On the Day I Died (20 page)

“Watch me!” I cried.

And two things happened at once. The stairs groaned and split open, and the rotted wood swallowed Aunt Viola, the railings and the plaster walls folding in on top of her. She screamed, a long, piercing wail followed by silence. And then the whole house started to shiver and quake. Piles of newspapers fell. Towers of garbage tipped. Things were crashing, smashing all around me.

I pulled open the door, what I thought was the way out. But it wasn’t the way out, it was a closet, and before I could close it more junk came crashing down, knocking me over, covering me. I struggled to stand, but the whole house was moving, shifting, leaning. I fell flat on the floor, gasping as junk hurtled on top of me. There was an ear-shattering crack as the ceiling gave way, and suddenly the attic was on top of me, too. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.

I smelled gas. Then smoke. And I knew the furnace, or the stove, or that crazy kerosene lamp, had caught fire, and I struggled, but the weight of fifty years’ junk pressed me down. My lungs were squeezed empty, and as the world faded, I managed to turn my head. Through the dust and smoke, I saw a man, just inches away. He was dressed in a pinstripe suit, a thick cigar clenched in his lifeless gray mouth, a scar on his left cheek. And all around him, like gold dust, was a sprinkling of coins.

The night sky was lightening to gray as Tracy ended her story.

“Scarface’s gold!” Johnnie whistled appreciatively. “I’da traded my last pair of knickers to see that.”

Lily shuddered. “Not if it meant meeting scary Aunt Viola.”

“She
was
a monster,” agreed David. “And if anyone knows about monsters, it’s me.”

“You know what I think?” Scott said. “I think we’ve
all
confronted monsters in some way or other—monsters, evil, the dark and unexplained.”

“Father,” muttered Edgar.

“Yeah, don’t forget to add dear old Dad to the list of creepy-crawlies,” said Tracy.

The others nodded.

“
Resolute
,” Scott said, still following his chain of thought. “That’s the word. However things got twisted, whatever weird stuff was thrown at us, we faced up to it. Sure, we died, but we dealt with that, you know? We even learned from it. And that’s something. Maybe it’s
more
than something.”

The ghosts nodded, moving closer. Standing around Mike in a broken circle, they fell silent, suddenly solemn.

It was Gina who broke the stillness. “I think that’s it,” she said. “We’re all done. Everyone’s told their story.”

“Good thing,” observed Rich, “because it’s almost morning.”

Johnnie looked hard at Mike. “And you know what
that
means, don’tcha?”

Fear stirred in Mike’s belly. “No,” he said, his voice cracking. “I’m … I’m not sure what it means.” He looked around at the ring of ghosts, his eyes moving from face to face, trying to read their expressions. And it came back to him then, what the voice in his head had whispered earlier, so many stories ago:

It’s a sign when the dead appear. A sign of your own death
.

Mike shook his head. “I don’t want to die.”

For a moment nothing moved. Even the wind stilled.

Then Evelyn giggled. Blanche joined in.

“Die?” repeated David, shaking his head.

“You got it all wrong, kid,” said Johnnie. “We didn’t bring you here to plant you six feet under.”

“We wanted—no, we
needed
—to tell our stories,” explained Rich. “And more importantly, we needed our stories to be
heard
.”

Gesturing toward the others, David added, “Carol Anne … Gina … 
all
of us brought you here to listen.”

“Don’t you see?” said Lily. “We all died without the chance to tell our stories. We may just be specters in this world, but our stories, if they are remembered and retold, become real and solid and alive.”

“It’s freaky weird, but totally true,” said Tracy. “Once you hear a story, it becomes part of you. It can’t die.”

“And neither can we,” said Blanche.

Gina nodded. “Now we can all move on.”

Mike felt dizzy. Once again he was forced to grip the rough edge of Carol Anne’s gravestone. In the growing light of dawn, he looked down at his hands. They looked so young and solid and
alive
. And he couldn’t help it, couldn’t put a lid on the stew of emotions—relief, sorrow, gratitude—that boiled up inside him. He swiped at his sudden tears, cleared his throat.

“Why me?” he finally managed to ask. “Why not somebody else?”

“Because you almost died last night,” replied David.

“What?”

“The road,” explained Rich. “Your hurrying. You couldn’t have known that the bridge over Salt Creek was out.”

“You would have come up on it too fast,” said Gina. “You would have tried to put on your brakes, but—”

“Splat!”
cried Tracy, a bit too enthusiastically.

Mike slumped against the gravestone.

“Don’tcha get it, dumb ox?” said Johnnie. “The only people who can see and hear us are those who are knocking at death’s door.”

“Those who have already drawn close to our world,” added Scott.

Mike was beginning to understand. “Carol Anne saved me,” he said, thinking aloud. “And … and brought me here to listen.”

“That’s right,” said Lily. “Every year on the anniversary of her death she leads someone to the cemetery—someone our age, someone like you who can listen. This year it was
our
turn to tell our stories.”

Mike looked around at the rows of tombstones. All those lives cut short, he thought. All those stories.

David broke into his thoughts. “The sun’s almost up. Time for you to go home.”

