A Ghost of a Witch

I

 

This is the longest night of the year, so here's a story, gathered from several of the sources involved. I cannot verify every last word; however, I have tried to rein in my usual volutes and arabesques, vowing to perhaps double down on them some time in the future.

The furniture movers had gone, and David and Nancy were in the process of putting the boxes blackly writ with KITCHEN in the kitchen, BEDROOM into bedroom, and so on. Nancy picked up a small box (of seasonal decorations) marked CLOSET and opened the door of the closet at the end of the hallway. She shoved the box onto the top shelf, where it met with some resistance. On her tiptoes she reached deep into the closet shelf, managed to get two fingers around a box that was already there, and pull it out. In the box lay an old blue tea pot, five cups with saucers, a tea infuser, and a small yellow notebook folded in half. She put the tea box down on the floor and put the decorations box up in the closet. She picked up the tea box, carried it into the kitchen, and set it down, to be dealt with later. "Someone left behind a tea pot," she called to David, who was wrestling with a shelf in the living room.

She went to look at him. He was wet with sweat under his arms and down his back. She thought about marriage at that moment, or so she told me later, with a crooked smile or maybe it was a sneer.

He looked over his should and said, "If we get enough done today then maybe we can relax and order a pizza."

She looked at the boxes and boxes of books. "I guess they're all out of order now."

"Manana, manana," rhymed with banana, like an ape.

"Maybe it'll be fun."

"Yes, your physics texts you don't need anymore 'cause you got it all in your head, they're all nice and back-breaking."

"I don't know them cover-to-cover."

She went back to the closet without waiting for a response. The decorations were already up in the closet and after a disorientating moment remembered she'd put them there. "I'm well ahead of the game," she said to no-one.

It was their first apartment together to build from scratch. The previous night they'd been sleeping on the floor in Nancy's apartment which they'd been sharing for two-and-a-half years. And now finally, they had a place that was held entirely in common, with all decisions to be made in common too. Up to a point. Curtains, cushions, rugs, bodem.

She took clothes out of garbage bags and suitcases and put them away, made up the bed (but couldn't find the pillowcases), and sorted the spices in the kitchen shelf. Meanwhile, David put the couch in the right place, wired up the television and the VCR, and set chairs around a table. Then in unison they decided they had done enough, ordered a pizza and watched a BBC show having to do with a series of murders at the University of Oxbridge.

Next morning, which was a Sunday morning, David asked Nancy about some overnight noises. Had she heard the sounds from the next apartment? The scratching sounds? They were faint, and he only heard them for about a minute, coming from somewhere in the hall. Could there be mice around? Did she see any mice? The place had been pretty much cleaned out, but there's been no inspection. Do we trust the property owner? Do you think our cheques have been cashed?

"David, what's with all the questions? You hear a minute's worth of scratching, which maybe you dreamed, and it's all of a sudden time to move out?"

They were having for breakfast what little they had, which was toast and jam and a small pot of coffee. David plunged the coffee and said, "You never know what you're going to find in a carpet. All kinds of problems maybe. We don't even know if the shower works."

Nancy smiled. "We could go find out right now."

"There's so much to do."

She stopped smiling. "I guess you're right."

Then it became early afternoon and they struck a deal. Nancy went out to get some food somewhere and David stayed behind to get new-fangled cds and old-fangled lps out of boxes.

Their respective tasks need not concern us here.

Nancy returned with three bags of food to find David tapping the walls of the hall. She asked, "What are you doing?" but before he could answer there was a knock at their new-to-them door. Opening it discovered a woman of late youth, smiling, dressed in lazy green Sunday sweatpants and a brown blouse a bit big, who said, "Hello there! Neighbour! I'm Maddy from next door!"

Nancy peeped out past Maddy in a utilitarian mode to look left and right, saying, "Which side?"

Maddy pointed right with a small brown box in her hand. "That one, 411."

"Ah. Well, would you like to step in? Of course it's a mess."

