Poe Read online

  “But you think it’s somehow related. What’s happening to me and what happened to your brother.”

  “I don’t know for sure, but still. He was looking for something. Maybe he found it.”

  “Look, Lisa,” I say, “a lot of people have listened to this shit. Not everyone—”

  “Stabs their sister. I know. But I just think there are some doors you’re better off not opening. And just to be safe, I’d feel better if you threw out that book. Leave it alone. Be happy instead.”

  She traces her hand on my face, and for a moment it seems possible that I could find happiness with Lisa in a small farmhouse on the outskirts of town.

  But I place my hand on hers. “The only problem is that whatever it is, I don’t think it’s going to leave me alone.”

  A pause. “That’s what Daniel said once. When he was still lucid.” Her voice chokes on the last word.

  I lightly kiss her cheek. “Play something for me.”

  “You’re trying to change the subject.”

  “Maybe.”

  Lisa sighs but sits up, walks to the drums, and settles into a metal folding chair behind them. I prop myself up on the bed.

  “Okay,” she says quietly, as if she’s alone, centering herself. She taps the gleaming brass cymbal with her index finger, makes a circular motion, and it gives a resonant hum. When she’s satisfied with the tone, she picks up some drumsticks off the floor, cracks her long, pale neck to one side, then the other, and closes her eyes.

  “This feels weird,” she says.

  “Just pretend I’m not here,” I say.

  “Yeah, right.”

  She starts tapping the cymbals with her drumsticks. It sounds like rain hitting the fire escape outside my apartment window, and she sustains that for a few moments, then adds a bigger cymbal with a deeper tone, sliding easily between them, her hands quick and light. While they hum she strikes a few drums lightly, and I realize that this is nothing, just the warm-up—she’s feeling how her drums sound today.

  “Sometimes they’re tight when it’s cold,” she says quietly.

  She flips a drumstick in the air and then starts in earnest, playing a percussive sliding rhythm that’s a staccato roll of thunder. Her hands move faster than I can follow; it’s like she’s looking for something or someone with sound. The sticks fly with relaxed ease, she’s incredibly light with her touch, but the vibration is so deep that I can feel it resonate in my ribs. I close my eyes too, letting it fall over me, a liquid rush. And then the sound gets faster, harder, like a storm is letting loose and I’m with her in it; the wind is blowing, the rain shattering in sideways slices, but then she suddenly pulls it all back, shockingly abruptly, into a light tinny rainfall, slipping between the drums and cymbals until they blend together into a riff so fast that is sounds like a word or a phrase. A voice.

  And I realize that this tells a story too, using rhythm. Maybe Daniel’s numbers are a rhythm the way words are a rhythm, the way my heartbeat on the monitor was a rhythm, the way life and death is a rhythm.

  When I open my eyes I see that hers are now half-closed. She is channeling her sound, alone in her private world, and a trickle of sweat drips unnoticed from her brow. If she sees me stand, it doesn’t register, and I move quietly behind her. Another small trickle of sweat runs from the base of her neck, past her scar. I lean over and kiss it, salty, like the ocean, like a tear. I hear her quick intake of breath. My hand slips around her waist, the other starts to unzip the top of her dress; her skin here is soft but cool. The drums get fiercer, wilder, like a part of her is trying to push me away, warn me.

  “I’m not Daniel,” I whisper in her ear. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  When she drops the drumsticks and turns to me, what takes my breath away is how shockingly instantaneous the loss of sound is, like death itself. But then she pulls at the buttons on my shirt, and nothing registers but her skin, her lips, and we don’t even make it to the bed, that first night.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: LIFESAVER

  The forlorn chair is a definite find that early morning on the corner of Elm and Main, where someone who obviously had no appreciation for tacky, egg-shaped mid-twentieth-century plastic furniture dumped it for the trash collector to pick up. And it is gloriously ugly. The chair is cast in an amber plastic the color of beer, with spindly chrome legs tapering to tiny, lethal-looking points. I manage to stuff it halfway into the trunk of my Mustang and then squeeze it through the narrow Victorian stairway of my apartment building with only a mild bout of swearing and a couple of scraped elbows. But Lisa will love it.

