As Simple as Snow (16 page)

“Maybe you need some inspiration,” she said.

She told me that there was a legend about a place across the river called Mumler. You wouldn’t find it on a map anymore, and there was no town there now, only a few acres of woods. I had never heard of Mumler before Anna told me about it. She said that the town was founded more than two hundred fifty years before, that it grew and prospered and then, through a series of strange events, died off. The only things left were some ruins and the legends. What had happened to Mumler was a mystery, and the woods where it used to be were said to be haunted.

She showed me a bunch of websites with the story. A lot of the details were different, but the general story was the same. Something horrible had happened across the river, and the people who had survived finally abandoned the place and moved into our town or far away. Most of the websites agreed that the town had been founded by George Tomias in 1737, but was overrun by the Mumler family a few years later. One site indicated that the three Mumler brothers had escaped England after a failed plot to overthrow the king, and that a curse had been put on them. Not long after they moved into the small settlement, strange things began to happen. The youngest of the brothers, Abel, went insane, and shortly after that, another resident, Grisham Pyn, fell to his death during a barn raising. According to one site, he was murdered, and Hiram Tanner, who owned the barn, was under suspicion. Tanner eventually went crazy from a curse put on him by his own sister. Some families left Mumler, but trouble seemed to follow many of them. In 1760, the Carter family abandoned their house, which was formerly Abel Mumler’s, and moved to Binghampton, where they were slaughtered by Indians. Around 1800, General Gideon Swann’s wife was killed by lightning, and soon afterward he went mad. The last events mentioned involved the Proby family in the late 1800s. William Proby’s wife died of an illness, and then his children disappeared in the woods or the river, depending on which version you consulted, and then Proby burned his house down and tried to set the whole town on fire, before disappearing himself. In a few years the town was gone, its residents either dead or moved on to a safer spot.

One website had a photograph of a washed-out road that had once run through Mumler and was now overgrown with plants and grass. To the left of the ruined road were a number of trees, with a white cloud suspended between two of the trees. The site identified the cloud as some sort of spirit, caught on film. “This is the kind of physical evidence skeptics hate,” the caption read. “There is obviously no way anyone could have created the spirit cloud, but there it is, plainly captured by the photographer.”

“Have you ever been there?” I asked Anna.

“It’s private property,” she said.

“Who owns it?”

“Some association. There’s no one there to stop us, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I don’t need to go there.”

“Come on,” she said. “You can’t write about the place unless you see it, soak up the atmosphere.”

“Who said I’m writing about it? It looks like enough’s been written about the place already.”

“Well, write about something else, then,” she said. “But this is the only place that I know of that’s supposed to have ghosts. You’re going to write a ghost story, right? So let’s go get some ghosts.”

Anna took me to Mumler. She brought along a picnic basket with sandwiches and fruit and a thermos of hot chocolate and a little bottle of brandy. It was cold and snow was everywhere. “Maybe we should wait until spring,” I said. We walked across the southern bridge, and then north about a mile and a half. It was a Saturday afternoon and there was only about an hour of daylight left. That’s the way she had planned it. She wanted to get there during daylight, but stay until it got dark. “I’ve got a flashlight if we need it,” she said.

It wasn’t anything more than a big, thick clump of woods. I had seen it a million times and had never thought anything about it. No one had mentioned it before Anna, and she was a newcomer to town. An old hiking trail led into the woods, but across it hung a chain with a “No Trespassing” sign.

“Do they think that’s going to stop anybody?” I said.

“Shouldn’t it say ‘Enter at Your Own Risk’?”

“Well, it doesn’t look like anyone’s been here lately.” I didn’t see any footprints in the snow. There weren’t any animal tracks either.

We trudged through the woods until we came on an old chimney sticking out of the snow. It was crumbling at the top, but otherwise was in good shape. Anna scooped away the snow from the base of the chimney and found the stone hearth. She brushed it off and pulled a blanket out of her picnic basket, spread it out on the hearth, and sat down. “This is a good-enough spot,” she said.

“Isn’t it cold?”

“Sure, but what are you going to do?”

“I could start a fire,” I said.

“Somebody would see the smoke and think the whole forest was on fire,” she said. “Besides, this will warm you up.” She took a drink of brandy and handed me the bottle.

I sat down beside her, and we took sips of the brandy and ate the food she had brought. She peeled an orange and handed me one of the segments. It was a brilliant curve of color against the white of the snow. Everything was sharp, the smell of the brandy, the crisp air. I could have stayed there forever.

 

 

 

It started to get dark. The sky was a deep blue, and stars were visible. There was going to be a full moon. “Let’s wait for the ghosts,” she said, and moved against me. We sat huddled in the freezing darkness and waited.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked her.

“I would like to believe,” she said. “I would like to think that there’s something beyond this life, something that connects us. It would make the world more interesting.”

“So you think this place is haunted and all that stuff we read about Mumler is true?”

“I doubt it,” she said. “That’s the problem, too many people have junked it up with legends and hoaxes and schemes.”

She told me about Houdini.

 

 

 

“One of the tricks he designed, and even patented, but never performed was to be frozen in a block of ice, or at least a theatrical representation of one, and escape, walk out of it, without disturbing it at all.

