Stories of a Ghost Town

 

On the night before my grandfather’s funeral, I woke to the sound of my younger brother screaming. It wasn’t the first time I had heard him do this – scream during a nightmare – but it was a shock, regardless. I shot up in bed and tried to get an arm around his shoulders to comfort him. Instead, he ended up standing by the near wall of the motel room and pointing his finger at the air above my side of the bed, all the while shouting nonsense words. My brother is a sleepwalker as well as a screamer, so I didn’t think too much of this. Mostly I just wanted him to shut up so I could go back to sleep.

My older brother, who by virtue of age always gets the best sleeping accommodations, was lying by himself in the other queen-sized bed at the far end of the room. When my younger brother started screaming, my older brother, taking control of the situation as the eldest is supposed to, tried his best to get us to calm down. I could see his eyes scanning the room, trying to get a handle on the situation.

It was only when my older brother started shaking and pointing at the ceiling near my head that I started to get a little nervous. “They’re playing a trick on me,” I thought. “They planned a prank while I was asleep.” I reached over and turned on the light.

My younger brother was still standing at the near wall, next to the door to the hallway, breathing heavily. He was awake. The cheap print of flowers you always find in budget motel rooms was right next to his head. My older brother was on the other side of the room, still in bed, but he, too, was breathing heavily, obviously shaken up. Without his glasses or contacts he was squinting all over the place.

“What the fuck?” I asked them. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Oh my god,” my little brother told me. “I just saw something hanging over the bed.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“There was some black shape, just hanging over your head, right there,” he said, still pointing at the ceiling above me.

“I’m too old for this shit, Hank,” I told him. “Stop fucking with me.”

“No, I saw it too,” my older brother said. “There was something there, and when Hank started screaming it flew and disappeared” – he made a smacking motion with his hand – “right into the wall.”

“You two are fucking with me,” I told them. “And I’m not gonna let you freak me out.”

“I’m fucking serious, dude,” Hank said, getting slowly back into bed. “There was something there.”

“He’s right, Sam,” my older brother said. “There was something there.”

“Whatever,” I said, my heart hammering. “Stop freaking me out.”

I reached over and turned the light back off. The shadows covering the room came back instantly. The cheap print of flowers took on a sinister blankness, where the heads of the roses could have been anything red and round.

“There’s no way I’m gonna get to sleep now,” Hank said, pulling the comforter over his head.

“Me neither,” my older brother told me.

Liars, I thought to myself, and sure enough they were both asleep within twenty minutes, with my younger brother snoring in a cartoon hacksaw fashion and my older brother breathing peacefully. My younger brother is a much bigger man than I am, and when he has screaming nightmares he sometimes flails his arms around violently, so as I lay in bed, trying to trick myself into sleeping, I wasn’t sure whether I was more afraid of the inky shape my brothers had seen hanging over me or the possibility of being accidentally hit by Hank’s terrified, flailing arms. I kept my eyes trained on the ceiling, while still trying to reassure myself that the whole thing was a prank, cooked up by my brothers, and that the best thing to do was not to let on how scared I was and just fall back to sleep. Tomorrow would be an early day. Eventually exhaustion won me over, and I drifted off.

 

The next morning, while we all bustled around the suite getting ready for the service, tying ties and making ourselves look presentable, we told my father and stepmother about the whole episode.

“They say they saw something hanging over my side of the bed,” I said, trying to make it seem like a ridiculous idea. “Some black shape.”

“We did!” my little brother said, his voice a little bit strained, trying hard to convince the skeptics. As the youngest, he’s learned to insist on his share and his say, over the years.

My older brother, Jack, gave his shy support. “I saw it, too,” he said, trying to get a good dimple in his tie.

So we had my younger brother, with his passionate argument, angry at our collective disbelief, and my older brother, with the cool, tentative support of someone who believes and thus has to agree, although he would really rather that the whole thing was just left alone. I was being worked at from both sides, between spirit and reason.

“This is just ridiculous,” I said, trying to make a show out of laying out my pants, as if the whole conversation was beneath me. “There wasn’t anything there.”

My father was a little distant that morning, sleepy and grieving. He puttered around the carpet, skipped out for donuts. He wasn’t all that interested in paranormal occurrences. His father had just died, and he was going to give remarks at the funeral.

