The Saturday Night Ghost Club: A Novel Read online

“You fainted,” said Billy.

  I stared up at a ring of faces. I couldn’t remember what…some sort of apparition, or was it…? Apparently my eyes had rolled back in my head as my legs went out from under me. My uncle had caught me in the dark. I retained the sense-memory of his arms enfolding me. He must have carried me out, too, like a sack of flour.

  As consciousness seeped back in, so too did my shame…how could I be such a baby?

  “You okay?” Billy asked.

  “Yeah, I…I just—”

  “I saw her, too,” Billy said.

  In silence, we doused the fire and bundled into Lex’s van. Lex stopped a few miles up the road, where Billy and my uncle hopped out to retrieve our bikes, then hopped back in. We drove to town. I had to clench my jaw to avoid bursting into tears—and it was more than the burning shame of fainting dead away. Had we really seen her? Lex claimed he’d witnessed nothing. My uncle copped to glimpsing a pale flicker, nothing definite. The clatter, they said, must have been made by a maintenance train passing over the trestle…except we all knew those tracks hadn’t been in use for years.

  Lex dropped off Billy at his house. Billy gave me a look of cautious concern and said, “Want to hang out tomorrow?”

  I shrugged, noncommittal.

  Lex dropped me and Uncle C at my uncle’s house. I got out of the van, zombie-like. “You okay, Jacob?” Lex asked.

  I smiled stiffly. “I’m fine.”

  “You’ll sleep it off,” he assured me.

  I pushed my bike up the walk while Lex spoke to my uncle. When he drove off, the tires of his van made a scalded-cat screech. Uncle C caught up to me at the door and offered a strained smile. I couldn’t tell if he was commiserating with me for what had happened, admitting some guilt on his end, or was ashamed of me for fainting but didn’t want me to catch on.

  He let us in and switched on the kitchen lights. “Want some warm milk, Jake? Help you sleep.”

  I shook my head no.

  My uncle stared out the window overlooking his backyard. I followed his gaze. The mulberry tree in the centre of the lawn looked like a hooded executioner slouching towards the chopping block.

  “I’m sorry if…I thought if you and I faced it together…”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really.” But I wasn’t so sure if that was the truth.

  “Go on to bed, Jake. I made up the bed with fresh sheets.”

  The spare room was cluttered with overstock from the Occultorium: boxes marked SORCERER STUFF and VARIOUS MAJICKS or RUBE JUNK. I crawled under the covers of the bed and stared at the ceiling. Uncle C had drawn designs up there with glow-in-the-dark paint. Symbols my uncle said had protective powers against nightmares and dream-stealing imps.

  I awoke at the witching hour. Down the hallway, in some other part of the house, I heard weeping. It was Uncle C. After a while, his thick cries trailed into a guttural sob. I’d never heard anyone make a sound like that. It was a noise more animal than human.

  I got out of bed. After spending many nights in my uncle’s house, I knew the boards that creaked and all the dead spots on the floor. I crept silently down the hall to the kitchen, where my uncle sat at the table. Moonlight fell through the window, scalloping his heaving chest. There was a sheaf of paper on the table, and charcoal pencils like the ones I used in art class. He was doing something with his hands, which lay trapped in the moonlight—miming the movement of letting someone’s hair fall through his fingers, again and again.

  “Where did it go?”

  Those words, piercingly clear, were spoken in a voice so unlike my uncle’s that I thought someone else must be sitting in that kitchen chair: my uncle’s ruined doppelgänger.

  “Where did it all go?”

  I stood in the hallway, unable to offer my uncle any comfort for his wretched need. I understand now that I was just a kid, at that stage where we’re good at forcing others to deal with our own outbursts but less adept when dealing with the painful emotions of others. I had no idea how to help, and…and I was so scared.

  There it was again, that animal sob. I pictured dozens of tiny mouths over every square inch of my uncle’s skin, mouths puckering on his arms and legs and chest, all of them twisted open and wailing.

  I snuck back to my bed, where I lay shaking. Eventually I drifted off, but woke again to glimpse my uncle in the darkness of the room. His head floated like a disembodied oracle in the doorway, his eyes unfocused while his jaw worked around words he could not speak….Now, all these years later, I choose to remember that as only another dream.

