Authors: Geoff North
He staggered into his study, spilling rum
from his glass onto the carpet and not giving a damn. He sank into his chair
and finished the drink off.
I haven’t even cried yet, but I’ve
found time to get good and drunk.
He shoved his half-finished manuscript off the
desk, letting it fall to the floor with the spilled booze and folded his arms
across the cool, mahogany surface. He lay his spinning head down and closed his
eyes. Maybe he’d consumed enough to die from alcohol poisoning…he hoped he had.
“
I’m sorry you
feel so sad.”
He lifted his weary head and saw the
ghostly girl in front of the desk. Frilly grey dress with a white face and pale
blue eyes.
Eyes are blue this time, not black…not
so scary.
“You picked a fine time to visit,” he
slurred. “I’m too drunk to be scared, too fuckin’ sad to care.”
“You shouldn’t cuss like that in front of a
little kid.”
He blinked twice, forced her and the rest
of the room to stop spinning. The hairs on his arms started to rise and he felt
for the first time how unnaturally cold it was in the study. He leaned back and
the swivel chair bumped into the window frame behind him. He shook his head,
rubbed at his eyes furiously and took another look. She was still there, now
sitting in the chair across from the desk, the same chair he could’ve sworn she
had sat in from time to time over the last nine years without being seen.
“You’re right--I shouldn’t. How did you
know I was sad and not just stinking drunk?”
“My daddy used to drink a lot, and he was
sad a lot, too. I can just tell.”
“Your daddy was Michael McFarlane?”
“Dr. McFarlane,” she corrected him like a
proud child only could.
“And what’s your name?” Hugh
was
scared. It wasn’t a ‘terrified piss your pants’ kind of scared, more of an ‘I
feel like dying, so who really gives a damn’ type of scared. He would be polite
and treat the spectral visitor with respect. Even through the haze of
inebriation and self-loathing grief, he was still afraid and curious.
“Mary.”
“What happened to your mother and brother?”
Stupid question. She’s a ghost that’s
been stuck in this house for forty years. How would she know?
She shrugged her narrow shoulders,
obviously un-offended. “Been a long time since I seen them…or daddy.”
“Your daddy isn’t here with you?” He
indicated the house by turning his head and moving his eyes around. Her little
body shuddered and Hugh’s heart ached for her. She was about to cry. “I’m sorry
that your sad too, Mary.”
Her face brightened and she stood up from
the chair excitedly. “I won’t be sad much longer, I’m going off to see daddy
again real soon.”
“But didn’t your dad--well, didn’t he hurt
you?”
“Grown-ups do all sorts of bad things; it
doesn’t mean they don’t love as much deep down.”
From the mouths of babes, Hugh thought.
Kids could be so forgiving, even dead ones. “Aren’t you going to visit me
anymore, Mary? Where do you plan on going? Where is your daddy?”
“He’s waiting in another place. He told me
that when the time came I could go there and be with him. He’s not angry
anymore. He won’t hurt me again. Nobody hurts nobody else there.”
Nothing brought sobriety on faster than
talking with a ghost, Hugh realized. His mouth was dry, and he could feel a
headache coming on, but he no longer felt sick in his gut, his senses were
sharp once again. “
Where
is that? Why are you going now after so long?”
“Because I’m not going by myself. Someone’s
coming with me.” Ben crawled out from behind the chair. He was wearing the same
pajamas Cathy had dressed him in on the last night of his life. In one hand he
clutched a fuzzy blue blanket with elephants and chimpanzees all over it. He
stood up on shaky legs and grinned at his father.
“Kernel go woof-woof!”
Hugh tried to stand but couldn’t quite
manage it. He fell to his side, clutching at the desk for support. He called
out to his son, sobbing.
Ben stuck his head around the corner and
giggled playfully. He’d loved to play hide and seek. Hugh held his hand out and
Ben took it. His fingers were soft and warm. He ran into his father’s arms and
Hugh hugged him to his chest, smelling the fresh smell of his wispy blonde
hair. “Oh, Ben, I’m so sorry…I’m so very sorry.”
