Trent and Trevor decided it time to introduce Buck to their mother. For if they wanted to officially call the ghost a brother, they needed to introduce the spirit to mom.
“Keep your eyes closed, mom, before you come into our room,” Trent lowered his voice into a whisper. “We have to make sure he’s ready. He’s probably really nervous, so we don’t want to surprise him.”
Carol knew how her boys enjoyed exploring the woods. “Have you boys found an animal? Have you find a turtle? I sure hope you two aren’t getting ready to spring some terrible bug collection on me.”
“You’re not even close.” Trevor shook his head.
Carol’s body stiffened. “Oh, please don’t have a snake in there. Your father is terrified of snakes. It would give him a heart attack if a snake escaped your room.”
“We found something a lot better than a snake.” Trent winked.
“Have mercy on me.” Carol imagined an entire menagerie of hairy arachnids scaling the walls of her boys’ room.
Trent pulled his mom into the room’s center. “You can open your eyes, but don’t expect to see him right away.”
“Him?”
“We don’t know his real name.” Trevor replied.
The boys’ room reminded Carol more of one of the spaceship control rooms so prevalent in the brothers’ science fiction movies than it did a terrarium. The lights were turned off, but the glow cast by a medley of monitors, televisions, alarm clocks and flashlights made the room’s details easily enough apparent. She had never tallied all the gadgets – the electronic book readers, the portable video game systems, and the digital music players – those brothers accumulated through their collection of Christmases, birthdays and report cards. Carol thought she saw each one as she turned around in the room, and she wondered what kind of credit her children might have procured to fund all the batteries and extension cords that brought those devices to life. But Carol smiled as she looked at all those twinkling lights, and she hoped her boys prepared to show her a constructive purpose to all the gadgets she and her husband had given them.
“Have the two of you made a robot?” Carol patted Trent’s head. “Your father used to try to make robots when he was little. Your father says that trying to create a robot was what led him to become an engineer.”
Trent shook his head. “We haven’t built anything.”
“Are you going to make me guess all day?”
“Watch closely,” Trevor nodded. “It’s how we first met him.”
Trent gathered a pair of video game controllers from a shelf, unwinding the cables before setting one upon the carpet to his right, which Carol assumed waited for Trevor’s hands.
“We’re going to play some hockey,” Trent navigated through various screens to prepare the game. “It’s his favorite game. He’s awful at it. But he likes hockey the best, and I finally have someone I can beat.”
“Tell me what I should see, Trent.”
Trent’s tongue leaked from out between his lips as his thumbs twisted against the controller’s joysticks. “Just watch that other controller.”
Carol watched, and the pair of joysticks began to circle on that controller resting on the carpet. She did not understand how the buttons rose and fell without fingers resting atop of them. Carol realized that video games became more complicated each day, and perhaps her boys hoped to share some of their pride for owning a system capable of moving joysticks on its own accord.
Trent laughed as he guided one of his forwards along the boards. “I’m going to score again on him. He plays awful defense. He tries for the big check too often and leaves his goalie alone.”
Applause erupted in the television as Trent sent the puck past the outstretched goalie’s glove. Suddenly, the controller to Trent’s right levitated off of the carpet, turned upside down, and slammed onto the floor with such force that it bounced.
The movement happened so unexpectedly that it stole Carol’s breath.
Trent giggled. “Don’t worry about that, mom. Every now and again he loses his temper when I score on him. He probably wanted to make a good impression on you is all.”
Carol stammered. “How did that controller move?”
“That’s what Trent has been trying to show you,” Trevor whispered. “He didn’t think you would believe him if he just came out and told you.”
The image of the levitating controller replayed in Carol’s mind. “Tell me what?”
Trevor didn’t answer. Rather, he pointed at the bedroom’s large mirror positioned over the boys’ dresser.
The mother gasped at the luminous, blue figure in the mirror. A strange boy sat on the carpet to Trent’s right. His form wavered in the reflection, as if a heat mirage distorted the boy’s definition. The boy wore a red, plaid shirt, denim pants, rubber boots and an old, coonskin cap out of fashion for decades. Sensing her gaze, the boy turned in the mirror to meet the mother’s sight, and Carol could count the freckles that surrounded the timid smile.
Carol gasped when she stared into the boy’s eyes. His eyes glared two beams of intense white in the mirror’s reflection. There were no pupils, no irises, only empty sockets of white light that shone in the polished glass. Those eyes shocked her, and a deep, buried fear screamed to her that what she looked upon was unnatural and broken.
She grabbed her children with a surge of force, and she dragged them behind her as she scurried through the home and into the SUV that waited in the garage. She drove several minutes before looking back into her rear view mirror at the receding form of her country home. Catching her breath, she heard Trent crying in the back seat, and turning, saw Trevor hugging his young brother in an effort to console him.
