20th Century Ghosts (4 page)

At last the drive opened into a dusty dooryard before a great yellow farmhouse, with a turret and a sagging porch that wrapped around two sides. A plywood sheet had been nailed into a broken window. A toilet bowl lay in the weeds. At the sight of the place, Carroll felt the hairs stirring on his forearms.
Journeys end in lovers meeting
, he thought, and grinned at his own uneasy imagination. He parked next to an ancient tractor with wild stalks of Indian corn growing up through its open hood.

He shoved his car keys in his coat pocket and climbed out, started toward the porch, where the fat man waited. His walk took him past a brightly lit carriage house. The double doors were pulled shut, but from within he heard the shriek of a band-saw. He glanced up at the house and saw a black, backlit figure staring down at him from one of the second-floor windows.

Eddie Carroll said he was looking for Peter Kilrue. The fat man inclined his head toward the door, the same
follow-me
gesture he had used to invite Carroll up the driveway. Then he turned and let him in.

The front hall was dim, the walls lined with picture frames that hung askew. A narrow staircase climbed to the second floor. There was a smell in the air, a humid, oddly male scent ... like sweat, but also like pancake batter. Carroll immediately identified it, and just as immediately decided to pretend he hadn't noticed anything.

"Bunch of shit in this hall," the fat man said. "Let me hang up your coat. Never be seen again." His voice was cheerful and piping. As Carroll handed him his coat, the fat man turned and hollered up the stairs,
"Pete! Someone here!"
The sudden shift from a conversational voice to a furious scream gave Carroll a bad jolt.

A floorboard creaked above them, and then a thin man, in a corduroy jacket and glasses with square, black plastic frames, appeared at the top of the steps.

"What can I do for you?" he asked.

"My name is Edward Carroll. I edit a series of books,
America's Best New Horror
," He looked for some reaction on the thin man's face, but Kilrue remained impassive. "I read one of your stories, 'Buttonboy,' in
True North
, and I liked it quite a bit. I was hoping to use it in this year's collection." He paused, then added, "You haven't been so easy to get in touch with."

"Come up," Kilrue said, and stepped back from the top of the stairs.

Carroll started up the steps. Below, the fat brother began to wander down the hall, Carroll's coat in one hand, the Kilrue family mail in the other. Then, abruptly, the fat man stopped, looked up the stairwell, waggled a manila envelope.

"Hey, Pete! Mom's social security came!" His voice wavering with pleasure.

By the time Carroll reached the top of the staircase, Peter Kilrue was already walking down the hall, to an open door at the end. The corridor itself seemed crooked somehow. The floor felt tilted underfoot, so much so that once Carroll had to touch the wall to steady himself. Floorboards were missing. A chandelier hung with crystal pendants floated above the stairwell, furred with lint and cobwebs. In some distant, echoing room of Carroll's mind, a hunchback played the opening bars of
The Addams Family
on a glockenspiel.

Kilrue had a small bedroom located under the pitch of the roof. A card table with a chipped wooden surface stood against one wall, with a humming Selectric typewriter set upon it, a sheet of paper rolled into the platen. "Were you working?" Carroll asked.

"I can't stop," Kilrue said.

"Good."

Kilrue sat on the cot. Carroll came a step inside the door, couldn't go any further without ducking his head. Peter Kilrue had oddly colorless eyes, the lids red-rimmed as if irritated, and he regarded Carroll without blinking.

Carroll told him about the collection. He said he could pay two hundred dollars, plus a percentage of shared royalties. Kilrue nodded, seemed neither surprised nor curious about the details. His voice was breathy and girlish. He said thank you.

"What did you think of my ending?" Kilrue asked, without forewarning.

"Of 'Buttonboy'? I liked it. If I didn't, I wouldn't want to reprint it."

"They hated it down at Katahdin University. All those coeds with their pleated skirts and rich daddies. They hated a lot of stuff about the story, but especially my ending."

Carroll nodded. "Because they didn't see it coming. It probably gave a few of them a nasty jolt. The shock ending is out of fashion in mainstream literature."

