20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill
The moon was only a little bigger than a quarter full, but bright enough to etch intensely dark, sharp-edged shadows on the ground, and to make the frosty yards below shine as if the grass were blades of chrome.
I glided forward. I did some loops around the leafless crown of a red maple. The dead elm was long gone, had split in two in a windstorm almost eight years before. The top half had come down against the house, a long branch shattering one of my bedroom windows, as if reaching in for me, still trying to kill me.
It was cold, and the chill intensified as I climbed. I didn’t care. I wanted to get above everything.
The town was built on the slopes of a valley, a crude black bowl, a-glitter with lights. I heard a mournful honking in my left ear, and my heart gave a lunge. I looked through the inky dark and saw a mallard, with a liquid black head and a throat of startling emerald, beating its wings and staring curiously back at me. He did not remain by my side for long, but dove, swooped to the south, and was gone.
For a while I didn’t know where I was going. I had a nervous moment, when I wasn’t sure how I’d get back down without falling eight hundred feet. But when I couldn’t bend my fingers anymore, or feel any sensation in my face, I tilted forward slightly and began to sink back to earth, gently descending, in the way I had practiced hour on hour in the basement.
By the time I leveled off over Powell Avenue, I knew where I was headed. I floated three blocks, rising once to clear the wire suspending a stoplight, then hung a left and soared on, dreamlike, to Angie’s house. She would just be getting off her shift at the hospital.
Only she was almost an hour late. I was sitting on the roof of the garage when she turned into the driveway in the old bronze Civic we had shared, bumper missing and hood battered from where I had crashed it into a Dumpster, at the end of my low-speed attempt to evade the police.
Angie was made up and dressed in her lime-colored skirt with tropical flowers printed on it, the one she only wore to staff meetings at the end of the month. It wasn’t the end of the month. I sat on the tin roof of the garage and watched her totter to the front door in her heels and let herself in.
Usually she showered when she got home. I didn’t have anything else to do.
I slid off the peak of the garage roof, bobbled and rose like a black balloon toward the third floor of her parents’ tall, narrow Victorian. Her bedroom was dark. I leaned toward the glass, peering in, looking toward her door and waiting for it to open. But she was already there, and in the next moment she snapped on a lamp, just to the left of the window, on a low dresser. She stared out the window at me and I stared right back, didn’t move—couldn’t move, was too shocked to make a sound. She regarded me wearily, without interest or surprise. She didn’t see me. She couldn’t make me out past her own reflection. I wondered if she had ever been able to see me.
I floated outside the window while she stripped her skirt off over her head and wiggled out of plain girdle underwear. A bathroom adjoined her bedroom, and she considerately left the door open between the two. I watched her shower through the clear glass of the shower cabinet. She showered a long time, lifting her arms to throw her honey-colored hair back, hot water pelting her breasts. I had watched her shower before, but it hadn’t been this interesting in a long time. I wished she’d masturbate with the flexible showerhead, something she said she had done as a teenager, but she didn’t.
In a while the window steamed over and I couldn’t see as clearly. I watched her pink pale form move here and there. Then I heard her voice. She was on the phone. She asked someone why they were studying on a Saturday night. She said she was bored, she wanted to play a game. She pleaded in tones of erotic petulance.
A circle of clear glass appeared in the center of the window and began to expand as the condensation in her room evaporated, giving me a slow reveal. She was in a clinging white halter and a pair of black cotton panties, sitting at a small desk, hair wrapped in a towel. She had hung up the phone, but was playing cribbage on her computer, typing occasionally to send an instant message. She had a glass of white wine. I watched her drink it. In movies, voyeurs watch models prance about in French lingerie, but the banal is kinky enough, lips on a wineglass, the band of simple panties against a white buttock.
When she got off-line she seemed happy with herself but restless. She got into bed, switched on her little TV and flipped through the channels. She stopped on the Think! channel to watch seals fucking. One climbed on the back of the other and began humping away, blubber shaking furiously. She looked longingly at the computer.
“Angie,” I said.
It seemed to take her a moment to register she had heard anything. Then she sat up and leaned forward, listening to the house. I said her name again. Her eyelashes fluttered nervously. She turned her head to the window almost reluctantly, but again, didn’t see me past her reflection…until I tapped on the glass.
Her shoulders jumped in a nervous reflex. Her mouth opened in a cry, but she didn’t make a sound. After a moment, she came off the bed and approached the window on stiff legs. She stared out. I waved hello. She looked beneath me for the ladder, then lifted her gaze back to my face. She swayed, put her hands on her dresser to steady herself.
“Unlock it,” I said.
Her fingers struggled with the locks for a long time. She pulled the window up.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God. Oh my God. How are you doing that?”
“I don’t know. Can I come in?”
I eased myself up onto the windowsill, turning and shifting, so one arm was in her room, but my legs hung out.
