a
friend.
Author unknown,
As Evening Falls
“UV rays diminishtheir energy, which is why you tend to make stronger contact at night. They are sometimes more responsive if you’re dressed from their era. To most people, they’re invisible, but just about anybody has the potential to glimpse oneifthey’ve been awake for too long but their brain still feels sharp. Something about that particular state opens the mind up to seeing beyond our physical plane. Encounters usually get shrugged off as ‘seeing things,’ though.”
Morgan requires very little from a conversation partner, happy to chatter enough for the both of us. “Interesting.” I tap the tail of a classic Kit-Cat Klock on the stairway’s landing. Vintage to me, but modern by Davilla standards, this clock must have been a gift from a fellow trespasser. The minutehand ticks once, in response, before swinging back to its broken sentry at two thirty. Morgan removes it from the wall, sliding it into his backpack; in the clock’s place, he hangs a small painting of a sailboat.
When we reach the top, a long hallway is spackled blue with a shine like moonlight although such a thing is impossible, for it’s a new moon tonight. The air is warmer up here, thicker, as if holding its breath.
“A common misconception about ghosts,” Morgan goes on, “is that they mostly stick to old, historic sites. Lonely farmhouses. Abandoned prisons, psychiatric facilities, funeral homes. Not true! Ghosts can pop up anywhere, and they move freely, changing residences whenever they feel like it. Ghosts like comfort zones. The house they grew up in, or a movie theater they used to love visiting. Sites that brought them joy when they were alive. Disney World is a billion times more haunted than any morgue.”
“Then we probably won’t find anyone here,” I point out. “Does this seem like a comfort zone to you?”
“To somebody, yes, I think it was. Who knows what this place looked like, once upon a time? Based on multiple eyewitness accounts, there have to besomeghosts established in this house.”
The second floor holds three bedrooms and a bathroom. Bedroom number one is empty save for a glass bottle on the windowsill, half filled with loose dirt. The carpet has been partially torn up, revealing wood floors with scorch marks.
Bedroom number two contains a little girl’s tea table, but the two chairs accompanying it sit on the opposite side of theroom, facing a cheval mirror with dark speckles across its surface like lichen. I step closer to the mirror. Morgan takes a miniature piano out of his bag and lifts its lid, and the charming little music box begins to play “Wiegenlied” by Johannes Brahms.
Years ago, I heard Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34, by Johannes Brahms and became besotted with the pianist, which only increased when I saw a picture of Johannes in his younger days. This is not the first time I’ve been swept away by somebody I’ve never met, not even knowing what they looked like or caring if they were already dust in a grave. After devouring a collection of short stories calledThe Barnum Museumby Steven Millhauser, and, in particular, the tale “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” I was half in love with the author. He was, at that time, a septuagenarian.
I look at Morgan as the notes of “Wiegenlied” tinkle around us like glass chimes, and he glows even rosier in my view.
I wait until he retreats from the room, investigating the bathroom across the hall, and touch my fingertips to the warped ones in the glass. Daring something to happen. For the expression in my reflection to change; to see the flickers of a sinister Victorian child in a white dress, moving closer with every blink. I wait, anticipating, and then—
A black blur streaks across the mirror, behind me. I whirl. “Was that you, Morgan?”
“Did you say something?” he calls from the bathroom.
My eyes sweep the corner where I saw the blur: with the angles of the room and the position of the doorway, there’s no chance it was the reflection of a bird flying past the window.The spookiest thing about this house, somehow, is that the windows are all so tiny, their placements random. Some are near the ceiling, others close to the floor. None of them are centered, and the size of them reminds me of a jail cell.
We’re in the dark, alone, in a creepy, isolated location. We’re primed for fear. Our imaginations are doing half the work, so all we need now is an external trigger: whether it be wind causing a door to creak, a mouse rustling papers, or a distant noise contorted by echoes.
Oh, how Iadorea good scare.
The bathroom is my favorite room of the house so far. It’s got an oval stained-glass window, a rush of impossible moonlight tinting the clapboard walls and tile floor green. The bathtub isn’t claw-foot, sadly, but itdoeshave rings of rust around the drain and a stain that vaguely resembles a handprint, minus the fingers. The seventies-floral shower curtain is cut in half, suspended two feet short of the tub. The sink has been wrenched out of the wall, exposing the dark hole of a long pipe, and a spider scuttling out.
A faint sigh expels from the pipe.
I stick my ear against it. “What are you doing?” Morgan asks, leaning in.
“Listen.” My eyes close. I count the beats: three, six, nine. “It’s as if the house isbreathing.”
“Get away, it might be the house’s mouth.” He pauses. “Wait. Do you feel that? Come here.”
I join him. He passes his hand through midair, then jolts back. “It’s cold in that spot.”
He’s right. “Ooooh. Fun.” I search the walls for a vent, ahole in the wall for air to blast through. I do find a hole in the ceiling, which is the likely culprit. Happiness dances through me to have found the source. I love an aha moment, pinning down thewhyandhow.
“Bathroom on the second floor,” Morgan reports to his Dictaphone, “contains a cold spot about the height and width of an adult human. Corroborated by Zelda Tempest, paranormal expert.” He measures the temperature with a thermometer, numbers erratically rising and dipping, ranging from eighty-one degrees to sixty-four.
“I’m not a paranormal expert,” I insist. “And I think your thermometer isn’t working.”
He smiles as if I’ve made a joke. To his Dictaphone, he says, “I’m Morgan, and this is Zelda. We are not here to hurt you. We’re here to learn more about you, and if we can, we’d like to help you. Can you please tell us your name?” He holds the recorder out, toward the cold spot.