This left my stepmother to hang out with us, joke with us, coax us out of bed. She was in good form that morning, keeping things light. She seemed interested in the ghost discussion. Though she’s a pretty practical woman, she’s not above a little spark in the eyes when these sorts of arguments come up.

“This is funny,” my stepmother said, laughing. “Here’s Hank saying, ‘it’s a ghost’, and Sam’s the one who says it’s ridiculous. That’s hard to believe.”

My stepmother’s mind is sharp. She seems to remember anything. During parties, in casual conversation, she has the gift of remembering every anecdote ever told about the people present, of pulling them up in a split second. When I was younger it used to embarrass the shit out of me. I like to think that the past is the past, that the person I am now is the firm and total outcome of a long and painful transformation that will never be mentioned again. But people like my stepmother remember the boy who used to shriek during the previews of horror movies, and they can cut you down to size. It took me a long time to understand the value in this. But in the motel room, with all of us shoved together as a family, these comments help reinforce the sense that we’re a self-contained unit that understands each other’s secrets.

Sometimes it seems to me that a family is held together by three things. One is love, obviously, and a certain assumed tenderness. We gave each other shoulder squeezes during the funeral, we held each other at the reception. The second is a willing embarrassment, where everybody knows that they have the power, at any time, to reduce any other member of the family to a red-faced, muttering wreck. As if to say, remember where you came from. Stay honest.

And the third, I think, is shared fear.

 

Nowadays it’s rare, obviously, for me and my younger brother to share a bed, but there was a time when we did it every night. Though it’s hazy in my memory, I think the period when we slept in the same bed lasted a couple of years, when I was seven or eight and my brother was three or four. It wasn’t out of any necessity; my parents are and were upper-middle class, borderline rich, and we lived in a farmhouse that had plenty of rooms. But my little brother had decided that he didn’t like the nursery where he had grown up and that he wanted to move in with me, and I, for my part, liked the company.

There were a couple of reasons why I liked the company. My brother has always been talkative and forward about conversation, drawing people out, and in those days I was going through a quiet, brooding time and needed someone to make me talk. Before going to sleep, he would egg me on with question after question, the kinds younger brothers ask older brothers.

“What’s that weird sound outside?”

“Frogs.”

“Do you think Mom is going to buy a new TV?”

“Maybe.”

“I think Mr. Loatman from down the street is nice. Do you think he’s nice?”

“Yes.”

I would pretend to be annoyed at having to answer all these questions, but secretly I don’t know what I would have done without them. Those were fairly unhappy years, and sometimes I went whole days without talking to anyone. At school I was invisible to everyone except the teachers. When I did talk I said wildly inappropriate things, things I had no reason to say. One day I told my classmates I could heal people with my hands. Some of them laughed at me and made fun of me for it. Most of them just ignored me. Melissa, probably my only friend at the time, took me aside one afternoon and tried to explain it to me.

“Why do you say things like that?” she asked, “Weird things. That’s why people don’t like you.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Whatever.”

“You can’t heal anybody with your hands,” she told me, with a teacher’s matter-of-fact tone.

“You don’t know that,” I said, scratching at the dirt with a stick.

“Okay,” she said, nodding. “But you should stop saying all those weird things if you ever want people to think you’re normal.”

I took her advice, and so I went for long periods of time without talking to anyone. My inner, invented world would start to take over; riding the bus home from school, I looked at the rushing branches and invented kingdoms in the woods, hidden behind stands of trees. No one talked to me to break me out of my reverie. The kingdoms stretched through the forest, growing larger and more intricate, pressing at the edges of the known world. Other kids were shouting, slapping each other, trading tapes and baseball cards. Finally, the bus dropped me off at the edge of my driveway, and I stood there for a while, watching the cattails waving in the wind. There wasn’t another house for a half-mile in either direction.

So it was good for me, I think, to have to answer my little brother’s questions. Though he was four years younger than me, he was infinitely more engaged with the world. He wanted to know everything, and although I was clearly the wrong person to ask, he assumed I had an authority to answer. Knowing this, I could give my best shot without being nervous.

“Does anyone in your grade play Little League?” he asked me.

