Ghostlove. Dennis Mahoney
undressed that night and walked around naked, wearing only my shoes because of the nails and broken glass in several of the rooms. I hoped the house would recognize my gesture of unguardedness. Desperate for any sign of life, I re-explored the whole building, listening and watching, and then I brushed off a chair in the dining room and sat beneath the unlit chandelier. I thought I heard the dust motes settling around me.
“Hello?” I said.
The dark offered nothing in reply.
“Hello,” I said again, answering myself.
I gathered my clothes and carried them up to my twilit bedroom, missing my parents and disappointed that my new home hadn’t presented so much as a ghostly twinkle or unexplained creak.
Upstairs, the bedroom’s tropical warmth soothed my chill from the otherwise wintry house, and I was prepared to sleep naked, as I might have done in summer, when I suddenly felt what seemed to be a breath inside my ear.
I spun. The room was empty. Nevertheless I felt the rising shame of standing there naked. My sense of being watched seemed to indicate a watcher.
I snatched a sheet to cover myself. I’d made my bed less than two hours earlier, and yet in the interval a spider’s nest, apparently hidden in the mattress, had spectacularly hatched. Dozens of grape-sized spiders polka-dotted the bed and scattered chaotically as soon as I exposed them. Many clung to the sheet I’d wrapped around my waist, and both my penis and my thighs were overrun with tickles.
I clutched the sheet and laughed. There I’d been, glum and lonely in the moribund house, and now a panoply of spiders and a ghost had appeared.
“Hello!” I said, thrilling at the animated room.
I swapped the sheet for flannel pajamas and sat on a narrow, spiderless section of the bed, and then I closed my eyes and covered my ears, exactly as my mother had taught me as a child.
I had encountered ghosts before but only passingly. I’d rarely felt the true, electric sparkle of connection. Generally ghosts regarded me with hazy apprehension, as if the skin between our worlds were too opaque to see through. Contact was often like a flashlight through a hand when only the glow and maybe a vein or two are easily discerned.
This was something else.
I sensed the ghost was female. She stood in the corner of the bedroom, slightly to my right, watching me and radiating needful curiosity. A D-minor tone persisted in my hearing like a pressure change, or possibly a memory of sadness, and I couldn’t tell if she or I—or both of us—was causing it.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m William. Do you live here, too?”
She faded like a cellphone signal in a tunnel. I concentrated hard and leaned in her direction but a growing void of loneliness convinced me she was gone.
I opened my eyes and stared at the empty corner, where a hook and wire dangled from the rough brick wall. An earlier inhabitant had probably hung a picture there. I felt the ghost’s absence like I felt the missing picture.
I shooed the remaining spiders onto the floor and lay in bed.
“Someone’s in my house,” I thought. “Possibly a friend.”
I woke the next morning with a cobwebby head, but once I wiped the silk out of my hair and eyes, my bedroom felt common again, aside from the strange humidity and an odd cast of light that had followed me out of a dream.
“Hello?” I said.
The bedroom ghost was nowhere to be felt but I began the day with a reborn sense of possibility. I dressed in jeans, an Oxford shirt, and a necktie—a uniform that placed me in the relaxed professional mindset of someone comfortable at work—and walked downstairs to the kitchen. I remembered the brownstone’s original builder was entombed inside the house, and for reasons I couldn’t articulate, I strongly suspected his bones were in the wall behind the refrigerator.
The fridge itself was avocado green and had the kind of latch-handle door, outlawed since the Refrigerator Safety Act of 1956, that contributed to the deaths of curious children who accidentally locked themselves in. I started a pot of coffee and imagined, as it brewed, what it would feel like to suffocate alone inside a box. Just as clearly, I imagined being the skeleton in the wall.
When the coffee was ready, I carried the carafe and my favorite orange mug up to the second-floor study. This was a large, rectangular room in the rear of the house with two windows, decrepit brick walls, and a heavy plank floor that had been smoothed, by two centuries of footfalls, to creamy warm softness.
I had an oriental rug the color of bread mold, a simple but imposing work desk, a trio of bookcases, a small stereo with a turntable, an upholstered reading chair, and seventeen unopened boxes of books, bones, candles, talismans, phials, records, vintage occult instruments, notebooks, and ballpoint pens: everything required to make the study my center of operations.
I had scarcely unpacked the first box of supplies when I noticed a fluttery shadow in my periphery and turned to the window. A pigeon had landed on the sill. He tilted his head and watched me with a keen, beady eye and I approached the window slowly, happy for the company. His body was unusually thick, especially in the back, and I thought without judgment that he must be a glutton.
When the pigeon flew off, I discovered my mistake. His burliness hadn’t been fat but rather an extra folded wing. I opened the sash and stuck my head outside, startled by the sparkling cold and thrilled to see the three-winged pigeon flap away. The extra wing was on his right side and made him fly erratically. I watched him enter a leafless tree, tangle in the limbs, and extricate himself before he ascended over a neighboring house and fluttered out of sight.
An omen, I believed, of prodigies to come.
I wasn’t disappointed. Prodigies abounded.
One morning, I discovered my dining room was coated with an ultrafine layer of snow. The table, floor, and wrought-iron chandelier were lunar white when I entered, and I assumed the powder was dust until I wiped the table with my palm. The sensation was painfully cold but oddly refreshing, like peppermint absorbed directly into my skin.
According to a thermometer I fetched from my study, the dining room was eight degrees Fahrenheit despite an otherwise well-heated building and a working radiator in the dining room itself. When the localized cold began to disperse, I swept as much of the snow as possible into a Mason jar. The snow soon melted into seventeen ounces of water, and yet the water remained unnaturally cold. I was strongly tempted to drink it but ultimately placed the jar in my curiosities closet, where I discovered, in the shadows, that the water was faintly luminous.
Another day, the water in the house’s pipes became impossibly hot—well beyond boiling point without becoming steam. A one-minute flow not only deformed the kitchen faucet but raised the room’s temperature so dramatically I fainted from the heat.
When I revived and fled to the cooler hallway, I heard a deep, metallic groaning in the downstairs bathroom. The sound was coming from the pipes, which were bowing and distending from the superheated water. I ran the sink and bathtub faucets to relieve the strain but succeeded only in damaging the drain pipes, too.
I ran from the bathroom to the first-floor utility room. My ancient hot-water tank was oily black and massive, with heavily grimed gauges, knobs, and valves, like a repurposed boiler from an evil locomotive. A flaking label read DO NOT ADJUST. I twisted several unmarked dials, then kicked the tank to quiet an ominous rumble. Nothing appeared out of order, and when I returned to the bathroom and retried the faucets, the water’s temperature had already begun to drop.
Much of my plumbing was visible along the house’s exposed brick walls and the lasting damage was immediately apparent. Horizontal pipes had sagged. Vertical pipes had tapered and bulged like hideous balloon animals. There were blockages and leaks, and from that day forward, the pipes’ distorted widths caused my toilet to flush with breathtaking suction and my faucets to dribble or spurt with unpredictable force.
My radiators sounded like a choir of murdered children, and now and then