In which we find out that there's always a way to turn minor to major. Part one is here, part two is here, and part three is here. You'll be lost if you don't read them, and I think I can safely promise they'll repay the ten minutes it will cost you.
Speak Ill of the Dead, Conclusion
I didn't dare mess with whatever was happening as long as I had it figured out, and could keep the chaos to a minimum. I needed my job. Aching feet and constant, dangling reminders of my boyfriend's infidelity, spiced with his total disregard for my well-being, seemed small enough price to pay.
Then we reached the end of the semester, and the director told me that my performance had improved enough. He was going to recommend that I continue. He gave me the green light for my summer class, which would at least keep food on the table, and there was every prospect that I would be able to continue to work there.
That is, as long as I managed the poltergeists. I didn't know if it actually was Albert. All I knew was that if I did the things that Albert liked when he was alive, the strange was kept to a minimum. I thought I could handle that. I thought I could put up with it, like I put up with the banging on the ceiling every time the Red Wings played on TV.
I thought wrong.
Mom would call, and I would snap at her. I cut people off in traffic. One night at a bar, trying to drink enough that I wouldn’t remember the locket or the damn shoes, a really attractive man, good suit, shine on his shoes, sat next to me and ordered me a drink. I poured it in his lap before he had a chance to talk to me.
How could I risk it? I had class the next day. I needed my laptop to be right where it was, my papers to be in order.
I fell into a dreary rut of doing nothing but driving to school, driving home—I did manage to get into another apartment. Two blocks from the old one, almost the same floor plan. Every bit as dingy as the one that burned.
On my way to work—this was last Tuesday—I cut a guy off in traffic. I didn’t think a thing of it, just rammed my Civic into the tiny gap in front of his shiny chrome F-150. But this guy was meaner than I was. He flashed his lights, and got right up on my rear bumper, honking and giving me the one-finger salute. Too late, I realized he had all the time in the world and all the anger to fill it.
I sped up, and he stayed right with me. I slowed down, and there he was. Never passed. Never went on his way. When I got off the freeway, he drove with me as I circled the blocks, trying to shake him, my hands jittering on the steering wheel, my car weaving back and forth. No police. No helpful bystanders. I was alone, driving in a strange part of town, lost. My breathing sped until I was heaving in ragged gasps. I pulled over, put my forehead on the steering wheel, and waited for him to come and get me. It was better than this horror.
His truck roared up beside me, a great metal beast. His window rolled down. Through the gaping mouth of it, I saw the round hole of a handgun like a cannon, black and empty.
I closed my eyes and prayed. He fired. The shot whined high and into the vacant lot beside me. And with a belch of diesel smoke, he was gone.
When my breathing slowed, I felt my hand bleeding, dripping softly onto my skirt. In my terror I had grabbed the locket.
That was when I knew I needed a miracle.
I have a friend. He's a Catholic priest. He did the divinity school, the whole thing, and he has a small parish that he oversees in the northeastern part of the state. I drove up to see him one afternoon, and brought the things that I thought were associated with, or possessed by, Albert's ghost. I laid them all out in one of the pews in the chapel and explained the things that had been going on.
It took quite a while for it to all come out, and when I was finished, Dale simply sat there gazing at the articles of clothing, and especially the locket. “So when you don't have one of these things on you, things go missing?” he said. I nodded, miserable, terrified. “Do they ever go missing when you can see them? As in, do they move while you're watching them?”
“Not that I'm aware of,” I said.
“So it could just be that you are moving them yourself, and you can't remember.”
“It could be, but these things move around when I don't have one of these articles of clothing on, and they don’t move around when I do. I doubt very much that any of these articles of clothing are causing me to have periods of unconsciousness.”
“You must forgive me,” he said. “ As a priest, I hear all kinds of crazy stories. People often come to me, wanting me to do things, just to kind of satisfy their curiosity.”
“You mean like Exorcisms, that kind of thing?” he nodded.
He set down his drink on the table and picked up a bible.
“It's interesting,” he said. “This is an age when people pretend not to believe in anything at all. They even pretend not to believe in God.”
