Goodlow's Ghosts

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NOVELS:

STRANGE SEEDS

BOUNDARIES

THE CHANGING

THE DEVOURING

NON FICTION:

THE INTELLIGENT MAN'S GUIDE TO U.F.O.s

UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

A MANHATTAN GHOST STORY – NARRATED BY DICK HILL

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For Cindy, whose character Sam is.

When he was fifteen years old and had discovered his psychic abilities, Ryerson
Biergarten
was positive he'd gone crazy. He knew about people who "heard voices," or saw faces in the wallpaper, or woke night after night from the same awful dream. So, when that sort of thing started happening to him, he went to his mother and asked her advice. She was at the sink, peeling potatoes. The water ran while they talked, so Ryerson's memory of the conversation would always be colored by the white noise of the water running.

She wore a knee-length white dress. Her blond hair hung long down her back.

Ryerson said, "I see things, Mom." He shook his head in confusion. "I see things and they come true." He paused. "Or I find out later that they're true." He closed his eyes a moment and went on, "And sometimes I know what people are thinking. I can
hear
what they're thinking, Mom, just like they were talking to me."

"And you suppose that you're crazy because of all this?" his mother asked.

Ryerson sighed. "I don't know, Mom. I don't know." He sounded as if he were in misery.

His mother nodded. "Tell me what you see, Ryerson." She adjusted the water that was running onto the potatoes because the hot was running out.

Ryerson shoved his hands into his pockets. He was, in many ways, a typical sixties teenager growing up in the suburbs just outside Boston. He was something of a slob, a trait he never grew out of completely. He was fascinated by The Beatles and Herman's Hermits and The Rolling Stones. His school work suffered from his preoccupation with girls, basketball, and acne. So, when his mother looked at him with that bemused expression on her face, and said, "Tell me what you see, Ryerson," what
she
saw was an awkward, vaguely scared-looking young man whose brown corduroy pants were baggy and whose shirttails hung out, and who was beginning to sport what might have generously been called a mustache. At the same time, this archetypal teenage boy was suffering torments that few other teenagers suffered, and she knew it.

Ryerson said to her, "I see all kinds of things, Mom," and quickly added, "I saw that Charlie was going to get hit." Charlie was their dog. He'd been hit by a school bus a week earlier and was recuperating in the garage—he had a broken leg and a cracked pelvis.

"When?" Ryerson's mother asked, and finally shut the water off.

"The day before it happened," Ryerson answered.

She turned around from the sink and folded her arms over her chest. Then she sighed, sat at the kitchen table, and asked Ryerson to sit opposite her. He did.

"And what else?" she asked.

He was confused. "And what else?" he said. "Don't you want to hear about Charlie?"

"We both know about Charlie, Ryerson."

He looked at her for a long moment until it became clear what she was saying—they both knew about Charlie, then, so he could be lying, or, at least, fooling himself. He clasped his hands nervously on the table top. He didn't like being mistrusted by his own mother. He said, staring at his hands and pouting a little, "And I know that Dad and you are going to get a divorce. I can hear you thinking about it."

Her face froze.

After a half minute, Ryerson said, "Mom?" He read pain in her. He
felt
her pain and her heartache. "Gee, God, I'm sorry," he said.

His mother stood, looked appraisingly down at him and said, "Never let anyone tell you that what you have is a ‘gift,' son. It isn't."

A month later, Ryerson's father moved out of the house.

~ * ~

Very early on, Ryerson had glimpses of what he became convinced was the world of the dead. These glimpses were at first swift, and horrific, and he was as much afraid of them as tantalized by them.

His first such encounter was on a bright winter morning when he was fifteen years old.

He had just awakened. A snow had fallen overnight, and the morning sun glinted gaily off the snow and into his bedroom window.

His world at that moment was bright, and cold, and cozy. It changed in an instant. It became dark, hot, claustrophobic.

He was no longer in his bedroom. He was in a room whose walls were close. And he was no longer lying in his bed. He was standing. He thought that he could reach and touch the walls of this room.

He could see little. His sudden confusion and fear prevented him from noticing much—a light fixture overhead, a chair, some kind of couch nearby, visible as only a fat lump in the darkness.

He smelled salt air. Fish.

He thought of calling for his mother.

