After going to a Halloween party in the 1980s, Michael is murdered–but he also is resurrected, too. As his life goes on, so do his deaths, much to his confusion and elation. Is this a curse? A religious miracle? Or just plain annoying? As Michael also falls in love, he is able to finally find peace with his numerous chance encounters.
I wrote this story while pregnant with my second son and it was a beautiful experience to write this strange tale. It was even stranger that, at a birthday party for one of my friends, I stumbled into Mira, who knew Henry, who is now the voice behind this stunning audiobook, many years later. The son that I had kicking around in me during this book’s conception is now three years old and going as a pirate for his Halloween tonight. So strange! So wonderful! So many lives & deaths indeed!
Fun fact: Henry “auditioned” for this role by reading a Bulk Barn receipt. He was obviously amazing! He got the part!
And I think he may still be accepting roles. 🙂
I hope everyone reading this month has a safe and suitably spooky Halloween!
We are getting so close to Halloween! I can practically feel it in the air and taste the chocolate and tasty things to come.
And today’s story feels the same way.
Once again, the setting for this horror story is a hospital. To me they’ve always been the quintessential haunted houses. This was one of my first published stories–way back in 2013–and so when I saw a Halloween haunted call for the small (and now defunct) Black Treacle magazine, I knew what I wanted to do. Hospital as Haunted House on Halloween, but with a no-nonsense nurse who doesn’t scare easily at all.
So here she is, Maggie Sullivan, as she tries to discourage folktales about ghosts and goblins and razor blades in apples as she also deals with her own demons. The story itself feels very rough in parts, and looking back, I would never write this in present tense, but hey. Here it is.
And it’s a cute little time capsule for me. I hope you all enjoy it too!
The Collectors
As Maggie Sullivan walks to work, kids dressed up as pirates and superheroes pass her by. No one notices her blue and purple scrubs; no one says Happy Halloween or offers her candy. It’s just as well, she figures. As soon as she enters the large waiting room, a sign declares NO MASKS. Next to the fake cob-webby stuff up on some of the large windows, another sign declares NO CANDY. Especially anything with peanuts, though this prohibition is pretty much a given now wherever Maggie works. While the hospital is willing to open its doors on the one night where it is said their morgue could rise up and walk the earth, they aren’t taking any chances with anaphylactic shock. No patrons of the ER may wear masks and they may not have peanuts. This is a government building. What do you take us for, anyway? But Happy Halloween. We respect all nationalities, sexualities, and creeds. Just please no peanuts and we need to be able to see your face for our security cameras.
Maggie sets her bag down on the front desk.
“Are you ready for tonight?” she asks, smiling wide.
Luke, the doctor on-call, sighs. He takes another patient from the full room and then disappears behind a curtain.
“Don’t look so excited,” another doctor calls to Maggie. “You’re the one to deal with head wounds and drunken men tonight.”
“Same as every other night,” she quips. “But I have faith I will be given something more interesting.”
“A trick or a treat?” Luke asks, poking his head out of the curtain.
“Maybe both,” Maggie smiles. She takes a seat at the front in-take desk and begins her shift.
Working usually makes Maggie feel better. The order and precision that comes from keeping track of patients when they first walk in becomes even more exciting when it’s Halloween, even with no candy or masks. This will probably be even better than a full moon. Though most people have tried to disprove lunacy and lunar cycles, Maggie knows better. The human body is eighty percent water and the moon is responsible for tides; if the moon can pull and prod bodies of water, why not our own bodies? There is also shared lunacy. If someone thinks they can attribute their behaviour to the full moon, then they will do that crazy stunt they’ve been wanting to. Up until 1940, there was still a lesser murder charge that held the moon and the murderer equally culpable for a crime.
But Halloween is different, Maggie is sure of this. This is the night where the barrier between the dead and the living is at its thinnest. This means that an ER room, where many people are already flirting with death when they walk through the doors, becomes downright occult. Maggie is not quite sure what she expects tonight, aside from the standard flu symptoms and domestic cases, car crashes and kids who have fallen and need stitches, but she wants something more than a séance or an eerie supernatural tale. Maggie knows that if she gets to see a ghost tonight, she’s asking for something back.
Some would call it a deal with the devil or scrying a possible future. Maggie just calls it good communication skills and knowing how to ask questions. Spirits have always been known for their insights and connections. It’s not what you know, Maggie repeats, it’s who you know. Though most ghosts probably don’t have the ability to grant Maggie any special request, they can put her in touch with those who can. And quite frankly, she’s sick of waiting or being put on hold, especially when it comes to hospitals. She had to wait long enough to realize she had cancer and she’s not willing to wait through cycles of chemo to see if it gets better. Treatments are always framed in conditional language. If, maybe, perhaps, possibly, we will see. Maggie has grown tired, beyond the illness inside that is draining her life, of wading through vague language. She wants something more solid – a better insurance plan.
After all, there is no Make A Wish Foundation for adults, like there is for sick kids. Most charities figure that if you’re an adult when you’re sick, you’ve already had a chance to go to Disney Land or be rebellious. You have to find your own way to get your needs satisfied. So Maggie is looking towards Halloween. It’s why she fought for this shift even though her supervisor wanted her to rest a while longer. Tonight is the one night where she can greet death head-on and also get something good out of the bargain.
When a man walks in with a plaid shirt torn at the front and sits down, Maggie thinks the night has started. She waits at the front desk, helping another man with a broken arm get his x-rays started, for the man in plaid to move. He sits in the rickety waiting room chairs, watching the TV on mute, for a long time. Maggie steals glances, never lingering too long. His nails are dark, possibly covered with dirt. He seems really pale, but that could be the fluorescent lighting. Maggie knows that she looks pretty pale now too, though she’s avoided mirrors the past few weeks. She should probably be a little kinder before she automatically starts thinking this guy is one of the un-dead.
Maggie’s heart falls when the next time she looks, plaid man is gone. Coming and suddenly going in an ER room is not that uncommon. Sometimes people come for small injuries because they feel as if that is what their mother told them to do. When they realize they could spend all night here, they leave. Maybe plaid man had a broken thumb and after looking at how many broken arms and twisted ankles there were, went home to set it himself.
“That guy left awful quick,” May, the other nurse taking patients tonight, remarks.
Maggie nods. “No rest for the wicked.”
May shrugs and takes a patient. Maggie is left alone again at the front counter, taking names and writing down numbers.
Ever since her diagnosis, Maggie feels as if she’s talking more and more in platitudes. In epigraphs for her future headstone. She used to think that death made someone really contemplative about life. It made people think things through, make a bucket list, and write epic poetry. But getting diagnosed with cancer when you’re barely in your thirties doesn’t turn you into the Picasso or Dylan Thomas that you thought you wanted to be when you were younger. It makes you depend on platitudes and quotations taken out of context. A diagnosis makes you morbid, even more than before, and you want to stare into open wounds of victims and see if you can see yourself in there.
What was it that Nietzsche said? Maggie thinks. If you stare into the abyss, the abyss will stare back. But Nietzsche was crazy, anyway. She’s stared into how many open wounds now and the only monster she’s really come face to face with is the one that is growing inside of her, duplicating cells in a rapid succession and eventually turning her blood into puss. There are no monsters, she thinks. Not really, not in the way we’re used to seeing them, dressed in green costumes and made from the body parts of others.
After attending to another fallen woman with matching black eyes, Maggie sits behind the desk. She waits and looks up when she can. But there is nothing, other than the old squeaking of the nurses shoes in the ward, to keep her company.
***
Another woman comes in shortly after. She’s standing next to a man that’s dressed like Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th films. Maggie points to the sign again that declares NO MASKS and the guy hunches over as he removes the hockey mask. Maggie goes over to the girl, noticing the large flesh wound on her forearm, before she’s brushed away.
“No, no,” the girl says. She puts her other hand over the wound, making Maggie’s stomach turn for a moment. Oh, make up, Maggie soon realizes. The woman is talking again, frantically moving her hands and pointing to Jason. He remains hunched over, a large hand over his stomach.
“I think I swallowed some razor blades,” he says.
“Urban legend,” Maggie states. “The only people who have died by Halloween candy were murdered by someone within their family. Unless you’re girlfriend here is turning the tables on you, I’d say you just ate too much.”
“No, he’s really sick.”
“What if some creepy person heard the story and tried to make it real?” the guy argues. “They could put razor blades in apples because he heard about it. All it takes is an idea, man.”
“Right, okay,” Maggie says curtly. “We’ll take an x-ray and see what we have, then.”
“Thank you. All I ask.”
Maggie smiles and nods as she passes the couple off to Luke. The patient is always right, Maggie thinks, at least, until a doctor comes along. If only it were so easy to deny cancer and make it work. She has still not look at the lab results from her latest test, but she knows the standard forms, the sad eyes she has been given, and the silence in certain tones of voices. She knows what death looks like, even if she is sometimes fooled by fake wounds on teenager’s arms.
There are lots of unrequited deaths in the hospital, lots of opportunities for ghosts to linger between the halls and the rooms. Maggie has seen more than one terrible car crash, stabbing, and domestic case pushed too far. Not to mention unfair diseases and children dying young. The Make A Wish Foundation can only do so much for terminal kids, especially those with imagination. Disneyland may not be a child’s first choice for a wish. Instead of accepting Goofy’s handshake as a fair enough trade for life, these kids come back and wander around, seeking better wishes, the same way Maggie wishes she had a chance to be asked what she wants before she dies.
What about the ghost of past selves? Maggie wonders in between patients. Every seven years all the cells within a person’s body have become brand new. Decade to decade, you are a new person– at least from a biological standpoint. Could those former selves and cells reform and walk around? What if they took another trajectory in your life? Here is the ultimate use for string theory, Maggie thinks. Maybe if she had taken that art class in college, and dated the woman from the class who always asked her out, she would not have become a nurse with phase-three cancer in her stomach.
The more that Maggie learns about cancer, beyond her medical school days, the more she thinks it’s a ghost, too. Cancer is like those new cells reforming to make new selves. Cancer gets down inside of you and rearranges what you once knew. It walks around inside of you, and it lives in Maggie now, like a shell.
It is clearly getting too late for this.
Maggie goes back to her post, after checking on Jason and his girlfriend again. There are no razor blades, but alcohol poisoning is a likely suspect. He is getting his stomach pumped. His girlfriend waits patiently by his side, and refuses coffee when Maggie offers. She takes her own mug back to her desk, and in between quiet moments, picks up her book to read.
You can’t work in a hospital without seeing a few Stephen King books tossed around, broken spine and wrinkled cover from being shoved inside a bag so much. Same thing with memoirs, too. Maggie often feels as if she is reading the library of the books left behind, from either death or remission. Many people, when they leave the hospital, leave behind everything they took with them. The flowers, the cards, Oprah’s book club. They want to start again and not think about what happened between the four walls.
Maggie looks around. There is nothing new or strange. She sighs and goes back to her charts, her books, though the cracked spine of her memoir making her feel weary and bored.
Ghosts let people know they’ve come through flickering lights and cold spots, right? That’s what all the shows say and that’s what Maggie has learned to look for. But those cold spots are hard to find in a hospital with its AC always cranked, even during winter. If the lights ever flicker here, the generator goes on. So many people’s heartbeats depend on electricity that they’re damned careful it does not go out, not even during electrical storms, not on anyone’s watch. If there are no warning signs for ghosts, then there is no way to tell you are haunted. And that’s the problem with ghosts, isn’t it? Maggie thinks. They follow you around and move things and make you think you’re crazy. But Alzheimer’s patients do that enough. Children do that. Even Maggie is doing it now, moving books and charts and forgetting where she put them. But she’s not a ghost, she’s sure of it. The staff here keep talking to her and treating her like she’s a fragile set of china dishes.
“I’m not dead yet,” she joked around with Luke one night. He stared back at her, silent. Apparently death is only funny when the real punch-line is much farther off.
Another person comes into the ER. Maggie looks them up and down, searching for a marker or something that makes them new and strange. But there is nothing. Maggie does what she needs to do.
***
When the clock reaches midnight, she looks out at the waiting area. She looks past the cob-webby doors and into the black night. The moon has moved away and is now above the hospital, around the other side. There is no one else coming, Maggie thinks. There is really nothing else here, no way to make a deal.
Ghost stories are out of date, anyway, she figures. The golden age of ghost stories, of Henry James and Shakespeare’s Banquo seeking revenge and regret, has long since passed. The house is no longer as haunted as we think it will be, not with so many apartment buildings and condominiums popping up each time Maggie walks to work. Houses were only seen as haunted because so many people died inside them. Now, that special place is reserved for the hospital. Even then, the medical building has a hard time keep spirits. Quite frankly, Maggie thinks, it’s just because people simply live a lot longer. It makes it harder to be an angry ghost when you’ve died in a hospital at age eighty of a heart attack. The older we get, the less we hear about ghosts. The less death scares us, maybe. Though Maggie knows that last platitude is not quite true.
Maggie likes Stephen King, in spite of his strange narrative choices, and she thinks he’s mostly right when it comes to ghosts. Cars are haunted. Even cell phones and e-readers are haunted. Every single thing that is new carries around a ghost inside of it, the ghost of a former life, of a perceived golden age. Even Maggie’s heard it come out of her voice a few times already: back in my day, when I was young, before all of this happened. Ghosts work their way into our language and remind us about what used to be. It’s hard growing up and watching the world change. So people haunt the present in order to remember the past. It’s another form of nostalgia, another form of love and life.
Maggie looks up again. There are deserted magazines, candy wrappers, and even Jason Voorhees has left behind his mask. There is another sign, further in the hospital, which displays the request NO CELL PHONES. No candy, no masks, no technology, and from what Maggie can tell, there are no links to the spirit world to be made tonight. She sighs as she leans back in her chair.
If there is a ghost here, Maggie thinks, it’s me.
***
Just past midnight, Maggie hears a slight knock on her desk. She looks up from her book, sees nothing, and stands up. The top of three tiny heads become visible. All boys, maybe around age seven or nine. One is dressed like a dog, a cowboy, and the other does not appear to have costume. He could be somebody from a television show that Maggie has not seen before, because they don’t keep the large TV in the waiting area turned to that channel. None of the boys have treat bags or masks that they need to discard before getting deeper into the hospital. Though the dog-boy has large dark brown patches under his eyes and other animal features drawn onto his skin, he is still very recognizable.
“Hello,” she greets.
“Sorry we’re late,” cowboy says. “We’re here to see a friend.”
Maggie looks behind them. No adult has come, but she notices a key around one boy’s neck that does not belong with his dog costume.
“Where are your parents, guys?”
“They’re coming. Parking the car.”
Maggie nods. Especially on one of the busiest nights of the year, the parking lot would be worse than a mall on Christmas. “I see. It’s a real nightmare down there.”
“We wanted to see our friend since he couldn’t come out with us,” the cowboy explains. “Can you take us up?”
“Visiting hours are over…” she says, trailing off. She looks back and finds May, who waves to her. Maggie turns back to the boys. The small one at the end, wearing all black, smiles.
“Please?”
“Well, when you put it that way,” Maggie says. She grabs her cardigan off the back of her chair and throws it around her shoulders. She points them to the elevator down the end of the hallway, which they move ahead to before she has a chance to utter anything else.
Inside the elevator, the small boy without a costume runs forward and presses the floor. When Maggie asks him if he’s sure that’s the right area, he nods his head. The number eight glows red from the other side where she stands. Oncology, she recognizes. Her stomach turns. She laments the boys’ friend, but also feels oddly at home.
Dog-boy and cowboy joke around and talk with one another, talking about cars and trains that they have stored away somewhere. The cowboy pets the dog-boy under his large floppy ears and then makes sure dog-boy’s pinned-on tale wags.
When the small boy to her side, dressed in black, picks out a cell phone from his pocket, Maggie eyes him for a moment. She allows him to finish what he’s doing – probably texting a parent who’s in the middle of the snake-like parking garage – and then she taps on the elevator wall for his attention.
“You guys can’t have cell phones here. It interferes with the signals.”
The little boy in black nods. He folds his phone and puts it in his pocket.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she says. She folds her arms across her chest. “Do you mind if I ask about your costumes?”
“I’m my dog,”
“I’m a cowboy.”
The boy in black is silent.
“And you?”
“I’m a collector.”
“Is that from a TV show?” Maggie asks. It sounds like something along the lines of Bob the Builder. Cody the Collector, a sequel or spin-off.
He shakes his head. “I collect things.”
“Like what?”
“He got me more toys,” dog-boy says.
“And candy for tonight,” the cowboy says. “We’re going around and collecting things.”
“How nice of him. I’m sorry we had none in this building for you guys,” Maggie says. The two other costumed boys say it’s fine in unison, but the other one remains silent. Maggie narrows her eyes. The boy is staring straight forward, his hands behind his back. He is waiting patiently.
The cowboy produces his lasso and pretends to wrangle up the dog. They talk together in the made-up language of children, the kind that speaks of a connection that someone eventually grows out of and into the more bureaucratic language of cultural codes and shared idioms. Without the make-up around the dog-boy’s eyes, she would swear that he and the cowboy were twins.
“He also likes wishes,” the cowboy says. He peers up at Maggie, his lasso now by his waist. “You know?”
“Like birthday wishes? Candles on a cake?”
“Yeah. And other kinds.”
Maggie opens her mouth to respond, but the dog-boy jumps forward.
“Did you wish to be a nurse?”
“No, I grew up to be a nurse. I went to school, studied really hard.”
Dog-boy sighs and rolls his eyes. He repeats, “So you really did wish to be one?”
Maggie narrows her eyes. She wants to disagree again, mostly because wishes to her do not signal real work. They magically appear, happen from thin air, like a genie from a bottle or a sudden cure for cancer. But these kids are using them as a way to articulate desire, want. They are wishing for candy, not because they don’t want to go through the motions of getting it, but because they want candy. You wish for what you want. Even if it ends up meaning that you have to get it for yourself. They are making decisions with their wishes, decisions that could end up changing their lives.
Maggie smiles. “I guess I did, then.”
“What else would you wish for?” the boy in black asks.
“That’s obvious,” Maggie says. She leans down on her legs and smiles at the small child. “Three more wishes.”
He smiles back at her. The elevator dings and they step outside.
In the hallway, the three boys run past her. She shouts at them a quick command to stop, but she does not repeat herself. She smiles at the way in which the dog-boy’s ears flap as he bounces. As she walks towards the oncology nurses’ station, she spots the now familiar face of Theresa, another night nurse. She sees Maggie and waves a quick hello.
“You’re here awful late,” she says.
“I’m taking some kids to see their friend. Zachary, I think?”
Theresa’s face falls. Maggie knows what those facial muscles mean and does not say anything. She looks at the ground, and then back up.
“I’m sorry,” Theresa says.
“Yeah, me too.”
Maggie remembers the boy slowly, in bits and pieces from her former shifts. She brought him cherry popsicles and read to him from his Marvel comic books. He was partial to Captain American. All the good little boys always are. The rebellious ones want Iron Man or The Hulk, like the little boy dressed in black. He would be a good Deadpool, too, Maggie thinks. But the boys who want to be Captain America, they’re just good little guys who really want to help but never get a chance to grow up.
Maggie excuses herself and walks down the hallway to tell them. She hopes they’re not too scared when they find an empty room or grieving parents. Maggie has done a million death speeches before. She has pronounced DOAs and watched as car crash victims die in her arms. She is used to death, even wishing for it to cross her in a tangible form like tonight. But there is something about these three young boys that she wants to protect without using those platitudes and cheap speeches they taught her in nursing school. She wants to tell them the truth. “Sorry,” she rehearses the new speech inside her mind. “Sometimes you just don’t get what you wish for, or what you deserve. I know and it sucks.”
After her first step down the hall, she feels her cell phone vibrate in her pocket. Embarrassed that she has left it on, she takes it out to quickly shut it off. The message, from an unknown number, stares back at her.
“Consider yourself given three more,” the text reads.
When Maggie looks up, she watches as all three boys, plus another one, run out of the room. She recognizes the red and blue markers of the cape as it trails around the door.
Seventy-Two Demons is one of my absolute favourites. It’s a weird western-slash-demon hunting story featuring queer characters. It involves my weird knowledge of demonology and the lesser key of Soloman.
And if I’m lucky, it may be the first of many stories set in the same world.
I initially wrote it for the weird western anthology called A Fistful of Demons. That was during my postpartum writing time, and now that years have passed, and I’ve definitely fought some more demons, I want to dive back into this world.
Seventy-Two Demons
By Eve Morton
“Don’t move.”
Tobias took in a sharp breath as the gun pressed into the center of his back. A man hovered close to his ear, the bristles of his facial hair like small spikes against his thin skin. The man was at least six feet tall, smelling of cattle and leather. A cowboy, maybe. This far into Deseret, it was hard to tell who belonged to what anymore.
“I’m not moving,” Tobias said. The man had been silent for three whole breaths. It seemed like a lifetime. “What do you want? I have no money.”
“You have black hands,” he said.
Tobias dropped the keys he’d clasped in his palm. They fell against the dirt outside the printing press office owned by his employer, Bertrand Button. Tobias didn’t bother to pick up the keys; he only flipped over his palms to display the ink stains that were almost always there. “I do,” he said. “So what?”
“You’re a devil, aren’t ya?” the man said, voice gruff and serious. But not insane, Tobias noted. This stranger wasn’t a preacher shouting about the end of days or like the men who came to the press to print their new religious pamphlets, branching out from the Bible and The Book of Mormon, coming up with their own golden plates and revelations. This man didn’t have that high strung trill to his voice that said he spoke to God. He seemed rather pedestrian. If not for the gun, anyway.
“A printer’s devil,” he added. “You work here. Yeah? You know how to run the machines?”
“I’m an apprentice. I can run whatever you like.”
“Good. Let me inside.” The gun pressed firmer into his back. “Now. I don’t have a lot of time.”
Tobias let out another breath. He kicked the keys on the ground, knocking them back to the man. No way was he bending over to pick them up. No way was he doing what this man told him to do. “That lets you in.”
“You do it. I can’t run these things.”
“You can’t read, you mean.”
“Shut up and let me in.”
Tobias now understood he had the upper hand. No gun or other weapon and barely twenty, but he could read and write. This man just had a gun and a different kind of desperation to his tone. He needed to get inside for whatever reason, and Tobias was his only way to enter and then make sense of what he found on the other side of the door.
The man huffed but soon bent over and grabbed the keys, found the largest one, and stuck it in the door. Tobias caught glimpses of him, even with the pistol still poised against him. Darker skin and hair, yet with blue eyes. A scar across an eyebrow, so no bushy hair grew in the place. Maybe thirty, maybe younger. Hard to tell with so much sun and wear against his face and clothing. He seemed to be utterly covered in dust.
“Open it.” The man gestured with the gun at the keys in the knob. He glanced behind them both, at the empty Deseret town square. The press office was positioned close enough to the Rockies that the man had probably had his fair share of crossovers with the undead or the indigenous who patrolled the area from the mountains to the Mississippi. So he didn’t want to bother with keys, only weapons and commands. “Open it, now.”
“There are no undead here,” Tobias said as he unlocked the door. “You can put your gun away.”
“Not yet.”
They stepped inside. Tobias went about undoing all that he’d done before leaving that night: lighting a lamp, placing the keys down on the wooden table, and then flicking on the press. It was a large industrial model, made in the early 1800s by Friedrich Keonig, and then expanded upon by Bertrand Button, Tobias’s current boss. While most models now were capable of printing at least a thousand pages an hour, Button’s could do twice that. He could also handle illustrations and complex drawings others had not yet mastered, and so, it had been Tobias’s dream to work for the man. The machine still thrilled him, even as it hummed to life as he was under duress. He regarded his last job, still half-finished, in the tray at the bottom. It was pornography, and the lurid title made him blush until he remembered the man holding him hostage couldn’t read.
“It’ll take at least ten minutes to warm up,” Tobias said. “And I have to clear the other job first.”
“That’s okay.” The man closed the door and thrust one of the large shovels through the two handles, a makeshift lock. A kid with rickets could get through it, but the man seemed satisfied. When he looked into his eyes, something ran through Tobias’s veins like lightning. A shock. Attraction.
“You are aware that this place does not have money, correct?” Tobias said, fussing with the printing press and moving the previous job to the work bench. “My boss handles those transactions at the bank, and I’m kept out of it. We don’t print money, either. Joseph Smith tried that, and it didn’t work, anyway.”
“I know. Don’t want money.”
“What is it that you want?” Tobias asked. The man’s gun was still aimed at him, or at least adjacent to him—more toward the small window above the press—but Tobias was growing more and more bold. “I think it’s best that we consider ourselves on the same side now that we’re both here, going against the rules in some way.”
“The only rules are the ones that come to you.”
“Ah, spoken like a man who has either never had a revelation in his entire life, or has had nothing but. Which is it?” Tobias met the man’s gaze now without flinching. The printing press’s power gave him the confidence he needed. He wasn’t just a scrawny kid with a Mormon family that had dragged him halfway across the country to this strange place where everyone spoke of milk and honey while hating everyone who was an outsider. He could print the words of God here. Or the words of the devil. Or the pornography that men smuggled in. He could print whatever he wanted, and even though it turned his hands black and people whispered that he was a devil, it didn’t matter. He could print. He could read and write.
The man didn’t answer him. He looked through Tobias, even as he stood tall and proud, and then the stranger stepped around him. He scrambled in the direction of the small window of the printing press office, his deep blue eyes fixed on something in horror.
“How on God’s green earth did you follow me here?” he said, low and terrifying. He grasped his weapon and fired at the glass. A burst of sparks and flame, then acrid smoke, filled the room.
Tobias jumped back and shielded his face. The man ran to the front door of the printing press, snapping the shovel’s handle he’d used as a makeshift barrier. He ran out into the night, his boots kicking up dirt and rocks, and fired again.