“Some people,” I said, thinking hard. I didn’t pay much attention to sports, or any of my classmates’ extracurricular activities. “The older ones.”

“I can’t wait to play tee ball,” he said.

“Uh huh.”

“It’s not real baseball, though.”

“Really?”

“No. You have to have pitches for baseball.”

“True.”

Sometimes I didn’t even answer, just let him talk for a while. It was nice to be able to hear someone talk without worrying about how to answer, what to say. And there was a part of me that wanted his company for more than just talking. I also wanted my brother’s company because he was fearless, and I was terrified.

“Are you okay?” he’d ask.

I was staring at my closet, at the view of the pond outside of our window. Sometimes you could see water snakes wriggling across the water in the moonlight.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Are you being scared again?”
“Yeah,” I said.

“There’s no such thing as monsters,” he’d say, very seriously.

“I know,” I said.

While in the presence of my brother the world I had brought into being when I was alone held no power over me. He drew me back to reality. Eventually, though, he would go to sleep, and leave me to my ever-growing fantasy life. During those years my parents were separating, our family was shattering, and two dogs ran away. What I remember most clearly is the view from my bedroom window, the feeling of terror I felt when the sun began to set, and the tremendous relief that always swept over me when I saw the sunlight coming in my window in the morning to tell me that I wasn’t dead.

 

The farm we lived on was no place for an eight-year old with a fevered imagination. Many times in the intervening years I’ve gone back to visit, and in the sunlight it’s a beautiful place. You roll down a long driveway, past three huge sycamores. The house stands on the top of a hill that slopes down to an endless plain of marsh on one side and a series of fields on the other. Tall cattails obscure the view from the orchard and the pond, and a large weeping willow guards the gateway to the marsh on the other side. I’ve walked through the peach grove in the sunset, thrown sticks into the old pond. The only sense of strangeness is the everpresent silence in the air. Maybe it’s the fact that I moved to the city a while ago, but the quality of silence around our old farm seems unaccountably eerie to me, like stepping out of the world. It’s as if the land has no interest in you, that you will pass away, given time.

I could handle that. I walked back and forth through the property. The woman who lived there looked at me with a combination of fondness and worry; she could tell the place meant a lot to me, and she wanted me to have time to see it, but she didn’t want me digging up old secrets or tumbling back into the place that she now rightly owned.

She left, the house went up for sale. I drove down once with friends and went out to the farm by night. We rode up the driveway, and as soon as I heard the sounds of the wheels hitting gravel I tensed up, grabbed my seat. One of the friends I was with, a girl who I had developed a giant crush on, patted my back.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I feel like I’m eight years old again.”

“I know what you mean,” she said, laughing.

When we got out of the car we pitched a tent in the peach orchard. They wanted to explore, but I couldn’t get beyond the first few steps of the trail that led through the fields. The night was practically pitch-black; there was almost no moon. I was literally paralyzed by fear.

“God,” one of my friends said. “This is really getting to you, isn’t it?”

I nodded. The sky opened up, and rain came pouring down. We rushed into the tent and I was saved from any further shame.

“What’s so scary here?” the girl I was interested in asked me, as we were lying in our sleeping bags.

“Oh, nothing real,” I told her.

“Well, tell me anyway,” she said.

She was lying next to me, inches away, and I was still young enough that this was a rare experience. The rain on the tent made it hard to hear, so I leaned in towards her.

“Are you sure you want to know?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said, laughing. It was a husky laugh, low and cynical. It made me want to tell her everything.

“I slept in a room overlooking the marsh,” I told her. “So when I was in bed I could look out over the whole long stretch.” I made a motion with my hands, letting my flat palm ride outward to show how long the marsh was. “When I was young I didn’t have a good grasp on reality. I was alone a lot of the time and I got to making up everything I saw, until I didn’t really know when to stop.”

“Kids do that,” she said.

“I guess they do,” I said. “But maybe not as much as I did. When I looked out over the marsh, all I could think about were things coming out of it, marching up the hill, towards the house.”

“Things?” she asked. Her voice sounded thin.

“Yeah, weird things. Monsters. Things that hopped on one leg, half scales, things with long fangs, things that tunneled up the hill so that all you saw was a trail of dirt, until they got right under my window and decided to show their face…”

“Stop,” she said. “Now you’re freaking me out.”

