Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Shirley Jackson, H.P. Lovecraft, Oliver Onions, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde … Paranormal fans will recognize names of classic horror writers. One other should appear on this list, an author better known for her cosy Callie Parrish novels. That writer crafted one of the finest stories of ectoplasmic– or any other– genre. SleuthSayers is proud to bring you the first US publication of a modern gothic tale from our friend and colleague, Fran Rizer.— Leigh
Emily’s Ghost
by Fran Rizer
(12 Dec 1944 – 24 Dec 2019)
I sit silently as Drew drives our red Porsche along the rutted dirt road. It’s been three days since he spoke to me this time. Seventy-two hours of quiet. An eternity of longing to hear him say my name – “Emily.” I hated that word until I met Drew. The people in South Carolina’s low country drop the “i” and it comes out Emm-lee.
The first time I ever saw Drew, I’d gone to put flowers on Grandma’s grave. He was in the Beaufort churchyard sketching moss-covered trees and magnolias. I stood behind him and watched as he created a whole world out of just a few pencil strokes. After several moments, he turned and looked at me with unwavering blue eyes. The man took my breath.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Sometimes I’m flippant, downright sarcastic. Got an attitude. It’s a wonder I didn’t answer, “What’s it to you?” Instead I replied, “I’m Emily.”
“Emily as in Emily Dickinson?” he asked, and I laughed with pure pleasure. He’d pronounced my name with three delicate syllables. It sounded positively delicious when Drew said it.
“Yes,” I answered, “but I don’t make up poetry. I try to write stories.”
“Why try? Why don’t you just write them?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’m not too good at it yet.”
“You can be if you want to be,” Drew said, and I believed him.
***
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| Andrew Wyeth, Sea Fog |
That’s how it began. Before long, we were spending most of our time together. Lots of days sitting side by side in churchyards or marshes. Me writing my little tales on a yellow legal pad while Drew sketched or painted.
“What are you writing?” Drew asked.
“A story to send to a magazine. I need to see my words in print. I want people to read what I write.”
“Where did you get the idea?”
“I made it up. It’s about a boy and girl falling in love and seeing a ghost.”
“Oh,” Drew said and went back to drawing.
When it rained hard and we couldn’t sit outside, we escaped into Drew’s battered old van. He kept a collection of Andrew Wyeth prints there. During bad weather and at night, Drew showed them to me.
“I want to paint like Wyeth!” he exclaimed. His eyes lit up like he was on fire inside. “When Wyeth paints fog and wind, you can feel them! Just look at this print. It’s called ‘Sea Fog.’ You can see the mist beginning to drift, to wisp away. You can feel the breeze tease your shirt in ‘Wind from the Sea.’ That’s how I’m going to paint!”
I didn’t have any books of my own, just the ones I checked out from the library. I’d hold up my favorite collections of short stories – ‘Skeleton Crew’ by Stephen King or one of Edgar Allan Poe’s and say, “Someday I’m going to write like this – mysteries and about ghosts and spooky things.”
“But, Emily, you’ve never been through any of that. Write about the life you’ve lived, people like the ones you know.”
I tossed my head to swing my hair back. “Don’t tell me what to do!” I snapped at him.
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| Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World |
Drew turned away from me and looked at his Wyeth prints again. He loved them all, but his favorite painting was “Christina’s World.” Everyone’s seen the picture of a young woman in a field of grass looking up toward a clapboard house and barn on top of a knoll. The girl’s wearing a pink dress, and her position looks strange. It’s as though she’s crawling, but her body seems twisted.
“That’s Christina Olson,” Drew explained. “She was crippled from childhood. Wyeth painted her and that farm for almost thirty years.” The picture has a haunting quality. Drew said, “It merges a feeling of loss and a sense of fulfillment at the same time.” At first, I thought that was ridiculously impossible, but now it makes sense.
When Drew decided we should live together, I told him that wasn’t how my Mama raised me, so we got married. Drew started selling paintings, and I mailed some of my stories off to magazines. I cried a lot the first year. Every time the mailman delivered a rejection letter, I sobbed. Mama always scolded me, “Don’t carry on so!” and I’d wail even louder.
My husband comforted me. He held me in his arms and gently brushed the hair away from my eyes. He kept telling me, “Quit worrying about writing proper by some teacher’s rules and making up supernatural stories about vampires and witches. Your stories about ghosts and murders sound too manufactured, too made up. Keep your stories real. Write those funny things you’ve told me about your relatives and low-country people, and put them on paper the same way you tell them.” I sniffled when he added, “And you can stop studying the dictionary to learn bigger words. Convey those yarns in your own vocabulary.”