“And time for us to go, too,” said Evelyn.

Later Mike would recall that it was like watching an old black-and-white film, the ghosts’ images jumping and flickering, fading in and out. First substantial and
then transparent. Solid, then ethereal. In the next second, they were drawn upward, lifted by a wind he could not feel. The cemetery itself seemed to exhale, a contented sigh that sounded almost human.

“See ya, schmuck,” Johnnie called out.

“But not too soon,” Gina hastily added.

What remained of their images flickered once more.

“Collin!” Lily squealed with joy.

And then they were gone.

Early-morning sunlight, soft and hazy, poked through the trees’ bare branches, dappling the gravestones with specks of gold. Mike turned and saw the saddle shoes he had flung away the night before lying in a tangle of underbrush. Picking them up, he carefully placed them side by side at the foot of Carol Anne’s grave.

“Take care,” he whispered. “All of you.”

Then, with the October sun warming his skin, he slipped back through the hole in the gate and down the dirt path to where his car was still parked on the side of the road.

He drove home … slowly.

You can blame my fondness for ghost stories on my mother. She was forever telling tales of strange events that took place in our town. “Did you know that the Wynekoop mansion over on Sixth Street used to be called the House of Weird Death?” she would say, her voice growing hushed and mysterious. Or, “It’s rumored that a ghost dog haunts Greenwood Cemetery.” Then my sister Carole and I—huddled beneath a shared blanket, mashed together as close as we could get—would beg, “Tell us! Tell us!” And Mom would spin hair-raising tales about a corpse that wouldn’t decay, or a phantom-filled trolley car, or a seaweed-covered ghost pilot whose plane went down in Lake Michigan during World War II.

Years later I realized that her stories, like most ghost stories, were inspired by memory and myth—by local legend and folklore, and by spooky tales told around the campfire. But above all, they were inspired by truth—by nearby places, real-life people, actual events. This connection with facts and history made her stories real … and real creepy! Fantasy suddenly became possibility. And as I listened, fear tickling my spine with its chilly fingers, I thought,
This
could happen to me. The idea was both thrilling and terrifying.

It was also enlightening. The best ghost stories, I learned, should always include a kernel of truth. And the stories in this book certainly do. Set in Chicago’s very real neighborhoods and suburbs, they are shot through with the city’s tragic, sometimes violent, but always intriguing history. Why Chicago? Because it is the spookiest place I know.

Mike
—White Cemetery really does exist. Located off a sparsely populated country road near the suburb of Barrington, Illinois, the place is notorious for ghost sightings. Over the years, people have reported seeing floating orbs, and phantom cars, and even a “magic house” that appears and disappears as baffled witnesses look on. Creepy? You bet. The perfect setting for Mike’s story.

Gina
—While her story is fiction, many of its details—the depiction of an Italian American neighborhood in the early 1960s, the real terror of being trapped inside a blazing schoolroom—were drawn from firsthand accounts of the tragedy that struck Our Lady of the Angels School on the city’s west side. On December 1, 1958, a fire tore through the Catholic grammar school, killing ninety-two students and three nuns and seriously injuring another hundred children. A former pupil later admitted to setting the blaze (as well as to starting other smaller fires throughout the neighborhood) but was never charged with the crime. Transcripts of actual interviews conducted by fire department investigators—as reported in David Cowan and John Kuenster’s book
To Sleep with the Angels
—were especially helpful in fleshing out the character of a child arsonist. And a trip to Our Lady of the Angels (rebuilt in 1960 on the same site, and just a ten-minute drive from my house) helped me visualize my fictional school’s layout.

Johnnie
—I grew up hearing endless stories about Depression-era Chicago. My parents, who’d spent their childhoods there, often talked about the city’s fifty percent unemployment rate, the hundreds of homeless boys camping out in Grant Park, the soup kitchens that were financed by gangster
Al Capone because the city was too broke to help its citizens. As I listened, my imagination filled in the details—the clattering sounds of Model T Fords, the smells of factory smoke, the taste of a ten-cent slice of pecan pie. Over time, it was as if my parents’ memories became my own, memories I fashioned into a story with help from the Chicago History Museum’s exhibit “Face-to-Face with the Great Depression,” and Houston’s National Museum of Funeral History’s macabre but vivid description of a 1930s neighborhood funeral home.

Scott
—Not far from my house, on the city’s northwest side, sits the former site of Chicago State Hospital, a sorrow-filled gothic monstrosity with a long and dark history—a history I borrowed for this story. As Scott reported, inmates were abused, mistreated and abandoned at the asylum. There was, indeed, a railroad car that locals called the crazy train. And those old headlines? They came directly from historical newspapers. As for the hospital itself, it was demolished in the 1970s. But many people claim that its spirits live on. They have reported hearing the disembodied laughter of children and seeing the outlines of groaning, white-robed specters. They link this paranormal activity to the fact that a portion of the hospital’s cemetery was bulldozed to make room for a strip mall—a mall that residents have nicknamed Poltergeist Square because of the city of bones lying just beneath the asphalt.