The printing press steamed on and on.
Tobias brushed glass out of his clothing. He looked at the now broken window, wondering how he would explain this to Bertrand, and a pair of red eyes stared back at him. An owl, or what seemed to be at first blush an owl, perched on the empty windowsill. Its red eyes stared at Tobias. It opened its beak, but instead of hooting it let out a ghastly cry that sounded like six women being murdered at once.
“What on—”
Another shot, another plume of acrid smoke. The owl-creature flew deeper into the printing office. Its wings were small, white and black, but its legs were nearly the size of a crane’s. Tobias stared in open-mouthed awe. The owl didn’t actually fly—it had stretched its wings and Tobias’s mind filled in the blanks—but it had stepped over the window ledge with its long legs. It walked over to the press, its beak open and screaming like a demon. Tobias could only watch as it pecked at the pornographic pamphlet’s keys still stuck in the printing press. It cracked several in a single stroke.
Tobias snapped out of it. “No! Don’t touch that! Don’t—”
Another shot, now from behind Tobias. This one hit the owl-creature. It stopped pecking; feathers flew off in a fury; and blood, black and viscous, stained its front as it fell over the remaining area of the printing press.
“I hit it, yeah?” The man stepped inside, the lines on his face much deeper. “It’s dead, yeah? Or not moving at least?”
“I. Uh. I think so?”
“Good.” The man eyed the creature, satisfied. Then he picked up the broken shovel. “Sorry about this. I’ll bury it.”
“What is it?”
“A demon,” he said. “Stolas. A prince. See his crown?”
“I don’t understand.” Tobias looked from the man to the creature, which did have a plume of feathers shaped in a crown around its head, but the words made no sense. “Is this a dream? A nightmare?”
“Close.” The man almost smiled. It was half-hidden by his beard and more scar tissue. “But no. This is real. Welcome to hell, devil.”
“I’m just an apprentice,” Tobias said feebly. “And my name’s Tobias. Toby. My family calls me Toby.”
“Toby. I’m Paul Beckett. Most people call me Beck.” He extended a hand, which Tobias shook right away. Ink from the printing press got on Beck’s hand, while the black blood from the creature spread from Beck back to him. Beck looked at his hand with a wry smile after they disconnected.
“I’m a demon hunter,” he added as he dragged the carcass of the Stolas out the printing press doors. “And you’re now on my side.”
*
Tobias cleaned the printing press of the creature’s blood the best he could. Many of the keys that had been part of the shoot-out were damaged, not just from the stray bullets or the creature’s pecks, but from the viscous fluid. Mixed with the ink, it became a near acid. He would have to destroy much of what he’d just made for the independent contract he’d tried to pick up off-the-books.
Shoot, more bad luck. With a sigh, Tobias grabbed the hellbox from the workbench where many of the other broken parts of the printing press—and the rarely used illustrations and symbols—were kept. He was in the middle of writing down what letters he’d need to replace when Beck came back inside.
“That should be good,” he said. “They don’t get up for a while after they’ve been shot with salt and sawdust.”
“That’s what made the cloud?” Tobias asked skeptically. “Salt and sawdust?”
“And birdshot, too. Can’t be too careful.” Beck smiled, revealing a small gap between his front teeth. He regarded the box on the workbench in front of Tobias. He dove into it without asking, pushing aside the letters Tobias had just put in.
“Watch it,” Tobias chastised. “I need to organize this.”
“What is it?”
“Hellbox,” he said.
Beck raised an eyebrow at him.
“No, seriously. This is a hellbox. It’s where spare parts go.”
“Of course. The words really are spells.” Beck threw the pieces down in disgust. A handful of phrases clung together, something Bertrand had started to do to make the printing process easier. Any type of common expression—such as the “and it came to pass” which appeared over two-thousand times in The Book of Mormon—was given its own line rather than individual letters. It was easier to render a page, not to mention the sound all those letters made at once was deeply satisfying to Tobias–but he had to admit that Beck was sort of right. The way so many of the words now hung together, disembodied and out of context, made the whole thing look like a bucket full of spells.
“What is it that you want?” Tobias asked. The press was warmed up, running as smooth as he could hope for. “I won’t be able to print anything with a p or a q, since those were damaged by that… thing. The w was as well, but we can flip an m over. Not perfect, but it works.”
“I… I need something you printed a while ago.”
“We don’t always keep finalized copies. But I do have records of some, especially if it was a specialty order. My boss likes to keep samples for clients. What was it?” Tobias reached for one of the many ledgers. He waited for Beck to say something, but he only stared at the press. He seemed enchanted, utterly in awe.
“It’s a fine machine,” Tobias said. “It’s the best in the country, too. I’ve seen others. Bertrand Button, my boss, he added many augmentations to Koenig’s device, which was built on Gutenberg’s model. Bertrand is truly changing the way books are made. I’m proud to work for him.”
“He made the demons on this thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“That demon, Prince Stolas.” Beck looked over his shoulder. Tobias realized he hadn’t been marveling at the press, but watching the now broken window for more creatures that may crawl through. “He was written about in a book called The Lesser Key of Solomon. Mr. Button printed it.”
“Let me see.” Tobias quickly found the book in the records. A large shipment had been printed nearly four months ago for someone named G. Faust. “Hmm.”
“What?”
“I found it. But whoever ordered this gave us a fake name. I didn’t write this record, either, so he must have given his false information to Bertrand.”
“Or, dear Bertrand didn’t write it down properly.”
Tobias nodded slowly. It was hard to imagine Bertrand, a small and bookish man, not understanding this name as an obvious reference to Goethe’s work called Faust about a pact with the devil. “What is this book you want? You said demons are in it?”
“The Lesser Key of Solomon. It’s made up of a lot of different parts, but the one I’m particularly after is the section where it names seventy-two demons. Stolas is number thirty-six, from what I recall. And I suspect that Bertrand printing the book granted them all some kind of passageway to this world.”
“I doubt that.”
“Why?” Beck looked over his shoulder again, lifting his asymmetrical brows in a challenge. “You saw what I saw, did you not? That thing was real. It’s blood is on your black hands. Why would I lie about that?”
“I don’t think you’re lying, I think you’re like the others around here.”
Beck remained silent. A challenge grew in the thick air between them.
Tobias continued. “Driven wild with belief. Whether it’s in the revelations that come down from angels or the demons that you blame for misfortune, it doesn’t matter. You believe.”
“And you don’t?”
Tobias shrugged. “I’m just here because my parents moved here, following yet another person who had the answer to my sister’s sickness. Then the rest of the world made it so it’s now impossible to leave, even though my sister is dead and there is no such thing as those golden plates. Besides, I like the machine. One day, if I keep working here and doing what I’m supposed to, it will be mine.”
“It’s enchanted. Wicked.” Beck bent his leg back like he was preparing to kick the press.
Tobias held his breath until Beck’s foot came down and merely drew an X in the black soot, and probable blood, that remained.
The blood from a demon. The demon that Tobias saw. How could he not believe what he’d seen with his own eyes? How could he deny the evidence in the record book—a G. Faust, a name for the devil—ordering a book on demonology? “I think,” he said, though he was not entirely sure anymore if Beck was listening, “I mean… When I print pornography on that machine, it doesn’t come true. Why would a demon book be any different?”
Beck let out a low chuckle. “Well, that porn was bad.”
“I thought you couldn’t read?”
“I know the best words.” Beck winked.
Tobias’s stomach quaked. His off-the-record work was a gay pornographic tale, a side job from the local saloon owner who knew Tobias was quiet and also liked to read about two boys in bed together. Mr. Horton was like him in his desires, and though there was a thirty-year gap between them, they got along. Not like that—Tobias had only the fantasies which he rendered on the press—but they knew one another were of the same type. Was this strange man like them, too? The thought brought him delight. It also brought him so much pain.
“Besides,” Beck said, “you told me Bertrand took that order. For the demonology book.”
“Yes. So?”
“He’s the magic one, I reckon. He’s the one that made this machine, so he’s the one that could also turn its magic off. So even if you did print up your lovely wild tales, it’s after hours. And trust me, you don’t want that swill coming to life anyway.” Beck gave Tobias another playful wink. “Yeah, I reckon Bertrand’s the magic one. You’re just the lowly apprentice, like you say.”
“So why don’t you hold him up?” Tobias snapped. “Because I’m tired and hungry and I honestly just want this day to end.” He slammed the record book shut and shoved it back on the shelf. He walked past Beck to the press and flicked off one of the machine parts. His hand missed the typical lever, however, and touched the underside. A part of the machine moved away, revealing a removable bonus plate. “What the…”
“Stay back.” Beck grasped Tobias’s shoulder and brought out his gun.
Tobias jerked away and stammered, “The plate may have slipped in the initial fight. It should be easy to fix.” Yet when he touched it, the plate was cold when it should have been hot. It wasn’t actually part of the machine, it was a separate piece inside the other. He quirked a brow. This was completely uncharted territory, not how a press should work at all. He grabbed the plate, lifted it up, turned it over, and revealed a star carved on the center.
“Damnit.” Beck held out his gun, but there was nothing to shoot. No demon crawled out from the plate, the earth didn’t open up and swallow them whole. It was just a star that Beck continued to curse and point his shaky gun at.
“What is it?” Tobias said. “I don’t get it.”
“It’s a Drude’s foot. Another demon sign. Your boss is the magic one. And this press is enchanted. My guess is,” he eyed the machine, “anything set on this plate comes to life. Anything set on the normal ones is normal.”
“No.” When Tobias stared at the symbol, the hair on his arms rose with an frisson of electricity. It was like something out of a fairy tale, a myth from his grandmother’s house, or even those damn golden plates that had dictated so much of his life so far. He didn’t believe in the Angel Moroni anymore, but maybe he should. Maybe it was people, like his mother and father, who’d messed up his life and not heaven or hell or anything in between. Just people. Just his dead sister. Just Bertrand, who was starting to become more than a kind old man who gave him his dream job, but a waking nightmare.
“I… I don’t. What is…”
Beck slapped a hand over Tobias’s back. Strong, firm, and reassuring. “Like I said before. Welcome to being a demon hunter.”
“I’m an apprentice.”
“Sure,” Beck said with a laugh. “You can learn from me. Now, we need to find those seals in that book.”
“What?”
“Seals. Sort of like symbols, like when people cross themselves.” He crossed himself for demonstration, as if it was something Tobias had never heard of before. “They’re written down, though. In that book. I need those seals. You can’t really kill a demon, but you can seal him away somewhere else.”
“What?” Tobias repeated, his voice cracking. “You mean that Stolas, that thing, wasn’t dead when you buried him? But you shot him. You—”
“Not entirely dead.” Beck shrugged. “We have to seal it from a panel in that large book. Then I need the rest of those damn seals to get the rest of the damn demon population under control. And then there’s Cassie. My sister, Cassie.”
“Your sister?”
Beck nodded and his face drained of color. He reached into his pocket and grabbed a watch that had been engraved with a similar star-marking to that of the printing press. When he noticed Tobias staring, he explained, “That one on your boss’s machine conjures demons, this one protects from them. It all depends on intention, I suppose. You’ll learn. For now, though. We have to print.”
“Print what?”
“Those seals. I don’t know. You did the job, didn’t you? Not you-you, but there’s a record. I know it’s come through here. So where are the seals?”
Tobias touched his forehead, running his hand over his hair and no doubt leaving a black mark as he went. He had no idea what was going on. Even as Beck explained it to him several times over, it did no good. He kept looking at his watch. And then outside at the broken window, as if expecting that savage owl creature to come back at any moment.
“And not to rush you even more,” Beck said, his voice now thin and reedy with fear. “But the reason I came here was not to give you a lesson on the occult. We can do that later, if you want to be like me. But my baby sister is in labor with one of these things, and I need to get whatever it is out of her.”
Tobias opened his mouth, but when he knew it would only be “what?” again, he shut it up tight. A woman having a demon baby? Why not! He shook his head, and in that process, spotted the hellbox on the workbench.
“There,” he said, suddenly remembering. “If we printed the seals—which would be like illustrations in this book, I think—we couldn’t have used them again. So they’re probably all in there.”
“Yes, illustrations. Like this.” Beck took a finger and dipped it in a fountain of ink on the work bench. He drew many intersecting lines, followed by more turns. It wasn’t like the star symbol on the press or on his watch, but more like a hieroglyphic, an ideographic language like Chinese or Japanese.
A faint memory of something similar came to Tobias. “Definitely in that box, then,” he said. “I know I saw something like that.”
“Good.” Beck grabbed the box and finding no room on the workbench, dumped it on the floor of the printing room.
It didn’t matter anymore about keeping things neat. The window was gone. There would be black blood everywhere. And if Bertrand truly had been dabbling in the occult and making demo books for the devil, then he was bound to have many other enemies who could have done this. He may not even know it was me. The thought was doubtful, but it kept him searching. It kept him hoping that maybe, this time, he’d be on the right side of things.
“This.” Beck grabbed a strange pattern from the floor. He held up his watch, which had a mirror inside of it and reversed the seal to the proper way. Beck closed his eyes as if accessing something from memory before he nodded. “This is for the Stolas. I will be right back.”
“What are you—”
“Keep looking, Toby,” he said, and his tone left no room for argument. “Find all the designs that look like that. We need seventy-one more. If we’re lucky.”
Tobias returned to searching, finding three more sigils before the night ripped with another set of horrible screams. The Stolas. Only the Stolas. Like so many women dying in a brutal fire. He shuddered and located more and more strange seals. He was in the process of counting almost fifty by the time Beck returned.
Black blood marked his cheeks. A feather was in his pocket, deliberately added there from the creature’s crown. A trophy. “It’s sealed underground now. Not gonna harm anyone unless they undo that nightmare symbol. Ain’t no one gonna do that by accident.”
“But on purpose?” Tobias asked.
Beck didn’t answer. He got on his hands and knees with Tobias as they combed through the remaining hellbox. In the end, they only held fifty-nine of the seventy-two seals in their command.
“Of course we’re missing thirteen.” Beck shook his head. Then with startlingly swift movements, he gathered everything they had into a small bag he grabbed from the workbench and tossed it over his shoulder. “I’m sure there’s something for Cassie in here. Come on. We should go.”
Tobias had shut off the press during the search, so he only grabbed his keys before he left. He locked up the office, though he didn’t think it would do any good. Three hours had passed since his shift had ended. He looked out at the street, now past midnight. No one was around. His parents were probably asleep long before he was supposed to return home.
No one would miss me, Tobias thought suddenly. I could just go. How far could I get before dawn? How far could I get alone—and then, with this man?
“You coming?” Beck asked. He was at the corner of the main road, looking to the outskirts where many of the villagers lived. Was his sister a Mormon? Or maybe she was just passing through. Hard to tell anymore. About anyone.
“You don’t need me, do you?”
“No, but I have ya. And I’d hate to see you get in trouble. Now come on. Unless you don’t believe me?”
Beck’s smile was a challenge. And Tobias, though he was scared more than he’d ever been in his twenty short years, stepped forward and followed the stranger into the Deseret night.
*
The screams that came from the wooden house, only a touch bigger than a Navajo hogan, were louder than the screams of the dying Stolas. Tobias’s stomach wrenched, pushing bile clear up to his tightening throat.
Beck’s lips curled under his thick beard, his blue eyes became a sullen gray, and he crossed himself the moment he knocked on the door. The gun hung at his waist, and he clutched it without pulling it out.
A young, tired woman with a face made red from exertion answered the door. She was indigenous, with brown skin and long black braids at her side. She shook her head, answering a silent question that Beck had asked with his eyes.
Then she set her dark eyes on Tobias. She looked at his hands, and whispered, “Devil” under her breath.
“He’s good,” Beck said. “He gave me the seals. We’re coming in. Making an end to this.”
“Keep her alive,” the woman said, and crossed herself. “Please.”
“Do my best, Sara.”
The woman, Sara, wore a cross around her neck and clutched it tightly. Framed images of honeybees and the hive that represented the Deseret state hung on the wall of the small house. A woman with blonde hair smiled in one image. She was alone, without a husband, Tobias noted. Another image of Sara and —who Tobias presumed was Cassie was also framed and hung. There were only shoes for small feet at the front door. This place was only big enough for two, two women. For a couple.
Tobias was filled with hope that a life like he wanted was possible, but it all faded to dread once again as he witnessed the same blonde woman from the images in a bed. She was strapped down with rope, her wrists red and smarting from her bindings. Her stomach was large, as if a pumpkin were hidden underneath a pale nightgown, and her legs were similarly bound and bloody. Liquid marked with green fluid tinged the bed sheets. She locked her sunken eyes on Beck as he entered the room.
She smiled at her brother, but in another blink of the eye, she snarled, cursing him as the devil’s spawn.
“I missed you too, Cassie.” He held up the bag of seals. “Let’s get this demon out of you.”
Sara appeared in the doorway behind Tobias. She held her hands in front of her chest, still holding onto the cross. Tobias looked from her to Cassie, understanding deep down that they were lovers, but he also regarded the display with some lingering suspicion. This woman was in labor. Not with a demon. Just labor.
“Wait,” Tobias said. “How do we know this is a demon? What if…”
“She was double-dipping?” Beck said, his crudeness not making even a flinch appear on Sara’s face. Beck shook his head. “She was not pregnant three days ago when I arrived.”
“And we don’t see men, other than Beck. I’m always with her, too,” Sara added. “When she woke up, she was sick. I saw the child move. It had horns. It’s a demon.”
Tobias looked at her stomach. The swell seemed larger than before. Beck lifted up the fabric, revealing her pale skin, and sure enough, two horns pressed against the already distended belly. A demon was inside of her. Tobias swallowed down a retch.
“But what one, what one?” Beck picked through several seals before he held one up to the mirror on his watch. “We know it’s not the Stolas, so that rules that out. And the three that I got rid of didn’t have horns.”
“How many do?”
“A lot more than I want to admit. Sara?” Beck looked to the other woman in the room.
She was crying, her tears matching her girlfriend’s on the bed. She wiped her hands over her eyes and met his gaze.
“Get the book. Give it to Toby here. He’ll tell me which ones have horns and which ones I can skip.”
Sara returned a moment later with a large tome. The Lesser Key of Solomon was printed in gold writing on the front and bore Bertrand Button’s name on the copyright information page, along with the date and location where it was printed. The heavy paper was familiar, though, and so was the magical feeling that radiated off the work. Just like the sigil on the plate. Just like the magic that now flowed everywhere around him. As Tobias balanced the book on his lap, Cassie continued to flail and rage against her bindings. Sara stared at her as long as she could before turning away in horror and sadness
Tobias read, read, read, while Beck sorted, sorted, and sorted as fast as they could.
“Botis,” Tobias shouted out one demon’s name. He held the book up and pointed to the symbol as Beck dug it out. He held each one from his small pile over Cassie’s stomach, hoping that some sort of reaction would occur.
Nothing did. They worked through six more, discarding the seals that didn’t fit the description, and then found four more.
“Hurry,” Sara said. “I don’t think we can wait much longer.”
Cassie let out a loud vocal boom. Tobias hoped it meant success, that they’d found what they needed, but she was merely crying out as more green-tinged liquid came out from between her legs. Sara slipped down, using a sheet to protect her girlfriend’s modesty while he and Beck continued to hold up seals to her stomach, to hopefully anger the demon enough to give them clues as to who he was.
“This isn’t working,” Beck said. He cursed heavily. “We’re almost out of seals. What if it’s one of the missing thirteen?”
“No. We’re almost through.” Tobias grabbed the bag from Beck. “Let me do it.”
Beck let the bag go. He rose and paced the room while exchanging worried looks with Cassie and Sara. Tobias tried not to be fazed by the yelling and tension, by the smell of sulfur and blood in the room. He focused on his task, one that was so much like a puzzle, so much like what he was truly good at, and soon reached the end of the list of seventy-two demons.
“That’s it.” Beck threw his hands in the air. “She’s dead. She’s—”
“What if it’s not horns?” Tobias asked. “What if it’s a crown, like the Stolas?”
Beck considered this for a moment before he shook his head. “Stolas can’t be in two places.”
“Right. But do you realize how many I passed up that had crowns? Tons. More than the ones that had horns.” Tobias grabbed a handful of seals on Beck’s side of the bed. He held up one that Beck had discarded. “Gremory.”
Cassie roared.
“Gremory,” Tobias said again. He held the seal at a different angle so it matched the one in the book. He read the description again, appearing to young women, especially maidens. This was the right one. “She’s obviously a virgin. Gremory could get inside of her easily. See?”
Tobias held the seal over her belly. The horns—which were now just two of many prongs in a crown—pushed the skin of her abdomen out by several inches. Cassie screamed in pain. Tobias didn’t understand how it didn’t burst through her. He didn’t know how the hell they were going to get it out of her without killing her.
But he had the right seal now. He gave it to Beck. “Use it! I don’t know what else to do.”
Beck grabbed the seal along with Tobias’s hands, holding them tightly. He stared intently into his eyes, as if he wanted to… kiss him—or maybe it was just another projection of Tobias’s. He didn’t know. He didn’t care. He moved from the bedside to the back of the room, using Sara’s body as a shield for some sort of privacy on Cassie’s behalf. He watched with a swollen lip from biting it so much as Beck took out a lighter. He heated up the seal from the printing press and then, with a mumbled apology to his sister, he pressed it into her round belly.
She let out the loudest scream Tobias had ever heard. Blood gushed from between her legs. A sudden breath exhaled from Cassie, one that no longer seemed strangled in her throat. She cried out with relief. She cried out with pain once again.
Sara fell back onto the floor as if shoved. A dark creature in the slender shape of a woman with a crown and bloody viscera covering everything else, ran from the room. It darted between doors, and then burst in a shatter of glass out a window.
“My dear.” Sara sprang to her feet. Her legs were slashed by the demon’s claws, yet she ran to her love as if unmarked.
Cassie was pale, her belly branded, but alive. She would surely need stitches or something to help with blood loss, but she was strong enough to hold onto Sara as she breathed in and out. The two of them hummed.
Beck darted from the room. He left behind the bag and the lighter and only carried his gun. Tobias wanted to follow, to be a hero, but he stayed on the chair in the corner of the room. He balled his still-black fists together and then opened them to examine his palms. One, two, three gunshots sounded in the distance. They were loud, yet so much quieter than all the screaming of the night.
Five minutes passed. Cassie’s breathing was normal, as was Sara’s sobbing. They hugged and kissed and still hummed a prayer, barely noticing Tobias was still in the room. Another five minutes passed. The smell of sulfur was replaced by salt and sawdust.
Tobias braved getting up from the chair.
“Dear,” Sara reached out to Tobias, “bring us water. Bandages. It’s all in the kitchen.”
Tobias left both women and easily found the kitchen. A window was broken. He looked outside, past the dead grass and the well. The night was filled with stars upon stars. No demons, but no demon hunter Beck, either. He gathered what the women needed and brought it to them. Sara clutched his face, kissing his forehead, and even Cassie gave him a weak squeeze.
“Where’s Beckett?” she asked. “My hero.”
“Your brother—”
“He’s not my brother. Just a man.”
“We’re all brothers and sisters in Deseret,” Sara said. She dabbed water on her girlfriend’s head, kissed her again.
Tobias said nothing. He waited.
And when he heard the crunch of footsteps, smelled the faint scent of leather and cattle, and felt the heat of a man against his back, this time he wasn’t afraid.
“Don’t move,” Beck said. He stepped beside Tobias, an arm around his waist, and smiled. His blue eyes were wide with pride, and though black blood marked one cheek, he was victorious. He glanced from the women back to Tobias. “I just want to remember this day, this night. Where the seals have all been used for their intended purpose.”
“Except for the last thirteen,” Tobias added a moment later, once the embrace and the merry-making had passed. “You still need to find those.”
“And capture the other demons,” Beck said. “And that’s a we, not a me, problem, by the way. If you’re up for it, that is. I take it now that you do believe?”
“Oh, in something.” Tobias looked around the room, filled with the items of his Latter Day past and the demon paraphernalia of his hopeful future. “I definitely believe in something now.”
“Good enough for me,” Beck said. This time, when he put an arm around Tobias, he also kissed him on the mouth.
I’ve said that for a lot of these stories, but it’s still true. Little Men was written when I was on mat leave / pregnant with my second son. I’d been reading a lot of true crime (shocker!) and ended up stumbling on Emily Craig’s Teasing Secrets from the Dead. What a fantastic book about death and decay! I especially loved her last chapter where she investigated and did body recovery for 9/11; I directly borrowed her details to craft this story about a similar morgue worker snatched away to recover what can be from the rumble.
Beyond the morgue setting of this story, there is a Lovecraftian edge to the horror and paranormal elements. The initial people in her first morgue gig give the protagonist the creeps, and then the strange rituals she witnesses after such a complex tragedy makes her doubt her sanity. But rather than, you know, actually dealing with these issues or her feelings, my protagonist tries to find a hookup to affirm life when surrounded by death.
When Strange Aeon wanted this story, I felt honoured for it to be among many, many other cosmic horror stories and spooky authors. If you enjoy Little Men, you’ll probably love the others contained in this eerie anthology.
Little Men
By Eve Morton
The day Henry showed up, Emily was knee-deep in fatalities from a ten car pile-up on the upstate New York highway. She’d prepared for days like this—everyone in her medical school had gone through the same accident and multiple death training—but the volume of the bodies in her morgue still left her wonky on her feet. She stood outside in the hallway as the paramedics rolled the body bags into her room, and then detoured out to start stacking them in the hallway. She shook her head aimlessly.
“First car crash?”