“Gotta go, da.”
“Go? No, please stay with me! I need
you…mommy needs you. We love you, Ben.”
The little boy ran back to stand in front
of the desk with Mary. He wasn’t afraid. She took his hand and smiled down at
him.
“Please don’t take him from me,” Hugh said.
He’d gotten back to his feet, but he was too weak to do any more. He leaned
down against the desk, his arms now the only thing holding him up.
Mary was looking at him. Her eyes were kind
and gentle. “Don’t be sad. I’ll make sure he gets to where he’s supposed to go.”
“Kernel go woof-woof!” Ben repeated.
“Kernel what?” Hugh tried to understand
what his son was saying, desperate to decipher what he knew would be his final
words to him. A dog began to bark from down the hallway. No, he thought,
swinging his head around. It was coming from outside the study window. It was a
deep bark, a familiar, friendly old sound. It was coming from everywhere.
He turned back around and Mary McFarlane
was gone.
And so was Ben.
The barking had stopped.
Hugh walked slowly throughout the house
knowing full well he wouldn’t find a thing. He was all alone in a now empty
home. Cathy was at his parents, and Ben was in a better place.
He ended up on the couch and closed his
eyes. No more visitors.
“Colonel goes woof-woof,” he muttered
before drifting off to sleep.
And as he slept, Hugh dreamed. There was a
field of wheat, its golden stalks waving softly in a cool summer breeze. Buffy
white clouds drifted along against a sky of clear blue, each resembling the
faces of people he’d once known that had left the world before their time,
others who had lived their lives to the fullest.
He could hear the laughter of a little boy
through the soft ruffling hiss of wheat.
His boy.
A dog barking.
His
dog.
He could see its furry tail bobbing and wagging above the stalks,
chasing after the head full of brilliant blonde hair. That’s all he could see
of them. It was all he needed to see. The wheat swayed and grew before his eyes,
blocking out the sky and turning color from golden yellow to a deep ripe brown.
The laughing and the barking were smothered out by it, consumed in its heavy,
rusted smell. The dream had ended, but Hugh was still awake, standing in that floorless,
featureless world of depressing singular color.
“Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
The Voice in the Brown.
“You knew he would die again! You could’ve
warned me! I could’ve stopped it.”
“I knew no such thing, and even I did, and
I had warned you, what good what it have done? If it wasn’t a plastic red nail
one night, it would have been a bottle of floor cleaner the next. And if you
were ready for that, he would’ve wandered out onto the road next week and been
hit by a car.”
“Bullshit.” But Hugh knew it wasn’t.
“Some people live and some people die,
there isn’t anything you or I can do to change it.”
“I saved Billy’s life.”
“His life isn’t over yet…accidents happen.”
Hugh could feel the grip he had on ‘knowing
everything that was going to happen’ begin to slip away. It was almost a
relief. “What about the people who died that shouldn’t have? Thomas Nelson,
Mrs. McDonald…Bob…Mandy Wood.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever
heard. What would’ve happened if you’d stabbed all those people with a knife instead?”
Hugh thought for a second. Was it a trick
question? “I would’ve gone to jail?”
“
Besides
that.”
“They would’ve died.”
“Bingo. It’s easy to kill, that’s why the
human race is so good at it. And it doesn’t always have to be murder…good
intentions can kill just as easily…you had plenty of those, hey Hugh?”
The road to hell—
The voice continued before he could finish
the thought. “Shit, Thomas Nelson never murdered Herbert McDonald; he really
did fall from that bridge by accident.”
“But Nelson was cheating with his
wife—everyone knew it! Why did he come after us, try and murder us?”
“McDonald
knew
Nelson was banging
his wife, hell, they used to have threesomes all the time! I don’t blame him
for coming after you. Probably knew nobody in town would believe his side of
the story. Mrs. McDonald would never admit to such a scandal. Oh yeah, and
Nelson was a crazy asshole…that might have had something to do with it.”
Four people dead because I believed the
town gossip.