Nancy moved back and aside, guiding her new Ethel Mertz into the living room of cardboard boxes. "It's just like ours, only backwards," she confided. "Though our closets intertwine, like puzzle pieces. Oh, here!" She held forth the box.

Nancy took the box whose printing was in Chinese. "Thanks. What is it?"

"It's the latest thing. It's called chai tea."

Nancy opened the box. It contained a plastic bag filled with crushed brown stuff. "What do I do with it?"

"You can simply stir it up in a cup of boiling-hot water and let it settle, or you can put it in one of those tea ball things."

Nancy gawped, then went into the kitchen and returned with the infuser she'd found in the closet. "Like one of these things?"

"Oh, you have one, isn't that nice," said Maddy in an icy way. (Nancy informs me she believes Maddy was trying to out-chic her, and was disappointed when she failed.)

"So let's go figure this out," and the two of them headed into the kitchen. Out in the hall, David came into view as he was tap-tap-tapping upon the wall like he was checking the back of a pneumonia patient, and Maddy called out, "Hello?"

David looked at her and said, "So you're on the other side of the closet?"

"Yes, Maddy's the name."

"Maddy. Please to meet you." He gently took her hand in hers, then returned to his tapping. Maddy was touched by this (so she said much later), then went into the kitchen to boil water with Nancy.

The tea got made, using the infuser, and the women took the pot and two cups (from the found box, and washed free of dust) into the living room. Maddy talked about living in the building, and about the last people who lived in the apartment, stating that they had seemed nice enough to begin with, but as time went on they became more and more unhappy, it seemed. And when they finally moved out, many in the building were mouthing D-I-V-O-R-C-E. Anyway, before them there was a single man for a bit, a broker of some sort, who seemed to like the apartment well enough, but suddenly did something of a 'midnight move' and left before anyone had the chance to say, 'So long.'

Nancy picked up the blue tea pot, made a mental note to look at the bottom of it later to see who had made it, and poured. The cups sang in a queer soprano voice as they filled, and Nancy thought the design rather clever, that, to tune the handles to the resonance of the d/m of the concave.

"So that man—Vic was his name—lived here when we moved in. You'll meet my guy Stan soon enough. I work from home most of the time, la-la-la, but it's not all fun and games. There's books in all those boxes?"

Nancy took a sip of tea. Oh, it was bitter! Was it supposed to taste like this, this chai tea? She politely set the cup down. Maddy took a sip of hers and cried out, "Ugh, this tea is bad!" She set down the cup. "I'm so sorry. Must be an off-batch somehow."

"Nancy, come here!"

She went into the hallway. David's head was sticking into the closet.

"There's a hollow space on this side," he said, knocking one closet wall.

Maddy, who'd also come up, said, "Of course there is. That's my closet you're knocking against."

 

II

 

Nancy and David put almost everything away, then cooked up some chicken and ate it. She scooped up the dishes and also the tea pot and cups from the living room. She poured out the awful tea, remembering she meant to look at the bottom of the pot. SCHWARZ WALD was all it read, with the Schwarz curving up and the Wald curving down. Black, something?

Both exhausted, they watched some Sunday night television, and then, though it was early, they decided to pack it in and hit the hay.

Before doing so, Nancy put away the dishes. She took the pot and the cups and the infuser and put them back in the box from whence they had come. After doing so, she took the small yellow notebook out and opened it. It looked to be a bunch of recipes, all in German, with three, four, or five ingredients for each recipe. Whatever they were for, she could find out at some later date. Let chance decide.

She started dreaming before she'd even fallen asleep. (Dream research calls this the 'hypnogogic' phase of sleep wherein some volition is combined with the neural phenomena most closely associated with the R.E.M. stage.) She'd gone back some twenty years, to her childhood, and her childhood home. The morning was bright and the birds were chirping. The math problem in her math book was hard to read and every time she thought she had a solution the question would change. She drew boxes and tried to solve something that way, but it still wouldn't work out.