  In the morning, I got dressed and walked past my uncle’s bedroom. He was fast asleep. His big pelican-like feet jutted off the bed, his toes furred with babyish blond hair.

  Sunlight filled the kitchen. The drawings my uncle had done in the dead of night were spread on the table. Knowing it was invasive but unable to help myself, I leafed through them.

  First was a woman’s face. Her features were indistinct, trapped in shadows created with subtle strokes of charcoal. It was almost as if he’d sketched her from the bottom of a lake, peering up through the water to capture the face as it danced above the surface.

  The next drawing was more concrete. The interplay of white and black along the top of the page gave the impression of trees: closely-knit pines arrayed like the teeth on a saw. A box at the bottom right represented a dwelling. The trees were scaled back to an eerie polar whiteness in the centre of the frame. There, a skeletal and famished shape hunched towards the house: some creature breaching the shadowy recesses of the woods to forge boldly into the light. I thought of the thing Billy talked about, the Windiigog. Wendigo. Eater of human flesh.

  I flipped the sheaf over to the last sketch….

  The leering, hate-filled face of a demon. It filled the page. Its features were rendered in brutal slashes, and its teeth were glints of busted glass crowded into its mouth. Its eyes just black pits—my uncle’s frenzied strokes had ripped coin-sized holes where the irises should have been.

  This is from the Void, was my thought. Wherever the USS Eldridge had disappeared into.

  The face belonged to a creature that could only exist in a gap between worlds—the same gap as the one the doomed destroyer had slipped inside. It belonged to something that lurked in the green mists, waiting for its prey to stumble along so it could steal their sanity and soul. An even more worrisome thought branched off this one: perhaps it wasn’t the face of a demon at all. Maybe I was looking at a man who’d been stuck in that gap for too long. Who had surrendered his elemental humanity, whose mouth hung open in an endless scream.

  Fingers shaking, I pulled a clean sheet of paper over that hideous face. Walking to the mud room, I pulled my shoes on and slipped out the door without waking my uncle.

  Years later, I can see how things might have ended there, if only I had put one of those drawings in my pocket and showed it to my parents. But at the time, I couldn’t allow myself to do that. These drawings were the product of my uncle’s secret heart. In my own naïveté, I felt that to take one would have been to snatch part of his soul.

  I would think about my uncle’s drawings when I saw the paintings of my young patient: Gunther and Camphor, robot and druid, were the fruits of her own secret heart. The girl had found them—two pulsing blips of familiar, loving light—within the dimming corridors of her brain. Found them, or summoned them at the time of greatest need. They stood as proof that her memories were still there, very faint, but persistent.

  4.

  SUNKEN WRECK

  Silas Gibbons was a louse. He knew it. Everyone who knew him knew it.

  Games of chance were his poison. Cards, dice, the ponies. Gambling alters the brain’s chemistry: there is a massive dopamine output when the dealer goes bust in Blackjack or the filly you’re betting on wins by a nose. This is offset by the crash when it is you who goes bust—but the brains of hardened addicts are conditioned to push past such minor set
backs.

  Silas’s gambling encouraged the usual related issues. He lived alone and had the eating habits of a college student. He dated fellow card sharps who operated on similar skeleton-shift hours: the casino was open all night and Silas could be found there at the witching hour, slinging cards with the other railbirds. He was in debt to everyone in his family and several ex-friends. If he felt guilt or shame over this, it wasn’t enough to compel him to quit.

  But in his mid-thirties, Silas changed, for no reason that anyone could see. He hadn’t hit rock bottom. Bookies would still take his markers. Even Silas couldn’t account for the change. He simply didn’t want to live that way anymore.

  “It was like eating too much cotton candy,” he told me during our initial consultation. “I just…I got sick of it.”

  Silas took a regular job. He joined a gym and acquainted himself with the produce section at the supermarket. He made amends with those he’d cheated during his “bad years.” He met someone he wanted to marry. A year after the wedding, his wife gave birth to a girl.

