Lure (4 page)

“Have you smelled it?”

“No, but Nana has. And so have a few other librarians. I don’t know what it means, or how it’s related to the ghosts. Whenever it happens, it always causes a lot of alarm because they’re worried there could be a fire somewhere. But every time people go searching for the source of the smoke they can’t seem to find anything.”

I leaned forward and took a deep breath. I was just expecting to inhale more of my grandfather’s greenhouse memories. But there it was — the unmistakeable fragrance of burning tobacco filling my nose. And it wasn’t an old, lingering odour … it was as fresh and sharp as if someone was smoking right there beside me. My heart began to beat a bit faster. I turned back to look at Caroline.
Could she smell that, too? Did I even want to ask? What the hell did it mean? Was there a ghost here now?
Suddenly I heard a whisper of a sound … like a long, deep breath blowing through the stairwell. A shiver crept over my skin, but I shook it off, forcing myself to remember how ridiculous this whole thing was. I didn’t believe in ghosts.

“So, let’s have a look up there,” I said, pointing up the stairway. It’s not as if I actually expected to see the ghost sitting on the top step waiting for me, dragging on a cigarette. Caroline glanced around to see if anyone else was watching. Nana appeared to still be absorbed with her computer. We were safe. “Um, okay … quickly, though. It’s supposed to be just for library staff, but I’ll show you if we go fast.”

With a nod, I took a step forward and conked my forehead against the overhang of the stairwell.

Ow! Damn it!

I recoiled backwards, as if I’d been punched. Caroline was instantly at my side, peering through my mop of brown hair to find the injury. Her hands fluttered nervously around my head like a pair of butterflies. The smell of ripe peaches filled my nose, overtaking any lingering scent of tobacco. The room shifted slightly to the left.

“Oh God, I’m sorry, I should have warned you about the low overhang. I guess you’re, um, pretty tall.” Her eyes dropped down to the floor.

Holy crap, was she blushing?

“Yeah, I guess I am,” I replied, struggling to keep a respectable amount of cool in my voice while my head throbbed with pain.

“I don’t think people got to be as big as you back in those days,” she continued after a moment. “You know … what with malnutrition and diseases and all those things. So doorways and ceilings were lower. And stairwell overhangs, too …” Suddenly, her fingers stopped fluttering and she lowered her hands back to her sides. “Okay, I saw it — it’s just a small, red mark, no blood or anything.” But I could tell that she was still worried. Her blue eyes searched my face for signs of trauma. They were practically glowing in the dim light of the stairwell. “So, are you all right?”

I think I nodded.

She sighed and her shoulders sank with relief.

“Could you maybe just try to duck a bit so we won’t have to take you to the emergency room?”

And then she smiled. The gap reappeared, taunting me like a glimpse of a secret passageway to another world. All I could do was nod stupidly.

Just like the idiotic, girl-obsessed social leper I’d clearly become.

7 - John

In the summer of 1885, I was eleven and William was thirteen. My cousin was still coming to stay with us every summer and that heavy chip on his shoulder was still firmly in place. But, naive as I was back then, I wasn’t able to understand that doing harm to me was the only way William thought he’d be able to knock the chip loose.

“Hello, John,” he’d said simply as I greeted him at the train station. Father had sent me in alone to fetch him while he waited in the stagecoach outside. “Are you really old enough to be here by yourself?”

William’s voice was almost unrecognizable and the mere sound of it caused me to take a small step back. It had deepened in the past year. And there was a faint shadow of a beard hiding under the skin on his chin. For a split second, I was afraid of him. But, of course, I didn’t let on. I knew to do so would invite a level of mischief and taunting that I’d surely never before had to endure.

“Father’s outside in the carriage,” was all I could manage to say in reply.

The visit started out smoother than any previous year. I thought perhaps William had matured over the winter because he seemed to be on his best behaviour. Until, that is, one day in mid-July.

It was my parent’s twentieth wedding anniversary. Mother surprised all of us by presenting Father with a bottle of French cologne for the occasion. Of course, Father complained bitterly about how ridiculous it was and how men shouldn’t act like women and put on airs, and how the smell of a good, honest, hard-working blacksmith was surely better than any foolish high-priced bottled water from France. But in the end, he agreed to put it on just as I knew he would. Mother almost always got her way with him (when the matter didn’t involve me, of course). I could smell the musky cologne lingering in the parlour air for a while after they’d left for lunch at the Yonge Street Hotel.

Of course, William tried to convince me to put on some of the cologne myself before we left for our fishing trip over at the nearby Don River. “Don’t you know? Cologne helps keep the mosquitoes away.”

But in the three years since William had started visiting, I’d finally learned not to fall into his traps. I wasn’t a gullible child anymore.

Or so I liked to think.

That was the first indication that William’s good behaviour had come to an end. The second came later that night when he first stole the pipe. I was sleeping at the time.

“Look what I’ve got,” hissed a voice beside my head.