She heard a scratching coming from outside her bedroom and she thought she should take her exercise book downstairs and into the kitchen to ask her mother for help because seeing straight was hard at the time. Scratch. She went into the hallway. The sound was coming from downstairs and she was scared but the math problem had to be solved. Her bare feet felt the carpeted stairs as she went down. Still the scratching continued. At the bottom of the stairs she went of course to the right because that was the direction in which the kitchen was and her mother was in the kitchen. She went to the door of the kitchen and the scratching wasn't scratching; it was a meat cleaver. Her mother—it wasn't her mother‑had her back to the door and she was bending over a huge thick wooden table covered in blood and viscera. Her mother—not her mother—had blood all over her thick arms and in her long hair where it had congealed into the odd dreadlock. She was raising the cleaver high overhead and smashing it down on the counter—scratch!—causing blood to splash to left and right. Nancy was frozen to the spot. She couldn't get away or even turn away. The cleaver fell again and again and meat help falling off the table onto the drenched floor, like her mother—not her mother—had an infinite supply of meat to chop into little bits. She stopped, as if exhausted with her labour, breathing heavily. She turned her head a little, and Nancy saw a bit of red something other than flesh where her cheek and temple should have been. "Uh," muttered Nancy, and the thing turned; there wasn't anything like a face where her face should have been; rather it was red-wet plastic or bone with glaring yellow eyes. It screamed, "Da bist du ja, mein Junge!"

Nancy's eyes popped open, still with that uncanny vision before her—and she still heard the scratching, fainter than it had been in her vision, but present nonetheless. She got out of bed—David didn't move—and, scared though she was, went into the hallway, listening for the scratches which must have had a perfectly reasonable explanation to them!

In the hallway she tracked the sound to the hall closet. She even located the precise point of the wall in the closet. She noticed the sound wasn't the sound of the fingernails of one hand scratching drywall; rather it was like the fingernails of a dozen or two hands simultaneously scratching drywall; or maybe it wasn't scratching at all. After a couple minutes, the scratching stopped. Nancy went back to bed and slept peacefully all through the night.

The apartment door creaked open and Nancy awoke. She went out into the kitchen: David was there.

"I heard the door."

"It was me."

"You were out?"

"Yes I was. Early. Looking around."

"How does it look?"

"Oh, fine."

"What's out there?"

"There's a couple cafes, and a couple stores."

A knock at the door. David shrugged and went to it while Nancy, who was indecently dressed, stayed in the kitchen. "Hi!" It was Maddy. "Oh, hello."

Nancy called, "Hi, Maddy. It's not safe for me to come to the door right now."

"That's okayy. Just passing by on my way out."

"You take the stairs?"

"Yeah; going down I take the stairs. See ya!"

The door closed. David came into the kitchen. "Don't know if I like her," he said.

"Six flights is a long way down."

David made a twirling cuckoo sign at his left temple and whistled.

Later, Nancy and David went out for a walk in the neighbourhood, about which he appeared to know little despite his morning stroll. They happened upon a used bookstore named ABC Books and went inside. After some browsing around, Nancy found herself in the dictionaries and saw a tiny Langenscheidt German-English dictionary going for a dollar. She bought it, half for fun.

Back at the apartment she opened up the yellow notebook. The first two pages were far too complicated—paragraphs—so she skipped straight to the 'recipes.'

Fenchel. Fennel.

Petersilie. Parsley.

They were recipes.

Schwarzer Pfeffer. That one was easy.

Beifuß. Not in the dictionary.

There weren't any proportions listed, so it seemed the stuff was mixed equally so.

A later recipe was fennel, black pepper, Haferflocken (oatmeal), and something called Alraunwurzel. Again there were no proportions listed, so.

She estimated there were some three dozen recipes in the book. She went to the box it had been in and took out the teapot again. She went to Langenscheidt to discover that the pot had been made in the Black Forest. She took out the cups and saucers and noticed there were two other items in the box: a mortar and pestle, both made of marble. There was some matter in the bottom of the pestle and Nancy smelled it but it didn't smell like anything, but it felt and tasted like a grave even though she had not felt or tasted it. This she could sense as surely as she felt the marble of the mortar: the substance within it felt like a grave, an open grave after an autumn rain, with flesh falling from the bones within, and the jaw moving too slowly to sound. She felt like she was the only person alive for hundreds of miles.