We paused for a second. I was scaring myself, too. The creatures were starting to take root in my mind.

“You thought about that?” she asked me.

“Pretty much every night.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That sounds terrible.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. We must have said something more, but I can’t remember what it was. Somehow or another I had weirded the conversation. She rolled over and went to sleep, and I was left wondering if maybe I should have kept the whole thing to myself. I spent the rest of the night listening to the rain and reminding myself that I was eighteen years old and shouldn’t be scared of the dark, for the sake of the normal person I wanted to become.

 

I can’t remember the precise time that my brother started sleepwalking. He always muttered in his sleep, and I remember how friends of mine used to tickle his fingers and face with feathers to hear the strange things he would say. Even when we were kids, sharing a bed, I would sometimes hear little sentences – nonsense, mostly – as I laid awake trying to convince myself that falling asleep wouldn’t mean certain doom. But he never left the bed, or screamed. He was an absolutely peaceful sleeper, as far as I remember.

I stopped being afraid of the dark – for the most part – when my family left the South Jersey countryside for Philadelphia. I was twelve at the time, and along with all the obvious benefits a move to the city had for a quiet, nerdy kid, there was the fact that it never went totally dead at night. Even if I woke up at two in the morning I could still listen to the soothing sounds of traffic passing underneath my window. For whatever reason, this constant reminder of the physical world convinced me, once and for all, that no human or monster was going to murder me while I slept.

It was in this downtown apartment that I first remember my younger brother sleepwalking. He had the room next to mine. It had big windows that looked out on a skyscraper that was always lit by a rotating message board. “BUY GIRL SCOUT COOKIES”, it said, and “SIXERS TIX NOW ON SALE FOR 2002 SEASON”. My room was between him and the bathroom, and he would sometimes walk through it during the day to avoid going out into the hallway.

One night I woke up to find my brother standing in the doorway. His eyes were sleepy and hooded, and he was swaying a little bit. Occasionally he made big smacking sounds with his mouth.

“Are you okay, Hank?” I asked.

“Just wait okay I’m… just hold on gotta find… hold on,” he said.

“Hank?” I asked.

My brother walked into the room and started opening and closing my drawers. It was loud, and it made me nervous.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey.”

“Just hold on and Ida what yousay un uh oops.” he said, closing the drawers again. He scratched his head and looked agitated. “What huh shoo OH OH MAN!”

His voice rising scared me a little. I didn’t really know what to do, so I just sat there in the bed and watched. Eventually he shuffled back to bed, leaving the door open behind him.

 

“Hank was sleepwalking,” I told my stepmother the next morning. She was sitting in our basement kitchen, drinking coffee. “It was weird.”

“Happens sometimes,” she said.

I waited for her to say something else, but she just kept drinking her coffee. In hindsight, I can understand that she just wanted me to leave her alone. With my dad at work, we were forced to spend a lot of time together. The natural thing would have been to give each other space, but at that age all I wanted to do was talk, all the time, for any reason.

“He walked into my room and just STOOD there,” I said, my adolescent voice getting nervous and shrill. “It was so WEIRD!”

“Make yourself a pizza in the microwave,” my stepmother said, exasperated. How had she gotten mixed up with this kid? What was he going on about?

“Okay,” I said. I let it go.

 

My brother’s sleepwalking didn’t remain my secret for long. It’s become a part of the family mythology. One night, not long after my stepmother had a baby, she found my brother standing in my half-sister’s nursery, slack-jawed, staring at the crib. My stepmother had heard his muttering over the baby monitor.

For a while the possibility of my brother falling down the stairs became an issue. We lived in a four-story row house, and if he had fallen down the four flights, toppling over the banister, it would have meant serious injury, if not death. My stepmother, who had known my brother long enough that she was, in all senses, his second mother, worried about this quite a lot.

In the end it seemed that my brother, despite having no recollection or seeming control over his night wanderings, had enough submerged sense not to throw himself down the stairwell. My father made sure that the roof door stayed locked, but other than that we didn’t take any special precautions.