I opened my eyes to the sight of William shaking me awake. I stared through the blackened room until my eyes adjusted and I could see his face. I knew by the depth of the darkness that it must be the middle of the night … what did he want now?

“What is it?” I mumbled, my mouth full of feathers.

“Look … let’s have a smoke.”

He thrust an object into my face. It took me a few seconds to recognize that it was my father’s pipe. The carved ivory bowl glowed like a ghost in the darkened room. White bone emerging from wet, black soil.

“We can’t smoke that,” I gasped. “Father will whip us if he finds out we took his pipe.”

“Come, he’ll never find out. We’ll do it away from the bedrooms. And I’ll put it back on the mantle as soon as we’re done.”

Somehow, through the darkness, he must have sensed my fears. Like it was a smell seeping out of my pores.

“Don’t worry, the pipe will have cooled completely by morning. There will be not a trace left of our transgression. I promise.”

Transgression
. That word had always possessed a strange power to make me feel guilty — the sound of it was like a priest breathing down my neck. I rolled over and pulled the quilt up over my ear.

“Leave me alone, William,” I begged.

For a brief moment, there was blissful silence and I truly thought he was going to go away and leave me be. My eyes closed with relief. But an instant later, William was yanking the quilt from my shoulders and spitting venom into my face. His voice was a cruelly pinched falsetto:

“Little John, always so afraid. You should have your mother sew you a dress and a bonnet because you’d get on much better in this life as a girl.”

My stomach twisted into a hard knot. When had William begun to sound just like Father? An owl hooted somewhere outside my window.
Hoo-hoo-who will prevail?
My eyelids drooped with exhaustion. Dear God, all I wanted was to roll over and go back to sleep. But my pride was at stake. Damned pride!

“Yes, fine. I’ll smoke the pipe with you.”

Tossing off my quilt, I got out of bed and followed William out of the room. My bare feet slapped against the cold wooden floor like fishtails against the surface of water. It was a cool night. More than anything, I wanted to run back to my bedroom and put on a pair of stockings but I feared that would invite more taunting from William, so I just kept going.

“We should do it in the stairwell,” he whispered over his shoulder.

I stopped in my tracks. “The stairwell? But why? If my parents wake up, we’ll be caught!”

“Trust me,” William hissed, grabbing me by the arm and pulling me along. “It’s the perfect place. There’s a draft in the stairwell that will carry the smell away from the bedrooms. And if we hear them coming, we can run downstairs and replace the pipe before your father can find it missing.”

This whole thing was giving me a stomach ache. But, of course, William didn’t care about that. He sat down on the top step and produced a box of matches from behind his back. My eyes bulged with surprise. Apparently, he’d stolen more than just Father’s pipe. William lit the tobacco and sucked on the stem until a wisp of smoke began to curl out of the bowl, like a snake rising out of the charmer’s basket. Then he passed it to me and waited for me to take my turn. I hesitated.

“Go on, John,” William hissed. “We don’t have all night.”

Closing my eyes, I took a small drag on the pipe. Right from the first puff, I felt like my lungs were collapsing. Muffling a cough in my hand, I passed it back to my cousin, silently hoping that now I could return to my bed. But William wouldn’t let me leave until we’d smoked every bit of tobacco in that pipe. “You’ll enjoy it when you have more practice,” he kept promising. He was wrong. The whole experience was just awful.

Our nighttime smoking sessions became a regular habit that summer. Each one of them followed an identical pattern. William would wake me up with Father’s pipe in his hand and taunt me until I agreed to come with him to the stairwell. The smoke would bring on coughing fits every time, which we would be forced to smother with our hands. It was terrible. And yet, night after night we continued to do it.

At first, I couldn’t understand why my cousin wanted to smoke that pipe so desperately. But after a few weeks I began to understand. And by the time we were finally discovered, I had developed a taste for the tobacco and was enjoying the smooth feeling of the smoke inside my throat. Holding the pipe felt forbidden, dangerous, grown-up. It certainly made me feel like more of a man than working in the forge ever had. But that meant nothing to Father who, as you might imagine, gave me the beating of my life when he came upon me one night with his stolen pipe in my hand. When he was done, my skin was so raw that I couldn’t walk for two days. But my pride hurt worse than anything I’d ever experienced. I had let myself be duped by my cousin yet again.

I vowed to myself that it would be the last time.

8 - Max

Ducking low this time around, I followed Caroline up the stairwell to the second floor of the house. There wasn’t much to see up there … just a big room with a long table and some chairs. And there were two little rooms that opened up off to the side.

“These were the bedrooms, I guess?”

“Yup,” she replied, leading me into a tiny room facing the street.

“Wow, it’s small,” I said, turning around slowly. There was barely enough room to put a bed.
And I thought my room in our new house was cramped!

“Remember what I just told you … people weren’t as big back then. And most of the families in those days were pretty large, so the children would have had to share these rooms with their siblings.”

I glanced around. “And where was the bathroom?”

