The apartment came with its very own ghost, which was fine by Will Archer, because he already knew what it was like to be dead. Not doornail dead. Or zombie dead. Or brain dead. Just clinically dead on an ambulance gurney, right after the accident, a symptom of trauma.
He would hate to disappoint anyone if asked. No, he didn’t see the proverbial light at the end of a tunnel, even though Utica teems with underground waterways haunted by the spirits of freedom seekers who died during passage. He came across no one he knew who had preceded him to the afterlife. There was no voice beckoning him back to the world of the living, telling him it wasn’t his time. There had been nothing, not even blackness: just a void in his existence while emergency technicians tried to electrocute his heart back into a rhythm with a portable defibrillator.
Later at the hospital, when he learned what had happened from two police officers who had shown up to interrogate him, he wished they hadn’t been so persistent.
If there was a ghost, it wasn’t introducing itself, not right away, as his landlady, a Mrs. Gossett, showed him around, laying down the rules of the house. She had a lively, wizened face framed by a bouffant of blue-gray hair—Will guessed she was the near side of 70—and wore a blue robe and house slippers to match.
There weren’t any other apartments to be had on this side of the Ohio River. And this was the address he had carried in his pocket on a scrap of notepaper coming down from Erie. It was the address his new employer had given him over the phone.
The village of East Orange, West Virginia, where he was taking up residence, had a certain Mayberry quietude about it. In comparison, New Bloomfield on the Ohio side of the river, where he was to begin his new job the next day, seemed an older cousin of the “school of hard knocks” variety.
His lodgings were in an old gabled Victorian house with steep slate roofs guarded by the shade of giant sycamores. In fact, it was called the Victorian Arms, as advertised on a bronze plaque out front. The house had been subdivided into apartments that they passed on their way up the stairs.
One door on the second floor opened onto nothingness, a straight plunge down twenty feet to a spiked iron fence. Mrs. Gossett showed it to him on the way up to the third story in case he lost his way and stepped through it by accident. The fire escape, having rusted through, had been removed some decades ago. The ladder had posed a greater hazard to her tenants’ well-being than a fire would.
“Wouldn’t want to lose a new tenant so soon,” she said drily, and he had made an attempt to laugh. He hadn’t much experience with older people—his own parents had died in their forties in a ferry accident, and he had never known his grandparents—but he figured it was always wise to humor senior citizens.
“Do you go by William?” she asked politely as he followed her up the last flight of stairs to a cramped landing. “Or can I call you Bill?”
“Will is fine,” he corrected her, more tersely than he had intended.
A naked bulb dangling from a high ceiling provided the only source of illumination. Will wondered who replaced the bulb when the light went out. It would take a tall stepladder and a firm sense of balance.
“Will it is then,” she said cheerily, sorting through a ring of keys at the door to apartment #9, a lucky number, he hoped, despite his trepidation with heights. “Ah,” she said, holding a skeletal key up to view with fingers that were equally skeletal, white, and sinewy. “Where there’s a will there’s a way.”
Surely she didn’t think this was the first time he had heard this proverb applied to his name.
She handed over the key as Will set down his duffle bag on the couch along with his laptop and a suit in its plastic sheath, which he draped over the back of a chair. He had graduated college in this suit, married Abbey, attended Joel’s baptism. It was a relic of his former life, something he carried from Utica to Erie, and now from Erie to this little dot of a town on the Ohio River. The laptop didn’t violate his rule about handheld electronics. It wasn’t exactly something you could be scrolling while driving.
“You have wifi?” he inquired.
“The house may be ancient,” she replied, “but it is equipped with modern conveniences. Think of the reviews I would get on Yelp without wifi.”
The first thing he did was unzip an outside flap of his luggage and pull out a 5” x 7” photograph in a gilt frame. It showed a pale, white face, beardless, topped with a business cut, and beside it, a young, brown-skinned woman, bright and smiling, cradling on her hip a small boy with a curly mop of black hair, maybe three years old. Instinctively, he ran his hand through the nest of a beard he had grown since, wearing it as he would a disguise.
“Sibyl—that is, Mrs. Waxman—didn’t mention you have a family,” she said, studying the photograph around his shoulder, as he propped it on a desktop. “Will they be joining you then? There’s only the one bedroom, I’m afraid.”
“No,” Will said sadly, “they won’t.”
“I’m sorry,” she replied, lowering her eyes. “I don’t want you to get the impression I’m nosy.”
“Are you?” Will asked, trying to lighten the mood.
“Of course,” she answered, smiling. “All landladies are. It’s their nature.”
She placed a hand lightly on his, and then Will knew that everything would be all right between them, after all.
“Come along now,” she said, removing her hand. “Let me show you the rest of the apartment.”
There wasn’t much to show. The apartment was old-fashioned, its quaintness matched only by its mustiness. The living room seemed comfortable enough despite its hardwood floor covered with a threadbare carpet that fell short of the baseboards, which looked as though they had been gnawed by rats. He hoped the rats had found different accommodations by now.
Beyond lay a small room inside a corner turret with a ceiling that rose into a six-sided dome. This, he could tell, was meant to be the bedroom. It offered a wonderful view of the river, wide and smooth-flowing, and the silver suspension bridge he had crossed, keeping an eye out for closed-circuit cameras. Going on fifteen years since 9/11, homeland security was still very tight, but he doubted inland river crossings were monitored 24/7.
“Now about that ghost,” his landlady said from the living room, as he emerged from the turret.
She described noises in the night, a low, vibrant humming, like the sound produced by a wax-paper comb, climbing and descending a musical scale. Thumps, as of footsteps, pacing the floorboards, back and forth, back and forth, like the steady metronome of a grandfather clock. Loud wails like a police siren, moving from one part of the apartment to the other. Rattles, as if a loose collection of bones were coming apart at the joints. All of these sounds, added together, have cost her more than one tenant over the years asking for a refund of their deposit.
