Dredging the Choptank. Kimberley Lynne

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СКАЧАТЬ telling Joe the swamp story.

      Joe was born in Frederick, Maryland, and he owns an antique store called Fat Elvis. He re-circulates dead people’s stuff back into the community. “No more. Stop,” he said. He paused and his brown eyes twinkled. “Okay, more. Tell me more. Is she carrying her head?”

      That’s precisely how I feel about ghost stories.

      Stop. No. More.

      We love ghost stories and repress them all at once.

      “New ghost stories are scarier than older ones,” Joe said. “Somehow the fresher ones are more powerful.” His goatee flexed as he thought. “Like it can still happen now.”

      “Like the older ones are further away?” I asked. This thinking seemed so linear.

      “Maybe,” he said.

      “But Big Liz is still off Route 50,” I said dubiously. “Ysabel knew her story and she’s fifteen.”

      The older ones hold power from all those years of the ghost being dead, from all those years of the story being told. Each re-telling by each generation makes the story more powerful; certainly each chronicling increases impact and increases the story’s base. The reporting conjures it, perpetuates it, like prayer.

      I took a chance and told him one of mine, just to keep the story alive a little bit longer. All this thinking on ghost folklore reminded me of a darkness I once saw, a darkness much deeper than the little black shapes.

      “All right. I know a fresher, newer ghost story,” I said

      I was working tech theatre at Essex Community College in Baltimore and standing at the fly rail backstage during a performance of Camelot. A thick, black, lighting cable had slipped and hung in a long heavy loop, blocking the offstage exit of one of the castle units. The tech crew waited in the wings to roll the castle units offstage in a complicated scene change, and Beck, our beloved production manager, stood beside me.

      “Go tell Eric that we’re going to have dress that cable before we can clear the castle,” he said. Then he slowly put his hand on my arm. ”No, wait, you don’t have to.”

      Rumor in the tech staff was that Beck was a warlock; maybe because he sported a long ponytail and could rip through lumber like butter. I don’t know about his religious leanings, but he saw the darkness coming before I did, a moving darkness darker than offstage, gathering around the cable, not really lifting it, but pushing it up, up over the edge of the castle. All the crew techs saw it, and shook their heads, as if their eyes would work better after the shaking.

      “There could be a logical explanation,” said Joe.

      “Maybe, but what?” I asked. “No one was up in the fly area. We all saw the darkness lift the cable up. What could that be?”

      “Precisely,” he said finally. “I said could.”

      “Maybe we want to believe the illogical because we want to believe the illogical,” I rambled. “But all of us together, having a group halluncination?”

      “Isn’t there a hospital right next to Essex?” Joe asked.

      Essex Community College is adjacent to Franklin Square Hospital, and some of its theatre department folklore recounts the recently hospitalized dead visiting the stage. A good percentage of the theatrical family believes in ghosts. We’re open to that sort of thing. In one theory, that belief is the reason that ghosts reveal themselves to us. We allow ourselves to see the unknown ships in the harbor.

      My friend Tomi’s best ghost story happened in a theatre. Tomi and I went to high school together. He has silver, wavy hair and a big belly laugh. He’s one of our group’s storytellers. Tomi’s been seeing ghosts for years. “Have I told you my favorite ghost story?” He asked me, drinking his beer.

      “We had finished the show and we were closing up Harbor Theatre. You know, Harbor used to be in that old Victorian building in Fells Point. North of the market.”

      I nodded, smiling, remembering Tom Flower’s Locust Street directions.

      “The stage manager went upstairs, right, to shut off the electric, to shut down the dimmers. So, you get that she shut everything off, electrically. That has to be clear. When she got back, we were all about to leave and we all heard that whoosh of a spotlight coming on – whoosh!

      And a spotlight shone downstage center. A perfect, round circle of light right dead center. Now, there are some remains of juice in a circuit.”

      “Yeah, but not enough to turn on a spot,” I said.

      “And not a perfect downstage center spot.”

      “So, I guess you left,” I said, grinning.

      “Oh, yeah,” he said, tipping back in his chair. “We booked.” He smiled. “Those people didn’t want to stay for the real show.”

      Not all theatrical types believe, though. I told my ghost cable story to two theatre carpenters recently. “Yeah, but you’re nuts,” said one.

      “But that’s the story how I remember it,” I insisted.

      Do you have to believe to see? See to believe? Do you have to believe in something all around you that’s usually hidden? Is that faith? I believed the ghouls in the Hampton Harvest Spook House were real, even though we helped Dad paint them. Why do the young believe ghosts more readily than those of us whose senses have been dulled by decades of life? Are we “trailing clouds of glory”25 as Wordsworth wrote, losing our vision of the mysterious magic of the universe as we age? Yet, the older I become and the more I see of life, the more I believe there’s more to life than what I see.

      I tried to remember the ghost in the Dorchester Arts Council hall almost two months ago: the sensation of being watched, the wet lick, the vague after burn, the cold whoosh of air that passed through me, tingling my skeleton and raising the hairs on my neck.

      The redness on my cheek had mostly faded. The bumps had lowered and turned white or clear. Weirdly, the curve of the pattern has shifted slightly on my cheekbone. It was inching up, slightly closer to my eye. I’m worried that my body absorbed the wall water. If the water caused an allergic reaction on the surface of my skin, imagine the damage it could corrode inside.

      Karl was afraid to kiss it. He kissed around the edges of it. “Has it moved up towards your eye?” He asked.

      “How could it?” I replied, turning over and away from him.

      That night, I dreamt that I was in a house, looking out a window, at a graveyard. A man, tall, angular and wearing a white suit, appeared in the graves. I knew he was dead. I turned from the sight of him, and he was suddenly beside me in the house. He was very handsome and older with white, curly hair. We didn’t speak. I saw a woman in the graveyard, and then she appeared beside him. She looked like my dead friend Carol, all dressed up. I gaped. I waited for them to dissolve, to decay, but they did not.

      The man said, “Everyone owes the debt of a death.”

      The woman nodded. “Everyone.”

      We dream in archetype.

      I called СКАЧАТЬ