“But they're not pretending,” I said.” They really don't believe in God.”
He shook his head. “Of course they do,” he said. “They believe in him as much as they ever did. They just don't have a name to stick on it. You know the saying, ‘There are no atheists in a foxhole?’” I did know it. He ran his hand through his hair, and looked around at the empty chapel, its pews and altars, light streaming through the stained glass.
“Everywhere you go is a foxhole. People don't really believe that God will come down, or that he will fix their car, or even demand things of them, but there are things you can get from God—even atheists can get from God—that cannot be had any other way, in any other fashion, by asking for them from any other kind of being.”
“Wishful thinking,” I said.
He laughed a little, but there was no mirth in it. “And yet here you are. Why come to me? I haven't seen you in years.” He had me, and he knew it. He had probably known the whole time.
Why was I here, if not for spiritual advice from someone I thought would be better acquainted with that side of things? In fact, why was I here unless I thought he could help me? I tried logic, I had gotten advice. Now what I needed was power, some way to change things. I knew I didn’t have it. And instinctively, though I was not religious, and would have told you that of course there was no God, here I was, getting ready to beg.
As Dale said, I believed in a god that wouldn't necessarily demand anything of me, and yet I knew was disappointed when I violated my inner law. I could have closed my fingers as the tie slid through them. I did not. And now this had happened. Maybe that was god after all, someone that could mend what I had broken.
I sighed, and sat back in the pew.
He chuckled and said, “Let’s go into my office. Bring the stuff.”
The locket sat on the table between us, between a pair of drinks, purplish and strong.
“I was going to tell you I don't know why I'm here,” I said, “But I hate insulting people’s intelligence. You know why I'm here. I need something, and I don't know how to get it.”
“And you think I do?”
I shrugged. “If you don't, I have no idea where I would find someone that does.”
Slowly, as if he were being dragged forward, he sat forward in his chair, picked up his drink, and tossed it back.
Then he picked up the locket. Part of me was shocked that he would be willing to make physical contact with it after the things I had told him. He splayed his fingers and held it in front of his face, watching it sway back and forth.
Instead of the locket, I watched his face. There was concentration there, and something of pain, too.
“Do you feel something?” I said.
His head gave a little shake. “It doesn't work like that. At least, it doesn't work like that for me. I don't feel something, I don't have some sort of mystical connection to the other side, so that when an article is possessed, or someone is, I have this visceral reaction. I've been ordained, that's all. I didn't feel anything during the ordination either. But if there are rules to how this world works, and there are always rules, then the people who know more about those rules than I do tell me this is the way you go about doing what you want done.”
“That doesn't make any sense,” I said, my voice rising. “If you don't feel anything about the spiritual world, how can you know if it's working? How can you know what you need to do and when you need to do it?”
He looked through the bow of the locket’s chain into my face. “You ever make a cake?” he said.
He saw on my face that I had, and also that I thought it was a stupid and somewhat bizarre question. “Fine. How do you know when to add flour? How do you know the temperature to set the oven at? How do you know when to take it out? You know because someone who has made the cake before has done these things, and they left you a recipe. I have a recipe. I follow it.”
“And how do you know if it worked?”
“You eat the cake. If it tastes crappy, you did it wrong. If it falls, you did it wrong. If it's gooey, or tastes like salt, or is burned on the top, you did it wrong.”
On some level that made sense. I was still disappointed. This, too, he could read on my face. A trace of annoyance came into his voice. “Look, when things move around your house, when you lose things, do you feel something happening? Of course not. You’re telling me you don't know why these things happen. You aren't even sure when these things are happening. You don't feel anything, you don't hear anything, you don't see anything, and yet you want me to see, to feel, to hear. I'm not different from you, except that I have a recipe book and a license to use it. You don't. So when I do it, it will either work, or it won’t.”
He looked back at the locket. “I think it will work. But I make no promises. I am not a magician. Prayers are requests, not orders. I don't tell God what to do. All I can do is ask Him.”
Miserable, but not-quite-hopeless, I said, “Well, ask him that.”