  Six weeks after his daughter’s birth, Silas began to experience crippling migraines. Three weeks later, he was on my table.

  The tumour was an adenoma on his pituitary gland, lodged in the folds of the corpus callosum. It was the largest such tumour I’d seen, but benign. The operation was routine. The tumour came out in one solid mass. Two days later, Silas was on his feet again.

  The next week, after his daughter was asleep in her crib, Silas told his wife he was heading to the gym. Instead, he went to the casino.

  He kept his lapses discreet for the next month. A few hours, a few hundred dollars won or lost, then back home with his wife none the wiser. Why would she look for signs? The old Silas, the bad one, was only a rumour to her. Steadily, his habit worsened. He began to disappear all night. His wife was outraged. She wouldn’t stand for it, shouldn’t have to. Silas showed up for work with bloodshot eyes, wearing his rumpled card-playing clothes. He lost his job, but being fired didn’t perturb him. Shortly after that, his wife moved out and took their daughter.

  Silas Gibbons was a full-on louse again. The transformation had taken less than three months.

  I had no contact with Silas during this time: the operation had been open-and-shut, no follow-up required. But five years later, he walked back into my office and told me his story.

  He looked healthy. He said he’d recently joined the gym and was eating well. His wife had divorced him—“She had every right to”—but he declared he was newly dedicated to winning her back. So far, this plan wasn’t working, though she had thawed. She was letting him see his daughter for a few hours every second weekend.

  “But the headaches,” he said. “They’re killing me.”

  An MRI disclosed the obvious. The tumour had come back. Benign tumours often regrow in the same spot, like a fruiting potato.

  “It’s easy enough to get rid of it again,” I told him. “This time I can clean it up, dig out all the clinging threads and—”

  Silas set his palms on my desk. “No.”

  “No?”

  “I need it.”

  “That’s interesting, Silas. Why do you think that?”

  “I think…I think I’m a better person with it in my brain.”

  I considered his theory. The tumour’s placement indicated that it did indeed press against a primary impulse centre. And Silas’s personality adjustment had occurred over several years that coincided with the growth of the tumour in his brain. Was it possible that the tumour was the equivalent of the little Dutch boy’s finger in the dike, blocking addictions that governed Silas’s life? When I’d excised it years ago, had the absence caused those compulsions to come back? Clearly Silas thought so. He also believed his problems would return if I removed this new growth.

  The tumour wasn’t getting any bigger. I gave Silas a choice. “We can leave it in, but I’ll have to monitor it. The migraines will continue.”

  “Anything. Just leave it be.”

  I prescribed medication. If he felt a migraine coming on, he popped a pill. If he got ahead of it, he was often fine. If not, he crawled into bed and turned off the lights and suffered. If this was his penance, Silas was willing to serve it.

  In time, his wife took him back. By now, their daughter would be nine. And that tumour remains in Silas’s brain.

  i.

  I spent the days following the Screaming Tunnel episode moping around the house. I watched so much TV in the sun-heated family room that my body welded to the leather couch, and I had to peel myself off like a giant Band-Aid. My folks didn’t ask me about that night at Uncle C’s. So far as they knew, I’d spent it watching an old Bill Bixby flick. And my uncle didn’t reach out to offer an apology beyond the one he’d given. Why should he? It had been my choice to go along with the club.

  About a week later, I was sitting on the porch reading a G.I. Joe comic when Dove Yellowbird rode up.

  “Howdy, stranger.”

  “Hey. How…?”

  “Do I know where you live? I have eyes all over, grasshopper. Not actually, you understand—eyes all over my body would be incredibly gross. It’s just a turn of phrase.”

  She popped a wheelie over the curb and sent her bike ghost-riding towards the elm in our front yard, into which it crashed. Dove wore cut-off shorts, a ball cap and a plain white T. “Haven’t seen you around lately.”

  I offered what I hoped was a carefree shrug. “Just doing stuff around home.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s about the size of it, I’m sure. Go for a ride?”

