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Short Story

Messages from the Afterlife
The Vicious Circle, the Whistler Writers’ Group, in conjunction with Celebration 2010: Whistler Arts Festival 2005, will be hosting Literary Leanings 2005, a literary gala on Feb. 20th and 21st. The gala will be held at Uli’s Flipside. Starting at 8 p.m. each night, local authors will share the stage with a number of professional writers from around British Columbia including Arthur Black, George Bowering, Bill Gaston, and Aislinn Hunter. Food, drink and open mic will be provided.

Whistler writers include Stella Harvey, founder of the Vicious Circle, as well as members Stephen Vogler, Brandi Higgins, Lisa Richardson, Pam Barnsley, Rebecca Wood Barrett and Sara Leach. In anticipation of the gala, Pique Newsmagazine will print the stories (fiction and non-fiction) that will be read by the Whistler based writers during the gala.

 

Messages from the Afterlife

We bought a church, my partner and I. A renovator, with character. (Pink and aqua paint scheme, floorboards rotting away at the entrance, sun-warped shingles that fly off in thunderstorms, layers of dust that trigger prospective vendors’ allergies. In short, a firesale). Cue jokes about lightning strikes, blasphemy, sex on the altar, David Koresh. But the most common question, after ‘can I have a stained glass window’: ‘is it haunted?’

***

Our tenant suspects so. She lives in the finished half of the building, while we prepare ourselves, amongst plywood floors and plastic sheeting, for phase 2. She wakes up at 3 a.m. Her stereo has suddenly come on: the luminous green of the LCD glows across the room. Heart slamming, as though her slumbering soul has been snapped back into her body like a violent bungee, she switches it off, resists the urge to cross herself.

She visits a psychic.

"Tell me about the little red church," she asks.

"Don’t do it," warns the psychic.

"It’s too late. I moved in a month ago."

"I see a fire," says the woman.

We talk to our insurance broker.

***

Lisa’s boss lives in a priory, outside Gravesend, in England.

It’s called Gravesend because that’s where they dumped the bodies, in mass graves, during the plague. Too many bodies and not enough time to dig individual plots. A bucket of lime and away you go.

The priory is haunted. This is a known fact, recorded in travel guides and history books. Someone has researched the ghosts of Kent, and interviewed previous tenants from the heritage-listed building. Her boss gets a kick out of this macabre fame, but Lisa thinks it’s so he has some company apart from his witch of a wife.

The ghost is a woman in a habit. Long skirts, a veil covering her hair. Previous visitors are reported to have come down for breakfast, "Please thank the nurse for her kindness last night. I had such a headache, and she brought me a wet cloth; it was very comforting."

"Nurse? There’s no nurse here. That’s the ghost you saw," the owners of the estate reply, nonplussed.

She walks a certain pattern around the priory, doesn’t ever hurt anyone. She is not a nurse, as she is sometimes mistaken for, but a nun. It is believed she was a nun who had an affair with a monk at the priory, and for her sins, was bricked between two walls. Alive.

Lisa’s boss hosts a dinner party. After dessert, he pulls out a Ouija board, turns down the lights.

"Is there anyone else who thinks this is a dumb idea?" asks Lisa.

She stares up at the stained glass window, which features the exorcism that took place to get rid of another evil spirit that inhabited the place in the eighteenth century. It looks like they’re sacrificing a two year old. She refuses to touch the glass at the centre of the board. Whimpers from the corner, "Is it really necessary to have the lights out?"

The spirit who joins them in séance is a eunuch pope poisoned last century. He answers their questions, about the afterlife, about their destinies. Everybody leaves at 11:15 p.m. The next day, Lisa’s boss tells them that the clock in the room stopped. At 11:15.

Here’s the thing that bothers me. What motivates that spirit to enter into conversation with a bunch of drunk people? Are the spirits all sitting around watching us fuck up our lives and moaning, ohh, if only they knew…

***

When Alec was nineteen, he shot himself in the head. He didn’t kill himself. He was hospitalized, in a coma, he died several days later. In my husband’s family, it is a forbidden topic of conversation.

Stephanie is Alec’s sister-in-law. She married the brother who found Alec with massive head wounds, still breathing, in the family basement. That would be the insomniac brother, Ron. Stephanie and Ron live in a little house, the rabbit hutch, on the back of the family property, with their kids. Ron’s parents still live in the front residence, across the street from the river. Stephanie can see Alec. He’s often there, sitting on top of the shed roof, a long-limbed crow, when she hangs out the washing.

She doesn’t tell anyone this. She talks to him.

"What does he want?" I ask.

We’re in the kitchen, mixing up drinks, she’s tending to dinner, whispering. She can tell me, because I’m in that strange place of family by association. Another in-law. We become privy to the family secrets, but it’s recognized that we’re outsiders, that we don’t feel the forbiddenness of these stories, the shame. Especially after a few drinks.

"I don’t know. I just talk to him, tell him what’s going on with the kids."

"Are his intentions good or bad?"

"Oh, sometimes I think they’re bad and I just tell him off."

He sits on the roof like a bird, watching, and waiting.

The old man dies. He was a chainsmoker. Heavy drinker. No one quite knows how he stayed alive so long, except maybe out of spite. I think he was afraid of meeting up with Alec’s angry ghost.

Once the old man died, Stephanie didn’t see Alec again.

***

"Is it haunted?" people ask us.

"It’s only thirty years old. And nobody died there. People went to sing and clap and eat chocolate slice."

Still, we’re careful to yell fuck instead of jesus christ if we swing a hammer on our thumbs.

I gather up all the ghost stories I know of, the defying curfew school camp stories, the ones that triggered a rash of goosebumps down the back of my neck. These spirits seem to wander in some half-world because of the suddenness, the violence of their death. They do their thing. They watch and wait. They don’t seem to have a particular message.

But my mother received a message.

Bev is a workaholic. A 10 cups of coffee a day, sit at the computer and ream off entire reports in record time, workaholic. Cigarette for breakfast, don’t have time to get outside, workaholic.

One night, she’s lying in bed. Her heart skittering in the dark, irregular and rapid, like the sound a jar of marbles makes as it falls on a parquetry floor. It’s hot outside – the regular hum of the air-conditioner softens the noise from the neighbourhood, the voices growing boisterous from the tavern across the road, the occasional defiant screech of tires skidding, the slamming doors of nearby units. She tries to keep her breath still, wishes she didn’t live alone. Who would know if something happened to her? Presses her hands on the wild tattoo drumming of her chest, afraid.

A shadow appears in her doorway. Leaning against the doorjamb. Bev.

Someone is here. In her house. In her room.

But it’s not a stranger. It’s her friend, Richard.

Richard, who just died of a heart attack.

Bev,

he says. Be careful. You have to take care of yourself. You have to take care of yourself.

Dead Richard. In her bedroom. That’s the message. Then he’s gone.

And I thank him. If he only had one message to give, in that moment of disembodiment, that he used his quota on her.



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