Emily looked down to see a small man beside her. No more than four feet tall, his arms were long and lanky. He loped more than walked to Emily’s side as he gave her a crooked smile. He wore blue scrubs and a name tag clipped to the front of his shirt with the hospital’s logo on the front. “It’s not too bad,” he said, when Emily had remained silent. “I don’t want to say you’ll get used to it, but you will find ways to manage. Here.” He slipped a normal-sized hand—everything save for his legs, which were small and didn’t seem as if they fit into his body properly, was normal-sized—into the front pocket of his scrubs and pulled out Vick’s VapoRub. He added a dab to his finger and rubbed it under his nose, his neck stiff as he worked. His head was round, hair thinning at the back, and grey near his temples. His voice was youthful, almost chipper, despite the fact that there were a final number of seventeen dead wheeled into Emily’s examination room and the hospital hallway.
“You want some?” The small man extended his hand with the VapoRub to her.
Emily shook her head and some sense into herself. She needed to not stare at this man who clearly had some sort of disability. Dwarfism? Bad arthritis? Something else? She felt bad even running through the medical textbook in her mind trying to diagnose him. A tight fear stretched across her chest as she wondered if she would get in trouble with HR.
Then she remembered that she’d still not said a word, let alone a bad word that would get her into a PC mess. “I’m sorry,” she apologized anyway, channeling her Canadian schooling. “I’m just…”
“In shock. Like I said, it happens. The big guns upstairs,” the man said, gesturing with his arm well above his short stature, “called me in for some assistance today. They knew it was a hard crash and that anyone would need help. Not a reflection on your skills, let me be clear.”
Emily chuckled. Was he worried about offending her now? Oh, this was too great. She decided that she liked him then. They were both worried about stepping on proverbial landmines, when they should really attend to the one thing everyone always had in common: death.
“I’m Emily,” she said, introducing herself and producing her hand. “I don’t use Vick’s—never liked the smell to begin with—but I have some lemons in my desk that I use when the odor gets too bad. They blot out everything. Good to cut up and put in water too, since I swear I can taste the smell some days.”
“Me, too. I’m Henry. Henry Clarke,” he added hastily, as if the last name would give him credit. His hands were cold as they shook; Emily thought briefly of the clay that one of her first bodies had been covered in when it arrived in her morgue. His hands felt like that clay. But the thought was gone almost as fast as it arrived. Henry withdrew his hand and gestured to the morgue door. “Shall we begin?”
*
Henry remained after the car crash had been processed through the autopsies, paperwork, and body claims. Emily didn’t even notice at first. She’d been so used to arriving at work for those strained two weeks as they sorted through dental records and body parts that ended up in the wrong vehicles—and thus in the wrong bags—that she merely took Henry’s presence for granted. His cinnamon tea on the counter, along with his penchant for the Rolling Stones on the portable stereo he brought with him to work, became as regular as latex gloves, the smell of cleaner, and the crinkling sound body bags made when opened. Small quirks she adjusted to and then decided she liked, since she’d learned a long time ago when dealing with death that she had to take the little accidents and call them blessings instead.
So when she arrived, a month and a half after that first meeting, and found the morgue room empty of all his signs of life, she couldn’t help but feel disappointed. She put a stack of articles she’d been reading about heavy metal toxicity—they had their first true arsenic case this week—down on one of the metal counters not jammed with bags or other paperwork, and sighed. How was she supposed to get through the remaining few weeks of the busy summer season, when people drank and drove boats or motorcycles or cars and lost their hands or heads or other body parts in the process? She found herself turning on the radio to find a classic rock station, just so she could catch a song or two of the Stones. Maybe channel Henry’s efficiency for the day.
She didn’t have time to get through the first body—or find a song she enjoyed—before there was a strong knock on her door.
“Just a minute.” Emily shifted her plastic shield up from her face, making her feel space-aged every time she did.
The knocking persisted. Emily hurried, snapping off her gloves. “Be right there,” she said, now louder.
The knocking had turned to pounding by the time she opened up. The man’s hand was still planted in the air before he lowered it with a strong gaze. “You the morgue lady Henry?”
Emily blinked several times to make sense of the statement and the thick Russian accent of the man in front of her. He was older, maybe in his late seventies, and his shock of white hair framed dark eyebrows that had not lost their color or dramatic flair. He furrowed them, wrinkling his forehead even further, and held out a plastic bag filled with jewelry. “Is this something you did?”
“Sir,” she said, trying to step back but only bumping into the thick metal door that had shut behind her. She peeked around the man’s shoulder, wondering just how the hell he’d gotten past the receptionist or the security team of the hospital. She saw no one at Maddy’s desk, and sighed. She had gone out to lunch early. Again. “Sir. I need you to step away from the morgue. Please go down the hallway where you came from and speak to reception about all lost or damaged items.”
“Who is responsible for this?” he said, voice thick with rage, but a little slower this time around. He also took several steps back toward the hallway, but not enough to break his stare with Emily. “No one at front. Who is responsible for this?”
“What exactly is the problem?”
“This. This!” He shoved the jewelry in the bag to Emily. “It’s not my wife’s.”
“Like I said, all damaged or lost items can be reported to someone else. Even if someone is not there—”
“My wife’s! But not my wife’s!” The man shook the bag at her again, and though she knew she’d be wasting her time, Emily finally relented and examined the items. Maybe he’d leave faster.
The man had avoided cutting the seal at the top of the bag and instead snipped it from the bottom. She fished one of the rings out and looked closely at it. She recognized the sapphire in the center as belonging to a woman who had broken her hip, come to the hospital to get it fixed, but died on the surgery table. A sad death, but one that happened all the time. She examined the man before her and noted the same type of ring on his finger. Not a woman’s cut, but a sapphire in the center. She struggled to remember the woman’s name, but fumbled. “What’s your name, sir?”
“Mr. Rushkin. My wife, Ada. I loved her. That was her ring. But it’s not her ring now.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Rushkin,” she said, channeling a calm, practiced voice from her training. “But I don’t understand what’s going on.”
Mr. Rushkin gestured to the bag again. He took out a watch, one that seemed to be plated with gold, yet there was something off about it. Even Emily could see this now. “It no gold. It no work.”
Emily traded the ring for the watch, her curiosity now peaked. She examined the time piece closely. She was used to the sometimes spooky occurrence of watches stopping at the time of death; it was a side effect of a car crash, of being banged around on an ambulance gurney, not something paranormal or that predicted bad luck. Hell, her watch had stopped the first time she met Henry, during that series of car crash victims, simply because she’d struck it on the metal table a bit too hard. Gotta be careful, Henry had said when she complained later on. Not all of us are eternal. He’d told it with a cock-eyed grin, and with his head permanently cricked to the side, so it had seemed funny.
This watch, Ada Rushkin’s watch, was ticking. It was in perfect order. The gold looked strange, almost more like brass, but when Emily flipped it over, she saw the wife’s name engraved on the back of the timepiece. The name was not common. This had to be her watch. “I’m sorry for your loss,” Emily stated again, and now completed the standardized speech they taught in school. She handed back the watch and the jewelry bag when completed. “These are your wife’s items. I can’t tell you more about them.”
“They have been tainted. This is not her. This is not right.” Mr. Rushkin took in a deep breath. He gestured to the bag once again, and then to the name who had signed off on the sealed items. “Who is Henry? Are you lady Henry?”
“No,” Emily said. “I’m Dr. Mortimer. Henry was an assistant I had for a while. Unfortunately, he’s not here anymore.”
“He’s gone? He took my wife’s watch and now he’s gone?” Mr. Rushkin said a few things in Russian. Though Emily did not know the language, she understood the cadence of curses.
“Sir. Dr. Henry Clarke is a trained professional, as am I. It’s very likely that if there is a problem with your wife’s items, they preceded our intervention here. Maybe someone at the hospital can tell you more, at a different reception desk, but this is the medical examiner’s office and I’m going to ask you to leave. Henry and I were only together a short time and we—”
“He is short?” Mr. Rushkin interrupted. His facial expression had changed, something like fear passing across it. He gestured to his own waist, which was about Henry’s height. “He tall as this.”
“Um, well, yes,” Emily said, wondering where the translation between the two of them had gotten mixed up. “But he was only here for a small time period. A month or so. Your wife’s case—”
“Was handled by a short man. By a man like this?” Mr. Rushkin mimicked—almost exactly—the strange loping gait that Henry had. Emily’s eyes widened. She’d never seen it mimicked so effectively—nor did she want to. Wouldn’t fixating on the fact that Henry seemed to walk as if his knees didn’t bend, as if his legs had been jammed into his hip joints like an afterthought of some unknown creator, be enough to get her fired?
She didn’t answer Mr. Rushkin. But her widening eyes told him all he needed to know. He said more words in Russian she could not comprehend, and slipped the jewelry into his jacket pocket. He looked at Emily once, with a forlorn expression, as if he wanted to tell her something. Warn her? A joke? She had no idea.
Mr. Rushkin opened his mouth, but then shut it tightly. He walked down the rest of the hallway. Emily remained where she was until he disappeared around a corner she heard the beeps of the elevator buttons.
As she walked back into the morgue room, the radio was playing the Rolling Stones’ song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” She knew the tune and the lyrics; Henry had sung it whenever it came over his small stereo, and especially as he tended to the effects of the bodies that they sealed off in bags for those like Mr. Rushkin to claim later. Had Henry said anything else as he worked? Emily wondered now. Or did he merely sing about losing items that you never truly possessed in the first place? Like watches and sapphire rings and time itself?
Emily shivered. The examination room was so much colder than she remembered. She waited until the song was over before she returned to prepping her next body for the afterlife. When she lifted the sheet over the face, and touched the surface of the skin, all she felt was the cold embrace of clay.
“I know it’s not your fault,” Dr. Sandersonsaid the moment she stepped into the meeting. “But we’ve had a few complaints about personal effects going missing.”
“Mr. Rushkin,” Emily said, already figuring that the confrontation at the beginning of the week had brought them here.
Still wearing scrubs, she’d only just finished her shift when Dr. Sanderson—Gary, as he sometimes preferred to be called—asked to meet her in his office. “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t think I handled the situation well. But his items were the same. None were missing, as far as I could tell. I asked him to leave when he became aggressive. Is he reporting anything else?”
“Nothing worth mentioning. It’s not your fault, like I said. Death makes people go a bit crazy. Loved ones especially need to find someone to blame. That’s why they sue, that’s why they claim items are not the same. That’s why people do a lot of strange things. We need to find someone holding the bag at the end of it. Hmm.” Dr. Sanderson fiddled with his own wedding ring as he spoke. “Perhaps I’m mixing metaphors here. All I’m saying is that I know you have done nothing wrong. We receive complaints of missing or damaged items all the time. We take them seriously not because we think that our doctors or examiners are corrupt, but because mistakes do happen. A car crash damages more than the body, but the watch and rings the body wears. And items like that fly off at the moment of impact, end up in other cars, any number of different scenarios. It is not our fault.”
“It’s good to hear you say that,” Emily said. “I’m sure Henry would appreciate it too.” She still replayed the conversation with Mr. Rushkin in her quiet moments in the morgue, and on the commute home. She’d even tried to look up some of the Russian phrases that Mr. Rushkin had used, but came up with only strange things about something called a homunculus, which literally translated into “little man.” A half-man creature from alchemy. She figured Mr. Rushkin was defaulting to old-world logic in his state of despair, and for a moment, the doctor became nothing more than a thief in the night. After all, she—and Henry—had done absolutely nothing wrong. They’d made not a single error sorting out the seventeen bodies from the crash, and if they could do that without making a mistake, then a woman dying of a broken hip shouldn’t be this much of a headache.
“Henry?”
“Dr. Clarke.” Emily wanted to mimic the walk that Mr. Rushkin had done so perfectly, knowing that Dr. Sanderson—or Gary, if you prefer—was good with his own name but no one else’s. He’d called her Emma for at least six months before finally realizing it was Emily. “Dr. Henry Clarke. He arrived to help me out with the car crash victims, and stuck around for a little while after. I figured you or someone else in the upper departments approved the extra help, because I sure needed it.”
“Oh.”
“He was the one who helped with Mr. Rushkin’s wife. So maybe Mr. Rushkin was upset that the person he wanted to talk to, the one he wanted to catch holding the bag as you say, was no longer around.” Emily shrugged, though it felt juvenile.
But Dr. Sanderson still seemed perplexed, like he had no idea of this strange name, this person, or even the approval form someone else higher up must have completed.
“You know,” Emily said, steeling herself from possible fall out. She held a hand up to her navel. “He was short. Yay big.”
“Oh.” Dr. Sanderson blinked slowly. Then he smiled widely. He held his own hand to his chest, mid-height, and asked again. “Yay big?”
“Yeah. And he walked a little strange. Nice guy, wonderful help. I sort of miss him, you know?” Emily added, just to be sure that her remarks at describing his disability were read correctly.
Her worries were unfounded. Dr. Sanderson was still smiling, and nodding along, repeating the name over and over so he couldn’t forget again. “Henry, Henry, Henry. Okay. That’s fantastic. That you had help, I mean. Always good to have an extra pair of hands around.” He smiled again, all teeth, and, Emily thought, a touch more sinister.
“Hey. You say he’s no longer around?” When she nodded, Dr. Sanderson let out a disappointed sigh. “Ah, well, I guess good things do come to an end.”
“You could see if there’s more money in the budget to hire him back,” Emily suggested. “Might help, especially if we’re receiving more complaints about the mistreatment of personal effects afterward. Just to demonstrate that we’ve taken the issue seriously, even if you’re sure that nothing is actually amiss.”
“You know? That’s a fantastic idea. I’ll make a note to run it by the department.” Emily couldn’t help but notice that in spite of Dr. Sanderson’s approval, he wrote nothing down. “In the interim, Emma, don’t worry. You’re a good doctor.”
“Emily.”
“Right. Well, Em, you’re a good doctor. And though I never want to say that you’ll get used to the work, it will get easier.”
Emily forced her smile. She wanted to say something else—I don’t go by Em, never have since I was teased after the class saw Wizard of Oz and called me Auntie Em—but she was stuck on Dr. Sanderson’s phrasing. It was exactly like Henry’s. Maybe they knew one another, maybe Dr. Sanderson had taught in Henry’s medical school, but if that was the case, it was odd for him to forget even his name. With such a distinctive body, too…
Emily shrugged it off, the rest of the meeting mere formality, and then left for the day. It was Friday, and though she had no plans, she was excited for the chance to shower and wear regular clothing again. She’d not yet completed her last body in the morgue, but she figured she may be able to get away with the weekend staff doing it. Or even leaving it for Monday. After all, hadn’t her boss just said things were going to get easier?
They were not going to, of course.
Over the weekend, a group of elderly patients on the ward had passed. Emily worked late into the night on Monday playing catch-up, and left the office just as her new watch chimed midnight and flipped over to display tomorrow’s date: September 11th, 2001.
By the time the news of 9/11 had spread to their small upstate hospital morgue, Emily and a bunch of other doctors, morticians, and anthropologists specializing in human remains were put on busses to go into the city. They would need all the help they could get in the coming weeks sorting out the aftermath.
And Emily was more than happy to go. She’d never been to New York City, despite her recent job placement in the state. Though this was definitely not a tourist mission, she couldn’t help but look out the windows of the bus with awe. She had grown up in Canada, done most of her schooling there, and only recently cashed in on her dual passport (thanks to her mother’s Midwestern blood) to expand her job search after she’d graduated. She’d never once felt any connection to the States over Canada, or Canada over the states, but once placed in the middle of the warzone that New York had become, she started to beam with pride. She started to fall in love with the people around her—the living and the dead—because there were just so many of them. Each one of them needed her, needed her knowledge, and needed to be discovered all over again.
The work never stopped. Trailers lined the streets of the city, usually adjacent or close to one of the surrounding hospitals, where most of their autopsies and body location/identification took place. Trucks and trucks of the dead arrived, all in body bags, but often mismatched or incomplete. One team of doctors would work side by side in the overheated environment, then switch off before finding the correct foot to go with a body, and then the whole process would continue with a new set of doctors, where they might be able to find who the foot or hand or bone belonged to; but more often than not, it was set aside for DNA testing later on. The doctors who had been relieved from the first shift would go to the bank of hotels and motels reserved for city workers, where they’d sleep or drink away their sorrows before the whole thing started all over again.
And this went on for weeks. Months.
Emily’s newfound patriotism and desire to help never quite waned, even as she watched the sun turn to gray skies and then disappear completely from her trailer window. But, after the seventh week in the pit, as she called the dank trailer she worked inside, the bar at the motel didn’t cut it anymore for stress relief. Nor did drinking alone, drinking with bad movies on TV, or drinking with others. Sleep was a joke, filled with nightmares that made her sweat into cheap bed sheets, or banal dreams of body parts that didn’t seem like nightmares at all, but a normal day at the office. Only when she described those banal dreams in language did she fully understand how macabre her life had become.
So she sought out men. She sought out touch. She needed someone, something to distract her from the horrible mess of death in front of her—the death that she had turned into her career, into her life. She sought out a different kind of life, one to hold temporarily between those same cheap bed sheets.
She slept with four men who also worked during her shift, all one night stands with mediocre bedside manner, before she found Craig. He was handsome and kind, but so were both Jacks and Dennis and Jiang. Craig’s brown hair and eyes, along with his roguish smile, didn’t make him attractive beyond the functionality of what he could give her at night. Emily liked him, and kept coming back to him after that first night because he’d had his own little man homunculus in his own morgue.
“I wish Henry were here,” she said the morning after they’d slept together for the first time. She’d been getting a coffee on her break and lingered by the station outside. He’d come up at the same time, smiled at her uneasily, and then broached small talk about the day, the weather. She hated the sound of something so trivial, and so instead of screaming that she needed to be bedded her way through New York so she could sleep at night, she simply said she needed help. “And heck,” she added when Craig hadn’t said anything in response, “I miss that weird imp.”
“Imp?”
Emily sighed. “Don’t go PC on me right now. I just want to describe someone and not sound like I’m being a jerk. I miss that short weird man who listened to the Rolling Stones as if it was the only band in the world, and drank so much cinnamon tea I’m shocked he didn’t gain inches in height from carrying so much in his kidneys. He did good work, never made a mistake. I need him. Where the hell is he? Why is he not helping out with this mess? I mean, didn’t they put up a Bat Signal for all the medical examiners in the state? So why isn’t he here? I can’t do this alone. I can’t—”
Craig had hugged her. Affection between doctors was not uncommon here—everyone needed a hug that first week and most people gave them out easily—but so much time had passed since the event had occurred, that though all the wounds still felt fresh every time a body bag was opened, people had developed their own routines and methods to deal with it. To change something now risked leaking through with pain upon pain.
“I’m sorry, I should be a professional,” Emily said, catching her breath and pulling away from the hug. She wiped a cheek, feeling sheepish as she thanked Craig once again. “You’re a good guy.”
“Yeah, yeah. But I want to talk about the imp.”
Emily couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh, well then. What do you want to know? He didn’t live under a bridge, if that’s what you’re thinking. Though I suppose he did sort of look like how I would have imagined Rumplestiltskin.”
Much to her delight, Craig laughed. It was not that she wanted to insult Henry or all the little men in the world. But she and Craig needed gallows humor. She’d read, early in her medical training, about the techs who had unearthed Gacy’s basement full of horrors having a “ghoul pool” for how many bodies they would find. Everyone working with death had their thing, and if she wasn’t going to tell fairy tales about the impish man who stole gold from her former patients, she was convinced she may burst from sadness.
So she told him the story of Mr. Rushkin, the weird conversation she’d had with her boss, and the missing gold. “Well, not quite missing. Just a lot of people complaining that their jewelry wasn’t all there. When you consider the stuff that actually happens in disasters though,” Emily said, gesturing all around to the trailers, “how can you fixate on something so trivial as a watch?”
“It’s hard. You just want a piece of something,” Craig said, then quickly added, “but…this is strange.”
“I know, I know. Death does weird things to people. Spare me the lecture. I’ve heard it, and I think even Kubler-Ross is spinning in her grave, resisting that last stage of acceptance.”
Craig didn’t laugh. He bit his bottom lip—a bottom lip that Emily remembered kissing the night before—and then shook his head. “I had an imp, too, you know.”
“Henry? You had Henry in your morgue?”
“Yes and no. He said his name was Gully.” Craig went on to describe Gulliver Norton, another short man who sounded, right down to the grey hair and the Vick’s VapoRub, exactly like Henry Clarke.
“So they’re…what?” Emily asked. “Twins? But with different last names, so raised apart? Surely they have to be related to have something so similar deform them. I mean—”
“I know what you mean. But what are the odds of both of them becoming doctors in a morgue? And liking the Rolling Stones, too?”
Emily considered all the case studies about separated twins. “Sometimes their interests do converge.”
“Sometimes,” Craig agreed. A long silence spread between them. They’d both seen the same strange short man, who could barely walk without loping, who helped them out during a busy season in the morgue.
“It wasn’t a car crash for me. A bad flu epidemic. Knocked out a large amount of immunocompromised crowd. It was really sad, actually,” Craig said, then quickly corrected, “of course, all death is sad.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Emily said, making the gesture that meant go on. Their break had become long. She watched as another van full of bodies arrived at her trailer. She could already see them, so vivid and clear in her mind’s eye, stacked by the doorway like incoming and outgoing mail. Like those seventeen bodies had been during the first day she’d met this strange little man. She shuddered. “Tell me more. What happened with…Not Henry, but your imp. I can’t remember the name.”
“Gully.”
“Right.” Emily shook away the image from Gulliver’s Travels where the giant had been overcome by the Lilliputians. “Did he take the gold, too?”
“No. Even stranger.” Craig told the story in a clipped manner, clearly seeing his own trailer beginning to fill up. Gully didn’t take things, and didn’t even appear to show interest in anything but his tea and music, until one day Craig found him staring at the body of one of the flu victims. A young woman, no more than twenty five. Her presence had bothered Craig—why would a young girl be so afflicted?—but before either one of them could cut her open and perform the autopsy or run any tests, Gully pronounced that she was pregnant. Eight weeks, not far along, but enough that her immunocompromised status made her a target for the flu.
“And when I asked how he could know, after I checked her chart and saw nothing there about the fetus, Gully said he could smell it,” Craig said, shaking his head. “How can you smell it? I asked him that then, and I’m still asking it now.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t really answer me. He just did the autopsy, showed me that he was right, and then we had another case to do. Another one coming in. It’s always something.” Craig’s gaze faded into the distance. Other doctors were coming out of the trailer. One threw up around the corner, where someone had kindly placed garbage bins for just that purpose. Two more doctors walked toward them, where the coffee area was. “I guess we get so busy we forget the little details, you know? We only realize it all in hindsight, just how weird some of it is, I guess.”
“Little details,” Emily said. She wanted it to be a joke, but no one laughed. “Did anyone ever come back? And you know, complain about anything when Gully was gone?”
“I don’t know,” Craig said. “So far as I know, Gully’s still working at the hospital. He’s my replacement, more or less, while I’m here.”
Emily and Craig looked at one another. A frisson of fear—or maybe it was desire, desire that was caged and cloaked in their dangerous and sad environment—passed between them. Craig threw the rest of his cold coffee on the ground when the new doctors grabbed their own cups. He went back to work without another word, and so did Emily.
But when the buses came with their replacements that night, Craig was waiting for her. The first Jack had waited for her, too, but she’d bypassed him with some lame excuse about being tired, needing alone time. Not with Craig. She clasped his hands in her own and brought him to her mouth in a kiss. They went back to Emily’s hotel room. Had sex in a quick burst of passion, and then in a slower and more relaxed way. When they ordered dinner, eating it half naked on the bed, she brought up Gully again. She made him describe to her the entire story again, this time fleshing out the detailed parts he couldn’t before. Giving her color and texture and motion, so it was as if she was watching this strange man, this homunculus, inside her own mind.
“Do you know that word?” she asked. “Homunculus? It means ‘little man.’ It makes me laugh.”
“No, I don’t know it. But I like imp better anyway.”
She didn’t answer. She put his hand on her, but Craig pulled away. She must have seemed wounded, because Craig soon kissed her.
“Want to go and see him?” Craig asked. “I bet he’s still working at my hospital.”
There was no doubt in Emily’s mind. She wanted to see that imp. And she wanted to ask him, face to face, what he really was.
The drive took all night. They took Craig’s beat-up Chevy, which had the passenger window permanently rolled down. He had taped a plastic bag to cover that side, but it reminded Emily of body bags, so she tore it off. The late October air was cool as they began, and had turned chilly by the time they arrived in Ithaca where Craig’s hospital was located. As they parked the car in the hospital lot, and Emily felt the middle-of-the-night chill cut through her bones, she started to doubt this hastily-put-together plan.
“What if he’s not there?” Emily asked. “What if no one is there?”
“We can check his work papers,” Craig said. “We can see where he came from. I don’t know. Maybe even grab a fingerprint from the work station, slip it in with some of the others we’ve been taking, and run it. I just want to see who this guy is.”
Emily wanted to ask the question: What if he doesn’t have fingerprints? She bit it back, thinking it foolish, but she also knew deep down that it was a valid inquiry. When she’d shaken his hand that first day, he’d felt like clay. Not like death, but not like life, either. How could something so cold and so strange, something that seemed so half-formed, be anything like the two of them?
Craig held the door for her and they stepped into the warm hospital light, she wondered if these little men could love. Had someone loved them? Had there been a birth, and if so, where were their parents now? And if they were created from nothing, from small bundles of earth and something unknown, like the lore proclaimed, then who had made them? And did that creator love them, too?
Weeks later, Emily would do a pregnancy test realize this was probably the night she and Craig conceived. Her fleeting thoughts about love and creation and birth, as they stepped into the hospital, should have made the fact obvious, her body always one step ahead of her mind. All bodies are always one step ahead of the mind. Even in death.
But for now, it felt like yet another necessary part of the investigation. Were these men real? And if so, what were they? Who were they? Sinister or helpful? Good or bad? Familiar or strange? Terrorist or brave patriot?
