Ravenous Ghosts (4 page)

Gone, and the nights exude peace, the mattress accepting his tired bones like clay in the hands of a potter. His dreams are golden, exorcized of the heavy cloying darkness that was the signature of life with Mother. There is no doubt that he loved her, but she molded him into a creature of indifference, isolating him in his own little box of shadow where there was never room for any kind of feeling.

He suspects what little grief he feels at her passing stems from his being accustomed to her constant presence rather than any true emotion on his part. This suspicion in turn ignites guilt, but guilt is something he has learned to master and, aided by his newfound happiness, it is soon beaten into submission.

The celebration of her death is a tawdry affair and Tom finds himself at the hub of a ring of people he doesn
't know, or care to.  The minister is a patrician man at least twenty years his senior, all practiced smiles and Bible passages as he leads them in a chorus of emotionless verse that rises like startled ravens above the gloomy fall graveyard. The air smells of cold earth and dying leaves.

Tom weathers the condolences, secretly wondering what it is about death that leads people to the assumption that they can immediately insinuate themselves into the lives of the grieving. If anything, he finds a note of condescension in those voices, powered by the look of
there but for the grace of God
in their eyes. It sickens him and reinforces his need to leave as soon as this stunted procession of sympathy is over.

When the last bleak face has moved away, he stuffs his hands into the pockets of his dark overcoat and rounds the church, the sympathizer
's last words to him carried on ill-formed tendrils of autumn wind, falling just short of his desire to hear them.

Grumbling, he slips through the wrought-iron church gate, the spire of St. Andrew
's like a chiding finger at his back, reminding him who might be watching his disregard for all things sacred. The image weighs on his shoulders like the memory of the woman he has left behind him in the ground. A woman he scarcely knows.

* * *

He has come home to the house on Marrow Lane.

As expected, his mother complains about the length of his hair, how much weight he has lost and asks him why he has bothered to come visit her after so long an absence. Her frequent wincing and moaning about her incessant headaches render his excuses meaningless.

"They steal my sleep and it's getting harder to keep anything down."

"
You need to eat to keep your strength up," he replies, feeling achingly redundant and thinking: Who
is
this woman?

Her dramatics are almost certainly a cry for attention, a trait not unknown to her and worsened by age. He delivers the customary platitudes and takes his leave of her, ushered out on a cloud of protest only silenced by the thick oak door of the house.

* *
*

Now, standing before that very same door, running a trimmed fingernail over the cracks and ridges in the wood grain, he ponders the irony of her death.

An aneurysm. If it
's any consolation, I doubt she felt a thing. It would have been very sudden.

I see.

Had she been complaining about headaches or dizziness lately?

No. At least, not to me…

Realizing he might have been able to save her had he taken her histrionics seriously brings to mind a far darker question:
Had you known, would you have done anything?

Brushing the thought aside, he opens the door of the two-story memory vault he used to call home. As he steps into the hall his senses hone in on the smallest, the slightest

(Tommy, is that you?)

of sounds. He waits, the dust settling around him in the chorus of quiet, ears attuned to the soundtrack of the old house. Eventually he straightens, exhales heavily and continues down the hall until he comes to the living room.

From the doorway, he sees the familiar sight of the old 10" television set in the corner opposite. A miniscule and fog-shrouded representation of himself is all that's showing on the vapid eye of the screen as he enters the room.

The beige carpet knots itself beneath his shoes and he resolves to have it torn up as soon as he moves in proper. He suspects that foul, vomit-colored layer of shag is older than himself and he has hated it for as long as he can remember.

The same goes for the sofa, a bloated brown semblance of intestines passing itself off as Naugahyde. The upholstery is ripped, yellow foam winking lewdly at him from elliptical eye-sockets.
Gone
, he thinks, relishing the thought of being rid of these particular harbingers of memory.

His double shadow bids him look up and he nods at the imitation gold chandelier, missing two of its four bulbs, then down to the once white wallpaper, curling from the mildewed plaster beneath…
Gone
.

The photographs, sepia-toned and black and white depictions of stern-faced young men cradling even sterner looking women in their burly arms, people he has never met but who he assumes are his relatives…
Gone
.

Gone, gone, gone. All of it. Anything not immediately pertaining to
his
life will be dumped and with an abandon impervious to the wheedling pleas of sentimentality. It is after all,
his
castle now.

Grinning, he makes his way down the hall to the kitchen.

This room seems smaller than he remembers it and he wonders if it has shrunk in on itself after years of absorbing the auras of subconscious misery from the inhabitants of this place.

The lemon-hued walls seem to sag as he wanders around the room. He sniffs at the leaky radiator with the small plastic bowl beneath the tap to catch the water and shakes his head at the grease-smeared range, the picture on the wall above it speckled with spots so that the faces of the two watercolor children look positively leprous. A foul smell drifts to his nose from the trash compactor beneath the sink. He decides to investigate that some other time.

Against the far wall stands a simple pine table with three chairs and it is here his gaze stalls as the bloated corpse of memory rises to the surface of his mind.

You
're a dreamer Tommy, you'll always be a dreamer and a man who spends too much time in his own head never gets a goddamn thing done.

Don
't talk to him like that.

I don
't remember anyone asking you're opinion, Agnes. It's a sweet life for both of you, living in your daydreams while I'm out busting my ass to put food on the table.

