A ghost story
“Fire burning, warm and brave
come into our secret cave.
We are best friends, candle true,
there is nothing we can’t do.”
You won’t believe this, but it really was a dark and stormy night. At least I think it was. To tell the truth, I’m not sure if I trust the recollection, recent as tonight or from back as far as then.
It’s as though memory itself has a life, growing and alert, and chooses when to sleep, or wake, or change; what to conceal and what to remake for its own bewildering design.
I’ll tell you, then, what my memory has told me about it all. About the fire, the cellar, and why I was in that house tonight. If it hadn’t been for Carolyn I never would have gone in there; not in any weather. But Carolyn was … well, she was Carolyn, and I just couldn’t say no.
Tonight, she showed up on my doorstep as she does each year, on the anniversary of the day it happened, with the same question. “Please, Cheryl, please come with me. One more time. You know I can’t do it without you. Please come.”
I went. I always go.
But nothing had ever actually happened until tonight–and it’s been twenty years. That’s quite a wait. I guess ghosts don’t have much sense of time.
I suppose I should back up and tell you what happened. I’m waiting here to give my statement to the police anyway, so I’ll practise by telling you.
Carolyn has been my best friend since Grade 4. You know how it is with best friends. We were the ones forever in trouble for giggling during math class, passing notes about cute boys, planning sleepovers and trading movie magazines.
For the most secret times, we had a hideout in the far corner of her basement; a damp and dirty haven we had discovered by accident. If you really looked, way behind the furnace, half hidden by some stacked-up cardboard boxes, there was the faint outline of a door.
There was no handle on it, but by jiggling the corner at the bottom against the dirt floor you could make it open just enough for two small girls to hold their breath and squeeze through sideways.
Never mind the cobwebs and the smell; it was our secret place. We’d go there for comfort, for privacy and for thumbing our pubescent noses at the adult world.
We smuggled in a box of matches, the old wooden kind that reek of sulphur, and the stink stays on your fingers. We’d light a candle in there, behind some blankets we threw over an old suitcase, and say a little verse we made up:
“Fire burning, warm and brave
come into our secret cave.
We are best friends, candle true,
there is nothing we can’t do.”
It made us feel safe. I loved how the light made the smelly old blanket feel softer; and the knowledge, certain as only a 10-year-old’s knowledge can be, that no one on earth knew where I was, except Carolyn.
My best friend. It was from each other, and in that place, that we learned how to keep secrets, to fight and make up again, and what it means to be loyal. It was the loyal part that got me into this mess.
What happened to her was so terrible, so creepy, so absolutely terrifying, that no made-up story could ever come close. It was also my introduction to the evil in the world. Until then I was a kid who believed in fairy tales and happy endings.
Carolyn’s life was neither. I don’t know if we’ll ever know the full truth, and that’s the thing; why she just can’t let it go.
It started the year we were twelve. Women of the world we were, who carried purses and even had lipstick in them. In the safety of our dank cellar place we had confided to each other about getting our periods, and secretly compared the size and shape of our shyly bulging breasts.
About halfway through that year, though, she got quiet on me. Moody. The first time I noticed it was the day she said I should go to the cafeteria without her.
Eat lunch without Carolyn? Was she crazy? It was like a zoo in there, and we sat together for sheer survival. Who would protect me from the flying banana peels and the totally disgusting armpit noises from the Grade 6 boys? It wasn’t like her at all.
“OK. Let’s eat in the girls’ washroom,” I said.
Gross, I know, but pretty private at times. We did it when we were desperate. But no, this day she wanted to be left alone. It happened the next day and then the next. She finally gave me a sideways look and sort of whined.
“Please Cheryl, I just want you to leave me alone.” I backed away, my face burning and a tight place hurting somewhere in my gut. She wanted me to leave her alone. She really did.
For awhile I did that. I tried anyway. She wouldn’t come to the phone, went right home from school, and started looking over her shoulder a lot. She jumped when you spoke to her. I was worried, and told my parents I thought something was wrong.
Mom said I should keep praying for her but that didn’t seem like enough. Dad said, ““Well, I hear her old man is at it again.” I didn’t know what he meant, and Mom gave him a look that told me I’d never hear another word about it.
After it happened, there were so many stories that I just stopped believing any of them. Sometimes I guess we just aren’t meant to know. Most of the time I don’t think about this part, so you’ll have to excuse me if I tell it in a scattered way.
After so many years I sometimes wonder what parts I actually remember and what I heard, or read in the paper. It even made the evening news: “Apparent murder/suicide in the north end of the city, more at 11.” Stuff like that.