Emily and Craig crept through the darkened hallways like burglars, though Craig had a key to every room. Even the HR office opened as he slid his key card inside. She flicked on the lights and stood lookout by the door while he opened the filing cabinets in an attempt to find Gulliver’s application form. A resume. His paystub. Something to prove he was real.
“Nothing,” Craig said.
“Check Henry Clarke.”
He did so, but still found nothing. “There’s a computer here, but I don’t have the password. I doubt it would have anything else, though. All the other employee files—like mine—were here.”
“And temp workers?”
“Still here. I looked up another intern I had a few years ago, and she was here. So was a student volunteer I had three years before that.” Craig read each name out with a baffled stare at their present paperwork before he met Emily’s eyes across the room. “We’re not going to find the imps here.”
Emily didn’t want to give up. She was still considering other rooms in the hospital to look for a possible paper trail, when a crash sounded. Craig dropped the files on the desk. “What was that?”
“No idea.”
Emily had no idea why—maybe she was trying to think like Gully—but her first thought was to sniff the air. Smoke cloyed at her lungs. Not like the nurses or janitors who sometimes snuck in the hallways of her own hospital for a cigarette fix, but something deeper and richer. Like an incinerator. She walked to the air vent in the office and sniffed again. More smoke. “You smell that?”
Craig was behind her, a palm on her back. She shuddered at his touch. Her nostrils flared and more smoke came through. “That leads to the morgue,” Craig said. His dark eyes glimmered. “Let’s go.”
They practically ran down the back stairs of the hospital, so they could come to the morgue from an unsecured entrance point. Maybe catch them—Henry and Gully? Someone else?—in the act. Craig reached the door first and stopped, a finger over his lips. He peered through the small window in the center. Emily rose on tiptoe to see a red-orange glow.
Craig entered the code for the room. The door swung open on an air-lock and smoke billowed out. So much of it, and so much like the Towers. Emily wondered if she and Craig would be covered in cement dust, walking statues, like so many of the dead and living in the aftermath of the collapse. She shook her mind free of the Towers and only thought of the many smokers’ lungs she’d examined over the years, lungs taken out of the holistic context of the body they had once been in, and laid on her table to identify. No image helped. Death upon death, only making it worse in each incarnation, each repetition.
Emily vomited in the corner, her body heaving out the aftermath of their meager dinner.
Craig was no longer around. He’d gone deep into the morgue. The smoke had dissipated, no more than a light haze now. None of the smoke alarms or sprinklers had gone off. Though Emily saw a red fire alarm at the end of the hallway only a few paces in front of her, she could not pull her body toward it. She needed to go into the morgue. She needed Craig.
When her eyes adjusted to the low lights, she realized the red-orange glow had been candles. Many, many candles. Like a music video from the 1980s, like the death scene in Romeo + Juliet. They lined every metal surface, the counter, even the sinks where they washed their hands and body parts.
Then she saw Craig. He stood, mouth agape in horror, as he stared at the three men, no more than four feet tall, each looking exactly like the other. Short, thinning hair, grey along the temples, hands and arms that were regular sized, but feet that seemed as if they had been screwed on backwards. All three of them wore scrubs. All three of them held a candle in front of them—but the similarities ended there. Over one candle, one of the men held a gold watch. Over another candle, another held a cube of salt or some other white crystal substance, one that burned and filled the room with smoke. Over the last candle, the last one held something red and slithery, something that belonged in a human body.
“A uterus,” Emily said softly. She looked to Craig, who now stood beside her. He held her shoulders like she was a small child. She looked into his big brown eyes and wanted to plead with him to stop this, stop this, stop this.
But there was nothing they could do. A forcefield would not let them get into the room any further. Emily saw chalk lines on the ground, strange symbols that she swore were Russian—or maybe Latin—circling the three men. They whispered to one another in a language she could not understand, that she was sure no one but each other could understand. Listening further, or going in too deep into this madness would only ensure that she and Craig could never leave. Breaking the divide between them and these strange creatures would seal off all exits, all hope of a future. Too much knowledge here would only bring on horrific results.
They’d seen enough of those already.
“We need to go, Emily,” Craig said to her.
She opened and closed her mouth. One of the men—Henry, she knew it to be Henry—started to hum. It pierced the force field and tickled her ear. Craig’s hand gripped her harder as the song got to him, too. It was the Rolling Stones intro for “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” but Henry had not yet gotten to the lyrics.
Emily was not going to let it. She started to run, with Craig falling in line behind her. They bolted up the back stairs and through the back door they’d entered the hospital through. They ran through the parking lot, the cool air of October now a boon to their overheated skin. Craig fell behind the wheel, she fell into the passenger seat, and they drove into the night. When the radio insisted on playing a Rolling Stones song, Craig kicked it so hard the radio broke.
“Good,” he said.
And Emily nodded: Good.
“I’ll be sorry to see you go,” Dr. Sanderson stated. He had received Emily’s resignation letter two weeks ago, but it was only now, on her last day in the hospital’s medical examiner’s office, that he had asked her in for a meeting.
Emily had relished the feeling of sliding that last body into the steel tray. It had been a normal death, as normal as any death could be: Heart attack in the sleep of an elderly pensioner. A known death, found by his son in the morning, a son who had come to get the personal effects not three minutes before Emily sat down for this meeting. The personal effects that had all been there and accounted for, nothing strange about them in the least. After such a bizarre and winding career, Emily had been relieved to escort this lovely death, as her last career death, to its natural conclusion.
Then she had to meet Dr. Sanderson. Her stomach flipped with fear and nausea all over again.
“I have to be honest,” Emily began slowly. She looked down at her scrubs, stained with fluid. She crossed her legs so she didn’t need to see the stain. “I won’t miss this place.”
Dr. Sanderson laughed as if it was the funniest joke. “I can understand that, after what you and so many other doctors have lived through. Your service has been commendable.”
Emily nodded, but didn’t comment. She didn’t like to talk about “her service” as so many put identifying the bodies in the wake of 9/11. At first, she’d deflected all praise by saying these tragedies were like all other natural or unnatural disasters, herself no different than those who suffered through and attended to victims of a Kansas Tornado or Oklahoma City, but that soon became too much of a lie in her mouth. Nothing would ever be the same again afterward, for known and unknown reasons.
Emily had returned from Ground Zero just after Christmas. She’d found out about her pregnancy over that break, informed Craig, and the two of them had picked up easily where they had left off. They never spoke about that strange night in the morgue, not since it had happened, but that didn’t seem to matter. Though they’d not slept together since that night, either, and had tried to work through the bodies stacked up in their trailer alone in the aftermath, they could not handle this part of life alone anymore: a baby. A shared future.
There was no doubt in Emily’s mind that he was the father, and no doubt in her mind that he’d be a good one. Their shared past, of both the strange little men and 9/11, made their relationship obvious and easy. They didn’t need to bicker or argue about small things like the type of milk to buy or who forgot to clean the bathroom sink because they’d been through so much already. They’d been living together in Emily’s apartment since the New Year, but they would eventually seek a house in another state not affected by either one of the tragedies that brought them together.
“Anyway,” Dr. Sanderson said, noticing Emily’s silence and her arms crossed firmly over her chest, “I can imagine you want to get going as soon as possible. And congratulations, by the way, for your bundle of joy.”
Emily had been about to dart to her car and into the arms of Craig, who most likely had made a lavish dinner, but she paused. She was halfway through her pregnancy now, but the scrubs and large coats had made it so she didn’t think it was obvious. She’d told no one. She raised a brow now as she regarded Dr. Sanderson.
“I know, yes; or at least, I know now.” He gave a small chuckle, one which Emily did not return. “There’s only so many reasons why people quit this work. They usually do so right away or after a tragedy. Or if they have some life inside them.”
Dr. Sanderson’s eyes went to Emily’s stomach. She thought of the slippery uterus one of the strange men had held and tried to keep a straight face as she added, “I’m not the only one to quit after 9/11. I’m no different than Dr. Sheldon or Dr. Wu.”
“Ah, yes, but you are different than Jack and Jiang. 9/11 was not your first tragedy. You survived the car crash, seventeen dead, before that. And those bodies, my goodness. More than a baker’s dozen! You survived with Henry, mind you,” Dr. Sanderson added. “But you still survived.”
Emily shuddered involuntarily at the mention of Henry. Dr. Sanderson smiled, his remark hitting its target. “I’m rather fond of Henry, and Gully too. But I think the true piece de la resistance was Markus. You know what they say in alchemy and everyday life—third time’s the charm.”
Emily swallowed hard. Her mouth tasted like bile, like the saliva that coated her mouth during the first trimester. She wanted to spit, to get the evil substance out, but she did not dare.
“I’m envious, you know. Not just of you but of all women who can create life so simply, so easily. Like that.” Dr. Sanderson snapped his fingers. “Just like that, from a random fling, you have something brand new inside of you. Of course, that life is still made from pieces scattered around by careless men, but it is still no less brand new. It’s amazing, truly amazing. I am envious.”
“Can I go?” Emily didn’t know why she was asking permission. Her work clock was done. Her job was over. Yet something kept her here. A low murmur from his office, so much like a familiar song.
“Yes, of course. I just wanted to congratulate you before you disappeared from us. I would say that you’ll be hard to replace, but as you can tell, I’ve been busy like you’ve been busy. I like to think I’m not as careless as any slut with open legs, but you know how these things get. Once you make one, you can’t stop.”
Dr. Sanderson rose and grabbed the door to his office. Emily was woozy on her feet as she stood, but she was determined to leave. She said nothing about his remarks, knowing deep inside they were meant to hurt. He called out to her—more well-wishing that seemed polluted by dust and venom—but she ignored him as she marched down the hall. If she could help it, she would never set foot in this hospital ever again. She’d already stayed too long. She grabbed her coat from her peg in the morgue, her purse, and the small radio she’d bought when she returned from 9/11 and Craig had insisted she needed one.
Just as Emily stepped out of the office, she ran into the small man.
“Hey doc,” Henry said. Or maybe it was Gully. Or Markus. Or another homunculus that her boss had conjured from the remnants of what people left behind. The little man smiled wide, then sniffed the air. “I hear there’s good news. Congrats on your bundle of joy. What are you having?”
Emily walked past the imp with her head held high. She thought of Craig. The dinner he’d made for them, all three of them. The house they would get in another state. The house she’d give birth in, because now she knew for sure, she could never trust any hospital, since there might be an imp doing the dirty work of death. In an age of terrorism and wars and disasters by men’s hands, there would need to be a thousand little men created to hold off the bodies as they stacked up in the hallway, as natural death tipped into unnatural life.
“That’s okay,” the homunculus said. “I know it’s a boy. Enjoy your little man while you can. They grow up so fast, and not all of us are eternal.”
Emily stopped just before she stepped outside. She turned to see the homunculus smile, sniff the air once more, and then reach into his pocket for Vick’s VapoRub. He rubbed it under his nose with that same crick in his neck. Then he waved goodbye as he stepped into the examiner’s room, a familiar song burning in Emily’s ears.
History’s Ghost is about a grad student who inherits a dead professor’s class. At first, the narrator is just happy to have some extra cash during the semester, but the old lectures that contain the dead professor’s voice begins to haunt him–and a further mystery unfolds…
I wrote this during the COVID pandemic, where I ended up recording a lot of my lectures. I was also pregnant during a lot of those recordings, and kept wanting to record ahead of time. Yet I was deeply paranoid that doing so would jinx something, so I put off doing my lectures ahead of time until I was almost nine months pregnant. Then, so I could be both practical and paranoid, I indulged my obsessive thoughts with this story.
I hope you enjoy it too!
History’s Ghost
By Eve Morton
I knew the professor was dead the moment the school called me. While I was used to last minute teaching posts–being a contract faculty member at a local university gives one all the prestige of being called “doctor” none of the convenience of being treated like one–there was no way that someone could abandon a course like this after only a week into the semester without some kind of tragedy undermining the entire operation. If the original instructor had been a woman, I would have considered her departure to be a quicker-than-first-believed mat leave. But it was a man, named Ralph Anderson, and despite being at the school for the past ten years, I had never heard of him before.
“Was he tenured?” I asked, evoking the dangling carrot for many in my profession. “I don’t recognize the name.”
“He was brilliant,” the head of my department said. She evaded the other question. “I’m sorry you never got a chance to meet him.”
“I’m sure I’ll get to know him now, through his work.”
“I suppose we live on in our research. Even if only one person reads the dissertation, it makes it seem like ten years of work has gone somewhere, right?”
I nodded. Marta detailed the subject area of my new teaching post, all without outright offering me the job for the first fifteen minutes. Though I’d gone to graduate school here, taken one of her classes on Shakespeare, she didn’t seem to recognize me. “I see from your CV that you’ve published a few papers in the area of medieval history. Would his class on the history of the 100 Years War and the Black Death be something you’d be willing to take? On such short notice?”
“Yes, of course.” I should have let her speak longer, tell me more difficulties. But I had a student debt to pay. “I’d love to teach the course. Sounds fascinating already.”
“Good. He’s done most of the work already. You’ll find some of his lectures, or the notes for them, already pre-recorded on his online website for the course. The class runs from 2-5 on Monday and Wednesday.”
I already had a class that term which ran from 1-2:30pm in another part of the campus. When I reminded her of that, she nodded as if she should have realized. I thought she was going to take away the job from me right then–something of which I had already started to allocate the money for in different debts and for different items in my rundown apartment I desperately needed–but she only nodded.
“Should be okay. Just start the class a half hour late. Like I said, most of the material has already been recorded. If need be, you can play that for the students until you arrive.”
“Oh. Okay. That makes sense.” An eerie feeling came over me then, as if there was a ghost in the room. Or rather, as if I was being encouraged to be a ghost in the room, nothing but a conjurer, a lion tamer, for a former professor who no longer had the course, but had done all the work.
It was here when I understood he was dead. And possibly a suicide, given the sudden nature and the way in which she smiled vaguely and shook my hand on acceptance in a strained, limp grip. Why else do all the work for a class and then suddenly exit the scene? Sure, Dr. Ralph Anderson could have had a heart attack or suffered in a car crash, but this was the Arts Department and we were all a sensitive lot I wanted to feel bad for him; I wanted to mourn him in a way people often feel the need to mourn when they see tied up teddy bears against telephone poles, marking hit and run victims, but I could only be grateful. Joyful.
Another class to teach. Another couple thousand in my bank account. I left the meeting feeling elated, almost as much as when I was first rehired by the school as a professor and not as a grad student, thinking it would lead to a career and not piecemeal postings here and there. I even got a bit drunk at the campus bar, spending my money before I even had it. When I mentioned the professor’s name to the bartender at the professor-frequented establishment, he had no idea who I was talking about.
“Ralph Anderson,” I said again, my speech slightly slurred and animated. “He taught medieval history.”
Cameron, the bartender, opened his mouth to say something, but then shook it.
“What? Did you pick him up one night?”
“Not exactly,” Cameron said, and then, flirting with me because he could, he said, “Don’t be jealous, Monroe. I still only have eyes for you.”
“But you know the name?”
“I know a medieval history professor. Or rather, I knew him. This old guy used to come in here all the time and tell me things about the Black Death. You know, the bubonic plague.” He pronounced it boo-bonic. “A lot of fun things there, believe it or not. Like night pigs! Did you know they had two sets of pigs develop because of all the bodies in the street? One set of pigs that ate during the day, tore the bodies open and ate the blood and infected flesh–only to die again in the street, of course–and then there were the nocturnal pigs, the ones that dug through the graveyard dirt and got the corpses up from the ground, and then of course, they ate them and died too.”
“That’s disgusting,” I said. “I’m going to be sick.”
“Yeah, well, he made it funny. But I don’t remember his name. I called him Night Pig for a while there.” Cameron furrowed his brows. “I wonder if I upset him, and that’s why he didn’t come back.”
“How long ago?”
Cameron made a gesture that meant years, years, when you were a wee babe. He gave me another refill on my beer, but I was now feeling ill. I said so aloud, and so I left my drink half-finished with a nice tip for Cameron. I drew a pig on the bill before I left. I had no idea why; it just felt like the thing I should be doing.
At home, I fell asleep under a pile of old laundry and my ever-present and always in the apartment blanket which moved from couch to computer chair and back again. When I woke up a few hours later, I guzzled water. I recalled dreams of medieval England with roves of wandering flagellants, whipping themselves in the name of Jesus, so they could fight the plague and please God again. I didn’t remember ever reading anything like that before in any books on the era, yet I knew it to be true. Something Cameron said? About the former history prof who also drank under his gaze, maybe even with a guiding hand?
A chill passed through me. I grabbed my blanket, curling it around me like a king, and sat in front of my computer with a glass of water. I wanted to review the material for my course, since I had an alert that the online system had been transferred to me. When I accessed it, I saw the outside page as a student. The syllabus, the assignments, the readings. Basic stuff. Only a handful of personalized announcements were present, most of which were answering frequent questions about textbook edition or policy on plagiarism software. The course had only been going for a week and the last announcement was one cancelling this week’s session.
I’m out of the area, students. Got stuck somewhere and it’s too late now to getaway. I’ll be cancelling classes today, Dr. Ralph Anderson wrote. Follow along with the reading. I’ll be with you again as soon as I can.
That was it.
Yet its sparseness, and its recentness in the queue of the announcements, made me think once again that this man had died. One moment he’d been telling them that the fifth edition was just as good as the sixth, but with different page numbers, utterly banal and pedandtic like a good professor, then the next moment he was gone and it was too late to do anything about it. The words “too late” repeated in my head in a different voice, as if warning me about something. Too late, too late. And it’s ten percent off your paper when you hand it in after the due date.
I shook my head. The voice was gone.
When I turned the online system into one that let me see Dr. Anderson’s notes, I thought there had been a computer glitch. The entire site changed design. The banners were in another color, the logo for the school was different, and so was the font. It seemed like I had hit the WayBack Machine online; I was looking at an early prototype for a class that had been designed in the early era of the accompanying online programs. I went to the announcements page again only to find the date to be the same as before; everything looked strange and archaic, but it was still showing the current year.
“Odd,” I said. My apartment echoed the words back. I needed to buy shelves, rather than keep relying on milk crates. I needed furniture to fill up the void, so my words didn’t echo back like that. I chilled. I grabbed the blanket tighter around me. “Very odd.”
On the content page for the class, everything was still in the old format, but it was all present and accounted for. There were notes and accompanying lessons, just like my department chair Marta had promised, and so I clicked on one of them. A man’s voice, clear and lucid and sounding very much like a dry history professor’s, like the one I’d conjured for him in my head, began to speak.
“The Black Death only grew in strength because of the 100 Years War, and the Great Famine before it ensuring that most of the inhabitants of the countries hit the worst were already suffering, already struggling to survive.” I skipped ahead in the lecture file, since it was forty minutes long. The recording got a little fuzzy near the end, as if there was static or more echoes. “We will continue this talk on the environmental conditions before we jump into the gory bits. I know it’s disappointing, but it’s a must in order to understand why things have happened as they happen. If we don’t, history will only repeat itself.”
I went to the next week’s class, clicked play. “I want to talk about the animals that you would see roaming around during this period,” Dr. Anderson continued, his voice slightly more animated than before. “We’re talking about fleas as the means of transmission for the Black Plague, which most of us have enough understanding of biology to grasp how it occurred. Dirty and filth leads to fleas, which carry the bacteria, which keep jumping from animals to humans and back again. Remember that this is not a virus–not like AIDs or the flu we get every year–but a bacteria. That means it’s alive in a different way than a virus, so it thinks in a different way, it has a different ecosystem, of which the fleas were only one part. Remember also that there is no technical cure for this sort of malady. Once you get it, there is no immunization. You can get it again, and again, and again.”
I skimmed forward again, hoping to find the section on pigs that Cameron had mentioned. Right near the end, mere seconds before the recording cut out, he said, “nocturnal animals became even more aggressive during this era. There were pigs who lived in the plague pits, those mass graves which–“
Then there was nothing.
I cursed, finding the content utterly thrilling, and went directly to the next week’s session hoping for some type of ending to the night pigs and their saga. It was the exact same story that Cameron had told me, complete with the same jokes and corny lines; Dr. Ralph Anderson and the former medieval prof in the bar were one in the same. Why didn’t Cameron remember him from this term? It had only been a week, sure, but there had been previous contact. Extended conversations and familiarity. And this was material that Dr. Anderson had been teaching for a long time. Though I only had this one class, and these scattered recordings, each one contained a distinct narrative arc, complete with facts, figures, and characters. Like those night pigs. They stole the show.
The lecture, I corrected. They informed the lecture.
When I tried to find dates for the recordings, there was only the current posting schedule for when these lectures would become relevant; everything was in the future, as if Dr. Anderson had time-travelled into another era digitally, while also living in the past.
“And being dead in the future,” I said. I shivered. I still could not get the notion that this man was dead and gone from my head. That he was the ghost in the proverbial machine, and that eventually, I’d get to the end of his life like the end of the Plague history in the invisible-to-students lecture queue.
I put on the next lecture, then the next, scanning for some sign of madness, of violence, of transgression. But he merely told the entire history of the Black Death, adding in asides that were interesting–did you know about the flagellants, those who whipped themselves in the name of Jesus? did you know about the popes who were, despite common impulse to believe that this illness was a punishment from god, science-forward? and they wanted to find that scientific cure?–and then the course was over.
“Be sure you submit your final papers in the proper formatting,” he said on one of the last recordings, one that was clearly made in a classroom. I could hear the chairs scraping before he was done lecturing about MLA and deductions for wrong citations. His voice was lost in the mass exodus of a class finally leaving for their exam season. There was chatter, footsteps, and then only breathing and small noises as Ralph cleaned off his desk. The recording was still going, though he was no longer lecturing. There were at least ten more minutes on here. I held my breath as I waited and listened.
For what? I still wasn’t entirely sure.
“Professor Anderson?” a female voice asked. It sounded familiar to me. The chair of my department? She sounded so young, it seemed impossible. Yet when he said, “Hello Marta, how are you?” I knew it was her.
“I was wondering about the final assignment. Could I possibly wrote on the resurgence of the plague that’s been happening in smaller communities?” She listed off a few recent cases, ones which I had never heard of, but immediately began to Google as I let the recording continue to play. “I wanted to compare the treatment of religion then to the treatment of science now. Or vice versa. I’m still working out the details…”
He gave her advice, but it was soon cut off by a hand–or fabric, or something heavy-over the speaker of the recorder. I had a flash in my mind in that moment of an answering machine that used little tiny tapes; the type of recording device my mother had used when she completed her night school education, and recorded her lectures, so she could review them later on via the tape deck in her car as she drove to work. As a cassette tape, not as a digital file like this was now; a tape recorder with something you had to physically rewind and then turn around to the other side. I could hear that same rewinding motion as this recording cut off mid-sentence, as Dr. Anderson gave Marta advice on how to make history modern even without bringing up more recent cases.
“It’s not that I don’t love that idea,” he said. “History repeats itself all the time. It’s where our better ghosts live, and those ghosts can often give us the best lessons. But how can you use the history we know for sure, that we know the definite consequences of from the mid-1300s to make the same point you’d like to make with these modern ghosts? And what is the point you want to make?”
“I guess–“
The tape was over. Online, I couldn’t find the exact cases Marla spoke about for the plague, but I did find a general plague counter that the CDC had established. There were roughly seven cases per year in North America alone; it had never gone away, not entirely, not forever. Most of the modern cases were concentrated in third world countries, in places that had a lot of rural areas, and people who were sheepherders were the most common demographic. But there were still cases in cities, still cases amongst the young, those who had never once touched an animal other than a household pet in their entire lives.
Another chill passed through my apartment, over my skin, and then down to my ankles where it stayed. Something shoved my feet under the desk, like a cat demanding my attention.
Or a night pig.
Or fleas.
I looked under the desk. I saw nothing but my bare feet, nothing but the pens and papers I’d dropped under there, nothing but a desperate need to vacuum. I shoved away from my desk, closing the laptop, and after checking my entire body for bugs and bites, I went to bed just as the sun came up.
*
Teaching my first class for Dr. Ralph Anderson was far less dramatic than reading through the files online. The students were older, a bit more organized and invested than your basic first years who still wanted you to be a high school teacher or their parents, but they were still only here because they had to be. They regarded me skeptically for a few minutes, wondering where Professor Anderson had gone, but they eventually came around and accepted my authority. They answered the questions. They engaged in the material.
I couldn’t have asked for a better first class.
When one student, the keener of the group–as there was always one–came over to me at the end of the session, she asked the very same questions I’d seen answered in that week’s announcement from Dr. Anderson. I hadn’t made it visible yet, though, and so I told her to be patient.
“Okay, will do,” she said, but lingered.
“Is there anything else I can help you with, Cassandra?”
“No. I just… where is Professor. Anderson again? You said he was still away from campus, but I… I’m afraid.”
“You’re afraid?” I repeated. She nodded, her dark eyes wide. “What are you afraid of?”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
I was never good at lying–the main reason I was not a high school teacher–and so I nodded. “I don’t know for sure,” I quickly added. “But it’s seeming that way. How did he seem to you the last time you saw him?”
“Sad,” she said. “Like he wanted to keep teaching, but that… something had run out.”
“Too late,” I said, repeating the line from his announcement.
“Yeah, exactly. Like a person who knows they have to pay for a parking meter.”
“Interesting analogy. Quite poetic.”
She beamed at the praise, told me she was also taking creative writing that semester. “I should go to that class, actually. I just wanted to know if there was a card I could send, or funeral I should be attending to.”
“I don’t think so.” I got a sudden image of everyone in medieval England forgoing funerals and merely throwing plague victims into pits, burying them, and hoping for the best. “I will let you know if anything changes.”
“Thank you.”
I waited until she was gone from the room before I let out a breath. Of course, I thought. If he’s really died, there will be a funeral. If he’s been part of the school for as long as it seemed from some of these lectures, then there had to be some kind of memorial page. Even if he didn’t have tenure.
