Ghosts – The Word Worker

The Phantom’s Mask

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The flashlight beam reflected from the dark water, and she stirred the water with her toe just to break the unnatural stillness. Even her footsteps barely whispered in the cavern. Quite a contrast from the busy, vibrant stage far overhead.

She continued skirting the lake, passing her light over damp columns. The years had left their mark underground in far different ways than they had above. Few knew or cared about the foundations of the Opera Garnier anymore, the stories that had surrounded its debut period reduced to little more than ghost stories for children.

Even Elodie herself wondered how much, if any, of the legend was true. So many generations had passed; memory changed in the telling, giving ordinary events mythological proportion. Still, she had promised her great-grandmother, the last Chagny to inherit that famed soprano voice, that she would visit the lake once in her lifetime, and the tour she had slipped away from had seemed the perfect opportunity.

Her flashlight beam caught a moldering wooden box perched on a pile of rubble left from some forgotten repair. Curious, she fingered the rusty lock, then winced as the board behind it peeled away like paper. She gingerly lifted what remained of the lid and gasped.

In a threadbare nest of velvet lay a pristine mask, black and gold accents glittering new in a seeming halo of light. Unable to resist, she lifted it to her face, daydreams of masked dancers and soaring music filling her vision. A silken whisper touched her mind as her hand fell in shock. “Christine, my love, I have waited so long for your return. Sing for me once more.”

The Folly

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“Come on, Sal, what kind of place is this for a picnic? It’s creepy!”

“Donny, you’re the scariest guy I’ve ever met. It’s just an old building and some dead trees. Can’t you imagine what this place looked like in its heyday?”

“Heyday? Sometimes I think you’re an old ruin, Sal. Who talks like that? And that’s not what scary means.”

“Look, we can sit here among the stones and no one will ever know. The river will even cover our voices. It’s romantic!”

“There’s plenty of romance right over there in the city, Sal. We’re gonna get rained out, anyway, look at the sky.”

“What are you talking about? The sun’s blazing, and anyway, the folly would keep rain off. Don’t be such a grouch.”

“Sal, did you see that? I guess you aren’t the only weirdo around here; somebody beat you to this place. I saw movement in the shadows. Can we go now?”

“Hello? Who’s there? Wow, listen at that echo, how cool is that? Nobody’s here, Donny, now cut it out. It’s a lot cooler in here, you really shou…”

“Sal? Come on, that’s not funny. Let’s just go, I’ll buy you a nice dinner instead.”

“Sal? Oh, hi. I told her there was someone in there; she rope you into her little game? Tell her she’s a royal pain in the backside, will you? Maybe she can hitch a ride home with you, I’m through.”

“Dooohhhnnnyyyy…”

Cursed City

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Fifteen years since she had fled the city, a child in a handful of refugees with nothing to feel but pain. Child or not, that last view of the city had been burned into her memory as surely as the real fires had marked her face. She frowned, old scars pulling tight; surely it should look different by now.

The burned out buildings shot twisted iron fingers toward the sky, and the asphalt beneath her feet had melted and cooled into a strange, urban desert floor. The ruins were earily silent, the cracked walls devoid of even the smallest sign of life. She shivered, glancing back at the overgrown countryside, and faltered. The boundary was too clean, too clear.

It had been a mistake to come here; they had warned her, but she had been so sure of herself. Fire leaped suddenly around her, crackling, roaring angrily. The scent of smoke choked her airway, and her coughs joined disembodied screams and shouts that assaulted her from every direction. Despite the flames, her hands numbed with cold, and every cough spewed white mist from her lungs.

Just as suddenly the ruins were empty again beneath the blazing August sun. She turned and fled.

The Glass House

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It was a house like every other. Brick walls, stone trimmings, wooden doors, and shingles roof. At least, that what everyone saw during the day. A nice, ordinary dwelling, if a little old-fashioned and pretentious.

