The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Her hair was a light blond, almost white in the sunshine, and when I first knew her she had to wear it braided tight around her head – her grandmother braided it for her, and she hated it. Like Gretel or Snow White in one of those damn dumb picture books for children, Mary Lou said. When she was older she wore it down and let it grow long so that it fell almost to her hips. It was very beautiful – silky and shimmering. I dreamt of Mary Lou’s hair sometimes but the dreams were confused and I couldn’t remember when I woke up whether I was the one with the long blond silky hair, or someone else. It took me a while to get my thoughts clear lying there in bed and then I’d remember Mary Lou, who was my best friend.

She was ten months older than I was, and an inch or so taller, a bit heavier, not fat but fleshy, solid and fleshy, with hard little muscles in her upper arms like a boy. Her eyes were blue like washed glass, her eyebrows and lashes were almost white, she had a snubbed nose and Slavic cheekbones and a mouth that could be sweet or twisty and smirky depending upon her mood. But she didn’t like her face because it was round – a moon face she called it, staring at herself in the mirror though she knew damned well she was pretty – didn’t older boys whistle at her, didn’t the bus driver flirt with her? – calling her “Blondie” while he never called me anything at all.

Mother didn’t like Mary Lou visiting with me when no one else was home in our house: she didn’t trust her, she said. Thought she might steal something, or poke her nose into parts of the house where she wasn’t welcome. That girl is a bad influence on you, she said. But it was all the same old crap I heard again and again so I didn’t even listen. I’d have told her she was crazy except that would only make things worse.

Mary Lou said, “Don’t you just hate them? – your mother, and mine? Sometimes I wish—”

I put my hands over my ears and didn’t hear.

The Siskins lived two miles away from us, farther back the road where the road got narrower. Those days, it was unpaved, and never got plowed in the winter. I remember their barn with the yellow silo, I remember the muddy pond where the dairy cows came to drink, the muck they churned up in the spring. I remember Mary Lou saying she wished all the cows would die – they were always sick with something – so her father would give up and sell the farm and they could live in town in a nice house. I was hurt, her saying those things as if she’d forgotten about me and would leave me behind. Damn you to hell, I whispered under my breath.

I remember smoke rising from the Siskins’ kitchen chimney, from their wood-burning stove, straight up into the winter sky like a breath you draw inside you deeper and deeper until you begin to feel faint.

Later on, that house was empty too. But boarded up only for a few months – the bank sold it at auction. (It turned out the bank owned most of the Siskin farm, even the dairy cows. So Mary Lou had been wrong about that all along and never knew.)

As I write I can hear the sound of glass breaking, I can feel glass underfoot. Once upon a time there were two little princesses, two sisters, who did forbidden things. That brittle terrible sensation under my shoes – slippery like water – “Anybody home? Hey – anybody home?” and there’s an old calendar tacked to a kitchen wall, a faded picture of Jesus Christ in a long white gown stained with scarlet, thorns fitted to His bowed head. Mary Lou is going to scare me in another minute making me think that someone is in the house and the two of us will scream with laughter and run outside where it’s safe. Wild frightened laughter and I never knew afterward what was funny or why we did these things. Smashing what remained of windows, wrenching at stairway railings to break them loose, running with our heads ducked so we wouldn’t get cobwebs in our faces.

One of us found a dead bird, a starling, in what had been the parlor of the house. Turned it over with a foot – there’s the open eye looking right up calm and matter-of-fact. Melissa, that eye tells me, silent and terrible, I see you.

That was the old Minton place, the stone house with the caved-in roof and the broken steps, like something in a picture book from long ago. From the road the house looked as if it might be big, but when we explored it we were disappointed to see that it wasn’t much bigger than my own house, just four narrow rooms downstairs, another four upstairs, an attic with a steep ceiling, the roof partly caved in. The barns had collapsed in upon themselves; only their stone foundations remained solid. The land had been sold off over the years to other farmers, nobody had lived in the house for a long time. The old Minton house, people called it. On Elk Creek where Mary Lou’s body was eventually found.