She put down the mortar and the illusion disappeared.

What an imagination!

She rolled the pestle around on the counter. The far end was roughened. She picked it up and held it with the thick rough end down. She tenderly put two fingers and her thumb around the mortar and pulled it towards her. The she heard the door open. She dropped the pestle and released the mortar, and turned. Of course it was David. Who could it have been?

"Hi," he said. "Still checking out that box?"

"I found a pestle and mortar in it. Did you put them in there?"

"I never ever touched the box. So, no. I'm going to take a shower."

"A shower? Now?"

"It's hot out there and I feel grimy. I'll be quick."

After dinner, they watched a rental of Blue Velvet. It amused David, but disturbed Nancy. They cleaned up and went to bed.

Nancy listened for the scratching to begin. Shadows of passing traffic silently crawled the wall in bunches. She watched the shadows climbing the wall and tried to calculate their frequency. The bunches must have been caused by the traffic lights down the street. She counted them and found that two, three, or four went in bunches. The road was four-lane. One, two, three. One, two. One, two, three, four. One, two, three....

 

III

 

Nancy didn't have class till one, so she went down to the building manager's office which was located through a door off the gritty lobby. Last year's calendar was askew on the wall beside a white chart that seemed to code maintenance tasks and arrear payments. The desk was none too tidy and the trash can flowed over with coffee cups. For some reason, she hadn't thought it so messy three weeks before. Just then the loud door that separated the lobby from the apartments proper opened and the manager came into the office. He smiled. "Hello, my dear. Likin' the place?"

"It's fine, but I found a box of stuff belonging to someone else, someone German, in a closet, and maybe they ... want it back?"

His face fell. "Don't remind me."

"Of what?"

"Frau Freudig. Lived here for some four decades. She died about ten years ago. Crazy old biddy. Back in the day, she drove everyone nuts. Her husband ran away from her or somethin' back in the '70s, then she went senile. She thought her husband was still alive, and she wanted to kill him."

"Really."

"She would wander around her apartment, wander around the buildin', barkin' out his name. Do you know how awful barked German is? 'Freudig! Freudig!'"

"I get the idea."

"Well, anyway, she died. Somethin' like ten years ago."

"So, is there anyone I can give the box to?"

He shrugged. "No-one we could find. Most of her junk went to Goodwill."

"Well, thanks."

Nancy went back up to their apartment. She took the box and sat down on the sofa with it. She took up the pestle and mortar again and smirked, then she put the pestle in the mortar and turned it, and there it was:

Scratch. Scratch, Scratch.

She dropped them.

Scratch. Scratch, scratch. Still.

She went over to Maddy's apartment and knocked on the door. She could still hear the scratching. The door opened a little and half of Maddy's face appeared, saying, "Yeah?"

"Hi, Maddy, it's me, Nancy. From next door."

"Oh, right. What are you here for?"

"Can I measure your closet?"

"What?"

"The one at the end of your hall. I think it's wider than mine."

"How can that matter?"

"Okay, okay. How about you just knock on its walls when I'm on the other side?"

"I'm kind of busy right now."

"Help me out here, please?"

Maddy paused and then agreed to knock on the walls of the closet for whatever good it would do. The door closed. Nancy briefly heard a man whispering and then went into her apartment and to her hall closet.

"Maddy, okay, can you hear me?"

"(Yes.)"

Nancy put her hands on the wall. "Okay, knock."

(Knock, knock.)

"Harder."

(Knock, knock.)

Nancy couldn't feel a thing. There was a gap between the walls. She had an idea of what was in there, and stepped back.

"Okay, you can stop knocking, and thanks."

"(You're welcome.)"