“The Water Cell Torture was like a phone booth filled with two hundred fifty gallons of water. Houdini was locked inside, upside down, and then a curtain was placed between him and the audience. His attendants would be visible, at least one holding an axe, to break the glass booth just in case. Houdini would ask the audience to hold their breath with him. The audience waited and waited. You could hear people gasping as they couldn’t hold it any longer. Still, nothing happened. They say that some people in the audience would become frantic, start screaming for the attendants to free Houdini, save him from drowning, and then, just when the audience couldn’t take any more, when no one could possibly be holding their breath, Houdini would emerge from behind the curtain.”

“That’s some trick,” I said.

“It was a trick,” she said. “Houdini could get out of the Cell whenever he wanted. Some people claim that he would sit behind the curtain reading a paper, waiting for the right moment to come out. What’s most amazing is that it’s a performance where nothing happens—the audience is just looking at a curtain and a couple of guys standing around. It’s what they
think
is happening that gets them agitated and excited, anxious and nervous, and finally relieved and amazed. The trick wasn’t so much in getting out of the Cell—he had figured that part out long before he ever took it onstage—but in manipulating the crowd. He knew how to play the crowd so well that he knew fake mediums and spiritualists were doing the same thing.

“His friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the biggest sucker, he fell for the cheapest tricks. Doyle had lost a son in World War One and wanted desperately to believe in séances and mediums,” Anna went on. “Houdini thought that this type of desperation was dangerous and allowed people to exploit Doyle’s grief and desire. So Houdini tried to convince Doyle that the mediums were really nothing more than skillful magicians. He wrote Doyle letter after letter denouncing mediums Doyle believed, and he described exactly how they had managed their tricks. Doyle refused to believe and told Houdini that the problem was that Houdini didn’t approach the mediums with an open mind. The friendship turned into a feud, and Houdini changed his act to include the exposure of the tricks used by mediums.

“The funny thing,” Anna said, “is that both men wanted to believe. Doyle wanted to believe so much that he was willing to accept any medium as genuine in order to hear from his son, and Houdini wanted to communicate with his dead mother so badly that he refused to accept the frauds and the fakes.”

“That’s why he used the code?”

“Exactly. He had tried to contact his mother through a medium, and one told him that she had made contact. Houdini wanted to know what his mother’s message was. ‘I’m through. At last, I’m through,’ the medium told him. Houdini’s mother couldn’t speak English, so he knew it wasn’t true, and that’s why he created a code for himself and his wife.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes, giving the woods an opportunity to live up to their reputation. Nothing happened. It only got darker. There was no moon, and I couldn’t see farther than ten feet. The closest trees were like enormous columns, and everything behind them was a solid black wall.

“Do you want to wait for the moon?” Anna asked.

“Not really.” I was colder than I wanted to be. She handed me the flashlight. “Do you think we need it?” I said, and took a few steps away from her. She almost disappeared in the darkness, only her blond hair visible, dimly shining. She came over and took my hand. “Listen,” she whispered, and gripped my hand. We stood for a few seconds in the cold silence. “What?” I finally whispered back.

“You can almost hear that Cure song I put on that first CD for you, can’t you?” she said out loud, and started singing the first verse, before breaking into laughter. I turned on the flashlight and we slowly made our way out of Mumler.

“Now we’re cursed,” she said when we left the trees and the darkness and the Cure behind us.

“I’m ready for it,” I said. “I feel like I’ve already been cursed.”

“That’s not a nice thing to say.” She came up to me quickly and kissed me, then ran down the road. I chased after, keeping the beam of the flashlight on her back, the light bending around her black clothes. She ran off the road and through the snow, down to the river. “Let’s walk across,” she said.

“I don’t think we should. I mean so soon after we’ve been cursed.”

“You think we should wait a half-hour?”

“Like swimming after you eat?” I groaned.

“You’re the one who wants to wait.” She took a step out onto the frozen river.

“Let’s at least do this during the day,” I said.

“Everybody does that.” She took a few more steps. I took a step onto the ice and shined the flashlight across the surface. There was a layer of brittle snow. I couldn’t see any water or fishing holes or other breaks, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there, waiting under a thin patch of ice. Anna was about twenty feet out. She turned back into the beam of light and looked at me, her black-mittened hand in front of her face, shielding her eyes. “Come on,” she said, seeing I was still at the shore. “Come on.”

I took the picnic basket and swung it back behind me and then tossed it forward onto the ice. I thought that I could slide it to her and test the ice between us, even though the basket weighed a fraction of what I did. Instead, the basket skidded to a stop a few feet away from me, slowed by the snow.

“You’re definitely cursed,” she said. She waited for me, but I told her to go ahead, we didn’t need to double the weight on a small space of ice. I knew this river; I had skated on it and walked across it hundreds of times in my life, but always in daylight. Anna acted as if she owned it, walking confidently across the surface, as if she did this every night, while I treaded more cautiously, examining every inch of ice between us and the other shore. My heart was thumping in my chest as I imagined us both breaking through the ice into the swift current just beneath our feet.

Finally we reached the opposite bank and I scrambled off the ice and collapsed. Even though I had been moving slowly and carefully, I felt as if I had just run the hundred-yard dash. I was out of breath and sweating. I turned the flashlight toward Anna, kneeling beside me; she was beaming, her face reflecting the light with the stars thrown out across the dark sky behind her. “How fun was that?” She was right; even though I’d been half scared to death, it was the most fun I’d had in a long time.

7 february

“I’ve finished my obituaries,” she said.

“The whole town?”

“Everybody. Do you want to see the last one?” She grabbed her notebooks and flipped through the pages, then handed me one. “I know you like him and everything, that’s what took me so long with his.”

It was Mr. Devon’s obituary: