Greg Weisman - Rain of the Ghosts

Rain looked around from the doorway, craning her neck into the far corners, looking for some sign that she was welcome. Nothing spoke to her, but eventually she began to feel silly standing out in the hall. She stumbled in. Her mother had resumed her redistributions and took no notice. Rain tried to affect nonchalance as she wandered about the room. It’s bigger than mine . The thought left her feeling immediately guilty. She didn’t want to want it that way. It’s not across the hall from Callahan. Another thought unbidden. Her face tightened. No. I’ll stay across from him. He’s not getting away with this. Whatever this was.

Rain paused to look down at ’Bastian’s old Spanish desk. An antique map of the Ghost Keys was unrolled flat on the dark wood and held in place by two paperweights: a steel-cased compass and her grandfather’s homemade astrolabe. He had tried to teach her to use both when she was nine. She had mastered the compass easily enough, but the astrolabe was beyond her then. Now she didn’t remember what it was even for. A good paperweight though.

She studied the map. It suddenly struck her that the islands were correctly labeled: “The Ghost Keys” and not “The Prospero Keys.” A local made this map, she thought. She found the legend and a date, “Summer, 1799.” A very old local.

Rain crossed to the bed and peeked inside an open box. A faded embroidered pillow lay on top. “What’s this?” she asked and pulled it out.

Her mother paused to look. She gently took the pillow from Rain. It had been white once with irises neatly stitched into the cotton fabric. Now the white had yellowed and there was a brown water stain across the back. “Your Grandma Rose made this. When I was little I wouldn’t go to sleep without it.” Iris shook her head in something like amazement. “I had no idea Dad kept this.”

“He was very sentimental.”

“I suppose. I never thought of him that way. To me, he was this dashing rake. Like a pirate in an old movie.”

Rain tilted her head and gave her mother an incredulous look.

Iris tilted her head right back. “I know. That sounds silly to you. But you only knew him as a very old man. He was so handsome, Rain. He wasn’t young when he had me, but even when I was your age all my friends still had big crushes on him. Ask Charlie’s mom.”

Now Rain looked ill. “Mrs. Dauphin had a crush on Papa?”

Rain’s mother considered this for a moment and soon her expression mirrored Rain’s. “Yeah, I thought it was creepy too.”

Rain felt a desperate need to change the subject. She took another look inside the box, reached in and pulled out a glass-framed black and white photograph that had long ago begun to brown with age. She glanced at it. Men in front of an old airplane. She started to put it down on the bed, to reach deeper into the box. Then she froze.

Terrified, she slowly turned her head to look at the picture again. It was like seeing a ghost, and for Rain that wasn’t just an expression. Men in front of an old airplane. Familiar men. The Eight. And standing in the center of the crowd: the Dark Man. To be sure, she silently counted the heads. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten? She counted again. And a third time. It wasn’t the Eight plus One Dark Man. It was the Eight plus One Dark Man plus one more….

She studied each face carefully to see if she could find the extra body. The ghost who hadn’t yet appeared. It wasn’t hard. All the faces were young. Barely men at all. All looked familiar, but on closer inspection, she realized that the second man from the right in the lower row was sitting in a wheelchair. His forehead was bandaged. He wore a bomber jacket like the others, but it seemed to her that he was wearing his over pajamas and a robe. She studied the others. The Eight. The Dark Man. And now there was a tenth. The Injured Party. The phrase entered her head unbidden; she wasn’t exactly sure what it meant or whether it applied. Maybe she had heard it on TV. But that was his name now. The Injured Party.

She peered up at her mother, who was staring at another framed picture. Rain held out her haunted photo. She saw her hands shaking and hoped her mom wouldn’t notice. “What’s this?” Rain asked—as flatly as she could.

Iris handed her picture to Rain and took possession of the other. Rain’s eyes fell on the new image in her hand. It was familiar. A wedding photo with a gold embossed caption that read, SEBASTIAN & ROSE BOHIQUE. She looked at her grandfather and had to admit her mother was right. He was dashing. She tried to imagine him then. The pirate, the rake. She knew the story, more or less. ’Bastian had told his worshiping version many times. ’Bastian Bohique was a confirmed bachelor, stunned into submission by the lovely young Rose Nitaino. “She chased me, ’til I caught her,” he would say. “She knew we were meant to be together.” He had married late in life. In his forties. The black and white picture clearly showed the gray hair at his temples. Rain kept a watchful eye on his face, as if he might wink back at her. Half her mind struggled to recognize the smiling old friend she knew. But half her mind was struggling with a different identification. Struggling so hard, she had all but forgotten the picture she had handed her mother.

And then, just as Iris spoke, Rain knew. “That’s Dad here in the middle. Which box was this in? I’ve never seen it before.”

The Dark Man. The Dark Man. The Dark Man was ’Bastian Bohique. The wedding picture spanned the gap between the young dark devil in the bomber jacket and the sweet old man with sparkling gray eyes. That ghost reaching for her in her bedroom hadn’t been evil. Hadn’t been a threat. He wasn’t trying to hurt her. It was Papa. He reached out to me, maybe needed me—and I screamed at him! Screamed until he left me alone forever.

She felt like dissolving. And looked like she felt. Iris dropped the picture on the bed to steady her daughter. “Rain? My God, Rain, what’s wrong?”

Rain stared wildly at her mother. At the picture in her hand. At the smiling devil eyeing her from among the other ghosts on the bed. That’s why he wasn’t there with the Eight at the N.T.Z. Why he wasn’t with his friends. Or at the cemetery. I chased him off. Twice. He tried twice. I pulled away from him. I screamed. I yelled. I chased him out into the hall. He’ll never come back now. I’ve lost him all over again!

Tears came, followed quickly by great heaving sobs. Iris wrapped her arms around her shuddering child and began to rock her gently back and forth. Rain just kept repeating, “He won’t ever come back. He won’t ever come back again.”

It took a good half an hour for a tearful Iris to calm Rain down. The saving grace, as Rain saw it, was that her mother attributed this latest breakdown to general grief. She had no idea of the new guilt Rain was carrying. ’Bastian chose me. Not Mom, but me. And I sent him away forever. Rain was sure her mother would never forgive her for that. So she could never find out. Rain struggled to control her breathing. To focus on something that didn’t make her head spin.

Callahan.

In a strange way, he had become her mind’s greatest ally. The anger she felt toward him was a tide washing everything else away. Fear, guilt, misery, they’d roll out to sea on the wave of his crime. She would get that armband back. ’Bastian’s armband.

She forced herself to study the two photographs again. In the wedding picture, the armband peeked out from below his sleeve on his right wrist. But in the airplane shot, she couldn’t see it. Maybe it was under the cuff of his bomber jacket. Or maybe he wasn’t wearing it at all.