3 a.m. Somewhere, most likely the foyer, a hound bayed an aria of melancholia, an unrequited plea to the sterling orb that owned her heart. O, cold, loveless Moon!
Margaret knew the routine. The night music would continue until at least 3:45 a.m. She got up, grateful to briefly escape Tallulah’s permanent scowl, and made her way past the grandfather clock and Persephone’s watchful eye, past Okka’s prehistoric snoring, and into her homey kitchen.
The fridge door, burdened by pickles, eggs, butter, four kinds of mustard and three of hot sauce, including one labeled Beelzebub’s Butthole, hung wide open for all the world to see. In fact, Margaret’s view of the gastronomical porn was only partly obscured by the broad translucent backside of one Gideon Chiswattle Hawley IV of Uxleyshire, Esq.
She’d Googled it on her phone. Around the time an estate called Uxleyshire existed, an “esquire” was ranked just below a knight – shining armor, horse, jousting, and the rest – even though the age of chivalry had already passed. In Atlanta these days, the honorarium was as insubstantial as the late Lord Hawley’s current physicality or his manners. Late also seemed like an odd word, given the current circumstances in her kitchen. Persistent might be a better choice. Persistent and annoying, like the others.
“I am nigh on becoming death’s head on a mop-stick, but a modest repast shall restore me to vim and vigor,” Hawley chortled, poking through the beer and soda six-packs and the leftover baked ziti from Maggiano’s. “Your larder shames the very crowned heads of Europe, madam. No wonder old George hated to see you colonists go. Nasty business that.” He managed to levitate the doggie bag over to the microwave, which he set for three minutes. Margaret deeply regretted having shown him how to operate the appliances, as it had caused her food bill to skyrocket.
The microwave came on with a faint hum, causing her stalwart kitchen sentinel to effervesce and pop like an old TV show. “And that doesn’t hurt you?”
He patted his waistcoat-covered belly. “Fret not, madam. I am touched by a trifling tickle only.” She ignored the “madam,” since Lord Hawley (probably) didn’t consider her to be a street wench. In any case, a bruised ego was a minor issue compared to watching Lord Hawley eat. He preferred to dematerialize “for privacy.” She watched forkfuls of delicious steaming ziti rise and cross the rainbow bridge into his mouth, hanging mid-air for a macabre display of mastication before vanishing altogether. It must be liberating to know one cannot choke to death a second time.
Preternatural bio-physics remained a mystery, and Margaret was content to leave it that way.
After savoring a forbidden Newport 100 on the back porch, Margaret returned to the kitchen to clear up Lord Hawley’s mess. He was worse than Henry, somehow managing to drip marinara over the tabletop, two chairs, the floor, and her new bees-and-berries curtains. Her scullery chores done, she headed back to bed.
She passed the girls’ old room, with its posters of boy bands and stuffed animals herded onto the bed, still waiting for a hug. They weren’t the only ones. She needed to call Lyda and Billie soon. Maybe they’d answer. Old memories hung around like – Yes, they certainly do. The girls had been little fireballs of joy and nonsense. They had grown and blossomed, cooled and darkened, not bothering to let their mother know why. And then they’d left.
Returning to bed, Margaret kicked off her fuzzy orange slippers and got herself halfway under the covers when she felt her face redden. Tallulah’s judgmental glare outshone the July Moon, admonishing her to abandon any thoughts of pleasure. In her day, Tallulah had been an acolyte of Phyllis Schlafly, embracing that Gorgon whose glower petrified any who dared explore attraction outside the bounds of church-sanctioned procreation.
The joke was on Tallulah. In this house, carnal passion is tits up.
To confirm that fact, Margaret reached over to Henry’s silent lump in the bed and petted it. Her bloodshot eyes widened, and then they narrowed. Pillows.
