Kelly Link - Get in Trouble - Stories

Mei said, “I’m just glad it wasn’t me who saw it. And I don’t want to talk about it anymore. We haven’t all been awake like this for so long. Let’s not fight.”

“No fighting,” Gwenda said. “No more gloom. For my birthday present, please.”

Sisi nodded.

“Now that that’s settled,” Portia said, “bring up the lights again, Maureen, please? Take us somewhere new. I want something fancy. Something with history. An old English country house, roaring fireplace, suits of armor, tapestries, bluebells, sheep, moors, detectives in deerstalkers, Cathy scratching at the windows. You know.”

“It isn’t your birthday,” Sullivan said.

“I don’t care,” Gwenda said, and Portia blew her a kiss.

That breeze ran up and down the room again. The table sank back into the floor. The curved walls receded, extruding furnishings, two panting greyhounds. They were in a Great Hall instead of the Great Room. Tapestries hung on plaster walls, threadbare and musty. There were flagstones, blackened beams. A roaring fire. Through the mullioned windows a gardener and his boy were cutting roses.

You could smell the cold rising off stones, a yew log upon the fire, the roses and the dust of centuries.

“Halfmark House,” Maureen said. “Built in 1508. Queen Elizabeth came here on a progress in 1575 that nearly bankrupted the Halfmark family. Churchill spent a weekend in December of 1942. There are many photos. It was once said to be the second-most haunted manor in England. There are three monks and a Grey Lady, a White Lady, a yellow fog, and a stag.”

“Exactly what I wanted,” Portia said. “To float around like a ghost in an old English manor. Turn the gravity off, Maureen.”

“I like you, my girl,” Aune said. “But you are a strange one.”

“Of course I am,” Portia said. “We all are.” She made a wheel of herself and rolled around the room. 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 can provide 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 great-grandmother told about the farm in Pirkanmaa where she grew up.”

The Great Room grew darker until they were all only shadows, floating in shadow. Sisi wrapped an arm around Gwenda’s waist. Outside the great windows, the gardeners and the rosebushes disappeared. Now you saw a neat little farm and rocky fields, sloping up toward the twilight bulk of a coniferous forest.

“Yes,” Aune said. “Exactly like that. I visited once when I was just a girl. The farm was in ruins. Now the world will have changed again. Maybe there is another farm or maybe it is all forest now.

“At the time of this story my great-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 great-grandmother’s work was to take the cows to a meadow where the pasturage was rich in clover and sweet grasses. The cows were very big and she was very small, but they knew to come when she called them. In the evening she brought the herd home again. The path went along a ridge. On the near side she and her cows passed a closer meadow that her family did not use even though the pasturage looked very fine to my great-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 of Halfmark House, a tree formed itself in a grassy, sunken meadow.

“My great-grandmother didn’t like that meadow. Sometimes when she looked down she saw people sitting around the table that the rock made. They were eating and drinking. They wore old-fashioned clothing, the kind her own great-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 great-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. Sullivan waved back.

“Creepy!” Portia said. “That was a good one. 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 things,” Portia said. “I wouldn’t mind.”

“I’ll just tell it the way I heard it,” Sullivan said. “Anyhow, 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 my grandfather told me.”

The gardeners were outside the windows again. They were ghosts, too, Gwenda thought. They would come and go, always doing the same things. Was this what it had been like to be rich, looked after by so many servants, all of them practically invisible, practically ghosts — just like Maureen, really — for all the notice you had to take of them?

Never mind, they were all ghosts now.

She and Sisi lay cushioned on the air, arms wrapped around each other’s waists so as not to go flying away. They floated just above the twitching silk ears of a greyhound. The sensation of heat from the fireplace furred one arm, one leg, burned pleasantly along one side of her face. If something happened , if a meteor were to crash through a bulkhead, if a fire broke out in the Long Gallery, if a seam ruptured and they all went flying into space, could she and Sisi keep hold of each other? She resolved she would. She would keep hold.

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

Rain beat at the windows of Halfmark House. 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 going to look for a girl who had gone missing. Sullivan’s grandfather, a young man at the time, went with them. The hunting trails were all gone. Parts of the forest had been flattened. Sullivan’s grandfather was with the group that found the girl. A tree had fallen across her body and cut her almost in two. She was crawling, dragging herself along the ground by her fingernails. There was nothing they could do for her and so she died while they watched.

“After that,” Sullivan said, “my grandfather only hunted in those woods a time or two. Then he never hunted there again. He said that he knew what it was to hear a ghost walk, but he’d never heard one crawl before.”

“Look!” Portia said. Outside the window something was crawling through the ruptured dirt. “Shut it off, Maureen! Shut it off! Shut it off!”