An Accidental Ghost Story
During the Venetian Carnival of 1819, an elephant brought in for the festivities escaped its menagerie. Trampling its custodian in exitus, it proceeded to tear through the streets in a panic before taking refuge in a small church. According to eyewitness accounts, the elephant attempted to create a barricade by piling up the pews with its trunk. Gunfire failing to take it down, the Venetians took the pitiful insubordinate out with a cannon instead. The elephant died of course, its skeleton placed on display at the University of Padua, and the party went on.
I have seen pictures of the church of Sant’Antonin and wondered at the audacity of cornered creatures, great and small: odds stacked like pews against us, the faint promise of a god hanging somewhere in the rafters, and the fate we’d imagined for ourselves about to be blown to smithereens.
I really tried to make a fresh start of it. I folded up my cheesecloth ectoplasm and left the sepia-tinted New England of my childhood, moving as far south as one could, to the saturated Keys, Ponce de León’s islands of Los Martires. I bought a house with my ill-gotten gains, a pastel gingerbread likely designed by a moonlighting confectioner. Mind you, this was before Disney World and retirement communities and spring break Bacchanalias; this was La Florida. Under palm and persistent sun, I assumed the ghosts I had wronged could not follow me to such a place. Ghosts, after all, are Gothic concoctions, the stuff of centuries-old secrets nestled in the roots of family trees that first took seed on Pagan continents. Not here, never here, or so I thought.
(interlude)
My father made his living as a traveling representative for a budding apothecary company that hawked its wares as miracle cures for everything from hysterical housewives to colicky babies. When he was away my mother pulled out her cigar box and opened shop, providing a similar service for a similar demographic. Neither seen nor heard, I hovered just along the periphery while my mother shuffled the inquiries of her guests. Even as an innocent I knew those cards were more than just a shabby player’s deck, that they contained the power to conjure money and tearful thankyous and godblessyous. One day I summoned the nerve to ask with feigned casualty what was so special about a pack of cards? Whenever my mother laughed, it sounded like crows flying out of her mouth.
“They’re not special at all, and neither are my patrons. Neither am I, for that matter. But combine all three and we get what we need.”
“You mean the cards don’t mean anything?” It was an astonishing first, an adult openly admitting to an untruth. It set my mother and me on uncharted—but not entirely unwelcoming—terrain.
“They mean whatever I want them to. And they keep that belly of yours stuffed with sweets and my vanity placated.”
“Papa doesn’t approve,” I piously sniffed at the last part, and it was true. He specifically forbade my mother from squandering funds on pots of rouge and freckle-lightening paste, just as he forbade the sweets I craved like goblin fruit.
“Exactly, my knee-high. Which is why the cards buy us those things and he needn’t be vexed for knowing. Just you remember that next time you go sifting through your rights and wrongs.”
It was to be my first and only lesson in the grey art of trickery. My mother and I never spoke of cards and deceits again.
From there it all began innocently enough, but doesn’t everything? A kiss for a penny a preamble to prostitution, a barfed-up cheesecloth evidence of one’s clairvoyance. I left home with a promised position at Champney’s School for Girls, a progressive establishment that assured my parents it “welcomed all ladies of good standing,” which made me snicker and swerve instead into the world of teatime spiritualism. I even lifted my signature catchphrase from one of my father’s books, which I (correctly) suspected would appeal to the Grand Tour snobs: I morti aprono gli occhi ai vivi. The dead open their eyes to the living.
My parlor trick was big news in the waning days of the Gilded Age and I made a tidy living as Charon’s proxy, ferrying the bereaved to the land of the dead in exchange for a generous fee. The Little Seer they called me, referring to my diminutive size. I gathered from the follies of Barnum that if one must be christened a freak, better to be one with a coveted gift. I marketed myself as a kind of household faerie, a wee helpful thing who held the confidence of the deceased, cursed in stature but blessed with a most divine talent. The séance parties thrown in my salon were anything but somber affairs, however, and one champagne hangover too many persuaded me to leave drinking to the devil. But of course it couldn’t last. Even the most cunning magician eventually reveals his secrets, if only to prove in the curlicue way the truth works that he was an honest con man all along. It’s not so easy for a medium. And I fell for the oldest trick in the naysayer’s book.