They were both silent for a while. Hugh began
to wonder if the Voice had left him all alone in the brown. It was a terrible,
claustrophobic feeling, like sinking in the middle of an ocean at night,
holding your breath, seconds of air left. “Was Mary McFarlane the reason that
house never burned down in 1979? Were we meant to move in there?”
“Now that is a very good question. Maybe
you are beginning to think of others before yourself.”
“Can you answer it or not?”
The voice sighed. “Poor little Mary died
twice in that house. First, at the hands of her father, and then when the house
burnt down in ‘79. Her soul was bound to the place, you know? When the building
went up in smoke, she went up with it. Hell of a way for a kid’s lost spirit to
go…all alone and scared.”
“So what changed when I came back? I didn’t
do anything that would’ve kept the place standing.”
“You did something. Maybe you had a cold
that fall and passed it on to the kid that was meant to torch the place. He
could’ve been home that night, too sick to be out burning houses down. Maybe you
just looked at someone funny that Halloween morning, and that someone got
talking to someone else about it, and that someone else said something to so
and so, and so and so mentioned it to what’s his name, and what’s his name may
have gotten spooked because he’d heard certain kids were wise to his plan, so
he decided to light up a few bales on the highway instead of an empty old
house. Maybe you--”
“Okay, okay, I get it. A million things
could’ve happened.”
“It doesn’t really matter
how
the
house stayed standing after you went back, Hugh. I think maybe you should ask
why. Mary may have stayed in that house for another thirty years if it wasn’t
for Ben dying. Time really has no meaning when you’re stuck in those final few
moments between life and death.”
“I –I don’t understand.”
The voice continued, softer now, more
sympathetic. “Her dad
choked
her to death. Sure, he was drunk, didn’t
mean to take it that far, but just try and imagine what that could do to a kid.
Wouldn’t you be afraid to go skipping off into the afterlife if your dad had
done that to you? She had no reason to go on. She was too devastated to get on
with things.”
Hugh recalled what the little girl had said
in his study. “But she said her dad was waiting for her, that he wasn’t angry
anymore.”
“Took a long time for the good doctor to
forgive himself. He ended his own life and that was another whole shit-load of
baggage for him to sort through. So what you end up with is a lot of fear and
feelings of betrayal on side, a lot of self-loathing and guilt on the
other...Ben is what finally brought them together. By helping your son, they
finally found each other again.”
Hugh began to tremble, it quietly turned
into an uncontrollable full-body hitch. The kind of motions kids make before
letting it all out. And out it came. He sobbed and cried and screamed. He
struck out at the brown air with his arms.
The voice waited until Hugh played himself
out and sunk to his knees. “Feel better?”
Hugh wiped his eyes for all the good it did
him. There was never anything to see here. “I don’t want a bunch of fucking
ghosts looking after him. He’s my son! I want him back.”
“Ben is happy—you’ve seen that. Go back,
Hugh. Go back and live your life. You’re at the halfway point now. This was the
hardest part. Things can only get better now.”
“Better.” Hugh spat the word out.
“You’ve lived through some pretty rough times;
you know these things take time.”
“Who
are
you?”
“No time for that now. You had better wake
up.”
The brown began to fade around him, the
color changing slowly to a dark, sickly grey. His eyes stung.
The television had been left on and Hugh
could see a little girl with pigtails running down a field of golden grass and
wild flowers, skipping and grinning. An old re-run of
Little House on the
Prairie
was just ending. The picture was fuzzy, out of focus, and his eyes
hurt like hell. At first he thought he was feeling the first effects of a
massive hangover, but then he breathed in and coughed, violently. He wheezed
for another breath but it only produced a second hacking fit. The living room
was thick with swirling grey-black smoke. The television suddenly blinked off,
a final image of little Mary Ingles jumping in the air with her arms held out
burnt into his watering eyes. The power had cut out. Now he could hear the fire
raging somewhere above his head.
He rolled onto the floor and crawled
through the kitchen, heading stubbornly for his study.
Get out of the house, you fool! Get out!