The moon told a different story. Bricks and boards gleamed, reflecting the soft rays with a greenish light that could only come from glass. As the moon rose higher, the house transformed, seemingly a thing of crystal. Though glass, the faceted brick revealed nothing inside. Shadows melded with shifting light in a nocturnal dance, seen only by the rare soul unable to sleep and out for a midnight constitutional.

Such walkers avoided the gleaming property, spooked by its ghostly appearance. None of them would ever have noticed that one shadow moved differently. As far as they knew, no one had set foot in the mansion for a century except for a daily woman, hired to clean, and a caretaker who visited one day a week for maintenance. The servants were frequently plied with questions over a friendly ale at the local pub, but to no purpose.

Only in the moonlight did that independent shadow flit across windowpanes, or pass through green-hued doors of carved glass to pace restlessly on the manicured drive. Silent, it would retreat with the stars into its daily disguise, invisible, waiting.

The Quarter

Photo by Becky Strike, French Quarter, New Orleans LA

Jean rested in the relative darkness of the tiled alley. The fan, incongruous against the ancient brick, did little to improve the sticky New Orleans heat pouring in from the open courtyard. Why couldn’t he have died somewhere cooler, he grumbled to himself.

He’d certainly had the opportunity. Born the younger son of the old city elite, he had craved adventure and excitement. The river had offered both, and his father had been only too glad to send his troublesome offspring north with the traders, away from the gambling halls that threatened the family fortune and reputation.

Ironic, then, that it should be fever from the delta swamps that took his life after all. Why he had been cursed to eternal boredom skulking in the darkness he had never learned. Two hundred and fifty years had brought bewildering change to the old city, at times almost its destruction. He would have welcomed that; perhaps he would have been released from his spectral prison.

He sighed at the sound of amplifiers whining on the other side of the wall. The courtyard still reflected the brilliance of the coastal sun through the dirty arched panes remaining overhead from some discarded doorframe. Apparently it was never too early for nightlife in the new old city. If only he could be part of it.

The Girl

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She was there every day the sun shone, sitting against the big oak in the park with her guitar. No one ever saw her come or go, but when she played anyone nearby stopped what they were doing. They gravitated to her, faces suddenly pensive, often tearful as if their deepest longings surfaced.

She always played the same three songs, soft and sweet, and sang more to herself than to anyone else. I often wondered if she even noticed her audience. Newcomers to the park would fumble in pockets or bags for loose cash and try to donate, but found no place to leave money. It was only a girl and her guitar.

I don’t know why none of us ever tried to talk to her. We would hover, entranced until the music ended, then wander on still half under the music’s spell. I never even learned her name, although her face remained with me long after the song was done and I had moved on.

One year the big oak was struck by lightning. The city council voted to remove the tree, stump and all, due to the safety hazards of a huge dead tree in a public area. When they pulled up the roots, they found a skeleton of a girl with a few rusty wires coiled near the fingers. The girl never played again.

The Legend

There he was, in all his lacy glory. I’d heard of the viscount, of course, from every local in every cafe and bistro between Paris and Calais. Quite the legend, apparently, that no one outside of France had ever heard.

No one remembered his full title, or even his family name, only that he was a viscount. A fact that had only fueled my dismissal of the story as a joke on gullible tourists, until now. Who could scoff with semi-transparent but gloomy dark eyes boring into one’s soul over the longest cascade of a collar ever seen in 18th century portraits?

“Je vous maudis, traitre!” The voice was bitter, but the lips set and motionless beneath the oddly unstyled black hair that streamed down both sides of a gray face. I glanced around, a shiver uncalled for in the warm summer night air setting my teeth chattering. Even my abominable French understood the word traitor.

“Th-the revolution is over,” I quavered in English. “I’m just a tourist.” Not that there was any point in speaking English to a dead French aristocrat, I thought. Even one that had managed to escape the guillotine only to be thrown from his horse into that widely spreading tree I could see through his face.