I argued with him. “No magazine or book is gonna publish those stories,” I whined. “I want to write about the paranormal.”
Usually I go on and do things my own way when people try to tell me what to do, but I got turned down every time I sent out a manuscript. I finally decided to try Drew’s suggestions. I wrote an old family anecdote of how my grandparents always killed a couple of chickens for Thanksgiving because they didn’t raise turkeys and couldn’t afford to buy one. Finally the year came when they bought a big bird from the store – a Tom, the biggest frozen turkey available. Grandma put it on the back porch to thaw. When she went back to check on the bird, she found their big ole cat named Tom chowin’ down on that Tom turkey. Grandma used to say, “If Grandpa’d had his way, we’d of had roasted Tom cat for Thanksgiving that year.” I mailed the story off to a regional magazine.
You could’ve heard me hollering in the next county when the mail man brought an envelope with a check inside. When I followed Drew’s advice and wrote the stories like I told them, checks and contracts kept coming instead of rejections. Drew told me what to write and sometimes tried to tell me how to write. He’d brush my bangs out of my eyes and say, “Don’t you think it’s time you started writing on a computer instead of with a pencil?” I didn’t switch to writing on the computer, but I did use the Dell he bought me to type up my stories after I wrote them on the yellow pads.
My work was even reviewed in newspapers and a couple of magazines. That was good. The bad thing was that they called me “folksy” and referred to me as a young literary Grandma Moses – like writing and painting are comparable!
Drew refused to see why that made me mad. He said, “You should be happy and proud,” but I tried to explain that all I’d done was follow his directions. I felt like it was his accomplishment, not mine. He was an artist! Where’d he get off telling me how to write?
Paintings kept selling, too. We were as excited as kids on the last day of school when he had his first show at an art gallery in Charleston. Drew said, “I can’t wear paint-splattered jeans, and bought himself a new outfit with a sports jacket.
He gave me money for a dress, but he didn’t like anything I picked out. Finally, Drew bought a dress and brought it home. I tried it on, and Drew said it was “perfect.” I couldn’t see wearing black anywhere except to a funeral, but he just laughed and said, “It’s a classic, your first little black dress.” He gave me a necklace to wear with it. Not dime store beads, jewelry store pearls!
We moved out of my Mama’s house and rented a place of our own. Most of that time was happy for me and I think for Drew, too. I still liked to go with him when he went out sketching, and even then, he listened when I talked about stories I wanted to write.
Sometimes I’d take along a book like Ghosts of South Carolina and read instead of writing. I learned about dozens of apparitions in our state, and when I told Drew about the phantom hitchhiker on the Sumter Highway or the Gray Ghost on the coast who warns of hurricanes, he listened. We even went together to Edisto Island and visited a crypt that was said to be haunted and a tree that is rumored to have a pirate specter guarding treasure buried beneath it. Drew was the most patient man I’d ever known and never complained about me babbling on or wanting to sit and wait to see if a spirit would appear.
Before long, we started making real money selling his pictures and my stories. I have to confess my ghost stories didn’t sell, but the simple low- country ones did. That’s when Drew decided he wanted to move back to Maine. “There’s nothing wrong with painting swamps and marshes!” I screamed, but he ignored me.
Drew told folks I won that skirmish because we moved upstate, which was a lot closer to my home place than Maine. So far as I was concerned, I’d lost anyway. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to move to Maine. I didn’t want to move anywhere away from the coast of South Carolina!
The Greenville Museum of Art is home of an impressive permanent collection of Andrew Wyeth’s work. When CNN told us Wyeth had died at age ninety-two, Drew insisted we make a road trip from Beaufort to see the exhibit. He stood in awe before each piece. “Why are you staring like that?” I asked. “I don’t see one bit of difference between this stuff and your prints.”
“These are the real thing. It’s like being in the presence of a lifelong hero.” Tears welled in his eyes. “I always planned to travel to meet the man someday, but I waited too long. All I can do is visit his work.”
I looked at my watch. “It’s past lunchtime,” I said. “Let’s go find a restaurant.”
Drew shook his head and looked at me with disbelief, but I kept complaining about how hungry I was, so we finally left. In my opinion, it was a long ride for nothing. I had no idea that useless day trip would be a major part of deciding where we’d live. A week later, Drew disappeared for several days. When he came back, he said “we’d” bought a three-story clapboard house on a hill a little north of Greenville. I screamed and hollered, but we moved there anyway.