He heard, "No mothers here." It was followed by a soft chuckle. Then faces appeared out of the darkness. They were faces whose mouths hung open and whose eyes were wide and hollow with fear, loneliness, hunger. He thought they were like the faces of the drowned appearing from dark water.

He heard, "Oh, we have use for you here, boy." He screamed.

Then, all at once, the room was gone, he was in his bedroom again, and his mother was standing over him, shaking him, pleading with him, "Ryerson, my God, what's wrong?"

He stared at her.

She told him, "You were calling to me. You sounded like the hounds of hell were after you."

He didn't remember calling to her. He shook his head. "I… I ..." He could think of nothing coherent to say.

His mother said, "You are a poor, unlucky boy, Ryerson."

At the time, he didn't know what she meant.

But in years to come, her words would come back to him, and he would understand.

Ryerson H.
Biergarten
(his friends called him "Rye") had the body of a long-distance runner, a face that was invariably described as "sexy," "intriguing," or both, and he dressed in a way that the first of his two divorced wives called "poor man's preppy," in faded, no-name jeans, and corduroys, battered yellow or brown cardigan sweaters, argyle socks, penny loafers, and well-worn blue, beige or green button-down shirts. ("It's clear, Rye," his first wife had told him, "that you don't give a damn what you look like." He had readily agreed.) He had a full head of reddish brown hair, usually in need of cutting or combing, and his gray-green eyes almost always had a spark of humor in them. He had also, in the past few weeks, taken to carting around a snorting Boston bullterrier pup he'd named Creosote. He called the dog Creosote because he had found it in a smokehouse behind a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in Vermont. Ryerson had been in the farmhouse looking for several of its previous tenants—a man in his nineties who did lots of cursing at odd hours, and a young woman of twenty or twenty-one who had a fetching smile and wonderful green eyes. She liked to lounge on a huge, Victorian-style sofa in the parlor and say suggestive things to the house's male visitors. Both of these previous tenants were dead. The man in his nineties had died 110 years earlier, according to the County Hall of Records, and the woman had died at her lover's hands early in the twentieth century. Her name had been Gwendolyn, and the man's name had been Mr. Barclay.

Ryerson did not go to the house convinced of anything. He was, by nature, a skeptical person and was ready to find any of a number of answers, the most likely being that the owners of the house had cooked the whole thing up to draw visitors in. The owners, a group of five area businessmen, charged two dollars a head for people to walk through what they called a "living piece of America's heritage." Ryerson believed firmly in the supernatural, and he believed just as firmly in its various and usually unpredictable effects on the world of the living. He also believed, perhaps even more firmly, in the potential for greed and ignobility inherent in everyone (including himself—though, at the age of thirty-three, he liked to think that he hadn't yet fallen to too much greed, or too much ignobility).

He talked to each of the five businessmen first. He asked them pointed questions about what they'd heard and seen, the same question several times, from different perspectives, trying to catch any of them in a lie. And when he was done, his own very well-developed sixth sense told him that there was a little bit of hoax, a little bit of truth, and a lot of colorful exaggeration involved in the whole thing: Whether there was anything actually supernatural happening at the house was a judgment he would put off until he'd been through it.

He went there on a Monday, the day the house was closed to visitors, and to his surprise—and without much effort—he found the two ghosts he'd been hired to find. It was late afternoon, the day was dismal and rainy, and the young woman, Gwendolyn, was in her usual place on the huge Victorian sofa in the parlor. She was, as Ryerson liked to say, "flickering"—her image waxed and waned like the light of a candle. Her suggestive words waxed and waned in the same way.

"Hi," she said when Ryerson walked into the room.

"Hi," he said.

"Would you"—her image waned; her words grew inaudible—"me?"

"I'm sorry," Ryerson said. He had stopped in the doorway. He didn't want to go any farther. The truth was, although he'd investigated several hundred "events," as he called them, he had never been able to push back the loud whisper of fear. He'd tried smiling, coughing, whistling, he'd tried thinking about Yogi Bear, had tried logic (
My God, this poor creature is lost, and I'm here to help it
!), but still the fear remained. No matter that Gwendolyn, when he could see her, was probably the most delightful and sensuous of all the ghosts he'd encountered; she was still a ghost, so she made his stomach flutter and started a hard knot of fear in his throat.