He ignored the smart voice in his head and
continued down the hallway, sucking in the last bit of clean air along the
hardwood floor. Away from the front door, toward his latest manuscript, toward
his diary. He
had
to save his diary.
An orange glow danced off the floor and
walls all around him, muddied by the smoke pressing down, swirling inches above
his face. The flames were working down the stairs, licking at the banister and
consuming the carpet.
Not like the fire in the old farmhouse.
I can’t beat this one out.
He made it to the study door, took in on
last breath and rose to his knees for the metal knob. He slammed it shut behind
him, thankful for not being too drunk (hours?) before to have left it open.
Smoke had found its way in here too, he thought, gasping for breath. There were
dozens of invisible cracks and broken seals in an old house like this, he had
less than minutes left. There was a loud crash from above, the room shook and a
white tile fell free and bounced off his shoulder. Hugh could imagine the bow
in the ceiling above his head, could hear the mass of burning timber and
plaster, the creaking of nails trying to hold it all up and failing. The attic
had collapsed into the second floor. That dirty old fake-leather couch was on its
way back down, a bitch to get up there in the first place, a yellow flaming
bastard now, with a shortcut in mind. The whole place was coming down, and
there was only one floor left to go.
It was dark, but he knew the layout of the
room well enough to side step the chair Mary McFarlane had sat in. He reached
for the desk, worked his hands along its surface, knocking a glass to the
floor, a cup filled with pencils and pens, the cool plastic edge of his
computer monitor. He flung out the narrow top drawer and found his diary. He
tucked it into the front of his pants and went to feel for the manuscript.
The house groaned and shook, a series of
loud snaps from out in the living room made him jump. Then he heard the distant
wail of sirens. The Braedon Volunteer Fire Department was on its way. There was
nothing left on the desk to feel for. Where was his manuscript? Why weren’t the
sirens getting any louder? The roar of the fire was drowning out all other
sounds, like a freight train coming straight down.
Not minutes--seconds left. Where was the
goddamned manuscript?
On the floor, in front of the desk!
Where you pushed it off…
He heard the door suck up into its frame.
The fire was that close, searching for more oxygen to feed on. A supporting
beam in one of the study’s inner walls snapped free, as loud as shotgun blast.
Hugh grabbed the heavy monitor and hurled it through the window. Cold air
rushed in and he half-climbed, half-fell through the jagged opening and onto
the grass below.
The house came down the rest of the way, crushing
his computer, his printer, his favorite writing chair, his desk…his unfinished
manuscript.
Fuck it…wasn’t that good anyway.
Two men dressed in bulky yellow suits
scooped him up and dragged him back to the safety of the street. Scott Harder
and Willy Jelfs, he thought dimly, good stand-up type of guys. Their orange
faces were coated with sweat and streaked with soot. They’d been here awhile, probably
started fighting the blaze while he was still sleeping on the couch. It was a
small town and everybody knew they’d been staying out at his parents since the
accident. The volunteer firemen must have assumed he was with his grieving
wife. That or maybe they considered the place was too far gone to attempt any
kind of rescue.
More fire trucks were arriving on the
scene. Their sirens hurt his ears, and a man with a bullhorn ordered the
growing crowd to make way. There were dozens of neighbors out on the street.
They were in their pajamas and bathrobes and fuzzy slippers. More people were
running up the road and down the back lanes to watch the old McFarlane house burn
down, their eyes open wide and glistening. Mouths agape like cavemen presented
for the first time with the gift of flame. Nothing brought a tiny community
together better than a big bonfire.
Hands were groping all over him, feeling
his forehead, shaking his shoulders.
“Are you alright? “
“How’s your breathing?”
“Were you burnt anywhere?”
“I’m okay.” He felt down for the diary. It
was still there. “I’m alright.”
The poking and prodding continued. Hugh
looked around at the gathering of concerned onlookers. A few were whispering
back and forth. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he could imagine
the questions being asked.
“Why isn’t he with his wife?”
“It’s a shame about their little boy…now
this?”
“What was he doing here all alone?”
Wonderful, Hugh thought.
They probably think I started the fire.