She giggled at that. “There was no indoor plumbing back in those days, Max. They had to use an outhouse … or a chamber pot if it was a cold night.”

Chamber pots? I could not even imagine having to take a leak in a bucket in my own bedroom. Thank God I was born after toilets were invented!

She pointed to the other little room. “The reason I brought you up here was to show you this bedroom. There was another apparition seen in here. A man returning a book to the outdoor drop box late one night claimed to have seen the greyish silhouette of a woman standing right there at that window.”

I walked over to the tiny window and looked out to the street below. “And do you think it was the same ghost who was wearing the high-buttoned boots on the stairwell?”

She shrugged. “I have no idea. All we know is that each time there’s been an apparition, it’s been a woman.”

I turned away from the window. Caroline was standing in the narrow doorway, chewing on her pinky fingernail. For a second there, she looked just like a nervous little kid.

“Do you have any idea who the woman is … well, I mean,
was
?”

She shook her head. “Some people think it’s the ghost of Ellen Ramsden, the first owner of this house. But this building changed hands many times over those years, so it really could be any one of the old inhabitants. Or even someone else who might have had connections to this place.”

I stepped toward her, the ancient floorboards groaning beneath my running shoe. “Hey, you know maybe you should think about studying history when you go to university,” I said. “You’re pretty good at remembering all these old facts about dead people.”

Her eyes dimmed … like a light inside her head had just been switched off. “Guess you could say I’m a bit of an expert in that department,” she mumbled. Then she turned and walked back to the stairwell. “I think we should get back downstairs now … I’m not really supposed to let people up here.”

There wasn’t much else to see in the bedrooms so I was glad to go back downstairs. At that point, I thought the tour was over, but it turned out that Caroline still had one room left to show me. To the left of the stairs was another large room full of bookshelves.

“This is the Fiction room. It was also part of the original house … most likely the kitchen. The rest of the library beyond this point was added on in later years.”

I looked around. There was nothing to see in this room except for books.

“Okay … so, is that it for the ghost tour?” I asked. Was this the part when she collects her commission and makes me sign up for that library card? I waited for the sales pitch. But it didn’t come. Instead, she just grinned and bobbed up and down on her toes. The light in her eyes was back again.

“No, not at all. I’ve saved the best for last,” she said, waving her hand in the direction of a narrow, sunlit window crammed in a space between the bookshelves. “The most famous apparition of all was of an old woman sitting in a rocking chair right there in that spot. She was covered in light, rocking back and forth and repeating the name
John, John, John,
over and over again. That was a long time ago but a couple of the other librarians have heard moaning coming from that exact spot over the years.”

An army of goosebumps began a slow march up my arms toward my neck.

“All right … so who was John?”

Caroline turned back to look at me, her blue eyes like ice. “I wish I could tell you, Max.”

“Well, can’t they look through the old records? There should be a way to see if someone named John lived here when it used to be a house?”

What I wanted to say was that this was finally a chance to get some real evidence to hold up all her crazy ghost stories. But, of course, I didn’t.

Caroline crossed her arms in front of her chest and smirked in a self-satisfied kind of way. “So, does this mean that you’re finally admitting that you believe in ghosts?”

“No … not at all,” I replied, suddenly defensive. “It’s just that some proof would make these stories a lot more believable.”

“Well, we did look through the old records and there were a lot of Johns who lived here. Remember, it was a very popular name back then. Ellen Ramsden was married to a John. And her son was named John, too. And the owner who came after her was named John. And so was his son. And there’s a big gap in the record-keeping between 1860 and 1890.”

“A gap? Why?”

“The building was rented out between those years. So, I guess there’s a chance that John was someone who lived here during that time. But, of course, all of this is based on the assumption that you believe in ghosts.”

I didn’t believe in ghosts, did I? I honestly didn’t know what I thought anymore. This girl was seriously playing with my head. Suddenly, I heard the faint sound of a door slamming from upstairs. My head whipped around. There was Nana still sitting and typing at the reception desk where she’d been all along.

“Did you hear that noise?” I whispered, turning back to Caroline.

She shook her head. “Are you okay, Max? You look pale.”

Grabbing my backpack, I stumbled out of the room. “I … I have to go now. I’ve got some studying to do before my afternoon classes.”

Although I didn’t turn around to see her face, I could tell from the little whine in her voice that Caroline was sorry to see me leave. “Okay. But will you come visit me again next week? I’ll try to remember some new ghost stories for you …”

“Yeah … no … I’ll see you later,” I said, hurrying through the entryway. No promises. I wanted to walk out the door and breathe fresh air again. I wanted to race down the garden path and never come back. I wanted to forget everything about this place. But I knew that would be impossible. I would be back … and it would be soon. The lure was too strong.

Yanking down the handle, I hurled open the door and charged outside into the crisp autumn morning. My body heaved with relief as I gulped down the fresh air. I felt like a drowning man who’d just been pulled from the water in the nick of time.