She used her marital radar to trace Henry to the hall bathroom. Trying the knob, she sighed, “Hank, come to bed.” Pressing her forehead against the door, she added, “No more experiments. We’re full to the rafters with ghoulies, shades, and haints. I’ve turned on the ‘No Vacancy’ sign.” She got no answer through the door, though she could hear movement on the other side.
Margaret reached behind her to the hall table, fumbled open the drawer and found a tiny screwdriver, which doubled as a burglar’s tool. As she slipped it into the lock, easily tripping the release, the door opened and Henry brushed past her.
“Nature called,” he said with a glib half-yawn.
She responded bluntly, “Stop drinking beer after dinner. And why didn’t you use our bathroom?” The one four feet from our bed.
“I… I like privacy.”
Privacy again. What could he be doing in there at nearly four in the morning? Could he even still do that? She took a different tact. “You know they can walk through walls, right?”
“Ha. I think this room is off limits.”
There was no logic to his statement, but then again, none of this business made sense to her.
Henry kissed her on the cheek and trudged back to bed, and she followed. Spooning, she reached around and under his elastic waistband. Nope. Out of order.
In the gloom of the bedroom they’d shared for decades, a bitter presence in tweed moved closer, bringing with it the smell of old lady body powder and shame. It was almost upon them. The spirit hovered inches above the marital bed, taking in the view.
“Fuck off, Tally!” Margaret growled.
A pair of cats-eye glasses fixed the couple with a stare of rhinestone reproach before their owner resumed her post at the foot of the bed.
I bet you died alone.
Ten minutes later, Henry was legitimately snoring, and Tallulah had dimmed a bit. Margaret was tempted to flip her off but was afraid she’d shriek. She did that sometimes.
Was eternity all about going around finding things to be incensed about? Margaret hoped not. Please don’t let me wander the Earth in leopard yoga pants, muttering old grievances for a trillion years. If that’s the game, I’d rather transmigrate into a potted fern.
Margaret slowly extricated herself from under the covers. Barefoot this time, she padded back to the hall bathroom. Henry hadn’t stuffed anything into his waistband, and he wasn’t the type to stick contraband anywhere else on his person. That meant his toy was in the bathroom.
Twice before she’d taken the odd wooden amulet from him. She’d even tried to burn it on the gas stove, but the damned thing wouldn’t light. He’d caught her and grabbed the amulet back. Why, why had he bought that hunk of junk from some old crone at the Shoppe of Wonderments in Little Five Points?
She checked the main compartment of the vanity. It was the obvious spot. Henry was not one for scouting out elaborate hiding places. This was the man who hid gifts on the same upper shelf of his closet, the man who bought her the same combo of chocolates and cheap jewelry every anniversary. She had the waistline and a jewelry box full of gold-plated hoop earrings to prove it.
Her hand ran through the familiar bathroom supplies until it found the hated lump of wood. She turned on the mirror light and took a closer look. The amulet was as she remembered it. There was no charring, just an egg-sized curio vaguely resembling a human face peering out from a bush or pinecone or something. The object was neither hot nor cold, smooth nor rough, light nor hefty. For all its banality, this little splinter was the cause of her headaches.
She put it back where she found it.
She was too tired to plan her next move, so she made her way back to her husband’s side. A few steps from the bedroom door, the air suddenly cooled. Gooseflesh covered Margaret’s arms and breasts. In the darkness and clutter of the hall there appeared a faint green miasma. From this there coalesced a ghastly shape, slowly revealing itself into a massive Great Dane, all bulk and purpose, its eyes alive with an inhuman excitement. The devil dog charged directly at her, leveling its nose like a knight pointing its lance at his opponent. The creature loped with remarkable speed and, faster than she could dodge, it found its vulnerable target.
“Hwoofpth!” Doubled over, Margaret took a moment to recover. She pulled the dog’s nose from her crotch. “Yes, Ollie, I love you too.” He reeked of squirrel and muddy canine merriment. Kissing the foul beast’s head delivered an uncertain sensation of contact. He may not have been her dog in life, but his spirit had won her over with his child-like hijinks – or maybe it was that she missed that kind of rough play.
Sir Oliver Bartholomew Pendragon panted and slapped his tail on the floorboards hard enough to split them asunder. Then, he simply vanished back into the darkness. The house was still and settled, except for two nagging sounds: someone prying open the refrigerator door again and someone else snoring loud enough to fell a mastodon.
From above the grandfather clock, Persephone’s twin flaming emeralds took it all in before she issued forth with a fang-framed yawn. The incorrigible Bengal blinked languidly and curled herself into a sleep ball. No poof! No vanishing act. Persephone was part of this earthly realm – at least as much as any living cat was.
Margaret took her cue and went to bed but got little sleep.
***
Daylight brought some relief. The others were gone. Betty the Bassett had finished her moonlight serenade and dissipated like morning dew, leaving only the lingering scent of dog farts. Tallulah offered a brief and strangely attenuated sermon against “reckless errands of the heart” before she too slid between here and there. The only sign of Lord Hawley was a heap of thoroughly denuded chicken bones on the kitchen tiles.
They would stay gone, she knew, until the twilight called them back. Well, most of them were gone. Not Okka of Spotted Deer Valley. Okka basked in the summer sun in his Barcalounger, his bearskins coordinating nicely with the soft leather. The uncanny rules eluded Margaret. Maybe his persistence of being had something to do with the frost stubbornly clinging to his hair and beard and the bluish cast of his skin. Okka lacked the elocution to relate his life story, but she imagined his physical body was stuck in a glacier somewhere, forever poised between life and death. This allowed his non-corporeal self to remain in daylight. Or so she imagined. Being a block of ice must get boring. Hang on. Global warming is your friend.
In any case, her grimiest guest remained incurious about either this brave new world or the people in it. He looked out the bay window, occasionally grunting at passing cars. He’d lost interest in them after he speared one only to be confronted by a driver who threatened to call the cops. Okka had stomped back inside while Henry paid the man off.
Margaret tried to teach Okka some of the familiar gadgets. The laptop fascinated him at first with its colors and sounds, but he quickly tired of the distraction and instead set to work lacing old chicken bones into necklaces. They went well with cheap gold earrings.
Henry was out most days. She knew – because she had checked his location on her phone – that he kept returning to the Shoppe of Wonderments. They were retired. They should be traveling or visiting the grandkids, pretending their parents wanted them there. Instead, Henry had become fixated on this glorified head shop.
She couldn’t figure him out anymore. What rattled around inside the skull of a seventy-year-old man?
“Hank, it’s almost sundown. Were you planning to leave me alone with your guests?” she cried as he walked in the door. Her tone surprised even her. When had she become so shrill? She sounded like The Wicked Witch of the West. I’ll get you, my hubby. And yer little ghost dogs, too! Ahahahaaa.
He put his keys on the sideboard and looked at his feet. “I needed to ask the lady” the crone “some questions.”
“You’ve been back there almost every day since this whole mess started. What is it you’re asking? I told you last night, you are NOT to use that stupid piece of wood to call any more spirits back to our side of the Great Divide. Do you understand me? Don’t make me go down there myself and give that old bat a piece of my mind. Did you even ask her how to send this bunch back?”
He looked wilted, damaged, crushed, old. Where was the young man she’d met on vacation in Hilton Head? Where was the man with the gorgeous sad eyes, the nervous laugh, and the adorable beer belly? Where was the giddy spontaneity? Who traded that fun for this shadow existence? It wasn’t me. I’m not the one who got old and cranky and dissatisfied with life.
The difference between dusk and night is an imperceptible note to humans, who have long since ceased to use their fine senses. Bugs, birds, and beasts all sensed the moment of nightfall. Persephone took up her post on the ramparts of Aunt Nedda’s China cabinet as the air began to cool and shimmer.
“I am famished,” announced the suddenly semi-solid Lord Hawley, beaming a greasy smile and consoling his robust paunch. The pewter buttons strained against the fly of his breeches, threatening to fire off at lethal velocity, and his calves betrayed a taut warning of gout.
The smokey shape of Oliver hauled tail through the living room, followed closely by Betty who was up for rough play.
Okka grunted a greeting, proudly holding up a newly-completed necklace.
Tallulah flitted between dimensions in shades of gray that matched the bleakness of her spirit. “There is sin in this house,” she lamented in tone both soft and humorless.
“Don’t talk to me about sin, Missy. You and Lord Hawley woke me up twice between four a.m. and dawn. I found cracks in my ceiling plaster. Do I want to go inspect the attic for a discarded girdle?”
Obviously flummoxed, Tallulah turned white as a sheet.
Lord Hawley rocked on his heels. “A mere dalliance.”
“Twice!” Margaret insisted.
Tallulah popped out.
“Indeed. Two dalliances. The flesh – urm, as it were – is weak, madam.”
“Is that everyone?” Margaret asked her husband through lips pressed white.
All at once, a pipe organ heaved a gothic blast. It wasn’t coming from anywhere but rather from everywhere. The walls themselves had come to life. The melody emanating from amidst the home’s studs, nails, dust, rat turds, and plaster boards was not actually Bach’s Toccata in D minor. For all its penetrating bombast, however, it might damn well have been. The hurricane lanterns on the mantle rattled, and Persephone leaped from Aunt Nedda’s cabinet. All anyone saw was a furpedo shooting under the sofa.
Okka bobbed his wooly head in time with the music.
Margaret had had enough. Simply. Plainly. Utterly. She had had her fill.
“Tollie, get your prissy ectoplasmic ass back here now!”
Tallulah half-materialized in the room, standing close to a white patch of wall hoping to blend in.
“Listen up. 3780 Kill Beaver Hill is my home, not some… Supernatural Super 8. Let me be clear. You are not welcome to stay forever.”
Tallulah hissed, “Then… he should not have summoned us.” Looking over the tops of her cats-eye glasses, she aimed a bony J’accuse finger at Henry, who stood like an adolescent boy caught with a dirty magazine.
“Peggie, you don’t understand,” Henry tried.
“No excuses. I want them gone… now!” The invisible organist pressed his fingers hard on his keyboard. “That includes the Phantom of the Opera… and the dogs too.” She kind of wanted Oliver to stay but decided not to split her resolve. Gone meant gone.
“My fair maid, I fear you labor under a misapprehension. We cannot leave. We are all of us constrained to this dwelling. Should we wander more than a few steps from your threshold, we would be snapped back inside by forces infernal or angelic, I know not which, but irresistible I assure you.”
Margaret felt the heat behind her eyes. She would not hear excuses. It had been weeks since she’d had a good night’s rest and she was tired of losing out on her favorite leftovers from Maggiano’s. She composed herself, took a deep breath, and pronounced her will. “If you do not depart forevermore, I will call a priest and –”
“No!” Henry interrupted.
“Show compassion for this wretched spirit who stands before you,” Lord Hawley pleaded. “Exorcism won’t work. I’m strictly Church of England, so you’d need permission from a bishop. Paperwork. Confounded paperwork.”
“I’m Jewish,” Tallulah chimed in. “I don’t think the dogs or the musician are Catholic either. Okka, I dunno, strikes me as Unitarian.”
“Even if you did find some spell to cast them out, they’d wander forever,” Henry added with a tinge of both horror and an odd sadness that caught Margaret off her guard.
“Do not fate us in such grim manner, I beseech you, dear madam. This was not any of our doing. It was Henry. He should have been more careful in his seekings. The damsel is a wily one and uncommonly strong. She thumped me soundly. Your husband bore down on us with his blinding tunnel of light again and again. In her stead, she tossed each of us, one after the other, into Henry’s embrace.”
Margaret blinked twice. Then again. “She?” Margaret looked around at each of her guests and thought back. The dogs had appeared on the first night. Henry had explained that he’d found a portal between worlds, and when he opened it, Ollie had trundled through with Betty on his heels.