I used the computer in the classroom to look up his name on the website. Nothing in the news, nothing in the general Google search for funeral homes close by either. I only found more classes he was teaching that semester, more classes that surely had been handed off to other contract workers. One class, on the Crusades and the Inquisition, called The History of Torture from 1000-1500, was starting in under an hour and across campus.
I figured it was about time to get familiar with yet another era of history. Just to see if, like he suggested, this was where our better ghosts lived.
*
A young professor named Dr. Julie Norton had been assigned this class. She was blonde and had great teeth; she smiled a lot as she went through the rather barbaric history leading up to the start of the Crusades to set the tone for the class. The room was filled with even more than the regular registered thirty-five students per class. There was more like fifty, sixty people filling the rows of desks and chairs. Not everyone was student-aged, nor were they decked out like a mature-student, either; they were like me, regular people part of the campus, but who had wandered into the room upon hearing the brutality, and were curious enough to stay around.
Though Julie spoke all of the lecture herself, and gestured to a recently made Power-Point slide with images that could only have been scraped together from Google Image Search, I heard Dr. Anderson in her voice. His particular turns of phrases, his macabre humor, all the things I’d listened to obsessively the night before. She must have had a similar experience to me, opening up her course and being rewarded with insight into the mind of a professor as it sprawled through the dead but still somehow living landscape of history.
“Can you imagine?” Julie said, gesturing to one of the famous torture racks on the board. “Being questioned like this? Having everything you’d ever known ripped from you, and being given nothing but pain to contemplate? Of course you’d give in. You’d say anything to make it stop. Torture never actually works to produce new information. We see this now, with waterboarding and any number of other practices we disguise as advanced interrogation. It’s happened before. It’s happening right now. History always is in the present moment. Nothing new is ever born. It’s always recycled, always already and currently happening.”
“Sort of like a ghost,” I said, and swore that Julie whispered it as well.
The lecture was over–the time on the wall declared it so, along with the ending of the PowerPoint presentation–yet no one left the room. They lingered at the front, wanting to ask Julie a dozen more questions, or they lingered in the back, discussing the topics amongst themselves. Every single student and straggler alike had been whipped into a frenzy.
I waited. By the time everyone had gone, it was nearly ten at night. I was starving, yet I felt no need for food. I could only see the images of the pigs tearing apart bodies for blood and puss, and then collapsing afterwards on the medieval streets. Or of teeth being removed one by one, in order to extract some sort of truth about the person’s perceived relationship to God, the Devil, or something in between.
“Hi,” Julie said, her smile worn down from hours of talking. “Can I help you?”
“Yes. Sort of. I hope. I’m teaching a class for Dr. Anderson as well.”
“Oh.” Her face went pale, and then she laughed easily. “I suppose that makes sense. He was given a full course load. There are probably many of us out there, teaching his words, reading through the old notes.”
“So you’ve seen it too, right? You’ve heard it too?”
“The ghosts?” she asked.
“The pigs?” I echoed. “The Night Pigs?”
“Poltergeist,” she whispered vaguely, this time in her own voice. “German for noisy ghost. History’s poltergeist has many forms, I guess.”
“It’s pigs for me. Is it teeth for you? The crunch of torture racks?”
“Yes. No. I have to go.”
She gathered all of her items–the laptop, the notes for the PowerPoint, the pens and papers and her cell phone–in a hurried gesture. She apologized meekly, not meeting my eyes as she explained she didn’t want to be too late for a bus. I stood at the front of the lecture hall, everything now empty and hollow. I cursed, heard the echo, and then the same distortion from the last recorded words. An echo, a crunch of bone, a snorting of pigs.
This was the place. The last place Dr. Anderson taught.
I was about to leave when I noticed a Post-It Note under the front desk. I picked it up, knowing that it could have come from anywhere or anyone, but also understanding that it was for me. From this professor to Julie Norton, then to Diego Ruiz, to Andy Watkins, and to Cecilia Jiang, to all the other contract workers who were teaching Dr. Anderson’s work. I would find each one of them in the coming days and nights, sit in on their lectures, and hear them speak in his voice as if possessed. As if history’s ghost could only handle so much; it needed to be spread out to bear the weight.
None of those other contract workers wanted to speak with me after their class, either. Each one, when they realized I knew what they knew, had seen what they’d seen, grew pale. Gathered their items. And then ran away, saying they were going to be late, too late, and left me alone in a lecture room with the echoes of madness and references in my ear.
The Post-It note listed an address around the corner from the official archives of the city. After turning up so many dead ends, it was the only place I had left to go.
*
The building was a three story brick structure, possibly from the late 1970s era of architecture that emphasized sharp lines and a brutalist exterior. Nothing fancy or ornate about it. Sandwiched between a Laundromat and a check cashing place, it looked like the type of cheap rental apartment building that catered to the student crowd of the city. Stairs led up to the front door, and once inside, brass animals flanked a front desk. I thought they were pigs, but when I looked again, I only saw lions. They were the only ornate feature so far that I’d seen, and so my attention was immediately directed to their flowing manes and muted roars.
“Can I help you?” A woman popped her head around from the front desk. She seemed small, almost elfin. She had a large book in front of her and tapped it. “You’ll need to sign in before going much further.”
“Of course.” I walked to the desk and grasped a pen in my hand that was on a chain, like at the old banks in my neighborhood. The woman watched me as I signed my name, said hello after reading my name upside down, and then beamed when I seemed impressed.
“I do it a lot,” she said. “Read upside down. Everyone else is so secretive, I have to find my ways of getting entertainment sitting up here all day. You have a nice name. It means dove. Did you know that?”
“Oh, no, I didn’t. Neat.” When I closed the book, I caught glimpses of names I was now familiar with–Andy, Diego, Cecilia, and of course, Julie. “What is this place?”
“A storage area. Nothing more, nothing less. Don’t expect a tour or anything.” She laughed and tucked her body back underneath the large desk and the closed ledger. “I’m just the brass at the front. Everything else here is self-directed.”
“I can go wherever I want, then?”
She laughed lightly. “No! But I take it you’re here for Dr. Anderson’s effects? He’s been a popular guy the last little while.”
“Has he?” I asked, and relished the present-tense of his name. “He’s been here, too?”
“Always here, in a way. This is where we store his research.”
“Oh.” My heart sunk. “Isn’t there some sort of privacy consideration? Can I go and look?”
“No privacy, not anymore. He’s signed over his material to us. You know, sort of like storage wars, but we didn’t need to win an auction. It’s just… ours now. You’re welcome to look through his items. Here.” She wrote down the number and floor I had to go to in order to access his materials. The Post-It note was exactly the one that had fallen on the floor in the lecture hall. Not that these weren’t ubiquitous in academia, or in business, but I was sure it was from the same pad. The same lot. The same everything.
I thanked her again and made my way to the elevators at the back of the building. I still had no idea what I was doing, only that I needed to do this. I still had a class to teach in three hours–not Dr. Anderson’s, but my own–and that knowledge pressed against me like a burden, like a dentist appointment I didn’t want to go to, rather than my passion. What had my dissertation even been about? I wondered. All I could think about now was medieval England, the plague, and the life and now the definite end of Dr. Anderson.
I stepped out of the elevator on the third floor. A narrow hallway was flanked on either side by large, orange roll up doors which led into storage lockers. I soon located Dr. Anderson’s in the middle, but when I went to open it up, I realized I didn’t have the locker code.
“Shoot.” I was about to go downstairs again to talk to the front desk lady, when I impulsively put in the year 1346, the first year of the Black Death. It clicked open. “The worst year to be alive,” I said in Dr. Anderson’s voice, now so much like my own in my ear, as I opened the locker. “The worst year of the worst century. To be remembered forever and ever and ever as a noisy ghost.”
There was nothing inside the locker.
Not a damn thing.
I blinked several times, not believing what I was seeing. I walked inside, right towards the back of the five foot by five foot cell-like space, and scoured the corners, the walls, for something, anything–but there was not even a trace of something left behind, not even another Post-It note with cryptic writing.
Had one of the other profs beaten me here? Had they gathered all his items and taken them back to their apartments, where they could tear through the pages of his old dissertation, of his finalized notes, of his course evaluations? I suddenly had the image of my fellow colleagues as night pigs, digging deep in a pit of research, and pulling out rejected paper after rejected paper, eating the second reviewer’s shitty comments, and then keeling over, dying, because everything was infected. I envisioned them tearing apart the papers as bodies torn apart on torture wracks. Extracting harsh reviews like rotten teeth, and then rewriting those papers to include the commenter’s reviews, like a false confession.
I let out a low breath. It came back to me as a chill. This room was empty, this room was hollow and contained nothing other than my own paranoid fear, yet I was so determined to find something more. I went to a corner and I felt the soft concrete around it. I wanted to dig. I wanted to burrow into other areas, into other lockers, steal someone else’s shit and call it my treasure for the day.
Instead, the door to the storage locker came down with a thwap. I bolted to my feet. I went back to the door, grabbed the handle, and tried to jerk it up.
Nothing.
Only orange stared at me, blinding orange against so many muted concrete tones. I banged on the door.
“Hello? Hello? Hey!” I called out. “I’m trapped. Help!”
Nothing. Only more echoes.
I sunk down on the floor, crossing my legs, and heaving another sigh. When I looked up, I saw a microphone hanging from the ceiling. A microphone and a recorder, the kind my mother had used in my youth and her night school days, the kind that Dr. Anderson had also used. There was nothing else around, nothing else there. Just a recorder, a microphone.
“This was where you recorded.”
I stood and reached up. I only dragged the bottom of the mic. I got on my tippy-toes. I cursed being so short; Dr. Anderson must have been at least six feet to get this high. I struggled, I jumped, and eventually, the whole thing crashed to the floor of the storage locker.
I grasped it in my hands, wincing at the possible damage, but nothing was broken. I checked the tape–rewound, ready to go–and then I hit record.
“Hello,” I said. “I’d like to finish up my lecture series before all of this comes to an end, before it’s too late.”
I didn’t need my notes anymore, not even for my other classes that I’d been neglecting. It was easy to speak, easy to remember. Almost as if it was all happening again before my eyes.
As I spoke, as I told story after bloody story of history and its aftermath, I heard the echoes all around me. Other people, other contract professors and grad students in other storage rooms with different microphones, recording their lessons. Putting down their voices into the machine of the system, so much like a ghost, yet utterly true, utterly living and breathing for the time being. I recorded. They recorded. The school would come and take the tapes when we were done, put them in another version, put them online, and then hand them off to someone else to teach while we continued to speak and speak and speak history’s story, history’s noisy past.
Then another group of students, curious and devoted and passionate, would find their way here.
It was easy enough to do. You simply followed what made you happy, followed what made you whole.
When I reached the end of my lesson, I stopped the recording. It was dark outside, though there was no light or window to verify what I knew to be true. My phone was dead, not that I could have gotten a signal through the thick walls. I heard nothing around me, not even the echoes of other professors.
I waited.
And when the pigs came, snorting and pounding their hooves against the concrete floors, I was ready for them. Not to fight, but to be devoured as part of history, so others would learn, and not repeat the same mistakes I’d made.
No News Is Good News went through so many iterations before I finally felt like it was “right.”
And even now, I still feel like I could try again and come away with something different.
Part crime story, part meditation on violence, and only a smidge of psychological horror–I wasn’t even sure if I could or should count this for the 31 for 31 challenge. But since it’s my list, I figured why not?
This piece was published in TOUGH, a crime and noir magazine. Someone saw something in it, even if it was only a passing $10 in the ever-present pulp market.
The dead body looked like a mannequin.
Marsha knew it was a silly thing to say. She’d watched a dozen true crime shows on Netflix and every single person who found a body always said that. They thought it was a mannequin in the river, or in the dump, or on the street. Never mind how horrifically out of context a mannequin in those places was, or the fact that mannequins were not proportioned like most people were; they insisted the sallow skin of a corpse was a mannequin before they made the grisly discovery. It always made Marsha think of her aunt’s old consignment shop and how she’d spent her Saturdays as a teenager sorting through donation bins. Mannequins had been everywhere. She’d never mistaken any of those dead-eyed vacant stares for something human. No way.
But here she was, spouting the same cliché to the police officer as he interviewed her on her discovery.
“Are you okay, ma’am?” the officer asked. She noticed a twitch in his expression and a shift in his gait, as if he wanted to wrap his arms around her in a hug, but professional instinct told him not to. “Can I get you a glass of water?”
Marsha shook her head. She ran her long red nails through her black hair and tried to recreate the scene for him. Her clichés weren’t going to cut it. So she started again from the beginning, from when she stepped out of the train station and turned the corner to the ravine by her bus stop. The officer, God, what was his name?–didn’t bother to rewrite any of those details down. The bus stop was easy. So was crossing the street and noticing a red van pull away. She even remembered half the letters of the license plate: BRA. It was funny to her at the time and she had given those details to him quite easily.
But the body. It hung in her vision like a magic eye painting she could not bring into focus. “She was… un. I saw the red. Dress. And blood. And she looked so unreal.”
“We know. That’s a common response. We can interview about the rest later.”
“No, no. I want to get this right.” Marsha closed her eyes. There were no shoes on the body. That caught her attention first, because the toes seemed like they would be really cold. So I hadn’t thought of her as a mannequin first, Marsha noted. It somehow made her feel better. She was aware of the humanity of the corpse; she wasn’t an unfeeling monster.
She was able to get out her full description after that. The body had no shoes. The hair was blonde and matted, tangled into the bushes of the ravine. The woman’s dress was open, displaying a chest that seemed to have no nipples. She didn’t add that part to the description, though. She wanted to give the woman some dignity.
“You did really well. The license plate letters are going to help for sure,” the officer said. He and Marsha both looked behind him as the body was lifted out of the ravine. Several workers became tangled in the bushes, struggling with the body. The dress ripped even more. From between her legs, Marsha noticed the penis. She thought it was another trick of the light at first, another way in which her vision had betrayed her and turned a human being into a mannequin.
But no, there was a penis. The woman was a trans woman.
The officer groaned, as if to echo her realization. “Another one?”
The other officers nodded their disdain. Marsha realized the way they handled the body now differed. They were careless, they were rough. The last strip of dignity was pulled back from the corpse. Marsha’s eyes saw red.
“Another one?” she asked. “You have a serial killer?”
“No, ma’am. Nothing is wrong. Just a certain lifestyle leads to certain ends.”
Marsha thought of the stab wound against the neck. Red like the woman’s dress, artificial like her cause of death. Not a natural part of the lifestyle in the least. Though the officers had now covered up the corpse, the vision remained pressed to Marsha’s third eye. She remembered the posters around the community centre from earlier in the week. The amount of women who seemed to go missing, and the women with stronger jawlines and names that didn’t seem to match. Hazel. Andrea. And Violet.
A lifestyle injury. It seemed like a sick, cruel joke. As they loaded the body into the coroner van, a sickening sense of dread rolled through Marsha. “What do I do now?”
“Hmm?”
“What do you need me to do now? Will I be at a trial?”
The officer let out a low laugh that he quickly cut off as he realized the horror on Marsha’s face. He put his notebook away in his back pocket. “Don’t get ahead of the game. We still need to sort out what’s gone on here. Find next of kin.”
“And if you can’t?”
“That’s not your concern.”
Marsha wanted to explain so much to him in that moment. But the sun was setting, it was getting dark, and her brother–her brother who used to be her sister, giving her access to understanding she never thought possible–was waiting for her to come home. “And after that?” Marsha pressed. “What is my concern?”
“Look,” he said, his voice thin. “We will call if we need you. If you don’t hear from us, consider it a good sign. You know the old saying? No news is good news. It applies here, too. You don’t have to worry about this anymore.”
The officer got into his car and slammed the door. Marsha tried to walk down the street, toward home, but glanced over her shoulder. The empty ravine haunted her.
Three days later, still without a phone call from the police to follow up, the ravine had grown over with a thin layer of snow. The white would cover everything. The silence would continue. Three more days passed with nothing. A week.
Marsha forgot about the mannequin woman until the next victim was found a month later. She was a nameless victim tossed inside an alleyway, only wearing a mini-skirt with a pink top. Tattoo of a dove on the left shoulder blade. The newspaper article laid out every last detail without actually saying anything at all. No transgender status was mentioned, but Marsha knew. Deep down, there could be no other way. She called the police station and found the officer who took her statement.
“I told you,” he said, “we would call.”
“I think you have a serial killer,” she said. “There’s another victim. She also doesn’t have a name. But I think if you go through the missing people reports filed in the last little while, you’ll find her. A lot of people from the Village have been going missing.”
The officer didn’t say anything. But she heard him breathing like a shadow behind her.
“You have to do something,” she pressed. She’s not the first and she won’t be the last.
“We are doing all we can.”
“That’s…” Marsha closed her eyes. That was precisely what she was afraid of. The police were doing all they could, and it still amounted to nothing. She saw the woman–the mannequin–again. Her eyelids. “What was her name?”
“Hmm?”
“The woman I found. What was her name? Did anyone bury her? I want to see.”
“Ronald Black,” he said after a while.
“That’s not her name.”
“We don’t have any other information at this time.”
“But what was her name?”
When the officer only gave her silence, Marsha eventually hung up.
***
“Jessica?”
“Look again, sir,” Jesse said. He splayed his legs to make his hips seem less wide, and his shoulder more broad. He cursed himself for shaving. The dusting of hair on his upper lip was never that much, but it at least signalled more than his still-out-of-date licence ever could. “It’s not Jessica.”
The convenience store owner glanced down again. He shrugged. “Jesse. Sure. What year were you born?”
“1988.” Jesse beamed. “I’m twenty-nine.”
“You look barely nineteen.”
“But I’m twenty-nine. Born July 7th 1988. I can give you my mother’s date of birth too. Maybe her maiden name and the street I grew up on as a child. Will that convince you it’s not a fake ID?”
The store owner’s stare turned from hardened to defeated. He tossed the ID back on the counter and turned to open a case where the cigarettes were kept. If not for the shaking hands Jesse got right before therapy, he would have avoided this place. He never passed in these kinds of stores. He was convinced it was the fluorescent lights, the cameras and mirrors around every corner. People were so prone to see theft in stores like this, or conning through fake IDs, that each and every last feminine mannerism still not yet worked out of him was highlighted and suspect.
But he knew it was really his ID. He glanced at the photo of himself two years ago, barely on testosterone, and the F marker where sex was listed. What on earth was the point of changing his damn name if people still saw a girl’s one instead? What was the point of having any official ID with a brand new name if there still was a giant F in the centre of the thing? It was always the F that made people’s sanity fall away. Always the damn F. Apple cheeks and small hands could be reasoned away by shitty genetics. But an F left no room to doubt his origins. Jesse Martinez was trans.
Jesse lit up his cigarette outside of the store. He should have been smoking at least nine metres away, but he wanted to show some disrespect back for what he’d just received. When Talia, a tall trans woman with a mini-skirt on walked by him, she splayed her hand in a wave.
“You comin’ tonight, hon?”
“You know it. Not exactly like we have a choice.”
“We always have a choice. It’s just not the easy one, you dig?” When he said nothing in response, she gestured to his cigarette. “You mind tossing me one, honey?”
“As long as you stop calling me honey, then we have a deal.”
“Pfft.” She waved her hand away like it was nothing. Her dismissal grated on his nerves, but he figured he could spare a cigarette. She was one of the most talkative in group; he knew all her secrets if he really wanted to harm her. Talk a bit more about her grandmother whose name she wanted to honour, but who had spit in her face when she came out as trans.. Talia was also one of the favourites of Genie, the therapist who would eventually sign thee letters approving their surgery. Jesse figured he would get brownie points just from being nice to her;:gatekeeper acceptance via osmosis.
“So how are you and your boy?” Talia asked, trying to make small talk. “I hear he dropped out.”
“He did. Yes.” Jesse didn’t want to talk about Anthony’s betrayal, as he thought of it. He knew it wasn’t a reflection of him or their relationship, but it was hard to accept no longer seeing Anthony in therapy. Anthony now had family money that would allow him to obtain surgery privately. A sister who would help him out when it came time to heal and help him out again if he ever lost his job because of his trans status. He had no use for the therapy sessions that mostly turned into a despair circle jerk. Jesse and Anthony had met bonding over their hatred of events like this, while also lamenting the therapist’s necessary role in their lives if they wanted to live their lives as they wished as men. Jesse thought they’d shared a fantasy together about a world that would bend to their whim as soon as they got surgery; the city would be theirs, and they could take it over from all the cissies who had made them feel like shit.
Instead, Anthony was about to join the rank of the cissies. And Jesse, like always, was left to nurse his fantasies alone.
He took a long drag on the cigarette. Talia was reminiscing about group therapy as if it was fucking summer camp, talking about how much she loved Anthony’s jokes and dry humour. She didn’t seem to think it a hardship that he wasn’t there anymore, or that therapy itself wasn’t the most invasive and cloying experiences.
“You don’t find it strange?” Jesse asked after a moment. “Spilling all our secrets to this place?”
“Nah. Just tell them what they want to hear and you get what you want.”
“But it’s not that simple.”
“It can be if you let it. Remember Genie’s advice from the first day? No news is good news. We should strive to be boring. We should strive for normal.” Talia laughed while Jesse huffed. “It may be antiquated nonsense, but it’s also kind of true. We need to just get our letters and move on. We don’t need to make headlines, you know? Life doesn’t have to be as hard as you make it out to be.
Jesse stared at the dirt in front of them, his mind reeling. How could any of this be easy? He’d just been called Jessica. He’d always be called Jessica because it looked just close enough to Jesse. He could change his name and start all over again, but even the most masculine name didn’t matter if his body was found. They’d peel back the clothing and find a vagina. They’d examine the bones and see child-bearing hips. He was fucked in this life and fucked because there was nothing beyond this one. He would always make the headlines, but it would never be in the gender he wanted.
“You’re always pouting,” Talia complained. She stamped out her cigarette and gestured for them to walk. “I mean, you don’t even have it that bad.”
“I don’t?”
“Yeah,” Talia said, cutting him off before he could rant. “Have you even noticed just how many trans women go missing? We’re being pegged off, one by one, because we’re the gender fodder. The gender monsters. So people kill us. Trans men don’t get that.”
“Brandon–“
“Don’t even say Brandon Teena because that was a lesbian story. He wasn’t killed for being a man but fucking someone’s woman. That’s it.”
Jesse wanted to scream. White-hot rage built inside of him and only cooled as he light another cigarette. Talia kept citing sources about trans women as monstrous, quoting the never-wrong Susan Stryker and Julia Serano. All names he knew. All theories he was familiar with. And really, all points that were valid. Trans women did disappear.
But so did trans men. They just disappeared in different ways than trans women, and no one fucking bothered to see it. Either they disappeared into their former feminine identities through lack of institutional recognition or they passed well enough to disappear into masculinity. Until their pants came off, of course. Jesse thought of all the ways in which he’d studied cis men in high school from afar, attempting to affect masculinity like a role he could slip into. The silent head nods, the flexing in mirrors, the quiet complacency. Trans men disappeared into hormones, into the rage that came more easily and the muscles that clenched underneath skin, but it all fell apart once pants were removed and once that skin was peeled back.
Trans women were murdered, sure, he could accept that. But trans men became silent monsters.
Jesse stamped out the last bit of his cigarette before he entered the building. In the basement of a community centre, a group of sixteen trans people in the midst of their transitions all faced one another in a circle. They gave their names and preferred pronouns before the leader in the centre–always cis, always a medical professional–directed them. They were all pawns in a game. All playing a role.
When Genie called on Talia, she stood up and spoke eloquently. She smiled. She gestured. She was successful in the role and she knew it. It would take another couple weeks, but Jesse knew Talia would get approved for surgery. She would live the rest of her life as a woman. No one would disagree. She would make no headlines. No news would be good news, like Genie always said. Strive for boring. Strive for normal.
When it was his turn, he mumbled. He grunted. He did not emote enough. He failed Genie’s test of confessional therapy, but he knew he passed his own. His masculinity covered him like another skin, like a mask that hid his fantasies.
“Well, that was fun,” Talia said once the meeting was over. “I suppose I’ll see you next week.”
“Yeah, something like that.”
Jesse smoked as he watched Talia wander down the street. He fingered the knife in his pocket he always carried for self-defense. After he put out his cigarette, he followed behind Talia silently.
***
“I think something’s wrong,” Anthony said. He stared into the mug of coffee in front of him. The whipped cream topping had seemed too girly when he ordered it, something that Jesse would have lectured him about if he had been here. He should have been here, but he cancelled at the last minute in a sparse text. Anthony never thought he’d miss the gender-passing nitpicking so much.
Marsha leaned forward on her chair. She extended her hand to Anthony, squeezing him gently. “Want to talk about it?”
“Well, yeah. It’s just hard. I know you don’t believe me when I say that testosterone has wiped my memory of feeling words, but it’s kind of true.”
Marsha chuckled lightly. “Oh, I believe it. I just don’t think it’s purely chemical. It’s cultural.”
“Sure. Maybe it’s both. The truth is often in the middle.”
“So what’s the middle of what you’re worried about? Chances are, it’s not benign, but it’s probably not as big of a thing as you’re making it out to be.”
Anthony bit his lip. “I think he’s cheating.”
“Oh, no sweetie. No.” Marsha’s face softened. She squeezed his hand again as he went through all the evidence he’d accumulated. Jesse was moodier now than ever before. Already cranky to begin with, it was as if he was riding a wave of ups and downs that would not relent. He’d be sullen and not speak or leave his room for days. Then he’d disappear and come back with manic energy. He wasn’t kissing Anthony nearly as much anymore, either. When he did, it was much rougher, and often coupled with his manic periods.