I conjured and conversed with the son of a man whose heir was very much alive and thriving, and the dominos went down fast. MINIATURE MEDIUM REVEALED AS IMPOSTER, LITTLE MISTRESS OF LIES GETS HER GHASTLY COMEUPPANCE blared the headlines—how quickly my anatomy pointed the way to my wretched character. I may as well have been a pixie exposed as a goblin in taffeta masquerading among decent folk. And just like a grifting carney I gathered my belongings—including the ectoplasm, which I wasn’t ready to part with—and lit out.
(interlude)
For years my parents refused to acknowledge my restricted growth, choosing instead to sprinkle pet names like ma petite over my head. They kept on insisting, and insisted that others do the same: overlook the abandoned height marker on the pantry door, my telltale proportions, the braces the doctor insisted would stretch my limbs to their intended length but only caused me intense discomfort and, more agonizing still, made me sound like the Tin Man wherever I went. I had been disassembled and reduced to my singular parts, each acting in rebellion against its sum.
When at last the proof was in the proverbial pudding, when at sixteen I stood no taller than a primary school bully, the household abruptly shifted its gears to accommodate my latent identity. I was kept out of sight as much as possible, as if I hadn’t been known in town all my life, hadn’t played and gossiped and grown up with my peers, attended their birthday parties and caroled from house to house in the snow. Shuttered away like a fallen debutante, I helped myself to sweets and my father’s extensive library, both off-limits for so long and now mine to devour in tardy consolation.
I would later learn that it was around this time my father became a partner in the apothecary company. It is a bruise on my heart to wonder if that practical armchair traveler was determined to find a bottled cure for the daughter who never required it in the first place.
My new neighbors to the south regarded me as a kind of pitiful bird, exotic by defect and living on a modest inheritance following her parents’ passing. A trope as old as time, spiced with the sorrow of a little person seeking sanctuary from the ignorant cruelties of the world. They were each protective of me in their own way, and whilst I had long outgrown my pinafore, they embraced me as an orphan cause, an appealingly helpless child incapable of reaching the counter to grasp her vanilla seltzer and receive her change. They lifted me up onto stools and into coaches, patting my head and speaking in tones and of subjects generally reserved for small children, while their actual offspring openly gawked. In the evening I strolled barefoot along the beach and tried not to think too far ahead, or far back for that matter. I lived in constant dread of being found out and it naturally made me resistant to anything threatening too much joy, so often the sneaky harbinger of retribution.
‘Do not speak ill of the dead’ goes the old adage, but I’d go one further and advise you not to speak to them either, let alone pretend to. Death masks attached to spectral bodies they may be, but the dead do not like being misinterpreted, especially when they’ve purposely missed the tram to the sweet hereafter for the sake of delivering one last, crucial message.
The first visitor—for that is what I must call them now—appeared at my breakfast table one morning. Seated at the opposite end where the sunlight sliced through the shutter louvres, at first I took it for a trick of light or bit of brain fog thanks to a lifelong aversion to early rising. Gradually the pieces of her came together: a young woman with features right out of a soap advertisement, a regular Gibson Girl. She regarded me with polite hauteur, and in her presence my specially designed chair with its helpful step stool and extra cushion was as good as a toadstool. We were already off to a bad start.
“Hello?” I offered at last.
She opened her mouth to respond but instead fell into a fit of coughing. Ah, I thought. She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and hacked into it, though no telltale drops of consumptive blood sprouted. The melodrama of the departed.
“Do you remember me?” she asked and I startled a bit. Her voice sounded as if it were coming from a gramophone, clear enough but inorganic and frequently interspersed with static.
“Would you kindly tell me your name?” I asked. “Then I might remember.”
“My husband came to see you,” she insisted, her lower lip protruding prettily.
“So? Many husbands have come to see me.” I told you, I am not a morning person.
