ME! THEY’RE BITING!
Screaming, you fall down on the street, rolling on the hard surface, trying to crush the horrid, grinning little biters. But it’s as if they’re made of rubber or something—they won’t crush. They spring right back, and dig back in with their poison-needle fangs.
Neighbors are out now, they’ve run to you on the street, and from the way they stop short, from their horrified faces, you have a flash of what you must look like: red face, bulging eyes, rolling on the street, screaming Stop them, it hurts, they’re hurting me.
The neighbors call an ambulance, of course, and the ambulance takes you away. The ambulance people say things that make no sense, and they don’t help you, they don’t get them off you at all.
You’re at the hospital, and your parents have come, and your mom is crying. But are they here right now? she asks, do you feel them even right now?
And you, clawing and slapping and flapping at yourself under the sheets: Yes, of COURSE they’re here now, can’t you see them, look, just LOOK.
And your dad says, really soft, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but we can’t see them. No one else can see them, kiddo. Don’t you think—
But just then one of them bites you extra-hard, and you scream, and the nurse comes running in. Now your dad is crying, too.
You pull up your shirt, for the millionth time that day, and scream, Look! Look! Will somebody just look? Look at them and look what they’re doing to me! You look down at your stomach, the writhing gray creatures with their little black claws and evil grins, at your skin with its swelling blisters and oozing sores.
You looks at your parents, you look at the nurse.
And your mother says wetly, through the tissue at her nose, But there’s nothing, honey, there’s nothing at all.
And the nurse says, I’ve got a sedative here, that will help, at least for a while.
And as the drug takes effect, you hear a voice saying—and is it your voice? it might be—saying, They’re on me, get them off . . get them off . . .
What Caroline Said
“It is reported that a house owned by Adolph Wollmer, situated one half mile south of Tess’s Corner in the town of Muskego, Waukesha County, is haunted. It is perfectly quiet around the house until the dread hour of night approaches when it is suddenly illuminated . . . Distinct sounds of footsteps are heard pacing the floors, and doors [swing] . . . to and fro . . . yet no object is perceptible. This scene is of very short duration, lasting one or two minutes only, and is repeated several times during the early morning hours.”
– February 5, 1886, Badger State Banner, as quoted in the book Wisconsin Death Trip
I knocked on the door of the big, dark house. It had steep steps up to the front, but no porch to sit on in the summer, like ours had. Wasn’t summer now, anyway.
The door knocker was shaped like a bear, turning to look at you, jaws open and snarling. It was heavy.
I waited. I watched my breath make warm puffs, watched the puffs lose heart and vanish in the cold air. February is the worst month, at least in Wisconsin, and I’ve never been anywhere else. It’s the shortest month, but it feels like the longest, ‘cause it’s been cold so long, and it’s so long to go before even a hint of spring and warm. And the snow isn’t pretty anymore, in February, only gray slush, all icy-dirty, with horse dung on the roads.
The door swung open to a teenage girl. She wasn’t a maid, for she wore a long green silk dress with dark flowers, banded at the ribs and falling in pretty cascades. I wish my mama still wore pretty dresses like that.
“Yes?” she said, looking sharp at me, but not too sharp.
“I read your house is haunted,” I said. “I read it in the paper. I’m good at talking to spirits, I am. Ma says I am. So I came to see if I could help.”
And that was partly true, about why I came. The other part, I just wanted to see people. I just wanted something to do in the long February, to get me out of the house, where it’s so lonely since Caroline died, since my mother stopped coming out of her room, since my father began staying at the bank till I am asleep and leaving before I wake.
Of course Caroline always wants to play. And I love her, and I’m glad for her. But sometimes I am lonely for a living friend.
The green-dress girl stood staring at me for a length of time, like deciding something. Then she said, “Well, come in, if you’re coming in, it’s far too cold to leave the door open.”
I was glad to be in the warmth of inside, for I had hitched a ride part way with the milk wagon, but mostly walked the seven miles to get here.
I was glad of the warmth, but at first the inside wasn’t glad or friendly. It was dark, dark all over, with the gaslights timid and dim against the dark wood.
The one bit that seemed like light, more real than the gaslight or the frosty window, was all the paintings on the walls. The walls were hung all over with great strange paintings, mostly of ships. They loomed out of the darkness, these paintings, glowing gold or silver-gray.
“Wait here,” said the girl, pointing to a bench by the stairs.