He sighed heavily, and laid the locket down. He covered it with his heavy black Bible and left it there for a few moments, his eyes closed, his fingers steepled under his chin. Then he began to speak. I don't feel right about saying the words. It's not that they're secret, you can find them with a simple search, or go find a priest and have him tell you what they are. But even if he didn't think that anything was happening, even if he felt nothing, that was not true for me.
I felt something right away. It was cold, icy, as if someone were running the tip of an icicle up and down my spine. It was not a feeling I had had before, nor was it one I hope to ever feel again. As Dale prayed—though the prayer was very simple—I felt that icicle melt. The temperature of it changed.
There is no other way I can put it. All at once, I had in my head the vision of that night, the one I had had a thousand times before. I felt the silk of Albert's tie in my fingers, saw the look on his face, the glare of the headlights as it struck the side of his head. I knew how this scene was supposed to go, but In this repetition of it, without my conscious will, my fingers closed on the tie. I felt the sliding stop, the tie catch in my fingers. My grip tightened. I was pulled forward, unable to stop myself. He was too heavy. Both of us fell into the road. But the tiniest delay, made by my weight, was enough. Instead of the front of the car impacting the side of Albert's head, the two of us thudded into the side of the car and bounced the other direction, away from the rolling wheels and squealing tires.
I felt a pain in the side of my head. Albert's eyes rolled back, but his breathing continued. I had blood on my face, blood on my clothes, but it was my blood, slowing and clotting, not pouring my life into the gutter.
I was alive. Albert was alive. All this I saw as I sat across the table from the priest as he prayed. I knew what I had seen was true. I also knew what I had seen was impossible, and hadn't happened. Somehow those two things existed in my head at the same time. I was aware that Albert was still dead. I was aware that I was still alive. I was also aware of how that night could have happened and that I didn't need to worry that my hand had not actually closed. The person that I was, the person I truly was, would have closed her hand. Should have closed her hand. Wanted to, and was ready to, and it wasn't malice that had stopped my hand from closing. It was just luck. And luck is no one's fault.
He finished praying.
Kept his eyes closed for a moment, made the sign of the cross on his chest, picked up his Bible, and exposed the locket. It lay on the table in exactly the same position it had when he had covered it with the book. To my eyes, and I'm sure to his, nothing had happened. But eyes are not the only way we know things.
“Thank you,” I said simply. He merely nodded, rose, and went to his bookshelf to replace the book. I went home, though I had no home really to go to. For the first time in months I found myself looking around at possible places I could live. I began to think about what my life could look like the next day, the next week, the next year. I began thinking about myself as being alive again, instead of dead. There was a great gift, the first thing I had felt since the accident. Because that's what it truly, really, was. An accident.
I went to my dingy hotel room. It took off my jacket, and hung it on the peg by the door. I went to the closet, opened it, and took out the clothes that belonged to Albert’s Helen. I unpacked my travel bag, stuffed all of those clothes in it, and zipped it back up. Into the outside pocket of the bag, I tucked the locket. I thought I might feel something, letting it go. But it was just metal, now, and meant nothing.
I was going to throw them in the dumpster, but somehow that didn't feel right. I ended up donating them to the local thrift store. They were nice clothes, after all. They just didn't fit me anymore. Feeling a great weight lift off my shoulders, free for the first time in months, I drove sedately back to my apartment, windows down in the car and the cold February breeze blowing through.
As I passed the bar, I caught a glimpse of a dark-haired man in a really good suit, just pulling open the door. My wallet had twenty bucks in it. I wondered if he would let me buy him a drink this time. No bar towel necessary.
I'll be honest. The original version of this story had a different, much darker ending. Just replace the final paragraph with this one:
I climbed the stairs, unlocked my room, and was just in time to see the locket, hanging from the corner of my mirror, swaying gently, back and forth.
But then I wanted a happier ending. And I found I really do believe in the power of goodness and forgiveness to drive out the evil things of this world, or any other. Ultimately, I write truth. I don't write lies, even if they're really, really creepy fun.
Until next time-
~Cristof