The Ammonite Violin & Others (30 page)

The first one came when she was only fifteen years old, and it merely sat at the foot of her bed and watched her with its sunken coal-lump eyes. She was not afraid that night, and she has never yet been afraid of them since. They come with needs, with the unfathomable and insatiable hungers and desires of all dead things, but they do not come maliciously. And though she understands, instinctively, that they are all jealous of her flesh and of her ability to taste and smell and touch, envious of her every breath, she also understands that she is an unlikely banquet, and that the loss of her would be an almost incalculable loss to these uninvited visitors.

Sometimes, they bring her gifts, though she has never asked or expected anything from them. Once, a withered bouquet of violets, found afterwards on her pillow, and on another night, a page torn from a book of poetry by Longfellow, and after still another liaison, she found a blue China bowl of milk waiting in the hallway outside her bedroom door.

She was a sickly child, prone to unaccountable fits and agues, and her parents were convinced on more than one night that she would not live to see the dawn. Certainly, hearing the grim pronouncements of the physicians who attended her, they had not expected their daughter and only child to reach adulthood. But she did, and now she has outlived them both by almost fifteen years and grown to be a fit and sturdy woman, though still somewhat thin and of a paler complexion than she’d prefer.

One of the few times she has spoken with her spectral callers, she asked, “Why was I always so sick?”

And the ghost hesitated only for a moment, then replied in a voice like winter wind along shingled rooftops, “We have ever been near to you.”

Emboldened by its response, she asked, “Why, then, am I always well now, hardly ever suffering even so much as a runny nose?”

“Because,” the ghost told her, and she thought possibly the tone of its voice betrayed a hint of impatience, “we are ever near to you.”

Because you need me,
she thought, but would not have spoken those four words aloud. If they need her, she has come to need them at least as much, and she can no longer comprehend the tedium of an existence without their nightly company She is proud of her skill as a dressmaker and of her position in the shop on Hanover Street, but she knows that the work and the demands of her craft are hardly sufficient to give meaning to her life. She has seen and felt too much to live as others live, to be no more than a spinster and a sempstress dwelling alone in the high, old house in the city’s North End. And it is not necessary that she flaunt her certainty of her visitors’ need for her; it is enough to know they do, to sense, from time to time, their anxiety that they will come some evening or another and find her gone.

She has overhead whispers and gossip, in the shop and on the street, when others think she is not listening or out of earshot. “Such a shame she never married,” someone will sigh, feigning pity, pretending to sympathy. Or, “An odd one, that woman, and have you heard...?” and then there will be some hushed tale of strange lights from her windows or peculiar sounds heard in her presence. Perhaps the smell of dying flowers or brimstone whenever she passes by, and were it only
two
centuries earlier, she might be hauled before magistrates in powdered wigs to be interrogated, accused of congress with demons, found guilty of witchcraft, and then hung from the limb of a convenient tree. But, by chance or providence, she was born into an enlightened age of Science and Medicine and gas streetlights. So, usually, she ignores the whispers, because none of them even begin to suspect the truth, and none of them can steal the nights away from her.

She lies in bed, naked and unashamed of her nakedness, shivering but unmindful of the chill, and she watches the restless patterns the lamp throws upon the walls. Sometimes, they come to her as no more than shadows, and when she happens to consider the unperceived form that
casts
those shadows, there is a delicious twinge or prickling at the nape of her neck or deep in her belly. So often, it is not what she glimpses, but what she will never behold that seems to nourish the greatest revelations.

In her right hand, she cradles the page ripped from a volume of Longfellow and left upon her pillow, and she has underlined this passage:

Let us go forward, and no longer stay

In this great picture-gallery of Death!

I hate it! ay, the very thought of it!

 

Elsie. Why is it hateful to you?

 

Prince Henry. For the reason

That life, and all that speaks of life, is lovely

And death, and all that speaks of death, is hateful.

 

Elise. The grave is but a covered bridge, leading from light to light, through a brief darkness!