The studio he contracted to have built looked like a farm shed. The new garage in the back was a fake barn, and Drew scolded me when I didn’t park in it. By the time I’d followed around the road that circled our hill to the one driveway that led up to the house, I wasn’t in the mood to continue around our home to park in the barn.
“Always park inside and close the doors,” he said. “New vans and sports cars around our home don’t fit the picture!”
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| Andrew Wyeth, Witching Hour |
Drew cut down the beautiful old trees around the house and had wheat planted in the stark, bare fields. Our farmhouse was exactly like a picture postcard of “Christina’s World” without Christina. Sometimes I thought Drew would be happy if I were crippled like she was. Maybe then he’d paint me. In all our years together, he’d never drawn or painted my likeness. He claimed he didn’t do portraits, and I never saw people in his work, but it still made me mad. He always told me what to do – write this way, stand that way. I told him, “If I was good enough for you when you met me, I’m good enough for you now, because I’m not gonna change!”
His answer was usually a muttered, “Most folks grow up eventually.”
***
Then the quiet times came. I call them quiet times, but the silence is one-sided. Drew stops talking to me, but I continue speaking to him. When I wake up in the morning and hear the birds singing outside and see the sunshine kaleidoscoping patterns on the walls through the lace curtains, I always lean over to kiss Drew and tell him about whatever I plan to write that day. Most times, he listens and then kisses me, too, but when he’s having a quiet time, he turns his back to me.
Drew doesn’t answer when I call him for breakfast during a quiet time. He comes into the kitchen and sits down at the big, round oak table. He eats whatever I’ve cooked for him with no comments about whether he likes it or not. Doesn’t seem to matter if it’s chicken-fried steak, eggs with cheese and scratch biscuits or simply grits with bologna gravy. Never says a word to me during quiet times. Just eats, then gets up and goes to his studio or climbs in his shiny new van and drives away for the day.
I wonder if he’s out sketching and painting or if he’s gone to the museum to “visit” his beloved Andrew Wyeth paintings.
Water colors of dilapidated, falling down barns have been selling like McDonald’s quarter-pounders. Drew’s even painted some old crypts and graveyards around Greenville, and those pictures have been pulling in big money, too. I don’t think it’s fair that he tells me not to write about ghosts or graves and things like that, but he does those cemetery paintings. When I stomp my feet and tell him how I feel, he ignores me.
Lately, it seems we’re having quiet times more than ever. I’d think he’d be happy that he’s successful, but who can tell? He never complains about anything, so how do I know whether he’s angry, disappointed, or just sad? He looks at me different, too. He narrows his eyes, and the intensity of his art is in those blue slits. Those cold, blue eyes freeze me so bad I just shiver.
***
Now we’re riding in the Porsche with the top down. He hasn’t said a word all the way back from an art show at some high-falutin’ gallery in Atlanta. Actually, it’s been three days since Drew spoke to me. The longest quiet time was almost two weeks. I wonder how many days and nights this one will last. What caused it? Most times he doesn’t seem to notice me at all anymore, but the night of the opening reception, he kept glaring at me. During the first hour, he told me to stand up straight so many times that I got mad and left. I went out and sat in the car.
Thank heaven we’re almost home. I look ahead and see our lonely house sitting atop the bare hill surrounded by fields of wheat that look like dried grass. A delicate breeze whispers a warning through the wheat, but I ignore it.
“A lot of your work at that show was those cemetery pictures,” I say, “but you always tell me that my mystery and ghost stories aren’t as good as the stories about my family and folks living on the coast. I don’t think that’s fair.” He stays silent. “Why don’t you paint people?” I demand.
Drew doesn’t say anything, just keeps driving.
“It’s taking forever to get there,” I say. “You should have a drive cut from the house down to the road on this side instead of having to ride all around the hill before we get to the turn-off. I’m so tired of everything having to look like the Olson farm.”
Drew keeps driving, his white-knuckled fingers clenched tight against the steering wheel. His eyes stare straight ahead, and his jaw works – flex and release, flex and release.
“Hurry up!” I say, “I need to use the bathroom!”
Unexpectedly, Drew turns off the road before we reach our long driveway. We’re hurtling across the field, headed toward the house.
“Stop!” I yell at him. “You’re going too fast!”