“Don’t worry,” Will said, looking around the room at some of the details that were filling in the overall picture: an exposed pipe running vertically up a wall, the high plaster ceiling with spider-web cracks running through it, old-style push-button light switches. He worried about insulation fraying from copper wires behind the walls. “I’m used to living with ghosts.” He glanced at three faces in the photograph on the desk. Some ghosts, he knew, were still among the living—himself included. “Who’s it a ghost of, do you know?”
“You’ll be getting acquainted soon enough,” his landlady answered. “At your new job, I should say.”
“Oh?”
“It’s the ghost of your employer’s son.”
“Mrs. Waxman’s? You mean Jamaal Waxman?”
Jamaal Waxman, saxophonist extraordinaire. He only knew the name because it was also the name of his new place of employment: The Jamaal Waxman Memorial Museum. Jamaal had been a young jazzman dead these past twenty years, give or take. It was his memory that his mother, Sibyl Waxman, was working hard to keep alive. And here he was, just another ghost.
“He died in this very room. On the couch, in fact.” Will glanced at the small settee with plump velvet cushions. Just enough room for two. A lovers’ couch. “I was the first to find him. A misfortunate occurrence.”
“How did he die?”
“Overdose,” she said simply. “Heroin. Are you a drinking man, Will?”
“No,” Will answered curtly, the word as blunt as a hammer blow. If he hadn’t been drinking—and texting—the accident wouldn’t have occurred. Two people—mother and child—would still be alive.
“Surely, you must have some vice. Do you smoke?”
“Now and then.”
“Well, you must come join me for a cigarette—now and then.” Her eyes were as bright as Christmas bulbs. She must have been something, Will reckoned, back in her youth.
He escorted her to the doorway, where she paused.
“I do hope you have better luck than the previous two curators,” she said solemnly. “They stayed in this very room, as well. The previous curator—would you like to know how he died?”
“The fire escape?” Will wondered, recalling the door to nowhere.
“Drowned in his bath.”
“Right, well, I’ll have to take my chances.” And he meant it. He didn’t have much choice. His money was tight, and he was grateful for a job that paid twice the minimum wage. The only downside was it didn’t offer healthcare, so he’d hung onto a Golden Rule policy under an assumed name for emergency treatment. He never knew when a seizure would be severe enough to send him to a hospital.
“And the one before that?” Looking him straight in the eye. “Do you know what happened to him, young man that he was?”
“Changing a light bulb?” Will responded, trying to make light of what he perceived as an inane line of questioning. He presumed anyone foolhardy enough to attempt it on the stairs would be taking a chance with limb, minimally, and probably life as well.
She shook her head slowly from side to side. If her goal was to unnerve him, she was succeeding all too well.
“A vehicle at a crosswalk. A very clear case of hit and run. Both young men like yourself. You’re a married man?”
“No—”
“Ah, but you still wear a ring.”
Will held out his hand, as though showing off the gold band on a shop-at-home network.
“I’m sorry,” she said, lowering her eyes. “There I go, prying again.” She made a move as though to touch his shoulder –or God forbid, his cheek—but, perhaps thinking better of it, brought her hand back to her side. “Just be careful. Always watch your back, Will. Always.”
Fortunately, this was something he had put a lot of practice into, and he almost said as much. Still, you could never be too careful.
“Well, thanks for the advice, Mrs. Gossett. Or do you have a first name you go by?”
“It’s Phyllis. But I prefer to be addressed by my last name. It was my late husband’s. That way I’m always reminded of whom I lost.”
“Of course.” Why was he not surprised by the mention of yet another death? They appeared to come with the territory.
“Don’t forget,” she said lightly, her tone brightening, as she backed through the doorway onto the landing as though to perform a curtsy. “Lights out at eleven.”
“Eleven?” Will wondered if he was hearing her right.
“I’m joking, Will,” she said, pulling the door closed on her exit. As though she were a Cheshire cat, the last thing he saw was her smile.
***
Feeling a migraine coming on, Will hoped to circumvent it through sleep. His landlady’s joke became a self-fulfilling prophecy: lights out at eleven after all.
He swallowed a couple of antihistamines as a sleep aid and plunged immediately into dream. In this one, he was climbing a skyscraper: One World Trade Center, testament to the Twin Towers that were lost. Scaling the glass panels without rope or plungers. Just his hands and bare feet—a human fly. He was only a few feet from the top when a young Black man in a white robe looked down at him.
“Hello, roomie!”
“Jamaal?” he asked, but the man only smiled, flashing a set of perfect teeth. One of the incisors glittered brilliant gold.
“Just let go,” he advised, still smiling.
“What?”
“Let go and fall back. You’ll feel so much better if you do.”
Will tried to hang on more tightly but started to lose his grip.
“Don’t worry,” Jamaal said, bending his head. “Just start counting backwards. You’ll be dead before you hit bottom. And then you can join them.”
“Them?”
“Isn’t that what you want? So you can beg their forgiveness?”
His fingers lost their grip and he fell away into nothingness, but this isn’t what panicked him. He didn’t know from which number he should start counting.
He felt a whoosh! as the bottom dropped out of his existence, then woke in bed with a start. It took him a moment to orient himself to his new surroundings. Part of him thought he was still drowsing on the bus coming down from Erie.
Eyes wide open, he heard a thrumming sound, faint at first, but growing louder, and climbing a scale. It went through one octave and reached a crescendo before descending again. But there was something peaceful about it, something lulling.
Just the pipes, he thought, turning over in bed. The pipes, the pipes are calling, he hummed lightly to himself before falling asleep.
