The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

In seventh grade Mary Lou had a boyfriend she wasn’t supposed to have and no one knew about it but me – an older boy who’d dropped out of school and worked as a farmhand. I thought he was a little slow – not in his speech which was fast enough, normal enough, but in his way of thinking. He was sixteen or seventeen years old. His name was Hans; he had crisp blond hair like the bristles of a brush, a coarse blemished face, derisive eyes. Mary Lou was crazy for him she said, aping the older girls in town who said they were “crazy for” certain boys or young men. Hans and Mary Lou kissed when they didn’t think I was watching, in an old ruin of a cemetery behind the Minton house, on the creek bank, in the tall marsh grass by the end of the Siskins’ driveway. Hans had a car borrowed from one of his brothers, a battered old Ford, the front bumper held up by wire, the running board scraping the ground. We’d be out walking on the road and Hans would come along tapping the horn and stop and Mary Lou would climb in but I’d hang back knowing they didn’t want me and the hell with them: I preferred to be alone.

“You’re just jealous of Hans and me,” Mary Lou said, unforgivably, and I hadn’t any reply. “Hans is sweet. Hans is nice. He isn’t like people say,” Mary Lou said in a quick bright false voice she’d picked up from one of the older, popular girls in town. “He’s . . .” And she stared at me blinking and smiling not knowing what to say as if in fact she didn’t know Hans at all. “He isn’t simple,” she said angrily, “he just doesn’t like to talk a whole lot.”

When I try to remember Hans Meunzer after so many decades I can see only a muscular boy with short-trimmed blond hair and protuberant ears, blemished skin, the shadow of a moustache on his upper lip – he’s looking at me, eyes narrowed, crinkled, as if he understands how I fear him, how I wish him dead and gone, and he’d hate me too if he took me that seriously. But he doesn’t take me that seriously, his gaze just slides right through me as if nobody’s standing where I stand.

There were stories about all the abandoned houses but the worst story was about the Minton house over on the Elk Creek Road about three miles from where we lived. For no reason anybody ever discovered Mr Minton had beaten his wife to death and afterward killed himself with a .12-gauge shotgun. He hadn’t even been drinking, people said. And his farm hadn’t been doing at all badly, considering how others were doing.

Looking at the ruin from the outside, overgrown with trumpet vine and wild rose, it seemed hard to believe that anything like that had happened. Things in the world even those things built by man are so quiet left to themselves . . .

The house had been deserted for years, as long as I could remember. Most of the land had been sold off but the heirs didn’t want to deal with the house. They didn’t want to sell it and they didn’t want to raze it and they certainly didn’t want to live in it so it stood empty. The property was posted with No Trespassing signs layered one atop another but nobody took them seriously. Vandals had broken into the house and caused damage, the McFarlane boys had tried to burn down the old hay barn one Halloween night. The summer Mary Lou started seeing Hans she and I climbed in the house through a rear window – the boards guarding it had long since been yanked away – and walked through the rooms slow as sleepwalkers our arms around each other’s waists our eyes staring waiting to see Mr Minton’s ghost as we turned each corner. The inside smelled of mouse droppings, mildew, rot, old sorrow. Strips of wallpaper torn from the walls, plasterboard exposed, old furniture overturned and smashed, old yellowed sheets of newspaper underfoot, and broken glass, everywhere broken glass. Through the ravaged windows sunlight spilled in tremulous quivering bands. The air was afloat, alive: dancing dust atoms. “I’m afraid,” Mary Lou whispered. She squeezed my waist and I felt my mouth go dry for hadn’t I been hearing something upstairs, a low persistent murmuring like quarreling like one person trying to convince another going on and on and on but when I stood very still to listen the sound vanished and there were only the comforting summer sounds of birds, crickets, cicadas; birds, crickets, cicadas.