  Not that she deserves her own chair after booting me out of her warm bed just around five in the morning into the freezing cold, all because she didn’t want to have to explain to Amelia or, God forbid, her mother what I was still doing there in the same clothes from the night before. As if they would care. But Lisa promised to drop by after work, which means I have some cleaning to do. The dishes in the sink are growing interesting fuzzy substances—some of which could be classified by the CDC as a health hazard—and I probably should invest in some sheets, maybe a new towel or two. The thought gives me a pleasant buzz.

  Which is instantly killed as soon as I open my apartment door. Christ, my place really does stink, somewhere between homeless man in the library and old cheese. I cover my nose with my hand and race to open a window.

  But when I turn around I notice that the shards of glass on the floor are different; they’re not randomly scattered. Instead they’ve been carefully arranged to form a symbol.

  The symbol on my ring.

  My heart starts to pound—was the glass like that when I came in? But I know the answer. It wasn’t.

  Theory one is that in less than five seconds someone zipped into my apartment, positioned the broken glass, and stepped out again without making a sound or cutting their hands in the process. Theory two of course doesn’t seem possible either, but then I’ve had to recently expand my notion of possible. After all, snow is not a normal meteorological occurrence in crappy apartments, unless there’s a gaping hole in the roof.

  Time to test theory two. So how does this actually work, communing with the spirit world? Maddy’s approach was a little histrionic, to say the least.

  I take a deep breath. Let’s see how a direct question works. “Poe, did you do this?”

  The temperature suddenly drops to just a few degrees below freezing, and a thin vein of frost crackles across the glass of the window.

  Fuck. My apartment’s haunted. As if my life wasn’t complicated enough.

  “For crying out loud,” I mutter, my breath hanging in the air, “could you do something useful, like clean my apartment?” My voice echoes in the empty space, and I don’t think I’m crazy, but then again, define crazy.

  But apparently my ghost friend is not all that into cleaning, because she doesn’t respond. And after I turn up the heat, start to wash the dishes—some are beyond help and get thrown in the trash—I realize that I am probably the worst person in the world to document a haunting, particularly my own, because I know little or nothing about the subject. We never even celebrated Halloween in my family. On October 31 we’d keep the lights low, and if some poor unfortunate kid in a Power Rangers costume happened to ring our doorbell, they’d be treated to a torrent of swearing in Russian by my father, who’d then slam the door in their face and mutter something about stupid Americans not understanding the origin of their commercialized pagan rituals. “What will they celebrate next?” he’d ask my mother, “Hiroshima?”

  And there was definitely no mention of how irritating a ghost could be. Because irritation is the main thing I feel as I sweep up the shards of glass on the floor and dump them into a can. It’s like being stalked by an angry ex-girlfriend, this haunting stuff. Is she here now, watching me search for a clean towel in the hamper? Is she pissed that I’m not scared shitless? She’s trashing my stuff, what little there is (I liked my photos without the tear through the middle, tha
nk you very much). And for Christ’s sake, if she can toss around my pictures and make it snow in my apartment, why the hell can’t she just tell me what she wants me to know?

  But the darker thought that nags somewhere in the back of my mind is something different altogether, a black little whisper that creeps along quietly as I straighten the mail. Why can Poe reach me but not my parents? Wouldn’t they be first in line to haunt me? Would it kill them to say hello?

  Maybe I am losing my mind.

  But in a strange way what happened at Aspinwall, while terrifying, also made me hope that this was a bigger door opening. It doesn’t make sense that a spirit I obviously have no connection to has control over my dreams, can even step into my waking life, but my parents—nothing. A part of me feels abandoned all over again. Which is ridiculous, stupid to even think about.

  But it does give me an idea. Maybe there’s a better way to communicate with Poe, one that doesn’t involve the destruction of my personal property and won’t bankrupt me with sky-high heating bills.