Makes it sound almost bearable–unless you were actually there, and I was. “Bearable” doesn’t even come close. Neither does horrendous, or tragic, or outrageous, all of which I heard a lot in the days that followed. Sometimes words just don’t cut it.
It was a Friday, I know that for sure, because I had decided I wasn’t going to let one more weekend go by without at least trying to talk, so I waited at the corner after school and just started walking with her.
She didn’t say much, but didn’t tell me to go away, either. I talked about homework, movies, anything at all, feeling lucky that she didn’t shoo me away like some pesky spider from our secret room and praying I wouldn’t do something to break the spell.
It was late November, and I can still smell the fresh sharpness of snow about to fall. As we walked, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t Carolyn at all; not the Carolyn I was used to. I kept looking at her out of the corner of my eye, hoping each time to see in her something… someone… I recognized.
It sounds silly, but she reminded me of a tomato in winter. It looks real, but it might as well be cardboard. She seemed colourless like that, too, even though her cheeks were red with the wind and there were dark, purplish blotches under her eyes.
Being hunched so tightly over her books must have hurt that skinny backbone. The angle of her body seemed unnatural; her voice came out tight and sharp like her shoulders. It gave me the creeps.
When we got to the corner she turned fast, and just walked away, her boots making scrunching sounds on the sidewalk. I stood there for a moment watching her walk. Carolyn always had a funny walk, quicker with one foot than the other. I would recognize that walk anywhere; pick the sound of her feet out of any crowd.
She cut across the corner of her yard, climbed the steps and went in the front door. It didn’t make a noise when it closed behind her. Her feet had left faint marks on the lawn. I kept looking at those; I don’t know why. They were comforting, in a way.
The curtains in the front room were closed as usual and no light shone from where I knew the kitchen was. Waiting for the yellow light to come spilling out of her bedroom window, I could feel the coldness seeping through my boots. My feet were freezing. No light appeared. I stood for a minute more and turned to go home.
Halfway there I turned again. What made me go back I’ll never know, but I did; as though that had always been the plan. Just turned and walked back, right over the lawn where there was not a sign now of her feet having passed just moments before. Right up the front steps and in the door, without knocking. I had to. I just did.
They tell me I didn’t scream. Apparently I phoned the police from the bloody phone on the kitchen wall, and waited. What I do remember for sure is the sensation of being outside my body watching it all, looking at the blood drying on my jeans and wondering if my mother would be mad; wanting to run fast and never stop, but knowing I had to stay. For her. For Carolyn.
Carolyn herself was nowhere to be found, but I knew where she would be, and when the men arrived, I led them to her. All I remember after that is being in the hospital, drinking warm ginger ale with a very big headache, and my mother trying to keep everyone away.
Carolyn herself can’t let it go. I don’t blame her, and I don’t know for sure what she remembers. I’ve never asked. I don’t think I could.
In all this time–twenty years now–we’ve had very little contact. They took her away that day and no one gave me any details. Part of me didn’t want them to; holding on somehow to the Carolyn I used to know.
What she wanted to accomplish by returning to the house, I could never understand. Maybe it felt unfinished to her. Maybe she can’t remember any more than I can and thinks that going back will help. I don’t know. But every year on the anniversary of that day, she comes to my place and together we go to the house.
It had stood empty for a few years afterward; no one wanted to rent or buy, knowing what had happened inside. The town took it over then, turned it into two apartments and rented them out to a series of transient workers from the mine north of town. They would stay a few months, skip out on the rent and leave it for the next tenants to do the same.
For the last year or so it’s been vacant again, and in bad shape. Not that I keep an eye on it on purpose, you understand. I avoid the street whenever I can, but it’s right there on the shortest route to my daughter’s day care and sometimes I drive by without remembering until it’s too late.
Mostly I try to pass quickly, but my eyes always find it in the rear view mirror no matter how I squint to control them.
The porch is all but rotted away now, and the cement steps have started to crumble. The backyard is a total mess, overgrown and a catch-all for neighbourhood trash blown there by the wind. A few windows have been cracked; probably kids fooling around. I can just picture them, daring each other to throw rocks or try the door, having heard God-knows-what about what happened in that place before they were ever born.
The most we ever did until this year, those times she’d come asking, was to walk by. It seemed to satisfy her, the walking, the slowing down and the blank, empty-eyed staring from the corner after we had passed.
I always asked her back to my house and she always said maybe another time. I’d go home with a headache and that would be it until the next year.