My brother and I had a fairly happy time in Philadelphia. I came out of my shell a bit, I joined a few bands, I made some good friends. Hank became a real sports talent, a great pitcher, a more than decent basketball player. We were, by all accounts, turning into well-adjusted kids. I even managed to get into trouble on more than one occasion for drinking in my parents’ house while they were away. My friends egged me on. I had friends! They wanted to egg me on! Life was turning out better than I had expected. I no longer woke up in the morning and felt blessed by the continuation of my life; I had started to take a certain acceptable level of happiness more or less for granted.

 

When I went to college I more or less cut off all contact with my family for months at a time. So I wasn’t around when my brother began to scream and shake in his sleep. I heard about all these things second-hand, from my family, whenever I was home. My brother, his body having swelled while I was gone into an impressive bulk, would be chatting with my stepmother at the kitchen table, his hands wrapped around a glass of orange juice, and she would drop a comment about it.

“You were really yelling last night,” she’d say.

“Was I?” he said, flashing his goofy, winning smile. “I can never remember. What’d I say?”

“I can’t remember,” my stepmother said. “Just nonsense, probably.”

“Weird,” my brother said, wolfing down a donut.

His face, the new one he grew while I was away at college, is open and welcoming, and his voice, having grown lower, booms out in a friendly way. My brother has become the kind of kid who could have a beer with pretty much anyone in the world. His voice is clear and confident, with a jocular ring you hear in some men, the kind of men who can make sly and inoffensive jokes, who can talk at parties, who know how to set people at ease. It’s not the kind of voice you imagine screaming in the night, and my brother doesn’t seem the type to be plagued by nightmares.

 

During college, after spending four years trying to put New Jersey behind me, I found myself obsessing about the place. I started telling people I was from there before even mentioning Philadelphia. Once, at a party, I drunkenly defended a female friend of mine against two guys who had stolen a bottle of liquor, and were threatening her to stop her from ratting on them.

“Don’t fuck around with me,” I said, swaying. “I’m from New Jersey, motherfucker.”

“Who is this guy?” they asked the room. “What’s his problem?”

“There’s no problem,” I said. “Just don’t fuck with someone from Jersey.”

In my college fiction classes, I found myself writing over and over again about places that looked suspiciously like the town where I had grown up; I wrote a story about a kid who falls in love with the daughter of a man who shoots four people in his basement, in a house next to waving cattails. I wrote a lot of thinly-veiled autobiography about brainy, reclusive kids struggling to make connections with other people; a lot of times, these people were girls. And no matter what, the marsh, stretching endless and unknowable, made an appearance.

The majority of these stories ended up being ghost stories, of one kind or another. Characters disappeared, or became entangled in various quasi-supernatural events. People seemed to like them, and I developed a certain pride about them. It seemed like a major possibility that I would be a writer someday, which seemed an endlessly romantic idea to me. Besides, I was in love, with a woman who was a writer, too. I had the thrilling feeling that I was able to tell people things, things I would usually never talk about, in a way that would make them understand. I had the power to make people interested in what was inside my head.

A year went by. I suddenly found myself sick about what it was that I was doing. I felt like I wasn’t progressing. The stories were coming out more and more the same, with the same tropes. People whispered in the night, kids went out on bikes in the darkness and discovered things. And there was always that stupid, uncreative image of the marsh grass waving in the wind. I was becoming lazy. No, worse: I was showing myself to be the worst possible thing, a hack, coasting along. All I had was one good idea and I wasn’t going to be able to milk it forever.

I started having this strange fixation, that someone would find out how I had embellished my childhood, that someone would read the stories and come after me, to punish me for profiting off a place I knew nothing about. I didn’t even remember the real New Jersey all that well. I had transformed it totally into a place in my mind.

I stopped talking about Jersey. I dumped the writer I was seeing and had a series of affairs with girls I thought were hip and glamorous, without any regard for my former girlfriend’s feelings. I left the country for a while, and when I came back I erased all of my old writing. I was convinced this was necessary in order to move on. I was jealous of my friends who wrote more experimental pieces. I began to write snarky, post-modern short stories, full of winking allusions and fashionable, complicated structures.

My advisor was less than excited about it.

“This is actually bad writing,” he told me. “I’m not going to lie to you. This is actually terrible. What are you doing? Why do you suddenly feel the need to change everything?”

“I want to be a different kind of writer,” I said.