  Poetry magnets.

  I don’t know where she got them, my mother, but sometime around the time I was in high school she picked up a box of poetry magnets, placed them on the fridge, and we would go back and forth trying to make each other laugh with the weirdest nonsensical phrase. “Raw vivid purple pops puppies.” “Lollipops eat city leave memories.” Or we’d use them as a kind of visual shorthand—“Would young man use imagination and clean clothes.” I know they were among the few things to make it into one of my five cardboard boxes. The ones I haven’t opened in a year.

  This is going to take a Xanax and maybe a couple of Valium to accomplish.

  Evicting a few spiders in the process, I drag each dusty box into the middle of my living room floor and use a dull steak knife to roughly hack at the tape, leaving jagged cardboard wounds on the flaps of the boxes.

  “See?” I say to an apparently empty room. “I fucking heard you. I get that the symbol’s important. But we are not engaging in some kind of Poltergeist cliché. We are going to make this a civilized haunting; we are going to act like two grown adults.”

  I might need to rephrase that.

  “Or one grown adult and one dead adult. Or ghost. Or whatever.”

  Maybe using a beer to wash down the meds was a bad idea. Or not, because I revise that opinion after drinking another.

  I reach an arm into the Styrofoam popcorn guts of box one, pulling out a battered Steiff monkey with an eerie grin, Bunky, who never left my side for most of my childhood. He goes to the floor with a thump. I reach in again, this time pulling out my high school yearbook, which is still wrapped in plastic, thank God, because that year I sported a mullet in an attempt at post-twentieth-century irony. The next find is the VHS copy of our middle school production of The Wizard of Oz, in which I played a munchkin; so far the only things I seem to have kept are ammunition for my blackmailers once I’m rich and famous.

  Then I hit upon the shoebox that was under the dresser. A few crushed pieces of Styrofoam cling to the top; I wipe them away with my wrist and sit back on my heels.

  The box must have been dropped or jostled somewhere among my several moves—first the boxes went into storage at my friend Neal’s garage, then into the U-Haul on the way to New Goshen—because the watch inside is even more broken than before. The back has completely sprung open and little bits of machinery are scattered about.

  It figures. My eyes are blurry from the beer, Xanax, or both, but I notice something on the inside of the watch: tiny writing—an inscription. A feeling of excitement rises in my chest—here it is, my detective-style aha moment—so I eagerly hold the watch closer and discover that the writing is… Greek. My head starts to pound. Is anything about this going to be easy? Could someone please leave me a single fucking clue that makes sense? So, I do the obvious thing, which is to throw poor Bunky across the room with more force than is necessary to kill a stuffed animal. He makes a satisfying thwump on the opposite wall, even makes a small crack in the plaster that will come out of my rent deposit (dang, that Bunky weighs more than I remember), but fuck it.

  The afternoon sun stretches across the floor, and I discover that instead of cleaning up my place I’ve made it a good deal worse, and with my current buzz, I’m not sure what time it is or how many hours have gone by. But Christ I don’t want Lisa walking in and thinking that she’s got another crazy freak on her (she does, but no need to clue her in on that fact just yet). I check my father’s watch (oh, right, broken) and start to shove the Styrofoam back into the box, actually stumbling across the poetry magnets in the process. Thank God something went right.

  I push, shove, and swear but finally get the boxes back into the closet and sweep most, if not all, of the clinging Styrofoam bits off the floor.

  Then, the faintest ticking.

  Did someone leave a bomb in my apartment? Because it’s that kind of sound, a don’t open that suitcase! sound; the kind of sound in a movie before there’s a loud and violent explosion. I stand for a moment and try to gauge where it’s coming from. Not the kitchen, not the closet—too loud for that—but somewhere closer, near the door. I glance over to the bamboo coffee table and see my father’s watch. The second hand is moving in a counterclockwise direction. Impossible, of course—half the parts were swept up into the trash. Impossible unless you have your own personal ghost.

  If Poe weren’t dead already, I might kill her myself.