So tonight I wasn’t ready for anything but that. I had even stocked up on Tylenol. But as soon as we started out, I knew something different was up.
Carolyn herself appeared more … more determined. Distracted and in a hurry. There was no hesitation in her signature walk as we rounded that corner, bowing our heads against the freezing rain that the wind was whipping into our faces.
Before I knew it, we were right in front of the house, and she still didn’t stop. Up the front stairs and in the door; she didn’t look back. I, however, stopped cold, and looked at the front door.
The place was dark, of course, the steps slick with ice, and rain congealing on the rotted cheap carpet. She had left the door ajar. Imbecile that I am, I followed. I avoided touching the door knob by shouldering it open and, taking a big breath, stepped inside.
It reeked. Urine and stale cigarette smoke, and something I can’t identify that made me want to retch. I started breathing in shallow little gasps through my mouth, and tried to attune my eyes to the darkness. They wouldn’t adjust. It was too dark to see anything at all, and for some reason I didn’t want to call out for her.
I listened for footsteps, breathing, anything. Where was she? Damn her. I never should have come. The only thing I could hear was the wind outside, and now the sound of the front door, which hadn’t properly closed behind me. I decided I’d rather take the sound than close it completely.
There I stood, freezing, in a pool of stinking stale air that held the sound of the wind and the groaning door and funneled them into my ears at ten times their normal volume. More than anything, I just wanted to get out of there; to run from the nothingness inside that house that felt so much like something. Something strange. Something ugly.
I couldn’t move. All of the stupidest, most intelligence-insulting horror movie clichés that I had ever read or watched seemed to reach out and twist my arm behind my back, daring me to laugh at them now.
This is stupid, I said to myself. I’m letting my mind go limp here.
I had to find Carolyn and get us both out of there before we got charged for break and enter even though we’d only done the enter part. I peeled my feet from the spot on the floor where they were stuck. Bracing myself, I walked into the dining room. Shoulders back, elbows out. Faking it all the way,
I stepped into the room. Nothing. Through in the darkness to where I knew the kitchen was, past the door to the cellar. Using my feet like a blind person’s white cane, I inched forward, sweeping tentative half-circles ahead of me in the darkness. With one hand I felt my way along the wall. It was sticky, and very cold. Pulling my hand away fast, I wiped it on my jeans, and refused to let my mind speculate on what I had just touched.
In the kitchen it was a bit brighter, from a street light outside. The phone was still where it used to be, I do remember noticing that. Carolyn wasn’t there. Then why did I feel that I wasn’t alone? A ticking on the window outside startled me, but it was only a fallen leaf caught in a spider’s web, being hurled by the wind over and over again against the glass.
Please Carolyn, please let’s just get out of here. Where are you anyway? Come on, we’ve seen it now. We can talk, anything you want, let’s just get out of here. Right Now. Please Carolyn, I have to.
Did I say those things out loud? I don’t think so, because the silence is one of the things I remember most as I turned to retrace my steps through the darkness of the dining room.
I heard her before I saw her. She was whimpering, little clicking noises coming from her throat, standing at the top of the cellar stairs. Her eyes were wide open, her mouth moving in a repetitious sucking kind of motion. She was staring at something I couldn’t see.
I felt it, though. Felt them. The memories, the ghosts, whatever you want to call them, were with us in that house as surely as I’m telling you the truth right now. I could feel them. Cold and silent and sticky and disgusting. They were there, they were dangerous and they weren’t finished.
With a sudden absolute certainty, I knew it. They still had power. They still meant harm. The life-sucking work they had begun was not over, and Carolyn was still very much in danger. By the look on her face I knew they had her–she couldn’t fight this time. It would have to be me.
I think I screamed as I ran for her, but I’m not sure. I grabbed her arm and pushed her ahead of me and headed for the only place that made sense.
“Fire burning warm and brave
come into our secret cave.
We are best friends, candle true,
There is nothing we can’t do.”
When they pulled me out of the burning house, I tried to tell them that Carolyn was still in there. No one would listen; maybe I wasn’t even making sounds, or sense. I don’t know. It’s all sort of fuzzy now.
And so I’m sitting here in the wee hours of the morning, in the hospital room with its glaring white light and clean smell and nothing sticky anywhere that I can see, except the black stuff I keep coughing up. We’re waiting for the police. I hope Carolyn is happy now. Even with everything that happened tonight, I have to believe that she is happier now than she’s been since the day she died twenty years ago.t