“You’ve hurt his feelings real bad, mom.” Trent sobbed. “This is the second time a family has run away from him since he drowned in the pond in the woods behind our house. He’s been so lonely ever since he fell through the ice.”
Carol collected her thoughts. “What are you talking about, Trent?”
Trevor spoke slowly to help us mom understand. “You saw him in the mirror. He’s the new friend we’ve been trying to tell you about, and he’s a ghost.”
* * * * *
Chapter 5 - A Wall of Masks...
Carol squirmed through the Wednesday afternoon of a week’s worth of accounting seminars held at the resort hotel’s conference center. Outside, winds gathered in the gulf before swinging into the coastal wetlands to sway the bald cypresses and sourgums waiting for a summer storm’s dance.
Afterwards, she declined the invitation for a corporate dining excursion to sample franchised Cajun dishes while listening to recorded Zydeco. Instead, Carol strolled the old Southern city’s brick streets. Each block took her further from the well-lit lampposts planted to guide the tourist into restaurants of spare ribs and hotels of young champagne and deeper into a city of second story porches and elevated tombs.
None of the city’s inhabitants looked Carol’s direction the deeper she walked into the city. She had feared her business attire would mark her as a helpless tourist who had lost her way. Rains drifted from the gulf and soaked her before she could unfasten the latches to her umbrella, but no one took notice that her heels clicked out of place atop streets crowded with puddles.
Anxiety for her sons and fears of the blue ghost distracted her thoughts. She had never given any credence to the notion that things did indeed go bump in the night. She had no experience from which to draw, but Carol had a notion that in a city where Marie Laveau still granted favors beyond the tomb she might uncover a magic that could cleanse her home from a spirit’s haunting.
The low, shotgun cottages lining each side of the street offered little shelter from wind. Carol wrestled against her umbrella, and leaning into the rain, nearly missed the unlit, hand-painted sign advertising hoodoo supplies bolted upon the front door of a narrow, windowless cottage. Carol gave the sign's painted and curling snake as little notice as she could and took a breathe before entering the strange s
hop. The thick door creaked open at her touch, and strange smells of spices Carol could not name assaulted her nose.
A macabre menagerie greeted her in the smoky luminescence of kerosene lamps. Leaning shelves crowded three of the small shop’s walls and display racks dominated the central floor’s space. Elaborately painted skulls grinned upon Carol from their high perches. Candles tickled her nose with fragrances both fair and foul. Powders of differing colors, piled high within racks of shoeboxes, fluttered into the air and stung at her eyes. Carol squinted at the molding spines of green serpent scales and browning leather kept behind a barrister bookcase’s thick glass, but she recognized none of the languages upon those books' covers.
One wall was spared the spider-work assembly of leaning shelving and warping bookcases. There, a wide assortment of masks stared upon the shop’s guests. The variety of mediums employed in the creation of the masks impressed Carol. Some were molded in glimmering plastic. Others were kiln-fired in ceramics and clay. More were worked by patient fingers out of paper-mâché, and several appeared composed of tightly woven thread.
The assortment of expressions trapped upon those masks matched the diversity of the elements that composed them. Though many grins contorted sharply in mocking abstracts of laughter, not one of the masks’ many lips shared a single curve. Many of those masks grinned cruelly, but just as many shaped mouths of extreme melancholy. Many an eye winced in pain, while an equal number glared contempt. Some noses looked too pure and slender to be true, while others portrayed bulbous and broken facsimiles of the same appendage. The longer Carol gazed into that wall of masks, the less she knew if the faces there suspended painted a theme of pleasure or of pain.
“You can’t shake the stare of those masks once they set their empty eye sockets on you. I got them pinned to that wall real good so they won’t be following you back out my door. I can’t guarantee, though, you won’t feel those beady eyes on your back many blocks away from my crooked address.”
The woman sat on a folding chair pulled to an edge of a poker table beneath that wall of masks. Carol considered her face young, filled with a pair of sparking eyes and features that many a young woman would envy. She hardly looked up at Carol as she shuffled a strange set of cards; and looking at her hands, Carol felt the wrinkles that twirled around the knuckles and fingers out of place with the youthful impression given by the woman’s countenance.
“What are they for?”
The young woman’s elderly hand paused a moment, its rhythm momentarily distracted, before throwing another card onto the face-down pattern that formed on the poker table.
“Suppose it depends what you need them for.”
The woman waited for Carol to give a clue to her need. When Carol, who was unsure how she might explain what motivated her to stray into such a strange shop, remained silent, the woman turned over one of the cards and looked to its face for an indication of how to respond.
“Those masks do many things,” the woman spoke, “and among them might be counted the trapping of spirits.”
Carol emitted a short gasp. “Like ghosts?”
The woman nodded, though she did not look up from the cards.
“Do they work?”
