Sam Weller - Shadow Show

“Funny old Aune,” Portia said. “Funny old all of us.” She somersaulted in the suddenly buoyant air. Her seaweedy hair seethed around her face in the way that Gwenda hated.

“Let’s each pick one of Gwenda’s tattoos,” Sisi said. “And make up a story about it.”

“Dibs on the phoenix,” Sullivan said. “You can never go wrong with a phoenix.”

“No,” Portia said. “Let’s tell ghost stories. Aune, you start. Maureen, you can do the special effects.”

“I don’t know any ghost stories,” Aune said slowly. “I know stories about trolls. No. Wait. I have one ghost story. It was a story that my grandmother told about the farm in Pirkanmaa where she grew up.”

The gardeners and the rosebushes disappeared. Now, through the windows, you could see a farm, and rocky fields beyond it. In the distance, the land sloped up and became coniferous trees.

“Yes,” Aune said. “Like that. I visited once when I was just a girl. The farm was in ruins then. Now the world has changed again. The forest will have swallowed it up.” She paused for a moment, so that they all could imagine it. “My grandmother was a girl of eight or nine. She went to school for part of the year. The rest of the year she and her brothers and sisters did the work of the farm. My grandmother’s work was to take the cows to one particular meadow, where the pasturage was supposed to be better. The cows were very big and she was very small, but they knew to come when she called them! What she would think of me now, of this path we are on! In the evening she brought the herd home again. The cattle path went along a ridge. On one side there was a meadow that her family did not use even though the grass looked very fine to my grandmother. There was a brook down in the meadow, and an old tree, a grand old man. There was a rock under the tree, a great slab that looked something like a table.”

Outside the windows now were a tree in a meadow, and a brook running along, and a rock that you could imagine would make a fine picnic table.

“My grandmother didn’t like that meadow. Sometimes when she looked down she saw people sitting all around the table that the rock made. They were eating and drinking. They wore old-fashioned clothing, the kind her own grandmother would have worn. She knew that they had been dead a very long time.”

“Ugh,” Mei said. “Look!”

“Yes,” Aune said in her calm, uninflected voice. “Like that. One day my grandmother—her name was Aune, too, I should have said that first, I suppose—one day Aune was leading her cows home along the ridge and she looked down into the meadow. She saw the people eating and drinking at their table. And while she was looking down, they turned and looked at her. They began to wave at her, to beckon that she should come down and sit with them and eat and drink. But instead she turned away and went home and told her mother what had happened. And after that, her older brother, who was a very unimaginative boy, had the job of taking the cattle to the far pasture.”

The people at the table were waving at Gwenda and Mei and Portia and the rest of them now. “Ooh,” Portia said. “That was a good one. Creepy! Maureen, didn’t you think so?”

“It was a good story,” Maureen said. “I liked the cows.”

“So not the point, Maureen,” Portia said. “Anyway.”

“I have a story,” Sullivan said. “In the broad outlines it’s a bit like Aune’s story.”

“You could change it up a bit,” Portia said. “I wouldn’t mind.”

“I’ll just tell it the way I heard it,” Sullivan said. “It’s Kentucky, not Finland, and there aren’t any cows. That is, there were cows, because it’s another farm, but not in the story. It’s a story that my grandfather told me.”

The gardeners were outside the windows again. There was beginning to be something ghostly about them, Gwenda thought. You knew that they would just come and go, always doing the same things. Maybe it was the effect of sitting inside such a very Great Hall, surrounded by so many tapestries. Maybe this was what it was like to be rich and looked after by so many servants, all of them practically invisible—just like Maureen, really—for all the notice you had to take of them. They might as well have been ghosts. Or was that what the servants thought about the people they looked after? Capricious, powerful without ever really setting foot on the ground, nothing you could look at for any length of time without drawing malicious attention?

What an odd string of thoughts. She was fairly sure that while she had been alive on Earth nothing like this had ever been in her head. Out here, suspended between one place and another, of course you went a little crazy. It was almost luxurious, how crazy you were allowed to be.

She and Sisi lay cushioned on the air, arms wrapped around each other’s waists so as not to go flying away. If something disastrous were to happen now, if a meteor were to crash through a bulkhead, or if a fire broke out in the Long Gallery, and they all went flying into space, would she and Sisi manage to hold on to each other? It almost made her happy, thinking of it. She smiled at Sisi and Sisi smiled back.

Sullivan had the most wonderful voice for telling stories. He was describing the part of Kentucky where his family still lived. They went hunting the wild pigs that lived in the forest. Went to church on Sundays. There was a tornado.

Rain beat at the windows. You could smell the ozone beading on the glass. Trees thrashed and groaned.

After the tornado passed through, men came to Sullivan’s grandfather’s house. They were forming a search party to go and look for a girl who had gone missing. Sullivan’s grandfather went with them. The hunting trails were all gone. Parts of the forest had been flattened. Sullivan’s grandfather was part of the group that found the girl at last. She was still alive when they found her, but a tree had fallen across her body and cut her almost in half. She was pulling herself along by her fingers.

“After that,” Sullivan said, “my grandfather wouldn’t hunt in that part of the forest. He said that he knew what it was to hear a ghost walk, but he’d never heard one crawl before.”

“Ugh,” Sisi said. “Horrible!”

“Look!” Portia said. Outside the window something was dragging itself along the floor of the forest. “Shut it off, Maureen! Shut it off! Shut it off!”

The gardeners again, with their terrible shears.

“No more old-people ghost stories,” Portia said. “Okay?”

Sullivan pushed himself up off the flagstones, up toward the whitewashed ceiling. He did the breaststroke, then dove back down toward the rest of them.

“Sometimes you can be a real brat, Portia,” he said.

“I know,” Portia said. “God, I’m sorry. I guess you spooked me. So it must have been a good ghost story, right?”

“Right,” Sullivan said, mollified. “I guess it was.”

“That poor girl,” Aune said. “To relive that moment over and over again. Who would want that, to be a ghost?”

“Maybe you don’t have a choice?” Gwenda said. “Or maybe it isn’t always bad? Maybe there are happy, well-adjusted ghosts?”

“I never saw the point of ghosts,” Sullivan said. “I mean, they’re supposed to haunt you as a warning, right? So what’s the warning in that story I told you? Don’t get caught in the forest during a tornado? Don’t get cut in half and die horribly?”

“I thought it was more like they were a recording,” Gwenda said. “Like maybe they aren’t there at all. It’s just the recording of what they did, what happened to them.”

Sisi said, “But Aune’s ghosts—the other Aune—they looked at her. They wanted her to come down and eat with them. So what was she supposed to eat? Ghost food? Would it have been real food?”