“And he’s been going out for longer and longer, sometimes without calling or warning, Anthony said. “He’s missing dates like this, too.
“And you’re sure it can’t be anything else? Maybe he’s got a new job or a side gig to help pay for things? I know his parents haven’t been great. Maybe he’s trying to reconcile with them?”
“Not a chance,” Anthony said, laughing a little. “”I think he’d kill his parents if he knew he could get way with it.”
Marsha blinked. Anthony instantly regretted the words. “Sorry. Not to be so grim. It’s just–“
“No, it’s fine. I need to strengthen my stomach anyway.” Marsha took a shaky drink from her coffee cup. Silence enveloped them. It felt like a wound.
Anthony had heard about the woman in the ditch on the night it happened. He’d dreamed about a graveyard full of mannequin arms between tombstones. When the next woman was found, he’d had the dream again. At first he didn’t want to mention the next missing woman poster he’d seen around the city, thinking it would trigger Marsha, but she called him and told him about it. She’d found several more cases too, all trans women, all of whom had gone missing without a trace or been found without being ID’d.
“Any more news?” Anthony asked tentatively.
“Some, yeah. I mean the police aren’t helping but I think that the numbers are not as big as I once thought.”
“Oh?”
“No. Because the police work with legal names or don’t find the names to begin with, it’s been hard to match up the victims with the missing. But there is overlap and I’m convinced I’m finding it. The numbers are going down. Not much, but some.
“That’s… good.” Anthony tried to drink his coffee. The words he wanted to say hung between them like a secret dream language that they’d once shared as sisters but had spread out and dispersed since his transition. She was always going to be there for him, but she was always going to be haunted by the negatives of this life. The murder and violence. Jesse’s parents abandoning him and the doctors mistreating him. As much as he wanted her to see the better parts of this community, he was coming up on blanks.
“I still haven’t found her name, though,” Marsha added. “Which still makes me sad.”
“I know. I’m sorry. You’ve done far more than anyone could have.”
“But that’s the thing. It shouldn’t be me but the cops.” She sighed and ran her hands through her dark hair. Her nail polish was chipped, the nailbed itself marked with flaked dry skin and red scabs from picking too much. Marsha forced a smile. “So let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about your issue. Have you tried talking to Jesse?”
Anthony shook his head. “I could. I mean… Nothing is stopping me.”
“But?”
“But I think right now I’m becoming that cop that told you no news was good news. You know a therapist once said it to us, too?”
“Oh, really? That’s…”
“Gross, I know. But it also makes a strange type of sense. No news is good news. Don’t rock the boat. Strive for boring, strive for normal.” Anthony sighed. He glanced down at his chest, still inside a compression binder, and wondered what it would feel like flat. His surgery appointment was in six weeks. Would Jesse still want to fuck him then? Or would his jealousy take over?
Suddenly, the fog lifted from his vision. Marsha noted and raised her eyebrows in suggestion. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I think I figured it out, though. All of this started to happen when Jesse heard about the surgery money I had. When I dropped out of therapy. He’s…jealous. He wants what I have so much more, but doesn’t have a family who will help.”
“He has you, though. He should be happy about that.”
“He does, but I need to show him. More than before. Oh.” Anthony sighed, feeling relief wash over him. “This is perfect. Thank you so much for talking, Marsh.”
“I didn’t do much.” She shrugged and then held her arms out for a hug. Anthony embraced her easily and squeezed her tight. Under her large winter sweater, he could feel that she was all sharp angles and bones. She was losing weight. But he said nothing about it.
“Call me tonight?” she asked. “Let me know you’re okay?”
“How about I call you if something goes wrong?” he suggested, then winked.”You know, no news is good news.”
Though Marsha rolled her eyes, she also let him go with another squeeze.
Though a part of him wanted to tell her to eat something more than coffee, he wouldn’t. She was his older sister. She knew what she was doing.
When Anthony came into the apartment that he shared with Jesse, he found him already there. Jesse stood at the sink, his back stiff. He wore the same pair of jeans as earlier in the day, but he had on no shoes or socks. Dirt was caked onto the front hall mat. Anthony suppressed what he was going to say in greeting when he noticed pats of blood mixed in with the dirt. He moved into the kitchen and noticed blood marking the back of Jesse’s shirt.
“Oh my God. Are you okay?”
A dozen scenarios repeated in his mind. Hilary Swank from Boys Don’t Cry,
Drew Barrymore from the opening sequence of Scream. When he examined Jesse’s face under the low kitchen light, he saw no injuries. Jesse’s eyes seemed vacant, his expression immovable.
“You’re home early.”
“I am,””Anthony said. “But I thought you wouldn’t be home at all.”
“Well, I am.”
Jesse’s voice was like ice. It made the hair at the back of Anthony’s neck stand up. When he looked at Jesse’s hands, he saw blood mixed with soap, runny with water. A knife lined the kitchen sink. The blood on his shirt had no origin, no trace of a wound.
Still, Anthony asked if he was okay again.
“I’m fine. Just a little scratch. Nothing to worry about.”
“Okay.” Anthony didn’t remove his eyes from the bloodstain. “Are you sure? If something happened, you know you can tell me, right?”
“I know. I would.”
“Good.”
Silence stretched between them. The din of the running water hitting the metal basin became too much. When Jesse turned it off, all the blood from the knife was gone. So was the soap and pink suds on his hands. The only speck of gore that remained was the blood-stained shirt. Jesse seemed like he wanted to remove it, but couldn’t.
Because he doesn’t have a binder on, Anthony realized. His breasts were visible. Tightly bound with a sports bra instead of a compression tank, but still visible. And he is ashamed.
“I need some privacy,” Jesse said.
“Right. Of course.”
Jesse nodded. He left the kitchen for their shared bedroom around the corner. Anthony stood in the kitchen. He put his hands on the sink and looked at the knife. It was not a kitchen knife, like he once thought, but one that he’d seen in Jesse’s bag in the past. The one for self -defense. He repeated Jesse’s claims of self-defense over and over. Anthony suppressed all other dawning thoughts. He heard Jesse shift and change in the other room.
“I have something I want to tell you,” Anthony said.
Jesse didn’t say anything.
Anthony went on. “I was talking to Marsha and I realized that I was being unfair. I should have shared my surgery money with you.”
The shifting stopped. Jesse’s breath was heavy. “What do you mean?”
“I should have split it with you. That way we both work together to get what we need.”
Jesse appeared in the doorway. The blood was no longer visible. Every trace of what Anthony had just witnessed was now gone, and because it was easier, he let it disappear. In between the two extremes, the answer was somewhere in the middle. Jesse was moody because he missed out on surgery. That was that. Everything else wasn’t important.
“Are you serious?” Jesse asked.
“Yes. We’re in this together, okay?”
Jesse wrapped him in a hug. It was rough, like usual, but there was tenderness inside it as well. Anthony was sure.. The two of them were happy. Their lives were taking shape together; he should have been focused on them as a unit, on their shared fantasy, rather than anything else.
“Are you going to be okay?” Anthony asked, after the hug was over.
Jesse didn’t answer; he merely put the knife that had once been in the sink back into his pocket, and then took Anthony to the couch.
The Ghost Who Loved Cherry Cake is a simple ghost story with a neat twist involving snacks. Why does this particular ghost like cherry cake? You’ll have to read the story to find out, but I can tell you that this idea came from being postpartum and having my sense of smell still completely out-of-whack. At the time, I was also reading about how hauntings and especially alien abduction stories can involve distorted smells (often amonia and cinnamon). That sounded so gross, but one smell that sounded ideal to me during that time period was cherry.
And cake.
And especially cherry cake.
So this particular ghost was born.
I also wrote this as a children’s story. The main character is younger and the issues she’s tackling in the story are very kid-centric ideas. Her parents are getting a divorce; they’re having a last vacation as a nuclear family unit; and it’s fun and exciting, yet, of course, things are still weird. The adult world is hidden from her, and so, she seeks solace in the kid-world and supernatural elements of this location. The ghost of this vacation house, and the ever-present cake, is what gets her through this eerie time period.
The ghost is a good ghost–and so, this story ended up being utterly perfect for Crow Toes Quarterly, a literary magazine of the gothic for kids. I’m so sad this publication doesn’t exist anymore. When I got my contributor copy, I poured over it for hours. There were zany poems, monstrous and yet cute creatures, and even more photos and drawings that gave the magazine an element of an enchanted curio cabinet. The stories were quirky and weird and delightfully spooky, but not scary-scary. Perfect for the budding goth kid in us all.
Enjoy!
The Ghost Who Loved Cherry Cake
By Eve Morton
It took me about two weeks staying at the summer home my parents’ rented in the Outer Banks to understand that we didn’t have a housekeeper. Rather, Abigail Swanson, with her blue dress and brown eyes that sometimes turned golden in the afternoon light, was a ghost. And she absolutely loved cherry cake.
Our first day arriving, we had been late. It was a time before GPS, a time when a mother’s role in long car trips was to hold the book of maps as if she was a witch with a grimoire and to cast the right lot for the road they were to take. Needless to say, my mother was not one for the occult, let alone for reading maps. My father was better at it, and so he’d tried to memorize the remaining route through the surface streets and small towns leading up to the coastline when we’d stopped for lunch at a rest stop. His speculations on the fastest and shortest area, however, only led us to go around in circles in a place called Duck before we finally pulled into the right stretch of highway dotted with candy-colored houses in which we were to stay for the month of July. I had already fallen asleep by then, somewhere around thinking that the third or fourth time we passed through Duck it would change to Goose, and we’d play a game.
“Come now,” my father said, scooping me out of the backseat of the car. “We’re here.”
He carried me under the house, not through it, towards the roaring sound of the ocean. The night was so black, the sand so lumpy under my father’s feet, that it felt as if I was still dreaming. When I saw Abigail, though I didn’t know her name then, she was only a pair of eyes in that darkness. Golden and half-hidden under the stilts that kept the house above ground. I didn’t know it then, either, but those skittles were there to keep the house from flooding, to make sure a storm did not drag out bodies of small children towards the ocean.
My father set me down as we reached wooden stairs built into a hillside. He held my hand and told me we had to see the ocean before bed.
“What’s that?” I gasped, seeing part of the sand move.
“Ghost crabs.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t worry,” he added. “There’s nothing to be afraid of here.”
“Even ghosts?”
“Even ghosts,” he confirmed.
“Not all ghosts are bad, anyway. Some just want to help.” A woman added that answer, the same woman belonging to those eyes I’d spotted before. She came out of the darkness, right beside me, and held my other hand as we walked towards the shoreline. She said nothing else, but her fingers’ firm grasp on me was a reassurance after being lost for so long and scared by the natural life by the shoreline. My mother was nowhere to be seen, and my father seemed to sense that I was looking for her.
“Your mom is tired. It was a long drive.”
His words were short and curt, but like everything with my father, they seemed to hint at so much more. I took his explanation–mom is tired–as the reason this other person was here with us, a person who tucked me into bed after my father had left the room, and told me her name was Abigail.
“You can call me Abby. I used to live here. Now I just make sure it’s nice for everyone. What do you want for breakfast in the morning?”
“Cake,” I said. It was my birthday the next day. All I could think about was cake.
“Silly goose,” she said. “That is not a breakfast food.”
I was so tired, the trip weighing on my eight-almost-nine-year-old body, that I didn’t bother to tell her my birthday was tomorrow. I only laughed at the goose remark; after so many ducks, finally a goose! Then I went to sleep.
In the morning, there was a cake on the counter. It was white frosted with red dots all around it. My mother sipped coffee from a cracked mug at the counter, and shook her head towards my father. He was hiding behind a newspaper, another chipped coffee mug in front of him.
“I saw another roach,” my mother said. “This place is filthy.”
“It’s the south,” he said. “It’s warm and so there are roaches. They’re just like spiders elsewhere. Normal. Don’t worry about it.”
Their conversation about bugs and cleanliness went on. I ignored it, but in the back of my mind, I’d log it away as yet another reason why Abigail was with us that month in the Outer Banks. My mother needed help with the cleaning, and my father wanted someone else to look after me. I always felt Abigail’s presence before she ever materialized, and so, I never truly saw my parents interact with her. It didn’t matter.
She appeared behind me that morning, wearing a blue dress and with a white apron over it. “It’s my birthday,” I told her.
“Well, happy birthday. I should have made a cake I knew you’d like, then!”
“What kind is this?” I pointed to the frosting that seemed impossibly thick. Even though it was only the morning, when the air was always cooler back home, it was still humid like the afternoon here. It would only get hotter and thicker as the weeks wore on. The frosting would not last long in this climate, and Abigail sensed this and pushed the cake towards me.
“What do you think? You can have a little bit now.”
I dragged my finger through the cake, the frosting stacking up against the pad of my finger like snow. Sweetness burst on my tongue when I held it to my mouth. “It’s like a sundae,” I said.
“It’s cherry. My favorite cake.” Her brown eyes became golden again. “What’s your favorite?”
It used to be chocolate. But all I could think at that moment was cherry, cherry, cherry. I reached for another dab of frosting when my mother cried out.
“Hey! Breakfast first,” she said.
“But Abigail–” I turned back to see that she was now gone. Probably cleaning, making my bed or doing laundry, or something else that my mother’s frequent headaches prevented her from doing.
My mother said nothing about Abigail. Only insisted that I eat some oatmeal before we went to the ocean that day. “And then, when you come back,” she said, smiling though it seemed to tire her, “you can have a birthday wish on your cake.”
I did as my mother asked. My father and I went to the ocean, which was much prettier now that it was daylight, and I walked with his hand in mine as I collected shells. Big ones, small ones, broken shards that sparkled in the light. “I want to make a necklace with these,” I told him. “Maybe Abigail will help.”
“Maybe,” he said. He, too, asked nothing further about Abigail. He looked off into the distance, glanced at his watch, and told me we were almost out of time. “We should head back to your cake.”
We did. Abigail waited behind the cake, the candles spelling out ten years–one bonus for good luck–on top of it. The frosting had been fixed. Since no one else mentioned her, I took Abigail’s presence to be obvious. As natural as the stilts that kept the house up from the floods and hurricane waters that sometimes cascaded up from the sand dunes. She remained in place as I blew out the candles, but it was only her smile that seemed genuine. My father’s was distracted and my mother was, as always, tired.
“What did you wish for?” my mother asked.
“You can’t tell,” Abigail said. “Or it won’t come true.”
I had wished for more and more time with her, an entire vacation with Abigail and I exploring the Outer Banks with one another. But I remained quiet, shaking my head to my mother. When my mother sliced open the cake, and it was red inside, she let out a gasp. “Oh. They messed up the order. It should have been chocolate. It should have been–“
“I love it,” I said. “It’s cherry.”
“It is. You sure?”
I nodded. My mother’s skeptical glance didn’t fade until I put a large hunk of the cake in my mouth. Sweetness burned against my tongue. Cherry. Something I’d never had before, something that I didn’t know existed until that trip. It was stunning, wonderful, a perfect birthday gift.
“Well, okay then. I guess you’ll get your wish.” My mother shrugged. She took a piece along with my father, but they didn’t finish theirs.
“Too sweet,” they later said. “You enjoy it. All for you.”
Abigail took their pieces into the kitchen, cleaned up the dishes, and then ate a big slice herself. I sat with her at the kitchen table, drawing on a piece of paper. “I hope you don’t mind sharing,” she said. “Cherry is my favorite.”
“Is it?”
She nodded, her dark eyes golden bright again. “The last time I was at this house, I had my little girl with me. Her name was Cherry. She sort of looked like you, except a little taller and with more freckles against her nose.” She touched my nose and I felt, for the first time ever since arriving in this hotter climate, a chill move through me. “She was a very pretty Cherry. My darling delight.”
“Where is she now?”
Abigail grew sad. She ran her finger along the frosting of the cake, though it was under a cover, and brought it to her lips. I didn’t question that she’d moved through plastic then; I only giggled at the deviousness of an adult flouting the rules.
“There was a hurricane here,” she said a moment later, all lightness of the moment gone. “A big storm came. Large waves crashed into the house. I thought we were safe. I was wrong. Cherry was swept out into the water.”
“The house wasn’t on stilts then?”
“No. That is something new here. That is a good thing. You will be safer than Cherry was.”
I didn’t know what to say, never having heard of much death, let alone a child’s death. I looked at the picture I was drawing, and it was the best thing I’d ever done. So I gave it to Abigail. It was of a sun with sunglasses shining down on a few kids from my school who I played with during recess time.
“Beautiful,” Abigail said. “Can you draw me a picture of Cherry?”
“I don’t know what she looks like,” I said, then remembered it was like me. So as Abigail watched, eerily silent–this was the only time I ever felt a ghostly presence from her–I drew myself. Then I added dots along my face, to transform me into Cherry. I gave it to Abigail with a smile. “Here you go.”
“Beautiful!” she praised again. “Stunning, stunning. It is my own gift. And on your birthday! Well, I’ll have to make you another cake. Do you want chocolate this time around?”
“No,” I said. “Cherry is good.”
For two weeks straight, there was always a piece of cherry cake for me in the morning on the counter to eat by the afternoon after I had swum in the ocean. I never saw Abigail make the cake or even frost it; it was just always there. My parents, still often arguing in the morning or speaking in hushed tones about something I would only realize was their divorce a month later, never mentioned the cakes aside from imploring me to not get crumbs everywhere.
“The roaches,” my mother chastised. “Don’t tempt them with more.”
“And don’t spoil your lunch,” my father might add. But even he, like my mother, soon forgot their own rules as they argued with one another. Each one probably assumed the other had made the cake for me, to keep me happy and amused during the vacation, to keep me fed and happy and a little spoiled on our last one as a true family.
Each afternoon, one parent would trade off an activity with me. My dad and I went swimming in the ocean again; my mother and I explored the dunes and then a fishing museum close by; my father took me out for a special dinner, all alone. When I asked him what Abigail was doing, he shook his head.
“Don’t know. Probably with your mother.”
“Is Abigail coming home with us?”
“No,” he said. “Probably for the best.”
“Right. She’d miss her daughter. She died here,” I added, and when my father still said nothing, only stared out the window of the restaurant at the dark clouds coming, I figured he was thinking about how she’d died in a storm.
“Don’t worry, dad,” I said. “The house is on stilts now. We’ll be safe.”
He nodded, but we still ate in a rush. When we arrived at home, my mother was on the porch, holding a book, but no longer reading. “Storm’s coming. We should leave.”
“It’s not hurricane season,” my father said, still shaking his head. “This doesn’t make sense. I don’t understand. We have the house for another month.”
“The storm’s coming in another day. Who cares about another month?”
I rushed past the two of them, speaking to one another in harsher and harsher tones, so much like the thunder underneath the clouds. I found Abigail in my room, packing my bags. She met my gaze and nodded with a firm smile. “Time for my second cherry to go before the water comes.”
“You’re not coming with us?”
“No, sweetheart. This is my house. I stay here.”
“It’s on stilts now,” I said. “You’ll be safe.”
“Yes, but you need to go with your parents.”
I surprised myself by screaming, “No, no, no!” and kicking my feet. I hadn’t had a temper tantrum–or a “fit” as my mother called them–in such a long time. I had genuinely begun to feel like a grown-up on this trip, with two separate worlds and a cherry cake always to myself. Now all I could do was cry and pout and not even let Abigail hug me to tell me everything was going to be all right.
“I’m not losing another little girl,” she said and left me with my bags in the bedroom. When she came back, I had stopped most of my crying. She handed me a thick wedge of the cherry cake, all that had remained in a plastic container. “Here. Take this for the road.”
“What will you eat?” I asked.
“I’m home. I don’t need food to remind me of it.”
Her words were so calm, so confident, I merely nodded. My parents were inside now, no longer fighting but their voices still tense from the storm and the sudden emergency set upon us all. The sky outside my window, once only a pale blue for two weeks straight, was grey and dark and ominous. The roar of the ocean was suddenly drowned out by a siren. A warning from the coast guard. Hurricane coming. Storm coming.
“Sweetheart,” my mother said, entering the room and pushing her body through Abigail’s specter in front of me. “Time to go.”
I gasped. It was the first time, the first true time, I understood what Abigail was. A ghost. Not our summer housekeeper, not my new best friend, not even a woman who loved cherry cake because it was her daughter’s name. These things were all still true, but they were also cloaked by the fact that she had died a long time ago, maybe with her daughter or another summer here, and she was a ghost.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” my mother said, wrapping me in a hug. “We will be all right. But we have to go. Vacation’s over.”
I looked over my mother’s shoulder and watched as Abigail nodded. She blew me a kiss and pointed to the cake in my suitcase, which she’d closed now. My mother grabbed the suitcase when she let go of me, and tugged me out the door.
The last time I saw Abigail was as we left the house. My father was driving, my mother in the front seat with a book of maps that were all but useless in her lap, and I was in the back. It was only the early evening, but it was as black as the night we’d first arrived. I looked at the house where I’d had my ninth birthday and one of the best vacations ever. When Abigail appeared on the wrap-around porch on the second floor, I knew she was a ghost.
But it was hard to be afraid. I had the cherry cake in my suitcase. I had the good memories. And her touch, as ghostly and cold as it had been, still rushed through me and comforted me as my parents fought again.
Abigail waved as the rain fell in heavy drops over the house and pounded like bullets against the roof of our rented car. She faded as we drove away, as the waves chased the houses on stilts along the shore, and the storm scared away the remaining tourists onto the now crowded highway. As I finished the cake in a Motel 6 that night, with my parents still bickering about directions, I thought of Abigail again and again. Even as we pulled into our home, which would no longer be shared between my parents in a months’ time, I still thought of Abigail.
I still think of her now, anytime someone mentions the ocean, hurricanes, or the Outer Banks. It’s hard to think of her as a haunting, as that summer vacation as being anything but delightful and sweet as the cake she served. Ghosts to me have never meant something to be afraid of, something to avoid. Ghosts have always been the people who know you the best, because they have lived through the worst, and know that in the end, the sweetest words are always the best. And life, too, can be a piece of cake.
It’s very rare for my stories to undergo a title change, but this story–other than maybe my Harlequin title–is the one that changed the most. Originally called Spellbound, and definitely meant to allude to the Siouxsie and the Bandshee’s song of the same name, this YA story was meant to be a nostalgic romp through the 1990s witchcraft culture.
The story involves Jessilyn, a teenager just figuring out this whole witchcraft thing as she goes to her local CD store and soon discovers a coven. She may also have the start of some sapphic feelings for her best friend–but that’s another story, or another spell, for another time.
The story ended up being changed to Lotus Eater’s Song for the publication to not have two stories entitled Spellbound. Now a reference to the actual song she finds in the CD store, the Lotus Eaters are also from Homer’s Odyessy; when we eat the Lotus Flower, we forget all that has come before.
Whatever you call this story, it’s a very fun romp through 1990s witch vibes. Enjoy!
The Lotus Eaters’ Song
By Eve Morton
Jessilyn had a routine. Once a month, when she had collected up all of her allowance from doing spare jobs (often over fifty dollars, if she was careful, and sometimes more if Christmas or her birthday had passed), she would tell her mom she was going out to the library. Halfway there, she’d turn down the street and walk right into the used record store called Back Beats Plus. Once inside, she’d find the most tattooed person working, and ask them for recommendations. She’d take these CDs back to her room, hiding them at the bottom of her backpack or under her bed, and transfer the music onto her computer so she could listen to them discretely later.
It wasn’t that her parents didn’t trust Jessilyn. Of course they did. They just didn’t understand music and refused to let her listen to anything with a Parental Advisory sticker on it, or with scary imagery, or with bad words.
So, basically anything cool.
Just after her birthday in early September, Jessilyn did up her jean jacket to her throat, and snagged a scarf for her bag in order to disguise what she would eventually purchase. Her last CDs had been Black Flag’s Damaged and My War, along with Jawbreaker’s Bivouac and Dear You; classics, according to Davey. She was pleased that he was right, since she still caught herself humming the chorus for “Rise Above” under her breath as she got ready.
“Do you have homework, Jessilyn?” her mother asked from the kitchen. Jessilyn smelled cinnamon and nutmeg from pies her mother was making.
“It’s too early in school to get homework,” Jessilyn replied. “But I’m going to the library.”
“Good. You’re in high school now, so it will suddenly creep up. The long weekends of doing nothing in your room are over.”
“So I’ll read what the teachers tell me instead of what I want?”
Her mother’s brow lifted, but she didn’t say anything. Jessilyn could already see what she needed from the look. Be careful. Don’t talk back. Watch your tongue.
“I’ll be back before dinner,” Jessilyn said.
“Good. See you then.”
As Jessilyn shut the door and walked down the cobblestone driveway, she knew her mother was behind the window, face pressed up to the glass. Jessilyn gripped her “emergency” cell phone in her pocket as if to reassure both of them that Jessilyn wouldn’t go very far. If she got into more than she could handle, the phone would always be there.
When Jessilyn was around the block, free and clear from her mother, she pulled out the phone and added ear buds. She found Black Flag’s “Rise Above” on her playlist and made sure to hum along.* * *
The door’s jangle was different this time around. Heavier, almost muffled. When Jessilyn glanced up, she saw some kind of flower or dried herb hung with the bell on the record store’s doorway.
“Welcome,” a voice from the counter greeted.
“Hi.” Jessilyn stepped inside. The woman behind the counter seemed to notice her apprehension, because she let out a small laugh.
“Oh, ignore that. Lola’s decorating for Halloween, though we haven’t even had Thanksgiving yet.”
“It’s the superior holiday, Torrance,” Lola called from the back. Jessilyn knew Lola; she was a tall girl with long blonde hair that sometimes sported dyed tips. She was also responsible for Jessilyn’s obsession with X-Ray Spex over the summer. Though the decorations were super-tacky, Jessilyn smiled along with the assessment.
“Yeah, I have to agree. Halloween’s probably the best.”