She gave me a name and described a young man mourning the loss of his wife to the wasting sickness and oh yes, I remembered him. His cartoonishly round, moony face was goofy-looking even in mourning and I wondered anew at such a gloriously improbable pairing. He was desperate to reach her, to find out once and for all if he had made her happy in their short time together. By the time I retched up my cheesecloth and delivered some lines about love altering not in its fair bloom, he was in tears and spilling the contents of his billfold onto the table. He left swearing he could smell the rosewater she dabbed about her neck and décolletage, which prompted me to add a new prop to my scheme: scents, bottled and sewn inside my crinoline, spilt upon the first hint of a giveaway. And believe me, people in desperate positions are only too eager to give themselves away—
“Violets? You smell Ethne’s eau de toilette?”
“Of course, don’t you?”
—a few dollops on the carpet. And not just violets, but sandalwood, lemon verbena, the Gibson Girl’s roses—I was a regular petticoat perfumery. The clean-up was a worthy compromise, for that olfactory addition became one of my biggest selling points.
The present company was having none of it.
“You said you spoke to me, but I would never say any of those dumb things.”
“Oh? And what would you have said to your husband?”
It was shockingly filthy, what came out of her mouth then. Something about how inadequate he always felt in their moments of, er, intimacy, that she wished she had assured him that the humble ones were always the best beneath the duvet, not too proud to learn and—I shall not repeat the exact details of her transcript. Task completed, she gradually dissolved with nary a toodle-oo. The only lingering scent was that of coffee burning on the stovetop.
In the days following they each appeared, one by one. Some came and went in an instant that barely registered, a scowl in the sideboard mirror or second reflection in my washbasin. Others lingered longer and loudly. They complained and reminisced and confided in me like the medium I once falsely claimed to be. But why had they waited till now? I’d wonder to myself. Where was the incorporeal stampede when their names were being called out loud from my salon? Were the dead merely possessed of faulty navigational skills or was I going mad in my self-imposed exile?
I left my house for longer periods, combing the beach for hours with my shell basket or lingering over the soda fountain, just one more malt please, I’m treating myself. And still they came to fill my head with the flotsam and jetsam of former lives. One evening as I sat on my back porch a visitor approached, a man I knew for certain I had never been asked to receive. A young soldier, tanned and bearded, eyes the color of tobacco, wearing a plumed helmet and dented breastplate. No doubt one of the conquistadores who long ago laid bloody claim to the shores my fussy abode now stood upon.
But I was in no mood this evening, at last and completely worn down by my troupe of guests who came and went without knock or request at whatever damn hour suited the dead.
“Keep moving. St. Augustine is some miles north. Darling coquina houses, always work for reenactors at the fort.”
The soldier removed his helmet and lowered himself onto the steps, adjusting his sword (Toledo steel, I noted, nice) and kicking the grit from his boots.
“Now look here,” I protested, “I mean it. I don’t want company, especially yours.”
“Pequeña señorita,” he grinned and pointed at me.
“Shoo,” I snapped. “This is my house and you weren’t invited. I have no business with you. Besides, I’ve read all about your drooling Hapsburgs. You’re in no position, sir.”
He chuckled and sneaked a peek through the open door.
“Ron?” He made the motion of lifting a cup to his mouth and taking a swig.
“I don’t keep spirits in the house.” Not that kind, at least.
Like the Gibson Girl, he languorously evaporated before my eyes, though it wouldn’t be the last I saw of him. Each week he returned at the same time, always at the exact point in the evening when the sun’s fiery peach hovered just above the horizon line, stirring my backyard into a humming orchestra pit of critters tuning up for the night. He spoke no English nor I Spanish, but in the way that often transpires between the living and the dead, we understood each other perfectly. Their tongues tuned to a frequency who-knows-what turns the dial on, the dead broadcast from a pirate station, unreachable but not inaccessible if the ear is trained. And in some cases, the song comes in all too loud and clear and you couldn’t switch it off if you tried. I learned that much from the gossipy nonnas and company-starved barflies who frequently invited themselves in.
