Ghostlove. Dennis Mahoney

      3. STRANGE COMPANY

      The three-winged pigeon returned to my study’s windowsill every morning at exactly 9 a.m.

      His punctuality may not have been preternatural but rather a perfect inner clock attuned to daily sunlight. His reliable visits mollified my loneliness, and I began to pause in my habitual reading at precisely 8:59 a.m. to witness his arrival.

      Why did he come? What did he want? He was an ordinary rock dove, pale gray with black-barred wings and an iridescent purple throat, in every way normal except for his extra limb. I admired his strange beauty and, as many people do in their relationships with animals, began to assume a degree of rapport that may have been imagined.

      One morning before his arrival, I opened the sash and placed a bowl of sunflower seeds on the ledge. A blade of winter air cut across my ankles while I waited in my reading chair.

      The pigeon landed in an anarchy of wings and scrabbling claws, a sudden fluttery mess that rapidly resolved to elegance and calm. He cocked his head and looked at me. I cocked my head back.

      The pigeon ignored the bowl at first, seemingly enchanted by the window’s open sash and relishing how the house’s warmth breezed through his feathers. He stepped toward the room and I wondered with excitement if he might decide to enter. Instead he looked at me a while, neither inside nor out, and my thoughts swayed poetically to thresholds and portals.

      At 9:03 a.m., he nudged the sunflower seeds brusquely with his beak, ruffled his neck, and flew away, leaving the window and the room emptier and colder.

      Likewise, June kept visiting and vanishing. I wrote simple messages on my bedroom window—“Good Morning”, “Who Are You?”—but she either refused to answer or had lost the ability to do so.

      Still I sensed her in my room once or twice a day. Whenever she was near, I greeted her aloud, wrote on the window, or tried new ways to get her to communicate. I blew out candles to see if she could manipulate the coils of rising smoke. I held a pen to a notebook and cleared my mind, hoping she’d possess me into automatic writing. Nothing helped, nothing worked. She intensified and faded like a drawing under tracing paper. At times she felt close—an onion skin away—and then the layer grew between us and she blurred or disappeared.

      One night in February, I made a gut-wrenching discovery.

      June had been completely absent for half a week and I had ceased to look for her return. I’d assumed she was choosing to avoid me or had simply lost interest, and the rejection had almost put me off trying to contact other spirits, encounter Mr. Gormly, or care about the pigeon visiting my study.

      The house had accepted me fully by then, presenting a steady array of wondrous or disquieting phenomena, but that particular day was mostly uneventful, and even the blinding light that strobed for eight minutes from the downstairs toilet was a disappointing substitute for personal interaction. I left my study just before midnight, took a shower, and entered my bedroom naked. Despite my room’s humid warmth, a mild fever had left me with a chill, and I walked to my secondary storage closet for an extra blanket.

      When I opened the closet door, I felt a strange, quavering air in the narrow dark space. I’d opened the closet four days earlier and encountered nothing unusual, and so I backed away and pondered the peculiar new atmosphere.

      I realized it was June. Several seconds passed before she rushed out of the closet and moved directly into me. I felt a flood of empathy and mutual possession as our lonelinesses blended in a saturating hug. Just as quickly, she was through me and behind me in the room. I crouched and cried—wept is more exact—not only from the wine-drunk sadness she’d infused me with, but also from the body-wide loss of our communion. We’d been thoroughly together. We were thoroughly apart again.

      I pressed my spine against the doorjamb, head between my knees, and waited for my breathing and my tears to settle down.

      She’d been locked inside the closet, possibly for days. Had she materialized there and found herself trapped, or had I locked her in myself earlier that week? Either way, opening the door had proved impossible to a ghost who could barely trace her name. She’d been as hopelessly confined as a child in a latching fridge.

      I stood and crossed the room, turning off the lamp so the only illumination came from a streetlight glowing down the block, and quickly got dressed in boxers and an undershirt.

      I sensed June’s presence more easily than ever. Passing through me, she had left me with a tinge of who she was, as if we’d kissed and I could still taste the flavor of her toothpaste, or as if the two of us had talked all night and I could recognize her voice days later in a crowd.

      She hid between the bed and the wall, near the nightstand corner with the tumbleweed dust. She filled the air as tangibly as worry in my chest. Instead of touching her again, I sat beside her on the floor and hoped my mere companionship would give her reassurance.

      Her terrible ordeal had raised many questions.

      If she could vanish from the bedroom any time she chose, why had she remained imprisoned in the closet?

      She couldn’t drift through walls, so how had she drifted through my body?

      Assuming she could walk and sit, did gravity affect her?

      How much of her was physical? How much of her was not?

      I let my thoughts float and focused on her mood. Her electrical panic seemed to disperse, and eventually she moved and lay on the bed above me, watching me—I think—and comforted to have me there.

      She seemed to fall asleep. I hoped she could dream.

      I fell asleep, too. In the morning she was gone but I could feel the way she’d moved underneath my skin.

      In early March, a new door appeared in my house. It was located in an unfurnished bedroom on the third floor and I confirmed—by studying photos from my realtor—the door didn’t exist when I bought the house in December.

      The room’s plaster walls were painted a shade best described as abandoned-hospital green. Chunks of plaster had broken off, revealing the underlying brick. The room was small and dim. There was a single wooden chair.

      When I entered the room from the hallway, the mysterious new door was centered in the wall to my right. The frame was six feet tall and two feet wide, and the door itself was roughhewn wood of an unknown species. The wood smelled of incense and midwinter wreaths, the way a temple door smells after decades of worship.

      I opened the door toward me with a black iron ring pull.

      The sight of myself beyond the door made me jump backward. My reflection jumped, too, but not with perfect symmetry. I stared at myself, observing how my self stared back, and then the two of us seemed to realize there were two of us indeed.

      The doorway wasn’t a mirror. It was a passage to another room, identical to mine, in which a whole Other William looked at me, amazed.

      Was he an Other William or was I an Other William? Had I summoned him by opening the door, or had he summoned me by opening a door in his own equivalent brownstone? Judging by my twin’s fascinated squint, he was puzzling over the same perspectival conundrum.

      Twice we started to talk at precisely the same moment, then stopped to listen when we realized the other was speaking. I sat in the wooden chair, determined to converse with him. Other William did the same.

      “Who are you?” I asked.

      “I’m William Rook.”

      “So am I.”

      We