  Her request went through my body like music, a chord struck just for me. I got my bike out of the garage. We rode down to Menzie Street, which emptied onto Stanley. The Fairview Cemetery spread out to our right, its hillsides lined with tombstones and Great War cenotaphs. Dove rode no-hands, her hair fanning out in the wind like the tail feathers of some wonderful bird.

  “I hear you went to some tunnels? Billy told me he was scared silly.” She spat a stream of tobacco juice in a graceful arc. “I mean, some creepy old tunnel in the dead of night. Who wouldn’t be terrified?”

  We rode through the intersection at Roberts Avenue into the tourist zone. Billy was waiting for us on the corner of Lewis Avenue. He and I nodded at each other, then together the three of us rode to the Occultorium. It felt like a natural destination, although I still wasn’t sure I was ready to face my uncle.

  Thankfully, the shop was closed. So Beta! was open, though not a single customer populated its aisles. Lex lounged out front smoking a cigarette.

  “Want to rent something? On the house.”

  “We have a VHS player,” Dove told him.

  Lex’s face crumpled like a paper bag.

  “Looking for your uncle?” he asked me. “Been a while since I’ve seen him.”

  That wasn’t unusual. My uncle often got wound up by something he’d heard over the Bat Phone and was liable to shut down the shop for a few days.

  “Hey, Ghostbusters,” Lex said to us. “Looking for another case?”

  “Not me,” said Dove. “Places to go, people to see.”

  At that, Dove popped her front tire up and cat-walked down the sidewalk, wending between the sloth-like tourists. The trailing fringe of her hair whisked around the street corner, leaving only the smell of cherries in the air.

  Following Dove’s departure, Lex said, “Well, what about you two goons? I want you to recover something of mine. From a witch.”

  “Get out of town,” I said.

  Lex’s tongue prodded at his canine tooth. “Okay, she’s my ex-girlfriend. But witches come in all shapes and sizes.”

  Billy said, “What did she do to you?”

  “You mean besides rip my heart out and stomp on it? She kept my cat.”

  He went in and came back with a photo. It showed a man, a woman and a cat. The woman was young and smiling. The man was also smiling. It took me a moment to register that the man was Lex, whom I’d always known to b
e basset-faced and dour. Maybe his ex was a witch. She appeared to have laid a curse on him, turning him from the man in the photo into…Lex.

  “That’s her.” Lex pointed at the cat. “Becca. Best cat in the world. The breakup was a disaster. She booted me out in the dead of night and I came back next morning to find my stuff strewn across the lawn. All my worldly possessions, except Becca.”

  “Why not just ask for her back?” said Billy.

  “You think I haven’t tried?” Lex said. “My ex is an unreasonable entity.”

  I said, “You sound like you really don’t like her.”

  Lex set his jaw, then let it relax. “Ah, we both made mistakes. Water under the bridge, che serà, serà. But she won’t give me back my cat—and that is witchy, don’t you think?”

  Billy said, “How much is the cat worth to you?”

  “Shrewd, my young sir. Shrewd.”

  Lex offered a ten-dollar retrieval fee, plus an additional dollar for incidentals.

  Billy agreed to the terms, gave me my half and tucked the remainder into his pocket.

  Then he said, “You still got Becca’s cat-carrier, Mr. Galbraith?”

  ii.

  We arrived at the witch’s house with the cat-carrier bouncing off Billy’s handlebars. Along the way, we had stopped at the pet store for a bag of catnip, burning through half of our incidentals.

  The house didn’t look like it belonged to a witch. It was painted a cheery shade of robin’s-egg blue, with white shutters. The lawn did not appear to have a patch of eye-of-newt or wolfsbane. I did, however, notice a hearse parked down the road, which I was fairly certain belonged to the undertaker Stanley Rowe.

  We stashed our bikes behind the hedge and walked up the drive. Billy unlatched the gate. We crept into the backyard, where a window looked in on the kitchen.

  “I’m pretty good at trapping,” Billy whispered. “Marten, porcupine. My uncles taught me.”

  “We won’t hurt her, right?”

  “No, no.”

  A square was set into the bottom of the back door, draped by a rubber flap. A cat door. Billy lifted it and made a whispering noise—wsswsswsswss….