I sat and tried to warm my toes by rocking them back and forth to crack the ice on my leather boots. Across from me was a framed photograph of a man with an old-fashioned necktie and eyes pale as glass.
The wind rose up, snapping and gnashing outside the door, and I thought, I made it just in time. That’s a blizzard-sound.
“You’re getting water on our floor,” said a voice above me. I looked up. On the stairs behind me, about halfway up, sat a boy about my age. He wore a dark wool suit, three silver buttons, a little dark tie, and short pants and high stockings. His leather boots were polished and supple, not like mine.
“Well where should I sit, then?” I asked. “The girl said to sit here.”
“That’s my sister Tillie,” said the boy. “Sit by the fire in the next room, and I’ll sit with you, and your boots will dry.”
As I arranged my boots before the fire, in my much more comfortable chair, he spoke again: “What’s you’re name?”
He was in the chair across from me, sitting importantly, like a man already for all he was but my size. His face was pale and his eyes were big and dark as if something had just shocked him terribly, but his voice was calm.
“Abigail,” I said.
“Eddie,” he said, and we sat in silence, but for the restless, rising wind outside.
Now a woman came, out of the kitchen, perhaps, as she was a bit floury, and wiping her hands on a floury cloth. She was pretty, curly dark hair loosening around her ears, and her bodice was tight and red beneath a white apron, the skirt falling in swags and folds to the floor beneath it. She smiled. “Well, my girl,” she began.
The boy interrupted her. “Her name is Abigail, Ma. She’s come about the haunting.”
By the time I’d explained about the spirits and that, the wind made it hard to hear, and the window was all excited with whiteness. “Whatever your powers with spirits, sweet Abigail,” said Eddie’s mother, pushing her hair from her face with the back of her wrist, “you will surely spend the night tonight. Ach, your parents will be frantic.”
“I believe they won’t,” I said. “Since my twin died, they aren’t very noticing. Once last summer I made a camp near the river, to pretend to be the Roman army. I stayed for three days. And they said nothing when I came back.”
It had been Caroline’s idea, being the Romans. At night we looked at the million billion stars together and picked out the few constellations we knew, and then made our own.
“Child,” said the woman, and how her eyes changed, like my mama used to look at me when I was sick or hurt. “I am sorry you had such a loss, and that your parents . . . well, they must be grieving, too.”
“Thank you,” I said. “But Caroline stays with me, mostly. She makes the wind in the leaves or under the roof into words, or the kettle bubble is her laugh, like that.“
“And that’s how you contact spirits,” said Eddie.
“Yes,” I admitted. “It’s mostly only Caroline I contact. But she tells me things sometimes, about the others where she is.”
A great stamping came from the back of the house, and a teenage boy’s half-deep, shouting voice. “Alma wanted to stay out! She’s a fierce one, no mistake. You should have been a boy, Alma.“
“I wouldn’t want to be a dirty BOY, Rudy,” was the indignant reply, from a girl younger than me, I guessed.
Their mother was already hurrying back toward the voices, murmuring, “Ah, they’ll wake the baby!”
Soon she was calling us to supper, and there was roast chicken and lovely warm potatoes and turnips, and rolls fresh from the oven, and baked cinnamon apples for dessert. And the four older children laughed and talked and teased, and the mother corrected them kindly and laughing herself. And she let me help feed baby Clara with a spoon, and Clara laughed and grabbed my nose with her porridgey fingers.
As we all helped clatter the dishes clean, I thought, I love it here, and I do not want to leave. I love this whole houseful of family—except where is the father?
“My father won’t be coming home tonight, no more than you will,” said Eddie. I looked at him sharp, in case he read my mind, but I didn’t think so. He put down the dish he was wiping. “That means I can show you something. Follow me.”
As we climbed the stairs, I felt so happy. This family, warm and alive: my heart drank them up like water.
But then I heard a whisper in the whistling wind: It’s dangerous here, said Caroline.
“Why?” I whispered.
It’s dangerous here, she whistled more loudly. Oh Abbie! Go home! He’s mad!
“But who is?” I said, bewildered
Eddie turned around to look at me. His big, dark eyes. Then he turned around to climb on.
We came to a long hall with many doors, but Eddie said, “Higher.” The stairway became narrow and cramped, twisting around, then so low we had to duck our heads. Finally, we came to a door we had to kneel to go through.