“Totally,” Lola came out from the back, holding several handfuls of fake cobwebs. She grinned, wide and maniacal, before she started to spread the cobwebs across the doorway from the front desk to the back room. “I mean, you’re not obligated to visit your relatives. You’re not meant to give gifts—only if you want, and if you do want to give something, it’s usually an offering to the dead. Halloween also has free candy for the young? I mean, how great is this?”
“Not the mention the music?” Torrance, the woman from before, added. Lola and her seemed to share a private joke while Jessilyn stood, still in awe. She had never met this woman—Torrance —before. She was small, maybe an inch taller than Jessilyn’s five-five. She had a round face with dark bangs and hair to her shoulders. A tight choker rounded her slender neck. Jessilyn was too far away to see what was printed across the cameo, but she assumed it was something creepy and spooky. Torrance had on a dark collared shirt that covered both her arms and black tight jeans. Jessilyn couldn’t see any tattoos around her arms, nor any piercings on her face. Torrance seemed like a complete contrast to Lola’s blue highlighted hair and her tight Bikini Kill shirts with ripped jeans.
But there was something about Torrance, something that pulled Jessilyn in, and made her want to ask her what music she should be buying for today.
“Are you okay?” Torrance asked, leaning across the counter. Lola swayed her hips into the back of the store, closing the door behind her. A skeleton was pasted over the window, with a sign in its hand that said DEAD END. “Can I help you find anything today?”
“Yeah,” Jessilyn said. “I usually ask whoever is working to help me out. Lola showed me X-Ray Spex a few weeks ago, and Davey showed me Black Flag. And Mitch, he gave me Bowie.”
“All great choices. I knew I hired them for a reason.”
“You own the store?” Jessilyn asked, her voice trembling slightly. Of course this woman owned the store. She was so beautiful she could have anything, and she picked music. The fact that, in some way, Torrance was responsible for all the songs of Jessilyn’s iPhone made her tremble from deep inside she couldn’t quite articulate yet.
“I sure do. It’s my home away from home.” Torrance smiled, then accidentally placed her hand inside a dense mess of cobwebs. Fake black spiders emerged like wind-up toys that ran forward. “Ugh. Lola! What did I say about the decorations?”
“Be careful what I wish for?” Lola let out another sharp laugh. Another inside joke seemed to be exchanged between them, while Jessilyn still waited. Her backpack felt heavier on her shoulders, and she adjusted it. Are the lights darker? she wondered. Jessilyn was about to glance out the front of the store window, when she saw Davey in the far corner, organizing the vinyl LP section. His tattoos glowed from under the limited light. When he waved, the tree that normally held autumn foliage on his arm appeared bare of any leaves whatsoever. Jessilyn waved back before another chill rolled through her.
“Come on. Ignore Lola’s games for now,” Torrance said, appearing by Jessilyn’s side. “And let’s find you some music.”
“Okay. Great. Thanks. I have about fifty dollars, so I can get a few things. Don’t worry about recommending me more than one.”
“Never dream of it, sweetheart.”
Jessilyn beamed under the name. When Torrance’s black heals clicked against the tile floor, Jessilyn followed. When she glanced back at the counter, she could have sworn one of the plastic spiders scrambled across the surface to hide under the tip jar.
* * *
“What did you and Lola mean? From before?”
Torrance glanced up from the discount bin she was searching through. Already, Jessilyn held one of Siouxsie and the Banshee’s first albums in her hands, along with The Indigo Girls, and Cyndi Lauper. These artists were, according to Torrance, sometimes slotted in with the Riot Grrrl movement, since they were female fronted, or all-women bands, but they were often categorized in varying genres. Jessilyn was still too young to really grasp much of the history behind all of these movements; she just knew how much she thought Siouxsie and the Banshee’s looked like a witch, and how utterly awesome that was. Especially given the way the record store was decorated.
“I think Lola and I say a lot. Can you be more specific?” Torrance said.
“Oh. Um…” Jessilyn knew it was foolish, but she wanted to ask about witches. About Siouxsie Sioux, and if the suddenly feeling she got in her stomach each time Torrance looked at her was like the song “Spellbound” or like a real magical charm. “You were talking about Halloween music when she was putting up cobwebs. Is the stuff you’re giving me related to Halloween?”
Torrance smiled, wide and long. Her matte lips were so dark red then, Jessilyn wanted to reach out and touch them. “It could be, if you wanted. Siouxsie Sioux does have a song called ‘Halloween’ on that album. She certainly gets me in the mood for the upcoming Equinox. It’s my favourite time of year. Really, Halloween—or Samhain, as it’s known for real witches—is a new year. A time to make resolutions.”
“There are real witches? I thought that was just…”
“Make-believe? There are make-believe witches—like in Oz—and there are pagan witches. The real witches I talked about before, who celebrate the Equinox and Samhain, are part of their own religion.”
Jessilyn’s eyes went wide. She was sure what she was learning about now, beyond the musical choices and Parental Advisory stickers, was something her parents would hate even more. But she didn’t care. As far as she was concerned, this conversation was ten times more illuminating that when she had discovered Riot Grrrl.
“That’s… so cool.”
“It is. And Lola likes to talk about witches and their traditions—especially Neo-Pagan ones—since we change our books here on November 1st, just after Halloween. So I treat my music store to the pagan calendar, I guess. All our employees of the month change out on a lunar cycle, too. I suppose it seems a lot easier that way, so I don’t run into the same crowds at the bank or at the printer’s office. But that’s adult stuff. Don’t worry about it.”
Torrance’s gaze focused back into the CD case, where she pulled out a couple more albums with discount stickers on them.
“No, it’s okay,” Jessilyn said. “I want to know. I just started high school, so, I may as well get t know the world.”
Torrance smirked. She collected the CDs she held under her palm, and then considered something for a little while. “High school, huh. You like it?”
“It’s easy so far.”
“It’ll get harder.”
“That’s what my mom says, but I doubt it. I read a lot, so I feel like I can work.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?” Jessilyn worried her lip. A tension had spread between them, but it wasn’t antagonizing. Not like the girls who would sometimes follow Jessilyn from gym class to home room, taunting her as she listened to music. “Are you going to tell me some encouraging words about bullies?”
Torrance laughed; the rasp of her breath was like fire. “No. I could, but I won’t. I feel like that’s pandering. But I can give you something.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” Torrance confirmed. She handed over the CDs, then spoke in quick, rushed terms. “Not these—though they are good albums. You still have about ten dollars left, right?”
Jessilyn nodded.
“Perfect. Keep these CDs and let me know if you think they’re good. But I’ll be right back.”
Jessilyn opened her mouth to respond, but Torrance was already gone. Jessilyn scanned the CDs for a band called Jack off Jill and another for Panic! At The Disco. She knew of the second band, and wanted to hand back the CD, but was pulled in by the super-long and interesting song titles. As she added the new CDs to her pile, she did some quick math in her head. Only three dollars left, maybe? If that. Oh, and taxes… Jessilyn really hoped that what Torrance brought out wasn’t too expensive, or else she’d have to put something back, and that felt like an impossible choices.
While Jessilyn waited, she noticed more Halloween decorations had been added to the store. In addition to the cobwebs, there were black and orange streamers by the door and a few hanging bags of dried herbs. The front window looked as if it had been tinted black as well, small cut-outs of bats added to the edge all around. Jessilyn left her CDs on the bin for a moment as she wandered back over towards the window. The sign for Back Beats Plus turned into SPELS BEAT U as she rearranged the letters in her mind. She blinked and the letters arranged themselves into nonsense again.
“It’s getting late,” Davey said from behind her. “I think you’re the last one to leave.”
“Is it?” Jessilyn glanced down at her phone. She already had one missed call from her mother. Her eyes widen, especially when she saw it was 5:30PM.
“Oh, crap. I have to go.”
“These were yours?” Davey asked, turning towards her small stack of CDs. He picked them up without waiting for a response and began to ring her through. Jessilyn stepped up to the counter, digging out her cash from her wallet. In the low light, she could have sworn that Davey’s tattoos sparkled.
“That’s 49.95.”
Jessilyn let out a breath. Just enough. She slid over her cash with a smile. Davey gave her back a nickel, and a black bag filled with her treasures.
“Happy Early Halloween,” he stated.
“Thanks. But I should be—”
Jessilyn as cut off by Torrance coming out of the back room. Finally. Her cheeks were red as if she had been running around. How big was that back room? Jessilyn wondered, but didn’t get a chance to say anything before Torrance thrust a CD at her. It was bright orange and yellow, the disc inside hot pink as the case flew open.
“This is for you,” Torrance explained. “It’s what Lola and I usually talk about.”
“Oh, but I can’t—I’m out of…” Jessilyn said, feeling slightly relieved she had an easy excuse. The CD looked too much like pop music; the kind on the radio that seemed like nonsense about boys to Jessilyn’s ears. She was shocked, really, that it had been Torrance who recommended it to her. Maybe the cameo on her neck wasn’t spooky after all, and she was just a boring person who liked the same singles as the girls in her math class. The thought disappointed Jessilyn.
Torrance’s green eyes, bright and vibrant, pulled Jessilyn’s attention back.
“It’s okay. I know I took forever so you’re out of cash. And we’re closing soon,” Torrance explained. “So just borrow the CD.”
“Borrow?”
“Yeah. So long as you bring it back next week and tell me what you think.”
“Are you sure?”
“Definitely. How else do you think people listen to new artists? A lending policy is always good. And you’re not going to find these guys anywhere else. So here.” Torrance extended the CD into Jessilyn’s hand with a smile. As she did, the feeling inside of Jessilyn’s stomach grew. Definitely magic. Or spell work. Definitely… something.
Jessilyn spun the CD over in her hands, still lamenting the image of the blonde girl on the cover. The cover model looked preppy, just like girls who harassed Jessilyn after gym class.
“Keep in mind,” Torrance added. “That appearances can be deceiving. We’re all someone else around the right people.”
“What now?”
“Nothing. Now go,” Torrance said. “I think you’re late—and we’re gonna close soon.”
“Right. Thank you!” Jessilyn glanced down at her phone as she stepped outside. Before she could call her mother back, the phone buzzed.
“Mom?” Jessilyn said. “I’m so sorry. I’m on my way back.”
“You better be,” her mother replied, voice stern.
Jessilyn sighed. I’m in trouble tonight. Jessilyn walked hurriedly after disconnecting the phone. The sky was filled with clouds, and when Jessilyn looked to the left, she thought she saw a sliver of white moon hanging there, as if it was waiting for her.* * *
“Young lady.” Jessilyn’s father narrowed his eyes across the dinner table. Jessilyn toyed with her peas, wondering if she could make them disappear just by looking at them. The booming baritone of her father’s voice, she swore, made all their vegetables tremble. “Young lady, why were you late today?”
“I told mom: I lost track of time in the library.”
“Then why do you have no books?”
Jessilyn chewed the inside of her cheek. Usually when she went out like this, she at least got out a couple books out to cover her tracks and hide her CDs under. This time, she had barely made it home with enough time to toss her new purchases under her bed, and explain to her mother in a blathering tone just why she had been caught up.
Now, over peas, potatoes, and pot roast, it appeared that her complex webs of lies she had been weaving since she was twelve was unravelling in front of her.
“I just… I forgot to check them out. I was there so late, then all of a sudden it was time to go, so I had to put my books back.”
“What were you reading about?”
“Nothing much.”
“And it took you all afternoon?”
Jessilyn sighed, and said the first thing that came to her head. “The Salem Witch Trials.”
“Oh?” her mother asked, surprised. “Is it for a school project?”
“Yes. We haven’t been assigned anything yet, but in history, we get independent study units. I figured I’d get ahead of the game and figure out my topic today. So I know I’ll have more free time later when the term gets busy, like you said it would.”
Her parents exchanged looks across the table. Jessilyn’s heart beat into her throat, and when they nodded, a rush of relief washed over her.
“Makes sense,” her father said. “Maybe we can help. You know, your mother has some books on the topic.”
“You do?”
“Well, I have books on the seventeenth century.”
“That would be helpful. Thank you,” Jessilyn stated. Both her mother and father beamed at her perfect use of manners.
“Excellent. Then it’s decided. I know you’ve already had a big day full of studying, but perhaps a little more wouldn’t hurt.”
“Not at all.” Jessilyn gave another semi-fake smile. Her heart rate returned to normal as she realized her cover was kept. If she had lost what had kept her sane in the past two years… She didn’t even want to consider what would have happened. So while her parents went on to talk about their upcoming plans for Thanksgiving, and what relatives would be over, Jessilyn thought of Torrance. Her green eyes, her laugh, and her cameo. What was on the centre of it? Jessilyn still didn’t know. She hadn’t gotten close enough yet to see.
But she would. She knew it was only a matter of time.
“Jessilyn?” her mother asked. “Did you hear our question?”
“I’m sorry, no. Pardon me? Can you repeat it?”
“Of course. We were just discussing how Aunt Michelle would like to visit us this Thanksgiving, and she will need a place to stay. Your room seems like the best option.”
Jessilyn’s fists clenched, but she tried to not let her anger show. “Yes, that’s fine.”
“Good. Thank you.”
As her parents continued their conversation, Jessilyn wondered if this was her punishment for being late today. Take away her sanctuary for the time being and give her more homework? Jessilyn was sure that was the case. If Aunt Michelle was here, Jessilyn knew that meant she’d be sleeping in the basement with the dust bunnies and the laundry machine monster from when she was a kid. There were no such thing as monsters anymore, of course, but that still didn’t stop Jessilyn from shuddering.
So long as I have my music, though, I’ll be fine. She nodded. Jessilyn put a stray pea into her mouth, and waited until it was all over.* * *
“Here you are.” Jessilyn’s mother handed her a giant textbook that was larger than her head. She took the book with an oomph as she sat back down on her bed.
“This should have all you need to know about The Salem Witch Trials. There actually weren’t as many as you think. And men were persecuted too.”
“Huh. Fascinating,” Jessilyn said, rather genuinely. She flipped open the dust-filled page and started to read about one particular witch, named David Morris, before her mother left.
Then Jessilyn listened, her eyes no longer scanning the page. She waited until she heard her mother’s footsteps reach the kitchen and the running of water start. When she was sure her mother was consumed with her new task, Jessilyn pulled out her new CDs and began the transferring process.
She was almost done all of them by the time bedtime came around. She hid what she could, and then remembered the bright yellow and orange CD. It was still too risky to keep transferring them, especially so close to bed, so she decided to forgo it for now. Especially since it was the only CD left, and it was pop music.
But in bed, Jessilyn couldn’t forget about the CD. It was like the bright oranges and yellows were its own light, and it kept her awake. She dropped down under her bed, finding it easily in her hide out. Then she dug out her old Discman, a relic she had bought off a kid in the third grade, and slipped in the CD.
The manufactured beats made her want to retch at first. It was like a Nintendo Game mashed with Aqua. And Jessilyn wanted to forget about her former love of the band that sang “Barbie Girl.” She liked real music now. Better music. Not this nonsense. She was about to turn this CD off entirely as a wasted effort, when she finally heard someone sing.
The voice was stunning. So much that Jessilyn actually forgot to breathe. When she finally remembered, her mind lost itself inside the liquid voice like it was its own entity, its own visualization. When the first song ended, Jessilyn pressed repeat. She wanted to know each and every song before she moved onto the next one. And there was so much, beyond the manufactured beats, to listen to here. It was her third time through the song when she noted the lyrics.
When the moon is an orb in the daylight sky we will come for you, new starling. When the history books are all wrong, we will come for you, little bird. Make a new covenant. Together we will take back the light. Starling, Starling our bird beyond its cage. Come home, into our night.
Jessilyn had no idea of the meaning of some of the words, but the tone was clear. This was calling her—her directly, she knew it—and pulling her into something she couldn’t fathom. Her parents had told her horror stories from rock bands whose CDs, when played backwards, revealed weird messages. But she thought that was her parents being uncool and ridiculous. This song wasn’t a backwards message from Judas Priest, but she was still so, so sure they were calling her. I’m a little starling. I’m the bird they’re looking for. Jessilyn flipped around the CD cover and read the name of the band. The Lotus Eaters. I’m the person The Lotus Eaters need.
Jessilyn listened to the next song. It was less bubble gum pop and more acoustic. And the signing voice, yet again, pulled her in. This song, though, was a bit more direct. It talked about hunting down the unbelievers and smashing all the cages to set animals and minds free. But it was the final two stanzas, almost whispered, at the end of the song that did Jessilyn in.
We will see you, little starling, Our bird girl with two names You will see us through a cracked mirror And know we are just alike.
The sword in your throat and the hum on your skin is real. That is love, that is magic. Let us show you our spell work.
In the dark, Jessilyn fumbled for the CD. She needed to know if these lyrics were really what she thought they were. She used the light of her still-charging iPhone and read them to herself. They were the same as she heard them. Written down, this was even clearer to her. Jessilyn was the bird girl with two names. The Lotus Eaters were speaking to her directly.
And most importantly, they needed her.
At the back of the CD booklet, she saw the names who had produced, written, and distributed the music. A logo with a birdcage on it was there, along with the names Davey Alison, Mitchell Carpenter, Lola Nightshade, Dunja Patel, and Torrance Abernathy. Everyone at the record shop.
Jessilyn stared at the ceiling for hours that night, listening to the new CD until the batteries ran out. In the silence, just before sleep, she knew what she had to do.* * *
When Jessilyn knocked on the record store door, there was only a couple minutes of waiting before the door was opened. Torrance answered. The moon in the sky, now bright and full, gave Jessilyn enough light to finally see the engraving of her cameo.
“Welcome!” Torrance touched Jessilyn’s shoulder, gently ushering her inside. “So glad you could make it.”
“Me too,” Jessilyn said. “I had to sneak out, but… I think it’s worth whatever punishment I get.”
“We’ll make sure you’re home safe before sun-up. I promise.”
Torrance tapped her cameo as if it sealed their fate. Jessilyn smiled, knowing that was probably right.
The record store was densely packed with people, all wearing bright red t-shirts with the Lotus Eater’s logo on it—half a flower within the empty space of a crescent moon. All the CD cases were pushed to the side of the store, opening up the floor to people. The normal music posters were turned over to reveal ancient occult drawings underneath. The now-familiar pop songs from before filled the air, and Jessilyn couldn’t help but hum along.
Lola was at the front, her blonde hair now sporting orange highlights. She held a microphone in her hand, swaying her hips, before she started to belt out the now familiar lyrics.
“I’m so glad you gave us a chance,” Torrance said. “We know the music’s not for everyone.”
“No, I loved it. Love it.”
“Good. Why don’t you join in? The full moon is about celebration.”
Torrance gestured to the centre of the record store floor. People swarmed the area, forming a massive pit. Jessilyn’s eyes went wide as she considered joining. Would it hurt? Would she break something? When Torrance pointed to the drawings along the floor, Jessilyn noticed the five-pointed star that seemed to guide the moshers. Around the mosh pit circle were the words An it harm none, do what thou wilt.
“So?” Torrance said, stepping into the pit. “What do you say?
Jessilyn followed her without another thought. Her routine was about to get a lot more interesting.
I am not kidding when I say that the best way to process all the nasty feelings postbirth and the hormonal ups and downs was to write fiction. Whenever I could. Which meant a lot of shorter stories, and my goodness, so many of them were horror.
Sometimes it’s the actual birth or body processes that were horrifying. Sort of like how common mastistis is for nursing women. I had never heard of this before two days postpartum, and then it was my #1 fear. It sounded horrible and painful.
So I had to write a story about it.
But it’s also how other treat you postpartum that’s scary. No one seems to trust your word anymore, and no one even seems to see you when you have a baby at the same time. You become spectral, a ghost, and yet, you are also supposed to feel and bleed and produce, produce, produce.
Easy to see how these two beasts came out in Motherhood’s Mite. For an early morning, it was a very good therapy tool, almost as good as formula itself. For those who have nursed and had a child, you probably know this feeling. And for those of you who haven’t, well, let me entertain you for the next 2000 words as I fought off this particular demon of my parental past.
Motherhood’s Mite
by Eve Morton
Kelly’s milk had turned to dust. When she pressed Jason’s mouth to her breast during his three-am feed, all she heard was coughing. Then sputtering like a worn-down exhaust pipe so much like the one from her first car. Soon her bare toes were covered in sand. She dreamed she was on a beach, far away from the horrors of exclusive breastfeeding and mastitis that would not relent, but Jason’s wail rudely returned her his blue painted bedroom. She turned on his elephant night-light and gasped.
His mouth was brown, the color of suede. His tongue pressed to the top of his toothless mouth as his cry turned inconsolable. He looked as if he’d eaten a vacuum cleaner bag, though that was locked away in the closet along with the other hazardous items for newborns. She searched his crib, the diaper changing area, and inside his swaddle for the source. She only came away with small bits of grit and dirt. When Kelly sneezed moments later, her breasts leaked.
No, she realized. Her breasts didn’t leak like they had been anytime she thought of her baby or husband or watched a sappy commercial. Her breasts weren’t producing anything at all but a faint itchiness that soon took over her entire body. She was shaking, wracking her body with her long nails which bent like cue cards now that she was eight weeks postpartum, when her husband came inside.
“What’s wrong?” He picked up Jason and held him close, only to track around more grit and dirt. “Oh, God.”
“I think…” Kelly opened her robe, displaying her breasts that were lumpy, worse than the six clogged ducts she had at once during week one. Her left breast seemed to tremble. Sand and dust and dirt littered her nursing bra. She closed her robe with another shudder, followed by a wave of sudden and sharp pain.
“I think…” she repeated, “we’re gonna need to go to the hospital.”
*
“Well, isn’t this strange…” The doctor held up the results from Kelly’s chest x-ray and ultrasound in front of the light source in his room. “Very interesting, indeed.”
Kelly wanted to quip something smartass in response, but she was exhausted. She and Mark had waited three hours for Jason’s tests to turn up nothing, only a stern lecture about cleanliness in the home, and then it was her turn to keep waiting. Three hours turned into six and now, after forty minutes of waiting alone in the doctor’s room, she was pretty sure it was the next day. Tuesday. Mommy and Me classes were in the afternoon.
“Can you give me some meds and then let me go?” Kelly asked. “I’m pretty sure it’s mastitis, which I’ve had before, and so I can take the meds, and then–“
“Oh, it’s not mastitis.”
When the doctor’s gaze fell on her breasts with a crooked brow, Kelly folded her arms in front of her chest. They were tender, still lumpy, and her stomach flipped knowing that she’d need to feed her son soon. She was lashed with the same sensation of pain as before, and trembled visibly in front of the doctor.
To her surprise, he stood by her side and placed a hand on her back. He waited with her until the spasm of pain ended, then let out a haughty sigh. “Just as I thought.”
“What is it?”
“A rare condition. Your milk has turned to dust.”
Kelly tilted her head. That was a dream of the beach. That was ludicrous. So she laughed, and laughed, her breasts shaking like beach balls as she did.
But he repeated: “Your milk has turned to dust. It’s drying up. Are you breastfeeding exclusively?”
“Yes. In fact, I need to see–“
“Your son can wait. For you. Because you need to feed him.”
Kelly opened her mouth to argue yet again that she was exclusively breastfeeding him, but she stopped. She’d come in with pain and this doctor now looked at her like a seven year old who’d lied about breaking something. How was this her fault? She was literally doing everything every last book, pamphlet, and website told her to do. “Well, is there still something you can give me for the pain? Maybe some antibiotics, too?” she asked bitterly. “So, you know, I can keep feeding him?”
“That’s not quite how it works.”
“How does it work, then, doctor?”
“I can’t give you antibiotics like with mastitis. That’s a bacterial infection and can be treated as such to relieve the problem. This is almost parasitic, like a secondary pregnancy infection.”
“What?” Kelly scanned her very-tired memory for something about this on mommy blogs or even in pamphlets at her OBGYN. So many damn messages about SIDS came to her, but nothing about… “What is this called?”
“Mother’s Mite.” He held up the ultrasound that a tech had taken of her breast. A spider-like pattern emerged from the nipple and extended back into the breast tissue. It was like the many drawings she’d seen on Etsy with the milk ducts illuminated as if they were constellations. What was the big deal with this ultrasound? It was only as she leaned closer that she noticed the secondary shadow over the center of her nipple the size of a small tack.
“Oh,” she gasped. “That is…”
“A mite, though it’s technically a small organism that is also feeding off your milk.”
“Oh. No wonder Jason’s been hungry! No wonder…” She ran her hands through her hair, relieved in a way she never had been before. No wonder she didn’t always like feeding Jason. No wonder she didn’t always feel like his mother, like she hadn’t bonded with him. No wonder nursing hurt so much and she hated it so profoundly. She had a goddamn bug living inside of her!
Maybe, with it out, she could actually be a good mother.
“So you must keep breastfeeding in order to remove the mite,” the doctor explained. “It will keep drinking the milk, drying you up, and not allowing Jason to get any.”
“So I starve it out?”
“Not quite. You’ll produce more milk to feed your son.”
Kelly leaned closer on the edge of the very uncomfortable chair. “I don’t hear anything about the mite dying.”
“You’re right. It’s going to stay there. It eventually leaves when you stop breastfeeding.”
“So I could stop now,” she said. “And it would leave?”
“You should feed your son now. There’s more than enough inside of you to do it. Even with a mite in the way. It’s no obstacle for a mother.”
“But it hurts,” Kelly said. “It’s weird and he may get a mouthful of dust like tonight. Why should I risk that–“
“There is no risk. He was sent home with another prescription, remember?” The doctor leaned closer, as if checking her pupils for dilation. “Do you not remember that?”
“I do. Yeah. I just… want to stop.”
“You shouldn’t,” the doctor said. He went to his computer screen, turned it on, and filled out her form. Even as Kelly added another pitiful, “but it hurts” he did not respond.
