David Nickle - The 'Geisters

Ann found the light switch, and the change-room filled with a dim yellow glow. She didn’t have to listen to the rest of the story. She knew it, in a way that made her think she’d always known it on some level: how Philip, mesmerized by the red-haired beauty from History of Europe, had one night turned away from the quiet touch of her—of the Smiling Girl…

He had rejected her. Like Peter Pan casting off Tinker Bell for the womanly temptations of Wendy… he’d cast her off.

And yeah—the Insect, the Smiling Girl, had shown Philip just exactly what that meant.

Which is to say: everything.

Ann sat down on the bench. She stretched her legs out, and thought about it.

“You there, sis?”

“Yeah,” said Ann. “Right here in the change-room.”

“Okay.”

“Did she… did the Smiling Girl visit you in here?” Ann thought that she did.

“Yeah,” said Philip. “Sometimes. She was always with me.”

“She was never just mine,” said Ann, “was she?”

“No.”

More quiet, as Ann thought about that. She wondered how much of it Dr. Sunderland really knew. He’d treated both Ann and Philip. Did he understand that the Insect, the Smiling Girl, was really a part of both of them? That both of them—Ann and Philip—were vessels to this poltergeist he and his friends coveted?

“She sure as shit wasn’t yours to give away in matrimony,” said Philip. “To those fucking rapists.”

“Those fucking rapists,” said Ann, “are the fuckers that you threw in with.”

“Don’t curse.”

“I was duped,” said Ann. “You weren’t duped at all. You threw right in.”

“Oh did I?”

“You wore their bathrobes—while they were doing their Eyes Wide Shut shit.”

“What?”

“ Eyes Wide Shut ? The Kubrick movie? Tom and Nicole?”

“Must’ve missed it on movie night at the Hollingsworth.”

“Sorry.” Ann thought about that. “Fuck you, Philip. I’m not sorry. You threw in with Ian fucking Rickhardt and Charlie Sunderland and everybody else who took… whatever it is we share, and made it into their sex toy.” She stood up from the bench, and went through the door to the showers. It smelled of chlorine in here—like a pool. She couldn’t find the light switch immediately, but she didn’t care. She just stepped farther into the darkness.

“And for what? So the Insect could carry you around like you’re walking under your own power, and… I don’t know, get you off? You sold me out . I trusted you. I always trusted you. And you sold me out .”

The darkness deepened as she rounded a corner and the dim light from the change-room vanished. She could hear Philip mouthing something, but the place she was entering didn’t seem to be hooked up to the PA system.

He made a garbled noise that might have been a protest: You don’t understand, it was all for the best… blah fucking blah blah blah.

As Ann kept on, the wall she was following fell away, and she had no guide for her progress. The floor transformed as well, to what felt like hard, dry clay. She felt a breeze of cold, sweet-smelling air that cut through the chlorine smell and eventually drove it away. The breeze intensified, as the darkness became absolute and the clay hardened to stone. The sound of her running shoes shuffling along it took on an echoing quality, and Ann came to imagine that she was in an immense cavern.

She stopped walking.

“I didn’t throw in with them.”

There was no PA system this time. Philip’s voice came from close—very close, because he was whispering. There was no light, so Ann reached out, trying to touch him. Her hand closed on empty air.

Philip went on. “They think I did. They think I’ll do what Michael… what he couldn’t do… and tame her for them. But I’ll tell you something, Sis.” Ann felt his breath, cold as winter on her neck.

“She was already tame,” he said, “when you flew off to Tobago—what with their tricks, and yours…”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll put it to you simple,” he said. “Our friend never would have killed Michael Voors, without my help.”

“What the hell, Philip?”

“I couldn’t stop you from marrying him. Couldn’t stop you from flying off to Tobago. But when she told me what Rickhardt had made her do, in that beach house… how she couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

“She burned down the beach house.”

“She didn’t like it,” said Philip, “and she demonstrated that, yeah. But she couldn’t stop it. The… rape. They’d conditioned her. That far at least.”

“But you undid that. How?”

“How do you do things, when it comes to her? I dreamed it. As you can imagine, I do a lot of dreaming.”

“Like that school.”

“Like that.”

“How did you learn to do that?”

“She taught me. She learned how to do it from you and passed it on to me. You know. The stuff you learned from that old lady. Eva.”

“I know,” said Ann. “But it doesn’t seem to be working right now.”

“Isn’t it?”

“There’s no school here,” said Ann. She held out her arms and turned around. “It’s all a big, dark cave.”

“Fuck.”

“There’s a breeze coming from one direction,” she said. “I bet it’s the way out.”

“Fuck,” said Philip again. “I’m sorry. It’s hard to concentrate.”

Ann started in the direction of the breeze. “How’s that?”

“You fucking try concentrating,” said Philip, “when you’re flying. ”

“Flying?” said Ann, and Philip said, “Oh.” And the cavern became very quiet.

“Oh,” said Ann after a moment.

“ Oh .”

At that, Ann became very quiet too.

The Insect was near. It might have been right behind her, long-fingered hands hovering at her throat. It might no longer have fingers, but great mandibles, and a vampiric sucker in place of a mouth. It might have just been a girl, smiling.

It might have been anything.

Ann tried to put the idea out of her mind. There was, after all, also a breeze. By the rules of this place, that should take her out. Ann started walking. Was the Insect following her footsteps? She tested the hypothesis twice—stopping short and turning, arms outstretched. Each time, her fingers closed around air—and Ann was lost, until she found a trace of the wind.

They marched into it. It led her along the bare rock, and she stumbled for a moment as her feet found a stone step, and then another. She began to climb. There were many steps; Ann was disinclined to count, after hurrying up the first dozen or so. The stairs turned back on themselves three times, and when they finally levelled out, Ann thought she could make out a faint light ahead, casting on a gleaming fall of minerals down a sharp cut of rock.

Ann hurried toward it—quickly, but not so hastily that she missed the fact that the floor here dropped away a good distance before the wall, leaving a deep chasm. The floor now became a ledge, crawling along the near chasm wall. The light was off toward her left—a bluish glow at the edge of her vision—so left she went.

As she clambered along the uneven ledge, it began to dawn on Ann that this light, the breeze, did not necessarily point the way toward escape. It might—in one of her old friend Ryan’s dungeon crawls, it probably would. You feel a breeze—and there seems to be some light coming down the southern passage. And the party would hurry along, hauling their sacks of loot and golf bags of magic swords. But that was Ryan’s game for you.

Fucking little people pleaser , Ann thought unkindly, and kept going.

The chasm widened as she went, until the opposite side was all but invisible. Partly it was the distance—partly it was the phosphorescent mist that filled this great space. The mist had a sharp smell to it, like vegetable rot—and Ann worried that it might be toxic. She supposed it didn’t matter if it were; this place wasn’t real, after all, not in the physical, biochemical sense.