“No,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”
“Yes. Real.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Honest.” I picked at the edge of the cape. “But I did it once before. A long time back. You know my knee and the scar on my chest? I told you I did all that falling out of a tree, you remember?”
A look of surprise, mingled with sudden understanding, spread across her face. “The branch broke and fell. But you didn’t. Not at first. You stayed in the air. You were in your cape and it was like magic and you didn’t fall.”
She already knew. She already knew and I didn’t know how, because I had never told her. I could fly; she was psychic.
“Nicky told me,” she said, seeing my confusion. “He said when the tree branch fell, he thought he saw you fly. He said he was so sure he tried to fly himself and that’s what happened to his face. We were talking and he was trying to explain how he wound up with false teeth. He said he was crazy back then. He said you both were.”
“When did he tell you about his teeth?” I asked. My brother never got over being insecure about his face, his mouth especially, and he didn’t like people to know about the teeth.
She shook her head. “I don’t remember.”
I turned on the windowsill and put my feet up on her dresser. “Do you want to see what it’s like to fly?”
Her eyes were glassy with disbelief. Her mouth was open in a blank, dazed smile. Then she tilted her head to one side and narrowed her eyes.
“How are you doing it?” she asked. “Really.”
“It’s something about the cape. I don’t know what. Magic, I guess. When I put it on, I can fly. That’s all.”
She touched the corner of one of my eyes, and I remembered the mask I had drawn with lipstick. “What about this stuff on your face? What’s that do?”
“Makes me feel sexy.”
“Holy shit, you’re weird. And I lived with you for two years.” She was laughing, though.
“Do you want to fly?”
I slid the rest of the way into the room, toward her, and hung my legs over the side of the dresser.
“Sit in my lap. I’ll ride you around the room.”
She looked from my lap to my face, her smile sly and distrustful now. A breeze trickled in through the window behind me, stirring the cape. She hugged herself and shivered, then glanced down at herself and notic
“Hold on a minute,” she said.
She went to her closet and folded back the door and dug in a cubby for sweats. While she was looking, there came a pitiful shriek from the television, and my gaze shifted toward the screen. One seal was biting the neck of another, furiously, while his victim wailed. A narrator said dominant males would use all the natural weapons at their disposal to drive off any rival that might challenge them for access to the females of the herd. The blood looked like a splash of cranberry juice on the ice.
Angie had to clear her throat to get my attention again, and when I glanced at her, her mouth was, for a moment, thin and pinched, the corners crimped downward in a look of irritation. It only took a moment sometimes for me to drift away from myself and into some television program, even something I had no interest in at all. I couldn’t help myself. It’s like I’m a negative, and the TV is a positive. Together we make a circuit, and nothing outside the circuit matters. It was the same way when I read comics. It’s a weakness, I admit, but it darkened my mood to catch her there, judging me.
She tucked a strand of wet hair behind one ear and showed me a quick, elfin grin, tried to pretend she hadn’t just been giving me The Look. I leaned back, and she pulled herself up, awkwardly, onto my thighs.
“Why do I think this is some perverted prank to get me in your lap?” she asked. I leaned forward, made ready to push off. She said, “We’re going to fall on our a—”
I slipped off the side of the dresser and into the air. I wobbled forward and back and forward again, and she wrapped her arms around my neck and cried out, a happy, laughing, frightened sort of cry.
I’m not particularly strong, but it wasn’t like picking her up…it was really as if she were sitting on my lap and we were together in an invisible rocking chair. All that had changed was my center of gravity, and now I felt tippy, a canoe with too many people in it.
I floated her around her bed, then up and over it. She screamed-laughed-screamed again.
“This is the craziest—” she said. “Oh my God no one will believe it,” she said. “Do you know you’re going to be the most famous person in human history?” Then she just stared into my face, her wide eyes shining, the way they used to when I talked about Alaska.
I made as if to fly back to my perch on the dresser, but when I got to it, I just kept going, ducked my head and carried us right out the open window.
“No! What are you doing? Holy Jesus it’s cold!” She was squeezing me so tightly around the neck it was hard to breathe.
I rose toward the slash of silver moon.
“Be cold,” I said. “Just for a minute. Isn’t it worth it—for this? To fly like this? Like you do in dreams?”
“Yes,” she said. “Isn’t this the most incredible thing?”
“Yes.”
She shivered furiously, which set off an interesting vibration in her breasts, under the thin shirt. I kept climbing, toward a flotilla of clouds, edged in mercury. I liked the way she clung to me, and I liked the way it felt when she trembled.
“I want to go back,” she said.
“Not yet.”
My shirt was open a little, and she snuggled into it, her icy nose touching my flesh.
“I’ve wanted to talk to you,” she said. “I wanted to call you tonight. I was thinking about you.”
“Who did you call instead?”
“Nobody,” she said, and then realized I had been outside the window listening. “Hannah. You know. From work.”