Kilrue said, "The way I wrote it at first, the giant is strangling her, and just as she's passing out, she can feel the other one using buttons to pin her twat shut. But I lost my nerve and cut it out. Didn't think Noonan would publish it that way."

"In horror, it's often what you leave out that gives a story its power," Carroll said, but it was just something to say. He felt a cool tingle of sweat on his forehead. "I'll go get a permissions form from my car." He wasn't sure why he said that either. He didn't have a permissions form in the car, just felt a sudden intense desire to catch a breath of cold fresh air.

He ducked back through the door into the hall. He found it took an effort to keep from breaking into a trot.

At the bottom of the staircase, Carroll hesitated in the hall, wondering where Kilrue's obese older brother had gone with his jacket. He started down the corridor. The way grew darker the further he went.

There was a small door beneath the stairs, but when he tugged on the brass handle it wouldn't open. He proceeded down the hall, looking for a closet. From somewhere nearby he heard grease sizzling, smelled onions, and heard the whack of a knife. He pushed open a door to his right and looked into a formal dining room, the heads of animals mounted on the walls. An oblong shaft of wan light fell across the table. The tablecloth was red and had a swastika in the center.

Carroll eased the door shut. Another door, just down the hall and to the left, was open, and offered a view of the kitchen. The fat man stood behind a counter, bare-chested and tattooed, chopping what looked like liver with a meat cleaver. He had iron rings through his nipples. Carroll was about to call to him, when the fat Kilrue boy came around the counter and walked to the gas range, to stir what was in the pan. He wore only a jock strap now, and his surprisingly scrawny, pale buttocks trembled with each step. Carroll shifted further back into the darkness of the hall, and after a moment continued on, treading silently.

The corridor was even more crooked than the one upstairs, visibly knocked out of true, as if the house had been jarred by some seismic event, and the front end no longer lined up with the back. He didn't know why he didn't turn back; it made no sense just wandering deeper and deeper into a strange house. Still his feet carried him on.

Carroll opened a door to the left, close to the end of the hall. He flinched from the stink and the furious humming of flies. An unpleasant human warmth spilled out and over him. It was the darkest room yet, a spare bedroom, and he was about to close the door when he heard something shifting under the sheets of the bed. He covered his mouth and nose with one hand and willed himself to take a step forward, and to wait for his eyes to adjust to the light.

A frail old woman was in the bed, the sheet tangled at her waist. She was naked, and he seemed to have caught her in the act of stretching, her skeletal arms raised over her head.

"Sorry," Carroll muttered, looking away. "So sorry."

Once more he began to push the door shut, then stopped, looked back into the room. The old woman stirred again beneath the sheets. Her arms were still stretched over her head. It was the smell, the human reek of her, that made him hold up, staring at her.

As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw the wire around her wrists, holding her arms to the headboard. Her eyes were slitted and her breath rattled. Beneath the wrinkled, small sacks of her breasts, he could see her ribs. The flies whirred. Her tongue popped out of her mouth and moved across her dry lips, but she didn't speak.

Then he was moving down the hall, going at a fast walk on stiff legs. As he passed the kitchen, he thought the fat brother looked up and saw him, but Carroll didn't slow down. At the edge of his vision he saw Peter Kilrue standing at the top of the stairs, looking down at him, head cocked at a questioning angle.

"Be right back with that thing," Carroll called up to him, without missing a step. His voice was surprisingly casual.

He hit the front door, banged through it. He didn't leap the stairs, but took them one at a time. When you were running from someone, you never jumped the stairs; that was how you twisted an ankle. He had seen it happen in a hundred horror movies. The air was so frosty it burned his lungs.

One of the carriage house doors was open now. He had a look into it on his way past. He saw a smooth dirt floor, rusted chains and hooks dangling from the beams, a chain saw hanging from the wall. Behind a table saw stood a tall, angular man with one hand. The other was a stump, the tormented skin shiny with scar tissue. He regarded Carroll without speaking, his colorless eyes judging and unfriendly. Carroll smiled and nodded.