Drew slams his foot on the accelerator. The low undercarriage of the Porsche drags against the plowed furrows of the field shearing off wheat and flinging it into the air. The car lurches to a stop. Drew stomps the accelerator even harder. Tires spin, and dust flies up all around us. Slowly, he turns in his seat and faces me. For the first time in my whole life, I know real fear. My heart thunders in my chest. A scream rises in my throat, but I choke it down, and no sound escapes me. Drew stares at my face with a fixed expression. His features are unfathomable. Insanity or evil? I can’t distinguish. His eyes squint, and I recognize the emotion.
Only one word describes his look: loathing. The man I love despises me. Suddenly, I know this. I don’t have to think about it. There’s no doubt. The man I love hates me! I fling my car door open, get out, and run toward the house.
Drew jumps from the Porsche and follows me. I stumble over a rock and gasp as the breath whooshes out of me. Just as I hit the ground in a sprawl, he grabs me.
***
Do you know what a space break is? It’s one of those double spaces to show that time has passed in a story. I have a space break in my life. One minute I’m tumbling to the ground with Drew clutching me. The next thing I know, I’m standing on the little front porch of our house. I have no idea how I got to the steps, no memory of climbing the hill.
Drew is right in front of me. He goes in and leaves the door wide open. I’m standing on the small stoop. I lean against the doorframe for a moment before following him into the front hall. He paces around inside the house, from room to room, up the stairs, down the stairs, pausing to gaze at each framed Andrew Wyeth print on the walls. He stops and pats his favorite chair just like Grandpa used to pet his favorite hound dog.
Drew walks toward me, and I shout, “Talk to me! Stop this foolish silence! I’m tired of being ignored.”
The look on Drew’s face chills me, and I shiver. His sad eyes seem to see right past me. There’s no expression at all. Suddenly I realize that I’m screaming. “Drew,” I lower my voice almost to a whisper, “We have to do something to save our marriage.” He ignores me. “I’m not putting up with any more of this!” The words leap from my mouth, growing louder and louder. Before I know it, I’m yelling again. “I said I can’t go on this way!” When Drew reaches the door, I move directly in front of him, blocking his way. Drew steps right through me!
Now I know. I finally comprehend. An epiphany. Lights flash on abruptly in my mind. Drew murdered me! Killed me right out there in the field of wheat on the slope of the Christina’s World we live in, though I don’t guess I really live here anymore. I’m experiencing a real murder and ghost, but what good will that do me since I’m the ghost myself?
For the rest of Drew’s life, I will haunt him. I loved him. I loved him more than any woman ought to care about a man. That’s how low-country females are. Why am I using past tense? I still love Drew. I love the way he used to hold me and whisper, “I died for Beauty—but was scarce adjusted in the Tomb when one who died for Truth was lain in an adjoining room.” That’s from Emily Dickinson. I know the words don’t sound romantic, but when Drew said it very softly with his lips barely brushing against my ear, it was incredibly sweet and sexy. He hasn’t done that in a long time.
Drew exits through the open front door. I shadow right on his heels, but he doesn’t see me; I’m dead. I follow him as he crosses the porch and starts down the hill to the field. Is he going for the car? I don’t think he’s planning to bury me – he didn’t get the shovel. Why did he go around gazing at everything in such a final, sorrowful way like he was saying goodbye? Will he drive away to Maine before my body is discovered?
Now we’re near where it happened. I can see the wheat flattened in a spot about thirty feet from the Porsche. Drew reaches the area before I do. He stands there, solemnly looking down. What’s he feeling? Is he overwhelmed with grief, or is he glad to be rid of me?
As I plod the final few feet to stand by Drew, horror greater than I’ve ever known floods over me. I’m scared to see my body. Terrified to stand beside the man I love as he stares at my corpse on the ground. I tremble. I’m afraid to see myself in death. Will I look like a bloody, twisted Christina? Even now, I want to be attractive for Drew, so pretty that he’ll regret what he did. I want him to cry for me, miss me, love me! I wish he would say something, but then, he doesn’t know my ghost is standing right by him. Besides, he’s not talking to me these days, anyway.
I look down. The body lies motionless. The head is bloodied, and a wet, crimson-stained rock, the weapon of destruction, lies close by. This simple stone has ended all chances of saving our marriage.
The corpse is not me.
My beloved Drew lies dead at my feet. I look at my hands and see his blood. Then I scream and scream as the phantasm standing beside me drifts away like fog in a fine Andrew Wyeth painting.
≡ 30 ≡
More about Fran…