Often, she has wondered which one of them left it for her, and precisely what those lines may have meant to them, but she has never found the courage to ask any of the visitors. Lying there with the page crumpled and brittle in her hand, worn smooth by her fingers and all the nights she has held it, she broods over the truest meaning of the stanzas and whether they might hold within them any truth beyond the pretty conceits of all poets, great and minor and those who have died completely unknown. It might be that Elise has spoken the truth to the Prince, or it might be that the darkness of the grave runs on forever, that it is not a covered bridge at all, but a well bored through solid granite, which never again emerges into the light of day. Or, she thinks, it might be a deep reflecting pool, where the weight of souls bears them down to the grey-green half-light, through murk and silt, to settle amongst the knotted roots of water lilies, disturbing only the fitful slumber of turtles and newts.

In a corner, near the bedroom door, something stirs and is still again. She watches, but only from the edges of her vision, because sometimes they are shy, especially if they have never visited before. For the moment, this one seems hardly more than a shredded slip of lightlessness, not even as solid as the fleeting wisp of smoke when a candle has been snuffed. She smiles and lets the page of Longfellow slip from her lingers to the floor, and then she rolls onto her back and raises her knees, spreading her legs in a wordless act of invitation. She turns her head until her right cheek is pressed against the blanket, until she can once again keep her indirect watch upon that corner of the room. She wants to whisper some further, slight encouragement, but keeps quiet for fear that even the softest voice might be too much. This one will come, or it will not, and she can make no more overture than the simple offering of herself that has been made already For an instant, a span measured in shallow breaths and the uncontrollable metronome of heartbeats, she watches as the angles of the corner become somehow more acute than their usual ninety degrees. The portal swinging open, stretching and straining that only apparently fixed intersection of the room’s north and eastern walls, and she parts her knees the slightest bit more. What was only a slip or a smoky wisp has already taken on a more substantial form, flowing into this world from when- and wherever Nature or Super-Nature consigns that part of the human mind that survives death. Then the walls are merely plaster walls again, the corner no more or less than any corner in this house, but filled now with a roiling, slowly revolving material, the singularly gossamer filaments of a being sewing itself together with naught but longing and urgency and dim memories. It is not exactly translucent, nor quite genuinely opaque, and its shifting surface glints with a greasy sort of polychromasia.

And this is when she always looks away, prudently turning to face the ceiling, instead, averting her gaze, for there is something too horribly vulnerable about her visitors at this stage of their manifestation. Neither quite here nor there, half in and half out, raw and exposed to any prying, curious eyes that might fall on them and stare without understanding cr mercy. The lamp on the bedside table flares suddenly, glowing almost painfully bright, and then it gutters as if an unfelt draft is about to extinguish it. But soon enough the flame grows steady again and retreats to its former, fainter brilliance, and she is grateful that the presence in the corner has not seen fit to douse the wick and leave her blinking at afterimages and waiting in the dark.

That is kind of you, Sir or Madam,
she thinks, and at once there is a dry, fluttering noise, the rattle of fallen leaves or castoff feathers blown across parched earth or cobblestones, and it may or may not have been anything meant for her ears. She knows that the apparitions hear her thoughts, sometimes, but other times, it seems her mind is closed to them. Or that they simply choose not to listen. She lies as still as she may, at ease and unafraid and open to the approach of her coalescing guest, waiting for this night’s ministrations to begin in earnest. She takes a deep breath, filling herself with the air in the bedroom which has become laden with all the familiar, astringent odors of ghosts, and exhales through her nostrils.

And were there anyone alive—a sister or mother, a friend or father confessor—to whom the sempstress might ever divulge these unions, she would readily admit that while the visitors do not frighten her, the reactions of her own body to them often do. Which is to say, the unconscious reflexes of her sympathetic flesh to the appetites and yearnings of non-corporeal intelligences, and no doubt it would leave the spiritualists in awe, and surely they would deem her possessed of some mighty gift or talent. It has been her experience that people are often eager to praise or envy that which they themselves have never had to endure. The cold begins in her belly and rises quickly into her chest, that ache, that unfolding bloom of frost, as though she is about to cough up the dirty slush of a January street.