Time, it seemed, passed sideways for the conquistador. He frequently spoke of himself and his life in the present tense, as if we shared a suspended leave of absence. His death had happened so fast, so unexpectedly, that he failed to notice and thus refused to accept it, which left him stranded on Los Martires indefinitely. I tried not to pity him, I knew my history thanks to Pa’s library, but truth be told he seemed far too young and eager for the mercenary life.
After so many months of hearing the complaints and confessions of my visitors, I unburdened myself to my new friend. After all, who was he to judge? I confessed my con, my years of deception, the demise that had brought me to this unlikely paradise I knew in the seldom-flexed muscle of my heart I did not deserve. Overburdened with guilt, true, but tired too of my visitors. Would they ever depart or just keep hounding me until I passed on as well—and then would I have to repeat my role in that neither-here-nor-there place they occupied? The thought was unbearable.
The conquistador listened patiently, unblinking—the dead don’t blink, did you know that?—then made another universal gesture with his hand, this time the flourish of a quill pen, the “check please” sign-off.
“Acqui?” he asked and made the gesture again.
“Write it all down?”
He nodded. What passed between us was not unlike a kicked-in footlight inexplicably illuminating the stage once again.
For the remainder of the year I wrote down all that my visitors divulged, some taking up multiple pages, others a mere paragraph, each their own chapter in my logbook. Whatever it was they wished to convey, the Little Seer presided as secretary over the mundane and blush-inducing alike. Word must have spread, for soon the discontented dead were queued up like a breadline outside my dining room, each waiting their turn to have their letters penned to the living. Confessions of infidelity and insistent declarations of just the opposite, where to find the hidden cash box, apologies for wrongdoings, corrected inheritance omissions, a family recipe passed down through generations and now threatened with extinction—the dead are so like us, so very unextraordinary.
Not all of my spectral dupes came to visit. Memory alerted me to the absence of those taken by murder or suicide, and on a slow day I mentioned this to Mr. Beardham, the butcher who dropped from a heart attack in the middle of his shop (and on the busiest day, he made sure to emphasize), leaving his wife to man the cleaver. He looked exactly like his surname.
“Oh, they wouldn’t be here,” he replied. “They go somewhere else to rest.”
“Rest? You mean like a sanatorium?” I conjured a Swiss chalet in the clouds, recuperating souls of all demises tended to by a luminescent staff.
“Sort of, I suppose. Takes awhile to recover, they need watching over until they’re ready.”
“Ready for what?” I pressed, fascinated.
“For passing on, of course.” He took a beat to mull over what I presumed was members-only information before carefully adding: “To wherever they are meant to go next.”
By the end of the year, when no visitor save the conquistador remained, I considered the matter amended and mailed the proof (no return address) to the newspaper headquarters of the city I had fled in disgrace. I made sure to include Mr. Beardham’s addendum for those whose loved ones were still taking the Alpine air.
On the eve of a milestone birthday I set a bottle of rum on the back steps and waited for the conquistador. I knew it was folly, befriending a ghost; they are as impermanent as the living. But who was I to say where and how kindred spirits should meet?
I smoothed the skirt of my new chartreuse organdy. “She looks like a little Key lime!” the dressmaker’s assistant had exclaimed before her mortified employer. I ignored them both and admired myself at my leisure. I had all the time in the world.
I fixed my eyes on the curtain of Spanish moss through which he always emerged.
I clasped the box containing my ectoplasm, its legacy washed and neatly folded in tissue and ready for regifting. It seems the dead aren’t the only ones dying to get it right.
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Emily Linstrom is an American writer & artist residing in Italy since 2017. Previous publications include Carve Magazine, Crannóg, Last Girls Club, and award-winning feminist horror magazine Suspira. Linstrom is a first place winner of Pulp Literature‘s The Raven short story contest and 2021 Best of the Net nominee. She will forever eschew the use of AI and you can pry the em dash out of her cold dead hands. Her work can be seen at www.emilylinstrom.com. | |