  I press my knuckles into my forehead. God, I don’t want this. I was feeling so good when I was on my way home, practically flying. And it’s been so long since I felt anything even approaching good. I wonder if Poe isn’t just messing around with my dreams, my apartment, and my father’s watch, but messing around with my emotions as well. Maybe that’s part of the whole haunting experience; she hasn’t exactly been a jolly presence to be around. Next time I see her in my dream I know what my question will be: How the hell do I get rid of you?

  I grab the poetry magnets and stride toward the kitchen. “These,” I say loudly, my voice echoing ridiculously in my apartment, “are called words. If there’s something you want to say, use them. But for Christ’s sake, leave my shit alone. Any more fucking around with my personal property and I’m going to pretend I don’t see or hear you. I’ll move to Florida. I mean it.”

  There. Ghost girl got served.

  By the time Lisa arrives I’ve borrowed a few things from my neighbor Doug to spiff things up and detract from the overall homeless-shelter interior décor. Apparently some people still own cloth napkins and iron them no less. (Not a big fan of the new chair, though, is Doug. One glance and his verdict was, “The point of design is to encourage relationships, not scare them away.”)

  Anyways.

  My first article for the Eagle detailing the spooky happenings here on Grant Street (MESSAGE FROM THE GRAVE) is almost done, I’ve got a pizza on the way from Del Fino’s, and I’ve even discovered a forgotten stash of bottled water that I’d put away in case of snowstorm-induced electrical outages—an amazing find, because I’d hate to serve Lisa water from the tap, which is yellowish from the old copper pipes. And all my effort is worth the moment when Lisa enters, slips off her jacket, and says, “It smells so much better.”

  Then she sees the chair, and her eyes widen. “That is the most hideous thing I’ve ever seen.” She settles happily in the egg and spins it around.

  “Jealous?”

  “Completely.” She stops the chair and then points to the opposite wall, where the photographs had been. “What’s up with that?”

  In my cleaning frenzy I made the decision—hey, who needs a corkboard when you’re living in a low-rent dive and have plenty of pushpins? So I’ve started my collage, tacking the torn-in-half photos to the wall, as well as the copies of the old Eagle articles and my handwritten mystery list.

  Lisa puts a finger to her temple with a pained expression. “Are you writing on walls now too?”

  Ooohh. Didn’t think about t
hat one. “This?” I say, trying to make light of the subject. “This isn’t writing on walls. This is writing on paper, then tacking the paper onto the walls. Completely different. Apples and oranges.”

  Lisa groans.

  “What—you have a corkboard with lyrics? I don’t make morbid associations about that.”

  Before we can get started with another argument—again, is this the Poe effect? We only seem to have arguments here—the pizza dude arrives, blessing us with pepperoni-induced peace and harmony.

  “Place mats?” asks Lisa, her mouth full. She seems wary of them, and they do look too expensive; not the kind of thing you want to drip pizza sauce on.

  “Doug, my neighbor’s,” I admit. They don’t look quite right on my bamboo coffee table with paper plates and plastic cutlery, but oh well.

  She shakes her head sadly. “You spent five hundred dollars on a book you can’t even read and you’re borrowing your neighbor’s table linens? Do you not know how to shop online?”

  “I got the chair,” I protest.

  She gives me a serious look. “How much did you pay for the chair?”

  “Okay, it was free,” I admit. “But you know what they say: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Plus you’ve got to see this book.” I jump up to get my messenger bag.

  She raises a hand. “No, I don’t.”

  “Really,” I say, rummaging through my closet. That’s something I feel like I can do now—open my closet without wallowing in a pity party for one. Interesting. “It’s cool,” I add. “Very goth.” I find the book and okay, it really doesn’t look all that cool, the gray MacGyver duct tape ruins the effect, but still. When I turn to show Lisa though, she’s got her bag over her shoulder and is opening the door.

  “I’m not doing this,” she says quietly. Her face is soft, as if she’s about to cry.

  “Wait,” I say. “Doing what?”

  “You know what. This is exactly how it started before.”