Nancy later told me that at that moment she put her hands on the closet wall again, to see if anything would happen, but nothing happened. She heard the apartment door open, and it was David. There'd been a power failure at work, and everyone had been sent home. He went into the washroom to shower.

Well, so what if he had visited Maddy on the sly that morning and on the previous morning? Why should she have cared? The guy was a worthless bum who didn't understand the world in the least, let alone the physics of it. Loser, loser, loser. He must have thought he was getting away with something but little did he know. She was sure it gave him lots of jollies. She had to get rid of him, because she obviously wasn't capable of finding out what was really going on with him hanging around. She dismissed going to class. There was much more important stuff going on there in that apartment. There was a ghost of a witch living there. She wanted to know its properties.

When David came out, dressed in the same clothes with his hair wet, Nancy was standing in the kitchen. She said, "So, what are you going to do?" knowing full well he would go to work though he'd have to make up a lie.

"I think I'll wander about. Maybe drop by work. The place could be open again."

"Maybe the place is open again. That's good. Okay, I'm going to get ready for class." She went into the bedroom and waited for him to leave, which he did.

She closed the blinds all over the apartment. In the bedroom she lay down on the bed and concentrated. Time passed.

Then it came: singly: scratch.

Nancy looked to the bedroom door. Something was in the hall. Another scratch, from that direction.

"Come on." She closed her eyes, thinking the ghost might be bashful. "Come on. Come in here. There's something you should know."

A smell reached her. It was a wet and rotten smell which she remembered from an old boyfriend's basement; especially the mattress and the thick and filthy blanket which they'd used to cover up afterward. The scratching continued, and she could hear something breathing as if through a broken and rotten windpipe. "Are you here now? Can you understand me?"

A wheeze of a yes came her way. She felt a breeze as it came towards her. The mildewy smell was like a wall closing in on her. She knew it was right beside her, looking down at her. She felt something touch her shoulder and she managed to flinch only slightly. The dry pads of fingertips and long nails resting on her skin.

"I hope you can understand me. You don't have to seek your husband's death, because you already killed him. You've merely forgotten. You can stop looking. You buried him behind a false wall in the closet. If you let me be for a while, I'll show you. I'll open up the wall so you can have a look."

The ghost somehow understood—she must've been at least bilingual—for the mildew receded and the sound of her rasping diminished. Nancy opened her eyes and briefly saw the spectre going into the hall; a torn nightdress, stained grey and green in places, stringy grey hair to her waist, and one thin hand, with grey skin stretched tight over bone. Nancy gave her a moment to get out of the hallway—Nancy preferred not to see the spectre more fully—then stood to go out of the bedroom.

The ghost appeared to have gone away. Nancy found their toolbox and took up a hammer and a carpet blade. In the closet she deeply scored around the edges of the upper half of the false wall then hammered against the wall to free it. The wall was flimsy, so it took only about fifteen minutes to knock out and pull away the drywall, revealing, in the lower part, a desiccated corpse tightly wrapped in plastic. Hello, Herr Freudig.

She went back into the bedroom and lay down again to close her eyes. "Frau Freudig, come. Look. There's your husband's body. You don't have to find him anymore. Come. Look."

The mildew smell returned as did the throaty breathing. Nancy anyway had to see this time around; she opened her eyes slightly and was just in time to see the face of the spectre as it passed the door of the bedroom. The eye she saw was bright yellow and the cheek was ash-grey and mottled with holes revealing the bone beneath. The spectre moved out of sight as it went to the closet. Then there came an earthly cry that whooshed up, higher and higher in frequency as if through a doppler shift, leading Nancy to imagine that it was flying away, faster and faster away, until there was no sound left.

The ghost of the witch was gone. Nancy got off the bed and went to the closet. She noticed that the corpse was small, and that there was still plenty of room available for another body. She went into the kitchen and took up the yellow book and the mortar and pestle and the Langenscheidt dictionary. A bit of searching and she found a good concoction for a fatal tisane of poison. All she needed was a bit of mandrake root to finish it up. She went out to find a good herb store. There was plenty of room in the wall; plenty of room for one more.