And then we were in a room full of light.The high windows were blank with snow, but all over the room, on easels, leaning against the wall, were enormous paintings of light: summer light, gold and full of itself, yearning autumn light slanting away, spring all pink-fresh, like eyes just opened. And winter light, the paintings had that too, they showed how it hangs still and silver-gray around you like a heavy coat.
Eddie was looking at me.
“Did you make these?” I said.
He nodded.
“And the ones downstairs?”
“No. My grandfather painted those. He died before I was born.”
“Yours are as good or better,” I blurted. I am a blurter at times. “Yours should be hanging beside his.”
Eddie watched me with his big dark eyes, but something softer in them now. He said, “My father does not wish me to paint. I paint here in secret. Well: it is not so secret, for my mother knows, and I think Tillie suspects. But they do not tell.”
The canvases glowed around us like stolen pieces of days. “Why doesn’t he want you to paint?
“His father went blind. They say that’s why he went blind, from all the painting. He went blind, and then he went mad, and then he died, when Father was Rudy’s age. And so he . . . ” he hesitated “. . . he is not a bad father, he is a kind father in many ways, but he forbids me to paint. He means it well,” he added, and his eyes clouded with so much pain then it was hard to see.
“It’s wrong and a shame,” I said.
A gas lamp on the stairwell sputtered and coughed, and I heard Caroline’s whisper: It’s something about the paintings.
Then we were called down for bed.
Their mother put Alma in with Tillie and let me have Alma’s room, apologizing it was so small. I said I loved it, so snug and pretty and well-arranged, and Alma, who had been looking rather cross and rebellious, smiled.
In the dark, I lay listening to laughing whispers down the hall, and doors opening and closing soft; and once something heavy fell and Tillie’s voice came floating out, “If I get up I’ll be cross, so don’t make me get up.” Then all was silent.
And I thought: I love it here. I love it more than at home with Caroline. It felt disloyal to think it, but think it I did. I didn’t want to know about hauntings and madness, I didn’t want to talk to spirits, not even my sister’s. I wanted to stay here in the arms of this kind mother, these happy children.
Abigail, Caroline whispered in the wind.
“Don’t,” I said, and pulled the covers over my ears.
Abigail! Her whistling, hissing voice held a curious hurt. Abigail? You don’t love them more than me?
I pretended I couldn’t hear her. Under the covers, my body settled and softened. I thought of the strange and lovely paintings above and below me, and then even those sank from my mind, and I fell asleep.
In my dream, my sister whispered my name in my ear, over and over, and I wished she wouldn’t. I could feel her cold, damp fingers pressed against my head as she whispered my name, over and over, Abigail, Abbie. Her voice sounded cold and damp as well, and the whisper came again, over and again, more urgently, every time, and then she was screaming, right in my ear, ABBIE! ABBIE! WATCH OUT!
I sat straight up, awake.
My room was full of a glowing yellow light, brighter than any gas lamp, bright as the brightest day.
But the house was silent. Even the blizzard seemed to have calmed.
I slipped to the floor in bare feet to see where the light came from. I pulled open my door and stepped out.
The whole hallway was full of the golden light, and the stairwell, too; it seemed the whole house was full.
Then, without warning, every door in the hallway swung open, swung wide. Then every door, all together, slammed shut, hard. Then they blew open again, as if from a blast of wind, and slammed shut together again. Then a third time—even my own door, which was torn from my fingers and banged shut, once, twice, again.
And now the wind howled and screamed outside like a patient at an asylum, and thunder cracked—thunder in a blizzard!
And out of the howling, my sister’s voice sang a terrible song: It is he! He does this! He calls for light! ‘Light!’ he screams, ‘Light! Give me light!’
And I knew that wasn’t Eddie, who now stood like the rest of the family in the hallway, staring wildly around. Below, something glass shattered, and I heard the mother scream.
“Tell me something more about him!” I called out to Caroline.
Curly hair, she sang with the wind, and low brows, but handsome, only his eyes are strange, pale as blue glass, and staring.
I thought of the photograph I had seen in the hall, and I shouted “Eddie! Come!” We stumbled down the stairway on cold bare feet.
Below stairs was as brightly lit as above, as if the the sun were inside with us, and the wind screamed in agony. Their mother crouched against the stairwell, bent over her baby, shielding her.
I pointed at the photograph, shouting over the wind. “Caroline! Is it him?”
It is! she howled among the snow-howls.
“That’s my grandfather, the one who was the painter,” Eddie shouted. He grabbed my arm. “What does your sister say?”