She swallows, blinks, and sees that it is standing at her bedside now—no, not
it,
but
him,
for the features have solidified into the face of a young man. There is a keen sadness to his expression, which is unusual; rarely do they show her sorrow, regardless of what the living might expect of those bereft of blood and bone. More often than not, there is relief that they have found her, that she has welcomed their arrival, and so their eyes beam and glisten for her, all gratitude and release. They wear the echoes of smiles and the faint remembrances of joy, no moaning phantoms dragging the burden of clattering chains, no weeping haunts. So this gentleman’s downcast countenance is unexpected, and she almost asks him aloud to tell her, to talk if he can, and if, perchance, talking might help, but then she catches herself and keeps the questions to herself. If he wishes her to know, he will explain, when and how it suits him. The ghost leans nearer, and she knows there would be tears if the dead did not, inevitably, forget how to cry.

And here is the same fact they all bring to her, and it might overwhelm or disappoint or insult another, but never yet has it lessened her enthusiasm for these encounters. The fact—they do not come to see
her
, but, rather, they come to see what she can
show
them. She is merely the instrument capable of sounding those old tones which they have dragged themselves up from pine boxes and moldering, worm-gnawed sod to hear, just as they are merely the musicians capable of playing her. In this improbable symphony, as in all orchestrations, neither one is anything without the ability of the other. He reaches out, and she can almost feel his fingertips brush gently across and through her erect nipples, and trapped there within the bower of her ribcage, the cold has redoubled and swelled into a blizzard. She can hold it inside just so long, and never a single second more.

He kisses her then, and his lips are flavored with dust and the clicking language of ebony beetles. She does not shut her eyes, and he does not close his, and so they share this one moment between them before she can no longer forestall what he has
truly
come here for. But it is enough, and she stops fighting what cannot be defeated, as the ice inside flows effortlessly along the trough of her throat, answering his unspoken pleas and rising up to meet her visitor.

“Death,” her father says, and he smiles so that the word does not seem so ominous. “Whenall is said and done, it is hardly more than a covered bridge.”

And here she is standing down on the street, staring up at the gauzy white drapes that cover her bedroom windows like cataracts obscuring blind and aged eyes. A carriage passes behind her, the horses’ iron-shod hooves throwing sparks as they strike the pavement.

And here she is only seven years old, lost in the throes of a fever, and her mother is sitting next to her bed, holding her hand and wiping her face with a cool, damp cloth.

“Life, and all that speaks of life, is lovely,” her mother says, and even though she sounds very afraid, the authority in her voice will brook no argument and accept no compromise. “Do you hear me, young lady? Death, and all that
speaks
of death, is hateful. Do you understand?”

“Yes, mother,” the sempstress whispers, keeping her eyes on the inconstant shadows hunched all around, pressing in from the years she has not yet lived.

“So, you’re staying
here
,” her mother tells her, “with us. You’re not going
anywhere
.”

“No,” the child replies, the child who knows what lies ahead because these are only recollections seen through the distorting glass of time. “I would never leave.”

The frowning young man with sad grey eyes touches her face with intangible hands, and a glacier pours across her tongue and teeth and out her open mouth.

“A shame she never married,” mutters the greengrocer’s wife, who has five children and loves none of them. And the sempstress thinks,
But I
am
a married woman, and my husbands and my wives and all my children an scattered across the ages and always seeking me.

“An odd one,” sighs the dour, scowling wife of a butcher or a banker or a Presbyterian minister. “You wonder what she gets up to, left all alone in that abominable old house. Oh, I’ve heard stories, but it’s nothing I’d care to repeat, being a Christian woman.” From the shingle of a rocky bcach, she watches as the day draws to its sunset end and the advancing tide rises by slow degrees from the eternal, devouring sea; her father laughs and places an especially pretty shell or rounded pearl of blue beach glass in her palm.