A few nights later, he admitted that the amulet was the key to this portal. He promised never to use it again, but sure enough, Lord Gideon Hawley IV of Uxleyshire, Esq. popped into their home larger than life.
Okka was next, followed not many nights after by the appallingly bland and judgmental Tallulah Cockburn.
Now an unseen organist. And she hated organ music.
“She?” Margaret repeated. “Who is she?”
“I don’t really know her. We barely exchange names over there,” Tallulah explained.
“And her name is?”
“Polly,” Tallulah answered.
Lord Hawley concurred, “Polly.”
As best he could push it past his large Cro-Magnon teeth, Okka echoed, “Bah-yee.”
Somewhere, two organ notes vaguely described the name, while twin aw-ee’s floated in from another room along with a wisp of canine flatus.
Lord Hawley looked past Margaret to Henry. “Sorry, old fellow, but as the kids say, the jig is up. You gave it your best go, but the lady has moved on.”
Margaret closed her eyes and collected herself once more. She counted to ten. Then twenty. She would not get angry. Would not be shrill. She would be the very essence of patience and open-mindedness. “Hank, who is Polly? Or… who was Polly?”
She turned to her husband but found their front door open to reveal the deepening purple outside.
***
Via stilted texts, Margaret and Henry agreed to a brief cooling off period. It was Saturday evening when he returned to the house.
“I’m sorry.”
It didn’t matter which of them said it. The words hung there, a masterwork of minimalist contrition.
“It’s almost dark,” he said, looking around the living room expectantly but finding only Persephone, curled up in the Barcalounger.
“No matter. They’re not coming tonight or any night.”
Margaret related her actions of the past few days, how she’d gone to Little Five Points and tracked down the crone. The lady was not nearly as awful as the image Margaret had pictured. She was, in fact, a bit younger than Margaret’s sixty-two years. And she was reasonable. Margaret presented Henry’s amulet and explained the situation as best she understood things, though parts of the netherworld remained as clouded and obscured to her as her husband’s past.
The afternoon was one part mysticism to which they added three parts Chardonnay to provide buoyancy for the girl talk. Men were skunks. They did things for reasons they themselves could never explain. They cherished memories, nursing them along through the decades until all truth and substance had drained out of them.
And so, on that last Saturday in July, Henry and Margaret sat in their empty home on Kill Beaver Hill.
“How much?”
“Fifty. She came over and got it done in like half-an-hour. She adopted the dogs and promised I could visit. She sent the others back from whence they came. Lord Hawley protested, but Birgit gave him the rest of your beer and a pizza from the freezer and he left smiling.”
“The lady’s name is Birgit?”
“Hank, you’re an idiot.”
He was, but there was no need to press the matter. Margaret’s heart, calloused by emptiness and abandonment, accepted its role in all this. She’d allowed them to drift apart and sent Henry on a desperate flight towards a phantom planet of old hopes. Her rival Polly was not some proverbial truck stop waitress but the persistent ghost of a ghost. Henry had loved this woman in life but lost her long ago – probably just before meeting Margaret. Oh, my sad-eyed Henry. In any case, Polly had never wanted her corner in this eternal triangle. Life and afterlife both liked their cruel jokes.
Margaret looked at the man who’d been her world for four decades and saw him as if for the first time. She let the noise in her head dim and cease, then raised her clear blue eyes to the emerging stars beyond the bay window and sent out a thought:
Be at peace, Polly.
Margaret and Henry sat in their splendidly empty, wonderfully silent home on Kill Beaver Hill and held hands. They said nothing, for nothing further needed saying. They did not try to conjure up love. They simply waited to see what would materialize.
###
I hope you enjoyed this free story. Please share it online, and I think you may also enjoy my novel of human magic, Goody Celeste.
Here's a link:
https://www.amazon.com/Goody-Celeste-Chris-Riker/dp/1665307072/