“Je vois maudis!” he shrieked, suddenly inches from me with his fist blending with my throat. My breath turned to ice in my chest and for a moment the world became as transparent as the viscount. Then it was over. I smiled with grim satisfaction, quickly twitched the lace on my cuffs back into shape, and turned back toward Paris. The traitors must die under their own cursed blade.

The Flower Girl

FB_IMG_1590179770886 She was my friend, but no one knew about her. She said no one would believe me anyway, so I never told anyone. Until now. Maybe you won’t think I’m crazy.

Her name was Daisy, but I called her my flower girl. She was so pretty in her white dress with a clover chain draped around her head. I thought she was the most beautiful thing in the world and my eight year old heart was smitten.

Daisy didn’t talk much. Mostly she smiled, giggled, ran away, and buried her face in every flower she found. She loved flowers and I could always find her hiding in the trailing roses at the edge of the cemetery.

I met her one day when I followed a lizard into the bushes. She had crouched behind them, watching the people pass by, she said. My lizard escaped while I stood and stared at her. She laughed at me and told me to chase her.

I had never been inside the cemetery before. It was an ordinary one, I suppose, but my child’s imagination had conjured all sorts of evil existing there. That day, with Daisy glancing over her shoulder at me as she ran, I forgot to be afraid. She led me a merry chase, up and down the rows of headstones, ducking behind trees and slipping away before I could catch up to giggle at me from behind another.

When the factory whistle reminded me of supper and my mother, she blew me a kiss and told me to come play again. So I did. Every afternoon, so long as it wasn’t raining, I ran to the cemetery to find her. She was always there, hiding under the trailing roses, and she always greeted me the same way. Every afternoon we played tag among the stones.

Some days, she would stop for a while at this grave marker or that, pointing at the words engraved there. I would stumble through the names and epitaphs, wondering what held her attention so long. Sometimes it would be a child’s grave, sometimes a soldier’s. Usually it named just an ordinary person. Some were new, some were so old the inscriptions were all but illegible. She never told me why they were important to her, and she never stayed long.

I never questioned that she was always there beneath the roses. I never asked why she never changed her dress. I never thought about the fact that her clover chain never faded or was lost, or her bare feet never dirty no matter how long we played. She was my best friend and the love of my young life.

Eventually other interests claimed me. The neighborhood boys recruited me for football practice with scraps from construction sites and dumpsters as goals, bicycle helmets and wadded newspapers in our shirts our only protection. My third grade teacher, a pleasant looking woman with a will like iron, believed in homework to keep idle hands from mischief, and thus stole many of the afternoons not devoted to “the game.”

Fewer and fewer days found me at the cemetery. When I did go, I found that playing chase and staring at headstones soon grew monotonous, and I would say goodbye to Daisy. She still blew me kisses and told me to come again, but she seemed different all the same.

One day, I followed her slowly into the graveyard instead of chasing her as usual. She stopped and turned to look at me, her smile gone. “Goodbye,” she said simply, then ran away. I went home to do my homework, and although I went to the cemetery for a few weeks afterwards, I never saw my flower girl again.

The Ghost

FB_IMG_1589074214619 The monk stood beneath the arch, staring down the endless corridor of archways. Once echoing with the sounds of prayers and sandals, once filled with the bounty of the fields waiting to be distributed where needed, the archways stood empty and silent. He was alone.

No one had foreseen the disaster. The unholy thing had slipped in so easily, feasting on the contentment of the people. There had seemed no need for guard; the peace of the community had been unbroken for centuries. The stranger was welcomed with open arms and generous kindness.

The monk barely remembered the first disappearance. An old man, he thought; or perhaps it was an old woman. The forgotten went first. The children were next, and with the first of those losses came the fear. By then it was too late.

One by one they were taken. One by one the community dwindled. When it came for the monks they were powerless. Their own fear and grief was their undoing. They fell to the unholy stranger like the last in a chain of dominoes.

The monk stood under the arch, staring down the endless corridor of archways. Here he would stand forever, the ghost of all those he had taken. With their deaths he had died, trapped forever in this empty hall of his own making.