“You’d have to be a different kind of person,” he told me.

I switched advisors, and set to work on a novel that I was sure had the greatest premise of all time.

“It’s set in the future,” I told people. “The United States has split into two countries.”

“The main character is working on a biography while trying to get his student across the river to Canada,” I told people. “It’s a book within a book.”

“I’m a quarter of the way in,” I told people.

“I’ve got a lot of it done.”

“It’s going to be long.”

“It’s going to be epic.”

“It might be longer than I expected.”

“It’s coming along.”

By the time the spring came, I had written a hundred and fifty pages. My novel, as far that went, was a failure. I left college certain that I’d lost whatever meager talent I’d had in the first place.

 

After graduation, my father and stepmother invited me to come along with them to Italy for a couple of weeks. I had nothing definite planned, and, figuring I’d never be able to visit Europe on my family’s dime again, I decided to come along.

My younger brother came, along with his girlfriend and my little half-sister. With no one special to spend time with, I spent the idle hours of the day wandering around the towns of the Amalfi Coast, Positano and Priano. Hemingway had spent time there, someone told me, and although I had almost forgotten about Hemingway in my post-modern rush it was something I enjoyed thinking about. I had brought my computer with the excuse that I wanted to work on my unfinished novel, but I didn’t write anything. By then I knew it wasn’t going anywhere. Mostly I just walked from town to town, buying an occasional cup of coffee, and reading. It was a lonely couple of weeks, and even though I understood that I wouldn’t have a chance like it again for a while I found myself missing home, and waiting for the return flight.

My brother was in heaven. He loved the food, he loved the weather, he loved his girlfriend. We stayed in a villa and a posh hotel, and while the luxury embarrassed me he made the smart choice and enjoyed every amenity. He swam in the pool, drank the lemon liquor, and lay in the sun.

In the last hotel we stayed in Hank and I shared a room, which meant sharing a king-sized bed. I had heard stories about his screaming, and I was worried.

“If I do anything, just wake me up,” he told me. “I’ll be okay.”

“Will do,” I said.

Despite the strange fear of a sudden outburst, it was comforting to share a bed with my brother. We argued a lot on the trip – I was frustrated and lonely, and a little condescending – but when we settled down for the night things were peaceful. I kept trying to convince him to go sleep with his girlfriend, but but my brother has always been an honorable kid and he stuck with the rules. Once again, I protested, but secretly I was glad for the company.

Most nights I had a hard time sleeping, and I lay awake and listened to the dim sounds of football matches coming through the walls from other rooms.

 

The night it happened I was having a terrible time trying to sleep. I tried the trick of making my whole body perfectly still, letting my arms and legs go numb, and thinking about the blackest, quietest place I could. Nothing worked. I could dimly hear my brother breathing next to me, so I tried focusing on that, thinking it might help.

As I lay there, listening, my brother’s breath started to quicken. Little gasps began to escape his lips. He started to mutter. He must be having a dream, I thought, as I lay there totally motionless. He must be having a bad dream.

Within a split second the murmurings turned to screams, and my little brother shot up in bed and slammed against the headboard. He put his hands in front of him as if to ward off some phantom that was flying to meet him.

“NO NO NO, STOP, NO NO, STOP, FUCK SHIT SHIT FUCK FUCK,” he yelled.

“Hank, stop!” I shouted. “Calm down, it’s okay, calm down.”

He gripped the headboard and shook it. His whole body was quivering, and he was rocking the bed back and forth. The bulk he had gotten, training for college baseball, was all tensed, gripping onto whatever he could find. I was sure he was going to break the bed.

“STOP, HANK,” I yelled. “SHUT UP!”

“OH SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT,” he finally screamed, and then he woke up.

“Holy shit,” I said, suddenly terrified that my heart was going to stop. “What the hell just happened?”

“There was something there,” Hank said, pointing at the corner of the room. “I just saw something there, there’s something there, look, there’s something there.”

“There’s nothing there, Hank,” I told him. “Look, Hank, there’s nothing there.”

“There was something there,” he told me, softer now, less insistent. “There was a boat, and it was coming to hit me. We were all on a boat, and someone was coming to ram us.”

He paused. We caught out breath.