The woman chuckled. “Honey, I stopped trying to tell folk one way or the other. Not my place to say. I have plenty of steady customers, so I’m not going to talk up those masks on my wall as if I was moving cars off of my lot.”
“Which mask do you think I should take?”
The woman looked up from her cards long enough to shake her head at Carol.
“I’ve never had to choose for my customers before. Most of my customers know for themselves what mask they need. I don’t know your need. Maybe you need to call a spirit in, or maybe you need to send another spirit away. Your guess would be better than mine, seeing you must have some inclination of the haunt that brings you to my wall of masks.”
Carol bit her lip and considered that wall of sordid faces and ghastly countenances. Soon, her eyes paused upon a wooden mask whose stain tinged a dark sheen of crimson over the leering eyes, the curving nose and the ghastly mouth that emanated scorn.
Once Carol dared to gaze into the deep shadows that filled the wooden mask’s eye sockets, she could not think of another face on the wall better suited for chasing a boy ghost out of her home. She regarded the mask’s exaggerated face of a woman a little longer, hoping that by taking her time she might give that woman seated before the cards the impression that she too could make a proper choice when it came to those faces.
“I’ll take that wooden mask high on the wall.”
The woman hardly considered the mask as she used a step-stool to reach it, and Carol felt offended upon not being complemented for her keen eye.
“I think I picked well.”
The woman shrugged her shoulders.
Carol desired some sort of acknowledgment. “I especially like the color of that wood. Seems a lovely texture. What is it?”
“Sourgum,” the woman answered. “There are more sourgams in the swamp than people in the city.”
Carol sighed. “How much?”
The woman shook her head as her wrinkled hands handed the mask to Carol. “Already told you I got plenty steady customers. Way I figure it, something stronger than a dollar’s led you to my spirit shop. Something more than the typical hoodoo has pulled you to my wall of faces. I charge my regular customers the coin I need, but I’m not so bold as to charge that something that pulled you down my steps. Maybe that something did me a favor by bringing me a woman who chooses to take that wooden mask away. Not my business to know the will of that something, so consider that mask a free souvenir.”
Carol’s knuckles turned pale as she clutched that wooden mask during the return trip through the city’s wet, brick streets back to the better illuminated blocks of the hotel conference centers. Share dared not look at the wooden mask, fearing its grin would stretch into a thing too ghastly for her resolve should she pay it too much attention to it. Carol imagined the mask's touch numbed her arm, and she feared to flag a taxi for whatever blasphemy the wooden talisman might give to a native driver. She covered the mask in several plastic shopping bags as soon as she returned to her chilly hotel room.
The next morning, Carol cited a fever and skipped the remaining seminars of the week. She booked an earlier return flight to her family, both anxious and hopeful that the wooden grin she packed in her luggage would cleanse the taint that haunted her family’s home.
* * * * *
Chapter 6 - Arguments Over Breakfast...
Carol introduced the mask over breakfast the morning after her return. Trent and Trevor winced at the ugly face trapped in the dark, crimson-stained wood while her husband James scratched his chin, perplexed to his wife’s motivation that persuaded her to bring such an ugly decoration home.
“I want you boys to hang this mask in your room.”
Trevor nearly choked on his cereal.
Trent spilled half his orange juice onto his lap. “You can’t be serious.”
Trevor coughed and recovered from the milk that had seeped down his air-pipe. “The thing’s hideous. It would give us nightmares if you hung it in our room.”
“What are you trying to scare with it?” Trent asked.
Trent and Trevor immediately looked at each other.
“You can’t!” Trent pounded the table with his spoon.
“I think I can,” rebutted Carol, “and I will.”
Trevor stood away from the table. “This is about our ghost. You can’t do that to him. We’re all he’s got. Help us out, Dad.”
“Catch a breath,” James worried he could no longer remain neutral. “Your mother is only trying to look out for the two of you.”
James peeked at the wooden mask Carol had placed on the kitchen counter. He too thought the wooden face hideous and could not fault the boys for not wanting the talisman tacked above their beds. Until his wife had shared with him her sight of a ghostl
y, blue boy shimmering in the mirror, James had not known Carol to harbor any interest in spirits or the supernatural. He had no doubt she told him the truth as she perceived it. Yet the boys did not appear frightened. Trent and Trevor displayed no signs that anything haunted them.
“Is this about that ghost boy, Carol?” James asked. “Is that mask really meant to frighten a ghost out of our house?”
Carol clutched the three cereal bowls from her family’s men before they could finish. “You should’ve seen him, James. I wouldn’t think it possible. A ghost in my home. Maybe it was how pitiful the boy looked, or maybe it’s the whole idea that spirits really exist, but it keeps giving me the shivers. I’m scared of what might jump around a corner, or what I might see when I look into a mirror. I fix my hair and make-up in the car’s mirror now.”