*
Kelly had not slept for about thirty-six hours–more than when she first gave birth in the middle of the night–when the dust happened again. She stared down at Jason in his crib with a heaviness in her chest that was only partly guilt. Jason was unbothered by the dust, barely reacting as his mouth and tongue were covered once again. The prescription–which had been with her husband all along–helped ease him of his symptoms, that was true.
But Kelly’s breasts ached. Her skin literally crawled. And she was so sick of feeling the dust drop out from her breasts, out of her bra, and down onto her feet again. She was so sick of drowning in her own exhaustion and feeding this parasite that wouldn’t let her sleep.
The same pain as before seized Kelly’s chest. She gritted her teeth, and like the doctor suggested in a pamphlet he gave her as he shoved her out the door, tried to nurse through the worst of it.
Jason was not hungry. He looked away, shutting his mouth full of dust. He slept.
So Kelly took matters into her own hand.
After expressing dust upon dust, faint milk started to trickle. She’d been leaning over the garbage pail in her son’s room, dumping what was unusable in the trap door for diapers, but now she stopped. Milk flowed like a hose in the left one.
Then a tiny, almost imperceptible head popped out.
Kelly dropped her breast in surprise and the mite went back inside her breast.
She picked up her breast again and squeezed it. The mite popped out halfway. She kept squeezing and squeezing, the skin around her chest turning bright red and her hands tingling with carpal tunnel, but the mite remained stuck. She thought of the ultrasound image and how this tiny tack had attached itself to her ducts, like a damn blocks off a river. With a sudden bolt of courage, she grasped the mite from her breast. She pulled.
The pain was excruciating. So much like giving birth, like that ring of fire as Jason’s head breeched her body. She gritted her teeth. She gripped the rocking chair arm. She pulled and pulled and pulled. Tears fell down her cheeks.
But once it was out, like with Jason, her body eased and relaxed.
Dust flowed. Then milk again.
She threw the mite in the trap door of the garbage. She listened to its skittering legs until they, too, stopped.
Then she did the same to the other breast.
By the time Kelly went to bed, both mites were now at the bottom of the diaper’s stinking garbage. All the dust had been cleaned up and thrown out, along with her son’s prescription. Formula, stacks and cans and tins of all sorts of bottles and nipples lined the counter.
I’m going to bed, she wrote her husband to place on his nightstand. Please let me sleep. Feed our boy whatever he wants. Thank you.
Kelly was about to crawl under the sheets when she remembered the sensation of sand against her toes. That, she decided, she’d actually miss, and so she added: PS: Our next vacation should be at the beach. I think Jason would like it, too.
I teach at one of the leading Engineering schools in the world: the University of Waterloo. As a sessional, this often means I’m teaching those engineers English for a credit and I often get hostile audiences, ones who don’t really care about English Lit. That’s fine. But one of my favourite stories to tell them is about the structure of campus itself, and how at one point, there was an entire building built to keep people apart from one another, just like they, too, want to be kept apart from English Lit.
(Hagey Hall, one of the Arts buildings on campus, was built in a strange shape so that protests could not form; it was built after Kent State and this was seen as a positive feature. My old PhD supervisor is the source for this lore, since he was there during the actual construction process).
I’ve told this story about Hagey Hall so many times that it was inevitable that during my mat leave, when I wouldn’t have to walk its spooky halls, I would write a short story about a similar university that has similar problems with the shape (and capacity) of certain rooms.
So follow along with this weird and twisty tale.
The Architects
By Eve Morton
The first time I witnessed a room disappear on campus, I was a proctor for an exam.
When you’re in graduate school, you’ll take whatever work you can get. All students are desperate and I was no exception. When all the qualification you need to be a proctor is the necessary gender in order to escort students to the bathroom during the exam, hover outside to make sure they don’t cheat, and then take them back to the room, it’s an easy gig. Even when it is at seven in the morning, on the first day of winter, and in a part of the school I’d never seen before. Most of the other proctor spots needed men, since they had women profs. This was the only class, for a man named Tom North, who required a woman.
I snapped up the opportunity as soon as I could. I received a confirmation from the admin staff, and waited the week until the exam was set. I’d never met Tom North before, but since he was a staple of the old guard on campus, I’d seen his framed face on the wall of the school’s teacher’s lounge. He was a Big Deal back in the day, but he’d since become a dinosaur. In the age of social media and Rate My Professor, he would have barely received tenure. Then again, they don’t do tenure anymore.
I took the bus on the designated morning while it was still dark. Frost dotted the campus lawns as I walked deeper and deeper into the hulking buildings as they shifted and changed from one generation of architecture to the next. When the campus first opened, there had only been the brick buildings, the yellow-painted welcome center at the front of the campus, and the expansive library. The brick buildings had now become the designated Arts area, where my office was in a basement. The welcome center stayed roughly the same, save for a few updates to plumbing, and the library was now in the center, rather than the far edge, of the campus itself. The rest of the campus had been added on in the last fifty years, thanks to the school’s graduates and reputation becoming more prominent for Math, Sciences, and Engineering. As I walked, the buildings seemed to evolve alongside me. They became sleeker and taller, filled with windows and elongated forms, until it felt as if I had wandered too far from the 1950s brutalism that marked my office into a sci-fi landscape.
I was amazed. I’d never needed to go beyond the library before. Even when I was on the top floor of that building, and could see the outstretched campus, I never looked too closely at the architecture. Only the foliage, and the Canadian geese that stayed here all winter long.
Though I was acting as a proctor for an Arts class–Milton and his Contemporaries, according to the course calendar–exam season demanded bigger rooms, and so, better buildings were used. I had thought I would be ushered into the gym, but the room I needed to go to was in a building called M2. It was for Maths and Sciences. I located it on the edge of the campus, almost a twenty minute walk from where my own office was, and I arrived with barely ten minutes to spare. I hurried through the glass doors, warming instantly, and walked past large fossils and rock specimens from the local mines encased in class. I wanted to stay and linger, examine what seemed to be a hidden museum inside a university campus, but I was more concerned about making a good impression on Tom North.
I located the stairs and headed to the second floor where the exam was. I stepped out and realized it was the third floor. I doubled back into the stairwell, but there was no other door than the one I’d stepped into. Only two twists of the stairs.
The second floor was gone. Or at least, I had no access to it in the stairwell.
I found the elevator on the ground level. I now only had five minutes until the exam began. In the elevator, I punched the #2 key easily. I stepped out a second later into an area of campus that looked like any other. There were tile floors that scuffed my shoes, thick wooden doors leading into various rooms, and a large foyer.
An empty foyer.
Even though it had been a long time since I’d written an exam myself, there were always early birds outside, hastily cramming until the last minute. Or late stragglers who wandered in from a bus, dazed and disoriented.
But there was no one here. Not even footprints or boot tracks from the limited snow outside. There was no evidence at all that anyone but me had been in the building all morning.
I walked down one of the two corridors that split off from the foyer. I compared the number of the room I’d been given for the exam against the doors around me. I walked in a semi-circle and came out the other side of the large foyer.
There was nothing. No room, and the only way there could have been a room with that number, would have been if the exam could take place here. In the foyer. From the way the stairs and the halls curved, it was the only way to make sense of anything.
“Hello?” I called out, thinking of nothing else to do.
No answer.
I started to panic then, believing this to be my error and my error alone. My phone had no signal in the thick walls, so I stepped out of the building–it probably wasn’t the right one anyway–and called the front desk in the English Department.
“Hello?” a woman named Margaret answered. “How can I help you?”
I explained to Margaret the situation. “I’m a proctor for Tom North, but I think I’m lost. I can’t find the room.” I gave her the number. I heard her click the keyboard on the other side. When she was silent a long time, I babbled about receiving a confirmation for the job, and that though I’d never met Professor North before, I didn’t want to leave him with a bad impression. “If I’m late, it’s one thing. But I don’t want to make it so his students suffer, either.”
More clicks. Soft breathing from the other side. “This is odd. Says the exam was supposed to be in the Arts department.” She listed a number close to my office.
“What? I was never told. I’ll head right over.”
“Then he cancelled it,” Margaret added, her voice thin. “I’m so sorry. I guess no one got around to telling you. It’s the end of the year, and–“
“Oh. Oh.” I let out a breath. It was a mistake. No one’s fault. When Margaret assured me that I’d still be paid for my time, all three hours the exam was supposed to go on, I really had nothing to be mad about.
“Again, we’re sorry,” Margaret said. “Enjoy your day–and your holidays!”
I spent the rest of the morning in the strange building, looking at the fossils and the rock specimens I’d never seen before. But soon would see, nearly every day, in time.
*
The second time a room disappeared on campus, I nearly missed it because it wasn’t a room at all. It was a hallway that suddenly disappeared, and nearly left me stranded in my office during a winter storm.
A year had passed since the incident with Tom North. I moved on from the preliminary stages of my PhD, passed the classes and the comprehensive exams, and was now in my writing mode. Tom North had retired shortly after the proctor mix-up, and I’d heard through the mailroom gossip circle that he’d died. Not uncommon for professors of his generation. It was one of the main issues–spoken about in hushed, polite tones, of course–that people in the department reminded me of when I selected Maurice Callahan as my own supervisor. He was of Tom North’s generation, had started the PhD department when he first began teaching at the university, and was already in his mid-seventies. He’d had no health problems so far, but that seemed to be a strike against him. It would only be a matter of time.
I liked Maury, though, as he wanted to be called. He was funny. He laughed at my jokes. And there was a certain allure to the fact that he was almost as old as the school itself. He’d watched the campus unfold into the strange monolith that it was now.
“It had a completely different reputation ten, twenty years ago,” he told me during one of our monthly supervisory meetings. “It was an Arts school, through and through. You know the sculpture that’s just outside Hubert Hall?”
I nodded. The sculpture was off a flat man, as if he’d been steamrolled, throwing a ball in the air.
“It’s not a ball. It’s a shot-put. It was supposed to be a symbol for the sports team–the flames–and a symbol for Prometheus stealing fire.”
“Supposed to?”
“Yes, well, I think he sort of loses his context now. The art may stay, but meanings change. And well, it feels like we’re strictly in the punishment stage of Prometheus’s life, getting our livers plucked out.”
I laughed. I could see–and sympathize with–his disdain for the lack of funding the Arts was now receiving. “That’s hindsight for you, I guess.”
“That’s the thing,” Maury said. “Prometheus means foresight. We should have seen this coming before, not after, our funding was gutted. Hindsight was Prometheus’s brother, Epimetheus.”
“I don’t know that story,” I said, cheeks blushing. I made a note to look it up, but Maury told it to me anyway.
“He was the twin of Prometheus, and together they were tasked with giving animals traits. But since Epimetheus lacks foresight like Prometheus, he didn’t give anything to man. He was a fool, in short, which then led his brother to steal fire and stand trial for that crime. Personally, I think we undervalue Epimetheus. He can be the fool, sure, but he’s also the kind one. There is no ulterior motive here. He’s pure materialism, which is to say, thought comes afterwards. He makes something. Then he tells us about it.” Maury laughed. “I think a lot of PhD students can benefit from that attitude. Not you, of course.” He gave me a sly smile. “But I see many students tell me what they’re going to write, and then never do it. Just write the damn thing, you know? Then you can steal fire somewhere else. Now, let’s get back to your project.”
It was only three days after that conversation when I became stuck in my office. The hallway that I’d taken to get there had simply disappeared. There were two main stairwells to gain entry to the basement of the building: one was the main entrance, flanked by glass doors and school colors, and then there was the back exit that was barely noticeable, especially in winter, when snow was piled close to the doorway. It was known as the “smoker’s exit” since those piles of snow often turned gray in no time with cigarette butts and ash.
I liked using the smoker’s doorway. It made coming and going to my office feel clandestine, and since students always seemed to recognize me on campus and want to discuss their grades, being covert was necessary. I’d taken that exit as an entrance like I always did, walked by the bathrooms and the information area, and then settled into my office, next to many other PhD offices. An hour, maybe two, had passed. When I was ready to leave, I wanted to use the bathroom.
But they were gone. The entire information center and its waiting room was gone. There was only a blank wall, nothing hanging on it, where it had once been.
“I don’t…” I didn’t finish my sentence because I heard it echo. I placed a hand against the wall that I swore had never been there. It was solid. I pressed my ear against it. I swore I could hear something–murmuring, chattering–but it could have been my own heartbeat. I tried to follow the wall, to see if it would lead me somewhere else, but it was truly a dead end. Just a wall where there had once been a way out.
I turned the other direction, in search of the elevator. That was the only other way I knew of getting to the front exit. My heart did not stop pounding in my chest until I stepped out on the first floor, saw the blazing sunlight through the glass doors, and touched them. They were real. They let me leave.
I was too spooked to go around back, where the smokers left their cigarettes, to check if that door was still there. By the time I did, a week and a half later, nothing had changed.
The hallway was back where it had been. There was a smoker’s exit again.
But a clear sign had now been posted in red, angry letters NO SMOKING WITHIN 9M OF THE BUILDING. The janitorial staff, and a handful of grad students, were now in obeisance of that law, and stood nine meters back. I wanted to go over and join them, take up smoking simply to ask if they had been there last week, and if so, did they get trapped outside, unable to get back in? When had the hallway come back? What the hell had happened?
But I didn’t say a thing to them.
I saw Maurice instead.
*
“Now that’s interesting,” he said, after I’d spilled the incident about the hallway and the previous one a year ago with Tom North’s nonexistent exam room. “You should write a story about that.”
“I don’t want to,” I said. Maurice often worked under the premise that nearly everyone obtaining an English Literature PhD wanted to be a writer in some way. He did when he was young, though, and some of the other grad students also harbored literary ambitions–but I just wanted to understand things. Including the strange campus. “I just want to know that I can trust the campus maps, and trust where I think I’m going.”
“You can trust the maps,” Maurice said. “Especially the online ones. They update more frequently.”
“So you’re telling me that the online map would have reflected that sudden change in my office? Even if it was only for an hour or a week?”
“I don’t know. I don’t use it myself.”
“How do you get around?” I asked him. He’d told me on several occasions that he walked everywhere, including to and from the campus since his house was merely a block away. It kept him young, he joked. But maybe it also kept him with working knowledge of a place that I was starting to realize I could never fully pin down or figure out.
“On foot,” he answered obviously.
“But how do you remember where to go?”
“I’ve been here a long time, remember. I was here when the Dean gave the order to build most of the newer parts of campus. I was even on some committees when they were electing to reshape some of this building, too.”
“They’ve renovated Hubert Hall?” I looked around the thick brick walls of his office, so much like mine in the basement. The architecture itself was so dense cell phones never worked. Even some of the computers that had been installed didn’t get wifi and had to rely on Ethernet cables. “Hard to tell.”
“I know, but they did. And it was a serious endeavor and expense, hence the committee. It was in the 1960s,” he began, getting somewhat of a dreamy quality to his voice. “I won’t bore you with too many details, because I could write a book about this myself.”
“Maybe you should.”
“Maybe. But I think it’s been done. Either way, this meeting was about the foyer. They didn’t want a large one for students to congregate inside. In effect, they wanted to avoid protesting. There was a lot of uproar about Kent State, with good reason, and so when I say that the staff didn’t want protestors, don’t think they were regressive. They merely wanted to save student lives. So they decided to not have a large foyer, and extend what they needed to do through many hallways instead.”
“Really? Like where my office is?”
“Yes. That’s why I thought it was interesting that a hallway disappeared. Almost like the school is fighting back, protesting itself.”
I didn’t want to believe him, yet I could feel it in my bones that he was right. “What about the other building?” I asked a moment later. “The one where Tom North’s exam should have happened, but didn’t? M2, Mathematics. That’s a newer building, right?”
“It is. But North–oh, he hated that area.”
“Hard not to,” I said then quickly added, “given the history between arts and sciences and funding. But it was really pretty. There were fossils there. It was nice.”
“Yes, I’ve seen those myself. The architect is a bit better than this brutalism. At least phones work.”
“Sometimes,” I added. “Not that morning with me.”
“Huh.” He shrugged, and then ran his hand over his beard. “From what I recall, though, the architect who designed those buildings was related to the first one who did Hubert Hall, version 1.0.”
“Including the hallways?”
“I think so. They were brothers?” Maury shook his head. “No, couldn’t have been with the generational difference, especially in styles. Must have been father and son, or something like that. I think I remember the surnames being similar. Potter or Pohle or something like that. So yeah, father and son.” When he noticed me take a note, he added with a wry smile, “be sure to double-check my information, of course. I’m not exactly as much of a library as I used to be.”
I told him I would. Then I remembered the library. “What about that?”
“What about the library? It’s been here as long as I can remember.”
“Right. Who built it? Was it the father or the son?”
“That I don’t know, but I would assume the father. It hasn’t been renovated, though, aside from the tech updates. So maybe it’s the only place on campus that will stay still.”
“Maybe.” I wrote down ‘Library’ and underlined it several times. Then, as easily and as quickly as we spoke about the campus, we moved onto my PhD research. My dissertation was almost complete, and when it was, my time at this school would be coming to an end.
*
The third time the campus changed shape for me, I was prepared.
I was teaching a class in the Environmental Sciences building. It was closer to the center of campus, having been one of the first buildings in the expansion of the early 1990s. Everyone on campus back then had welcomed the addition. It was the early days of environmental awareness at a popular cultural level; the legwork in critical Sciences had already been done by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the 1960s, and so, having a building on an already liberal and progressive campus devoted to the green movement was easy to understand and push through budgetary approval.
It was also easy to make the building stunning. Filled with high glass windows and large, spacious foyers, there was clearly no fear of protestors here. Entirely one side of the foyer walls was covered in a make-shirt trellis, complete with waterfall that allowed whatever greenery on the trellis to bloom and grow and thrive. The staircase into the upper levels was open and allowed for complete viewing of the green wall. I loved looking at it up close–but those stairs gave me vertigo. I often took the elevators to my class on the third floor, or I took the back stairwell when there was a line-up for the elevator.
I was halfway through the spring semester when I noticed the contours of the building change. I took the stairwell to the third floor, but the doorway out read the second. I continued walking and added another flight, but came out at the fourth floor.
The third floor had disappeared.
I walked down to the building’s ground level and started again. The elevators took me to the third floor, but when I walked out, it was still the second. That was where all the offices, rather than classrooms, were so it was easy to recognize. I doubled back once again and stood in the foyer. Some of my students had already started to arrive, and seeing me, went over to say hello.
“Are you all right?” a girl named Deidre asked me. “You look a little pale, if you don’t mind me saying.”
I considered lying for a moment, saying I was sick, and cancelling the class. How could I get to the class if the floor didn’t seem to exist? But when I saw Shawn, another student of mine, take the free-floating stairs next to the green wall, and make it to the third floor without doubling back, I realized there was only one way to the room.
“I’m fine,” I told Deidre. “But will you walk with me? I don’t quite like heights.”
Deidre was one of those eager to please students, so she took me up on my offer without protest. I made a mental note to give her 100 for participation for the next six weeks, until this class was done, since I knew I’d be relying on her far more. We found the room together, as easy as pie, except that the nagging feeling of the floor disappearing again bothered me.
We were in the middle of Marilyn Robinson’s Gilead this week, a text about an absent father writing to his son who will not remember him, and it felt as if the campus was mocking me in some way. Or aligning in the best way possible. From one of the large glass windows in the room, as I read off the passage I wanted my students to analyze, I saw the library’s ornate edifice and tall, imposing structure.
The library, where nothing seemed to change. The library, where from its top-most floor, all of the campus could be visible.
I quickly finished my class, with ten minutes to spare, and dismissed them. Deidre stayed behind. “Do you need help getting down the stairs?”
“No thank you,” I told her. “Going down is always easier than going up.”
She nodded, and gave a silent promise to be there the next week. I knew it would not be a problem, though. The campus was going to right itself, even if I had to be the mediator between father and son.
*
My visits to the library, at first, were uneventful. I went to the top floor, studied the landscape, but still came back with all I’d seen before: a lot of nice greenery, a campus split in two, and those ever-present geese. I wandered through the stacks, trying to find all I could about the architects who built the campus, but only came up with names, the thinnest of biographies, and blueprints. Frederick and Philip Pohle. Father and son, much like Maury had said, and with different design schools influencing their work.
When Frederick had died, Philip took over his business, but left many clients unhappy with his attempts to become the Canadian Frank Lloyd Wright. He didn’t have enough ambition to take on that kind of legacy, however, or the proper work ethic, so most of his designs remained on paper. The only places that came to fruition were ones he inherited from his father: the campus extension, a renovated downtown building that I had never liked, and a hospital a town over that had since been torn down. Philip had no children of his own, and so the family business died with him.
I made photocopies of all the blueprints I could find, giving special attention to the campus extensions. I figured I could take those, at the very least, to Maury who might be able to help me piece the mystery together–but I soon realized the maps fit over one another. Not as a mere expansion of the campus, but as another layer over top. I took the photocopies out of the tray and made sure that what I’d seen in a glimpse could truly fit. Once I found the library on the blueprints, and used it as the centering anchor it was, the campuses aligned. It was perfect. They weren’t added on in a spatial way, but stacked up in geological time.
“Like those fossils,” I said aloud. The library was so quiet my voice, though a whisper, seemed to be a roar. Everyone in the study carrels had on headphones, so no one noticed. But I tip-toed around like a mouse, suddenly afraid that the secret was out.
After asking a librarian for tracing paper, I went into a study area and laid out the maps on top of one another. I traced around them, wondering if I could see the way in which floors and hallways had disappeared on me. I could make the maps work in some instances, but not in others.
Baffled, I logged into some of the online accounts for the school’s student body and found a message board. A handful of people described the campus as the most difficult to navigate they’d ever come across. The room I needed seemed to disappear, one person wrote, peaking my attention. It sounds crazy, but that’s what happened. I didn’t find it until a week later.
I started to link together online reports with my own experiences. Soon enough, when I flipped over the blueprint I’d traced, so it was now a mirror image on top of the older campus, the coordinates began to make sense. Father and son had designed the exact same building, but always in opposition.
So how to make them stop feuding, even after death? I wondered about this for a long time. It was only as the semester wore on, and Maury began to get more persistent about my dissertation, that I remembered his words of foresight and hindsight.
Don’t be like Prometheus, he wrote to me in an email. You don’t want to be repeating this year over and over, even if it seems like fun. You gotta move on and finish that degree.
But what about hindsight? I asked him in return. What if I realize now that I like the campus, and want to stay?
He didn’t answer me for a couple days. In the interim, I’d found the sole place of unbalance in my maps of the father and son campus. While the Arts campus had its own figure of Prometheus with a shot-put/fireball, the Science side of campus did not have such a figure. Only a blank area, where someone had put a trash can and where squirrels and geese congregated.
We can talk about alternative plans at your next meeting, Maury wrote back. It’s usually better to teach at a different school. Shows depth. But if you really want to stay, we can figure out a way to make it work.
I will be teaching at a different school, I thought. I’d been stuck on the father’s side of campus until that proctor exam. Frederick Pohle may have wanted me to, like the olden ways of graduate school, leave and set about on my own–but his son Philip had other plans. He was a bit more dynamic and interesting, if only on paper. He just needed more ambition and work ethic, something I knew I had in droves. If he only had his own monument to hindsight, maybe his father could be proud.
Then, after that, maybe the fighting could stop.
*
When I met with Maury a week later, I told him of my progress. He didn’t seem that surprised that my dissertation, once about the genre known as the campus novel and the subsequent works of Don DeLillo, had now become about the father and son feud that seemed to stretch on for generations in the ever-shifting landscape.
“I told you,” he said after I’d explained it all, including the pitch to get another statue to keep the men happy, “you should be a writer.”
“Fine. Yes, sure, this is what I’ll write my dissertation about, and it will help me get a job here. On Philip’s campus, though. It’ll be different that way.”
Maury didn’t say anything for a long time. He picked up the maps I’d given him, and the notes, including my sketch for the matching statue of Epimetheus on the other side. He was a flattened monument like the previous one on the other side, only he held a hammer in his hand rather than a shot-put/flame.
“I wanted the hammer to symbolize materialism,” I told Maury in the silence. “The fact that thought here comes after form, after the hammer blow. And I–“
“It’ll take a lot of funding to get this to go through,” he said, cutting me off. It was not mean, only a fact.
“That’s fine. I can help. I don’t know how to fund beyond a bake sale, though.”
Maury smiled. “You gotta learn grant writing soon. It’ll be a great part of your service record. And if you can pull off this statue, especially as a Canadian historical site, while also writing your dissertation, well, then, you’ll be a shoe-in as a prof here.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Don’t expect tenure, though,” he added quickly. “No one gets that anymore.”
I didn’t want tenure. I just wanted to teach in that building with the fossils. I wanted to see a statue of a flattened man, holding a hammer like Epimetheus, and melding the work of father and son into one.
*
A year, then two, went by. My dissertation passed with few revisions and I turned it into a book about the father and son team. I applied for a job teaching Writing and Communication to the Science and Math students, and was accepted after three rounds of interviews. Not with tenure, of course, but with a three-year contract.
My office is now in the M2 building, and overlooks the statue of Epimetheus on the campus.
Though sometimes, when I walk the same stairs that lead to the second floor, it disappears, I now know how to get it back. I call out for father and son to behave, to develop some hindsight.
Then I take the elevator.
It all sorts itself out in the end.
When the campus is truly temperamental, and foresight or hindsight get us nowhere, then I cancel the class I need to teach entirely. I tell them to go to the library instead, because that’s where I’ll be. I make sure I am on the top floor, looking down on both time and space, and generations of a family history at once. I look out at all that I’ve inherited, all that I can claim as my own, with the right map to understand where to go next.
When a student shows up, which sometimes happens and sometimes not, I show them the statues of Prometheus and Epimetheus, and they learn, for at least an hour, how to stay in one place.
Eve Morton 