“I thought we were going to die,” he told me.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Go back to sleep. Let’s go back to sleep. You scared the shit out of me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought there was something there.”

“Whatever,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

Sure enough, he was off snoring within minutes, while I laid awake and tried to calm myself down. I stared at the corner of the room. I thought about protecting my brother from invisible enemies. It was a silly idea; my brother has no need of protection, and certainly not from me. But I lay awake and worried about him. Some part of family is shared fear. The fear of parents for their children. The fear of brothers for their sisters’ well being, at the hands of teenage boys. The fear of a brother for his brother in the face of nightmares.

 

I came home from Italy and got myself an apartment in Philadelphia, a city that I love dearly and am fairly certain brought happiness into my life. I got a job that I thought was pretty decent, and I settled down to the business of writing again. I tried to stop self-editing so much, and as I did I found that my old hometown crept back, slowly. I used it as a setting, once in a while. I didn’t feel too bad about it. It was part of my life.

In the weeks after my brother woke me in the middle of the night and told me about the black shape hanging over my head, I wandered around my neighborhood with a strange sense of otherness clinging to me. It was a feeling I remembered from when I first moved to Philadelphia at the age of twelve. I was marked by something that no one else understood. How could everyone be walking around in a state of happiness, in this light, shining place where it never seemed to be totally quiet? Hadn’t they ever been afraid of the silence, for once in their whole lives? I fixated on the idea of a shape hanging over my head. It seemed like a sign of something. Marked for death? Visited by strange wisdom from another word?

The stories I am writing these days are, in one sense or another, ghost stories. I think they always will be. I think the emotion of fear is so deeply ingrained in me that it will never be absent from any story I create. For me, the unknowable in life centers around things that inspire terror. Empty roads, overhanging trees, strange sounds. Places of death, like graveyards. Not that these places are always terrifying. But in order to inspire joy and transcendence, to place themselves outside of mundane reality, they have to have the capacity to inspire fear. When I think of a man flying, or a woman walking across water, I always imagine it happening at night, down a dirt road, on a secluded lake surrounded by trees. They are outlined against the moon. They turn and look at you and you don’t quite know their intentions.

I drove down with my older brother and his girlfriend to my old hometown recently. On the way there my brother pointed out various landmarks.

“That’s the place where I made out with Jackie Dawson in her basement,” he said, smiling.

His girlfriend rolled her eyes. I could tell she thought the stories were cute. They made my brother look like a wild young kid in love with the town, someone who knew its secrets. They were innocent stories.

But when we turned the corner onto the main street of our old town, and parked the car, the glib retelling of stories ended. My brother fished out two little bottles of Jack Daniels and gave me one.

“Tell us a ghost story,” he told me.

“Sure thing,” I said.

We walked down the street and I rattled off a few of the ones I know, about the Wood House and the pirate ghost that haunts the third floor, about the Greenwich Horror that took away three British soldiers during the Revolutionary War. None of them are particularly scary, just odd and haunting. We drank some whiskey and walked to the edge of some empty fields. Someone was running a combine, even at night. We could hear the engine in the distance. Otherwise it was unearthly quiet. You could smell the salt of the bay and the marshy plain.

“God, I see what you mean about this place,” my brother’s girlfriend said. “It’s just deadly quiet here.”

“It is eerie,” my brother said. We walked up and down the street, not talking much. We passed a house with candles burning in its windows, and many more with no lights at all.

One car drove past us, going about fifteen miles and hour.

“What are they doing here?” my brother asked,

“What are we doing here?” I said.

“Good point.”

We never saw another car. After a while we got back in ours.

“Do you want to do to the farm?” my brother asked,

“No,” I said. “That place is too much for me.”

“Me too,” my brother said. “I understand.”

“Sometimes I tell myself I’ve made this place up,” I told them, as we started to pull away.

“Tell me about it,’ my brother said, looking out the window at the marsh that pressed against the road on both sides.

“Watch the road, Hon,” he told his girlfriend. “Deer run out all the time.”

“Oh Lord, as if I wasn’t creeped out already,” she said. “It’s such a strange place.”

“It’s where we came from,” my brother said.

I looked out my window at the marsh grass, the occasional shaded houses, the long runs of field below moonlight, as we left the town of ghosts.