HE CALLS FOR LIGHTS! Caroline cried.
“But the lights are on, sir!” I called into the wild wind. “It is as bright as day in here!”
Now the wind stopped, like a caught breath. In the silence I saw Rudy and Tillie on the stairway, eyes enormous, Tillie with Alma pressed against her side.
Then the the thunder CRACKED, like the roof itself had split apart.
And in that same instant, all at once, every painting on the walls crashed to the floor. The ones along the stairways hit the steps, bounced on their corners, and Rudy cried out and held his own arm. One nearly struck Eddie as it slammed down, but I pushed him out of the way.
Eddie’s mother, still shielding the baby, screamed “Children! Take cover!”
Now again the doors banged again in unison, once, twice, three times, and again the wind wailed.
“Caroline,” I cried above the moans, “how can we help him?”
EDDIE, Caroline howled.
All the eyes in the room widened, and the mother looked up, and I could see: they heard her.
Then, all in one gust: He wants Eddie to paint. That’s what he wants. He wants Eddie to paint for him.
A pause for the smallest of seconds. Then Eddie turned and ran up the stairs, past his huddling sisters and brother. We heard his feet thudding, flying.
Then silence.
And the light subsided, inside the house, from brilliant gold to softer white, to dim gray, to gone.
And at the same time, the wind outside subsided into softer sobs, then long sighs. Just before it faded altogether, I thought I heard the wind say, and not in my sister’s voice but in a man’s voice, older and sadder, Let him paint. Let him paint. Let him paint.
***
The next day, the father came home to find doors splintered and split and his own father’s paintings in broken frames leaning against walls every which way. I saw his wife pull him aside, and they spoke behind a closed door for a long time. I listened for any shouting, as at my house, but there was none. He came out, looking pale, and called for Eddie to join them.
And later, when Eddie emerged, he was smiling, and for the first time his eyes had lost their pained and haunted look.
The father leaned down to me. “Thank you for helping my family,” he said. “You have my gratitude, and if ever we can help you, we will. You have a second home here.” He glanced out the window, then smiled at me. “When I’m more certain that the calm weather will hold, I’lll horse up the sleigh and take you home.”
But I did not want to go home. After breakfast, as the others picked through the wreckage below, I ran to my room and said to Caroline: “I want to stay.”
You don’t love me any more, she hissed in the gaslight.
“I love you. I will never leave you. But I can’t have only you, it’s too lonely.”
I have no one but you, and it’s enough for me.
I was stubborn. “I’m going to ask to stay.” And I made my bed up as neatly as I could, and straightened my frock, and dabbed off the bit of turnip juice, and combed my hair, and started down the stairs.
The gas lamp spoke again. Wait, Caroline hissed. I will help. I will tell you a true thing that will happen, and when you tell Eddie, he will be so grateful, he will persuade them you must stay.
“Caroline!” I cried softly. “Thank you, beautiful sister.”
But when she told me the true thing to tell Eddie, my heart quailed. I wasn’t sure he would be so grateful. But Caroline promised, so I turned around and went back up the stairs, and burst into Eddie’s painting-place, and told him what Caroline had said.
His face went white, and he ran down to his parents. I followed partway and stood on the stairs to listen, but I heard almost nothing.
“Caroline?” I whispered. But she didn’t answer.
The father emerged with a new face, cold and stern. “We’ve had enough of your games, miss,” he said. “Snow or no, I’m taking you home, and you’re not to come back. You understand? Never. Put on your coat.”
All the long ride home, he said not a word. “Caroline?” I whispered into my wool scarf, so he couldn’t hear.
The wind breathed, It’s better this way. I love you more than they ever could.
So I never went back to the warm house with the laughter and the paintings of light. And I only saw Eddie one other time, almost two years later, when what Caroline had said came true. I ran most of the way there, to see if he saw now that it was no mean trick, it was true. To see if he would be my friend again.
The house was full of people. I searched through crowds of black silk and black wool to find him. “Eddie!” I cried when I saw him.
But his wet eyes went dark, and he pointed and shouted “Get out! Get her out! Get her and her ghost sister out!”
And a very large woman in rustling silks grabbed me hard by the arm and pulled me right out the front door. “How dare you, child,” she said, puffing. “How dare you come upset the boy on the day of his mother’s funeral!”
And she slammed the door against me.
I don’t know why he was so upset with us, I’ll never know why, I guess. Eddie’s mother did die. It’s not like Caroline wasn’t right.