Tom stems the flow of recollection, feels it swell against his resistance. The surface of the table is pitted with scratch marks and tiny holes where knives have been used to make a point. Coffee rings on the left—his mother
's side of the table—stare up at him like blinded eyes. On the right, paler circles where his father lost himself in the liquid utopia of liquor.

And in the middle where Tom used to sit there is nothing.

He can almost see himself now—a young boy, eyes permanently narrowed in anticipation of a blow that could come at any time, skin sallow, devoid of the youthful glow typical of a child his age, sitting in a chair that only emphasizes his diminutive frame, his parents flanking him like birds of prey, always watching and waiting as if they expect something profound to trickle from his small tight-lipped mouth. But Tommy remains silent as much as possible. It is safer.

Shrugging off the memory, Tom shuffles over to the range and the bulbous white kettle, the base blackened by time and negligence, the handle loose, screws rattling. He opens it and angles it toward the naked bulb behind him. To his surprise it appears moderately clean. Nevertheless, he rinses it until he is sure nothing untoward will end up in his cup, fills it and lights the gas ring beneath, the thought of piping hot coffee staving off the unpleasant chill reminiscence has brought in tow.

Suddenly the blue flame beneath the kettle sputters as the kitchen door drifts open. He turns as it groans wide, allowing him to see down the length of the hallway.

Damn it.

The front door is standing open. He figures he must have forgotten to close it when he came in so drawn was he by the familiar. He stomps down the hall, grabs the door handle and is pushing it closed when a faint shuffling gives him pause. He listens, glances at his wristwatch: almost eight. Not an odd time for people to be out wandering, surely?

Peering around the edge of the door and out onto the cracked pavement reveals nothing except the lazy onset of twilight; the air is heavy, stars twitch into life in the vermillion canvas that hangs above Marrow Lane. A neighborhood dog yips and growls, yips and whines like a violin with ill-tuned strings. Someone yells:
"shut that damn dog the hell up," and is ignored.

Tom frowns and shivers at the autumn chill insinuating its way through the fabric of his coat. Just as he is about to shut the door, he catches sight of an old woman standing by the streetlight a few feet down from his house, her hair a wild halo of sodium fire. She is dressed in nothing more than a housecoat and slippers and appears to be staring right at him, sending an unwelcome spark of unease through him and he backs away from the door, starts to ease it closed.

The old lady moves.

He pauses, one eye peeking through the inch-wide space between door and jamb, watching though now he feels as if he has donned a coat of snakes, his skin crawling as the shadow-faced woman moves along the sidewalk with short, stiff steps, the orb of fuzzy darkness hiding eyes that may or may not be fixed on him. She shuffles closer still and he realizes this is the sound he heard earlier.
Shhhnick! Shhhnick! Shhhnick!

He wants to close the door, an action that will leave his sudden inexplicable fear outside with the old woman, but he is powerless to do anything but watch.

She reaches the mailbox—a simple black tin semi-cylinder staked in Tom's garden but jutting out over the pavement—and stops, cocks her head and brings a gnarled hand toward it.

Is she pilfering the mail or what?
He wonders, his unease no less potent as the idea of confronting her is rapidly abandoned.

He hears the soft scraping sound of the mailbox door being opened and watches in disbelief as the old lady stoops down and peers inside. After a moment in which he imagines he can feel the victory radiating in icy waves from her skeletal frame, her hand emerges clutching a small white rectangle. Clutching the letter to her chest, she swivels on her heels and shuffles back up the street, passing through the orange glow from the streetlight much quicker than she had on her way to steal the mail.

I should have done something
. He watches the shadows swallow her.
That letter might have been important
.

The kettle shrieks and jars the thought from his head.

* *
*

Later that evening, he stands at the threshold to a time capsule, held in place by a feeling of unreality that almost makes him dizzy.

Over the last few years his visits to this house have been infrequent and he has never stayed, had in fact come armed with a plethora of excuses should such a thing be suggested. As a result, he has never come upstairs and seen his old room.

He is shocked to find it is exactly the same, from the crimson toy chest at the foot of the bed to the Mickey Mouse wallpaper. His old teddy bear Rufus, now missing an eye, sits atop a once white pillow, arms splayed in frozen greeting. The carpet whispers as he advances further into the sanctuary of his childhood, head pounding, eyes wide with the strain of trying to absorb the sudden rush of familiarity.

A small oak desk, rescued from the local dump and restored to nothing like its former glory by Tom
's father in one of his rare charitable moods, stands solemnly before the small white-framed arched window overlooking the neighboring rooftops.

Through one of the four panes, a thin crack like mercury lightning streaks an eternal path in the glass from top to bottom. Beyond that, the darkness rolls over the silent neighborhood, dampening the sounds of life and nodding its ethereal assent to the night creatures and the hunters waiting for their time to shine.

Tom shakes his head, looks down at the pockmarked surface of the desk and remembers...
Just as his father jabs the kitchen table with his knife or fork or the stub of his carpenter's pencil, so Tommy waits until he is alone and punctuates his own confused anger with the corner of a ruler, or pen, or…

"
Did I hate him?" Tom asks the empty room. "Did I hate them both and not know it?"

He kneels down before the desk as if it is the armrest in a confessional, his knees quickly growing sore on the threadbare carpet. He studies the indecipherable doodles and unfinished scribbles printed on the table. Only one is clear and etched w
ith an angry hand into the wood: HAVEN

This one he understands, even if he can
't quite remember carving it.