“Is she studying for something? I heard you ask why she was studying on a Saturday.”
“Let’s go back.”
“Sure.”
She buried her face against my chest again. Her nose grazed my scar, a silver slash like the silver slash of the moon. I was still climbing toward the moon. It didn’t seem so far away. She fingered the old scar.
“It’s unbelievable,” she whispered. “Think how lucky you were. A few inches lower and that branch might’ve gone right through your heart.”
“Who said it didn’t?” I said, and leaned forward and let her go.
She held onto my neck, kicking, and I had to peel her fingers off, one at a time, before she fell.
WHENEVER MY BROTHER and I played superheroes, he always made me be the bad guy.
Someone has to be.
MY BROTHER HAS been telling me I ought to fly down to Boston one of these nights, so we can do some drinking together. I think he wants to share some big-brother advice, tell me I have to pick myself up, have to move on. Maybe he also wants to share some grief. I’m sure he’s in grief too.
One of these nights, I think I will…fly on down to see him. Show him the cape. See if he’ll try it on. See if he wants to take a leap out his fifth-floor window.
He might not want to. Not after what happened last time. He might need some encouragement; a little nudge from little brother.
And who knows? Maybe if he goes out the window in my cape, he will rise instead of fall, float away into the cool, still embrace of the sky.
But I don’t think so. It didn’t work for him when we were children. Why would it now? Why would it ever?
It’s my cape.
LAST BREATH
A family walked in for a look around, a little before noon, a man, a woman, and their son. They were the first visitors of the day—for all Alinger knew they would be the only visitors of the day, the museum was never busy—and he was free to give them the tour.
He met them in the coatroom. The woman still stood with one foot out on the front steps, hesitant to come in any further. She was staring over her son’s head at her husband, giving him a doubting, uneasy look. The husband frowned back at her. His hands were on the lapels of his shearling overcoat, but he seemed undecided whether to take it off or not. Alinger had seen it a hundred times before. Once people were inside and had looked beyond the foyer into the funeral home gloom of the parlor, they had second thoughts, wondered if they had come to the right place, began to entertain ideas of backing out. Only the little boy seemed at ease, was already stripping off his jacket and hanging it over one of the child-level hooks on the wall.
Before they could get away from him, Alinger cleared his throat to draw their attention. No one ever left once they had been spotted; in the battle between anxiety and social custom, social custom almost always won. He folded his hands together and smiled at them, in a way he hoped was reassuring, grandfatherly. The effect, though, was rather the opposite. Alinger was cadaverous, ten inches over six feet, his temples sunk into shadowed hollows. His teeth (at eighty, still his own) were small and gray and gave the unpleasant impression of having been filed. The father shrank away a little. The woman unconsciously reached for her son’s hand.
“Good morning. I’m Dr. Alinger. Please come in.”
“Oh—hello,” said the father. “Sorry to bother.”
“No bother. We’re open.”
“You are. Good!” he said, with a not quite convincing enthusiasm. “So what do we—” And his voice trailed off and he fell quiet, either had forgotten what he was going to say, or wasn’t sure how to put it, or lacked the nerve.
His wife took over. “We were told you have an exhibition here? That this is some kind of scientific museum?”
Alinger showed them the smile again, and the father’s right eyelid began to twitch helplessly.
“Ah. You misheard,” Alinger said. “You were expecting a museum of science. This is the museum of silence.”
“Hmm?” the father said.
The mother frowned. “I think I’m still mishearing.”
“Come on, Mom,” said the boy, pulling his hand free from her grip. “Come on, Dad. I want to look around. I want to see.”
“Please,” Alinger said, stepping back from the coatroom, gesturing with one gaunt, long-fingered hand into the parlor. “I would be glad to offer you the guided tour.”
TH
Each beaker had what appeared to be a stethoscope attached to it, the diaphragm stuck right to the glass, sealed there with a clear adhesive. The earpieces waited for someone to pick them up and listen. The boy led the way, followed by his parents, and then Alinger. They stopped before the first display, a jar on a marble pedestal, located just beyond the parlor entrance, set right in their path.
“There’s nothing in it,” the boy said. He peered all around, surveying the entire room, the other sealed beakers. “There’s nothing in any of them. They’re just empty like.”
“Ha,” said the father, humorlessly.
“Not quite empty,” Alinger said. “Each jar is airtight, hermetically sealed. Each one contains someone’s dying breath. I have the largest collection of last breaths in the world, over a hundred. Some of these bottles contain the final exhalations of some very famous people.”
Now the woman began to laugh; real laughter, not laughter for show. She clapped a hand over her mouth and shivered, but couldn’t manage to completely stifle herself. Alinger smiled. He had been showing his collection for years. He was used to every kind of reaction.
The boy, however, had turned back to the beaker directly before him, his eyes rapt. He picked up the earpieces of the device that looked like but was not a stethoscope.