He opened the door of his Civic and heaved himself in behind the wheel ... and in the next moment felt a spoke of panic pierce him through the chest. His keys were in his coat. His coat was inside. He almost cried out at the awful shock of it, but when he opened his mouth what came out was a frightened sob of laughter instead. He had seen this in a hundred horror movies too, had read this moment in three hundred stories. They never had the keys, or the car wouldn't start, or—

The brother with one hand appeared at the door of the carriage house, and stared across the drive at him. Carroll waved. His other hand was disconnecting his cell phone from the charger. He glanced at it. There was no reception up here. Somehow he wasn't surprised. He laughed again, a choked, nerve-jangling sound.

When he looked up, the front door of the house was open, and two figures stood in it, staring down at him. All the brothers were staring at him now. He climbed out of the car and started walking swiftly down the driveway. He didn't start to run until he heard one of them shout.

At the bottom of the driveway, he did not turn to follow the road, but went straight across it and crashed through the brush, into the trees. Whip-thin branches lashed at his face. He tripped and tore the knee of his pants, got up, kept going.

The night was clear and cloudless, the sky filled to its limitless depth with stars. He paused, on the side of a steep slope, crouching among rocks, to catch his breath, a stitch in one side. He heard voices up the hill from him, branches breaking. He heard someone pull the ripcord on a small engine, once, twice, then the noisy unmuffled scream-and-roar of a chain saw coming to life.

He got up and ran on, pitching himself down the hill, flying through the branches of the firs, leaping roots and rocks without seeing them. As he went, the hill got steeper and steeper, until it was really like falling. He was going too fast and he knew when he came to a stop, it would involve crashing into something, and shattering pain.

Only as he went on, picking up speed all the time, until with each leap he seemed to sail through yards of darkness, he felt a giddy surge of emotion, a sensation that might have been panic but felt strangely like exhilaration. He felt as if at any moment his feet might leave the ground and never come back down. He knew this forest, this darkness, this night. He knew his chances: not good. He knew what was after him. It had been after him all his life. He knew where he was—in a story about to unfold an ending. He knew better than anyone how these stories went, and if anyone could find their way out of these woods, it was him.

The best time to see her is when the place is almost full. There is the well-known story of the man who wanders in for a late show and finds the vast six-hundred-seat theater almost deserted. Halfway through the movie, he glances around and discovers her sitting next to him, in a chair that only moments before had been empty. Her witness stares at her. She turns her head and stares back. She has a nosebleed. Her eyes are wide, stricken.
My head hurts
, she whispers.
I have to step out for a moment. Will you tell me what I miss?
It is in this instant that the person looking at her realizes she is as insubstantial as the shifting blue ray of light cast by the projector. It is possible to see the next seat over through her body. As she rises from her chair, she fades away.

Then there is the story about the group of friends who go into the Rosebud together on a Thursday night. One of the bunch sits down next to a woman by herself, a woman in blue. When the movie doesn't start right away, the person who sat down beside her decides to make conversation. What's playing tomorrow?
he asks her.
The theater is dark tomorrow
, she whispers.
This is the last show.
Shortly after the movie begins she vanishes. On the drive home, the man who spoke to her is killed in a car accident.

These, and many of the other best-known legends of the Rosebud, are false ... the ghost stories of people who have seen too many horror movies and who think they know exactly how a ghost story should be.

Alec Sheldon, who was one of the first to see Imogene Gilchrist, owns the Rosebud, and at seventy-three still operates the projector most nights. He can always tell, after talking to someone for just a few moments, whether or not they really saw her, but what he knows he keeps to himself, and he never publicly discredits anyone's story ... that would be bad for business.

He knows, though, that anyone who says they could see right through her didn't see her at all. Some of the put-on artists talk about blood pouring from her nose, her ears, her eyes; they say she gave them a pleading look, and asked for them to find somebody, to bring help. But she doesn't bleed that way, and when she wants to talk, it isn't to tell someone to bring a doctor. A lot of the pretenders begin their stories by saying, You'll never believe what I just saw.
They're right. He won't, although he will listen to all that they have to say, with a patient, even encouraging, smile.